The Turtle-Girl from East Pukapuka

by Cole Alpaugh

  “Please, you can’t stay! You have to get to the deep water or you’ll die!”

  But the sea turtle never went anywhere in a hurry, even in the best of times. Butter gave him a rough push, spilling the warm water she had freshened every morning with coconut shells filled from the lagoon. He extended his long neck to try seeing behind his shell as the girl heaved against his massive weight.

  “Go!” Butter shouted. She stood back up and pointed toward the sandy beach before scrambling back to her other animals.

  “Fly!” she hollered at the red-footed boobie, who had been slow to recover from a terribly cracked beak. Butter had found the boobie dehydrated and near death on the north end of the island. She had gathered him up and nursed him back to health with ground squid and fresh water from the dropper.

  Diving birds were especially prone to severely damaged beaks. Entranced by the silver flashes of prey below, they zeroed in on the target, misjudging the shallow reef as they crashed from the sky.

  “Please go!” Butter begged, her frenzy fueled by the awful fact that animals were not welcomed on Happa Now. There were thirty small cages, most on the ground, while a few rested on stone shelves above. All the doors were open, but most of the patients wanted none of this change. They were content to have three square meals and a doting human to change their dirty nests.

  You want me to do what? You want me to fly where? But I love it here!

  “The wave is coming. You can’t stay!” Butter began plucking birds from roosts, tossing one after another into the darkening sky. A few took flight, tiny splints and all, while others fluttered and fell in puffs of feather dander and indignantly scrambled back toward their doomed homes.

  In her hysteria, Butter tore into the Habu nest and was promptly bitten by the fat little viper, who had been grumpy since having most of its tail either lopped or bitten off. Stupid, she thought through tears, although it didn’t really matter. Not with the wave coming to take them all away. The bite sent searing heat running up her arm and deep into to her shoulder. It kept her muscles from responding, no matter how much her brain pleaded with them. The tendons in her neck clenched and her jaw locked tight. Sweat stung her eyes.

  She was able to confirm that all the cages were wide open. It was the best she could do, though not enough. Now the poison was coming for her, just like the wave. Hearing the noise of a jet airplane flying close, Butter glanced upward. She saw nothing but a few clouds and several circling gulls that seemed hesitant to land. Confusion turned to horror as she identified the source of the thundering noise. “Oh, god,” she wanted to say, but her mouth was frozen shut. The heat from the toxins reached her forehead, making her dizzy. She stumbled back to the sea turtle, who had made no progress toward the lagoon.

  The thunder grew and Butter could feel tremors in the sand as she knelt behind the thirty kilogram turtle. She leaned her good shoulder into the back of its shell and pushed with all her might. It didn’t budge. Butter extended her legs, gripped the shell with both hands and dug her toes in for leverage, but one side of her body had gone mostly numb.

  This was just too much for a ten-year-old girl, Butter thought, with two small specks of blood on her swollen hand peering back at her as she weakly shoved the recalcitrant, backpedaling turtle.

  It was too late.

  A second before the wall of water swept the island clear of all living creatures, the great reddish-brown sea turtle retracted its gnarly head and flippers, hiding from the raging sea as best it could. Butter shifted forward, grabbing hold of the sides of his shell in a final loving embrace, her heart already broken.

  Bigness swallowed them all.

  Chapter 2

  Dante Wheeler knew where the birds were hiding. He had a rainbow sherbet image of rustling feathers, could hear their nervous bickering, despite being ten thousand miles away and having barely enough bird savvy to distinguish a pelican from a pigeon.

  “Sherbet,” Dante hissed into the turbulence created by his tremendous velocity on the famed Lauberhorn downhill race course. He’d blasted through the start wand and made great skating strides toward the first gate. Television cameras followed him across the top of the world, expanses of treeless snowfields zipping by, picturesque jagged peaks in the distance. The first jump was thirty second in. Dante’s long skis were rifle shots slapping down on icy flats. “And yellow,” he chirped happily, despite instincts from a lifetime of training that demanded he rerun the images of his inspections and practice runs.

  Dante sensed the huddled birds in his mind were agitated as he came roaring across the side hill portion and bled his speed in the hundred-eighty degree C turn, just before the nightmarish Hundschopf jump. Through the narrow chicane, giant netting on the left and a rock and snow wall a ski-length away on the right, Dante snuck a peek at the barren tree tops that had begun to appear, half expecting a glimpse of one of those birds from the Fruits Loops box.

  “Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!” Dante shouted giddily, laughing, flashing under the train track bridge and into the speedy Super G turns. His eyes watered behind the yellow goggle lenses he’d chosen to cope with the flat light sections.

  The slope fell away and Dante accelerated to a hundred miles per hour, ski bases melting, vibrating madly as they barely touched the snow.

  “White,” Dante cried out, his voice hoarse from the strain and the icy wind. “I see white!”

  Spectators and coaches could practically reach out and touch gloved hands here, where a racer approached the first off-camber turn of Stump Alley, the Ziel-S. And they might have thought the American wearing bib number fifty-five—the hot-shot young cowboy—was referring to the course, or maybe the few fat snowflakes set free from a single dark cloud directly above. But Dante was seeing the curious seagulls framed by a great black monster when he caught a whiff of perfume that had been trapped somewhere in his long underwear since the night before. It was already a fond memory, what with all the wonderfully dirty things the girl had allowed him to do to her. Her smell had been sweet and fruity, and Dante was smiling as he and his skis launched into the frigid Swiss air at sixty miles per hour, headed for a tight grove of pine trees.

  “Focus,” Dante called out too late, arms flailing, body too far back on his tails to absorb what should have been a harmless, buried mound of earth. Dante was helpless against the mighty wind and roar that began his ascent. He sniffed for the girl from last night, but was distracted by salt on his lips. He licked them and tasted the sea.

  A recurring lack of focus was forever his albatross. Precious course inspection time had been wasted when he’d skied over to an early spectator to score a phone number and autograph her breasts as their steamy breath mingling overhead.

  “Dammit, boy, do you have a death wish?” The German-accented American coach had railed over muffled laughter from the teammates who’d whipped out their own cell phone cameras. The coach shook a ski pole, pointing at Dante from an especially tricky section of the course. “You are too scatter-brained, Wheeler. A downhiller needs to be focused. A downhiller who expects to live, anyway.”

  “Big, big wave.” Now that his body was fully airborne, Dante’s voice was calm. He opened his mouth wide, frigid air puffing his cheeks, and his lips vibrated and tickled insanely.

  The orange safety netting protecting the last turn of the Lauberhorn would have done its job had Dante not been soaring out of control, twenty feet above its reach.

  “Hit your line perfectly, or very bad things will happen,” Dante’s coach had said to his most worrisome charge during the morning inspection. He’d smacked the rock-hard snow with his pole. “This is life or death right here.”

  “Life or death.” Dante’s voice was a whisper as he flew headfirst, looking skyward at the rogue cloud still spitting flakes. Like a lawn dart, he thought, recalling a dangerous version of the game he’d played with his drunken teenage friends during summer ski camp on the Mount Hood glacier. Two puncture wounds, an eye nearly put out. They had been turned
in by an Amazonian camp nurse, whose betrayal was almost made forgivable by her spectacular boobs that brushed your naked chest and arms.

  “Incoming!” the thrower would shout, sending the heavy metal-pointed dart straight up in the mosquito-filled mountain air. The last to bail out of the launch spot won the point, sometimes paying with his own blood. But it was totally worth it. A little creative twist on a tedious game had resulted in the group having to wash breakfast dishes for the remainder of the session. Any mention of lawn darts disappeared from the following season’s camp brochure.

  A sudden, buffeting wind forced Dante’s chin to his chest, and he took in the awesome view of his Atomic skis overlooking the meringue-covered Alps. He made a mental note to run an idea past his agent—a photo of him launching into the sky over Wengen, showing thumbs up, smiling, knowing he would land safely. Maybe even the girl from last night could be tucked under his arm, Superman and Lois Lane-like, for a new ad campaign. “They make you fly!” Dante mused, his body slowly rotating as if in a space orbit, providing a postcard-quality panorama of snow-topped roofs in the scenic valley.

  And then Dante heard the collective gasp from the thirty-thousand spectators below, knowing this life or death thing must surely be only an instant away.

  “What was her name?” Dante tried to sniff for another hint of perfume. Her skin was pale as snow, cheeks freckled and nipples pink, eyes a deep green he’d guessed were colored contacts. And even though he only had one final second to recall the young redhead’s name, he couldn’t. She’d never told him and he’d never asked. She was probably just another energetic ski racer groupie, willing to take on a talented but young second-tier competitor. “Maybe she’d already done all the old-timers,” Dante pondered, suddenly melancholy—a brand new emotion when it came to women.

  Normally melancholia set in at bar closing times or during visits to the team doctor—the last time in particular, when he had diagnosed the source of the burning when he peed.

  “Three times, Wheeler?” The doctor had scoffed at Dante’s reckless disregard for his penis, shaking his shiny bald head. “Who catches the clap three times in one season? Put a condom on it, boy, or just keep it in your pants. Are you going for a record?”

  But to be melancholy over a girl? Could she have been the one? Could he have fallen in love? She did give incredible head and did that cool thing with her left hand. Dante smiled, even shivered a bit at the memory, despite all the dangerous things racing toward him.

  Dante suspected she’d only mastered four English words: yes, okay, sure, and again. But language was no obstacle to true love. To smell her perfume one last time, her warm tongue in his ear distracting him from identifying the familiar song she was humming. She had hummed when he kissed her on the dance floor and when he made love to her in the narrow hotel bed.

  “You’re disgusting, Wheeler.” His new roommate had rolled over in the other bed, but Dante had caught her giving the guy a lingering look. Had she already been with his roommate? Would she be with him tomorrow? Dante thrust harder, hoping to convince her of his own feelings.

  Love was confusing for a man who had no trouble finding willing partners for sex, but only with women who invariably developed amnesia in the morning light. He’d first suspected he was doing it wrong, that the Europeans knew things he did not. Like any fearsome competitor, he’d borrowed one of the team’s video cameras used for race analysis and studied the surreptitiously recorded tapes he made. He found no major flaws in his technique. Nothing glaring, anyway. He tried hard to excel in all things, even on matters that were not of life and death.

  Was he too much of a jerk? Being nicer didn’t keep any of these girls around, nor did being an even bigger jerk. Sleepily telling the girl who’d decided she was up for one more go ’round to “feel free to screw his roommate” was probably going too far.

  “I love you,” Dante called into the frigid wind that made his lungs ache, just before slamming head-first into a tree. His helmet shattered on the first sticky pine trunk, goggles launched and flapped away like a drunken bird, and the wispy, slicing sound of speed turned into the racket of bounding impacts. The sounds made by Dante’s body and equipment combined to form a symphony—the high pitch of his snapping poles, the base reverberating from his thumping boots. Dante’s bones resonated with the metallic and fiberglass music, soon joined by the cracks of breaking tree limbs. There was a terrible beauty in the shocking reality of pale, splintered bone emerging from gashes in the expensive speed suit.

  “I love you,” he tried to say again, but his mouth was too filled with blood, and the little sparks of electric messages zipping around his brain were not reaching their destinations. Dante came to rest face up. The great pines, looming like tall, prickly skeletons, surrounded his small crater in the snow.

  Dante listened to the faraway birds, and then died for a little while.

  Chapter 3

  It was as if a knit hat was jammed down too low, limiting Dante’s vision to two narrow slits. His eyes were being pulled by separate tides, had lost their synchronicity. A wave of nausea rolled over him. Blurry light flickered—a fire, or maybe a movie screen. He seemed to be lying down, but having no point of reference, he was just speculating. He couldn’t actually feel anything against his skin, just a vague, detached sense of pressure on his shoulder blades and buttocks. Yes, if he had to guess, he was lying down, looking up at a house engulfed by flames, despite there being no heat.

  “Hey, it’s time for The People’s Court!” A queer announcement at the scene of a raging fire. “Which of you wrinkled farts has the goddamn remote?” Remote? Dante had to stitch the words together for the sentences to make sense. Capital letters were appearing and disappearing across his field of vision, as if someone was typing them into his brain using an old manual machine, maybe a Smith Corona.

  Moments later, a more coherent picture came into focus on the large screen above him. There were black tones from the judge’s robe, surrounded by the dark wood interior of the courtroom, and stark music to herald new proceedings. Dante strained to coordinate the direction of his wandering eyeballs, as the judge hushed the chatter of the crowd and the smiling, gray-haired bailiff stood at attention. There was order in this court despite the stakes, which involved a vicious dog bite and a questionable countersuit. Viewers were introduced to the defendant and the plaintiff, and the tension unfolded like the first round of a Vegas boxing match.

  “Will somebody please wheel the dead guy out of the way?”

  “He ain’t dead. Look, he’s even pitchin’ a tent under there.”

  “You’re just filthy.”

  “Move your chair and shut your yap. I can’t hear shit.”

  “You shut up! I can’t see past his goddamn boner!”

  “You’re jealous that a dead guy can get it up and you can’t!”

  “I’d beat the livin’ piss outta you if I was thirty years younger.”

  Dante followed the exchange by reading the subtitles, the angrier tones creating scarlet letters.

  “If you was thirty years younger, you’d still be the same limp-dick antique. Only thing the dead guy can move is his pecker, and the only thing you can move is your flapping gums.”

  “I’m not dead,” Dante wanted to say, lowering his eyes to where his erect penis was pointing toward the television from under the white sheet. His penis and eyes were the only functioning parts so far. He tried his feet, but received no answer from his toes or ankles. They wouldn’t budge. His knees refused the slightest bend and it was the same for his hands and arms. Just a distant sense of dead weight, of being pushed down toward whatever he was lying on. Gravity seemed to be working exceptionally well. There was a metal bar next to his shoulder, the kind that protects hospital patients from falling out of bed. A hospital gurney?

  Is this a hospital? Am I a patient? If nothing but my penis is working, then this had better be a hospital.

  Dante went back to inventorying his non-functioning part
s. Shoulders wouldn’t shrug, neck wouldn’t bend. Panic began to well up, as he tried and failed to wiggle one ear then the other and scrunch his nose. He tried clenching his left fist again, but nothing happened. His right was also … Wait! Something happened over there. His right hand had responded. He was pretty sure that his heart continued to function, for this sliver of success caused a warm rush of blood and adrenaline that made Dante’s boner wave a little.

  “Jesus Christ, that’s distracting.” It was a voice from nearby. The letters were light purple.

  Using every bit of concentration, Dante zeroed in on his right hand. He began at the wrist and then tried lifting each finger, one at a time. Nothing from his pinky or ring finger. He strained to lift his middle, pointer, and … yes! His middle finger had moved. He was certain of it. He tried again: tap, tap, tap. He could hear fingernail on metal. Woo hoo! Dante triumphantly raised his middle finger under the sheet, a smaller counterpart to his upward facing erection.

  A warm sense of accomplishment flowed through his prone body. If Dante could have managed a smile, it would have been wide and genuine. Could he cry? He felt the tears of joy just on the brink, so he squeezed his eyes, but was disappointed when nothing spilled out. No, it was either too soon or too late for crying.

  “Wait a minute.” Dante interrupted his thoughts of successful finger pointing to ponder the big picture of his immediate situation. “If I can only move my middle finger and my penis, I’m probably in a boat load of trouble.”

  “Nurse!” shouted one of the faceless, old man voices. “How ’bout you come jerk off the dead guy real quick so we can see the whole TV screen?”

  Chapter 4

  Dante had never been so squeaky clean in his life, despite only being able to lift a single finger due to his current vegetative state. Nurses and volunteers who were young and old, male and female, enthusiastically sponge-bathed the motionless athlete. Dante’s skin spent a lot of time moist, pink, and deeply pruned.