by Cole Alpaugh
While his mother got to work on the dishes, Dobby was outside throwing stones at the old TV next to the dog pen. He’d heard his father go on and on in a bragging tone to his buddies from down at the slaughterhouse, while they drank Lone Star longnecks and made half-assed attempts to split wood out back of the trailer. The boy didn’t know the meaning of most of the words his father used to describe his mother to them, but they were all preceded by “stupid” or “dumb.” He sure knew what those words meant.
“Go gemme another cold one, ya little dumb fuck, and wipe that stupid look off yer face, for Christ’s sake.”
Turtle soup was the good smell of his mother when she came into his room after midnight. She’d be wearing her old torn pink robe, its sash cinched tightly in a knot at her waist, her hair a tumbled mess. She’d be sniffling back a mix of blood and snot, the little bit of makeup she was allowed to wear while serving the holiday meal smudged and giving her silly-looking raccoon eyes. Her cheeks were puffy and bruised. As she climbed into his warm bed, she picked at the knot of her threadbare robe, pulling it open and inviting him to snuggle right up against her cool bare skin. Her funny patch of scratchy hair down there tickled his legs, but he didn’t mind one little bit. God, he loved her so much. Here in his mama’s arms was the only safe place in his entire world. They lay huddled, wrapped in a thin pink cocoon, her occasional shudders making him squeeze closer. Her lovely fragrance of nail polish and turtle soup washed over them, as tiny tears escaped his clenched eyes. He wished he could build a jet airplane and fly them both away from the awful snoring coming from the next room. Or maybe build a boat and sail them into the dusty sunset.
And then the grown-up captain’s dream shifted forward through the years, back to the bowl of turtle soup on the island of Pitcairn, where he closed his eyes and let the aroma waft up and cover his face like a shroud. It was a smell as complicated as being in love with your mother and wanting to murder your father.
When Dobby opened his eyes in the dream, he saw the half-naked bimbo grinding her big round bum against the crotch of a leathery old fisherman. Dimes and quarters bounced on the table each time her knees struck its low edge. It was a dream he’d had a thousand times and would have a thousand times more if he lived long enough. A tear for his long dead mother splashed into his steaming turtle soup, just as the sound of a blood-curdling scream wrenched him from the dream and sent him scrambling to find the little brown girl.
Chapter 26
The strong breeze tore small slivers of red and black paint loose from the chugging tugboat, swirling and fluttering in the air pocket behind the pilot house, reminding Butter of the dancing butterflies during their island to island migration. The butterflies were mostly black, with a white circle on each wing. The males had intense blue auras around their circles and the females had flecks of orange.
Franklin Roosevelt, the village’s best tree climber, had tried to convince Butter that the butterflies were the confused souls of the recent dead trying to find the path to Happa Now.
“No they aren’t. They’re just butterflies.” Butter stood in the shade of a tight grove of puka trees as Roosevelt expertly husked a young coconut with a machete and carved out the soft white meat.
“I see them when I am in the tall trees.” Roosevelt pointed the machete at Butter, a square of meat on the end of the blade. “They fly around all crazy, looking for the path. I think the souls must be blind. The butterflies who venture farthest away from the pack, who climb up on the highest wind currents, get sucked into the tunnel to Happa Now.”
Roosevelt made a popping sound with his long brown finger and cheek to mimic the sound of the lucky ones getting sucked into the tunnel.
“Only people can go to Happa Now,” a skeptical Butter said, taking the piece of coconut from the blade and sucking the sweet milk.
“The souls ride on the wings; you see them as blue and orange spots. The souls are allowed in and the rest of the butterfly is spit back out.” The tall, skinny man spit a chunk of coconut, showing the little girl how the afterlife worked.
Even though Roosevelt was held in high regard for his climbing skills and was married to the fattest and most beautiful village girl, he wasn’t necessarily telling the truth. Butter knew that about grown-ups.
Grown-ups said things just to make sad children feel better, like when they would step on your favorite conch shell you’d spent days decorating with paints and gluing on tiny starfish and shiny tumbled rocks.
“Oops,” they’d say. “I’ll help you fix it tomorrow.” That was a lie. No fixing was ever done the next day. Not by the grown-ups, at least.
And Butter was five or so when all the magic of the Tooth Devil was spoiled. She’d done her best to stay awake in her bedroll—hours after the village had gone silent. Mama had placed her little white front tooth with its bloody flecks on the Devil Spoon, an item each household on the island possessed. The wooden spoon and child’s tooth were to be left on the ground at the threshold of the home as an offering to the Tooth Devil. In exchange for the tooth, the Tooth Devil always left a fine black pearl, supposedly from the deepest part of the ocean where he lived.
Hours passed as Butter lay quietly waiting. Occasionally she heard footsteps pass her hut—human-sounding and accompanied by soft whispers—a distant coughing fit and a brief argument between a man and his wife; then silence fell over the village.
Sleep came for the tired little girl just as an alien sound pulled her from its grasp. Was it real, or a sound from behind the curtain of a dream she was approaching? The sound came again, and Butter’s heart raced when she heard the odd rustling. Her eyes flew back open and searched the darkness. Right there in the open entryway of her home—maybe seven steps from where she lay curled in her soft blanket—stood the beast from a thousand meters under the ocean. It was hunched over the Devil Spoon, murmuring something in its devil language. The Tooth Devil had apparently dropped her tiny tooth in the darkness and was padding around the floor and front step searching in the scant light of the sliver of moon.
Butter was petrified. What if the Tooth Devil couldn’t find it in the dark? What if it had dropped through a crack too small for its hand or horrible tongue? Might it not expect another as replacement? It was, after all, a long trip from his home in the deepest water.
“Damn it to hell,” the Tooth Devil hissed in Butter’s own language, and she shrank back even deeper into her covers, her own tongue frantically testing her remaining front tooth for any hint of a wiggle. There was none. It was still in there as solid as could be.
That’s when the Tooth Devil turned on her and came for it. She had imagined it would hold her down, one devil hand on her forehead, the other on her chin, forcing open her mouth. The effort would require just a tiny portion of the strength it took to swim the thousand meters to and from its murky home. She had imagined its face would come down to hers, as if to kiss her open mouth, instead breathing in the intoxicating scent of the little kid teeth it lusted for.
“Please take only one,” Butter would try to say, but her jaw would be locked open as the beast began to nibble at her gums.
Butter wanted to cry out for her mama and papa, but was frozen in fear as the creature slowly crawled across the polished wood planks of her home’s floor. The Tooth Devil’s bulk blotted out any light from the moon, and the Devil Spoon clicked in its hands as it used all four limbs to scramble closer.
Butter clenched her eyes shut as tightly as she clenched her jaw, waiting for the prying to begin. She had somehow known the smell that would come—the stench of spoiled fish and rotten seaweed. The smell of dead crab in the hot sun would close her throat, keep her from screaming. But none of that happened. Instead of stink, instead of clawing and biting, she felt just a brush of rough lips on her damp forehead. She knew those rough chapped lips. They had kissed her goodnight ever since she was a little baby. When she dared open her eyes, she saw the Devil Spoon there on her bedroll, with a small speck of fine black pearl rig
ht where it was supposed to be.
The little girl felt relief, then confusion, then betrayal. As she watched her papa push aside the billowing silk screen that separated her bed from her parents’, Butter reflected with some bitterness that she had been lied to. She reached out for the small black pearl, rolling it between her thumb and forefinger. It was hard, smooth, and cold. Not the least bit magical.
Now, as Butter stood on the main deck of the Gypsy Dancer watching the butterfly paint chips, she suddenly realized that everything the grown-ups told her had been a lie. Every word had been made up.
So she screamed as hard and loud as she could to drown out all the lies. Grown-ups only pretended to care about you, when they were really only worrying about themselves. They broke your things and smashed your heart all up. They did stupid things that got them sent to Happa Now while you still needed them. They deserted you. They went off to be happy and left you all by yourself. Birds and snakes didn’t do that to their babies. Lizards didn’t either. Nothing else did, just stupid human parents. Grown-ups could go on with their lives on Happa Now, while all her patients had nowhere to go. They simply died. And here she was on this stinking boat with the dirty rotten god who might have caused it all.
Butter’s screaming made the hurt stop.
Chapter 27
“It’s … not … fair!” Butter wailed between banshee-like shrieks and blood-curdling screams, some of which caught in her throat, interspersing her tantrum with coughing and gagging fits.
Butter lifted the pink doll in front of her face and squeezed it hard enough to make deep indentations in the plastic. “It doesn’t hurt because you’re fake, too!”
She clutched the doll against her ribs and with her left hand grabbed at its head, her neck muscles taut and straining as she pried under its chin where it was connected to the torso. When the round baby head finally popped off, Butter grunted with satisfaction. She turned and threw the head over the side of the boat with all her might, then lifted the body and slammed it down onto the deck. The doll bounced almost straight up.
Butter began to yell again, “Everything is dead! Dead, dead, dead!” Her feet were planted at shoulder width, her brown, compact body naked except for a narrow woven belt. Her arms were bent at the elbows, her hands clenched into white-knuckle fists, as if ready to challenge any comers. “Everything is lies and everything is dead!” Butter screamed, a high-pitched wail that turned into a dreadful approximation of a boatswain’s pipe, the whistle that announced visiting dignitaries aboard ships.
The screaming went on and on, while a confused and winded Dobby stood at the base of the pilot house ladder on the twenty-by-forty foot deck—piled with salvage and other junk—fearing the girl’s next move. She had no obvious wounds, was not dripping blood. There was nothing flopping around on the deck, no flying fish or dying birds. She’d apparently gone berserk, or maybe was possessed by a devil.
“What’s wrong with—” Dobby began during what seemed like a lull, but the little girl’s voice wound back up like an air raid siren.
“I took care of every hurt animal!” Butter shouted, spittle flying. “I was always good! I washed the bedding! I swept when I was told, and I piled the coconuts and I took trash to the fire pit! My mama and papa and everybody are dead and now I’m alone out in the middle of nowhere! No stupid god has any right to hurt people like that! Any dumb god who would do that shouldn’t be a god in the first place! The god should be dead instead of all the people and animals! Dead!”
Another pause and Dobby took a step toward the girl with no idea what to do. The only blind fury he’d ever witnessed was his father’s and the time some drunk in the bar had decided the guy sitting next to him was the one who made his wife run off.
“It’s your fault!” Butter screamed at the captain, more spittle flying. “It’s all your rotten fault!”
“What did I do?” Dobby retreated one step, surrendering the space he’d just ventured into.
Butter directed her white hot fury directly at Dobby. “Who kills little babies?” Her voice was gravelly, older.
“Babies?” Dobby’s head ached from the hangover and all the screaming. He shifted from foot to foot, needing very much to pee over the gunwale. Little bits of black and red paint were raining down on him from the rusting smoke stack, as a strong breeze blew across the choppy water. “I swear I never kilt no baby.”
Butter turned her full wrath on the captain. “You’re a lazy, fat god, who eats his own boogers and sniffs his stinking armpits! I’ve seen you!”
Dobby was used to being alone and bad habits were easy to develop. He was instantly ashamed, but even now was fighting an overwhelming urge to turn his head and sniff his armpit. It was just awful how that worked. “I’m sorry.”
“I never did anything wrong to you or any other stupid old god!” Butter shouted, her naked body glistening with sweat. She was pointing her right index finger at Dobby, stabbing at the air. She moved toward him, menacing, stepping over her decapitated baby doll.
Dobby was cowering, flinching at every screeched accusation. “Oh, please, girl …” he muttered, attempting to retreat. He had backed into the lower bridge door and was groping for the handle with his shaking hand. His dirty fingernails tapped against the rusty metal, finding rivets but no latch. Dobby’s head and bladder were filled with a sick heat and he needed to get away. His stomach rolled over.
“You and your gods killed my snakes!” roared the little girl, jabbing her finger at him with each word. “You killed the birds with broken wings! Who would kill a bird that couldn’t fly? You killed everything! You killed Franklin Roosevelt and Charles Darwin!”
“I’m sorry,” Dobby moaned, regressing into the little boy his father had so often belittled. Worse, he’d promised his mother never to hurt a woman, and now here was a miniature version accusing him of killing her family, her pets, and a famous president. “I’m sorry. I have to pee,” he said weakly.
“You have to fix everything right this minute!” Butter demanded, now just a few steps from the captain, who had given up finding the door latch behind his back. Instead, he covered his face with grimy hands. “I want to go home right now!” Butter howled and lunged at the captain, pummeling his bare arms and chest with tiny, balled-up fists.
It was Dobby’s turn to begin sobbing like he often did in bars right around closing time. His mother had warned him about god and karma, even though they’d never once gone to church to experience them first hand. His father had forbidden church-going, didn’t trust a word out of that lying preacher’s pie hole. And Dobby now knew he was somehow responsible for everything that had happened to this little girl. The bad things he’d done, despite promises to his mother, couldn’t be blamed on the booze. This epiphany slammed down on Dobby’s shoulders like a two-ton anchor. He was guilty as charged, had gone ahead and let down another person instead of bein’ any kind of hero.
Butter punched and slapped the defenseless captain, ripped handfuls of gray hair from his chest. She splashed Dobby with her sweat and tears, making small nicks and cuts in his arms with her jagged fingernails. Her long black hair whipped about her face. “You killed everything I care about! You did it! I hate your stupid guts!”
Dobby caught hold of the slick girl, who tried to wriggle away from his grasp like a trapped animal. “I’m sorry,” he said again.
“Let me go!” But Dobby’s rough, callused hands held tight. He scooped her up from the deck as she aimed a few final kicks into his thighs, delivering one glancing blow to the testicles. Dobby’s kept his grip on her.
“It’ll be okay,” Dobby tried, but that only unleashed another struggling flourish, making his right testicle ache deep inside his stomach. Now he needed to pee and puke. “Oh god, please stop, girl.”
“You’re a rotten liar!” Butter shouted painfully into his left ear. She would have bitten it off if he hadn’t immediately twisted his neck away, recoiling from her caterwauling. “You’re a killer!”
“What can I do?” Dobby pleaded. “How can I help you? I’ll do anything, just tell me. I never meant to hurt nobody.”
Suddenly the fight drained out of Butter. It was there and then it was gone. Beyond exhaustion, she hung limply in the captain’s arms. All the anger and hate that had flooded her body was now far away.
“Take me home,” Butter whispered in the ear she’d just tried to bite off. “Make everything alive again.”
“Oh, dear god.” Dobby groaned at such a task, knowing he had no choice but to try. He’d promised his mother and knew he couldn’t let her down again. Dobby hadn’t been able to save his mother from his drunken father, who’d been taken over by that black rage. That’s the way his father had described it to the sheriff’s men who’d come and driven Dobby’s father away in one car and Dobby in another. That awful black rage came out of nowhere, just took over his mind and there was nothin’ anybody could do about it. It made him start slapping his wife, tearing the old pink robe off her body and throwing her down the steps onto the dusty ground out behind the trailer. And the slaps turned to punches because he needed her to know how mad she’d made him, how angry the black rage made him feel. A fist full of hair bunched up in his left hand and his right knuckles pounding away like he was pumping the tire jack under his pickup truck.
After his father was done punching, Dobby had run to his mama. When the black rage lifted, his father was calm as could be, sorta like when a tornado came through, wrecked your barn and killed half your cows, then just blew away and disappeared. It got quiet, too, with no more shouting and no more crying. The little boy knew right away his mama wasn’t going to be okay. Her face bones were all broken and sunken in and her lips were torn away from her face, just hanging by threads and showing her teeth like she was trying to smile. Dobby kissed her anyway. Knew he was kissing her goodbye.