The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island Read online

  “Nothing but rocks down there,” I said, then caught up with them.

  “Yeah,” Miguel agreed. “Nuttin’ from nuttin’ leaves nuttin’.”

  As we approached the other end of the island, Randy stepped down a foot or two on the opposite side from where we crashed, then noticed something in the water, which was as still as glass.

  “I think I see something!” he said, then slowly climbed down the jagged backside of Sometimes Island. Where the water kissed the rocky skirt of the island, Randy pulled a piece of wood too large to be a branch and too small to be a log, but seemed promising enough as a piece of building material for a shelter. It was a start, at least. “A piece of wood!”

  I stepped down a foot or two with the thought that I could help Randy pull the piece of wood to the top of the island by handing an end to Miguel to help us the rest of the way. I watched Randy wrestle with it, grabbing the gnarled end, then lifting it out of the water. It was a pretty good-sized branch, maybe six or seven inches in diameter and five or six feet in length. It was a rather straight piece of wood, too, as luck would have it.

  “I bet we can use this,” he called out as he struggled to pull the branch up the steep backside of the island. But when he got about halfway between the water and where I stood, the water-logged piece of wood fell apart, the rebellious half dropping behind him, then tumbling back in the water. He examined the other piece still in his hands as it, too, fell apart.

  “Oh man,” he moaned.

  But he didn’t lament too long about it as Miguel yelled from up top, pointing in the opposite direction like a crazed sailor, happy to see land after months stranded out at sea. “Over there! Look!”

  Randy looked down to where Miguel was pointing, then descended, carefully stepping or sliding over rocks, some the size of boulders.

  “Be careful!” I pleaded.

  “See it?!” Miguel called out.

  “Yeah!” Randy replied.

  When he reached the bottom, he pushed a rock aside, then pulled a rusty metal For Sale sign out of the water. He lifted it above his head for me and Miguel to see. It said on the front:

  FOR SALE

  BY OWNER

  CALL 210-493-2707 FOR INFO

  “I got it!” Randy yelled.

  “Can you bring it up?” I said, worried.

  “Yeah!”

  We watched Randy climb back up, refusing any help.

  “I think this’ll work.”

  We followed Randy back to where Brian knelt on the ground, hunched over his makeshift fire pit, his arms stiffly extended with the binoculars in his hands. The kindling looked just as it did when we left him: not on fire. He looked up at us. “I hope you had better luck than I’m having. This stuff won’t light!”

  “We found something to use for shelter,” Randy said, showing him the metal sign.

  “Wicked!”

  “I just don’t know where—” Randy said, looking around. “Oh, I know.”

  A few feet away were two, wispy cedar trees, just far enough apart to act as beams for a makeshift roof. He wedged the metal sign horizontally between them, not much higher than where his head rested on his shoulders, creating a simple shed.

  “Tah dah!” he cheered. “Shelter.”

  Miguel and I examined the structure and the amount of shade it provided. It didn’t provide much, maybe a square of shade that was three by three feet, but it was better than no shade at all.

  “We’ll be awfully crowded under there,” I said.

  Miguel shook his head. Brian jumped up, frustrated.

  “Damn it!” he cried out. “Damn! It!”

  He hung the binoculars around his neck, then came over to examine the shed, too.

  “Good thing I like you guys. We’ll have to snuggle under there to get shade.”

  “Yep,” I said, then snickered. “Snuggle time!”

  Randy and Miguel groaned as Brian and I fought for the best spot in the shade. Not even being stranded on an island kept our competitive natures at bay.

  “You’re a couple of dingleberries,” Randy said.

  “Yep,” Miguel agreed. “Stinkin’ dingleberries.”

  18.

  Later that day, the island and the wind sang us a duet called Boat Wreck Blues. The hunger pangs tweaked our dispositions even more, but Brian was the only one of us skilled enough to do something about it in our unfortunate situation. He promised us he would catch a fish, but only if the rest of us continued to try to ignite a fire in our makeshift fire pit using the binoculars. We quickly agreed to his proposal. But after ten minutes of roasting in the sun without any progress on a lit camp fire, the three of us decided to hunker under our For Sale sign shelter and watched Brian fish for dinner from our shady vantage point. He was using a long, grass stalk as a fishing rod with a piece of cotton thread he pulled from the bottom seam of his t-shirt tied to the end of the stalk as the fishing line. For bait, he tied a sticker burr to the thread’s end, thinking it would act as a hook when a fish tried to bite it. The only problem was, the sticker burr simply floated on the water instead of sinking, and no fish seemed interested in his bait, or maybe there weren’t any fish in our vicinity. Either way, Brian’s lack of fishing success curdled his ego.

  “Why aren’t they biting?!” he said, stomping on the slimy rock he precariously stood on. Not having much experience around water (remember, he couldn’t swim), his angry feet slid on the slippery platform of rock, and he fell on his back. The shallow bit of water splashed on top of him—on his face and chest—sending him into a panic. Maybe he thought he was about to sink in the lake, or maybe he thought he was done for. Either way, he booked it from the rock to the top of the island faster than what seemed humanly possible. The three of us almost died from laughing, which irked Brian.

  He peeled the wet t-shirt from his back, wrung the lake water from it, and huffed.

  “Screw you guys!”

  We laughed some more until Brian finally smiled. He knew we weren’t making fun of him. It was just too humorous not to laugh at.

  “Ha ha. Very funny,” he said, flinging his sopping wet t-shirt over his shoulder. There wasn’t enough room in the shade for Brian. But since he was wet, he seemed happy to sit in the warm sun.

  “You would think at least one boat would’ve come around by now,” Brian said, then wrung out his t-shirt again.

  “You would think,” I agreed. “Not one dang boat.”

  “Not one!” Miguel said. It almost seemed like he was going to cry, but he simply sniffled and turned his head.

  We all looked out across the lake in the direction we believed the marina floated by the shore. I couldn’t see it at all and it seemed like the sailboats scattered across the bay bobbed lifelessly in the water. Or maybe those buoyant objects were dragonflies dancing on the surface of the lake. I couldn’t tell anymore. When hunger eats you from the inside and the heat bakes you on the outside, reality can retreat into the parts in the mind where dreams and nightmares come from.

  “One will come by eventually,” Randy said. He cracked his knuckles with the certainty and confidence of a seasoned gambler. “I’m sure of it.”

  “Yeah,” I agreed, although skeptical. It seemed like the population of lakers and campers and fisherman were extinct.

  “I mean, Tony knows we’re out here. Right?” Randy said, looking at me. He scanned my eyes for an affirmation.

  “I don’t know if he saw us crash out here. He ran into the woods when Rogelio jumped on you and Billy,” I said, looking at the ground between my legs. There was a line of ants marching within a crack and my curiosity was piqued. “He probably has no idea we’re out here. Hey, how do you think these ants got out here?”

  Randy pulled a stalk of grass from the rocky ground and snapped it in half, then in half again. “How would I know. This sucks.”

  We sat under the For Sale sign in the summer heat for what seemed like an hour, watching birds fly above us and the occasional disturbance down at the wate
r line that could’ve been a discombobulated fish or cranky turtle. I jabbed at the line of ants with a brittle twig, contemplating different, plausible scenarios that brought the ants from the mainland to the island. Our stomachs sang a baritone folk tune about destitution and regret when something caught our attention: a speed boat.

  Brian jumped to his feet and jabbed at the air with his index finger. “A boat! A boat!”

  We all jumped up and flapped our thin arms like excited birds attempting flight for the first time and squawking for the mother bird’s attention. The speed boat skirted along the horizon—water spraying out from the inboard motor onto the turbulent wake that snaked from the back like billowing smoke—then made its way into the middle of the bay. As it headed in our direction, its motor roared louder and louder, and soon we could see that the speed boat was pulling a slalom skier who knifed back and forth across the boat’s wake, occasionally catching air when hitting the wake’s frothy outer seams.

  “Hey! Over here!” we pleaded in unison.

  The sight of the boat was very exciting, but the idea of being rescued was even more exciting. I knew we didn’t want to be on that island much longer than we had to. We jumped and yelled and flapped our arms as much as we could.

  “OVER HERE! HEY!”

  As the boat approached the island, it became apparent that the skier was exceptional in skill. As he skimmed back and forth across the wake, he performed a variety of flips and acrobatic moves that mesmerized us. Our pleading turned to gandering. We watched what appeared to be a double backflip that the skier performed as effortlessly as me scratching my butt.

  “Did you see that?” Randy said, a tinge of astonishment in his question.

  “Yeah,” the three of us replied enviously.

  But soon, the boat skirted close enough that we could see the driver’s grizzled face with dark sunglasses perched on his sunblocked nose, his sunbleached hair flapping at the back of his head, and his shoulders also slathered with white sunblock. The driver swiveled at his waist, looking out in front of the boat then looking back at the skier, and back again, repeating at short intervals. There wasn’t anyone else on the boat to watch the skier. And the driver definitely didn’t see us, that was for sure. We restarted our pleading in earnest as the boat approached closer.

  “OVER HERE! HEY!” we called out together.

  We flapped our arms as wildly as possible. The motor boat roared as it skimmed across the lake, drowning out our cries for help. The driver didn’t look in our direction and neither did the skier, who was too occupied with his skiing performance to look at the typically abandoned island. We cried out louder and louder, but eventually the boat turned at the orange buoys to avoid the jagged rocks that surrounded Sometimes Island just under the surface of the water, and made its way out into the safer, open water of the lake. The skier followed, flipping and jumping to his heart’s content. The boat and the skier soon vanished around the back of the peninsula, the one with the Cabin of Seclusion: our previous residence.

  “They didn’t see us,” Miguel said, then sighed.

  He walked back over to the For Sale sign shelter and plunked down in the shade. Brian and Randy joined him soon after. I was the only one left flapping my arms and jumping for attention. I heard the sound of my voice and realized my friends were not with me. I turned back to see them—dejected and tired—but I tried to remain hopeful.

  “They’ll come back this way,” I said, joining them under the sign. “I’m sure of it.”

  No one said anything.

  We sat in the shade without saying a word to each other for what seemed like a few hours. The speed boat never came back our way. The blazing sun slowly descended behind some poofy clouds—edging its way closer to the hilltops in the distance—and with its descent came the armada of hungry mosquitoes. They swooped in with the humid evening breeze and attacked us relentlessly, our unprotected skin a feast for the bloodsuckers. Miguel noticed them first and swatted his arms and legs with his hands, occasionally leaving a bloody stain on his skin where an insect used to be.

  “Blech!” he protested. “So gross!”

  The rest of us swatted our unprotected appendages. But we couldn’t keep up with the insect barrage. There seemed to be millions of the bloodsuckers and nowhere on the island for us to hide from their mindless attack. So, as the evening turned to night, we surrendered.

  “You know,” Brian started, then swatted a mosquito on his forearm. A bloody splat appeared on his skin. “If you rub mud on the mosquito bites, it helps them stop itching.”

  Randy examined Brian. “Where do we get mud? There’s nothing but rock on this island.”

  “We can make our own,” Brian said. With his fingers, he swept a tiny pile of dust in the middle of his crossed legs, then hocked a loogie in his palm. He held his palm above the small dust pile, and with his index finger he pushed the loogie onto the pile. He mixed his own mud and dabbed a small amount on one of his mosquito bites. “Like that.”

  “We’ll be spitting all night to make enough mud to cover these damn mosquito bites!” Randy complained.

  We all laughed, then got to work spitting and dabbing. And I hate to admit it, but Brian was right. The mud did help with the itching, even though we all smelled like spit and dust and bad breath. Once the sun dipped behind the distant hills, the soft glow of twilight entertained us, which eventually turned to a black curtain speckled with stars, and the mosquitos retreated across the water with full bellies. The lights from the marina and the campgrounds illuminated the edge of the lake, some dancing like fireflies. And the bright moon bathed us in a corn yellow glow. The Milky Way spread across the chasm of sky, our galaxy’s brilliance aglow with speckles of light and gamma rays from stars far, far away. We managed to all lay down under the For Sale sign shelter like four sardines wedged between the two cedar trees. Normally, the touch of each other’s skin would be repellent. But that night, it was comforting. No one complained.

  I remember being mesmerized by the sight of the Milky Way. It wasn’t something we saw at night in our home town, being that the sky there was filtered through the glow of city lights. But on Sometimes Island, the Milky Way was as clear and brilliant as the Christmas tree my parents setup in our living room every winter.

  “It looks amazing,” I said.

  “It sure does,” Brian agreed. “Seeing it is one of the coolest parts about camping.”

  As we took in the brilliance of the night sky, a familiar sound interrupted us. It was a sound I had heard before, recently in fact. It sounded like this: Hoo huh hoo. Hoo huh hoo. I sat up, looking for where the bird call was coming.

  “Did you hear that?” I said, looking around us, then up.

  It called again: Hoo huh hoo. Hoo huh hoo.

  About twelve or fifteen feet above us sat an owl in the bur oak tree. It’s yellow eyes glowed—reflecting the pale moonlight—as it looked back down at me. Occasionally, it would blink. The contours of its body blended in with the crooked lines of the tree branches, an effective nocturnal camouflage. I was surprised that, not only could I see it, but that it sat there staring back at us.

  I pointed in its direction. “Guys! There!”

  My three friends sat up to see the owl, which startled it. It spread its wings wide, then leapt into the air, flapping its wings with long, swooping beats. As it ascended in the sky, something fell in front of us, dropped from a clinched claw. The object hit the rocky ground with a thud.

  “It dropped something,” I said, then got on all fours and slowly made my way to it. But once I realized what it was, I gagged. “Yuck!”

  “What is it?” Randy said. He crawled over to where I was to get a look. He gagged, too, when he saw it. “Ugh! A dead mouse!”

  The poor creature was disemboweled, its entrails flopped out of its slit-opened belly onto the dusty ground.

  “Ewww!” we all cried out. Randy and I crawled back under the shelter with Brian and Miguel, holding our folded legs up to our chests
as if shielding ourselves from the natural violence that ended that poor rodent’s life.

  “Maybe—” I started, gagging again. “Maybe, it thought we were hungry and dropped us a snack.”

  “That’s gross!”

  We didn’t see or hear the owl again that night, but its presence left a pallor of dread. Would it harm us? Or worse, drop more dead animals on us? We didn’t know, but eventually decided unanimously that we would try to get some sleep instead of worrying about it.

  “We should look for something else to eat in the morning,” Brian suggested.

  And with that, everyone laid back down to sleep, supine as we were on the rocky ground under the For Sale sign shelter. Quickly, everyone drifted into sleep, except for me. I laid awake for another hour or so, listening to my friends snore a new duet with the Hill Country breeze. I thought I saw the owl flying across the sky, or maybe I was only dreaming.

  19.

  When I woke up the next morning, the first thing I saw was Randy peeing into the lake. I rubbed my eyes thinking I was dreaming because it was a strange sight to see. When I sat up, I also saw Brian peeing into the lake, his shorts crumpled down around his bony ankles and his tan butt bare in the breeze for all to see. And a few feet from him, Miguel was squatting on a rock taking a dump. The turd shot out from his behind, then quickly flopped in the water like a runaway train you’d see in an old-timey movie dropping off the end of a broken suspension bridge, then tumbling down to certain destruction into a ravine. The sight of my friends relieving themselves made me laugh out loud, but also made me realize that I had to pee, too. I couldn’t remember the last time I peed, but it didn’t matter. I joined my friends for an emergency piss into the lake.