The Rescue

The Meridian took me off Palisade Island the way she had taken me out of the sea three weeks earlier, which is to say with the same grudging cargo-room courtesy and the same padlocked forward hold. The hold was empty this time, and the emptiness was the first thing the boat told me about what it had been carrying all those years.

Captain Rhodes met me at the rail with his binoculars in his hand, and he looked at the Whistle at my heels, and he looked at the island behind me, and he did not ask what had happened there. He asked one question, and the question was not the one I had prepared for.

"Is the Warden on the island?"

"The Warden is dead," I said.

Rhodes looked at the island for a long time, and I saw something cross his face that I had not seen there before, and I did not know, then, whether it was grief or relief or the two of them occupying the same small space. Then he turned and went below, and when he came back he had a bottle, and he poured two glasses without being asked, and he said, "Fifteen years. Fifteen years of that run, and I never once asked what was in the hold, and I never once went ashore, and I told myself it was because the money was good." He drank. The bottle went back on the rail, and he did not pick it up again. "The money was good, and the island was quiet, and a quiet island with a fence is a business like any other."

We sailed through the night, and I stood on the deck with the Whistle and watched the island go down behind the horizon, and I did not sleep, and in the morning Rhodes came up with the coffee and sat beside me, and he talked the way a man talks when he has decided the truth is cheaper than the lie.

"They'll want to know about you," he said. "The company. They'll have people at the dock. They'll have a room, and a form, and a pen, and they'll want you to sign, and the signing will be the end of the story. That's how it works with islands, Mr. Marsh. The island is the story, and the story is the island, and the mainland is where stories go to be signed away."

"Who runs the company?"

Rhodes looked at the water for a long time. "A man named Ferris," he said. "He bought the Warden's patents twenty years ago. He bought the island, and the fence, and the hold on my boat, and he bought the Warden's silence with it, and he has been selling the silence ever since, at a very good price." He looked at me. "You're going to walk off this boat with a story the mainland has already decided it doesn't want, and the mainland is very good at deciding that. I'm telling you so you don't make the mistake of thinking it will be different for you."

We raised the mainland at dusk, a long low line of light with the haze of the city standing over it, and I stood at the rail and watched it come, and I understood that I had been living for three weeks in a world with one fence, and that the world I was returning to had ten million of them, and that the fences were the thing the city was made of, and that they were all of them kept by the same kind of keeping that had held the Code.

Rhodes put in at a private dock in San Pedro, not the one the company used, and a black car was waiting at the gate, and a man in a suit stood beside it, and the man in the suit looked at me the way you look at a package that has arrived ahead of its paperwork.

"Mr. Marsh," he said. "We're very glad you're safe. There's a room, and a form, and a pen, and a flight back to your life. All of it is waiting for you."

The Whistle pressed against my leg. The man in the suit looked at the Whistle, and the Whistle looked back at him with eyes that were entirely dog, and the man in the suit did not ask what the Whistle was, because the mainland had already decided it did not want to know.

I got in the car. I do not remember deciding to. I remember the dock going by the window, and the island a thousand miles behind me, and the fence line running up out of the dark. I had not left the island. I had brought it with me, the kind of thing you carry the rest of your life, and the mainland was going to help me carry it by pretending it was not there.