Island of the Sequined Love Nun

1 The Cannibal Tree

Tucker Case awoke to find himself hanging from a breadfruit tree by a coconut fiber rope. He was suspended facedown about six feet above the sand in some sort of harness, his hands and feet tied together in front of him. He lifted his head and strained to look around. He could see a white sand beach fringed with coconut palms, a coconut husk fire, a palm frond hut, a path of white coral gravel that led into a jungle. Completing the panorama was the grinning brown face of an ancient native.

The native reached up with a clawlike hand and pinched Tucker’s cheek.

Tucker screamed.

“Yum,” the native said.

“Who are you?” Tucker asked. “Where am I? Where’s the navigator?”

The native just grinned. His eyes were yellow, his hair a wild tangle of curl and bird feathers, and his teeth were black and had been filed to points. He looked like a potbellied skeleton upholstered in distressed leather. Puckered pink scars decorated his skin; a series of small scars on his chest described the shape of a shark. His only clothing was a loincloth woven from some sort of plant fiber. Tucked in the waist cord was a vicious-looking bush knife. The native patted Tucker’s cheek with an ashy callused palm, then turned and walked away, leaving him hanging.

“Wait!” Tucker shouted. “Let me down. I have money. I can pay you.”

The native ambled down the path without looking back. Tucker struggled against the harness, but only managed to put himself into

a slow spin. As he turned, he caught sight of the navigator, hanging uncon

scious a few feet away.

“Hey, you alive?”

The navigator didn’t stir, but Tucker could see that he was breathing. “Hey, Kimi, wake up!” Still no reaction.

He strained against the rope around his wrists, but the bonds only seemed to tighten. After a few minutes, he gave up, exhausted. He rested and looked around for something to give this bizarre scene some meaning. Why had the native hung them in a tree?

He caught movement in his peripheral vision and turned to see a large brown crab struggling at the end of a string tied to a nearby branch. There was his answer: They were hung in the tree, like the crab, to keep them fresh until they were ready to be eaten.

Tucker shuddered, imagining the native’s black teeth closing on his shin. He tried to focus on a way to escape before the native returned, but his mind kept diving into a sea of regrets and second guesses, looking for the exact place where the world had turned on him and put him in the cannibal tree.

Like most of the big missteps he had taken in his life, it had started in a bar.

The Seattle Airport Holiday Inn lounge was all hunter green, brass rails, and oak veneer. Remove the bar and it looked like Macy’s men’s depart-ment. It was one in the morning and the bartender, a stout, middle-aged Hispanic woman, was polishing glasses and waiting for her last three customers to leave so she could go home. At the end of a bar a young wo-man in a short skirt and too much makeup sat alone. Tucker Case sat next to a businessman several stools down.

“Lemmings,” the businessman said.

“Lemmings?” asked Tucker.

They were drunk. The businessman was heavy, in his late fifties, and wore a charcoal gray suit. Broken veins glowed on his nose and cheeks.

“Most people are lemmings,” the businessman continued. “That’s why they fail. They behave like suicidal rodents.”

“But you’re a higher level of rodent?” Tucker Case said with a smart-ass grin. He was thirty, just under six foot, with neatly trimmed blond hair and blue eyes. He wore navy slacks, sneakers, and a white shirt with blue-and-gold epaulets. His captain’s hat sat on the bar next to a gin and tonic. He was more interested in the girl at the end of the bar than in the businessman’s conversation, but

he didn’t know how to move without being obvious.

“No, but I’ve kept my lemming behavior limited to my personal relationships. Three wives.” The businessman waved a swizzle stick under Tucker’s nose. “Success in America doesn’t require any special talent or any kind of extra effort. You just have to be consistent and not fuck up. That’s how most people fail. They can’t stand the pressure of getting what they want, so when they see that they are getting close, they engineer some sort of fuckup to undermine their success.”

The lemming litany was making Tucker uncomfortable. He’d been on a roll for the last four years, going from bartending to flying corporate jets. He said, “Maybe some people just don’t know what they want. Maybe they only look like lemmings.”

“Everyone knows what they want. You know what you want, don’t you?”

“Sure, I know,” Tucker said. What he wanted right now was to get out of this conversation and get to know the girl at the end of the bar before closing time. She’d been staring at him for five minutes.

“What?” The businessman wanted an answer. He waited.

“I just want to keep doing what I’m doing. I’m happy.”

The businessman shook his head. “I’m sorry, son, but I don’t buy it. You’re going over the cliff with the rest of the lemmings.”

“You should be a motivational speaker,” Tuck said, his attention drawn by the girl, who was getting up, putting money on the bar, picking up her cigarettes, and putting them into her purse.

She said, “I know what I want.”

The businessman turned and gave his best avuncular-horndog smile. “And what’s that, sweetheart?”

She walked up to Tucker and pressed her breasts against his shoulder. She had brown hair that fell in curls to her shoulders, blue eyes, and a nose that was a tad crooked, but not horribly so. Up close she didn’t even look old enough to drink. Heavy makeup had aged her at a distance. Looking the businessman in the eye, as if she didn’t notice Tucker at all, she said, “I want to join the mile-high club, and I want to join it tonight. Can you help me?”

The businessman looked at Tucker’s captain’s hat on the bar, then back at the girl. Slowly, defeated, he shook his head.

She pressed harder against Tucker’s shoulder. “How about you?”

Tucker grinned at the businessman and shrugged by way of apology. “I just want to keep doing what I’m doing.”

The girl put on his captain’s hat and pulled him off of the barstool. He dug into his pocket for money as she dragged him toward the exit.

The businessman raised a hand. “No, I’ve got the drinks, son. You just remember what I said.”

“Thanks,” Tuck said.

Outside in the lobby the girl said, “My name’s Meadow.” She kept her eyes forward as she walked, taking curt marching steps as if she was leading him on an antiterrorist mission instead of seducing him.

“Pretty name,” Tucker said. “I’m Tucker Case. People call me Tuck.”

She still didn’t look up. “Do you have a plane, Tuck?”

“I’ve got access to one.” He smiled. This was great. Great!

“Good. You get me into the mile-high club tonight and I won’t charge you. I’ve always wanted to do it in a plane.”

Tucker stopped. “You’re a…I mean, you do this for…”

She stopped and turned to look him in the eye for the first time. “You’re kind of a geek, aren’t you?”

“Thank you. I find you incredibly attractive too.” Actually, he did.

“No, you’re attractive. I mean, you look fine. But I thought a pilot would have a little more on the ball.”

“Is this part of that mistress-humiliation-handcuff stuff?”

“No, that’s extra. I’m just making conversation.”

“Oh, I see.” He was beginning to have second thoughts. He had to fly to Houston in the morning, and he really should get some sleep. Still, this would make a great story to tell the guys back at the hangar—if he left out the part about him being a suicidal rodent and her being a prostitute. But he could tell the story without really doing it, couldn’t he?

He said, “I probably shouldn’t fly. I’m a little drunk.”

“Then you won’t mind if I go back to the bar and grab your friend? I might as well make some money.”

“It could be dangerous.”

“That’s the point, isn’t it?” She smiled.

“No, I mean really dangerous.”

“I have condoms.”

Tucker shrugged. “I’ll get a cab.”

Ten minutes later they were heading across the wet tarmac toward a group of corporate jets.

“It’s pink!”

“Yeah, so?”

“You fly a pink jet?”

As Tuck opened the hatch and lowered the steps, he had the sinking feeling that maybe the businessman at the bar had been right.

2 I Thought This Was a Nonsmoking Flight

Most jets (especially those unburdened by the weight of passengers or fuel) have a glide rate that is quite acceptable for landing without power. But Tucker has made an error in judgment caused by seven gin and tonics and the distraction of Meadow straddling him in the pilot seat. He thinks, per-haps, that he should have said something when the fuel light first went on, but Meadow had already climbed into the saddle and he didn’t want to seem inattentive. Now the glide path is too steep, the runway a little too far. He uses a little body English in pulling back on the steering yoke, which Meadow takes for enthusiasm.

Tucker brings the pink Gulfstream jet into SeaTac a little low, tearing off the rear landing gear on a radar antenna a second before impact with the runway, which sends Meadow over the steering yoke to bounce off the windscreen and land unconscious across the instrument panel. The jet’s wings flap once—a dying flamingo trying to free itself from a tar pit—and rip off in a shriek of sparks, flame, and black smoke, then spin back into the air before beating themselves to pieces on the runway.

Tucker, strapped into the pilot’s seat, lets loose a prolonged scream that pushes the sound of tearing metal out of his head.

The wingless Gulfstream slides down the runway like hell’s own bobsled, leaving a wake of greasy smoke and aluminum confetti. Firemen and paramedics scramble into their vehicles and pull out onto the runway in pursuit of it. In a moment of analytical detachment, one of the firemen turns to a companion and says, “There’s not enough fire. He must have been flying on fumes.”

Tucker sees the end of the runway coming up, an array of an tennae, some spiffy blue lights, a chain-link fence, and a grassy open field where what’s left of the Gulfstream will fragment into pink shrapnel. He realizes that he’s looking at his own death and screams the words “Oh, fuck!”, meeting the FAA’s official requirement for last words to be retrieved from the charred black box.

Suddenly, as if someone has hit a cosmic pause button, the cockpit goes quiet. Movement stops. A man’s voice says, “Is this how you want to go?”

Tucker turns toward the voice. A dark man in a gray flight suit sits in the copilot’s seat, waiting for an answer. Tuck can’t seem to see his face, even though they are facing each other. “Well?”

“No,” Tucker answers.

“It’ll cost you,” the pilot says. Then he’s gone. The copilot’s seat is empty and the roar of tortured metal fills the cabin.

Before Tucker can form the words “What the hell?” in his mind, the wingless jet crashes through the antenna, the spiffy blue lights, the chain-link fence, and into the field, soggy from thirty consecutive days of Seattle rain. The mud caresses the fuselage, dampens the sparks and flames, clings and cloys and slows the jet to a steaming stop. Tuck hears metal crackle as it settles, sirens, the friendly chime of the FASTEN SEAT BELTS sign turning off.

Welcome to Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. The local time is 2:00A.M., the outside temperature is 63 degrees, there is a semiconscious hooker gurgling at your feet.

The cabin fills with black smoke from fried wires and vaporized hydraulic fluid. One breath burns down his windpipe like drain cleaner, telling Tucker that a second breath may kill him. He unfastens the harness and reaches into the dark for Meadow, connecting with her lace camisole, which comes away in shreds in his hands. He stands, bends over, wraps an arm around her waist, and picks her up. She’s light, maybe a hundred pounds, but Tucker has forgotten to pull up his pants and Jockey shorts, which cuff his ankles. He teeters and falls backward onto the control console between the pilot seats. Jutting from the console is the flap actuator lever, a foot-long strip of steel topped by a plastic arrowheadlike tip. The tip catches Tuck in the rear of the scrotum. His and Meadow’s combined weight drive him down on the lever, which tears though his scrotum, runs up inside the length of his penis, and emerges in a spray of blood.

There are no words for the pain. No breath, no thought. Just deafening white and red noise. Tucker feels himself passing out and

welcomes it. He drops Meadow, but she is conscious enough to hold on to his neck, and as she falls she pulls him off the lever, which reams its way back through him again.

Without realizing it, he is standing, breathing. His lungs are on fire. He has to get out. He throws an arm around Meadow and drags her three feet to the hatch. He releases the hatch and it swings down, half open. It’s de-signed to function as a stairway to the ground, designed for a plane that is standing on landing gear. Gloved hands reach into the opening and start pulling at it. “We’re going to get you out of there,” a fireman says.

The hatch comes open with a shriek. Tuck sees blue and red flashing lights illuminating raindrops against a black sky, making it appear as if it is raining fire. He takes a single breath of fresh air, says, “I’ve torn off my dick,” and falls forward.

3 And You Lost Your Frequent Flyer Miles

As with most things in his life, Tucker Case was wrong about the extent of his injuries. As they wheeled him though the emergency room, he con-tinued to chant, “I’ve torn off my dick! I’ve torn off my dick!” into his oxygen mask until a masked physician appeared at his side.

“Mr. Case, you have not torn off your penis. You’ve damaged some major blood vessels and some of the erectal tissue. And you’ve also severed the tendon that runs from the tip of the penis to the base of the brain.” The doctor, a woman, pulled down her mask long enough to show Tucker a grin. “You should be fine. We’re taking you into surgery now.”

“What about the girl?”

“She’s got a mild concussion and some bruises, but she’ll be okay. She’ll probably go home in a few hours.”

‘That’s good. Doc, will I be able to? I mean, will I ever…?”

“Be still, Mr. Case. I want you to count backward from one hundred.”

“Is there a reason for that—for the counting?”

“You can say the Pledge of Allegiance if you want.”

“But I can’t stand up.”

“Just count, smart-ass.”

When Tucker came to, through the fog of anesthesia he saw a picture of himself superimposed over a burning pink jet. Looking down on the scene was the horrified face of the matriarch of pyramid makeup sales, Mary Jean Dobbins—Mary Jean to the world. Then the picture

was gone, replaced by a rugged male face and perfect smile.

“Tuck, you’re famous. You made the Enquirer.” The voice of Jake Skye, Tuck’s only male friend and premier jet mechanic for Mary Jean. “You crashed just in time to make the latest edition.”

“My dick?” Tuck said, struggling to sit up. There was what appeared to be a plaster ostrich egg sitting on his lap. A tube ran out the middle of it.

Jake Skye, tall, dark, and unkempt—half Apache, half truck stop waitress—said, “That’s going to smart. But the doc says you’ll play the violin again.” Jake sat in a chair next to Tuck’s bed and opened the tabloid.

“Look at this. Oprah’s skinny again. Carrots, grapefruit, and amphetamines.”

“Tucker Case moaned. “What about the girl? What was her name?”

“Meadow Malackovitch,” Jake said, looking at the paper. “Wow, Oprah’s fucking Elvis. You got to give that woman credit. She stays busy. By the way, they’re going to move you to Houston. Mary Jean wants you where she can keep an eye on you.”

“The girl, Jake?”

Jake looked up from the paper. “You don’t want to know.”

“They said she was going to be okay. Is she dead?”

“Worse. Pissed off. And speaking of pissed off, there’s some FAA guys outside who are waiting to talk to you, but the doctor wouldn’t let them in. And I’m supposed to call Mary Jean as soon as you’re coherent. I’d ad-vise against that—becoming coherent, I mean. And then there’s a whole bunch of reporters. The nurses are keeping them all out.”

“How’d you get in?”

“I’m your only living relative.”

“My mother will be pleased to hear that.”

“Brother, your mother doesn’t even want to claim you. You totally fucked the dog on this one.”

“I’m fired, then?”

“Count on it. In fact, I’d say you’d be lucky to get a license to operate a riding lawnmower.”

“I don’t know how to do anything but fly. One bad landing?”

“No, Tuck, a bad landing is when the overheads pop open and dump people’s gym bags. You crashed. If it makes you feel any better, with the Gulfstream gone I’m not going to have any work for at least six months. They may not even get another jet.”

“Is the FAA filing charges?”

Jake Skye looked at his paper to avoid Tuck’s eyes. “Look, man, do you want me to lie to you? I came up here because I thought you’d rather hear it from me. You were drinking. You wrecked a million dollars’ worth of SeaTac’s equipment in addition to the plane. You’re lucky you’re not dead.”

“Jake, look at me.”

Jake dropped the paper to his lap and sighed. “What?”

“Am I going to jail?”

“I’ve got to go, man.” Jake stood. “You heal up.” He turned to leave the room.

“Jake!”

Jake Skye stopped and looked over his shoulder. Tucker could see the disappointment in his friend’s eyes.

“What were you thinking?” Jake said.

“She talked me into it. I knew it wasn’t a good idea, but she was persistent.”

Jake came to the side of the bed and leaned in close. “Tucker, what’s it take for you to get it? Listen close now, buddy, because this is your last lesson, okay? I’m out of a job because of you. You’ve got to make your own decisions. You can’t let someone else always tell you what to do. You have to take some responsibility.”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this from you. You’re the one who got me into this business.”

“Exactly. You’re thirty years old, man. You have to start thinking for yourself. And with your head, not your dick.”

Tucker looked at the bandages in his lap. “I’m sorry. It all got out of hand. It was like flying on autopilot. I didn’t mean to…”

“Time to take the controls, buddy.”

“Jake, something weird happened during the crash. I’m not sure if it was a hallucination or what. There was someone else in the cockpit.”

“You mean besides the whore?”

“Yeah, just for a second, there was a guy in the copilot seat. He talked to me. Then he disappeared.”

Jake sighed. “There’s no insanity plea for crashing a plane, Tuck. You lost a lot of blood.”

“This was before I got hurt. While the plane was still skidding.”

“Here.” Jake tucked a silver flask under Tuck’s pillow and punched him in the shoulder. “I’ll call you, man.” He turned and walked away.

Tuck called after him, “What if it was an angel or something?”

“Then you’re in the Enquirer next week too,” Jake said from the door. “Get some sleep.”

4 Pinnacle of the Pink Pyramid

A low buzz of anticipation ran through the halls of the hospital. Reporters checked the batteries in their microrecorders and cell phones. Orderlies and nurses lingered in the hallways in hope of getting a glimpse of the celebrity. The FAA men straightened their ties and shot their cuffs. One receptionist in administration, who was only two distributorships away from earning her own pink Oldsmobile, ducked into an examining room and sucked lungfuls of oxygen to chase the dizziness that comes from meeting one’s Messiah. Mary Jean was coming.

Mary Jean Dobbins did not travel with an entourage, bodyguards, or any other of the decorative leeches commonly attached to the power-wielding rich.

“God is my bodyguard,” Mary Jean would say.

She carried a .38-caliber gold-plated Lady Smith automatic in her bag: the Clara Barton Commemorative Model, presented to her by the Daughters of the Confederacy at their annual “Let’s Lynch Leroy” pecan pie bake-off, held every Martin Luther King Jr. Day. (She didn’t agree with their politics, but the belles could sure sell some makeup. If the South did not rise again, it wouldn’t be for lack of foundation.)

Today, as Mary Jean came through the doors of the main lobby, she was flanked by a tall predatory woman in a black business suit—a severe con-trast to Mary Jean’s soft pastel blue ensemble with matching bag and pumps. “Strength and femininity are not exclusive, ladies.” She was sixty-five; matronly but elegant. Her makeup was perfect, but not overdone. She wore a sapphire-and-diamond pin whose value approximated the gross national product of Zaire.

She greeted every orderly and nurse with a smile, asked after their families, thanked them for their compassionate work, flirted when appropriate, and tossed compliments over her shoulder as she passed, without ever missing a step. She left a wake of acutely charmed fans, even among the cynical and stubborn.

Outside Tucker’s room the predatory woman—a lawyer—broke formation and confronted the maggotry of reporters, allowing Mary Jean to slip past.

She poked her head inside. “You awake, slugger?”

Tuck was startled by her voice, yanked out of his redundant reverie of unemployment, imprisonment, and impotence. He wanted to pull the sheets over his head and quietly die.

“Mary Jean.”

The makeup magnate moved to his bedside and took his hand, all compassion and caring. “How are you feeling?”

Tucker looked away from her. “I’m okay.”

“Do you need anything? I’ll have it here in a Texas jiffy.”

“I’m fine,” Tucker said. She always made him feel like he’d just struck out in his first Little League game and she was consoling him with milk and cookies. The fact that he’d once tried to seduce her doubled the humi-liation. “Jake told me that you’re having me moved to Houston. Thank you.”

“I have to keep an eye on you, don’t I?” She patted his hand. “You sure you’re feeling well enough for a talk?”

Tucker nodded. He wasn’t buying the outpouring of warm fuzzies she was selling. He’d seen her doing business on the plane.

“That’s good, honey,” Mary Jean said, rising and looking around the room for the first time. “I’ll have some flowers sent up. A touch of color will brighten things up, won’t it? Something fragrant too. The constant smell of disinfectant must be disturbing.”

“A little,” Tuck said.

She wheeled on her heel and looked at him. Her smile went hard. Tuck saw wrinkles around her mouth for the first time. “Probably reminds you of what a total fuckup you are, doesn’t it?”

Tucker gulped. She’d faked him out of his shoes. “I’m sorry, Mary Jean. I’m…”

She raised a hand and he shut up. “You know I don’t like to use profanity or firearms, so please don’t push me, Tucker. A lady controls her anger.”

“Firearms?”

Mary Jean pulled the Lady Smith automatic out of her purse and leveled it at Tucker’s bandaged crotch. Strangely, he noticed that Mary Jean had chipped a nail drawing the gun and for that, he realized, she really might kill him.

“You didn’t listen to me when I told you to stop drinking. You didn’t listen when I told you to stay away from my representatives. You didn’t listen when I told you that if you were going to amount to anything, you had to give your life to God. You’d better damn well listen now.” She racked the slide on the automatic. “Are you listening?”

Tuck nodded. He didn’t breathe, but he nodded.

“Good. I have run this company for forty years without a hint of scandal until now. I woke up yesterday to see my face next to yours on all the morning news shows. Today it’s on the cover of every newspaper and tabloid in the country. A bad picture, Tucker. My suit was out of season. And every article uses the words ‘penis’ and ‘prostitute’ over and over. I can’t have that. I’ve worked too hard for that.”

She reached out and tugged on his catheter. Pain shot though his body and he reached for the ringer for the nurse.

“Don’t even think about it, pretty boy. I just wanted to make sure I had your attention.”

“The gun pretty much did it, Mary Jean,” Tucker groaned. Fuck it, he was a dead man anyway.

“Don’t you speak to me. Just listen. This is going to disappear. You are going to disappear. You’re getting out of here tomorrow and then you’re going to a cabin I have up in the Rockies. You won’t go home, you won’t speak to any reporters, you won’t say doodly squat. My lawyers will handle the legal aspects and keep you out of jail, but you will never surface again. When this blows over, you can go on with your pathetic life. But with a new name. And if you ever set foot in the state of Texas or come within a hundred yards of anyone involved in my company, I will personally shoot you dead. Do you understand?”

“Can I still fly?”

Mary Jean laughed and lowered the gun. “Sweetie, to a Texas way a thinkin’ the only way you coulda screwed up worse is if you’d throwed a kid down a well after fessing up to being on the grassy knoll stompin’ yellow roses in between shootin’ the President. You ain’t gonna fly, drive, walk, crawl, or spit if I have anything to say about it.” She put the gun in her purse and went into the tiny bathroom to check her makeup. A quick primping and she headed for

the door. “I’ll send up some flowers. Y’all heal up now, honey.”

She wasn’t going to kill him after all. Maybe he could win her back. “Mary Jean, I think I had a spiritual experience.”

“I don’t want to hear about any of your degenerate activities.”

“No, a real spiritual experience. Like a—what do you call it? — an epiphany?”

“Son, you don’t know it, but you’re as close to seeing the Lord as you’ve ever been in your life. Now you hush before I send you to perdition.”

She put on her best beatific smile and left the room radiating the power of positive thinking.

Tucker pulled the covers over his head and reached for the flask Jake had left. Perdition, huh? She made it sound bad. Must be in Oklahoma.

5 Our Lady of the Fishnet Stockings

The High Priestess of the Shark People ate Chee-tos and watched afternoon talk shows over the satellite feed. She sat in a wicker emperor’s chair. A red patent leather pump dangled from one toe. Red lipstick, red nails, a big red bow in her hair. But for a pair of silk seamed stockings, she was naked.

On the screen: Meadow Malackovitch, in a neck brace, sobbed on her lawyer’s shoulder—a snapshot of the pilot who had traumatized her was inset in the upper-right-hand corner. The host, a failed weatherman who now made seven figures mining trailer parks for atrocities, was reading the dubious résumé of Tucker Case. Shots of the pink jet, before and after. Stock footage of Mary Jean on an airfield tarmac, followed by Case in a leather jacket.

The High Priestess touched herself lightly, leaving a faint orange stripe of Chee-to spoor on her pubes (she was a natural blonde), then keyed the intercom that connected her to the Sorcerer.

“What?” came the man’s voice, weary but awake. It was 2:00 A.M. The Sorcerer had been working all night.

“I think we’ve found our pilot,” she said.

6 Who’s Flying This Life?

At the last minute Mary Jean changed her mind about sending Tucker Case to her cabin in the mountains. “Put him in a motel room outside of town and don’t let him out until I say so.”

In two weeks Tucker had seen only the nurse who came in to change his bandages and the guard. Actually, the guard was a tackle, second-string defense from SMU, six-foot-six, two hundred and seventy pounds of earnest Christian naïveté named Dusty Lemon.

Tucker was lying on the bed watching television. Dusty sat hunched over the wood-grain Formica table reading Scripture.

Tucker said, “Dusty, why don’t you go get us a six-pack and a pizza?”

Dusty didn’t look up. Tuck could see the shine of his scalp through his crew cut. A thick Texas drawl: “No, sir. I don’t drink and Mrs. Jean said that you wasn’t to have no alcohol.”

“It’s not Mrs. Jean, you doofus. It’s Mrs. Dobbins.” After two weeks, Dusty was beginning to get on Tuck’s nerves.

“Just the same,” Dusty said. “I can call for a pizza for you, but no beer.”

Tuck detected a blush though the crew cut. “Dusty?”

“Yes sir.” The tackle looked up from his Bible, waited.

“Get a real name.”

“Yes, sir,” Dusty said, a giant grin bisecting his moon face, “Tuck.”

Tucker wanted to leap off the bed and cuff Dusty with his Bible, but he was a long way from being able to leap anywhere. Instead, he looked at the ceiling for a second (it was highway safety orange, like the walls, the doors, the tile in the bathroom), then propped

himself up on one elbow and considered Dusty’s Bible. “The red type. That

the hot parts?”

“The words of Jesus,” Dusty said, not looking up.

“Really?”

Dusty nodded, looked up. “Would you like me to read to you? When my grandma was in the hospital, she liked me to read Scriptures to her.”

Tucker fell back with an exasperated sigh. He didn’t understand religion. It was like heroin or golf: He knew a lot of people did it, but he didn’t un-derstand why. His father watched sports every Sunday, and his mother had worked in real estate. He grew up thinking that church was something that simply interfered with games and weekend open houses. His first ex-posure to religion, other than the skin mag layouts of the women who had brought down television evangelists, had been his job with Mary Jean. For her it just seemed like good business. Sometimes he would stand in the back of the auditorium and listen to her talk to a thousand women about having God on their sales team, and they would cheer and “Hallelujah!” and he would feel as if he’d been left out of something—something beyond the apparent goofiness of it all. Maybe Dusty had something on him besides a hundred pounds.

“Dusty, why don’t you go out tonight? You haven’t been out in two weeks. I have to be here, but you—you must have a whole line of babes crying to get you back, huh? Big football player like you, huh?”

Dusty blushed again, going deep red from the collar of his practice jersey to the top of his head. He folded his hands and looked at them in his lap. “Well, I’m sorta waitin’ for the right girl to come along. A lot of the girls that go after us football players, you know, they’re kinda loose.”

Tuck raised an eyebrow. “And?”

Dusty squirmed, his chair creaked under the strain. “Well, you know, it’s kinda…”

And suddenly, amid the stammering, Tucker got it. The kid was a virgin. He raised his hand to quiet the boy. “Never mind, Dusty.” The big tackle slumped in his chair, exhausted and embarrassed.

Tuck considered it. He, who understood so much the importance of a healthy sex life, who knew what women needed and how to give it to them, might never be able to do it again, and Dusty Lemon, who probably could produce a woody that women could chin themselves on, wasn’t using it at all. He pondered it. He worked it over

from several angles and came very close to having a religious experience, for who but a vicious and vengeful God would allow such injustice in the world? He thought about it. Poor Tucker. Poor Dusty. Poor, poor Tucker.

He felt a lump forming in his throat. He wanted to say something that would make the kid feel better. “How old are you, Dusty?”

“I’ll be twenty-two next March, sir?”

“Well, that’s not so bad. I mean, you might be a late bloomer, you know. Or gay maybe,” Tuck said cheerfully.

Dusty started to contract into the fetal position. “Sir, I’d rather not talk about it, if you don’t mind,” he whimpered. There was a knock on the door and he uncurled, alert and ready to move. He looked to Tucker for instructions.

“Well, answer it.”

Dusty lumbered to the door and pulled it open a crack. “Yes?”

“I’m here to see Tucker Case. It’s okay, I work for Mary Jean.” Tuck recognized Jake Skye’s voice.

“Just a second.” Dusty turned and looked to Tucker, confused.

“Who knows we’re here, Dusty?”

“Just us and Mrs. Jean.”

“Then why don’t you let him in?”

“Yes, sir.” He opened the door and Jake Skye strode through carrying a grocery bag and a pizza box.

“Greetings.” He threw the pizza on the bed. “Pepperoni and mushroom.” He glanced at Dusty and paused, taking a moment to look the tackle up and down. “How’d you get this job? Eat your family?”

“No, sir,” Dusty said.

Jake patted the tackle’s mammoth shoulder. “Good to be careful, I guess. Momma always said, ‘Beware of geeks bearing gifts.’ Who are you?”

“Jake Skye,” Tuck said, “meet Dusty Lemon. Dusty, Jake Skye, Mary Jean’s jet mechanic. Be nice to Dusty, Jake, He’s a virgin.”

Dusty shot a vicious glare at Tuck and extended a boxing glove size mitt. Jake shook his hand. “Virgin, huh?”

Jake dropped his hand. “Not including farm animals, though, right?”

Dusty winced and moved to close the door. “You-all can’t stay long. Mr. Case isn’t supposed to see no one.”

Jake put the grocery bag down on the table, pulled out a fourinch-thick bundle of mail, and tossed it on the bed next to Tucker. “Your

fan mail.”

Tucker picked it up. “It’s all been opened.”

“I was bored,” Jake said, opening the pizza box and extracting a slice. “A lot of death threats, a few marriage proposals, a couple really interesting ones had both. Oh, and an airline ticket to someplace I’ve never heard of with a check for expenses.”

“From Mary Jean?”

“Nope. Some missionary doctor in the Pacific. He wants you to fly for him. Medical supplies or something. Came FedEx yesterday. Almost took the job myself, seeing as I still have my pilot’s license and you don’t, but then, I can get a job here.”

Tucker shuffled through the stack of mail until he found the check and the airline ticket. He unfolded the attached letter.

Jake held the pizza box out to the bodyguard. “Dopey, you want some pizza?”

“Dusty,” Dusty corrected.

“Whatever.” To Tuck: “He wants you to leave ASAP.”

“He can’t go anywhere,” said Dusty.

Jake retracted the box. “I can see that, Dingy. He’s still wired for sound.” Jake gestured toward the catheter that snaked out of Tucker’s pajama bottoms. “How long before you can travel?”

Tucker was studying the letter. It certainly seemed legitimate. The doctor was on a remote island north of New Guinea, and he needed someone to fly jet loads of medical supplies to the natives. He specifically mentioned that “he was not concerned” about Tucker’s lack of a pilot’s license. The “need was dire” and the need was for an experienced jet pilot who could fly a Lear 45.

“Well,” Jake said, “when can you roll?”

“Doctor says not for a week or so,” Tucker said. “I don’t get it. This guy is offering more money than I make for Mary Jean. Why me?”

Jake pulled a Lone Star from the grocery bag and twisted off the cap. Tuck zeroed in on the beer. Dusty snatched it out of Jake’s hand.

“The question is,” Jake said, glaring at Dusty, “what the fuck is a missionary doctor in Bongo Bongo land doing with a Lear 45?”

“God’s work?” Dusty said innocently.

Jake snatched back his beer. “Oh blow me, Huey.”

“Dusty,” Dusty corrected.

Tucker said, “I’m not sure this is a good idea. Maybe I should stay here and see how things pan out with the FAA. This guy wants me right away. I need more time.”

“Like more time will make a difference. Damn, Tucker, you don’t have to sink eyeball deep in shit to know it’s a good idea to pull yourself out. Sometimes you have to make a decision.”

Tucker looked at the letter again. “But I…”

Before Tucker could finish his protest, Jake brought the Lone Star in a screaming arc across Dusty Lemon’s temple. The bodyguard fell like a dead tree and did a dead-cat bounce on the orange carpet.

“Jesus!” Tucker said. “What the fuck was that?”

“A decision,” Jake said. He looked up from the fallen tackle and took a pull on the foaming Lone Star. “Sometimes this high-tech world calls for low-tech solutions. Let’s go.”

7 Travel Tips

“I can’t believe you hit him,” Tucker said. He was in the passenger seat of Jake Skye’s camouflaged Land Rover. It was much more car than was re-quired for the Houston expressway, but Jake was into equipment overkill. Everything he owned was Kevlar, GorTex, Polarfleece, titanium alloy, graphite-polymer composite, or of “expedition quality.” He liked machines, understood how they worked, and could fix them if they didn’t. Sometimes he spoke in an incomprehensible alphabet soup of SRAM, DRAM, FOR-TRAN, LORAN, SIMMS, SAMS, and ROM. Tuck, on the other hand, knew most of the words to “Mommas, Don’t Let Your Babies Grow Up to Be Cowboys” and could restore burned toast to new by scraping off the black stuff.

Of the two, Jake was the cool one. Tucker had always found being cool a little elusive. As Jake put it, “You’ve got the look, but you can’t walk the walk or talk the talk. Tucker, you are a hopeless geek trapped in a cool guy’s body, but out of the goodness of my heart, I will take you on as my student.” They’d been friends for four years. Jake had taught Tuck to fly.

“He’ll be fine. He’s a jock,” Jake shouted over the buffeting wind. He hadn’t bought a top for the Land Rover, opting instead for the Outback package with the “patented rhinoceros poking platform.”

“He was just a kid. He was reading the Bible.”

“He would have ripped my arms off if I’d let him.”

Tuck nodded. That was probably true. “Where are we going?”

“The airport. Everything you need is in that pack in the back.”

Tucker looked into the back of the Rover. There was a large backpack. “Why?”

“Because if I don’t get you out of the country right now, you’re going to jail.”

“Mary Jean said she had that handled. Said her lawyers were on it.”

“Right, and I go around smacking kids with beer bottles for recreation. The hooker filed a civil suit this morning. Twenty million. Mary Jean has to throw you to the wolves to save her own ass. She has to let the court prove that you fucked up all on your own. I grabbed your passport and some clothes when I got your mail.”

“Jake, I can’t just take off like this. I’m supposed to see a doctor tomorrow.”

“For what?”

Tuck pointed to the lump of bandages in his lap. “What do you think? He’s supposed to take this damn tube out of me.”

“We’ll do it in the bathroom at the airport. There’s some antibiotics in the first-aid kit in the pack. I confirmed you for a flight to Honolulu that leaves in an hour. From there you go to Guam, then to someplace called Truk. That’s where this doctor is supposed to meet you. I’ve got it all written down. There was an e-mail address at the bottom of the letter. I sent him a message to expect you tomorrow.”

“But my car, my apartment, my stuff.”

“Your apartment is a pit and I put your stuff worth keeping in a ministorage. I’ve got the pink slip for your Camaro. Sign it over to me. I’ll sell it and send you the money.”

“You were pretty fucking sure I’d want to do this.”

“What choice do you have?”

Jake parked the Land Rover in short-term parking, shouldered the pack, and led Tucker into the international terminal. They checked the pack and found a rest room near Tucker’s departure gate.

“I can do this myself,” Tucker said.

Jake Skye was peering over the door into the stall where Tucker was preparing to remove his bandages and, finally, the catheter. A line of businessmen washed their hands at a line of lavatories while trying not to notice what was going on behind them in the stall.

“Just yank it,” Jake Skye said.

“Give me a minute. I think they tied a knot inside it.”

“Don’t be a wuss, Tucker. Yank it.”

The businessmen at the sinks exchanged raised eyebrows and one by one broke for the rest room door.

Jake said, “I’m going to give you to five, then I’m coming over the stall and yanking it for you. One, two…”

A rodeo cowboy at the urinals hitched up his Wranglers, pulled his hat down, and made a bowlegged beeline for the door to get on a plane to someplace where this sort of thing didn’t happen.

“Five!”

Security guards rushed through the terminal toward the screaming. Someone was being murdered in the men’s room and they were responsible. They burst into the rest room with guns drawn. Jake Skye was coiling up some tubing by the sinks. There was whimpering coming from one of the stalls. “Everything’s fine, officers,” Jake said. “My friend’s a little upset. He just found out that his mother died.”

“My mother’s not dead!” Tucker said from the stall.

“He’s in denial,” Jake whispered to the guards. “Here, you better takes this.” He handed the tubing to one of the guards. “We don’t want him hanging himself in grief.”

Ten minutes later, after condolences from the security staff, they sat in the departure lounge drinking gin and tonics, waiting for Tuck’s boarding call. Around them, a score of men and women in suits fired out phone calls on cell phones while twenty more performed an impromptu dog pile at the bar, trying to occupy the minuscule smoking area. Jake Skye was cataloging the contents of the pack he’d given to Tuck. Tucker wasn’t listening. He was overwhelmed with the speed with which his life had gone to shit, and he was desperately trying to sort it out. Jake’s voice was lost like kazoo sounds in a wind tunnel.

Jake droned, “The stove will run on anything: diesel, jet fuel, gasoline, even vodka. There’s a mask, fins, and snorkel, and a couple of waterproof flashlights.”

The job with Mary Jean had been perfect. A different city every few days, nice hotels, an expense account, and literally thousands of earnest Mary Jean ladies to indulge him. And they did, one or two at each convention. Inspired by Mary Jean’s speeches on self-determination, motivation, and how they too could be a winner, they sought Tucker out to have their one adventurous affair with a jet pilot. And because no matter how many times it happened, he was always somewhat surprised by their advances, Tucker played a part.

He behaved like a man torn from the cover of some steamy romance novel: the charming rogue, the passionate pirate who would, come morning, take his ship to sea for God, Queen, and Country. Of course, usually, sometime before morning, the women would realize that under the smooth, gin-painted exterior was a guy who sniffed his shorts to check their wearability. But for a moment, for them and for him, he had been cool. Sleazy, but cool.

When the sleaze got to him, he needed only to suck a few hits of oxygen from the cabin cylinder to chase the hangover, then pull the pink jet into the sky to convince himself he was a professional, competent and in control. At altitude he turned it all over to the autopilot.

But now he couldn’t seduce anyone or allow himself to be seduced, and he wasn’t sure he could fly. The crash had juiced him of his confidence. It wasn’t the impact or even the injuries. It was that last moment, when the guy, or the angel, or whatever it was appeared in the copilot’s seat.

“You ever think about God?” Tucker asked Jake.

Jake Skye’s face went dead with incomprehension. “You’re going to need to know about this stuff if you get into trouble. Kinda like checking the fuel gauges—if you know what I mean.”

Tucker winced. “Look, I heard every word you said. This seemed important all of a sudden, you know?”

“Well, in that case, Tuck, yes, I do think about God sometimes. When I’m with a really hot babe, and we’re going at it like sweaty monkeys, I think about it then. I think about a big old pissed-off Sistine Chapel finger-pointin’ motherfucker. And you know what? It works. You don’t come when you’re thinking about shit like that. You should try it sometime. Oh, sorry.”

“Never mind,” Tucker said.

“You can’t let that kid with the Bible get to you. He’s too young to have given up on religion…doesn’t have enough sin under his belt. Guys like us, best bet is that it’s all bullshit and we go directly to worm food. Try not to think about it.”

“Right,” Tucker said, totally unsatisfied. If you had a question about any piece of gadgetry on the planet, Jake Skye was your man. But spiritually, he was a hamster. Which, actually, was one of the things Tucker used to like about him. He tried not to think about it and changed the subject.

“So what do I need to know about flying a Lear 45?”

Jake seemed relieved to be back into the realm of technology. “I haven’t seen one yet, but they say it flies just like Mary Jean’s old Lear 25, only faster and a longer range. Better avionics. Read the manuals when you get there.”

“What about navigation equipment?” Tucker’s navigation was weak. Since he’d gotten his jet license, he’d depended completely on automatic systems.”

“You’ll be fine. You don’t buy a four-million-dollar plane and cheap out on the navigation and radios. This doctor’s got an e-mail address, which means he’s got a computer. You’ll be able to access charts and weather, and file flight plans with that. Check the facilities at your destinations, so you’ll know what to expect. Some of these Third World airstrips just have a native with a candle for night landings. And check your fuel availability. They’ll sell you sewer water instead of jet fuel if you don’t check. You ever deal with Third World airport cops?”

Tucker shrugged. Jake knew damn well he hadn’t. He’d gotten his hours flying copilot in the Mary Jean jet, and they’d never taken that outside of the continental United States except for one trip to Hawaii.

“Well,” Jake continued, “the catchword is ‘bribe, bribe, and bribe.’ Offer the highest amount you can at the lowest level of authority. Always have a thick roll of American dollars with you, and don’t bring it to the table if you’re not willing to lose it. Keep something stashed in your shoe if they tap you out.”

“You think this doctor is going to have me hauling drugs?”

“Good chance of it, don’t you think? Besides, it doesn’t matter. These people are brutal. Half the time the government guys have the same last name, so if you move up the ladder, you’re just talking to the uncle of the last one that hit you. He has to charge you more out of pride.”

Tucker cradled his head in his hands and stared into his gin and tonic. “I’m fucked.”

Jake patted him on the arm, then drew back at the intimacy of the act. “They’re calling your flight. You’ll be fine.”

They rose and Jake threw some cash on the table. At the gate Tucker turned to his friend. “Man, I don’t know what to say.”

Jake extended his hand. “No sweat, man. You’d have done it for me.”

“I really hate flying in the back. Check on that kid from the motel, okay.”

“I’m on it. Look, everything you need is in the pack. Don’t leave it behind.”

“Right,” Tucker said. “Well…” He turned and walked down the ramp to the plane.

Jake Skye watched him go, then turned, walked to a pay phone, dialed some numbers, and waited. “Yeah, it’s Jake. He’s on his way. Yeah, gone for good. When can I pick up my check?”

8 The Humiliation of the Pilot As a Passenger

Once on the plane, Tucker unfolded the letter from the mysterious doctor and read it again.

Dear Mr. Case:

I have become aware of your recent difficulties and I believe I have a proposition that will be of great benefit to us both. My wife and I are missionaries on Alualu, a rather remote atoll at the north-western tip of the Micronesian crescent. Since we are out of the normal shipping lanes and we are the sole medical provider for the people of the island, we maintain our own aircraft for the transport of medical supplies. We have recently procured a Lear 45 for this purpose, but our former pilot has been called to the mainland on personal business for an indefinite time.

In short, Mr. Case, given your experience flying small jets and our unique requirements, we feel that this would be a perfect opportunity for us both. We are not concerned with the status of your license, only that you can perform in the pilot’s seat and fulfill a need that can only be described as dire.

If you are willing to honor a long-term contract, we will provide you with room and board on the island, pay you $2,000 a week, as well as a generous bonus upon completion of the contract. As a gesture of our sincerity, I am enclosing an open airline ticket and a cashier’s check for $3,000 for traveling expenses. Contact us by e-mail with your arrival time in Truk and my wife will meet you there to discuss the conditions of your employment and pro vide transportation to Alualu. You’ll find a room reserved for you at the

Paradise Inn.

Sincerely,

Sebastian Curtis, M.D.

Sebcurt@Wldnet.COM.JAP

Why me? Tuck wondered. He’d crashed a jet, lost his job and probably his sex life, was charged with multiple crimes, then a letter and a check arrived from nowhere to bail him out, but only if he was willing to abandon everything and move to a Pacific island. It could turn out to be a good job, but if it had been his decision, he’d still be lingering over it in a motel room with Dusty Lemon. It was as if some combination of ironic luck and Jake Skye had been sent along to make the decision for him. Not so strange, he thought. The same combination had put him in the pilot’s seat in the first place.

Tuck had grown up in Elsinore, California, northeast of San Diego, the only son of the owner of the Denmark Silverware Corporation. He had an unremarkable childhood, was a mediocre athlete, and spent most of his adolescence surfing in San Diego and chasing girls, one of whom he finally caught.

Zoophilia Gold was the daughter of his father’s lawyer, a lovely girl made shy by a cruel first name. Tuck and Zoo enjoyed a brief romance, which was put on hold when Tuck’s father sent him off to college in Texas so he could learn to make decisions and someday take over the family business. His motivation excised by the job guarantee, Tuck made passing grades until his college career was cut short by an emergency call from his mother. “Come home. Your father’s dead.”

Tuck made the drive in two days, stopping only for gas, to use the bathroom, and to call Zoophilia, who informed him that his mother had married his father’s brother and his uncle had taken over Denmark Silver-ware. Tuck screeched into Elsinore in a blind rage and ran over Zoophilia’s father as he was leaving Tuck’s mother’s house.

The death was declared an accident, but during the investigation a policeman informed Tuck that although he had no proof, he suspected that the riding accident that killed Tuck’s father might not have been an accident, especially since Tuck’s father had been allergic to horses. Tuck was sure that his uncle had set the whole thing

up, but he couldn’t bring himself to confront his mother or her new husband.

In the meantime, Zoophilia, stricken with grief over her father’s death, overdosed on Prozac and drowned in her hot tub, and her brother, who had been away at college also, returned promising to kill Tucker or at least sue him into oblivion for the deaths of his father and sister. While trying to come to a decision on a course of action, Tucker met a brace of Texas brunettes in a Pacific Beach bar who insisted he ride back with them to the Lone Star state.

Disinherited, depressed, and clueless, Tucker took the ride as far as a small suburban airport outside of Houston, where the girls asked him if he’d ever been nude skydiving. At that point, not really caring if he lived or died, he crawled into the back of a Beechcraft with them.

They left him scraped, bruised, and stranded on the tarmac in a jockstrap and a parachute harness, shivering with adrenaline. Jake Skye found him wandering around the hangars wearing the parachute canopy as a toga. It had been a tough year.

“Let me guess,” Jake said. “Margie and Randy Sue?”

“Yeah,” Tucker said. “How’d you know?”

“They do it all the time. Daddies with money—Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Petroleum. Hope you didn’t cut up that canopy. You can get a grand for it used.”

“They’re gone, then?”

“An hour ago. Said something about going to London. Where are your clothes?”

“In their car.”

“Come with me.”

Jake gave Tucker a job washing airplanes, then taught him to fly a Cessna 172 and enrolled him in flight school. Tucker got his twin-engine hours in six months, helping Jake ferry Texas businessmen around the state in a leased Beech Duke. Jake turned the flying over to Tuck as soon as he passed his 135 commercial certification.

“I can fly anything,” Jake said, “but unless it’s helicopters, I’d rather wrench. Only steady gig in choppers is flying oil rigs in the Gulf. Had too many friends tip off into the drink. You fly, I’ll do the maintenance, we split the cash.”

Another six months and Jake was offered a job by the Mary Jean Cosmetics Corporation. Jake took the job on the condition that Tucker could copilot until he had his Lear hours (he described Tuck as a “little lost lamb” and the makeup magnate relented). Mary Jean

did her own flying, but once Tucker was qualified, she turned the controls over to him full-time. “Some members of the board have pointed out that my time would be better spent taking care of business instead of flying. Besides, it’s not ladylike. How’d you like a job?”

Luck. The training he’d received would have cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and he’d gotten most of it for free. He had become a new person, and it had all started with a bizarre streak of bad luck followed by an op-portunity and Jake Skye’s intervention. Maybe it would work out for the better this time too. At least this time no one had been killed.

9 Cult of the Autopilot: A History Lesson

The pilot said, “The local time is 9:00 A.M. The temperature is 90 degrees. Thank you for flying Continental and enjoy your stay in Truk.” Then he laughed menacingly.

Tuck stepped out of the plane and felt the palpable weight of the air in his lungs. It smelled green, fecund, as if vegetation was growing, dying, rotting, and giving off a gas too thick to breathe. He followed a line of passengers to the terminal, a long, low, cinderblock building—nothing more really than a tin roof on pillars—teeming with brown people; short, stoutly built people, men in jeans or old dress slacks and T-shirts, women in long floral cotton dresses with puff shoulders, their hair held in buns atop their heads by tortoiseshell combs.

Tuck waited, sweating, at one end of the terminal while young men shoved the baggage through a curtain onto a plywood ramp. Natives re-trieved their baggage, mainly coolers wrapped with packing tape, and walked by the customs officer’s counter without pausing. He looked for a tourist, to see how they were treated, but there were none. The customs officer glared at him. Tucker hoped there was nothing illegal in his pack. The airport here looked like a weigh station for a death camp; he didn’t want to see the jail. He fingered the roll of bills in his pocket, thinking, Bribe.

The pack came sliding through the curtain. Tucker moved through the pall of islanders and pulled the pack onto his shoulders, then walked to the customs counter and plopped it down in front of the officer.

“Passport,” the officer said. He was fat and wore a brass button uniform with dime store flip-flops on his feet.

Tuck handed him his passport.

“How long will you be staying?”

“Not long. I’m not sure. A day maybe.”

“No flights for three days.” The officer stamped the passport and handed it back to Tucker. “There’s a ten-dollar departure fee.”

“That’s it?” Tucker was amazed. No inspection, no bribe. Luck again.

“Take your bag.”

“Right.” Tucker scooped up the pack and headed for an exit sign, hand-painted on plywood. He walked out of the airport and was blinded by the sun.

“Hey, you dive?” A man’s voice.

Tuck squinted and a thin, leathery islander in a Bruins hockey jersey stood in front of him. He had six teeth, two of them gold. “No,” Tucker said.

“Why you come if you no dive?”

“I’m here on business.” Tucker dropped his pack and tried to breathe. He was soaked with sweat. Ten seconds in this sun and he wanted to dive into the shade like a roach under a stove.

“Where you stay?”

This guy looked criminal, just an eye patch short of a pirate. Tucker didn’t want to tell him anything.

“How do I get to the Paradise Inn?”

The pirate called to a teenager who was sitting in the shade watching a score of beat-up Japanese cars with blackened windows jockeying for position in the dirt street.

“Rindi! Paradise.”

The younger man, dressed like a Compton rapper—oversized shorts, football jersey, baseball cap reversed over a blue bandanna—came over and grabbed Tucker’s pack. Tuck kept one hand on an arm strap and fought the kid for control.

“You go with him,” the pirate said. “He take you Paradise.”

“Come on, Holmes,” the kid said. “My car air-conditioned.

Tucker let go of the pack and the kid whisked it away through the jostle of cars to an old Honda Civic with a cellophane back window and bailing wire holding the passenger door shut. Tuck follow him, stepping quickly between the cars, each one lurching forward as if to hit him as he passed. He looked for the driver’s expressions, but the windshields were all blacked out with plastic film.

The kid threw Tuck’s pack in the hatchback, then unwired the door and held it open. Tucker climbed in, feeling, once again, com

pletely at the mercy of Lady Luck. Now I get to see the place where they rob and kill the white guys, he thought.

As they drove, Tuck looked out on the lagoon. Even through the tinted window the blue of the lagoon shone as if illuminated from below. Island women in scuba masks waded shoulder deep; their floral dresses flowing around them made them look like multicolored jellyfish. Each carried a short steel spear slung from a piece of surgical tubing. Large plastic buckets floated on the surface in which the women were depositing their catch.

“What are they hunting?” Tuck asked the driver.

“Octopus, urchin, small fish. Mostly octopus. Hey, where you from in United States?”

“I grew up in California.”

The kid lit up. “California! You have Crips there, right?”

“Yeah, there’s gangs.”

“I’m a Crip,” the kid said, pointing to his blue bandanna with pride. “Me and my homies find any Bloods here, we gonna pop a nine on ’em.”

Tucker was amazed. On the side of the road a beautiful little girl in a flowered dress was drinking from a green coconut. Here in the car there was a gang war going on. He said, “Where are the Bloods?”

Rindi shook his head sadly. “Nobody want to be Bloods. Only Crips on Truk. But if we see one, we gonna bust a cap on ’em.” He pulled back a towel on the seat to reveal a beat-up Daisy air pistol.

Tuck made a mental note not to wear a red bandanna and accidentally fill the Blood shortage. He had no desire to be killed or wounded over a glorified game of cowboys and Indians.

“How far to the hotel?”

“This it,” Rindi said, wrenching the Honda across the road into a dusty parking lot.

The Paradise Inn was a two-story, crumbling stucco building with a crown of rusting rebar beckoning skyward for a third floor that would never be built. Tuck let the boy, Rindi, carry his pack to an upstairs room: mint green cinder block over brown linoleum, a beat-up metal desk, smoke-stained floral curtains, a twin bed with a torn 1950s bedspread, the smell of mildew and insecticide. Rindi put the pack in the doorless closet and cranked the little window air conditioner to high.

“Too late for shower. Water come on again four to six.”

Tuck glanced into the bathroom. Mistake. An exotic-looking or ange thing was growing on the shower curtain. He said, “Where can I get a beer?”

Rindi grinned. “We have lounge. Budweiser, ‘king of beers.’ MTV on satellite.” He cocked his wrists and performed a gangsta rap move that looked as if he’d contracted a rhythmic cerebral palsy. “Yo, G, we chill with the phattest jams? Snoop, Ice, Public Enemy.”

“Oh, good,” Tuck said. “We can do a drive-by later. How do I get to the lounge?”

“Down steps, outside, go right.” He paused, looking concerned. “We have to shoot out driver’s side. Other window not go down.”

“We’ll manage.” Tuck flipped the kid a dollar and left the room, proud to be an American.

An unconscious island man marked the entrance to the lounge. Tuck stepped over him and pushed his way through the black glass door into a cool, dark, smoke-hazed room lit by a silent television tuned to nothing and a flickering neon BUDWEISER sign. A shadow stood behind the bar; two more sat in front of it. Tuck could see eyes in the dark—maybe people sitting at tables, maybe nocturnal vermin.

A voice: “A fellow American here to buy a beer for his countryman.”

The voice had come from one of the shadows at the bar. Tuck squinted into the dark and saw a large white man, about fifty, in a sweat-stained dress shirt. He was smiling, a jowly yellow smile under drink-dulled eyes. Tuck smiled back. Anyone that didn’t speak broken English was, at this point, his friend.

“What are you drinkin’, pardner?” Tuck always went Texan when he was being friendly.

“What you drink here.” He held up two fingers to the bartender, then held his hand out to shake. “Jefferson Pardee, editor in chief of the Truk Star.”

“Tucker Case.” Tuck sat down on the stool next to the big man. The bartender placed two sweating Budweiser cans in front of them and waited.

“Run a tab,” Pardee said. Then to Tuck: “I assume you’re a diver?”

“Why would you assume that?”

“It’s the only reason Americans come here, other than Peace Corps or Navy CAT team members. And if you don’t mind my saying, you don’t look idealistic enough to be Peace Corps or stupid enough to be Navy.”

“I’m a pilot.” It felt good saying it. He’d always liked saying it. He didn’t realize how terrified he’d been that he’d never be able to say it again. “I’m supposed to meet someone from another island about a job.”

“Not a missionary air outfit, I hope.”

“It’s for a missionary doctor. Why?”

“Son, those people do a great job, but you can only get so much out of those old planes they fly. Fifty-year-old Beech 18s and DC3s. Sooner or later you’re going into the drink. But I suppose if you’re flying for God…”

“I’ll be flying a new Learjet.”

Pardee almost dropped his beer. “Bullshit.”

Tuck was tempted to pull out the letter and slam it on the bar, but thought better of it. “That’s what they said.”

Pardee put a big hairy forearm on the bar and leaned into Tuck. He smelled like a hangover. “What island and what church?”

“Alualu,” Tuck said. “A Dr. Curtis.”

Pardee nodded and sat back on his stool. “No-man’s Island.”

“What’s that mean?”

“It doesn’t belong to anyone. Do you know anything about Micronesia?”

“Just that you have gangs but no regular indoor plumbing.”

“Well, depending on how you look at it, Truk can be a hellhole. That’s what happens when you give Coke cans to a coconut culture. But it’s not all that way. There are two thousand islands in the Micronesian crescent, running almost all the way from Hawaii to New Guinea. Magellan landed here first, on his first voyage around the world. The Spanish claimed them, then the Germans, then the Japanese. We took them from the Japanese during the war. There are seventy sunken Japanese ships in Truk’s lagoon alone. That’s why the divers come.”

“So what’s this have to do with where I’m going?”

“I’m getting to that. Until fifteen years ago, Micronesia was a U.S. protectorate, except for Alualu. Because it’s at the westernmost tip of the crescent, we left it out of the surrender agreement with the Japanese. It kind of got lost in the shuffle. So Alualu was never an American territory, and when the Federated States of Micronesia declared independence, they didn’t include Alualu.”

“So what’s that mean?” Tuck was getting impatient. This was the longest lecture he’d endured since flight school.

“In short, no mother government, no foreign aid, no nothing.

Alualu belongs to whoever lives on it. It’s off the shipping lanes, and it’s a raised atoll, only one small island, not a group of islands around a lagoon, so there’s not enough copra to make it worth the trip for the collector boats. Since the war, when there was an airstrip there, no one goes there.”

“Maybe that’s why they need the jet?”

“Son, I came here in ’66 with the Peace Corps and I’ve never left. I’ve seen a lot of missionaries throw a lot of money at a lot of problems, but I’ve never seen a church that was willing to spring for a Learjet.”

Tuck wanted to beat his head on the bar just to feel his tiny brain rattle. Of course it was too good to be true. He’d known that instinctively. He should have known that as soon as he’d seen the money they were offering him—him, Tucker Case, the biggest fuckup in the world.

Tuck drained his beer and signaled for two more. “So what do you know about this Curtis?”

“I’ve heard of him. There’s not much news out here and he made some about twenty years back. He went batshit at the airport in Yap after he couldn’t get anyone to evacuate a sick kid off the island. Frankly, I’m sur-prised he’s still out there. I heard the church pulled out on him. Cargo cults give Christians the willies.”

Tuck knew he was being lured in. He’d met guys like Pardee in airport hotel bars all over the U.S.: lonely businessmen, usually salesmen, who would talk to anyone about anything just for the company. They learned how to make you ask questions that required long windy answers. He’d felt sympathetic toward them ever since he’d played Willie Loman in Miss Patterson’s third-grade class production of Death of a Salesman. Pardee just needed to talk.

“What’s a cargo cult?” Tuck asked.

Pardee smiled. “They’ve been in the islands since the Spanish landed in the 1500s and traded steel tools and beads to the natives for food and water. They’re still around.”

Pardee took a long pull on his beer, set it down, and resumed. “These islands were all populated by people from somewhere else. The stories of the heroic ancestors coming across the sea in canoes are part of their reli-gions. The ancestors brought everything they need from across the sea. All of a sudden, guys show up with new cool stuff. Instant ancestors, instant gods from across the sea, bearing gifts. They incorporated the newcomers into their religions. Sometimes it might be fifty years before another ship showed up, but

every time they used a machete, they thought about the return of the gods bearing cargo.”

“So there are still people waiting for the Spanish to return with steel tools.”

Pardee laughed. “No. Except for missionaries, these islands didn’t get much attention from the modern world until World War II. All of a sudden, Allied forces are coming in and building airstrips and bribing the islanders with things so they would resist the Japanese. Manna from the heavens. American flyers brought in all sorts of good stuff. Then the war ended and the good stuff stopped coming.

“Years later anthropologists and missionaries are finding little altars built to airplanes. The islanders are still waiting for the ships from the sky to return and save them. Myths get built around single pilots who are supposed to bring great armies to the islands to chase out the French, or the British, or whatever imperial government holds the island. The British outlawed the cargo cults on some Melanesian islands and jailed the leaders. Bad idea, of course. They were instant martyrs. The missionaries railed against the new religions, trying to use reason to kill faith, so some islanders started claiming their pilots were Jesus. Drove the missionaries nuts. Natives putting little propellers on their crucifixes, drawing pictures of Christ in a flight helmet. Bottom line is the cargo cults are still around, and I hear that one of the strongest is on Alualu.”

“Are the natives dangerous?” Tuck asked.

“Not because of their religion, no.”

“What’s that mean?”

“These people are warriors, Mr. Case. They forget that most of the time, but sometimes when they’re drinking, a thousand years of warrior tradition can rear its head, even on the more modernized islands like Truk. And there are people in these islands who still remember the taste of human flesh—if you get my meaning. Tastes like Spam, I hear. The natives love Spam.”

“Spam? You’re kidding.”

“Nope. That’s what Spam stands for: Shaped Protein Approximating Man.”

Tucker smiled, realizing he’d been had. Pardee let loose an explosive laugh and slapped Tuck on the shoulder. “Look, my friend, I’ve got to get to the office. A paper to put out, you know. But watch yourself. And don’t be surprised if your Learjet is actually a beat-up Cessna.”

“Thanks,” Tucker said, shaking the big man’s hand.

“You going to be around for few days?” Pardee asked.

“I’m not sure.”

“Well, just a word of advice”—Pardee lowered his voice and leaned into Tucker conspiratorially—“don’t go out at night by yourself. Nothing you’re going to see is worth your life.”

“I can take care of myself, but thanks.”

“Just so,” Pardee said. He turned and lumbered out of the bar.

Tuck paid the bartender and headed out into the heat and to his room, where he stripped naked and lay on the tattered bedspread, letting the air conditioner blow over him with a welcome chill. Maybe this won’t be so bad, he thought. He was going to end up on an island where God was a pilot. What a great way to get babes!

Then he looked down at his withered member, stitched and scarred as if it had been patched from the Frankenstein monster. A wave of anxiety passed through him, bringing sweat to his skin even in the electric chill. He realized that he had really never done anything in his adult life that had not—even at some subconscious level—been part of a strategy to im-press women. He would have never worked so hard to become a pilot if it hadn’t been for Jake’s insistence that “Chicks dig pilots.” Why fly? Why get out of bed in the morning? Why do anything?

He rolled over to bury his face in the pillow and pinned a live cockroach to the spread with his cheek.

10 Coconut Telegraph

Jefferson Pardee dialed the island communications center and asked them to connect him to a friend of his in the governor’s office on Yap. While he waited for the connection, he looked down from his office above the Food Store on the Truk public market: women selling bananas, coconuts, and banana leaf bundles of taro out of plywood sheds; children with bandannas on their faces against the rising street dust; drunk men languishing red-eyed in the shade. Across the street lay a stand of coconut palms and the vibrant blue-green water of the lagoon dotted with outboards and floating pieces of Styrofoam coolers. Another day in paradise, Pardee thought.

Pardee had been out here for thirty years now. He’d come fresh out of Northwestern School of Journalism full of passion to save the world, to help those less fortunate than himself, and to avoid the draft. After his two years in the Peace Corps were up—his main achievement was teaching the islanders to boil water—he’d stayed. First he worked for the budding island governments, helping to write the charters, the constitutions, and the re-quests for aid from the United States. That work finished, he found himself afraid to go home. He’d gone to fat on breadfruit and beer and become accustomed to dollar whores, fifty-cent taxis, and a two-hour workday. The idea of returning to the States, where he would have to live up to his potential or face being called a failure, terrified him. He wrote and received a grant to start the Truk Star. It was the last significant thing that he’d done for twenty-five years. Covering the news in Truk was akin to taking a penguin census in the Mojave Desert. Still, deep inside, he hoped that something would happen so that he could

flex his atrophied journalistic muscles. Something he could get passionate about. Why couldn’t the United States nuke a nearby island? The French did it in Polynesia all the time. But no, the United States nukes one little atoll in Micronesia (Bikini) and they go away, saying, “Well, I guess that ought to do for twenty-five thousand years or so.” Wimps.

Then again, maybe there was something going on out on Alualu. Something clandestine and dirty. Jefferson Pardee had lost his ambition, but he still had hope.

“Go ahead,” the operator said.

“Ignatho, how you doing, man?”

Ignatho Malongo, governor’s assistant for outer island affairs, was not in the mood to chat. It was lunchtime and he was out of cigarettes and betel nut and no one had come to relieve him on the radio so he could leave. His office was in a bright blue corrugated steel shed tucked behind the offices of the governor. It housed a military-style steel desk, a shortwave radio, a new IBM computer, and a wastebasket full of tractor-feed paper stained with red betel nut spit under a sign that emphatically declared NO SPITTING. He was round, brown, and wore only a loincloth, a Casio watch, and a Bic pen on a string around his neck. He was sweating into a puddle that darkened the concrete floor around his desk.

“Pardee, what do you need?”

“I was wondering if you’ve heard anything going on out on Alualu?”

“Just the same. Occasionally the doctor radios for supplies to be sent out on the Micro Trader. They’re not officially in Yap state, so they don’t go through my office. Why?”

“You hear any rumors, maybe from the Micro Trader crew?”

“Like what? The Shark People don’t have contact with anyone since I can remember. Just that Dr. Curtis.”

Pardee didn’t want to be in the business of starting rumors. More than once he’d had to track down a story to find out that it had started with a drunken lie he’d told in a bar that had circulated through the islands, changed enough to sound credible, and landed back on his desk. Still, Malongo wasn’t giving anything today. “I hear they have a new aircraft out there. A Learjet.”

Malongo laughed. “Where did you hear that?”

“I’ve heard it twice now. A couple of months ago from a guy who said he was going out there to fly it for them and just now from another pilot on his way.”

“Maybe they’re starting a new airline. Be serious, Jeff. Are you that desperate for a story? I’ve got some grants you can write if you need the work.”

Pardee was a little embarrassed. Still, he had no doubt that Tucker Case had been contacted by Dr. Curtis. Something was up. He said, “Well, maybe you can ask the guys on the Trader to keep an eye out. Ask around and call me if you hear anything.”

Suddenly Pardee had a flash of motivational inspiration. “If someone’s buying jet airplanes, there might be some untapped government money out there that you guys don’t know about.” He could almost hear Malongo snap to attention.

Malongo was thinking air conditioner, laser printer, a new chair. “Look, I’ll ask out at the airport. If someone’s flying a jet off of Alualu, then they have to use the radio, right?”

“I suppose,” Pardee said.

“I’ll call you.” Malongo hung up.

Pardee sighed. “And once again,” he said to himself, “we lead with the ‘Pig Thief Still at Large’ story.”

A half hour later the phone rang. The phone never rang. Pardee picked it up and could tell by the clicking that he was being connected off-island. Ignatho Malongo came on the line. He sounded like he was in a better mood. Pardee guessed that he was in a state of foreign aid arousal.

“Jeff, the Trader is in the harbor. Some of the crew was having lunch at the marina and I asked them about your Learjet.” Malongo was smoking a Benson & Hedges and chewing a big cud of betel nut. He was in a better mood now.

“And?”

“No one’s seen it, but they did see some Japanese on the island the last time they were there.”

“Japanese? Tourists?”

“They were carrying machine guns.”

“No shit.”

“Do you think this means there’s some military money coming our way?” Malongo was thinking air-conditioning, a case of Spam, a ticket to Hawaii to go shopping.

Pardee scratched his two-day growth of beard. “Probably the crew off of a tuna boat. They’ve been threatening to shoot some of the islanders off Ulithi if they keep stealing their net floats. I’ll check with the Australian Navy, see if they know about a Japanese boat

fishing those waters. Meantime, I owe you a bag of betel nut.”

Malongo laughed. “You owe me about ten bags by now. How you going to pay if you never leave that shithole of an island?”

“You’ll see me soon enough.” Pardee hung up.

11 Paging the Goddess

The Shark men had been beating drums and marching with bamboo rifles since dawn, while the Shark women prepared the feast for the appearance of the High Priestess.

In her bed chamber the High Priestess was doing her nails. The Sorcerer entered through a beaded curtain, moved up behind her, and cupped her naked breasts. Without looking up, she said, “You know, I used to get a pretty good buzz doing this in my studio apartment. Close the windows and let the fumes build up. Want a whiff?” She held the polish bottle out behind her.

He shook his head. He was in his mid-fifties, tall, thin, with short gray hair and ice blue eyes. He wore a green lab coat over Bermuda shorts. “Missionary Air just radioed. Their Beech is broken. They’re waiting for a part from the States and won’t have it fixed for a month. Our pilot’s stuck on Truk.”

The High Priestess fired a glare over her shoulder and he could feel himself going to slime, changing, melting into the lowest form of sea slug. She could do that to him. Her breasts felt like chilled river rocks in his hands. He stepped away.

“It’s all right,” he said. “I’ve sent him a message to fly to Yap. He can catch the Micro Trader there tomorrow and he’ll be here two days later.”

She was not impressed. “Don’t you think it might be a good idea for me to meet this one before he gets here? It took long enough to find him.”

The Sorcerer had backed all the way to the beaded curtain. “You were the one that didn’t want any more military types.”

“Because it worked so well last time. It’s bad enough I have to be surrounded by ninjas. I don’t like it.”

The Sorcerer couldn’t believe anyone could walk that slowly and still express so much; it was positively symphonic. He said, “They’re not ninjas. They’re just guards. This will all be over soon and you can live in a palace in France if you want.”

He held his arms out to receive her embrace. She turned on a red spiked heel and quickstepped back to the vanity. “We’ll talk about this later. I have to go on in an hour.”

Feeling stupid, he dropped his arms and backed through the beaded curtain. In the distance the Shark People began the chant to call forth the Priestess of the Sky.

12 Friendly Advice

Tuck was sweating through a slow-motion dream rerun of the crash. The end of the runway was coming up too quickly. Meadow Malackovitch was bouncing off of various consoles in the cockpit. Someone in the copilot seat was screaming at him, calling him a “fuckin’ mook.” He turned to see who it was and was awakened by a knock on the door.

“Mr. Case. Message for you.”

“Just a second.” Tucker scrambled in the darkness until he found his khakis on the floor, shook them to evict any insect visitors, then pulled them on and stumbled to the door. Rindi, the driver-rapper, stood outside holding a slip of paper.

“This just come for you from the telecom center.” He reached past Tuck and clicked the light switch. A bare bulb went on over the desk.

Tuck took the note, dug in his pants pocket for a tip, and came up with a dollar, but Rindi had already shuffled off.

The note, on waxy fax paper, was covered with greasy fingerprints. Tuck guessed it had probably passed through a dozen hands before getting to him. He unfolded it and read.

To: Tucker Case c/o Paradise Hotel

From: Dr. Sebastian Curtis

Mr. Case,

I deeply regret that my wife will not be able to meet you on Truk as planned.

We have reserved a seat for you on tomorrow’s Air Micronesia flight to Yap,

where we have arranged transport aboard the supply ship, Micro Trader, to Alualu. Your plane will arrive at 11:00

A.M. and the Micro Trader is scheduled to sail at noon, so it will be necessary for you to take a taxi to the dock as soon as you clear customs.

I apologize for the inconvenience and would ask that you refrain from discussing the purpose of your visit with the crew of the Micro Trader—or with anyone else, for that matter. It would be unfortunate if this research reached the FAA before it had been thoroughly investigated. Rumors travel quickly in these islands.

I look forward to discussing the intricacies of the particular strain of sta-phylococci with you.

Sincerely,

Sebastian Curtis, M.D.

Staphylococci? Germs? He wants to discuss germs? Tuck couldn’t have been more confused if the message had been in Eskimo. He folded it and looked again at the fingerprints.

That was it. He knew that other people would be reading the note. The germ thing was just a red herring to confuse nosy natives. The bit about the FAA obviously referred to Tuck’s revoked pilot’s license. In a way, it was a threat. Maybe he ought to find out a little more about this doctor before he went running out to this remote island. Maybe the reporter, Pardee, knew something.

Tuck dressed quickly and went down to the desk, where Rindi was listening to a transistor radio with a speaker that sounded like it had been fashioned from wax paper. Someone was singing a Garth Brooks song in nasal Trukese accompanied by an accordion.

“It sounds like someone’s hurting animals.” Tuck grinned.

Rindi did not smile. “You going out?” Rindi was eager to get into Tuck’s

room and go through his luggage. “I need to find that reporter, Jefferson Pardee.” Rindi looked as if he was going to spit. He said, “He at Yumi Bar all the

time. That way.” He pointed up the road toward town. “You need ride?” “How far is it?” “Maybe a mile. How long you be gone?” Rindi wanted to take his time,

make sure he didn’t miss any of Tuck’s valuables. “I’m not sure. Do you lock the door at midnight or something?” “No, I come get you if you drunk.”

“I’ll be fine. I’ll be checking out in the morning. Can I get an eight o’clock wake-up call?”

“No. No phone in room.”

“How about a wake-up knock?”

“No problem.”

“Thanks.” Tucker went out the front door and was nearly thrown back by the thickness of the air. The temperature had dropped to the mid-80s, but it felt as if it had gotten more humid. Everything dripped. The air carried the scent of rotting flowers.

Tuck set off down the road and was soaked with sweat by the time he reached a rusted metal Quonset hut with a hand-painted sign that read YUMI BAR. The dirt parking lot was filled with Japanese beaters parked freestyle. A skeletal dog with open running sores, a crossbreed of dingo and sewer rat, cowered in the half-light coming through the door and looked at him as if pleading to be run over. Tuck’s stomach lurched. He made a wide path around the dog, who looked down and resumed concen-tration on its suffering.

“Hey, kid, you’re not going in there, are you?”

Tuck looked up. There was a cigarette glowing in the dark at the corner of the building. Tuck could just make out the form of a man standing there. He wore some kind of uniform—Tuck could see the silhouette of a captain’s hat. Anywhere else Tuck might have ignored a voice in the dark, but the accent was American, and out here he was drawn to the familiarity of it. He’d heard it before.

He said, “I thought I’d get a beer. I’m looking for an American named Pardee.”

The guy in the dark blew out a long stream of cigarette smoke. “He’s in there. But you don’t want to go in there right now. Wait a few minutes.”

Tuck was about to ask why when two men came crashing through the door and landed in the dirt at his feet. They were islanders, both screaming incomprehensibly as they punched and gouged at one another. The one on the top held a bush knife, a short machete, which he drew back and slammed into the other man’s head, severing an ear. Blood sprayed on the dust.

A stream of shouting natives spilled out of the bar, waving beer bottles and kicking at the fighters. Earless leaped to his feet and backed off to get a running attack at Bush Knife, who was rising to his feet. Earless hit him with a flying tackle as Bush Knife hacked at his ribs. A pickup truck full of policemen pulled into the parking lot and the crowd scattered into the dark and back into the bar, leaving

the fighters rolling in the dirt. Six policemen stood over the fighters, slamming them with riot batons until they both lay still. The police threw the fighters into the bed of their truck, climbed in after them, and drove off.

Tuck stood stunned. He’d never seen violence that sudden and raw in his life. Ten more seconds and he would have been in the middle of it instead of backpedaling across the parking lot.

“Should be okay to go in now,” said the voice from the dark.

Tuck looked up, but he couldn’t even see the cigarette glowing now. “Thanks,” he said. “You sure it’s okay?”

“Watch your ass, kid,” said the voice, and this time it seemed to come from above him. Tucker spun around, nearly wrenching his neck, but he couldn’t see anyone. He shook off the confusion and headed into the bar.

The skeletal dog crawled from under a truck, seized the severed ear from the dust, and slunk into the shadows. “Good dog,” said the voice out of the dark. The dog growled, ready to protect its prize. A young man, perhaps twenty-four, dark and sharp-featured, dressed in a gray flight suit, stepped out of the shadows and bent to the dog, who lowered its head in submission. The young man reached out as if to pet the dog, then grabbed its head and quickly snapped its neck. “Now, that’s better, ain’t it, ya little mook?”

The bar was as dingy inside as it was out. Yellow bug bulbs gave off just enough light to navigate around drunken islanders and a beat-up pool table. An old Wurlitzer bounced American country western songs off the metal walls. A khaki-wrapped hulk, Jefferson Pardee, sweated over a Budweiser at the bar. Tucker slid in next to him.

Pardee looked up with red-rimmed eyes. “You just missed all the excitement.”

“No, I saw it. I was outside.”

Pardee signaled for two more beers. “I thought I told you not to go out at night.”

“I’m leaving for Yap in the morning and I need to ask you some questions.”

Pardee grinned like a child given a surprise favor. “I’m at your service, Mr. Tucker.”

Tuck weighed his need for information against the ignominy of telling Pardee about the crash. He pulled the crumpled fax paper from his pants pocket and set it on the bar before the reporter.

Pardee lit a cigarette as he read. He finished reading and handed the fax back to Tucker. “It’s not unusual to have changes in travel plans out here. But what’s this about bacteria? I thought you were a pilot.”

Tucker took Pardee though the crash and the mysterious invitation from the doctor, including Jake’s theories about drug smuggling. “I think the bacteria stuff was just to throw off anyone who got hold of the fax.”

“You’re right there. But it’s not drugs. There aren’t any drugs produced in these islands except kava and betel nut, and nobody wants those except the islanders. Oh, they grow a little pot here and there, but it’s consumed here by the gangsta wanna-bes.”

“Gangsta wanna-bes?” Tuck asked.

“A few of the islanders have satellite TV. The people who look like them on TV are gangsta rappers. The old rundown buildings they see in the hood look like the buildings here. Except here they’re new and run-down. It’s a Coke and a smile and baby formula their babies can’t digest. It’s packaged junk food shipped here without expiration dates.”

“What in the hell are you talking about, Pardee?”

“They buy into the advertising bullshit that Americans have become immune to. It’s like the entire Micronesian crescent is one big cargo cult. They buy the worst of American culture.”

“Are you saying I’m the worst America has to offer?”

Pardee patted his shoulder and leaned in close. Tuck could smell the sour beer sweat coming off the big man. “No, that’s not what I’m saying. I don’t know what’s going on out on Alualu, but I’m sure it’s no big deal. Evil tends to grow in proportion to the profit potential, and there’s just nothing out there that’s worth a shit. Go to your island, kid. And get in touch with me when you figure out what’s going on. In the meantime, I’ll do some checking.”

Tuck shook the reporter’s hand. “I will.” He threw some money on the bar and started to leave. Pardee called to him as he reached the door.

“One more thing. I checked around. I heard that there’s some armed men on Alualu. And there was another pilot that came through here a few months ago. Nobody’s seen him. Be careful, Tucker.”

“And you weren’t going to tell me that?”

“I had to be sure that you weren’t part of it.”

13 Out of the Frying Pan

Tuck’s first thought of the new morning was I’ve got to catch a plane. His second was, My dick’s broke.

It happens that way. One has a “private” irritation—hemorrhoids, menstrual cramps, swollen prostate, yeast infection, venereal disease, bladder infection—and no matter how hard the mind tries to escape the gravity of the affliction, it is inexorably pulled back into a doomed orbit of circular thought. Anything that distracts from the irritation is an irritation. Life is an irritation.

Inside Tuck’s head sounded like this: I have to catch a plane. I’m pissing fire. I need a shower. Check the stitches. No water. It looks infected. Probably lep-rosy. I hate this place. I’m sure it’s infected. When does the water come on? It’s going to turn black and fall off. Whoever heard of a place with satellite TV but no running water? I’ll never fly again. I’m thirty years old and I have no job. And no dick. And who in the hell was that guy in the parking lot last night? I smell like rancid goat meat. Probably the infection. Gangrene. I can’t believe there’s no running water. I’m going to die. Die, die, die.

Not a pleasant place to be: inside Tuck’s head.

Outside Tuck’s head the shower came on; brown, tepid water ran down his body in gutless streams; pipes shuddered and trumpeted as if trying to extrude a vibrating moose. The soap, a brown minibar made from local copra, lathered like slate and smelled of hibiscus flowers and suffering dog.

Tuck dried himself on a translucent swath of balding terry cloth and slipped into his clothes, three days saturated with tropical travel funk. He shouldered his pack, noticing that the zippered pockets had

been tampered with and not giving a good goddamn, then trudged down to the front desk.

Rindi was sleeping on the desk. Tuck woke him, made sure that the room had been paid by the doctor as promised, then stood in the tropical sun and waited as Rindi brought the car around.

It seemed like a very long ride to the airport. Rindi ran over a chicken, then got out and fought an old woman who claimed the chicken, each tugging on a leg, testing the tensile strength of poultry to its limit before Rindi busted a kung fu move that secured his dinner and left the old woman sitting in the dust with a sacred chicken foot in her hand. (The old woman was from the island of Tonoas, where magic chickens were once called up by a sorcerer to level a mountain for a temple, the Hall of the Magic Chickens.)

At the airport Tuck gave Rindi a dollar for the cab ride, which was twice the going rate, and waved off the bloody handshake the aspiring gangsta offered. “Keep the peace, home boy,” Tuck said.

14 Espionage and Intrigue

Yap was cleaner than Truk and hotter, if that was possible. Here the beat-up taxis actually had radio antennas to identify them. The roads were paved as well. The airport, another tin roof over concrete pylons, was filled with natives: men in loincloths and topless women in hand-woven wraparound skirts. Tuck caught a cab at the airport and told the driver to take him to the dock.

The driver spat out the window and said, “The ship gone.”

“It can’t be gone.” What had moments ago been a pleasant drunk from four airline martinis turned instantly to a headache. “Maybe it was another ship that left.”

The driver smiled. His teeth were black, his lips bright red. “Ship gone. You want to go to town?”

“How much?” Tuck asked, as if he had a choice.

“Fourteen dollar.”

“Fourteen dollars? It’s only fifty cents on Truk!”

“Okay, fifty cents,” the driver said.

“That’s your counteroffer?” Tuck asked. He was thinking about what Pardee had said about these islanders absorbing the worst of American culture. This was his chance to help, if only in a small way. “That’s the most helpless bargaining I’ve ever heard. How do you ever expect your country to get out of the Third World with that weak shit?”

“Sorry,” the driver said. “One dollar.”

“Seventy-five cents,” Tuck said.

“You find another taxi,” the driver said, digging in his fiscal heels.

“That’s better,” said Tuck. “A dollar it is. And there’s another one in it for you if you don’t run over any chickens.”

The driver put the car in gear and started off. They passed though several miles of jungle before breaking into a brightly lit, surprisingly modern-looking town with concrete streets. Occasionally, they passed a tin house with stone wheels leaning against the walls. The stones ranged from the size of a small tire to seven feet in diameter and were covered with varying degrees of green moss. “What are those millstone-looking things?” Tuck asked the driver.

“Fei,” the driver said. “Stone money. Very valuable.”

“No shit, money?” Tuck looked at a piece of fei standing in a yard as they passed. It was five feet tall and nearly two feet thick. “What do your pay phones look like?” Tuck asked with a grin.

The driver didn’t find it funny. He let Tucker out at the dock, which was suspiciously shipless.

Tuck saw a bearded, red-faced white man sitting in the shade of a forklift, smoking a cigarette.

“G’day,” the man said. He was about thirty. In good shape. “Impela my tribe?”

“Huh?” Tuck said.

“American, then?”

Tuck nodded. “You Australian?”

“Royal Navy,” the man said. He pulled a hat from behind him and tapped on it. “Join me?” He motioned for Tuck to sit next to him on the concrete.

Tuck dragged his pack into the shade, dropped it, and extended his hand to the Australian. “Tucker Case.”

The Australian took his hand and nearly crushed it. “Commander Brion Frick. Have a seat, mate. Looks like you been on the piss for a fortnight, if you don’t mind my saying.”

He handed Tucker a business card. It bore the seal of the Royal Australian Navy, Frick’s name and rank, and the designation NAVAL INTELLIGENCE. Tuck looked again at the scruffy Australian, then back at the card.

“Naval Intelligence, huh? What do you do?”

“I’m a spy, mate. You know, secret stuff. Very hush-hush.”

Tuck wondered just how secret a spy could be who had his status printed on a business card.

“Espionage, huh?”

“Well, right now we’re watching the Yapese Navy don’t make a move.”

“Yap has a navy?”

“Only one patrol boat, and she’s broken right now. Yapese put gas in the diesel engine. But you can’t be too careful, lest the little buggers get it in their mind to launch a surprise attack. That’s her over there.” He nodded down the wharf. Tuck spotted a rusted boat designed like a Chinese junk with the word YAP stenciled on the side in flaking orange Rust-Oleum. A half-dozen Yapese, thin brown men with high cheekbones and potbellies, were lounging on the deck in loincloths, drinking beer.

Tuck said, “I guess an attack would be a surprise.”

“Ain’t as easy a job as it looks. Yapese can lull you into a false sense of security. They might sit there without moving for two, three weeks, then just when you start to relax, wham, they make their move.”

“Right,” Tucker said. The only damage the patrol boat looked capable of inflicting was a case of tetanus for the crew.

A mile past the Yapese Navy waves crashed on the reef, just a line of white against the turquoise sea. Cottony clouds rose out of the sea into shining columns. Tuck scanned the horizon for a ship.

“Is the Micro Trader in yet?”

“Been in and gone,” Frick said. “She’ll be back around in six weeks or so.”

“Dammit,” Tuck said. “I can’t fucking believe it. I need to get to Alualu.”

“Why’d you want to go out there?”

“I’m a pilot. I’m supposed to be flying for a missionary out there.”

“Boys and I were out there in the patrol boat last week. Godforsaken place.”

Tuck lit up at the mention of the patrol boat. Maybe he could catch a ride. “You have a patrol boat?”

“Seventy-footer. Some of the boys are out with it now, tuna fishin’ with the CIA. Don’t mention it, though. Secret, you know.”

“What’s the CIA doing down here?”

Frick raised a blond eyebrow. “Keepin’ an eye on the Yapese Navy.”

“I thought you were doing that.”

“Well, I am, ain’t I? And when they come back, it’s my turn to go fishin’. Lovely, us bein’ allies and all. Cuts the work in half. Want to suck some piss?”

“Pardon?” Tuck wasn’t ready for any kind of bizarre native customs.

“Drink some beers, mate. If you keep an eye on the Yappies, I’ll run down to the store and grab some beers.”

“Sounds good.” Tuck was ready to take the edge off his headache. Besides, there was still a chance for a ride out to the island.

Frick put his hat on Tuck’s head. “Right then. By the power invested in me by the Australian Royal Navy, et cetera, et cetera, I hearby deputize you as official intelligence officer until I get back. Do you swear?”

“Swear what?”

“Just swear.”

“Sure.”

“There it is.” Frick started walking off.

“What do I do if they make a move?”

“How the bloody hell should I know?”

Tuck watched the Yapese Navy for an hour before they all stood up and left the boat. He was pretty sure that this did not constitute a defense emergency, but just in case he decided to walk up the street to see what had happened to Frick. The pack felt even heavier now, and he guessed that it was the responsibility for Australian people that weighed him down. (A woman had once offered Tucker a goldfish in a bowl, and Tuck had graciously declined it on the basis that it was too much responsibility and would probably die anyway. He felt the same way about the Australians.)

The concrete streets of Colonia were bleached white and stained with three-foot red strips of betel nut spit on either side and lined with thick jungle vegetation. Off the streets Tuck could see tin hovels, children playing in the mud, women passing the hottest part of the day combing lice from each other’s hair in the shade of a tin-roofed porch. The women wore wraparound skirts, black with brightly colored stripes, and went topless. All but the youngest of them were enormously fat by Western standards, and Tuck felt his idealized picture of the beautiful island girls fade to a lice-infested, rotund reality. Still, there was something in their gentle grooming and in the quiet concentration of the children that made him feel sad and a little lonely. If only he could run into a woman he could talk to. A Western woman—she wouldn’t have to know he was a eunuch.

He broke out of the jungle into the open street of Colonia’s main “business district.” On one side was a marina with a restaurant and bar (or so the sign said), on the other a two-story, stucco minimall of shops and snack bars. Around it, in the shade of the modern portico, stood perhaps a hundred Yapese, mostly women, some

young men in bright blue loincloths, all shirtless. The islanders all had bright red lips and teeth from chewing betel nut. Even the little children were chewing the narcotic cud and spitting periodically into the street. Tuck walked in among them, hoping to find someone to ask about Frick’s whereabouts, but none made eye contact. The women and girls turned their backs to him. The men just looked away or pretended to pay attention to sprinkling powdered coral on to a split green betel nut before beginning a chew.

He went into a surprisingly modern grocery store and was relieved to see that the prices were in American dollars, the signs in English. He picked up a quart of bottled water and took it to the checkout counter, where a woman in a lavalava and a blue polyester smock rang up his purchase and held out her hand for the money.

“Do you know where I can find Commander Brion Frick?” Tuck asked her.

She took his money, turned to the cash drawer, and turned back to him with his change without uttering a word. Tuck repeated his question and the woman turned away from him. Finally he left, thinking, She must not speak English.

He ran into Frick coming out of the store. The spy had a six-pack tucked under his arm.

“I was looking for you,” Tuck said. “The Yapese Navy took off.”

“You could have asked inside. They knew where I was.”

“I did. The woman wouldn’t talk to me.”

“Not allowed to,” Frick said. “It’s bad manners to make eye contact. Yapese women aren’t allowed to talk to a man unless he’s a relative. If a woman and a man are seen speaking in public, they’re considered married on the spot. Shame too. Ever seen so many bare titties in all your life? Tough grabbin’ a snog if you can’t talk to them.”

Tucker didn’t want to talk about it. “You were supposed to come back to the wharf.”

Frick looked affronted. “I was on my way. Didn’t think you’d desert your post. I hope you’re a better pilot than you are a spy. Letting them sneak off like that.”

“Look, Frick, I need to get to Alualu right away. Can you take me in your patrol boat?”

“Love to, mate, but we’ve got a mission as soon as the boys get back from fishin’. We’ve got to tow the Yapese patrol boat down to Darwin for repairs. Won’t be back for a fortnight at least.”

“Doesn’t it make more sense to leave it broken? I mean, in the interest of watching them?”

The spy raised an eyebrow. “What threat are they with a broken boat?”

“Exactly,” Tuck said.

“You obviously don’t know a wit about maintaining job security. Mis-sionary Air might take you out, but I hear their plane is down for a while. Fishing boats are all Chinese. Buggers wouldn’t piss on you if you were on fire. You might charter a dingy, but I doubt that you’ll find anyone willing to take you across four hundred kilometers of open sea in an out-board. There’s fellows do it off Perth, but the West Coast is full of loonies anyway. Get yourself a room and wait. We’ll take you out when we get back.”

“I don’t know if I can wait that long.” Tuck stood up. “Where should I go to charter a boat?”

Frick pointed to a large Mobil oil tank at the edge of the harbor. “Try heading down to the fueling station. Should be able to find someone down there who needs the gas money.”

“Thanks, Frick, I appreciate it.” Tucker shook the spy’s hand.

“No worries, mate. You watch yourself out there. I hear that doctor’s a bedbug.”

“Good to know.” He waved over his shoulder as he walked down to the edge of the harbor. A group of women chewing betel nut in the shade of a hibiscus tree turned away from him as he passed.

He walked along the bank and looked into the cloudy green water at the harbor’s edge. Tiny multicolored fish darted in and out of the shallows, feeding on some kind of shrimp. Brown mud skippers, their eyes atop their heads like a frog’s, walked on their pectoral fins across a small mudflat that had formed around the roots of a mangrove tree. Tucker stopped and watched them. They were fish, yet they spent most of their time on land. It was as if they had evolved to a certain point, then just couldn’t make a decision to leave the water, grow into mammals, and finally invent personal stereos. For sixty million years they had been hanging out on the mudflats, looking at each other with periscope eyes and goofy froggy grins and say-ing: “What do you want do?” “I don’t know. What do you want to do?” “I don’t know. Want to go up on the land or stay in the water?” “I don’t know. Let’s hang out on the mudflat a little longer.”

Tuck completely understood. Although if he had been a mud skipper, after a couple of million years of dragging himself around the mudflat, he would have lost his patience and yelled, “Hey, can I get some feet over here!”, thus moving evolution along.

He was enjoying the superiority of the Monday morning quarterback (And in a world created in six days, what day but Monday could it be?), feeling a little smarter, a little more worldly than the mud skippers, when it occurred to him that he had no idea how to proceed. He could find the telecom center, if there was one, and contact the doctor, but then what would he do? Sit for two weeks on Yap until the Australians returned? Maybe they were wrong. Maybe there was a privately owned plane on the island. What about a dingy? How bad could it be. The sea looked calm enough. That’s it, take to the sea.

Or perhaps he should just stay on Yap and find a sympathetic woman to take his mind off the problem. It had always worked before, not to pos-itive results, but it had worked, dammit. Women made him feel better. He ached for a Mary Jean Cosmetics consultant. A cool, thin, married woman, armored in pantyhose and a bulletproof bouffant. A sweet, shocked, backsliding Born Again on a one-time sin quest to remind her of why re-demption was so so good. Mud skipper thinking.

He was reeling with the heat and the lack of possibilities when he saw her, up ahead, walking by the water’s edge, her back to him: a thin blonde in a flowered dress with a swing to her walk like a welcome home parade.

15 The Navigator

Out on the edge of the world, with no place to stay, no way to move on, no job, no life, no friends; hurt, confused, hot, thirsty, and irritated, Tuck was desperate. Desperate for just the momentary satisfaction that might come from attracting an attractive woman. No matter that he couldn’t do anything about the attraction.

What was she doing out here? Who cares? What a walk!

He quickened his pace, his legs and shoulders protesting against the weight of his pack, and approached within a couple of steps of the blonde.

“Excuse me,” he called.

She turned. Tuck stopped and backed up a step. Something is wrong here. Very, very wrong.

“Oh, baby,” she said, hand to her chest as if trying to catch her breath. “You scare little Kimi. Why you sneakin’ up like that?”

Tuck was dumbfounded. She wasn’t a natural blonde. Her skin was dark and she had the high cheekbones and angular features of a Filipino. Long false eyelashes, bright red lipstick, but lines in the face that were a little too harsh, a jawline that was a little too square. The dress was tight around the chest and there was nothing there but muscle. She wore a huge black medallion at her throat that looked as if it was made of animal fur. She needed a shave.

“I’m sorry,” Tuck said. “I thought you were something—er, someone else.”

Then the medallion turned its head and looked at him. Tuck let out an involuntary scream and jumped back. The medallion was wearing tiny rhinestone sunglasses. It squeaked at Tucker. It was the

biggest bat he had ever seen, hanging there upside down with its wings

folded.

“That’s a bat!”

“Fruit bat, baby. Don’t be scared. This Roberto. He no like the light. He like you, though.” Roberto squeaked again. He had the face of a fox or perhaps a small dog—a shaven Pomeranian with wings. “I’m Kimi. What you name, baby?” Kimi extended his hand limply to shake or perhaps for a kiss.

Tuck took two fingers, keeping his eye on the bat. “Tucker Case. Nice to meet you, Kimi.” He was horrified. Thirty seconds ago he’d been having lustful thoughts about a guy! A guy wearing a fruit bat!

“You look like you need a date. Kimi love you good long time, twenny bucks. Whatever you need, Kimi can do.”

“No, thanks. I don’t need a date. What I need is a boat.”

“Kimi can get boat. You like it in boat? Kimi take you round the world in a boat?” He giggled and patted Roberto’s little upside-down head. “That funny, huh?”

Tucker forced a smile. “No, I need a boat and someone who can pilot it out to an island.”

“You need a boat, Kimi can get boat. Kimi can pilot too.”

“Thanks anyway, but I really…”

Roberto shrieked. Tuck jumped back. Kimi said, “Roberto say he want to go on boat with you. How far is island?”

Tucker couldn’t believe he was having this conversation. He hadn’t really decided he would go by boat. “It’s called Alualu. It’s about two hundred and fifty miles north of here.”

“No problem,” Kimi said without hesitation. “My father was great navigator. He teach me everything. I take you to island and maybe we have party too. You have money?”

Tuck nodded.

“You wait over there in shade. We be right back.” Kimi turned and wiggled away. Tucker tried not to watch him walk. He was feeling sick to his stomach. He walked to a grove of palm trees that grew along the harbor and sat down to wait.

Kimi piloted the eighteen-foot fiberglass skiff out of a shantytown built over the water, across the harbor, to a dock in front of the marina restaurant. Roberto had unfolded his wings and was crawl

ing spiderlike over Kimi’s head and back, looking for a comfortable spot to get out of the light.

Tucker walked to the dock and looked at the boat, then out past the harbor, where waves were crashing on the reef, then back at the little boat. He wasn’t sure what he had expected, but he was sure this wasn’t it. Something bigger, maybe a cabin cruiser, with twin diesels and a big wheelhouse with some radar stuff spinning on the top—a modest but well-stocked wet bar, perhaps.

“I got you boat!” Kimi said. “You give me money now, I go get gas and look at map.”

Tucker didn’t budge. The engine was a forty-horse Yamaha out-board. A rubber tube ran from the motor to a gas tank that took up nearly all the space between the two seats. Tuck guessed it would hold at least a hundred gallons of fuel, maybe more. “Are you sure this thing has the range to make it out there?”

“No problem. Give me money for gas. Five hundred dollar.”

“You’re insane!”

“Gas very expensive here.”

“You’re insane and your bat’s glasses are crooked.”

“I have to pay man for boat. The rest is for pilot. You buy water, flashlight, and two mango, two papaya for Roberto, and two box Pop Tarts for Kimi. Strawberry.”

Tucker felt he was being hustled. “For five hundred dollars you can get your own mangoes and Pop Tarts.”

“Okay, bye-bye.” Kimi said. “Say bye-bye to cheap sweaty American, Roberto.” Kimi moved Roberto onto his shoulders and pulled the cord to start the engine.

Tuck imagined himself stuck on Yap for another two weeks. “No, wait!” He unclipped the flap of his pack and dug inside.

Kimi killed the outboard, turned, and grinned. There was lipstick on his teeth. “Money, please.”

Tuck handed down a stack of bills. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t have a choice. Actually, not having a choice made it a little easier. “Are we going to leave right away?”

“We go through reef before dark so we no smash up and drown. After that it better to go in dark. Go by stars.”

Smash up? “Shouldn’t we call for weather?”

Kimi laughed. “You smell storm? See storm in sky?”

Tuck looked around. Except for a few mushroom-shaped clouds beyond the reef, it was clear. He smelled only tropical flowers on the breeze and something skunky rising up from his armpits. “No.”

“Meet me here in half hour.” Kimi started the motor and putted off across the harbor toward a big tank with the Mobil logo stenciled on the side.

Tuck walked to the store and bought the supplies, then found the telecom center a few doors down and sent a handwritten fax to the doctor on Alualu to let him know that his new pilot was on the way.

He was waiting at the dock when Kimi returned in the skiff, his wig tied down with a red chiffon scarf. Roberto wore a smaller scarf with holes cut for his ears. Strangely, the scarf, in conjunction with the sunglasses, made Roberto look a little like Diana Ross. They say there is a finite number of faces in the world…

Tucker threw the heavy pack into the front of the boat, then climbed in and sat down in front of the enormous gas tank. Kimi threw the transmis-sion lever on the motor, twisted the hand grip, and piloted the skiff out into the harbor toward the reef.

Kimi steered the boat out of the deep green of the harbor to the turquoise water of the channel. Tuck could see the reef, tan and red coral, just a few feet below the surface at the edge of the channel. He spotted small fish darting around great heads of brain coral. They were more like streaks of color than animals, and as one disappeared another appeared in the line of sight. A few long, slender trumpet fish, looking as if they had been forged from silver, swam adjacent to the boat, then turned and cruised into the reef.

They passed the edge of the reef and into the open sea with only a slight bump into the first few swells. Kimi cranked up the motor and the skiff lifted and rode across the tops of the waves, bucking and dropping a gentle six inches, thumping out a drumbeat as counterpoint to the whining out-board. Tucker relaxed and leaned back as Kimi skirted the reef, traveling toward the setting sun until he cleared the island and could make the turn north to Alualu.

For the first time since the crash, Tucker felt good, felt as if he was on his way to something better. He’d made a decision and acted on it and in eighteen hours he would be ready to start his new job. He’d be a pilot again, making good money, flying a great aircraft. And with some healing, he’d be a man again too.

A quarter mile from Yap, Kimi made a gradual turn that put the sun at their left shoulders. Tuck watched the sun bubble into the ocean. Columns of vertical cumulus clouds turned to cones of pink cotton candy, then as the sun became a red wafer on the horizon, they turned candy-apple red, with purple rays reaching out of them

like searchlights. The water was neon over wet asphalt, blood-spattered gunmetal—colors from the cover of a detective novel where heroes drink hard and beauty is always treacherous.

Tucker searched the sky for cumulus clouds that looked like they might have aspirations to become thunderheads. How in the hell were you supposed to see weather from sea level?

Just then a swell lifted the front of the boat and slammed it down. Tuck felt his tailbone bark on the edge of the seat and was just bracing himself when another swell bucked him to the floor of the boat and a sudden gust of wind soaked him with spray.

16 And Now, the Weather Report

The High Priestess sat on the lanai watching the sunset, taking sips from a glass of chilled vodka between bites of a banana. The intercom beeped inside the house and she cocked an ear to the open window.

“Beth, can you come down to my office? This is important.” The Sorcerer was in a panic.

He’s always in a panic, she thought. She put her vodka down on the bamboo table and tossed the banana out into the sand. She padded across the teak deck, through the french doors to the intercom, and laid an elegant finger on the talk button.

“I’m on my way,” she said.

She started toward the back door of the house—a two-room bungalow fashioned from bamboo, teak, and thatch—and caught sight of herself in the full-length mirror. “Shit.” She was naked, of course, and she’d have to cut across the compound to get to the Sorcerer’s office. Life had become a lot more complicated since they had hired the guards.

She stormed into the bedroom and grabbed an oversized 49ers jersey with the sleeves cut off out of her closet, then stepped into some sandals and headed out the back door. She wasn’t really dressed, but it might keep the Sorcerer off her back and the ninjas off her front.

The compound consisted of half a dozen buildings spread over a three-acre clearing covered with white coral gravel and concrete and surrounded by a twelve-foot chain-link fence topped with razor wire. At the front of the compound was a pier and a small beach that led to the only channel through the reef. At the back a new

Learjet sat on a concrete pad, just inside the fence. Outside of the fence, the concrete runway bisected the island. Past the runway lay the jungles, the taro patches, the villages, and the beaches of the Shark People.

The office was a low concrete building with steel doors and a roof covered in solar electric panels that shone red in the setting sunlight. She nodded to the guard by the door, who didn’t move until she passed, then tried to get a glimpse in the side of her jersey. She slammed the door behind her.

“What’s up? You almost done with the satellite dish? My shows are coming on.”

He turned from a computer screen, a piece of fax paper crumpled in his hand. “We’ve hired an idiot.”

“Do you want to be specific or should I assume that one of the ninjas has distinguished himself above the others?”

“The pilot, Beth. He missed the Micro Trader on Yap.”

“Shit!”

“It’s worse.” He held out the fax to her. “It’s from him. He’s chartered a small boat. He says he’ll be here tomorrow.”

She looked over the fax, confused. “That’s sooner than he was going to get here. What’s the problem?”

“This.” The Sorcerer pushed back in his chair and pointed to the computer screen. The image looked like a blender full of green and black paint.

“It looks like a blender full of green paint,” she said. “What is it?”

“That, my dear, is Marie.”

“Sebastian, you’ve been out here too long. I know you like abstract art and all…”

“It’s a satellite picture of typhoon Marie. And she’s a big one.” He pointed to a dot to one side of the screen. “That’s Alualu.”

“So it’s going to miss us.”

“We’ll catch the edge of it. We’ll have to put the jet in the hangar, tie everything down, but it shouldn’t be too bad. The problem is that the eye will pass right over where our pilot is going to be. I can’t believe he went to sea without checking the weather.”

She shrugged. “So we have to get a new pilot. Tucker Case, meet Marie.” She smiled and her eyes shone like desolate stars. Too bad, she thought. The pilot would have been fun.

17 Foul-Weather Friend

Tuck was amazed by what the human body could achieve when pressed to its limits: lift tractors, trek a hundred miles through the tundra after being partially eviscerated by a Kodiak bear, live for months on grubs and water sucked from soak holes, and in this particular case, vomit for two hours straight after having ingested nothing but alcohol and airline peanuts for two days. The stuff coming out of him was pure bile, burning acrid and sour, and with the bull rider pitching of the boat, half of it always ended up down the front of him. And between heaves there was no respite, just constant motion and soaking spray. His stomach muscles twisted into knots.

It started with the swells rising, first a few feet, then to ten. Kimi piloted the boat up the face of each as if climbing a hill; they were dashed by the whitecap, then a sled ride down into a trough where they were faced with the next black wall of water. Roberto climbed down into Kimi’s dress and clung there like a furry tumor. The navigator cried out each time the spray washed over him as Roberto’s wing claws dug into his ribs.

“Tie down you pack. Tie you belt to the boat,” Kimi shouted.

Tuck found a coil of nylon rope and a folding knife in his pack and tied himself and the pack to the front seat. He noticed that the space under the seat was filled with dense Styrofoam. The boat was, theoretically, unsink-able. Good, someone would find their beaten, shark-eaten bodies. He threw a length of rope to Kimi, who secured it around his own waist.

The wind came up as if someone had spooled up a jet engine, going from ten to sixty knots in an instant, dumping gallons of water

into the boat with each wave, drowning out the sound of the outboard.

Kimi screamed an order to Tuck, but it was lost in the wind. Tuck caught one word: “Bail!”

Riding down the face of a wave, he took the time to look around the boat for a container, but found only the gallon of drinking water. He took the folding knife from his pocket and slashed the top off of the jug. He dumped the fresh water, then, with his feet braced against the inside of the bow and his spine against the seat, he began bailing between his legs, taking a full gallon with each scoop, throwing it with the wind. He bailed as if in a “run for your life” sprint and he was winded and aching after only a minute, but he couldn’t seem to get ahead of the storm. The boat was riding lower in the water.

He ventured a glance back to Kimi and saw the navigator had found a coffee can and was braced between the seat and the gas tank, bailing with one hand while steering with the other. His scarf and fallen around his neck and was trailing the blonde wig behind him in the wind. The motor was cranked full-out, and Kimi was trying to keep the boat steered into the waves. If one caught them from the side, they would roll and continue to roll until the storm consumed them.

Tuck slowed his pace and tried to fall into some kind of sustainable rhythm. It began to rain, the drops coming in almost horizontal, and as they topped the next wave Tuck realized that half of the sky had disap-peared. They were only at the edge of the storm. The navigator was screaming at him. The sea, the sky, the boat faded to black. One second he was squinting saltwater out of his eyes and staring at an obsidian wall ahead of the bow, then everything went black. Total sensory overload, total sensory deprivation. He looked around for the stars, the moon, a highlight or shadow somewhere, but there was nothing but wind and wet and cold and ache. He shivered and nearly curled into the fetal position in the bow to wait for death. The navigator’s screaming gave him a bearing.

“We need light!”

Tuck braced himself, then dug into the saturated pack until he came out with two waterproof flashlights. Bless you, Jake Skye.

He hit the sealed switches.

Light. Enough to see that Kimi was steering them parallel to an ominous wall of water. They would be swamped. The navigator slammed the outboard to one side and gunned it. The little boat

whipped around just in time to meet the oncoming wave, ride up and over it. Tucker clung to the boat like a newborn monkey to its mother.

Tuck lashed the lights to the anchor pulley at the bow, one pointed forward, one into the boat, then he resumed bailing.

A monster wave rose up thirty feet and slammed down over them. When Tuck blinked the salt out of his eyes, he saw that the boat was all but a foot full of water. Another wave like that would swamp the motor. Without the motor to steer, they were lost. Bailing wasn’t enough.

We’re going to die, he thought.

Then the noise of the storm was gone.

“No, you’re not,” came the voice, “you fuckin’ mook.” The roar of the wind and the screams of the navigator were gone. There was only the voice. “There’s a tarpaulin in your pack. Lash it over the boat so you don’t take on any more water. Then move to the stern and bail.”

Now there was a picture in Tuck’s mind of what he was to do. There were eyelets on the outside of the gunwales to accommodate the line around the edges of the tarp. He needed only to hook the line around the boat and tie it off back by Kimi, leaving just enough of the boat open for the navigator to steer and him to bail water.

“You got it, ace?”

Tuck could see it and he knew he could do it. “Thanks,” he said. Forget questioning where the voice was coming from. He nodded. The storm roared back over him.

Five minutes later the boat was covered and began to rise in the water as Tuck sat next to the navigator and bailed.

“You steer!” Kimi screamed.

Tucker took the tiller as the navigator let go and tried to rub his hand out of a cramped claw.

Tuck took the boat up the face of a monster wave and the skiff went airborne. With no resistance on the propeller, the motor shrieked and Tuck dumped the throttle to keep it from blowing up. The bow tilted skyward and Kimi grabbed the gunwale just in time to avoid being dumped off the stern. They landed hard and the motor nearly went under. The motor sputtered. Tuck worked the throttle to bring it back to life.

They were already going up the face of another wave, steeper than the last. If the wind caught them at the top, they would flip. Tuck suddenly remembered a surfing move from his youth. The cut

back. There was no way they could continue into the wind and into the waves. Halfway up the face of the wave, he twisted the throttle and threw the motor sideways. It coughed as if expelling a hairball, then roared, sending them across the face of the wave.

“What you doing?” Kimi shouted.

Tuck didn’t answer. He was looking for the pocket, the place where the face of the wave would stay the same. If only the motor could maintain speed.

The wave was creeping up on them, looming above their backs, but then they were high enough for the wind to catch them. Just enough boost. Just enough speed. The boat flattened out on the face of the wave. They were surfing, a thirty-foot wall of water waiting to crush them from behind should Tuck lose the pocket.

Strangely, Tuck felt elated. It was a small victory, maybe even a temporary one, but they were running with the storm and he was in control of something for the first time since the plane crash. He watched the angle of the boat on the face of the wave, gauged its speed, its steepness, and made the adjustments that would keep them alive. The black water seemed to eat up the flashlight beams, but he could see the wave becoming steeper and rising higher as it climbed the ocean shelf toward the hungry reef.

18 Land Ho

The island was little more than a coral cupcake with a guano frosting. Not a hundred yards wide at its widest point and only five feet above sea level at its highest, it served as a resting place for seabirds, a nesting place for turtles, and purchase for forty-eight coconut palms. The foliage and coconuts had all been torn from the palms, and the storm-driven waves breaking on the surrounding reef frothed over the island, beating against the trunks and washing away the precious topsoil. Heavy as they were, some of the palms were being undermined by the sea and would soon wash away.

Of the three travelers, only Roberto knew the island was there. As a young bat, he had stopped there to rest after leaving Guam, his birthplace, on his way to someplace where the mangoes were sweet and the natives did not consider fruit bat a delicacy. But right now he was too busy hiding inside Kimi’s dress, screeching and clawing and generally trying to keep warm, to mention to the navigator that the reason they were suddenly riding the face of an increasingly steep fifty-foot wave was because they were about to crash over a reef.

By the time Tucker Case realized what was happening, they were inside an immense tube of water, surfing inside of the curl of the wave. The flashlights refracted off the green water, illuminating the tube, making it appear as if they were inside a giant seething Coke bottle. Tuck tried to keep the boat pointed toward the narrow circle of blackness where the bottle cap would go, where they would have to go to escape. He’d seen films of surfers shooting the curl on the North Shore of Hawaii. It could be done. He clung to that vision,

even as the wave passed over the reef and collapsed upon them.

The boat rolled once, twice, three times, then tossed end over end and spun just under the surface as the wave frothed over the island. Kimi and Tuck were wound against the boat by their lifelines, beaten against the trunks of the palms, tossed and battered against the boat. For Tucker there was no up, no down, no way to know when he might take a breath of life-giving air or suck seawater and die. He held his breath until he felt as if he would explode, then was slammed between the boat and a tree and he let go.

Roberto’s wing claws cut deep furrows into Kimi’s ribs as he scrambled for air. The navigator had taken a glancing blow across the forehead as the boat rolled over him and was knocked unconscious.

Tuck felt himself pulled away from the boat, spun for a moment, then the pressure of the lifeline around his waist. He could see the lights attached to the boat, still shining, the only visual input in the sensory chaos. The boat had caught on something and he was trailing out behind it. Something bumped against his ribs and he reached for it instinctively, catching a handful of Kimi’s dress. Roberto was clinging to Kimi’s head, growling into the wind.

They had passed through the island and come out on the other side. The boat had caught on the last palm tree before they were swept out to sea again.

Tuck caught his lifeline with one hand, then wrapped his other arm around Kimi’s chest. Slowly, working against the streaming current, more like a river now that the waves had been broken by the reef and the island, he pulled them back to the boat.

The boat was afloat, but barely, held up by the Styrofoam underseats and the air trapped in the gas tank. Only an inch or two of gunwale showed above the water. Tuck crawled in, took one deep breath, then dragged the lifeless navigator in after him. Roberto scrambled on Kimi’s head to escape the sea and was almost taken by the wind. Tucker caught the giant bat by the throat and lifted him from Kimi’s head to his own back, wincing as Roberto’s claws penetrated his shirt. Then he hung the navigator over the side and began pumping the water out of his lungs.

After a few seconds, he flipped him again and administered mouth-tomouth until Kimi coughed and vomited up a stream of seawater. Tuck held his head.

“You okay?”

Kimi nodded as he sucked in painful lungfuls of air. Once he had his breath, he said, “Roberto?”

Tuck pointed to the little dog face that was looking over his shoulder.

Kimi managed a smile. “Roberto! Come.” He took the bat from Tuck’s back and held him to his chest.

They were safe, relatively; sheltered by the island from the monster swells, they had only the wind and the rain to deal with. The tarpaulin was gone. The boat was full of water, but it was afloat. Miraculously, the flashlights were still attached. Tucker could see the tree that had caught them. He fell back into the bow, hooking his armpits over the gunwales, then slipped into a state of exhausted unconsciousness that could almost be called sleep.

19 Water, Water

At first light the coconut palm that had saved them finally gave up and tipped over, releasing the boat to the sea. The outgoing tide carried the skiff and its sleeping passengers through a break in the reef to the open ocean.

Tuck, sitting chest deep in seawater in the bow, was dreaming of being lost in the desert when a flying fish smacked him in the side of the head. Startled, he reached up instinctively, as one might slap at a biting mosquito, and caught the fish in his right hand. He opened his eyes. In his mind he was still in the desert, dying of thirst, and the fact that he was now holding on to something that looked like a trout with wings seemed a cruel surrealist joke. He looked around, saw the boat, Kimi slumped in the back, ocean and sky, and nothing else—there was no land in sight.

He threw the fish at Kimi. It bounced off the navigator’s forehead and into the sea. Kimi screamed and sat up abruptly. Roberto—sunglasses akimbo—poked his head out the neck of Kimi’s dress and screeched at Tucker.

“What you do that for?” Kimi said.

“Nice piece of navigation,” Tuck said. Then he mocked Kimi’s broken English. “You smell storm? You see storm in sky?”

“Oh, you big-time pilot. Why you not check weather? What kind of dumb fuck American try to go two hundred miles in outboard, huh?”

“You told me it was no problem.”

“You paying Kimi big money. Not a problem.”

“Well, it’s a fucking problem now, isn’t it?”

Kimi stroked Roberto’s head to calm him. “Stop yelling. You scare Roberto.”

“I don’t care about Roberto. We’re half-sunk in the middle of the Pacific and we don’t have a motor. I’d say we have a problem.”

Kimi stopped ministering to Roberto and looked up. “No motor?” He turned and looked back at the empty motor board. There were marks where the clamps had raked across it as the motor pulled off in the tumble. He turned back to Tuck and grinned sheepishly. “Whoops.”

“We’re dead,” Tuck said.

Kimi looked back again where the motor should have been, just to make sure that it was still gone. “I ask that man, ‘Is motor on good?’ He say, ‘Oh yes, is clamp on very tight.’ I pay him good money and he lie. Oh, Kimi is very mad.”

Roberto barked in agreement.

“Stop it!” Tucker shouted. Roberto ducked into Kimi’s dress again. “We’ve got to get some of this water out of here. We have no motor. We can’t go anywhere. We’re adrift, lost…”

“Alive,” Kimi interrupted. “I get you out of typhoon alive and you just yell and say bad things. I quit. You get new navigator. Roberto say you mean, nasty, Chevy-driving, milk-drinking, American dog fucker.”

“I don’t drink milk,” Tuck said. Ha! Won that round.

“That what he say.”

“Roberto does not talk!”

“Not to you, dog fucker. You no…” Kimi paused in mid-rant and retrieved the coffee can, which had been tied to the boat with a string, and started furiously scooping water out of the boat. “You right. Now we bail.”

“What?” Tuck looked up to see Kimi was looking, wide-eyed, out to sea. Tuck followed his gaze to a spot twenty yards in front of the boat where a triangular fin was describing slow arcs in the swells.

“Hurry,” Kimi shouted. “He coming in.”

Tucker reached for his pack, causing the bow to dip under the water by a foot. Before he could adjust his weight to counterbalance the boat, the shark came over the gunwale, snapping its jaws like a man-eating puppet.

Tuck stood up to escape the jaws and the bow lurched deeper underwater. The shark slid into the boat as Tuck went backward over the side.

Fear bolted through his body as if the water had been electrified.

He wanted to move in all directions at once. He kicked hard and came up a few feet from the boat to see the shark slide back into the water.

“Get in boat!” Kimi screamed. He was standing with his feet wide, trying to keep the boat from capsizing.

Tuck kicked so hard that he raised out of the water to the waist, then he fell toward the boat, catching the gunwale with one hand. Kimi shifted his weight to counterbalance and Tuck pulled himself in just as something hit his foot. He jerked his foot so hard he nearly went out of the boat on the opposite side, then he twisted in time to see the shark sliding down into the water with his shoe in its mouth.

“Behind you!” Kimi screamed.

Another shark rose up at Tuck’s back. He swung around and punched it on the snout as hard as he could, taking the skin off of his knuckles on the shark’s sandpaper skin. The shark slid away.

The motion in the bow caused the stern to dip underwater and the next attack came at Kimi. He tossed Roberto into the air as the shark came into the boat. Roberto spread his wings and soared into the sky. Kimi reached down and came up with the rubber fuel line.

Tucker looked for anything they could use as a weapon, then remembered the folding knife he had put in his pocket the night before. It was still there.

Kimi was slapping the shark with the rubber hose and backing his way up onto the huge gas tank that made up the midsection of the boat. Tuck opened the knife, then lunged forward at the navigator. “Kimi!”

Kimi reached back and Tuck fit the handle of the knife into his hand. The shark had worked half of its nine-foot body into the boat. Its tail thrashed at the water to power the shark up onto the gas tank. Kimi scrambled backward. Roberto swooped and screeched in the air above.

Kimi’s right foot found purchase on the screw cap of the gas tank and he sat up. Tuck thought he was going to strike the shark with the knife, but instead he cut the gas line and squirted a stream of gas into the shark’s gaping mouth. The shark thrashed and slid off the side of the boat.

Kimi brandished the knife in the air. “Yeah, fuckface, you run away. That not taste so sweet as Kimi, huh?” He fell back onto the gas tank and took a deep breath. “We show that shark who the boss.”

Tuck said, “Kimi, there’s more.” He pointed to set of fins approaching from the stern.

20 Leadership’s a Bitch

The storm had been easy on the Shark People. A little thatch lost from a roof here and there, a cookhouse blown over, some breadfruit and coconuts stripped from the trees, but not enough to cause hardship. Some seawater had washed into the taro patch, but only time would tell if it was enough to kill the crop. The Shark People went slowly about the business of cleaning up, the women doing most of the work while the men sat in the shade of the men’s house, drinking alcoholic tuba and pretending to discuss important religious matters. Mainly they were there to pass the heat of the day and get good and drunk before dinner.

Malink, the high chief of the Shark People, was late rising. He awoke shivering and afraid, trying to figure out how to interpret a strange dream. He rolled off of his grass sleeping mat, then rose creakily and ambled out of the hut to relieve himself at the base of a giant breadfruit tree.

He was a short, powerfully built man of sixty. His hair was bushy and gone completely white. His skin, once a light butterscotch, had been burned over the years to the dark brown of a tarnished penny. Like most of the Shark men, he wore only a cotton loincloth and a wreath of fresh flowers in his hair (left there by one of his four daughters while he slept). The image of a shark was tattooed on his left pectoral muscle, a B-26 bomber on the other.

He went back into the hut and pulled a steel ammo box out of the rafters. Inside lay a nylon web belt with a holster that held a portable phone, his badge of leadership, his direct line to the Sorcerer. The only time he had ever used it was when one of his daughters had come down with a fever during the night. He had pushed

the button and the Sorcerer had come to the village and given her medicine. He was afraid to use the phone now, but the dream had told him that he must deliver a message.

Malink would have liked to go down to the men’s house and discuss his decision for a few hours with the others, but he knew that he couldn’t. He had to deliver the dream message. Vincent had said so, and Vincent knew everything.

As he pushed the button, he wished he had never been born a chief.

The High Priestess was also sleeping late, as she always did. The Sorcerer

jostled her and she pulled the sheets over her head.

“What?”

“I just got a call from Malink. He says he’s had a message from Vincent.”

The High Priestess was awake now. Wide awake. She sat upright in bed and the Sorcerer’s eyes fell immediately to her naked breasts. “What do you mean he’s had a message from Vincent? I didn’t give him any message.”

The Sorcerer finally looked up at her face. “He was terrified. He said that Vincent came to him in a dream and told him—get this—to tell me that ‘the pilot was alive and on his way, and to wait for him.’”

She rubbed the sleep out of her eyes and shook her head. “I don’t get it. How did he know about a pilot coming? Did you say something?”

“No, did you?”

“Are you kidding? I’m not stupid, Sebastian, despite what you might think.”

“Well, how did he find out? The guards don’t know anything. I haven’t said anything.”

“Maybe it’s a coincidence,” she said. “Maybe he was just having bad dreams from the storm. Vincent is all he thinks about. It’s all any of them think about.”

The Sorcerer stood and backed away from the bed, eyeing her suspiciously. “Coincidence or not, I don’t like it. I think you need to have an audience with the Shark People and give them a direct message from Vincent. This whole operation depends on us being the

voice of Vincent. We can’t let them think that they can reach him directly.” He turned and started out of the room.

“Sebastian,” she said and the Sorcerer paused and looked over his shoulder at her. “What about the pilot? What if Malink is right about the pilot being on his way?”

“Don’t be stupid, Beth. The only way to control the faithful is to not become one of them.” He turned to leave and was struck in the back of the head by a high-velocity whiskey tumbler. He turned as he dropped to the floor grasping his head.

The High Priestess was standing by the bed wearing nothing but a fine golden chain at her hips and an animal scowl. “You ever call me stupid again and I’ll rip your fucking nuts off.”

21 How the Navigator Got from There to Here

Watching the sharks circle the boat, Tuck felt as if he was being sucked down the vortex of a huge bathroom drain.

“We need a better weapon,” Tuck said. He remembered a movie once where Spencer Tracy had battled sharks from a small boat with a knife lashed to an oar. “Don’t we have any oars?”

Kimi looked insulted. “What wrong with me?”

“Not whores. Oars!” Tucker pantomimed rowing. “For rowing.”

“How I know what you talking about? Malcolme always say oars. ‘Bloody oars,’ he say. No, we don’t have oars.”

“Bail,” Tuck said.

The navigator began scooping water with the coffee can as Tuck did his best to bail with his hands.

A half hour later the boat was only partially full of water and the sharks had moved on to easier meals. Tucker fell back onto the bow to catch his breath. The sun was still low in the morning sky, but already it burned his skin. The parts of his body not soaked with seawater were soaked with sweat. He dug into the pack and pulled out the liter bottle of water he had bought the day before. It was half-full and it was all they had.

Tuck eyed the navigator, who was bailing intently. He’d never know if Tuck drank all of the water right now. He unscrewed the cap and took a small sip. Nectar of the gods. Keeping his eye on Kimi, he a took a large gulp. He could almost feel his water-starved cells rejoicing at the relief.

As he bailed, Kimi sang softly in Spanish to Roberto, who clung to his back. Whenever he tried to hit a high note, his voice cracked

like crumpled parchment. Salt was crusted at the corners of his mouth.

“Kimi, you want a drink?” Tucker crawled onto the gas tank and held the bottle out to the navigator.

Kimi took the bottle. “Thank you,” he said. He wiped the mouth of the bottle on his dress and took a deep drink, then poured some water into his palm and held it while Roberto lapped it up. He handed the bottle back to Tucker.

“You drink the rest. You bigger.”

Tucker nodded and drained the bottle. “Who’s Malcolme?”

“Malcolme buy me from my mother. He from Sydney. He a pimp.”

“He bought you?”

“Yes. My mother very poor in Manila. She can’t feed me, so she sell me to Malcolme when I am twelve.”

“What about your father?”

“He not with us. He a navigator on Satawan. He meet my mother in Manila when he is working on a tuna boat. He marry her and take her to Satawan. She stay for ten years, but she not like it. She say women like dirt to Micronesians. So she take me and go back to Manila when I am nine. Then she sell me to Malcolme. He dress me up and I make big money for him. But he mean to me. He say I have to get rid Roberto, so I run away to find my father to finish teach me to be a navigator. They hear of him on Yap. They say he lost at sea five year ago.”

“And he was the one that taught you to navigate?” Tucker knew it was a snotty question, but he had no idea what to say to someone whose mother had sold him to a pimp.

Kimi didn’t catch the sarcasm. “He teach me some. It take long time to be navigator. Sometime twenty, thirty year. You want learn, I teach you.”

Tucker remembered how difficult it had been to learn Western navigation for his pilot’s license. And that was using sophisticated charts and instru-ments. He could imagine that learning to navigate by the stars—by memory, without charts—would take years. He said, “No, that’s okay. It’s different for airplanes. We have machines to navigate now.”

They bailed until the sun was high in the sky. Tuck could feel his skin baking. He found some sunscreen in the pack and shared it with Kimi, but it was no relief from the heat.

“We need some shade.” The tarp was gone. He rifled the pack, looking for something they could use for shade, but for once Jake Skye’s bag of tricks failed them.

By noon Tuck was cursing himself for pouring out the gallon of fresh water during the storm. Kimi sat in the bottom of the boat, stroking Roberto’s head and mumbling softly to the panting bat.

Tuck tried to pass the time by cleaning his cuts and applying the antibiotic ointment from Jake’s first-aid kit. By turning his back and crouching, he was able to create enough privacy to check on his damaged penis. He could see infection around the sutures. He imagined gangrene, amputation, and consequently suicide. Then, looking on the bright side, he realized that he would die of thirst long before the infection had gone that far.

22 Finding Spam

The octopus jetted across the bottom, over a giant head of brain coral, and tucked itself into a tiny crevice in the reef. Sarapul could see the light purple skin pulsing in the crevice three fathoms down. He took a deep breath and dove, his spear in hand.

The octopus, sensing danger, changed color to the rust brown of the coral around it and adjusted its shape to fit the crannies of its hiding place. Sarapul caught the edge of the crevice with his left hand and thrust in his spear with his right. The spear barely pierced one of the octopus’s tentacles and it turned bright red in a chromatic scream, then released its ink. The ink expanded into a smoky cloud in the water. Sarapul dropped his spear to wave the ink away before making another thrust. But his air was gone. He left his spear in the crevice and shot to the surface. The octopus sensed the opening and jetted out of the crevice to a new hiding place before Sarapul knew it was gone.

Sarapul broke the surface cursing. Only three fathoms, eighteen feet, and he couldn’t stay down long enough to tease an octopus out of its hole. As a young man, he could dive to twelve fathoms and stay down longer than any of the Shark men. He was glad that no one had been there to see him: an old man who could barely feed himself.

He pulled off his mask and spit into it, then rinsed it with seawater. He looked out to sea, checking for any sign of the sharks that lived in abund-ance off the reef. There was a boat out there, perhaps half a mile off the reef, drifting. He put on his mask and looked down to get a bearing on his spear so he could retrieve it later. Then he swam a slow crawl toward the drifting boat.

He was winded when he reached the boat and he hung on the side for a few minutes, bobbing in the swell, while he caught his breath. He made his way around to the bow and pulled himself up and in. A huge black bat flew up into his face and winged off toward the island. Sarapul cursed and said some magic words to protect himself, then took a deep breath and examined the bodies.

A man and a woman—and not long dead. There was no smell and no swelling of the bellies. The meat would still be fresh. It had been too long since he’d tasted the long pig. He pinched the man’s leg to test the fat. The man moaned. He was still alive. Even better, Sarapul thought. I can eat the dead one and keep the other one fresh!