The Turtle-Girl from East Pukapuka

by Cole Alpaugh

  “What was that?” Jope screeched at the noise of the bumping boats. He lunged into Ratu, who was scrambling to find a light switch.

  “Must be goblins.” Ratu was all too familiar with his friend’s crippling fear of the dark. He’d also had to contend with Jope’s fear of heights, cats, loud noises and open spaces. It was a lot of fear to overcome for any pirate worth his salt.

  Coincidentally, it was Julius Caesar himself, Emperor of Rome, who was credited with coining the phrase “worth his salt,” since his soldiers were paid, in part, with rations of salt. If a soldier was not up to snuff, he was said to be not worth his salt.

  Ratu and Jope knew a little about this, having once snuck into a matinee of Marlon Brando’s version of Julius Caesar, each packing two fat joints, their own two-liter bottles of beer, but no popcorn.

  “How come everything is black and white?” Jope had asked twenty minutes into the movie, the first joint and half the beer gone.

  “They didn’t have color back then.”

  Jope had pondered this for a minute. “How’d they know when the light turned green?”

  It was Jope’s shaking hand that found the light switch first, after a second and third loud bump in the night shook the walls and floor of the big schooner. A moan escaped the skinny black pirate, and if his starter pistol had been a real gun, he most definitely would have shot off a few of his own toes.

  “Okay, good,” Ratu said of Jope’s light switch discovery. “Hey, what you make of them packages?”

  The oversized forward stateroom was nearly three-quarters filled with neatly stacked brown, brick-shaped bundles. As small-time crooks and occasional drug salesmen—mostly to island-hopping backpackers—Ratu and Jope had a pretty good idea of what was wrapped up in the bricks. And they’d seen enough cop videos of drug smuggling busts, always a little bummed because it meant the prices would be going up and their profit margins going down.

  “Can’t be.” Jope’s eyes were wide.

  “No way, man.” Ratu’s eyes were even wider.

  They stood side-by-side, starter pistols hanging limp in right hands, trying to decide whether this was the greatest thing ever, or if they maybe should slowly back out the door and scurry back onto the Julius Caesar and forget what they’d just found. Both knew this was some big time shit.

  “That’s gotta be a billion dollars worth of coke, Ratu.”

  “Not a billion. A billion would sink dis big boat. Maybe half a billion.”

  Ratu stepped forward, away from the door, and plucked a package from the top of the thick wall it formed. He felt its heft and then used the sight knob on the barrel of his starter pistol to rip through the brown paper and plastic inner wrapping. A thick white powder spewed from the wound; both men greedily jabbed index fingers and rubbed their gums.

  “That’s blow, yeah?” Jope asked, and Ratu shook his head in agreement.

  Jope bent over the bag, closed one nostril with his cocaine-coated index finger and snorted what would be a year’s worth of wages had he’d ever held a legitimate job back home. Ratu used his own index finger to do the same thing.

  “I can’t feel my tongue,” Ratu tried to say. His entire mouth had gone completely numb from the nearly pure cocaine. The black chests of both pirates looked like chocolate doughnuts sprinkled with powdered sugar. Their noses were as white as their eyes.

  Then Jope’s own oral paralysis took hold with pins and needles as the pair stood looking at each other, unable to communicate.

  “They’ll kill us,” Jope tried saying. “Please, let’s leave this shit and get out of here fast.”

  “Yeah, let’s grab as much as we can,” Ratu attempted to say, but he sounded an awful lot like the old drunk guy from Ono who’d fallen off the Suva peer and hadn’t been pulled up from the bottom of the harbor for a good ten minutes. The poor old guy sat on the curb of the main drag these days, occasionally making motor boat sounds.

  Before Jope could reach the door, Ratu had scooped an armload full of bricks and was making motor boat sounds for Jope to come help. The high quality cocaine allowed the fearful pirate to overcome his clamoring inner voice.

  “They gonna chop you up and use you for chum,” Jope’s inner voice warned.

  “I can’t hear you,” Jope answered, sticking one finger in his ear and humming, while Ratu pulled down bricks to cart another load out to their boat.

  “I didn’t say nothing,” Ratu said.

  “They gonna chop him up, too,” said the inner voice. “Chop, chop, chop!”

  Forty minutes later, the planet’s newest millionaire drug king-pins were pushing off in the Julius Caesar, heading out into the deepest waters. Paranoid and sweating freely from doses of cocaine of such high quality that it would have killed men with weaker hearts, the pirate duo stood on the pilot deck and began singing the only pirate song they knew. It was from another old black and white movie.

  Fifteen men on a dead man’s chest

  Yo ho ho and a bottle of rum.

  Because of their numb mouths, the song came out sounding like a couple of motor boats badly in need of tune-ups.

  Chapter 15

  When the meteor blasted across the sky, Butter was awake on the Gypsy Dancer’s weathered main deck, gazing up at the stars. Wherever Jesus was taking them, it was sure different from her island, she thought, rubbing her eyes and trying to blink away the ghost images. The sky over her home never caught fire like this at night.

  She worried about her old sea turtle, but was afraid to ask Jesus if he’d seen him or knew where he’d gone. She hoped his shell stayed strong and that he’d find a good home near a safe reef. While she didn’t think the kindest man who’d ever walked Earth—as Jesus had been described in the flying soldier’s stories—would have caught and cooked him up, she didn’t feel capable of handling any more horrible news right now. A pair of older teenage boys had teased her when she’d first lugged the bleeding turtle out of the sea and up the beach to her hospital. Stopping in front of her row of cages under the big puka tree, they’d pretended to sharpen their machetes, licking their lips and comically rubbing their stomachs in big round circles. Not so funny when the sharp piece of coral bounced off the forehead of one of the boys.

  “If your father wasn’t stupid enough to swim with sharks, he’d beat you senseless for that.” Blood poured from the small cut. Butter knew head wounds bled like crazy. Didn’t matter if you were human, bird, or lizard. She wished her mama, the Keeper of the Books, had a book about medicines and how things worked inside different animals. Learning through trial and error often had sad results. She kept notes in a blank-paged book named Diary, which had arrived on the big aid ship that also brought the heavy bags of food. Butter took great pride in making her own book, hoping it might one day be part of her mama’s important collection. Reading and writing had become a small part of her mother’s daily lessons. The supply ship delivered plenty of pencils, but the books had blue lines and no words. Letters had disappeared from her people’s alphabet and nobody seemed to care enough to rediscover them. When Butter was at a loss for a word or phrase, she drew a picture in her book of animal healing.

  The sadness came flooding back as she realized her book was gone, along with most all of her patients and the hospital that she’d spent so many months wiring and nailing together.

  The flying soldier had explained the healing powers Jesus possessed, which were far greater than Butter’s. Maybe Jesus had the power to heal her island, to make everything the way it was before the big wave. The flying soldier had told how Jesus had parted an entire red ocean, made a pathway right at the bottom of it for pairs of animals who couldn’t swim. And Jesus had healed a baby cut in half like her papa, had scared little miniature devils from inside the bodies of terrified villagers. Jesus turned mud puddles into little brown birds called sparrows. The stories were called miracles and Jesus had performed hundreds of them, according to the soldier. Each miracle was documented in the fat book called Holy Bible
, although no miracle had saved it from becoming just as waterlogged and melded together as the fifteen other books in Mama’s care.

  Jesus was described as the Son of God. That would surely make him a full-fledged god, only younger, right? Sort of like the Wapa Juice Maker’s son.

  If Jesus could move an entire ocean, divide it right in half, couldn’t he fix one puny island? Or would there be rivalry between the flying soldier’s god and the sea gods? Would there be the same heated, drunken arguments that erupted between Old Deepop and Old Lampu, the two main family elders charged with most decision making on Butter’s island? If you wanted to build a new hut, you went to Old Deepop for permission. If you needed to clear brush—cutting down a tree was a crime worse than murder on East Pukapuka—you sought Old Lampu’s blessing. A civil war might erupt over who had authority, especially if the issue came up after the wapa juice had been flowing.

  Maybe Jesus could bring her village back to life. He could turn water into wapa and evil women into pillars of salt, so would it be so difficult to make her island whole again? It was a little gross to imagine a god making the first woman from a bone he ripped out of the first man, but the story of their home being in a lush garden, surrounded by birds and snakes, was far better than Butter’s image of Happa Now. In her people’s version of the next life snakes and birds weren’t welcome—a horrible reality. The Happa Now that Jesus’ people called Heaven was so much better, so much fairer. What would eternity be like if you couldn’t lie on a sandy beach with a chirping gecko sunning himself on your belly, licking his eye membranes and trying to change his color to look just like you?

  That there was a burning fiery jail at the bottom of the ocean where bad people were sent made no sense. That story was surely impossible. The ocean would have extinguished it long ago. And in the days and nights she’d tossed and turned on the smelly bedroll while her fever ran its course, her sleep often interrupted by dreams of the big wave, Butter struggled with the idea of this ship captain god named Jesus.

  Jesus did some ungodlike things in front of a little girl he thought was sleeping. The constant scratching and then sniffing of supposedly divine fingers seemed too mortal, too much like the men and boys from her island. And there was all the picking of his hallowed nose. Would a god really eat his own boogers? Would the holy man the flying soldier shared reverent stories about pee off the side of his boat as great booming farts growled from his wide rump and he nearly fell overboard from all the wapa juice he’d guzzled? The front of his pants were stinky and wet. Wouldn’t a true god know not to aim into the wind?

  Maybe a god would do all of these things. Butter wanted to believe in Jesus so badly for the sake of her animals. And maybe if she could get him to like her, he would put her father back in one piece here on this world. He would make him alive again and aware of how to get out of the water when the big sharks were near the good fishing spot.

  Butter, who missed her papa, longed to be tossed into the blue sky again, screaming with laughter, as Mama stood close by with eyebrows scrunched. Maybe it was the lack of a living father that produced so much of the distrust she felt toward men and boys. The village men treated her widowed mama differently from the married women. Butter saw the long looks that struck her as some sort of attempt at conveying a secret message. It was the same look she saw them give the last piece of coconut pie. What was the message? Butter suspected it had to do with sex, since an adult female of any species was always courted at some time of the year. The nasty wet kisses they blew at Mama, and the way they held out both hands and pretended to squeeze boobies, thrusting their hips to flap their weenies. It had to be a mating ritual, like the crested iguana who could change its colors, or the smaller iguana who bobbed its head in a dance to impress a possible mate. Her mother told her it was nothing for a little girl to know about, but Butter wasn’t upset by these ceremonies. She just wished her mama had a better selection, should she decide to choose another mate.

  Island children learned about human sex at a very early age, with glimpses of copulating adults in dark shadows resulting from the fact that huts didn’t have doors. And rooms partitioned by thin, wafting cloth provided only the slightest privacy.

  The coupling was sometimes interrupted by fits of mad giggles coming from children huddled in their bedrolls. It was one thing for men to walk around with their thingies swinging in the breeze, but when papa tried to tickle your mama with it after bedtime, it seemed like some form of funny torture.

  Butter had also seen the dark side of mating. The poor little banana slug male, who was about the length of a grownup person’s longest finger, had a male part as long as his body. Sometimes the female slug would allow him to put it in her, but sometimes she’d change her mind and chew it off. There were stories of this happening among mating humans on the island. More than one of the younger children had reported witnessing the awful act, although none of the men ever appeared to be missing any parts. Did they grow back?

  Many questions about sex remained unanswered, but the notion of gods and the afterlife was a thousand times more befuddling—and pressing—to a lost ten-year-old island girl whose home was nowhere on the horizon.

  Butter decided that a real god might well wear filthy, grease stained pants, but wouldn’t he know he’d left the vent open?

  Chapter 16

  The meteor shower that might have made amateur astronomer Dicky Miller famous was not visible in the sky over the Lake Mohawk Care Center in the rolling hills of Northern New Jersey, although it did make the television news. Nobody in New Jersey saw it live because it occurred in the middle of the afternoon in that part of the world, streaking across the heavens roughly eight thousand miles away.

  The population of the South Pacific was just as oblivious to the jet-ski accident that occurred simultaneously out in the middle of Lake Mohawk, some two hundred yards beyond Dante Wheeler’s closed window. The mishap made the news right before the weather as a fifteen second segment during the roundup of local stories. But it wasn’t a fiery collision that caused the ensuing ruckus back at the Care Center. The accident went unnoticed by everyone but those involved out on the water. While being pulled behind a jet-ski on a rubber tube, the victim got a tow line entangled around his wrist. One unfortunately timed burst of acceleration had severed the man’s hand, sending his beer can flying. It was a coincidence that the victim’s girlfriend was a nurse’s aide at the adjacent Care Center, but she wouldn’t hear about the accident until long after the paramedics had loaded her man into an ambulance and taken him away. It was a phone call to her from the police that set off the commotion.

  On the five o’clock news, a Fish and Game Officer told an interviewer that they were continuing to search for the hand, not because there was any hope of reattachment—that shipped had sailed—but because nobody wanted a stray hand floating around their picturesque lake. While there was no cash reward, bathers were asked to keep an eye out.

  The commotion might never have transpired if the cop calling to notify the nurse’s aide—listed as the emergency contact on the victim’s insurance card—had spoken a little more slowly. Having arrived from El Salvador two months earlier and equipped with only broken English, the victim’s girlfriend was confused about exactly what had been cut off.

  Nurse Derrick, Dante’s most enthusiastic sponge-bather, put down the small hand mirror and stainless steel tweezers he’d been using to pluck his eyebrows and answered the phone at the nurses’ station. He called down the hall for the little Salvadoran aide to come answer the call, then resumed plucking, his eyes watering like crazy.

  “Miss Gonzalez?” A stern, cop-like voice boomed into the receiver that Dante could clearly hear from his squeaky chair. “Miss Miriam Gonzalez?”

  “Si?” She waved for Derrick’s help, tilting the handset to share. “Por favor?” she said. Derrick nodded, dropped the tweezers, and leaned in against her small shoulder.

  “This is Patrolman Klein from the New Jersey State Police
. I understand you are an acquaintance of Hector Ruiz?”

  “Si?” Derrick watched her eyes go wide. “Es mi novio.”

  “Right, well, I’m afraid I have some bad news.” Derrick felt the woman’s weight push against him. “There was an accident out on Lake Mohawk and Mr. Ruiz was transported to Saint Clare’s Hospital after suffering a severed hand.”

  Derrick glanced toward the large picture window, where overgrown hedges mostly obscured the view.

  “Ah, mi Dios, his head?” Mirriam held the receiver away from her face, and Derrick stuttered, began telling her no, not his head. “Mi novio está muerto,” she said flatly, her hand with the phone dropping to her side.

  Nurse Derrick, who knew a little Spanish from high school classes and the many aides and cleaning people, caught the word “muerto,” which meant “dead.” The little Salvadoran woman began to shake violently. The mirror shattered on the floor as he reached for the hand with the phone and brought it back up to both their ears.

  “I’m very sorry,” said the officer. “They are holding out some hope of finding and reattaching it.”

  “Ah, mi Dios.” Oh, my God. Miriam swooned, her legs buckled, and Derrick caught her before she went down. He had the phone in his left hand, cradling the small woman with his right.

  “No, no, sweetheart, it’s not that bad,” Derrick tried telling her, holding the phone toward her, but she recoiled. “Please listen to him. The officer said it was his hand.”

  “Mi Dios,” Miriam said, and began to whimper. “My Hector! They took his head!”

  “Mr. Ruiz is in the intensive care unit and would like to see you.” The officer paused, probably waiting for questions about the hospital, the room number, and the man’s current condition.

  “La cabeza es ida.” Miriam voice became a hiss, and Derrick could see she was now clearly in shock. “La cabeza es ida,” she repeated. His head is missing.