wieners and nukable chicken noodle soup and industrial desserts and containers of peanut butter and ketchup and Coke like characters from a child’s nightmare, the familiar form and features swollen to monstrous proportions.
I chose the lightest-looking item, a plastic bag containing sixty packs of cheese-flavored corn snacks, and set off the way the other two had gone, following a barely visible path in the rough grass. The sound and scent of the ocean grew stronger. Then the moon glowed from behind the clouds and I saw it, a seething dark surface stretching away on all sides. The house, I realized, was built on a promontory. The next moment the ground beneath my feet turned hollow and I stumbled on something, almost falling.
“Take it easy,” said Lenny. “We don’t want to lose any of that stuff.”
I discovered that I was standing on a narrow pier of wooden slats built out into the water. There was a boat alongside, and what I had stumbled on was the heavy metal ring to which it was moored.
“Just set it down here,” Lenny told me. “Rick’ll load her.”
He brushed past, heading back the way we had come, his lanky figure outlined against the yard light on the house.
It took us another twenty minutes or so to lug all the groceries down to the water, while Rick manhandled it aboard the boat and stowed it away.
“You got any baggage?” he asked when we were done.
“Just an overnight case.”
“Better get it.”
I finally understood.
“You mean we’re going in the boat?”
Lenny chortled.
“You’d have one heck of a hard time driving there!” he said.
He walked back with me to the house, where I got my case out of the trunk of the car.
“Leave the keys with me,” Lenny told me. “I’ll put her in the garage later.”
I wasn’t particularly happy about giving my car keys to a total stranger, but presumably Sam’s friends weren’t going to rip me off. With a weak shrug, I handed them over. A diesel motor gurgled into life down by the water.
“Better get going, you don’t want to be left behind,” said Lenny, turning back into the house. A moment later the light went out. The moon was obscured again. I made my way slowly back to the pier, trying to dilate my eyes to the point where I could distinguish grass from rocks and land from water. The lights inside the boat were on, and once I found the pier I got aboard without difficulty. It was a surprisingly roomy old motor cruiser, with an enclosed wheelhouse.
While I stowed my overnight bag below, Rick untied the ropes and pushed us off from the pier. He put the engine in reverse until we were clear of the shore, then revved up and spun the wheel to turn the boat around. I peered out through the windshield. I could see nothing whatever. We appeared to be heading out into an expanse of total darkness.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
Rick stood grasping the wheel and staring straight ahead.
“Heading due wrest right now,” he said. “Once we get out into the strait we’ll turn north until we clear Orcas, then head on in.”
None of this meant anything much to me, but that’s usually the way I feel when I talk to boat people.
“So how do you know where you are?” I asked. “I can’t see anything out there.”
Rick tapped a circular glass inset in the dashboard. I leaned over and saw a white line revolving slowly around a screen. In its wake, a ghostly outline faded slowly until the line passed once again, refreshing its vigor.
“Didn’t use to be able to do this run at night,” Rick remarked with satisfaction. “Not till we got this baby. Cost plenty, but it’s doubled our mobility.”
The gadget was some kind of radar, I supposed. The ghostly outline was an image of the shoreline apparently moving past the boat, which remained eternally stationary in the middle of the screen. For some reason I thought of David, the still center of a world which seemed to move around him, safe and navigable, and something gave way inside me. “It will only get better,” the psychiatrist had advised me. “You will have bad patches for a long time to come, but they will be farther and farther apart.”
I was having one now. It was not just his death I was grieving for, I realized, but the brief life which had preceded it. Children are vectors aimed at the future. All the doubts and anxieties about how they will turn out are balanced by the knowledge that their course and final destination are ultimately out of your hands. Whatever happens to them will happen when you are different, or dead, and the world an unrecognizable place. But no such perspectives existed in David’s case. The only things that would ever happen to him had already happened. His death seemed to make a mockery of his ever having existed at all, and of my continuing to do so. For the first time, I understood why Rachael had decided that she could not go on.
As we emerged into the open channel, the waves grew steeper. We passed a large unladen oil tanker coming the other way, its high sides towering over us. Later a car ferry crossed our bows, decked out in lights from stem to stern. It was almost eleven o’clock by my watch when Rick finally eased the throttle and the roar of the motor died away to a gentle gurgle. The boat wallowed lazily on the slight swell. A few moments later, I made out a light in the darkness up ahead.
“Are we there?” I asked.
Rick’s head moved in what might have been a nod. He had hardly spoken a word to me the whole way. If the rest of Sam’s friends were as much fun as Rick and Lenny, this was going to be a visit to remember.
The boat crept imperceptibly toward the beacon. It was impossible to tell how far off it was, and I thought we still had several hundred yards to run when the light suddenly loomed overhead and we bumped heavily against something. The boat tipped, the door of the wheelhouse opened and Sam was there, flinging his arms about me.
“Phil! It’s so great you’re finally here, man!”
His manner couldn’t have been more different from his cool response on the phone. He stood there slapping me on the shoulders and grinning delightedly. I smiled at him with real pleasure. Sam’s was the first familiar and friendly face I had seen in what seemed like a very long time. My earlier doubts about the wisdom of coming were swept away.
As we stepped off the boat, I saw that there were three other men standing on the pier beside some kind of hand-truck.
“Get the stuff unloaded, guys,” Sam told them casually. “Bring Phil’s bags too. I’m going to take him straight up to the hall. He must be wiped out.”
I was slightly surprised at this peremptory tone, but the men obediently climbed aboard the boat and set to work. I also thought it kind of strange that Sam made no attempt to introduce me. Still, this was his scene, not mine.
We walked along the pier to a trail winding up a wooded hillside. The only sound was our footsteps, the only light the faint glimmer of the moon behind a screen of high cloud. Superficially, Sam had hardly changed since we met in Minneapolis. His body was as spare as ever, his features as sharp, his hair as long. But something was different. He had a new poise, a gravitas, a centered, controlled energy. The very exuberance of his greeting revealed a confidence that had been lacking on that previous occasion, when he had been so stiff and guarded. Now he could permit himself what seemed like a genuine and spontaneous display of affection. In all our previous dealings, I had always felt older and more mature than Sam. Now the relationship seemed to have been mysteriously inverted.
“How come we had to take a boat to get here?” I asked.
“Because it’s an island.”
I stopped and looked at him.
“An island? You never told me that.”
Sam’s smile was visible even in the half-light.
“There’s a lot of things I haven’t told you, Phil. This way, you get to find out for yourself.”
This sounded more like the old Sam.
“So where the hell are we?” I demanded.
