Isle of Man

CHAPTER 8

Discovering ‘Merica



“Did he answer?”

“No,” Jimmy says. “He’s still locked in the bunkroom.”

“Come on, it’s been two days already. I’m tired of sitting at these controls. It’s boring.”

“Why you tellin’ me? I’m sittin’ right here with ya.”

“Sorry. I’d just like to go up top and get some air.”

“Bring us up,” he says. “I’ll watch the controls.”

“No. It’s okay. We’ll stay together until he snaps out of his stupid mood. I wish we had a shock table on board.”

Jimmy steps up beside me and nods to the throttle lever. “Let’s see how fast she can go.”

The look of mischief in his eye makes me smile.

“Okay.”

We’ve been submerged and moving at a steady fifteen knots for over two days, and it feels good to press the throttle down and feel the screw wind up and push us faster through the water. The gauge climbs to twenty-five knots, then to thirty, but other than the brief acceleration, it’s just as boring as going fifteen. I back the throttle off. As we slow to around ten knots, a pod of dolphins overtakes the submarine, one of them swimming alongside the window and looking straight in at us.

When the dolphins veer right, Jimmy says: “Follow them.”

I turn the wheel and adjust our course, hitting the throttle and speeding after them. We quickly overtake the pod, so I drop our speed again and allow them to catch up. Several of the dolphins take turns swimming to the windows, looking in and tapping the glass with their noses, as if playing a curious game. Then they break left and swim away again. Again I chase after them. Jimmy points up through the windows.

“Up there!” he shouts. “They’re runnin’ on the surface.”

I flip the switch to blow water from the ballasts and use the planes to steer us toward the surface. But I miscalculate the angle, and we launch from the water like a giant dolphin, the windows going sky-blue before the nose of the sub slaps down hard onto the surface. We stabilize at our normal surface-level depth and continue on. I shoot a glance at the door, expecting to see the professor storm in at any second.

Jimmy regains his footing, laughing uncontrollably, and rushes to the windows, which are now just beneath the water’s surface. I set the throttle at ten knots and leave the controls and join him. We watch as the dolphins stampede all around us, riding the bow wake, leaping into the air, appearing to double in size from our vantage point beneath the water’s surface, their silhouettes trembling there on the liquid lens above like melted version of themselves, only to shrink again to their normal size before piercing through the waves and racing on ahead of us. I count ten, twenty—no, there must be at least fifty dolphins rushing ahead of us in some kind of aquatic jubilee.

Then a terrific screech is followed by a terrible boom, and Jimmy and I hurl forward at a frightening speed, and my head bounces against the acrylic window with an explosive cracking sound that makes me sick to think it came from my own skull. I fall in seeming slow-motion forever toward the floor.

“You little idiots!”

The professor stands over me with his hands on his hips. I can feel every heartbeat in my aching brain. Jimmy lies next to me, and Junior cowers in the corner licking his paw.

I reach out and shake Jimmy.

“You okay?”

He moans. “I’m all right.”

As we pick ourselves off the floor, the professor storms to the controls and shuts down the engines. The submarine isn’t moving. It is, however, tilted slightly on its side with the port window yet fully beneath the water and the starboard window half above it, showing blue sky. I stagger to the window and lift to my tiptoes and look out above the water line. A small set of waves rolls past the submarine, obstructing my view, but as they get farther away, they shrink into the horizon, revealing an island. Just a glimpse of green. Then a new set of swells blocks the view again.

I turn and see Jimmy checking Junior’s paw. The professor inspects his charts, a look of furious consternation on his brow. My head is still throbbing with an audible pulse of pain and I can hardly hear my own voice when I ask: “What happened?”

“What happened?” the professor slurs, mimicking me. “Nothing happened. Rather, what ensued as a result of your idiocy, and I mean idiocy in the classical definition of one who hasn’t enough apparent intelligence for simple self-survival, is that you and your simpleton sidekick here ran us up on a reef.” Here he pauses to turn his anger toward the chart book, which he tosses against the wall.

“Which makes even less sense when there isn’t even supposed to be a reef here.”

While the professor rants, I wave Jimmy to the window and point out the island.

“What?” he asks.

“Wait for the wave to pass.”

“There,” he says. “I see it.”

“What are you two gawking at?” the professor asks, storming to the window himself. “Just great,” he says, when he glimpses the island. “Just fricken great.”

We pop the hatch and climb onto the tilted deck. The professor pokes his head out and immediately withdraws back into the submarine, shielding his eyes with his forearm. It hits me that not once has he been above deck when the sun is up.

“You okay?” I ask.

“I’m fine,” he replies. “Just tell me what you see?”

“Well, it looks like there’s a wide lagoon of sorts. It’s pretty calm, protected by the reef. And there’s an island. Pink sand. Some kind of green grass on the hills. Palm trees.”

“How far are we on the reef?”

“I can’t tell from here. Wait. Jimmy just dove in to check it out. I’m gonna go check it out, too.”

The professor calls from behind me as I head toward the edge of the deck: “Be careful; that stuff will cut you to shreds.”

I dive off the back, and swim around to join Jimmy on the protected side, facing the island shore. The water is cool but refreshing after so much time stranded inside the submarine. Jimmy points toward the nose where it appears to be resting on the reef, and we both take a deep breath and dive under.

The clear water provides nearly limitless visibility at this shallow depth, and we follow the submarine’s hull all the way around, seeing that nearly the front quarter is stranded on the reef. The titanium hull of the submarine has ripped through the white and pink coral, exposing a deep gash of darker layers beneath. A glint catches my eye, and I swim closer and brush aside the crushed coral, uncovering what looks like a piece of brass. Brass? In coral? I surface for air and bob in the water, waiting for Jimmy, since he can hold his breath much longer than I can. Finally, he comes up looking like a seal with his dark hair slicked back against his head.

“It’s stuck pretty good,” Jimmy says.

“Hey, does something seem funny about this stretch of reef to you?” I ask.

“Whataya mean?”

“Well, for one thing the part we’re stranded on is much higher than the rest of the reef. And it appears to be a kind of patch of its own in the middle of nowhere. I mean, look—the natural reef starts over there.”

“I dunno,” Jimmy shrugs. “Let’s dive again and look.”

“Okay, but let’s swim out on the deep side and see if it looks different from out there. Plus, we’ll be able to see how bad the sub is hung up.”

“Submarine,” Jimmy corrects me, laughing as he mimics the professor’s voice. “Never sub and never ship.”

We swim around to the seaward side and paddle about twenty meters from the stranded submarine. Then we gulp lungs full of air and descend beneath the waves and look back toward the reef. Sure enough, only about the front fourth of the submarine is resting on the reef, but it’s the reef itself that has my attention. It’s a hulking rectangle of coral, seemingly out of place as it towers above the line of much lower reef near the seafloor. Then it hits me. The familiar shape. One end wide, the other end angled nearly to a point. The side a sheer wall of coral-filled windows, waving with strange sea flowers and odd tentacled creatures. The narrower base. The nearly perfect cylinder rising from the reef like a giant coral smoke stack. It’s a ship! Or at least it used to be a ship before the sea turned it into the very reef it wrecked upon. I know what kind too. I’ve seen images of these cruise ships before, in educationals, down in Holocene II.

“Unbelievable,” the professor says, shaking his head as we stand dripping before him. “All the pristine ocean in the world to travel upon, and you manage to strand us on top of another stranded ship. Get back in the water. Both of you.”

“What? Get back in the water?—”

“Why?” Jimmy asks.

“To lighten the load while I try to back us off.”

We climb out the hatch and jump back in and tread water, watching from a safe distance as the professor full-throttles the screw in reverse, managing to churn up a noticeable amount of wash, but not budging the stranded submarine an inch.

Next, we try to kedge. At least that’s what the professor calls it. He releases the anchor from where it tucks into the aft ballast, and Jimmy and I take turns diving down and walking it along the bottom, away from the reef. When we’ve walked it out as far and deep as we possibly can, the professor wrenches it back, trying to get it to grab. We nearly exhaust ourselves to the point of drowning, dragging the anchor out again and again, but it just won’t take hold in the soft bottom. I suggest we try hooking it to the coral ahead and maybe pull ourselves sideways off the shipwreck-reef, but the professor says it’s too likely to compromise the hull. So we all gather again in the control room while the professor consults his tide charts.

“Hey,” I say, looking out the window again at the island. “I’ve got an idea.”

“This should be good,” the professor mumbles.

“What if we swim to the island there and chop down one of those palm trees and float it back? Maybe we could use it as a kind of lever to lift our nose off the reef while you reverse the engines, and we might just slide off.”

The professor looks up from his charts.

“You know, that’s not a half bad idea. But you’ve got one major problem.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“Well, since you asked,” he says, straightening his stance and clearing his throat as if he’s about to begin teaching a class. “Archimedes said ‘Give me a place to stand, and I shall move Earth with it.’ You might have noticed that we’re here on the thing that is stuck. The load force, if you will. You can’t get any mechanical advantage without having a place to stand.”

“Sure we can,” I answer, “if we wedge the tree beneath the front of the submarine, using the coral itself as a fulcrum.”

“How would you apply any force?” he asks.

“Easy,” I say. “We’ll just climb out to the end of the tree. Our own weight will be multiplied as a force on the other end.”

The professor scratches his head. He turns over one of his charts and writes on its other side.

“Let’s see,” he mumbles. “You two together—maybe 150 kilograms—figure two meters from fulcrum to load—eight meters to the effort—divide by point-two-five—makes a load force of over six hundred kilograms.” He looks up from his equations. “By Jupiter, that may just be enough to do it. Very impressive, young man. But I’m afraid you have one larger problem yet to solve.”

“Oh, yeah?” I say, feeling confident. “What’s that?”

“How will you cut down the tree?”

“What do you have on board for tools?”

The professor leads us to the engine room and shows us the collection of tools, mostly wrenches and electrical supplies, but nothing in the way of an axe or a saw. Jimmy snatches up a coil of titanium wire and a small cutter.

“We’ll jus’ use this.”

“To fell a tree?” the professor asks.

“Sure,” Jimmy says.

“It’s your plan,” the professor shrugs.

We eat a quick meal and drink our fill of water and climb the ladder to the submarine deck, carrying nothing but a coil of wire and a pair of cutters. The professor stands in the shadows below watching us go.

“Try and be back before high tide.”

“When’s that?” I ask.

“An hour after sunset,” he calls up.

“We better be back before that,” I reply.

Jimmy leans into the doorway.

“Hey, leave the hatch open so Junior can get some fresh air, will you?”

I hear the professor mumbling profanities as he walks the passageway back to the control room.

“It doesn’t look too far.”

“Nah,” Jimmy says. “We’ve swum farther. All right, Junior. You stay here and keep an eye on the old man for us, okay?”

Junior sits on the deck whimpering as we slide off into the water and push away from the submarine. Of course, it’s a longer swim across the lagoon than we figured.

By the time we drag ourselves panting onto the warm, pink sand and look back, the stranded submarine is just a black dash that could easily be a piece of floating driftwood if it weren’t suspiciously sticking out motionless from the water.

“We better get on,” Jimmy says.

We climb the sandy bank to the grassy edge of the island and walk up a gentle hill toward the palm trees that cover the upper plateau. Jimmy stops along the way and uses his knife to hack down a cedar sapling, carrying it with him and stripping off the little branches as we go.

“We’re gonna need something a little bigger than that to pry the submarine free,” I say, picking fun with him a little. Jimmy just smiles and keeps on whittling his piece of wood.

Soon we come upon strange lumps on the ground, almost like abandoned turtle shells, if turtles had hair. I kick one over and see it’s some kind of shell. By the time we reach the grove of palms, we realize that they aren’t just palms after all—they’re coconut palms. Clusters of coconuts cling to the treetops, and coconut shells litter the ground, making it impossible to walk without stepping on them.

We select a tree that is tall and straight, thick enough to be sturdy, but not so thick that we won’t be able to carry it back by ourselves, or at least roll it down the hill to the water’s edge. Jimmy takes out the spool of wire and measures out a length a little more than twice as long as the piece of cedar he’s been cutting on and snips it free. He folds the wire in half and wraps one length of wire around the other in a continuous spiral, finishing it off with a loop on each end. Then he bends the cedar sapling and slips the wire loops into angled notches he’s cut into its ends, and when he finishes, he holds up a perfect wire bow-saw.

“Brilliant!” I say, genuinely impressed. “Think it’ll work?”

“Never know ‘til ya try,” he says, setting the wire against the palm’s trunk and sawing back and forth.

It’s slow going, sawing through the tough outer bark. Jimmy saws until he’s exhausted, pausing to wipe the sweat from his brow before handing the saw to me. I work for half an hour or so and make about half an inch of progress. Then the wire breaks. Jimmy cuts another length of wire, and we start over again. We work for several hours—taking turns, breaking the saw, remaking the saw—then something catches my eye and stops me cold with the saw frozen in my hand.

“Is it stuck again?” Jimmy asks.

“Did you see that?”

“See what?”

“Over there. Behind those trees.”

Jimmy follows my gaze toward a thicker grove of coconut trees farther into the island. Several minutes pass, but nothing shows itself.

“What’d you see?”

“Thought I saw something over there watching us, but it must’ve been my imagination.”

“I’ll bet you’s dehydrated,” Jimmy says.

“I am pretty thirsty.”

Jimmy walks over to a shorter, thicker tree and looks up at the coconuts hanging there. Before I can ask him what it is he’s thinking, he wraps his long arms around the tree and shimmies to the top and starts tossing down coconuts. I catch them and gather them into a pile. Jimmy slides down the tree and uses his knife to carve holes in the tops of two coconuts, and we stand and drink their sweet water.

“This is the best water I’ve ever tasted.”

“Same here,” Jimmy says. “Hey, I thought I saw somethin’ from up there, too.” He nods toward the other grove of trees.

“What’d you see?”

“Somethin’ movin’ around in them palms.”

“Well, let’s get this tree sawed down and get out of here.”

“Good idea,” Jimmy says, pointing to the horizon where the sun has dropped low, its light already more orange than it was just ten minutes ago.

We return to the saw with renewed vigor, a silent sense of urgency communicated between us. The second the sun dips into the Atlantic, a cold breeze blows in from the ocean and stirs the palms. I remember the professor telling us high tide was a half hour past sunset. I saw faster. My gaze keeps drifting back to the other grove of trees, and soon there’s no mistaking dark shadows darting low to the ground between the trunks. Jimmy stands watching, too, his knife ready in his hand.

As the light fades, the shadows moving in the trees grow bolder. They come closer, making quick runs to nearer trees, betraying themselves with squeals and grunts. Soon, they seem to be all around us. My hands are raw and blistered but I keep working through the pain, falling into a kind of frenzy.

The sky grows dark, the palms sway in the wind. The loud rustling of the treetops mixes with a raucous chorus of strange squeals coming from the shadows, and it suddenly seems like we’re in the center of some haunted hallucination.

Then the saw jams and the wire snaps.

I’m about to grab Jimmy and suggest we make a run for it, empty-handed, when there’s a loud crack from the tree as the wind bends it into the cut. It splinters, then snaps, tipping over and falling to the ground with a thud.

“Let’s grab it and go!” I shout, above the wind.

Jimmy jogs to the far end and lifts the tree as I kick the cut end free of its base and wrap my hands around the trunk. We stagger off toward the water with our prize.

It’s heavy work. We take baby steps, making slow progress toward the edge of the hill where I hope we can roll it the rest of the way down to the shore. The shadows follow us, their grunts coming from all sides now and no longer even bothering to stay hidden in the trees. Jimmy is at least six meters behind me on the tree and I can’t hear him over the wind, but I feel him pushing faster, so I pick up my pace. Stronger wind, louder grunts, closer shadows—pushing faster, faster, faster. Then I’m stopped in my tracks by the full weight of the tree as Jimmy’s end drops to the ground.

I drop my end and rush back to see what’s wrong, but Jimmy is nowhere to be found. The shadows rush at me then and I stagger backwards, seeing them now for feral pigs. They surround me, herding me toward nearby trees. I stop and plant my feet, ready to fight if I have to.

“Jimmy!” I call out. “Where are you!”

A particularly vicious pig rushes me, and I see the glint of its tusks in the low twilight. I dodge its slash, but fall to my knees. I’m surrounded on all sides now.

“Jimmy!”

The grunts and squeals are deafening. I hold my hands up to protect my face. I see strange flashes through my fingers. Cloven pig hooves. Glinting tusks. Bloated human feet. Before I can make sense of anything, something is pulled over my head and everything goes dark. I’m being strangled. I can’t breathe. I panic—struggling, kicking, screaming. My arms are pinned. My legs being tied. Now strange lights. Where? Lights inside my head. Pulsing. Fading. Blackness.

When I come to, I’m lying on cold stone with a smelly sack over my head. Something lies struggling next to me. I hear a muffled cry and realize that it might be Jimmy. I nudge him with my elbow.

“Jimmy?”

“Aubrey? Is that you?”

“Yeah. Are you okay?”

“I dunno,” he says. “Where the hell are we? And what was those things?”

“Looked like pigs.”

“I ain’t never seen no pig tie someone up,” he says.

“Yeah, me either. Shh ... someone’s coming.”

Padding feet approach, accompanied by obscene grunting and labored breathing. Something nudges me, sniffing loudly.

“Is this the only two?” a deep and phlegmy voice booms.

“Seems so, Chief,” is the squeaky reply.

“You think they’s spies?” a third voice asks.

“What was they doin’?”

“They chopped down a tree.”

“Well, that isn’t any big crime.”

“But they’s guilty of something for sure,” the squeaky one says. “You know they is.”

“Why say you that?”

“They ran from us, Chief.”

“Well, that tells us only that they’re not very brave.”

“Lack of bravery aside, sir, they’s definitely foreigners.”

“Heave ho, then,” the deep one belts out, “pull off those hoods, and let’s have a look at them.”

I feel hands loosening the rope around my neck, then the sack is ripped free, and I’m blinded by the light of a lantern. As my eyes adjust, three ugly faces fade into view. They’re people, but their features resemble those of pigs. Beady eyes peering out from above upturned noses. Thin lips quivering on mouths that stick out just enough to resemble snouts. The fattest of the three leans in and sniffs my hair, his sweaty nose trembling. “Smells like the sea, this one does.”

“Mightn’t I surmise, Chief, that they’s came to us across the ocean?” the squeaky one asks.

“Surmise as you want,” the leader says. “Why should I give a coconut’s care what goes on in that little head of yours?”

“But from where?” the third chimes in. “There isn’t any other land out there.”

“Can they talk?”

“This one was cussing, Chief.”

The leader pokes me.

“What’s your name?”

“Aubrey,” I answer.

“How about your friend here?”

“That’s Jimmy.”

“Are you spies?”

“No, sir, we’re not spies.”

He turns to his fellows.

“They’re polite.”

“But how do we know they’re not dangerous, Chief?”

He turns back to us.

“Are you dangerous?”

“No sir. We were just minding out own business.”

“You mean chopping down my tree?”

“Well, yes. We did do that. But we didn’t ...”

“Untie them,” he says. “This is no way to treat guests.”

“But, Chief? We don’t even know where they’s from.”

“I said, untie them!” the big one shouts, losing his temper. “Show some small hospitality, I tell you. You’d not have us be thought of as rude, would you? What would the elders say?”

“As you wish, Chief. As you wish.”

“We can interrogate them after the show.” Then he grunts and waddles off, moving almost as much like a pig as a man.

“You heard the Chief,” the squeaky one says to the other, his pride obviously hurt. “Help me untie the filthy things.”

They lean over us, grunting as they struggle with the knots. When we’re both free and standing on our feet again, the men, if I can even call them that, snatch up their lanterns and herd us from the cave into some sort of passageway.

The one in front constantly glances back to see that we’re following, and the one behind keeps grunting to remind us that he’s there. They’re much shorter than we are, perhaps because of their hunched backs, and they’re both wearing clothing made from gray, bristly pigskins so that it would be easy to mistake them for pigs themselves if they hadn’t just been speaking.

I lean forward and whisper in Jimmy’s ear: “Maybe we should try to take them while we can?”

“Less talking, more walking,” the one behind us grunts.

The passageway shrinks little by little until we’re forced onto our hands and knees. Claustrophobia sets my heart racing, but the passageway opens suddenly onto a giant crystal cavern like no other cavern I’ve ever seen. And I grew up in one. The cavern is lit by coconut-shell candles everywhere—propped on shelves in the rock, lining pathways on the floor, some even floating in dark pools of water. Their light sparkles on crystal-flecked walls, illuminating stalactites dripping from the ceiling. But much stranger than the cave itself are its inhabitants.

Pig people. Everywhere. They shuffle around, preparing for some kind of event. Lighting candles. Setting up a buffet. Manning cook fires. Herding squealing children into groups. And there are pigs everywhere among them, too. Pigs rooting around at their feet, pigs snorting and snatching up scraps.

“This is weird,” Jimmy says.

“I know it.”

I feel a hand push me from behind.

“Move along.”

We wind our way down into the cavern until we arrive at a place where people sit in rows on the floor looking at a raised slab of stone lit with lanterns. It appears to be a stage. The wall behind the stage is crudely painted as a scenic backdrop, with a misshapen sun hanging in a purple sky. It looks like some scene I might have finger-painted as a child. The strange set is framed with palm fronds, creating the illusion of trees.

A hush falls over the small crowd as they become aware of us. They whisper and stare. The two pig men sit us on the floor in the front row next to the fat one they refer to as Chief.

“Hi-dy,” he says, shaking our hands. “I’m William. Sorry about the rough treatment back there. Uh-huh. I am. The boys get excited sometimes. No hard feelings, I hope.”

“No hard feelings,” I say, “but we really would like—”

“Hush!” he holds up his hand. “They’re starting.”

The babbling crowd falls silent as a solemn procession approaches the stage, led by a small boy pounding a pigskin drum that’s hanging from his neck. Behind him is an old man struggling to keep up, his legs swollen and his feet gnarled with gout. Following the old man are several plump girls, wearing only grass skirts and coconut-shell bras, fanning themselves theatrically with dried palm fronds.

Jimmy nudges me.

“Do ya see a way out?”

“I don’t dare turn around,” I whisper back.

“Shh ... ,” William hisses, holding his finger to his lips.

The procession reaches the stage, and the old man stands before the crowd while the girls line up behind him. The old man ceremoniously holds up his hands, and the drummer stops. Then he scans the crowd, draws in a long breath, and speaks:

“Many centuries ago, uh, our forefathers gathered together on a night just like this, uh, possibly in these very caves. And, uh, they begun an ancient tradition that continues to this, uh, very day. We honor them now by refusing to forget their, uh, sacrifice. Their wisdom was greater than ours. Their discipline mightier. Their, uh, spirits filled with holy grace. And so here now I give you their story lest we someday forget.”

I risk a look around. Everyone’s head is slumped forward on their fat necks, their pig mouths hanging open as they loudly breathe, their eyes locked on the stage. I wish we weren’t in the front row so we could slip away. The old man continues:

“Once we were a great country. Our ancestors worked the dry and ugly land until they had, uh, produced a vast paradise as close to heaven as, uh, any place can be without being heaven. You could climb a hill under purple skies and look down on endless fields of corn. Streams flowed with buttermilk. Honey dripped from trees, their branches hanging low and offering, uh, sweet meat. But men quarreled even so. And some refused to honor God’s decrees. They were, uh, lazy. They laid down in the mud and rose only to eat and to fornicate.”

Several people gasp with apparent shock when he says the word fornicate. I notice a few mothers with their hands clamped over their children’s ears. He continues:

“And soon the land was, uh, reduced to nothing more than a sty. And God was angry. And so He sent the rains.” Here the old man pauses, and the drummer boy hands him a coconut-shell rattle filled with sand. He holds the rattle high in his gout-mangled hand and shakes it, producing a sound effect of falling rain. Behind him, the showgirls look to the cavern ceiling with mimed horror and hold their palm fronds up, as if to shield themselves from the imaginary downpour. He goes on:

“And the waters rose. Uh. And the lands were covered up. Uh. And the greatest country in history was destroyed by God’s flood. And still the lazy among us laid in their filth, moving only to higher ground when forced by the rising waters. And like so many fish in a draining pond, uh, they were all crowded together in the last remaining bit of dry land, forced to live together with the pigs they had become. And so they turned on one another. Uh. They did. They ate the flesh of their own and so angered God further. And God in his rage sent down the plague. I said plague, I did. Great mechanical birds swept from the purple skies and cut the greedy sloths to shreds. Massive sea monsters rose from the deep and laid them to waste upon the tiny patch of remaining, uh, sand. For little else was left above the waters that covered the Earth.”

The girls fall to the stage behind him and writhe on the ground, as if being ravaged by imaginary adversaries from above. The old man waves his fat, knobby finger in the air and speaks now in a hushed voice:

“But the story does not end there. No, no, no. God, uh, took mercy on the few worthy men who remained. Gradually, he slowed the rains. He called the machines away. And peace fell again on the tiny patch of land. That’s when our forefathers gathered here, possibly in these very caves, and renewed their commitment to the decrees of God. Gone are the days of corn and streams of buttermilk. But they will come again. Gone are the days of honey trees filled with sweet meat. But they will come again. Uh. I tell you. They will come again!”

The crowd chants it back: “They will come again!”

“They will come again!” the old man says.

“They will come again!” responds the crowd.

Someone nudges me, breaking my trance, and the strange surroundings fade back into view. William slurps milk from a coconut shell and passes it to me. I hold the shell in my hand and look at his milky slobber coating its rim. I want to pass it on without drinking, but William is watching me with his beady eyes. I raise the shell to my lips and sip the milk, trying not to vomit as I pass it on to Jimmy.

The old man holds his arms up.

“They will come again!”

“They will come again!” comes the response.

“We must only be patient, and never forget our history,” he says, his stutter disappearing as his voice rises like someone giving a sermon. “And the good times will indeed come again. The dreaded waters will lower. Our promised land will be uncovered. The ships and dragons will disappear for good, and we will once again be free to leave these caves and rebuild the great nation of ’Merica!”

“Rebuild ’Merica!” the crowd chants.

“I said: rebuild ’Merica!”

“Rebuild ’Merica! ’Merica! ’Merica!”

The drummer boy beats his drum as the old man shambles off stage, appearing to move with considerable pain. The girls fall in line behind, shaking their grass skirts and waving their fronds, and the odd procession heads back the way it came.

I turn to William beside me.

“Did I understand that right? Do you think this island you live on is America?”

“Think?” he grunts. “Where else would it be? Come now, it’s time to eat.”

He leads us through the noisy crowd to the other end of the cavern, where a long buffet is set up on the floor. Coconut shells filled with food line the center, and each seat is marked by a personal trough carved into the stone. Jimmy and I sit where we’re told. William slumps down next to us.

“That’s my wife, Annie,” he says, pointing to an enormous woman lying across the way. She has a baby in her arms, and the baby is clamped onto her nipple, feeding. Because of the way she’s slouched, her other breast hangs nearly to the floor and a piglet stands on its hind legs suckling, too. I watch as it loses its balance and falls, only to get up and stretch to the dangling nipple again. Even if it weren’t for the piglet, I’d probably be creeped out, because babies are formula-fed down in Holocene II. Jimmy, on the other hand, doesn’t even seem to notice.

The food bowls are passed around, and everyone reaches in and scoops out portions and slops them together in the troughs in front of them. They eat with their fingers, slurping so loudly that the entire cavern echoes with the sound. Trying not to be rude, I pick out tiny pieces of the least repulsive foods and set them in my trough. Everything seems to be made from two ingredients only: coconut and pork. Bowls of boiled pig feet pass by, followed by bowls of blood pudding. Then a strange gelatinous substance riddled with tiny piglet snouts. Something that looks like liver, something else that looks like tongue. Most of these I let pass without touching.

Then comes cooked meats that actually smell pretty good. Chops and bacon, sausages and ham. The meat is followed by bowls of shaved coconut, and others filled with coconut oil or coconut cream. They pass community drinks down the long, floor-laid buffet. I avoid the milky drinks, and wipe the ones filled with coconut water with my sleeve before raising them to my lips. Jimmy seems to be enjoying himself. He sits beside me and eats without reservation, even making conversation with one of the portly dancing girls on his other side.

“Whatcha celebratin’?” Jimmy asks, leaning across me and addressing William.

“Come again?” William grunts, his mouth filled with food.

“The feast,” Jimmy says. “What are ya celebratin’?”

William looks confused. He slurps up a piece of pale flesh dangling from his lips and leans closer to Jimmy, crowding me. “Nothing special,” he says, his stinky breath wafting over me. “We do this every night ’cept Sundays.”

When William turns away, I lean into Jimmy and speak in a low voice: “We’ve got to get out of here.”

“Why?” Jimmy asks. “Let’s jus’ go with the flow.”

“But don’t you see what this is?”

“What what is?”

“These people. That whole skit back there.”

“Seemed like some kinda show to me,” Jimmy says.

“Remember that ship we saw? The one in the reef?”

“Yeah.”

“Well these must be the descendants of the cruise ship passengers. It’s all pretty clear, isn’t it? Some of them must have survived the Park Service drones by imitating pigs. Now they’ve evolved to look like them.”

“Yeah,” Jimmy says. “So what if?”

“Well, they’ve got it all wrong. There wasn’t any flood. And this sure isn’t America.”

“Well, how do we know it ain’t?” Jimmy asks.

“How do we know? Don’t be stupid. This isn’t all the land that’s left. You know that much. And we just came ourselves from North America.”

“Maybe,” Jimmy says. “But didn’t you grow up bein’ told none of this was up here period? And that sure ain’t true. How do we know how anythin’ really happened, ’cept by what we’s told?” He pauses to drink from a bowl passed by the girl on his other side. “And besides,” he continues, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand and passing the bowl to me, “no one likes a know-it-all.”

William whistles to quiet the crowd.

Hands freeze, suspended halfway between troughs and mouths. Bowls clatter as they’re set down. A baby cries, but is quickly hushed by its mother.

“It’s time to give thanks,” William says, nodding to the old man, now seated at the other end of the floor-table.

The old man reaches over and seizes up a baby by the legs and lifts it flailing above the table and holds a knife to its neck. Before I can even open my mouth, a woman screams—

“No!” She leaps from her seat and pulls the baby away from the knife. “You old blind bastard!” she shouts, cradling the baby in her arms. “That’s my baby, not a piglet.”

The old man mumbles an apology and turns and reaches into the wallow beside the table and, with some labor and much squealing, manages to snatch a piglet and lift it up to the blade. He leans in close and inspects the piglet with one milky eye, as if performing a public display of due diligence. Then he slashes its throat and catches the gushing blood in a bowl.

I feel my stomach retch, but I hold down my vomit. Even Jimmy looks a little pale. When the flow of blood slows to a trickle, the old man hurls the dead piglet into the wallow where it is immediately set upon by other hungry pigs. Then he sips from the bowl, wipes the blood from his chin with a gouty knuckle, and passes the bowl of blood. I begin to panic as it makes its way toward Jimmy and me.

I elbow Jimmy.

“I’m not drinking that.”

“We better jus’ do it,” Jimmy says. “Seems like it’s custom or somethin’.”

When the bowl of blood reaches Jimmy, he holds it in both hands, pausing to scan the crowd. All eyes are on him. He glances at me and shrugs, then lifts the bowl to his mouth and drinks. He passes the bowl to me with a look of silent apology. I immediately pass it on to William.

William hands it back.

“You must drink,” he grunts.

I shake my head.

“I’m not drinking this.”

An even deeper hush falls over the group. I feel everyone’s eyes on me as I hold the offering out, my hands trembling, the thick red blood sloshing around in the bowl. William won’t take it, so I set it down in front of him. He slides it back toward me.

“You drink,” he says. “Otherwise God will punish us.”

I push it back.

“I’m not drinking that poor pig’s blood.” The defiance in my voice surprises me. “And besides, there is no God. At least no God that would flood any place. So you don’t need to worry about being punished for anything.”

William takes a long, stilted inhale through his quivering nostrils, then stretches open his mouth and lets it out in what might be a silent roar, or maybe just a yawn. He turns his beady eyes on me.

“You tire me with these childish antics,” he says. “Just drink so we can move on to the entertainment.”

“I won’t drink that blood.”

“Eh then!” someone calls. “Let’s drink his blood.”

“Pigs’ feet and human snouts!” the squeaky one shouts. “Let’s cut the spies and bleed them out.”

William reaches into his trough, grabs a fistful of slop, and hurls it down at Squeaky, silencing the racket.

“Enough!” he bellows, his lips pulled back and his incisors showing. “You act like children. Show some consideration to our guests.”

“But what if they’s spies?” squeaks the sheepish reply.

William turns back to me. “Are you spies?”

“We already told you we’re not,” I say.

“They’re not spies!”

“If they was, they wouldn’t say it.”

William shakes his head.

“Tell me where you’re from?”

I’m relieved to finally be asked one civilized question.

“We came on a boat, well, a submarine, really. From the west coast of North America. And there was no flood. There are all kinds of other lands out there. This just happens to be an island.”

William looks confused.

“The stories tell of no other lands. And none are visible from the hill. But if there are other lands, there is certainly no other ’Merica.”

“With all due respect, sir, this is not America.”

“Lies!” someone screams.

“Blasphemy!” another shouts.

“I told you they was spies, Chief,” the squeaky one says.

The old man snatches up his knife and crawls down the floor-table toward Jimmy and me. I’m frozen with disbelief. Is he really going to cut us? William pushes us back and meets the old man with balled fists. Then Squeaky leaps onto William’s back. William’s wife casts her baby aside and seizes Squeaky’s dangling leg and sinks her teeth into his calf. Someone pounces on Jimmy. I’m hit on the head. Arms grab me from behind.

It’s all gnashing teeth and swinging fists and kicking feet. Then, suddenly, the entire mad brawl comes to an immediate halt, and all heads turn to stare behind Jimmy and me.

Their faces are frozen with horror.

Their beady eyes bulge.

My captor releases me.

As my senses return to my swirling head, I slowly crane my neck to see what it is they’re looking at. Junior crouches on the path behind us, his hackles up, and his canines exposed. He’s growling, bless his little heart. And his effect on the pig people is astonishing. They back away, coming together and crouching against the wall in a mass of pale flesh and pigskin.

Jimmy picks himself up. We walk backwards toward Junior and the path. We’re almost to Junior’s side when one of the pig people lets out a hair-raising scream. The crowd parts, and I see Squeaky has caught his clothes on fire with a candle. He dances in circles, the fire getting worse as he does, and the others chase after him swatting at the flames.

We turn and run.

Junior races ahead of us, and we follow him up the path and into the tiny passageway, crawling on our hands and knees until it widens, then clambering to our feet and rushing through the pitch-black cave, following the sound of Junior’s yapping. Soon, we’re on an incline that steepens with every step until we’re climbing with our feet and our hands. I feel a cool breeze on my face. Then Jimmy reaches me a hand, and I scramble to my feet, above ground and free.

As we rush in the direction of the beach, we nearly trip over our felled coconut tree. Without a word, Jimmy grabs an end, I grab the other, and we run with it toward the hill. Maybe it’s just the adrenaline pumping through my system, but this time the tree seems to weigh nothing at all. We carry it down the hill until we stride onto the warm sand and plunge with it into the cold water. We each wrap an arm around the tree and swim it in the direction of the submarine. Junior treads water beside us, taking turns going ahead to check on Jimmy and coming back to check on me. Then Junior climbs onto the floating tree and hitches a ride. He deserves it.

We seem to be swimming forever, the tree moving slow in the dark water. I work my way up the trunk toward Jimmy so he can hear me.

“Are we headed in the right direction?”

“I think so,” he replies, sounding as breathless as I am.

“But are we making any progress?”

“I dunno,” he says.

We swim for another twenty or thirty minutes, and I’m about to suggest we dump the tree and try to make it alone when I hear the professor shout from the deck of the stranded submarine.

“Boys! Is that you?”

We call back and adjust our course and five minutes later, we’re climbing aboard.

Junior shakes himself dry next to us. Jimmy and I fall to our knees and hug his neck and kiss his wet face. He wags his tail with pride.

“What on Earth happened to you?” the professor asks.

“We’ll fill you in later,” I say. “Let’s hoist this submarine off the reef and hurry up and get out of here.”

“The tide’s dropping,” he says, “but we can give it a go.”

It takes all three of us and a rope from below to drag the coconut tree around to the front of the submarine. Once there, we hold the tree steady with the rope while Jimmy jumps in and helps lower the cut end down onto the reef, beneath the angled nose of the submarine. Thankfully, there’s plenty of tree above water to keep it weighted down. Once it’s wedged there good, Jimmy climbs back on deck, and we remove the rope.

“I think we’re ready,” I say, inspecting the tree where it’s wedged in front of the submarine, slanting away over the water.

The professor returns to the control room and floods the rear ballasts and maxes out the engines. Then he shouts from inside the control room.

“Did he say ‘now’?” Jimmy asks.

“I think he said ‘now.’”

Jimmy goes first, scrambling up the leaning tree. When he reaches its end, he straddles the tree and calls back to me. The light from the open hatch doesn’t reach much of the tree, and it’s slippery climbing in the dark. I feel the tree bending beneath my weight. When I join Jimmy, we both cling to the top of the tree, bouncing to try and exaggerate our weight. It reminds me of an old childhood seesaw game in our underground park, except it’s Jimmy and me on the upside end and a submarine on the downside end. We bounce and we bounce. I hear the screw churning water against the back of the submarine. Junior stands on deck and yips encouragement up to us. Then Jimmy slides a little farther out on the tree, where it’s too narrow to sit, and rolls off and hangs there. I slide out and join him. We hang together, swinging our legs above the black water below. It feels and looks strange. As if the tree were growing from the black lagoon itself. Or perhaps as if in some alternate reality where the pig people’s flood really happened after all, this was the last holdout tree and Jimmy and I are clinging to it, refusing to surrender to the rising waters below.

There’s a loud crunching sound, and the tree drops a foot. It takes everything I have to hold on. Then Jimmy lets out some kind of tribal yell and flails his legs. I join him, screaming into the night and swinging from the treetop. Another crunch, another drop, and then the submarine slides free from the reef and the tree falls over into the water with us still clinging to it.

I’m momentarily tangled beneath the fronds of the floating tree, but I feel Jimmy’s hands in the dark water, pulling me free.

“You okay?” he asks, once we’re treading water.

“I’m gonna have another bump on my head,” I say, “but otherwise, I’m all right.”

We swim back to the freed submarine and climb onto its deck. Junior greets us with a round of licks to our wet ankles. As the professor carefully backs us into deeper water, I scan the dark island hillside for any sign of pursuit from the pig people. I think I see a light moving between the trees. But before I can point it out to Jimmy, it’s gone, and I can’t be sure.

Jimmy throws his wet arm around me.

“You jus’ had to tell ’em they was wrong, didn’t you?”

“You mad at me?”

“No,” he says, smiling.

“Good. I don’t like it when you’re mad at me.”

“But that sure was crazy close.”