Christopher Moore - Island of the Sequined Love Nun

She yawned. “Maybe tomorrow night. Around seven. Maybe we can try out my new TV.”

“That’ll be fine.” Tuck said. “I have a few things I’d like to discuss with you and the doc anyway.”

“Good,” she said. “I think we should spend more time together. Now explain to me what all these gauges mean.”

Privacy is a rare commodity on a small island and secrets weigh heavy on their keepers. Malink was weary with the burden of too many secrets. If he could only go to the drinking circle and let his secrets out, let the coconut telegraph carry his secrets to the edges of the island and let him walk light. But that wasn’t going to happen. Secrets sought him out now, even from the old cannibal.

He stood with Sarapul and Kimi examining an eighty-four-foot breadfruit tree with a trunk you couldn’t get your arms around. Kimi held an ax on his shoulder, waiting for Malink’s judgment.

“Why so big?” Malink asked. “This tree will give much breadfruit.”

“This is the tree,” Sarapul said. “The navigator has chosen it.”

Kimi said, “We will plant ten trees to take its place, but this is the one.”

“Why do you need such a big tree?”

“I can’t tell you,” Sarapul said.

“You will tell me or you won’t cut the tree.”

“If I tell you, will you promise not to tell anyone else?”

Malink sighed. Yet another secret. “I will tell no one.”

“Come. We’ll show you.”

Sarapul led Malink and Kimi through the jungle to an overgrown spot piled with dried palm leaves. Malink leaned on a tree while the old cannibal pulled away the palm fronds to reveal the prow of a canoe. Not just any canoe. A forty-foot-long sailing canoe. Malink hadn’t seen one since he was a small boy.

“This is why we need the tree,” Sarapul said. “I have hidden it here for many years, but the hull is rotten and we need to fix it.”

Malink felt something stir in him at the sight of the big eye painted on the prow. Something that went back to a time before he could remember, when his people sailed thousands of miles by the eye of the canoe and the guidance of the great navigators. Lost arts made sad by this reminder. He shook his head. “No one knows how to build a sailing canoe anymore, Sarapul. You are so old you don’t remember what you’ve forgotten.”

“He can fix it,” Sarapul said, pointing to Kimi.

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

Malink raised a grizzled eyebrow. “That is where you learned our language?”

“I can fix it. And I can sail it.”

“He’s teaching me,” Sarapul said.

Malink felt the stirring inside him grow into excitement. There was something here he hadn’t felt since the arrival of Vincent. This was a secret that lifted him rather than weighing him down. But he was chief and dignity forbade him from shouting joy to the sky.

“You may cut the tree, but there is a condition.”

“You can’t tell anyone,” Sarapul said.

“I will not tell anyone. But when the canoe is fixed, you must teach one of the young ones to be a navigator.” He looked at Kimi. “Will you do that?”

Kimi nodded.

“You have your tree, old man,” Malink said. “I will tell no one.” He turned and walked and fell into a light bowlegged amble down the path.

Kimi called to him, “I hear my friend, the pilot, was in the village last night.”

Malink turned. The coconut telegraph evidently ran even to Sarapul’s little corner of the island. “He asked about you. He said he will come back.”

“Did he have a bat with him?”

“No bat,” Malink said. “Come tonight to the drinking circle. Maybe he will come.”

“I can’t,” Kimi said. “The boys from the bachelors’ house hate me.”

“They hate the girl-man,” Malink said, “not the navigator. You come.”

After a nutritious dinner of canned peaches and instant coffee, Tuck checked the position of the guards, turned out the lights, and built his coconut-headed surrogate under the mosquito netting. Only the second time and already it seemed routine. There was none of the nervousness or anxiety of the night before as he crawled below window level to the bathroom and pried up the metal shower tray.

He dropped through the opening and was reaching up to grab his mask and fins when he heard the knock on the front door and froze.

He heard the door open and Beth Curtis call, “Mr. Case, are you asleep already?”

He couldn’t let her see the dummy in his bed. “I’m in the bathroom. Just a second.”

He caught the edges of the shower opening and vaulted back into the bathroom. The metal tray fell back over the opening, sounding like the Tin Man trying to escape from a garbage can.

He heard Beth Curtis pad to the bathroom door. “Are you all right in there?”

“Fine,” Tuck said. “Just dropped the soap.” He snagged a bar of soap off the sink and placed it in the bottom of the shower tray, then threw open the bathroom door.

Beth Curtis stood there in a long red silk kimono that was open in a narrow canyon of white flesh to her navel. Whatever Tuck was going to say, he forgot.

“Sebastian wanted me to bring you this.” She held out a check. Tuck tore his eyes from her cleavage and took the check.

“Five thousand dollars. Mrs. Curtis, this is really more than I bargained for.”

“You deserve it. You were very sweet to take the time to explain all the instrumentation to me.” She leaned over and kissed him on the forehead, keeping the warm pressure of her lips there a little too long. Tuck imagined her tongue darting though his skull and licking his brain’s pleasure center. He could smell her perfume, something deep and musky, and his eyes locked on her breasts, which were completely exposed when she leaned forward. He felt as if he had been staring at an arc welder and that creamy powdered image would travel across his field of vision for hours. A chasm of silence opened up and wrenched his attention back into the room.

“This is very generous,” he said. “But it could have waited. It’s not like I have anywhere to spend it.”

“I know. I just wanted to thank you again. Personally, without Sebastian around. And I thought you might be able to explain some of the finer points of flying a jet. It’s all so exciting.”

Never a man of strong resolve, the combination of sight, scent, and flattery activated Tuck’s seduction autopilot. He glanced toward the bed and the switch clicked off. Sexual response was replaced by the dummy Tuck shaking its coconut head. He looked back at her and locked on her eyes—only her eyes. “Maybe tomorrow,” he said. “I’m really bushed. I was just going to catch a shower and go right to bed.”

For an instant her pouty smile disappeared and her lips seemed to tighten into a red line, then just as quickly the smile was back, and Tuck wasn’t sure he’d seen the change at all.

“Well, tomorrow, then,” she said, pulling the front of her kimono together as if she had only just noticed that it had fallen open. “We’ll see you at seven.” She turned at the door and threw Tuck a parade queen wave as she left, once again the darling of the Eisenhower era.

When she was safely out of the bungalow, Tuck ran to the bed and picked up the green coconut. “What in the hell was that about?”

The coconut didn’t answer. “Fine,” Tuck said, fitting the head back on the sleeping dummy. “I am not impressed. I am not shaken, nor am I stirred. Weirdness is my business.” Even as he said it, he dismissed the hallucination as his own good sense manifesting a warning, but the duel cravings for a drink and a woman yanked at his insides like dull fishhooks. He turned off the light and let the cravings lead him out the bathroom hatch to the moonlit sea.