An Introvert's Guide for Island Domination novel · Chapter 2 of 2
Chapter 2: The Man With the Rope
Ranger Wes Fenner talks nonstop while rigging a bridge, patches Maren's arm and meets her forty laminated cards; sixty-one people are on the Shelf by dusk, and he measures the gap and tells her the island is drifting away from Landing.
By noon the plank had been crossed by thirty more people, and Maren had hidden from every one of them.
She had run out of conversations hours ago, so she sat on a flat rock above the spring with a stack of cards in her lap.
Teddy stood in front of her holding her camera, because she had made the mistake of nodding when he asked.
"Say something for the channel," he said. "People will want to know you're okay."
"There's nobody to watch it."
"There will be."
She looked at the lens and said her line.
"Hi. I'm not going to do this long."
Behind Teddy, a man who was coiling a rope laughed once, short and surprised, and then bent over the coil and said nothing else.
Maren added it to the list of things she would not ask about.
He was tall and sandy-haired, in a gray-green ranger shirt with the sleeves rolled, and he had arrived at the plank twenty minutes earlier talking.
He was still talking.
"The plank is fine for walking but it's a bad idea for a hundred people," he said. "I'm Wes, by the way. Wes Fenner, Redfork ranger, seasonal, don't tell anyone how seasonal."
He did not wait for her to say anything.
"I'm going to tie a bridge between that big pine and one on Landing. Do you mind if I use your pine?"
Maren held up a card.
FINE.
"Great. Excellent. It's a bowline on the near end, which is the knot that does not slip, and honestly the only one people should trust."
"How's the arm?"
She held up the same card.
"That's a lot of blood for fine. Can I look at it?"
She held up the same card again.
Wes looked at it, and looked at her, and then crouched in front of her very slowly.
"Is that your only card?"
Dot, who had been listening from the spring with her ladle on her hip, let out a snort.
"She has forty," Dot said. "Teddy counted. Go on, hon, show him."
Maren did not want to show him. She was outvoted by a cafeteria lady, and she knew it.
She flipped through them one at a time, because it was faster than speaking.
NO. LATER. NOT BEFORE NOON. I'M NOT ANGRY. I AM NOT ANGRY AT YOU. THANK YOU, GOODBYE.
At the bottom was one that said GO AWAY (KIND).
Wes took that one out of her hand and read it with real interest.
"There's a kind one?"
She took it back.
"Can I look at the arm?" he asked again, and this time she held out the arm.
His hands were warm and dry, and he did not talk while he looked at it, which surprised her.
He turned her wrist over and pressed beside the cut with two fingers.
"Clean edges. You'll want these closed."
He cleaned it with water from her own filter and pulled a flat tin from his shirt pocket.
Inside were butterfly strips, laid out in rows by size.
He set each one across the cut with his thumb, and his thumb stayed on her skin a second after each strip was down.
Maren watched the top of his head and felt nothing about that, and filed it under the bleeding.
"Done," Wes said, and then the talking came back. "Tourists always say it doesn't hurt and then they fall over."
She held up a card.
THANK YOU.
"Oh, that's a good one," Wes said. "I didn't know you had that one."
"She doesn't use it a lot," Dot said.
By two o'clock the rope bridge hung between the pines.
Wes crossed it four times to show people how, and each time he said, "Don't look down, look at the person in front of you."
Nobody looked down, and twenty-two more people crossed in a long line that did not end until the sun was low.
Dot stood at the end of the bridge with a clipboard she had taken from a man who didn't need it.
She counted every head as it came off the ropes, on top of the thirty-nine already at the spring, and she kept the number in a loud voice.
"Fifty-eight. Fifty-nine. Sixty. Sixty-one."
"That's the last one," Wes said. "That's everybody who'll come over tonight. The rest are staying on Landing for now."
Dot looked at Maren.
"Sixty-one people, hon. All of them thirsty, and the spring runs maybe forty gallons an hour."
Maren did the arithmetic.
She had a card for it.
IT'S ENOUGH.
"It's enough for two days," Dot said gently. "If nobody washes."
Maren stood at the spring that evening and watched sixty-one strangers line up with cups, tins and one hubcap.
She had planned for three nights, no people and a good video, and instead she had a line and a clipboard.
Wes came and stood next to her at the edge of the pines, a little closer than she liked, and for once he was quiet.
He was looking at the bridge, so she looked too.
The rope bridge hung in a long curve between the two pines, and in the last light it had less curve than it had at noon.
It was pulled almost straight.
"I measured it at two," Wes said, low enough that nobody else would hear. "Forty feet. I measured it again just now."
He turned and looked at her.
"It's fifty-five."
She stared at the gap.
"Your island is drifting away from Landing," he said. "I've got about sixty feet of rope in that bridge, and it will be gone by morning."
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