Island of the Sequined Love Nun

them finally gave up and tipped over, releasing the boat to the sea. The outgoing tide carried the skiff end its sleeping passengers through a break in the reef to the open ocean.
    Tuck, sitting chest deep in seawater in the bow, was dreaming of being lost in the desert when a flying fish smacked him in the side of the head. Startled, he reached up instinctively, as one might slap at a biting mosquito, and caught the fish in his right hand. He opened his eyes. In his mind he was still in the desert, dying of thirst, and the fact that he was now holding on to something that looked like a trout with wings seemed a cruel surrealist joke. He looked around, saw the boat, Kimi slumped in the back, ocean and sky, and nothing else-there was no land in sight.
    He threw the fish at Kimi. It bounced off the navigator's forehead and into the sea. Kimi screamed and sat up abruptly. Roberto-sunglasses akimbo-poked his head out the neck of Kimi's dress and screeched at Tucker.
    "What you do that for?" Kimi said.
    "Nice piece of navigation," Tuck said. Then he mocked Kimi's broken English. "You smell storm? You see storm in sky?"
    "Oh, you big-time pilot. Why you not check weather? What kind of dumb fuck American try to go two hundred miles in outboard, huh?"
    "You told me it was no problem."
    "You paying Kimi big money. Not a problem."
    "Well, it's a fucking problem now, isn't it?"
    Kimi stroked Roberto's head to calm him. "Stop yelling. You scare Roberto."
    "I don't care about Roberto. We're half-sunk in the middle of the Pacific and we don't have a motor. I'd say we have a problem."
    Kimi stopped ministering to Roberto and looked up. "No motor?" He fumed and looked back at the empty motor board. There were marks where the clamps had raked across it as the motor pulled off in the tumble. He fumed back to Tuck and grinned sheepishly. "Whoops."
    "We're dead," Tuck said.
    Kimi looked back again where the motor should have been, just to make sure that it was still gone. "I ask chat man, 'Is motor on good?' He say, 'Oh yes, is clamp on very tight.' I pay him good money and he lie. Oh, Kimi is very mad."
    Roberto barked in agreement.
    "Stop it!" Tucker shouted. Roberto ducked into Kimi's dress again. "We've got to get some of this water out of here. We have no motor. We can't go anywhere. We're adrift, lost…"
    "Alive," Kimi interrupted. "I get you out of typhoon alive and you just yell and say bad things. I quit. You get new navigator. Roberto say you mean, nasty, Chevy-driving, milk-drinking, American dog fucker."
    "I don't drink milk," Tuck said. Ha! Won chat round.
    "That what he say."
    "Roberto does not talk!"
    "Not to you, dog fucker. You no…" Kimi paused in mid-rant and retrieved the coffee can, which had been tied to the boat with a string, and started furiously scooping water out of the boat. "You right. Now we bail."
    "What?" Tuck looked up to see Kimi was looking, wide-eyed, out to sea. Tuck followed his gaze to a spot twenty yards in front of the boat where a triangular fin was describing slow arcs in the swells.
    "Hurry," Kimi shouted. "He coming in."
    Tucker reached for his pack, causing the bow to dip under the water by a foot. Before he could adjust his weight to counterbalance the boat, the shark came over the gunwale, snapping its jaws like a man-eating puppet.
    Tuck stood up to escape the jaws and the bow lurched deeper underwater. The shark slid into the boat as Tuck went backward over the side.
    Fear bolted through his body as if the water had been electrified. He wanted to move in all directions at once. He kicked hard and came up a few feet from the boat to see the shark slide back into the water.
    "Get in boat!" Kimi screamed. He was standing with his feet wide, trying to keep the boat from capsizing.
    Tuck kicked so hard that he raised out of the water to the waist, then he fell toward the boat, catching the gunwale with one hand. Kimi shifted his weight to counterbalance and Tuck pulled himself in just as something hit his foot. He jerked his foot so hard he nearly went out of the boat on the opposite side, then he twisted in time to see the shark sliding down into the water with his shoe in its mouth.
    "Behind you!" Kimi screamed.
    Another shark rose up at Tuck's back. He swung around and punched it on the snout as hard as he could, taking the skin off of his knuckles on the shark's sandpaper skin. The shark slid away.
    The motion in the bow caused the stern to dip underwater and the next attack came at