"Soldier's Brannigan" is a novella, about 90 pages long. This is probably what I would call my first "grownup" novel, written when I was sixteen. It touched me deeper than anything I'd written before, and I learned a lot while writing it; not just about the art, either... "Soldier's Brannigan: A Novella" spins the tale of a futuristic soldier and the troops he leads, marooned on an island that everyone thinks is deserted. Turns out there's more there than meets the eye; not just inhabited by the humans marooned there over the years, the island also plays a central role in an ancient war between myths and reality... and houses a jail in which are kept the Muses.
I don’t think I’ll ever forget the sight of Lenny Hill and his troops, crowded onto the deck of the small ship, desperately trying to stay out of the way of the murderous crew. I don’t think I’ll ever forget Lenny, standing proud, taking his cap off and letting his red hair blow in the breeze— well, not really blowing, I guess, as he’d just cut it and it was only about an inch and a half long. Maybe closer to two inches. And he may not have had his hat on in the first place. But his men were all standing solidly behind him, except for a few slackers like Clyde Christopher and Mindy Leave, who’s legs weren’t quite right. And of course Elliot Dane was vomiting over the side. I still think he might have mentioned before they left that he got sea sick. Dane is a big, swell-looking guy, and he looked like an idiot. Absolutely ridiculous. Anyhow.
And then Dash, standing there with his blind eyes turned towards the sun. It gave me an odd, shuddery feeling in the pit of my stomach, to realize suddenly that because he can’t see, he can look at things no other human can. At least, I think— I guess— well— no, it must have been Dash, he was the only blind man on the ship. What was I talking about? Anyway, I’ll never forget it.
The ship moved off slowly, majestically. Beautiful, for all it was an ugly ship, just beautiful, as an example of what man can do if he really puts his mind to it. Here is an object that is not just big and ugly and difficult and contrary, but it also prowls the ocean, contaminating the sight of the water’s horizon, until it conversely springs a leak and sinks with all hands into the winking depths, carrying hundreds of people with it. I don’t know what the captain was thinking, down there in his cabin, or the steersman, who apparently wasn’t paying attention. They ruined this great, wonderful, terrific exit by running into a poor, harmless fishing boat on their way out.
Nobody was hurt. Elliot Dane was leaning a bit too far over the edge in his quest for the Perfect Vomiting Position, and so naturally he fell in the drink at the impact, but he was, thank heaven, a fine swimmer, after he recovered from the shock of the icy water. Until then, he floated. But he survived. And the fishing boat was fine, a crack or three, but it survived as well. The captain of the fishing boat, not knowing how to speak English, made the customary rude gesture at Lenny, mistaking him for the captain and root cause of the collision. Lenny gravely tipped his hat— which clinches it, he did have his hat on— at least, it seems to signify— although I suppose he could have....
At any rate, Lenny, in the midst of his naivete and diplomatic innocense, handled the whole episode magnificently, with humor and calm, and refrained from making the rude gesture back until the fisherman was facing the other way. I knew then, as I know now and had actually known for quite a while before, that I had chosen the right fellow for the mission. I mean, I suppose a Fightin’ Hill wouldn’t remember a great deal of diplomacy in the heat of battle. Nonetheless, I supposed also that, barring any extenuating circumstances, Lenny would keep his people and all others in the palm of his hand.
I recognize this as an opportunity to foreshadow a little. The “Little-Did-I-Know” sort of thing. I could very easily say, for instance, “Little did I know the extent of the extenuating circumstances that were eventually to ensue.” That’s a little alliterative, isn’t it?
Pat Howard woke abruptly out of the spell my narrative had woven on him. “Eh,” he grunted. I was happily off on a tangent.
“Alliterative. Kind of like— oh, I don’t know— ‘ambidextrous ambitious amphibians and anacondas ate Amanda’s amoebas’. Odd.”
“Hmmph,” said Pat Howard.
“At any rate,” I continued, “I refuse to say something like that—”
“Something like what?” growled Howard.
I explained. Something like “Little-Did-I-Know”. I recognized it as a writer’s classic, especially if the writer is a journalist, but I’m neither and so I’d be more comfortable without all the cliches, though wouldn’t we all. How very strange.
“What?” demanded Howard, finding my attention once again wandering from a subject that he had gone from feeling was worthy only of ridicule to deeming it not only a great conversation topic but all-important. I regarded this with a bit of false alarm and a great deal of amusement.
“Well, nothing, nothing— but this steak doesn’t taste quite right.”
“Then send it back,” he said, impatient with my foggily expressed desire to stop talking and eat.
“Oh, I don’t think I’d want to do that—”
“Then eat it,” snapped Howard. I shoved my plate about one inch from me, to my left, and heaved a sigh. Howard glared at me.
“Oh— hmm— where was I?”
Between uncomfortably tight together teeth, Howard gritted out, “The ship just left the harbor.”
“Oh— then I already told you about the banana spider episode? Oh, okay. I’ve got it. Now, considering how important and influential the victim was—”
I was, as this last came out, ignoring the exclamations and increasingly agitated denials that had begun coming from Howard’s direction as soon as the words “— banana spider episode?” left my mouth.
Most notably, Howard said, “No, you didn’t! No, you didn’t! Wait a minute! Start over! Shut up, you fool! No, NO, NO!”
I stopped. Howard was breathing as hard as a person just come across the Pacific without benefit of a boat.
“Now,” I mused aloud, “how do you placate a man who is your superior and whom you have to be nice to for your career but whom you don’t personally like very much?”
“Ahem,” said Howard.
“So where was I?”
“Banana spider episode.”
This was good. Howard had gotten so drawn into the story that he didn’t really give a darn what I said. Good, heck, this was great. I smiled complacently at him and he just gritted his teeth back.
As a sort of reward for his being civil, I told him about the banana spider episode.
The way it went was this. The captain had not only been coerced into staying in his cabin while the ship set out, but a mischievously insane crew member had locked him in. It was then discovered that the mischievously insane crew member had put a highly dangerous tropical spider in with the captain— the spider was a banana spider, hence the fact that it was called the banana spider episode, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, and so on and so forth, never say die. The captain, stupidly, fell asleep. The spider intelligently bit the captain.
Got it?
Got it, okay, go on already, said Howard.
And because of the importance of the victim, as I started out saying, the ship was turned around. Lenny looked a little put out.
The ship hadn’t quite reached the harbor again when the first mate changed everyone’s minds for them and turned around again. Lenny lost his balance at this. Nobody had told him they were turning.
Elliot Dane fell in again. I wish they would have left him.
They finally got out to sea, the captain screaming and raving under the influence of the spider’s venom in the cabin, the doctor snoring in his bunk, and the first mate chuckling evilly as he contemplated the wide blue ocean. Lenny, the last I saw of him, was looking worried. And the next thing that happened was that the crazed crew went on a berserker rampage. I’m not entirely sure what it was that touched them off. I know only that the Army had been talking with the Navy, and everybody wanted the Butterfly’s crew out, but they tried a few times and it never worked. They couldn’t do anything about this. Most of the crew wouldn’t even get off the boat when they came into shore. They tried everything. Almost everything. They did not try sharpshooters.
But they went berserk. I said that, didn’t I? There’s got to be a better word. Crazy. Loco. Looney, crackpot, demented, maniacal, nuts, insane, um, berserk. Oh well.
And so the crew basically went crazy and somebody, don’t ask me who because I don’t know, but somebody started a rumor that Lenny Hill and his fifty were planning to mutiny, kill the first mate, let the spider bite the captain again (the spider was dead, but ghosts work as well as any thing for lunatics in search of a theory), and drug the crew with the cleaning supplies and dump them overboard. The plan was a bit unclear after that, but this can be forgiven because it was concocted by madmen.
But the rumor circulated quite quickly in the close society of the ship. They were not quite a week out to sea when the captain, still moaning every once in a while despite having had more than enough of an antidote and recovering nicely, heard about it. He decided that in order to forestall this latest Navy maneuver that he (understandably) took to be another attempt to get them off the boat, and out of the Navy, they would strike first. They would maroon them.
How crazy were they? Very crazy. I mean, they were really going to maroon them.
Did you get that? Maroon them.
And where?
Where, Howard asked me, breathless.
I sat back and smiled and breathed, all of this very, very slowly.
“There is an island in the middle of the Pacific. Not exactly in the middle, perhaps. It seems to move around quite a bit.”
Howard’s eyes opened wide.
“It was handed down through the generations as a legend, a myth, an illusion. And it came to be called the Sailor’s Brannigan.”
Howard’s lips soundlessly shaped the word Brannigan.
“Look it up,” I said softly.
Howard nodded. I wasn’t sure if it was in the dictionary or not.
“And this island was rocky on almost all the sides, and this is a nine-sided island we’re talking about here. There was just a tiny section, barely big enough for a rowboat. The crew disarmed Lenny and his troops and slowly, painstakingly, oh-so-carefully, took them over, five by five, and believe you me it took a long time. They landed each time in the little dinghy, having jettisoned the life boats at a much earlier date, shoved the troops out while they were still in waist-deep water. Lenny, riding over on the fifth trip, joined his fellows standing silently in the water by the shore, and stared at the dinghy as the crazy masters-of-the-sea rowed it back, stared and stared and stared.”
In Howard’s eyes were reflected the words to the question his lips were silently shaping: how could this possibly happen?
I allowed myself a very small, grim smile. Lenny couldn’t figure out how it was allowed to happen either. Here they were, hundreds of miles away from their original destination, marooned for Pete’s sake, on an obviously uninhabited island (here is yet another chance to use the “Little-Did-He-Know” thing, but I refuse to do it), the fifty of them, with nothing to eat or drink and no shelter and no defense....! How could this happen?
A few times before the crew’s gristly work was done, a few of the rowdier troops tried to darn well stage a mutiny. They were shoved unceremoniously out of the boat into the waist-deep water; this got them wet, which they didn’t like, and offended their dignity. They lunged out of the brine, trying to grab the side of the boat to tip it over, or grab the paddles from the crew members, or grab the crew members themselves and try to inflict violence on them. The most that resulted from this was that the crew members, with eerily dead silence in response to the loud cries of rage from the soaking troops, lifted their paddles and bashed the rioters unconscious. Then they were gone to get the next load. A few of the men on the beach came to the rescue of their bubbling comrades from drowning and hauled them onto the shore. Lenny wanted to help but couldn’t for the life of him move.
After the third small mutiny that afternoon, fifteen or so of the troops had nasty bumps on their heads, and the mutinies were over. Lenny still couldn’t force himself to move.
He began to notice, as the last few dinghy-loads were transported, that the men were glaring at him when they thought he wasn’t looking. This made him nervous, very nervous, made him feel like he wanted to run, but he still couldn’t move.
The crew members were still couched in deadly silence as they brought over the last six. Among them were Lucie Reardon and Sam Dashiell. Lucie sat close to Dash, and huddled in the warmth of his smile as he turned his eyes toward her presence. It unexpectedly hurt Lenny to see how cold she was, how starved for light and heat even in the sun, gave him a sharp twinge right in the brotherliness. He shivered very slightly and found that his state of unmovement was still current.
Lucie closed her eyes and clutched Dash’s uniform coat briefly before being shoved into the water. She was slightly shorter than most of the others and the water came to a good two or three inches above her hips, but she struck forward through it just as easily as the rest. She held Dash’s hand and led him, but Lenny thought it was probably more for her need rather than his necessity.
The last six reached the shore uneventfully, looking tired and dejected and sad. A few of them plopped down in the shallow water, the rest of them stood, but one and all they faced with the rest of their comrades out to the direction of the ocean’s wide main.
They watched in almost complete silence as the dinghy was rowed back to the ship. A few of the older men coughed as the cold salt smell of the water went up the wrong nostril. A younger man sneezed, then looked around red-faced in embarrassment, though no one was looking at him. The nineteen women were completely quiet, heartbreakingly quiet even to Lenny Hill, who had been brought up less inundated with the idea that women were not only the weaker sex, but the much much weaker sex, and cried at everything, from weddings to the death of pet parakeets. He discovered then and there that he really, truly admired his mother.
He honestly admired the dignity of these women here that he had charge of, ranging in age from nineteen to forty-eight, whom, he’d been of the opinion, he knew well. He thought now that he didn’t know as much as he had thought he had known. He frowned, lifted a hand and rubbed it over his bewildered face. He had a sudden sense of how he must look, dumbstruck and heartbreakingly young in his surprise at this happening. He must look a great deal like the rest of his troops looked. Even the older one’s lined faces had turned young in their astonishment.
The dinghy had safely reached the ship again, and the ten erstwhile guards and pusher-outers hauled themselves up the ladders to the deck of the ship. They were greeted with rousing cheers from their mates. The joyous yells floated across the waters to the shore, became distorted by the distance into animal cries, and proved the final stage of Lenny Hill’s undoing. Through the cold numbness that enveloped him he felt the thin, sharp, eager lick of fear. He knew well enough to know that the same fear was already weakening the knees of his troops, making them stumble as they backed slowly towards the tidelines on the beach, still facing outland and watching the ship as it began to disappear around the crags of rock, the crew on board still cheering, though silently from this distance. They backed away, some of them shaking their heads, dumbly denying reality. They backed away, sodden feet slowly lifting and shifting and finding level ground to rest on, then pausing, then moving again.
And then they stopped.
They stopped.
And there was a moment of silence, that like the pause before a criminal’s death sentence. In the silence, the ship finally disappeared around the rocks, out of sight, with an all-but-audible click.
Click.
And then there was another, briefer, pause, related but wholly different, that of the calm before a storm.
A cry leapt from the disbelieving throat of a young man, and jumped to join the myriad cries that leapt also from the throats of the others. Identical to each other, so it sounded as though it was just one cry that repeated itself and spread throughout the troops like a disease, echoing past the rocks and out onto the ocean, resounding behind them into the thick jungle.
They were angry, and in their anger they turned on Lenny Hill.
