Dash in the Blue Pacific Read online

  The creature shook its phantom member, made a farting noise, and dissolved into the black wall as though it never existed.

  “Stairway.” Dash once loved that song, had sung along with Sarah each time it played on the classic rock station out of Burlington. He sniffed hard, cleared his throat of the lingering ammonia. Maybe there was hope for his vision, if only to watch pissing goblins in hell.

  He began to hum about a lady and things made of gold.

  Chapter 4

  A hand prodded Dash’s face, pinched his nose, and shook it from side to side.

  “Wake up, Cracker, no more cleaning your filth.”

  “That hurts.”

  The hand drew away when Dash reached. Long nails with dirty crescents in a flickering candlelight. The mud and grass bandages were gone. The pain was gone. He wiggled five pale fingers. No scars on his wrists.

  “You okay now to wash own ass.” The voice came from above and was followed by a sharp hand clap. “Let’s go, let’s go.”

  Two women in matching men’s underpants and white sports bras grabbed him under his armpits and lifted. He stood wobbling, weak and pathetic, leg and back muscles threatening to give out. He was naked except for the same style underpants as the women. His were saggy, pastel, maybe light blue.

  Dash remembered the female voice: “They need to be examined to find answers for the victims’ families.”

  He grabbed at his crotch, found numb resistance beneath thin material, the sensation of touching someone else, a corpse, perhaps. He wedged his hand into the fly, digging until he located a shriveled, lifeless member. It might be asleep, he reasoned, and squeezed as hard as his muscles allowed. There was nothing, no pain, not a distant tingle. He kneaded, groped his testicles.

  “You do nasty stuff on your own time,” said the woman on his right, who began moving them forward, leading the way out of a place that had no resemblance to a bathroom. It was a stone chamber, a cave with charcoal walls, barely head high, but wide enough for them to march three across. It dog-legged left and the sun struck him like a fist, his vision exploding in a white flash, heat searing his face and chest.

  Dash whined, his knees buckling. The women grunted, struggling with their awkward load. “Come on, Cracker, you too big to carry,” said the woman, propping up his left side.

  “And too stinky,” added the other.

  “Even flies scared to land. You gonna walk or crawl, but Manu wants you washed up to eat.”

  He kept his balance, squinted into the hellish glare. Each arm draped over a squat woman. Wait a second. Did this Manu person intend to eat him? What kind of crackers were they talking about? If he could see, and if his legs could manage a few good steps, he might have considered running.

  Instead, he allowed himself to be shuffled blindly forward. With no escape from these women, he confronted his fate. “Are you going to eat me?”

  “You dumb as you look.” The woman hocked and spit to show her disgust. “Nobody eat people for long time.”

  “Especially white man who smells like rotten fish,” said the other. “The girl will come for you when food is ready. You need to wash first. Give some stink back to the sea where you came from.”

  Dash stopped the forward momentum when his toes hit water. He struggled against the women’s grip, tried backpedaling. His vision returned in time to see the enormous expanse of blue water. He might have come from the sea, but he wasn’t ready to return. He had images of fire and demons, terrible things lurking below the surface. It took a ruthless shove from both cantankerous women to send him splashing into the water.

  He tried turning, twisting his arms and bending at the waist, but they were too strong, or he was too weak. “I don’t think I can swim,” he cried out in voice so pathetic that even he was embarrassed. Dash was being overpowered by a pair of short female cannibals and was on the verge of tears. Nothing out there was burning, he told himself, and he was too easy pickings for any devil to bother with. He looked down at his spindly legs, his knobs for knees. He worked to get hold of himself, recover a sliver of dignity despite his smell and dirty underpants.

  His captors grunted, forced him deeper into the lapping water. It felt like a thousand tongues. He tried not to look.

  “You gotta wash, not swim,” said the woman on his right. “White man is a big baby when he don’t have a gun.”

  Dash wanted to tell them he’d never owned a gun, never even fired one. He had friends who shot deer and even moose up in Maine. But they weren’t good friends, just people he knew, really. You might even call them strangers. Sure, there were rusty antique weapons hanging in his father’s shop, but Dash only wanted to fish as a kid. He was a boy who set model airplanes on fire, left the real killing to others.

  He was pushed deeper.

  “I just wanted to fish.”

  The heat was stirred by a headwind that carried the noise of seagulls and distant waves crashing over a partially exposed reef. The shells underfoot were all razors and broken glass, shredding the pads of his delicate feet and surely tantalizing the deadliest species with fresh blood. The trio splashed into water that surged and pulled, the bottom becoming slick rocks and sea grass that tangled around his ankles. They stopped when he was waist deep, rolling waves pushing at his damaged crotch, extra material an underwater cloud, a blue jellyfish hugging a too pale man.

  The women loosened their grip, allowed him to take two more steps forward on his own.

  Dash swayed in the cool water, all the color returning to his world. He dropped open hands to the surface, fingers spread and palms slightly cupped. He turned slowly, creating a light wake behind each hand, careful not to slip on the unstable bottom. His back to the sun, he saw the world come into full focus. Framed by his two escorts—both frowning, middle-aged women with chocolate skin and wild black hair—was a panorama of unimaginable beauty. He stood gaping at a tropical paradise as the woman to his right fumbled a hand into her bra, produced a sliver of soap, and tossed it at him.

  “Be sure to scrub that calf meat real good.” She licked her lips, then turned and trudged back toward dry land.

  “Yeah, and get both them ears clean,” said the other, gripping her own ears and waggling. “They good and chewy.”

  He began to lather his whole body.

  * * *

  Dash scanned the heavens beyond the clusters of puffy clouds, numb penis in his right hand, soapy underpants at his knees. He tried recalling a snippet of prayer from one of the half-dozen times his grandmother had bundled him off to church without his father’s knowledge, but too many years had passed, and he’d been too young. He’d only hoped for something generic, since no rural Vermonter had risen in church to ask God’s help for his sort of ailment. He mostly remembered the shiny pews that made your thigh skin squeal when you slid in shorts and the smell of hair tonic. Even the songs he’d stood up to sing next to his Nanna were long gone.

  There was nothing in the sky but clouds and the airplane cabin’s fading image. An old lady hunched over, hands below the hem of her flowered dress, appalled by what he was doing. He couldn’t stop himself any more than she could have stopped praying. They’d faced death via two different paths. He should be grateful his parts were still attached, and that he’d washed up in a paradise inhabited by cranky natives instead of on the shores of hell.

  Where was the lady? Probably with Cindy at the bottom of the ocean.

  A girl was sitting in a patch of black sand drawing with a twig when Dash hauled himself out of the water, exhausted from fighting the slight current. Had she been there during his examination? No cuts or scars, and it remained the same pink color. But the entire package was devoid of feeling, tip to testicles. He’d used his middle finger to flick the end, but felt nothing. He’d shaken and tugged, then stopped to catch his breath and fend off panic. He slapped his member against the water, threatened and then pleaded for its forgiveness.

  The girl’s large brown eyes found him, and he was embarrassed about h
is drooping underwear and what she must have witnessed.

  “Food’s not ready.” She tossed the stick and wiped away her artwork. “I came early. Men are drinking clap-clap and are all piss and wind.”

  “My name is Dash. The women said you’d come.”

  “I’m Tiki. You looking for your airplane?”

  “I don’t know what I’m looking for, but it’s beautiful here. This is an island?”

  The girl nodded.

  “I’m sorry the airplane killed your fish. I was only a passenger.”

  “Not your fault. Manu says the Volcano was angry. She threw a stone and made your airplane fall. There’s another.” She pointed past him, and he turned to look up at shiny hints of distant metal, long contrails beginning to twist apart at their far ends.

  He made old man sounds when he dropped onto a mound of hardened lava, knees popping. “Did anyone else survive?”

  She shook her head. “You’re the only one. Fish ate what the Sea God didn’t want.”

  “The volcano erupted?”

  “Just one stone.” She used her thumb to indicate the barren mountain rising from the center of the island, a soaring brown monolith producing a ribbon of white smoke.

  “I’ve only seen volcanoes on television.”

  She leaned toward him to whisper, “She has a bad temper.”

  “It’s incredible,” he whispered back. “I guess the smoke means it really is active. That it’s alive.”

  She tilted her head at him. “How else would she throw stones?”

  “Right,” he said, reasonably sure the engines had been starved of fuel, or died from a catastrophic failure of a bad wiring job. Or terrorists. “I guess that makes sense.”

  “People who hunted for your airplane pieces said we should move far away. They said the Volcano will kill our village soon. Manu told them people can’t hide from a god. God want to eat you, then you will get eaten no matter what island you go to. Manu said those people had nice clothes and fancy boat, but were dumb as shitter bugs.” She wrinkled her nose. “Ever see what a shitter bug does?”

  He shook his head. “Has it been smoking like that for a long time?”

  Tiki shrugged, got to her feet. A pretty child—maybe ten years old—with wide eyes and smooth skin, she had a mass of thick hair halfway down her back, brushed to a deep shine. She wore the same style underpants as everyone else.

  She leaned in close again and lowered her voice. “She smokes when she’s angry, which is most of the time. Her temper is worse than boy warriors who drink too much clap-clap. Warriors get angry because they have nobody to fight. Maybe it’s the same thing for the Volcano God.”

  “The volcano wants to fight?”

  “She is surrounded by water, has no enemies. Eating people is the only thing left to make her happy.”

  The narrow trail of smoke was an unbroken line connecting the mountain to the horizon. Would it bring rescue? How far did it hold together for people to see? If it really came from the mouth of a god, maybe it traveled all the way to where they’d lifted off, the perfect white smoke mixing with the yellow smog over Los Angeles. The thought made him feel less isolated, if only for a few seconds.

  “Should be time for food,” said the girl. “You look hungry as a volcano.”

  She was looking up at him, smiling with a flawless set of round teeth that he caught himself inspecting for bits of human flesh.

  * * *

  The path brought them up a slope toward a thick jungle, where soaring palms with clusters of heavy looking fruit stood sentry. Dash had researched exotic honeymoon spots, read trivia with regard to the number people killed by falling coconuts. One writer compared the fruit to dangling bowling balls, taking many more lives than great white sharks.

  Tiki plunged them into humid darkness. Vines hung from a low canopy that had been chopped into a tunnel, brown cuttings lining the way. He struggled to keep up, legs and lungs pushed to their new pathetic limits for a man who’d lived his entire life in a mountainous state. Rivers of sweat poured from his body, clumps of tiny bugs riding the rapids. He eyed the girl’s bouncing hair as she skipped and did pirouettes, naked back dry and insect free, apparently too young for the bra tops worn by the cranky women.

  The path leveled and they emerged into a sunny clearing. He bent at the middle, grabbed at his sweaty knees, suddenly sure his heartbeat would never slow. Through his straggly hair, he could see they were at the perimeter of a village composed of dozens of thatched huts. Busy brown people were doing chores in similar Western-style underwear. A boy probably seven or eight ran to Dash, who half straightened for a greeting. The boy grinned and kicked him in the right shin, then turned and sprinted toward a group of children standing around a lopsided ball.

  “What the hell?”

  Dash hopped on one leg, but it gave out and he fell hard. The ground was a layer of crushed shells that stuck to his skin. He clutched his shin with both hands and waited for the pain to ease.

  Tiki squatted and picked away shards one at a time. She patted the top of his head. “John John hates white people and can kick pretty good for a boy. He’s our goalkeeper.”

  Dash looked beyond the girl at women tending black pots suspended over wood fires. Others swept dirt from interiors or sat weaving fibrous material into coiled piles. Nearly all the women appeared pregnant. He gave his shin one last squeeze and Tiki stepped back.

  “You really don’t eat people, right?”

  He had seen all the movies where an explorer is met by a greeting party, strings of flower leis draped over his head by dutiful, bare-breasted women with lowered eyes. Intricate carvings and valuable beads were gift wrapped in wide green banana leaves, left at his boots. Drums would thump in the background—some official tune for an honored guest—a line of hula girls with swaying arms off to one side. Men in traditional face paints would hold bamboo weapons to port on the other.

  None of this happened. Nobody except the one mean little boy had taken any notice of Dash, who struggled to his feet, brushing away shell fragments.

  Tiki led them across the village compound to a gathering of men sitting on the ground outside the largest hut. The group was in a shady spot, circled beneath a narrow palm growing at a steep angle. The girl cleared her throat for their attention then ran off to where children were playing. Dash noticed their eyes were all glassy, each man suffering a slight wobble as a cup was refilled from a wood jug and passed around. Outside the circle were more jugs. Two were apparently full and ready, while four lay spent on their sides.

  “Sit, Cracker, before another child knocks you over.” It was a voice Dash remembered, the Australian accent cut into short bursts. The chief was directly across the circle, the oldest looking of the bunch. Elevated by a stack of large leaves under his rear end, he was the only one not sitting directly on the crushed shells.

  “Thank you very much.” He brushed his hands, then stepped forward and dropped to his butt when the circle parted to make room. “My name is Dash.”

  “I am Chief Manu.”

  Dash offered his best polite smile. “I’m honored to meet you.”

  “There is no honor left, only age,” said Manu, who leaned toward a muscular young man next to him—one of the warriors, Dash guessed—and spoke in the native language. The warrior nodded once, hopped to his feet, and left the circle. “Other business,” said the chief, waving a hand. “Time for rest will come when our bodies are cast into the sea.”

  “I’m grateful that your people took care of me.”

  “You killed our fish,” said the old chief.

  Dash looked around the circle. Some were nodding enthusiastically, while others seemed nearly comatose, leaning hard, hands planted for stability. The man with the cup took a sip and swallowed. He then spit into the remaining liquid before passing it along to the man on his right. The ritual was repeated.

  Outside the circle, Dash saw the warrior emerge from one of the huts tugging a skinny teenage boy. Difficult to
see in the harsh glare was the cord binding the teen’s wrists.

  “Your airplane poisoned our lagoon,” said the chief. “Even men who came dressed in white bags and used big towels did no good. They brought barrels of medicine for the water and dirt, but made nothing better. Your people did not bring our fish back to life.”

  “I was a passenger,” Dash said, an innocent victim up until that point. “I was on my honeymoon. Row 22, seat F.”

  “Your honeymoon killed our fish.”

  Dash opened his mouth, but couldn’t speak. The chief’s face was so wrinkled it was impossible to read. Maybe they were going to eat him out of spite.

  The man to Dash’s left spit into the cup and handed it to him. It smelled like lamp oil with a hint of rotten fruit. “Makes you strong,” said the man, words slurred but chin jutting proudly. He stuck out a bent arm, flexed a rubbery bicep. “Keeps them little sprogs from kicking your arse.”

  Dash took the cup. As he did, he watched the teenager manhandled across the compound, the big man jerking hard on the cord, impatient with the boy’s resistance. The man slapped the back of the teen’s head twice, sending him to his knees once. The warrior stopped at a pile of large stones and wood stumps just shy of the soccer players. The children ignored the pair, but shifted their game to the far end of the field.

  It was a mouthful of sugary high test gasoline that closed Dash’s throat, made his stomach muscles contract. He shook his head furiously while trying not to spill, knowing the punishment for such an offense might very well be death.

  The circle of men snorted and laughed, clapped their hands when Dash finally managed to swallow and keep it down. He remembered to spit into the cup before passing it along. He caught his breath as the laughter died. His throat was coated in something similar to candle wax. “Your island is beautiful,” he said, nearly barking the words while trying to relax his gag reflex.