“Yes,” Malink said.
“Of course you do, smart kid like you. So I am needing you to build, oh, say six ladders, thirty feet long, strong and light. Use bamboo. Are you getting this, kid?”
Malink nodded. He was grinning from ear to ear. Vincent was speaking to him again.
“You’re talkin’ my ear off, kid. So, anyway, I need you to build these ladders, see, as I am having big plans for you and the Shark People. Large plans, kid. Hugely large. I’m talking about substantial fuckin’ plans I am having. Okay?”
Malink nodded.
“Good, build the ladders and stand by for further orders.” The flyer began to back away into the taro patch.
“You said you would come back,” Malink said. “You said you would come back and bring cargo.”
“You don’t look like you been shorted on the feedbag, kid. You got your cargo in spades.”
“You said you would come back.”
Vincent threw up his hands. “So what the fuck’s this? Western Union? Don’t go screwy on me, kid. I need you.” The pilot started to fade, going as translucent as his cigarette smoke.
Malink stepped forward. “The Sky Priestess will tell us orders?”
“The Sky Priestess took a powder fifty years ago, kid. This dame doing the bump and grind on my runway is paste.”
“Paste?”
“She’s a fake, squirt. A boneable feast to be sure, but she’s running a game on you.”
“She is not Sky Priestess?”
“No, but don’t piss her off.” With that the pilot faded to nothing.
Malink leaned back against the mahogany tree and looked up through the canopy to the sky. His skin tingled and his breath was coming easy and deep. The ache in his knees was gone. He was light and strong and full, and every birdcall or rustle of leaves or distant crash of a wave seemed part of a great and wonderful song.
59
Call in the Cavalry
They had missed Guam and Saipan (passing at night) and all the Northern Mariana Islands (drifting in fog) and Johnston Island and all ships at sea (no reason, they just missed). The sunscreen had run out on the seventh day. The drinking coconuts ran out on the fourteenth.
They still had some shark meat that had been smoked and dried, but Tuck couldn’t choke down a bite of it without water. They had had nothing to drink for a full day.
They were at sea for three days before Sepie came out of her catatonia, and after a day of sobbing, she started to talk.
“I miss him,” she said. “He listen to me. He like me even when I am being mean.”
“Me too. I treated him badly sometimes too. He was a good guy. A good friend.”
“He love you very much,” Sepie said. She was crying again.
Tuck looked down, shielding his face so she couldn’t see his eyes. “I’m sorry, Sepie. I know you loved him. I didn’t mean to put him in danger. I didn’t mean to put you in danger.”
She crawled to his end of the canoe and into his arms. He held her there for a long time, rocking her until she stopped crying. He said, “You’ll be okay.”
“Kimi say he would sail me to America someday. You will take me?”
“Sure. You’ll like it there.”
“Tell me,” she said.
She grilled Tuck about all things American, making him explain everything from television to tampons. Tuck learned about men,
about how simple they were, about how easily they could be manipulated, about how good they could make a woman feel when they were nice, and how much they could hurt a woman by dying. Telling the things that they knew made them each feel smart, and sharing the duties of sailing the boat made them feel safe. It was easier to live in the little world inside the canoe rather than face the vast emptiness of the open ocean. Sepie took to curling into Tuck’s chest and sleeping while he steered. Twice Tuck fell asleep in her arms and no one steered the boat for hours. Tuck didn’t let it bother him. He had accepted that they were going to die. It seemed so easy now that he wondered why he’d made such an effort to escape it on the island.
Roberto hadn’t spoken since the first night. He hung from the lines and pointed with a wing claw when Tuck called to him. When Tuck was still reckoning, he reckoned that they were traveling at an average speed of five knots. At five knots, twenty-four hours a day, for fourteen days, he reckoned that they had traveled well over two thousand miles. Tuck reckoned that they were now sailing though downtown Sacramento. His reckoning wasn’t any better than his navigation.
On the fifteenth day Roberto took flight and Tuck watched him until he was nothing but a dot on the horizon, then nothing at all. Tuck didn’t blame him. He accepted his own death, but he didn’t want to watch Sepie go before him. At sunset he tied off the steering oar, took Sepie in his arms, and lay down in the bottom of the boat to wait.
Sometime later—he couldn’t tell how long, but it was still dark—he woke with a parched scream when a tube of mascara dropped out of the sky and hit him in the chest. Sepie sat up and snatched the tube from the bottom of the boat.
“To make you pretty,” she said. Her voice cracked on “pretty.”
Tuck was too disoriented to recognize what she was holding. He took it from her and squinted at it. “It’s mascara.”
“Roberto,” Sepie said.
Tuck looked around in the sky, but didn’t see the bat. It was beginning to get light. “You brought us mascara? We’re dying of thirst and you brought us mascara?”
“Kimi teach him,” Sepie said.
Tuck didn’t think he had the energy left for outrage, but it was coming nonetheless. “You…”
Sepie put a finger to his lips. “Listen.”
Tuck listened. He heard nothing. “What?”
“Surf.”
Tuck listened. He heard it. He also heard something else, a rhythmic stirring in the water much closer to the canoe. He looked in the direction of the noise and saw something moving over the water toward them.
“Aloha!” came out of the dark, followed by a middle-aged white man in an ocean kayak. “I guess I’m not the only one who likes to get out early,” he said.
In their first hour at the Waikiki Beach Hyatt Regency, Sepie flushed the toilet seventy-eight times and consumed two hundred and forty dollars’ worth of product from the minibar (five Pepsis and a box of Raisinets).
“You poop in here and it just goes away?”
“Yes.”
“In this big bowl?” She pointed.
“Yes.”
“You poop?”
“Yes.”
“And you push this?”
“Yes.”
“And it goes away?”
“That’s right.”
“Where?”
“To the next room.” Plumbing. They hadn’t talked about plumbing.
“And they push this and it goes away?”
“Look, Sepie, there’s a TV in here. You push this and it changes the picture.”
Tuck couldn’t be sure because they’d never had sex and because she’d told him about how she could fool a man, but he thought she might have come right then.
He made her promise not to leave the room and left her there flushing and clicking while he went to the police.
The desk sergeant at the Honolulu police department listened patiently and politely and with appropriate concern right up until Tuck said, “I know I look a little ratty, but I’ve been at sea in an open boat for two weeks.” At which point the sergeant held up his hand signifying it was his turn to talk.
“You’ve been at sea for two weeks?”
“Yes. I escaped by boat.”
“So how long ago did these alleged murders happen?”
“I don’t know exactly. One about a month ago, one longer.”
“And you’re just getting around to reporting them now?”
I told you. I was trapped on Alualu. I escaped in a sailing canoe.”
“Then,” the sergeant said, “Alualu is not a street in Honolulu.”
“No. It’s an island in Micronesia.”
“I can’t help you, sir. That’s out of our jurisdiction.”
“Well, who can help me?”