27

Girl Talk

Sepie washed the pilot's hair in a bowl with pounded coconut and brackish water. She had been taking care of the unconscious white man for two days and it was starting to get tedious. She was mispel of the bachelors' house, and washing and ministering to a sick and stinky white man was not in her job description. This was women's work.

There are legends in the islands, and some of the old men swear they are true, that the women who service the bachelors' houses, the mispels, were taken to the secret island of Maluuk, known only to the high navigators, where they were trained in the art of pleasuring a man.

After months of training, a mispel was required to pass a test before she was allowed to return to her home island to take over the duty of tending to the sexual needs of the men of the bachelors' house. The test? She was sent into the ocean with a ripe brown coconut clutched between her thighs, and there she floated, in heavy surf, for the entire circuit of the tides. Should the coconut pop loose or the mispel touch it with her hands, she failed the test (although there was some leeway in the event of shark attack). It is said that the inner thighs of the mispels of old were as strong as net cable. The second part of the test required the girl to find a delicate dragonfly orchid with a straight stem, and while her teachers looked on, she would lower herself over the flower until it disappeared inside of her, then rise again after a few minutes, leaving the stem unbent and the petals unbruised. The mispel held a position of honor, respected and revered among the is-landers. She was not required to do housekeeping, cooking, or weaving, and while the other women

toiled in taro fields from the time they could walk, a mispel was allowed to nap in the shade, conserving her energy for her nocturnal duties. A mispel often ended her tour of duty by marrying a man of high status. No stigma followed her into married life, and she would be sought out to the end of her days by the other women for advice on handling men.

Sepie, however, had not been chosen because of any special skill, nor had she passed through any vigorous concubinal boot camp. Sepie had been marked for mispel from the moment of her menses, when she emerged from the women's house with her lavalava tied a bit too high and showing a bit too much cappuccino thigh, her skin rubbed with copra until she glistened all over, and her breasts shining like polished wooden tea cups. She had painted her lips with the juice of crushed berries and peppered her long black hair with scores of sweet jasmine blossoms. She giggled coquettishly in the presence of all the men, danced dangerously close to the taboo of speaking to them in public, risked beatings by refusing to fall to her knees when her male cousins passed, and went about her chores with a wiggly energy that had caused more than one of the distracted village boys to fall out of a breadfruit tree during harvest. (She broke ankles as well as hearts.) Sepie was all titter and tease, a lazy girl who excelled at leisure, a natural at invoking and denying desire, a wet dream deferred. At fifteen she took up residence in the bachelors' house and had lived there for four years.

When Malink and the men brought the flyer and the man in the dress to her, she knew she was in for some trouble.

"Take care of them," Malink said. "Feed them. Help to make them strong."

Sepie kept her head bowed while Malink spoke, but when he finished she took his hand and led him into the bachelors' house, gesturing to the other men to lay the flyer and his friend on the ground outside. The men smiled among themselves, thinking that old Malink was going inside to receive a special favor from the mispel. What, in fact, he was receiving was an ass chewing.

"Why don't you take them to your house, Malink? I don't want them here."

"It's a secret. If my wife and daughters find out they are here, then everyone will know."

"I'm the only one who can keep a secret in the bachelors' house. Take them to old Sarapul's house. No one goes there."

"He wants to eat them." Malink couldn't remember ever having to argue with a woman and he wasn't at all prepared for it.

"You're chief. Tell him not to. I will not cook for them. If I feed them, they will shit. I'm not going to clean it up."

"Sepie, what will you do when you marry and have children? You will have to do these things then. I am asking you as your chief to do these things."

"No," Sepie said.

Malink sighed. "I am asking you to do these things because these men have been sent to us by Vincent."

Sepie didn't know what to say. She had heard the Sky Priestess chastise Malink in front of the people, but she had been more concerned with losing coffee and sugar for a month than with the actual offense. "You will tell the men to cook for them?"

"Yes."

"And they will carry them to the beach and wash them if they shit?"

"I will tell them. Please, Sepie."

No man had ever said "please" to her before, let alone the chief. It was not a courtesy that women deserved. For the first time she realized how desperate Malink really was. "And you will tell Abo to wash his dick when it is his turn."

"What does that have to do with this?"

"He is stinky."

"I will tell him."

"And you will tell Favo to quit making me put beads in his ass."

"Favo does that?"

"He said he learned it from the Japanese."

"Really? Favo?"

"Yes."

"But he's old, and he has a wife and many grandchildren."

"He says it makes his spear stronger."

"He does? I mean, does it work?" Malink had momentarily forgotten why he was here.

"I don't like it. It is evil and unclean."

"You're talking about my old friend Favo, right? He's the one you're talking about?"

"I told him only bachelors were suppose to stay here, but he says his wife doesn't understand him. His hands are like the skin of a shark."

"What kind of beads?"

"Tell him," Sepie said.

"Okay," Malink said in English. Then to himself he said: "Old Favo." He shook his head as he walked out of the bachelors' house. "Beads."

Sepie watched him go, wishing that she had asked for more favors.

Outside the men were grinning when Malink stepped into the moonlight. He hitched up his loincloth and averted his eyes from theirs.

"Take them inside. You must cook and clean for them. Don't let the woman do it. It is too important for her."

As the men carried Tuck and Kimi into the bachelors' house, Favo ambled up to Malink. "How was it?"

Malink looked at his old friend and noticed for the first time that Favo wore a long string of ivory beads around his neck. "I have to go home now," Malink said.

Sepie was, once again, swabbing up the wooden floor where the pilot had urinated on himself, when she heard the other one speak for the first time. The men had propped the Filipino up in the corner, where he had sat drinking the coconut milk and fish broth that she had been pouring into the pilot, but except for a few grunts when he made his way outside to urinate, the man in the dress had been quiet for two days. Sepie had learned to ignore him. He didn't smell as bad as the pilot, and she sort of liked his flowered dress. She'd said a prayer to Vincent for a dress just like it.

"Where is Roberto?" the Filipino said.

Sepie jumped. It didn't surprise her so much that he had spoken, but that he had spoken in her language. Although the words were clipped, the way someone from Iffallik or Satawan might speak.

"He's right here," she said. "Your friend stinks. You should take him outside and wash him in the sea."

"That's not Roberto. That's Tucker. Roberto is shorter." Kimi crawled over to Tuck and laid his hand on the flyer's forehead. "He has bad fever. You have medicine?"

"Aspirin," Sepie said. Malink had given her a bottle of the tablets to crush into the flyer's broth, but after he gagged on the first dose she had stopped giving it to him.

"He is more sick than aspirin. He needs a doctor. You have a doctor?"

"We have the Sorcerer. He does our medicine. He was a doctor before the Sky Priestess came."

Kimi looked at her. "What island is this?"

"Alualu."

"Ha! We have to get doctor for Tucker. He owes me five hundred dollars."

Sepie's eyes went wide. No wonder he wears such a fine dress. Five hundred dollars! She said, "The chief says I have to be secret about this man. Everyone knows he is here. The boys get drunk and talk. But I can't get the doctor."

"Why are you taking care of him? You are just a girl."

"I am not just a girl. I am mispel."

Kimi scoffed. "There are no mispels anymore."

Sepie threw down the rag she was using to wipe the floor. "What do you know? You are a man in a dress, and I don't believe you have five hundred dollars."

"It was a nice dress before the typhoon," Kimi said. "Wash-and-wear. No dry cleaning."

Sepie nodded as if she knew what he was talking about. "It is a very pretty dress. I like it."

"You do?" Kimi picked at the crushed pleats around his legs. "It's just an old thing I picked up in Manila. It was on sale. You really like it?"

Sepie didn't understand. Among her people, if you admired someone's else possession, manners bound them to give it to you. How could this silly man speak her language and still not know her customs. And he wasn't even looking at her that way all men looked at her.

"What island do you come from?"

"Satawan," Kimi said. "I am a navigator."

Sepie scoffed. "There are no more navigators."

Just then the doorway darkened and they looked up to see Abo, the fierce one, entering the bachelors' house. He was lean and heavily muscled and he wore a permanent scowl on his face. The sides of his head were shaved and tattooed with images of hammerhead sharks. He wore his hair tied into a warrior's topknot that had gone out of fashion a hundred years ago.

"Has the pilot awakened?" he growled.

Sepie looked down and smiled coyly. Abo was the one boy in the bachelors' house who didn't seem to accept the communal nature of her position. He was always jealous, enraged, or brooding, but he

brought her many presents, sometimes even copies of People that he stole from the men's drinking circle. Sepie thought she might marry him someday.

"He is too sick for this," Kimi said. "We need to take him to the doctor."

"Malink says he must stay here until he is well."

"He is dying." Kimi said.

Abo looked at Sepie for confirmation.

"Well, he smells dead," she said. The sooner they sent the pilot to the

Sorcerer, the sooner she could get back to spending her days swimming and preening. "Malink will be angry if he dies," she added for good measure.

Abo nodded. "I will tell him." He pointed to Kimi. "You come with me." Kimi got up to leave, then turned back to Sepie when he reached the

doorway. "If Roberto comes, tell him I'll be right back." Sepie shrugged. "Who is Roberto?" "He's a fruit bat. From Guam. You can tell by his accent." "Oh, him. I think Sarapul ate him," Sepie said casually." Kimi turned and ran screaming into the village.

Malink looked up from his breakfast, a banana leaf full of fish and rice, to see Abo coming down the coral path toward his house. Malink's wife and daughters shuffled to the cookhouse at the sight of the fierce one.

"Good morning, Chief," Abo said.

"Food?" Malink answered, gesturing with his breakfast.

Abo had already eaten, but it would have been rude not to accept. "Yes."

Malink's wife poked her head out of the cookhouse and saw the chief

nod. In a second she was giving her own breakfast to Abo, who neither thanked her or acknowledged her presence. "The pilot is sick," Abo said. "Very bad fever. Sepie and the girl-man say that he will die soon without the Sorcerer's help."

Malink suddenly lost his appetite. He set his breakfast on the ground and one of his daughters appeared out of nowhere to take it to the cookhouse, where the women shared what was left.

"And what do you think?" Malink asked.

"I think he is dying. He smells of sickness. Like when Tamu was bitten by the shark and his leg turned black."

Malink rubbed his temples. How to handle this? The Sky Priestess was angry with him for even dreaming of the pilot. What would happen if he suddenly showed up with him?

"What about the girl-man?"

"He is not sick, but he has gone crazy. He runs around the village looking for Sarapul."

Malink nodded. "Catch him and tie him up. Make a litter and take the pilot to the betel nut trees by the runway. Leave him there."

"Leave him there?"

"Yes, quickly. And bring the litter back with you. Make it look as if he walked to the runway. Send a boy to me when it is done. Go now."

Abo put down his food and ran off down the path.

Malink went into his house and pulled the ammo box out of the rafters. Inside, next to the portable phone, he found the Zippo that Vincent had given him. He clicked it open, lit it, and sat it on the floor while it burned. "Vincent," he said, "It's your friend Malink here. Please tell the Sky Priestess that this is not my fault. Tell her that you have sent the pilot. Please tell her for your friend Malink so she will not be angry. Amen."

His prayer finished, Malink snapped the lighter shut, put it away, then took the portable phone and went outside to wait for the boy to tell him everything was in place.

28

Choose Your Own Nightmare

Tucker Case rolled through a fever dream where he was tossed in great elastic waves of bat-winged demons - crushed, smothered, bitten, and scratched - and there, amid the chaos, a pink fabric softener sheet passed by the corner of his eye, confirming that he had been stuffed into a dryer in the laundromat of Hell. He tumbled toward the pink, ascended out of the clawing mass, and awoke gasping, with no idea where he was.

The pink was a dress on a heart-faced woman who said, "Good morning, Mr. Case. Welcome back to the world."

A man's voice: "After your message and the typhoon, we thought for sure you'd been lost at sea." He was a white blur with a head, then a lab coat wrapped around a tall, smiling middle-aged man, gray and balding, a stethoscope around his neck.

The doctor had his arm around the heart-faced woman. She too was smiling, with the aspect of an angel, the vessel of human kindness. Together they looked as if they had walked off of fifties television.

The man said, "I'm Dr. Sebastian Curtis, Mr. Case. This is my wife, Beth."

Tuck tried to speak, but emitted only a rasping squeak. The woman lifted a plastic cup of water to his lips and he drank. He eyed the IV bag running into his arm.

"Glucose and antibiotics," the doctor said. "You've got some badly infected wounds. The islanders found you washed up on the reef."

Tucker did a quick inventory of his limbs by feel, then looked at them lest he had lost a leg that was still giving off phantom feel

ing. He raised his head to look at his crotch, which was sending pulses of pain up through his abdomen.

The woman gently pushed him down. "You're going to be fine. They found you in time, but you're going to need more rest. 'Bastian can give you something for the pain if you need it."

She smiled beatifically at her husband, who patted Tuck's arm. "Don't be embarrassed, Mr. Case. Beth is a surgical nurse. I'm afraid the catheter will have to stay in for a few days."

"There was another guy with me," Tuck said. "A Filipino. He was piloting the boat."

The doctor and his wife shot each other a glance and the "Ozzie and Harriet" calm shattered into panic, but only for a second, then they were back to their reassuring cooing. Tuck wasn't even sure he had seen the break.

"I'm sorry, but the islanders didn't find anyone else. He must have been lost in the storm."

"But the tree. He was hung in the tree..."

Beth Curtis put her finger gently on his lips. "I'm sorry you lost your friend, Mr. Case, but you need to get some rest. I'll bring you something to eat in a little while and we'll see if you can hold down some solid food."

She pulled her hand away and put her arm around her husband's waist as he pushed a syringe of fluid into Tuck's IV tube. "We'll check on you shortly," the doctor said.

Tucker watched them walk away and noticed that for all her "Little House on the Prairie" purity, Beth Curtis had a nice shape under that calico. Then he felt a little sleazy, as if he'd been caught horning on a friend's mom. Like the time, drunk and full of himself, he'd hit on Mary Jean Dobbins.

To hell with solid food. Gin - in large quantities over a tall column of ice - that's the rub. Tonic to chase away the blues of bad dreams and men lost at sea.

Tuck looked around the room. It was a small hospital ward. Only four beds, but amazingly clean considering where it was. And there was some pretty serious-looking equipment against the walls: technical stuff on casters, stuff you might use in complicated surgery or to set the timing on a Toyota. He was sure Jake Skye would know what it was. He thought about the Learjet, then felt himself starting to doze.

Sleep came with the face of a cannibal, leg-jerk dreams, and finally settled in on the oiled breasts of a brown girl brushing against

his face and smelling of coconut and flowers. There was a scratch and scuttle on the tin roof, followed by the bark of a fruit bat. Tuck didn't hear it.

The pig thief had been caught and Jefferson Pardee had to find a new lead story. He sat at his desk pouring over the notes he'd written on a yellow legal pad, hoping that something would jump out at him. In fact, there wasn't a lot of jumping material there. The notes read: "They caught the pig thief. Now what?"

You could run down the leads, pound the pavement, check all your facts with two sources, then structure your meticulously gathered information into the inverted pyramid form and what you got was: The pig's owner had gotten drunk and beat up his wife, so she sold his pig to someone on the outer islands and bought a used stun gun from an ensign with the Navy Cat team. The next time her husband got rough, a group of Japanese tourists found him by the side of the road, sizzling in the dirt like a strip of frying bacon. Mistaking him for a street performer, the tourists clapped joyously, took pictures of each other standing beside the electrocuted man, and gave his wife five dollars. The whole intrigue had been exposed when police found the pig-stealing wife in front of the Continental Hotel charging tourists a dollar apiece to watch her zap her husband's twitching supine body. The stun gun was confiscated, no charges were pressed, and the wife beater was pronounced unharmed by a Peace Corps volunteer, although he did need to be reminded several times of his name, where he lived, and how many children he had.

The mystery was solved and the Truk Star had no lead story. Jefferson Pardee was miserable. He was actually going to have to go out and find a story or, as he had done so many time before, make one up. The Micro Spirit was in port. Maybe he'd go down to the dock and see if he could stir up some news out of the crew. He slid his press card into the band of his Australian bush hat and waddled out the door and down the dusty street to the pier where rock-hard, rope-muscled islanders were loading fifty-five-gallon drums into cargo nets and hoisting them into the holds of the Micro Spirit.

The Micro Spirit and the Micro Trader were sister ships: small freighters that cruised the Micronesian crescent carrying cargo and passengers to the outer islands. There were no cabins other than

those of the captain and crew. Passengers traveled and slept on the deck.

Pardee waved to the first mate, a heavily tattooed Tongan who stood at the rail chewing betel nut and spitting gooey red comets over the side.

"Ahoy!" Pardee called. "Permission to come aboard."

The mate shook his head. "Not until we finish loading this jet fuel. I'll come down. How you doing, Scoop?"

Pardee had convinced the crew of the Micro Spirit to call him "Scoop" one drunken night in the Yumi Bar. He watched the mate vault over the railing at the bow and monkey down a mooring line to the dock with no more effort than if he was walking down stairs. Watching him made Pardee sad that he was a fat man.

The mate strolled up to Pardee and pumped his hand. "Good to see you."

"Likewise," Pardee said. "Where you guys in from?"

"We bring chiefs in from Wolei for a conference. Pick up some tuna and copra. Same, same."

Pardee looked back at the sailors loading the barrels. "Did you say jet fuel? I thought the Mobil tankers handled all the fuel for Continental." Continental was the only major airline that flew Micronesia.

"Mobil tankers won't go to Alualu. No lagoon, no harbor. We going to Ulithi, then take this fuel special order to the doctor on Alualu."

Pardee took a moment to digest the information. "I thought the Micro Trader did Yap and Palau States. What are you going all the way over there for?"

"Like I say, special order. Moen has jet fuel, we here in Moen, doctor wants jet fuel soon, so we go. I like it. I never been Alualu and I know a girl on Ulithi."

Pardee couldn't help but smile. This was a story in itself. Not a big one, but when the Trader or the Spirit changed schedules it made the paper. But there was more of a story somewhere in those barrels of jet fuel, in the ru-mor of armed guards, and in the two pilots that had passed through Truk on the way to No One's Island. The question for Pardee was: Did he want to track it down? Could he track it down?

"When do you sail?" he asked the mate.

"Tomorrow morning. We get drunk together tonight Yumi Bar. My boys carry you home if you want. Hey?" The mate laughed.

Pardee felt sick. That was what they knew him for, a fat, drunken white man who they could carry home and then tell stories about.

"I can't drink tonight. I'm sailing with you in the morning. I've got to get ready."

The mate removed the betel nut cud from his cheek and tossed it into the sea, where tiny yellow fish rose to nip at it. He eyed Pardee suspiciously. "You going to leave Truk?"

"It's not that big a deal. I've gone off-island before for a story."

"Not in ten years I sail the Spirit."

"Do you have room for another passenger or not?"

"We always have room. You know you have to sleep on deck?"

Pardee was beginning to get irritated. He needed a beer. "I've done this before."

The mate shook his head as if clearing his ears of water and laughed. "Okay, we sail six in morning. Be on dock at five."

"When do you come back this way?"

"A month. You can fly from Yap if you don't want to come back with us."

"A month?" He'd have to get someone to run the paper while he was gone. Or maybe not. Would anyone even notice he was gone?

Pardee said, "I'll see you in the morning. Don't get too drunk."

"You too," the mate said.

Pardee made his way down the dock, feeling every bit of his two hundred and sixty pounds. By the time he made it back to the street, he was soaked with sweat and yearning for a dark air-conditioned bar. He shook off the craving and headed for the Catholic high school to ask the nuns if they had any bright students who might keep the paper running in his absence.

He was going to do it, dammit. He'd be on the dock at five if he had to stay up all night drinking to do it.