Monsters of the Week

When John Frum Came Back to Peliwak

Deep, deep in the distance, way out over the ocean, something rumbled in towards us, crossing the reef out where the atoll had got up as far as it was going to and then slumped back down, breaking on my ears like waves catching on that line of coral. I looked up, and saw the dark whorl of the storm sitting out over the deep gray sea, saw the palm fronds and Lew's windsocks all pointing back from the water, and figured this was a great time to get the Cat tied down and get back inside. I closed up the panel where I'd been working on the rudder controls, zipped up my toolbag and threw it at the dock, then slid off the fuselage into the water and swam back around to where I left my crocs. Any way around I was going to get wet, but this way it wasn't going to be sitting on top of an airplane that might be trying to pop off its moorings. I grabbed my kit and checked the hawsers – all good, at least as good as I could make them if Lew was busy and Hurley wasn't in his once-in-a-blue-moon useful phase – and sprinted back to the quonset as the first drops of rain started to fall.

Inside, Hurley was sitting at his desk with his weird white bird legs up on top of it, which was nothing new but still stops me dead every time I see it; nobody else here wears socks if there isn't some navy or congressional delegation coming through on a junket, but Hurley always wore white socks, pulled up all the way, under his strappy hiker sandals, like he was a British chief of station out of some nineteenth-century dime novel keeping up appearances for the natives. Lew had the back of the hut open and was surrounded by a bunch of greasy parts; it looked like the spare carburetor, and checking that would allow me to not interact with Hurley for a little more of the time I was cooped up in here by the weather.

"Is that the carb? You got an idea what's going on with it?"

Lew nodded. "Yeah. Boy's sixty years old, all gunked to hell. Sent a call out for a new one, but he gotta come off Guam, and when he gets here, I gotta take him down jus' like this, make sure he even work." That was the problem; procurement regs meant we had to buy American, but American makers had given up on seaplanes long before any of us were even born. The Cat was a nice ship to fly, but every flight always ended in two weeks' non-emergency grounding and a complete rebuild of something, usually involving more prehistoric spare parts getting pulled out of a warehouse in Guam or Hawaii, or maybe some retired master chief hand-turning a replacement on his backyard lathe; if we got spun off as a NGO or seconded over to the UN, we could get a nice new Bombardier or ShinMay and spend more time doing the actual job they put a seaplane out here for instead of just passing on radar reports, and maybe even get rid of Hurley in the bargain.

"Shame about the storm," Hurley said, absent-mindedly flicking his totally-non-reg swagger stick around. "I was going to send you over to Peliwak, but there's no way you're taking off in this soup, and the storm won't be through before dark. It'll have to be tomorrow then, if we can get the bird up."

I put down the filter I'd been scrubbing for Lew and looked up. "Peliwak? Why? I had the radio up all day and didn't catch anything."

Hurley smiled. "Lew had better tell you, he had one of the natives come by today, and he had a story while buying his gas." I turned back around to Lew, since if there was a way I didn't have to deal with Hurley, I was gonna take it; despite being the kind of person who could seriously say "natives" in the twenty-first goddamn century and mean it that way, he was curiously decent about giving us credit and space. The first part probably explained why he was stuck out here; the second part probably explained why he hadn't gotten fired yet.

Lew set down the valve he'd been working on and the toothbrush he'd been scrubbing it with, and squatted up into his storytelling pose, elbows on knees. I sat down. This was going to take a while. He smiled. "John Frum, he come back to Peliwak." I didn't follow, and Hurley must have been expecting me to say something, because he followed up, strutting over and leaning against an oil barrel.