Dash in the Blue Pacific (26 page)

Healing hands itched in a way he could not
scratch, and sunburned skin peeled in fat strips over scabby
blisters on his shoulders and back. His beard, long enough to see
if he pulled it from his chin, had turned blond from the salt and
sun, or maybe fear had made it white. He ate bowls of tasteless
fish and rice twice a day, drank watered-down clap-clap from a tall
jug. He huddled on death row in a cell made of bamboo, grass, and
woven fronds, waiting for Tiki to come, but fearing the news she
might bring, that the moon’s orbit had sped up, a mighty shove
given by a volcano impatient to feast.

He thought about his mother, had developed a
new kind of empathy for her craziness. She’d had her finely crafted
baby dolls to confer with, while he now spoke to half empty bowls,
usually when the jug was spent. Sarah had ridiculed her for
believing the dolls were alive, but how many movies had they sat
through with his fiancée wiping away tears? Sarah, caught up in
fiction, wept for imaginary things, laughing and jeering at
villains and heroes who were all phony. She’d squeezed his hand,
braced for death or survival that was nothing but light and shade
cast upon a painted white screen. Any cheating fiancée should be
sentenced to nights in a black cave filled with spiders and watched
over by cynical gods. Perhaps it would soften a few heartless
souls.

Dash fell out of love on a sleeping mat still
scented with oils from a failed night of sex. “You can have her,”
he told the backs of his guards. “You hear me, Curly? You got that,
Moe? Don’t leave her alone with that Tommy guy, and you’ll be hunky
dory, live happily ever after.” They ignored his offer, but he
didn’t care.

The pregnant woman who brought his food
lingered while he picked at the burned fish. She knelt with her
arms folded across her belly, as if wanting to speak, or maybe only
to observe a condemned man up close. She watched him eat, then
spoke slowly, telling him that Manu wanted him at the drinking
circle when he was finished. But she hesitated, had something more
to say.

He sipped bitter water, offered her the empty
cup when she took his uneaten food.

“
It’s wrong for you to die,” she
finally whispered, then got to her feet and walked out. She paused
for a brief exchange with the guards, who let Dash pass a few
minutes later.

* * *

The clap-clap circle was aglow. Every other man
held a coconut candle in front, eerie shadows cast on their haggard
faces. Dash was woozy after one round, but grateful to see Willy
amble up and seem to sit on top of two men to his right. His
semi-translucent body settled over their spots, seemed to possess
both until one of the men sneezed, and then wiped his nose on his
forearm. It was clear the three were simply sharing the space,
Willy with his own cup and jug, one in each hand, apparently off
the wagon.

The man on Dash’s left drank and spit. He held
the cup out, and Dash raised it in a toast. “Long live the fish!”
He sipped and spit, then passed it on as Willy chugged his own
private stash. The two men trapped inside Willy’s aura were more
fidgety than the others. They kept looking back over their
shoulders, rubbing at their ears as though they were plugged with
water.

“
I thought you quit drinking,” Dash
asked the former god, and the men on either side of Willy shrugged
and looked toward their chief.

“
Our ancestors came to this island
from a distant land.” Manu’s voice silenced the boozy murmurs,
although Willy hummed and poured a refill. “They traveled beneath
mighty sails, in boats wide and flat, to carry the pigs and goats,
all their possessions.”

“
My mother came from a fish tank,”
said Willy, who was double the size of the man next to him but had
a voice much smaller than the chief’s.

“
The journey took two cycles of the
moon,” said Manu. “They left their homeland under a black face moon
to show faith in their gods. They knew they would be taken care of,
that their gods were closest when the moon was hidden.”

“
My mother was a special attraction
on a passenger steam ship sailing under a British flag,” said
Willy, draining another cup. “On board were a hundred children of
wealthy aristocrats being sent overseas to study. Couple of young
bucks snuck into the dining room late one night, when it was dark
like this. Thought it would be a hoot to steal my mother from the
tank over the bar, put her in their girlfriends’ wash basin as a
practical joke. Imagine turning on the light and finding something
like this?” Willy tapped a finger to his head, the fleshy bulb
pulsing to illuminate his sharp teeth.

The men inside Willy looked up at the sky, then
rubbed their eyes hard.

“
Twenty-eight brave explorers on two
boats,” Manu continued. “They fished and collected rainwater, and
might have traveled ten more moons had the Storm God not made
herself known.”

“
Girls screamed bloody murder when
they found her,” said Willy. “Dropped their toothbrushes and bolted
out of the crapper. Somebody in the hall pulled the fire alarm, put
the entire ship into a frenzy. The boys knew they were up shit’s
creek if the crew found the stolen fish. They grabbed my mother and
wrapped her in a bath towel. Bastards ran out onto the main deck
with the other passengers, who were half asleep, stumbling around
in pajamas.”

“
One boat was lost in the current
and never seen again,” said Manu. “But seven men and seven women
were summoned to these shores by the Volcano’s orange eye on the
black horizon.”

“
They threw her overboard in the
middle of nowhere,” said Willy, slamming an open palm into the
dirt. Some of the men felt the impact and watched the rising plume.
“Imagine living your whole life in a glass case, fed all the juicy
shrimp you can eat, water changed every month. And then to be
dropped twenty meters into the wide-open ocean by some pinhead
teenagers.”

The cup came around to Dash, and Willy held his
own out to him. They mimicked clinking them together, both mouthing
the word ‘cheers.’

“
We owe everything we are and
everything we will become to the Volcano God,” said Manu, who
glanced up into the dark.

“
One of the men on the lost boat
caught my mother on a hook baited with a dead grasshopper. She
would have been starving by then, as were the humans. But as hungry
as they were, they didn’t eat her. She was like no fish they’d ever
seen, and they took her as a sign from a god they didn’t know. They
filled a bucket with seawater and fed her the remaining bait. I
never told you how much I look like her. And my father, too.” Willy
pointed to the lump on his jaw that had a small tail growing from
it.

“
The Volcano is the mightiest of
gods, and accepts our sacrifice as a sign of faith. The stronger
the belief, the more powerful is the god,” said Manu, voice
booming.

“
The lost ship beached on a
beautiful island three days later,” said Willy. “Rich soil as black
as coal, and fresh water springs that trickled down from rolling
hills. They set my mother free in a crystal lagoon, where I was
born a few months later.”

“
The Volcano God has provided the
soil to grow a bounty to feed our people,” said Manu.

“
Our soil sprouted withered seed
from a thousand mile journey, was as fertile as the women who
brought a half-dozen babies that first year,” said Willy, digging
his fingers into the hard ground next to his thigh. “Not like this
dust. She doesn’t care for her people. No loving god would spit
poison ash, tolerate earth like this. The storm slaughtered my
people, but not because I didn’t provide. I showed my soul through
things I gave.” Willy’s voice trailed off as he refilled his cup.
There was silence around the circle before he resumed speaking.
“And I planted the dead like they’d planted tubers to grow their
taro.”

Dash rubbed his scabs, the clap-clap masking
the constant itch.

“
You hope good things grow in their
place.” Willy’s voice was low, as though not to disturb the men
he’d consumed, the two small brown bodies now moving in slow
motion, hands out in front to explore the surface of an invisible
wall, eyes glued to a dangling light. “Not just weeds and more
vines, but something special,” said Willy.

“
No more stolen children, no more
violations. I have the Volcano God’s promise that we will be free,”
said Manu, and the circle nodded and muttered, bodies rocking, all
of them drunk. “Peace will rain down when the moon is right and her
belly is full.”

Willy turned to the chief, whose trembling
hands were busy with the cup. “You have it wrong, old man,” said
Willy, jerking a thumb toward Dash. “You might as well be praying
to this guy’s sweaty rabbit for a chocolate egg.”

The men inside Willy’s body were clinging to
each another, reciting the same muffled sing-song phrase over and
over, when a sudden burst of wind blew out the candles around the
circle. The captive pair found themselves free, and began rubbing
dust from tearing eyes.

Willy was gone.

D
ash longed for his cushiony
airplane seat and the tide pool where the sea delivered surprises
twice daily. He was allowed onto his front steps, a pair of stone
slabs that were uncomfortable under his boney ass. When the breeze
flooded his hut with sour air, he sat outside picking scabs from
both palms, missing his dark cave and even the elusive spiders and
old urine stink.

The four young men who’d pulled him from the
waves were his constant chaperones, although they mostly sat bored
in the hut’s shadow. They never used English, always traditional
words in shorts bursts, as if everything they spoke was a command.
Dash assumed they addressed him that way for the same reason that
their eyes were filled with resentment and the muscles at the back
of their jaws flexed when they looked at him. Dash knew that after
killing him slowly they would eat his heart, delivering justice for
every crime his color had committed.

“
Good for you, Moe,” Dash would say
when he caught one staring. “Good for you. I’d hate me just as
much.”

When he needed the outhouse, one escort would
get up and trudge behind. If he lingered near the compound’s wild
green perimeter, the guard would cross his arms as if tempting him
to try something stupid. Dash wished for the mettle to use the
element of surprise, maybe shout a few lines of AC/DC lyrics and
leap for the nearest tree, swinging from vine to vine, away and
free.

“
I bet you miss fishing,” he told
the guard. “I bet your girlfriend is skinny dipping in the lagoon
with some handsome new boy toy right about now. You think you know
her, but I can tell you plenty of stories.”

The guards remained stoic, but there was no
mistaking the fire in their eyes.

“
Hey, Tarzan, maybe I can talk the
Chief into throwing you in with me,” Dash told the tallest of the
group, who was also the surliest. He had pockmarked cheeks and a
small scar across his upper lip that gave him a look of perpetual
contempt. “Synchronized diving is an Olympic sport. We only get one
shot at a medal, but no guts no glory.”

The guard only grunted as he followed Dash to
the cut where the six pigs were fenced. Dash had smuggled a piece
of fish from his dinner, tossed it to the smallest pig, a gray runt
always on the outside of food scrums. The smaller pig hesitated,
sniffed the morsel first as if it couldn’t believe its fortune or
didn’t trust who’d thrown it. One of the other pigs snatched it
away and gobbled it down, demanded more as the rest of them
converged, ramming one another, snouts first.

“
You’d get a real charge out of
stomping me into the ground and tossing me in there.” Dash poked a
thumb at the pigs still jockeying for position, greedily licking
the mud where the fish had bounced, “but at least I tried to do
something. I didn’t sit on my ass while my loved ones were dragged
into this jungle and raped. How many sisters have they taken? How
many nieces and cousins have you watched disappear on their boat?
Did you wave goodbye, you bastard?”

The guard, his black underpants even dingier
than the rest, hair tied with grass rope, did not move, but stood
with his hands at his sides. Dash suddenly couldn’t take his eyes
off the scar—a one-inch white slash that drew the man’s upper lip
away from his teeth ever so slightly. Rage welled, burned in his
joints and flooded his wasted muscles. Other than acne, it was the
only mark his huge body had sustained, one insignificant nick while
he’d allowed the girls to be devastated, kidnapped into the worst
of all worlds.

“
You fucker,” he hissed, but only
the pigs answered. Dash took one lunging step forward, right hand
balled into a loose fist, injured skin allowing for nothing more.
He swung a looping roundhouse blow that connected with the scar and
teeth behind. Dash lost balance and stumbled to the hard earth that
smelled of pig shit and spoiled food, scraping open the wounds on
his knees. The guard’s dusty feet were the same dark brown as the
rest of his skin, but Dash noticed a distinct line of contrasting
shades that extended from toe to heel. The man’s hidden flesh was
much lighter, almost white on the bottom. And then the feet turned
and walked away, flashing Dash with every step.