Christopher Moore - Island of the Sequined Love Nun

Sleep came with the face of a cannibal, leg-jerk dreams, and finally settled in on the oiled breasts of a brown girl brushing against

his face and smelling of coconut and flowers. There was a scratch and scuttle on the tin roof, followed by the bark of a fruit bat. Tuck didn’t hear it.

The pig thief had been caught and Jefferson Pardee had to find a new lead story. He sat at his desk pouring over the notes he’d written on a yellow legal pad, hoping that something would jump out at him. In fact, there wasn’t a lot of jumping material there. The notes read: “They caught the pig thief. Now what?”

You could run down the leads, pound the pavement, check all your facts with two sources, then structure your meticulously gathered information into the inverted pyramid form and what you got was: The pig’s owner had gotten drunk and beat up his wife, so she sold his pig to someone on the outer islands and bought a used stun gun from an ensign with the Navy Cat team. The next time her husband got rough, a group of Japanese tourists found him by the side of the road, sizzling in the dirt like a strip of frying bacon. Mistaking him for a street performer, the tourists clapped joyously, took pictures of each other standing beside the electrocuted man, and gave his wife five dollars. The whole intrigue had been exposed when police found the pig-stealing wife in front of the Continental Hotel charging tourists a dollar apiece to watch her zap her husband’s twitching supine body. The stun gun was confiscated, no charges were pressed, and the wife beater was pronounced unharmed by a Peace Corps volunteer, although he did need to be reminded several times of his name, where he lived, and how many children he had.

The mystery was solved and the Truk Star had no lead story. Jefferson Pardee was miserable. He was actually going to have to go out and find a story or, as he had done so many time before, make one up. The Micro Spirit was in port. Maybe he’d go down to the dock and see if he could stir up some news out of the crew. He slid his press card into the band of his Australian bush hat and waddled out the door and down the dusty street to the pier where rock-hard, rope-muscled islanders were loading fifty-five-gallon drums into cargo nets and hoisting them into the holds of the Micro Spirit .

The Micro Spirit and the Micro Trader were sister ships: small freighters that cruised the Micronesian crescent carrying cargo and passengers to the outer islands. There were no cabins other than

those of the captain and crew. Passengers traveled and slept on the deck.

Pardee waved to the first mate, a heavily tattooed Tongan who stood at the rail chewing betel nut and spitting gooey red comets over the side.

“Ahoy!” Pardee called. “Permission to come aboard.”

The mate shook his head. “Not until we finish loading this jet fuel. I’ll come down. How you doing, Scoop?”

Pardee had convinced the crew of the Micro Spirit to call him “Scoop” one drunken night in the Yumi Bar. He watched the mate vault over the railing at the bow and monkey down a mooring line to the dock with no more effort than if he was walking down stairs. Watching him made Pardee sad that he was a fat man.

The mate strolled up to Pardee and pumped his hand. “Good to see you.”

“Likewise,” Pardee said. “Where you guys in from?”

“We bring chiefs in from Wolei for a conference. Pick up some tuna and copra. Same, same.”

Pardee looked back at the sailors loading the barrels. “Did you say jet fuel? I thought the Mobil tankers handled all the fuel for Continental.” Continental was the only major airline that flew Micronesia.

“Mobil tankers won’t go to Alualu. No lagoon, no harbor. We going to Ulithi, then take this fuel special order to the doctor on Alualu.”

Pardee took a moment to digest the information. “I thought the Micro Trader did Yap and Palau States. What are you going all the way over there for?”

“Like I say, special order. Moen has jet fuel, we here in Moen, doctor wants jet fuel soon, so we go. I like it. I never been Alualu and I know a girl on Ulithi.”

Pardee couldn’t help but smile. This was a story in itself. Not a big one, but when the Trader or the Spirit changed schedules it made the paper. But there was more of a story somewhere in those barrels of jet fuel, in the ru-mor of armed guards, and in the two pilots that had passed through Truk on the way to No One’s Island. The question for Pardee was: Did he want to track it down? Could he track it down?

“When do you sail?” he asked the mate.

“Tomorrow morning. We get drunk together tonight Yumi Bar. My boys carry you home if you want. Hey?” The mate laughed.

Pardee felt sick. That was what they knew him for, a fat, drunken white man who they could carry home and then tell stories about.

“I can’t drink tonight. I’m sailing with you in the morning. I’ve got to get ready.”

The mate removed the betel nut cud from his cheek and tossed it into the sea, where tiny yellow fish rose to nip at it. He eyed Pardee suspiciously. “You going to leave Truk?”

“It’s not that big a deal. I’ve gone off-island before for a story.”

“Not in ten years I sail the Spirit .”

“Do you have room for another passenger or not?”

“We always have room. You know you have to sleep on deck?”

Pardee was beginning to get irritated. He needed a beer. “I’ve done this before.”

The mate shook his head as if clearing his ears of water and laughed. “Okay, we sail six in morning. Be on dock at five.”

“When do you come back this way?”

“A month. You can fly from Yap if you don’t want to come back with us.”

“A month?” He’d have to get someone to run the paper while he was gone. Or maybe not. Would anyone even notice he was gone?

Pardee said, “I’ll see you in the morning. Don’t get too drunk.”

“You too,” the mate said.

Pardee made his way down the dock, feeling every bit of his two hundred and sixty pounds. By the time he made it back to the street, he was soaked with sweat and yearning for a dark air-conditioned bar. He shook off the craving and headed for the Catholic high school to ask the nuns if they had any bright students who might keep the paper running in his absence.

He was going to do it, dammit. He’d be on the dock at five if he had to stay up all night drinking to do it.

“How are you feeling today?” Sebastian Curtis pulled the sheet down to Tuck’s knees and lifted the pilot’s hospital gown. Tucker flinched when the doctor touched the catheter. “Better,” Tuck said. “That thing is itching, though.”

“It’s healing.” The doctor palpated the lymph nodes in Tucker’s crotch. His hands were cold and Tuck shivered at the touch. “The infection is subsiding. This happened to you in the plane crash?”

“I fell back on some levers while I was trying to get a passenger out of the plane.”

“The hooker?” The doctor didn’t look up from his work.

Tuck wanted to throw the sheets over his head and hide. Instead, he said, “I don’t suppose it would make a difference if I said I didn’t know she was a hooker.”

Sebastian Curtis looked up and smiled; his eyes were light gray flecked with orange. With his gray hair and tropical tan, he could have been a re-tired general, Rommel maybe. “I’m not really concerned with what the woman was doing there. What does concern me is that you had been drinking. We can’t have that here, Mr. Case. You may have to fly on a moment’s notice, so you won’t be able to drink or indulge in any other chemical diversions. I assume that won’t pose a problem.”