Christopher Moore - Island of the Sequined Love Nun

Sebastian Curtis took a capped syringe from his coat pocket as he crossed the room.

Tuck sighed. “Another one?”

“You must be feeling like a pin cushion by now, Mr. Case. I need you to roll over.”

Tuck rolled over and the doctor gave him the injection. “It’s either this or the IV. We’ve got this infection on the run, but we don’t want it to get a foothold again.”

Tuck rubbed his bottom and sat up. Before he could say anything, the doctor stuck a digital thermometer in his mouth.

“Beth tells me that you’re worried about your friend, the one you say came to the island with you?”

Tuck nodded.

“I’ll check into it, I promise you. In the meantime, if you’re feeling up to it, Beth and I would like you to join us for dinner. Get to know each other a little. Let you know what’s expected of you.” He pulled the thermometer out of Tuck’s mouth and checked it but made no comment. “You up for dinner tonight?”

“Sure,” Tuck said. “But…”

“Good. We’ll eat at seven. I’ll have Beth bring you down some clothes. I’m sorry about the hand-me-downs, but it’s the best we can do for now.” He started to leave.

“Doc?”

Sebastian turned. “Yes.”

“You’ve been out here, what, thirty years?”

The doctor stiffened. “Twenty-eight. Why?”

“Well, Mrs. Curtis doesn’t look…”

“Yes, Beth is quite a bit younger than I am. But we can talk about all that at dinner. You should probably rest now and let those antibiotics do their work. I need you healthy, Mr. Case. We have a round of golf to play.”

“Golf?”

“You do play, don’t you?”

Tuck took a second to catch up with the abrupt change of subject, then said, “You play golf here?”

“I am a physician, Mr. Case. Even in the Pacific we have Wednesdays.” Then he smiled and left the bungalow.

Sarapul twisted the last of the fibers into his rope and drew his knife to trim the ragged end. It was a good knife, made in Germany, with a thin flexible blade that was perfect for filleting fish or cutting microthin slices from coconut stems to keep the tuba running. He’d had the knife for ten years and he kept it honed and polished on a piece of tanned pig hide. The blade flashed blue as he picked it up and he saw the face of vengeance re-flected in the metal.

Without turning, he said, “The young ones are going to kill you.”

Kimi stopped, his knife held ready to strike the old man in the neck. “You ate my friend.”

Sarapul gripped his knife blade down so he might turn and slash at the same time. There was no quickness in his bones, though. The Filipino would kill him before he got halfway around. “Your friend is with the white Sorcerer and Vincent’s bitch. Malink took him away.”

“Not that one. Roberto. The bat.”

“Bats are taboo. We don’t eat bats on Alualu.”

Kimi lowered his knife an inch. “You are not supposed to eat people either, but you do.”

“Not people I know. Come over here where I can see you. I am old and my neck won’t turn that far around.”

Kimi walked a crescent around the tree and crouched at ready in front of the old man.

Sarapul said, “You were going to kill me.”

“If you ate Roberto.”

“I like that. Nobody kills anybody anymore. Oh, the young ones are talking about killing you, but I think Malink will talk them out of it.”

Kimi cleared his throat. “Were you going to eat me when they killed me?”

“Someone brought that up at the drinking circle. I don’t remember who.”

“Then how do I know you did not eat Roberto?”

“Look at me, little one. I am a hundred years old maybe. Sometimes I go to the beach to pee and the tides change before my water comes. How would I catch a bat?”

Kimi sat down on the ground across from the old man and dropped his knife in the gravel. “Something happened to Roberto. He flew off.”

“Maybe he found a girl bat,” Sarapul said. “Maybe he will come back. You want a drink?” The old cannibal offered his jar of tuba to Kimi, who leaned forward and snatched it before retreating out of knife range.

Kimi took a sip and grimaced. “Why are they going to kill me?”

“They say you are a girl-man and that you make Sepie forget her duties as mispel. And they don’t like you. Don’t worry, no one kills anyone anymore. It is just drunk talk.”

Kimi hung his head. “Sepie sent me away from the bachelors’ house. She is mad at me. I have nowhere to go.”

Sarapul nodded in sympathy, but said nothing. He’d been exiled for so long that he’d gotten used to the alienation, but he remembered how he had felt when Malink had first banished him.

“You speak our language pretty good,” Sarapul said.

“My father was from Satawan. He was a great navigator. He taught me.”

“You’re a navigator?” In the old days the navigators stood above even the chiefs—and just below the gods. As a boy, Sarapul idolized the two navigators of Alualu. The long-dead dream of his boyhood surfaced and he remembered learning from them, watching them draw star charts in the sand and stand at the beach lecturing on tides and currents and winds. He had wanted to be a navigator, had begun the training, for in the rigid caste system of the Yapese islands it was the one way for a man to distin-guish himself. But one of the navigators had died of a fever and the other was killed in a fight before he could pass on his knowledge. The navigators and warriors were ghosts of the past. If this girl-man was a navigator, then the

bachelors were piss ants to talk of killing him. Sarpul felt infused with an energy he hadn’t felt in years.

“I can show you something,” Sarapul said. He tried to climb to his feet and fell back into a crouch. Kimi took him by a bony arm and helped him up. “Come,” Sarapul said.

The old man led Kimi down the path to the beach and stopped at the water’s edge. He began to sing, his voice like dried palm leaves rattling in the wind. He waved his arms in arcs, then threw them wide to the sky so that his chest looked as if it might crack open like a rotten breadfruit. And the wind came up.

He took handfuls of sand and cast them into the wind, then clapped his hands and resumed singing until the palms above them were waving in the wind. Then he stopped.

“Now we wait,” he said. He pointed out to sea. “Watch there.”

A column of fog rose off the ocean at the horizon and boiled black and silver into a huge thunderhead. Sarapul clapped his hands again and a lightning bolt ripped out of the cloud and across the sky like a jagged white fissure in blue glass. The thunderclap was instant, deafening, and crackled for a full ten seconds.

Sarapul turned to Kimi, who was staring at the thunderhead with his mouth open. “Can you do that?”

Kimi shook off his astonishment with a shiver. “No, I never learned that. My father said he could send the thunder, but I didn’t see him do it.”

Sarapul grinned. “Ever eat a guy?”

Kimi shook his head. “No.”

“Tastes like Spam,” Sarapul said.

“I heard that.”

“I can teach you to send the thunder. I don’t know the stars, though.”

“I know the stars,” Kimi said.

“Go get your things,” Sarapul said.

The guards came for Tucker at sunset, just as he was slipping into the cotton pants and shirt the doctor had left for him. The doctor’s clothes were at least three sizes too big for him, but with the bandages he had to put them over, that was a blessing. He still had his own sneakers, which he put on his bare feet. He asked the guards to wait and they stood just inside his door, as straight and silent as terra-cotta soldiers.