It’s where I left it. So I’ve opened it. So now I’m writing again.
I don’t know why I’m bothering.
Except, like Kimberly said, we’ve got to have a record of what’s been happening here.
Maybe the cops’ll get their hands on it, someday.
Yeah, right.
Do they have cops in this goddamn armpit of the universe? Do they have anyone?
I know one thing: I don’t ever want to see this thing get published. Not anymore. Not after what happened.
“After what happened?” you ask.
I don’t know what happened.
It has been a few days since my last entry in the journal. I think. I’m not sure how long it’s been.
I just now turned back a couple of pages to read what’s there and refresh my memory. It’s almost like somebody else wrote them. Wrote them a long time ago. Years ago. So much has changed.
I’m embarrassed to see what I wrote.
Example: I expect he’ll try to kill me again. The placement of again makes it sound like I’ve already been killed once. But that isn’t the real problem. (One can’t be held accountable for the grammar of dialogue, right? And who gives a rat’s ass, anyway?) The real problem is my cavalier, jaunty fucking attitude. Ah, yes, my good Wesley? He’ll likely make another try for me. Tut, tut. Have to be on my guard, won’t I? Have to remember to duck.
Well, here’s news.
It wasn’t me he got.
It was them.
Kimberly, Billie and Connie.
They’re gone with the fucking wind, and I’m not. I’m here, back at the beach, writing in my journal, alive and well and alone.
I’m not planning to get killed.
Another gem from my previous entry.
Talk about arrogance.
Talk about being the prime asshole of the world.
Talk about prophetic.
Of course, I don’t actually know if the women have been killed. I think it’s likely, but I’m not sure. I know some of what happened, but not everything. They were still alive when I went down, but what happened to them afterwards?
I don’t know.
I know they’re gone, though.
I can’t handle this. I’m going for a swim. Maybe I’ll be lucky and a shark’ll eat me for dinner.
War Party
This is the next day.
I was too messed up to do any more writing yesterday. I went for a swim, like I said. The sharks didn’t get me, though. I didn’t see hide nor hair of any sharks.
I did consider suicide, though.
One of those really cool, melodramatic suicides like you’ve seen in a billion crappy movies—where some idiot goes swimming off into the sunset. The deal is, I guess, you keep swimming away from shore until you get too pooped to make it back. So even if you eventually change your mind, you’re history.
There are several reasons why I didn’t do it.
A. Drowning sucks.
B. Being dead sucks.
C. Being the lone survivor is not a fate worse than death.
D. I’m not one hundred per cent sure that all the gals are dead.
E. If I kill myself, I won’t be able to do any of the things that I want very badly to do to Wesley and Thelma.
F. Like it or not, I do feel a certain obligation to play Ishmael and tell thee, to be the Horatio of our noble, lost band and report our cause aright to the unsatisfied.
Other than not kill myself, what I did yesterday is of little consequence. I swam, I ate, I wept, I slept.
Today, I’ll tell what happened to us on day eight.
As much as I know, anyway.
Day six was when Thelma returned, battered and claiming that she’d killed Wesley. That night, she went at me with her razor. Then she escaped by swimming away.
Day seven, we did a lot of talking about what had happened on night six. And I did a lot of writing about it. Other than that, nothing of consequence happened. Connie’s injuries were the main reason why we didn’t take any action. She seemed to be getting better, though.
Nothing happened that night.
Day eight, Connie was still sore but she was ready for action. We all were. We knew it was time to go after Wesley and Thelma.
We hoped that Wesley was already dead.
We were fairly sure that Thelma had lied about killing him, just as she’d lied about nearly everything else. We thought mere was a good chance, however, that Wesley had died from the wounds he got on the night of our ambush. Kimberly had put her spear through his left tit, and she’d rammed a hole into his ass. As a result of those wounds, he could’ve died from blood loss or from infection.
If he wasn’t dead, we figured he might at least be incapacitated.
On the other hand, maybe he’d recovered enough to be a real threat to us.
We’d discussed every possibility that we could think of.
We’d concluded that anything was possible, but that we were more likely to have trouble from Thelma than Wesley.
We set out at mid-morning.
Kimberly wore Keith’s Hawaiian shirt over her white bikini. She carried her tomahawk on its rope sling. The Swiss Army knife puckered out the front of her pants. The spear was in her left hand.
Billie wore her same black bikini and no shirt, of course. Her chest was crossed by ropes. The single line of the tomahawk sling swept down from her shoulder to her right hip. The remains of the hanging rope (which we’d used for tying Thelma’s hands) crossed her from the other shoulder. It was long enough to make three loops. We’d decided to bring it along in case we took a captive.
Though Kimberly was the one with Indian blood in her veins, Connie looked more the part. Because of her headband. She wore it to hold the bandage in place against her wound. The bandage was a pad of cloth made from her old T-shirt. The T-shirt had been ruined, anyway, so Billie had washed it in the stream and cut it up.
Connie also wore a vest. She’d made it herself, using my razor on day seven to cut it out of a beach towel. It had yellow and white horizontal stripes. Even though it didn’t weigh much, it helped to hold a bandage down against her left shoulder. It also protected her shoulders and upper back from the sun, though it had no sleeves and was so short that it left her arms and lower back exposed. Not to mention her rump, which was as good as naked in that thong.
Before we set out, I offered to spread some of Billie’s sunblock on her bun. She told me to fuck off. (Like I said, she was feeling better.)
The vest couldn’t be shut in front, but the towel panels covered her breasts—her real reason for making and wearing the thing, more than likely. To keep them out of my sight. To taunt me and punish me.
Logically, she should’ve made herself a skirt, too. But she didn’t. Did she think I had no interest in her lower regions? It didn’t make any sense, really. But then, you could go crazy trying to make sense out of Connie.
She was sure good to look at, though. They all were.
