by Cole Alpaugh
“Yes, ma’am, he’s doing fine. I saw him for a few minutes and can tell he’s a real fighter. They’d appreciate if you’d head over to the hospital for some paper work and spend some time with him.”
Miriam Gonzalez abruptly stood and pulled away from Derrick’s hairy hands, broken glass crunching under their feet. She turned and sprinted down the long empty hallway, the only sound coming from her chirping rubber-soled shoes. If she’d been screaming, the orderly wheeling the television from the audio-video storage closet would have had plenty of time to stop and let her pass. Instead, the force of the diminutive Salvadoran nurse’s aide was enough to topple the top-heavy television cart, the glass tube impacting the tile floor like a bomb, exploding into countless fragments and a gray puff of smoke.
The building’s emergency system automatically relayed a call to the fire department, also triggering the sprinklers that began showering every square inch of the wing in cool water droplets. Derrick grabbed an umbrella from the lost and found box.
* * * *
A startled Dante Wheeler sprang bolt upright in his bed, very much awake and alert for the first time since dying for a little while among the snow encrusted pine trees. His muscles were terribly atrophied despite all the nightly swims, his once perfectly defined six-pack abdomen now quaking from surprise mobilization.
Dante’s eighty-year-old roommate, the retired teacher from Florida, pulled the covers over his head to shield himself from the howling alarms and chilly spray. “This place is going all to hell,” he grumbled, and then chanced a quick peek over the white linen to see if the pretty boy might be drowning in his bed. “Oh, for Christ’s freaking sake,” the teacher mumbled at the sight of the young bastard sitting up, looking as if he might be deciding what to order for supper. As good as dead for months and still handsome—a face like Cary Frigging Grant’s, with a little notch in the chin, a baby’s ass crack that turned the whole staff into giggling imbeciles.
The old man had watched the young prick getting dozens of warm sponge baths and being endlessly doted over, while he lay there like an invisible, stinking lump. His bitterness surged as his hip throbbed from the cold, pooling water, and his feet swelled into fat sausages.
The water pitter-pattered off the skinny bastard’s face and head, the scene backlit by the large window beyond, transforming the cold, sterile room into what looked like a television commercial for fancy shampoo and conditioner. Goddamn, if only he had his trusty old rock hammer; giving that pretty boy a few good knocks on the head would sure feel good.
“Yeah, well, don’t it all just figure,” the old teacher snarled, resigned to his fate of bad smells and now soggy bedding. He rolled away from the brutal unfairness. “Welcome back to the world of the living, turnip boy.”
Dante Wheeler didn’t seem to hear any of the griping from his roommate, didn’t appear to notice the bawling alarm, or feel the cascading water from the emergency sprinkler system. In a voice cracked from months of disuse, throat parched despite water everywhere, Dante finally managed to speak just loud enough for his roommate to hear over the racket.
“I have to get home to my island.”
The retired school teacher cocked his head at the far wall, wondering if he’d heard the turnip correctly. An island was exactly where he’d planned to spend these last years, down in the Keys, a far cry from this lousy joint two miles from his son and daughter-in-law’s family. Never smoked a cigarette in his life and God gives him lung cancer, all wrapped up and tied with a bow last Christmas. Fa-la-fucking-la.
“I’ll call you a cab, turnip boy,” the retired school teacher said to the wall.
Chapter 17
“You’re goin’ too fucking fast!” Jope’s pencil nub bounced around the scrap of paper on the console of the Julius Caesar, its sharp graphite point sure to break from his wild jabbing. The pirates each sat in a helm seat, high up in the pilot house, pouring sweat despite the relatively cool air rushing at them from over the low windscreen. Running full-out, the fishing boat turned scurvy galleon bounded from white-cap to white-cap at thirty knots.
As anyone who’d snuck into a theater for a pirate movie would know, a ship’s speed was more important than its weaponry. That was fortunate, for this ship was equipped with nothing but starter pistols.
As often happens with someone who has recently snorted a death-defying amount of high-grade cocaine, each pirate had become obsessed with his own individual mission. Jope needed to know how much all the cocaine they’d stolen was worth. Although the task was complicated by the fact that he’d never learned multiplication, extensive street corner drug dealing did provide a solid starting point.
“How much does a kilo go for?” Jope asked.
“A lot. A kilo is a lot.” Ratu concentrated on the choppy sea below the bucking prow, his right hand cramped from gripping the helm too tightly. Ratu’s cocaine obsession manifested itself in a need for more speed. As much godforsaken speed as he could squeeze out of their stolen charter fishing boat. Both throttle levers of the control box for the twin diesel engines were jammed forward, and Ratu continued to push with all his might, trying to get one more knot out of the straining engines.
“No, I mean how much money.” Jope was trying to sharpen the broken pencil point by rubbing it back and forth on its side. “If you was gonna buy a kilo of coke, how much money would it cost?”
“We don’t need to buy coke, stupid.” Ratu’s left hand was cramping from squeezing the hard shifter knobs. “We got like a hundred kilos, you dumb fuck.”
“Don’t call me a dumb fuck, Ratu.” Jope, whose feelings were hurt whenever his friend called him names, was especially sensitive to words like dumb and stupid. “How much money would we get for selling a kilo?”
“I don’t know, maybe five or ten thousand? Shit, Jope, it feels like we’re slowing down.” Ratu searched the various knobs and buttons for some sort of overdrive, some faster gear. “Don’t it feel like we’re slowing down?” Ratu considered the plausibility of getting a foot up on the gear box to force the throttle forward even harder. Sweat was dripping into his eyes, burning his vision. “Fuck, it’s hot. We’re going too slow!”
“Ten thousand? You mean ten thousand Fiji dollars?”
“Jesus, what’s ten thousand Fiji dollars? What the hell are you asking me?” Ratu was annoyed by this interruption in his quest for acceleration.
“How many zeros do I make?”
“Go down and see what you can throw overboard!” Ratu squeezed the helm with both hands, his left foot up on the console in order to force both throttle sticks as far forward as they’d go. He appeared to be frozen in mid karate kick.
“A hundred is two zeros.” Jope squinted down at the slip of paper, trying to navigate the pencil in a circular motion, but the bounding boat turned both zeros into lopsided figure eights.
“Jope!” Ratu yelled at his pirate partner. “We need to get rid of extra weight. Go down on the main deck and look for anything heavy we don’t need and throw it overboard. We swimmin’ like a big fat woman, too damn heavy. We gotta go faster!”
“Stop yelling at me.” Jope abandoned his pencil, which immediately bounced to the floor and rolled away. He sat in the helm seat staring down longingly, making one brief attempt to do the math in his head, but the zeros looked liked lopsided figure eights in there as well. “Fuck it,” he finally said, feeling a dip in his energy-filled high. His body countered by sending out a flourish of tiny electrical impulses demanding he replenish all these wonderful new chemicals.
“C’mon, hurry up, Jope!” Ratu’s voice was straining from the muscle cramps, which had moved from his hands into his crotch. It seemed this position had stabilized the loss of speed, but he now had to contend with his wildly vibrating testicles. The coke had first made his balls crawl up and feel like they’d disappeared, but now they were back, looking to cool off, trying to escape his overheated body. “My balls really hurt.”
“I’m going.” Jope got up and
turned toward the jostling ladder. It would be useless asking Ratu to slow down so he didn’t break his neck climbing down to the main deck.
“Hurry!”
Jope’s sweat-slick hands grabbed hold of the aluminum railing as he backed down to the main deck. He was motivated more by the need for another big snort than by Ratu’s badgering and name-calling. Ratu acted like the boss only because he was taller by maybe one finger. And that was only from having bushier hair. People sometimes mixed up their names because they looked alike, especially if they hadn’t showered and their hair had become greasy and flat. What had Ratu yelled at him about? Going faster? How was he supposed to make the boat go faster? Jope had forgotten what Ratu had sent him off to do. Ratu sometimes acted too crazy, like when he’d slapped a beer bottle out of the biker’s hand at the Riki Tik for no reason. With a queer smile on his face, Ratu had just walked up to the huge monster looking dude, looked him in the eye and slapped the bottle into the air. It fizzed all over the tables and floor and white foam dripped from the guy’s leather jacket and shaggy beard. The big biker had grabbed Ratu with two hands, one at his throat and the other at his crotch, lifted him over his head and thrown him through the big glass window of the bar. Ratu had landed in a groaning heap on the sidewalk, the same loony smile still on his face.
“Oh, yeah!” Jope remembered that he was supposed to find things to throw overboard.
Chapter 18
Jope was tossed from wall to wall of the kitchenette directly below where Ratu was kicking at the throttle sticks with his bare left foot, allowing the hard plastic steering wheel to jerk right and then left.
“Throw shit overboard.” Jope repeated the order in his head, trying to memorize the task he fully intended to complete right after renewing his cocaine buzz.
“Go, you dumb bastard!” Jope flinched at Ratu’s voice from the other side of the fiberglass ceiling. He wasn’t sure whether his friend was cursing him or the controls, which didn’t seem to be cooperating. The boat was going crazy, shifting one way and then back the other. The overworked engines smelled a lot like his old neighborhood after he and his friends had piled up old tires, lit them on fire and run like hell. They had targeted several intersections, creating smoky mazes of flaming piles of rubber. The taxi drivers would have to navigate these dead ends, often giving up and backing out.
The hundred or so one-kilogram bricks of cocaine were scattered in the galley and forward stateroom. The pirates had begun their transfer carefully enough, stowing bricks in the oven, cabinets, refrigerator, and even in the microwave. But they ended by piling armload after armload on and around the pull-out couch and coffee table, paranoia growing with each trip back onto the abandoned luxury yacht. The crazy, bounding action of the ride had spilled most of them across the floor, and Jope lurched around the bucking room, searching for the open brick they’d already sampled.
“The bread box!” Jope spun to the wooden container where he suddenly remembered stashing the brick. He kicked a dozen of the carefully wrapped packages aside as he lunged across the room and grabbed the bread box with big cherries painted on the front. He snatched the brick of cocaine from within and tossed the box to the jostling floor. Flopping onto the couch, he clasped the bag between his thighs and, steadying himself with his left hand on the wooden arm, scooped out a palm-full of cocaine.
The powder coated his sweaty hands and wrists, and he barely noticed how badly he was shaking. Jope’s heart was slamming inside his chest to the beat of a heavy-metal rock band. AC/DC’s “Back in Black” screamed inside his head, and he involuntarily bobbed and swayed to the blaring phantom music that didn’t exist outside his brain. Jope assumed Ratu had left the radio on.
The boat crashed through a big wave as the Fijian pirate threw his hand to his face in a white puff of nearly pure cocaine. Inhaling with both nostrils, Jope hungrily snorted the mound. Every neuro-receptor in his body seemed to fire simultaneously in wild, crackling response.
Jope’s coated hand slowly dropped to his lap, the torn bag falling to his feet. The boat stopped its insane rocking and the music went suddenly dead, giving him a very clear look at the god standing before him, smiling down with a thousand or so razor-sharp teeth.
Jope never dared mention religion to Ratu, who believed any sort of god was an excuse for white missionary wankers to trek around small island slums, knocking up twelve-year-old prostitutes with half-breed bastards. Ratu had made his religious feelings perfectly clear in regular rants back in the Riki Tik, especially after a dozen glasses of beer. Ratu’s own father had been a white Christian missionary who claimed to be from some country called Chicago. Ratu assumed this detail was another of his stinking lies.
“Fucker didn’t even have the decency to plant the right color jizz in Mama to make me look white.” Ratu’s tenth glass of beer had left him feeling blue. “Damn half-breeds get all the best resort jobs, ya know? I coulda been a towel boy, gettin’ big tips for rubbing lotion on rich fat broads. Instead, Mama’s crack habit got so bad she dumped me at the orphan house. It was a bad place, man, a real, real bad place.”
Jope had longed to tell Ratu about his religion, which had been passed down through the men in his family. His grandpa had been an important elder on Benau Island, located opposite to the Somosomo Strait. The venerable artisan had been in charge of carving the figurines of Dakuwaqa, the half-man, half-shark god of seafaring and fishing communities. The coral and wooden figurines he made were mostly purchased by a rich Suva businessman who exported them all over the world.
It was said that one of these figurines, a muscular Fijian man with the upper torso of a great shark, sat on the desk of the President of the United States of America to give him guidance for directing his warriors in a land called Vietnam.
Jope was disappointed by many of the shark-god stories, which usually put him on the losing end of epic battles. The worst was when Dakuwaqa traveled inland to conquer Kadavu; an octopus-god had defeated the shark-god after a mighty struggle. It made no sense to Jope that an octopus-god could ever come close to kicking the ass of a shark-god. It was sacrilege to consider the possibility of an ink-filled, boneless bag of slime vanquishing his mighty shark-god.
But having a shark-god to worship did have some really cool benefits. The dopey pale tourist women, willing to risk life and limb to experience real Fijian culture by visiting dive bars in Suva, couldn’t get enough of the shark-god stories. In Jope’s version of these tales, Dakuwaqa always came away the victor, not some shitwad octopus. Nope, not a chance Jope would spread those rotten lies. He delivered these revised endings with great pride.
“Wanna come up and see my little Dakuwaqa?” Jope would eventually ask the drunken white girl, who was more often than not wearing a cheap, polyester knock-off suluvakatoga. The traditional garment looked even better balled up at the foot of his twin bed, beneath the set of ominous, hand-drawn Dakuwaqa posters thumb tacked to the wall of his one room efficiency. That was, until Ratu moved in and taped all his Kiss posters on top of them.
The Dakuwaqa t-shirts were also cool, as were the big Dakuwaqa beach umbrellas protecting the light-skinned tourists.
Ratu would have said Dakuwaqa looked like a tuna fish with chicken legs, so Jope shut up about him. He kept the remaining evidence of his religion in the front pocket of his filthy cut-offs—a one-inch-tall Dakuwaqa figure his grandpa had carved out of white coral. Ratu sometimes teased Jope that he should stop playing with his nuts, when he was really just surreptitiously fondling his shark-god.
Jope looked up at the fantastic half-shark, half-man looming over him in the kitchenette.
“You’re in some deep shit, son,” the shark-god bellowed, his great, razor-sharp teeth gnashing wetly as his jaws moved to form the grim message. His horrible teeth were triangular and stained bright orange, with serrated edges to tear flesh.
“You can speak?” Jope’s voice was weak. He was practically hypnotized by all the lethal orange teeth looming over him.
/> “I’m a god,” said Dakuwaqa, thrusting his arm out in a dismissive gesture and spilling half the remaining bag of Cheetos. “Of course I can speak. Listen, dummy, you and your loser buddy really stepped in it this time.”
Jope’s feelings were hurt again. Now his god was calling him names.
“You two heisted all this nose candy off some badass characters, with some even more badass friends.” The shark-god’s muscular human arms swept out across the kitchenette, indicating the bricks of cocaine. “This stuff is bigger trouble than you could ever imagine.”
“We’re pirates.” Jope’s voice was tiny and not at all pirate-like.
“Pirates, Schmirates!” the shark-god mocked, inhaling the rest of the Cheetos and balling up the bag. “The owners of this blow have sicced dudes from Malakula on your pirate asses. And you wanna know who the Malakula are?”
“No.” Jope was near tears. “Please don’t tell me.”
“Cannibals!” Dakuwaqa roared, gnashing his thousands of teeth again for effect. “Big bad cannibals sent to eat you up!”
“No!” Jope slid off the couch and dropped to his knees at the human feet of the shark-god, his flesh burning from the rough indoor-outdoor carpeting. “Please, you’re my god. You have to protect me! It’s part of the rules!”
“Nah,” said Dakuwaqa. “I’m just a hallucination from all the coke you snorted.”
“And the cannibals?” Jope looked up hopefully, blinking through tears at his mighty shark-god.
“Sorry, dumbass, but they’re real.” Dakuwaqa licked his orange fingers, clapped his hands together, and vanished in a billowing white puff that might have been cocaine, leaving the terrorized pirate on his knees, whimpering.
Chapter 19