Gabriel Tallent - My Absolute Darling

“Now we’re going to need several cotton ties.” She eases herself up and they cut the ties from her wet flannel.

She carefully extracts her broken hand from her armpit and holds it out.

“Jesus Christ,” Jacob says.

The bones make angular protrusions in the skin. Her ring finger is visibly dislocated from its socket.

“How are you not freaking out?”

“What?”

“Aren’t you, like, flipping out?”

“Jacob.”

“You need a doctor.”

“Pull steadily and firmly, in line with the finger.”

“Oh god.”

“Don’t go easy. Pull firmly on that bitch.”

Taking hold of her broken pinkie finger, he says, “Oh god it’s bad, oh god it’s real bad, it feels real, real bad.”

Turtle looks up at the sky. Her body flushes with anticipation, and she can feel her hair prickling and standing up.

“Now?”

“Yes, now.”

“Okay,” he says.

“Wait!” she says.

He looks at her. She takes a deep breath. She is quivering with fear.

“Don’t limp-wrist it, Jacob,” she says.

“I don’t know what that means.”

“Just do it right the first time.”

“I’m gonna try.”

She blows air through her pursed lips, shuddering and shaking.

“Okay: now.”

Jacob pulls traction and the finger straightens with the audible grinding of bones. Turtle hisses through gritted teeth. Jacob shrieks as the finger straightens. “Motherfucker!” she says. She gasps, sweating. “Motherfucker!” she says again, looking at him almost with needfulness. Jacob places the trimmed pen half against the straightened finger and wraps it carefully with a wide flannel band and ties it off.

“You’re lucky you didn’t die.”

“I know it.”

“I’m serious, Turtle.”

She looks at him flatly, trying to see how she could be anything else but serious.

“The way you got dragged across those rocks.”

“I know.”

“I can’t believe you’re alive.”

She says nothing.

“You might be kind of a tough person.”

Afterward, Turtle lies in the grass getting her mind back. With the pain from splinting the fingers it felt like the thinking part of her had gone away and she needs it back. Jacob says, “So I’ve been looking down into that little beach below us. I think it’s mostly safe. I think we could go down there. The waves aren’t really coming up very far. There are driftwood logs down there and fishing floats with little bits of nylon rope and seaweed and there are a few plastic bottles. I think we can make a raft.”

“The tide’s still coming in,” she says.

“We better wait, then.”

She closes her eyes with pain.

“I’m kind of leery.” He’s eyeing the stretch of water. “If we do make a raft, we’ll have a tough decision.”

Turtle says, “I was thinking that. If we head straight toward the bluffs, right there ahead of us, we won’t be able to beach the raft at high tide because the beach is flooded and we’ll be broken on the cliffs. But at low tide, we can’t get across the rocks. So, we’ll have to try and make it back into Buckhorn Cove. Past the island.”

Jacob pauses. “Sure—there’s that. But also, like, are you Jim and I’m Huck? Are you like Huck and I’m Jim? Those parallels are just kind of tangly and might be hard to sort out. Because, like, in a certain way, I’m the captive of a delimiting and coercive capitalist mind-set, but also you might be like a literal and actual captive. So it’s hard to say. We’re gonna have to talk that one out.”

“What?”

“Well, I’m just saying that— Never mind.”

“What are you talking about?”

“Nothing. I was being childish and naive. This is why I don’t have Twitter.”

“ What? ”

“Just— I’m gonna shut up now.”

When the tide goes out that afternoon, they pick their way down to the beach and Turtle sits on a log looking west. The beach is coarse sand fretted with cobble, set back into a little notch in the island’s western cliff face and enclosed on three sides by leaning, blue sandstone walls, twenty feet high. The beach is only ten or so feet wide. It ramps steeply out of the water. In each retreating wave, the beach cobbles lurch from their beds and roll over one another with a sound like the world grinding its teeth. The wind cuts crosswise to the mouth of the notch and eddies against the rock walls. In gusts, these eddies reel foam up into the air and churn it into spindly twisters that go staggering across the tide line. Set into the graywacke sandstone wall that forms the back of the notch, there is a triangular crack, the mouth of a cave. It must go entirely through the island, because sometimes it burbles startling washes of seawater. Jacob kicks through the piled driftwood, calling out his finds to Turtle. “A Sprite can!” Then, “Turtle! A two-liter Coke bottle!”

He comes over and sits beside her. He is shivering. His teeth chatter. For all the sun, they can’t shake off the cold, which seems to have gotten in their bones. They are both still wet.

“What can we do?”

“I don’t know.”

“What can we make with this?”

“I don’t know,” she says.

“Well, what do we need to do next?”

“We need to make a fire.”

“Okay. Why?”

“Well, we’re not getting home tonight. Not unless someone comes to get us, and no one’s coming for us, I don’t think. And if we’re gonna make it through the night, we need a fire.”

“You don’t think we’ll make it through the night?”

“Not comfortably. We need water, Jacob. And with a fire we can make fresh water. Plus, as exposed as we are, we’re going to get cold. Not cold enough to die, but cold enough to be miserable.”

“Can’t we make fire by rubbing two sticks together?”

“Everything’s wet.”

“Could we use the knife and strike sparks from these rocks?”

“We could maybe start a fire with a bow drill.”

“What are the chances it would work?”

“Low,” she says.

“Let’s try!”

“We need to think. We need to be sure. Before we do anything, we need to be sure.”

“I’m excited about this.”

She is silent.

“We’ve got to try something . And since your plodding literalness will not allow us to strike sparks from your flinty heartstrings, we should try a real and actual solution.”

“Okay.”

“Great.”

“I’m not ploddingly literal.”

“I know.”

Turtle sits in a crescent of sunlight on the beach, her hands clamped in her armpits, and explains what they need to make a bow drill while Jacob brings driftwood for her examination. “We’ll need a pliant rod for the bow itself and we’ll string it with a strap from your shirt. Then wood of matching hardness for a spindle and fireboard. Then a handboard—the handboard matters less.” She coaches him on the clove hitches for tying off the bow, saying, “Looser. Looser yet. There. The bowstring will roll a loop around the spindle, and you rotate the spindle by sawing the bow forward and back.”

“Okay—?”

“So the bow should be bent well shy of breaking.”

“Here?”

“There. Now tie it off with another clove hitch.”

Some tine of bone shifts in her ring finger and she sucks her teeth, sweating.

“You okay?”

“We need a spindle. Something dry.”

She watches him sorting through the driftwood.

“I can’t tell if they’re dry,” he says, looking at his own hands, too scraped up and too sandy to feel the damp.

“Test them against your face.”

He tests a wood scrap against his face, looks at her blankly—he doesn’t know.

“You’re useless,” she says, raising her chin.