like crumpled parchment. Salt was crusted at the corners of his mouth.
“Kimi, you want a drink?” Tucker crawled onto the gas tank and held the bottle out to the navigator.
Kimi took the bottle. “Thank you,” he said. He wiped the mouth of the bottle on his dress and took a deep drink, then poured some water into his palm and held it while Roberto lapped it up. He handed the bottle back to Tucker.
“You drink the rest. You bigger.”
Tucker nodded and drained the bottle. “Who’s Malcolme?”
“Malcolme buy me from my mother. He from Sydney. He a pimp.”
“He bought you?”
“Yes. My mother very poor in Manila. She can’t feed me, so she sell me to Malcolme when I am twelve.”
“What about your father?”
“He not with us. He a navigator on Satawan. He meet my mother in Manila when he is working on a tuna boat. He marry her and take her to Satawan. She stay for ten years, but she not like it. She say women like dirt to Micronesians. So she take me and go back to Manila when I am nine. Then she sell me to Malcolme. He dress me up and I make big money for him. But he mean to me. He say I have to get rid Roberto, so I run away to find my father to finish teach me to be a navigator. They hear of him on Yap. They say he lost at sea five year ago.”
“And he was the one that taught you to navigate?” Tucker knew it was a snotty question, but he had no idea what to say to someone whose mother had sold him to a pimp.
Kimi didn’t catch the sarcasm. “He teach me some. It take long time to be navigator. Sometime twenty, thirty year. You want learn, I teach you.”
Tucker remembered how difficult it had been to learn Western navigation for his pilot’s license. And that was using sophisticated charts and instru-ments. He could imagine that learning to navigate by the stars—by memory, without charts—would take years. He said, “No, that’s okay. It’s different for airplanes. We have machines to navigate now.”
They bailed until the sun was high in the sky. Tuck could feel his skin baking. He found some sunscreen in the pack and shared it with Kimi, but it was no relief from the heat.
“We need some shade.” The tarp was gone. He rifled the pack, looking for something they could use for shade, but for once Jake Skye’s bag of tricks failed them.
By noon Tuck was cursing himself for pouring out the gallon of fresh water during the storm. Kimi sat in the bottom of the boat, stroking Roberto’s head and mumbling softly to the panting bat.
Tuck tried to pass the time by cleaning his cuts and applying the antibiotic ointment from Jake’s first-aid kit. By turning his back and crouching, he was able to create enough privacy to check on his damaged penis. He could see infection around the sutures. He imagined gangrene, amputation, and consequently suicide. Then, looking on the bright side, he realized that he would die of thirst long before the infection had gone that far.
22
Finding Spam
The octopus jetted across the bottom, over a giant head of brain coral, and tucked itself into a tiny crevice in the reef. Sarapul could see the light purple skin pulsing in the crevice three fathoms down. He took a deep breath and dove, his spear in hand.
The octopus, sensing danger, changed color to the rust brown of the coral around it and adjusted its shape to fit the crannies of its hiding place. Sarapul caught the edge of the crevice with his left hand and thrust in his spear with his right. The spear barely pierced one of the octopus’s tentacles and it turned bright red in a chromatic scream, then released its ink. The ink expanded into a smoky cloud in the water. Sarapul dropped his spear to wave the ink away before making another thrust. But his air was gone. He left his spear in the crevice and shot to the surface. The octopus sensed the opening and jetted out of the crevice to a new hiding place before Sarapul knew it was gone.
Sarapul broke the surface cursing. Only three fathoms, eighteen feet, and he couldn’t stay down long enough to tease an octopus out of its hole. As a young man, he could dive to twelve fathoms and stay down longer than any of the Shark men. He was glad that no one had been there to see him: an old man who could barely feed himself.
He pulled off his mask and spit into it, then rinsed it with seawater. He looked out to sea, checking for any sign of the sharks that lived in abund-ance off the reef. There was a boat out there, perhaps half a mile off the reef, drifting. He put on his mask and looked down to get a bearing on his spear so he could retrieve it later. Then he swam a slow crawl toward the drifting boat.
He was winded when he reached the boat and he hung on the side for a few minutes, bobbing in the swell, while he caught his breath. He made his way around to the bow and pulled himself up and in. A huge black bat flew up into his face and winged off toward the island. Sarapul cursed and said some magic words to protect himself, then took a deep breath and examined the bodies.
A man and a woman—and not long dead. There was no smell and no swelling of the bellies. The meat would still be fresh. It had been too long since he’d tasted the long pig. He pinched the man’s leg to test the fat. The man moaned. He was still alive. Even better, Sarapul thought. I can eat the dead one and keep the other one fresh!
PART TWO
Island of the Shark People
23
Deus Ex Machina
The Sky Priestess first appeared in 1944 on the nose of a B-26 bomber. Conjured out of cans of enamel by a young aviator named Jack Moses, she lay cool and naked across the aluminum skin, a red pump dangling from a dainty toe, a smile that promised pleasure that no mortal woman could offer. As soon as Moses laid the final brushstroke on her black-seamed stocking, he knew there was something special about this one, something electric and alive that would break his heart when they flew her off to the Pacific. He caught a kiss in his palm and placed it gently on her bottom, then backed down the ladder to survey his work.
He stood on the tarmac for perhaps half an hour, just looking at her, charmed, wishing that he could take her home, or to a museum, or lift her off the skin of the bomber and put her on the ceiling of a cathedral.
Jack Moses didn’t notice the major standing at his side until the older man spoke.
“She’s something,” the major said. And although he wasn’t sure why, he removed his hat.
“Ain’t she,” Moses said. “She’s off to Tinian tomorrow. Wish I was going with her.”
The major reached out and squeezed Moses’s shoulder; he was a little short of breath and the Sky Priestess had set off a stag film in his head. “Put some clothes on her, son. We can’t have muffin showing up on a newsreel.”
“Yes, sir. I don’t have to put a top on her, do I?”
The major smiled. “Son, you put a top on her, I’ll have you court-marshaled.”
“Yes, sir.”
Moses saluted the major and scampered back up the ladder with his brushes and his red enamel and painted a serpentine scarf between her legs.
A week later, as a young pilot named Vincent Bennidetti was leading his crew across the runway to take the Sky Priestess on her first mission, he turned to his navigator and said, “I’d give a year’s pay to be that scarf.”
A half century away, Beth Curtis pinned a big red bow into her hair, then, one at a time, worked sheer black-seamed stockings up her legs. She stood in front of the mirror and tied the red scarf around her waist, letting the ends trail long between her legs. She stepped into the red pumps, did a quick turnaround in the mirror, and emerged from her bungalow to the sound of the Shark People’s drums welcoming her, the Sky Priestess.