by Cole Alpaugh
“What the heck?” Dante was suddenly upside down in the air again, this time over water. At least it wasn’t frozen into snow and ice, which provided some consolation.
Despite the distinctive rhythm of funky Latin music, the screaming of one female, and the booming racket of a million horsepower speed boat engines, Dante could clearly hear a calm and hopeful voice coming from somewhere up above his tumbling body. It was quite comforting, actually, even though it didn’t evoke any memories from his damaged gray matter—all childhood memories having been lost.
The plaintive call was repeated, perhaps coming from behind one of the few, almost-round puffs of clouds.
“Olly, olly, oxen free,” the voice called, and then Dante splashed down, hard.
Chapter 37
Butter’s mother and father, Anonymous and Clarence Darrow, were doing what an awful lot of couples had done after being separated on Earth and then reunited in the next life: they were going at it fast and furious.
“It was a really lovely funeral,” Anonymous whispered huskily from underneath Clarence, as his wiry hips worked like greased pistons. “Everyone in the village came to sing and toast wapa.”
“I missed you so much,” Clarence moaned as he pushed his toes against the hut wall for better leverage.
“You looked almost good as new after the weaving group sewed you back together.” Anonymous arched her back, grinding her hips to meet his lunatic thrusts. How many years had it been? Anonymous had put up with all the leers and tongue-wagging, all the disgusting mating dances and wiener-grabbing, biding her time until she could find her way back into Clarence’s arms.
Clarence showed no signs of having been bitten in two by the mischievous shark—one of the truly great things about Happa Now. And his condition didn’t go unnoticed, especially by family members of people who’d been surprised by ship propellers and bisected by big sharks.
“Oh, god, I’m getting close again.” Clarence made his funny, strained face and whimpered.
The newly arrived villagers from East Pukapuka shuffled away from the amorous noises coming from inside the loving couple’s home. One wiseass teenage boy grabbed a sharp stone and a piece of flat driftwood to begin writing a sign: “If this hut’s a rockin’ …”
“When they poured on the cooking oil and set you on fire, you glowed the color of a summer sunset,” Anonymous crooned into her husband’s ear. The long-lost voice of his recently deceased wife pushed Clarence closer to the edge of orgasm. It was all he’d imagined during those endless nights he’d lain awake and restless, waiting for his beloved wife to die.
“You … never … looked … more … beautiful,” he struggled to say in short, one-word bursts. His eyes were closed as he briefly allowed himself a quick, guiltless image of the wonderfully fat wife of the village climber—that lucky bastard. Fantasizing about other women was a no-no among the people of East Pukapuka, but this was, after all, their second go-round in less than half an hour.
“I picked your teeth out of the ashes,” Anonymous hummed into his ear. She was nearing the Promised Land—that old tingling sensation beginning in her feet and running past her knees, right up to her quivering brown thighs. “I kept them in a bowl with Butter’s baby teeth.”
“Aaaaahhhhh!” Clarence froze in painful ecstasy. Only his member continued moving. Couples were free to copulate without fear of pregnancy on Happa Now. No babies were ever born, because, like fleas and spiders, sperm and ova had been banished by the gods.
“Not yet!” cried Anonymous, trying to restart his hips as if attempting to get a stubborn donkey to ‘giddy’ up.
“I love you.” Clarence’s damp forehead collapsed between her heaving bosoms.
Inside the hut, suddenly still, the sweat-drenched couple lay folded in each other’s arms. Anonymous was waiting to see if Clarence might be up for a third reunion when a terrifying notion crossed her mind. The rogue thought came out of nowhere, but instantly seemed the only thing she should have been thinking about since setting foot on Happa Now. It made her feel like the worst person in the world, dead or alive, at that very moment. Sure, she’d spent her first few postmortem hours enjoying the freedom from a nagging case of bellyworm that hadn’t made the trip to hound her in the next life. Now guilt welled up and filled the space where the parasites had recently flourished. It was well within reason to be lost in the embrace of her long-dead husband, but some things surely were inexcusable no matter what the situation.
“Where’s Butter?” Anonymous asked her husband, who had already begun to snore.
Chapter 38
The sight of testicles drawing up and disappearing into the body of a severely frightened person was familiar to Albino Paul—what with his side work involving tracking down and eating people. It was one of the human body’s little magic tricks he always got a kick out of. That it was currently his own testicles playing hide-and-go-seek was not quite so awesome.
And it hurt a little.
Looking back over his shoulder, Albino Paul tried wrapping his mind around what had just occurred between his priceless machine and the little piece of crap boat he’d just swamped. His narcissism floated a thought toward the surface of his mind: he’d intended to do that. He’d come raging out of the blinding sun at a hundred thirty kilometers per hour, bearing down on the small, insignificant vessel in his path, cutting the wheel with perfect timing to deliver a sideswiping blow. What felt like a glancing nudge that hardly smudged the seventeen coats of deep lacquer paint on his thirteen meter speed boat was a bare-knuckle punch in the face to the little day cruiser. In truth, Albino Paul had fallen fast asleep at the helm, the warm sun on his back, the massaging rhythm of the almighty horsepower urging him into cozy cannibal dreams. Those bloodthirsty visions came easily, especially since he’d applied his hunter’s paint at the last piss break.
There was a moment in every hunt that was especially meaningful to a cannibal. Consuming the flesh was show time, the big attraction to tourists and magazine writers. When National Geographic had come poking around, his grandpa described eating the victim’s flesh as the high point, the money shot. But it was what they had wanted to hear, the idea that sold the most magazines. The real spiritual moment came from the look in the victim’s eyes when they knew they were damned. In that instant the last flicker of hope escaped their grasp and they realized their terrible fate was sealed. There might be screaming, begging, or dead silence. It didn’t matter. It was all about the look—knowing that the worst possible thing was about to happen to your body, some of it while you were still conscious.
A white Christian missionary from Chicago had given Albino Paul the greatest moment of his bloodthirsty cannibal career thus far. Tracking down and eating drug thieves was good, but they were often stoned and confused men, filled with panic instead of terror. Their lifestyle had also accustomed them to near-death situations. But the missionary had been different. He’d come sniffing around Malakula, figuring a little Bible thumping and cash would score him young island pussy. Albino Paul had taken the money and led the missionary to an empty hut in a remote spot on the island, even promising a choice between three of the youngest and purest girls.
“I’ll be back,” Albino Paul said, and the missionary agreed to wait. Twenty minutes later, the bloodthirsty cannibal returned in full hunting paint, spear in hand, penis gourd polished and proudly worn. At first the missionary appeared to be in complete denial, perhaps clinging to the hope that this was all part of the show for a sacrificial virgin. But there had been no virgins hiding behind the lunatic cannibal who stepped into the hut and slammed the handle of the spear across the top of his head.
When the missionary woke up, he began making all sorts of promises. Thousands of dollars, the cannibal’s very own apartment in a nice neighborhood in Chicago, walking distance to Wrigley Field. Did he like baseball? Did he know about the Cubs? If he was a White Sox fan, the missionary was sure he could get great tickets behind the first base dugout. Was there a
ny chance the cannibal could loosen the ropes? Being lashed to the fat tree trunk was horribly uncomfortable.
Albino Paul bent over the missionary as if to kiss him on the face, but went for his ear instead. Any hope of talking his way out of this mess had evaporated for the missionary, leaving Albino Paul the wonderful pleasure of looking into the eyes of a man who knew he was condemned to the most horrible of fates.
Albino Paul chewed the missionary’s ear lobe as if it were a wad of Juicy Fruit gum, relishing the flavor and the moment.
Albino Paul, like a bat making use of echolocation, was startled awake by a sudden change in sound. The pitch of the engine was suddenly being returned by something closing fast. Eyelids flying open, he cut the wheel instinctively—at the last possible instant—creaming the little boat with a tremendous slap of water and fiberglass.
The cannibal also had a snapshot image of a large white man sitting at the back of the boat, head cocked like a curious dog, about to be ejected as if from a wounded fighter jet. The white man did in fact become airborne, still in the sitting position—an awful lot like Rodin’s Thinker.
At the helm was a woman, also white and particularly large. In that brief moment, she appeared to be frantically trying to start the engine, apparently aware her boat was about to receive a mortal blow.
The strike from the sleek speed boat cracked the hull of the much less significant boat, splintering wood and fiberglass. And although it threatened to roll, the full gas tank provided just enough counter ballast, which allowed it to rock back into an upright position. Water flooded the wound, swamping the boat in seconds, but by the time it was a mere speck on Albino Paul’s aft horizon, the white peoples’ little boat was still refusing to sink.
Heart pounding robustly and testicles still in absentia, Albino Paul checked his GPS, corrected the wheel slightly, and began surveying the location where East Pukapuka was about to appear.
Tempted to circle the island and get the lay of the land prior to commencing his attack, the cannibal could see he may have come all this way for nothing. It was immediately apparent why the scumbag coke thieves hadn’t gone any farther. A mid-size fishing boat floundered capsized and decapitated on the shallow reef that appeared to encircle the archipelago.
Albino Paul approached the wreck and dropped anchor. He was pissed that he’d have to swim—his hunting paint would wash away—but any hopes for a hunt seemed to be dashed. If the bodies were recoverable and fish hadn’t done too much damage, he could still stage a massacre. The very idea of eating cold meat turned his stomach, but he’d do what he’d have to in order to get paid. He grabbed his spear and jumped in. Propelled by one arm, he got enough of a foothold to swim up and over the reef to examine the ravaged hull. He prodded empty seats that would have held bodies and peered down into the single berth, but there were no drowned thieves still attached to the wreckage. There were just oscillating bits of the mangled fishing charter, and a dissipating ring of oil and gas that made the water slick and rank.
Albino Paul turned toward the island and lunged back into the deep water, swimming until his feet hit sandy bottom. The shoreline showed signs of some recent disaster—a tropical storm, or maybe even a tsunami. The palm and puka trees that hadn’t snapped were beginning to right themselves, reaching back for the sun. He paused, waist deep, leaning against his spear, the gentle push of small waves from behind urging him forward. No signs of people—no smoke from cooking fires, no buildings. He stood sniffing the air, but being upwind only smelled the boat wreckage. At the closest jut of land, Albino Paul tried to make sense of a huge mound of sand. Piled up away from the beach, at the fringe of the decimated vegetation, it would have been completely out of place anywhere except at some touristy resort beach.
The huge sandcastle was protected by a moat and head-high walls. There were turrets and arrow slits, and the front entrance was a barbican where the encroaching enemy was to become confined and lose the ability to defend itself. Enthralled by the deadly weapons of the period, Albino Paul had read dozens of books on medieval castles but was completely confounded by the one facing him here in the South Pacific.
A flash of motion from the parapet followed by a heavy kerplunking sound in the water a few meters behind Albino Paul made him jump. Another blurry flash … This time the projectile struck the cannibal squarely in the forehead, knocking him off his feet, backwards and underwater. Coughing and rubbing at the angry knot sprouting from his sore head, Albino Paul saw that the small hairy coconut that had struck him now bobbed at his loin cloth.
“Son of a bitch!” Shifting into bloodthirsty cannibal hunting mode, he let out a tribal shriek and began plowing through the water amid rapid volleys of more small coconuts. Once out of the water, Albino Paul could see the castle defenders twenty meters dead ahead: two skinny black men on the parapet whose wide eyes expressed absolute terror. Like any good cannibal, Albino Paul could smell fear, and this close up the air was absolutely dripping with it. The fear turned him into an unstoppable killing machine. He let out another ancient tribal shriek to let everyone know resistance was futile. Coconuts bounded off his shoulders and chest; one clacked off his right knee and opened a nasty cut. But he charged on, breaking into a sprint as he pulled away from the deep sand. He leaped across the dry moat and scrambled up the side of the wall, making the same battle cries of the hunt—practiced over recent years in front of pasty-white tourists with video cameras and dumbstruck faces—that his grandfathers had made. As he breached the wall, Albino Paul pulled back his spear, intending to force these two thieves into surrender with sheer terror; then a new, unexpected weapon was introduced into this combat. A sliced-open brick of nearly pure cocaine slapped him across the eyes and nose, like a pie to the face, sending a miniature mushroom cloud all around his upper body, temporarily blinding him and filling his lungs with burning powder.
As he lay slumped over the sandcastle wall, clenching his eyes and gasping for breath, Albino Paul braced for the spears he expected to tear into his defenseless body. Instead, he heard retreating footsteps and the unmistakable sound of two grown men crying like frightened children as they escaped into the devastated jungle.
Chapter 39
“Ratu, you remember back when we stole all them watches?”
“That was last week.”
“Them was the best days. I don’t think we ever gonna have days like them again.”
“Yeah, Jope, they were the best days.”
The small-time Fijian crooks lay splayed out in the shade from the tallest wall of their sandcastle, hearts palpitating wildly from what should have been fatal doses of cocaine. They’d done their best to copy the castle design from the cover of one of Jope’s comic books called Dark Age Slut Princess from Narnia. They panted like dogs, trying to cool themselves. They’d reached the point of terminal dehydration, as their bodies had become incapable of producing sweat.
“Did your shark-god say when the cannibals would get here?” Ratu panted, not the least bit surprised that the cloud formation above was in the shape of a Pit Bull Terrier lifting its leg to pee on a young boy. He had fond memories of his childhood dog, Killer. Ratu had been taken out of the orphanage three times. The first family had lasted almost an entire year. The man of that family had used Ratu for cleaning his shithole house and any other lousy chores he could think of. The man had beaten the dog for being a lousy fighter; he’d beaten Ratu just for the hell of it.
The instant Killer had been let off the leash for training, he’d torn down the back alley and disappeared for days at a time. He hadn’t returned until nearly dying from scrounging putrid shellfish. Five-year-old Ratu would sneak Killer scraps he’d collected while the dog was missing, sneaking the food to the bony, cowering dog who’d come back because this was apparently as good as it was ever going to get for him. Killer would repay the little boy by turning sideways and lifting his leg, dousing young Ratu in warm dog piss to claim the child as his own. And the man of the family would take the dog
back and beat him some more because this was the best dog he’d ever be able to afford. Ratu loved that dog and it broke his heart to be sent back to the orphanage, despite all the beatings. Having a dog love you was just about the best thing in the world. It was probably the reason Ratu appreciated Jope so much.
“He’s not just my shark-god, Ratu. He’s everybody’s shark-god.”
“Okay, so when did everybody’s shark-god say they were coming?”
“They’re coming real soon. The cannibals are right on our tail and we’re in big-time shit.” Jope wanted very much to crawl down to the cool water, but he knew how hot the white sand in between had become. The beach was on fire and the former pirates could feel the heat radiating all around them. Digging a shallow hole on the leeward side beach to bury the cocaine booty—all except one brick to keep their hearts beating—had sapped the very last of their energy. They walked, then crawled, back through the broken jungle, lunging across piles of brown palm fronds and downed pukas. There they found even more evidence of the bad things that had visited this island. On the narrow path Jope tripped over a rag doll, cursed hoarsely, but then picked up the little bundle and carried it for a while like an American football. He thought it would be nice to have some extra comfort, especially since Ratu’s temper had gotten worse. When they absolutely had to take a break from their zombie-like march—they were down to about ten meters of progress each minute—the pair collapsed in broken shade.
“I have to name my new baby doll.” Jope’s head ached and his vision was blurry, but when he pulled the thin soiled blanket away from the baby’s face, he saw it was a dead human child. He brushed a sticky slug away from its empty eye socket. It had kinky hair like his—after he’d slept outside on the sidewalk in the rain. He’d wake up in front of the bar window with hair just like this little baby’s. Jope checked and saw it was a little boy.