The Last One Left

Chapter Fourteen

Corpo had propped her up on the narrow bed, almost to a sitting position. He had put his best white shirt on her, folded a blue bandanna diagonally, knotted it around her small waist as a belt, folded the cuffs of the shirt back until they were at her wrists. He had combed her hair in a way that looked quite good to him, gently fashioning it over the shaved and bandaged place.

He had cleaned up several areas of the littered room, stacking the things in boxes he had saved. On an upended crate beside the bed were some of the brilliant red blossoms of flowering air plants in a small glass jar.

He could not tire of looking at her. Her eyes were sea green, with little flecks of amber near the pupils, her skin flawless where it was neither burned nor bruised nor abraded. He liked to lean close and look at those eyes, and the way the little dark lashes curled, and the way the pale hair of the eyebrows was laid so neatly and cleverly, the blonde head hair springing so vitally from the white scalp where the curve of the gentle forehead ended. She had small even teeth, a narrow upper lip and a full protruding lower lip, and a small cleft in her chin. All the neatness of the way she was made reminded him of birds he had picked up, freshly killed, the feather patterns and the down of the soft underside.

He sat on the broken chair near the foot of the bed and admired her. She went on and on and on, in a light sweet breathless voice, her expressions changing often. She was by far the prettiest thing he had ever seen.

“And you sure are a talker, Missy. You sure do go on and on.”

He could not understand much of it. Sometimes the words didn’t fit together in any way that would make sense. It didn’t seem to matter whether he was there or not if she felt talky. She talked to a lot of different people. Sometimes she’d seem to be talking right to him, but when he moved off to the side she’d keep talking to the place where he’d been. She’d doze off. Sometimes it would be a good heavy sleep. Other times she’d toss and twitch and whine. She’d get all sweaty, and he’d wipe her face off.

He liked it when she’d laugh. It would make him smile and sometimes laugh with her. She had a lot of different kinds of laughing. Sometimes like a tea party, and sometimes teasing, and sometimes a real belly-buster, deep and hearty for such a little mite of a thing.

It began to seem to him as if he was getting to know the folks she was talking to. She’d wait and listen to them answer, and she’d nod, and he’d find himself straining to hear what they were saying to Missy. There was Stel and Roger and Mister Bix and Carrie. Then there was Captain Stan and Captain Staniker which could be the same one. There was a Mary Jane, and Jonathan and Sam, and other people she didn’t say often enough for him to remember.

Sometimes when she was talking real clear and straight, he would put his hands on her shoulders and give her a little shake and say, “What’s your name, Missy. What do these folks call you?”

But she would keep carrying on as if she hadn’t understood a word. She talked about fish and reefs, and whether she ought to go back to the Island Shop and buy that blue sweater. A couple of times she just sat there and cried, not making much noise about it, but he just couldn’t stand it and he had to get out of there because it like to broke his heart hearing it. He went down to clean some fish and in a little bit he heard her tea party laugh a couple of times. He shook his head in wonder, and decided he’d boil her up a nice thick fish chowder for her supper.

Once he got angry enough to try to join in. Missy was talking in a whispery little voice to the one called Stel, trying to get Stel to stop crying. He figured it out from what she said that Stel had a game leg, and the one named Carrie was being mean to her. Missy didn’t seem to care much for Carrie either. So he said it was a pretty sorry person that’d pick on a little gimpy gal, but Missy went right on without hearing a word, and it all turned into nonsense words and she fell asleep all at once, leaving him with the idea that it was a good thing Captain Stan was being especially nice to that Stel, because she sounded like somebody who could use friends.

It tired his head trying to sort out all those people. And he was beginning to feel impatient with her for not getting better faster. Those heavy sweats and the moaning in the sleep made him nervous.

He had the uneasy idea he ought to go right on over to town and get the Lieutenant. But then they’d put her into the hospital. But hospitals had that funny thing about what to do when your head was hurt. They might never let Missy go. There was another thing too. The Lieutenant might get upset about the girl being there on the island with him all this time. And the people in those candy houses over there would get real puckered about it, and get dirty ideas. No use trying to explain to them there’d been just that one little slip, and he was sorry it happened, his hand just reaching out that way for a little feel of that pretty, dainty, little titty. If that hand got away from him again, he was going to go down and lay it on the fish cleaning block and whack a couple fingers off it with the axe.

They wouldn’t even try to understand he was busier right now than he’d been when he was building the place all by himself. It was so hard to keep track of all the things he had to do, he kept falling behind on one thing or another and racing around trying to catch up.

What with washing out the bedding, scrubbing the place, burning the trash that piled up on him, patching up the place where the night bugs could get in to pester her, he still had to keep track of the nurse chores.

He’d boiled the boat sponge clean, and when she made a mess, after he’d put the bedding to soak, before he’d slip her into the fresh sheets, he had to swab her off clean and nice again, using the sponge and soap and warm water, keeping his head turned and going by touch so as not to look at her, then drying her nice with the soft toweling. Good thing the brief rains had been heavy or he’d be short on water.

Food was a real problem too, getting something down her that would give her some strength back. A can of chili looked just too dark and heavy for a sick missy, so you thin it down with powdered milk. Put the spoon to her little mouth and she’d open up like a baby bird, and that was the way to get the pills into her too, stuff them into those first few spoonfuls. When she got all she could handle, you couldn’t get the spoon past her teeth and she’d make a tired whiney sound and roll her head back and forth to get away from the spoon.

Had to watch her back to see how it was coming, and the last time he greased her it looked fine, except for two little bad spots left on that sunk-in little white butt, to be pinched open and scrubbed clean and covered with the medicine.

Then he had a name for her. She was talking to that Jonathan and said, “Leila Dye. Leila Dye. That will be funny after all the years of being Leila Boylston, huh?” Celebrate, he thought, with a good chowder for her so thick you could stand a spoon in it, plenty of chili powder and that spic sauce to give it some life. Stir a whole damn tin of that Aussy butter into it to start her fattening up. Count every little rib she had. Fever melts it right off them every time. Never thought she’d be as much as nineteen. Boylston girl, with a teacher fellow to get married to. Teacher, don’t you sweat too much. Ol’ Corpo’s fixing her up fine, and she’ll live right here with him until she’s dancing and laughing and singing the whole day through, and then she’ll let you know how it’s time to come get her, and you can let on to that brother Sam she’s in good hands.

While fishing he was taken far off, and came slowly back into himself to find that he was drifting through the Inlet, out toward the breakers, holding a rod with an empty hook. He started the motor on the skiff and came home, and coming around the last turn, saw the strange boat under his place, couldn’t fit his mind around what he was supposed to know, because it had been there before and he couldn’t remember why. Then he remembered the girl all of a sudden, and why he’d gone out. He yanked open the bait well lid and saw four good fish, enough, thank God, and couldn’t remember catching them. He squeezed in beside her fancy boat, moored the skiff, ran up to take a look at her. She was out of the bed and on her side on the floor sound asleep, her head in a corner. He clucked and went over and felt of her, and was pleased to find out she felt almost cool to the touch for the first time. He lifted her easily, put her back on top of the rumpled bed, tugged the tails of the shirt down to cover her decently. He went down with the cook pot, cleaned the fish and cut them into chunks and dropped them into the pot. When he carried it up, she was sitting on the edge of the bed, and he said, “You feeling a lot better, Missy?”

“But you can’t expect me to be absolutely useless, darling! It doesn’t make any sense. I’ve done some of Sam’s work at home for ages, and I’m a whiz typist, and pretty dang good at speedwriting too, and certainly somebody in Montevideo needs typing in English. So all I’m asking, darling, is for you not to get all proud and stuffy, and write to them and just ask them to fix up the permissions and things I’ll need to earn any money down there... What difference does that make? When we have babies I’ll stay home. Darling, it’s a tiny, tiny apartment, and you’ll have long hours and I’ll go slowly mad. Do you want me wandering the streets or something?... Certainly I like to be alone with you, Jonathan, but I also like to be with people too.”

“Sorry I asked,” Corpo mumbled, and spiced the fish generously, added water and powdered milk and set it to boil. When he looked over at her, she was on her feet, tottering feebly across the rough flooring, her hands held out for balance. He dropped the spoon and hastened toward her.

“Did anyone see Jonathan?” she asked in a higher voice than usual, thin, plaintive — a little-girl voice. “Did anyone see Jonathan? I have to talk to Jonathan. It’s about Mrs. Staniker. It’s about Mrs. Mary Jane Staniker. She scared me awful. Her hair is wound up in the fan. Her face is like plums and her tongue is sticking way out and her eyes are bugging way out and her lips are like sausages. I got to find Jonathan. I thought it was firecrackers. For a joke. Jonathan!”

He caught her by the wrist as she started to run. She wheeled toward him, and he knew that she saw him. She looked at him, and her eyes were different. They saw him. They went wide. She stared down at herself, looked wildly around the room, and then began screaming and screaming and trying to yank free of his grasp. She was much stronger and wirier than he could have guessed. He tried to keep her from hurting herself. In her struggles she fell, and kept trying to crawl away from him, her screams dwindling to tiny rasping squeaks. Suddenly she seemed to faint. He put her back in the bed. She lay on her back, snoring softly, her mouth sagging open. She felt hot again.

After he had stared at her for a little while, he looked until he found his mirror and propped it in its place on the two nails over the sink. He studied himself for a long time, slowly combing the beard with his fingers. He looked around the room.

“Damn, damn, damn,” he said softly, and went to the box where he thought there was a good chance he would find the razor and the soap stick and the little scissors he’d need to chop it short enough to shave and to chop his hair close enough to grease it and comb it.

That Wednesday night, down on the port bunk aboard the Muñequita, Corpo felt mildly disconsolate. Nice how much of that chowder he’d gotten down her, and she’d cooled off some. But she’d been talking to a mess of people he’d never even heard of before, waving her hands some, giggling and smiling and bobbing her head. And he’d wanted her to look right at him once more and see there was nothing to be so scared of. Think he was a wild man or something. A good beard keeps the bugs off. Man had a right to shave or not shave. But she hadn’t been able to see him. She was looking past him mostly, making him feel as if there was a room full of people behind him. “My name is Leila Jane Boylston and I am eleven years old, and I like tennis and swimming best,” she had said in her little-girl voice.

He heard the rain coming, moving across the mangroves, hissing more loudly as it approached. It was a good rain for ten minutes, leaving the air washed clean when it ended.

He told himself that it was no good. She had gotten a little better and now she was worse. It went that way a lot of times. They’d get hit bad, so bad it wouldn’t look as if there was any point in trying to get them back to the field hospital. The corpsman would plug up the holes as best he could, put on plenty of sulfa powder, squeeze those ampules into the casualty’s arm. Before the morphine took hold, they’d sometimes brighten right up, ask for a butt maybe, look around, and then all of a sudden they’d go. Just like that. Life filled a man up, and when it went out, he sagged like a kid’s balloon losing a part of its air. But slower. The dead would just dwindle and flatten, and their uniforms would look too big; and if the outfit had been saddled up without a break for a few days, the whiskers would look artificial, little wires poked neat and careful through the silent skin. Every dead knew it couldn’t happen to him. Even if the whole platoon was wiped out, he’d be the one left. It’s what they had to think or they wouldn’t be there at all, and if they were, you couldn’t get them to keep moving. If any one of them ever knew his odds were no better and no worse than anybody else, then how in hell could you get him to take the point? How could you get anybody to work their way along a hedgerow close enough to lob grenades into a machine-gun position with a good field of fire? After a while you got to understand that it was exactly the same with the krauts, and they could do the things they did, the damned fine soldiering, because theirs was just the same dream, each one of them accepting the idea of a wound, maybe a bad one, and pain that could be bad, but not accepting that final listening-look some of them got and the shrinking down into a still thing smaller than the clothes it had worn. If you kept them on the move too long, then the ones who had all their springs and strings pulled a little tighter than the others; they would start to figure it all out, start to know that what kind of luck was coming up for them, good or bad, had not a damn thing to do with who they were, or what they thought, or how they felt. Then they had to make do with the idea of being nothing. Just something moving and breathing in a bad place. That’s when they’d flatten out and try to work their way down into the safe, black, warm ground and never stand up again. They gave it a word. Combat fatigue. What it really was was the knowing of it, finding out you were some kind of a bug, killing other bugs, and if God paid any attention at all, it was more like he’d look down and shake his big sad head and say, “What the hell are they up to now?”

Right there toward the end, he thought, before they busted my head, I had me some workers. Ever’ one had been through the mill, got over believing he could depend on some kind of magic, knew that the onliest way to have any personal luck was to give it a chance to work by being as quick, smart and sly as a weasel. Slide like a snake through every little fold in the ground. Bust every place that even smelled like a sniper would like it. Ears to hear the incoming mail before it made any sound at all, like a dog whistle. But I was losing them too. One at a time. Something always happens you can’t count on. And then I lost myself. Knew I was getting hit. Glad it didn’t hurt. Felt like somebody hitting you with a stocking full of sand. Sort of a jar, and then a warm running feeling where the hole was. And then it just winked out. Like back in the rest area when the movie film would break. All of a sudden nothing except a white light on a white screen.

And that boy upstairs there, that fresh meat from the repple depple, he never had time to get smart...

Corpo knuckled his eyes and shook his head in a familiar disgust with himself. Sergeant, if you’re getting so you can’t tell a pretty little girl from a dumb recruit, them candy people are sure to God going to haul you off in the funny wagon.

He crawled out of the cramped forward section of the Muñequita and straighted up on deck, snuffing the clean night. Wrap her up and tote her down here and use this fine boat and run her down to the city pier. Or wait a bit, do all you can, then make her up a nice box out of the good boards you’ve been saving, pretty her up, say the words, and bury her deep and neat and quiet. And take this fine boat out on the first misty night and let it loose with the tide moving out.

It could have happened by now, he thought. He went up and moved close to the bed, sat tirelessly a-squat on his heels, reached and laid the back of his forefinger against her forehead. It felt so unexpectedly cool he was certain it had happened, then the breath caught in her throat in a half-snore. She coughed, sighed, turned onto her side, her back toward him.

“Cain’t quite make up your mind to live or die, huh?” he whispered. “If you’re making a choice, Missy, living is better, hear?”

He thought of going back to the bunk aboard the white boat, but he had the feeling that if he left her, something that was hovering over her might pounce. He stretched out on the floor beside the bed, and awoke in first light, feeling a little bit stiff and sore. She was still cool to the touch, and he leaned over her face and snuffed at her, nostrils wide. That sick-smell was almost gone, that soury new-bread smell. He went fishing and came back and she was still asleep. He fixed breakfast and then ate it all himself when he could not wake her up enough to eat it. This was her heaviest sleep of all, and when it lasted through midday it began to worry him.

He had his back to her, and he was patching a hole in a window screen when she started yelling so loudly he nearly went through the window. He spun and saw her sitting straight up and trying to squirm back away from something. “No!” she yelled. “Oh God, no! Please! Please! Get away from me! No!”

He trotted to her, wiping his hands on khakied thighs, and grasped her shoulders and tried to ease her back down onto the pillow, saying, “Now there, Missy. Nothing after you. Everything is fine, Miss Leila. Just having a bad dream there, Missy.”

And all of a sudden he realized that those wide green eyes were staring directly at him, wide scared, wondering eyes, and her lips were sucked white. He released her and stepped back.

She knew it was another part of a dream, exceptionally vivid, trapped in some kind of a terrible shacky place in some kind of a jungle, with some huge weird type staring at her, scary pale eyes, and that dent in his forehead so deep it made her stomach turn over. She willed herself to wake up, willed the man and the shack to fade away.

“Are you awake now for sure, Missy?” he asked.

She closed her eyes and opened them to an undeniable reality which, if it were a dream, was more carefully detailed than any she had ever had. Yet, she thought, if I am ill, maybe a dream could be like this.

“Missy?”

“Awake? I don’t know. I can hear my own voice. I’m awake I guess. But nothing makes any sense.”

“You had the fevers, Miss Leila.”

“I feel kind of vague and floaty,” she said. She pushed a sleeve up to scratch her arm, sensed a strangeness about it, looked at her arm, and felt a sudden wild alarm. “What’s happened to me! I’m like a skeleton! What’s happening?”

“Now don’t you be scared. Please don’t you be scared. You’re doing real fine, Miss Leila. You’re a-looking real good today.”

“Who are you?”

“Why, I’m Sergeant Corpo, Missy.”

She looked slowly around the room. “Why am I here? What is this crazy place? Where is it?”

“Well, this is my place. I built this place. This is my island. Everybody calls it Sergeant’s Island. I’ve been here a long time. The Lieutenant fixed it so I can stay on here for good.”

“What are we close to, Sergeant? Are we near Nassau?”

“Nassau? That’s a good piece from here. The closest place, where I buy supplies, that would be Broward Beach, twenty minute run to the south in my skiff.”

“Florida!”

“It surely is.”

She lay back abruptly, thin forearm across her eyes. He thought she was going to sleep. She said, “Sergeant?”

“Yes, Missy.”

“You’ve got to help me. I don’t know what questions to ask. You’ve got to just tell me why I’m here, and what this is all about. Please.”

He came closer and sat on his heels by the bed. “Missy, it was Sunday morning, early, real misty morning, and I was wading the flats to the north of my island, and you like to scared me half to death, come floating right up to me in a big pretty boat, line dragging from the bow, weed tangled in it. There you were laying on the deck when I took a look, jaybird naked, excuse me, and sunburned terrible bad, and that big open place on your head I had such a time sewing up nice.”

She took her arm away, stared at him, then lifted her hand and reached unerringly to the healing wound and touched it tenderly with her fingertips. It felt alien to her, a great thickened clumsy welt, with a dull inner pain when she touched it. How in the wide world, she thought, would I happen to be drifting around naked in a boat in Florida? It has to be some kind of a complicated joke. Or a plot.

“What kind of a boat?”

“New and nice, Miss Leila. Blue and white color. Kind of a greeny-blue hull, white topsides, twin stern-drive engines, name Muñequita registered out of Brownsville, Texas, but it’s got a Florida number and a seal on the bow.”

He seemed so very anxious to please and reassure, but there was an oddness about his eyes that made her wary. “When did this happen, Sergeant? When did you find me?”

She saw him press both fists against his forehead, then rise and wander aimlessly, go over and start looking through bits of paper fastened to a post which supported a crude beam. He turned toward her and with a shy smile and hopeless gesture said, “Near as I can make it out, it had to be last Sunday. That means this is Thursday. And that would make it the twenty-sixth of May.”

She felt her mouth go dry, and she went back into the confusing corridors of memory, searching for a date. She found a Friday she knew. The sixth day of May. Twenty days gone without a trace! She could remember the day clearly. They were at anchor at Southwest Allen’s Cay in the Exumas. The island was a long oval barrier of sand and rock enclosing a broad anchorage with but two good entrances for a boat of the draft of the Muñeca, one to the east and one to the west, almost opposite each other. A long still day, dazzlingly bright. But not one of the good days, because Carolyn had been whining at Mister Bix again. She had wanted to go further down the Exumas, and Captain Garry had figured out how far they could go and still get back to Nassau again on the tenth for some kind of business meeting Mister Bix had. But then she had changed her mind and decided she wanted to get back to Nassau sooner. She had apparently agreed to staying at the anchorage another day and a half or two days and arrive back at Nassau on Sunday, and then she had begun complaining about the heat, a rash on her throat, running out of the good sun lotion, a stone bruise on her foot.

By then the pattern had become familiar. Carrie’s pattern. It set up the usual side effects. Carolyn would be poisonously and damagingly sweet to Stella, ignore her husband completely, and flirt quite openly with Captain Staniker. Bix, suffering rejection, would take every chance to stomp on his son Roger’s pride, pointing out everything Roger seemed incompetent to do, from catching a fish to making a drink. Roger would go about with the stiff-mouthed look of someone fighting tears of helplessness. Mary Jane Staniker would keep her head down and go about her chores with a scuttling look. Staniker, by making an extra effort to be protective and gentle with Stella, would inadvertently add to Carolyn’s sour mood. And Leila would make an extra effort to stay out of everybody’s way. She was in awe of Carolyn’s special talent to make six other adults as miserable as herself.

In the morning Carrie had Staniker launch and rig the little sailing dinghy, and she went off alone, up and down the protected waters in the light air, managing to look rigidly discontented as far as the eye could see. Mister Bix and Captain Staniker went off in the Muñequita to troll on the Atlantic side, Bix making it clear that Roger would be an unwelcome nuisance to take along. Leila had put her writing materials in a plastic bag and swum ashore. She went to a pebbly beach at the south end of the island where the slope of rock and scrub growth behind her concealed the anchorage where the Muñeca lay. As she sat with her bare back against a smooth and comfortable slant of stone, she could see Stel on her plastic float-board paddling slowly back and forth over a coral reef, looking down through the little glass porthole. She finished another two pages of a letter to Jonathan, thinking she would probably add more before mailing it from Nassau.

The heat of the sun finally made her uncomfortable enough to think of getting back into the water. Stella came paddling to the beach and came walking ashore, carrying the light foam board under her arm.

Stella limped badly. She had been Leila’s friend for years. Leila had realized in the very beginning with this strange, shy girl that any kind of special consideration made her become remote. So she had treated her as if there was no handicap. And, indeed, there was far less of one than Stella believed. Leila knew the history of it. It had been a difficult delivery. The nerves of the left leg had been damaged. By the time the specialists had achieved a sufficient regeneration to give her the use of it, the leg was smaller around and shorter than the other leg, and it would never be very strong. Both legs were pretty, slender, shapely. They did not match. That was all. Her figure was very good. She had a delicate and sensitive face, lovely eyes which seldom looked directly at anyone. She had a dark, brooding look, and only the very few who knew her as well as Leila knew the quickness of the hidden humor, the taste for the absurd.

Only once on the cruise had Leila made an effort to comfort Stel. Carolyn, one night at dinner, had been exceptionally, cleverly vicious. She talked about bringing “poor Stel” out of herself. She seemed incapable of saying her name without adding the “poor,” and she would jump to Stel’s assistance when she least needed it. Leila awoke in the night in the cabin she shared with Stel to hear the smothered sound of weeping. So she had stepped over to the adjoining bunk and slid in with her and held her. Stel had been rigid at first, and then had softened and clung and wept herself out. It had made Stel strange toward her for the next few days, but then they had found their way back to the casual warmth they knew best.

Stel dropped the board and sat on it and said, “Madame the Queen is really winging it today.”

“Whatever it is, if somebody could bottle it, you could use it to destroy empires. Your father ought to give her a good thumping.”

She made a face. “He’d rather thump on Roger. My dear daddy made his own bed like they say. I guess the daughter-daddy bit clouds my vision, but he acts so damned — goaty about her. She keeps him on the hook. She makes his hands shake. Years married and still it goes on. He’s scared to thump her, Leila. She wouldn’t let him near her for a year. Anyway, thank God Garry’s got the sense to steer clear of her.”

“It’s Garry now? Gracious me!”

“Oh, come on! He’s a nice guy, Leila. A really truly nice guy. And this cruise is rough on him and his wife. I’m glad they’re getting paid well at least. A happy ship. Ho, ho, ho and a bottle of arsenic. Honest, I’m sorry I dragged you along, but I think if you hadn’t been along, I’d have jumped overboard a long time ago.”

“Oh sure. You know, for a guy who’s supposed to have been captaining for years, Staniker seems sort of keyed up and twitchy to me.”

“Darling, the Kayd family does that to everyone. It’s our proudest boast.” She paused. “I guess what really gets me is what Carrie does to daddy. He is so strong in every other way. And she keeps him groveling around whenever she feels like it. She keeps putting the knife in me to see if she can get a rise out of him. When he doesn’t do a thing to get her off my back, then I resent him. And when he crushes poor Rog, I resent him more. I know what she’s doing. She’s cutting us loose from him. Uncontested possession. Anyway, I’ll tell you one thing. This is the last cruise of the Kayd family. As a happy united little group at least. Rog can keep taking it if he wants to. Leila, maybe we ought to jump ship in Nassau and fly back home.”

“Mean it?”

“Mmmm. I don’t know. It’s nice to think about.”

Leila sighed. “There’s not enough cruise left to make it worthwhile to stir up the fuss. Let’s stiff it out, kid. Let’s show ’em we’re tough. Honey, I have to get into that water before I begin to smoke.”

In the late afternoon of that day at Allen’s Cay, with Bix and Staniker still not back, Carolyn napping, Stella reading in the shade of a tarp Roger had rigged over a part of the cockpit deck, Leila swam ashore again and wandered, looking for shells. She came upon Roger standing in the shallows and casting out over the reef where Stel had paddled before lunch, using light spinning gear. When she asked him if he was having any luck, he lifted a stringer of gaudy fish out of the shallows and said, “Mary Jane’ll know which of these can go in the pot.”

Fifty feet further along the shore she came upon big and curious animal tracks and called to Rog in an excited voice. He came hurrying and looked and said, “Hey now! Garry said there might be some on this cay. Iguana. This groove is where his tail drags. Let’s see where he went.”

“But those feet look pretty big. Don’t they bite?”

“Garry said they’re timid unless you corner them and try to grab them. He said there used to be thousands and thousands up and down the Exumas. But they’re delicious. Like chicken.”

“Lizard steaks? Gaaah!”

“Come on.”

They followed the track for several hundred yards, losing them in the rocks then picking them up again in a sandy patch further along. At last they lost them for good. He had driven a driftwood sliver into the arch of his foot, in the middle of the sole. He sat on a flat stone, and she knelt and picked carefully at it with thumbnail and fingernail until at last she got a firm grip on it and pulled it free. She held it up in triumph and said, “You will walk again!”

He laughed. His teeth looked very white in the saddle brown of his lean face. Of all aboard he was the only one to take a tan as deep as Staniker’s. He had dark hair, like Stella’s, and the same mobile sensitivity of feature, the same hint of vulnerability. Yet he was unflawed in any physical way, slender, muscular, moving with sureness and precision and grace, except when he had to perform any task when his father was watching him. He wore pale blue briefs, a ragged hat from the Nassau straw market.

They were in a cleft in the rocks, with a sand floor, with walls rising eight sheer feet behind him. It was like a small room which had been cut in half diagonally, looking south across the blue of the depths, turquoise of shallows.

“Thank you, Doctor,” he said, and his smile faded away. He looked at her in a way which made her aware of the skimpiness of her one-piece suit, cut to a deep oval in back almost to the base of her spine.

She rose with a bright smile and said, “Ol’ Iguana is probably back there chomping up your fish, Rog.” As she turned away he caught her, hands on her waist, pulling her back, burying his face in her hair.

“Knock it off, Roger. Please.”

“Leila, Leila, Leila.”

“I mean it! Stop it right now.”

He turned her swiftly and tried to put his mouth on hers. She wiggled and twisted and pushed at him. It was all so stupid and unexpected and ridiculous. When struggling seemed to only excite him more, she decided to go dead. She took a deep breath and let it out. She let her arms hang. Except for keeping her lips tightly compressed, she went limp. He would give up in a moment. Her eyes were closed. His hand clasped the back of her neck, his arm against her back holding her tightly against him. He slid his other hand down inside the low back of her suit and, fingers splayed wide, hand cupping her bottom, pulled her against the hardness of himself. The sun came red through her eyelids. He smelled of sun-flesh, wind, salt and maleness. She felt a dreaminess, an inner turning, a loosening of her mouth, a yearning for Jonathan’s body so wretchingly vivid she felt as if her heart had been torn loose. As she put her hands lightly on his shoulders, pressing herself into him, with coughing catch of breath, suddenly all the textures were wrong, and in shame and fright she plunged free of him, stumbling in the sand, to come to her feet and find herself trapped in the corner of the V. He prowled toward her, hands low, his face as blind as the stones around them.

She felt a stone move as her foot brushed it, and she snatched it up, held it to strike, and yelled, “Roger! Roger!” He was in some far place where he might hear her.

He halted, still in a half crouch, then slowly straightened and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. He looked at her and turned away and went to the flat stone where he had sat before. He rested his arms on his knees, lowered his head to his arms. She saw him in profile, chest and belly expanding and contracting with his fast, deep breathing.

She dropped the stone and walked out to where she could not be trapped again. She saw a movement of his hunched shoulders and thought for one incredulous moment he was laughing at her.

“I don’t — know why,” he said. “I’m sorry. I’m — so sorry.”

She sighed and went closer to him. She felt very tired. “Just don’t cry. It doesn’t matter that much.”

He looked up, frowning, eyes wet. “I had the feeling — it would be — some kind of an answer to something.”

She understood. She moved closer. “It could be, maybe. Not with me, though. It’s what he’s doing to you, Rog. He won’t let you have any pride. He won’t let you have — manhood. Or maleness, maybe is a better word. He’s getting you to the point where you don’t know what you are. So this was — trying to find out, maybe. I don’t know anything about these things, Roger. Maybe he is trying to — emasculate you because she’s emasculating him. Could that make any sense?”

“I don’t know. I hate him. I keep getting the feeling I’m going to do some terrible thing. I guess — I almost did.” He tried to smile.

“You were very scary, you know. I don’t know if I could have hit you with that stone or not. I didn’t even know you. If I couldn’t — stop you, you were going to rape me.”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“If you could hate him, Roger, it would be better for you.”

“I despise him!”

“Sure. That’s why you keep straining all day to do something that will please him. Something to make him proud. And the harder you try, the worse things get. Roger, listen to me. Please. You’ve got to get out from under. Because, if you could — try what you tried, you haven’t got things under control. You could do some terrible thing. You’re a man. You shouldn’t let him make you doubt it.”

“I feel so ashamed, Leila.”

“It’s over. Okay? Don’t keep on making some kind of a thing out of it. People can start enjoying remorse. Come on, Rog. Get up. Nothing happened. Nothing will. Nothing has changed. I’ve forgotten it already.”

She could remember going back to the rocky beach with him, remember making him laugh, finally. But she could not unearth any other parts of what was left of that day. It seemed to fade out somewhere between the beach and the cruiser.

Now in this narrow bed in the clutter of the shack, with the Sergeant watching her, she wondered if it had been a very bad decision to do nothing about Roger’s attack. Perhaps, when he had the next chance, when they were in the Muñequita together, he had come at her again and she had not been able to stop him. She had read that a severe blow on the head resulting in concussion could temporarily or even permanently wipe out all memory of the incidents leading up to the moment when the injury occurred. The Sergeant said she had been naked when he found her in the drifting boat. The boat had a good range. She remembered Captain Staniker saying it would go two hundred and something miles on full tanks. That could account for her being in Florida. When it was done, and the madness dwindled, Roger would have tried to wake her up. If he couldn’t, he would panic. He would head for the states, abandon the boat, and try to run away and hide. But they’d find him. Maybe they already had. She wondered how large the gap in her memory might be, how much time had passed between that day when things faded out to the time she had been injured and abandoned.

“I guess they’ve been trying to find me, Sergeant Corpo. I guess there’d be a big fuss about it in the papers and on the air.”

“Now I wouldn’t rightly know about that, because there’d be nobody coming by here to tell me. Don’t have a radio or get a paper. Lot of noise, foolishness, gets people all stirred up.”

She tried to smile. “You’re kidding me!”

He sat on a rickety wooden chair and tilted back dangerously. “One time some kids came and messed this place up for me. But they won’t be back. And the Lieutenant stops by to see how the place looks, maybe once a year. But I go on in every month to town to cash my army check and stock up on what’s needed. Have to go back sometimes when I forget something. Damn — excuse me, Missy — nuisance.”

“Then you’re a hermit!”

The chair legs came down with a thump. He looked aggrieved. “Hermit? Some nutty old man in a cave? Miss Leila, what I am is a veteran on a pension. Having people around gets my head to hurting. Maybe on account of getting wounded in the head. I couldn’t say. When I was a little kid I liked to go off by myself. Go into the big swamp and stay in there for days.”

She sat up straight and swung her legs out of the bed. The look of them shocked her. They were like old pictures of people in concentration camps. The backs of her legs were pink and tender where the deep burn had shredded away the tanned skin of cruising.

She looked at the improvised garment, the rolled and knotted blue bandanna which served as a belt. She saw the brilliant red flowers in the glass jar on the crate beside the bed. She saw the piece of cheap costume jewelry pinned to the front of the white shirt. Red glass mounted in a brass brooch. It was like someone dressing a doll, a tender game which made her feel shy.

“You — you’ve been taking care of me since Sunday morning? Alone? You’ve been doing everything that had to be done?”

He got up restlessly. “Missy, I had a long time in them hospitals, believe you me. What has to be done has to be done. You were burning up and clean out of your head.”

She tried to stand up but the room swam and darkened and she fell back as he hurried to her. “Now don’t try a fool thing like that!”

She sat in a huddle of misery and said, “I... I have to go to the bathroom.”

He covered his eyes with his left hand and began snapping the fingers of his big right hand, making a very loud cracking sound. “Now just a minute. Now you wait. I had something worked out.

Oh!”

He spun and hurried out. A spring slapped the screen door shut. She heard him clumping down outside stairs. Soon he was back looking pleased, carrying an old-fashioned chamber pot. Water sloshed in it as he set it down close beside the bed. The lid was from a small green garbage container. He said, “You get well enough to walk, I’ve got a privvy about a hundred feet from the cabin. I recalled finding this pot a long time ago, and I kept looking till I found it. Brush grown up around it and a mess of other stuff. I sand-scrubbed it clean as a dollar.” He moved the chair over next to the pot. “You just kind of ease yourself over, and take it slow and easy so you don’t get faint, Missy. You need me, you just yank on that cord there and it’ll jangle some cans I’ve got hung below. When you get settled back into bed you jangle them anyhow. I’ve got to cook you up a good dinner. You slept on through breakfast today, and you should be next door to starved.”

After she had crawled back into the bed and covered her legs with the sheet, she lay quietly, her eyes stinging, fingertips resting on the absurd piece of jewelry. It sounded too dramatic to tell herself she had fallen into the hands of a madman.

What had happened to everyone? Where were they?

Suddenly ravenous, she reached and grasped the cord and jangled the cans vigorously.

She heard his distant voice. “Coming, Missy. Be right there.”