Dash in the Blue Pacific (28 page)

Looking out into the dark, he imagined this
must be what it was like taking your daughter to a movie—a daughter
who is mostly naked and covered in cold sweat and dirt because she
hasn’t been recently cleaned by a legion of dancing spiders. This
was a daughter not worried about too much homework, or a boy who
likes her on the bus. She was child who had never tasted a
blueberry Pop-Tart, but had already been violated by a stranger and
sentenced to die by her father. She was a little girl who mostly
wanted a kitten. He squeezed her again, but not too hard. He wished
they were thousands of miles away, closer to his world rather than
sitting with their backs turned to a not-so-restful
volcano.

More details emerged as his eyes continued to
adjust. Their view was out over a rounded clearing, maybe half the
size of a football field. It was a wide bowl, with dark sides and a
lighter bottom. Strewn across it were downed trees lying
crisscrossed, with black smudges he recognized as humps of lava
rock. What looked at first like fog was actually low brush, or
maybe stray taro brought by thieving rodents that chewed the sweet
parts and left pieces to grow and multiply.

Tiki suddenly flinched as if she’d touched an
electric wire, and he heard her suck in a breath but not exhale.
One hand pulled free and she pointed, and although he couldn’t see
what excited her, wind seemed to rattle the leaves at the left edge
of the bowl, a few drooping vines swaying. The clearing was empty,
but he watched her eyes follow something from one side to the
other. Her eyes were huge, unblinking, and when a patch of jungle
was disturbed on the right side, she quickly looked back to the
other edge.

“
What do you see?”

“
She was so beautiful. Her hair was
like mine, but she was prettier.”

“
Who?”

She shook her head, calmed her breathing to
whisper. “She looked like Mama.”

“
I don’t understand.”

“
They become almost like us. Almost,
but not quite. They have bodies like ours to understand how easy it
is to fall with only two legs. Stomachs like us to feel hunger and
thirst. They have our hearts to know how simple they are to
break.”

“
Who, Tiki? I don’t
understand.”

She half turned and spoke slowly, reaching to
put a hand flat against his chest, directly over his heart. “The
Volcano God came as Mama, wore her eyes and her smile. She put on
Mama’s face to be near me.”

“
I couldn’t see her.”

He heard a sharp sound, a snapping limb, maybe,
and both looked toward the field. She patted his chest once, and
then clasped her hands together as if to pray. “Another is coming,”
she whispered through her fingers. “Look!”

But he saw only more vines being made to sway,
and then shrubs that seemed to flatten, and spots of soft earth
that compressed and filled with new shadows. The swirling breeze
carried the scent of tropical flowers and salty fish, as well as
the distant sound of jumbled voices, as though a radio dial was
slowly turned across a hundred stations on a clear summer
night.

She covered her mouth as if to stifle a cry,
wide eyes again following the path of something
spectacular.

“
I hear them,” he said, and she gave
a quick nod.

“
Look!” She pointed to where two
palm trees leaned apart and dropped fruit with hollow thuds. “Maybe
the sea, or maybe the sun. It’s a giant god, but she has a
disguise.”

“
What is she wearing?” he asked, but
wasn’t answered.

They sat silently watching the invisible
procession of three more gods, as the breeze came up stronger and
the chill crept deeper. By the time the insects resumed their
conversations, Tiki was making little snoring sounds against his
shoulder. A flock of birds took off from a shadowy corner of the
clearing, and Dash squinted at a moving shape in a spot he hadn’t
noticed. There was another of the black lumps where lava had pushed
up through the ground, maybe a hundred or a thousand years earlier.
This stone bulge was wider, had formed a bench similar to the one
he used before the airplane seats washed up.

A mostly human figure was sitting, had watched
the parade of gods from a vantage not risked by mortals. Dash could
tell the man-like creature had huge shoulders that slumped forward
from unbearable sadness. The figure that was neither human nor
godly slowly rose and turned from where Dash huddled with the girl.
In a lumbering motion, the giant man took four long strides and
stepped inside the thick jungle. Dash caught a glimpse of the tiny
dangling light hanging over Willy’s forehead before he
disappeared.

D
ash was jarred awake by the
ground rumbling and the heavens answering. Lightning scored the
roiling clouds beyond the hut’s entryway, made white-hot lines in
imperfect seams as if tasting the grass walls. His sleeping mat
bucked and slid as the earth tilted hard. He dismounted, crawled to
the threshold on unsteady boards, waved down at the four guards
huddled on their own collection of mats in the scrub grass and
dirt. The expressions of the strapping young men were bewildered;
they were apparently still drunk and making no attempt to test
their balance.

Villagers emerged from their own sleep, the sky
creating a strobe effect on brown bodies stretching and hands
rubbing upturned faces. Feet shuffled forward a step or two and
then back, some moving side to side, a dance with their god they
might have done before. Children were the first to be fully awake,
finding their ball and dividing into teams out on the field. A
lightning bolt connecting clouds to the tops of trees somewhere out
in the jungle went unnoticed by the screaming players, was seen as
nothing special. Men scratched their backs and pissed into the
ferns next to their huts. Women began stoking cooking fires as on
any other day, Dash in awe of their dispassion toward the pending
apocalypse.

Clouds turned slow rotations over the volcano’s
peak, and Dash could make out the bird flocks gliding on the heated
wind over the crater. There was thunder, but most of the noise came
from the children, a happy game that took priority over
end-of-times declarations from an attention-hungry god. He watched
the boys and girls give chase and tumble, sometimes having to pause
for the next bolt to show them where the ball rolled in past the
jungle’s edge.

Tiki came to him, stepping over the guards and
wiggling into the narrow space next to where he watched the world
as he’d never seen it.

He shook his head and looked down at her. “What
does it mean?”

“
Nothing. It’s not time for us.” She
leaned into him and put an arm across his bony knee to rest her
chin. “Manu wants to know if you’re hungry.”

“
I couldn’t eat.” He leaned back
against his hands, enjoying a perfect view of the volcano and
sky.

“
It’s a hard climb,” she said. “So
many steps.”

“
You’ve been up there?”

“
An older boy claimed this wasn’t an
island. He tried making us believe we were on the tip of a great
land, and that Manu and the missioners lied to keep children from
wandering off to places with buildings that touch the clouds. He
said any kids who hiked the entire shore became confused, would see
a river and not the sea, and that a bridge of dry earth would let
us walk to the other side of the world. I climbed the Volcano to be
sure.”

“
What did you see?”

She looked up, eyebrows scrunched. “It’s an
island. And it’s smaller than I thought it would be.”

His voice became a whisper. “Have you seen
people thrown into the volcano?”

She was quiet for a moment, and then shook her
head. She made crying sounds, and he felt her warm tears wander
down his shins. “Only the grownups went to the top. But Manu says
it’s important for the whole village to witness our sacrifice. Even
the kids.”

Dash was startled by Willy’s voice from behind.
“People bounce and then roll down the steep interior. There are
loose rocks and ash mounds, but they come to a fast stop against
the boulders. They are hurt and bleeding, but most are still
conscious. They’ve fallen two or three hundred feet, broken many
bones. Sometimes they are screaming, and sometimes they are
praying. It all depends. But you hear them because of the
acoustics. It’s a funnel shape, and voices rise on the heated air.
And that’s what gets them. The heat. No plunge into fire, no
instant death. They slow roast like pigs over coals. It might be
twenty minutes before their hair begins to smoke, and forty before
it catches fire. The human body has good fuels inside, and the
people looking down from the rim stay until the fire is burned out,
until they know the Volcano has been satisfied.”

Dash waited to see if Willy was done. He
listened to the thunder and the shouting children, the sharp claps
that followed the brightest flashes.

“
I could hear your god talking,”
Tiki said, sniffling. “I couldn’t understand what he was saying,
but I could hear his voice.”

Dash stroked her hair, touched the places where
she must have tried hacking it away while he was drifting at sea.
“He’s not really my god. He’s more of a friend, I
think.”

She turned her head to look up at him. “That’s
the best kind of god.”

* * *

The guards came fully alert when a pack of kids
ran across them, chasing their ball, one washboard stomach used as
a launch pad, a perfect ashen footprint left as a temporary brand.
The men cursed in their own language, looked up at Dash and cursed
him, too. When Tiki lifted her head and glared down, the men looked
embarrassed, got to their knees and seemed to become aware of the
hullabaloo going on all around. The largest barked orders that sent
one scurrying toward the chief’s hut, while the other two sauntered
off and cut to the front of the outhouse line.

Tiki sat up, but still leaned heavily. Her skin
was cool in the humid air, eyes perfectly white despite all the
tears. “Manu says the soldiers will be back soon.”

“
Did the volcano tell
him?”

“
She tells him everything. He says
our sacrifice will send them away. But he calls it ‘his sacrifice’
because of me. Did you ever want children?”

“
Yes, someday.”

The tone of her voice altered, turned bitter.
“If I had children I would keep them safe instead of killing
them.”

The vent’s billowing smoke changed color, went
from orange to red in a swirling vortex. Lightning flashed over the
expanding mass in super-heated tunnels, fat arteries and a mesh of
tiny capillaries. It wanted to grow a heart, Dash realized, wanted
to come to life in a way it didn’t yet understand. Perhaps a lack
of any soul kept it an angry mountain, limited it to brief monthly
visits in a masked human form.

Dash knew how to mix vinegar and baking soda
for science class projects, but was clueless about the stages of
eruption, or even if there were stages. Maybe each volcano behaved
differently, the important workings deep inside the earth,
somewhere in its distant brain. But the abrupt shifting of the
ground made it feel close to something big, its remaining fibers
poised to snap. The low haze had gone from amber to a deep shade of
yellow, the odor sharper, a spoiled food smell beyond the stench of
rotten eggs.

“
Brimstone,” he said.

“
Who’s that?”

“
Not a person,” he said. “It’s a
stone that burns. Someone I knew used to say it a lot.”

“
Sarah?”

“
No, it was actually someone on
television who was more like a missioner. She was on late at night,
and my college friends played a game where you took a sip of booze,
of clap-clap, every time she said the word.”

“
The men here would play that
game.”

The real draw to the cable-access show was the
lovely preacher’s gothic looks, which half the guys argued was
unintended. Jet black hair that fell to her ass, heavy boots that
nearly reached a knee-length skirt, leaving flashes of pale skin
that drove everyone nuts. She used the same middle finger knuckle
on her right hand to push up librarian-style glasses on a silver
chain. She pounded the lectern and shook a fist in the air. There
was an old-fashioned blackboard with the message of the day written
in thick script as a backdrop.

“
Brimstone!” she would herald, head
thrown back, long fragile throat exposed above a white
rectangle.

“
Drink!” they’d sing, tipping shot
glasses all at once, and then slamming them down for refills.
Victory to the last man standing.

She was a caged animal stalking the stage,
spitting scripture for venom, Bible clasped as a weapon or
shield.

“
Brimstone!”

“
Drink!”

“
Brimstone!”

Sarah was missing in action the week after
they’d met. Everyone claimed to have just seen her, but nobody knew
where she was. Check this guy’s room, or maybe she’s with that guy.
Give her time, buddy, she’s gotta come up for air sooner or later.
Dash was alone and already drunk when the preacher came on that
night. He sat with a bottle half empty, microwave chirping that his
burrito was done.