“Hi there!” I said. “You all look very busy.”
The children, two boys and a girl aged about six or seven, eyed me solemnly. I thought they looked scared.
“We’re learning to read,” the woman said. “Aren’t we, guys?”
She was wearing a man’s shirt, open at the neck, and jeans. I could see her breasts moving slightly as she breathed.
“Yes, Andrea,” the children chorused.
“That’s great,” I said. “I wish you’d teach me sometime.”
The woman’s brow creased in a small frown.
“You don’t know how to read?”
She didn’t seem terribly surprised.
“Yes, but I only read writing,” I explained.
“What else is there?”
I waved theatrically.
“Looks. Portents. The future.”
The ghost of a smile appeared on her lips. By daylight, she looked older than she had the night before. Her figure was attractive, her face pretty enough but unremarkable. I still couldn’t understand why she fascinated me so much. Just as she appeared to be about to say something, a door opened at the far end of the room and Sam appeared. The children immediately rose to their feet.
“Good morning, Los,” they chanted in unison.
“Hi, kids!” he called out breezily.
He stopped for a moment to exchange a few words with one of the men watching TV. Then he caught sight of me, broke off his conversation and strode over.
“How you doing, man? Sleep all right?”
“Fine. I was just admiring the old school-house scene.”
He narrowed his eyes, as though realizing for the first time what was going on at the table.
“Oh yeah, we home-school here,” he said. “Can’t schlep them over to Friday every day.”
“What?”
“Friday Harbor. That’s the nearest school. Nearest stores, everything. But Andrea here does an OK job. It’s legal in this state, lots of people do it. You can buy kits and stuff.”
He waved toward the door.
“C’mon, let’s take a walk. We’ve got lots to talk about.”
I shot Andrea a quick glance, but she was already bent over the textbook, her short brown hair concealing her face. I followed Sam out of the hall and across the compound, where he responded with nods and smiles to the greetings of the people we encountered. Like the night before, everyone seemed excessively pleased to see him, hanging with childish eagerness on his slightest word or gesture.
“You’re sure popular around here,” I remarked.
He smiled smugly.
“I’m the landlord. They’ve got to keep me happy.”
“How do you mean?”
“I own the place, Phil. They don’t get along with me, they’re out of here.”
I stopped and looked at him.
“You own this whole island?”
Sam nodded casually. I stared at him in genuine amazement. If he was trying to impress me, he’d sure found the hot button.
“But it must have cost a fortune!” I gasped. “Where did you get the money?”
He smiled.
“Didn’t cost me a cent.”
This was the familiar old Sam, being mysterious in order to provoke further questions which would cast him as the source of wisdom and me as the humble seeker after truth. I decided to back off and let him make the first move. After all, he was the one who’d said that we had lots to talk about.
The shoreline was visible by now, a stony beach surrounded by smooth planes of inclined rock. Small waves surged in, teasing the pebbles, while tall grave firs looked on like parents watching their children at play. I felt again the sense of joyful tranquility which had overwhelmed me on my walk.
“It’s so beautiful!” I exclaimed.
Sam nodded like a teacher whose student has given the correct answer.
“I knew you’d get it, Phil,” he said. “It took a leap of faith, but I knew. Some of the others were opposed to having you come here, but I overruled them. Everything is coming together.”
He looked me in the eye.
“Amazing things will happen to you here, Phil. Things you wouldn’t believe if I told you.”
This was too gushy for me. I decided to get back to solid ground.
“Those people who didn’t want me to come, I take it they include Mark.”
I told him about our confrontation by the woodpile. Sam smiled and nodded.
“Don’t let Mark get to you,” he said. “He’s basically an OK guy, although he’s kind of in-your-face sometimes. But I can handle him.”
He turned off down a steep path cutting through the trees to the left. Eventually it came out on a rocky bluff, where we had to scramble down, using a series of knobs and ledges worn smooth by many hands and feet. At the bottom was a small cove where a slab of basalt protruded out over a natural pool formed by two curving lines of rock. On the other side of a stretch of open water, only a few hundred yards away, rose the precipitous, fir-covered flank of another island.
“You can swim here in the summer,” Sam said, pointing to the pool. “The water comes in at high tide and then gets trapped and warmed by the sun. We go skinny-dipping here a lot.”
He sat down on the smooth rock, his long thin legs extended in front of him. In addition to his regulation work shirt and jeans, he was wearing a pair of fancy sports shoes with inch-thick soles and the logo of a basketball player.
“Wow, cool shoes!” I remarked in a teen-speak voice.
Sam glanced at them indifferently.
“Oh, yeah. Russ bought a pair, and I said I liked them, so he got me some.”
He said it casually, as though this was standard operating procedure.
“On account of you being the landlord and he has to keep you happy?” I queried with a touch of irony.
Sam shrugged.
“I was just kidding about that.”
“So who does own the place?”
“No, I was kidding about them having to suck up to me. Everything they do is done out of love, man. No one lays any power trips around here. We’re all in this thing together.”
He gazed out across the water at the island opposite for a moment, then began to talk in a slow, steady voice, as though reading a speech.
“The island used to belong to a group of Theosophists. This was back in the twenties. Then Theosophy went out of fashion. The place was deserted for years, then in the sixties it was bought by this woman from Seattle. She was working in the naval base at Bremerton, in the kitchens, and one day she put her hand through the meat grinder and lost two fingers. I happen to know she was stoned out of her skull at the time, but she sued the federal government and used the money to buy this place.”
“So where do you come in?”
“Well, what she did, she got all her hippie friends together and they all came over here to set up a commune. That was everyone’s dream at the time, right? Get away from it all, live off the land, all that shit. Well, that lasted as long as those things usually did, and then people began drifting away. In the end Lisa, that was her name, was hanging on here pretty well alone.”
I looked out over the reach of open water glinting and shifting in the raw sunlight. Gulls swooped and plunged for fish, efficient feeding machines, aerial rodents.
“By then she wanted out too,” Sam went on, “only it turned out this place wasn’t so easy to sell. There are a couple of hundred islands round here, but only some of them have a good supply of water, and even then there are shortages all the time. This place had enough for the Theosophists and the hippies and guys like us, but not enough to support people who want showers and washing machines and dishwashers and Jacuzzis. So Lisa found that having invested all her dough in this place, she was kind of stuck with it.”
“I still don’t see where you come in,” I said.
Sam grinned broadly.
“I got in, that’s how.”
He made a circle with the thumb and first finger of his left hand and inserted the forefinger of his right rapidly several times.
“We fell in love,” he added in a tone of contempt.