excerpts from ‘robinson crusoe maybe’

by Colin Gee

Yet there was no secret cenote on the SE cone

Poking about with my sword, stabbing the ground, kicking aside rocks, and hacking down to the grey-brown clay with my hardwood machete, I discovered that in the year 1661 or 2 there was no secret entrance to any enchanted underground lagoon upon the SE cindertop, and I should know because we spent several days up there rooting around, as Quaker Bill is my witness.

In fact I had had great visions of an underground cenote far more wondrous than the one that backed my original fort, so when we came up empty handed, my eyes glazed over like those of a soldier that has killed many unarmed bumpkins on a raid into enemy territory without really ever meeting a worthy adversary, and gotten nothing but some paltry coins for his trouble, so for comfort I lit a pipe and gazed out upon the wreck of Captain Bob’s old gunboat, and as I looked moley if I did not see a helpless little curl of woodsmoke sift out from the crotch of the jungle on Ritsy, as clear a sign to me of survivors as a map with just the letter X written in the middle.

‘She went down with all hands,’ scoffed my new parrot, kicking amongst the clay and broken plants with a fury that surprised even an old hand such as myself. ‘There were no survivors! No man could escape the gnashing teeth and flashing fins and walloping tails!’

‘Well then, how do you explain the cookfire smoke we are presently witnessing on Ritsy Mandoblé,’ I demanded, ‘an isle of the archipelago that has never belched so much as a genie’s cloud?’

Quaker Bill was busy destroying some ferns so I took one last survey around, concluded that the cenote must have a secret side entrance instead, and headed downslope.

‘Hey way you gown you sumabitch?’ screeched the foul-mouthed bird in a panic, and with a wild squawking came bang swoop through the jungle, found me beyond a patch of palm, and alighted on my retreating shoulder like a box of rocks.

‘Ugh,’ I said, nearly firing my gun in the air.

That was when we saw the young goat caught in a nest of thorns, bleating pathetically, and though Quaker Bill told me ‘to blast her through her shedevil noggin the lava hogging sumuvagun’ I put up the lethal mouth of my lumpyshot gun and went to her, hacking the thistles away with my hardwood machete, and got her out, for which she bleated her eternal thanks, and would follow us all the way down the mountain like the crazy goat she turned out to be.

I said to Parrot Bill, ‘The last time I tried to adopt a goat it did not turn out too well for the goat.’

Parrot Bill nodded sagely upon his roost, which was now my parrot shoulder, shuffling his butt in complete contentment, happy not to have to hop or fly like the freeloader he would turn out to be, but said, ‘No good for fucking.’

I told him that he did not understand the situation, that I planned to keep goats and other live animals as a reserve against hard times, the parrot chuckled -- I realizing my words too late, and to keep from depleting the herds upon my grassy Mitsy, not for fucking.

‘Well then, what are you going to fuck,’ one daffy Quaker bird wanted to know, like the holy ghost of a god that created sex for pleasure rather than procreation, that had tongues of whipping thorn instead of tongues of fire.

I replied that I did not usually speak of such things, but that if he really had to know, I had Beatrice.

‘Sounds like a cow,’ said Quaker Bill. He said, ‘I wouldn’t fuck a cow,’ though I found out later that that was a goddamn lie.

I said, ‘Look here you little peckerwood, Beatrice is a lady and no cow. She writes poetry, words of exquisite tact and beauty, often lazing sadly by the sun-draped winder, from which her agonized and lovely-browed gaze sweeps the pleats of the upland hills and forest glades with their tinkling brooks in which in her daydreams she encounters her true champion, a knight upon a noble steed who saves her from an unsightly clutter of dastardly robinhoods and is strong enough to lift her onto his saddle with one chainmail hand, and his breath is minty.’

Quaker Bill whistled in derision and said, ‘If that is poetry, then I’m a fucking son of a bitch,’ and was forced to fly and hop the rest of the way home.

Now, at last, the aerie lookout

On Nosy Mitsy the Wilmots built their fortress with an earth and stone stockade fronting the entrance to the old mine where there was an entire complex of tunnels hacked into the mountain which the men had appropriated for various uses: storerooms, treasure vaults, bedrooms, sex caves, and torture dungeons for king’s officers taken out of the beastlier, peskier men-o-war. Upon entering the mine one came almost immediately upon a rickety old ladder that ran straight up an overhead shaft. This shaft went more than three hundred feet up onto the top of Nosy Mitsy. You stood at the bottom, one foot upon the lowest rung, and looked up and up until you thought you could catch a twinkle of light up there.

Now I stood on my new and precious lonesome shipwreck island yet at the base of what seemed to me to be the same ladder, so I had to blink hard and then look again, shaking my head because it seemed I was back on Nosy Mitsy at the back of that mine.

Well I was not, I reassured myself, I was at the back of my new land fort that I had constructed with my hands and wheelbarrow, inside the rock face against which I had set the camp inside the shallow cave I had chosen to cellar my powder and biscuit and meats. This little overhang ended at what I had previously thought was simply a low rock face, but that in pulling away of the mat of vines, I discovered was in fact a screen that concealed a hidden tunnel with several shallow dead-end branches; a secret keep! The passages were stuffed full of rotted food and tools, including a wheelbarrow.

This tunnel at the back of my cave held no skeletons, lairs of snakes, or vaults of treasure, I cussed. But what I found at its end was even more wonderful, I realized, as the floor gave out under my rag-knot feet and by some miracle I caught myself on a rung of the ladder as chunks of wood-rot and tarpaulin that had covered the pit fell far down, one two three seconds into air, and splashed into a great subterranean lake below, as I dangled and gazed into its teeth.

Looking up, I saw I was hanging from a rickety wood ladder at the bottom of a great shaft that rose far up into the mountain.

The rickety ladder was affixed to the wall with metal spikes that protested under my weight as I pulled myself free of the opening in the floor and looked up into the mountain. And the shaft seemed to wink at me from way at the top, so I imagined the grasses that pushed and jibed at its open mouth, and wished to ascend, but held off on that adventure until I was able to put a new floor down above the cave cenote. This cenote I later found held fresh water from the time before the popes and dinosaurs, and a great boot of treasure, and would save my life during the long siege to come.

Colin’s novel, Robinson Crusoe Maybe is currently published through Urban Pigs Press.

Photo of Colin Gee

BIO: Colin Gee (@ColinMGee on X) is founder and editor of The Gorko Gazette.