The Benevolent Lords of Sometimes Island Page 19

  “Then do it.”

  “Yeah,” Miguel agreed. “Just eat it.”

  “OK, I will.”

  I slowly raised the leaf to my unsuspecting mouth. I opened it wide—comically agape. Miguel watched with anticipation. Brian continued to ignore me.

  “Here I go,” I said.

  Brian then watched my progress from the corner of his eye and as the leaf got closer to my mouth, the more he turned his head to watch. Then without warning, I shoved the leaf in my mouth and chomped on it.

  “He actually ate it!” Miguel called out, then burst out laughing, rolling onto his back, kicking with excitement.

  Brian’s eyes bulged with astonishment like he knew something I didn’t, but that I would soon find out. As I chomped on the leaf, the bitterest of acrid liquids covered my tongue and elicited my gag reflex immediately. I spit out of the half-chewed leaf and coughed.

  Both Brian and Miguel were on their backs laughing hysterically, kicking their legs up and punching at the sky with celebratory fists. I even had to go down to the water (in spite of my sore leg and the excruciating pain it caused going down there) and rinse out my mouth, scraping the last of the bitter leaf from my tongue with my finger nails. Dirty lake water was better than the horrific taste of that insidious leaf.

  “It’s disgusting,” I said.

  They continued to laugh at me, their arms now draped across their bellies. I didn’t like being the source of their amusement, but it was better than discontent between us.

  Brian sighed. “That was hilarious.”

  “So funny,” Miguel agreed.

  I returned to where they were sitting and sat down.

  “Glad that I amuse you. Still friends?” I said, extending my hand to Brian for a reconciliatory shake.

  “Of course,” he said, shaking my hand with an extra firm grip, then he twisted his arm so he could pin me to the ground. We wrestled for a bit, but not in a competitive way. We were just horsing around when Miguel cried out that he saw something down in the water.

  “Look! Money!”

  Brian and I quit wrestling and we watched Miguel go down to the waterline and pull a soggy $100 bill from the cold, dark water. He stepped over mossy rocks to get back to where we were standing and held the limp bill up for us to see, pinched between his thumb and index finger.

  “Do you think that’s from—” I said, then looked out to the lake at the spot where I remembered seeing Bloody Billy’s head bobbing in the water for the last time.

  “Maybe. Who knows? Did you know American money is made from a remarkable material that’s like cloth?”

  Brian and I looked at each other, then both shook our heads.

  “It’ll air dry in fifteen or twenty minutes. You’ll see.”

  Brian and I shrugged at this new information about American paper money.

  “Let’s go back with Randy,” Miguel suggested. “It’ll dry just as fast over there. Too bad we can’t eat it.”

  We made our way back to where Randy was laying under the For Sale sign. It was nicer sitting in the shade while we waited for the $100 bill to dry. And to be rescued. Fifteen minutes quickly went by and Miguel’s theory about how fast the money would dry was proven correct.

  “See?” he said to Brian and me, then handed us the $100 bill to examine. Sure enough, it was dry as can be and felt remarkably like any old bill. “I want to make something for you.”

  He extended his hand and I gave the bill to him. First, he folded it in half. Then he flattened it and used the line down the middle as a guide for his impromptu origami project. He held the paper close to his face and folded it a number of times while his tongue jabbed in and out of his mouth, revealing his intense concentration. After performing a dozen or so origami folds, his project was complete. He placed it in his palm and showed us.

  “A paper airplane!”

  “Whoa!” we said in unison.

  He handed the paper airplane to me.

  “Maybe a plane like this will rescue us soon,” he said.

  I pinched the paper airplane between my index finger and thumb, then examined its aerodynamic lines. I swung it through the air as if to throw it, but didn’t.

  “Throw it to me!” Brian commanded.

  So, I did, but it crashed quickly on the rocky ground instead of landing in Brian’s outstretched hands.

  “Piece of crap,” Brian said, which made us all laugh.

  Randy moaned, then turned on his other side. His skin was grey and damp. He pulled his knees to his chest and laid on his side in the fetal position. We didn’t dare touch him.

  After a few minutes, our excitement about the paper airplane dissipated with the realization that maybe—just maybe—Tony and Victoria wouldn’t be back as soon as we’d hoped. There was no sign of them at all and Randy seemed to be getting worse as time trudged on. He moaned and groaned in a state of listless irritation and we didn’t know what to do except to comfort him by whispering well-wishes. Our presence seemed to calm him sometimes, but his worsening condition worried the three of us. Is he going to die? I thought to myself. How could I face his mother if that happened while we were stuck on Sometimes Island?

  As night fell, we did as little as possible to expend energy, lying together on the ground like cadavers. All my friends slept as I gazed up at the Milky Way—I held the paper airplane in my hands, every once and a while zipping it through the air above my head—and I wondered if the owl would hoot or, at least, pay me a visit by sitting on a branch up in the bur oak tree. If he dropped a dead mouse this time, then I would most likely eat it, particularly since Randy was asleep and couldn’t chide me about not having dignity or something like that. I was so hungry that dignity was something I just wasn’t worried about.

  So, rather than think about dead mice or dignity or food, I decided to put the paper airplane in my pocket and count as many stars as I could in an effort to go to sleep. The last thing I remember was that I counted ninety seven stars before I, too, fell asleep. I must have fallen into a very deep slumber because the next thing I remember happening was like something out of a dream. It was like a UFO was coming down from the sky and—little did I know—it was coming for us.

  PART IV.

  Rescue of the Benevolent Lords

  25.

  During elementary school, not only was I obsessed with Spider-Man comics, I was also addicted to movies about extraterrestrials and spaceships. That time from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s was the pinnacle of alien movies in my opinion. There were these stone-cold classics: E. T. the Extraterrestrial, Star Wars, Cocoon, Alien, just to name a few. But the greatest of them all—the coup de grace to all arguments about alien movies of the period—was Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It had amazing special effects, but it was also very realistic in its portrayal of government conspiracy as well as the alien abductions. A viewing with my parents during a dollar matinee was revelatory to my young, impressionable mind. As I watched—transfixed, mesmerized, and stuffing my face with buttered popcorn—I remember my parents telling me afterwards, “This is exactly what would happen.”

  “How what would happen?” I said, worried.

  “An alien invasion.”

  I agreed with them, not only because they were my parents, but because the depiction of the aliens was so realistic and plausible that I had no doubt it would be true. Scenes like the alien scout ships flying through the toll booths or the abduction of the little boy outside his rural home or the final landing of the gargantuan mothership on the top of Devils Tower burned indelibly into my adolescent imagination. I was certain—as certain as any little kid could be—that Close Encounters of the Third Kind was an accurate depiction of what would happen if aliens came to Earth. It was a documentary of what was to come for humanity.

  So, when I was awakened by an ominous sound from up above and those all too familiar searching, incandescent lights beamed down from the inky black, night sky, my first thought was, I knew it was true!

&nbs
p; I sat up and watched the strange object approach the island from up above—two shafts of light radiating the water and a glow from its bulbous fuselage—and it emitted a rumble similar to the sound of someone boxing your ears repeatedly. Thwump thwump thwump. I was flabbergasted, to say the least. And as it got closer, a gust of forced air pushed up to the island from the water and launched shrapnel of dust, pebbles, twigs, and sticker burrs into my bare chest and face. My friends awoke from the attack of island debris, immediately covering their eyes with their hands. The thwumping became audibly clearer as it got closer, as well as the realization that this unidentified flying object was actually very identifiable. Brian was the first to verbalize this fact.

  “Tony sent a helicopter to rescue us!”

  The reflection of the search lights off the murky water illuminated the helicopter from below, and it was clear to us that we would probably be getting off that godforsaken island soon, as long as we didn’t get impaled by shrapnel first. The force of the air and the debris pummeling us was almost too much to take, so we crawled behind some cedar trees and the bur oak tree and held onto the trunks tightly, using the base of the trees as a shield from the dangerous debris. The For Sale sign wriggled in between the two trees it was pried between, broadcasting an irritating sound similar to a clown blubbering his index finger between two slobbery lips through an amplifier. The closer the helicopter descended, the stronger it blew. Inevitably, the For Sale sign just couldn’t stay put. It launched from between the two cedar trees out into the dark water behind us like a crazed Frisbee, floating a moment after it splashed, then quickly sinking to its doom. I turned back to find my friends gripping the trees for their dear lives. I knew we were being rescued, but it was a terrifying way to rescue us.

  Hovering above the island, I could see there were two men in the helicopter. The pilot spoke to us through a speaker mounted below, but his voice was indecipherable. He sounded like every adult character in every Charlie Brown cartoon I ever watched: muffled, squawky, and incomprehensible.

  “I think they’re trying to tell us something!” I yelled out to my friends.

  Brian nodded. Miguel and Randy hugged their trees and didn’t make a move.

  “I wonder what they’re saying!”

  After a couple of stanzas of unintelligible squawking, the helicopter hovered in place like a gigantic wasp, occasionally adjusting its search lights to different locations on and around the island. Maybe they were surveying the scene. Maybe they were contemplating an ill-advised landing. Maybe they just didn’t know what they were doing. I never found out, to tell you the truth. Believe me, later in life, I asked everybody just what the hell this helicopter pilot was thinking, but nobody could tell me. It remains a mystery to this day. But at the time, as I gripped my tree and looked up to the helicopter the best I could, it seemed like the only hope we had to be rescued.

  It hovered long enough to sweep all the loose debris off the island, the shrapnel attack finally relenting. I noticed something descending from the bottom of the helicopter, but I couldn’t tell what it was at first. It lowered through flashes of light, a line of some sort dangling from below the fuselage, at one point illuminated enough to reveal to me a rope with a triangular handle at the end of it. Then I realized what the helicopter pilot was attempting to accomplish: rescue via flying trapeze.

  “They dropped a rope!” I cried out.

  Brian returned a puzzled look, which morphed into a grimace. As young as we were, we both realized what a dumb idea this was and wondered which adult came up with this ridiculous rescue plan.

  “I’m not hanging on to that!” Brian yelled. “I can’t swim! Doesn’t everybody get that by now?!”

  As the trapeze descended closer to us, the pilot squawked another stanza of garbled instructions. This was the misguided attempting to rescue the inexperienced. This was—in so few words—a disaster. The helicopter maneuvered closer to the island, the dangling trapeze twirling under the forced air of the helicopter’s spinning blades. The farther it descended, the faster it spun.

  “This is crazy!” I cried out.

  “I’m not doing it!” Brian screamed. “Not doing it!”

  Soon, the dangling trapeze swayed in the air as it spun, swinging an invisible circus performer back and forth. The invisible performer grew more and more daring, swinging wider, the trapeze wobbling. Before long, the trapeze unilaterally changed its purpose from a rescue device to a dangerous flying object. Its swinging radius grew wildly and more erratic. Once the helicopter pilot noticed what was happening below to his rescue line, he adjusted the helicopter’s position. But the tilted blades forced more air toward the island, sending the trapeze on a hurtling course toward an unsuspecting cedar tree. The branches ensnared the trapeze and the rope slithered around its catch like a snake hungry for a quick kill. Losing its freedom, the helicopter’s engine revved loudly, performing a panicked shimmy as its motion was restricted.

  “It’s gonna crash!” I screamed.

  All the cinematic logic in all the 80s action movies told me this. It was supposed to crash. Rambo movies told me this. Indiana Jones movies told me this. James Bond movies, too. The helicopter’s engine revved even louder as it tilted in an effort to escape the cedar tree’s grasp of the rescue line. Like a rowdy dog pulling on its owner’s leash, the rescue line grew taut to the point of almost snapping, and the tension created seemed to pull the helicopter closer to the water. And right when I thought it was going to crash—plugging both my ears with stiff index fingers as I prepared to brace myself for an explosion—the rescue line snapped with a whip-crack screech. And the next thing I knew, I was on the ground, under a dog pile of friends.

  “Stay down!” Randy commanded. He must have tackled the three of us to the ground to protect us. He was so big and heavy, we had no choice but to stay down.

  The rescue line screeched and hissed like a prehistoric creature as it whipped above us, then splashed into the water behind us. The cedar tree dropped all its needles in a shower of panic. And the helicopter ascended into that deep, dark sky, its thwumping, rhythmic din pulsating toward the clouds, its fluorescent lights beaming at the hills. It hung in the air for a moment or two like a ruminating wasp, then it was gone with a quick tilt to the right, the beating of its blades still reverberating in my ears after it vanished.

  Brian, Miguel, and I elbowed our way out from under Randy, or what appeared to be the ghost of Randy. His skin was pallid, almost translucent, and his sulking face glowed in the dark. He sat down where our For Sale sign shelter used to be, the roof now at the bottom of the lake, and he shook cedar needles from his hair.

  “That was crazy,” he said, then coughed up a loogy.

  “Totally,” I replied.

  We sat with Randy as the night embraced us with the hope for a rescue gone.

  26.

  The next morning, no one needed to pee, mostly likely the first signs of dehydration. That urgent feeling we usually felt first thing in the morning—whether at home with our loving families or on that godforsaken deserted island—had dissipated along with our hopes of being rescued. The helicopter that visited us in the night seemed more like part of a collective nightmare than an attempt to rescue us. What normal adult thought that was a good idea? I kept thinking to myself. It just didn’t make any sense. Even I, at such a young age, saw the absurdity of a helicopter / flying trapeze rescue mission of four preteens in the middle of the night. It was asinine, really; any middle-schooler would’ve told you that.

  But as the sun slowly ascended and the four of us rubbed our crusty eyes covered with dust and debris from the botched rescue mission, we could smell the evidence of civilization in the air, my friends and I only separated by a cruel body of water that—in the grand scheme of things—wasn’t the greatest distance we would have to cross in our lives, as impossible as it seemed at the time. The water churned just enough to let us know that we were not getting across it, no matter how hard we tried. Besides, Brian could
n’t swim, as he stoically reminded us. What we smelled floating across the angry water was exhaust from engines, wafts of fragrant cedar and oak trees, and the scent of the most delicious of all Texas traditions. It was so strong that Brian, Miguel, and I sat up, tilting our sniffing noses up in the air like hungry beasts.

  “I smell barbeque,” Brian said, then licked his dry lips with his sandpaper cat tongue.

  “Smells like chicken,” Miguel added.

  We couldn’t figure out exactly where the delicious combination of scents came from, but Brian surmised that the engine exhaust must have been from the marina and the fragrance of a cherished barbeque dinner must have been from the extinguishing grills and campfires of the campgrounds next door. The intoxicating scents drifted to the island on the Hill Country breeze. It was a malicious tease from humanity and a serenade from the sirens of barbeque lore.

  “I would destroy some chicken right now,” I confessed. Brian and Miguel emphatically agreed. It sounded divine to my malnourished body.

  “I could guzzle a 2-liter of Big Red, too!” Miguel said.

  “Daaang! That sounds good!” Brian said.

  We could’ve gone on like that until the moment we happily died, reminiscing about family feasts we took for granted and easy snacks we snatched without thinking how hard our parents had to work to provide, anything to appease our dreaded souls from the hopelessness we felt deep in our hearts and empty stomachs. But then a familiar sound returned. It came in with the delicious Hill Country breeze across the churning waters.

  The thwumping noise.

  The thwump thwump thwump of helicopter blades.

  And the sound of an armada of rescue boats. Like the rumble before an avalanche or the rolling thunder after a heavy rainstorm.

  “Look!” Brian cried out, pointing toward the approaching mass.

  And just as we hoped—finally—a different, larger helicopter (similar to the ones you’d see in war movies like Apocalypse Now or Rambo—army green with white, block lettering stenciled on it and a machine gun mounted on its side, although this one didn’t have one of those) approached Sometimes Island with dozens of motor boats underneath it: ski boats, fishing boats, patrol boats, even a party barge. It was an exciting vision, which is how it seemed to me because the boats emerging from the smear of hazy horizon across the glittering water appeared to shimmy and sparkle as if ejecting themselves from our mirage of hope. The rumble from the beating helicopter blades and the dozens of outboard motors was the most beautiful sound I had heard since long before our boat wreck on Sometimes Island. I was so excited that I just had to tell Randy, who was still lying on his side in the fetal position. He was a despondent lump of poisoned meat.