The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck (books for students to read TXT) 📕

“The ocean’s all wrong,” he said. “It’s out of tune.” Then he stood up slowly, in obvious pain. He stepped out into the rain and turned his head skyward, opening his mouth to taste the rain.

I let him go. I curled into a ball to make myself small and warm. Still, I never got back to sleep. I just huddled there in the corner, trying to evoke Lura’s voice. I tried in vain to picture her.

As the days passed we lost track of time. Sickness visited me again and again. Feverish, I moaned and kicked at the world as I slept. I saw ghosts and guardian angels and once even thought that I was home, in my father’s house, in my room, the sunlight streaming in through the window to warm me as I woke.

Santiago’s wound was covered with pus, but it looked a little better each day. In the morning and evening he boiled ocean water and poured it over the wound, cussing every time. “I’ll outlive both of you yet,” he’d say, grimacing. He chewed on his nails for hours, until his fingertips were raw and bloody.

We were constantly hungry. We had thrown the putrid fish away not long after arriving, and then all we had was the rice.

Outside, the world was drab and muddy. We were living in what seemed to be a perpetual twilight. The days and nights bled together, and I rarely knew on waking from some bad dream what time it was.

We often heard dogs barking in the distance. They scavenged the desert at night. After one of his nightly excursions, Santiago told Zeller and me that their tracks came to within a quarter of a mile from the caboose. He said they could do damage if they attacked us.

One afternoon I was working on the radio, thinking about how worried my parents must be. As the rain fell methodically, I thought about how news of our plight would be making its way around the world. When we returned, Charlie Rose and Larry King would want to talk to us. We’d be heroes.

“Do you have any cigarettes left?” I asked Santiago. He was sitting in the doorway again. He never seemed to sleep.

“I got a few I’m saving,” he said.

I went back to working on the radio. I’d taken it apart to clean and dry it out. I knew a little about radios. They were my brother’s hobby. Growing up, he always had four or five radios rising up from the boxes in which the parts arrived. We looked forward to reading the addresses to see how far they had traveled. He saved every dollar he made to spend on radios. My grandfather had been good with his hands like that, the kind of man that could hold his body steady long enough to solder a wire or a transistor into place. We often found him hunched over his worktable, magnifying glass held steady on a stand above a circuit board while one hand held the part in place, and the other went patiently about its work. I had none of that in me. I was clumsy, but at least I was trying.

Santiago cupped his hands and held them out to catch some rain. The air in the car was disgusting. It smelled like rotten fish, rice, Santiago’s wound, and body odor. But as with anything, we were growing used to it.

Santiago turned in the doorway, bringing one foot in and leaving the other out. He closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the frame. His jaw was tight and his face had thinned out. His hair was longer than I’d ever seen it. He’d always kept it close, but now I could see gray mixed in with the dark growth.

There was sand in every crevice of the radio. It was ruining all our equipment, and soon it would ruin us.

“How many men did your wife sleep with before you?” Zeller asked Santiago.

“Hell, I don’t know,” Santiago replied. “I never asked.” He stood and stretched his legs. “It doesn’t really matter to me.”

“You’d like to know though, right?” Zeller continued.

“Why?” Santiago said. He was pacing now. “You can’t change it and it doesn’t really matter anyway. So who cares?”

“I’m just asking,” said Zeller. “I just felt like talking about something for a change.” He was quiet then, but I could tell that he wasn’t going to let it go. “After all, when you sleep with her you sleep with all the men she’s been with before.”

“That’s a real theory you got there,” said Santiago. I could see that he was getting angry.

I asked Zeller, “How many women have you been with?”

“Ten or eleven,” he said.

“Is that Zeller talk or real talk?” asked Santiago.

“At least ten,” Zeller replied. “But with one of them I was kind of drunk.”

I thought of Cooper and his virgin girlfriend. He wouldn’t have liked this conversation.

“Are those imaginary numbers?” asked Santiago.

“Look,” Zeller said, “you may not care who your wife has fucked, but I’d like to know.”

“Shut up,” said Santiago. “Just shut the fuck up.”

“Whatever,” said Zeller, “she’s probably fucking—”

Santiago was on him before Zeller knew what was happening. He had his hands around Zeller’s neck and pushed him up against the wall of the caboose.

“I don’t fucking care how many men your wife has fucked,” Santiago said. “And if you don’t shut the fuck up I’ll fuck her too.”

“Fuck you,” snarled Zeller. Then Santiago let him go and Zeller stepped out into the rain.

Zeller didn’t know when to stop, but Santiago was getting worse. He’d never been the most stable man, and between our losses, his wound, and the endless rain, he seemed to be breaking down.

After Zeller left, I stared at the pieces of the radio while Santiago paced. At one point he stopped in the middle of the caboose and hunched over as if he was trying to catch his breath. I wanted to ask if