by Mailie Meloy
Benjamin ate the abandoned seeds as quickly as he could. But the other birds, starved from their ordeal, lost their fear and flew at him, pecking at his eyes and wings. They screamed in their tiny voices, and Benjamin ducked his head and flew away.
In a tree, he found some grubs: fat white worms waving their tiny heads blindly in the soggy air. The bird in him said they were good to eat, but the boy was revolted. He ate them anyway, knowing he needed strength, and they were salty, with the texture of grapes, the thin skin popping in his mouth. He swallowed as quickly as he could.
He flew on, not knowing where he was. He had a better intuitive sense of navigation as a bird, just as he had better eyesight, and he knew he had been blown east, but how far east? He was definitely out in the Pacific Ocean, well east of the Philippines. But he hadn’t intended to go that direction, so hadn’t studied the map carefully.
A series of small islands appeared. Benjamin was thinking about where they might fall on the chart when he felt a hard blow in the back of the neck. Then there was a searing pain as something dug into his skin, through his feathers.
Benjamin screeched and flapped, trying to free himself, but the pain grew worse as he struggled. There was a gust of air and a sound of heavy wings, and he realized it was another bird that held him. It was carrying him toward the nearest island as he fought.
Benjamin felt his skylark heartbeat start to slow, and his skin start to tingle, and he knew he was beginning to change. But he couldn’t let it happen yet. Not now. He would break his legs, or even his neck, if he became a boy and fell with the giant bird to the island. He concentrated on keeping his bones light and birdlike, his pulse quick, his arms winged. But it was hard to concentrate on anything with knifelike talons seizing the back of your neck. He couldn’t hold on to his bird shape much longer, and the beach was still too far below. There was a canopy of trees off to the right. If he could only steer his captor toward the trees, maybe the branches would break his fall.
He tried flapping in the direction of the trees with his ineffectual, trapped wings. The bird that held him screamed and squeezed harder with its talons. A lightning bolt of pain erased all thoughts and all willpower, and Benjamin started to grow, in spite of himself.
His bones stretched and thickened, and his skull expanded and grew heavy. His legs and feet took on weight and density. His feathers retracted into his tingling skin and his wing tips became fingers. Then the fingers were attached to featherless hands…forearms…elbows. His blood slowed, his heartbeat dragging in his ears.
The big raptor, his load growing heavier, screamed and let Benjamin go. The green of the trees flew at him and he crashed into the treetops. He hit one branch with his ribs and another with his shoulder, and then he grabbed a third with both hands and hung on. The world that had been so noisy and chaotic, all crashing and screaming, grew still. The clinging, stabbing creature was off his neck. But the ground was still far below his hanging feet. He took a deep, shuddering breath.
How to get down? He considered, then swung hand over hand down the branch until he could grab the trunk with his legs. He clung there like a monkey, arms shaking, feeling the relative safety of the solid tree trunk. He wondered what island this was, and how he would get off it. But right now he needed to concentrate on climbing down. Just do the next thing. That was his task. He reached for a shaky foothold, then for a finger-shredding new handhold. He groped blindly with his toes for a lower foothold, then another.
Finally he lowered himself to the ground and put a hand to his neck to feel the damage. He came away with spots of blood on his fingers, but the raptor didn’t seem to have torn him to shreds. His ribs were bruised where he’d hit the first branch, and his hands were raw from climbing down, but nothing was broken. He’d been lucky.
He looked up, scanning the treetops, and saw a muscular white bird with a gray hood of feathers perched on a high branch. It glowered down at him, looking both confused and humiliated. A sea eagle. It had nearly been his death. He wondered: Would his bones have grown inside the bird’s stomach? Or would he have stayed a tiny thing if he had died as one?
“Nice try!” he called to the sea eagle.
The bird ruffled its white wings as if shrugging off embarrassment, and gazed away into the middle distance.
“Nice try,” a gruff voice said on the ground, and Benjamin looked to find a man standing near him. The man had dark skin and a faded red Coca-Cola T-shirt over a woven grass loincloth. He had appeared out of the trees, and he was smiling. “John Frum?” he asked.
“Oh, no,” Benjamin said, putting up his hands to push the idea away. He knew about John Frum from their time on Espíritu Santo, where the Americans had set up a base during the war. The navy had brought trucks and food and radios, things the people of the island had never seen before. A legend had spread of a man named John Frum, who was supposed to come back to the islands in an airplane, bringing more supplies—more cargo. The people were still waiting for him, on more than one island group. “Not John Frum,” he said.
“You come from sky,” the man said.
“Yes,” Benjamin said. “Well, sort of.”
“You have cargo.”
“No,” Benjamin said, holding out his empty hands. “No cargo. See?”
The man reached and took Benjamin’s rumpled shirt collar between two fingers and rubbed it reverently, inspecting the fabric. “I tell the people, belong this island, long time,” he said. “They don’ believe. I say, John Frum, he must come. He come from sky. He bring cargo.”
“I only came from the sky because I was a bird,” Benjamin said. It sounded outrageous, spoken aloud. But being a bird seemed more plausible than that he, Benjamin Burrows, was the long-awaited South Pacific hero, bringing Cokes and wristwatches and jeeps to the people. And it had the advantage of being the truth.
The man looked at him a long time. “John Frum come from sky.”
“But John Frum has an airplane,” Benjamin argued. The exact beliefs were different from island to island, but he knew that John Frum was usually believed to be a pilot. Sometimes he was said to wear a navy uniform.
“John Frum come from bird,” the man said. So either the cult on this island was different, or the prophet was willing to be flexible. Prophecies were tricky. The outcome was all in the interpretation.
“No!” Benjamin said. “I’m Benjamin Burrows. What island is this?”
The man moved toward a gap in the trees and made a beckoning gesture. “You come, John Frum,” he said.
Benjamin hesitated, but he had no choice. He didn’t know where he was and didn’t have any way to get off the island. He looked at the bird that had brought him, but it lifted its great wings to go look for easier prey. So he followed the barefoot man.
His father said that the cargo cults had started even earlier than the war, with the nineteenth-century missionaries who arrived on the islands. The belief had only been intensified by the astonishing wealth of the American navy. The navy had so many goods, but the men who brought them clearly hadn’t made them. The men had no skills. They did nothing but sit in offices, moving papers, listening to voices that came over small boxes. When the boxes broke, the men sent them away to be fixed. So there must be a source, elsewhere, of all this magical stuff.
After the war, the navy had bulldozed a lot of equipment into the sea, to try to discourage the cargo cults and return the islands to their undisturbed existence. But there was no returning to an earlier time. Such wanton waste of trucks and goods had only convinced the islanders that the coveted objects were infinite in the land of John Frum—in the legendary land of America. More would surely come.
The man in the loincloth talked quietly to himself as they walked. “Nice try,” he said. “Nice try.”
Benjamin realized that the man was memorizing the first words of the returning John Frum. It was so ridiculous. He had to make them see that he wasn’t a god.
They reached a clearing and found two small boys crouch
ed over a bowl, chewing. The boys were bare-chested, in loincloths, and they looked up with wide eyes and fat cheeks. They were making kava. Benjamin’s father had studied the root, interested in its narcotic properties, looking for possible medicinal uses. It was a drink prepared by chewing the root of the kava plant, mixing it with saliva, and spitting it into a bowl. Then the chewed pulp was fermented. Only boys who hadn’t reached adolescence or had any contact with girls could be given the task of preparing it. Once fermented, it became a powerful hallucinogen.
The man who had found him barked a command in a language Benjamin didn’t recognize, and the smaller boy spit a glob into the bowl and dashed out of the clearing.
“Where are we?” Benjamin asked.
The man grinned at him. “Nice try,” he said.
Two more men emerged from the trees a moment later, dressed in loincloths, but without Coca-Cola T-shirts. One had long, grizzled hair, and the other had dark hair cut very close to his scalp. They spoke with the prophet, and their eyes grew wide. The younger man put his hand on Benjamin’s shoulder, bowed his head, and said, “John Frum.”
“No,” Benjamin said, and he started to explain, but the young man took his hand away from Benjamin’s neck. There was blood on his fingertips. The three men seized Benjamin gently, with all the urgency and deference due to an injured god.
He was hustled into a dimly lit hut, and his bloody shirt was peeled off. He wished he had brought some of his father’s blue paste, which would have healed the wounds instantly. He had no great hopes for the medical technology on this island. He hoped the water was clean, at least. The grizzled older man washed his wounds, and the younger brought Benjamin a bowl of white soupy goo.
“That’s all right,” Benjamin said, pushing the bowl away. He had been curious about the visions people had after drinking kava, and the superhuman strength it seemed to give them. But he could only think about the fact that it was made with spit.
“Yes!” the prophet insisted.
The two other men held Benjamin’s arms, and the bowl was pressed against his chin, the slimy contents tilting toward his mouth. Benjamin tried to protest, but when he opened his mouth to say “No!” it was filled with starchy, lukewarm kava. One of the men clapped a hand over his mouth so he couldn’t spit it out, and pinched his nose so that he had to swallow to breathe. Benjamin gagged and shivered.
“That’s disgusting,” he said when they uncovered his mouth. “Let me up!”
But they were still holding his arms.
“Stay,” the prophet said. “Good medicine.” The bowl was pressed to Benjamin’s mouth again, his nose held to force it down. He drank to avoid drowning, and then he sputtered and gasped for air.
“My father will look for me!” he said. He wasn’t sure why he’d said it. It wouldn’t mean anything to these men, but he was starting to feel desperate.
The prophet laughed. “John Frum has no father! He is father!”
“I’m not a father,” Benjamin said. His head was starting to swim and his tongue felt thick. “I’m just a boy!”
“Boy John Frum.”
“No,” Benjamin said weakly. “No cargo.” He could feel his hold on the room slipping. Shadows moved in the corners of his vision. Were they actually there? Had he asked that aloud? “No cargo,” he said again, trying to be firm.
“Nice try, John Frum,” the prophet said.
CHAPTER 32
Copley Square
Pip had a plan. He wasn’t sure it was a good plan, but he had come all this distance to America, and he had to do something. And anyway, the plan was already under way. His first thought had been to go to Opal’s mother for help, but Opal had said no.
“She’s afraid of my father,” she said. “She won’t help. If anything, she’ll just warn him.”
So that left Opal’s grandfather, the sultan. Sultans had money, he understood, and the ability to fly people places. Pip and Opal sent him a telegram as soon as the Western Union office opened, and then climbed aboard the bus to Boston.
“I’ve never taken a bus before,” Opal said.
“It’s not so bad.”
Opal raised her eyebrows at the worn seats.
“Not what you expected?” Pip asked.
“I never thought about what a bus was like,” she said, gazing out the dirty window through her clunky, pointless glasses.
It was a two-hour ride to Boston, and the bus swayed along. At the Copley Square Hotel, Opal went to the desk alone and booked a room on her father’s account. Her family lived in Marblehead, outside the city, but she and her mother sometimes stayed in Boston when they went shopping. And her father stayed at the hotel when he was working late—Pip had some theories about that. While Opal checked in, Pip read a newspaper in the lobby. Then he trailed her up to the room. They made sure there were no maids in the hall before Opal unlocked the door. Now they just had to wait for word from her grandfather. They would be ready to go at a moment’s notice.
The room had heavy curtains, blue-and-gold upholstery, and two identical beds under blue-and-gold bedspreads. “Did you ask for two beds?” Pip asked.
“Of course I did.”
“That’ll seem suspicious. You’re just one person.”
“I said I was going shopping, and wanted a spare bed to lay out dresses.”
“And they believed you?”
“Of course. You’ll have to sleep on top of yours, not in it. Otherwise the maids will know.”
“How about you sleep on top of yours?”
She smiled at him and pushed her glasses up onto her nose. “Very funny.”
Pip sat down on one smooth bedspread. “So,” he said.
Opal sat on the other. “So what?”
“We wait for your grandfather’s response.”
“It’s not like sending a telegram to a normal person’s house,” she said. “It has to go through attendants and translators. He doesn’t even speak English.”
“It’s from the sultan’s granddaughter. They’ll get it to him.”
“Maybe,” Opal said. “If he’s like my dad, he won’t care.”
“He’ll care,” Pip said. “And he’ll send us a plane.”
Opal made a skeptical face, then lay back on the bed with her hands behind her head and looked at the ceiling. Her hair spread out in a shining pool. Her legs in laddered blue tights hung off the end of the bed, warm skin showing through the runs. She kicked her legs. One scuffed shoe fell to the carpet.
“I’m bored already,” she said.
Chapter 33
Nature Red
in Tooth and Claw
Janie’s first thought, stepping off the plane onto the small airstrip on Magnusson’s island, was that she had walked into a wall of wet heat. The air was so dense and humid that her clothes stuck to her skin. She was weak from the long trip—they had stopped in Siberia, of all places, to refuel, and to take on a new pilot—and she was exhausted from the mental effort of trying to find Benjamin. She hadn’t been able to make contact, and she tried to push away the idea that he’d been torn apart by sharp talons while he was trying to come to her rescue. Because he was trying to come to her rescue—wasn’t he? He must have seen the office when Magnusson had shown her the island on the map. She should have closed her eyes so Benjamin wouldn’t have known where to go. Then he would have stayed where he was. But she hadn’t known he was there. And it’s very hard to close your eyes when there’s something interesting to see. She scanned for Benjamin overhead, but saw nothing but the oppressive glare of blue sky.
Magnusson, beaming with the pride of ownership, followed her gaze up into the air.
Janie tried not to look down quickly, which would look suspicious. “Hot day,” she said. “Bright.”
Magnusson studied her face. “It is,” he said. “It gets that way.”
The pilots were doing something with the airplane engine. The beautiful Sylvia looked tired and rumpled. Janie was rumpled, too. But what did it matter? A jeep came
down a path through the trees and pulled up beside them. It was driven by a man in a green uniform who looked like military, although what military Janie didn’t know.
They all climbed in, Janie feeling resigned. What else was she going to do? Run? Where? The jeep took them down a road of crushed seashells and past a pretty, sandy beach.
“Can I go for a swim?” Janie asked.
“You can swim in the pool,” Magnusson said.
“I mean in the ocean?”
“Sure,” Magnusson said. “If you want to be swallowed whole by a shark.”
In Janie’s demoralized mood, that idea didn’t seem too alarming. “Whole is better than in two pieces,” she said. “I might be able to fight my way out.”
“Let me be very clear,” Magnusson said. “You can’t go in the ocean.”
Next the jeep passed a pretty lagoon. It looked like a place for water nymphs to play. “What about there?”
“No,” Magnusson said. “Very dangerous. Strange tides.”
Then they were on the curving drive of a private villa: a large white house with a blue swimming pool and a series of smaller cottages on a sloping lawn below.
“This doesn’t look like a mine,” Janie said.
“The mine is at the other end of the island,” Magnusson said.
“So where’s the desalinization plant?”
“It’s not set up yet.”
“You said you had a plant.”
“And I will, with your help.”
There was something in his voice that bothered her. He sounded bored. He didn’t care about desalinization. As they approached the villa, a high wire fence stopped them. A gate in the fence opened, and they continued down the drive. The big house had white columns, a terrace, and an oversized red door.
“What is this place?” Janie asked Magnusson. Something was still bothering her, buzzing in her mind.