Island of the Sequined Love Nun

can handle that. You just get flyboy ready to do his job."
    "He'll be able to fly within a week. He brought up his navigator again while we were outside."
    "If he's here, you'd better find him."
    "I'll speak to Malink tonight. The Micro Spirit is due in day after tomorrow. If we find the navigator, we can send him back on the ship."
    "Depending on what he's seen," she said.
    "Yes, depending on what he knows."

    Tucker Case entered his bungalow feeling satisfied and full of himself. Someone had fumed on the lights in his absence and fumed down the bed. "What, no mint on the pillow?"
    He changed into a pair of the doctor's pajama bottoms and grabbed a paperback spy novel from a stack someone had left on the coffee table.
    They had a TV. There had been a TV in the Curtises' bungalow. He'd have to ask them to get him one. No, dammit, demand a television. What did Mary Jean always say? "You can sell all day, but if you don't ask for the money, you haven't made a sale." Good food, good money, and a great aircraft to fly-he'd stumbled into the best gig on the planet. I am the Phoenix, rising from the ashes. I am the comeback kid. I am the entire 1980 gold-medal-winning U.S. Olympic hockey team. I am the fucking walrus, coo-coo ka-choo.
    He went into the bathroom to brush his teeth, caught his reflection in the mirror. His mood went terminal. I am never going to get laid again as long as I live. I should have pressed them about Kimi. I didn't even ask about what in the hell kind of cargo I'm going to be flying. I am a spineless worm. I'm scum. I'm the Hindenburg, I'm Michael Milken, Richard Nixon. I'm seeing ghosts and bats that talk and I'm stuck on an island where the only woman makes Mother Theresa look like a lap dancer in a leper colony. I am the man who put the F in failure, the P in pathetic, the G in gullible. I am the ringworm poster boy of Gangrene City. I'm an insane, unemployed bus driver for the death camp cartel.
    Tuck went to bed without brushing his teeth.

33 – Chasing the Scoop
    Natives slept side by side, crisscrossed, and piled on the deck of the Micro Spirit until-with a thu showing here, or a lavalava there, streams of primary color among all that gelatinous brown flesh-it looked as if someone had dropped a big box of candy in the hot sun and they had melted together and spilled their fillings. Amid the mess, Jefferson Pardee, rolled and pitched with the ship, finding three sleeping children Lying on him when the ship moved to starboard, a rotund island grandmother washing against him when the ship listed to port. He'd been stepped on three times by ashy callused feet, once on the groin, and he was relatively sure he could feel lice crawling in his scalp.
    Unable to sleep, he stood up and the mass moved amoeba-like into the vacated deck space. A three-quarter moon shone high and bright, and Pardee could see well enough to make his way through to the railing, only stepping on one woman and evoking colorful island curses from two men. Once at the rail, the warm wind washed away the cloying smell of sweat and the rancid nut smell of copra coming from the holds. The moon's reflection lay in the black sea like a tossing pool of mercury. A pod of dolphins rode the ship's bow wave like gray ghosts.
    He took several deep breaths, relieved himself over the side, then dug a bent cigarette out of his shirt pocket. He lit it with a disposable lighter and exhaled a contrail of smoke with a long sigh. Thirty years in the tropics had given him a high tolerance for discomfort and inconvenience, but the break in routine was maddening. Back on Truk, he'd be toweling off the smell of stale beer and the residue of an oily tumble with a dollar whore, preparing to pass out with a volume of Mencken under his little air conditioner. No thought of the day to come or the one just passed, for one was like the next and they were all the same. Just cool cloudy sleep that made him feel, if only for a minute, like that young Midwestern boy on an adventure, exhausted from passion and fear, rather than a fat old man worn down by ennui.
    And here, in the salt and the moonlight, on the trail of a story or maybe just a rumor, he felt the fungus growing in his lungs, the pain in his lower back, the weight of ten thousand beers and half a million cigarettes and thirty years of fish fried in coconut oil pressing on his heart, and none of it-none of it-was so heavy as the possibility of dashed hopes. Why had he opened himself up to a