The Turtle-Girl from East Pukapuka

by Cole Alpaugh

  “It looks like a big truck ran over the island,” Jope said. He leaned forward and used the straw to make the little mound of cocaine disappear.

  Ratu tapped out more and they took turns using their other nostrils.

  “We gotta fix the boat,” Jope said suddenly, now fully aware of the island’s electric greens and blues.

  “The boat’s all mashed up.” Ratu began nodding his head repeatedly, involuntarily. The coke was taking over his body, making his fingers tingle. He could feel his hair growing. No wonder rich people were willing to pay so much for good coke. This stuff made everything okay. Unlike with beer, you didn’t have to pee all the time. His head still nodding, Ratu flexed his right bicep and squeezed the small knot of muscle with his left hand. “Just like Superman.”

  “We gotta find a place to hide,” Jope said, nodding his head in rhythm with Ratu.

  “Island’s all squished down, Jope.” Along with the nodding, Ratu began to blink his eyes rapidly. “Ain’t no place to hide. Here, let’s do one more line, then I wanna see if I can fly.”

  The former pirates were both nodding spastically. Other than each others’ faces, everything they looked at was blurry.

  “What do we gotta hide from?” Ratu was painfully and repeatedly jabbing the inside of his nose with the straw while snorting and spilling thousands of dollars’ worth of coke.

  “The shark-god said the cannibals are coming to eat us for stealing the blow.” Jope was blinking rapidly, stabbing at his own nostrils.

  “Nah, ain’t no way cannibals could find us out here. We’re just a little booger in a really big nostril.” Ratu sniffed hard, wiped at his nose, and began talking quickly. “You ever swim in a pool, look down and see a little booger floatin’ by? Even if you know it’s a booger for sure, you don’t wanna believe it. Who wants to know they been swimmin’ in booger water? You tell yourself, ‘No, that ain’t no booger. That’s somethin’ else.’ ”

  “I can’t swim.”

  “Then a bathtub, Jope! We’re a booger in a bathtub is what I’m trying to tell you. And there ain’t even much of a boat left to spot. One more line and you climb on my back and we go fly up high in the sky. We a bird, we a plane, we Super-negroes!”

  “Oh, God, Ratu, look!” Jope recoiled from the open brick of cocaine as if a snake had poked its head out from the powder.

  Ratu tried to focus his blinking eyes on Jope’s discovery, but the bobbing of his head was making that difficult.

  “Shark-god knows his shit. We’re in big trouble. Big, big, trouble.” Suddenly despondent, Jope nodded his head, blinked, and picked the flashing GPS transmitter out of the open brick of cocaine. He dropped it in the sand as if it were burning hot. “I seen on cop shows how they find criminals with this kinda thing.”

  “Holy shit,” Ratu said, nodding and blinking back. He picked the transmitter out of the sand, turning it over in his jittery hands. “I think your cannibals just found a couple of boogers.”

  Chapter 35

  In one long, brutal weekend, Ratu and Jope had gone from small-time crooks, to high seas’ pirates, to cocaine-addicted castaways. Knowing they were being hunted down by bloodthirsty cannibals took every last bit of fun out of their huge bounty of devil’s dandruff, paradise white, ninety-nine percent pure uptown whiz bang.

  Instead of skinny-dipping in the lagoon and cracking coconuts to toast away their thirst, the former pirates were on a frenzied mission to create a military beachhead to ward off the impending cannibal invasion.

  “They’ll come from that direction, following the GPS track. They’ll come the same way we did.” Ratu pointed a shaking finger out beyond their wrecked boat.

  “Maybe they’ll crash, too,” Jope said.

  “I don’t think so, Jope. Cannibals are primitive and crazy, but they are also big-time clever. They get the scent of blood and they’re like them dogs tracking escaped prisoners. Except these fuckers have GPS.”

  “It could happen, though, right? It’s possible they could crash?”

  “We gotta keep working,” Ratu said. “Maybe just one more quick toot.”

  “What do they eat first?” Jope’s heart could be clearly seen thumping inside his chest. Sand coated his sweaty black body after multiple trips to the water’s edge to fetch heavy buckets of wet sand for the project that was to be their final stand.

  “Probably parts that don’t kill you right away.” Ratu hefted his sloshing bucket. “Cannibals ain’t got Frigidaires and they gotta keep your meat fresh.”

  The two men had gone on their own salvage mission, wading far enough out to collect a pair of bait buckets, some tangled fishing gear, and a broken pair of Ray Ban sunglasses. Then they began the tedious process of marking off their fortress foundation.

  Jope looked down at his fingers, reached up with his free hand to touch his left ear. “Oh God, they eat fingers and ears first, don’t they? They just bite them right off.” Having just one lens in his new sunglasses added to the sense of impending doom. He tossed the Ray Bans in the sand.

  “Measure twice and cut once,” Ratu said under his breath, pacing off where the thickest wall would go, leaving marks in the sand with his heel. The constant nodding of heads had begun to slow as small muscles tired and started to give up. It made seeing much easier.

  “What are we going to cut with, Ratu?” Jope asked, still worrying about his fingers. With all the places he’d stuck them, he couldn’t imagine they’d taste very good.

  “It’s just a saying, Jope. We ain’t gonna cut anything.”

  Over the next few hours they wore a path of damp, compacted sand from the wide white beach to the edge of the jungle destruction at the northwest point of the island. In this spot the land jutted the farthest out to sea, giving them a wide, panoramic view of the blue expanse. They dumped bucket after bucket, forming one shoulder-high wall and then the next. Their ambitious, cocaine-fueled construction was interrupted only by breaks to snort lines of Bolivian marching powder.

  Having eaten nothing in nearly three days, the two men were beginning to look the worse for wear. When Jope’s shorts dropped from his emaciated hips to his ankles, he simply walked out of them. The same thing happened to Ratu five minutes later. He just grunted and kept lugging his heavy bucket.

  They fell into a steady, butt-naked rhythm, collecting beach sand and delivering load after load to the fortress, passing each other midway, usually at about the same spot.

  The intense sun and subsequent dehydration was also beginning to cause hallucinations.

  “Ratu, are you seeing them rabbits?” Jope didn’t bother to stop as their paths crossed. Instead he jerked his head to indicate the line of smiling rabbits peering at them from the edge of the broken trees.

  On the next pass, Ratu said, “Those ain’t bunny rabbits, Jope. I think they’re some kinda penguins, but they don’t look dangerous.”

  The difficult work continued.

  “Maybe we can make a cannon,” Jope said, a few passes later, veins bulging on the arm lugging the bucket.

  “We ain’t got no cannon balls,” Ratu told him on the next pass.

  Jope was silent while he thought hard.

  “Rocks!” Jope said at the next opportunity. The line of what he was sure were smiling rabbits were continuing to watch them work. “We could load the cannon with rocks. We just gotta find really hard rocks.”

  “Why you wanna shoot the penguins? They ain’t bothering nobody. And look, they’re all gettin’ busy.”

  Jope waited to look until he had filled another bucket with wet sand and was headed back to the fortress. Sure enough, the smiling rabbits at the edge of the broken jungle had paired off and were mating. Jope thought about the last time he’d paired off with a girl—back before Ratu had moved in with him.

  Jope had met the girl in line at an illegal fireworks stand by the airport along the Rewa River. He’d sold out his nickel bags of crank and had cash to burn. Roads leading away from the airport were a great spot
to deal drugs, Jope had found, since it was harder and harder to smuggle your dope onto airplanes. There was an unofficial bus stop along the Rewa where back-packing travelers would beg the driver to pull off, then run down the steps and set upon the dealers for a fix. Jope had been one of the first of a small but growing group of crank dealers at these pull-off spots. By the time the drivers arrived at the bus depot at the end of their shift, the floors tinkled with empty glass vials.

  Thirty-four dollars in his pocket, Jope anxiously awaited his turn in line at the tin roof shop, which had a sign advertising hour-long massages and putt putt golf. He was purchasing an armload of Roman candles and bottle rockets.

  “I seen you dealing.” The female voice came from behind him.

  Jope recognized the young woman from another unofficial bus stop just up the road from his. Her stop had a thicket of low growing bushes the prostitutes used for turning quick tricks while the buses idled.

  “Oh, yeah, I seen you turning tricks.”

  “It’s been pretty slow,” the prostitute said, holding out two packs of bottle rockets as if they showed how slow things had been.

  “Hasn’t been too slow for crank.” Jope tilted his armload for her to get a look at all his bottle rockets. “You wanna come shoot some off with me?”

  “Look, Jope, the penguins are all smoking cigarettes.” Ratu interrupted Jope’s memory as the two former pirates passed each other in the sand. “That just don’t look right.”

  Jope saw the smoking rabbits on his return trip up the beach. The prostitute he’d met at the fireworks stand had used her cigarette to light his bottle rockets, which they’d launched at passing boats from under the old steel Rewa Road Bridge. She stuffed the long sticks into an old coke bottle and lit the fuses while Jope pushed up her dress and mounted her from behind. The prostitute angled the rockets to explode over fishermen heading back up river after a morning in Laucala Bay.

  “I still think we oughta build a cannon,” Jope said on the next pass. Despite all the cocaine in his system, his slender erection was now boldly pointing the way. The memory of shooting off the bottle rockets with the hooker had been good, even though she beat him up and stole his last five dollars. At least she’d let him finish.

  Chapter 36

  Ophelia had programmed her GPS unit with chart plots to her favorite fishing spots and coordinates for ship wrecks she planned to visit someday. She had entered the location of shallow reef formations and rocky hazards as well as tracking the long deepwater route to East Pukapuka.

  “There’s only one more can after this,” Dante told Ophelia, who already knew how much gas they’d used and how much remained. Keeping a steady pace over flat seas caused them to burn much less fuel than expected, and she had plenty of gas for the return trip, whether racer boy came back with her or not.

  Ophelia had learned to completely cut the engines to allow Dante to drain the spare cans into the main fuel tank. When she’d only gently throttled back for his first attempt, he’d doused himself. Carrying so much fuel on her small boat, especially out in the middle of nowhere, made her nervous. She’d helped tow in her fair share of boat fires and engine troubles over the years, all part of the job. Boaters were family and it was more common than not to have too many captains respond to a distress call. The severity of the call didn’t matter. A dead motor, an empty gas tank, someone with a seizure, even just a tourist losing their bearings—all of these situations brought more help than was needed in the waters surrounding her island.

  Ophelia had once delivered twins to a woman thirty kilometers out, as a dozen other boats stood by. She’d seen the glint from telephoto lenses, heard the pictures being snapped. The pregnant woman and three friends had decided to combine a baby shower and an afternoon pulling in some tasty wahoo and Spanish mackerel. The first contractions coincided with a ruptured fuel line to the twin 260 horsepower engines of the ten meter Windjammer. Ophelia delivered the babies two minutes apart, stabilized the mother and her three hysterical friends, then waited for the coast guard to shuttle their group back to Avarua Harbor. Ophelia had been buzzing on an endorphin high, feeling somewhere closer to understanding the meaning of the universe as she tied off lines and prepared to tow the floundering boat to port. Her white bikini top and light tan shorts were soaked in blood and afterbirth, making her quite a sight as she stepped back onto the dock and posed for a newspaper photographer.

  It was the breathless, panicked cries from on board a burning boat that would send painful chills down her body. If you couldn’t immediately extinguish the flames, you were taught to grab a life preserver and swim to a safe distance. It was incredible how many times the wrong decision had been made over a five-thousand or even five-hundred dollar piece of metal and fiberglass. The fire would often leave nothing but a charred disaster—unrecognizable as a boat. At other times, the explosion would blow out the fire, leaving one person with face and chest heavily singed. And there’d be another person—usually a wife or girlfriend—clutching two life preservers in their own dead hands. Their last seconds of life had been spent pleading that they should please, for the love of god, get off the boat.

  No babies or fiery explosions today, which was exactly how Ophelia wanted it. Her plan was to make this trip as humdrum, business-like, and anticlimactic as humanly possible. Mama had gotten it into her head to help this relatively sweet nutcase, and she knew it was the proper Raro thing to do. He had come to their island with his own version of a distress call. And Mama had handed the phone to her.

  The first seconds after Ophelia cut the engine were disconcerting. After hours of constant outboard engine noise and vibrations, of the continuous thwacking of wave on hull, the thick silence put them on pins and needles. Both worked their jaws to pop their ears. The heat of the late day sun baked skin that had previously been cooled by tepid wind and made them want to scratch various body parts.

  The first sound to return was the slapping of water against the hull, followed by the light ticking of the cooling engine. Dante grunted as he lifted the heavy red can, unscrewed the lid and poured gas into an orange funnel. Without the wind, the glare seemed to intensify, maybe because of the building heat or because without the rushing air there was no need to squint. Dante ripped an arm’s length of paper towels from its roll to wipe up the gas he’d spilled while pouring the last can into the boat’s fuel tank.

  “I have to pee,” Dante called up to Ophelia, who had closed her eyes and tilted her head to the sky.

  “Climb over the seat.” Eyes closed, Ophelia allowed the sun to put its warm hands on her face. “There’s a swim platform you can stand on. Don’t fall in and don’t pee on the motor.”

  “Why shouldn’t I pee on the motor?”

  “Jesus, because I don’t want anyone peeing on my motor, racer boy.”

  “Oh.” Dante climbed over the vinyl seat cushions to balance on the swim platform at the very back of the boat. The boat rocked in all directions; he held onto a low aluminum bar to keep from falling in while accidentally peeing all over the hot motor.

  “Do you hear that?” Dante strained to distinguish a distant buzzing over the slight hiss of steaming urine.

  “Hear what?”

  “A buzzing sound.” Dante tucked himself back into his shorts with one hand. “Really far off.”

  “I don’t hear anything.” Ophelia yawned and stretched her arms out over her head.

  “It sounds like bees,” said Dante, who now sat on the stern, feet resting on the dive platform. “I swear, it sounds like a big swarm of bees. And I think it’s getting louder.”

  “Can I trust you to take over for twenty minutes?” Ophelia asked, intending to close her eyes for real, but now she thought she might be hearing Dante’s bees. “What is that?” She stood, stretched her long, stiff legs, and spider-walked across the cushions to sit next to Dante. Both squinted off behind the boat, just below where the sun had begun its slow descent into the sea.

  “An airplane?” Ophelia gu
essed, as the swarming of bees grew tenfold. “I can’t see anything.”

  Dante turned eastward to scan the rest of the almost cloudless sky, which had turned deep indigo. No birds, no bees, and no airplanes. Whatever was approaching was coming directly out of the west, the sun over its wings or shoulders. And it was coming fast.

  “What could it be?” Ophelia cupped her hands around her eyes as the sun drew a shimmering path on the water toward the source of what had become an angry roar.

  “Maybe a rocket?” Fear had pitched Dante’s voice higher.

  “Let’s go!” Ophelia clambered over the cushion toward the wheel. “Fast!”

  * * * *

  Dante had been hypnotized by the brightly glimmering ocean and whatever mechanical beast was bearing down on them. An image flashed across his injured brain, as a small sliver of memory returned for a split second. The image was big and dark, and turned out to be as hard as steel, at least compared to a ski helmet and a human skull. Dante could see the old grove of tall Swiss pine trees hurtling toward him at an incredible speed. He figured he was going to die and hoped it wouldn’t hurt too badly, or at least for very long.

  Dante heard a scream. He was reasonably certain it had been made by a female. He certainly hoped he wasn’t capable of screaming like that, especially not with all the television cameras around. Imagine the snickers from the Germans crowded around their televisions watching replays of the hot-shit American downhiller, going headfirst into the woods screaming like a twelve-year-old girl!

  The sleek black hull of the bloodthirsty dude careened off the side of the much smaller Sea Ray at eighty miles per hour. Dante was a little confused as to how and why some criminally insane looking shirtless guy with a bone necklace and big white teeth painted all over his face was driving the grove of pine trees from his dreams, or maybe his memories.