Christopher Moore - Island of the Sequined Love Nun

orchid sprigs arranged in a crystal bowl. A whole grouper stared up between fanned slices of plantain on a serving tray, his eye a little dry but clear and accusing.

Tuck said, “If that thing starts talking, I want to be sedated—and right now.”

“Oh, Mr. Case.” Beth Curtis rolled her eyes and laughed as they sat down to dinner.

Tuck could almost feel his body absorbing the nourishment. He told them the story of his journey to the island, exaggerating the danger aspect and glossing over his injuries, Kimi, and his craving for alcohol. He didn’t mention Roberto at all. By the time Tucker was in the typhoon, the Curtises were well into their second bottle of white wine. Beth’s cheeks were flushed and her eyes sparkled with enthusiasm for Tuck’s every word.

Tuck really intended to ask about Kimi, their cryptic messages, the guards, the rules for his employment, and of course, where the hell all the money came from, but instead he found himself playing to Beth Curtis like a comedian on a roll and he left the bungalow at midnight quite taken with both himself and the doctor’s wife.

The Curtises stood arm in arm at the door as the guards escorted Tucker back to his quarters. Halfway across the compound, he did a giddy turn and waved to them, feeling as if he had been the one to consume two bottles of wine.

“What do you think?” the Sorcerer asked his wife.

“Not a problem,” she said, keeping a parade smile pointed Tuck’s way.

“I really expected him to be a little more resistant to our conditions.”

“As if he’s in a position to bargain. The man has nothing, is nothing. He shatters this little illusion we’ve given him and he has to face himself.”

“He looks at you like you’re some sort of beatific vestal virgin. I don’t like it.”

“I can handle that. You just get flyboy ready to do his job.”

“He’ll be able to fly within a week. He brought up his navigator again while we were outside.”

“If he’s here, you’d better find him.”

“I’ll speak to Malink tonight. The Micro Spirit is due in day after tomor-row. If we find the navigator, we can send him back on the ship.”

“Depending on what he’s seen,” she said.

“Yes, depending on what he knows.”

Tucker Case entered his bungalow feeling satisfied and full of himself. Someone had turned on the lights in his absence and turned down the bed. “What, no mint on the pillow?”

He changed into a pair of the doctor’s pajama bottoms and grabbed a paperback spy novel from a stack someone had left on the coffee table.

They had a TV. There had been a TV in the Curtises’ bungalow. He’d have to ask them to get him one. No, dammit, demand a television. What did Mary Jean always say? “You can sell all day, but if you don’t ask for the money, you haven’t made a sale.” Good food, good money, and a great aircraft to fly—he’d stumbled into the best gig on the planet. I am the Phoenix, rising from the ashes. I am the comeback kid. I am the entire 1980 gold-medal-winning U.S. Olympic hockey team. I am the fucking walrus, coo-coo ka-choo.

He went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, caught his reflection in the mirror. His mood went terminal. I am never going to get laid again as long as I live. I should have pressed them about Kimi. I didn’t even ask about what in the hell kind of cargo I’m going to be flying. I am a spineless worm. I’m scum. I’m the Hindenburg , I’m Michael Milken, Richard Nixon. I’m seeing ghosts and bats that talk and I’m stuck on an island where the only woman makes Mother Theresa look like a lap dancer in a leper colony. I am the man who put the F in failure, the P in pathetic, the G in gullible. I am the ringworm poster boy of Gangrene City. I’m an insane, unemployed bus driver for the death camp cartel.

Tuck went to bed without brushing his teeth.

Natives slept side by side, crisscrossed, and piled on the deck of the Micro Spirit until—with a thu showing here, or a lavalava there, streams of primary color among all that gelatinous brown flesh—it looked as if someone had dropped a big box of candy in the hot sun and they had melted together and spilled their fillings. Amid the mess, Jefferson Pardee, rolled and pitched with the ship, finding three sleeping children lying on him when the ship moved to starboard, a rotund island grandmother washing against him when the ship listed to port. He’d been stepped on three times by ashy callused feet, once on the groin, and he was relatively sure he could feel lice crawling in his scalp.

Unable to sleep, he stood up and the mass moved amoebalike into the vacated deck space. A three-quarter moon shone high and bright, and Pardee could see well enough to make his way through to the railing, only stepping on one woman and evoking colorful island curses from two men. Once at the rail, the warm wind washed away the cloying smell of sweat and the rancid nut smell of copra coming from the holds. The moon’s re-flection lay in the black sea like a tossing pool of mercury. A pod of dolphins rode the ship’s bow wave like gray ghosts.

He took several deep breaths, relieved himself over the side, then dug a bent cigarette out of his shirt pocket. He lit it with a disposable lighter and exhaled a contrail of smoke with a long sigh. Thirty years in the tropics had given him a high tolerance for discomfort and inconvenience, but the break in routine was maddening. Back on Truck, he’d be toweling off the smell of stale beer and the residue of an oily tumble with a dollar whore, preparing to pass out with a

volume of Mencken under his little air conditioner. No thought of the day to come or the one just passed, for one was like the next and they were all the same. Just cool cloudy sleep that made him feel, if only for a minute, like that young Midwestern boy on an adventure, exhausted from passion and fear, rather than a fat old man worn down by ennui.

And here, in the salt and the moonlight, on the trail of a story or maybe just a rumor, he felt the fungus growing in his lungs, the pain in his lower back, the weight of ten thousand beers and half a million cigarettes and thirty years of fish fried in coconut oil pressing on his heart, and none of it—none of it—was so heavy as the possibility of dashed hopes. Why had he opened himself up to a future and failure, when he had been failing just fine already?

“You can’t sleep?” the mate said.

Pardee hadn’t heard the wiry sailor move to the rail. He was drinking a Bud tallboy, against regulations, and Pardee felt a craving twist like a worm in his chest at the sight of the can.

“You got another one of those?”

The mate reached into the deep front pocket of his shorts, pulled out another beer, and handed it to Pardee. It was warm, but Pardee popped the top and drank off half of it in one gulp.

“How long before we make Alualu?” Pardee asked.

“Three, maybe four hour. Sunrise. We drop you on north side of island, you swim in.”

“What?” Pardee looked down to the black waves, then back at the mate.

“The doctor no let anyone go on the island except to bring cargo. You have to swim in on other side of island. Maybe half mile, maybe less.”

“How will I get back to the ship?”

“Captain say he will swing back around the island when we leave. Captain say he wait half an hour. You swim back out. We pick you up.”

“Can’t you send a boat?”

“No boat. No break in reef except on south side where we unload. We have many fuel barrel and crates. You will have seven, maybe eight hour.”

Pardee had seen the Spirit arrive in Truk lagoon a thousand times; the ship was always surrounded by outboards and canoes filled with excited natives. “Maybe I can get one of the Shark People to ferry me.” He did not want to get in that water, and he certainly