by Cole Alpaugh
Dash craved everything he’d lost, then realized he’d never experienced anything like what these women seemed to happily take for granted. His mother had promised he’d find good friends; they just hadn’t met each other yet. But she was wrong. School was miserable, and summers worse. Summers brought solitary confinement where he suffered the demands and eccentricities of his father.
One woman laughed, put a wet hand on another’s shoulder, and pointed an index finger, a soapy bra dangling from her fist. The woman with her back to him turned.
She was as dark and beautiful as when she’d slid over his body in the love hut. Younger under the sun, her eyes wide at first, curious as she followed her friend’s words to where he crouched on the shore. He remained frozen among the thorny plants while her eyes explored the landscape and found him. She took three slow steps away from the others, allowed the strap to fall from her shoulder, the half-filled sack set adrift. Dash searched for words, an apology, anything that would make her come closer, come touch him. He would learn her language to share anything she wanted to know about mountains not filled with fire or pillows made of feathers. He had nothing, but still had so much to give.
He read lips that formed the word cracker, and held his breath, praying for those lips to curve into a smile. She jostled in the water to spread her feet, pushing her hips forward. He tried to look away when she reached down and snatched fists of coarse hair and screamed two words at him, then repeated the message each time she thrust her hips.
“Nova oom,” he heard himself repeat, recognizing the words Tiki sometimes used.
“Nova oom,” shouted the woman, pulling at her hair, rocking her hips. My daughter is nine, she called out with two sing-song words that to Dash sounded like a moan at end of the world. And he knew her daughter must have the same fine bones and unmarked skin, and was incubating under the sun for her turn with evil.
Dash ran away, bare feet slapping down on things hard and sharp, not stopping until he was curled up alone in his dark cave, surrounded by spiders.
Chapter 20
Thunder rattled the cave, shook dust from the ceiling and sent startled spiders scrambling for their holes. Dash rolled from his mat to hobble down the rocks and splash cold water on his chest. He washed his gritty feet and picked thorns from a callused heel, thick skin that was the color and texture of a worn sandal. He should be building a boat rather than moping, but standing there alone made him feel every god was against him. The storm had gathered to the southeast, with soaring clouds flashing lightning deep inside their purple guts, wind lifting spray from whitecaps. He could never build something capable of withstanding such power.
He took one step forward to feel the energy of the rushing tide push against him, foamy water riding up his shins and cascading off bony knees. Another step and he felt the energy begin to shift, as if deciding it might want to take him with it. He barely existed on this island, as if there really had been no survivors. The plane and all its beings who mattered were at the bottom of the sea. It wouldn’t be a sin to keep walking, if only he possessed the courage.
Had Sarah bothered attending his funeral? Did she stand next to his crying mother whose useful life had already ended? His throat tightened at the thought of his mother’s image. As pale and fragile as the tea cups his father kept on the highest shelves, away from the grubby hands of youth.
Tommy Chambers was good with heavy equipment; perhaps his latest job had been at the cemetery. Tommy in the excavator cab, cigarette dangling, as on the night he’d given Sarah a ride in the plow truck. Good old Tommy, waiting for the last person to leave so he could sling some dirt, looking forward to sharing a good laugh with his drinking buddies about the assholes who paid cold hard cash to bury an empty coffin.
Dash turned from the sea, trudged back up to where Willy lounged in his favorite window seat.
“A real fairy tale story,” Willy said, fingers from both hands working to prop a three-inch plastic Snoopy doll on his muscular abdomen. The toy had been deposited in the tide pool the day before, along with two baby eels currently doing laps, probing the walls for a way out.
Dash sat to watch the waves roll over the black lava. The wind blew from the north, pushing at the storm as an invisible barrier, piling the clouds taller. “I lost my job because of that bastard. My fiancée and my job. Everything.”
“You have your health,” Willy said, then glanced down at Dash’s crotch and made a wet clicking sound with his mouth. “Oh, sorry.”
“That’s for the girl.” Dash pointed at the Snoopy. “She expects the soldiers to give her a kitten. Nice clothes and a kitten.”
“Do they really have nine lives?”
“I won’t let her go. I need to figure out how to build a boat, and keep the birds from ratting me out. Who knew birds took sides?”
“This was made in China.” Willy held the toy upside down for Dash to see the stamped letters. “Imagine it coming so far. If the girl doesn’t know you found it, we should put it back in the ocean and let it keep going.”
“I should have died in the crash with everyone else.”
Willy made the clicking sound again, which was followed by a bright flash and rolling thunder Dash felt through the seat.
“You’re a bundle of joy,” said Willy. “You survived for a reason, my friend. She knocked the plane out of the sky and let you live. You might have been singled out as the best baby-making prospect, but she didn’t figure on you throwing a wrench into your delicate mechanism.”
Dash leaned forward, turned to look up at the monstrosity spewing wispy puffs of smoke into the gray scud. From where they sat, it looked too steep to climb. There had to be a path on a hidden side, chiseled steps in the stone face making easy access for sending innocent castaways to their deaths. He imagined a lovable, bumbling Gilligan with his trademark white cap gone, his red shirt and white pants in bloody tatters, being prodded to the edge of the volcano by sharpened spears, the villagers humming the sitcom theme song.
“You’re bumming me out with this shit,” Willy said, obviously reading his thoughts. “Think of something cheerful, will ya? Tell me the story about your bride-to-be and the snow plow driver. That was a good one.”
“You can be a real jerk.”
“How’d the guy get you fired?”
Dash reached across the middle seat and plucked the Snoopy from Willy’s cavernous belly button. “I really do want to give this to Tiki.”
“Suit yourself. How’d he get you shit-canned?”
“Tommy worked the counter at his old man’s bowling alley when he wasn’t driving a plow. You know anything about bowling?”
Willy tilted his fish head at him, bulb at the end of the dorsal spine flickering. “I know whatever you know about bowling. You’d order a couple of light beers and try to impress your girl with an awesome follow-through.”
“Okay, okay, so we’d either catch a movie or bowl a few games on Saturday nights. It was the winter after graduation, and I’d started writing for the newspaper. Not a whole lot to do in northern Vermont once the sun goes down.”
“You spent your time bowling even though your penis worked? Must be a very satisfying game.”
Dash ignored the sarcasm. “I started noticing some of the people who’d come into the bowling alley. They’d hang around the front counter where Tommy chain-smoked behind the register and sprayed disinfectant into rental shoes.”
Willy lifted a huge bare foot and wiggled his toes. “Never owned a pair of shoes in my life.”
“I recognized a lot of these guys, mostly local business owners. One had a third-generation sandwich shop, another owned a Hallmark franchise. An insurance guy, a tax preparer, all pillar-of-the-community types. I also knew their faces because they’d stop in to shoot the breeze with our ad reps at the paper, or go to lunch with my managing editor. But what the heck were they doing at the bowling alley with this lowlife Chambers? A few times they rolled a couple of frames, but some didn’t even switch out
of their street shoes.”
“Bad for the lanes, right? Scuffs them up.”
“Yeah, I guess. You’re supposed to wear special shoes,” said Dash, who owned his own pair, kept them tucked away in a hall closet. Only now they were either boxed up in his mother’s basement or had been donated to charity. He’d kept them next to the used bowling ball he’d found on Craigslist for fifteen bucks. “Sarah complained that we stopped going to movies because I planned on trying out for the Olympics.”
“No kidding? Bowling is an Olympic sport?”
“Jesus, I don’t know. Something was going on between Tommy and the business owners. I started a list of who was coming and going. There was a story buried there some place, and I was determined to dig it up. It involved a whole lot of important people in town.”
“You sound like a lousy date.” Willy made more clicking sounds with his mouth. “Your girl didn’t know what you were up to?”
“I couldn’t trust her to keep it secret. She was still going out drinking with her friends on nights I had late assignments.”
“You were a lucky guy to land such a princess.”
“Anyway, I figured it all out by accident. I was headed to the snack shop for two more beers, but detoured toward the men’s room. By coincidence, Tommy was walking down the hall ahead of me and pulled his wallet from a back pocket. It was one of those set-ups with a chain attached to one corner that connects to a belt loop.”
“Biker style,” said Willy. “Wicked chic.”
“When he goes for his wallet, I see a little square packet pop out and land on the carpet. I was real smooth, scooping it up and slipping it into my pocket without missing a beat. Then I stood right next to the fucker at the urinal while we both took a piss. He had a dangling cigarette, acted like I was invisible. He zips up, hits the handle, and doesn’t even pretend to wash his hands.”
“To be fair, you said he was spraying disinfectant.”
“Can I finish?”
“I’m listening,” said Willy.
“I had all the answers practically burning a hole in my pocket. I knew before looking that it was cocaine he was dealing.”
“Bingo!” Willy clapped his hands just as a lightning bolt crashed down and touched the ocean surface a few hundred yards away. The white flash spread out like a wave in all directions. “Front page story, right?”
“I needed proof. I had to get it on video. I could report what I’d seen, plus I had the little package of coke, but it wasn’t enough. Without video, it was my word against his. And what had I really seen? I needed to show money exchanging hands, then confront one of the buyers away from the bowling alley where he’d have to take me up on my offer. I’d promise to keep his name out of the paper in exchange for everything he knew.”
“You were a man with a plan,” Willy said. “Very impressive.”
“I pictured the story getting picked up by all the dailies in the state, the Associated Press including it in its regional and maybe even national feed if any councilmen had their hands in it. They really get off on that stuff. Local bowling alley owner’s son is narcotics supplier to downtown business bigwigs.”
“How’d your boss feel about your investigative reporting?”
Dash used his big toe to draw a wavy line in the black sand. “Not anything like I expected. He threatened to fire my ass and make certain I never worked at another paper in the state. The ad revenue from the people I’d be destroying was the lifeblood of the newspaper. If he found out I so much as took one more note or asked one more question, my career was over.”
“But you couldn’t leave it alone,” said Willy.
“I borrowed a video camera from a friend, cut a hole in an old gym bag for the lens. I asked for lane eight or nine, the ones with a good view of the front counter, said they were lucky for me. I set the camera to record while we bowled.”
“What made you take Sarah to that joint in the first place? It had to be pure hell being around some guy you were pretty sure had hooked up with your girl.”
Dash drew more lines in the sand. “You already know.”
“You’re telling the story. I’m just sitting here listening.”
“The night we got engaged kept coming back. I did everything I could to pretend I hadn’t seen what happened, what she’d done in the truck. But it got into my dreams and was harder and harder to push out of my head.”
Willy was nodding. “You wanted to hurt him bad.”
“I wanted to kill him. It’s why I took Sarah bowling in the first place. I couldn’t hide from it anymore, so I faced it the only way I knew. The story was dumb luck. But even after I knew something shady was going down, I followed him to the bathroom to confront him. I’d started losing it big time. I was fantasizing non-stop about murdering him, had a hundred different ways of doing it running through my head. Dropping the coke saved the fucker’s life. I would have smashed his head into the tile wall while he was pissing. Grabbed him by the neck and just kept smashing and smashing.”
“You had him in a different way. One that kept you from rotting in prison for the rest of your life.”
“I had video of a dozen bedrock citizens buying drugs from Tommy Chambers.” Dash paused and took a deep breath of salty ozone. “Or at least appearing to buy little square packages that may or may not contain drugs. So I kept to my original plan and picked the guy most likely to roll over on the rest. He owned a new shoe store, was married and had two young kids. It was also the one guy I didn’t want to see ruined. I wasn’t trying to judge people for buying coke. I was caught up in doing a real story for the first time in my shitty career.”
“And you wanted to take Tommy down.”
“The next best thing to bashing in his head.”
“So you took the guy a copy of the tape?”
Dash nodded. “I walked into his store around lunch time. His name was Bob, and damn if he didn’t have a smear of white powder under one nostril while I was trying to explain my offer. But he was hyper as hell, sniffing and rubbing at his nose, scared shitless that I was some kind of blackmailer. I tried calming him down, but he was amped up. ‘I don’t have money,’ he tells me, and goes on about two mortgages and twenty grand worth of Buster Browns nobody was buying. So I tell him again what I need, and something seems to finally click in his head. He bends over the glass counter, looks down at the knickknacks lined up in the case as if they have the answer, and starts talking. Tells me everything I needed to know. Gives me Tommy’s prices, who turned him on to the operation, and who he suspected was Tommy’s supplier.”
“Hot damn. Signed, sealed, and delivered. You were a helluva reporter after all.”
“Bob went home and hung himself in the garage,” said Dash. “Did I mention his two little girls? And would you believe his wife had just found out she was pregnant again? Not many people have the sort of life insurance that covers self-inflicted rope wounds.”
Willy reached across and patted Dash’s hand. “Funny how things work out.”
“I went ahead and wrote the story, but didn’t give it to my editor. I sent it right to the wire service, and reporters from all over the state were on the phone looking to fill in some blanks or add quotes from me. My boss wrote a retraction of the story the minute he found out, sent it over the wires marked urgent, saying a former reporter had fabricated the entire piece as an act of retribution. He claimed I’d gone crazy, was trying to pull off some sort of sick stunt that caused an innocent man’s suicide.”
“Boy, oh boy.” Willy squeezed Dash’s hand, held it. “What a story that made, huh? Husband and loving father driven to suicide by crazed journalist. Talk about front page news.”
“I made the front page, for sure.”
“I really like that Snoopy,” Willy said, pointing to the figure on Dash’s lap. “I like things you can touch and not worry about killing.”
Dash handed him the toy.
“Thanks.” Willy propped Snoopy back in his belly button. “You have so
me time before the big weenie roast. Seems like a waste, grinding on things you can’t fix. Try spending your time with something productive, maybe work on your stone skipping.”
Dash watched the storm as it was pushed farther to the south. The village fishermen were headed home through the heavy surf, making the last turn at the southern tip of the reef. One waved to Dash, who lifted his hand from habit. Maybe becoming a human sacrifice was exactly what he deserved.
Chapter 21
Dash skipped stones across the rolling wave tops. The wind had died down when the thunderheads disappeared, the sea as calm as it ever got south of the reef. Foam spilled over the rocks, gulls squawking and battling for air space. They chased the flat stones, were frustrated when the tempting objects dug in and sank out of sight. Tiki laughed, gathered more for him to throw.
“Come, I wanna teach you.” He held a stone with his curled index finger and thumb.
“Did you have happy times with her?”
“Who do you mean?”
“You and Sarah.”
He backed away from the meager surf, stone still in his right hand. He sat next to Tiki as she stacked her collection into a pyramid.
“Was she a good cook? Did she make you clothes?”
He would never admit the only successful aspect of their relationship to a ten-year-old girl. He had, come to think of it, once blurted out to Sarah that she was like a pro when it came to certain endeavors. She bopped him in the head for that one. They were in bed, still panting, when the words slipped out. She stormed from the sweaty covers into the bathroom, locking the door. He knew she’d sit on the toilet for an hour, reading magazines and smoking from a stale pack of Marlboros she kept stashed in the medicine cabinet. He’d been forced to pee in the kitchen sink.
“She seemed to really like my mom,” he finally said. “And my mom sure loved her. She thought Sarah was the best thing in the world for me. My mom was a sucker for a good love story, maybe because hers had turned out so sad.”