It took five men to pull Orlando onto shore. His intestines spilled out of his abdomen, ripped from the connective tissue attaching them to his spine, stretched past his legs, tethering him to the cool wet sand while the ocean kept pulsing and salting the exposed tissue. The men laid him on his back. The receding waves exposed tufts of seaweed and small crabs scampering back to the foam. Gulls hovered above their heads. Cruz swatted them away with a stick. Trying to help, Ernesto picked up a section of intestines. The pain jolted the dying man, flattening him out. His breath soon slowed to a shallow snore.
Geronimo ran back their camp and soon returned with his pistol, stood over Orlando for a moment, then fired. The sound of the crashing surf swallowed the pop from his revolver. Cruz cut the intestines from Orlando with a pocket knife and flung them into the sea, gulls dove after the chum.
They buried Orlando that night on the grassy plateau overlooking the rock cliffs where they had washed ashore a few days before. A steady breeze kept the knee-high grass bent toward the mountain. They spent the night on the plateau, hungry and cold, the stars providing neither blanket nor comfort, only light and reflections of their insignificance. Gravity held their bodies to the soft dirt beneath their heads while milky way grew brighter, moving from left to right.
Greg was the last to fall asleep. He pointed out constellations and stars to his mates while they dozed off. Hours later he woke to pee and returned to find one man strangling another. Greg stayed in the shadows, waited for their business to conclude. In the morning they searched for Ernesto.
They ate sparingly the following week, netting seven small fish before the undertow dragged their cargo net into the sea. Their bodies, once covered in plump flesh, began eating themselves, exposing the prominent bones of their drying skeleton. Their leathery skin tightened, tanned, and dried each day. Their eyes retreated into their skulls. They slept lightly, accustomed to the guard’s flashlight clanking on cell bars during night checks and the groans of their nuclear powered carrier, now waking to the sounds of the ocean, others talking in their sleep, or the wind swaying massive palm trees, dropping coconuts.
Without their regiment of psychiatric medications, the men succumbed to bouts of depression, mania, weeping, hallucinations, anger, and violence towards each other and themselves. Their episodes lasted a few moments or stretched on for hours, increasing with frequency the longer they sat, or walked, or ran, or talked, or remained awake. Escaping the onslaught of burning circuitry was no option, senses deadened or became hyperactive without warning. When they weren’t sleeping or sobbing they walked the island, day and night, alone or in groups. They talked to themselves like actors reviewing lines and directors blocking a stage. They stared at the horizon. They whispered names.
Their withdrawal symptoms eventually deadened and they grew accustomed to the rhythm of the sea, wind, lightning, and rain. The men became resourceful. They established a permanent camp on the lee side of the islands lone mountain and built a small freshwater pool by damming a runoff stream with volcanic rocks, fallen trees, palm fronds, and mud. They took to eating a variety of crabs, leaves, seeds, and insects. A few man-sized sharks were the only fish wandering around the island. Geronimo used his last pistol round on a bull shark hunting the shallow waters of the west side cove. It swam away, painting a thin cloud of blood into the dark water beyond the shelf.
Greg was the next to pass. He ate pale berries from the drainages on the south side of the volcano. The first bite released its acrid juice, puckering his lips, flooding his mouth with saliva. A sweet fibrous pit followed. He ate two more before the roof of his mouth and tongue began to itch. Within minutes his skin was tingling and sweating. He stumbled his way to the camp and knelt by the fire. He heaved several times before emptying the contents of his stomach. Abdominal pain twisted him to the ground, flexed his body into the fetal position.
The men carried Greg to the water and bathed him by hand. Their voices blended into muzzled grunts, gibberish. His mouth couldn’t make the words he needed. His mind wandered from one thought to another. He watched the men dry into dust then blown away by the breeze. He turned towards the edge of the jungle where Cruz sat with his hands outstretched, long and droopy, reaching his cheeks. A voice told him to breath.
Greg took a deep breath, felt the warm air pass into his nose, down his trachea and inflating every alveolus, stretching his lungs, blood colliding with god. He felt bacteria writhing on his skin. He closed his eyes and saw the muted explosions of hydrogen in the darkness of space and heard the voices of tall and slender beings, “how did you get here”, “stop searching, stop pretending, I am all around you”.
He felt the cool sensation of water poured over his head, soothing the red skin on his shoulders and back, and rolled down his spine, dissipating the excruciating erection the drug had induced. His heart rate slowed and he could hear the men's voices again, muffled then clear. He could see their bronze weathered faces.
Greg was carried back to the shade where he slept into the evening. He woke long after the men bedded down and walked the moonlit beach for a while before he sprawled out on the sand, staring into the night sky. His muscles soften onto the sand. He remembered helping his mom make Christmas cookies when he was a child. Gravity grabbed his shoulders and hips, holding him to the ground. A deep searing pain from his abdomen pulsed up his spinal column to the base of his skull. He clenched his teeth. The surge passed, then a brief moment of euphoria before feelings of shame, anger, and regret settled onto his chest, squeezing and burning him from inside. “I need to die,” he whispered, “I’m so tired.”
He turned his head toward the black of the tree line that separated the beach from the night sky. A small man, the height of a child, appeared; hairless and muscular, painted white from head to toe with a wide black stripe around its abdomen, its skin glowed in the moonlight. It sprinted across the sand with effortless bounds and hopped onto Greg’s chest, paralyzing him instantly, leaving him breathless. Its long expressionless face turned peered into Greg, its bright blue eyes shone in the moonlight. Greg screamed, “I know you, I know you, Fuck you, I know what you want”, but there was no sound. Its face melted and its nose and mouth swallowed into itself. The figure hopped off, stared at his victim for a minute then walked back to the jungle. Greg sobbed until dawn then passed away. They buried him on the windy plateau by Orlando. Cruz and Dave said a few words. Geronimo watched Greg gasp like a fish before he passed. He kept that to himself.
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Once a stout and stocky man, five weeks on the island chiseled Geronimo to lean sinew. He wore a wiry speckled beard, sun weathered skin, and high cheekbones. His thousand meter stare could bore through flesh and rock. He took to fits of masturbation at all hours of the day, on walks around the island, on the grassy plateau by his dead comrades, in the abandoned concrete bunkers along the cliffs, or into their camp fire so he could “hear the sperm screaming in terror as they sizzled on the red coals”, his words. His behavior was unpredictable and inconsiderate. The men were amused by his antics, watching him walk into the crystal clear cove and “churn dick-butter” as he told them. They wagered a small shark would swim by and bite off his hands and penis.
He was raised in the same town in southwestern New Mexico where his parents are buried. He read incessantly as a young man, Sinclair, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Russian novels, Mexican Novels, Das Kapital and the Wealth of Nations, geology textbooks, biology textbooks, history books about World War 1, and his favorite, biographies of rockstars and musicians. He worked on fire crews in the Gila National Forrest most of his adult life. His work took him all over the western United States, from vacant hills and mountains of Wyoming to the outskirts of Los Angeles, working with his hands and sleeping on the floor. Geronimo sought nothing more than being bone tired and watch stars move across the sky while everyone slept. He drank his coffee black, dipped tobacco, and loved Mexican pastries.
Geronimo had no children nor spouse. He considered the latter a waste of time and raising someone else’s children at his age was punishment he could do without.
His sister died in middle age of cancer, leaving behind three sons, strong young men with young families of their own. His younger brother drank himself to death, decimating the liver assigned at birth long before annihilating a liver donated by good a Samaritan. Geronimo buried him the week before he left for ship.
__________________
The hour before dawn, two amphibious vehicles landed on the southern shore of their island, each carrying eight soldiers dressed in green and black camouflage. The soldiers hid their boats under thickets of elephant ears and vines by the base of nearby boulders, and spent the following days assembling and monitoring electronic equipment on the plateau where Orlando was buried. They made no noise and built no fire.
The marooned men watched the soldiers closely. Undetected, they became part of the jungle and moved close to them each night, under vines and rocks, wading through mud, blending into the trees and brush, searching for scraps of food or anything they could steal, but the soldiers left nothing, even burying their feces. The soldiers kept night watch, taking turns staring into the night, holding their weapon across their lap, and listened to the ocean slap the rocks below the cliff. A few hours later another would take his place.
On the morning they set out to leave the island, two soldiers awoke to find their kits and weapons missing. They had slept with them as before, satchels at their heads, weapons to their right, backs to each other in a circle. The soldiers searched the island without finding a trace of their gear or signs of anyone else on the island apart from the small pool of fresh water, a cold fire ring, and the concrete pill boxes from a distant war, not a footprint or scrap of food. They searched shallow caves, inlets, jungle, and scanned the far reaches of the dead volcanic island. Their equipment was lost.
A signal came over their radios to leave the island. They gathered their gear and pushed their watercraft onto the surf, powering themselves over the first set of waves until they reached calmer waters 400 meters past the reefs. Glassing the coastline of the island, the soldier who lost his weapon nudged and handed the binoculars to the woman who left her prized sniper rifle on the island. He pointing toward the blue-water cove where they had kept their rafts. She focused the binoculars and saw a bony brown man with a bushy peppered beard and a rifle slung over his shoulder fervently masturbating into the thigh deep water of the cove. She watched him finish and handed the glasses back to the young soldier. He raised the binoculars and the man was gone.
————————————
Cruz found a dead man near the north shore tidal pools. The corpse wore their prison uniform, a navy blue jumpsuit with embroidered reflective yellow lettering and trim around the waist and cuffs. He didn’t recognize the bloated man. Escapees from ships typically removed all identifiers before fleeing. The dead man’s uniform still bore all insignia. Its outfit wasn’t as tattered and beaten as he would later tell the biographer his ego convinced he’d meet after the island.
Cruz remembered the ship. The crowded mess halls and long hours of work, the smell of jet fuel on the deck and its textured sticky black top. He recalled the narrow hallways, the small doors, and the tensions that built between angry and resentful men. He remembered the prison promoting boxing matches in a pro-sized ring on Fridays twice per month. The event provided entertainment and a platform to resolve disputes. Resentments were necessary, grudges were encouraged, but they could only fight the same person 3 times within a year of their first encounter. It was rare for men to fight twice, unless they were fan favorites. Most fights were terrible, fighters leaning into each other, swinging wildly like windmills, exhausting themselves and never landing a punch.
The show was 90 minutes and the schedule was always full, 6 matches, 3 minute rounds. Sign-ups opened the week before each fight, Thursday mornings before breakfast and closed by lunch. If six matches could not be scheduled, another date was announced during supper.
On a ship with 3,200 inmates and new staff cycling through every few months, there was never a shortage of men willing to fight. Anyone who wanted to fight was allowed to fight, but both men must agree. A cafeteria manager from a catering crew knocked unconscious an inmate he recognized from their Memphis slum. The inmate robbed the manager’s brother at gunpoint, shot him in the head over a meager sum from the till. The criminal was disappeared off the ship.
Guards challenged each other but were prohibited from engaging the prisoners. Most men knew how to fight, even the fat ones. A retired LAPD officer and a former Cleveland cop fought an epic gray-hair bout that featured an additional round requested by both men. They exchanged haymakers, putting on a clinic of endurance and expired testosterone.
The last guard vs inmate match took place a month before Cruz arrived. Both men mauled each other, they spent a week in the infirmary. The inmate eventually died from swelling to the brain and the referee, a friend of the guard, was fired for breach of duty, property damage, endangering the life an inmate, and shipped back to the states.
Arranged by prison staff, the first fights were spectacle; a tall man vs a short man, two obese men swinging for the fences, pedophiles, former cops, lawyers, and so on. The second fights were set aside for grudge matches between rival gangs or department cliques, the laundry room vs the flight deck, the supply room vs maintenance, and so on.
The gang fights were sloughs, men fought like Japs at Iwo Jima, brawling to the last second. The last bell was a signal to lay down a fury of haymakers their downed opponent or clamp ears or a nose with their jaws, taking with them whatever flesh was available. The crowds shouting “Otra '' in Spanish, begging for one more round. The mob could be heard from the flight deck, “Otra! Otra! Otra!”, then a loud buzzer and a PA system concluded the fights for that week.
The headline fights paired real athletes, matching them in similar weight classes unless otherwise requested and agreed upon by the fighters. These men were fit and wiry, or thick and powerful, with skills and physiques to match. They fought for sport and displayed a level of sportsmanship recognized by the staff and outside world, some receiving full pardons for their crimes, a special few secured sports contracts with the private equity firms that own the prison ships.
Most of the athletes were good men with solid work ethics, sober about their imprisonment. They were responsible for each other, understanding of their common well being and the opportunity to earn a ticket from the ship, but a handful were skilled and undisciplined savages who’s intent mayhem, absolute annihilation of their opponent. Many of the fighters carried entourages and creative names like Masshole Mick, El Azteca, Hank “Rain Man” Thomas, Dallas Dave, Ade “The Nigerian Nightmare”, TT Cowboy, and countless others.
“Why Dallas Dave?” Cruz asked. Dave happened to be sitting one seat over and across from him at breakfast. Dave kept chewing, glanced at him, swallowed, then returned his gaze to the faded mural of the battle of Midway.
“There were 6 ‘Daves’ on my block when I got here. I’m from Dallas.” He kept eating. It made sense.
Cruz remembered prisoners beaten to death, referees were slow to stop the fight, one was fired for negligence and destruction of private property. A heart attack finished another man, a fat one. His opponent, a wiry white kid with a bald head and gold rimmed teeth, pummeled the fat mans face an chest. The skinny man landed a right hook to the fatty’s temple. He fell to one knee, stood up, took two weary steps, vomited on himself and fell face first onto the mat.
Orlando was sent to solitary confinement for a month for his safety, avoiding retaliation from anyone seeking retribution for the kill. The fat man’s friends were few, he’d only been on the ship for a month. Management greased him up with thick praise, referencing his past fights at other prisons and promised him extended phone privileges if he signed up to fight. Orlando told Cruz he’d been notified of his opponent only a few hours before the fight.
Cruz’s glance wandered across the tidal pools noting small blue crabs running across the volcanic rock and into the tidal pools. He took a last look at the corpse. It was young, fat, and bald, white lump of bruised and bloated flesh. It’s blue skin obscenely perforated by fish tearing morsels off his face, neck, hands, and feet. It’s bulging eyes and puffy tongue remind him of Gumby, an old claymation show he watched as a child.
He walked back to camp where the men ate supper together and played chess with the game board and pieces Caleb carved from driftwood. They were quiet and smoked the dried mushrooms growing by the hillside latrine. They watched the night’s milky way drift across their field of vision, their eyes absorbing every glimmer of light. Their muscles softened into the sand. They slept well.
__________________________
The following morning Caleb watched a firefight far above the southern horizon. He counted six fighter jets swirling from one end to the other, then moving closer. Within minutes he heard them tearing through atmosphere, then a crack, an instant fireball, then black smoke trailing downward and debris falling into the sea not far beyond them. Moments later another fighter was shot down. This time a tiny yellow parachute deployed in the distance. By now Geronimo had taken a seat by Caleb.
“How long they been at it?”
“15, maybe 20 minutes.”
“That one might end up on our shore”
“How do you figure?”
“That’s the direction we came from. The current will wash him up soon.”
“Today?”
“Maybe”
“You worried?”
“Nah, he’s probably dead. You hungry?”
“Shit yes.”
“You’ll have to stay that way. No rats in the trap this morning.”
“That’s a shame.”
“You remember the big country breakfast?”
Caleb remembered Sunday morning breakfasts on the ship. The smell of warm biscuits with butter and honey. The ship served a homestyle American breakfast every Sunday. Both mess halls served scrambled eggs, bacon, sausage, pancakes, waffles, three flavors of syrup, coffee, fruit, hand made biscuits, and real butter, none of that margarine crap. His favorite were blueberry pancakes with pecan syrup.
It was only a memory, missing it and wanting it was silly, time wasted. He knew in a few minutes the jets above them would scatter and in a few hours or days the man ejected from his wreckage would wash ashore as Geronimo predicted. He knew people would come looking for the man. If he was dead, they would have to dismember him, use his flesh to bait sharks, erase all traces of his arrival and existence. If he was alive they would have to kill him and proceed with the previous plans.
“What if we just leave him alone?” Geronimo proposed. “Just keep our distance and watch.”
“You know they’re coming to get him, right? Probably in a helicopter, loaded with weapons.”
“Yeah, that’s the idea. I can take a pop shot at the pilot and see what happens.”
“You only have three bullets.”
“Yeah, I know.”
“Ok, what if you miss? What if the helicopter crashes, then what? They’ll send more.”
“They might firebomb this fucking island.” Geronimo grinned.
“For one guy?”
“I’m not shooting anything unless I have to, I’m only curious to see what they do. Hell, they might not send anybody to get him. We need to watch, respond, not react, and let this shit unfold.”
That night the southern horizon was on fire from one end to the other. Yellow and red flames flickered through the bellowing black smoke rising into the stars above. The men hiked up to the funeral plateau to watch the show.