The Turtle-Girl from East Pukapuka

by Cole Alpaugh

  Now that he was dead, Jope prayed that this was just some new god taking him toward the tunnel to Happa Now rather than the beginning of a lurid, cannibal-feeding-frenzy. He went with the flow, not that he had much choice. There was no sound as he broke the surface of the water. Tiny stars twinkled down as if in greeting.

  “Hello,” Jope said to the stars, as his flaccid body was dragged across the coarse sand. And then the stars disappeared, eclipsed by a round black object.

  Jope liked this part of the journey to Happa Now very much. Back in Suva, the prostitutes charged three whole dollars and still wouldn’t let you kiss them. Not on the mouth anyway. Here, the kiss was free and delivered under the beautiful twinkling stars of a tropical island. Wait, did this mean prostitutes on Happa Now gave away their services and kissed you on the lips? An afterlife with free hookers?

  Jope’s wang had not been made huge by the shark-god, but it stood proudly at attention as the kissing went on and on. If only Jope wasn’t dead, he could maybe get the heavenly prostitute to move over a bit and climb aboard his modest pole of love. The tender embrace had created an almost impressive tent under his cut-off jeans.

  Jope turned his head to spit up most of the salt water that had caused him to die in the first place. He hoped that wasn’t too much of a turn-off for the hooker. With air filling his lungs, Jope was able to tell the angel whore what he usually told the prostitutes back home: “Please spank me.”

  Ratu spit out the water Jope had puked up during the mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. He grabbed his best friend in the whole world and hugged him tightly, frantically, not caring that Jope’s boner was poking him in the stomach like one of the fatties they used to smoke together when business was good.

  Chapter 30

  The God of Time was a heavy sleeper. Fat chunks of decades often slipped away during his watch over Happa Now. That hadn’t mattered much, except when he was late to a particularly critical meeting of the gods. The four had gathered to find a substitute for all the coral that couldn’t make the trip to the next life. Aesthetically, the missing coral reef in the eternal version of East Pukapuka would be potentially upsetting to new residents, not to mention the reef’s crucial protection as a wave break.

  “Sorry,” the God of Time said, taking his place among his fellow divine entities. They gave him the cold shoulder. A dozen hurricanes and a thousand tides had come and gone while they’d waited for him. They had continued on as if he wasn’t there.

  “Look, my job is the weather,” the God of Weather said. “You try dealing with Aura God every day. She gets a hangnail and starts tossing around snowstorms and lightning bolts for laughs. Crazy bitch.”

  “Yeah, well I’ve been busy with the tides,” the God of Tides countered. “Every six hours, day after day, year after year. I never get a friggin’ break.”

  “For crying out loud you’re all gods! What the hell did you think coral was?” The God of the Stars clapped his hands together. The three other gods flinched, expecting at least a moderate catastrophe, but nothing came.

  “Look,” the God of Weather said. “Your gig is to make sure stars don’t start falling, am I right? How hard can that be? You shoulda been all over this.”

  “Guys!” the God of Tides shouted. “We aren’t solving our problem with a bitch fest. We know only plants and humans can live on Happa Now. That’s page one, paragraph one in the Laws of the Universe. But we need enough live coral to protect one lousy endless beach. Anybody? Anything?”

  “I have an idea,” said the God of Time.

  * * * *

  It was partly cloudy and eighty-two degrees on Happa Now, just like most days, thanks to the God of Weather. The gentle breeze that came out of the southwest at seven kilometers per hour wouldn’t have been strong enough to keep the sand flies from pestering anyone sunbathing or fishing on the beach. But there were no sand flies on Happa Now. No jiggers or bright yellow banana slugs, for that matter. And even if it was possible to fashion a fishing pole, there were no fish in the water or worms to bait hooks. No more trouble from Habu vipers.

  To say that Happa Now was an especially happy place would be misleading. Although designed by the gods as the ultimate blissful sanctuary, the place had plenty of sadness to go around. Over the centuries, human beings had become too complex to be satisfied with nothing but warm sunny days, an absence of sand flies and the end of hunger. To the frustration of the gods, humans had come to define happiness more broadly to include cups of wapa juice in the evening and chicken eggs for breakfast. Not to mention the sheer joy of having a dog lick their faces after a long day. The four creators of Happa Now couldn’t possibly understand the meaning of those licks. The gods relied on their own observations, which included all the other things dogs spent days licking.

  Happa Now was—and is—an oxymoron. It is an island, of course, but an island that extends forever, whose seas are fathomless and whose sandy beaches are impossible to measure. There was a great dearth of theories concerning the creation of Happa Now, at least among the inhabitants of this part of the great island, because no theoretical physicists had “moved on” from this region of Polynesia. Had Albert Einstein fallen overboard while tuna fishing off Pago Pago, perhaps some of the mysteries of its origins could have been explained to its people.

  Einstein might also have tapped into his Theory of Relativity to explain the lack of hostilities and the general sense of contentment bordering on malaise. Time slows down as an object’s velocity increases, Einstein postulated. The God of Time had designed negative emotional responses on Happa Now to slow down in direct proportion to the amount of emotion expended. Accidentally kick someone who had fallen asleep lying across the path to the outhouses in the ribs, and the air might fill with clear molasses. Mention how thin someone’s wife looked—a tremendous insult—and it might be three hours before the next person blinked.

  Were there any Parisians or New Yorkers or Sudanese on Happa Now? That question was never asked by the people who had come from East Pukapuka and its surrounding regions. Impressionist Masters, Manhattan Bagels, and those long, tunic-like garments known as thawbs had no place in their Happa Now experience. And they wouldn’t become part of the wonderful mystery until someone from the Sudan ate a bad plate of oysters in Hanga Roa while waiting to catch his plane back to Africa.

  Happa Now was designed to make newcomers comfortable and at home. Since there was no discrimination, and the only requirement for entering Happa Now was that you had become dead, a lot of segregation was necessary. The original Malakula cannibals, for example, were isolated in the vast interior section, far away from the victims they’d already eaten once. Black people were kept far away from the New Caledonian slave traders, since the lingering hard feelings would be contrary to the overall goal of maintaining perpetual bliss. There was a village filled with abusive husbands and a colony composed entirely of women with low self-esteem. If not for the segregation, everything would slow down so badly that nobody would get a chance to enjoy this next life. They’d just stand around scowling, and that was surely no way to spend eternity.

  Somewhere in the northwest corner of the great island that is Happa Now, the most recent arrivals were appearing one by one, each having taken slightly different and often chaotic paths on the wings of butterflies. They materialized on the beautiful sandy beaches with shaky knees and ruffled hair at the same moment their fluttering butterfly chariots were unceremoniously spit back out of Happa Now. The newcomers milled about, getting accustomed to their new yet somehow familiar surroundings. The puka trees were almost the same. The palm fronds brushing the old lava flows were nearly the right colors. The coral reef, a hundred meters off the beach, was the only obvious blemish to the near perfection. The God of Time had used a million liters of waterproof pastel paint on piled up rocks to replace the organisms that couldn’t make the trip to Happa Now.

  * * * *

  A middle-aged woman named Charles Darwin stood knee deep in a lagoon that looked
amazingly similar to the one fifteen meters from the hut she’d been born in—the lagoon where she’d spent her entire life. Now that she was dead and reborn, everything was a little off. For one thing, there wasn’t a single minnow swimming around her toes, sampling the tiny air bubbles clinging to her skin. There were no scuttling crabs, no clams, and none of the big pink conches whose insides tasted so wonderful fried up with a squirt of lemon juice. And she wasn’t the least bit hungry, despite not being able to recall her last meal.

  Charles Darwin tilted her chin to scan the sky that was equally void of life. There wasn’t a single gull, tern, frigatebird, lapwing, heron, or egret. No chirps came from hidden spots among the coconut clusters. No hoots, and no cuckoos. It was pretty enough, but it was awfully weird. She was not a happy camper—as the saying goes—and her increasingly agitated emotions were slowing time down all around her. Wriggling her chubby toes in the not quite right sand, under the not quite right water, the naked godmother of a ten-year-old girl who had gotten lost on the trip to Happa Now was growing increasingly distraught.

  Charles Darwin replayed their final moments at the edge of their island. The villagers clasped hands to form a great chain around the lagoon that was almost identical to the one in which she now stood. It had been a moment of perfect peace, of complete togetherness shared by her doomed people. Total bliss, right before the big wave crashed down on them, killing every last being. The gods had summoned them to their new lives with noisy voices.

  So where was Butter? As godmother, Charles Darwin was fully responsible for the girl’s spiritual development should her parents meet an untimely death, which they certainly had. Charles Darwin had looked under every bush, searched every tree, and called and called for the little girl to come out from wherever she might be hiding. She’d even tried the universal cry, the plaintive appeal every child recognized as the all-clear sign that it was safe to come home.

  And here in water—which was either just a little too salty or maybe not quite salty enough—Charles Darwin cupped her slightly wrinkled brown hands around her mouth and took a deep breath.

  “Olly, olly, oxen free!” Charles Darwin shouted into the vast green and blue expanse, which looked so much like the vast green and blue expanse of East Pukapuka’s horizon. She cupped her hands behind her ears to catch any hint of an answer.

  Except for the low murmur of the calm sea, there was only silence.

  Chapter 31

  Albino Paul gunned the six-hundred horsepower speed boat engines, welcomed the intense vibrations deep in his bones as if satisfying a physical hunger. The bloodthirsty cannibal from Malakula was bare-chested, sporting a brand new loin cloth and hundred dollar Nike Air Jordans. The human finger-bone necklace whipped in the air as the sleek black hull sliced through the light chop at one hundred-fifty kilometers per hour. At these breakneck speeds, fuel economy was lousy at just about two kilometers per liter, but sometimes it was all about the rush.

  Albino Paul ran hard for a full hour before cutting back to cruising speed and punching the CD play button. The brass section of the Miami Sound Machine blasted full volume from eight top-of-the-line speakers, and the Cuban goddess Gloria Estefan sang along with Albino Paul about shaking your body, baby, and doing the conga!

  The bloodthirsty cannibal waggled his booty in a stationary conga line. A long journey lay ahead. He was feeling good about this job, embracing his role as the boogeyman. After a couple of stagnant months of tourist performances, these road trips were invigorating, providing a lungful of fresh air out on the open sea. Albino Paul felt bulletproof to whatever might be unlucky enough to get in his way. After expenses, he’d clear another twenty grand easily, all of which would be wired to his Swiss bank account. Maybe another dozen assignments and he’d have enough to finally buy the entire island of Malakula and secede from the heavy-handed government of Vanuatu.

  Albino Paul didn’t want to be a king, he just wanted to be free. Free from the lard-ass bureaucrats who paid his people shit for posing less and less like an authentic cannibal tribe—which had at least offered some feeling of pride. Each year they were handed instructions demanding more dancing and less of what the tour operators considered humdrum traditional prayers. Once his people were free, those pricks might be the first to be tied to the tenderizing logs. The island would be renamed … how about “Mala Conga”? The rich heritage of his people would rise from the ashes left from tourist marshmallow roasts. Never again would his people kneel down before pale white men in flowered shorts to measure their chapped pink feet for swim fins.

  A big-time drug lord on family vacation had taken the Cannibal Culture Spree with his wife and seven kids a few years earlier. He’d gotten the idea to harness some of the human flesh eating fear for his own business purposes. Cannibals would be used as deterrents for anyone considering ripping off one of his shipments. Thereafter the money had begun to flow fast and easy for Albino Paul. He was just the man for the job.

  He’d been hooked after his first gig. Albino Paul had been offered a ridiculous sum of money to track down six Filipino thugs who’d ripped off a fishing boat loaded with a ton of Columbian Gold marijuana. Albino Paul caught up to them at a Chevron refueling station in Erromango, where one was working the self-service pump while the others sat around the thirty-foot outboard stoned off their asses.

  Albino Paul cut his engines, coasting right up to the dock as if getting in line for gas. In full view of everyone—including several dozen curious tourists—he pulled a Peruvian teak box from the console and began applying traditional hunting paints made from roots and berries. Giant white teeth artwork made his face especially menacing. Albino Paul began the hunting dance on the glossy black bow of his expensive speed boat, not ten meters from the pumps. He waved a long sharpened spear like the baton of a marching band leader, quickly drawing a good-sized crowd of onlookers.

  Tourists snapped picture after picture of the makeshift show, and even the stoned Filipinos relaxed and started enjoying the spectacle, jiving and grooving to the background music coming from the cannibal’s awesome stereo system. The Filipino thugs were too stoned to protest when he leaped on board their boat and began dancing the conga on bales of carefully wrapped Columbian Gold. They were clapping along with the surrounding tourists, dopey wide grins and bobbing heads. One dropped a bong with a smoldering bowl, spilling smelly water across the deck. The stoned thug held in his hit as long as he could, then let go a burst of sweet blue smoke, smiling as though a couple of ice cold brews would really hit the spot about now.

  “Yeah, yeah, shake your body, baby, do the conga!” Albino Paul had sung, and the five stoners struggled to their feet, wanting in on the dancing. Camera flashes went off in rapid fire and one little boy began drawing the scene with a crayon and paper his parents used to keep him busy. Albino Paul let out a haunting tribal scream as he turned on his conga line and began thrusting his spear into the belly of one Filipino after the other. Albino Paul performed the brutal, unrelenting slaughter for the benefit of the camera mounted above his boat’s console, to be edited and used as a dramatic warning to any prospective drug thieves once it was uploaded to YouTube. Filipinos dramatically clutched at their stomach wounds, staggering like actors in an old silent reel before collapsing in shuddering heaps.

  What a show it was.

  Tourists cheered and clapped, and every moment of this wonderfully choreographed pageant was also recorded in at least a half dozen cell phone videos.

  With five Filipinos down, Albino Paul turned to the one holding the gas pump nozzle, also stoned and now very much in shock. Albino Paul snatched the man by his wrist, pulled him close as if wanting to slow dance and plunged three of the thug’s middle fingers into his painted mouth. Mothers covered the eyes of young children, worried about this awfully homoerotic scene. Fingers in other people’s mouths? Mental notes were taken for nasty letters to be written later. The Filipino screamed bloody murder when his hand came free because his fingers had been bitten off
.

  The cheering and clapping stopped as the Filipino held his wounded hand out to the tourists, as if pleading for help, and then passed out cold. Albino Paul spit the severed fingers into his own hand and tucked them into his loin cloth for safe keeping. You could never have too many human fingers.

  “Hey, I think he really bit off his fingers,” exclaimed a dapper man with a New Zealand accent, who stood next to an attractive woman with a gaping mouth and twin boys cradled in each arm. And as if reacting to the report of a starter pistol, everybody except Albino Paul and the six Filipinos ran like hell, leaving the cannibal from Malakula to casually load the bales of marijuana onto his boat. Albino Paul topped off his tank, set the Filipino boat on fire, and got out of Dodge.

  No, he didn’t want to be a king, he just wanted his people to be free and his music to be loud. And, most of all, he longed to be a real bloodthirsty cannibal.

  Chapter 32

  Dobby rooted through a mound of salvaged clothes taller than the naked girl, tossing anything that might fit her into its own separate pile. His aching knees crackled and popped as he struggled back to his feet. He held out five tropical-print dresses, a Frederick’s of Hollywood lace bustier he thought might be some kind of necessary underwear, and a bridal veil. Butter took one of the dresses.

  “There’s hundreds of islands in these waters, in every damn direction.” Dobby’s back was turned to the little girl as she slipped the dress over her head. “Ain’t no island just called Home, girl. Not East Home, or West, South, or North Freakin’ Home. Home ain’t a name.”