The Turtle-Girl from East Pukapuka Read online

  The Turtle-Girl from East Pukapuka

  by

  Cole Alpaugh

  The Turtle-Girl from East Pukapuka

  Copyright © 2012 Cole Alpaugh

  Seattle, WA

  Published by Coffeetown Press

  PO Box 70515

  Seattle, WA 98127

  For more information go to: www.coffeetownpress.com

  www.colealpaugh.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Cover design by Sabrina Sun

  The Turtle-Girl from East Pukapuka

  Copyright © 2012 by Cole Alpaugh

  ISBN: 978-1-60381-116-3 (Trade Paper)

  ISBN: 978-1-60381-144-6 (eBook)

  Library of Congress Control Number: 9781603811163

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Produced in the United States of America

  * * * * *

  For my mother

  Acknowledgments

  Special thanks to Joni Cakobau of Suva, Fiji, who provided his expertise on cannibal history and food preparation.

  My gratitude to Tylea Rain, whose love of even the most god-awful animals was inspiration for my character Butter; to Hailey Neales for her help with a specific vision; to my beloved Amy, Kat, and Regan for their support; to Western Wayne High School’s Justin Hayden, Alyssa DeKenipp, and Allie Poltanis; and to Catherine Treadgold, the most patient and talented editor on this extremely blue planet.

  Drawing by Tylea Rain

  Chapter 1

  The birds were gone. The green ones that darted like spears across tree tops. The ones with spindly, old man legs that charged up and down the tideline pecking at leftover bubbles. Gone were the sand burrowers and the dive-bombing frigatebirds that sometimes stole fish right off James Hilton’s lines. If something huge and bad was coming to visit, the birds knew first. Birds saw the Bigness from up high. And the Bigness was coming to swallow them.

  James Hilton’s own spindly legs wobbled, the sudden silence playing with his balance. It was as if both ears were filled with water too stubborn to be thumped out with a palm. He hesitated in the doorway of the empty thatched hut, rubbing at his yellow eyes to make them adjust to the dim light.

  “I’m a dirty thief,” he whispered, shuffling across the threshold into the familiar stench of rotted jackfish. The smell was another sign that things were not right. It was proper to eat inside, away from the sun, but leftovers quickly turned rancid and invited in all sorts of jungle creepers. The hut’s owner knew that leaving food to spoil near your bedroll was akin to swimming in the feeding grounds at dusk. A good neighbor like Hilton would always take the time to scrape the forgotten dinner plates into the sea.

  But the Bigness—the giant wave—was coming too fast for courtesy.

  Hilton’s old knees crackled as he shuffled guiltily past the plates toward the sacred books. He’d called out for the widow—the Keeper of the Books—but his voice had echoed back unanswered. He’d even looked for her crazy child, who wasted days sewing up snakes and lizards the boys had gotten at. The girl made Hilton uncomfortable. Her eyes darted like a goby fish, and were the same mix of colors. She had probably flown away with the birds.

  There would be no more “normal,” thanks to the coming tsunami. A radio broadcast had warned that they were about to die. This was his one chance to rescue the book that held his unanswered questions. The emergency message following the earthquake played in a loop in the back of Hilton’s mind like a catchy slit drum melody. “The tsunami is forecast to reach ten meters in height.” Hilton didn’t know what a meter was, but from the gravity of the voice, it must at least be equal to the size of a man. The two words, man and meter, sounded similar in his language. Hilton had pictured ten men stacked on one another’s shoulders, peckers waggling in the wind, and concluded it would be a mighty wave indeed, worthy of such dire warnings.

  The word came back to him again, as if it were a dark shadow swimming circles at the end of a reliable hook.

  “Bigness,” Hilton whispered. It was one of the words brought to his people by the flying soldier. The soldier used it to describe the ocean, had held out his arms and made the sweeping gesture the elders of the time had taken care to learn. It was a word the villagers had accepted into their language, saving it for the mightiest storms and the ships with three chimneys that passed at the end of every hot season.

  Hilton’s fingers spider-walked along the dusty shelves and found the book. Snatching it down, he clutched the copy of Lost Horizon to his boney chest, knowing without seeing because an old fisherman had a way of identifying things by weight and touch. He’d only held the waterlogged book a few times in his life, but knew it weighed nineteen shells in one hand. Hilton had been named to honor the book’s creator and he had a plan to solve the mystery of the story told inside the moldy leather binding.

  Embarrassed about his crime and dripping sweat, Hilton turned toward the daylight and retreated into the salty air, knowing that not much time remained.

  Hilton stepped over a pile of splintered bamboo—pieces that would have made sturdy backbones for fine new homes—and gave a wide berth to the five muscular teenagers struggling with a washed up boulder. A powerful storm had deposited the enormous rock in the middle of the beach, and the cocksure youngsters had promised to clear it away. They’d dug in their heels and tried pushing, then secured vines to it and tried pulling. Heave, they had cried. And ho, they had called.

  Hilton shielded the book as they jabbed fresh cut poles into the sand, leveraging with their shoulders until their veins bulged almost to bursting. Hilton was halfway to the lagoon when a piece of bamboo shattered so loudly that he instinctively ducked, searching the sky for thunderclouds. He smiled at the distant shouts and laughter behind him, as the boys dropped their mangled tools and chased each other into the jungle. Over the months, the boulder had been nudged no more than two arm lengths. The surging tides had begun pulling sand from beneath the giant stone, as if the island was trying to swallow it whole before it could escape.

  Hilton followed the curved shoreline, the sea and lowering sun off his left shoulder, busy homes lining the way on his right. There were no salutes, no hellos, but Hilton wasn’t offended. Just as he had needed to find his book, his neighbors all had last minute tasks to complete before death.

  The lagoon was filled with what looked like bobbing heads—coconuts loosened by a heavy jolt inside the earth a few hours earlier. A thousand hard fruits had rained down across the island in a lethal brown hail storm, causing the emergency radio from a supply ship to be switched on for the very first time. The news was ominous, but the chief elder decided his people would accept the sea god’s plan calmly and without fear. “There’s nothing special for us to do,” were his final words on the matter.

  Hilton had nodded and mumbled agreement. There’d been no dissent in the meeting, no hysterical desire to paddle away in the village’s half dozen boats. Hilton had joined the group of elders in the last few years by no choice of his own. He’d just managed to become old. His only specialized knowledge involved the motion of the tides and the proper way to make and bait a hook. But because he was old, people expected answers from him. He only ever replied with a smile, which was enough.

  The ground continued its intermittent shifting under Hilton’s feet, a familiar sensation from
so many years aboard his small skiff. He watched his neighbors stumble, as if drunk on wapa juice, comforting one another and tidying up what was about to be smashed. Hilton trudged through sand littered with broken palms fronds. Every few moments, a coconut falling from an overhanging tree sounded a heavy kerplunk in the otherwise still water of the lagoon, perhaps the gods’ way of counting down the remaining minutes.

  Hilton stepped over the mooring lines of the fishing boats one by one. On his skiff’s bench was the collection of hooks he’d spent years grinding with coral files and stone tools, meticulously shaping the whale bones and shells. There were a dozen types of hooks for a hundred species of fish. He considered stopping to tuck them into the narrow bow. But everything was to be left behind on this moving day, this pilgrimage from peaceful existence on an isolated tropical island to the next life in a place called Happa Now. Everything but the book clutched in his right hand, he hoped.

  Hilton didn’t want to miss the wave’s arrival. He yearned to welcome it peacefully, not rushed and out of breath. He had no other possessions he cared to save. It was believed that only people made the trip to the next life. No animals, not even a beloved pet. But maybe, just maybe, Hilton thought, the gods might allow an object as simple as a book. He reasoned that if a drowned child appeared good as new on Happa Now, it was possible that his waterlogged book—a gift from the flying soldier during the Great War—would arrive crisp and light again, no longer just a solid brick of paper and ink.

  Hilton craved to know what a lost horizon truly was, to learn if perhaps it was a story about a great wave that swept away the writer’s people to their version of Happa Now. Or maybe it was something different and wondrous, meant to answer questions Hilton could never even think to ask.

  Sweat dried on his chest as the beach angled toward the west, the sweeping panorama of colors mixed by the nearly exhausted day. And there it was, a black curtain rising from the once familiar sea. Tiny white specks swarmed across the growing face of the wave, and Hilton recognized them as curious, scavenging gulls. Every other bird was smart enough to find some distant safe place, while the seagulls could only listen to their bellies. He rubbed his own empty stomach, wondering if he’d ever eat again, then pushed away the dark thought that haunted him. If there were no animals in the next life, what would a fisherman do all day?

  Hilton shaded his eyes with cupped hands, the book trapped between one arm and his bony ribs, as he stood on a mound of sun-bleached coral stacked by recent tides. He was perched at the north end of a crescent-shaped cove—the main hub of activity on his people’s tiny atoll. The wave was still too far away to hear.

  Hilton supposed the teaming flocks of seagulls were drawn to fish trapped beneath the wave’s looming crest. Or were the fish drawn to this safe haven from the churning waters below? Maybe there were no fish at all, only hopeful birds. He knew that if he had wings, he too would be drawn close by such marvelous power, such bigness.

  Hilton glanced over his shoulder at the stubborn boulder, sitting there in the middle of the white beach as if waiting, then back at the black curtain hurrying toward him.

  “Bigness,” he repeated. A smile spread across a face carved by deep wrinkles—hundreds of tiny channels at the corners of his eyes and mouth, usually visible only during the glare of the morning sun. It produced what the islanders called a fisherman’s squint. Now, as the wave loomed, it was his smile creating the furrowed brow and sinuous creases.

  The people of East Pukapuka made their slow, ambling way to the edge of the lagoon behind Hilton—all one hundred of them, as far as he could tell. They came to accept their fates head on. There was no panic or visible dread, just what seemed like nervous anticipation over the pragmatic issues for which the elders had no specific answers. Would it hurt to die? Or would part of the gods’ plan be to shield them from pain as the wave tumbled and drowned them? How long did it take to get to Happa Now?

  The briny water of the cove was nearly black this time of day, an hour past supper. White sand was dappled by long shadows of puka trees and coconut palms, and broken shells tinkled underfoot as person after person left off whatever they’d been doing to bear witness to what approached on the distant horizon.

  A hush had fallen over the small island—a tiny dot in the South Pacific that had gone mostly unnoticed and unbothered since the Great War, save for an International Red Cross supply ship’s intermittent visits. Dusty bags of flour and rice were accepted with tempered gratitude; they were a polite people who took pride in their self-sufficiency. They’d enjoyed more than a half-century of tranquility, at one with nature and in harmony with the gods.

  Hilton turned his head away from the rising curtain and searched the faces of his cousins and neighbors. Mostly they seemed curious. He was still smiling at the prospect of learning the story inside the book held against his side, and a few of his neighbors returned that smile.

  There was a tug at his fingers. The villagers were holding hands, forming a complete link from one end of the cove to the other. Hilton stepped down from the pile of coral beneath his amber toenails and grasped the hand of a boy whose name he couldn’t recall. It felt tiny and soft. He gave it a gentle squeeze.

  The evening breeze stirred small ripples on the lagoon and in the mouth of the cove, dancing whitecaps kicked up beyond the reef. Even the creepers had gone silent, another sign of nature’s understanding—or at least an appreciation—of what was about to happen, even though its involvement wouldn’t go beyond this life.

  Many eyes were closed, chins tilted to accept the last rays of orange sun and the cooling air. Most stood naked except for shell jewelry and belts and wristbands woven from coconut husks and sea grass. There was no shame on East Pukapuka and only the least bit of jealousy. In a peaceful society, the greatest warrior was one who could hold his or her breath the longest, spearing fish from the deepest hiding spots. And who could be jealous of an eight-year-old?

  Hilton looked down at the boy whose head came to his hip. “My name is James Hilton.” He spoke softly, but the boy’s eyes were fixed on the horizon, and his only reaction was to clutch Hilton’s hand a little tighter. It made the old fisherman suspect there might be more fear buried just beneath the surface.

  As the moments passed, the breeze became a wind and the palm leaves rattled behind the chain of villagers. The sun was eclipsed by the rising sea and, with the sudden darkness, there came a chill. The wave began to make itself heard.

  “We’ll be okay,” Hilton said to the boy when he noticed the small hand had begun to shake.

  “Bigness,” was all the boy said, and shut his eyes.

  * * * *

  The one man not part of the human chain at the cove was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who had shimmied up the tallest coconut palm at the north end. Roosevelt was an expert climber, the best of any male in the village, and thus had claimed the fattest girl as his wife. He’d enjoyed a good, full life thus far, revered for his impressive climbing skills and humble nature.

  “Big, big, wave.” Roosevelt looked down at his wife, then back over his shoulder toward the highest spot of land on the island—the modest lava knoll to the north. He scanned the rooftops of the thatched huts. “Not good.” Roosevelt expertly shimmied down to his beautiful fat wife. His expression of apprehension was not caused by the impending drowning or crushing impact, but at the possibility of losing his standing as the best climber. Would his fat wife still love him if another man climbed faster in the next life? This long-time worry was only exacerbated by the big wave’s approach. Roosevelt shared his daily anguish with anyone who’d listen. The fuel for his exceptional climbing abilities was the fear of slick, polished trees in the next life. Roosevelt was bone thin because he was often too distressed to eat, no matter how much food his beautiful wife prepared. She would eat it instead, thus making her even more breathtakingly lovely. It was a vicious, bittersweet cycle for Roosevelt.

  “Hold me tight,” whispered Roosevelt’s wife into his ear, swe
eping the lanky rail of a man into her wonderful brown folds. They were both naked and the cool breeze made her shiver, her skin quaking against his scrawny body. “The trees on Happa Now will be like ladders. I promise you will climb like a frightened monkey.”

  Roosevelt’s eyes spilled tears on her soft, round shoulder.

  * * * *

  The only child not joined in the human chain already had far too much life and death to attend to in order to calmly appreciate the impending tsunami. The little girl was furiously tearing open the cages of her hospital, coaxing patients out of their warm nests, back to the harsh reality that had already broken their beaks, wings or legs once.

  “You have to climb!” Butter shouted at a handful of young rats she’d been nursing from a dropper meticulously fashioned from bamboo and a melted plastic soda bottle. Black mane bounding across her narrow, mocha-colored shoulders, Butter ran the pups to a leaning tree that they might be able to climb. At least now they would have a slim chance of survival. She swiped sand from eyes rounder than the other children’s. “Eyes like a scared goby’s!” the boys would tease.

  “C’mon, hurry!” she pleaded with her sea turtle—a half-century old Loggerhead—whose recovery room had been the bow of a small skiff that had washed up years earlier. The girl had spent an entire day excavating sand, then dragging the boat into the hole and filling it with water. Butter could never have lifted the heavy creature, and the men on the island wouldn’t be caught dead helping the ridiculous girl who tended to dying animals instead of playing with other children.