9

Cult of the Autopilot: A History Lesson

The pilot said, “The local time is 9:00 A.M. The temperature is 90 degrees. Thank you for flying Continental and enjoy your stay in Truk.” Then he laughed menacingly.

Tuck stepped out of the plane and felt the palpable weight of the air in his lungs. It smelled green, fecund, as if vegetation was growing, dying, rotting, and giving off a gas too thick to breathe. He followed a line of passengers to the terminal, a long, low, cinderblock building—nothing more really than a tin roof on pillars—teeming with brown people; short, stoutly built people, men in jeans or old dress slacks and T-shirts, women in long floral cotton dresses with puff shoulders, their hair held in buns atop their heads by tortoiseshell combs.

Tuck waited, sweating, at one end of the terminal while young men shoved the baggage through a curtain onto a plywood ramp. Natives re-trieved their baggage, mainly coolers wrapped with packing tape, and walked by the customs officer’s counter without pausing. He looked for a tourist, to see how they were treated, but there were none. The customs officer glared at him. Tucker hoped there was nothing illegal in his pack. The airport here looked like a weigh station for a death camp; he didn’t want to see the jail. He fingered the roll of bills in his pocket, thinking, Bribe.

The pack came sliding through the curtain. Tucker moved through the pall of islanders and pulled the pack onto his shoulders, then walked to the customs counter and plopped it down in front of the officer.

“Passport,” the officer said. He was fat and wore a brass button uniform with dime store flip-flops on his feet.

Tuck handed him his passport.

“How long will you be staying?”

“Not long. I’m not sure. A day maybe.”

“No flights for three days.” The officer stamped the passport and handed it back to Tucker. “There’s a ten-dollar departure fee.”

“That’s it?” Tucker was amazed. No inspection, no bribe. Luck again.

“Take your bag.”

“Right.” Tucker scooped up the pack and headed for an exit sign, hand-painted on plywood. He walked out of the airport and was blinded by the sun.

“Hey, you dive?” A man’s voice.

Tuck squinted and a thin, leathery islander in a Bruins hockey jersey stood in front of him. He had six teeth, two of them gold. “No,” Tucker said.

“Why you come if you no dive?”

“I’m here on business.” Tucker dropped his pack and tried to breathe. He was soaked with sweat. Ten seconds in this sun and he wanted to dive into the shade like a roach under a stove.

“Where you stay?”

This guy looked criminal, just an eye patch short of a pirate. Tucker didn’t want to tell him anything.

“How do I get to the Paradise Inn?”

The pirate called to a teenager who was sitting in the shade watching a score of beat-up Japanese cars with blackened windows jockeying for position in the dirt street.

“Rindi! Paradise.”

The younger man, dressed like a Compton rapper—oversized shorts, football jersey, baseball cap reversed over a blue bandanna—came over and grabbed Tucker’s pack. Tuck kept one hand on an arm strap and fought the kid for control.

“You go with him,” the pirate said. “He take you Paradise.”

“Come on, Holmes,” the kid said. “My car air-conditioned.

Tucker let go of the pack and the kid whisked it away through the jostle of cars to an old Honda Civic with a cellophane back window and bailing wire holding the passenger door shut. Tuck follow him, stepping quickly between the cars, each one lurching forward as if to hit him as he passed. He looked for the driver’s expressions, but the windshields were all blacked out with plastic film.

The kid threw Tuck’s pack in the hatchback, then unwired the door and held it open. Tucker climbed in, feeling, once again, com

pletely at the mercy of Lady Luck. Now I get to see the place where they rob and kill the white guys, he thought.

As they drove, Tuck looked out on the lagoon. Even through the tinted window the blue of the lagoon shone as if illuminated from below. Island women in scuba masks waded shoulder deep; their floral dresses flowing around them made them look like multicolored jellyfish. Each carried a short steel spear slung from a piece of surgical tubing. Large plastic buckets floated on the surface in which the women were depositing their catch.

“What are they hunting?” Tuck asked the driver.

“Octopus, urchin, small fish. Mostly octopus. Hey, where you from in United States?”

“I grew up in California.”

The kid lit up. “California! You have Crips there, right?”

“Yeah, there’s gangs.”

“I’m a Crip,” the kid said, pointing to his blue bandanna with pride. “Me and my homies find any Bloods here, we gonna pop a nine on ’em.”

Tucker was amazed. On the side of the road a beautiful little girl in a flowered dress was drinking from a green coconut. Here in the car there was a gang war going on. He said, “Where are the Bloods?”

Rindi shook his head sadly. “Nobody want to be Bloods. Only Crips on Truk. But if we see one, we gonna bust a cap on ’em.” He pulled back a towel on the seat to reveal a beat-up Daisy air pistol.

Tuck made a mental note not to wear a red bandanna and accidentally fill the Blood shortage. He had no desire to be killed or wounded over a glorified game of cowboys and Indians.

“How far to the hotel?”

“This it,” Rindi said, wrenching the Honda across the road into a dusty parking lot.

The Paradise Inn was a two-story, crumbling stucco building with a crown of rusting rebar beckoning skyward for a third floor that would never be built. Tuck let the boy, Rindi, carry his pack to an upstairs room: mint green cinder block over brown linoleum, a beat-up metal desk, smoke-stained floral curtains, a twin bed with a torn 1950s bedspread, the smell of mildew and insecticide. Rindi put the pack in the doorless closet and cranked the little window air conditioner to high.

“Too late for shower. Water come on again four to six.”

Tuck glanced into the bathroom. Mistake. An exotic-looking or ange thing was growing on the shower curtain. He said, “Where can I get a beer?”

Rindi grinned. “We have lounge. Budweiser, ‘king of beers.’ MTV on satellite.” He cocked his wrists and performed a gangsta rap move that looked as if he’d contracted a rhythmic cerebral palsy. “Yo, G, we chill with the phattest jams? Snoop, Ice, Public Enemy.”

“Oh, good,” Tuck said. “We can do a drive-by later. How do I get to the lounge?”

“Down steps, outside, go right.” He paused, looking concerned. “We have to shoot out driver’s side. Other window not go down.”

“We’ll manage.” Tuck flipped the kid a dollar and left the room, proud to be an American.

An unconscious island man marked the entrance to the lounge. Tuck stepped over him and pushed his way through the black glass door into a cool, dark, smoke-hazed room lit by a silent television tuned to nothing and a flickering neon BUDWEISER sign. A shadow stood behind the bar; two more sat in front of it. Tuck could see eyes in the dark—maybe people sitting at tables, maybe nocturnal vermin.

A voice: “A fellow American here to buy a beer for his countryman.”

The voice had come from one of the shadows at the bar. Tuck squinted into the dark and saw a large white man, about fifty, in a sweat-stained dress shirt. He was smiling, a jowly yellow smile under drink-dulled eyes. Tuck smiled back. Anyone that didn’t speak broken English was, at this point, his friend.

“What are you drinkin’, pardner?” Tuck always went Texan when he was being friendly.

“What you drink here.” He held up two fingers to the bartender, then held his hand out to shake. “Jefferson Pardee, editor in chief of the Truk Star.”

“Tucker Case.” Tuck sat down on the stool next to the big man. The bartender placed two sweating Budweiser cans in front of them and waited.