Island of the Sequined Love Nun

little tired. We got a pretty early start. I chink maybe I'll just fix up something quick at my place and get to bed early."
    She yawned. "Maybe tomorrow night. Around seven. Maybe we can try out my new TV."
    "That be fine," Tuck said. "I have a few things I'd like to discuss with you and the doc anyway."
    "Good," she said. "I think we should spend more time together. Now explain to me what all these gauges mean."

41 – What's a Kidney
    Privacy is a rare commodity on a small island and secrets weigh heavy on their keepers. Malink was weary with the burden of too many secrets. If he could only go to the drinking circle and let his secrets out, let the coconut telegraph carry his secrets to the edges of the island and let him walk light. But that wasn't going to happen. Secrets sought him out now, even from the old cannibal.
    He stood with Sarapul and Kimi examining an eighty-four-foot breadfruit tree with a trunk you couldn't get your arms around. Kimi held an ax on his shoulder, waiting for Malink's judgment.
    "Why so big?" Malink asked. "This tree will give much breadfruit."
    "This is the tree," Sarapul said. "The navigator has chosen it."
    Kimi said, "We will plant ten trees to take its place, but this is the one."
    "Why do you need such a big tree?"
    "I can't tell you," Sarapul said.
    "You will tell me or you won't cut the tree."
    "If I tell you, will you promise not to tell anyone else?"
    Malink sighed. Yet another secret. "I will tell no one."
    "Come. We'll show you."
    Sarapul led Malink and Kimi through the jungle to an overgrown spot piled with dried palm leaves. Malink leaned on a tree while the old cannibal pulled away the palm fronds to reveal the prow of a canoe. Not just any canoe. A forty-foot-long sailing canoe. Malink hadn't seen one since he was a small boy.
    "This is why we need the tree," Sarapul said. "I have hidden it here for many years, but the hull is rotten and we need to fix it."
    Malink felt something stir in him at the sight of the big eye painted on the prow. Something that went back to a time before he could remember, when his people sailed thousands of miles by the eye of the canoe and the guidance of the great navigators. Lost arts made sad by this reminder. He shook his head. "No one knows how to build a sailing canoe anymore, Sarapul. You are so old you don't remember what you've forgotten."
    "He can fix it," Sarapul said, pointing to Kimi.
    Kimi grinned. "My father taught me. He was a great navigator from Satawan."
    Malink raised a grizzled eyebrow. "That is where you learned our language?"
    "I can fix it. And I can sail it."
    "He's teaching me," Sarapul said.
    Malink felt the stirring inside him grow into excitement. There was something here he hadn't felt since the arrival of Vincent. This was a secret that lifted him rather than weighing him down. But he was chief and dignity forbade him from shouting joy to the sky.
    "You may cut the tree, but there is a condition."
    "You can't tell anyone," Sarapul said.
    "I will not tell anyone. But when the canoe is fixed, you must teach one of the young ones to be a navigator." He looked at Kimi. "Will you do that?"
    Kimi nodded.
    "You have your tree, old man," Malink said. "I will tell no one." He turned and walked and fell into a light bowlegged amble down the path.
    Kimi called to him, "I hear my friend, the pilot, was in the village last night."
    Malink fumed. The coconut telegraph evidently ran even to Sarapul's little corner of the island. "He asked about you. He said he will come back."
    "Did he have a bat with him?"
    "No bat," Malink said. "Come tonight to the drinking circle. Maybe he will come."
    "I can't," Kimi said. "The boys from the bachelors' house hate me."
    "They hate the girl-man," Malink said, "not the navigator. You come."

    After a nutritious dinner of canned peaches and instant coffee, Tuck checked the position of the guards, fumed out the lights, and built his coconut-headed surrogate under the mosquito netting. Only the second time and already it seemed routine. There was none of the nervousness or anxiety of the night before as he crawled below window level to the bathroom and pried up the metal shower tray.
    He dropped through the opening and was reaching up to grab his mask and fins when he heard the knock on the front door and froze.
    He heard the door open and Beth Curtis call, "Mr. Case, are you asleep already?"
    He couldn't let her see the dummy in his bed. "I'm in the bathroom. Just a second."
    He caught the