The Turtle-Girl from East Pukapuka

by Cole Alpaugh

  “I have to save her,” the sea turtle told the voice, but there was a throbbing pain deep within his shell that seemed to build with each stroke of his yellow and white dappled paddles.

  “Do you feel that?” the inner turtle voice asked, as the pain began to bloom like a field of algae in a warm sea. “Your time is almost done and you are about to die.”

  “I have to save her.” The turtle again searched the sky for signs of approaching night. The great beast still raged. The girl held on. The sea turtle could sense the water being pushed forward just behind him, as if reaching, hungering for them.

  And then the darkness the sea turtle had hoped would descend on them, giving them an opportunity to hide, did seem to come. Its silent blackness enveloped everything in his world, and for just an instant, he was back in his egg, buried deep in the warm sand. The sea turtle’s final heartbeat echoed quietly through his gnarled shell, mended not long ago by the loving hands of the girl still clinging to his back.

  One final message came from his inner turtle voice: “Time to go home.”

  And the brave old sea turtle slowly and quietly sank to the floor of the ocean, down among the bottom feeders.

  Chapter 9

  Captain Jesus Dobby was not a cruel man. Not entirely, anyway. Long ago, in fact, his mother had gone to great lengths to make certain her son did not grow up to be a womanizing, alcohol swilling, no-good louse like his father. Dobby—born on Christmas Day, a bit more than a half-century earlier—had managed to avoid two of those traps.

  Dobby owned the rust-coated Gypsy Dancer. He would troll the islands and vast open waters of the South Pacific for salvage, occasionally encountering day trippers who ran out of gas and needed a tow. He’d set the price according to how much cash they had in their wallets. Business was business. If they wanted a better deal, they were more than welcome to continue floundering; maybe they’d get lucky, maybe not.

  Dobby figured his mother would be happy to see him gainfully employed. He could also more or less claim he never hit a woman—unless it was the last resort and all other options had been explored, including locking them in a closet or tying them to the bed posts. And those times were rare; the only women he associated with were prostitutes who had a financial stake in tolerating his more unsavory requests.

  Dobby owned homes on three different islands, little more than fold-up cots under tin walls and thatched roofs. In exchange for some flotsam booty upon his return, neighbors would use hand-made brooms once a month to whisk the spiders and spook out the fox bats.

  Although born in Amarillo, Texas, Dobby was a citizen of Tokelau, of British Pitcairn, and the famous whale-watching island of Niue. The majority of his nights were spent under the stars, though, on a bedroll tucked against the gunwale of the Gypsy Dancer’s main deck. If the air was still, he’d drape a mosquito net from the winch above. Dobby slept much better rocked by the sea, which also offered ease and proximity for the late night pissing and vomiting resulting from his love affair with locally bottled hooch. Staring up at the swaying stars, Dobby drunkenly whistled one half of the duet from the second act of a Verdi opera, a tune of revenge after poor Rigoletto received a severe ass-beating upon trying to save his daughter from the Duke. A cherished memory, a magical night his mother had snuck them downtown to a summer stock production. She’d held his hand through all three acts just like a grown up date, and he never once fell asleep.

  By now keeping pace with the turtle-girl barely required cutting a wake. Dobby knew it was just a matter of time before she surrendered. The creature was clearly unable to submerge, and despite the relentless strokes of its front flippers, her head lolled back and forth. Dobby knew the thing was more valuable alive than dead, and he was worried about swimming it to death or running it over. Now, in the growing shadow of the Dancer’s wheel house, Dobby fantasized about the bidding war for this exotic critter, maybe among the big shot heavies at the Starkist Tuna plant on Pago Pago. A thousand dollars! Ten thousand dollars! Do I hear twenty-thousand for this fantastic, one of a kind aberration from the darkest depths? I have thirty-thousand from the wealthy gentleman in the first row! Do I hear forty?

  The chase lasted into the third bottle of rum, when the turtle-girl surprised Dobby by dipping under the surface of the nearly calm sea. Dobby hit the engine’s kill switch and fell off his bar stool, cracking his forehead on a hard plastic Easter Island moai head he’d long ago pulled from the ocean and kept as a silent companion. Dobby stumbled out of the wheel house and down the bridge ladder, snatching the throwing net as he climbed over the H-bitt to peer down into the shadowy water.

  Nothing. Just deep blue sea and the sound of trickling water from the automatic bilge pump and the ticking twin diesel engines. Dobby cupped both hands around his eyes, but the alcohol made surrendering his hand-holds dangerous as he leaned out over the bow.

  A few large bubbles broke the surface directly below, and Dobby decided the grappling hook was his only chance to at least haul in a carcass. Better alive than dead, but better dead than nothing, he drunkenly reasoned. He climbed back over the H-bitt to retrieve the ominous, four-pronged hook and line from its home on top of the capstan.

  The captain worked quickly and methodically, as is only possible for the most seasoned drunks. He dropped the heavy hook over the bow, then worked it from port to starboard, jigging deeper and deeper until the round bottom knob struck what had to be the turtle-girl under fifteen feet of water. He pulled in a foot of rope, then dropped under the target and jerked the hook back up, snagging his prey. He brought her up hand over hand, careful not to mangle his trophy too badly, although if he did, there was always that saltwater fish taxidermist on Tokelau he drank with—the one who could work absolute wonders.

  When the creature broke the surface, Dobby’s heart sank like a thousand-pound anchor. Fortunately the prong of the grappling hook had snared a thin belt around the turtle-girl’s naked waist and hadn’t torn up her flesh. But the shell had come off, leaving what looked like a regular human kid. The thing began coughing up foaming water, as her nearly weightless body dangled a few feet over the sea, slowly rotating.

  Dobby considered throwing the frigging thing back, just letting the hook drop and being done with this sorry bullshit. How much fuel had he burned? It would be fine if the hook dislodged from the girl’s woven belt, and screw it if it didn’t. Let the sea have the entire goddamn mess. Minutes ago, he’d been on the verge of the payday he’d hunted for thirty years. This thing would have a boatload of trouble attached to it.

  “It’s a turtle-girl that lost its goddamn turtle parts.” Captain Dobby spit a huge wad of phlegm skyward, and then reeled her on board.

  Chapter 10

  The exotic television island invaded Dante’s dreams with textures and smells, the cries of hidden birds, and constant motion. The images collected from his nightly visions filled the void left by whatever had brought him to this bed. They became his reality, his past and what he more and more frequently hoped would be his future.

  It was the motion that triggered the most longing. Every swaying palm frond contrasted with his immobility. While his legs and arms were frozen and still, the liquid rolling of the sea teemed with life and possibility.

  Shortly before each sunset Dante walked the narrow pathway to the leeward side of the island and stepped carefully into the calmer water, keeping an eye out for stonefish and prickly urchins. Waist deep, he’d lunge forward and begin taking long freestyle strokes, as the coral and rock bottom fell away. He’d grab quick breaths every few strokes, making short kicks, while keeping a heading due east, directly away from shore.

  Most evenings Dante would glide perhaps a thousand yards before the island disappeared behind the chop of the sea, at which point he would stop swimming and tread water. He reveled in the lingering sense of danger. If he lost his bearings, he’d have only one chance to get back to dry land. But being out in the middle of the vast undulating water put his strong, athletic body to the
test. He felt he could tread in this spot for hours, if not days. Every muscle was working, it seemed, warm and burning fuel slowly, like the well-oiled parts of an efficient machine.

  As the first stars appeared in the eastern sky, Dante turned and began swimming away from them, back to the island in the direction of the setting sun. Just past the reef, which circled the entire island a few feet beneath the surface of the water, Dante heard the cries of a child. It was the voice of a young girl, who between sobs was calling out names that made no sense to Dante. They seemed to be the names of famous politicians and authors. This portion of Dante’s dream distressed him, setting off far away beeps and alarms and switching on bright lights in places that were better left dark.

  And when things made no sense to Dante’s injured brain, it did its best to simply shut off for a while.

  “Wheeler, Dante, here in bed four, sports related traumatic brain injury,” a god-like voice boomed from above. Dante was no longer submerged in dark water, but was lying helpless and prone in a brightly lit room. He listened to the complicated, supposedly important words coming from this god: “biochemical cascades that occur in the days following … free radical overload … excessive release of neurotransmitter glutamate … dysfunction of mitochondria … pass me a banana … injured axon in the brain’s white matter …”

  Dante wished the god would shut up, head back for the door and cut the lights, allow him his peace.

  “The prognosis for survival was maybe two percent at the outset,” the god said. “Although prior physical condition was a strong contributing factor.”

  “How long since the incident?” This was a softer female voice, perhaps one of the god’s angels.

  “Incident?” wondered Dante. “Two percent of what?”

  “Thirty-two weeks,” said the god. “CT shows epidural hematoma, and there were epidural bleeds in the spinal column. Brain activity is strong, which is hard to explain. Moderate to extensive atrophy has occurred.”

  The god seemed to be shuffling papers. “Any questions?”

  With the middle finger of his right hand, Dante began tapping frantically, his spastic version of Morse code. He certainly had questions.

  “What is that?” asked the angel, and Dante opened his eyes, strained to catch a glimpse of the gentle spirit. He slowed the pace of his tapping.

  “I’m lost,” Dante tried pleading with his eyes and his middle finger. “I’m lost and I want to go home.”

  The god loomed over Dante’s bed, slowly peeling back the thin blanket to expose his waggling digit, exhausted from tapping and the recent ocean swim.

  “It sounds like he’s trying to communicate.” The angel’s voice was hesitant, so Dante again increased the pace, tapping as hard and emphatically as he could. “Listen. Do you hear the pattern? Dash. Then dot, dot, dot, dash. Could it be Morse code?”

  The god scoffed at his assistant’s suggestion. “Ridiculous,” he proclaimed. “The young man is, for all practical purposes, a one hundred-sixty pound prairie turnip.”

  “But with strong brain activity, right?” Clearly the angel wanted to believe, reaching down to hold Dante’s right wrist, feeling his busy tendons with her light touch. “Isn’t it possible this is a conscious effort?”

  “Simple reflex.” The god scribbled in Dante’s chart, which he then returned to its hook at the foot of his bed.

  Had the god been a Boy Scout—or even if he’d just happened to catch the same television biography of Samuel Morse that Dante had watched two nights ago—he might have recognized the simple request in Dante’s feverish message. Some file in the damaged brain of the gravely injured ski racer had saved a bit of information it deemed might be useful later on. The dash, then dot, dot, dot, dash he was tapping combined to form two letters which, together, would have solved all of Dante Wheeler’s crushing problems of the moment. His brain was one hundred percent certain the letters were his ticket away from this sterile, colorless world. His link to what his life had been.

  Dante’s eyes finally found the beautiful, round face of the angel, who was now peeking over the shoulder of the god. The angel’s hair was pulled back from her face, exposing cherubic cheeks and the dark frames of thick, heavy glasses.

  Dash, then dot, dot, dot, dash, he repeated to the angel, forming the letters T and V. Dante’s body might have been reduced to a turnip state, but his mind pleaded for the television, absolutely certain his real life was on the tiny speck of an island in the South Pacific featured on channel sixty-three.

  “East Pukapuka,” he tried to tell the angel with his eyes. “Help me get home.”

  Chapter 11

  Butter wondered if her journey to Happa Now had begun. Her body rotated slowly. She was waking from a nightmare, expecting comfort from familiar things, her mother’s soft touch and calming voice. They would go together to meet her father, who’d hug her tight, then grab her under her armpits and throw her high in the air.

  Butter’s body jerked hard, and then jerked again, but it wasn’t from her father’s strong hands. A terrible voice boomed nasty curses. “Damn it all! God fugging damn this shit!”

  Her belt was too tight on her hips and something hard was digging at her lower back. She was jerked twice more, saw the rusty bow of a big metal boat.

  The grunting voice bellowed more curses as she spilled onto a wood deck like a fish from a net. “Too damn old to sell as a baby and too young for that Viti Levu whoremaster. Just fugg me and be done, for Christ’s sake.” Most of the words were her language, but they made no sense.

  The man scooped her off the hard floor and carried her across the boat, gently settling her on a musky bedroll. He put a hand to her forehead and shook his head, making clicking sounds with his tongue. “Something bit you real good.” He held out her swollen right hand, examining the bite marks. He crowded next to her, blurry behind her drooping eyelids, just a shadowy silhouette stinking of wapa juice. He examined her arms for more bites. “Must be what gave you this fever. Tsunamis make animals do queer things, gets them real ornery. Their homes get wrecked and they ain’t got food, so they start actin’ all crazy. You got rabies, girl?”

  The captain had no idea how terrible the startled Habu viper had felt for striking out at the girl from his jumbled nest. He’d immediately withdrawn his fangs, done his best to retract any poison. She had been so kind, had tended to his burning wound after a village boy had chopped him in two for no reason. He’d been sunning himself on a smooth rock, sleepily enjoying the feeling of a half-digested frog in his belly. Then wham, out of nowhere, the machete sliced down through the air and left him writhing in searing pain, staring at his own twitching, bisected tail.

  “What’s wrong with boys?” Butter had asked her mother, refusing to leave the snake’s side after stitching the wound closed. Her bare belly was still smeared with gore from cradling the mutilated creature and sharing her body’s warmth as she rushed it back to her makeshift hospital. “How could they do this to a living thing?”

  “Men and boys are the same, Butter.” Her mother had brought her a warm bowl of mahi-mahi, boiled with ginger root and mirin, but she ignored the food. How could she eat? Her mama brushed matted hair from her forehead, away from tear-streaked cheeks. “Men and boys do things without thinking. It’s their nature.”

  “Like spear fishing when sharks are in the water?” She was always saddest about losing her father when forced to witness the life and death struggle of an innocent animal. It was unfair that so much weight was piled on her fatigued shoulders.

  “Yes, like swimming with sharks, honey.”

  Butter knew the Habu might be the offspring of the pregnant snake she and her father had returned to the east side of the island when she was three. Habus were an endangered species on East Pukapuka because their bite was so deadly. Anyone spotting one would run for a machete.

  Kneeling over her naked body, the captain squeezed fresh water from a dirty rag onto Butter’s parched lips. Her eyes fluttered open, but
just barely, and she still couldn’t focus.

  “You been in the water a long time.” The captain put the cool rag to her steaming forehead. “You got a bad fever, little one. You’re on fire.”

  Butter watched his wide, hovering shadow, eyed his great hairy halo. She was terribly cold, could feel her teeth begin to chatter. “Where am I?” she wanted to ask, but the fever had dropped a heavy cloud. “Cold,” she tried to say. “I’m very, very cold.”

  “Which one of these islands you get washed from?” The captain loomed closer, and it didn’t seem like he was questioning her, just talking out loud to himself while inspecting her face. “Nothin’ unusual in them cheekbones, just another mutt savage. I suspect everybody else that didn’t have a goddamn turtle to hold onto drowned.”

  “My turtle,” Butter mouthed. Where was her turtle? She tried turning her head to look, but white flashes of lightning erupted and made her give up. “My turtle,” she said, pleading to the shadowy man.

  “Jesus Dobby.” The man thumped his open hand to his hairy chest. “Me Jesus,” he loudly repeated, as if she was hard of hearing instead of feverish and nearly drowned.

  “Jesus,” she tried saying, her lips forming the word. Butter’s fevered mind forgot the missing turtle and searched for the reason the name was familiar. “Jesus,” she tried to say again, but a liquid blackness rushed in and her eyes rolled back in her head. The deck of the boat went dark, but she could still hear the slap of waves and the distant cry of sea birds. There was a tapping sound—like a bird trying to dig bugs from tree bark—that she eventually recognized as the chattering of her own teeth.

  “Yeah, that’s right, girl.” The man’s knees popped as he leaned his weight and bad smell even closer, stroking her cheek with a rough, callused hand. “You just call me Jesus, or maybe Mister Jesus. Who knows, if all your people are dead, maybe I’ll keep you on as a deckhand for a while. You can earn your keep ’til I can swap you as a house girl. Even the dumbest savage can learn to swab a floor.”