The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island Read online

  I burst to the water’s surface, then swam toward Sometimes Island, eventually climbing on top of a large rock. I was able to sit on the slimy rock, the cold water at my waist, my legs submerged beneath lapping water. The motor boat was upside down and floating away from Sometimes Island, but I didn’t see any of my friends. I tried to stand on the rock, but it was too slippery. I cried out for my friends.

  “Randy! Miguel!” I yelled. “Brian!”

  But all I heard was the motor, still running and upside down with the propeller up in the air, spinning wildly. The submerged motor abruptly stopped. The boat sank amongst rings of gurgling water, morphing into placid ripples, then a shimmer of refracted sunlight. The boat was gone. I scanned for any sign of my friends. I choked on some tears, worried that they were all dead, and I was all alone. But the next thing I knew, I heard coughing and gasping, and my three friends were clinging to another rock behind me and closer to the island. I was relieved that they were alive, safe, and sound close by.

  But for how long?

  PART III.

  Boat Wreck on Sometimes Island

  16.

  When Randy, Miguel, Brian, and I were in the sixth grade, we used to ride our bikes outside of the neighborhood to find buildings with access to their roofs. It didn’t matter what kind of buildings: schools, convenience stores, car dealerships, whatever. We had this thing for getting up high and surveying the area. Being on top of buildings made us feel powerful, free, and even a little naughty. The business owners hated it—some of them even called the cops—but we couldn’t get enough of it.

  One time, we noticed a strip mall with an unsecured ladder on the back of an auto insurance business. It was a building we hadn’t been on top of before. We decided to ditch our bikes in an overgrown grassy field behind the strip mall and climb up. Randy, Brian, and Miguel went up first and I stayed on the ground, on the lookout for angry business owners or malicious security guards. Randy was the last one up and, once he was on the top, he leaned over and told me to come up the rear. As I scaled the squeaky, rusty ladder, Randy spotted a curious security guard walking around the side of the building. He probably saw us on a security monitor or something like that and decided to investigate, or at least smoke a cigarette. I scurried up, but my feet slipped. I fell one rung and my quick descent stopped cold when my crotch hit the rung. The pain launched fireworks into my eyes and I felt like I was going to pass out, but I was able to cling to the ladder and not fall to the ground and crack my head open. The security guard noticed my predicament and ran over. Randy watched the entire episode from the roof, and felt helpless. He cried out for me to come up the ladder to escape. He leaned over the roof edge, extending his hand. But I was only halfway up. I didn’t see the security guard coming, but I knew he was there because of Randy’s pleading. I wanted to climb, but I was petrified from pain and shock. I vividly remember looking up at Randy and seeing the fear in his eyes. He was extending his hand as far as he could to me, almost as if he was about to fall down the ladder, too. He kept pleading, over and over.

  “Reach my hand! I’ll help you up! Come on!”

  I thought about this time when I clung to the strip mall roof access ladder while I swam from my rock to the rock my friends were on, just after the motor boat sank in the angry waters of Canyon Lake. The water was considerably choppier around the island and the wind howled ruthlessly. Randy reached down to help me up on their rock, which was just as slippery as the other one. I wouldn’t have been able to climb on it without his help. With Miguel and Brian bracing him, he grabbed my hand and effortlessly pulled me out, and plopped me on the rock. I was always amazed at just how strong Randy was. I’m sure he pounded Bloody Billy and Rogelio pretty good before running out to the motor boat.

  “Dude, you all right?” he said, panting.

  “I think so,” I replied, squeezing out the front of my drenched t-shirt.

  “Why am I always helping you up places?”

  “Beats me,” I said, then shrugged.

  “I pulled him out, too,” Randy said, thumbing back to Brian who was right behind him, shivering with his backpack still strapped around his shoulders and standing next to Miguel, who was also shivering. “You know he can’t swim.”

  “Yeah,” I said, dejected.

  “What happened to the backpack?” Brian said. His teeth clattered from the effect of the wind on his wet skin.

  “Fell off and sank,” I said. “How did you keep yours on?”

  “Don’t know,” he said. “Just did.”

  The four of us stared at each other. We were dumbfounded. Thirty minutes before, we were getting ready to go back home. Our parents wouldn’t have been the wiser about what we had done that weekend, I was certain of that. We would’ve seen other kids around the neighborhood enjoying their summer (riding their bikes, swimming at the pool) and we would’ve bragged about our weekend to whoever would listen, but no one would’ve believed us. It would’ve been our secret trip—a couple of blissful days at our Cabin of Seclusion—the place no one in middle school knew existed, nor would our parents have fathomed we had the gumption to go to. I mean, Brian’s parents knew of the abandoned lake house, but I don’t think they ever would’ve imagined us paying a high-schooler to come pick us up and take us to it. It was pretty unbelievable. It was even more unbelievable that we were standing on Sometimes Island and staring at each other like a bunch of idiots.

  I turned around and peered at the lake house. It was farther away than I thought it would be from the vantage point of the island. It appeared to be a small, brown dot, and I couldn’t see if Rogelio or Tony were still around. I then turned to see how far the marina was and it wasn’t even a dot (I couldn’t see it at all actually), although I could make out a few sails here and there of the boats anchored in the bay, but they appeared to be more like crumpled, white triangles bobbing on the water than boat sails.

  I turned back. Fear loomed large. “What are we gonna do?”

  “And what are we gonna eat?” Miguel said. “I’m already hungry.”

  “I bet you have to pee, too,” Brian said, then rolled his eyes.

  “Yeah, that too,” Miguel said, his head bobbing in agreement.

  Randy craned his neck over the rest of us, surveying the island. Something caught his attention. Then he looked down at the rock we were standing on and how far it was from the island.

  “We should try to get to those rocks that look like a staircase, then climb up higher away from the water,” he said, looking to all of us. “Can you guys do it?”

  I looked down to see just exactly how far we were from the rock staircase and, it seemed to me, that the distance between the rock we were standing on and the bottom of the staircase on the island was about three or four feet. Not too far, but one of us couldn’t swim. I pointed this out to Randy.

  “Yeah, I’ll help him. Can you two get across yourselves?”

  Miguel and I looked at each other, then nodded.

  “Great. You two go first. Then I’ll go and help Brian.”

  Miguel and I didn’t even hesitate. We climbed down the rock into the water, which turned out to be about as deep as up to our necks, but easy enough to cross without any problems. Once we got to the rock staircase, we began our ascent. Randy jumped in and out of the water in one swift motion. He turned to Brian and insisted he follow.

  “Jump in, dude! I’ll help you!”

  Miguel and I watched from the top of the rock staircase. Brian shook his head.

  “Come on! You won’t drown. Just jump and I’ll grab your hand.”

  With such a profound fear of water, it was a miracle that Brian was as close as he was to becoming an Eagle Scout. Seemed like being able to swim would be a requirement for a Boy Scout. Don’t you think? Brian hesitated, shaking his head and wrapping his arms around his torso, as if holding himself in such a way would transport him somewhere else far away like to his living room in the safe confines of his house, watching reruns of Gilligan’s
Island or The Beverly Hillbillies like he’d done so many times before, without fear of drowning.

  “All right then,” Randy said, taking one step up the rock staircase. “See you later!”

  This was enough motivation for Brian. I’m sure he didn’t want to be left stranded on that slippery rock away from the rest of us. He leapt as far as he could. Randy knelt close to the water and extended his hand. Brian pulled himself up Randy’s arm onto the island, his feet frantically kicking at the water, his fingers penetrating Randy’s skin like cat’s claws in a tree trunk. He was relieved to be out of the lake.

  “Thanks, dude,” he said to Randy, who patted him on his sopping shoulder.

  “No problem.”

  They both climbed the rock staircase up to where we were standing, where we would later learn was the tallest point on the island. From this vantage point, we could see everything around us, just like standing on one of the roofs of the businesses we would scale after school. Except for a few birds flying above, there didn’t seem to be any other living things close by. And we were completely surrounded by water with green and brown scribbles of land and trees way out toward the horizon.

  Brian was standing closest to me, both of his arms wrapped around his torso as if he was hugging himself. He loosened his self-hug, then patted the outside of his upper arms, a gentle act of self-motivation.

  “Let’s survey this island,” he said, and began trudging across a ridge that started where we were standing and seemed to stretch across the entire length of the island. He walked with both arms stretched out like he was traipsing across a high wire. We followed him in the same fashion.

  We quickly discovered that there wasn’t much on the island, mostly an abundance of rocks with sparse vegetation. There were scattered patches of wild grasses jutting up from cracks in the rocks, mostly covered in grass burrs—or as we called them: sticker burrs. There were a few rather tall cedar trees, and they swayed carelessly in the wind. The tallest of them all was a bur oak tree. (Brian pointed out this fact and explained that bur oaks had no relation to sticker burrs, in case you were wondering) The bur oak was the only tree on the island with some sort of canopy, casting an oblong shadow on part of the island; the cedar trees were like giant twigs with little for leaves. Once we got to the other end of the island, we looked out to the mainland, which seemed like miles away, the tops of the tree-covered hills mere squiggles of oaky green dashed across powder blue sky. A loud sigh escaped from my mouth as a profound realization materialized after gazing across that dark, cold water.

  We were stranded.

  “Well, guys,” I said, raising my hand to my brow, then shading my eyes with it. “I think we’re screwed.”

  “You got that right,” Randy agreed. “Screwed City.”

  “Screwed Central,” Brian added.

  “Just plain screwed,” Miguel said.

  I couldn’t have agreed with my friends more.

  17.

  We sat on the jagged ground within the oblong shade of the bur oak tree, gazing in the direction of the lake house. No boats sailed or motored by, and the only sound we could hear—besides occasional sighs from each other’s mouths or the grumbling of our stomachs—was the rustling of the Hill Country wind in our ears. I was starting to get hungry, but telling my friends that fact seemed too obvious, and maybe a little cruel. I was certain they were getting hungry, too, and we didn’t have anything to eat as far as I knew. But maybe the backpack sitting between Brian’s legs would yield something for the group.

  “Hey, Brian?” I said, then waved a curious hand to get his attention. He was staring off in the distance as if looking through the window of a pet store at a puppy he knew he could never have. “Wha cha got in the bag?”

  “I don’t know,” he replied, then unzipped the backpack and rummaged through it. “Let me look.”

  He jabbed his hand around inside, then pulled out his pair of binoculars, still wet from his quick plunge in the lake, but nothing else.

  “I got this,” he said, then raised them to his face and adjusted the focus with the center knob as he looked through them. “We can keep an eye on shit.”

  “Oh yeah? What do you see?”

  He pulled the lens covers off and held the binoculars steady to his face, examining something off in the distance that I imagined was the lake house. Sometimes he would squint, then adjust the knob that sat in the middle again for better focus.

  “I don’t see Rogelio,” he said, then squinted some more. “I don’t see Tony. I don’t see Bloody Billy, either.”

  “I hope that bastard drowned,” Randy said defiantly, tossing a pebble into the lake. “He deserved to drown.”

  “Yeah,” Miguel agreed. “Él es un pendejo grande.”

  “I don’t know what that means, but I agree,” I cracked. All my friends chuckled.

  Brian turned his head and set his sights on what I imagined was the marina.

  “Maybe someone will sail by soon,” he said. “Maybe...”

  “Yeah,” we all said.

  Maybe someone would sail by. Maybe a rescue crew would fly over. Maybe. And more maybes. The longer we sat on the rocky terrain with the tree’s unsympathetic shadow slithering closer to the trunk of the tree, the more it seemed less likely that someone would just happen to notice us sitting on this sad excuse for an island. As far as we knew, we were the only ones in the entire world that knew we were sitting on Sometimes Island.

  “I know!” Brian said, jumping up and smacking his forehead. “Remember what they did in that dumb book Lord of the Flies?!”

  “I told you I didn’t finish it. Too depressing,” Randy muttered, then picked up a flat, glossy rock the size of a half dollar and threw it side-arm across the water, attempting to skip it, but it plunked in the water instead and sank.

  “They used Piggy’s glasses to light a fire, so a ship would see them. Let’s try to start a fire,” Brian suggested.

  “None of us wear glasses, dufus,” Miguel said, then scoffed. “Got any matches in that backpack of yours?”

  “No, just the binoculars,” Brian replied.

  “Figures,” Miguel said.

  We sat in silence, staring off in various directions. I noticed Brian fidgeting with the knob on the binoculars, and it seemed to me at that moment—observing the lenses refract light at the end of the black and white shafts—that they were the closest thing we had to glasses.

  “I know!” I blurted. “Let’s use the binoculars to start a fire!”

  “The binoculars?” Brian said, looking quizzically at them. “How would that work?”

  “I don’t know. They have lenses like glasses, though. Right?”

  Brian examined the binoculars, turning them around to see the glass on both ends, and quickly deduced he couldn’t argue with that rationale.

  “Seems legit,” he said, then stood back up. “Let’s try it. You guys gather kindling and leaves and stuff, and I’ll see if I can light it on fire.”

  Brian knelt back down and gathered rocks, forming a circle to create a makeshift pit to start a fire in. The three of us split up and explored, looking for dried twigs and grass and leaves that we could bring back as kindling. Sometimes Island was pretty barren, almost like the surface of the moon. We were able to gather a few things for kindling, but not much. When we all returned to where Brian crouched, we dropped what we foraged into the fire pit.

  “That’s it?” Brian complained. “You barely found anything.”

  “Yup,” I confirmed, punctuated with a wilting whistle. “That’s it.”

  “Well, I’ll see what I can do.”

  Brian suspended the binoculars above the sad pile of twigs, then glanced up to see where the sun hung in the sky. He strategically turned the binoculars, then adjusted some more. Once he was able to train a pinhole-sized bit of refracted light onto our lame excuse for kindling, he steadied his hands.

  “It may take a bit,” he said confidently. “But I think I can do it.”

>   “Great!” I said, patting Randy and Miguel on their backs. “We’ll have smoke signals in no time!”

  “Maybe,” Randy grumbled. His apprehension was palpable.

  We watched Brian for maybe five or six minutes, but it seemed like an eternity. The pinhole-sized bit of refracted light rested in place like a white freckle on a dry, brown leaf. But there was no fire, or even smoke. Brian remained undaunted.

  “May take a bit,” Brian repeated. “Just a bit.”

  Randy sighed. “I’m gonna sit in the shade.”

  He began to walk in the direction where we sat earlier, but the tree’s shadow slid further away in the other direction.

  “If we don’t find shade, then we’re gonna roast in the sun,” Randy said.

  He scratched his scalp and I could tell he was irritated, maybe because he was hungry, or with his frustration of being stuck on this island. I certainly was feeling frustrated and I was definitely hungry, but I didn’t know what to do. The hunger pangs in my gut distracted my mind, leaving little room for rational thought.

  “Maybe you guys should try to build a shelter while I try to start this fire,” Brian suggested.

  Seemed like a good way to occupy our time. The three of us looked at each other, dumbfounded. None of us had any idea of how to build a shelter, let alone what to look for to build one. In fact, if the building materials we found weren’t Legos or Lincoln Logs, then the possibility of the three of us building a shelter was close to zero. Randy rolled his eyes at our predicament.

  “Come on and follow me,” he said, then sighed. “I’m sure we’ll find something to build a shelter with.”

  We followed Randy along the top ridge of the island, first looking down the side where our boat crashed. I stopped and gazed at the water. The lake gently lapped at the bottom of the island and the rocks just underneath the surface. Time seemed to stop as a vivid daydream played in my eyes of the boat sinking, its rear end up in the air with the motor still spinning, as it slowly disappeared into the depths, eventually hitting bottom next to Bloody Billy’s bloated corpse. I shook my head, ending the daydream.