"Sure."
Buddy's favorite section of Malinowski's book described the island of Kaytalugi, populated entirely by man-hungry women who went about naked. The island was to the north of the Trobriands, two days' rough sailing, but it was worth it: the women were voracious and insatiable. They waited on the beach, and when men arrived the women pounced, ravishing them. Buddy loved the part about the women using the men's fingers and toes when their penises went limp. Boys were sometimes born to the women of Kaytalugi, but they were fucked to death before they grew old. As intensely as the chest-thumping men of the Irobriands, Buddy dreamed of going to Kaytalugi.
"I am in the Philippines once. Nice place, but plenty of bugs," Tran said, pouring gin, jerking caps off beer bottles, and no one heard what he said for his being an employee.
"I've seen spiders like this," Peewee said. He made a fist and hefted it bravely, lifting it to his eyes, seeing a dangerous hairy creature. "In Tahiti."
"That's small for a spider in the Irobriands," Buddy said.
Sandford said, "Who hasn't had spiders in his boots?"
"The most poisonous spider in Australia is no bigger than your fingernail," Lemmo said, beckoning with his finger, displaying his bitten nail. "If you're stung, you die. Nerve toxin. You're fried in five minutes."
"Goddamn rat curled up and died in my shoe in Samoa," Buddy said. "I wore the shoe all day without even noticing. It was a very small rat."
"Fungus is worse than any animal. I went green between my toes from some crud I picked up in Tahiti," Peewee said.
"Ever get ookoos in your crotch?" Buddy said. "I had them in Fakareva."
"Buddy loves saying Fakareva," Sandford explained to me.
Hearing that, I was reminded that they were not really talking to each other; they were talking to me, as other people did, with deadly insistence, knowing that I had once been a writer. I thought: If they had read anything I had written, they would never tell me stories.
Willis filled his cheeks with beer, but before he could swallow, he sneezed and spewed a mouthful, as mist, as droplets, as foam, as specks of surf, and everyone laughed at the coarseness of it, and his dripping chin.
"He's locked and loaded," Sandford said.
"You once asked me what a ratfuck is," Buddy said to me. "This is a ratfuck."
He was drunk, with a sense of relief — relieved to know that the others were too, and safe because of it, so it was like a brotherhood. When had I ever asked him what a ratfuck was?
All their slurred and lispy talk of foreign places suggested bed, implied sex, and the word "woman" was unspoken so far, yet conspicuous. Ihere was a woman in each man's story, in the boots, in the bedroom, in the jungle hut. Each spider was a woman, each leggy centipede, the small rat was a woman, the fungus a woman, the "ookoos" in your crotch, the mentions of poison and bites — women.
"This girl in Pukapuka," Lemmo said. What girl in Pukapuka? "She scratched and cut me until I was bleeding. "She had these sharp little teeth. You wouldn't believe the things she did to my body."
"Yes, I would," Buddy said. "It's in the book."
"I had one of them little Negritos in my room one morning," Willis
said.
He was going to say more, only then an older woman walked by, a hotel guest I recognized as Mrs. Bailey Nivens from Tucson. She moved in that fastidious and balancing manner of a top heavy woman, her hands slightly raised like an overweight acrobat treading a tightrope, the hands giving a stateliness to her toppling gait. Buddy and his friends fell silent, like bad boys caught boasting. She was about their age, mid-sixties, yet they looked utterly unlike her, furtive, conspiratorial, shamed by her
motherly nearness. Willis blew out his cheeks and held his words until she went by.
"She must've come through the floor, this Negrito woman, oiled her body and squeezed through. She was naked and greasy. She looked like a dead monkey in the moonlight. I says, 'Get over here,' and she climbs into my rack and starts giggling."
"Amazing little people," Lemmo said. "And they fight like terriers."
"Reason she was there was we were having trouble with the locals. This was in Mindanao," Willis said. "They were stealing parts off our vehicles and hoisting our dogs. Then we sent word to the Negritos."
"Negrito women look like cute little girls with huge knockers," Buddy
said.
"You can buy them — their families sell them. I knew a guy who outright owned one," Willis said. "Anyway, these Negritos went into the jungle and killed some monkeys and cut off their heads, about ten of them. They stuck the monkey heads on posts around the camp. We never had any trouble from the locals after that."
"Hoisted your dogs so they could eat them," Peewee said. "They marinate the dead dog in Seven-Up to get the smell off, and then stew it with potatoes and pineapple chunks."
"I've eaten that," Buddy said. He laughed in a chewing way. "I've eaten pretty much everything."
"Know how we used to catch monkeys when we were in New Guinea?" Sandford said. "We used to get 'em drunk."
Peewee said, "How'd you get 'em to drink?"
"We'd go buy a big bottle of the cheapest wine we could find. Then we'd go to where there were a bunch of 'em in the trees and pour it in a big flat bowl, put it on the ground, move off a little, and just sit there and watch. Sooner or later one would come down and taste it, splashing some into his mouth with his hand. Then he'd go back up into the trees. After a while, he'd come back and splash some more. There'd be others, too. Pretty soon one of them would be jumping back and forth in the branches, and he'd miss and fall to the ground. Ihen we'd run in and grab him and put him in a sack and run like hell. All the others would start throwing sticks and stones at us. If we got a real young one, the mother could be real tough. She'd hit you with a stick and knock you down."
Willis said, "I saw a woman in the Philippines giving a monkey a bath. I don't know why, but it made me real horny."
Lemmo said, "I once saw a woman breastfeeding a dog in Tonga. A little puppy."
"Most of the things you see in the Pacific were done in Whyee once," Buddy said. "Probably right here where we're standing."
Ihe five of them straightened their backs and blinked through the entrance of Paradise Lost into the lobby.
"I wonder if that's in the book," Buddy said, and leaned over the counter, grunting at Tran to pass him the thick book, which was well thumbed enough to be a Bible.
"Lots of times I've seen women getting it on with dogs in Olongapo," Willis said. "In bars. That used to be the big thing. 'Hey, Joe, you wanna see girl and dog?"
Buddy opened the Malinowski. He moved his lips, looking prayerful as he read. "It mentions a guy who was caught sodomizing a dog. He was a laughingstock."
"Speaking of tattoos," Peewee said — who had said anything about tattoos? — "that Marquesan woman I lived with in lahiti was covered in tattoos. She used to cheat at cards. I brought her here once. She wanted a guitar. We visited my ex-wife and my mother. They couldn't believe I was with a sixteen-year-old. She waited on me like I was a king. I said, 'She's not my girlfriend. She's my pet."
"I had one of them in Zamboanga," Willis said. "She was just a kid. We used to fight and pretty soon we'd be in bed."
"That's in the book," Buddy said. "I remember one ratfuck we had in Waimanalo. I was completely shitfaced. Momi was away. I woke up with a little wahine. She says, 'Mahalo. That was nice.' I didn't remember a thing!
I says, 'Hey, how old are you?' She says, 'Fifteen next birthday.'"
"That's in the ballpark," Sandford said.
Willis said, "I knew this guy in the Philippines who had three girls living with him, none of them older than sixteen. His rule was that one of them had to be naked all the time. They took turns. It was kind of a harem-type thing."