The Turtle-Girl from East Pukapuka

by Cole Alpaugh

  The man stood over the giant crayon mural and whispered, “East Pukapuka,” which meant nothing to Butter. His head was cocked to one side like a dog trying to figure out where a strange sound had come from. He was breathing hard from dancing.

  “It’s my home.” Butter’s voice was soft.

  “It’s beautiful.” The rising sun put the man in silhouette, his shadow falling across the meticulous drawing.

  “When Jesus wakes up, he’s taking us there.” Butter lifted up on one elbow, trying not to wake the white woman, but also not wanting to pull away from her warm embrace.

  “Jesus?”

  “The captain is Jesus. He’s a god, but not a very good one.”

  The man walked back and knelt down on the edge of the bedroll where Butter was cradled in the sleeping woman’s arms. “A big wave swept across your island.”

  “I know. I was there when it came for everybody.” Butter’s large brown eyes searched the man’s face. “Jesus let the big wave happen and now he feels bad. He knows he shouldn’t have done it. It took everyone to Happa Now.”

  “Happa Now?”

  “I couldn’t leave my animals behind. They need me. I opened their cages and some could fly and some could swim. I have to get back and take care of the ones that didn’t get killed.”

  “How did you survive the wave?”

  “I grabbed my turtle and held my breath,” Butter said. A tear rolled down her cheek. “Jesus let my turtle die. He can’t live in deep water without food.”

  “The captain?”

  “Yes, it was the captain’s fault. Turtles aren’t allowed on Happa Now, just people. My turtle’s just dead. But I’m not even sure Happa Now is real anymore.”

  “I’m sorry.” The man folded his long legs to sit criss-cross, leaning back against his palms.

  “Why are you here?”

  “I asked her to bring me out here to find something.” He paused, as if searching for the right words. “Have you ever had the feeling you were completely alone and lost in the world?”

  Butter was about to mention being swept away into the open sea by a giant wave, losing her one living parent and everything she loved and knew. But the ten-year-old girl just nodded her head.

  “I’m going to East Pukapuka to start my life over again.” The man pointed across the deck to the mural. “That’s where we were headed.”

  “Is this lady your wife?”

  “No, I don’t think she even likes me. Some really bad things have happened since we met.”

  “It was her boat that got wrecked?”

  “Yeah.”

  “She’s really beautiful,” Butter whispered. The woman opened her eyes and began stroking Butter’s long black hair away from her face, which was a Crayola mixture of Cedar Chest and Aztec Gold.

  “I know.”

  Butter pointed to the crayon portrait at the top of the mural. “That’s my mama.”

  “She’s really pretty, too.”

  “Yes, she is.”

  “She’s on Happa Now?” he asked.

  “I hope so. She’s with my dad, but he didn’t get taken by the wave. A big shark bit him when I was little.”

  “Wow, I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. If my animals don’t need me, if they were all killed or went away, then I’m going to see my family soon, whether or not it’s real.”

  “You’re going to Happa Now?”

  “Yeah, well, if I’m not needed on my island.”

  “How will you get there?”

  “I may need help. I once had to hold a blue-footed Booby underwater. She had such a bad infection in her chest and up under her wings. She cried all the time and I couldn’t help make it better.”

  “So you want someone to drown you?”

  “The elders say it’s a great honor to send someone to Happa Now, as long as you don’t do it because you’ve been drinking wapa juice.”

  “Your customs are a lot different than ours.”

  “You’ve never drowned a little girl?” Butter asked. It took the man a minute to realize she was teasing.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “I thought about asking Jesus, but he’s always drinking wapa juice.” Butter’s voice quieted to a hush as she looked up toward where the captain was still sleeping in the pilot house. “I think a kid needs to check out all her options before asking help from a drunk god who eats his own boogers.”

  Chapter 45

  “The last thing we wanna do is come sneakin’ up on a drug runner,” Dobby said, handing the binoculars to Ophelia. “Them bastards are all armed to the teeth, and the one who ran you over’s gotta be particularly nuts. We steer clear of them, and they return the favor. That’s the way it works out here and I got no plans to change it.”

  “I’m not arguing with you,” Ophelia said. “This trip started out as a favor to my mother. She asked me to deliver a lost cause she met on a bus near the airport, and I was about ten minutes from being free and clear.”

  Standing shoulder to shoulder with the captain up in the pilot house, Ophelia wiped the filthy front glass elements of the greasy binoculars on the tail of her shirt and then held them back up to her eyes. They took turns peering out one of the broken windows as the Gypsy Dancer chugged at five knots to within a few hundred meters of East Pukapuka.

  Happy screams and shrieks of laughter came from down on the main deck, where racer boy and the girl were busy playing with the piles of Dobby’s salvage. Ophelia had caught a glimpse of Dante wearing a dress and pillbox hat, carrying a big yellow purse. The girl was wearing a plastic Viking hat, using a sword to violently thwack everything in sight.

  “That friend of yours retarded?”

  “Ah, yeah, well, not exactly.” Ophelia concentrated on keeping the binoculars steady. The captain had repeated his promise to radio their position once he’d left them, but it was prudent to make sure the drug runner wasn’t still in these waters first.

  “He sure seems retarded.”

  “No sign of any people.” Ophelia ignored Dobby’s comment. “No boats and no smoke. And it looks like the island took a direct hit from the tsunami. We had rescuers down here just days after the disaster. Whoever wasn’t washed away was buried on the island.”

  “I seen bodies floatin’ out east of the island,” Dobby said, both hands on the rusty wheel. “That’s where I pulled the girl out of the water. It ain’t possible any of her kin survived?”

  “It wasn’t possible that the girl survived.” Ophelia lowered the binoculars and turned to Dobby. “They estimated the wave was going two hundred-forty kilometers per hour, and was ten meters high when it swept across the island. It’s wide open sea from the direction of the original earthquake. Would have been like getting hit by a train.”

  “I found her hangin’ off the back of a sea turtle.”

  “She told me her turtle died.”

  “Yeah, a big old loggerhead swimmin’ like hell trying to get away,” Dobby said, shaking his head. “Thought I was gonna be rich.”

  “That’s incredible. I saw video of the island. Some people had been caught in the trees and crushed by the wall of water. Most of the buildings were thatched huts, really primitive structures. The damage was like an enormous high tide line of trash piles. Some painted wood splinters here and there, with what turned out to be broken bodies mixed right in. It’s amazing what nature is capable of, worse than I imagined.”

  “Coupla rainy seasons and it’ll look like nothing bad ever visited,” Dobby said. “That’s the way it works down on these islands, and it’s the same with the real big storms. It all just grows back eventually. The roots run deep.”

  “Except maybe for the people,” Ophelia said.

  Dobby took back the binoculars. “Looks like there’s some wreckage on the reef.” He pointed. “It’s broke all to hell. Part of a hull, but it’s white, with light blue trim. Your drug runner was drivin’ an all black job, right?”

  “Yes, black from bow to stern.�
��

  “Then he ain’t here.” Dobby handed her the binoculars. “Coulda been a drop or pick-up, but ain’t no reason for him to hang around. He’s probably headed straight out to Tahiti or Bora Bora. I say the fucker’s long gone.”

  Chapter 46

  Albino Paul whistled while he worked, despite a growing impatience with these two imbeciles and his inability to find the cocaine.

  He’d swum back out to his boat and then motored around to the calm east side of the island, navigating through a narrow break in the reef. Now he could tuck the sleek black craft close to the beach on the leeward side of this shithole island. He was able to wade back through waist-deep water carrying the video camera and a shovel to dig for the buried cocaine. Stashing his boat was more about keeping it from getting dinged by crap peeling off the crashed fishing charter the dimwits had rammed into the reef than laying low. Albino Paul had nobody to hide from, except maybe a government bounty hunter hired to track down the maniac who had slaughtered some drug couriers at a refueling station. Few island governments would bother to invest in finding the culprit for that crime. They’d be perfectly content that all parties had moved on or were already buried and out of sight. Albino Paul didn’t want any more screw-ups, and these two morons were enough of a pain in his ass.

  Even the sandcastle on the west side no longer looked manmade, now that he’d kicked down the walls during his search for the cocaine bricks. He’d followed each set of footprints, dug into any small mounds, had tried each spot where it appeared the sand had been recently excavated. He kept digging up freshly buried bodies—the work of rescue and recovery crews. A few weeks in the hot sand and the sight of the corpses was hard on the stomach of even the most barbarous cannibal.

  He found ample evidence that the search party had swept the island—littered containers of military food rations, crumbled cigarette packs, and the occasional deep imprints from navy deck boots.

  Albino Paul wasn’t the least bit sympathetic to the fate these people had suffered, even though nature—not a stronger tribe—had wiped them out. There could be pride in being slaughtered if you fought with bravery but were outmanned. The Second World War was a battle his people had no stake in, yet their land was deemed strategically important by all sides. What use were even the finest spears and most valiant fighters when metal ships and diving airplanes strafed your villages with thousands of bullets? His elders bowed down to the occupiers, laid their meager weapons at the boots of the white, black and even yellow skinned soldiers. But when these soldiers turned their backs, his forefathers stuck a knife deep and twisted hard. Five villagers would die for every attack, but that statistic had not extinguished their pride.

  Here on this crappy little island, the people had done something worse than kneel down to foreign fighters with superior weapons. Allowing your people to be so easily destroyed at the hands of a god was cowardly. Gods were enslavers and their respect had to be earned. The Malakulans were not gods, but they were great warrior people, not simple, contemptible humans. By eating the hearts of their enemies and absorbing their strength, Albino Paul’s people had risen above humanity. The gods knew not to screw with his people because there would be hell to pay. Maybe not at first, but one day Albino Paul’s people would find a god with his back turned.

  Albino Paul was certain of his final destiny in some future life. It was one of the reasons he’d embraced technology, had learned how to repair and maintain engines, had studied space travel and astronomy on a wireless laptop, alone at night in his hut.

  “Resistance is futile,” Albino Paul dreamed of saying once he had become a cybernetic organism, absorbing another weak race into the thriving, unstoppable collective hive. That’s what his people would say once they had taken their land back from the Vanuatu government. There wasn’t a Star Trek episode Albino Paul didn’t know by heart—another benefit of the wireless Internet. The smokin’ rack on that tall, skinny chick named Seven of Nine was heaven for a bloodthirsty cannibal from Malakula.

  But that was centuries away, and now there were stolen bricks of cocaine to find. This current hassle was rapidly dissolving into a search for a needle in a haystack. Albino Paul was just about at the end of his rope when it came to these two morons.

  “How about I track down both your mothers and slice off their tits with a butcher knife?” the bloodthirsty cannibal threatened the naked upside-down former pirates. Albino Paul grabbed the rope around their middle and spun them hard, blood and snot spraying the white sand.

  “Oh, god, no!” said one.

  “Weeeeee!” said the other.

  The twisted rope came to a halt and then quickly began unwinding, spinning in the opposite direction.

  “I’ll put their tits on toast and eat them with pepper.” Albino Paul stood menacingly beneath the two dizzy pieces of worthless shit, feet at shoulder width, arms crossed in front.

  “We don’t got mothers. Ratu’s mom was a dirty crank whore who left him at the orphanage, and my dad accidentally killed my mother when he got drunk and punched her too hard.”

  “You fucking dipshits! I need you to remember! Was it near where you threw the coconuts at me? Did you dig the hole in a clearing, or was it surrounded by trees? Think, or I’ll cut your fucking tongues off!”

  “We’re sorry we threw coconuts at you. We didn’t wanna get eaten. Nobody wants to get eaten. Please don’t eat me!”

  “Shut up! Were there any big rocks around? Were you up on the bluff?”

  Prolonged silence as the former pirates quietly wobbled at the end of the rope.

  “For fuck’s sake, don’t shut up! Talk! Were you up on the bluff or not?”

  “I’m pretty sure we were here on the island.”

  “You buried a million dollars worth of cocaine and have no fucking clue where?” Albino Paul rubbed his aching forehead. “Do you idiots remember a single detail?”

  There was another long pause. “I remember it was hot.”

  The bloodthirsty cannibal turned and stormed off with his shovel.

  Chapter 47

  “What’s up with all these birds, Ratu?”

  “I don’t know, but there sure are a lot of them.” Ratu had avoided pointing out all the birds, which had been flying in and landing everywhere, practically carpeting the ground all around them. Tied up like this—upside down and back to back—they resembled a human bird feeder, and getting pecked to death wasn’t a whole lot better than being eaten by a cannibal. He was pretty sure of that.

  “I never seen so many birds.” Jope pursed his lips and began to whistle and call to them. “Here birdie, birdie, here birdie.”

  “What the fuck are you doing?”

  “Bird calls.”

  “You want them gettin’ closer to us?” Ratu asked.

  “I can do one of them big gray gooses that fly in a pointy shape.”

  “Don’t.”

  Jope tilted his chin to the ground as all the shoulder-to-shoulder birds crowded closer. It was as if some were standing on one another’s backs, there were so many. “You know a bird call to make them go away?”

  “The trees are all filled up, too.”

  When Jope had rotated around to face the trees, he said, “Holy shit, it looks just like a scene from that movie.”

  “What movie?”

  “You know, that real scary movie with all the birds.” Jope wracked his brain for the title. “Snakes on a Plane, or something like that. They shot chickens out of cannons and some fat white guy took one up the pooper on that lousy canoe trip. Remember the banjo boy?”

  Ratu recalled jumbled pieces of all the movies they’d snuck into. “Yeah, and there was that crazy fucker with a chainsaw.”

  “Brummbumbumbum …” Jope mimicked the chainsaw, which made some of the birds back off.

  “Blood everywhere!”

  “Hey, Chucky, why do you kill?” Jope asked in a deep voice and giggled maniacally.

  “I’m mad ’cause I got a little doll-size pecker!”
Ratu cackled hysterically, then coughed up a wad of bloody phlegm and spit at the closest bird.

  Jope stopped laughing, grew serious as they slowly turned. “You remember them naked pictures of that vampire chick after she was all growed up?”

  “Yeah, you showed them to me on the library computer. Then that old lady pushing around the cart of books went apeshit and kicked us out.”

  “I’d let a chick with knobs like those bite me, you know? Not a crazy cannibal, but that hot vampire chick would be okay.” Jope was quiet for a minute. “He’s comin’ back to eat us, isn’t he?”

  “Stop thinking about it or you’ll just get upset again. Think about something happy.”

  The former pirates were silent for a while, reflecting on the scary movies they’d watched to escape the Suva afternoon sun, empty beer bottles clanking at their feet and a serpentine trail of pot smoke climbing up through the projection light.

  More and more birds arrived, searching for places to land. Flocks of all types circled overhead, sounding upset and impatient. The bigger birds came barreling down on top of others already on the ground, sending them squawking and scrambling, tiny feathers flying. Those feathers floated everywhere, coating all the men’s sweaty body parts that weren’t wrapped in rope.

  “Something crazy is up with these birds,” Jope said over the noise of what seemed like tens of thousands of complaining birds. There was a flurry of wings directly above the former pirates as an elegant pair of black-naped terns landed on Jope and Ratu’s bound feet. The male immediately mounted the female from behind, humping away as if nobody was watching. “This is startin’ to get really weird,” Jope said.