Island of the Sequined Love Nun

head.
    Outside Tuck's head the shower came on; brown, tepid water ran down his body in gutless streams; pipes shuddered and trumpeted as if trying to extrude a vibrating moose. The soap, a brown minibar made from local copra, lathered like slate and smelled of hibiscus flowers and suffering dog.
    Tuck dried himself on a translucent swath of balding terry cloth and slipped into his clothes, three days saturated with tropical travel funk. He shouldered his pack, noticing that the zippered pockets had been tampered with and not giving a good goddamn, then trudged down to the front desk.
    Rindi was sleeping on the desk. Tuck woke him, made sure that the room had been paid by the doctor as promised, then stood in the tropical sun and waited as Rindi brought the car around.
    It seemed like a very long ride to the airport. Rindi ran over a chicken, then got out and fought an old woman who claimed the chicken, each tugging on a leg, testing the tensile strength of poultry to its limit before Rindi busted a kung fu move that secured his dinner and left the old woman sitting in the dust with a sacred chicken foot in her hand. (The old woman was from the island of Tonoas, where magic chickens were once called up by a sorcerer to level a mountain for a temple, the Hall of the Magic Chickens.)
    At the airport Tuck gave Rindi a dollar for the cab ride, which was twice the going rate, and waved off the bloody handshake the aspiring gangsta offered. "Keep the peace, home boy," Tuck said.

14 – Espionage and Intrigue
    Yap was cleaner than Truk and hotter, if that was possible. Here the beat-up taxis actually had radio antennas to identify them. The roads were paved as well. The airport, another tin roof over concrete pylons, was filled with natives: men in loincloths and topless women in hand-woven wraparound skirts. Tuck caught a cab at the airport and told the driver to take him to the dock.
    The driver spat out the window and said, "The ship gone."
    "It can't be gone." What had moments ago been a pleasant drunk from four airline martinis turned instantly to a headache. "Maybe it was another ship that left."
    The driver smiled. His teeth were black, his lips bright red. "Ship gone. You want to go to town?"
    "How much?" Tuck asked, as if he had a choice.
    "Fourteen dollar."
    "Fourteen dollars? It's only fifty cents on Truk!"
    "Okay, fifty cents," the driver said.
    "That's your counteroffer?" Tuck asked. He was thinking about what Pardee had said about these islanders absorbing the worst of American culture. This was his chance to help, if only in a small way. "That's the most helpless bargaining I've ever heard. How do you ever expect your country to get out of the Third World with that weak shit?"
    "Sorry," the driver said. "One dollar."
    "Seventy-five cents," Tuck said.
    "You find another taxi," the driver said, digging in his fiscal heels.
    "That's better," said Tuck. "A dollar it is. And there's another one in it for you if you don't run over any chickens."
    The driver put the car in gear and started off. They passed though several miles of jungle before breaking into a brightly lit, surprisingly modern-looking town with concrete streets. Occasionally, they passed a tin house with stone wheels leaning against the walls. The stones ranged from the size of a small tire to seven feet in diameter and were covered with varying degrees of green moss. "What are those millstone-looking things?" Tuck asked the driver.
    "Fei," the driver said. "Stone money. Very valuable."
    "No shit, money?" Tuck looked at a piece of fei standing in a yard as they passed. It was five feet tall and nearly two feet thick. "What do your pay phones look like?" Tuck asked with a grin.
    The driver didn't find it funny. He let Tucker out at the dock, which was suspiciously shipless.
    Tuck saw a bearded, red-faced white man sitting in the shade of a forklift, smoking a cigarette.
    "G'day," the man said. He was about thirty. In good shape. "Impela my tribe?"
    "Huh?" Tuck said.
    "American, then?"
    Tuck nodded. "You Australian?"
    "Royal Navy," the man said. He pulled a hat from behind him and tapped on it. "Join me?" He motioned for Tuck to sit next to him on the concrete.
    Tuck dragged his pack into the shade, dropped it, and extended his hand to the Australian. "Tucker Case."
    The Australian took his hand and nearly crushed it. "Commander Brion Frick. Have a seat, mate. Looks like you been on the piss for a fortnight, if you don't mind my saying."
    He handed