Sea of Tranquility Read online

  That’s when the first shot rang out. Brian put his camera away and waited. A second shot and then a third, then a full volley of blasts and the echoing racket of bullets hitting metal. It sounded like a war had begun. Brian couldn’t tell how close or how far away the shooting was, but he hid behind the willow tree that seemed surprisingly healthy, given its proximity to the sludge pond.

  As soon as Brian decided that he was more or less safe and that he was not going to die, he realized that he liked the feel of imminent danger. Decided again that he’d missed his calling, should’ve been a war reporter spending his days in Sarajevo, Cambodia, or Northern Ireland. Instead, this would have to do.

  He got his bearings, tried to get a fix on where the shooting was coming form. The “practice” apparently had begun. He hiked back down past the archives of automobile wreckage until he found a place to post himself behind a Bluebird school bus that was lying on its side. Poking his head around the side of the front of the bus, he saw six men in what looked to be duck hunting outfits shooting at items dangling in the air. On a clothesline strung between two sturdy posts hung what appeared to be a portable hair drier, a toaster, a telephone, a laptop computer, and a portable CD player.

  Men were shooting at the objects, occasionally scoring a hit and laughing. And among them was one boy who couldn’t have been more than eleven or twelve years old. It didn’t quite make a whole lot of sense.

  When the shooting stopped for the men to reload, Brian saw the proprietor he had met earlier. Phonse walked out from a shed towing something on a little kid’s trailer. It was a large TV — 36-inch screen, was his guess. He parked it in the middle of the gravel clearing and walked back to the gunmen. Brian saw him hand a double-barrelled shotgun to the boy, who loaded it as if he’d been doing it all his life. Then the kid walked out into the middle of the clearing and let go a mighty double blast with both barrels. The TV glass shattered, the tube imploded and gave off a very satisfying report in its unlikely demise.

  All the men cheered.

  Brian sat down on the automotively littered soil and reached in his pocket for a cigarette, momentarily forgetting that he had quit smoking over two years ago. He fingered his pockets nonetheless, gave up, torqued a telephoto lens onto his Pentax and clicked off a good twenty pictures of the men while they were still holding their rifles. Got one of the kid holding his shotgun aloft. There was a story here, but he knew he didn’t have all the pieces yet.

  The reporter waited twenty minutes until he was sure that practice was over. Then he sauntered on down to the rattletrap building that appeared to be the junkyard office. Phonse was alone now, his feet up on a pile of old Car and Driver magazines.

  “Guess you heard the racket,” Phonse said.

  “Yeah, wondered what that was.”

  “Oh, you didn’t know?”

  “No.”

  “Sorry, my friend, I would have invited you, too. Just the usual routine. People come from all over to have a go at it. Good clean fun. Although business is slacking off now the eco-tourism thing is down the tubes. Should have known you couldn’t trust whales to do what you wanted them to.”

  With little prodding, Phonse gleefully and generously explained the nature of his little theme park, noted that even a few off-duty Mounties from the mainland came out to practise. “Hard to keep up with appliances and computers and whatnot though. Still, it’s one last use for all the junk manufactured on the mainland.”

  “What do you do with whatever’s left?”

  “Oh, bury it or throw it in the pond.”

  “That kid looked like he was having some fun.”

  Phonse nodded.“He’d had at them little computer monitors before but I’d promised him a full screen Panasonic. His father said it was worth double the price of admission.”

  “You charge people.”

  “Not much. Twenty bucks an hour plus ammunition costs. Beer, if they’re interested. But I only let ’em drink after they shoot. And I never let kids have more than a couple of sips.”

  “Guess you have to have some regulations.”

  “Absolutely. I run a tight ship. Wanna have a crack at anything before you go? First-timers usually just like shootin’ the windscreens out of cars.”

  “Thanks anyway. Maybe I’ll be back another time and take you up on it.”

  “Bring your friends.”

  So there was no Michigan militia here. But there was a deadly pond and some wacko with a junkyard where people came to blast away at the paraphernalia of civilization. If Brian had given himself a day to cool and consider things, he might not have let the words take over and write the story themselves. He might have considered that this bad publicity for an otherwise respectable island was going to do more harm than good. And he had kind of liked Phonse Doucette. The man seemed genuine, sincere, fun-loving. Certainly no guerilla groups practising for the upheaval of the state here. Just some good old boys with a sightly off-kilter sense of entertainment. Sure, the kid shouldn’t be there with a gun. But he was blowing up a TV after all. Commentary on the electronic media.

  Brian unfortunately decided to trust his initial instincts and believed that if he cracked the lid on this thing, there’d be shit a mile deep. God knows what kind of vile toxic waste melded with pure, raw gun culture. Pollution and violence. Nifty news combination.

  Trent Stoffler, his immediate boss, was out of town and the stand-in editor, a rookie, was easy to manipulate. The story ran page one. People all over Nova Scotia were outraged. Ragged Island had proven itself to be some kind of horrible place, not the eco-destination it had once been thought to be. How the hell could all that go on unnoticed, unregulated, and unlicensed here at the tail end of twentieth century, anyway?

  E-mail flowed, phone calls were placed, editorials were written, and, worst of all, inspectors started to show up at Ragged Island within days. As did more reporters. Phonse told them that he felt like Jesus Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane now that some damned mainland asshole from the Herald had published all that horse shit in the paper.

  The island was warped and wanked by TV, radio, and newsprint for several days until a building under construction in Bedford collapsed and killed eight workmen, taking all the wind out of the Ragged Island story for a while. But the damage was already done. And D. O. T. had no problem getting the cabinet approval to kill the island ferry for good come October and began offering very modest financial packages to bring Ragged Island families back to the mainland and home to civilization.

  Chapter Seventeen

  People on the island began to bicker. Their home had made the national news. The province was trying to figure out what to do with Phonse Doucette, what to charge him with, how much to fine him, whether to put him in jail or what. The government had all the PR (and then some) that they could possibly need to do their good deed by moving as many families ashore as possible, bringing the islanders screaming and kicking into the civilized world of the late twentieth century.

  On the island itself, everyone blamed one other for the crisis. Fights broke out over beer, rum, or just a lobster sandwich. Many blamed Phonse, some blamed Moses for his failed tourist business. Moses blamed the whales. While all this was going on, Sylvie was working on some kind of cocoon inside herself. There were only two things that were keeping her sane. One was Kit’s mental instability — a kind of roller coaster ride that required the proximity of one solid and sane woman to hold her down to the ground or to pull her back up from under the sea of despair. And the other thing was this: kids. The two American children. They visited every day, told impossible tales of life in Upper Montclair, where people had money to burn and spent it freely and frivolously on junk. These two, even Todd, who could be arrogant at times, were great fun to be around.

  Todd offered to bring his laptop over and hook it up to Sylvie’s phone so she could try out the Internet for recipes, but she declined. Angeline asked for stories, and Sylvie was happy to comply. Todd pretended that he wasn’t interes
ted but he was. He listened while playing some kind of joyless little pocket electronic game.

  A favourite was the story about the moose that Sylvie’s parents raised from an orphan. Way back there in the early part of the century. An orphan moose with long, gangly legs swam ashore one summer and had to be fed milk from a baby bottle. Sam they called him, and Sam he was. A moose made a fine pet. (Todd thought she was making it all up but she was not. He would report the story in a chat room on the Internet and get spammed by other users who also disbelieved.)

  Yes, a moose was a fine and loving pet. Sylvie’s father, a big man of few words with a long beard and few teeth, loved the animal dearly and allowed the moose in the house sometimes until it just got too big to fit its antlers through the door.“I rode bareback on the moose, you know. And we borrowed a saddle and rode Western style. Sam took me everywhere. He had kind eyes and a good heart and didn’t mind people.

  “My dad hitched up a plow to Sam and Sam didn’t mind that either. He liked to work, Sam did. And we fed him well. In the winter, we’d hook up a sled and he’d tow us around Up Along and whatnot. Not a thing wrong with a moose for a pet.

  “In the winter we had to keep a big, red blanket tied onto him so that a hunter wouldn’t shoot him. You know how people like to kill things for sport. Sam lived a long and happy life, I guess, for a moose. He died the day after Dad did. Was his time, I suppose. We weren’t allowed to bury him in the cemetery but he was planted in the field. Deep under. Bones are still there, I reckon. Old Sam, he was. You don’t see many people have a pet like that anymore.”

  And that just sort of took the wind out of all the fine things in Upper Montclair. Old stories began to grow on the kids like those round globs of fuzzy, soft moss. Old and soft. Old stories and Sylvie, who didn’t want to be thinking about any damn future. And she refused to get into blaming her neighbours for whatever the hell was going wrong. Let ’em all leave. She’d stay, figure something out. Maybe all she needed was another good, faithful pet like old Sam was.

  Angie and Todd were given free rein of the island after their first couple weeks. As long as they followed the rules. Don’t go swimming in the ocean. Stay out of the way of young men gunning the engines of their ratty cars. Don’t fall off the wharf. Watch out for poison ivy. (But there was none.) Don’t talk to strangers, only people you know. (But that’s all there were at that point on the island — people they knew. Not many mainlanders or tourists.) And, oh yes, stay out of the way of TV camera people and don’t talk to reporters. They’d misquote kids as sure as they’d misquote a politician. Make a twelve-year-old boy look like some poverty-stricken juvenile delinquent for the sake of the dinner hour news and completely miss the fact that he was the son of a financial advisor from Upper Montclair.

  Todd and Angeline knew all the trails inside the forest and along the coasts. They were careful around the rocky cliffs of chunked-up brown shale and cautious with their footing around big boulders gummed up with green algae from the sea.

  The dreams of children are elastic and the island was an ever-expandable dream world of possibility. Todd carried around a video camera, sometimes working on what he called his “documentary.” Angie filmed while he held up a sea urchin or a starfish or a tiny blue and orange crab and spoke at great length about the creature’s eating and mating habits. He made most of it up but it sounded very convincing, the result of having watched too many science documentaries on PBS and the Learning Channel.

  Near the old, fallen-down house in the clearing by the spring there were butterflies and a mountain of wild roses. Todd documented the place this way. “The Angioderm butterfly arrives here from Paraguay every summer to feast upon rose nectar and copulate with its counterparts who have flown here from…. um, the Marshall Islands. They bask in the glory of life in this haven and then, as the coolness of fall approaches, they leave for the southern hemisphere, and ride the Jet Stream south.” That sort of thing. Todd had a nearly endless supply of words and fragments of unrelated knowledge that he jury-rigged any way he saw fit.

  Angie, even as she filmed, remained in dreamland. She absorbed sun and sea and sky and salt water soaking through the pores of her skin and her thoughts. She never wanted to return to New Jersey. Rose petals sometimes fell like pink snow onto the ground around her. Butterflies were being just butterflies. Seals would pop up in the sea like Charlie Chaplin comedians several feet from where she sat on a smooth stone perch by the Trough. She thought often of Sylvie. Sylvie, with her stories of older times, better times.“I want to adopt you, Sylvie, as my grandmother and take you back to the States,” she had told the old lady.

  “No, child. I don’t want to move. This is my island. But I can be your grandmother while you are here and when you are gone, we can write to each other.”

  “All right.”

  “Now we’re family.” And there was plenty of truth in that.

  “In some primitive countries, extended families are extremely important and often family members who die can be replaced by others chosen from the community,” said Todd.

  “I’m very sure that can happen,” said Sylvie.

  The sea caves at the base of Signal Hill were always a bit of a tempting mystery. You could see them from across the little bay and you could try to look at them from above on the hill, but they were, alas, facing the open sea, and without a boat you could rarely view them head on. Todd and Angie had messed about that area. Sylvie had told them to be extra careful and to never ever go swimming there because a wave might wash you into the cave and under the hill. Sylvie was the one who had shown them the existence of the caves in the first place and told the tales to go along with it. Todd would create his own private pseudo-scientific essay about the caves and send it off anonymously on the Internet, where many people would believe it to be true.

  Then August and a different phase of the moon. Lowest tide in maybe three years or more. Todd and Angie out on the prowl, looking for adventure, when they discovered that the shoreline in front of the caves was exposed. They scrambled down and landed on a strip of smooth, sandy beach — and saw a tunnel going back under the hill.“Too dark in there,” Angie observed.

  But Todd’s tug of curiosity was a powerful thing and did its usual trick. Todd and Angie, hand in hand walking into the sea cave on a floor of smooth, damp sand, listening to the sound of their voices echoing.“This is way cool,” Todd noted.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s okay. Our eyes are adjusting. The pupils are dilating to allow in more light. See? It’s not so bad.”

  The sea cave veered a bit to the left, the result of the weaker band of sedimentary rock that had been eaten away by the ocean over the years. And there was a low part where they had to duck down, but then it opened up again into a kind of room with a higher ceiling. Todd had a tiny flashlight attached to his collection of keys that unlocked things left back in New Jersey. He carried it everywhere, and it afforded a small, delicate ribbon of light.

  But the stubborn moon was at work on that low tide. Water was seeping in. Todd was already practising the narration for a potential video documentary about this amazing place, trying it out on his usual audience of one.“We’re here inside the sea cave of Ragged Island and, as you can see, well, it’s very dark.”

  They sat on a small ledge about three feet off the floor, and, as long as Angie focussed on the bright sunlight creeping into the tunnel, she could keep herself calm. While Todd pontificated,Angie silently sang a Spice Girls song to herself, one that she used to hear on the radio in New Jersey.

  Todd was wondering if there were any cave paintings or gold or buried treasure or maybe stalagmites.“Stalactites are usually formed by calcium and they hang down from the ceiling. Stalagmites are the ones that come up from the floor.”

  “Can we go now?”

  “Sure. I’m hungry.”

  “Me too.”

  Splash.

  Ankle-deep water and creeping up. The moon busy calling back the tid
e from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean.

  Todd held onto his little sister’s hand and urged her forward, but she wouldn’t move.

  “Damn,” Todd said out loud.“Come on, Angie.”

  “It was dry when we came in.”

  “I know. I guess the tide is coming in.”

  “Let’s wait until it’s dry again.”

  “Not a good idea.”

  “Why?”

  Todd wasn’t sure how long it took tides to cycle. He also didn’t know that there was a tropical storm sitting a couple hundred miles off the coast and even though the weather was perfectly fine in Nova Scotia, the distant waves were creating an unusual storm surge that was pushing the incoming tide.

  When Todd finally convinced Angeline to jump into the water she screamed. It was only three feet deep, but that was almost up to her chest.

  “We’ve got to get out of here now,” Todd insisted.

  “I can’t.”

  “You can.”

  “No.”

  “It’s no big deal.”

  “It is.”

  Todd said he’d check the passageway. Maybe the water was shallow there. He checked and, much to his despair, he discovered that in the passageway, with its low ceiling, the water was almost up to the top. There was only about a foot of air space.

  When he sat back down on the ledge, Angie was crying. “I’m not moving,” she said.

  Todd felt panic rise up like some kind of acid taste in his throat. He shone his tiny flashlight around the cavern. It had a high ceiling. He was sure the tide would not fill it up. He didn’t know what to do but heard a sound that sent a shiver down his spine. A wave had broken at the shoreline and water was rushing into the cave. He heard it slapping the top rock of the low passage. Damn.