Christopher Moore - Island of the Sequined Love Nun

“No. None,” Tuck said, but he felt like he’d been hit with a bag of sand. He’d been craving a drink since he’d regained consciousness. “By the way, Doc, since we’re going to be doing business together, maybe you should call me Tucker.”

“Tucker it is,” Curtis said. “And you can call me Dr. Curtis.” He smiled again.

“Swell. And your wife’s name is?”

“Mrs. Curtis.”

“Of course.”

The doctor finished his examination and pulled the sheet back up to Tuck’s waist. “You should be on your feet in a few days. We’ll move you to your bungalow this afternoon. I think you’ll find everything you need there, but if you do need anything, please let us know.”

A gin and tonic, Tuck thought. “I’d like to find out what happened to the guy who was piloting my boat.”

“As I told you, the islanders found you and a few pieces of your boat.” There was a finality in his voice that made it clear that he didn’t want to talk about Kimi or the boat.

Tuck pressed on. Respect for authority had never been his long suit. “I guess I’ll ask around when I get out of here. Maybe he washed up on a different part of the island. I remember being hung in a tree with him by an old cannibal.”

Tuck saw a frown cross the doctor’s face like a fleeting shadow, then the professional smile was back. “Mr. Case, there haven’t been any cannibals in these islands for a hundred years. Besides, I will have to ask you to stay inside the compound while you are here. You’ll have access to beaches and there’s plenty of room to roam, but you won’t be having any contact with the islanders.”

“Why, I mean if they saved me?”

“The Shark People have a very closed society. We try not to intrude on that any more than is necessary for us to do our work.”

“The Shark People? Why the Shark People?”

“I’ll explain it all to you when you are feeling better. Right now you need to rest.” The doctor took a syringe from a metal drawer by the wall and filled it from a vial of clear fluid, then injected it into Tuck’s IV. “When do you think you’ll be ready to fly?”

Tuck felt as if a veil of gauze had been thrown over his mind. Everything in the room went soft and fuzzy. “Not real soon if you keep giving me that stuff. Wow, what was that? Hey, you’re a doctor. Do you think we taste like Spam?”

He was going to ask another question, but somehow it didn’t seem to matter anymore.

The Sorcerer stormed into the Sky Priestess’s bungalow, stripped off his lab coat, and threw it into the corner. He went to the open kitchen, ripped open the freezer, pulled out a frosty fifth of Absolut, and poured a triple shot into a water glass that froze and steamed like dry ice in the humidity. “Malink lied,” he said. Then he tossed back half the glass and grabbed his temples when the cold hit his brain.

The Sky Priestess looked up from her magazine. “A little stressed, darling?” She was lying out on the lanai, naked except for a wide-brimmed straw hat, her white skin shining in the sun like pearl.

The Sorcerer joined her and fell onto a chaise lounge, a hand still clamped on his temples. “Case says there was another man with him on the island. He said an old cannibal hung them in a tree.”

“I heard him,” the Sky Priestess said. “He’s delirious?”

“I don’t think so. I think Malink lied. That they found the boat pilot and didn’t tell us.”

She moved next to him on the chaise lounge and pried the glass of vodka out of his hand. “So send the ninjas on a search mission. You’re paying them. They might as well do something.”

“That’s not an option and you know it.”

“Well, then go yourself. Or call Malink on it. Tell him that you know there was another man and you want him brought here chop-chop.”

“I think we’re losing them, Beth. Malink wouldn’t have dared lie to me a month ago. It’s that dream. He dreams that Vincent is sending them a pilot, then you tell him it’s not true, then a pilot washes up on the reef.”

The Sky Priestess drained the glass of vodka and handed it back to him empty. “Yeah, nothing fucks up a good religion like the intervention of a real god.”

“I wish you wouldn’t talk that way.”

“So what are you going to do, after you get a refill, I mean?”

The Sorcerer looked up at her as if noticing her for the first time. “Beth, what are you doing out here? The Priestess of the Sky does not have a tan.”

She reached under the chaise lounge and came up with a plastic bottle of lotion. “SPF 90. Relax, ’Bastian, this stuff would keep me creamy white in a nuclear flare. You want to rub some on me?” She pushed her hat back on her head so he could see the predator seriousness in her eyes.

“Beth, please. I’m on the cusp of a crisis here.”

“It’s not a crisis. It’s obvious why the Shark People are getting restless.”

“It is?”

“No one has been chosen in over two months, ’Bastian.”

He shook his head. “Case isn’t ready to fly.”

“Well, get him ready.”

Kimi sat under a coconut palm outside of the bachelors’ house sulking. His flowered dress was gone and he wore a blue thu , the long saronglike loin-cloth worn by the Shark men. Gone too was his blond wig, his high heels, and his best friend, Roberto, who he had not seen since the cannibal tree. Now it looked as if he had no place to sleep. Sepie had thrown him out.

Sepie came out of the bachelors’ house wearing Kimi’s floral dress and glared at him. She paused on the coral pathway. “I am not a monkey,” she said. Then she picked up a stone from the path and hurled it at him, barely missing his head.

Kimi scuffled to the leeward side of the tree and peeked around. “I didn’t say you were a monkey. I said that if you didn’t shave your legs, you would soon look like a monkey.”

A rock whizzed by his face so close he could feel the wind of it. She was getting more accurate with each throw. “You know nothing,” she said. “You are just a girl-man.”

Kimi dug a stone from the sand at his feet and hurled it at her, but his heart wasn’t in it and it missed her by five feet. In English he said, “You just a poxy oar with a big mouth.” He hoped this verbal missile hit closer to home. They were the last words of Malcolme, Kimi’s pimp back in Ma-nila. In retrospect, Malcolme’s mistake had been one of memory. He had forgotten that the overly made-up little girl standing in front of him with a machete was, in fact, a wiry young man with the anger of hundreds of beatings burning in his memory.

“I no have the pox,” Kimi said to Malcolme, whose look of surprise remained fixed even as his head rolled into the corner of the

hotel room, where a rat darted out and gently licked his shortened neck.

“I no have the pox,” Sepie said in English, punctuating her statement with a thrown lump of coral.

“I know,” Kimi said. “I’m sorry I say that.” He skulked off down the beach.

Sepie stood outside the bachelors’ house watching him, totally disarmed. No man had ever apologized to her before.

Kimi hadn’t meant to hurt her feelings. Sometimes it takes a thick skin to trade beauty tips with a girlfriend. Sepie was naturally pretty, but she didn’t understand fashion. Why bother to put on a pretty dress if you’re going to have monkey legs and tufts of hair hanging out from under your arms making it look like bats hanging there?

Bats. Kimi missed Roberto.

The Shark men wouldn’t talk to him, the women ignored him, except for Sepie, who was angry at him now, and even Tucker had been taken away to the other side of the island. Kimi was lonely. And as he walked down the beach, past the children playing with a trained frigate bird, past the men lounging in the shade of an empty boathouse, his loneliness turned to anger. He turned up the beach and took a path into the village to look for a weapon. It was time to go see the old cannibal.