A Reality Television Adventure
If you watched Season Thirty-One of Exile Isle, you know me. You probably know me as "that guy," said while pointing.
My name's Dale Tummins. I'm a consultant. People ask what I consult on. I tell them that's exactly the kind of question I'd normally charge for.
These days I'm an adventurer between adventures. The gap's run about nine years so far. But I always say an adventure's like a bus. Stand in one place long enough and it'll hit you.
I live above the Sudsy Duck Laundromat. The dryers thump all night, but you get used to it. And if you ever need a sock, there's always one in the alley.
The trouble started with Hollis Brandt and his jet ski. Hollis lent it to me one Saturday. Well, he was asleep, and the keys were in a bowl by his door. Same thing, really.
I drove it out onto Lake Wendle. Lake Wendle turned out to be deeper than it looked. Most lakes are, if you think about it. That's how they get you.
I swam to shore and walked home dripping. I'd lost the jet ski, my wallet, and a really good shoe. But the lake had taught me something. A jet ski doesn't float once it's full of lake. People go to college for four years and never learn that.
Hollis came over the next day.
"That jet ski was worth four thousand dollars," he said.
"Seems like a lot," I said, "for something that's mainly a house for fish now."
"I don't care about the fish," Hollis said.
I told him that was a pretty revealing thing to say. I told him to think hard about the kind of man he was becoming. Then I stopped answering my door.
For three months I lived like a spy. I left through the laundromat's back exit, and I wore a hat, and I grew a mustache. It came in mostly on one side, so I had to tilt my head whenever anybody looked at me.
People said it made me look thoughtful. Actually, one guy said it, and he was drunk. But he said it twice.
Then one afternoon somebody pounded on my door. I hid in the bathtub for twenty minutes before I heard sneezing.
It was Phil.
Phil Brumley is my best friend and my only friend. I consider that efficient.
He teaches high school biology, and he's allergic to shellfish, wool, bees, and most grasses. I've always figured he's allergic to fun, too, so I asked his doctor once. The doctor asked how I'd gotten into the examination room.
Phil was out of breath and holding a letter. He'd applied to Exile Isle eleven times. Every time, he mailed in a video of himself starting a fire with a magnifying glass. Then he'd explain which tropical frogs are poisonous to lick.
Every time, they mailed back a form letter. One year it had a coffee ring on it. Phil framed that one, because he said it meant a real person had held it.
"Maybe they want somebody with less frog information," I told him once.
He wrote that down.
Now he was waving the letter at me. "Dale, I got cast," he said. "Season Thirty-One. It's called Ride or Die. Everybody goes on in pairs."
"Good for you," I said.
"I need a partner," he said.
Then he looked at me with his big wet eyes. It was the look a dog gives you when you're holding a sandwich.
"I'm honored, Phil," I said. "But I'm very busy right now."
"Busy with what?" Phil said.
"I've got three consulting opportunities pending."
That was true, if you counted thinking about them. Also, I have a strict policy. I don't go anywhere the food is bugs.
"I understand," Phil said. He always says that. He was halfway down the stairs when I glanced out the window.
A red pickup truck was pulling up across the street, with a trailer hitch and a bumper sticker. The sticker said, "My other ride is a jet ski." I felt that was a little pointed.
Hollis got out. He looked up at my window. I ducked, but the mustache gave me away.
I ran down the stairs and grabbed Phil by the sleeve.
"Phil, I've reconsidered," I said. "I can't let my best friend go to a dangerous island alone. I'm coming with you. And I won't even ask you to pay me."
"Dale," Phil said, "that's the nicest thing anyone's ever said to me."
Then he started crying. That attracted attention. So I pulled him into the laundromat, and we crouched behind a folding table until the truck drove away.
That night I lay awake listening to the dryers. Millions of people would be watching this show. They'd need something to call me. Something short and powerful that fit on a T-shirt.
Not "Dale." Dale's the name of a guy who's about to back a truck into something.
I'd need a nickname. I fell asleep before I picked one. In my dream a huge crowd was chanting it, but they were too far away to make out the words.
Also, they were chasing me.
The casting office in Los Angeles shared a floor with a dentist, a tax attorney, and a company that sells fake plants to restaurants. I felt right at home. All four of those businesses depend on people not looking too closely.
Phil drove. It took two days, because Phil obeys the speed limit.
"It's a maximum, Dale," he said, somewhere in Arizona.
"It's an opening offer," I said.
I explained this to him for most of Arizona. He drove fifty-five the whole way anyway. Some people just can't be taught.
The waiting room had about thirty other hopefuls in it. Some were doing push-ups. One woman was eating a raw onion like an apple, I guess so the producers would remember her.
One guy went into the dentist's office by mistake and came back an hour later with a cleaning. I don't think he got cast, but his gums looked great.
I just sat there, radiating. You can't teach radiating. Believe me, people have asked.
Finally a young woman in a headset came out with a clipboard.
"Dale Tummies?" she called.
Three people turned to look at me.
"She said Tummies," Phil whispered.
"That's how you know it's getting around," I said.
I took it as recognition.
The psychologist had a big mirror on the wall behind her, and I'm pretty sure it laughed at me.
Her name was Dr. Haverkamp, and she was a calm woman with a clipboard. I've been in rooms with big mirrors before, mostly the men's room at the laundromat, so I wasn't nervous. I gave myself a nod in it for confidence, and that's when it laughed.
"Describe yourself in three words," Dr. Haverkamp said.
"Brave, honest, and," I said. "Can I get back to you on the third one?"
She wrote for a long time. You don't write that much about a boring person.
"Do you ever feel that people are plotting against you?" she asked.
"Only the ones who are," I said.
"How do you handle conflict?"
I told her I handle conflict the way the great generals did. From a hill, far away, with binoculars, while somebody else handles it.
Then she showed me some inkblots.
"Butterfly," I said, for the first one. The second one was a butterfly that owed me money. By the fifth one, the butterfly had hired a lawyer and stopped returning my calls.
Dr. Haverkamp put the cards down and just stared at me. I could tell she was hooked.
Somewhere behind the mirror, people were laughing. Somebody back there said the word "villain." Somebody else said, "Oh, he's perfect."
I knew they meant hero. A villain's just a hero seen from the other side, and they were on the other side of the glass.
"Do you have a nickname?" Dr. Haverkamp asked.
"In the consulting world," I said, "they call me The Closer."
"What have you closed?"
I thought about it. "Mostly accounts," I said. "And the occasional lake."
"Can you explain the lake?" she asked.
"That's proprietary," I said.
While she wrote, I tried to read her notes upside down. She'd underlined one word three times. I couldn't make it all out, but I could see it started with "un."
There are only so many good words that start with "un." I felt I'd earned every one.
Phil's evaluation took eight minutes. Mine took an hour and forty.
They brought in a second psychologist, and then a man from the legal department, who asked me to spell my name. Then he asked me to spell it again, slower, while he wrote it on a form I wasn't allowed to see.
"What'd they ask you?" I asked Phil afterward.
"Mostly about my allergies," Phil said. "And whether I'd ever eaten a bee on purpose."
I patted his shoulder. That's how I comfort somebody when the good news is about me.
On the way out, I told the receptionist I was The Closer, so she could spread it around.
"Okay," she said. Then she shut the glass partition between us, and then she locked it. That's how I knew I'd made an impression.
Waiting for the elevator, I met Brock Sterling. He was wearing a safari vest indoors, in an office building, in case a lion jumped him at the water cooler. His teeth were very white. I looked right at them by accident and had to blink for a while.
I stuck out my hand. "Dale Tummins," I said. "You might want to start practicing that."
He looked at my hand, and then at my mustache, and then over my shoulder for a long time, toward the security desk.
I knew that look. It's the look of a man realizing he won't be the most interesting person on his own show, and wondering if security can do anything about it.
"Great energy," Brock said. Then he walked off fast, the way you walk past a dog that hasn't made up its mind yet.
In the elevator I said, "Brock Sterling's obviously intimidated by me."
"That's not how I remember it," Phil said. "He asked the guard who let you in."
"Exactly," I said. "He wanted to know who to thank."
The night before the flight, I stole a hundred and twelve tiny bottles of shampoo.
The network put us up at an airport hotel. I spent the evening following a housekeeping cart through the halls, a few doors back so it wouldn't get spooked. By midnight I had a whole pillowcase full.
"What are those for?" Phil asked.
"The island," I said.
There'd be no stores out there, and no money. And in a society with no money, something has to become money. I planned to be the guy with the shampoo. I took some body lotion too, because you've got to diversify.
On the plane, Phil gave me the window seat, because I asked. Then I asked louder.
On my other side was a big, quiet man doing a crossword puzzle in pen. I helped him with it. He hadn't asked for help, which is how you can tell a man's too proud to.
"Seven across," I said. "Four-letter ocean bird. Duck."
"Ducks don't go to the ocean," he said.
"Probably because of people like you," I said.
He didn't answer that. He just filled in some other word, in pen, which I felt was a little stubborn for a guy who'd been wrong so recently.
By the time we crossed the equator, he'd paid a teenager forty dollars to switch seats with him. The teenager didn't have a crossword. I'll be honest, it was a long flight.
When the flight attendant came by with pretzels, I took one bag. Then, while she was handing Phil his, I took the basket.
I'm not a thief. I just believe a free thing offered to one person is offered to everybody, and I see myself as everybody's representative.
Phil wrote in his journal the whole flight. It was waterproof. He'd tested it at the hotel by holding it under the bathroom faucet for ten minutes, smiling.
"What are you writing about?" I asked.
"Everything," Phil said.
"Does that include the pretzels?"
"Especially the pretzels," Phil said.
Over the Pacific the sun went down, and the clouds turned gold and pink. I thought about how small our problems look from thirty thousand feet.
Somewhere down there was Hollis, no bigger than an ant. If I dropped a pretzel from up here, it'd almost certainly miss him. But you never know, and I'm a guy who likes to give luck a chance.
The window didn't open. I've since written to the airline.
"Do you think being famous will change you?" Phil asked.
I thought about it for a while. "No," I said. "Except in the ways I'm looking forward to."
He wrote that down too. I hope he spelled it right.
The production ship was white and the size of a hospital, and I'd ranked everybody on it within five minutes.
They'd brought us out there on a propeller plane and then a boat, and lined us all up on the deck. First impressions are the only accurate ones. They're formed before people start talking and ruin it.
Number one was an old man everybody called Grandpa Ray. He was a retired dentist, seventy-one years old, and within ten minutes three different people had hugged him. A seagull landed on his shoulder, and he didn't even look surprised.
Anybody that easy to love is hiding something. I gave him a star.
Number two was a giant named Gus. He'd played minor-league hockey as what he called an enforcer, and his hands were the size of two baked hams. Then the sun touched the water, and Gus started weeping softly.
I almost moved him up to number one. A man who can cry like that in public has nothing left to lose.
Then there was a married couple, Tiffani and Brayden. They were filming themselves on a phone they weren't supposed to have, and their teeth were better than mine. I felt that was an aggressive move this early.
Near the bottom I put a small woman in a sun hat, reading a chemistry journal.
"That's Professor Annette Lund," Phil whispered. "She won a Nobel Prize."
"They give those to all kinds of people," I said. "Even for peace."
At the very bottom I put the woman at the rail. Her name was Marisol, and she'd been a Coast Guard rescue swimmer. She was looking at the horizon, very calm.
She glanced at me for about one second, and then she looked very hard at the ocean. I've seen that move in movies, right before two people end up together. I see it a lot in real life too. It tells you how many women out there are pretending not to love me.
That's why I ranked her last. You don't worry about somebody who's already yours.
On a ship, a man needs a nickname with nautical authority. So from then on, I'd be Captain Dale. I tried it out on a crewman coiling a rope.
"Captain Dale, reporting," I said.
"Sir," he said, "please stay behind the yellow line."
He didn't say "Captain." I decided to have him demoted as soon as I found out who handled that.
Then I gave Marisol a little salute, from one captain to another. She leaned over to Phil.
"Is he with you?" Marisol asked.
"Yes," Phil said. A little proudly, I thought.
"I'm sorry," Marisol said.
It was the first thing she ever said about me. You could already hear how worried she was about the day I'd leave her.
Poor thing.
A hundred yards from Kalaboo Island, the engine cut out, and a man with a megaphone told us to jump.
First he said we had sixty seconds to grab what we could carry and get to the beach, and then he said jump. There were twelve of us on a landing boat, and it was dawn.
The island looked closer than a hundred yards. I've since learned that islands use the same trick as lakes.
In the middle of the deck was a pile of supplies. There was a machete, a cooking pot, a sack of rice, a coil of rope, and a fishing spear. And there was one enormous wooden crate.
I've always believed the biggest box holds the best thing. It's the whole basis of Christmas.
When the horn blew, I grabbed the crate and threw myself overboard with it. It floated beautifully. I lay across the top and steered, and Phil swam behind and pushed.
"Dale," Phil said, spitting out water, "you could kick."
"You put on your application that you're a strong swimmer," I said. "This is your chance to prove it."
A good friend gives you chances like that.
Halfway in, Marisol passed us. She had the machete in her teeth, the pot on her back, and Grandpa Ray on her hip like a sack of groceries. Ray waved as they went by. Even while being rescued, the man was campaigning.
Brock Sterling was waiting on the beach in his safari vest and tall rubber boots. He was perfectly dry, and I found out later he'd come in by helicopter. That's a strange way to arrive at a show about being marooned, but I didn't judge him. I'd arrived on a crate.
Phil and I dragged the crate up the sand. Everybody gathered around, dripping, and I pried the lid off with a stick.
Inside were forty decorative throw pillows in coral and teal, and some had tassels. One had a seashell on it and the words "Beach, Please."
Everyone stared at me.
"It was a strategic choice," I said.
"What's the strategy?" somebody asked.
"If I told you," I said, "it wouldn't be strategic anymore."
They stopped asking. I could see they were impressed.
"Back in Season Nine," Grandpa Ray said, "a woman named Doreen grabbed a crate of rubber ducks. It went very badly for her."
Everybody laughed warmly. I made a note to look up Doreen when this was over. It sounded like we had a lot in common.
Mainly vision.
Brock flashed his teeth at the sun, and the sun flashed back, but weaker.
"Welcome to Exile Isle, Season Thirty-One," Brock said. "Ride or Die."
He split us into two tribes. Six of us got blue bandannas and were named Barracuda. That included Tiffani and Brayden, who started whispering to their phone about their journey right away.
"Day one, you guys," Tiffani told the phone. "We're Barracuda, and we are so blessed."
I've never been blessed that fast in my life. It usually takes me a few days to get anything.
The other six got yellow and were named Gecko. That was me, Phil, Marisol, Grandpa Ray, Professor Lund, and Gus.
At first I was a little disappointed in yellow. Then I thought it over. Yellow's the color of gold, and the sun, and champions. It's also the color of cowardice, but only in very old movies, and nobody watches those anymore except cowards.
Marisol tied her bandanna around her wrist. So I tied mine around my wrist too, so she'd know. She moved hers to her head.
Then Brock smiled a slow smile.
"Wanna know what you're playing for?" he said.
We did. He waited. He waited so long that a crab walked across his boot, stopped halfway, and seemed to wonder along with the rest of us.
"One million dollars," Brock said finally.
Everybody gasped except me. I'd already spent it, apart from a small part I'd set aside for Hollis.
In theory.
Gecko got a map to our camp, about a mile inland, and we marched there single file. I went in front, carrying nothing. A leader's hands have to be free to point.
Then the wind changed.
The smell of Kalaboo Island is hard to describe. The best I can do is this. Picture a hard-boiled egg that died inside a wet dog. Then the dog crawled inside a bigger, older dog to be alone.
Everybody stopped, and Phil sneezed four times. Professor Lund held her sun hat over her face. All six of us looked at each other, and then at the ground, politely.
I looked at Gus, who was the biggest of us. It stands to reason that the biggest person makes the biggest smell. It's the same with trucks.
I took him gently aside.
"Gus," I said, "it's nothing to be ashamed of. Everybody's body does things. Yours just does them on a bigger scale."
"Oh no," Gus said, and his eyes filled up. "I'm so sorry, Dale. I had no idea."
That settled it, as far as I was concerned. Nobody apologizes for something they didn't do.
Gus tied his yellow bandanna over his nose and mouth. After a minute I gave him mine too, for a second layer. That's the kind of teammate I am.
"Thanks, Dale," Gus said, through both bandannas.
"Don't mention it," I said.
Besides, I didn't really need it. For some reason, the smell never bothered me much.
Our camp came with a strip of sand, a few palm trees, and a fire pit that somebody had started digging and then lost faith in. It also came with a goat.
"First thing we need is a shelter," Gus said.
"Agreed," I said. "I'll be foreman."
Every great building has a foreman. Nobody remembers the guys who carried the stones for the pyramids.
"Nobody remembers the foreman either," Phil said.
"That's because he didn't have a good publicist," I said. "I'm planning ahead."
"In Season Twelve," Grandpa Ray said, "the best shelter was a simple A-frame. Lashed with vines, with a raised floor to keep out the crabs."
Everybody nodded, the way people nod at Ray.
"Thanks for the history lesson, Ray," I said. "But this isn't Season Twelve. This is now, and now is where I live."
I drew my design in the sand with a stick. It had three stories, a balcony facing the ocean, and a separate wing for me. I had to redraw it twice, because the goat kept walking through it.
"Where does everybody else sleep?" Phil asked.
"Outside my wing," I said. "Near the balcony. You'll have a great view of it."
The goat came with the campsite, the way a dent comes with a used car. She was brown and white, with a little beard.
"Her name's Carol," Grandpa Ray said. "After my first dental hygienist. She had the same gentle eyes."
I looked into those eyes. The pupils went sideways. I felt right away that Carol and I understood each other. Neither of us had asked to come here, and both of us planned to eat whatever we wanted.
"She likes you, Dale," Phil said.
"She knows talent," I said.
Then she ate my stick.
My real innovation was the pillows.
Marisol and Gus cut bamboo with the machete. Phil and Ray gathered vines. Professor Lund measured angles with a piece of string. I paced around and gave encouragement. Sometimes I gave a sharp look, which is also encouragement, just from the other direction.
Bamboo is strong but hard. Pillows are soft but weak. Put them together and you get something strong and soft at the same time, like a great leader, or a good dinner roll.
Tying the poles with vines would've taken hours. So I had everybody wedge a pillow into every joint, as a kind of mortar. Nobody ever won a million dollars by tying knots.
"Dale," Professor Lund said, very politely, "won't the pillows compress under load?"
So I explained compression to her. I went slowly and used my hands, since she was a chemist and not a builder.
"I see," she said. Then she walked a little way down the beach and sat down by herself. I think she was reflecting on what she'd learned.
By sunset the shelter was done. It was only one story, because of time and bamboo. But it was the most colorful building on the island, coral and teal, with tassels hanging off the corners. It looked less like a shelter than a shelter that was celebrating something.
"Professor," I said, "since you doubted it, you can be the first one in."
She crawled in and lay on her back. Everything held. I raised both arms to the tribe, the way architects do in newspaper photos.
That's when Carol, my ally, wandered over and started eating the tassel on the corner pillow.
The corner pillow, it turned out, was holding up everything else. That's the trouble with load-bearing tassels. Nobody gives them a thought until they're inside a goat.
The shelter came down slowly, and then all at once. We dug Professor Lund out from under a pile of bamboo and coral. She was fine except for her glasses, and one lens was gone completely. The other one had a crack across it shaped like a lightning bolt.
"It makes you look like a wizard," I told her.
"Thank you, Dale," she said, very quietly.
It was obvious what had happened. She'd lain down too scientifically, with too much weight on one side. You see that in people who've spent their whole lives in labs, sitting on stools.
"She just lay down, Dale," Phil said.
"Exactly," I said. "Like a scientist."
Marisol and Gus put up a lean-to with the leftover bamboo in about twenty minutes. They used vines, which I felt was a step backward, toward the monkeys. But that night we slept on the pillows, which were softer than anything Barracuda had. I call that a win.
Professor Lund slept a little apart from the rest of us. She held her cracked lens up to one eye and looked at the stars.
I lay awake listening to Carol chew in the dark. It was Day One, and I'd already designed a building, made a friend, and taught a Nobel Prize winner some physics.
Not bad for a guy named Dale.
On the second morning we had rice, a pot, and plenty of water, and no fire to put any of it on. Uncooked rice is technically food, the same way a brick is technically a house.
Gus went first. He rubbed two sticks together for forty minutes, until his palms blistered and he started to weep.
"It's partly the sunset," Phil told me. "From last night. He's still thinking about it."
"In Season Six," Grandpa Ray said, "a man named Hector made fire with a bow drill and a shoelace."
So Marisol built a bow drill out of a bent branch and her own shoelace. In a few minutes she had a thin curl of smoke. I cheered louder than anybody, and a little before the smoke went out. That way it was clear I'd been supporting her, and not the smoke.
Professor Lund squinted at the fire pit through her one cracked lens.
"Fire needs three things," she said. "Heat, fuel, and oxygen."
"You forgot the fourth thing," I said. "Leadership."
She took a very long breath. "I'll make a note of it," she said.
"I always used a magnifying glass in my videos," Phil said. He looked up at the sky, which was cloudy. Then he wrote something in his journal. I assume it was "cloudy."
"The problem is tinder," Marisol said. "Everything here's damp. We need something dry enough to catch from one ember."
Everybody patted their pockets. That's what people do when they want to look helpful without giving anything up.
I thought about the problem the way the great inventors do. Mostly that's staring into the distance with one hand on my chin until somebody asks if I'm all right.
"You all right, Dale?" Gus asked.
"I'm inventing," I said.
Phil's journal was waterproof, and he'd told everybody. He'd shown us several times how water beaded up on the cover and rolled right off. And if water couldn't get into that journal, then the inside of it was the driest place on the island.
Marisol finally coaxed out a glowing ember. "Anybody have anything dry?" she said.
"I do," I said. I took the journal right out of Phil's hands and dropped it on top.
It turns out waterproof is very different from fireproof. The company printed the first word right on the cover and never once mentioned the second. I feel that's a little sneaky.
The journal went up with a big, happy whoosh.
Phil stuck both hands into the fire pit.
He pulled the journal back out and smothered it in the sand. Then he patted it, the way you'd pat a cat that's been through something. The cover was black and curled, and a third of the pages were gone.
But the twigs had caught, and then the sticks. For a minute we all just stood there in the warm orange light. Nobody thanked me. They were too moved.
That evening, over a pot of rice, I told the tribe how I'd made fire. I covered the challenge, the setbacks, and my bold idea. I left out Marisol's ember, for time.
"That's not how I remember it," Phil said.
"Phil," I said gently, "a third of what you remember is ash now. I'd be careful about correcting people."
He opened the journal to the first page, and most of it had burned away. There was one line left in his neat schoolteacher handwriting.
"Dale took the," Phil read out loud.
The rest had gone up in smoke. But I knew how that sentence ended. It ended with "lead."
"From now on," I told the tribe, "you can call me The Flame."
"Sure thing, Dale," Grandpa Ray said.
"Okay, Dale," Gus said.
Professor Lund didn't say anything. She took off her glasses and polished her one lens on her shirt, very slowly. That's how scientists applaud.
Marisol didn't say anything either, which I understood. It's hard to say a man's nickname out loud when you have feelings for him. You worry your voice will give you away.
For the first time since we'd landed, camp smelled like something besides the island. It smelled like smoke, and rice, and a little like a burning briefcase.
"It's nice to have something covering up the other smell," Gus said.
Everybody looked around at each other again. Out of habit, I looked at Gus.
Carol wandered up and ate a scorched page that had blown loose.
"That was the page about the pretzels," Phil said quietly.
I felt that was fitting. Carol's the kind of friend who takes care of things for you without being asked.
Late that night I woke up and saw Phil sitting alone by the fire, writing in what was left of his journal, by its light. The fire I'd made, out of that very journal.
He never once looked over to thank me. But that's all right. A man like me doesn't do these things for thanks.
He does them for the nickname.
Once a day, the show makes you talk to a camera alone, and they call it a confessional. That's a bad name. I didn't have anything to confess, and if I did, I'd tell a priest. A priest keeps quiet. A camera does the opposite for a living.
Our camera guy was Dusty. He was thin, with a gray ponytail and a sunburn in the exact shape of his camera strap, so even with the camera off he looked like he was working. I've always envied that.
Dusty wasn't allowed to talk to us. Right away I could tell he was a great listener, because he never interrupted me once, and when I said something important, he zoomed in.
For my first one, I sat on a log and laid out my strategy. "The key to this game is trust," I said. "You get people to trust you completely. That way, when you betray them, it really means something."
Dusty adjusted his focus. I took that as a yes.
"Not that I'd ever betray anybody," I said. "That's what separates me from these animals." I pointed at camp, where Grandpa Ray was teaching Gus to tie a bowline. Gus was crying, because it was such a nice knot.
That afternoon I went back to the log. I'd done some thinking. "Forget trust," I told Dusty. "The real key is staying invisible. You lie low and let the big personalities wreck each other, and nobody even remembers you're here."
Then I asked if he was getting my good side. "Because I'd like this in the opening credits," I said. "Slow motion. Maybe an eagle lands on my arm."
He didn't answer, but I could tell he was picturing the eagle. "I'm great at holding still for birds," I added. Dusty looked at the ocean for a while, the way a professional does when he's working out a budget.
On the third day I had a breakthrough. "Okay, forget all that," I said. "The key is loyalty." I said it with my hand on my heart. Then I used the same hand to take a banana out of Grandpa Ray's bag, which was sitting right there.
Ray was watching me. He winked.
Uh-oh. A man who winks while you rob him has already decided how he'll get even. I made a note to watch Ray closely from now on.
Especially while he slept.
Most players form alliances of three or four, and then they spend the whole game worrying about who'll flip. Not me. I formed an alliance of one.
It was me.
"We meet every evening behind the latrine trench," I told Dusty. "Mostly it goes great."
Mostly. One night I accused myself of leaking information to Phil, and things got heated. I said some stuff I regret, and I had to go for a walk to cool off. When I came back, I apologized. I accepted.
Phil was technically my partner, since it was the Ride or Die season. But I explained to Dusty that Phil wasn't really a partner. He was more of an asset, like a mule or a savings bond.
"I'll carry Phil as far as I can," I said. "Then I'll set him down someplace comfortable, near water, and keep going."
Dusty swung the camera toward the beach. Phil was hauling both our water jugs up the sand, one in each hand, and he'd stopped to rest them on his knees.
"Swing it back," I said. "That's not the story." Dusty swung it back.
I also told him I wouldn't let romance distract me from the game. Then I spent twenty minutes on Marisol. "She looked at me twice today," I said. "Once when I was standing in front of the water jug, and once when I accidentally stepped in the fire. Both times, she held the look."
Dusty lowered the camera and drank some water. I could tell he was moved too.
That week, Dusty started wearing a bandanna over his nose for my confessionals. Every day he set his tripod a little farther from my log. Monday it was ten feet. Wednesday it was over by the palm trees. By Friday he was filming me from knee-deep in the lagoon.
"Smart!" I called out to him. "That smell's coming from inland. You keep your distance from that jungle."
He nodded a little. Or a wave hit him.
Kevin's nose was mostly sunscreen. He was a production assistant, about twenty-three, and he brought out the water and the release forms. He put the sunscreen on so thick that it was basically a second, smaller nose, riding on top of the first one.
Kevin walked around all day with inside information, so between confessionals I worked on him. "Here's the deal," I said. "You tell me where the hidden advantages are buried, and I'll give you a jet ski."
Kevin looked at me. "Do you own a jet ski?"
"I have access to one," I said. "It's in storage."
That was true. It's just a wet kind of storage.
"Where's the storage?" Kevin said.
"Lake Wendle," I said. "It's a very deep lake, deeper than it looks. That's what keeps it safe from thieves."
He thought about it. "I can't accept gifts from contestants," he said.
So I offered him the production ship. "You already have access to it," I pointed out. "So it's the easiest bribe a guy could ever take. You don't even have to move anything."
Kevin held his clipboard up over his face and walked away fast. That's how you know a man's thinking it over.
The next day I offered him the ship again, and this time I threw in the helicopter Brock flew in on.
"You can't give me the helicopter," Kevin said.
"Not with that attitude," I said. He walked away fast again, and I felt we were getting close.
At the end of the week, I sat on my log and asked Dusty the big question. "Be honest," I said. "Am I gonna win this thing?"
He didn't answer. He was still out in the lagoon, up to his knees. But the little red light on his camera kept blinking, steady and patient, like a heartbeat. Or like a smoke detector that needs a new battery.
I went with the heartbeat.
Brock Sterling had so many teeth that I started counting them. I got to forty and lost my place. A man with that many teeth should probably share.
The first challenge was in a cove on the north side of the island. Gecko lined up on mats in yellow, and Barracuda lined up in blue. Brock walked out in front of us in his safari vest and smiled for a long time.
"Wanna know what you're playing for?" he said.
"Money," I said.
He looked at me and waited, the way you wait for a dog to stop barking. Then he pulled a velvet cloth off a pedestal. Under it was the Immunity Conch, a big pink seashell on a carved wooden base. Whoever won it couldn't be voted out that night.
"So, not money," I said.
"Not money," Brock said.
That was fine. I figured it'd look good on my mantel, once I had a mantel, and once nobody was watching the conch.
Brock explained the course. One person swims out to a floating platform and unties a crate of puzzle pieces. The tribe hauls the crate across a balance beam, and then everybody puts the pieces together into a picture of a sea turtle.
I'd never done a puzzle. But I'd once seen a sea turtle on a placemat at a seafood place, so I felt I had an edge.
"I'll take the swim," I said.
Phil looked at Marisol, and Marisol looked at the water. Everybody knew she'd been a Coast Guard rescue swimmer.
"Think about it," I told the tribe. "If anybody needs rescuing out there, you want her on shore. Rested."
Nobody said a word. They just stared at me, and I could feel them deciding to trust me.
"Dale," Phil said quietly, "she rescues swimmers for a living."
"Exactly," I said. "Save her for an emergency."
The horn went off, and I swam out to the platform with a breaststroke I came up with myself. I believe it also works on land, though I haven't tried it in front of people.
The crate was tied down with a thick rope with a lot of knots in it. I counted the knots and didn't like the number.
Think, Dale.
I didn't have time to untie them all. So I found the rope that looked the most important, and I untied that one. It was the anchor line.
The platform drifted gently out to sea. It took the crate with it. Also me.
"Dale!" Phil yelled from the beach. "Wrong rope!"
"I know what I'm doing!" I yelled back. After that it got harder to hear him, because of the distance.
A safety kayak came out and towed us back, platform and all. Brock said that had never happened before in the history of the show. I was already reinventing the format.
By then Barracuda was halfway across the beam. "Don't worry," I told my tribe. "This isn't about who starts fastest. It's about who starts second fastest, and lets the other tribe make all the mistakes."
We hoisted the crate onto the beam, and I took the front, to set the pace. Halfway across, I noticed camera two was getting my profile. So I stopped and turned around, so it could get the other side too. Both sides are good, and it'd be a shame to waste one.
The crate stopped. Gus was right behind me, so Gus stopped. Grandpa Ray was behind Gus, and Ray didn't stop in time. Ray bumped Gus, Gus tipped, and they both went off the beam into the sand, along with the crate. Phil went last, slowly, still holding his corner.
That was a rule, it turned out. If anybody fell, the whole tribe started the beam over.
"This is good," I told them. "Now we know the beam."
Phil sat up, spitting out sand. "I knew the beam the first time," he said.
"Sure you did, buddy," I said. I let him be wrong in front of everybody.
That's leadership.
There was a pile of sandbags next to the puzzle table, and I still don't know what they were for. Brock said later they were for a tiebreaker round that never would've come up.
By the time we got to the table, Barracuda was already arguing over the turtle's head. Professor Lund took over our puzzle. She'd won a Nobel Prize, and a turtle is basically a molecule with flippers.
Her glasses were still taped together from the shelter, so she had to tilt her head to see out of the good half. But she was fast. In a few minutes she had the whole shell and half the flippers.
"We're gonna win," Phil whispered.
He was right, and I wanted the winning moment to include me. So I picked up a sandbag and threw it at the victory gong. A great leader rings the gong before the victory. That way the victory knows where to go.
The sandbag missed the gong.
It was the best throw I've ever made. It went up in a high, beautiful arc, and everybody watched it, even Barracuda. Then it came down on the back of Professor Lund's head with a soft thump.
She pitched forward onto the table, and the turtle went everywhere. There were about a hundred pieces in the sand. She lay there for a second. Then she sat up.
"I'm fine," she said. "Thank you, Dale."
She said it so politely that it seemed to cost her something. Barracuda finished their turtle four seconds later. Tiffani and Brayden hugged, and then they both turned and smiled at a camera that wasn't theirs. They seemed disappointed in it.
That night at camp, I went over the whole thing for the tribe. "Strong swim," I said. "Solid beam. The puzzle was almost done. Then Professor Lund decided to lie down on it."
Phil looked up from his journal, which was still curled at the edges from the fire. "That's not how I remember it," he said.
"Memory's a funny thing," I told him. "Yours'll probably get better once you get some food in you."
Then I ate the last of the rice. Now he had something to look forward to.
Losing meant somebody from Gecko was going home that night at the Torch Tribunal, and I knew right away it had to be Grandpa Ray.
On the surface, Ray was a harmless retired dentist who knew every season by heart and shared his trail mix. That was the problem. Everybody loved him. Even Carol the goat followed him around, and she'd tried to eat me twice.
Nobody gets loved like that by accident. It takes planning, and a dentist has nothing but time to plan. He stands there all day with his hands in people's mouths, talking to them while they can't answer.
I had to be careful. Ray could sense a plot against him the way a dog senses an earthquake. Or a ham.
So I came up with a code name. I wanted something big, something that said "giant in the game," and after some thought I went with "the Moose." I was proud of it. It wouldn't mean a thing to anybody who overheard.
I started with Phil, who was filtering water. "The Moose has to go," I whispered.
Phil looked across camp at Gus. Gus is six foot six, and he was wearing his old hockey jersey, the one with the word MOOSE across the back. At that moment he was carrying a log under each arm.
"Are you sure?" Phil said.
"The Moose is dangerous," I said, "because nobody sees him coming."
Phil watched Gus set the logs down very gently, so he wouldn't bother a crab. "Okay," Phil said.
Next was Professor Lund, who had an ice pack on the back of her head. "The Moose has a strategy nobody understands," I told her.
"I don't understand it either," she said.
"That's the point."
She closed her eyes. "Dale, I have a mild concussion. I'll vote however makes this conversation end." I counted that as a yes.
I told Marisol the Moose was coming for her. She said Gus had made her a driftwood chair that morning.
"That's exactly what a Moose would do," I said.
She looked at me for a long moment, and I believe something passed between us. Possibly the decision to vote with me.
I even told Gus. "The Moose has to go," I said. Gus nodded seriously and said he'd do whatever helped the tribe. Then he hugged me.
I felt bad for him. He had no idea how close he was to the real power in this game.
He was hugging it.
The Torch Tribunal was mostly logs. I'd pictured a courtroom with torches, but it was a clearing in the jungle with log benches and a fire pit in the middle.
We each carried in a torch and stuck it behind our seat. Brock said the torches stood for our lives in the game. I wanted to ask if there was a bigger torch for people with bigger lives. But the flames were very close to my hair, so I decided to focus.
Brock asked Gus how he was feeling. "Grateful," Gus said. "It's such a beautiful place, with such wonderful people. Last night's sunset made me want to call my mom."
Brock asked Grandpa Ray if he felt safe. Ray chuckled. "Nobody's safe, Brock."
Everybody laughed, and I saw exactly how he did it. One chuckle, and the whole clearing was his.
We voted in a little hut, one at a time, writing a name on a strip of bark. I wrote "Moose" in big letters. Then I held it up to the camera, the way people do on the show. "Sorry, big guy," I said. "It's just a game."
I meant Ray. I was thinking about Ray the whole time.
Brock came back with the urn and read the votes out loud. "Moose," he said. Then, "Moose." Then "Moose" again, and again. Then, for some reason, "Dale." Then, "Moose."
He looked up, and for the first time all night, he seemed truly happy. "Gus," he said, "bring me your torch."
Gus was crying before he even got to his torch. He cried while he carried it up, and he cried harder while Brock lowered the long brass snuffer over the flame, nice and slow. Brock looked like a man biting into the first peach of summer.
"Gus," Brock said, "the island is done with you."
Then Gus hugged every one of us. Even me. Even Brock. He walked off down the path toward Exile Ridge, still crying.
I looked over at Grandpa Ray. He was wiping his eyes. That's the kind of player Ray was. He could even fake being sad about a vote he'd obviously masterminded.
The guy's a pro.
Brock waited until we were all standing up to leave. Then he turned to the camera and flashed his teeth.
"And to the folks at home," he said, "I've been getting a lot of letters about the Golden Coconut. So let me say it one more time. The Golden Coconut is a myth. It doesn't exist. So please, nobody go looking for it."
He laughed, and the crew laughed. One guy behind a camera laughed a little too hard, and then he stopped all at once.
I didn't laugh. "Phil," I whispered. "What's the Golden Coconut?"
"It's a myth," Phil whispered back. "He just said."
"Right," I said. "But what is it?"
"Dale, it's not real."
"Then why's he getting letters?"
Phil opened his mouth and shut it again. Then he looked at his feet, and I could tell I'd stumped him. You don't get letters about nothing. I've never once gotten a letter about nothing. I barely get letters about things.
I stood there very still, holding my torch, and I felt something catch fire inside me. It was a flame no brass snuffer was ever gonna reach.
Kevin had to put out the other one with a bucket.
I'd wandered into a fern.
I didn't sleep that night. Every time I shut my eyes, I saw a gold coconut glowing in the dark, the way a coconut would glow if it was worth a lot of money and knew it.
In the morning I asked around, casually. I asked Phil. I asked Marisol. I asked Professor Lund. Then I asked Phil again, louder, in case he'd been holding back the first time.
"I don't know, Dale," Phil said. He didn't look at me when he said it.
Nobody knew anything. So finally I did the thing I'd been dreading, and I asked Grandpa Ray.
Ray's whole face lit up. "Oh, I'd love to tell you," he said. "But a story like that has to be told right. Tonight. Around the fire."
I could see what he was doing. A man who makes you wait for a story wants you to spend the whole day thinking about him. And I did, all day. I was furious.
That night we sat around the fire, and Ray told the legend of the Golden Coconut. He told it slow, in a low voice, poking the coals with a stick, and the firelight made deep shadows in his kind old face. It was the most manipulative thing I've ever seen a man do with a stick.
"Back in Season Four," Ray said, "a contestant wandered off into the jungle alone. Three days later, they came back carrying a coconut made of solid gold."
"Who was it?" Phil asked.
"Nobody agrees," Ray said. "Some say a young woman from Ohio. Some say a welder. Some say two brothers who shared one bandanna and never spoke."
"How do two guys share a bandanna?" I said.
"Very closely," Ray said.
Then he told us what it did. Whoever played the Golden Coconut got total immunity, the million dollars, and their own spin-off.
"Their own spin-off," I said. Ray nodded.
I was already casting it in my head. I'd play myself. Phil would play my loyal assistant, until season two, when I'd replace him with somebody taller.
"But they never played it," Ray said. "They got hurt and had to be medically evacuated. On the way out, they hid it somewhere upriver, near the source of the Snorrel River. Past the Bog of Endless Regret."
"And the producers?" I said.
"They've always denied the whole thing," Ray said. "Which is how you know it's true."
I agreed with him. Nobody denies a thing for twenty-seven seasons unless it's real.
Or unless Ray keeps calling.
Professor Lund said a solid gold coconut would weigh about forty pounds. "Nobody's carrying that very far through a jungle," she said.
"People find great strength when they're holding something valuable," I told her.
"That's not how strength works."
"It's how mine works," I said. "Maybe you've just never held anything valuable."
She took off her taped glasses and rubbed her eyes for a long time. I've noticed really smart people do that when they meet somebody smarter. They want to make sure he's really there.
Then Ray said the thing that surprised me. The Bog of Endless Regret, he said, was where the island's smell came from.
I'd always figured the smell was Gus. But Gus got voted out the night before, and the smell was worse, if anything. So either Ray was right, or Gus had left a lot of it behind.
"Could be the bog," Phil said.
"Could be," I said. "Could be Gus."
"Gus is gone, Dale."
"Sure," I said. "Physically."
I decided to keep an open mind, which in this case meant I kept blaming Gus.
After that it got quiet, and the fire popped. Then Phil cleared his throat. "I've always believed in it," he said.
Everybody looked at him.
"Since I was a teenager," Phil said. "I watched Season Four with my mom. We used to talk about it at dinner."
He opened his journal to a singed page near the back. There was a map on it. He'd drawn the whole river from memory, with little trees along the banks and a small, sad-looking bog. He turned red, like he'd been caught with a comic book in class.
"Don't be embarrassed," I told him. "Believing in stuff is totally normal for a child."
"Thanks, Dale," he said.
"And guard that map with your life," I said. "I'm gonna need it."
The coconut had been sitting alone upriver for years, waiting. I thought about that a lot, lying in the shelter that night. I wondered if it got lonely out there in the dark, and if it was waiting for me, specifically.
Then I wondered what it'd cost to get it melted down. And whether the coconut part would come off by itself, or if I'd have to pay a guy extra.
By morning I knew it was my destiny. Some men are born great, and some men work at it. And some have it hidden upriver for them by a welder from Season Four.
A man with a destiny like that needs a name to match. I went with The Coconut King.
"From now on," I announced at breakfast, "you can call me The Coconut King."
"Sure thing, Dale," Grandpa Ray said.
Marisol didn't say anything. She just ate her rice. Phil wrote it down in his journal, which is the closest anybody came.
So I made myself a crown out of palm fronds, to help people remember. It had five points and a little flap in the back for shade. I wore it all morning. Nobody mentioned it, which meant it was working on a deeper level. Professor Lund walked by, looked up at it, and said, "Of course." I believe that's scientist for "nice crown."
Carol ate it before lunch. I was sitting on my log, explaining my plans to Dusty, and she came up behind me and ate it right off my head. Slowly. She looked into my eyes the whole time she chewed.
"Hey," I said. "That's mine." She kept chewing.
Honestly, I respected it. That's how one king treats another.
Every morning at sunrise, Marisol walked out to the rocks at the end of the point with a homemade spear, and an hour later she came back with fish. Every single morning.
That's how I knew she was struggling. Nobody who's good at something has to go do it every day. So one morning I followed her out there to show her how it's done.
I'd never actually speared a fish. But I'd eaten a lot of fish over the years, and that's the harder half. Anybody can catch a fish. It takes a certain kind of man to finish one.
Marisol was crouched on a flat rock, perfectly still, watching the water. I came up right behind her. "Morning!" I said.
A whole school of fish turned around and swam out to sea.
She stayed crouched for a second, looking at the spot where the fish used to be. Then she stood up and gave me her complete attention, which is what I'd come for.
"Dale," she said. "I'm fine. I don't need anything."
That's exactly what people say when they need something.
"I'm just gonna show you a couple techniques," I said. I took the spear out of her hand, gently, the way you'd take scissors from a kid. The only difference was she let go right away. A kid usually fights you.
"First thing," I said. "Fish psychology." She folded her arms.
"A fish wants to be caught," I explained. "Think about it. He's spent his whole life down there in the cold and the dark, eating whatever floats by. Deep down, he's waiting for somebody to come along and see him for who he is. Lift him up into the light. And fry him."
"That's not true of fish," Marisol said.
"See?" I said. "That's why you're out here every morning."
Then I saw him, a big silver fish turning lazy circles in the green water right under my rock. I raised the spear over my head and stepped forward onto a mat of rotting seaweed.
The seaweed and I left the rock together.
The spear went a different way. It flew high over the point and came down on the beach, where it went straight through the bottom of our only cooking pot. I didn't find that out till later. At the time I was busy being underwater.
I want to be clear that I'm a good swimmer. Water respects a man who refuses to panic, so I didn't panic. I just thrashed a lot and swallowed a big part of the lagoon. Then I grabbed onto what I thought was a rock. It was the bottom, which didn't help, since the bottom was what I was trying to get away from.
Then a strong arm came around my chest from behind and pulled me up into the air. It was Marisol. She held me tight across the chest and towed me toward the rocks with long, steady kicks.
In the Coast Guard, that's called a cross-chest carry. Everywhere else, it's called a hug.
I leaned back against her and looked up at the sky, which was pink and gold. And I thought, This is how it starts for some couples.
She hauled me up onto the rocks, and I coughed for a while. She knelt next to me. "Keep breathing," she said. "Dale. Can you hear me?"
"I let you do that," I said, between coughs. "On purpose. To give you some confidence. You've been having such a hard time with the fishing."
She stood up. Then she wrung out her ponytail right over my face. "You smell like the bog, Dale," she said.
"That's the seaweed," I told her. "Rotting seaweed is one of the strongest smells in nature, right up there with sulfur and wet goat. It's got nothing to do with me personally."
She didn't say anything.
"I used the hotel shampoo," I said.
"When?"
"Four days ago."
Marisol kept a spare spear in a crack in the rocks, which seemed sneaky to me. While I lay there getting my strength back, she pulled it out and caught three fish in about eight minutes.
She did it quietly, the way people do when they're trying to impress somebody without looking like it. "Nice one!" I called. She turned her back on me, so I wouldn't see how much it meant to her.
I carried the fish back to camp. She'd carried me, so it was only fair we took turns. I laid them by the fire and told everybody about my morning, minus some of the middle.
Grandpa Ray clapped me on the shoulder. "Way to go, Dale." But I saw his eyes. He knew exactly whose fish those were, and he was saving it for later.
Phil looked at the fish, and then at me, and then at the cooking pot, which had a spear sticking out of the bottom. "Did a spear land on the beach this morning?" he said.
"Weird," I said. "No idea."
The next morning I followed Marisol out to the rocks again. She was halfway down the point when she stopped and turned around.
"Dale," she said. "Please stop following me."
I thought about that the whole way back to camp. First, she said "please." That's the most polite word there is, and nobody wastes it on somebody they don't care about.
Second, she said "following." That means a journey, a journey we were on together.
And third, she said "stop." If you think about it, that's what people say right before something wonderful starts. Stop and smell the roses. Stop, you're making me blush.
So I stopped. I gave her a four-second head start.
Out of respect.
"Wanna know what you're playing for?" Brock said.
This time I let him finish. I'd learned.
He swung his arm toward a sandbar, where a wicker basket sat on a red-checked blanket in the sun. "Fried chicken," Brock said. "Deviled eggs. Shrimp cocktail. Peach pie. And a jug of cold lemonade. Plus, every member of the winning tribe gets a two-minute satellite phone call home."
I hadn't had fried chicken in what felt like a year. I already had a plan for each deviled egg, and I'd named two of them.
The challenge was a relay with a key in it, and a chest, and a canoe. I didn't follow all of it, because I had the most important job. I held the Gecko flag at the starting line and kept it upright.
And I kept it upright the whole time. The wind was strong, and at one point a pelican landed on top of it. Still, I didn't let it fall.
"Dale, you could help paddle!" Phil called.
"Somebody's got to hold the flag!" I called back.
"Nobody has to hold the flag!"
He didn't mean that. He was just tired.
Marisol did the dive and the chest and most of the paddling, because Grandpa Ray got a cramp and Professor Lund couldn't find the canoe. She kept looking through the good half of her glasses at a log.
We won by almost a minute. I planted the flag in the sand. "That's how you do it!" I shouted.
Marisol looked at me for a long time, breathing hard. I could tell she was grateful.
It's nice to have a flag you can count on.
We waded out to the sandbar and sat around the blanket. Phil reached for a deviled egg, and I grabbed his wrist. "Phil," I said. "You're allergic to shellfish."
"It's an egg, Dale."
"It's been sitting next to the shrimp cocktail."
"I don't think it works like that," Phil said.
"I'm not taking that chance with my best friend," I said. So I ate the egg myself. Then I ate the shrimp, so nothing could happen to him.
Then I ate his chicken, because it'd been in the basket with the shrimp. I ate his pie, too. He's allergic to most grasses, and wheat's a grass, and who knows what they put in that crust.
Phil got the lemon wedge from the shrimp cocktail. I squeezed it into his lemonade myself, as a gesture.
After the picnic, Kevin brought out the satellite phone. I went first. I hadn't planned who to call, so I called the laundromat under my apartment. The woman who runs it picked up, and when I told her who it was, she said she'd assumed I was dead. She sounded let down that I wasn't.
That got me thinking. Who else might enjoy the news?
Phil was next. He'd been looking forward to calling his mom, who'd watched every season of the show with him.
"I just need one quick call first," I told him. "It's an emergency. You'll understand when you're older."
He handed me the phone. That's Phil. He'll hand you anything, and he hardly ever asks for it back, and when he does, it's easy to pretend you didn't hear him.
I dialed Hollis. When he picked up, I made my voice low and serious. "This is the chief medical officer of Kalaboo Island," I said. "I'm sorry to report that Dale Tummins has died."
"Oh yeah?" Hollis said.
"He was attacked by a shark," I said. "And then by a second shark. It seemed to know the first one."
Nothing on the line.
"His last words," I said, "were, Tell Hollis the jet ski was a gift."
There was a long pause. Then Hollis said, "Dale, I can hear you chewing."
I'd brought a drumstick.
"That's not chewing," I said. "That's the island's grief. All matters regarding Dale's estate will be handled by his close friend, Phil Brumley. He's very good with money. He has a pension."
Then the line went dead, because the two minutes were up. Phil took the phone back. "Hi, Mom," he said.
Then Kevin took it away.
Later, Phil asked me why a man named Hollis now believed Phil was handling my estate.
"I never mentioned you," I said.
"That's not how I remember it," Phil said.
"The island plays tricks on a man's mind," I told him. "Especially a man who hasn't eaten much today."
That night my stomach started making sounds like a big dog having a dream. Everything in that basket had been sitting out in the sun all afternoon, and now it was all coming to an understanding inside me. The understanding wasn't quiet.
Then a smell settled over the shelter. It was worse than anything the island had made so far, which is saying a lot.
Professor Lund sat up in the dark. "What on earth is that?"
"Carol," I said.
"The goat?"
"She ate a flip-flop this morning," I said. "And half a tarp. You can't expect a stomach like that to keep its opinions to itself."
Phil didn't say anything. But I heard him writing something down in the dark, which I didn't think was possible.
Carol was lying at the edge of the shelter. She lifted her head and looked at me for a long time with those sideways eyes. Then she got up, walked slowly down the beach, and lay down again about forty feet away.
That's exactly what a guilty goat would do.
On day fourteen, Brock told us all to drop our bandannas. I figured it was a challenge, so I dropped mine first and fastest, and then I looked around to see what I'd won.
"It's not a challenge, Dale," Brock said. "It's a tribe swap."
"So who won?" I said.
"A crab," Brock said. My bandanna had landed in a tide pool, and a crab was dragging it off. I let him have it. You have to let a crab win once in a while, or they quit trying.
There was a clay urn on a stump. Everybody reached in and pulled out a new bandanna, yellow for Gecko or blue for Barracuda. I got yellow, which is skill. Phil got blue. He looked at me like a dog in the back of a car, when the car's going to a nice farm in the country.
"I'll be fine," Phil said. I hadn't asked, but I told him I'd be fine too. Then I asked if he was going to need all his rice.
"I was going to bring it with me," Phil said.
"Sure," I said. "Sure. Take the rice. Don't even think about it."
In exchange, Barracuda gave us a guy named Doug. Doug sold irrigation equipment. He shook everybody's hand twice and said he was just happy to be here. I don't trust a man who's happy to be anywhere. I'm not happy to be anywhere, and I'm usually the best thing there.
"So what do you do, Dale?" Doug asked me.
"I consult," I said. Doug asked what on, and I told him that's the kind of question I'd normally charge for.
Doug laughed and slapped me on the back, because he thought I was kidding. Then he asked if he could have Phil's spot in the shelter, since it was open.
"It's not open," I said. "It's being held."
"For who?" Doug said.
"For nobody," I said. "That's what makes it held."
Phil walked off down the beach with his blue bandanna and his rice. He turned around twice to wave. I didn't wave back, because I was busy watching the crab.
Doug was going to be trouble.
I want to be clear about this. I didn't miss Phil. Two friends are like two trees. If somebody moves one tree to the other end of the island, the other tree gets more sun. That's just science.
So that afternoon I sat in the sun and watched Barracuda camp through a tube I'd rolled up out of bark. The tube didn't magnify anything, but it did narrow things down. Through it I could see a stretch of beach, a palm tree, and once, for about a second, either Phil or a pelican.
"Is that Phil?" I asked Doug.
Doug squinted down the beach. "That's two miles away, Dale."
"He looks happy," I said. "That's a little selfish of him."
At dinner I set a place for Phil out of habit. It was a big leaf with a scoop of rice on it. Then I ate his rice, which was also out of habit.
That night the shelter was too quiet. Phil used to whisper, "Good night, Dale," and then a few minutes later he'd whisper, "Dale? Good night." It drove me nuts. So I whispered, "Good night, Phil," into the dark. I just wanted to remind myself how annoying it was.
From the far end of the shelter, Professor Lund said, "Good night, Dale." It came out between her teeth.
The next day I wrote Phil a letter on a banana leaf and floated it down the beach toward Barracuda. I should stress that it was mostly a list of things he owed me: the rice, a bag of airplane pretzels, and interest on the pretzels.
I also practiced his line, in his voice, on a coconut. "That's not how I remember it," I told it. That way, if anybody told a story wrong, the camp wouldn't lose its standards.
"Who are you talking to?" Doug said. "It sounded like you were doing a voice."
"That's not how I remember it," I said. It worked great.
Then I tried confiding in Dusty, but Dusty isn't Phil. When I told Phil a plan, he'd say it was a bad plan and then help me with it anyway. When I told Dusty a plan, he just kept filming, which, to be fair, is all I'd ever said I wanted from Phil.
"You get it, right, Dusty?" I said. Dusty didn't answer. He zoomed out a little.
I didn't miss Phil at all.
The smoke signal was my best idea. If I built a big enough fire, Phil would see the smoke from two miles away, and then he'd know I was doing fine. I wanted the smoke to say that Dale was thriving. That Dale wasn't lonely. That Dale hadn't given Phil a single thought.
"Can smoke say all that?" Doug asked.
"If you make enough of it," I said.
I piled up driftwood, dry palm fronds, and the stuffing out of two decorative pillows. For the accelerant, I used my last bottle of hotel body lotion, the one I'd saved for the island. The label said it was enriched with essential oils. Turns out they're essential mainly to fire.
Professor Lund came over to watch. She said she was interested in the social function of signal fires in isolated groups, and she bent down to see how I'd arranged the kindling.
"Get in there," I told her. "A good scientist gets close to her work."
"Thank you, Dale," she said, and she got closer. Then I touched a burning stick to the pile.
The whole thing went up at once. It made a sound like a very big man saying "whump" in a library. When the smoke cleared, Professor Lund was still bent over the kindling, close to her work. She'd kept her notes, her balance, and her composure. The eyebrows were a different story.
"That's fine," she said. "They grow back."
"I hope so," I said. "For the show. Viewers like to know what a person's feeling, and now they'll have to guess."
"Thank you, Dale," she said. Then she walked into the ocean up to her waist and stood there for a while.
The smoke went up about forty feet and blew out to sea, where a cargo ship spotted it and radioed to ask if we needed rescuing. Kevin told me later that Brock radioed back that we absolutely did, but not until after the finale.
"Is that even legal?" I asked Kevin.
"He's the host," Kevin said.
Two mornings later, a leaf washed up near camp with writing on it in ballpoint pen. It said, "Saw your smoke! Miss you too. Phil." I'd never said I missed him. That's Phil for you. You build one fire on a beach, and he thinks it's about him.
"What's that?" Doug said.
"Evidence," I said. I kept it under my pillow.
Grandpa Ray once said hidden advantages are usually tucked near something iconic, like a weird rock or a lone tree. So on day seventeen I dug a hole at the bottom of every tree near camp. On an island, any tree's a lone tree if you stand close enough and squint.
Doug offered to help. I told him no thanks, because I'd seen what irrigation guys do to a hole.
"What do we do?" Doug said.
"You fill it with water and call it progress," I said.
Hunting advantages takes a special kind of mind. You have to think like a producer, somebody sneaky and a little cruel, who always wants the worst thing to happen to the nicest person. I've always been good at that. Friends say I don't even seem to be trying.
By the second afternoon I'd dug forty holes. I'd found two crabs, a flip-flop, and an older hole somebody had dug looking for the same thing. Later I figured out it was one of mine from that morning, which shows you how thorough I am.
Then I found it. It was stuck in the fork of a tree a few yards past a sign that said Crew Only. No contestant was allowed back there, so that's exactly where I'd hide something, if I were a coward.
It was a bamboo tube with a rolled-up paper inside. My hands shook as I unrolled it. It said, "Two turkey on wheat, no mayo. One veggie wrap. Three iced teas. Brock: egg whites, dry, no yolk, he will check."
A lesser man would've seen a lunch order. I saw a lunch order too, at first. Then I saw what was under it, which was a code.
"Two turkey on wheat" meant two men would make a long trip across open country. "No mayo" meant no mercy. "One veggie wrap" was obviously Professor Lund. She's a vegetarian, and she'd been wearing her bandanna low on her forehead ever since the smoke signal.
I showed it to Doug. "What do you think the iced teas mean?"
"Iced tea?" Doug said.
"That's what they want you to think," I said. I'm still working on the iced teas.
I wished Phil were there. Not because I missed him. It's just that nobody was around to tell me I was wrong.
It turns out being right is lonely.
The next morning, Carol walked into camp with a bamboo tube in her mouth. This one was different. It had a red wax seal, and the word Gecko was burned into the side. She held it sideways and looked at me, and I looked at her. I believe there's a moment when an animal decides what kind of animal it's going to be.
"Easy, Carol," I said. "Good girl. Give Dale the tube."
I walked toward her slowly with my hand out, which is how you approach a friend you're about to rob. Carol backed up. Then she bit through the bamboo like it was a breadstick. She pulled out the scroll and ate it. She chewed it slow, and I think she was reading it first.
"What did it say?" I asked her. She didn't say anything. In a normal goat, that's not a refusal. In Carol it was.
When she was done, she spat the red wax seal onto my foot. That's a tip. That's what you leave at a restaurant you're never coming back to.
Doug came over and looked at my foot. "Was that the clue?" he said.
"That was the clue," I said.
"Should we tell somebody?" Doug said.
"Who'd believe us?" I said. "She's a goat."
That was the day Carol stopped being my ally. A goat who reads the clue and keeps it to herself isn't a pet.
She's a competitor.
I needed inside information, and the only inside guy I knew was Kevin. Kevin wore a walkie-talkie on his belt. Earlier I'd offered him my beach house in Maui for it, and he turned me down, maybe because I described it differently each time.
"Is it on the beach or not?" Kevin had asked.
"It's near a beach," I'd told him. "Everything in Maui is near a beach."
This time I didn't offer. I told Kevin that Carol was chewing on a camera cable, and he ran off to check. The walkie-talkie was sitting on a cooler, where he'd set it down to run faster. Kevin's a good kid, but he's a poor guardian of property.
I took it behind the latrine and turned the dial until I heard voices. Mostly it was producers arguing about lunch.
"Did the egg whites come?" somebody said. I felt a chill, because he was going to check.
Then a man's voice came on, low and nervous. "Okay, but whatever happens, nobody goes upriver. Nobody. Upstairs was very clear."
"Copy," another voice said. "Nobody goes upriver." Then they went back to talking about iced tea, which was obviously a cover.
I sat behind the latrine a long time and let it sink in. Nobody tells their employees to stay away from a thing that doesn't exist. My building doesn't have a pool, and my landlord's never once told me to stay out of it.
The Golden Coconut was real, and it was upriver, and they were scared somebody would find it. I couldn't think of anybody better qualified to scare them.
I gave the walkie-talkie back to Kevin and told him I'd found it in the bushes. To keep him quiet, I promised him a share of the Golden Coconut. It was the first thing I'd ever offered Kevin that I had a real chance of owning.
"A share of what?" Kevin said.
"Exactly," I said.
Late on day eighteen, something came crashing through the brush behind our shelter. I figured it was a wild boar, or Carol back for more clues, so I grabbed the nearest heavy object and got ready to throw it. The nearest heavy object was Doug.
"Dale," Doug said. "I'm awake. Please put me down."
It wasn't a boar. It was Phil. He'd walked two miles across the island in the dark, through the kind of tall grass he's allergic to, which is most of them. His arms and neck were covered in hives. I started counting them to be polite and quit at forty.
He'd brought me half a grilled fish from Barracuda, wrapped in a leaf. I was very moved.
"I barely noticed you were gone," I told him.
"I knew you'd say that," Phil said, and he hugged me. I let him. He'd walked a long way, and it was cheaper than giving back the fish.
We sat by the embers and whispered. Phil said Tiffani and Brayden had their own map over on Barracuda. They kept it in a waterproof case, with the phone they weren't supposed to have either.
"If anybody finds the Golden Coconut," Phil said, "it should be somebody who's believed in it for eleven seasons."
"Sure," I said. "Or somebody who's believed in it since Tuesday, but harder."
I told him about the walkie-talkie and the nervous voice and "nobody goes upriver." Phil's eyes went wide. He opened his journal, the singed one, and showed me a map he'd drawn from everything Grandpa Ray said and everything he'd read on fan forums since college.
It had the beach, the mouth of the Snorrel River, the Bog of Endless Regret, and a waterfall. At the very top, in his neat teacher handwriting, it said, "the source?"
In one corner he'd drawn a little cartoon of himself holding a coconut. Next to him was a little cartoon of me, holding his backpack. I let it go. There'd be time for revisions.
"Can I have it?" I said.
"It's in my journal," Phil said.
"That's fine," I said. "I'll take the journal too." He didn't give me either one.
We agreed to go together and split the prize. "Fifty-fifty, of course," Phil said.
I shook his hand. "Fifty-fifty," I said out loud. In my heart I said ninety-ten, because that's where the real contracts are kept.
Ten percent's a lot of money for a man with simple needs. Phil's a biology teacher. He once spent a whole Saturday showing me a moss.
It was a pretty good moss.
Every great expedition needs a leader with a name the men can rally behind. So I told Phil that once we got upriver, he should call me the River Fox.
"Why a fox?" Phil said.
"Foxes are cunning," I said. "They're fast, and they know rivers."
Phil thought about it. "Foxes aren't really river animals, Dale," he said. "If you want a river animal, you might think about the otter."
"Nobody's ever been scared of an otter," I said. He wrote "River Fox" in his journal, which isn't the same as calling me it.
That's when Marisol spoke up. She'd been sitting on a log at the edge of the firelight the whole time, sharpening a spear. I'd figured she was a stump.
"This is a terrible idea," she said. She listed the reasons. The river was dangerous. The bog was worse. If production caught us, we'd get pulled from the game. "And I've seen you swim," she said. "From underneath."
I could tell she was worried about me. When a woman lists the ways you might die, she's obviously been thinking about you a lot, and in detail.
"I mean it, Dale," she said. "If you go in the water up there, I am not fishing you out this time."
This time. A woman doesn't say "this time" unless she's keeping count, and a woman doesn't keep count unless she plans to keep going.
"Do you want to come with us?" Phil asked her. I thought that was rude of him, since she was obviously waiting for me to ask.
"No," Marisol said. "Absolutely not." She said it to Phil. Then she said, "Good night, Phil," by name, and nothing to me. Some feelings are too strong to put into words, or even into a nod.
Before dawn, Phil and I agreed to meet the next night at the production supply dock, where they kept the rafts. Then he hugged me again and started back across the island, scratching. I watched him go and felt something in my chest. I believe it was the fish.
I lay awake a long time making a list of what I'd buy with my ninety percent. A boat. A second boat, to tow the first one. A statue of the River Fox in the town square, facing the laundromat, so Hollis would have to see it every time he came looking for me.
Near the bottom, I put something nice for Phil. Then I took it off again.
You shouldn't decide things at night.
I've borrowed a lot of vehicles in my life, and I've returned almost a third of them. So on the walk to the supply dock, when Phil asked if this was stealing, I could talk to him as an expert.
"It's only stealing if you get caught," I said. "Or if you sink it." Phil wrote that down. He writes down a lot of what I say, and I've never once charged him for it.
The supply dock was a wooden pier at the far end of the production beach, with one yellow bulb humming over it. Three inflatable rafts were tied up there. They were gray and fat, and they didn't look like they'd put up a fight.
I'd brought provisions: a coconut, my fishing spear, two decorative pillows, and Gecko's entire supply of rice.
"Is that all the rice?" Phil said.
"It's the tribe's rice," I said. "I'm in the tribe, so some of it's mine, and I decided which part."
"Which part?" Phil said.
"All of it," I said. "They can always win more."
Phil had brought his journal, a water bottle, and a little first-aid kit. Before we left, he tore the map out of the journal, folded it twice, and buttoned it into his shirt pocket. He said it was so it would stay dry. I think it was so I couldn't get at it, which shows you how far Phil still has to go on trust.
I untied the nearest raft and stepped down into it. I held my fishing spear point down, because I wanted to look ready for anything.
The raft wasn't ready for anything. It let out a long, unhappy sound, like a bagpipe getting bad news, and folded up around me as it went under.
Phil pulled me out by the collar. The coconut floated. The rice didn't. The pillows bobbed off into the dark, looking comfortable.
"Maybe that's a sign," Phil said. "Maybe we should go back."
"A sign's a thing on a post with words on it," I said. "If you see one, read it to me."
"What about the rice?" Phil said.
"The rice knew the risks," I said. Then I looked down the dock and saw something better than a raft.
It was a little motorboat, white with silver trim, with leather seats and a tiny windshield and the words Sterling Silver painted along the side in fancy script. It was Brock Sterling's personal boat. I knew because there was a framed photo of Brock screwed to the dashboard, smiling at himself.
"We can't take Brock's boat," Phil whispered.
"Why not?" I said.
"Because it's Brock's," Phil said.
"Brock's said a hundred times that all he cares about is great television," I said. "So he's given up any right to his boat."
"I don't remember him saying that," Phil said.
"He said it to me privately," I said. "With his eyes."
The keys were in the ignition, on a keychain shaped like a tiny rubber Brock whose teeth lit up when you squeezed him. I squeezed him several times for luck.
Under the back seat was a cooler of sparkling water, a box of teeth-whitening strips, a spare safari vest, and a little orange case marked Emergency. I didn't open the case. I don't like to think about emergencies when I'm on vacation.
The problem was that the boat gleamed. In the moonlight, anybody on the beach would see it. "What we need," I told Phil, "is camouflage."
So we scooped mud from the edge of the mangroves and smeared it over every inch of Sterling Silver: the seats, the windshield, and the framed photo of Brock, who I felt looked better for it. When we were done, it looked like a big pile of mud shaped like a boat. That's the best camouflage there is, in a place with a lot of mud and no boats.
The mud smelled terrible, and Phil gagged twice. "That's the beauty of it," I told him. "Nothing comes near a thing that smells like this."
Phil didn't say anything for a while. Either he was impressed or he was trying not to breathe.
We waited at the river mouth for first light, because I didn't want to steer up a jungle river in the dark. I'm brave, but I'm not reckless, and I'm not good at steering.
The sun came up over the mouth of the Snorrel, and the birds started up in the trees. I stood at the wheel, covered in mud, and figured this must be how the great explorers felt. Magellan and those guys, right before the parts of their stories I usually skip.
I turned the key. The engine coughed and caught. Phil sat down in back with his hand pressed over his shirt pocket, and we pulled out into the river.
Behind us, a light came on at the supply dock, and Brock's voice carried across the lagoon, high and cracking. "My boat!" he yelled. "Somebody check on my boat!" He didn't mention us at all.
That tells you his priorities.
The Snorrel's the most beautiful river I've ever stolen a boat on. The jungle on both sides was so tall that the sun only got to us in long, skinny beams.
I stood at the wheel and watched the beams on the water, feeling small and humble. And I thought how someday, after I found the Golden Coconut, I'd come back and build a hotel right here. I'd clear out the jungle so the guests could see the river.
Phil sat up front with his journal, naming everything. "That's a kingfisher," he said. "That's a monitor lizard. That fern's been on Earth since before the dinosaurs."
"If it's been here that long," I said, "it should've done more with itself."
Around noon he spotted a white orchid on a mossy log and got real quiet. "That might be one of the rarest flowers in the South Pacific," he said. "There might be a few hundred left in the world."
I leaned over and picked it for Marisol. Now there are a few hundred minus one, which makes mine worth more.
"Dale," Phil said.
"She's gonna love it," I said.
To save fuel, I had Phil paddle while I kept the motor company. He paddled for about three hours. "It's good exercise," I told him. "You're lucky you've got a friend who looks out for your health."
Phil didn't say anything. He was breathing too hard.
In the afternoon the river widened into a slow brown pool, and in the middle of it sat an old man in a dugout canoe, mending a fishing net. His straw hat had been patched so many times it was mostly patches.
He watched us come: a mud-covered boat, a mud-covered man at the wheel, and a hive-covered man at the paddle. He didn't seem surprised. I liked him right away. Most people are surprised by me, and a few have had to sit down.
His name was Teodoro, he said, and he'd fished this river for sixty years. I told him I'd been on it since dawn, so we had a lot in common.
Teodoro looked at the river for a while. "The river does not hurry," he said, "and yet it reaches the sea."
"Thank you," I said. It's not every day a stranger compares you to a river, powerful and always moving forward. I could tell he'd heard about me.
"I think it's about patience," Phil said.
"Not everything's about you, Phil," I said.
Then Teodoro looked at our boat. It was riding low, from the cooler and the spare safari vest and the coconut I was saving for later. "A man who carries too much in his boat," he said, "will drink the river."
That one was obviously a clue. Drink the river. Either the Golden Coconut was underwater, or I should stay hydrated. Either way, he was looking out for me, so I opened a sparkling water from Brock's cooler, to be safe.
"The fish that boasts of its size," Teodoro said, "is the first one in the pan."
"I've been called a big fish," I told him. "A guy at the laundromat under my apartment said it. He meant it as a compliment, or close."
Teodoro laughed so hard he almost fell out of his canoe. Nobody's ever enjoyed my company that much on the first day.
Then he looked past me at Phil, who was resting on the paddle with his eyes closed and his hands all blistered. "A friend who paddles," Teodoro said, more quietly, "is worth more than gold."
I sat up straight. More than gold. Somewhere up this river was something worth more than the Golden Coconut. A platinum coconut, maybe, or one made out of diamonds.
"Which way?" I said. Teodoro just smiled and shook his head.
I figured he'd signed something.
Before we left, Teodoro handed us a fat silver fish wrapped in a banana leaf. In return, I gave him a pair of Brock's sunglasses from the glove box, so he'd have something to remember me by, or at least Brock.
"Upriver, the smell gets worse," Teodoro said, as we pulled away. "Hold your nose, and hold your friend."
"I'm not worried," I told him. And I wasn't. A bad smell had followed me from the boat to the beach, from the beach to camp, and from camp to here, and in all that time it had never once been anything to do with me.
That night we tied up under a fig tree, and I cooked Teodoro's fish over a little fire.
"I'm only allergic to shellfish," Phil said. "Regular fish is fine."
"Let's not take any chances," I said, and I ate it myself. It was flaky and sweet and a little smoky. It was the best meal I'd had since Phil's picnic.
"Teodoro was really kind to strangers," Phil said, and he wrote it in his journal.
"He sure was," I said. I decided right then that Teodoro deserved a share of the Golden Coconut, and I took it out of Phil's ten percent.
They'd seemed to get along.
We smelled the Bog of Endless Regret about an hour before we saw it. It smelled like a rotten egg, but a rotten egg that had worked hard and gotten promoted. Phil tied his bandanna over his nose and mouth. I didn't bother. I'd been smelling something like it for weeks, and a man builds up a tolerance.
Then the jungle opened up, and there it was. The river spread out into a wide, shallow swamp of yellow-green muck that bubbled here and there in slow, fat burps. Dead trees stood around in it, waiting. A haze hung over everything, and even the mosquitoes flew around it.
"Wow," Phil said, through the bandanna.
"Vindication," I said.
For weeks, people on the show had looked at me when they talked about the smell. Gus looked at me. Professor Lund looked at me, then at her shelter, then back at me. And here, finally, was proof. It had been the bog all along, from three miles inland. That's how strong that bog is.
"I think the bog's part of the smell at camp," Phil said carefully. "But maybe not all of it."
"What's the rest?" I said.
"It's more of a personal smell," Phil said.
"Whose?" I said.
"Never mind," Phil said. He wrote something in his journal. Then he closed it and held it shut.
Fifty yards in, Sterling Silver slid up onto a mudbank and stopped. Somebody had to get out and push.
"A captain stays with his ship," I told Phil. "That's one of the oldest laws of the sea. It's older than most of the sea."
Phil nodded. He took off his shoes and climbed over the side. The first few steps were fine. Then he was in up to his knees, and then up to his waist.
"Dale," he said, in his calm teacher voice, "I think I'm sinking."
"Well, stop sinking," I said.
"That's not really how it works," Phil said. That's Phil. Even while he's sinking, he has to be right.
They say in a crisis you find out who you really are. I found out I'm a man who can see both sides.
On one side, there'd be more room in the boat, and the cooler would last twice as long. And fifty-fifty, which was already ninety-ten, would turn into a hundred-nothing. That's my favorite split. On the other side, Phil's mom sends me a fruitcake every Christmas, and she'd have questions.
I was still weighing it when I saw the corner of the map sticking out of Phil's shirt pocket. It was maybe four inches above the muck, and dropping. Suddenly this wasn't about Phil anymore.
I grabbed one of Brock's oars and held it out over the side. Phil reached for it. So did I, in a way, because I was reaching past the oar for his pocket. I got the map first. Then, since I was already down there, I got Phil.
I pulled harder than I've pulled on anything since the jet ski, and that time the lake won. The boat tipped, and I almost went in, which would've been a tragedy for the show. In the end Phil climbed the last part himself, by grabbing a clump of reeds. Reeds are a grass. He's allergic.
He flopped into the bottom of the boat, covered in sulfur mud from the chest down and hives from the chest up, and lay there breathing. Then he looked up at me with tears in his eyes.
"You didn't leave me," Phil said.
"Of course not," I said. And I meant it. The map was a little damp, but basically fine.
Grandpa Ray told us it's called the Bog of Endless Regret because everybody who crosses it ends up regretting something. He was right.
I regretted not copying the map.
It took the rest of the afternoon to push Sterling Silver through the shallows. By push, I mean Phil pushed. He stood on a sunken log so he wouldn't go under again, and I steered and held the map up high, out of reach of the splashing.
"Could you maybe help push?" Phil said.
"Somebody's got to hold the map," I said.
We tied up just before dark on a bank of dry sand, and Phil fell asleep in the back of the boat in his muddy clothes. That's when I first noticed how bad he smelled.
It was terrible. A deep, rich, sulfur stink came off him in waves. And it hit me that it'd probably been Phil all along, back at camp too. I decided to forgive him, because that's what friends do.
Around midnight he woke up for a sip of water, and I told him. "I figured out the smell," I said. "It's you. I don't hold it against you."
Phil looked at me a long time in the moonlight. "That's not how I remember it," he said. Then he rolled over and went back to sleep.
I stayed up a while longer, holding my nose. Weirdly, it didn't help.
By midmorning Phil didn't smell like the bog anymore. Now he smelled like a guy who'd recently been in a bog, which is different, and worse, because it lingers.
I steered Brock's boat with one hand, the way the great captains do. With the other hand I ate the coconut I'd been saving for later, since it was later.
Phil sat in the back drying the map one corner at a time. I'd let him hold it for this, under supervision. He hadn't dried himself at all, so I knew he finally understood which of the two of them mattered.
"Dale," Phil said, "I want to thank you for coming back for me in the bog."
"No need," I said. "I already thanked myself, several times. It sounded more sincere coming from me."
Around the next bend we heard a woman's voice say, "Hey, guys, so we're on the river." It was the voice people use when they're talking to nobody and expect to get paid for it.
Tiffani and Brayden Sloane drifted into view on a raft made of bamboo and production cooler lids. Tiffani held the phone. Brayden held Tiffani, at an angle that worked for both of them. The current was doing all the work, and I could tell they planned to thank it in the caption.
"Oh my gosh," Tiffani told the phone. "It's the pillow guy."
I was flattered. You don't often get recognized for your architecture.
Brayden held up a map of his own, and it was laminated, which I found offensive. Ours had been through a bog. Theirs looked like it had been to a spa.
"The Golden Coconut's ours, bro," Brayden said. "No offense, but your map is, like, moist."
"It's not moist," I said. "It's seasoned."
Phil said maybe we could all work together and share whatever we found. That's the kind of thing Phil says, and it's why it took him eleven tries to get on TV.
I looked at Brayden, and Brayden looked at me, and Tiffani swung the phone back and forth between us so nobody at home would miss it. Then I answered for our whole boat.
I threw a coconut at them.
There were about forty coconuts rolling around the bottom of Brock's boat. I'd figured he kept them for snacks, but now I understood. Brock was a man who prepared for war.
My first coconut missed their raft by a lot. It sailed into the jungle and hit something that grunted, and a second later the something threw it back.
"Was that a pig?" Phil said.
"That was an ally," I said. "He's just confused."
What followed was the most savage naval battle in the history of the Snorrel River, and as far as I know the only one. Brayden threw with a smooth, loopy motion he said he'd learned at a wellness retreat. Tiffani filmed it all and whispered, "This is so raw, you guys."
Phil wouldn't throw anything, on principle. Instead he caught the coconuts that came at us and handed them to me, which is the same as throwing them, but with more guilt.
"I'm not throwing," Phil said, and handed me one.
"Of course not," I said. "You're a supplier."
A coconut hit me in the shoulder and I went down. I lay in the bottom of the boat and thought it over. I'd been wounded in battle, which meant I could walk with a limp for the rest of my life. It was my shoulder, but I didn't see why that should matter.
While I was down there, I found a little orange case under the seat marked Emergency. I decided this counted. Inside was a flare gun, a tin of breath mints, and a signed photo of Brock, I guess so whoever rescued him would know who they'd rescued.
I stood up with the flare gun to fire a warning shot into the sky, the way civilized navies do.
"Dale, wait," Phil said. That's when the boat hit a rock.
The flare went off sideways and skipped across the water like a flat stone at a lake. It went right between Tiffani and Brayden and came to a stop among the cooler lids. It turns out cooler lids are made of something that's always wanted to be on fire.
The raft went up all at once, and Tiffani and Brayden went into the river. Phil leaned so far over the side that I had to grab his belt.
"Thanks," Phil said.
"Don't mention it," I said.
The map was in his lap.
Tiffani came up holding the phone over her head, still recording. That phone's been through more than most soldiers.
"Okay," she told it. "So this is honestly a huge moment for us."
"Babe, get the flames," Brayden said. "Are you getting the flames?"
They were fine. I want to be clear about that, for legal reasons.
Their map floated past us, perfectly dry because of the lamination, and I hooked it with an oar. Phil said we should give it back.
"Phil," I said, "they've still got something worth a lot more than a map. They've got each other. And a phone, which is the one they really want."
I wiped the laminated map on my shorts and tucked it in my shirt. I've kept it ever since. A map that can't get wet is a map you hang on to.
Phil tossed them our two biggest coconuts to float on. They kicked away downstream toward the beach, still filming, talking about how the universe had a plan for them. I hoped so. Mine had involved a rock.
That night we tied up on a sandbar, and I told Phil how the battle would go in the history books. I'd lured the enemy close, I said, and faked a terrible injury, and then, at the key moment, fired.
"I mainly remember a rock," Phil said.
"The rock was part of it," I said.
"You didn't know the rock was there."
"Nobody knew the rock was there," I said. "That's what made it brilliant."
Phil wrote something in his journal. I asked him what, and he said, "Rock."
That's why nobody lets the ammunition boy write the history books.
We heard the waterfall a long time before we saw it. It was loud, and I figured it was a crowd that had heard I was coming.
Then it showed up, a white wall of water about a hundred feet tall, throwing rainbows around. Phil took off his hat. I took off my shirt, in case there were helicopters.
"Okay," I said. "We haul the boat up the cliff, like the old explorers. Ropes and suffering."
"Who does the suffering?" Phil said.
"You," I said. "I'll do the explaining."
"Or," Phil said, "we could use the boat lift."
There was a boat lift beside the falls, all brass and teak, with a potted fern and a little sign that said WELCOME, PLEASE RING. Phil rang.
The platform carried us up the cliff, muddy boat and all. A recorded voice thanked us for visiting and mentioned that the Pell Foundation had planted fourteen million trees.
"That's wonderful," Phil said.
"It's a little showy," I said. "When I plant a tree, I don't tell everybody."
"I've never seen you plant a tree," Phil said.
"Exactly," I said. "That's my point."
Halfway up, Phil asked if we should be worried that a secret river had an elevator. I told him that if they didn't want guests, they wouldn't have a fern.
He didn't have an answer for that.
Nobody waters a fern for enemies.
I'd always pictured the source of a great river as a muddy spring, or a pipe. The source of the Snorrel was a marble fountain. The whole river came pouring out of the mouth of a stone dolphin, like he'd been holding it in for years.
Past the fountain, marble terraces went all the way up the hill, and peacocks walked around on the lawns. One hedge was trimmed into the shape of Dr. Pell, holding a smaller hedge. The smaller hedge was a hospital.
And it smelled great, like coconut and vanilla and money. For the first time in weeks I could smell something besides the island, and what I could smell was Phil.
Two young guys in cream polo shirts came down the steps with a garden hose and, without a word, hosed Phil off. Then they talked quietly for a second and hosed me off too. I took that as a courtesy, so Phil wouldn't feel singled out.
I'd been missing Dusty. Since the beach, the only one I could confide in was Phil, and Phil remembers things. So I sat on a bench next to a peacock and told it everything: my strategy, my fears, the ninety-ten split. The peacock listened in perfect silence, and then it screamed.
That's more feedback than Dusty ever gave me.
Phil wanted to see the gift shop. Everything in it was a coconut candle. The biggest one was the size of a fire hydrant, and it was called Island Serenity, and it cost nine hundred dollars.
"Nine hundred dollars," Phil said. "For a candle."
"It'd fit in Brock's boat," I said, "if we took out the seats."
The tag said every candle was hand-dipped with love by "our Exile Ridge family." I didn't know what that meant. I figured it was a nice family with a lot of wax.
Past the gift shop was a stone arch with orchids hanging off it. Carved across the top it said EXILE RIDGE REST CAMP.
Phil stopped walking. "Dale," he said, "Exile Ridge is supposed to be on the other side of the island."
"Islands are round, Phil," I said. "Everything's on the other side of the island."
He didn't find that as comforting as I did.
On a terrace past the arch sat Gus the Moose, in a cream smock, looking at the sun and crying into a towel. It was three in the afternoon. He was crying about the sunset in advance, and I respected the planning.
Gus waved at us with a hand that looked like it was coated in wax. I waved back with a hand coated in fish.
Then she came down the steps. It was Marisol Vega, in the same cream smock. She was prettier than any of the marble, and a lot less likely to scream at me than the peacock.
"Dale?" she said. "Phil? What are you doing here?"
"I could ask you the same thing," I said. "But I won't. A man knows when he's been followed."
"I got blindsided at the Torch Tribunal two nights ago," Marisol said. "A boat brought me here to rest."
I nodded the way you nod when a woman makes up a story to protect her pride. It was obvious what had happened. She heard I'd gone upriver, so she got herself voted out on purpose and came all this way to be near me. Some women write letters.
"I didn't follow you, Dale," she said. "I didn't know you were gone. I'm not sure anyone did."
"They knew," I said. "They're just hiding it, like you."
She lowered her voice. "Something's wrong with this place. They won't let us leave. Get back in your boat."
"I'm not leaving without you," I said.
"That's exactly what I'm afraid of," Marisol said.
A bell rang, and one of the guys with the hose came over to say Dr. Pell would be honored if we joined him for dinner. Marisol looked at the boat lift. Phil looked at Marisol. I had a question.
"Will there be dessert?" I said.
"At the compound," the man said, "there's always dessert."
It was the most beautiful thing anybody ever said to me. That includes Marisol, and she once told me to keep breathing.
I went and found my shirt.
The dining room was the size of a small airport. It had chandeliers made out of seashells and a table long enough to have its own weather. On the wall was an oil painting of Pell handing a library to some orphans, who looked grateful, but also like somebody had told them to.
Dr. Augustin Pell stood up to greet us. He had silver hair, a cream linen suit, and the soft voice of a man who's never had to raise it, because he pays people to raise it for him.
He took Phil's hand in both of his. "Mr. Brumley," he said. "Eleven applications. That's devotion."
Phil turned the color of a boiled shrimp, which with his allergy I thought was brave. Then Pell turned to me. "And Mr. Tummins," he said. "You stole Brock's boat."
"Borrowed," I said.
"That's what you told Mr. Brandt," he said, "about the jet ski."
I decided right then that I didn't care for him, and that I'd take extra silverware.
There were seven forks at my place. I counted them twice. That's a lot of forks for one guy.
"Which one's for the soup?" I whispered to Phil.
"None of them," Phil whispered. "That's a spoon."
I ate with two of the forks and put three in my pockets. That still left two on the table, so nobody could say I took more than my share.
The first course was clear soup with one flower floating in it. I ate the flower. Phil said it was a garnish, and I told him a garnish is just food that's shy.
The second course was a fish so small it seemed to be apologizing. I accepted.
The third course was a terrine. Phil told me later it was mostly eel. I wish he'd mentioned that sooner, because I ate his too.
"Is everything to your liking?" Pell said.
"The forks are great," I said.
He smiled at my pockets. I smiled back at his.
Over dinner, Pell told us about his philanthropy. He'd built hospitals and endowed libraries. He'd started a scholarship for underprivileged oboists.
"And a museum wing," he said, "devoted entirely to sand."
"Do you charge for the sand?" I said.
"Admission is free," he said.
"Well, there's your problem," I said.
He talked about giving the way other guys talk about golf, with a faraway look, like he could see a hospital out there and was picking a club. Phil listened with tears in his eyes. I listened with soup on my chin. We each honor greatness our own way.
I thought about what I'd do if I were a billionaire. I'd give a lot to charity too, at first, just to see how it felt. If I didn't like how it felt, I'd stop, and then I'd tell everybody I hadn't.
Then dessert came. It was a coconut soufflé on a silver tray, tall and golden and shaking a little. I've been in love a few times, mostly with Marisol, but never as hard as when the waiter set that down and stepped back.
Pell put down his spoon and got serious.
"Television is cruel, gentlemen," he said. "A contestant is voted off, and in one moment they lose everything. The cameras. The beach. The purpose. I've watched it for thirty-one seasons, and I couldn't bear it any longer. So I give them a home."
He pointed out the window at a long, low building with smoke coming out of its chimneys. The smoke smelled like coconut.
"Here at Exile Ridge," he said, "no one is ever voted off of anything again. They have structure. They have meaningful work. They hand-dip coconut candles for the Foundation gift shop, and every candle funds the Foundation, which funds the compound, which makes the candles. It's a circle, you see. Nothing in it ever ends."
"How long do they stay?" Phil said.
"Forever," Pell said kindly. "A season that never ends. Gus, Ms. Vega, the others. Nobody goes home sad again, because nobody goes home."
Phil had gone pale. "That's kidnapping," he said.
"It's a residency," said Dr. Pell.
Phil pushed his soufflé away. I took that to mean he wanted me to have it, and I respected his wishes. That's what you do for a friend, even when it means eating fast before he changes his mind.
He didn't change his mind.
I thought hard about everything Pell had said. Candles. Forever. Gus and Marisol, trapped.
I knew I had to say something. So I wiped my mouth with a napkin that I found out later cost more than my apartment, and I asked the question I'd come all this way to ask.
"Is there any more soufflé?"
Phil put his face in his hands. The waiter said he'd check, and while he was gone, I asked the other question I'd come all this way to ask, which was about the Golden Coconut.
The room got quiet. Out on the lawn, a peacock stopped screaming. That's how quiet.
Phil looked down at his journal. He'd been writing in it under the table all night. He was taking minutes at his own kidnapping, which in fairness it was.
"What are you writing?" I whispered.
"Everything," Phil whispered.
"Did you put in the forks?"
"Especially the forks."
Pell folded his napkin and set it next to his plate. He looked at me for a long time. Then he smiled, slow and gentle and generous, the way a dentist smiles right before he says, "Little pinch."
I smiled back. Two men of the world, I thought, who understood each other perfectly.
"I've been hoping you'd ask," he said.
"And I've been hoping you'd answer," I said.
He didn't. He just nodded at the waiters, and one of them locked the big doors, and another one locked the little doors.
I waited a while longer, to be polite.
The soufflé wasn't coming.
We got captured the way a lot of great men get captured, after dessert.
Four attendants in cream polo shirts marched us down a marble staircase. I carried my own soufflé dish, in case there was anything left in the corners. There wasn't. I checked again at the bottom of the stairs, and again at the door.
"It's empty, Dale," Phil said.
"You don't know that," I said. "You've never checked a corner the way I check a corner."
The candle room was a long, hot hall full of copper vats of melted coconut wax, with wicks hanging down from wooden racks overhead. It smelled so much like coconut that after an hour I could taste it in my teeth. After two hours I could hear it.
A loudspeaker in the ceiling played Dr. Pell reading his own poetry. Every so often he'd stop in the middle of a poem to remind us of our quota, which was forty candles a day, and then go back to the poem. You were never sure which part was the poem.
"Forty candles," Phil said. "Is that a lot?"
"Not for me," I said. I'd never made a candle in my life.
Gus was the best dipper in the room. His candles came out tall and smooth and perfect, and every time he finished one, he held it up to the light and cried. He said it was like a sunset he'd made himself.
My candles came out lumpy. An attendant said they looked like potatoes that had been frightened. I told him that was a style. He wrote something on his clipboard, and I hoped it was the name of the style.
Phil was a natural. He dipped slow and steady, the way he does everything, and he talked to each candle while it cooled, the same way he talks to the frogs in his classroom.
By the end of the first day, Phil had made fifty-one candles and I'd made six. I let him put four of his under my name, which I felt was big of me.
I tried to bribe the attendant at the door. I offered him Brock Sterling's boat for a key. He said that boat was tied up at Dr. Pell's dock now, so it was Dr. Pell's boat.
So I offered him Phil.
On the second morning, a boat brought a new resident. It was Professor Annette Lund, voted out at the Torch Tribunal the night before, still holding her notes on group dynamics.
She saw me and stopped. "Oh," she said. "Oh, no."
Her eyebrows had never grown back, so it was hard to tell how she felt about seeing me, except from everything else about her.
"Professor!" I said. "Welcome to the family."
"I'd like a vat," she told the attendant, "as far from him as you have."
She picked one at the far end of the hall, behind a pillar. That's a smart spot, because pillars are load-bearing. I went over and told her so, as an architect.
"I'm aware, Dale," she said.
Within an hour she'd made herself a pair of safety goggles out of two candle molds and some twine. Nobody else in the room needed safety goggles. I took it as a compliment. She clearly thought I was a man of great energy, and great energy can splash.
"Those are good goggles," I called down the hall.
"Thank you," she called back, and tightened the twine.
I walked over to see how they worked. She took a step back for every step I took forward, until she was flat against the wall. In science you keep a safe distance from your subject, and she did it perfectly.
"Do they fog up?" I said.
"Not yet," she said.
That night we slept on cots in a row under the wick racks. Gus snored like an outboard motor that kept starting and never went anywhere, which, now that I think about it, is also Gus.
Professor Lund slept behind her pillar, still in her goggles. Phil lay on the cot next to mine, looking up at the dark.
"Dale," he said softly. "I know this isn't the time. But I want you to know you're my best friend in the world. You always have been."
I lay there and thought about all the years Phil had stood by me. The jet ski. The time I sold his car while he was at a wedding. The time I got us both banned from the aquarium. Through all of it, he never once gave up on me, which shows poor judgment, if you think about it. A guy like that deserves to hear something from the heart.
"Okay," I said.
It got quiet, and I could tell he wanted more. So I said, "Same here, I guess. Roughly." Then I patted him on the arm twice, which is once more than I usually pat anybody, so he'd know how much I meant it.
Since we were sharing feelings, I told him how I really felt, which was that all of this was his fault.
"My fault?" Phil said.
"Let's go through it," I said.
I laid it out calm and in order. He was the one who applied to the show eleven times, when any normal person would've taken the hint after six. He was the one who let himself get swapped to Barracuda and left me alone with Carol, who everybody knows is a bad influence. He was the one who sank in the bog and made me save him, which took a lot out of me, and some of it was the map.
"And who rang the bell on the boat lift?" I said.
"I did," Phil said.
"There you go," I said. "All I did was follow you, as a friend."
"That's not how I remember it," Phil said.
"That's the whole problem," I said. "You remember things. It never helps anybody."
Phil was quiet a long time. Down the row, Gus said something in his sleep about a pelican, and the vats ticked as they cooled. Then Phil said he understood, and that he forgave me.
I told him I accepted his apology.
Every great escape starts with a plan. Mine started on the third morning, with a candle the size of a fire hydrant.
On Thursdays the big Island Serenity candles got wheeled down to the dock and loaded onto a flat wooden barge bound for the Foundation stores overseas. Nobody checked them. They were just candles. And if a man was inside one, he'd be just a candle too.
I explained the plan to Phil that night.
"Part one," I said. "We dip you, real carefully, until you're a nine-hundred-dollar candle. Part two, I stay behind and lead the resistance."
"What's the resistance going to do?" Phil said.
"Mostly eat," I said.
"And part three?"
"I haven't worked out part three," I said. "In my experience, part three takes care of itself."
Phil thought for a while. "How do I breathe inside a candle?"
"Through the wick," I said.
He thought about that one for a long time, the way he does when he's looking for the nicest way to say something. Then he said he'd do it, because he trusted me.
Personally, I've never trusted anybody, and it's worked out great for me. But I didn't want to discourage him at such a big moment, so I just shook his hand.
It was waxy.
We waited until the attendants changed shifts. I tied a rope around Phil's middle, hooked him to the big wick rack over the biggest vat, and started to crank. Phil rose up into the air, slow and graceful, in his smock.
"Dale," he said, "I'm not sure about this."
"You're doing great," I said.
He said he wasn't sure about this about nine more times. I didn't count. He did.
The crank was harder to turn than it looked. I put my whole back into it, then my whole shoulder, and then, for leverage, I put my foot against the vat. I've always had great leverage. That's the problem with it.
The vat tipped over with a long, slow groan. A wave of warm coconut wax rolled across the floor, about ankle deep, and it smelled terrific.
Phil swung above it, perfectly safe, kicking his feet. I'd saved him from the wax by not having dipped him yet. That was lucky timing, and I've since decided it was also the plan.
"Did you mean to do that?" Phil said.
"Every bit of it," I said.
The door burst open and three attendants rushed in. They took two steps into the wax and stopped. Then they tried to take a third step.
Coconut wax cools faster than you'd think. In about a minute, all three were stuck in the doorway with their arms out, like a museum exhibit called Men Who Hurried.
"Help," one of them said.
"Hang in there," I said. I was talking to Phil.
The attendants weren't going anywhere.
That's when Marisol came in, through a side door I'd never noticed, with a ring of keys in one hand and a hairpin in her teeth. She looked at the tipped vat. She looked at the stuck attendants, and at Phil hanging from the ceiling, and then at me.
"I was going to do this on Tuesday," she said. "This works too."
She moved through the room fast and quiet. She unlocked the dormitory and woke up the other workers. She found the master switch for the loudspeaker and shut off Dr. Pell in the middle of a sonnet. Then she laid cot frames across the wax to make a bridge, and in five minutes every candle worker in the compound was walking over it toward the dock.
I knew this was my moment. Great events need great words, so I climbed up on an overturned vat and raised my arms.
"Friends," I said. "Candle makers. Tonight you are free. Tonight, the wick of tyranny has been snuffed."
Nobody stopped walking. Gus went by with a peacock under each arm, crying. Professor Lund went by in her goggles, taking a wide curve around my vat that kept her as far from me as the walls allowed.
"Some will ask, who freed us?" I said. "And history will answer. A liberator. The Liberator."
I waited there to let it catch on. It didn't catch on. I figured it needed time, like any great nickname, or a soufflé.
I gave the rest of the speech anyway. It ran twenty-two minutes, including a part about my childhood and a part where I compared myself to a lighthouse. The only one who heard the whole thing was an attendant whose shoes were stuck in the wax up to the laces. He couldn't leave, but I like to think he'd have stayed anyway.
"Any questions?" I said at the end.
"Can you get me out?" the attendant said.
"Great question," I said. "I'll get back to you."
By then the room was empty except for him and me. I climbed down, feeling like I'd done a great thing, and also like I was forgetting something.
"Dale," said a voice above me. It was Phil, still hanging from the ceiling.
Marisol came back and cut him down with a candle knife. I'd told Phil I'd come back for him, and I would have, eventually, once I remembered where I'd left him. He landed easy and thanked her. Then, because he's Phil, he thanked me.
"Dock," Marisol said. "Now. Both of you."
"Right behind you," I said. Then I went the other way, down a hallway marked PRIVATE, toward a brass sign at the end that said VAULT.
A liberator deserves a small honorarium.
The vault door was standing wide open. Rich people never think anybody will come into their house uninvited, which is why it's so easy.
"Hello?" I said. Nobody answered, so I went in. That's the rule.
Inside was a round room lined with glass cases. One held a jar of sand labeled "From the Museum Wing." Another held what looked like every library card from every library Dr. Pell ever gave away. I thought that was a weird thing to keep, until I got it. Nobody could check anything out.
In the middle of the room, on a velvet pedestal under a glass dome, sat the Golden Coconut. It glowed. Not like a light bulb. More the way a dessert glows when you're the only one at the table who knows there's a second one.
A little brass plaque on the pedestal said SEASON FOUR. I took off my hat. Then, to be safe, I took off the dome.
The coconut was lighter than I expected, which I figured proved how pure the gold was. The finest things in life are always light. Feathers, angels, soufflé, and a clear conscience, which I've always made a point of keeping very light.
I held it up and started my acceptance speech. I'd gotten as far as thanking myself when somebody behind me said, "Mr. Tummins."
It was Pell, standing in the doorway in a silk robe, holding a lit candle in a silver holder. He didn't look angry. He looked disappointed.
"I would have given it to you," he said softly. "After forty years of service. That's how the Foundation works. You only had to wait."
"Forty years," I said. "Is that counting weekends?"
"Weekends," he said, "are when we do the votives."
I took a step back to think over his offer, and my elbow hit a tall brass rack of display candles. Every one of them was lit. Rich people will light candles in a room nobody's in, just to show they can.
The rack tipped over, very slowly.
"Oh, dear," said Pell.
I'll say this right away. It was the most beautiful fire I've ever caused, and I've caused several.
It started on the carpet, which was worth more than my building and burned like it knew. Then it got the curtains, then the paneling, and then it went out into the hall, very polite, one room at a time. The coconut wax made every flame burn gold, and the whole place smelled like a birthday.
"Mr. Tummins," Pell called through the smoke, "put that down and help me."
"I can't," I said. "I'm holding something."
I walked out through the smoke with the Golden Coconut under my arm. Behind me the gift shop caught, and a whole row of nine-hundred-dollar Island Serenity candles started burning at once. I guess that's what they were for.
The hedge shaped like Dr. Pell went up, and then the hedge shaped like a hospital. The peacocks left in single file, with dignity, which is how you'd hope a peacock would leave. They didn't let me down.
Everyone got out. I want that on the record.
Gus carried two attendants down the steps, crying because the fire was so beautiful. I didn't argue with him. Professor Lund walked calmly through the smoke. She had no eyebrows left to lose, and it gave her a kind of freedom the rest of us will never know.
"Hi, Professor," I said as she went by.
"No," she said, and kept walking.
Marisol was down at the dock, lashing gift-shop shelving together into rafts and counting heads. She counted me last. I think she was saving the best for last.
Phil was waiting in Brock's boat at the end of the dock with the engine running. He wouldn't leave without me. I've never understood why he does stuff like that, but I've always been glad he does.
I'd forgotten where we parked.
Then something roared in the boathouse. Pell came shooting across the fountain pool on a gold-colored jet ski, with his robe flying out behind him, headed for the boat lift.
I took the wheel.
I want to be honest about what happened next, because history will make it sound heroic. I was steering with one knee. I was holding the Golden Coconut over my head with both hands, so Marisol could see it, and I wasn't looking where I was going.
"Dale," Phil said.
"Not now," I said. "She's looking."
"Dale."
Brock's boat hit the jet ski broadside with a deep, satisfying clonk. Pell flew off in a nice arc and landed in the fountain pool. The jet ski rolled over, made one long, sad gurgle, and sank.
Pell was fine. He climbed onto a stray Island Serenity candle and paddled toward the boat lift with his hands, still in his robe, still looking generous.
I watched the bubbles come up where the jet ski went down, and a deep, peaceful feeling came over me. Some men are put on this earth to cure diseases. Some are here to build hospitals, or raise kids, or swim out and save people from rocks. I'm here to put jet skis on the bottom of things, one at a time, for as long as I'm needed.
"Are you okay?" Phil said.
"I've never been better," I said. "I know who I am now. I'm a guy who sinks jet skis."
"That's not a job, Dale," Phil said.
"It's a calling," I said.
Phil took the wheel back and got us pointed toward the dock. I looked at the bubbles one more time and made a note to tell Hollis. I thought it might help him understand.
It was never personal.
There's no feeling like going downriver after you've burned down a billionaire's house. The current does all the work, and you just sit there.
Every so often there's a soft boom way behind you. That's the candle inventory, still finding its way to the fire. It's nice to hear your work carrying on without you.
We had Brock Sterling's boat. It still had some of my mud camouflage on it, and now it also had a dent in the front the exact shape of a jet ski.
"That dent's going to be hard to explain," Phil said.
"It's not a dent," I said. "It's a trophy that happens to be part of the boat."
Behind us, tied on with extension cords, we towed three rafts made out of gift-shop shelving. The freed candle workers sat on them in rows, smelling like coconut and blinking at the sky.
Some of them had dipped candles so long they couldn't stop. They'd doze off and keep making little dipping motions with their hands. I've always found it restful to watch other people work.
I sat up front with the Golden Coconut in my lap. "Can I hold it?" Phil said.
"Of course," I said. "As soon as we reach the beach, and I get it appraised, and I make a few calls."
Phil nodded. I could tell it meant a lot to him that I'd said "of course."
Around midmorning we passed the Bog of Endless Regret. Everybody held their noses, and they kept holding them for an hour after, way past where you could even see the bog. That's how strong that bog is. It follows you.
Gus was weeping softly on the last raft, and I asked Phil if Gus was hurt.
"It's the sunrise," Phil said.
Gus had also wept at the peacocks, at a moth, and at the compound burning down, which he called "the saddest beautiful thing."
I've only cried once as an adult. A waiter told me the soup I'd already eaten wasn't included.
"That's a different kind of crying," Phil said.
"It was a lot of soup," I said.
Old Teodoro was sitting on a sandbar mending his net. Same hat, same net, possibly the same knot.
He raised one hand as we floated by. "The man who burns the house," he called, "should not also ask for breakfast."
It was a strange thing to say, but with Teodoro you have to listen for what's underneath. So I steered over to the sandbar.
"Got any breakfast?" I said.
Teodoro laughed for a long time, and then he gave me a fish.
"I think the proverb meant the opposite," Phil said.
"I'm the one holding the fish," I said.
As we drifted on, I thought about Dr. Pell's jet ski, which was at the bottom of the Snorrel now, next to most of his gift shop. I wondered if he'd ask me to pay for it. That'd make two jet skis I owed people, and two is how most fleets get started.
"Are you thinking about jet skis?" Phil said.
"I'm thinking about logistics," I said.
In the afternoon I told the candle workers the story of their rescue, so they'd have it straight for the interviews. I explained how I'd planned the escape from the start, and how I'd set the compound on fire as a signal. I pointed out how well the signal had worked, since you could still see it.
The workers nodded. Some of them were just dipping in their sleep, but I took it as nodding.
Phil looked up from his journal, which still had a scorch mark from the day I invented fire. "That's not how I remember it," he said.
That's the trouble with journals. You write things down the way they happened. Then later, when you need them to have happened another way, there they are, in pen.
"Is that thing still waterproof?" I said.
"Yes," Phil said.
"Fireproof?"
"No," Phil said, and he moved it to his other side.
By evening the river had gotten wide and the sky had gone the color of a peach left on a dashboard, so I decided it was time to ask Marisol to marry me.
She'd followed me all the way upriver. Then she'd pretended to get voted out, just to be there when I showed up. A woman only goes to that kind of trouble for one man.
Marisol had taken over steering after the sandbar, because everyone asked her to. Some people asked twice.
The only dry place on the boat to kneel was the cushion in the back, and Professor Lund was sitting on it, still wearing her candle-mold goggles.
"I need that cushion," I said.
"Of course you do," she said.
She moved to the edge, I knelt, and the boat tipped. Professor Lund went over backward into the river, holding her notebook up over her head the whole way down. I thought that showed real priorities.
Gus fished her out by the collar. "Don't mind me," she said, through her teeth.
So I didn't. I took Marisol's free hand. The other one was on the wheel, which I respected.
"Marisol," I said, "will you be my wife?"
She looked at me for a long time. Then she said, "Not in a million years, Dale."
The grand prize was one million dollars, so I knew exactly what she meant. Not yet. Not until after the finale. I've always admired a woman who keeps her eye on the money.
"That was a no," Phil said quietly.
"It was a not yet," I said. "Write it down."
He wrote it down. I asked to hear it, and he read it back: "Dale proposed. Marisol said no. Professor Lund fell in the river."
"You misspelled 'not yet,'" I said.
"I didn't spell it at all," Phil said.
"That's the problem," I said.
At dusk we came around the last bend and saw the beach, with the production tents and the lights. Brock Sterling was at the waterline in his safari vest, holding his brass snuffer and looking at his boat.
I'd only seen that face once before. It was on Hollis, the day I gave him back his jet ski's handlebars and told him where the rest of it was.
Brock didn't look at me. He looked at the dent.
"You took my boat," Brock Sterling said. We hadn't even touched sand yet.
"I didn't take it," I said. "I improved it." I pointed out the camouflage.
He looked at the dent. Then he looked at the candle workers, and at Gus, and at Marisol, and his face went through a few colors. One of them I don't think has a name yet.
"Where have you been?" he said.
"Well," I said, "first there was a waterfall."
He held up one hand. "No," he said. "You were at the rest camp. All of you. It was very restful."
Behind him, the whole crew nodded at the same time. I'd never seen that crew agree on anything before, not even lunch.
That night the production tent glowed until dawn. Through the canvas I could hear Brock on a satellite phone with a lot of lawyers, saying "liability" and "containment" and "narrative."
Then somebody said "spin-off," and I sat up so fast I hit my head on a tent pole. The legend had promised a spin-off. It was all coming true. The head would heal.
Kevin came out around midnight with a clipboard to take statements.
"I'll give you Brock's boat," I said, "if you tell me what's going on."
"It's Brock's boat," Kevin said.
"Brock's got a lot on his plate," I said. "He'd probably be glad to have one less thing."
"I could lose my job over this," Kevin said.
"That's why I'm offering you a boat," I said. "So you'll have somewhere to live."
He wrote down nothing and walked off sweating. I took that as a counteroffer.
The next morning the crew searched everybody's stuff "for flammables." They took the matches and the candles, and a lighter Grandpa Ray swore he'd never seen before, which said "Ray" on it.
"Never seen it," Ray said again, and winked at me.
They didn't search the decorative pillows. Nobody had touched those pillows on purpose since the shelter came down, which is why I'd hidden the Golden Coconut inside one.
I slept on it every night after that, like a dragon on its gold. I kept turning the gold over to find the flat side.
There isn't one.
While we were gone, Carol the goat had become the star of the season.
"She gets more fan mail than anyone," Kevin told me.
"More than me?" I said.
"More than everyone," Kevin said. "Combined."
A crew member had made her a tiny yellow bandanna, and there was talk of a calendar. When Carol saw me, she gave me the same look she gave the first clue, right before she ate it.
Let's look at the record. Carol had eaten a clue, a flip-flop, and part of the shelter. I'd found the Golden Coconut. Nobody was offering me a calendar.
"She's very photogenic," Phil said.
"She ate my crown," I said.
"People liked that part," Phil said.
Everybody agreed the beach smelled worse than when we left. I explained that the Bog of Endless Regret had followed us down the river, hanging on to the bottom of the boat the whole way as a stowaway.
Several people agreed that something had followed us down the river.
Before the evening assembly, I sat down in the confessional with Dusty. He'd set his tripod up in the lagoon again, knee deep.
"Something big is coming," I told him. "I can feel it."
Dusty adjusted his lens, which in camera language means, I know, Dale. I know.
"Is it the calendar?" I said. "Did they change their minds about the calendar?"
Dusty kept filming. I took that as a maybe.
I told him he was smart to stand out there, away from the bog smell. He didn't argue. He never does.
Brock's left eye twitched all through the assembly. It twitched on the important words, which helped you know which ones they were.
We sat in the Torch Tribunal clearing while Brock stood in front of the fire. He said the island had a heart. He said the island believed in second chances.
"And nothing happened upriver," he said. He said that every few sentences, the way some people say "God bless."
Then he announced the Redemption Twist. Every player who'd been voted out was coming back into the game, effective immediately.
"Because the network loves you so much," Brock said, "it wants you where it can keep an eye on you." He said that last part very fast.
Gus sobbed. Grandpa Ray clapped and said, "Oh, that's wonderful." Professor Lund said, "How generous," without moving her jaw. Marisol didn't say anything. She just watched Brock without blinking and counted the exits.
It was obvious to me why this was happening. I'd gone upriver and redeemed everybody, and now there was a twist called the Redemption Twist. You don't need a Nobel Prize to see that. Professor Lund has one, and she didn't see it.
Personally, I'd have called it the Tummins Twist. But networks are cautious, and they didn't want the other players to feel bad.
I stood up to thank everyone for the honor.
"Sit down, Dale," Brock said.
I sat down, but slowly, with a little wave, so people would know it was my idea.
Later, in the shelter, Phil whispered to me. "It's a way to keep us on camera," he said, "where the lawyers can see us. If anybody talks about the candle room, the footage gets lost."
"Lost where?" I said.
"Just lost," Phil said, and he wrote it in his journal.
I let him have his theory. Phil's always had trouble when somebody else gets an honor, and I try to be patient with him about it.
Across the beach, one light was still on in Brock's tent. Through the gap in the flap I could see him sitting alone, polishing his brass snuffer. He did it slowly, over and over. You could tell he was saving it for somebody special.
I was touched. Nobody's ever polished anything for me.
"Wanna know what you're playing for?" Brock Sterling said.
"No," I said, just to see what would happen.
He told us anyway. I've come to believe the asking is the only part he enjoys.
We were playing for the final Immunity Conch. Out in the lagoon stood a row of wooden posts, each with a top about the size of a dinner plate. We'd stand on them until we fell off, and the last one standing would win.
"The purest test of the human spirit," Brock said to one camera. Then he said it again, slower, for a different camera.
I swam out to the post nearest Dusty's little boat, so the footage of my victory wouldn't have to be zoomed.
I climbed up and stood very straight, and something came over me. It was destiny, or possibly a cramp. I went with destiny.
I'd need a name for this, and I picked The Pillar. A pillar holds things up. A pillar doesn't fall.
I could already hear the reunion audience chanting it, softly at first and then louder. Then somebody would shush them, and there'd be more chanting, because you can't shush a pillar.
"Call me The Pillar," I told Phil, down the line.
"Okay, Dale," Phil said.
Next I thought about my statue. It'd be bronze, of course, with me on a post, gazing at the horizon, one hand raised, as if to say, "Here's the horizon." There'd be a little plaque. Pigeons would be allowed, but only on the post part.
I also thought about my memoir. I went with "The Pillar: A Life in Balance." I'd dedicate it to Phil, "who was also there." That's the kind of generosity people remember.
A pelican landed on Grandpa Ray's post and sat down by his feet,. Everybody loves Grandpa Ray. Even pelicans.
I've never cared for pelicans. A pelican looks like it was put together from leftover bird parts, by somebody who was told it'd need to carry soup. I don't trust any animal that keeps its lunch in its face. It suggests it doesn't trust you either.
Marisol was on the post next to mine, perfectly still, with her eyes half closed.
"Fancy meeting you here," I said.
"Dale," she said, "I'm concentrating."
She didn't say on what. She didn't have to. I stood up a little straighter, to make it easier.
Down the line, a bee had landed on Phil's arm. Phil's allergic to bees, so he stood totally rigid, eyes huge, watching it walk toward his elbow.
"Become one with the post, Phil," I called.
"I'm trying," Phil said, without moving his lips, "to become one with anything but the bee."
The bee stayed. So did Phil.
After what felt like several hours, my legs started talking to me.
"Dale," they said, "you're a hero." Then they said some other things that were less clear.
A breeze came across the lagoon, carrying a faint smell of the Bog of Endless Regret. I'd have thought we left that upriver for good, although now that I think about it, I'm not sure the breeze was coming from that direction.
That's when I saw the moth. It was pale and soft, almost silver, drifting past me in loops. It was the most beautiful moth I'd ever seen, and I've seen at least two.
I thought, if I catch it, that's the shot: The Pillar and the Moth. That's the cover of the memoir, and maybe a second statue.
"Dale," Phil said. "Don't."
"It's for the cover," I said.
I reached for it, and then I reached a little more. Then the post was somewhere behind me and the lagoon was in front of me. I went in face first.
Kevin told me later that on the replay, it looked less like a fall than a decision.
The water was only waist deep, but I made the most of it.
"Dale is out," Brock announced, so happily that the pelican looked up. "At eleven minutes."
"Eleven?" I said.
"Eleven," Brock said. "I had them check."
I stood in the lagoon and thought it over, and I realized The Pillar had never really fit. A pillar just stands there while other people lean on it. I'm a man of motion, and I do my own leaning.
I spent the rest of the day on the beach under a palm tree, giving the players advice they couldn't hear. Some of it was good.
Marisol won a little before sundown, nine hours in, with her eyes still half closed.
Gus cried on the shore when she won, and again when she climbed down, and once in between at nothing anybody could identify.
Sometime in the afternoon, the bee had left Phil alone and the moth had shown up. It landed on his shoulder and stayed there the last four hours, opening and closing its wings, while Phil smiled at it the way he smiles at a student who finally gets an A.
"Don't move," Phil whispered. He said it to the moth, not me.
I've been betrayed by a goat, a host, and a network. I'd never been betrayed by a moth.
I'd been waiting for this night ever since Brock said the Golden Coconut was a myth. I knew he was lying, because when he said it, his teeth got even whiter.
The clearing was ringed with torches. We sat on the log benches in clean clothes, looking rested. That's how people look after you've rescued them from a candle factory.
I had my decorative pillow under one arm. "Why'd you bring a pillow?" Grandpa Ray asked.
"You'll see," I said.
Several more people asked, and I told every one of them, "You'll see." That takes discipline.
Brock asked how we were feeling about the vote. Marisol had the Immunity Conch in her lap, and she said she felt fine.
Grandpa Ray said he felt blessed, and everybody smiled at him like he was a puppy that had learned to whistle.
Phil said he felt conflicted, and looked at me.
"I feel," I said, "like a man who's got something in his pillow."
Then I stood up.
"I'd like to play an advantage," I said.
Brock sighed. "Hidden advantages have to be played before the vote," he said.
"I'm aware of the rules," I said. "This isn't a hidden advantage. It's the Golden Coconut. They haven't written the rule that can hold it."
I unzipped the pillow. The stuffing fell around my feet. I raised the coconut over my head, and the torchlight caught it.
For one second I saw my whole future: the spin-off, the statue, and the memoir with the moth on the cover.
Somebody gasped. It might've been Gus. Gus gasps at a lot of things, but this time I think he meant it.
Brock took the coconut from me with two fingers and held it way out from his body, which I didn't care for.
He turned it over, then raised his brass snuffer and brought it down hard. The coconut split with a hollow knock.
There was no gold inside, just old coconut water and an old coconut smell. The smell was so strong that several people turned and looked at me.
"That's the coconut," I said.
"Sure, Dale," Ray said.
The gold went about as deep as paint goes, because it was paint. Inside the shell, folded up in a little plastic bag, was a note.
Brock read it out loud, slowly, enjoying every word. "Nice try. Love, the Season Four crew."
For a moment I was disappointed. Then I noticed the word "Love." A whole crew of strangers had signed a note to me with love, years before they ever met me.
That doesn't happen to just anybody.
Brock said he'd read the votes. He'd never looked so ready for anything.
The first vote was for me, and so was the second. Grandpa Ray's vote was for me, with a smiley face drawn next to it. That's exactly the kind of thing the most dangerous man alive would do.
Professor Lund had written my name and pressed so hard the pen went through the bark and into her knee.
"It's fine," she said, very calmly. "It's only a knee."
Marisol's vote just said "Dale," with nothing else, which said everything.
Phil's vote said, "Dale, I'm sorry. You know I love you. Please eat something with a vegetable in it. Phil."
"That's the longest ballot in the history of the show," Brock said.
I made a mental note to forgive Phil later, when it'd mean more.
The last vote was mine. I'd been practicing my autograph on the back of my ballot while I waited my turn. It turns out a ballot's only got one side that counts, and it isn't the side I thought.
Brock unfolded it. "Best wishes, Dale Tummins," he read. He looked up. "That's a vote for Dale."
"That's a signature," I said.
"It's a name," Brock said. "On a ballot. In an urn."
"A great man's autograph isn't a vote," I said. "It's a gift."
"That's beautiful," Brock said. "It's still a vote."
So it was unanimous. In the end, even I had to admit I had a lot of support.
Brock picked up my torch and carried it to the middle of the clearing. He didn't snuff it right away. He walked all the way around it and looked at it from a few angles, like a man picking out a melon.
"Closer," he told Dusty. "Closer."
He lowered the brass snuffer very slowly and held it there long after the flame was out, with his eyes closed.
"Dale," he said. "The island."
He paused so long that Kevin coughed. "Is done with you."
I picked up the two halves of the Golden Coconut, since nobody else seemed to want them, and I walked out of the clearing into the dark.
Behind me, very quietly, I heard Brock say, "Thank you."
I thought that was classy. Hosts don't have to do that.
I wore a new suit to the live finale, and I'd tucked the tags inside the collar so I could return it in the morning. That's how a man stays humble.
It was in a TV studio in Los Angeles. Kevin said nine million people would be watching at home.
The cast sat on tall risers, and they gave me the seat at the very end, behind a big potted fern.
"It's a place of honor," Kevin said.
"I can barely see the stage," I said.
"Yes," Kevin said.
Brock Sterling came out in a black safari vest, which is how you know a safari is formal. He flashed his teeth at the audience, and the front row put on sunglasses.
He didn't look at me once all night. You don't look straight at something you love too much.
They showed a recap of the season, and the audience laughed hard at my parts. They laughed hardest at the parts that weren't supposed to be funny. That's how you know somebody's a natural.
When the shelter fell on Professor Lund, a man in the third row laughed so hard they had to help him outside. Professor Lund watched the clip without blinking, and I believe she was taking notes for later.
Then they showed the fire. "This is the part where I invent fire," I whispered to Phil.
"That's not how I remember it," Phil said.
Up on the giant screen, there I was, feeding his journal into the flames while he tried to grab it back.
The whole audience gasped, and then they all turned around to look at me at once.
I waved. You've got to acknowledge your public.
"They're not waving back," Phil said.
"They're stunned," I said.
Brock took so long opening the envelope that a stagehand checked his pulse. Then he read it. Marisol had won the million dollars.
The confetti came down and the audience stood up, and Marisol stood in the middle of it like confetti was just more weather she'd been trained for.
I stood too, and opened my arms to her. She walked right past me and hugged Gus.
Gus cried. That's not news.
I didn't mind. On the river she'd told me, "Not in a million years." Now here was the million. In a sense, the years had passed.
"Dale," Phil said, "that's not how years work."
"It's how money works," I said.
Next came Fan Favorite. It went to Phil.
The audience stood again and clapped for almost two full minutes. It went on so long that Phil started looking worried. He thought he might be in trouble. I stood up too, so people could see me better.
In his speech, Phil thanked his students, his mother, and his allergist.
"And my best friend Dale," he said, "who I forgive."
The audience cheered the forgiving part loudest of all. A lot of people turned around to look at me. I understood. They wanted to see what a man looks like who's worth that much forgiveness.
Then the music stopped, and Brock read a short statement from the network.
"Dr. Augustin Pell," he read, "has stepped back from philanthropy to spend time with his lawyers."
He added that the coconut candles that survived the fire would be sold as collector's items, and that former residents of Exile Ridge would get a generous settlement. All they had to do was agree that Exile Ridge never existed.
"I'll sign," Gus said, crying. "It was a beautiful place that never existed."
I was glad for Dr. Pell. Everybody needs people who understand them.
During the commercial break I peeked around the fern, and there was Hollis Brandt in the fourth row.
He was holding a sign made out of a pizza box. In big black letters it said, "Dale. Where is my jet ski."
Below that, smaller, it said, "Four thousand dollars."
And below that, smaller still, it said, "Plus interest." It looked like he'd run out of room and rage at the same time.
He hadn't seen me. The fern was doing a great job, and I made a note to thank it.
"Phil," I whispered. "Hollis is here."
"I know," Phil said. "He waved at me."
My plan was simple. I'd wait out the show, then leave out the back with the crew, maybe wearing Kevin's headset as a disguise.
That's when Dusty turned on me.
In all our weeks together, Dusty had never said one word against me, and he still didn't. He just swung his camera around and pointed it right at my face.
The monitors cut to me. And there I was on the giant screen over the stage, forty feet tall, peeking out of a fern.
Hollis looked up. I don't remember deciding to run. I only remember running.
I went down the riser, across the stage, and right through the middle of Brock's closing remarks.
On the way, I knocked Professor Lund's new reading glasses off her face, and they flew into the orchestra pit and landed in a tuba.
"Of course," she said, with no expression at all.
Backstage, Kevin was standing by the fire door. "Kevin," I said. "Lock that door behind me and the jet ski's yours."
"Which jet ski?" Kevin said.
"Any of them," I said.
That's our custom. I promise him something I don't have, and he thinks about it. He looked at me for a long time, and then he locked it.
As the door shut, I heard the audience get to its feet for the third time that night. The first two times were for Marisol and Phil.
I like to think the third time was for me. It might also have been so Hollis could get out of his row.
Either way, they stood.
It's good to be home. My apartment over the laundromat is just how I left it. The dryers still thump all night, and the lavender from the dryer sheets still drifts up through the floor, doing its best.
I'm famous now, in a quiet way. Last week a man at a gas station looked at me for a long time.
"You're the guy," he said.
I said I was. He didn't say anything else, and neither did I. Sometimes that's all fame is, a man at a gas station knowing you're the guy.
I glued the two halves of the Golden Coconut back together with candle wax I'd smuggled out of Exile Ridge in my bandanna. Then I touched up the gold with a paint pen. It looked better than ever. You could barely see the crack, and you could only just hear the note rattling around inside.
One night I left it on Hollis's porch, along with an invoice marked "Paid in Full" and a certificate of authenticity. I wrote the certificate myself. Then, to make it official, I signed it again as a witness.
"He's not going to take a coconut," Phil said on the phone that night.
"It's not a coconut," I said. "It's a payment plan."
The next morning the coconut was on my doormat, in two pieces. Inside was a fresh note in Hollis's handwriting, and it said, "Nice try."
That's the second time that coconut's told me that. I'm starting to think it has a personality.
I put both halves on the windowsill, facing Hollis's house. Let it think about what it said.
Since I got home, I've had a lot of time to think about what I learned.
I learned that a friend is the most valuable thing in the world, after gold. And after things that look like gold, which are worth just as much, right up until somebody cracks them open.
I learned that fire is only a tool, and you can't blame a tool for anything. That's why I like to keep one around.
I learned that a man should always follow his dreams, unless his dreams lead up a river into a bog. Then he should send a friend first, and follow him.
I read the list to Phil on the phone. "Those aren't really lessons," Phil said.
"Write them down anyway," I said. "They'll sound better in the memoir."
Marisol hasn't called. I respect that. A woman with a million dollars has to be careful who she gives her number to, and she's never given it to me, which shows you how careful she's being.
Professor Lund sent me a letter through her attorney, asking me to stop sending her letters. She signed it "Regards." In science, I believe that's very warm. I wrote back to say I'd stop, but that was a letter too, so I'm not sure where we stand.
Gus sends me a postcard every week. Each one has a sunset on the front, and on the back he's written, "Sorry. Crying again."
Kevin mailed me a copy of the calendar. Carol is every month. She stares out of every page with the same look, the one that says she's eaten something of yours and she'll do it again. I hung it over the stove, where I can keep an eye on her.
So far she hasn't eaten anything. That's how she gets you.
This morning the phone rang. It was Phil, and he was so excited he forgot to say hello.
"A new show called me," he said. "Two friends get left in the Arctic for a month. One canoe. One sack of flour."
"Just flour?" I said.
"Just flour," Phil said. "They asked if I had a partner. I said yes. I said you."
I told Phil I was flattered, but it was out of the question.
"I've got consulting work," I said. "I've got my memoir."
The memoir had a moth on the cover now, which is a lot of responsibility. Also, I didn't like the sound of the flour. A sack of flour isn't a supply. It's a dare.
"I understand," Phil said. He always says that. It's one of his weaknesses.
Then I glanced out the front window, and there was Hollis's truck, pulling up to the curb. Hollis got out, carrying the pizza box sign. He'd added a new line at the bottom, in smaller letters. I couldn't quite read it. I didn't need to.
"Phil," I said, "I'd be honored. But only because you need me."
There was a short pause on the line. "That's not how I remember it," Phil said, very gently. "But come out the back. I'm in the alley."
I grabbed my bandanna and both halves of the coconut. I went down the back stairs and through the laundromat, past the folding tables and the humming machines, and out into the alley. Phil's car was sitting there waiting for me, with all four windows already rolled down.
Behind me, the woman who runs the laundromat propped open both doors, the way people do on the first warm day of spring.
It was November.
I was glad somebody was finally doing something about the smell.