Chapter Five: Exploring

Clean-shaven Doug dumped the bowl of hot water down the sink drain, where it flowed through the new bamboo pipe to a sump in the sand beneath the cabin. It was better than dry shaving, but some soap would have enhanced the experience. Mary had already trimmed Alyson's bangs. "Are we ready?" he asked after putting the razor in a cabinet.

Mary and Alyson moved to either side of him and stroked his cheeks and neck. He felt the fingers of both drag over minute rough spots. Something was different between those two, but he couldn't identify what was different, much less guess why.

"I don't know," Mary said with a frown. "What do you say, Aly?"

Alyson put on the standard Patient Female Dealing with a Hopeless Male look, complete with Put-Upon Sigh. "If we have him do it over, we'll never get to go exploring. I guess we'll just have to live with him."

"I guess."

The two began giggling. Doug wondered if he should go check the level of the bottle of rum he'd found in the file cabinet, but Alyson rose on her tiptoes and each of his women kissed a cheek. And both rubbed their tits on his arms. He quickly corrected that thought: Mary had rubbed her tits on one arm, but Alyson had merely brushed her tits-her breasts-against the other one. Somehow that correction made things worse instead of better. I wouldn't have noticed at all if Mare hadn't started prying.

All wore deck shoes and belts with sheathed knives. Aly's belt was leather. Doug and Mary wore cloth-wrapped nylon rope with small pouches attached. They gathered the three canvas "shopping bags" Doug had made to replace two rotted ones and trekked out the back door, pausing on the porch for Alyson to retie one of her shoes while Doug retrieved the machete from a wall peg. When all were ready they disappeared into the trees beyond the outhouse. They followed the wide, shallow, freshwater stream for a hundred yards, then crossed it on stepping stones that Welch apparently had put in the water. They followed a path Doug had explored across the gently rising, undulating ground to the wide empty space where the tornado had cut across the island.

The space was empty only by comparison. It was littered with shattered tree stumps and debris from the powerful storm. Brightly colored birds chased insects across the expanse. "Watch your step out there," he cautioned. "You can twist an ankle or ram a piece of wood through your shoe and your foot if you aren't careful. And we don't have adequate medical facilities."

They stood silently for a few moments, awed by the might of the winds that had devastated this section of tropical forest. Those same winds had thrown a tree through the side of their boat a quarter-mile out to sea, over a mile from this location. Because of the open area they could see the nearby steep foothills looming like miniature mountains several hundred feet into the western sky and blocking their view of the higher peaks beyond. Alyson dubbed the path of destruction "The Tornado Freeway."

Doug led them across a path he'd marked to the trees on the far side. After that point they were in unexplored territory. "Be careful," he said.

"I will, Daddy."

He knew that. Fear of getting a splinter would keep Alyson alert. His remark was really aimed at the winner three years past of the Braeden-Seaforth Award for Botanical Research.

The winner gave him her usual sidelong "I know what I'm doing" look.

"I'm open to suggestions," he said, looking into the thick tropical forest fanning one hundred eighty degrees before him.

"Up."

Doug and Alyson turned to Mary, who was shading her eyes and peering at the canopy above. She looked at Alyson for a moment, said, "Yeah," and reached into her "shopping bag." She brought out a length of nylon rope with a loop at one end. She whirled it overhead and whipped the end forward, causing it to wrap around the trunk. She marked the spot she wanted and knotted a second loop at that point.

Mary kissed the others, took a loop in each hand, and started walking up the trunk, shifting the rope upward as she went.

"Daddy, what did she mean by that?"

"Why are you asking me?"

Alyson chuckled. "Yeah." They found a comfortable log and watched the pretty birds darting about while others sang strange, lyrical songs from the trees.

Mary returned with a wide smile and a spike of pinkish flowers with small white and yellow spots fastened behind her left ear. She reached into the bag and pulled out a similar one plus a short length of thin vine. "Bromeliads," she explained and with a deft touch wove it into Alyson's hair behind her left ear.

Doug gaped at her. "You went all the way up there for some flowers?"

Mary glared at him. "It's for your daughter," she snapped.

He saw how delighted Alyson looked and felt the total fool. "And she looks quite lovely with them," he said with what he hoped wasn't a sheepish smile. "So do you."

"While you're trying to talk your way out of trouble, look in the large can in the bag."

Doug withdrew a large clump of moss protecting three beige eggs the size of small chicken eggs.

"Tomorrow's breakfast," she explained, finishing the braid and using the vine to keep it from unravelling.

He hesitated, wondering if they were just yolks and whites or almost developed birds. "Um, Mare, what if these aren't... fresh?"

Mary took the can and crammed the moss into place. "Gee, Doug, I guess I never thought of that, since I've never spent weeks at a time in a place like this learning anything. I just laid around and watched tropical television while everyone else did all the work."

"Sorry. I guess I wasn't thinking."

She shook her head and looked at Alyson, who hadn't moved. "It's finished, honey."

Alyson jumped up and down with glee. "Daddy, can I see the mirror?"

He removed the signal mirror from a pouch and handed it to her.

"Oh, Mother! It's wonderful! Thank you!" She gave her mother a big squeeze, then turned the sprig toward Doug.

"Prettiest pixie I ever saw," he said as she threw her arms around his neck. She was still jumping up and down, and the feel of those firm little cones brushing against his chest stirred feelings he didn't want stirred. When she stepped back and handed him the mirror he noticed her nipples were erect. He immediately diverted his attention to carefully putting the mirror back into its pouch, sandwiched between two thin strips of protective wood.

When he finished he looked toward Mary. She pointed and said, "Produce is this way."

When they reached the embankment the clouds had begun gathering and they were ascending a moderate slope. The area looked as if someone had sliced vertically through the earth and pushed everything on this side down seven feet. It ran as far as they could see to either side. "Turn back now?" Doug asked.

"We have another hour," Mary said. "Let's see what's higher up."

Doug backed up to the embankment, squatted, and laced his fingers together. "Pixies first," he said. Alyson grinned and put one foot in his hands, steadying herself with her hands on his shoulders. He straightened his legs and lifted with his hands. She also straightened and used her hands against the dark embankment for balance.

As the heart-shaped brown curls passed his face his nose caught a faint hint of her feminine fragrance. He wanted to look away, but it wasn't safe to do so. If Mary hadn't made that horrid suggestion, I wouldn't have noticed, he thought, as if trying to convince himself. But what if I had? I damned sure noticed Tiffany Smith's.

She lifted her leg to place her foot on the top of the embankment, bringing her plump outer labia into view. As she placed her foot on the upper bank they parted to show their moist inner surfaces and the mouth of her vagina. When she put her weight on the upper foot that mouth opened. He tried to tell himself it was the same thing he'd seen when he gave her a gynecological exam a year earlier, but even for a nudist this view in a tropical island setting was far more erotic than the same view in a clinical examination room. Her pheromones weren't helping, either. Damn it, Mare! Alyson straightened her leg and rose from his hands. Her open slit winked shut and then vanished as her legs came together.

He looked at Mary. She was grinning at his dick, which had swollen enough to indicate four o'clock instead of six. "Want me to take care of that before you go up?" she asked, circling her lips with her tongue.

"No," he snapped. For God's sake, I'm a pediatrician! Can't she understand that? She has to understand that. She must be digging. She must have heard something from someone, somehow. She must have!

She shoved a finger into her slit and rubbed a few times, cooing at him, but gave up when he ignored her. She shrugged. "Your loss."

He helped her up the embankment and handed up the shopping bags and machete. Mary fastened one rope around a tree and dropped the end over the edge. He used it to walk up the vertical wall, accompanied by gentle applause from his audience. He bowed, then took the machete to hack a blaze mark into the side of a tree.

A hundred yards later a dip in the land directed the flow of a stream toward the southwest. A small yellow-striped blue lizard sat atop a mossy log and watched them settle beside the stream before scurrying away on urgent lizard business elsewhere, just as the afternoon shower began. The overhead leaves provided impact protection from the shower. The water that pattered on them was cool and comforting after their exertion. They drank from the bubbling stream and seated themselves on a broad mossy patch a few feet from the water.

As Mary doled out the fruit and nuts onto napkin-like cloth squares for a quick lunch Alyson looked around at the picturesque wooded glen. "Daddy, this is beautiful. Can we come back here some day?"

He flicked his eyes to Mary in surprise and found hers wide and staring back at him. "I don't see why not. Do you really like it?"

"Yeah. I wish we had some place this pretty back home. It makes the campground at the lake look blah. Eek!" A six-inch centipede crawled from beneath the lizard's log and scurried toward her in a flutter of legs. It turned aside and went up the slope to disappear under a pile of decaying leaves, but not before she had rolled sideways and jumped into Doug's lap. "Daddy!"

Both parents laughed. "Now that's a centipede with one amazing sense of comedic timing," Mary observed.

Doug agreed and then noticed the warm, moist heat where she was sitting on his thigh. Warm and moist like Tiffany's. Damn it! What the hell's the matter with me? he wondered. Mary's got me thinking of my own daughter as a sex object, and I said I wouldn't do that anymore. He gave Alyson a slight nudge. "I think it's safe for you to get up now."

The sudden look of hurt in her narrow eyes surprised him. "Yes, sir," she said as she rose. The formal response was another surprise. She shuffled head down the few feet to the edge of the stream and stood there in the rain with her back to him, her shoulders trembling.

I swear, I'll never understand women. He glanced to Mary. She was unexpectedly glaring at him and starting to rise. When she was upright her eyes softened as they shifted to Alyson, and she moved beside her daughter. She put an arm around Aly's shoulders and spoke to her in a soft voice. The sound carried to Doug's ears, but not the words.

His daughter said something, then tilted her head back to let the rain land on her face. She washed her face with her fingertips while Mary returned to sit cross-legged beside Doug. "We still have about six hours until bedtime," she said in a quiet voice.

Doug knew very well how to translate that: "You still have about six hours to fuck up some more."

"What did I do?" he asked in a whisper.

She gathered the corners of one cloth and handed him his lunch. Her eyes turned as cold as her whispered voice. "This time you chose to reject her when she needed you."

Reject her? This time?

"Honey, your lunch is ready when you are," she said and began eating in silence, letting Doug think about her words.

Alyson nodded, wiped her eyes, and returned. She took a seat on the opposite side of Mary from himself. It had appeared to be a deliberate destination, chosen after she started walking. The mossy ground stopped where Mary was sitting. Alyson perched herself on another log, took the makeshift cloth bag, and also ate in silence.

Doug wanted to speak, but he was afraid that anything he said would make things even worse since he didn't understand the problem. The brief rain tapered to a stop and still he didn't know. He was so deep in thought he didn't notice the sound before the other two stood and rushed into the stream, peering upward.

Airplane engine.

He scrambled to his feet and rushed into the stream, fumbling for the signal mirror. But the sun was still behind the clouds. He looked to the small gap nearest the sun and tried to calculate whether it would expose the sun in time for him to use his mirror. A small single engine plane with pontoons crossed the gap and disappeared.

"Do you think he saw the SOS sign?" Alyson asked in a hesitant voice.

"Possibly," Mary said, trying to will the plane to cross the gap again.

"But not likely," Doug added. "Unless there are gaps over the beach. He's already past it and probably won't be looking backward."

Mary's head swiveled to gape at Doug, unable to believe he'd said that, and then to Alyson, expecting to see her in tears.

"Oh," Alyson said softly. Her shoulders drooped slightly as she relaxed. And that was all.

They spotted a patch of mushrooms just before the Tornado Freeway. Mary pronounced them not only safe but wonderfully flavored. While they added some to their shopping bags a large butterfly with metallic blue, black, and gold wings floated around a tree in front of Alyson. She whispered to the others to not move and watched as it landed on her arm. Its tiny feet tickled as its proboscis uncurled and tapped her arm, sipping her sweat for the salt. Her eyes widened in delight and a broad smile spread, making her apple cheeks even more prominent. She watched the butterfly turn a circle, open and close its wings for a few seconds, and launch itself to rise in a shaft of sunlight and disappear overhead.