Дональд Уэстлейк - Collected Stories

And the worst thing is the hunger. Cowley is gone now, all gone, and I am hungry again.

There is a perennial cartoon idea which begins, “Two men on a desert island. One of them says…” Then there is a funny gag line delivered by one of the men. It can be funny because there are two of them. But what about one man on a desert island?

Jim Kilbride was one man on a desert island. It was one of a group of four islands, alone in the middle of the Pacific, south of the major sea lanes. The island that Jim Kilbride was on was the largest of the four, a mile by a mile and a half. It was mainly unshaded sand, washed by the ocean during high tide, but there were two small hillocks near the center of the island, on which were stunted trees and dark green shrubbery. On the eastern side of the island there was a small, curving indentation in the beach, forming a natural cove in miniature, a pool surrounded by a half-circle of sand and a half-circle of ocean. A few birds soared among the islands, calling to each other in raucous voices. The caws of the birds and the whisper of the surf against the beach were the only sounds in the world.

Jim Kilbride had happened to be on a desert island, alone, through a series of half-understood desires and strange events. He had once been a bookkeeper, snug and safe and land-locked, working for a small textile firm in San Francisco. He had been a bookkeeper, and he had looked like a bookkeeper. Short, under five foot seven. The blossomings of a paunch, although he was only twenty-eight. Hair straight and black and limp, with a round and receding forehead that shone beneath the office lights. Round eyes behind rounder spectacles, steel-framed and sliding down his nose. A tie that hung from his neck like the frayed end of a halter. Suits that had looked fine in the department-store window, on the tall and lean and confident mannequins.

He was James Kilbride then, and he wasn’t happy. He wasn’t happy because he was a cliché and he knew it. He lived with his mother, and he never went out with women, and he rarely drank intoxicants. When he read the sad tales of contemporary realism, about mild and unobtrusive bookkeepers who lived with their mothers and who never went out with women, he felt ashamed and unhappy, because he knew they were talking about him.

His mother died, and this is where all the sad tales begin or end, but for James Kilbride, nothing had changed. The office remained the same; the bus took no new routes. The house was larger, now, and darker and more silent, but that was all.

His mother had been well insured, and there was quite a bit left over. Something from his reading, or from a conversation over lunch, gave him the idea and the impetus, and he bought a boat. He bought a sailing cap. On Sundays, alone, he went sailing in the near waters of the Pacific.

But still nothing changed. The office was still bright with incandescent lights, and the bus took no new routes. He was still James Kilbride, and he still lay wide awake in bed and dreamed of women and another, livelier, happier sort of life.

The boat was a twelve-footer, with a tiny cabin. It was painted white, and named Doreen, the woman he had never met. And on one bright Sunday, when the ocean was bright and clean and the sky was scrubbed blue, he stood in his boat and stared out to sea, and he thought about going to China.

The idea grew. It took months, months of thought, of reading, of preparation, before he knew one day that he would go to China. He really and positively would. He would keep a diary and would publish it and become famous and meet Doreen.

He loaded the boat with canned food and water. He arranged for a leave of absence from his employer. For some reason, he couldn’t bring himself to quit completely, though he intended to never come back. And then he took off, once again on a Sunday, and steered the little boat out to sea.

The Coast Guard intercepted him, and brought him back. They explained a variety of rules and regulations to him, none of which he understood. On the second try, they were more aggressive, and told him that a third attempt would result in a jail sentence.

The third time, he left at night, and he managed to slip through the net they had set for him. He thought of himself as a spy, a dark and terrible figure, fleeing ruthlessly through the muffled night from an enemy land.

By the third day, he was lost. He had no idea where he was or where he was going. He paced back and forth, his sailing cap protecting him from the sun, and stared out at the trembling surface of the sea.

Ships, black silhouettes, passed on the horizon. Islands were mounds of mist far, far away. The near world was blue and gold, and silence was broken only by the muted play of the wavelets around his boat.

On the eighth day, there was a storm, and this first storm he managed to survive intact. He bailed until the boat was dry, then slept for almost twenty-four hours.

Three days later, there was another storm, a fierce and outraged boiling of water and air, that came at dusk and poured foaming masses of black water across the struggling boat. The boat was torn from him, and he lashed his arms about in the water, fighting and clawing and swallowing huge gulps of the furious water.

He reached the island at night, borne by the waves into the slight protection of the crescent cove. He crawled up the sanded beach, above the reach of the waves, and slept.

When he awoke, the sun was high and the back of his neck was painfully burned. He had lost his sailing cap and both of his shoes. He crawled to his feet and moved inland, toward the scrubby trees, away from the burning sunlight.

He lived. He found berries, roots, plants that he could eat, and he learned how to come near the birds, as they sat preening themselves on the tree branches, and stun them with hurled stones. He was lucky, in one way. In his pocket were matches, water-proofed, that he had put there before the storm hit. He built a small shelter from bits of branch and bark. He scooped out earth to make a shallow bowl in the ground, and started a fire in it, keeping the fire going day and night. He only had eight matches.

He lived. For the first few days, the first few weeks, he kept himself occupied. He stared for hours out at the sea, waiting expectantly for the rescuers. He prowled the small island, until he knew its every foot of beach, its every weed and branch.

But rescuers didn’t come, and soon he knew the island as well as he had once known the route of the bus. He started drawing pictures in the sand, profiles of men and women, drawings of the birds that flew and screeched above his head. He played tic-tac-toe with himself, but could never win a game. He had neither pencil nor paper, but he started his book, the book of his adventures, the book that would make him more than the minor clerk he had always been. He composed the book carefully, memorizing each sentence as he completed it, building it slowly and exactly, polishing each word, fashioning each paragraph. He had freedom and individuality and personality at last. He roamed the island, reciting the completed passages aloud.

It wasn’t enough. It could never be enough. Months had passed, and he had never seen a ship, a plane, or any human face. He prowled the island, reciting the finished chapters of his book, but it wasn’t enough. There was only one thing he could do, to make the new life bearable, and at last he did it.

He went mad.

He did it slowly; he did it gradually. For the first step, he postulated a Listener. No description, not even age or sex, merely a Listener. As he walked, speaking his sentences aloud, he made believe that someone walked beside him on his right, listening to him, smiling and nodding and applauding the excellence of his composition, pleased by Jim Kilbride, no longer the petty clerk.