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I'm not going into how we spent the next hour on the beach comforting each other. We did. It was wonderful. And that's that.
But the next day Debby tried to act like nothing had happened. So I played along with it. Except I took occasion to smile at her when I had the chance.
We continued to work together and find things to do that we could do to make our stay here as pleasant as possible. And we took turns up on the hill, standing watch, tending the smoking fire in the daytime and keeping it burning at night.
But then we entered our second week and... the 'novelty' of what had happened to us had long since wore off. I had to force myself to eat my daily almost-rat. The stream started to play out and the water got a little brackish even deep in the forest at its spring. Then depression started to creep in along the edges of our camp.
Then Chad cornered a pig.
It wasn't a pig as in an Iowa-raised corn-fed hog. But it was a small wild pig-type animal. And it was in the larger bunker, evidently attracted by the food we had gathered and put in there to keep away from, well, him.
The discussion about the best way to dispatch him lasted about forty-five seconds.
I hit him square in the head with the shovel. Then Buck and I carried him out to the clearing closer to the beach, and he did the pig in with his diving knife.
Even though it was rather small by pig standards, we suddenly had more real meat than we could eat.
To fight boredom we scoured the area for more relics of the island's fascist past. And found where some wooden buildings had stood, and the remains of their pier further down the beach. But only two other things turned up that were really useful. We found the German's water well and, on the other side of camp, what used to be their pit toilets.
It took some bailing and some creative engineering, but in two days we had water from the well that we felt was clear enough to drink and cook with.
The toilet was easier to fix. Two logs and a tree branch privacy screen and... Well. You get the idea.
Now that we knew there were other things to eat besides what appeared to be an endless collection of two kinds of almost-rat, we worked on ways to catch about one pig a week or so.
We had lost all contact with civilization since the battery in Mr. Simmons portable radio had died. I had forgotten I had wanted to check my email when we got back to the hotel that day. Survival, and now a few comforts consumed our day.
My encounters with Debby grew a little more frequent. And once on a 'produce shopping run' I made some time with Cheryl when she caught me looking at her while she picked some gourds.
"I thought you liked Debby." She said.
"I do. I like you too."
"You know what I mean."
"I like pretty women. And I think I am incredibly lucky to be stranded here with you two instead of a couple of other men." I smiled at her. "You are both beautiful."
"I'm not as pretty as Debby." She said.
"In your own way. You're gorgeous."
She looked at me like she was going to deny it. Then smiled.
I kissed her like she was the last woman on Earth. Well. She was close to it. One of two available women on the island.
And all things being equal, and Debby was head and shoulders above Cheryl in the looks department, well, Debby was about a foot taller and built like a... well, she was Built, put it that way. But still I was beginning to like Cheryl more than Debby.
Afterward we sighed together when we realized they were waiting on our collection for dinner. We got ourselves together and hauled the stuff back to camp.
"Get lost?" One of the others asked.
"Kinda. But it's hard to stay lost on this island." I answered.
It was true enough. For awhile we were lost in passion. But it is extremely hard to stay that way here.
Our fifth week started with a gray sky.
The wind started that afternoon.
Rain at sunset.
Another hurricane. In spite of Hurricane Season being over for a month.
And it felt like this one hit the island directly.
Last Sunday the Morning Service had been me and the Simmons', Debby came in toward the end and said she had forgotten it was Sunday. Tonight's prayer service saw one hundred percent attendance.
The roof was long gone on our building. We rode it out in the larger bunker. Shouting encouragement to each other and saying that this was a good thing. As soon as it was done we'd run up the hill and build a big fire and they'd think somebody had been shipwrecked or something in this one.
I didn't mention my fear that this storm would be the end of the plane, and would probably blow our platform to the next island.
It stormed all that night and the next day. But toward the end of it we made the trip up the hill and found the platform damaged, but still mostly standing. The heavy steel door must have been just enough of an anchor to hold it down.
It was still far too windy to do any rebuilding the next morning, and at times the gusts made it difficult to stand and shout into each other's ear while holding onto a tree almost stripped bare of its fronds.
After the storm we rebuilt the platform in record time and got a fire burning on it just as the last of the clouds cleared out.
There was no sign of the plane. It had either been broken up by the waves or had been washed out to deep water and sunk.
We kept it up for days. Smoke in the daytime, high flames at night.
But gradually we gave up and just kept it ready to go. Just in case we saw or heard something. When one of us got real bored we'd go up to the platform and keep lookout.
We put together an expedition. Buck, Chad and I hiked all the way around the island. We found where somebody had been before, but there was no sign that they had been there anytime recently, and their campsite was overgrown enough to suggest they didn't use it more than once a year if that.
There was nothing of use or interest there, but we spent the night there anyway.
We left a note in a piece of plastic tacked to a tree in an obvious place and went on our way.
Back at the beach where the plane had crashed we looked around. The plane had vanished like it had never been there. We couldn't even find the pilot's grave. The second storm had erased them.
We continued on. We found the place where our little stream joined the ocean, but it wasn't worth writing home about. Then in another half a day we were 'home'.
Our island was three days around. But we all admitted that if we had put our minds to it we could have done it in maybe a day and a half of solid hiking.
The days passed. Weeks passed.
Just for something to do I walked around the island in the opposite direction from the first time. It took me two very lonely days. But I did it.
Our note was still on the tree. There was no sign anybody else had landed anywhere.
We had Christmas on the Island.
That was difficult on everybody.
We had missed Thanksgiving. Just trying to stay alive had driven it from our minds. We had a dinner, Mrs. Simmons saw to that, and we were all Thankful to be Alive and Have Each Other as I said in my talk, but... it wasn't the same.
Christmas was another story.
We had our Compound. We had built and invented enough tools and things that we were rather proud of our level of civilization. If you stepped back and looked, we weren't totally pathetic. Hot water, privacy, good food, fairly comfortable sleeping quarters, games of skill.
Yes. Games of Skill.
Chad became our recreation officer. He fashioned horseshoes from some German parts we had no other use for. Then he made darts, supposedly for hunting, but they worked better as a game. He taught himself to juggle to amuse us. And then he made a real working longbow that didn't break when he pulled it back and got good enough that he was going to try pig hunting with it.
Christmas Day came. We exchanged gifts of crafty type things from seashells or something we had hoarded of our possessions from our luggage. Mr. Simmons gave each of us men something he had been working on in secret for a long time.
"Its tobacco. I've been curing it for a month. I found it growing down the beach in the old German garden."
"You said that was some sort of weed." Chad said.
"Well it is." He grinned. "Now. It's been wild for how many years?"
I looked at the rather rough hand rolled cigar. Then I sniffed at it. "Smells like natural leaf wrapper." I grinned.
"It is." He laughed. "It's all I had."
He took his out and lit it from the fire. "I imagine the Krauts tried to grow some from Cuban seed or something and gave up." He took a long drag. Then coughed.
"Ok. I'll try it." Buck said. He lit his and pulled at it. Then he coughed. "Whew. It's uncut, that's for sure."
I said I'd try mine after dinner.
"I've got more." Mr. Simmons said.
"I'm not much of a smoker."
"It's not bad. Once you get past that first puff. I've paid for some that tasted like they were cut with sawdust." Buck said smoking his in earnest now.
"Thank you Lieutenant." Mr. Simmons said.
Buck smoked in silence for a minute. "Christmas."
We stared into the fire.
After while Chad started singing carols and we joined in.
Since I had become the Chaplain for our 'colony' the Christmas Service fell to me. I spoke about the 'Greatest Gift of All' and how our experience here was proof of the better nature of Man and how I had come to love each of them in a special way.
OK, it was sappy. But it was true.
Christmas dinner was roast 'pig', tropical fruit, water flavored with fruit, and hand rolled wild tobacco cigars for dessert. Even the women indulged in dessert. It was something different and rather enjoyable.
Our New Year's party was about the same, except this one was on the beach just because we felt our New Year's party should be on the beach.
Buck and Chad had made some firecrackers out of some seeds we found exploded if they were put in the fire and some empty German cartridges. Most of them made a satisfactorily loud 'pop' in the fire and sent a good billow of sparks out over the water on the breeze. But then a later one actually exploded and scattered the fire halfway down the beach to the waterline. We decided that that shell casing must have had a primer or something in it. But it was the only fireworks we had seen for a long time, so once we all calmed down, we applauded their effort as a success.
We had tried to make wine out of this and that, and had some that wasn't too awful for a toast at midnight. But there was no danger of becoming an alcoholic on it, it was too much work to make.
Then we had a talent show that got a little risqué for Mrs. Simmons' taste, but she laughed with us and said it was OK for one night.
But Sunrise brought the New Year.
And we were still on the island.
Some things got to be routine.
We got good at predicting the weather through observation and deduction.
And I became an expert at making and using fish traps.
Weeks passed.
Buck had been tinkering off and on with some parts and tools we had found in the bunkers and some half-formed ideas about some rigs that had been on a TV show (I am not going to name which one) and well, he said it passed the time.
He had built a few useful items, but he was almost obsessed with the electronics. Even though they were twice his age.
"DAMN!" He shouted one day. We all came running, thinking he had hurt himself again.
We stood around and looked at what could only be called a contraption. He had taken the small generator off its two cylinder gas motor, and connected it to some other parts and did some creative engineering. Buck grinned and hand turned the crank. It didn't turn easily, but then it was going. The ancient generator turned. The connections between it and the transformer and the ancient military receiver sparked. Something hissed.
Then...
The radio started jabbering in Spanish.
We cheered and danced and hollered at each other and slapped Buck on the back while Debby listened and shook her head every so often.
"He's giving the news and a sports report about a soccer team, but I can't understand all of it, and I'm not sure where it's from, I don't recognize the city."
Then while we took turns cranking he carefully turned the dial on the set. He said it was very stiff and he was trying to keep from breaking something we could never fix, but it would only turn a little bit in either direction. Finally, after my second turn at cranking he found an English station right at the end of the dial's range.
I never thought a car commercial would sound so good.
It was faint, and faded in and out. But it was American English.
He fiddled some more and the reception got better.
We spent the next several hours cranking and listening to the Miami station. Right through the spring training Baseball pre-game show...
"Baseball?" Chad asked while he cranked. "How long have we been here?"
"Long time." Was the consensus.
We figured out the MW on the dial was World War Two German for AM.
Then we sat around and rooted for our new favorite team, Miami, even though the only one who before then even professed to know anything about baseball was Mr. Simmons, and took turns cranking.
"Tomorrow I'll see what I can do about the batteries." Buck said nodding at the huge old storage batteries.
"I think they're passed their service life." I grinned as I cranked.
"How good do they have to be for one old radio?" Mr. Simmons said.
Then Debby asked the question. "Is this a transmitter or just a radio?"
Buck shook his head before he answered. "I think it was part of a larger set, but it's just a receiver. I went through the stuff a dozen times. There's nothing here that I can make into a transmitter. I just don't have the expertise."
She looked at the rest of us. We all shook our heads. I couldn't have gotten as far as he did with it.
Finally, well exhausted from our new exercise, we went to bed happy. Miami had won. We had heard the news from home. And how Coast Auto World was having a no money down sale.
It took every bit of ingenuity we could muster to come up with water pure enough for the batteries and make the connections, improvise solder and decipher the sixty year old German on the gauges on some of the equipment, but we got it done. Whether or not it would all work was anybody's guess.
I turned the crank and one of the connections started to smoke and what seemed to be the charging indicator went nuts. Then it all settled down. I cranked until my arms were burning, then the others got to crank.
Finally Buck said that had to be enough to find out if it worked. Mr. Simmons stopped cranking and Buck turned on the radio.
Nothing.
"It'd work better if we connected it to the batteries wouldn't it?"
It would.
The Miami station started talking about the mid-day traffic.
We were all cheering so loudly we never heard the traffic report.
The radio would work for about two hours on about half an hour of cranking. Not a bad exchange really.
There were also a few old light bulbs, but once we made sure they worked we refused to use them, saving them for an emergency. If they burned out, that was it.
Then as we sat listening to the radio discussing the final spring training standings and looking for Opening Day tomorrow it dawned on us.
We had been on the island for Months now.
Months.
The time had passed quickly. But we had crashed during the first week of November. Here it was early April now.
The coming of spring brought another grim reality.
Hurricane season was coming too. We had already weathered a fairly heavy storm that could only be called a precursor for the coming attractions.
We decided to put our refined talents to making the bunkers more livable for riding out storms.
Our clothes were fast becoming rags. Even with what we had had in our suitcases, they just didn't last long wearing the same outfits day and night and washing them in an old steel pot, modern clothes just weren't made for that.
We had varying degrees of success with weaving our own 'cloth', and we were getting very creative with hand-me-downs.
"It looks better on you than it ever did on me." I said to Debby as she turned my last dress shirt into, whatever it was she was wrapping around herself.
"You said that about the T-shirt you gave to Cheryl for a skirt."
"And it was true."
She laughed. "I thought you liked me better without anything to wear."
"I do. But then again, I'm biased."
"That pretty women thing of yours again."
"Women like you make me Thank God I was born a man. You'd rather I didn't like girls?"
She laughed and called me silly. I nodded, then she kissed me and thanked me for giving her the shirt off my back.
Since there wasn't much left of it, the arms were gone, it had two buttons left, and I had ripped the collar off to do something with a month ago, it hadn't been a big sacrifice.
But then I had to wear my grass-vest with a rather ragged pair of beach shorts.
"It's Robinson Caruso." Buck said when I came out one day.
I paused and thought about it. I was wearing one of Chad's woven hats, my vest, and shorts. Yeah. That's who I looked like. I called Buck 'My man Friday' and went to make today's produce run.
All things considered we had done fairly well for ourselves.
We had become experts in trapping fairly large fish, and had developed several ways of cooking them, and Mrs. Simmons became something of an island gourmet and swore when we were rescued she was going to publish a castaway's cookbook. For fear of over-hunting we limited ourselves to one 'pig' a month or so, but there didn't seem to be any lack of the things on the island. From the tracks we saw near the platform and the stream on the hill, we might be doing the island a favor by eating them. And we still dined on the 'almost rats' once in awhile hoping to run their population down, but that didn't seem to be happening either.
As for the plant kingdom, we had identified enough that we could eat that we weren't missing out on that either. And we had identified a few that we shouldn't eat. I was the test subject on one that almost lowered the island's human population by one.
The monkeys had been eating them and didn't seem any worse for the wear, so I tried a few of the berries. They tasted bitter, but, not too bad.
I saw visions. I felt like my insides were trying to come out of my ears. I had cramps and vomited and ran a fever. It was the longest night of my life. And the next morning I felt like maybe I'd have been better off dead. It was two days before I felt like I was back to normal.
"OK Bruce." Buck said giving me a 'field physical' and pronouncing me fit to return to duty.
"OK what?" I said trying to smile.
"Don't eat any more little black berries."
"No problem."
But then when Cheryl fell and badly dislocated her shoulder I remembered one of the side effects of the berries. They had made me feel numb all over.
We took one and cut it in half, then mashed the halves, and had her take a little of it at a time. Then when she began blinking in a rather cross-eyed way and saying it didn't hurt much any more, me and Mr. Simmons held her tightly and Buck put her arm back in its socket.
She didn't scream nearly as much as she had earlier when we had carried her back to the compound.
With Mrs. Simmons' careful administration of the berry and other nursing she got through it and in a couple of days was gently moving her shoulder a little. But then we were worried she might become addicted to the stuff. It was powerful, I attested to that.
But after she had gone a couple more days only complaining about mild discomfort as it healed we felt she was out of danger and never told her what we had used for pain reliever.
Our second 'house' was a great improvement over the first.
Well our first was actually our second attempt at building a semi-permanent structure to live in. The first attempt became a pile of logs and palm fronds the first time a halfway meaningful wind blew. But we learned a lot and rebuilt it like we knew what we were doing.
Then, experience in hand, we set a more ambitious goal and actually made a blueprint so we didn't have two windows and no doors. Something that happened on the first one, but we would always deny it.
This one had walls you couldn't throw a rock through, and that a 'rat' had to work at to get through. It held up to a storm without major damage. And was better than I expected at keeping the rain out. Other than smelling like a compost heap until it had dried out for a couple of days after a rain, it was passable.
Mr. and Mrs. Simmons called it the nicest house they'd ever had.
We had another medical scare.
Chad developed a distended stomach and fever. We used a little of the berry, but he wasn't able to take much of it, and it didn't seem to help anyway.
We sat up with him, and cleaned him up when he had accidents, and took turns praying over him, and applying cool compresses to his forehead. But there was nothing else we could do.
Buck worried himself sick and had to be put to bed.
The first aid manual from the plane's kit didn't cover stuff like this. And none of us had any clue as to whether it had been an insect bite, bad food, island fever, or an evil spirit that had stricken him.
Three days he laid in his bunk, sweating then shivering, as it ran its course.
On the fourth day Debby stood at the door and whispered to us around the fire. "I think he's coming out of it."
Buck was elated. Chad recognized him and said he was thirsty.
It was a week before he was able to eat more than a bite or two of food. And we never did figure out what had gotten to him and left the rest of us alone. We all drank the same water and ate the same food and swatted the same bugs.
It was just one of those things.
The Baseball All Star Game was over. We were sitting around the fire when we thought we heard something.
"That's an engine." I said. The others agreed, there was a boat someplace nearby.
We ran for the platform and lit the fire. Then we scanned the sea with the binoculars. But we couldn't make anything out through the light misty fog that had settled into the area.
I took the watch and sat on the beach trying to peer through the haze. Once in awhile I thought I might have heard something besides the surf. Maybe.
The next morning we were setting up an expedition to the 'campsite' when...
"THERE IT IS!" Mrs. Simmons shouted. She came running back into the compound pointing out to sea.
And there it was.
And it was headed our way.
The small ship stopped and a large rubber boat with four men in it left its side and was coming toward our beach while we watched.
We waited breathlessly.
The boat slid up onto the sand and they looked at us without a word from them or us. Two of them were in uniform, and they were wearing sidearms.
Then the older of the civilians got up. He was holding our note. "We got it." He said in stiff English.
But now that it was time to go I know I wasn't the only one who didn't want to leave.
The island had been our home for over eight months.
We had built rather respectable huts. We had mapped our island and tracked the two streams from spring to ocean and even built a dam to create a freshwater bathtub that wasn't intolerably cold. We had perfected the cranking of the generator to get through any sporting event the Miami station broadcast. The radio only got two English language stations, one from one of the Islands and the Miami one, and the one Spanish station. But the island station seemed to focus on tourists and broadcast steel drum bands more than any of us could stand, but the Spanish station played some good music, so we had our musical tastes expanded. We were a captive audience for them.
And I had fallen hopelessly in love with Cheryl.
Which was good. Because Chad and Debbie had become quite the item themselves in spite of their age difference. I had wondered about her and Buck, but he kept reminding himself, and everybody else, that he was married. But... well... nevermind all that.
Over the last couple of months Cheryl and I talked about it and promised each other that after we were rescued, we'd move to Miami and get married. We made great plans, and revised those plans, and dreamed. Then the next morning we'd play it cool for the others. But they all knew, at least Mrs. Simmons did. She said she could see it on us. Now that rescue was at hand, she kissed me and said she hoped another guy she loved wouldn't leave her standing at the alter. All I could do was kiss her with everything I had as an answer.
The ship belonged to the Venezuelan Navy, but it was being used by a conservation group to check on several islands that made up a preserve and national park. We had been trespassing and didn't know it. But, they assured us, it was OK.
The next day another ship arrived and a naval doctor and an official from the American Embassy joined us.
We all had physicals, and given the chance to call our relatives and break the news to them as gently as possible.
The doctor pronounced us all healthy and in pretty good shape. Even Mr. Simmons, who had had some sort of 'condition' he wouldn't talk about, was in better shape than he had been in for years. Mrs. Simmons attributed it to months of good food, fresh air, and exercise. We just laughed.
Our relatives pronounced us something of a miracle and wanted to know when and where we would arrive back in civilization.
We spent the rest of that day showing off our island. And telling the naturalist about our discoveries and uses for various things. We found out our berry was something I can't spell or pronounce and was a native cure for almost everything. And a hallucinogen as well.
It turned out the pigs were survivors from a farm on the island that had gone bust. They had gone wild and been inbreeding for years. But there were still plenty of them to maintain the population.
We took such souvenirs as we could. Boarded the larger ship. And left.
The conservation official said they'd use our compound from now on for their activities on the island. They hadn't known the German facilities were there, they had never really explored our side of the island during their pig counts.
It was some relief to know our labors hadn't been in vain in the long run.
Two days later we were on the ground in Miami.
The first thing I did was ask the van driver to turn on our radio station.
Then I took Cheryl's hand and asked the driver where the nearest justice of the peace was.
End Island
[NOTE: This story is FICTION. No infringement of anything Gilligan is intended. None of the characters presented represent real people, none of the situations are based on real occurrences. No almost-rats were roasted in the writing of this story. Email- dr_leftover{~at~}themediadesk{~dot~}com Thank You ]
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