Elin Hilderbrand - The Castaways

The Chief had always respected the way Addison fretted over Phoebe. Especially now that the Chief had his own wife to worry about.

The Chief and Addison had once been lost in the woods together. They had rented a canoe during their group trip to Saranac Lake, paddled around the wrong bend (the Chief had chosen incorrectly; he’d insisted, despite Addison’s protests), and ended up in East Who-the-fuck-knows. They had no map (two big strong men, no need for a map), half a bottle of Evian, and no food except for breath mints. They each had a cell phone, but no god-damn reception. They were out on the lake for hours, and when they were supposed to meet the hotel pickup truck at the end point, they were lost. They decided to pull onto land and carry the canoe and look for a road. Hitch a ride back to the refuge of their elegant resort, the Point, where everyone else was getting ready for dinner and most likely starting to worry.

They pulled off into thick, almost impenetrable woods. They considered getting back into the canoe, but that felt like regressing. They battled through the brush while holding the canoe over their heads. The Chief had worked with guys who had been to Vietnam; he’d heard stories just like everyone else about the dense jungle, the bugs, the snakes, the booby traps. What the Chief and Addison were dealing with now was, of course, not warfare, but the conditions weren’t much more favorable. The mosquitoes were thick and whining; there were thorns everywhere, and mud. Addison was, ridiculously, wearing Ferragamo loafers. The canoe hindered them tremendously; at one point they were tempted just to ditch it, but it belonged to the resort, it was a beautiful wooden canoe and had probably cost thousands of dollars. It was growing dark, they couldn’t see, the mosquitoes were like motherfucking tigers, the Chief was dying of thirst. He was so thirsty he would gladly have drunk lake water, despite whatever kind of gut-rotting dysentery it would give him, but by now, he estimated, they were at least a quarter-mile inland.

They were both tired; they decided to rest. They had been paddling all day in the sun; the resort had packed them an excellent picnic lunch, which they had devoured six hours earlier. They sat on top of the overturned canoe and swatted at mosquitoes and caught their breath and surveyed their surroundings. Woods and more woods. The Chief was trying not to panic. He was a policeman; he had heard countless stories just like this-man out enjoying nature for the day-that ended in tragedy.

They had to keep going. They had to ditch the canoe; it was too cumbersome. Addison said that he would pay for it. The Chief said they could argue about that later, once they found some god-damn civilization that included a hot shower, clean sheets, and a cold beer. Once it was just the two of them, minus the albatross of the canoe, they moved much faster. They ran in places. They had decided to move in only one direction, toward the sunset, west, which was, theoretically, the direction in which the resort was located. But west went on forever.

To keep from getting discouraged, Addison told the Chief stories of the wild days when he was married to the stick-thin, chain-smoking socialite Mary Rose Garth, who loved seeking out scandal the way other women loved chocolate, and then he told the real story of why he got kicked out of Princeton the week before he graduated. (The Chief swore never to divulge the details.) These were fantastic stories, they passed the time, and the Chief tried to come up with his own stories, but he had never been married to a woman who liked to bring another woman home to bed or throw last year’s couture on the library fire, and so what he realized in the woods was that although he was a police chief, his life had been pretty dull.

They noticed the woods starting to thin out. Then they hit a road. “A road! A motherfucking road!” They’d hit the jackpot: all roads led to somewhere.

But maybe not this one. It was a dirt road, and half an hour later, not a single vehicle had driven past. Addison tried his phone and got a cell signal. While he was dialing the hotel-all he would be able to tell everyone was that they were alive-the Chief saw headlights, and along came an honest-to-God VW bus with two hippies inside smoking a doobie as if they had arrived straight out of 1967. Addison and the Chief gratefully climbed into the green haze of the backseat.

There were two men sitting up front, if kids in their twenties with wispy beards and remnants of acne could be called men. They were listening to John Hiatt on the radio, and the Chief said happily upon settling in his seat, “Love the music!”

“Where we dropping you?” the driver asked. He was wearing a purple T-shirt and a pair of John Lennon sunglasses with purple tinted lenses.

“The Point,” Addison said with obnoxious authority, as though they were in Manhattan and this was their cab.

“Whoa-ho!” the passenger up front said. He was the one actually holding the joint, and after hearing the name of their hotel, he inhaled again and while holding his smoke said, “Sweet place.”

The Point was sweet-it was the finest place the Chief and Andrea had ever stayed at, with its rustic luxury, every detail attended to, including the temperature at which the red wine was served and the type of pillow each guest preferred. The Point was a resort for the rich. The Chief understood that Cheech and Chong here would now mistake him and Addison for wealthy men, and while this bothered him and he yearned to set the record straight, he really just wanted to get back.

“Can you take us there?” he asked.

“No prob,” the driver said. He looked at his companion and said, “Want to offer our friends a taste?”

The passenger, who looked like he was trying to grow in muttonchop sideburns, passed the joint back over the seat. Addison took it without hesitation.

“I haven’t smoked in twenty years,” he said. “But I have just been lost in the wilderness and experienced what I can most accurately describe as fear for my life, and a little spliff feels like exactly what I need right now.”

“Amen,” the passenger said.

Addison inhaled deeply with his eyes closed, held the smoke, and then let the stream go. “Smooth as silk,” he said. The Chief looked upon Addison not with shock or disgust, but rather with envy. He wanted to smoke, to have a looseness enter his stiff and sore muscles-but he just couldn’t.

“No, thanks,” said the Chief.

“Come on!” the passenger said.

“Can’t, really. Random drug testing at work.” The random drug testing among Nantucket’s police officers had been the Chief’s idea.

“Bummer!” the driver said. “What’s your line of work?”

“He’s a police chief,” Addison said.

There was a pause. One beat, then two. The song changed to Paul McCartney and Wings singing “Band on the Run.” The Chief wanted to deck Addison. What if these potheads got unnecessarily paranoid and decided to dump them? They would be only half a mile closer to home.

But instead the passenger, Master Scrawny Sideburns, burst out laughing. It was a giggly and girlish sound. And this set the driver laughing. Then, in a drug-induced delayed reaction, Addison laughed. He laughed so hard he held his stomach.

“Police chief,” he said. “Heeheeheeheeheehee.”

The driver could barely keep the van on the road. His tiny glasses slipped down his nose. He hunched over the steering wheel. Hahahahahahaha.

It took several minutes for them to collect their wits, but when they did, Master Scrawny Sideburns said, “Well, there, Mr. PO-lice Chief, would you like a beer?”

The Chief said, “Yes. Please.”

And that was now the Chief’s own best story.

Addison looked worse sitting across the table at the Begonia than he had after being lost in the woods for three hours and enduring what had ended up being a forty-five-minute drive back to the secure luxury of the Point. Then he had been mussed and torn and mud-caked and mosquito-bitten and sunburned and stoned out of his mind, and now, although his shirt was pressed and his hair tidy, he looked bloated and pale and tragically sad. He looked, the Chief thought, like a bald male version of Andrea. There had been a guy in the force in Swampscott who had lost his partner in a botched arrest, and as a sign of his grief he had tattooed half his face. The grief of the people close to the Chief was just as clear and indelible as Sergeant Cutone’s tattoo. And as with the sergeant, the Chief could barely stand to look at Addison. He had to avert his eyes.