Diane Cook - Man V. Nature - Stories

There it was.

Ross sobbed into his clenched fist, unable to continue. But it was enough. Phil carefully slid his hand under his waistband, skimming the raw chafed skin around his middle, and tried to let the images and a light touch do the work so the boat wouldn’t quiver. Sweet Bren wearing only cotton panties, giggling into her hand. He’d meant only to comfort himself, not climax, but he was the hardest thing for miles. Inside, everything lined up.

“We know what you’re doing, Phil,” Dan said, disgusted.

“Shut up,” Phil hissed. Distracted, a banal dribble slipped out. But that was all. No big release. Frustrated tears sprang. “I hate you,” he muttered. It sounded like a yell.

Phil hid behind his closed eyes. When he opened them, he saw that Dan was asleep, his head loose and lolling with the swells. But Ross sat rigid, arms crossed, his gaze seemingly fixed on Phil. In the shadows made from slivered moonlight, Phil couldn’t tell if Ross’s eyes were shut or if his stare was meant to accuse Phil of something. He held his breath. Soon, he heard Ross snore.

Even though Phil had the floor, he couldn’t sleep. His inner drone continued. As night passed he watched the stars blur and the eerie green auroras appear, spilling along the horizon like paint. As his sight adjusted, the night was not as pitch-black as before. It shone through his eyelids like the glare from a streetlamp.

He picked at his crusty shorts. He filtered through questions to soothe himself to sleep. Why hadn’t they been rescued? Where were the other boats? Was it the end of the world? What did Ross really think of him? Who did Dan like better? Every question he asked yielded an unsatisfying answer that woke him more. To make himself feel better, he ate the last of the peanuts. Then he leaned toward Dan, felt Dan’s rotten sleep breath in his face, and cleanly plucked the last strip of jerky from his pocket.

Phil woke to the wind in his hair and Ross and Dan bellowing, “One, two, one, two!” They synchronized feeble hand scoops through the water like a crew team, but they went nowhere. They spun in slow circles.

Ross and Dan spat words and dusty saliva toward Phil. They’d woken disoriented, frenzied, lost to time.

“The jerky is gone!” Ross barked.

“The peanuts!” Dan screamed. He took a breath and screamed again.

The remaining oar was also gone.

“How?” Phil asked.

Ross and Dan stopped mid scoop.

“Someone must have taken it,” Dan said, and scratched his palms, pilling bits of grime and skin. He looked over his shoulder as if someone had tapped it.

“Who could have done that?” Phil asked. He focused on seeming innocent.

Ross eyed him suspiciously.

There was no good answer to this question, and so they settled into an uneasy calm.

Phil felt roller-coaster queasy; the final part, when the hills come too quickly.

We are unlucky, he thought. Like people who always miss the bus, even with a schedule. Though maybe luck is cyclical. Maybe luck was constantly on the move, gracing people and then leaving them. People with luck or good fortune early in life — they’ll crash into a snowbank and freeze to death, slowly over days, to the sound of other cars passing just out of sight, or get snarled in the propeller of a boat when they’re snorkeling on a relaxing vacation, or die giving birth to their child. Phil tried to think of when luck had visited him last, if ever. Was he due for some, or had he squandered his share long ago?

Phil peered sheepishly at Ross from under his lashes. “I slept with your wife.”

“I know.” Ross dunked his head in the lake.

Dan clapped his hands gleefully, and the resulting pop was the morning’s only other noise. “If I were a television writer, I’d be writing all this down, because this is gold .”

“Dan, you are a television writer,” Phil said. He laughed, but the lake dampened the sound and it came off morose.

Dan scowled. “That’s what I meant . I meant if I had a pen.” He picked at a sun blister on his thigh until he let loose the pus. He dabbed his finger and licked it.

“ Did you sleep with my wife?” Ross asked, easing a leg out for a stretch. It brushed by Phil’s shoulder, purposefully, Phil thought.

Ross dunked his hands into the lake and gave each underarm a good scrub. He smelled them with fascination.

“Does it matter?” Phil asked. He’d hoped what he said would come off as a joke, and was annoyed it hadn’t.

“Yeah. Yeah, I think it actually does, now that you mention it.” Ross flicked his wet hands in Phil’s face. “Now that we’re here, I think it matters.”

“Well, then, no, I didn’t.”

“Why did you say you did?”

“Because I wanted to. I’ve always wanted to sleep with your wife. She was hot.”

Dan nodded. “She is hot.”

Ross shrugged and twirled the minute hand around and around on his watch.

Phil scratched his head. “Why did you say ‘I know’ when I said I slept with her, if I never slept with her?” He was beginning to suspect Bren had said something to Ross. It was years ago, and they’d been so drunk, and it was only a blow job.

“Because I thought you did. I always thought you did.”

“How could you think that? How could you think I’d do that to you?”

“Because I banged your sister. Remember?”

“Why would you bring that up? When we get home I am going to sleep with Bren. You deserve it.” Phil stared out at the water. The way it moved on its own made him feel vaguely wet, like he was becoming part of the lake, being absorbed.

Ross chuckled. “No chance,” he said, not even bothering to look at Phil. Which stung. Did he mean they had no chance of making it home, Phil wondered, or that he had no chance with Bren? How could Ross seem so sure? Had Bren said something? Phil squirmed in the bottom of the boat, trying to quell his burgeoning erection. He wanted to sleep with Bren badly.

“If I were writing this into a television sitcom,” Dan mused, “or even a movie, I would have written this as a fight scene. Every time you guys say something, I’d have you start wrestling, so that the boat is almost tipping, and things get very tense for the audience, which thinks the boat is going to tip, but then I, or, you know, the actor playing me, intervenes and says something like—” Dan put his finger to his lips, thinking, then hollered, “ ‘Hey fellas, something something blah blah,’ and then cue laugh track”—he pointed to the wavy gray horizon—“and that would calm you down because, you know, metaphors, etc. And then some action music would play, and we’d start figuring a way out of this mess.”

Phil looked at Ross. He wiggled his eyebrows in a way that asked, Is he losing it? But Ross wouldn’t look at him.

Ross, instead, looked at Dan with interest. “What is the way out of this mess?”

Dan scratched at the rubber seams beneath him. “I’m glad you finally asked. Let’s flag down one of the tankers we keep seeing.”

“We haven’t seen any tankers,” Phil said.

Dan’s face registered shock, but then a vague smile appeared.

Ross glared at Phil.

“All right, then,” Ross said soothingly to Dan, “we’re three men in a boat in a large lake that is a major shipping route. Why have no boats passed to rescue us? I want you to write me a world in which that happens. I want my own television show, dammit.”

So Dan told them about how, the other day, a coup d’état occurred in Canada. Rebels blocked all waterways and ports in protest, and were holding the prime minister hostage. Armed gunmen had broken into his room late at night while he enjoyed a cigar and a brandy, though this particular boutique hotel had strict no-smoking rules, which would be communicated by a slow pan from a No Smoking sign to the prime minister relishing a thick exhale just before the armed men barged in, threw a bag over his head, and dragged him through the hallway to the service elevator. Patrons screamed and cowered against walls at the sight of the guns because Canadians are peaceful nancies. The armed men brought the prime minister to the basement, which was really a dungeon from colonial times. They tied him to a chair and threatened to rape his daughters if he didn’t cooperate. They’re twins. “Double the pleasure,” one of the more dastardly gunmen said, twirling his waxed mustache. The prime minister broke under the pressure of picturing his beautiful brunette daughters brutally raped, shown in slow, soft-lit vignettes so that it’s classy and, of course, feminist. As viewers, we’d be horrified and so we would all understand — we would have sympathy for —the prime minister when he handed over the country to these armed men.