And the Sea Will Tell (11 page)

Later, Buck read aloud to Jennifer from a book she had brought along, Euell Gibbons’s account of purposeful beachcombing. He sensibly chose the chapter covering all the useful products derived from coconuts. Delectable possibilities seemed endless, but ice cream still topped Jennifer’s list.

They slept well that night. Jennifer no longer had to jump up every hour or so to monitor their course. Tied up to the dolphin in the placid lagoon, she felt they were safe at last.

The next morning, without prodding, Buck left early to help Jack Wheeler. When he returned several hours later, he was flushed and sweaty, and trudged off to take a bath. When he came back, Jennifer was taking some biscuits out of the oven.

“How’d the work go?” she asked, really wondering how he had gotten along with Mr. Wheeler.

“Okay, but I think nature is gonna win the battle.”

“Even if they fix it up, how can a plane land with all the birds on the runway?”

Buck shrugged indifferently. “Jack was talking this morning about having to poison them.”

“
Poison
them?” she said. The idea was unthinkable.

“Wheeler told me he has enough poison in one of the sheds to kill an army. He said they’d have to burn the nests and crush the eggs, too.”

Buck’s voice was so steady that Jennifer couldn’t tell whether he was opposed to the idea or not.

“Kill all those birds so a damn plane can land?” she said angrily. “For what? Probably so they can put in a golf course and fancy restaurant and hotel.”

“Yeah, it stinks.”

“They’ve already killed and wrecked enough things in this world in order to make money.”

“Fucking-A right!” Buck chortled. He seemed to be enjoying Jennifer’s display of righteous indignation.

“We can stage a sit-in on the runway so they can’t land.”

“In all that bird poop?” he said, cracking a smile.

“It’s not funny,” she said. “Don’t laugh.” Then she laughed.

“Who’s laughing?” Buck said, laughing.

He kissed her. “You’re beautiful when you’re mad,” he whispered as he took her in his arms.

Buck and Jennifer’s effort to ingratiate themselves with Jack Wheeler took a nose dive the next day when Popolo bit his son. At Jennifer’s suggestion, Buck had tied up his dogs, because Wheeler obviously didn’t approve of their running loose. Unfortunately, young Wheeler had run past Popolo within the reach of his chain, and the dog had nipped him on the thigh. Though the youth’s skin was broken, rabies was no threat, since no Pacific island (including Hawaii) has ever recorded a case. Even so, the Wheelers were upset.

On June 30, a couple hours after sunset, the
Caroline
, with her complement of ham radio operators, departed Palmyra, reducing the island’s population to seven. By then, the fallout from the dog incident had dissipated. Buck was back helping Wheeler and his son clear the runway.

The following morning, Jennifer and Buck resumed their exploration of Palmyra, taking the dinghy directly across the lagoon from Cooper to Home Island. When they neared shore, they got caught up on a sandbar in about two feet of water.

Buck gave Jennifer the oars and got out. He pushed several times until the dinghy came free.

Jennifer saw the fast-moving shadows in the clear water before he did. She screamed.

In an instant, three sharks, flashing swiftly and silently through the water like menacing torpedoes, had converged on Buck from different directions.

Now aware of the danger, Buck yelped and jumped into the dinghy so hard Jennifer thought his feet might go through its wooden bottom. The small boat rocked precariously. Worried about being spilled out into the water, a distracted Jennifer lost her grip on one of the oars and it floated out of reach.

All three sharks were now circling the dinghy, as if desperately trying to pick up a lost scent. Her heart was thudding in her ears.

“Get us out of here, Buck! Now!”

With the single oar, he rowed them crookedly to shore.

Long after the sharks disappeared, Jennifer couldn’t shake the incident. She had thought that sharks wouldn’t attack unless they saw or smelled blood. Wrong. No sooner had Buck stepped into the water than these aggressive creatures had homed in on him. And the way they had circled the dinghy afterward…With a chill, Jennifer thought it was as if they knew dinner was inside the boat. She resolved to never step foot in the lagoon, so picturesque, but teeming with danger.

The next afternoon, Jennifer spotted from the deck of the
Iola
a two-masted sailboat anchored just outside the channel. “Looks like we’re due for a population explosion tomorrow,” she cracked to Buck.

Actually, two boats glided into the lagoon the following day, July 2. First in was the double-masted boat she’d seen; its name,
Sea Wind
, now legible on the stern.

Buck rowed out to greet the new arrivals, sizing up their boat along the way. He recognized her as a ketch with unusually graceful lines. A middle-aged couple were bringing her in, the man concentrating at the bow but directing a blond woman at the helm.

As they drew near, Buck shouted, “There’s an extra space over by us. Can I help you get in?” He was suddenly all smiles and hospitality, as if he’d usurped the mayoralty of Palmyra.

“Thanks just the same,” the man yelled back. “We’re looking for more privacy.” He and the woman kept up their work.

Miffed, Buck rowed back to shore, where Jennifer and Wheeler were watching.

“Looks like he knows what he’s doing,” Wheeler said levelly, spitting out a twig he’d been chewing. “Boy, what a beauty of a boat. He’ll probably put in at the little cove up the way. It’s deep enough. Only problem is, without the dolphins to tie on to, it will take a lot of securing so they don’t drag anchor and end up beached when the wind comes up.”

An hour later, the island’s newest visitors came traipsing down a jungle path toward the
Iola
. They all amiably introduced themselves. Jennifer thought Mac Graham looked the part of a storybook adventurer, with his military-style haircut, dark aviator glasses, knife-edge khaki shorts, and bare brown chest. He dismissed their sail from Hawaii—only
seven
days—as if it had been child’s play.

“How many people are here?” he asked unhappily.

“Too many,” Buck said, agreeing with the implication. “Hell of a note. We came here to play Adam and Eve on a deserted island.”

Mac laughed. “We had the same idea.” He took a pack of Marlboros from his waistband and couldn’t help but notice that Buck stared with the pale intensity of a helpless addict. “Like a smoke?” Mac asked obligingly, offering the open pack.

“Sure,” Buck eagerly replied. He snatched out two cigarettes at once.

Jennifer smiled knowingly. There went Buck’s typically ineffective plan to give up smoking when his tobacco ran out. One day en route to Palmyra he had even broken open a Lipton tea bag and rolled an ersatz cigarette. Since they’d reached Palmyra, he’d been desperate for a fellow smoker with a supply to share.

In this first sociable encounter, Mac did most of the talking. He acted so open and friendly that Jennifer had liked him immediately. It was apparent how thrilled he was to see his goal, Palmyra. His vibrant smile, expressive eyes, and quick sense of humor contrasted sharply with Jennifer’s first impression of his wife, who seemed reticent, shy, perhaps even standoffish. Clearly, the woman stood in her husband’s shadow.

Only a couple of hours later, the
Journeyer
, a sleek forty-five-foot cutter owned and sailed by Bernard and Evelyn Leonard, moored next to the
Iola
.

“Four boats,” Wheeler grumbled to Jennifer. “Most I’ve ever seen here at one time. This must be the most popular vacation spot of the year.”

Unspoken was the resentment practically everyone felt toward everyone else. Certainly, Wheeler, Buck, and Mac each believed, at some irrational level, that the others were intruding upon
his
territory. There was gridlock in Paradise.

A
S
W
HEELER HAD GUESSED
, Mac and Muff had slipped the
Sea Wind
into the small cove, where the curvature of the shore afforded them the privacy they coveted. Mac tied the boat stern-first to two trees near the water, then dropped an anchor well off the bow. That would have been enough to satisfy most skippers, but Mac was extra careful with his beloved boat. He ran another line off the port bow and sank a second anchor in the shallow reef there. Eventually a squall, not an uncommon occurrence in the equatorial regions of the Pacific, would probably blow across the lagoon, and he wanted rock-steady protection against going aground.

Muff and Mac wrote their first letters from Palmyra two days later and gave them to Jack Wheeler to mail in Hawaii, where he and his family headed on the morning of July 6. These were the first of many letters that would keep relatives and friends back home eagerly awaiting the next entertaining installment of life on an enviably tropical and serene, if not deserted, Pacific island.

Muff’s first letter home—to her mother and two sisters in San Diego—expressed a different view.

Nonetheless, Muff dutifully joined Mac in setting up housekeeping in earnest. As she reorganized the galley for life in port, he hooked up the boat’s power source to their large generator and serviced the
Sea Wind
’s engine. To make more living space on the
Sea Wind
, they removed the sails and carefully folded them. Mac lugged them to a nearby storage shed and, using a block and tackle, suspended them from a rafter, well out of the reach of rodents.

He hacked away the brush near the boat, then set to work building a makeshift dock with lumber scavenged on the island. That completed, he ran a rope from the dock to the boat ladder at the
Sea Wind
’s stern. They could now pull either one of their two dinghies back and forth to shore without always having to bother with a motor or oars.

Aboard the
Sea Wind
, Muff tied canvas awnings from the shrouds to cover the deck area and provide shade from the blazing sun.

One morning that first week, Mac declared that they needed a break. He persuaded her, despite her uneasiness about the jungle and its creeping things, to do some exploring with him before the day got too hot.

As they worked their way down a well-worn winding path, Muff realized how serious Mac was about exploring the island. “Most people stay on the trails,” he said, taking out his machete. “But not me.” He began hacking at what looked like an impassable wall of vines, shoots, and fronds.

Muff watched passively for a few minutes, then wandered alone up the path. She came across an enclave of old buildings that had been all but swallowed up by the jungle. Peeking into the crumbling shells of the structures, she had the strong feeling that strange, tragic things had happened on and around this island. Was it just her imagination?

Walking on, she was soon surrounded by a panoply of violenthued flowers. She recognized wild morning glory, thick with deep-purple and carnelian red blossoms. Poinsettia, growing in abundance and tall as trees, were in full bloom, the showy scarlet bracts setting off the tiny yellow flowers. From behind the veil of forest echoed the calls of unseen, unfamiliar birds. Small sudden movements teased the periphery of her vision.

It wasn’t long before Muff became aware that she could no longer hear Mac at work behind her. She quickly headed back, but when she came to a sharp curve in the trail she didn’t recognize, she realized she had taken a wrong turn somewhere. She wheeled around.

“Mac. Where are you?”

There was no answer.

“Mac!” Her loudest shout sounded weak, ineffectual, all but absorbed by the unrelenting jungle.

She felt everything closing in on her. But she held on to the knowledge that the lagoon and the
Sea Wind
were just on the other side of a wall of vegetation in front of her. Or were they? Was the lagoon actually in the other direction? Now, the trails and the palm trees,
everything
, all looked alike to her. Where could Mac be? The jungle had devoured him without a trace.

Suddenly, she heard a commotion nearby. Midway up the ninety-foot-high trees she caught a glimpse of several blue-footed boobies clumsily trying to take flight.

Common in the Pacific, the appealing gull-like boobies have a white chest, gray wings, and a pretty dappling of blues and oranges around their eyes. These nesting birds, disturbed by Muff, had panicked.

As she watched, they flew directly into a leafy barrier. She couldn’t imagine they could get through, and they didn’t. But they continued to beat themselves against the thick foliage, squawking in fear.
My God, they’re going to beat themselves to death
, she thought, realizing with shock that she was the aggressor here.

Muff hurried down the trail, hoping the birds would calm down when she was gone, and give up their suicidal escape attempt.

Suddenly, there was scurrying at her feet. She looked down to find a fat brown rat staring up at her, its tiny nose quivering in the air as if trying to place her scent.

She screamed, and jumped back. The rat held its ground without flinching, still regarding her with beady eyes. Then it went back to chewing on part of a coconut shell.

She heard chopping off in the distance.

“Mac!” she yelled desperately.

“Over here,” came his unconcerned reply.

She finally found him, standing on a fresh trail he had fashioned.

Dripping with sweat, he was grinning widely at his accomplishment.

“I got scared, I couldn’t find you.” She sounded accusing, but Mac didn’t bite.

He wiped his sweaty brow with a wet forearm. “Honey, you can’t get lost on a two-hundred-acre island.”

“
I
can.”

“Then stay closer.”

“I almost stepped on a big rat.” Muff felt she deserved more sympathy.

“Well, they won’t hurt you. They’re not sewer rats like you find in the city. They’re coconut rats. You know, honey, vegetarians. I think they’re kinda cute.”

At the end of Mac’s trail was a concrete bunker that had been concealed in dense foliage. It was obvious that no one had been inside for decades. Mac was amazed and delighted to find forty untouched drums of aviation gas stored there, a trove for the outboard motor on their Zodiac dinghy.

“These things are heavy,” Muff remarked, rather than praising his find. “How are you going to get them back to the boat?”

Mac pushed over a drum and nudged it with his foot. “I can do it.” He didn’t have an easy time rolling the drum all the way down the narrow trail back to the lagoon, but he managed, as Muff followed.

After a brief rest, Mac said he was going back for another drum, but Muff decided to wait for him. Just then he spied a foot-wide land crab lumbering along the beach. They loved crab. He threw a palm frond on the crab and trapped it beneath his foot.

Muff looked away, squeamish because she knew what came next.

With no hesitation, Mac reached down and snapped off the big meaty claw. He lifted his foot and let the amputee continue on its way.

Muff understood that snapping off the large claw would not kill a crab, which would eventually regenerate another. But she still felt it was a form of maiming, and probably painful. She’d never been able to do it herself.

Mac gave her the claw and headed back to his private fuel depot.

To keep the succulent meat fresh, Muff left the claw inside a large shell lying at the edge of the lagoon. She knelt down nearby, leaned over, and soaked her hair. Feeling refreshed, she sat back against a tree trunk and shut her eyes. Now that she was in sight of the
Sea Wind
, she felt she could relax.

Soon, a light splashing sound got her attention, and she opened her eyes to see a big moray eel trying to steal the crab leg. The eel’s head had broken the surface of the water as it flailed at the shell. Its small yellow eyes and the row of sharp tiny teeth in its gaping mouth aimed for the tasty meat. Muff gasped in horror and leaped up, just as Mac reappeared.

“Look!” she screamed. “I put the crab leg—”

She watched dumbfounded as Mac calmly unsheathed his machete, walked over to the struggling eel, and with one firm swing decapitated it.

“Ready for dinner?” Mac casually asked, holding up the prized claw.

T
HE NEXT
day, Mac set out on another mission, having drafted Muff again as a reluctant companion.
Wheeler asked for it
, Mac had convinced himself. Frequently, the
mayor
had talked about all the “good stuff” he’d found here, and bragged that he had hidden it so well “over by the East Lagoon” that no one would ever find it. This was just the sort of challenge Mac found irresistible. If Wheeler had really wanted to keep the stuff, Mac reasoned, he should have been cagey enough to take it with him. “Finders keepers,” he told Muff. And to the victors in life go life’s spoils.

There were two natural lagoons at Palmyra. During the war, the Navy had divided the eastern one with a cement causeway, creating Center Lagoon and East Lagoon. The
Sea Wind
lay at anchor in West Lagoon, as did the other boats tied up at the dolphins. East Lagoon was on the far side of the causeway, which, at the extremes of tide, lay as deep as two feet underwater. They motored eastward across Center Lagoon in their Zodiac, got out in two or three feet of water, and lifted the dinghy over the causeway. At the far side of East Lagoon, they landed on Papala Island, a slender islet about one hundred yards long.

Of the sixteen islets that form the broken horseshoe shape of Palmyra, Cooper, where the boats were moored and the old runway was located, is by far the largest. In addition to Papala and Cooper, the other islets are Strawn, Aviation, Quail, Eastern, Pelican, Bird, Holei, Engineer, Tananger, Marine, Kaula, Paradise, Home, and Sand. With the exception of Sand, which was adjacent to the channel entrance, all had been joined by the road built by the industrious Seabees. They had also built a narrow cement causeway through the lagoon to allow quicker access (by foot) between the islets on opposite sides of the lagoon. Seven of the islets lined East Lagoon; in places, some were not much wider than the road.

Mac and Muff carried the Zodiac up the beach and found a safe place to leave it.

From Papala, it was a short walk to the atoll’s leeward side. They found an ocean beach of coarse sand and simmering, unmoving air. The absence of any breeze made the heat and humidity seem even more stifling. Feeling an asthmatic tightness in her chest, Muff could breathe only with difficulty. In no time, she and Mac both were basting in their own sweat.

After a quick and cursory search, Mac decided Wheeler’s treasure was nowhere around there.

Back on Papala’s lagoon side with its light breeze, Muff found a shady place to catch her breath while Mac walked south to the next islet, Pelican. The connecting road, broken up and submerged occasionally, was just barely passable.

Pelican was more densely overgrown. Rising to the challenge, Mac hacked away with his machete and soon uncovered an empty bunker and a concrete gun emplacement. It looked like a defensive position constructed in anticipation of an invasion. The find gave him renewed energy, and he turned to assault another wall of shrubbery, hacking and slashing, finding his rhythm. Two swipes with the whistling blade, then a small step forward. Hack, hack, step. Hack, hack, step. Wheeler’s taunt drove him on. “You’ll never find it.”
Ha, ha. Never
.