The Turtle-Girl from East Pukapuka

by Cole Alpaugh

  “It already got a name,” Ratu said quietly. A few minutes later, more tired than when they’d sat down to rest, the pirates trudged on, leaving the baby boy alone in the shade.

  “We should keep lookout,” Ratu said, head lolling on the top of his skinny neck. The tall walls of their castle were cool and comforting. “You go first.”

  “I’m so tired, Ratu.” But Jope didn’t argue. Instead, he rolled to his belly and shimmied up the side of the interior wall, careful not to spill the piles of small coconuts they’d collected for their arsenal. He squinted out into the glaring sun and was mildly surprised to see the awesome vision of a sleek speed boat swaying in the gentle surf, just beyond the reef. It wasn’t quite as good as the vision he’d seen while trudging through the interior—of the noni plant that had mysteriously transformed into the big-melon stripper back at the Sticky Finger Bar in Lautoka. Jope would have had his way with the bush if Ratu hadn’t socked him and called him a pervert for humping a bush.

  “You gotta see this, Ratu,” Jope crooned, staring out at the exotic hallucination. “I bet that Sticky Finger stripper would do me for free if I had one of them. I’d pull that up to the dock, tell her to come see my big black machine, yes sir.”

  “What you runnin’ your mouth about, dumbass?” Ratu was too tired to share Jope’s hallucination. And that Sticky Finger stripper was a hundred fifty kilos and had a big bald spot on the top of her head.

  “It’s a cool black racing boat, Ratu.” Jope shaded his eyes, jealous of all the strippers and whores a boat like that would attract. “It got maybe ten-thousand horsepower and goes faster than a jet plane.”

  “That’s good, Jope.” Ratu closed his eyes to the sound of his friend’s voice and began to drift off.

  “It has color television and a water bed.” Jope imagined lying in the water bed next to the Sticky Finger stripper, looking up at the mirror on the ceiling. He flashed himself a big thumbs-up sign in the mirror, and the stripper giggled, nudging closer. “You own that boat and everybody would know not to call you a dumbass no more. They know you could rev up that big engine and blow them right outta the ocean.”

  “It have a bar on it?” Ratu mumbled, nearly asleep.

  “Hell, yeah, there’s two bars on it! You gotta have two bars ’cause so many people wanna come party with the pimp king who got a badass boat.”

  “You take me for a long, fast ride, okay?” Ratu nestled his head in the sand.

  “Hey, some crazy fucker is messin’ around on my boat,” Jope said, suddenly upset at the change to his awesome hallucination. “Looks like one of them Aborigine pricks always pickin’ fights at the dive bar across the street from the Sticky Finger.”

  “That’s good, Jope.”

  “Now he’s poking around the wreck with a long spear, Ratu, like he’s lookin’ for something.”

  “Tell me when he finds it, Jope.” Ratu yawned big and round, creating bottomless crevasses between the straining tendons of his neck.

  “Hey, he’s comin’ this way.” Jope was beginning to seriously doubt his hallucination.

  “Let me know when it’s my turn to drive.”

  “Ratu!” Jope cried out, his flailing arms knocking over the piles of stacked coconuts, a dozen of which rolled down and bounced off Ratu’s head.

  “What’s the matter with you!”

  “It’s the cannibal!” Jope pointed out to the ocean with one hand while grabbing a handful of Ratu’s hair and pulling with the other. “He’s here to eat us!”

  “Let go of my hair!”

  “I don’t want to be eaten!” Jope looked from side to side in panic. “He comin’ to eat us!”

  “Christ, who’s here, Jope?” Ratu pulled away from his friend’s grasp and hoisted himself to the top of the wall. “Oh, shit!”

  “Don’t let him eat us, Ratu!”

  “Shut up and grab the coconuts,” Ratu ordered. “Don’t throw any ’til he gets close enough to really hurt.” But Jope had already begun wildly heaving the small coconuts rapid-fire. The first two didn’t make it out of the sandcastle, just slammed into the wall and created little craters.

  Ratu got his footing and took aim with his own coconut. The bloodthirsty cannibal stood waist deep in water, a sitting duck despite the long distance. Ratu reached back and then heaved the coconut with all his might. It arced high over the nearly still water before delivering a direct hit to the middle of the cannibal’s forehead. The bloodthirsty cannibal fell backward, disappearing under the water.

  “You killed him!” Jope screamed with glee, reaching to hug his best friend in victory; then the cannibal rose from the dead and began hollering some lunatic, flesh-eating chant. Ratu and Jope began tossing the coconuts one after the other, blindly, as the cannibal bore down on their castle.

  “Don’t eat me!” Jope cried, as the cannibal easily hurdled the dry moat they’d spent hours digging and mounted the wall directly in front of their firing position. Their coconut arsenal spent, Jope reached for the brown brick of nearly pure cocaine they’d used to keep their spirits up. He slammed it into the hideous face of the human flesh-eater, just as the cannibal prepared to shish-kebob him on a sharp spear.

  With the bloodthirsty cannibal surely chomping his razor-like teeth at their heels, Ratu and Jope made their inglorious retreat toward the interior of the brutalized island.

  “Don’t let him eat me!” Jope hollered, and as they ran, both cried like frightened children.

  Chapter 40

  Butter watched the red streak rise in the twilight and then drift like a bird gliding on a warm updraft. It floated in the distant sky, sparkling like a tiny, angry star. Maybe “angry” was the wrong word, thought Butter. Maybe it was a tiny, important star. The line and twinkling mass were mirrored in the water below. Had she really just witnessed the birth of a star? Were all stars born from the sea, climbing to their place in the night sky, a compressed broiling flare, full of mad energy?

  Butter’s mama hadn’t known where stars came from, or what special purpose they served besides nighttime decoration. If the moon wasn’t keeping them company, they didn’t even offer enough light to keep you from tripping over your own feet. Maybe somewhere a book about the stars offered a full explanation. But they all seemed so far away and impossible to know. They were probably a mystery even to the owners of the supply ship and the flying soldier, who was now old enough to be young again on Happa Now. If the flying soldier had known, he‘d certainly never shared any special knowledge with her people.

  “A star,” Butter said aloud, as if to announce its birth. “A beautiful baby star.”

  Dobby was on his knees under the light of a dangling bare bulb, hands coated in grease, trying to scrub tiny motor parts clean with gasoline and a toothbrush. Looking up into Butter’s eyes brought him groaning to his feet and then scrambling up the ladder to the bridge. He reappeared with a metal tube thrust to his eye and aimed it toward the glowing spectacle, twisting and turning the object in his hands. The faulty god dashed back and forth, in and out of the pilot house, acting excited about this new life in the heavens.

  “Do you think more will be born?” Butter called up to him, but he was too busy to answer.

  * * * *

  Being a salvage man first, Dobby turned his short range radio to channel sixteen and listened without touching the microphone. Any transmission from his end might tip off other ships out of visual range of the flare, which could mean he’d have to bid for the tow job. And if the distressed boat was floundering, chatter on the radio could bring witnesses to any creative bargaining for rescuing the crew. Dobby was a mostly honorable mariner and never let a distress signal go unanswered. It didn’t matter what your motivation was, as long as you were willing to step up to aid someone in trouble. Who did it hurt if you also made a buck or two? Everybody won when you came to the rescue and the rescued expressed their gratitude with a little something you could spend at the bar.

  But the shorter range VHF emergency chan
nel was dead silent, not even a click. It could mean nothing, or it could mean anything from an electrical problem to a fire. Dobby checked the compass and started the engine, sending a plume of black smoke into the purple sky.

  The flare was no more than ten kilometers to the northwest, maybe forty minutes at a safe speed. Dobby had to ease the tugboat around what might be shallow waters—the Gypsy Dancer’s depth-finder having been swiped by some lowlifes at the Suva docks. Stealing boats or navigation gear in these parts was akin to horse thievery back in North Texas. And if the police didn’t catch the stinking thief, they might just find him swinging from a long stretch of rope.

  “No boat should come within five hundred yards out here,” Dobby told Butter, warning the little savage to keep an eye out for approaching boats while he was asleep or drunk. “You see a boat, you start hollering like there’s no tomorrow.”

  “Where are the yards?”

  “Christ, girl, this is a yard.” Dobby had held his arms out the length of a yard, but the puzzled look remained on her face. “Come get me if you see any boats. That ain’t too difficult, is it?”

  “What if they’re hungry?”

  “Pirates don’t want your food, they want your valuables. And you sure as hell don’t wanna know what they do to a female they get their hands on, even a dirty little savage girl.”

  “My mama said pirates take misbehaving children away on their giant wood boats,” Butter explained to Dobby. “They have blue beards and legs made out of the same wood as their boats. There’s a book written about pirates.”

  “That’s pretty darn close,” Dobby said. “She tell you about the big old parrots they keep for pets? They sit right on the pirate captain’s shoulder barking out orders.”

  “Parrots don’t bark!” Butter said, giggling. Dobby smiled down at her. She hardly ever sounded or acted like a normal kid. Not that he knew much about normal kids. But this damn girl sure seemed to spend too much time brooding, crying, or complaining.

  As Dobby cut the big rusty wheel, something warm leaned into his left hip.

  “It’s a new star,” Butter told him. She’d snuck up the ladder to the bridge despite being warned to keep out of the pilot house because there were too many things she shouldn’t be messing with in here. In truth, he just didn’t want her to see the dog-eared girlie magazines stacked along the back wall of the cabin. Most of the photographs didn’t reveal any more nakedness than what she’d described on her island. Dobby had been to more than a hundred inhabited islands. Quite a few had swinging boobs every which way you looked, but not one had been completely bottomless, too. And while the idea of all that exposed punani had a certain appeal, Dobby looked down at his own dimpled belly and figured he wouldn’t be such an enchanting vision were he to hang his hat on the girl’s island for a spell. If there was anything left of it, that is. And the very idea of sitting in the sand without britches was equally unappetizing.

  “That ain’t no star,” Dobby said, as the girl pressed into him, her little head against the side of his belly. Cool air was blowing in through the broken windows, so Dobby took his left hand off the wheel and draped it about her shoulders. It was the first time he’d touched the girl since she’d pitched a fit over him killing babies and innocent animals.

  “I saw it born.” Butter’s arms half circled his big round belly, which jiggled mightily as the snubbed bow of the tugboat plowed through the chop toward the wafting star. “Everything is born in the sea.”

  “That’s what you people think, huh? I guess it ain’t so wrong. Some of the savages in these parts believe airplanes brought people to Earth from outer space. Came here like they was riding on the Mayflower, just stepped off and started fishin’ and havin’ babies.”

  “No, people came from the sea.” Butter shook her head against Dobby’s belly. A new, cooler breeze had rushed in as Dobby rolled the wheel a quarter turn. “Even you came from the sea. All gods do. Everything.”

  “I’m from Texas.” But Dobby didn’t mean to argue with the shivering girl who hugged him tightly, her face turned to watch the sparkling object out of one eye.

  The star flickered brightly, like a super nova, and went black.

  “Where did it go?” Butter pulled away to search the sky.

  “Over there.” Dobby pointed up into the sky with the hand that had been rubbing her bony shoulders through the thin material of her dress. “Looks like it found its home right up there.”

  The Gypsy Dancer left a white wake in the black sea, engines firing and sometimes misfiring, sending puffs of thick oily smoke up toward the new twinkling star.

  Chapter 41

  “Are there sharks out here?”

  “It’s the ocean, racer boy. There are four hundred kinds of sharks.”

  “Do they all bite?”

  Dante had splashed down twenty feet from the boat without dying instantly. The return swim was effortless, bringing back images of his sunset adventures in his island dreams. The splintered boat refused to sink, although only the canvas sunscreen, windshield, and top half of the control panel remained above water.

  Ophelia grabbed for the radio microphone, but the electrical system had shorted out from the impact or the deluge of salt water. Next she fumbled for the emergency kit strapped to the base of her pilot’s seat—now under three feet of water. She set the box on top of the instrument console and popped the latch. Inside were two dye packs, a signaling mirror, six hand launch flares, and a twelve-gauge flare gun with a single parachute flare already chambered.

  Ophelia slammed the lid closed and turned to the hatches stuffed with life preservers.

  “You okay?” Dante had swum right into the boat, barking his left shin on the submerged fiberglass side.

  “We’re in big trouble.” Ophelia tossed him one of the bright orange life preservers, which he put on. He was standing in waist deep water with the floor of the boat slowly undulating beneath his feet. Ophelia clipped into her own life preserver and then lumbered onto the bow to find and jettison the anchor.

  “Do you have food or water in your backpacks?” Ophelia grabbed two more life preservers and climbed back to the pilot’s chair.

  “A bag of granola and three packs of Oreos.” Dante turned to retrieve the submerged bags from a compartment under the rear seat cushions, which began floating away. “And two jugs of Gatorade. The other bag just has clothes and a bunch of cash.”

  “Here, tie them both to this.” Ophelia flipped him one of the life preservers. “Then clip it to the railing. If the boat starts going down, try to grab them. We’ll need the Gatorade.”

  “You think the boat will go under?”

  “It’s a matter of when, not if, racer boy.”

  “I’m sorry I made you bring me out here.” Dante scanned the horizon. No sign of land and the water looked like it might be a hundred miles deep.

  “You didn’t make me do anything.” Ophelia looked around the boat as if to figure out what was left to do. “The radio’s dead, but we have some flares.”

  “What about the boat that crashed into us? He knows we’re here.”

  “He doesn’t give a shit about us,” Ophelia said. “A speed boat this far out is probably a drug runner.”

  “Did you see him? He didn’t look like a drug runner. He looked like a crazy headhunter.”

  “Then he was a headhunter in a sixty-thousand dollar boat blasting dance music.”

  “I thought I heard music. Do you know how far the island is?” Dante asked. It didn’t take an epiphany to make him realize his life was completely in the Raro cop’s hands. In the past year, his life had pretty much been handed from person to person—from doctors to nurses, and then to therapists. Even before that, he’d relied on downhill coaches to convince him to take their line through blind spots in courses where bad decisions meant piling into trees at sixty miles per hour. If not for Ophelia, Dante knew he would just crawl up above the console and take a nap until being rescued or accepting whatever other out
come presented itself. He would see if he could sleep his way through this pickle.

  “If I’d known we were going to get run over, I’d have checked our position more closely. The island can’t be more than a few kilometers away.”

  “So we can swim?”

  “The current is strong, maybe five kilometers per hour to the south. It would be like trying to swim across a rip tide.” Ophelia gazed longingly to the east, to where she could almost see a bump on the horizon that would be land.

  “So we’re drifting away from land?”

  “Yeah, well, that’s relative, isn’t it?”

  “So what’s to the south of us?” Dante asked. “Where are we headed?”

  “I’m pretty sure the next land would be Antarctica.”

  “You mean the South Pole?”

  “Uh, sort of, yeah.” Ophelia got busy again, lashing empty gas cans together.

  “Oh, Christ, polar bears.”

  “I’m pretty sure they’re just at the North Pole.”

  “I guess that’s good.”

  “Yes, if we end up drifting six thousand kilometers, we won’t have polar bears to worry about,” Ophelia said.

  “Are you going to shoot a flare?”

  “We should wait a little, let the sun drop. Unless we start going under,” Ophelia added ominously. “It’ll be easier to spot. And maybe we’ll be able to see some ship lights.”

  “I wasn’t really looking forward to it getting dark.” Dante sloshed forward to balance against the co-pilot’s seat. Ophelia sat against the console and faced him. The air was still hot, but the water had taken on a chill. “Do people get hypothermia in this kind of water?”

  “Not for a couple of days, maybe longer. We found survivors ten days after their boat capsized twenty kilometers out. It all came down to a two liter jug of water they’d grabbed from the store at the last minute. It ended up saving their lives.”

  “Wow, ten days and they were fine?” Dante looked around at all that water and tried to imagine what ten long nights would be like. All those hungry things swimming in the dark right under you.