Bed of Nails

by Michael Slade

  He was out there for the blink of an eye. It was almost an occult experience.

  Twice the number of northern first-magnitude stars illuminate the heavens of the southern hemisphere. Lying in the hammock rocked by the trade winds, Zinc peered up at the awesome stellar display. He took in the Milky Way, which spilled across the celestial vault, and the Clouds of Magellan, which floated away, and the bright bulbs of the Centaur and the Southern Cross, out in front. With no pollution between him and them, the stars seemed to have multiplied a hundredfold. So bright were the diamonds dazzling his eyes that Zinc could believe the light of heaven burst through those pinpricks in its black screen.

  Are you up there, Alex? he wondered.

  And drifted off to sleep.

  “Zinc?”

  She was calling to him from the great beyond.

  “Zinc?”

  He struggled to open his eyes against the blinding glare.

  When he did, he saw Alexis Hunt gazing down at him, the nimbus around her head as auroral as an angel’s halo.

  “Wake up,” she said. “Tempus fugit, Mr. Van Winkle.”

  Zinc blinked.

  “Yvette?”

  “The one and only, Sleepy. Who did you think it was? The Hunchback of Notre Dame?”

  He tried to sit up and almost flipped out of the hammock onto the sandy beach.

  “It was tempting,” Yvette said. “What with you sleeping as sound as a baby in that Dennis the Menace slingshot. How I would have loved to pull you back in your elastic pouch, then let go to catapult you into the sea. I’ll bet that would have woken you up.”

  “What time is it?”

  “Time for a quick dip. Then time for breakfast. Then time to catch a plane.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Bad beer,” she said. “It’s a long, sad tale of woe. I’ll regale you over breakfast.”

  He managed to swing out of the hammock and gain his feet, a Herculean effort that made every joint ache. With one hand in the small of his back, he moaned as he stretched out the kinks. How did Cook’s crew sleep for years in those nautical hammocks?

  “Oh-oh,” Yvette teased. “Is your body seizing up? Perhaps there’s someone younger here to play with me.”

  Backed by the blazing disk of the sun above the offshore horizon, Yvette was a dark silhouette encased in solar light. But as she retreated and sidestepped a pace or two to search up and down the arc of sand for Mr. Youthful, the shadowed apparition came into her own in the Mountie’s eyes.

  The sight took his breath away.

  Even without her in it, the vista was a stunner. Glaring white sand stretched left and right as far as he could fathom. The inland edge of the pristine beach danced hypnotically with the shade cast by swaying palm fronds. The closer the wide swath of shore got to the lagoon, the brighter and bluer the shimmer that rose with its heat, until the sand slipped away beneath the lapping water where hermit crabs skittered through bits of coral. Bluer and bluer its hue became as the lagoon deepened, and Zinc had no idea which tint best described such allure: azure? turquoise? aquamarine? or a palette of all three? So transparent was the tranquil sea within the reef that he could see heads of brain coral submerged beneath its surface and the colorful tropical fish that swam around them like lazy ideas. Out where the Pacific foamed white over the underwater ramparts of the sunken reef, the protective barrier surfaced as a line of four green islets—the motus—ringed with sand and crowned by palms. Farther still, puffs of white cloud dotted a light blue sky that stretched forever across the endless deep blue sea.

  But all of that was just the frame around her.

  If Yvette Theron had stopped the Mountie dead in his tracks at the Seattle convention, that was a prelude compared with the whammy that flattened him now. As lithe and lean as only youth can bestow, her body was accented by electric blue. The flimsy triangles that held her breasts were tied at the back of her neck and cupped their bounty in such a way that she needn’t have worn a top. The bottom of her bikini was hidden in the hip-hugging wrap of an ankle-length matching blue pareu, except that its cloth was patterned with white hibiscuses and flame-shaped red leaves. Was the bottom beneath as skimpy as the top? he wondered. Around her ankle was a bracelet of tiny white shells.

  “Nope,” she said. “No better playmate.”

  With a languid move as calculated as Gypsy Rose Lee’s, she tugged the pareu free from her waist. Closing in on Zinc, who still stood by the hammock, she looped the garment around his neck like she might a lasso. Her sunglasses were pushed up on top of her head. Her blonde hair, ruffled by the offshore breeze, had a life of its own. A bloodred flower was tucked behind her ear. And those eyes, the shade of one of the hues in the lagoon beyond, seemed to tug him into her like a magnetic dream.

  The pareu slipped through her fingers until it hung free around her captive. Turning, Yvette strolled away toward the beckoning lagoon. His eyes slipped down her hourglass figure to her long and shapely legs, then back up to the bikini bottom.

  Suddenly she stopped and looked over her shoulder.

  “Well, are you going to join me?”

  “Sure,” he said, and followed.

  “If I were you,” she said, “I’d change into my trunks. You might sleep in your clothes. But swimming in them is a little much.”

  “Here’s to bad beer,” he said, raising his coffee cup.

  “I can’t toast that, Zinc. It made them really sick.”

  “Made who sick?”

  “Most of the Odyssey writers.”

  “Bad beer?”

  “Bush beer. Bad home brew.”

  “Where was that?”

  “On Atiu. At the tumunu.”

  Refreshed by their morning frolic in Muri Lagoon, Zinc and Yvette were eating breakfast in the beachfront restaurant. The open-air octagon-shaped hut sat at the point where a stream that snaked through the lush resort fed the sea. In the light of day, the dark grounds through which the Mountie had followed the night porter a few hours ago were bursting with the riotous red, yellow, orange, and pink blossoms of torch gingers, fruit salad, monkey tails, hibiscus, frangipani, golden trumpets, and tropical snow planted in a manicured jungle of green, green, green. Beyond the railing beside their table on the perimeter deck of the hut, a school of mullet fish swam in lilied waters stalked by a predatory eel.

  “Eat up,” Yvette said. “We have to catch a plane.”

  “The Odyssey continues?”

  “With diminished ranks.”

  “Who survived the bad beer?”

  “Bret, Wes, Petra, me, and two lawyers-slash-wannabe writers.”

  “Where are they now?”

  “On Atiu. Waiting for us.”

  “Us? They know I’m coming?”

  “I spilled the beans. That’s how I got to accompany the poisoned ones back here. To pick you up.”

  “Poisoned?”

  “Get your food. Time is tight.”

  The buffet breakfast was laid out in the center of the thatched hut. The roof was supported by several poles sheathed with green fronds, the ribs of each palm radiating out from a vertical spine. Suspended over the table spread with tropical fare, an old wooden outrigger canoe hung in a fishing net. As he stocked his plate with fresh papaw, starfruit, guava, pineapple, coconut meat, and grapefruit that tasted like lime, Zinc prayed that the meshes above weren’t rotten from brine. The cop knew he was Down Under—in the case of the boat, literally—by the Kiwi and Aussie voices he heard using colloquialisms like “poor bloke” and “mate” and “bit of a shocker” in accents that complemented tossing another shrimp on the barbie. That this was a parallel world to his was obvious from brand names. Nothing was packaged as it should be. They had Ricies instead of Rice Krispies, Skippy instead of Corn Flakes, and Weetabix instead of Shredded Wheat. And why all the Germans?

  Yvette was shooing the mynah birds away as Zinc returned to their table. He maneuvered around a pair of chickens pecking crumbs up off the floor, and r
eclaimed his seat while the pesky mynahs took to the air in a flap of white stripes on brown feathered wings and tails, amid caws of protest from their yellow beaks. A second later, they were landing on the next table.

  “Damn birds,” Zinc swore. “It’s like that Hitchcock film.”

  “There’s a story in this.”

  “Yeah? Pray tell.”

  “Mynah birds are native to India. Tahiti imported them in the 1800s to control coconut stick insects. The mynahs were so successful at the job that the Cooks imported them in the 1900s. They saved the coconut trees and multiplied so quickly that now they have pushed out most of Rarotonga’s native birds and drive diners like us mad.”

  “You’re a font of knowledge.”

  “I want to be a writer. Dig deep enough and there’s a story waiting to be mined from everything.”

  “Can you tell me another story?”

  “Sure.” Yvette rubbed her hands.

  “Why are there so many Germans on the island? One of the clocks in reception tracks Frankfurt.”

  “Easy,” she replied. “The curse of Treasure Island.”

  “This I gotta hear.”

  “Captain Cook sailed the South Seas and grabbed lots of sand for Britain. The French colonized Polynesia too. By the time Germany came looking for its place in the sun, there was squat left. Only Samoa, which was independent.”

  “That was Germany’s Treasure Island?”

  “No, I meant the book.”

  “By Stevenson?”

  “Yes, Robert Louis. By then, he was famous for Treasure Island, Kidnapped, Jekyll and Hyde. But the climate of Scotland was doing him in, and he was dying of consumption. So Stevenson left Edinburgh on a round-the-world quest to find somewhere that would alleviate his T.B. In the end, he chose Samoa.

  “The Samoans took instantly to their new guest. The Scot learned their language quickly so that he could enthrall them with stories. By the time the Germans landed to stake their claim, not only was he ‘Tusitala,’ the Samoans’ teller of tales, but they had built him a magnificent estate—Vaima—in their midst. Not impressed, the Germans ordered Stevenson off their island, and that’s when the islanders pulled their knives. ‘That’s our Tusitala,’ they said.”

  Zinc grinned. He could picture it.

  “When Tusitala died, the Samoans hacked their way up a pinnacle of rock to bury him near the heavens. The curse of Treasure Island cost the Germans their colony after the First World War. So ever since, they’ve been forced to wander the South Pacific in search of sun under a foreign flag, and that was the real cause of the Second World War.”

  Zinc laughed. “I think your plot needs work.”

  “That’s my story,” Yvette said, “and I’m sticking to it.”

  He felt as if he could sit and listen to her forever. It was one of those idyllic junctures in life when everything comes together: setting, company, conversation, weather, the works. For the first time since Alex died, he was reveling in love, lust, infatuation, the whole mirage. If fate had sent the Reaper to harvest him instead of Alex, this is the outcome that he would have wished for her. To find someone new to dispel crippling memories so that life could move on.

  Tempus fugit.

  But still he felt guilty. Yvette was too young and too sexy.

  “I’ll give you another chance. Tell me the story behind bad beer,” he said.

  “Do you know what a tumunu is?”

  “No idea.”

  “The bush-beer drinking school that survives on Atiu. As planned, the Odyssey arrived in Raro on Wednesday. The next morning, we flew to Atiu, the cannibal island. Since that’s where the initial writing seminar was to be held, Bret thought it a good idea to pass his literary wisdom on to us neophytes in the traditional way.”

  “At a tumunu?”

  “Uh-huh. A makeshift pub in the bush. That word actually refers to the trunk of the coconut tree—the round, thick part that’s closest to the ground and can be hollowed out to make a container that holds up to forty gallons of drink.”

  “Of bush beer?” said Zinc.

  “Not originally. In the years before Captain Cook put Atiu on his map, kava was the drink prepared in the trunk. It was made from the root of the pepper plant. Though nonalcoholic, it packed a punch. Depending on your tolerance, you got a mild buzz or were knocked flat on your butt. The tumunu was strictly for men. They’d sit around, get zonked, eat, and talk about life.”

  “Eat like cannibals?”

  “I suppose. When the missionaries hit the beach in the 1800s, they suppressed kava tumunus with their blue laws. But they also introduced oranges as food, and soon the islanders learned from white Tahitian beachcombers how to brew orange beer. If the natives thought kava was potent, that stuff was Kickapoo joy juice.”

  “No doubt the Bible-thumpers reveled in that.”

  “They tried to stamp it out, of course, but the tumunus moved into the bush. Word would spread as to where and when, like it does now for raves back home. The boozing was done in the bush, so it became ‘bush beer.’ And because the drinking sessions were how the elders passed on their wisdom, the tumunu became known as the ‘bush-beer school.’ So that’s why Bret suggested it for a seminar.”

  “And the poison?”

  “Bret paid some of the locals for use of their tumunu site, and for a few gallons of brew. The thirteen of us gathered in the bush to drink and talk. A bush-beer setup consists of a ring of stools cut from coconut logs, with the hollowed-out trunk in the center. The barman, or tangata kapu—which was Bret, in our case—sits beside the beer. He scoops a cupful out of the tumunu with a small coconut shell and hands it to one of those on the stools to swallow in a gulp. The drinker returns the cup to the barman to refill, then it’s passed to the next in line.”

  “Everyone drinks from the same cup?”

  “Yes,” said Yvette, “unless you wave the cup by. No one is forced to drink what they don’t want.”

  “Is that what happened there? Bret controlled the drinking?”

  “Right. He filled the cup from the trunk and passed it to each of us in turn. Until most began throwing up.”

  “Did you drink?”

  “No.”

  “Did Petra?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  “What about Bret and Wes?”

  “I know Bret had a few. Someone made a joke about our ending up with a drunken barman.”

  “How does that make sense? If it was bad beer in the tumunu, why didn’t he get sick?”

  “Good question.”

  “Could Bret have poisoned the others?”

  “What, you mean could he have scooped a cupful inside the trunk, then added poison of some sort while it was out of sight, before drawing the cup from the trunk to pass it to someone on the stools?”

  “That’s what I mean.”

  Yvette shrugged. “I guess so. But why would Bret do that? Travel with us to the Cooks, then reduce the group?”

  ODYSSEY

  Zinc was still packed from his overnight flight, so all he had to do to get ready to fly on to Atiu was take a quick shower and dig out fresh clothes: a tropical patterned short-sleeved shirt worn with the tail out over khaki shorts and sandals. To top it off, he plunked a wide-brimmed safari hat on his head and contemplated fastening one side up, Australian-style, but then concluded that would be geek chic in a tourist. Besides, it seemed illogical to bare one side of your face to the sun, when the purpose of wearing a hat was to protect yourself from its rays. By the time he carried his bag out to the beachside patio, Yvette sat waiting for him in a lounge chair. She had switched her hip-hugging pareu for a full-body one worn like a dress. The curvy sheath was navy blue with royal-blue marbling and a pattern of bright red-and-yellow flowers. The actual flowers behind her ear matched the print.

  “Why do men always keep you waiting?” she asked.

  “I had to paint my toenails.”

  “Excuses, excuses. One thing I’ll say about the tropics is n
o fuss, no muss. Fuss with your makeup, muss with your hair, and you look like a clown.”

  “Another story?”

  “Try me.”

  “What gives with all the tattoos?”

  With breakfast over, the sand was the place to hang out. The Kiwis and the Aussies were staking their claims to wide-open plots of beach. True, this was the age of new tribalism, when body piercing, scarification, and tattooing were back in vogue, but even so, the Down Under folks appeared to be addicted to taking ink. Both genders were human canvases.

  Most of the males wore surfing shorts with muscle shirts. Splotches of color on their shoulders were in, as were barbed-wire rings around their upper arms. The funny thing about guys with tattoos is that they appear to swagger, as if their balls are a little too big to fit between their thighs.

  “The Kiwis are a snap,” Yvette said. “Their islands once belonged to the Maoris. The Maoris were the tattooingest culture on earth. Horrific designs on their faces and full-body cover. As for Aussies, Oz began as a prison colony for transported Brits. Cons love tattoos, so ink’s in their descendants’ genes.”

  “Shh! Keep your voice down! You’ll get us creamed!”

  “That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.”

  The tattoos on the females were much subtler. The scent of exotic lotions wafted up the beach as—having set up shop with sand towels, sandals, paperbacks, and peeled-off pareus—they slathered creams onto their tanned bodies in preparation for another bake. A Chinese girl had a snake tattooed the length of her spine. From his case in Hong Kong, Zinc recognized the symbols at top and bottom as “good luck” and “dragon.” The peekaboo brigade was out in force too—those women who tucked half-hidden etchings away in their wispy bikinis, like the Amazon who stretched out facedown on the sand nearby and undid the top of her swimsuit to flash a creamy patch on the side of her patterned breast.