He waited for their arrival, for them to round
the corner into his dark home to finish him off. Heat radiated from
his core, a pulsing fever that brought flashes of red to his black
world, but he was otherwise numb. More stings wouldn’t hurt, at
least not as bad. One last flourish of barbs would take him away,
would save him.
The droning sound veered, changed pitch, as if
the bees had suddenly zeroed in on someone or something else. He
felt regret for their new target, hoped it had speedy legs or
wings. But doubt blossomed, made him wonder if it really was the
sound of a hunting swarm. There was something mechanical about the
noise, something familiar, as though it came from Dash’s world and
not from some jungle clearing. Maybe it was a motor, the kind
attached to a boat. And it made sense of the wet bubbling and
lowered pitch, a craft swinging around the tip of the reef,
powering down to maneuver in the shallow water. A boat meant he was
going home, that his rescuers had arrived to deliver him from this
hell on earth. Adrenaline rushed through his body, tensed his
muscles, and stirred the poison in his blood.
“
Help,” he tried saying, but his
tongue was too far gone. The fever swept away his consciousness,
took him to a place without dreams.
* * *
Dash was wrenched from sleep when the word
‘help’ was repeated, a plaintive cry from a voice he
knew.
He tried calling Tiki’s name, but not enough
healing time had passed since the motor sound. It might take days
or weeks, or maybe his tongue would never work again, as forever
numb and useless as his penis. His bones ached from shivering, the
fever wicking the last of his liquid through burning skin. His lips
felt like they were turned inside out.
“
My eyes,” he tried saying, touching
a bloated hand to his swollen brow. The bees had gotten into the
softest parts, had jabbed their barbed weapons into the most
fragile surfaces.
The girl’s voice returned in a scream, not far
away, but the cave’s acoustics made it difficult to judge. He
rolled from his mat, crawled on hands and knees toward the sound,
toward Tiki and whatever had her.
He knew it was something to do with the motor.
The soldiers were back, had gotten hold of the child and were
hurting her. He scrambled blindly, reaching the cave’s opening on
his knees, knowing it was day from the sun’s heat. He lifted his
chin, eyes swollen completely shut, and gently pawed at the puffy
mess with one hand. He reached out to the wall at the cave’s mouth
and pushed his way up, getting first one and then the second
wobbling foot under him.
He listened for more cries, and it was a minute
before her voice came again. More screams, and maybe she called his
name. He stumbled forward on bent legs, hands out in front, forming
a picture of the tunnel-like pathway toward the village. Up and
over a slight knoll carpeted with broken shells, and then into the
humid air as the vegetation closed around him. The sound of insects
grew tenfold as he crept forward, vines ensnaring his feet and
sharp things drawing blood from probing hands. A man’s laughter and
more screams, but not from the direction of the village. Tiki had
been caught, pulled inside the jungle by a monster, and Dash was
feebler than ever, blind and stumbling, because he hadn’t heeded
her simple advice not to swat the bees.
Twenty more steps and the insect noise was
maddening, blood pulsing in his ears as he collapsed to his knees
and felt for the opening that led toward her last scream. It was
the clearing with the stone altar she must have been taken to,
hopefully biting and scratching. God’s House, the missionaries had
named it. He tore at the vines, cutting his hands on the prickly
bushes, his knees becoming pincushions. He stopped prodding the
thick wall of low growth to pull out a finger-length thorn sticking
from the top of his left thigh. He fingered the needle in his
clumsy hands, touched the tip to one wrist to test its strength,
where it slid easily through his skin and found muscle.
He could feel the jungle vibrate as he brought
the thorn to his left eyelid and slipped the point into his
puss-filled flesh. The skin burst like a volcanic pimple, and he
carefully kneaded the inflamed tissue with his bulbous knuckles. He
wiped the mess away with his sweaty forearm, then switched hands
and slowly plunged the thorn into his other bloated eyelid. He
plunged twice this time, pressing and kneading. He could once again
blink, could see forms in the dark jungle—the yellow leaf plants
and white flowering vines giving texture to black satin shadows.
The world looked hazy, as if deep under water.
The opening through which Tiki once led him was
five paces beyond, and he got back to his feet and lunged forward.
He could hear her cries over the insect noise, as well as her
captor’s mocking voice. Or maybe it was his imagination that kept
her alive, his desperate hope that her throat hadn’t been slit on
the sacrificial altar. He stumbled over rotted tree stumps and
through tangles of bushes that claimed pieces of flesh. He flung
his body forward, falling and clawing to his feet, his panicked
mind driving him to her rescue. Nothing in his disappointing life
had ever mattered as much as getting to her, as stopping whatever
the monster was doing.
Dash tumbled into the circle of piled stones
beneath the leaf-covered altar. His breath was gone, blackness
threatening to take away the vision he’d recovered. He searched the
shadows for a uniform, although he’d only imagined what the
soldiers wore. He’d pictured them in Australian outback
clothing—tan uniforms suitable for the harshest bush. He rose,
stood tall with his fists out in front, ready for a battle to the
death.
But there was nothing to fight, only a small
slumped figure on the wide stone where the countless spiders had
saved their souls. When he reached for the whimpering child, she
made a choked noise and pulled away. Her underpants lay in a lump
next to her, a bloody handprint on the outside of her thigh. He
dropped his forehead to the wet stone, let his eyes close until
night took firm hold.
T
he tiny, careening spiders
stayed hidden, maybe because they’d failed, or maybe because they
didn’t exist. Dash leaned over the massive stone, watching the
empty leaves, the only movement caused by Tiki’s occasional fits of
shivering. It was hours before she stopped pulling away from his
touch. He slid his hands beneath her dirty knees and fragile neck,
gently scooping her up and holding her as steadily as his own frail
body allowed. He carried her through the jungle and delivered her
to the sea without resting, cradling her in the protected water
until she said she was clean. The soldiers’ boat was gone, with
only a single aluminum can left bobbing, trash captured in a lazy
vortex within the reef’s bony tip.
She spent two days and nights in the cave, Dash
sleeping restlessly under the Pacific sky in an aisle seat, his own
toxins drifting away on the wind.
He dreamed of thousands of spiders spinning
their frantic circles, him standing over them in judgment. He
lifted a bare foot and brought it down over their soft bodies,
smearing them in a short arc in one direction and then the other.
The blood and guts looked like the two strokes a child’s crayon
might make when drawing a seagull.
He checked on her before heading up the east
coast to gather driftwood for a signal fire. She’d been sound
asleep on his grass mat, but halfway up the beach he noticed her
following his footsteps in the sand. He slowed for her to catch
up.
They made it all the way to where waves swept
across dead coral shallows at the island’s northern tip. It was a
foreboding panorama, bleak and windy, stinking of things rotting in
salt. But maybe if he’d first woken here, had spent weeks and
months staring out over this landscape, it would all be as familiar
and comfortable as the southern end.
Wood was plentiful, caught in bleached tangles
like smashed ribcages over the rocky terrain. He picked the driest
pieces, snapped them into similar lengths.
“
They took one of my sisters,” she
whispered, her voice forced through a too small space, as if she
was still being choked. “We need longer vines.”
It broke his heart some more as he watched her
tie a perfect knot in a green strip to secure one bundle. She
walked to the edge of the jungle and disappeared without
hesitation, barefoot and determined. Her fearlessness made him feel
pathetic. Not in a million years would he dare wander into the
thick growth that was infested with snakes and colorful giant
spiders with hinged legs. And maybe white men filled with even
worse poison.
He didn’t explain the expedition, and she
helped without question. A signal fire would bring rescue, make
everything right. Safely away, he’d convey the plight of the
villagers to anyone who’d listen. The pirate raids to steal
children would cause outrage, bring protection after years of
misery and loss. Salvation was achieved from one’s self, not a god
who may or may not understand words amid the raucous chorus. His
escape was the only chance for her people, not his murder or
suicide. Not his persecution.
She touched his arm with a vine lasso for his
bundle of sticks. He hoisted the wood across his shoulders, sharp
parts digging into sunburned flesh. She pulled her package
lengthwise from a cord around her waist, the back end bumping over
rocks and sand, a wavering claw-mark trail left behind.
The fire’s purpose was the first lie. He told
her he wanted to cook his own last meals, even if he had to ask for
handouts from the passing fishermen. She would only need to bring
his water, and he’d have no trips at all to the village. He was
ashamed to be playing on her sympathy, but he knew she expected him
to follow Manu’s vision into the volcano’s mouth. Perhaps if Dash
had rescued her, she would have understood him wanting to rescue
himself.
They lugged the wood across the lava to a spot
near the airplane seats, where she picked at the knots. They
arranged the wood in a log cabin stack that rose just above her
shoulders. He filled the hollow center with the driest foliage he
could scavenge. The sun would bake out any remaining moisture in
one afternoon. They pulled giant banana leaves into a pile next to
the tinder chimney. He would use the leaves to shelter the wood if
rain threatened, but their main purpose was to create smoke once
the stack was burning. The green leaves would become the signal,
white smoke against black lava and the brown volcano
behind.
They stepped back to look at their
work.
He heard skepticism in her choked voice. “You
can’t cook with this. It’ll get too hot, burn up too fast. The wood
will be wasted.”
His heart broke some more.
“
It’s for coals.” It was his second
lie, but he still felt a sense of accomplishment. He looked beyond
the structure to the glimmering sea, dotted with whitecaps in the
late afternoon breeze, each spec on the horizon a potential ship.
And help for these people, too, he reasoned, looking down at the
girl who was watching him, her eyes filled with emotions he didn’t
recognize.
She returned to the village alone, but her face
came back to Dash when he was lying on his sleeping mat under a
single candle’s yellow glow. He again saw her eyes, and recognized
the emotions as sadness and betrayal.
When he walked down to the tide pool in the
morning light, he wasn’t surprised to find his chimney of wood
gone. Each stick and every last twig had vanished, probably cast
back out into the water to drift another thousand miles.
He stood with his arms at his sides, the breeze
cold on the open sores left by the stings, his only company a
thirty foot shadow of a lonely man. He turned his back to the sun
and raised his arms to change the shadow into a cross. Then he
spread his legs and dropped his hands to form a triangle that might
also be a volcano. He hooked his thumbs and made a shadow puppet
bird, then turned it into two mouths that talked.
“
I’ll go to a movie.”
“
A Coke with ice would hit the
spot.”
“
And sit in the first
row.”
“
Let the light and colors fall over
me.”
“
Laugh at things not
funny.”
“
Or cry.”
“
A double feature if they still have
them.”
“
Hope for a happy
ending.”
“
There are no happy
endings.”
“
What makes them believe the
almighty Volcano won't spit you back up to where the big planes
fly?”
“
Before drowning them in melted
rock.”
“
Blood, the girl calls
it.”
“
The girl dragged into the jungle,
violated and left on an altar, while one less tempting was snatched
away forever.”
“
Left
at
the
altar.”
“
You’re their savior.”
“
Their last hope.”
“
There are no happy
endings.”
His arms were tired when he dropped his hands.
The sun burned his still shoulders, his skinny neck. He scanned the
ocean beyond the coral reef and decided to follow the
driftwood.