Richard had changed. Hadn’t he announced that he was going back to open a bakery?
So what happened to this new Richard when Javi reappeared? When he announced he’d fixed his messes, that Dex was bailing them out, that things could go back on track to where they had been before they fled Los Angeles? What had the new Richard done? Collapsed like a badly whipped soufflé. Become a yes-man. Proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that all his changes were illusory.
Javi had already been on the islands for a week vacationing in Mooréa and Bora-Bora on money he’d borrowed from Lorna. He’d been hustling a job as executive chef at the Aloha Pearl, just in case, when he saw the Crusoe cam and decided he’d better hightail it over. On top of everything, he’d gotten buddy-buddy with Dex, but Dex was Richard’s friend (he sounded like a pathetic six-year-old). And then Javi made moves on Wende, not to mention in the far past he’d had an affair with Ann. Why didn’t Richard just punch him out?
But the pinnacle of Richard’s self-loathing was connected to the pink, hairless piglet that Javi had bought, yanking him out of the supply boat and draping the little fellow over his shoulders like some pillaging Viking. Richard wasn’t a child, Richard knew the porcine score, but he had turned a blind eye once again . With everything else happening — the wedding, Loren, and Ann — it was easy to shove to the back of his mind the image of the cute little guy in his pen, plowing through the piles of scraps coming out of the kitchen, an animated, curly-tailed garbage disposal. Richard lied to himself that the piglet was a kind of pet, that at the right moment he would be set free. Right. On a barren motu , surrounded by carnivorous, luau-obsessed Polynesians, owned by the reckless, heartless Javi, that piglet didn’t have a swine’s chance in hell, unless it had a protector. If ever fate arranged a stage for a man to stand up for what he believed in, this was it, Richard was that protector, yet he had almost done nothing.
That morning they had been awoken from their hangovers by terrified squeals. Richard broke out in a sweat at the childlike screams of the restrained piglet. He knew what was about to happen; in fact he was imagining it in far more vivid, 3-D detail than he would see if he were watching the actual butchering. It was no different for him than listening to a grisly murder taking place, but he did not have the courage to jump out of bed and run to stop it. He worried about making a fool of himself. When at long last the air was still, the silence was trebly damning.
And then it happened. As if spirits had entered him and given him the strength he longed for but always fell short of, he jumped out of bed, startling Ann. He ran in his underwear to the location of the pen. He saw the piglet tied down to a rock slab; Javi stood above him with a hatchet.
“Don’t you dare touch that pig!”
Richard didn’t care any longer if he looked like a fool as long as he knew he wasn’t a coward.
As Javi made the entire non-piglet-highlighted luau, Richard sat on his lanai, petting his new snouted companion as he rested on a bed of banana leaves at his feet. Later he sat down at the judgment table and ate the terribly overspiced food, carefully avoiding the fish. There was lots of grumbling around the table about the inauthenticity of a luau minus a pig. That’s when he noticed it. Without Richard’s tempering influence over the last month, Javi had lifted off into the outer sphere of unpalatable. Each bite he took was inedible, yet Richard did eat it. He didn’t care. He was saved. The restaurant never would have succeeded without him.
* * *
Another foul spasm erupted from Richard’s bowels. Someone was knocking at his bathroom door. He wanted privacy.
“Go away!”
“It’s Titi.”
“Go away, Titi.”
“I brought you coconut milk.”
“I can’t put anything in my mouth.”
“It will help your stomach.”
A pause.
“Leave it at the door.”
“Okay, but drink it.”
“Titi?”
“Yes?”
“Thank you.”
“Sure.”
“Titi?”
“Yes?”
Pause.
“It was a terrible meal, wasn’t it?”
Titi sighed. “The worst I ever ate.”
“I should never have let it happen.”
“You are too kind to that man.”
“I’m a coward.” What was that saying about dead lions and live dogs? Without a doubt, he was a dachshund.
Titi didn’t know the details of the trouble, but it was clear that this stranger, Javi, brought agony to Richard and unhappiness to Ann, so she wanted him gone for their sake. She had dropped some leaves and powders into Javi’s sauces to ensure disgrace. As penance for making the others sick, she had eaten the food also.
“Do you know what I think?” Titi asked.
“What?”
“This Javi is a very bad man.”
“Really?”
“I watch him. I see. He doesn’t wash his hands when he comes into the kitchen. He tastes everything with his fingers. He licks them.”
“I see.”
“You are a good man. Very clean.”
“I appreciate that.”
“Clean is important.”
* * *
While everyone else retired to a toilet with a burn that extended from the esophagus to the colon, Cooked and Javi stayed at the table and drank beer, both immune to the incendiary food.
“This is a nice spread you have,” Javi said.
Cooked nodded. He was very, very drunk.
“Connor over at the Aloha Pearl said it was underutilized. Do you know my buddy, Connor?”
Cooked shook his head, trying to block out Javi’s voice as well as his face.
“Connor is someone you should know. I’ll introduce you two. We’ll go party sometime.”
Cooked picked up a new beer and drank it down in one gulp.
Javi watched, impressed. “That’s my man!”
Cooked said nothing.
“Anyway, his feelings were that maybe a partnership, a mutually exclusive arrangement—”
“The Aloha Pearl is a shithole. They pay below the official wage and cheat their workers.”
“Maybe they have a few issues.”
“‘Aloha’ is Hawaiian. Do you understand how messed up that is? Aren’t you leaving today?”
Cooked was towering over Javi, and somehow his hand was encircling Javi’s neck, not necessarily in a threatening way, unless one wanted to be picky and ask what good reason he could have for holding a man’s neck in his hand in the first place. To Javi’s credit, he didn’t appear unduly concerned; he just ducked out of Cooked’s hold to grab another beer.
“Some dinner that was, huh?”
“It made everyone sick.”
Javi was tempted to try to get something negative out of Cooked about Richard’s dishes, but considering the recent hand around his neck, he thought better of it.
“Well, got a long flight home, better hit the hammock.” Javi gave a fake yawn. He started to leave, then did a dramatic turn back.
“Connor is probably a douche bag, agreed. But he did say Steve from the main resort would steal the place from you in a matter of months. He said they’d either buy it cheap outright, or put you in debt and take it as collateral. Just a warning. Nighty-night.”
Those were just the words Cooked needed to stay up all night with the mother of all anxiety attacks.
Over time what happened — what he feared now for himself — was that most activists lost energy. They lost fight. They got older, got married, started to have too much to lose by going to jail or, worse, getting killed. They forgot. Most likely, Cooked would do nothing. Justice, if it came, would be won by others.
He didn’t like his new role of being envied. Loren’s gift was double-edged. It created a space between the villagers and Cooked because no matter how much he ignored it, they did not. Titi was different. She had royal Pomare in her blood somewhere way back. To her, this felt owed. The weight of stewardship was a crown to her. Not for him. No other way to look at it — the island was a rock tied around Cooked’s neck, and he’d better keep swimming or he would drown.
Читать дальше