Dash in the Blue Pacific

by Cole Alpaugh

  Willy came back. He was nearly solid, head cocked in sympathy, body leaning forward as if to deliver comforting words. Through the searing pain, Dash sensed he’d summoned Willy, the fire in his hands and fingers causing his mind to seek out anything that might alleviate his suffering. Dash silently begged for mercy, an unspoken plea to heal his wounds or slice off his hands and take them far away. Either would be an acceptable solution.

  The more the pain ebbed, the more he believed that although Willy was nothing like a flesh and bone creature, neither was he a mere ghost from his imagination. The diminishing pain left space to truly imagine the misery Willy had absorbed from the thousands of souls he’d had to bury. Willy had come as a beacon, an energy form to accept Dash’s agony, a man-shaped sponge to take on the hurt. Human torment made Willy whole.

  Dash leaned forward, elbows on his knees, limp and useless hands dangling in front. A bead of drool dropped from his lower lip on a thin line toward the bloody water. “Maybe you’re real,” he whispered, and then mouthed the word sorry.

  Willy’s dangerous mouth, with its horrible spiked teeth, became a lopsided smile. “You never had to be afraid,” he said in a familiar woman’s voice.

  Dash’s mother had taught him to believe in things he could not see or touch. Her bedtime stories ranged from rainbows that ended at pots of gold, to magic bunnies that hid chocolate eggs for children who cleaned their rooms without being asked. His father had provided the skepticism, and would come sit on the edge of his young son’s bed in the spot still warm from his mother.

  “Your mother told you about Good Rabbit?” his father would ask, and Dash would nod, eyes wide as he inched the blanket higher for protection, knowing the story to come. “But she doesn’t tell you anything about Bad Rabbit. That’s the bunny a boy’s really got to know about.”

  Dash had barely started school when the more graphic tales had begun, and they’d lasted for years. He suspected they only ended because he stopped showing fear, stopped believing they might be true. Or maybe they ended when scaring a child stopped being entertainment for his father.

  “Bad Rabbit sneaks into a child’s room late at night, and there’s nothing anyone can do to stop him from coming. Even if there are no windows, he knows a magic entrance, just like Santa Claus. Once inside, he crawls right in with the unsuspecting bed owner,” his father would say, patting Dash’s blanket where the interloper would take refuge. “The child is safe from any real harm because Bad Rabbit isn’t interested in biting them. Of course, your sheet and blanket, and even your favorite pillow, will turn awful from an odor so foul that no amount of detergent will make them right.”

  His father spread his hands out over the bed. “All this will have to be set afire come daylight. Everything will need to go right into the burn barrel, lest the odors get into the walls.”

  “But kids can be washed, right?” Dash pictured being rolled up in his bedding and stuffed inside the rusty old drum down by the brook that cut through their property.

  “Well, I’ve never heard of a child having to be burned.” His father would pause, removing his metal frame glasses to polish on his shirt. “But I don’t think parents would want that sort of thing in the news. It’s very bad form to admit you’ve torched your child for smelling bad. Might even bring the law.”

  Dash nodded, trying to recall the worst thing he’d ever smelled, something so bad that his parents wouldn’t want him anymore if it got on him. There had been a raccoon killed on the road near their house early that summer, maybe too close to their neighbor’s driveway for the vultures to get at. The coon had gotten fatter and fatter, and his father had explained it was because of the gases forming inside, just like a party balloon. It gave Dash the notion to sneak out by the road with a stick to see if it was true, thinking somehow that if he poked a little, the raccoon might lift up off the ground and drift away on the summer breeze. But the coon was heavy, all muscle and hair. His father had lied. It was nothing like a balloon. He jabbed hard, trying to push it off the gravel and into the grass when it made a wet thump and began to deflate.

  “Pay attention, son,” his father warned. “Bad Rabbit goes for the easy pickings first, so you should listen close.”

  Young Dash would peer up at the black rectangle of glass on the far wall. “The window,” he whispered, smelling the memory of the coon.

  His father would follow his gaze, nodding slowly. “Easy as pie. Bad Rabbit would use his front paws to raise the wood frame, get his long nails underneath and push. Then he’d slip his fat belly over the sill and drop to the floor like a sack of butcher’s meat.”

  “What does he want?” Dash knew the story, but felt compelled to repeat the questions he’d asked the first time. It was his part in the telling.

  “Like your mother says, a bunny comes to deliver a chocolate egg.”

  “He has a basket?”

  “No, Bad Rabbit has a special place where he carries an egg,” his father would say, an unpleasant smile on his face, like maybe he was smelling the dead raccoon, too. “You see, he’s twice the size of most children, although shaped very much like your average bunny, with the fleshy pink color of a baby hamster.”

  “My hamster had babies.”

  Dash’s father frowned while he nodded. “So you know the color. It’s a color that looks like it might be fragile, don’t you think? And his fur is handsome in some places, smooth to the touch. It might even tempt you to stroke Bad Rabbit in those spots.”

  Dash shook his head that he wouldn’t, not in a million years.

  “But the rest of him is matted with burs and chewing gum, and other bits of garbage.”

  “Where does he keep the chocolate egg?”

  “Oh, yes, the egg is tucked up inside his rolls of fat, right about here.” Dash’s father would pat his own flat stomach, where there was no place to hide an egg. “It is all those layers of fat which cause the most unpleasant feature of Bad Rabbit.”

  “Even worse than his smell?”

  “Worse because when he sneaks into your bed and curls next to you, he begins to sweat. Not the kind of perspiration you get from lifting boxes and running around out back on the hottest of days. It is a sweat that leaks out of every part of him, so much that a child wakes up and begins to cry, believing they’ve done number one.”

  Dash knew he would cry, too, because he’d peed his bed right up until the second week of pre-K. The accidents had stopped when the new life in school became routine.

  “But Bad Rabbit’s badness is much worse for a grownup. If a parent was to check on a child late at night, sit on the edge of a bed where he lay hidden, Bad Rabbit would lash out with his long rabbit teeth and bite down hard, right through the blanket. He would not let go until the parent was also in tears.”

  “What happens to the chocolate egg?”

  “Oh, Bad Rabbit always leaves it. That’s his job, after all. He tucks it under a sweaty pillow with his filthy paws, arranges it on its side just right. Children expect their treats and would be disappointed.”

  Dash’s father had no idea of the nightmares he caused his son. Or maybe he did. As an adult, Dash rationalized that his father had only wanted to balance what he considered his wife’s obsession with things made-up. His father could not tolerate people who were gullible, who would flock to church to hear a mortal human being justify their existence. What man could know the thoughts of any creature able to create the universe? What muttonhead would sit there and listen? The Bible was ink and paper to his father, no different than any self-help book hawked on late night infomercials. But after his father died, Dash began believing the stories had all been for the man’s enjoyment, his desire for control. Not every fragile antique could be put out of the children’s reach, but his own son was easy pickings for both him and Bad Rabbit.

  “The pain is a little better?” Willy’s voice sounded like it came from another room.

  Dash looked down at his hands and mistook the awful mess for a melted chocola
te egg.

  Chapter 25

  A thud jarred the skiff to one side hard enough for cold water to splash over Dash. He banged the top of his head in the dark as he came awake, confused and shielding himself with both arms. He pushed free of the mat, used his elbows to lift onto the bench, and then searched the cocoon of blackness. It had to be a ship. There were no crashing waves, no squawk of night birds. There was no smell of too-sweet flowers or decaying jungle. But there was also no sound of men talking, no radio static, no creak from a giant wooden stern or metallic squeal of shifting steel. A ship would have lights, and here it was pitch black, no moon or stars. There was nothing but a few dull plunks from rain drops.

  “Willy?” No one answered his raspy whisper. “Willy?”

  There was only the sound of water against wood, teasing slaps and lazy trickles. He crept over the middle bench and reached out, needing not to be alone, but terrified of touching a dead god. Willy’s hollow form had at least offered comfort, as much as did an old family photograph hung too many years in the sun.

  A new jolt knocked Dash back into the narrow bow. His head struck the flooded bottom, and when his hands with their raw wounds found the paddle blade, white flashes crossed his vision. The next impact turned the skiff, forcing him to grab one side or go overboard. He balanced on all fours until the motion settled, then he turned and lowered himself onto his crumpled mat.

  A slit opened in the clouds, was pulled wider as if the Storm God had something for him to see. Enough light showered down to display the weak crests of the stirred ocean, the nearest stars returning dimension to his perilous new world. A gleaming dorsal fin slid through the water like a prowling submarine. The shark was longer than his meager boat, easily measured when it streamed past on a parallel course, its wake nearly enough to roll the skiff and begin the feeding.

  He used his forearms to scramble up against the pinched bow, adrenaline the only fuel for his spent muscles. He faced a pale outline with a hovering green speck, what might be the last fleeting glow of a squashed firefly.

  “Can you hear me? You believe this shit? They sicced a shark on me, Willy. A goddamn shark of all things.” He turned to the water, his voice giddy, nearly hysterical as he began shouting, “I saw this fucking movie as a kid. Shark eats man, aliens not friendly, dinosaurs chase kids. Bring on the flesh-eating zombies, motherfuckers!”

  He collapsed back, out of breath. Heart pumping as if it wanted out, he looked up at Willy’s slumped figure. “Sorry about the zombie thing, buddy boy. You can’t help what you look like.”

  It was a head-on strike that lifted the skiff under Dash’s ass and sent him weightless. The keel slapped down hard, wood splintering. At least two precious coconuts were sent airborne and splashed into the ocean with solid kerplunks. Something larger also went overboard, and at first he thought it might be what remained of Willy. Pushing back up, he could see the floating paddle forever out of reach. Not that his hands would ever heal enough to put it back to use, having rowed himself into the questionable mercy of gods he didn’t know.

  He braced for the final assault, with the regret of not having fashioned a spear for his escape into shark territory. He imagined the satisfaction of returning some of the pain with a mighty jab, a sudden epiphany over what went on in the heads of killers who stabbed their victims a hundred times. Once you’d started, why stop? He might have been Custer of the Sea, making a glorious last stand in this primitive craft, weapon at the ready to track the canny man-eater. He’d sound a battle cry before putting out one of his assailant’s eyes with a bulls-eye throw before being swallowed whole. The idea of bravery made him laugh, and then made him weep. He was a raging coward who ran from trouble in the real world—left innocent, motherless girls to suffer murderous devils alone.

  Minutes passed, and then an hour or more. The clouds broke farther apart and the stars changed positions. The shark did not come again. Maybe it had grown bored, or maybe frustrated enough to move on. Perhaps it would return later for another go.

  Dash reached for the leaning bucket with his fingertips and righted it. He touched the moist interior and brought the dampness to his lips. He sat with his legs folded, elbows on the seat behind. The amber disk Tiki had given him sat on its edge, leaning against his right foot. As he took it between his fingers and rubbed the smooth surface, the guilt for leaving her was almost too much to bear. He tucked her gift into his underwear.

  The stern seemed empty, but not quite. Not when he looked real hard. He could discern Willy’s beefy torso that reflected some of the light from the heavens. “Talk to me, Willy. Are you pissed that I blamed you for the girl getting hurt? So what if she didn’t believe in you? I needed you to help her.”

  There was no response, no flicker from his bulb.

  “She was just a kid. Becoming a god after the fact, after rotten things happen, is bullshit. It’s all backwards. That girl and her people would have good reason to hate you if they knew you existed. Christ, the only thing more useless than talking to a god is listening to one.”

  Dash’s head rolled with the waves, a loose coconut bumping his knee in the sloshing water. He was tired and alone, and needed this to end. It wasn’t possible to live another day by himself.

  “You lied,” he said, wanting to provoke a response. “My plane wasn’t knocked out of the sky by some crazy Volcano bitch. I felt what happened. We ran out of fucking gas, or some tube fell out of the carburetor. It wasn’t any more magic than you are. It was one of those shit happens things.”

  Dash tilted his head toward the egg-shaped opening in the clouds. Stars twinkled from a fast moving low scud, perhaps the same stars he’d taken for granted back in Vermont. Stars were meant for real sailors and for people in love. They were for children to make wishes that sometimes came true. Watching the flickering light, he made his own wish that he would die easily, without much pain. He also wished there to be no afterlife with judgmental gods hanging around to keep score, only an instantaneous transition from all this loneliness to perfect nothingness.

  The skiff rocked him into a sleep where he dreamed about birds that flew at night.

  * * *

  He woke with the sun warm on his face, a wood box floating at his feet, probably dislodged from the old netting stuffed under the middle bench. It was about a foot across and three fingers tall. He lifted it with his knuckles and balanced it on his thigh. The surface was polished, with tiny intricate hinges engraved in fine designs. It was constructed some place far away. He pushed open the metal latch and lifted the lid to expose a dozen crude bone hooks, a small square mirror, and a Western-style serrated knife with a brown stain running the blade’s length. He set the box next to him, flexed his right hand to stretch the skin being pulled tight by fledgling scabs. The wounds itched and burned, but were bearable. He gripped the knife’s wood handle. The brown stuff was rust, or maybe fish blood.

  “Look.” He held his find up to Willy, whose eyes appeared to move, face muscles to twitch. Hard to be certain, since the sky behind him was nearly the same brightness as his translucent head.

  Dash sniffed the blade, stuck his tongue out over cracked lips to taste the steel.

  “Don’t.”

  Dash jerked, nearly sliced his tongue, heart thumping.

  “What the hell, Willy?” It hurt his throat to speak above a whisper. “I was seeing if it was blood.”

  The outline of Willy’s slumped body filled in and became a little more real. Dash could see his light pulsing.

  “How old were you?” Willy asked.

  Dash ignored the question. Maybe he also had the power to read minds, because he knew what Willy had returned to ask.

  “It’s just an old fishing knife.”

  “Were you alone when you found him?” Willy’s voice came from one of those tin can phone set-ups you put together as a kid, running a string from one can to the other, smelling chicken soup the whole time. It was as if Willy was in a nearby boat, rather than sucking breath through a
grotesque fish mouth two seats away and hurling accusing questions.

  “You want to know about my father.”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m asking,” said Willy, who’d come fully back. “We’re on a sea cruise, could use a little entertainment, but I’m all talked out. Time for a story from my last friend in the world.”

  Dash remembered seeing his breath in the house, and his mother worrying that the oil truck hadn’t delivered even though she’d called and left dire messages. The entire winter he’d turned fifteen was miserable, felt like it would never end. Spring came on the calendar, but the snow pack remained a solid five feet. There hadn’t been a whole lot of big nor’easters, but there hadn’t been the usual thaws. Snow built up in layers, reflecting back the good warm sun. The cold had gotten inside their home, had invaded their family.

  “I was fifteen, a sophomore in high school.” Dash pinched the blade between his fingers, then drew it along slowly. It came clean in spots, flashing bright when it caught the sun. He wiped the brown stuff on his thigh.

  “Not a whole lot of friends?”

  “No,” said Dash. “I worked in my folk’s store when I wasn’t at school. Helped in the summers, too. Not a lot of kids wanted to hang around a dusty old antique shop. I sure as hell didn’t.”

  “Your clothes smelled like the store when you went to school.”

  Dash remembered the girl in math class. He had a crush on her and she didn’t know he was alive. He practiced a hundred ways of talking to her. Those are pretty earrings, he’d tell her in algebra class. Did you get that bracelet for Christmas? That drawing is great, you should be an artist. He imagined Lisa Pederson would smile, perfect white teeth flashing just for him. And she’d say thank you, it was nice of him to say. Dash also secretly noticed the strain between the third and fourth buttons of her blouse, the little gap that showed her tan bra. Skin color, he’d thought after his first peek. Lisa Pederson wears a skin-color bra.