how much?”
Thomas shrugs. “Let’s wait to see if you survive.”
“That’s a terrible thing to say!”
“I thought you’d like the simple truth.” He pats Cooper’s good knee, then stands. “The world will look different to you once you’re recovered. You may think of me in a better light.”
Cooper ties off the wheel of his drifting mind and now stands on the foredeck, the swells rolling past like the great backs of whales, his sloop nosing through the chop, the cloudless sky as blue as hope—soon he will sight land, he tells himself. Soon.
“I’m sorry,” Cooper says. “I’m unreasonable, aren’t I?”
“You’ve got an attitude, I’ve noticed.” Thomas upends his can of beer, so tiny in his hand, drains it, then smacks his lips.
“Is the Army really coming to rescue me?”
“You think I want a dead American on my little island?”
“So this is your island?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Would you get serious for one second?” Cooper asks. “Just one serious second?”
The big man sighs, glances out the doorway, pats his beard absently, then seems to confess: “Sometimes I wonder how serious I truly am. I don’t know what happened to me any more than I can explain what happened to my Melville collection—I used to have 28 books. Right here in my fridge. Now there are fifteen.”
Cooper feels himself sinking slowly into a too-warm bath of delirium. If only he could sleep through this or wake up. He feels his head nod; the empty can of beer drops from his hand.
“You better not die on me, Coop old buddy. Come on, you’re almost home.”
Gasping, nearly weeping, Cooper sucks in a lungful of air, his head booming. Home? Where would that be?
But then, sure enough, he hears a familiar sound like something from home: the putter of a distant lawnmower.
“Who’s cutting the grass?”
“That’s your ride,” Thomas says. He steps into the sunlight.
“There’s no airstrip,” Cooper says hoarsely. He limps out. Thankfully his damaged leg now feels numb. “No way they can get to me.”
“Oh, they’ll think of something.”
It’s a military plane. A-48? Y2K? 40.08? Cooper sees a white star on its tail. Everyone is waving now. The plane circles, then circles again in the too-blue sky. The silver-white clouds look like frosty sea horses.
Cooper takes another step expectantly but somehow misses the ground and collapses. Sea horses bob over him like carousel steeds.
Then a dog hungrily licks his face. Another sniffs with a cold nose at his injured leg.
Thomas waves them away. Kneeling next to Cooper, he says in a low voice, “Your boat’s in good hands, stop looking so injured, man.” Then he stabs at the sky with one fat finger. “There’s your ride!”
Cooper sees something black blossom abruptly from the plane’s tail. A parachute? Breathlessly, he watches as it drifts lazily over the island in small, agonizingly slow circles. The islanders gaze at it with reverence, as if they beheld the approach of an ancestor’s spirit. With growing terror, Cooper regards his oozing leg and recalls that he could have pulled into a different lagoon and found a different island; he could have caught a different fish or let the big blue go; he could flown out here and been safe. A wave of nausea slams him like a crushing breaker. You can’t go under, he coaches himself, not yet. The figure falling from the sky—this could be anything: maybe not the stealthy emissary of Death; maybe, instead, a behemoth bird come to carry him away. Or maybe the smiling angel of God come to deliver him another chance.
Nora and her four fellow Diversity Delegates know they can’t say aloud what they’re thinking as the noon ferry chugs away from Echo pier on its way to Ebeye, two nautical miles north of Kawjalein: they will smell Ebeye before they see it. Ebeye is so gross, it’s cool to go there, just so you can say you did. Garbage is always smoldering from one end or the other of this little island and, because it’s just half the size of American-occupied Kwajalein but has four times the people, it’s been called the Calcutta of the Pacific. It’s like something from a PBS special. No place is more crowded or trashy. Old, fat, forever sweaty Mister Norman has an explanation for that, like he’s got explanations for everything. He’s the Advisor to their Diversity Delegates Club. Today he’s arranged for them to deliver discarded computers to Ebeye High. It’s 2004, a new millennium, and everybody all over the world is online except for the Marshallese!
“The thing is,” Mister Norman explains,” “nobody owns land on Ebeye. In fact, all of the islands, every little sandy speck of land, are owned by only a handful of families. Most of those families live on Majuro. How far is Majuro, our capital island, from here?” He pauses to hear the answer and wipes his sunburnt face with a sweat-soaked handkerchief. Until she met Mister Norman, Nora had never seen anyone use a handkerchief except to pretty up the breast pocket of a suit.
Todd Williams answers: “Approximately 300 miles due east.” Rumor has it that Todd is still a virgin. Next year he’ll be going to Harvard.
Norman nods his satisfaction. “Everybody who isn’t a member of those land-owning families—that’s about 13,000 Marshallese on Ebeye—all of those people are just renting space. You get what I’m saying? There’s no motivation for the Marshallese to build nice houses or plant pretty gardens. As far as they’re concerned, they’re just passing through.”
Nora and Todd and Stef and Tabatha nod like they get it, but they don’t get it. If Nora was living here, God forbid, in some sun-blistered tin-roofed shack, she’d do something about it. She’d fix it up. She’d plant flowers.
The ferry lurches as the pilot gears down. The ferry is a decommissioned barge-like Army transport with a white tarp strung overtop to keep the sun off. Two new hydrofoil catamarans are being shipped from New Zealand soon to replace these old boats. The world is catching up to the Marshall Islands!
Ferry passengers sit on wooden benches that remind Nora of church pews. The Marshallese women and girls dress in the most colorful muumuus: big bright flowered prints that extend nearly to their ankles. To sit among them is to smell their coconut oil, which they use as hair dressing, perfume, and skin lotion all at once.
Mister Norman paces at the front of the boat, pausing now and then to peer ahead. Nora imagines he’s rehearsing his next lecture. The way he talks, you’d think he hated Americans and thought the Marshallese were gods. He married a Marshallese woman when he was in the Peace Corps eons ago. Rumor says that his wife stands to make a lot of money if her family can win its suit against the American government for having suffered in the Eniwetak disaster, when the Americans’ nuclear fall-out drifted over in 1954. Some say that’s why Mister Norman works so hard to make Americans look bad.
He and his wife and their many children live on Jaluit, which isn’t much better than Ebeye, Nora has heard. Nora has been to Ebeye only once since she’s been dating Jeton and that was at Christmas and she and Jeton didn’t get a moment alone. Not that there’s any place to go on Ebeye. It has no trees to speak of. The “town” is an uneven grid of mostly paved streets. There is shack after shack, only the smallest yards, if any at all, dirt and sand at your feet and overhead a web of electrical wires and phone lines slung from low poles. Stray dogs, cats, and chickens dart past, and stray children, so many children, and idle men, so many idle men, the air smoky from burning garbage and other fire, and Japanese motorbikes speeding by dangerously close.
“In fifty years, all of these islands will be under water,” Mister Norman says, sweeping one hammy, freckled arm towards the small brown mound