Christopher Moore - Island of the Sequined Love Nun

“Just let me die!” Tuck screamed, most of the sound caught by his pillow.

It was a persistent fist on a rickety door. “Mr. Case, rise and shine,” said a cheery Sebastian Curtis. “Ten minutes to tee time.”

Tuck rolled into the mosquito netting, became entangled, and ripped it from the ceiling. He was still wearing his wet suit and the fragile netting clung to it like cobwebs. He arrived at the door looking like a tattered ghost fresh out of Davy Jones’s locker.

“What? I can’t fly. I can’t even fucking walk. Go away.” Tuck was not a morning person.

Sebastian Curtis stood in the doorway beaming. “It’s Wednesday,” he said. “I thought you might want to play a few holes.”

Tuck looked at the doctor through bloodshot eyes and several layers of torn mosquito netting. Behind Curtis stood one of the guards, sans machine gun, with a golf bag slung over his shoulder. “Golf?” Tuck said. “You want to play golf?”

“It’s a different game here on Alualu, Mr. Case. Quite challenging. But then, you’ve been practicing, haven’t you?”

“Look, Doc, I didn’t sleep well last night…”

“Could be the wet suit, if you don’t mind my saying. Here in the tropics, you want fabrics that breathe. Cotton is best.”

Tuck was beginning to come around, and as he did, he found he was focusing an intense hatred on the doctor. “I guess we know who got laid last night.”

Curtis looked down and smiled coyly. He was actually embarrassed. Tuck couldn’t quite put it together. The doc didn’t seem to have any problem with killing people or taking their organs—or both—but he was blushing at the mention of sex with his wife. Tuck glared at him.

Curtis said, “You’d better change. The first tee is out in front of the hangar. I’ll go down and practice a few drives while you get dressed.”

“You do that,” Tuck said. He slammed the door.

Twenty minutes later Tuck, his hair still wet from the shower, joined Curtis and the guard in front of the hangar. He was feeling the weight of three nights with almost no sleep, and his back ached from dragging Kimi across the compound, then towing him in the water to the far side of the minefield. The guard had never caught up to them, but he had come to the edge of the water and shouted, waving his machine gun until Tuck and Kimi were out of sight.

“We’ll have to share a set of clubs,” Curtis said. “But perhaps now that you’ve decided to stay, we can order you a set.”

“Swell,” Tuck said. He couldn’t be sure, but he thought the guard might be the same one that had chased them to the beach. Tuck sneered at him and he looked away. Yep, he was the one.

“This is Mato. He’ll be caddying for us today.”

The guard bowed slightly. Tuck saluted him with a middle finger. If the doctor saw the gesture, he didn’t comment. He was lining the ball up on a small square of Astro Turf with a rubberized pad on the bottom. “We have to hit off of this. At least until someone invents a gravel wedge.” He laughed at his own joke.

Tuck forced a smile.

“The Shark People covered this entire island with gravel hundreds of years ago. Keeps the topsoil from being washed away in typhoons. This first hole is a dogleg to the left. The pin is behind the staff’s quarters about a hundred yards.”

“Doc, now that we’ve come clean, why don’t we call them the guards?”

“Very well, Mr. Case. Would you like honors?”

“Call me Tuck. No, you go ahead.”

Curtis hit a long bad hook that arced around the guards’ quar ters and landed out of sight in a stand of palm trees behind the building.

“I have to admit that I may have a bit of an advantage. I’ve laid out the course to accommodate my stroke. Most of the holes are doglegs to the left.”

Tuck nodded as if he understood what Curtis was talking about, then took the driver from the doctor and hit his own shot, a grounder that skipped across the gravel to stop fifty yards in front of them. “Oh, bad luck. Would you like to take a McGuffin?”

“Blow me, Doc,” Tuck said as he walked away toward his ball.

“I guess not, then.”

The pins were bamboo shafts driven into the compound, the holes were lined with old Coke cans with the tops cut off. The best part about it was that Tuck was able to deliver several vicious high-velocity putts into the shins of Mato, who was tending the pins. The worst part was that now that Curtis considered Tuck a confidant, he decided to open up.

“Beth is quite a woman, isn’t she? Did I tell you how we met?”

“Yeah.”

“I was at a transplant symposium in San Francisco. Beth is quite the

nurse, the best I’ve ever seen in an operating room, but she wasn’t working

as a nurse when I met her.” “Oh, good,” Tuck said. Curtis seemed to be waiting for Tucker to ask. Tucker was waiting for

the guard to rat him out for sneaking out of the compound last night. “She was a dancer in North Beach. An exotic dancer.” “No shit.” Tuck said. “Are you shocked?” Curtis obviously wanted him to be shocked. “No.” “She was incredible. The most incredible woman I had ever seen. She

still is.” “But then, you’ve been a missionary on a remote island for twenty-eight

years,” Tuck said. Curtis picked his club for the next shot: the seven iron. “What’s this?” “Looks like blood and feathers,” Tuck said. Curtis handed the club to Mato for him to clean it. “Beth did a dance with surgical tubing and a stethoscope that took my breath away.”

“Pretty common,” Tuck said. “Choke you with the surgical tubing and use the stethoscope to make sure you haven’t done the twitching fish.”

“Really?” Curtis said. “You’ve seen a woman do that?”

Tuck put on his earnest young man face. “Seen? You didn’t notice the ligature marks on my neck when you examined me?”

“Oh, I see,” Curtis said. “Still, I, at least, had never seen anything like it. She…” Curtis couldn’t seem to return to his story. “The wet suit this morning. Was that a sexual thing? I mean, most people would find it uncomfortable.”

“No, I’m just trying to lose a little weight.”

Curtis looked serious now. “I don’t know if that’s such a good idea. You’re still very thin from your ordeal in getting here.”

“I’d like to get down to about eight pounds,” Tuck said. “There’s a big Gandhi revival thing going on back in the States. Guys who look like they’re starving have to beat the babes off with a stick. Started with female fashion models, but now it’s moved to the men.”

Curtis look embarrassed. “I guess I’m a bit out of touch. Beth tries to keep up with what’s going on in the States, but it, well, seems irrelevant out here. I guess I’ll be glad when this is all over and we can leave the island.”

“Then why don’t you just leave? You’re a physician. You could open up a practice in the States and pull down a fortune without all this.”

Curtis glanced at the guard, then looked back to Tuck. “A fortune maybe, but not a fortune like we’re accumulating now. I’m too old to start over at the bottom.”

“You’ve got twenty-eight years’ experience. You said yourself that the people you take care of are the healthiest in the Pacific. You wouldn’t be starting over.”

“Yes, I would. Mr. Case—Tuck—I’m a doctor, but I’m not a very good one.”

Tuck had met a number of doctors in his life, but he had never met one who could bear to admit that he was incompetent at anything. It was a running joke among flight instructors that doctors made the worst students. “They think they’re gods. It’s our job to teach them that they’re mortal. Only pilots are gods.”