Chapter 1

I SAT WEAKLY, HELPLESSLY, and watched the half-naked man in the edge of the water. I felt with him the sand that grated between his cheek and something harder; I felt the sun burn his other cheek, felt the skin tightening as the salt dried.

I wanted to go to him, to help him from the sullen, cheated waves, but I couldn't. My legs refused to move; my neck was too weak for my head. All I could do was lie there in a dress ripped open from the crash. And watch.

And be thankful I wasn't alone.

He pushed up a knee, dragged his foot out of water. He tried to laugh, but choked and had to lift his head to vomit. Retching, he blobbed the beach with greenness. Swaying, he sat slumped, forcing his fingers to uncurl themselves from the handle of the flight bag he'd somehow managed to drag ashore.

Then he did manage a laugh, a tired and unfunny sound that said he and the bag were safe with the angered surf cursing behind them. The man shouldn't have made it alone, much less dragging the heavy flight bag. He looked weak and drawn, without strength. I didn't remember him.

Mutely, wave-beaten and sand-hammered, I lay quiet, staring at this other survivor as he fumbled with the catch of the bag. Wet cloth tongued through a rip in one side, and the material was smeared with oil. The stuff made his hands slippery and he had trouble with the lock.

He started to cry, and my heart turned over. What kind of man was this; which of us would lean upon the other in the stark fight for survival we would both have to face? But I remembered I had cried, too. A man is also entitled to tears.

He felt into the rip. The bottle came out, but his fingers were shaking so he couldn't open the seal. He forced the cap between his teeth and chewed at it, spitting out celluloid, twisting with both oily hands. The cap came off and he let it fall into the sand. The first drink was a long one. I heard the bottle neck rattle against his teeth.

Eyes closed as if in prayer, he waited for strength to come. He pulled at the bottle again, and once more, until he was able to worry the bag up to the edge of the trees. He collapsed across the wet oblong, sighing, his sea-matted head in the shade.

Shade. I had to find it, too. I had to force my scuffed knees to take my swaying weight, to crawl like a wounded crab up the burning sands to the welcome coolness out of the blazing sun. In the shade, I sank down again, bone-tired, soul-tired, wondering vaguely why I had taken the trouble.

It came to me then, sharp and clear. The plane. It had been crammed with military dependents, Department of the Army employees, a few soldiers and one or two genuine civilians.

The plane had been at Tokyo International Airport, and I had almost missed it. The hours aboard-how many? I didn't know, for time had long ago become a blur; my world had become populated with vague shadow people.

Somewhere, there had been noise-a mighty, paralyzing blow of sound wrapped in brightness that struck against closed eyelids and hurt.

I remembered the moment of silence, the fragment of utter quiet from which all the air had been sucked. My window wasn't there and the air whooshed in just as the screaming began. Wild, frenetic motion was an eggbeater that mixed sight and sound with people and objects.

Instinct made me claw my way out of the glass-toothed frame; blind instinct pushed me away from the rupturing metal and into the roiling sea. I didn't want to live, and I wallowed coughing and flailing through the waves until they spat me upon the beach.

My cheek was against the earth now, and I stared out at the water, at the oilslicks and bits of wreckage lurching with the waves. The plane had missed land by some fifty yards. Any closer, and the man and I would never have battled our way to shore; any nearer, and we would have been flattened messily with the impact.

Far out where sea and sky met, the cloud hovered-tall, tall with a fat parasol top. So it has started, I thought. Someone, somewhere, pushed a button, and now the beginning of it and the end will be close together.

Somebody had chosen a target in this part of the world-Guam, Wake, Midway? By now, Tokyo and Manila were probably gone, along with Seoul and Taipeh in a chain of rampaging destruction spring-boarding from Manchuria to Hawaii and beyond.

"Well," the husky, scratched voice said, "here's to anybody that's left."

I searched for my own voice and slowly found it. "To us, at least."

His thin face turned my way, seeking. Then he crawled down to where I lay and propped my head in his lap to trickle a few drops of the whiskey between my lips.

"Take it easy," he said, "you're okay now. I'm Danny Mixon."

I knew the warm bite of the liquor in my stomach, and firmed the slackness of my mouth. "The rest?" I asked.

Danny Mixon shrugged. "You're the first I've seen." Tilting the bottle to his lips again, he said, "To us, then."

I stared at him. The man was drunk, had been drunk for a long time. Now I remembered him, recalled glimpses of his pale thin face as he had weaved through the aisle of the plane on many trips to the washroom-where he could drink in peace.

"I'll look around," he said, and lowered my head to the ground. I watched him move stiffly along the beach, saw him stooping over huddled bundles that were strewn casually in the sand. He turned a man over, and even from where I lay, I could see the man was dead. He only had part of a head.

I was stronger now, and guilty because I was doing nothing, so I pulled myself up and went clumsily down to help Danny pull the living from the water. We stopped when the waves were the only things moving. The survivors crouched or lay limply around Danny's flight bag. He gave them his bottle and watched it pass from hand to hand. A dozen people had come through the crash.

Eleven women and Danny Mixon.

I sat close to him, arms folded across my breasts, waiting for him to say something, do something. Danny took a deep breath and I felt he didn't want to take over, that decisions were things Danny left to other people.

A few of us were hurt. One girl had a broken arm, already being splinted by an efficient woman in her fifties. There were bruises and scratches on the rest of us, but nothing serious. I was glad. I didn't like to watch people die.

"Well," Danny said to the waiting faces, "I guess we'd better rest awhile. Later, we can put some sort of camp together."

The older woman nodded. "A good idea."

Nobody else spoke; we stretched out in wet closeness, and let the shock come as it would, let our keyed-up emotions subside into something like sleep. I awoke still tired and aching, and saw Danny with a bottle to his mouth. The other women were watching when he lowered it.

"All right," he said angrily, "I need two volunteers."

Some of the women lifted their hands, and memories tugged at me. Danny knew the words, and I could imagine he had said them many times before-in a sharp, clear voice that would have gone with the chevrons on his sleeve. But now the voice was blurred and uncertain, and the stripes were gone.

"We need fresh water," he said. You two look for some. Mark your way so you won't get lost, and watch where you put your feet. We don't know what's on this island."

One of the women whined: "We don't even know if it's an island."

"It has to be," Danny said. "There's nothing else out here. Now look for that water."

I recognized the old buddy system of the army, two on patrol, two in a foxhole, so that each is ashamed to show fear. Would the method work as well with women?

Danny moistened cracked lips with a fuzzy tongue, and pointed out the older woman: "Take a couple of girls with you and comb the beach. Bring back anything we might use."

I stood up and brushed myself off, wondering where I'd lost my shoes, wondering how I'd ever patch together the rips in my wrinkled, shrunken dress, and laughing silently and cynically at myself for thinking of such trivia.

The others clustered around Danny as he squatted to draw lines in the sand, lines that showed them how to build a lean-to, other sketches that demonstrated how to bind the poles with strips of cloth torn from the clothing in his flight bag.

"Food next," he said, touching me on the shoulder. "We'll try up the beach for shellfish."

The man was a drunk, but all of the other things he had been weren't completely soaked away. I knew the signs, knew he had listened to countless survival lectures, that he'd lived off the land in strange countries. I felt better. If this island had anything edible for us, this ex-soldier could find it.

"I'm Mrs. Julie Curtis," I said as we walked together away from the others

"Danny Mixon," he repeated, "civilian."

"You weren't always."

"No. You Army?"

"I was. My husband-died."

"Recently? It's still hard for you to say."

I held my face down. "Yes."

He squatted, pointing. "Here-this ridge says there's a clam under it."

We dug with our fingers, searching, tugging the shells out to heap them in little piles. I thought of what it was going to be like, of how rough the "simple life" is, when translated into terms of scratching for our existence.

Cigarette lighters and matches would function when they dried out, and there was plenty of fuel around. There must be birds and perhaps small animals on this atoll. With fruits and berries, we could hold out until help came.

I stopped digging. Help? Who would miss one stray plane in the atomic holocaust raging across the world now. Who would even know, or care?

Danny was watching me. "You've thought of it."

"Yes; I guess we've had it."

"We'd better keep it quiet-about no rescue, I mean. Some of the others might get hysterical. I don't think you will."

I said it calmly: "No; it doesn't matter."

He looked at me closely and I knew what he saw-a woman in her mid-thirties with a streak of gray in her brown hair. My body was goodfull and firm and snuggled by the torn blouse and wrinkled skirt. In the past, in the long, dead years ago, I had been told my body was that of a temptress, seductive and alluring. But that didn't matter now, either.

My mouth is too wide for my face, and had smile lines worn into its corners, but I hadn't smiled for a long time. My nose was straight, and I thought he must see the ache lying close to the surface of my dark blue eyes.

"You don't care?" he asked.

Only my lips were mobile in the stillness of my face, curling. "I don't, except."

"Except for what?"

I motioned at the twisted trees, the coral, the sea. "Except-I don't want to be buried in strangeness. It's difficult to explain."

He nodded. "I know; it's a soldier thing-alien dirt, earth you don't know, the differentness. You hate to die on it and have it piled on you. You must have been Army a long time, Julie. That idea is something civilians don't know."

"Yes," I said.

He took off his tattered undershirt and spread it out. We began to fill it with clams. It was nearly full, and we were lifting it between us when a man's voice said: "Hey!"

They came around a jutting point of coral, a man and a woman. The man moved easily, bulking big with a power that made itself felt even from a distance. The woman behind him was Japanese, small and frightened.

Danny put out his hand when they came close. "Glad to see you."

The man looked at Danny's hand, but made no move to take it. "How many more made it?"

Danny dropped his hand, and the man's stare moved up to his bare chest and fixed there. I couldn't see his eyes; I only sensed the darkness beneath the black, scarred brows. I shivered, and tried to pull my torn blouse together.

I saw Danny's right foot slide back in instinctive reflex, and spoke quickly: "Twelve, including us. You two make fourteen."

Knobbed cheekbones showed as the man's head swung to me. A too-red tongue licked at heavy lips as his opaque eyes flickered over me, touching my breasts, stomach, legs.

"How many men?"

I moved closer to Danny. The man's eyes followed me, unwinking under a furry skullcap of cropped hair. "Just me," Danny said.

The man laughed, a choppy burst of sound. "And me."

His eyes measured Danny, guessed his weight, knew the weakness of his thin arms, the softness of his belly. He laughed again.

"I'm Kane Zell-sergeant. I don't guess that matters a hell of a lot now. This moose was sittin' with them others up front. Figured it was just her and me left--but I like the idea of other women; a lot of other women.

His hard eyes ran over me again, then he abruptly pushed past Danny and me, with the Japanese girl following silently.

I watched Zell move up the beach and caught the glint of sunlight on the naked bayonet thrust through his belt.

I put my hand into Danny's and he clung to it. The flutter inside me was the same feeling you get when you've been too close to something wild and deadly.

We picked up the clams and followed the tracks. Danny clung to my cold hand and I wondered which of us was more afraid.

The camp was taking shape, and I was working beside a girl named Ella Martin. Her quick fingers tugged at a wet shirt, took another grip and tugged again until the material parted at the seam and ripped across. She gave a strip of cloth to me and I clumsily lashed one end of a long, dry limb to a small tree.

Ella's slightly too-full lips twisted. "It's ironic," she said, "that I should be helping to build a house, at last. When I was very small, I used to daydream my own house, planning each room in detail, helped by treasured cutouts from the color catalogs. In my dreams, I always helped with the building, because I had to be certain everything was exactly right."

I stepped back and down, dug my bare toes into the sand. "And what happened?"

Her heavy lashes came down. "It fizzled out, as dreams do. But it was a fine, great house while it lasted. Now its outlines are fuzzy, pushed out of shape by the years. At least-it didn't look like this one."

"No house ever did," I said, "but I suppose it will hold out water and wind-maybe."

Ella's fingers tore another strip of cloth. "You won't mind sharing this lean-to with me."

"No," I said. "Should I?"

"All of you are shaken by the crash now," she said slowly, "so maybe it doesn't matter yet. But it will, later. It always does."

"The people who feel that way aren't worth counting," I said.

She smiled, slow and bitter. "Everybody counts here."

We worked silently for awhile, lashing branches into place, weaving dry palm leaves through the roof sticks in overlapping layers. Then Ella said: "I have to talk. When I get frightened, I always have to talk. If you don't want to, you don't have to listen."

"I'll listen," I said. "We're not going anywhere."

Hesitantly at first, then with her rich voice growing quicker and stronger, Ella told me about her stay in Japan. From the beginning, she had felt a kinship to the Japanese, a oneness of pigmentation that should have drawn her closer to the natives, on the other side of the invisible barrier between themselves and the other Americans.

But Ella had found the wall to be strongly braced from the other side, too. The Japanese accepted no foreigners, no matter what their skin shade. They had bowed and smiled and talked ever so politely, but she had always been conscious of an uncrossable gap.

"Once," she went on, "I thought it might be different, but the man was only interested in me because I was-an oddity. He would have liked to display me better, if my skin was much darker, so there could be no mistake."

She paused, and I said: "I'm ready for another one."

Ella passed me more palm leaves, dark, sloe eyes evaluating me. "You don't know what it's like, being put on display."

"No, I don't."

Her rich mouth turned even more bitter. "I know you, Mrs. Curtis. I know a hundred like you, a thousand-married, loved, taken care of. You all accept it casually, as if being loved was something you had coming."

I didn't answer. I kept my hands busy and my face turned away as Ella talked it out.

"You know what love is to me?" she asked. "I'll tell you-it's a stomach-churning, hateful thing, all dark and hurting and ugly. Love is a brutal, sweaty lie with grinning gold teeth and the stink of cheap gin. Love is a gray sheet on a thin mattress where nobody can hear you scream."

I felt her try to push the man back into memory, back through the years to the dirty shack she described to me, the shack smelling of collard greens and often used grease. But the man came forward, refusing to be shut out of Ella's now.

I saw the scene with her, the moon that came through a curtain-less window and put a big, round pearl on her flour sack nightgown. The pearl was just like the ones those funny women in the book wore in their navels.

Ella had wriggled under it, moving her hips down on the torn sheet until the spot of moonlight sat square on her navel. She giggled, wondering if the women ever changed, like you did clothes, maybe putting a diamond into their navels on Monday, a ruby on Tuesday. The pearl would be best for Saturday nights.

But the pearl was not for North Little Rock Saturday nights, not for staggering feet in heavy work shoes, not to go with pints of Bluebird gin and tinny music of the jukebox. No, that kind of pearl was for a beautiful princess who would dance to soft music in a storybook palace, and fourteen-year-old Ella Martin had postured and posed on the sagging bed, pretending, humming the soft music, dancing lying down.

The creaking of worn floorboards came in, and the girl tried to pull a tattered quilt over herself, staring up at the dark shape looming in the dark.

His name was Big Monty, and he said: "Mighty pretty. Don't hide, girl-you got too much to hide."

"Get out. Get outa' here. I'll holler; I swear I'll holler."

The bed creaked when he eased down on it, and she scrunched up to the wall away from him. "Holler ahead. Won't nobody hear you."

"Mama will."

"Your mama's drunk, passed out in the kitchen."

"Big Monty, get away-please get away. You mama's man."

He laughed, his hand coming out toward her. The wall was hard against her back. "I every woman's man."

Ella had only screamed once-wordless and high and hating. Then she fought silently, hopelessly, as the rats did under the house when the cur dog got them. She bit into his chest, tasting blue work shirt, tasting man sweat, and he stopped laughing.

Light whiter than moonlight, redder than moonlight, burst inside her head and she fell back as he tore at her nightgown. It hurt; mean and dirty, it hurt where she couldn't rub it, and Ella cried into his wet mouth, against his slick gold teeth.

The tears were all gone, after. All gone forever, all dried out, cried out, and she could never feel them again.

"You pretty good," Big Monty grunted, sopping up the sweat from his chest with her wadded up nightgown. "You gonna' be a heap better when you know more. I teach you some more."

Long after he had gone back into the other room, Ella felt his fingers. The mark of them ached. She wiped at her mouth, trying to wipe away the taste of him, rub away the pigpen dirt he had put there.

She was still rubbing when she stood outside Miss Willa Hoffer's fence, waiting for it to get light, for the house to wake up and stir around so she could knock and beg Miss Willa to please ma'am' let her stay and work.

And Miss Willa did, being a schoolteacher and social worker, too. Three years of Miss Willa was a long time, because she was so good-hearted she never let anybody forget it; she told them about it all the time.

She was quiet after she told me of Miss Willa, quiet and still, with big, dark eyes staring achingly into the past. I said: "Ella, I'm sorry."

She came back to the present, to now and an island and the harsh facts of survival. "I'm not sorry," she murmured. "It took a thing like that to teach me."

"Love isn't like that," I said. "It's good and sweet and filling."

She looked at me and didn't say anything else until she glanced over at Danny Mixon. "That man looks sick to me."

"Danny?"

"If that's his name. He'd almost be nice-looking, if he wasn't so sickly. Did you ever see such dark circles around anyone's eyes before? And skinny. His bones are big enough, but there's no meat on them. How old you say he was?"

I hadn't thought about that. "Oh-thirty-four, thirty-five, maybe."

Ella stood and rubbed the small of her back. "There. One more stick that way, and we can start fixing them across the other way, as he said. Thirty-five? No, I'd say years more. But that might be because he's sort of-used up, as if he'd been a long way, and done a lot of thing-mostly bad."

"You may be right," I said. "I know he's lonely and afraid."

"The other, one isn't afraid of the devil himself," Ella said. "But I won't have to worry about either of them. Not with so many women of their own race here."

I frowned. "Ella-I think you're carrying a cross mostly fashioned by yourself."

Her mouth twitched. "You think so? What's my race, Mrs. Curtis? Superior white because some unknown, long-forgotten Caucasian with two dollars in his hand called on my mother? No-I'm not white; one drop doesn't make a river. Not even fifty percent white can turn muddy water into crystal.

"There are plenty of names for me-mulatto, quarter-blood, octoroon, cafe au lait, high yellow. It all boils down to nigger. And what about the black blood? Does its generation-diminishing strain hold me, make me eternally a part of it? The hell it does. The niggers scorn the lighter color of my skin; they don't want me; they sneer at me for being a line-crosser.

"I heard a preacher rant about that once. He said I was one of the uppity colored people who want to cross the line and pass as white. That I thought I was better, because I was lighter. But I wasn't, he raved. Because I wasn't nothin' but a nothin', he screamed-not a horse and not a jackass. A horse and a jackass get together to make a mule, but a mule can't reproduce. I was a mule, he said-nothin' but a nothin'. "

"Ella-" I said.

"He was right," she said. "He was an old, dirty, inflamed man, but he was right. My kind are nothings, of no race, accepted by none. I've had to carry my roots inside me, Mrs. Curtis, and since I can't put them down anywhere, they stay tender and touchy. So don't talk to me about love-any kind of love. I don't believe in it."

I was suddenly conscious of a stopping motion around me, a taut stillness, a waiting. I looked up at Ella again, then turned to follow her stare.

"Well, ain't this nice," Kane Zell said. "Everybody helpin' out, everybody workin' hard."

Ella's hand went to her mouth and rubbed across her full lips, scrubbed hard at them. A small girl drifted from behind the man bulking wide and fearsome at the edge of the campsite, and fled with joyous chatterings to the other Japanese girls.

I moved slowly to Ella's side; we stood together, facing the powerful man who gave off an aura of something feral.

Ella whispered it in my ear: "That one-he could be Big Monty himself, if he wasn't white. But that one is worse, Julie; that one is all black-inside."