Entering the arena, Neil was momentarily bewildered to realize that the corpses of Wheatstone, Jaworski, and Spicer were nowhere to be seen, but then he noticed a mound of mud in the center of the field, evidence that someone — Father Thomas, quite likely — had buried them. An unholy odor rose from the grave, so intense it instantly killed any notion of solving the incipient famine through the ingestion of former shipmates.
By 1530 the pagans were back in the city, sorting through the day’s harvest. It came to a little over thirty pounds, which Haycox divided into two equal stockpiles, storing the first in a seabag — bait, she explained — and parceling out the second on the spot. Greedily Neil grabbed his allotment, a conglomeration of apple cores, Concord grapes, and frankfurter stubs welded together with Turkish taffy and melted cheddar cheese. Staking out a shady spot beneath the banquet table, he sat down, lit a Marlboro, and puffed.
He stared at his meal. A sharp moan broke from his larynx. This wasn’t food. It was a travesty of food, a cruel impersonation of food, tormenting him the way a dead child’s voice torments its parents.
He devoured the ration in four big bites.
“I got a job for you.”
Neil looked up. Dolores Haycox stood over him, her stocky form now swathed in a beige Exxon jumpsuit.
“We need pontoons,” she said, handing Neil a set of battery-powered needle guns. “Four of ’em.”
“Aye-aye.”
“Take Mungo, Jong, and Echohawk. Locate some fifty-five-gallon drums. Good ones. Drain ’em.”
He took a drag on his Marlboro. “Gotcha.”
“We’re gonna get out of this mess, Weisinger.”
“You bet, Captain Haycox.”
After a half-hour’s hike across a mud flat riddled with aerosol cans and disposable diapers, Neil and his three shipmates reached the nearest chemical dump, a dark, viscous swamp where dozens of 55-gallon drums lay about like chunks of pineapple suspended in Jell-O. Most of the drums were fractured and leaking, but before long Mungo spotted a cluster that the dumpers, in an effort to either appease their consciences or cover their asses, had evidently sealed against saltwater corrosion. The sailors switched on their needle guns and got to work, chipping the rust from the caps with the radical caution of neurosurgeons severing frontal lobes: each cap had to be loosened but must not suffer damage in the process.
As Neil freed up his cap, two disquieting images arrived.
Leo Zook, suffocating.
Joe Spicer, bleeding.
Summoning all his pagan powers, the full force of Anno Postdomini One, he tore their livid faces from his mind.
He unplugged the drum, laid it on its side, and watched in appalled fascination as something that resembled black mucus and smelled like burning sulfur flowed forth. He screwed the cap on tight. Within minutes, Mungo, Jong, and Echohawk were emptying out their respective drums: a sudden rush of stinking yellow goo, a steady stream of putrid brown syrup, a slow trickle of acrid purple pus.
Like Sisyphus rolling his stone, Neil began pushing his drum across the mud flat, his companions following, and by sundown all four pontoons were safely within the city’s walls.
The deserters rose at dawn, carrying the banquet table to the beach and lashing the pontoons in place with wires and fan belts scrounged from the nearest auto graveyard. By 0800 the vessel, christened Cornucopia, was ready for sea. Captain Haycox assumed a commanding position in the bow, right beside the freshwater casks. Echohawk, the designated first mate, manned the tiller. Ramsey and Horrocks settled down amidships, their fists wrapped firmly around two jumper cables whose clamps had been twisted into fishhooks. Mungo and Jong took up a corroded pair of Datsun bumpers and began paddling.
Standing on the beach, Neil watched the Cornucopia smash through the breakers and vanish into the dark waters beyond. As fog engulfed the raft, he turned and joined the solemn little march back to the city.
For the next two days, Neil and his mates remained in the museum, lolling in the muddy yard like fourteenth-century Londoners in thrall to the Black Death. They spoke in grunts. They dreamed of food. Not simply the aquatic delicacies promised by Captain Haycox’s mission (lobster bisque, pollack chowder, marlin pie), not simply imitation franchise food from Follingsbee’s galley, but good old-fashioned sailors’ fare as well: hardtack, cracker hash, midshipman’s muffins, strike-me-blind. The fog thickened. Prayers drifted heavenward. Tears fell. Neil figured that each mariner’s reasoning was not unlike his own. Yes, Haycox and her crew might break the covenant, blithely fishing their way to Portugal and never bothering to save their stranded mates, but to do so would constitute betrayal on a cosmic scale. There is honor among the starving, the AB sensed. An unfathomable fraternity binds those who seriously contemplate cutting off their own toes and chewing the raw flesh from the bones.
“I hate you,” muttered Isabel Bostwick. “I hate all of you. You… you men, you and your slime. It’s a real fine line between a consensual orgy and a rape, that’s one thing I’ve learned on this trip, a real fine line.”
“I didn’t see you worryin’ about any fine lines during the party,” said Stubby Barnes.
“I’d better not be pregnant,” said Juanita Torres.
“If we don’t stop talking,” said Neil, “we’re gonna lose our strength.”
On the morning of the third day, the Cornucopia’s little company staggered into the museum. Their faces looked scored and deflated, as if painted on expiring helium balloons. The news was doubly bad. Not only did an impassable barricade of waterspouts and maelstroms surround Van Horne Island, but her bays and inlets were as bereft of fish as the dusty seas of the moon.
“We ate only our fair share,” said Haycox, setting the bait bag on the flagstones.
One by one, the sailors who’d stayed behind came forward, each thrusting a hand into the bag and drawing out his due measure. Neil’s portion consisted of half a Three Musketeers bar on which sat eleven raisins, a cherry LifeSaver, and five sugar-coated Alpha-Bits, K, T, A, S, E. He couldn’t help noticing that the letters, rearranged, spelled STEAK.
August 17.
Course: nowhere. Speed: 0 knots.
They came back 24 hours ago, weak, dizzy, and frightened, stumbling out of the fog like, as Ockham put it, “a bunch of extras from Night of the Living Dead.” I’ve never seen such a scraggly gang of sailors in my life. Led by their phony captain, Dolores Haycox, they threw down their weapons — bazookas, harpoon guns, flare pistols, blasting caps, decorative cutlasses — and collected in the shadow of the hull.
Their arrival proved no surprise to Ockham. On his return from the city, he told me their provisions would be gone by the 9th, so frantic was their bacchanal. Assuming the padre calculated correctly, the mutineers held out for over a week after eating their last morsel.
Impressive.
The minute I saw them, I ordered the anchor raised, locking the bastards out. It’s like some crazy inverse siege — the trapped defenders eating, the outside army starving. I am not a cruel man. I am not Captain Bligh. But if I don’t feed Rafferty and my other loyalists the last of our reserves, they won’t have the energy to keep taking the Juan Fernandez on the trolling expeditions that are our last, best, and only hope. So far nobody’s gotten more than two miles from shore before encountering a twenty-foot wall of turbulence, impossible for a small craft to penetrate. Within the navigable zone, though, we’re certain to find fish.
Last night I ordered Follingsbee to do a new inventory, this time throwing in everything that remotely qualifies as food.