Gargantua (3 page)

Based on what he’d seen so far, this wasn’t the case. Even this rinky-dink hotel had air conditioning, everyone spoke better English than Brandon did, and there wasn’t a grass skirt in sight.

A yawn crept up on him, then seemed to wash over his entire body as his mouth opened wide and he stretched his arms out.
This place may be nice, but it sure is far away from everywhere else.
The flight had taken hours, and with all the switching around and the dinky planes they had to take on the last leg of the trip, it felt like it took longer to fly from Manila to Malau than it did the much longer distance from Vancouver to Manila. Brandon had slept as much as he could on the various flights, but he still wanted some time to relax, maybe take a nap.
Hope Dad feels the same.

A clicking noise brought Brandon’s attention away from the splendid view and to the door, through which walked his father.

Weirdly, Dad came in alone.

“Where’s all the stuff, Dad?”

Dad smiled. “The ‘stuff’ is out on the beach, which is where we’re gonna be in a few minutes. How’re Jack and Jill doing?”

Brandon rolled his eyes. He never understood why Dad had to name the computers, and always after some kind of duo. The previous two laptops, before they upgraded to the latest notebooks, were called Thelma and Louise.

In answer to Dad’s question, he said, “They’re booting up now. But we’re all unpacked and everything. Do we have to go out to the beach right away?”

Dad nodded. “ ’Fraid so.”

“Can’t you start without me?” Brandon asked, thinking once more of naps.

Putting his hand to his chest, Dad got all sarcastic. “What? Start without my loyal intern?”

“Assistant.”

“Fine, assistant. Either way, you know I need you down there.” He smiled. “C’mon, finish up with the machines, then put on your bathing suit.”

Brandon frowned. “Bathing suit?”

Dad laughed as he unbuttoned his shirt. “Or shorts, I don’t care. But we’re on a tropical island now. We go out like this, we’ll suffocate.”

Brandon looked down at his own outfit: a long-sleeved Polo shirt and jeans. Fine for Vancouver, but not so much for here. “Yeah, okay,” he said, pulling the Polo shirt over his head, then moving over to the dresser to pull out a T-shirt and a pair of shorts.

After both Brandon and his father had changed, the boy checked out the laptops. “Everything looks cool, Dad. No error messages or viruses or anything. Want me to run the applications?”

“Nah. And don’t bother bringing them down—don’t wanna get sand in ’em. We’re just doing the basic stuff today, water temperature and the like. So bring a paper notebook.”

Brandon nodded and grabbed a legal pad and pen from one of the duffels. “Let’s go to work, Dad.”

“Look, Kal, it’s
my
front page. All you gotta do is print it . . . No, I didn’t clear it with Manny, why the hell should I? . . . Look, Manny believes in freedom of the press just like me, so . . . c’mon, Kal, it’s not like this is a big secret or anything, especially the way that John Dovrojer guy is carrying on at the top of his lungs . . . Kal, this ain’t a discussion, all right? It’s my paper, and I’m tellin’ you that that picture of those two girls is goin’ on the front page . . . All right, then . . . ’bye.”

Paul Bateman sighed as he hung up the phone. Kal had never given him this kind of hard time before. But then, Paul had never printed the story of two tourist corpses on his front page before, either.

Prior to Paul setting up the
Malau Weekly News,
Kal’s clientele at his print shop had consisted primarily of signs, pamphlets, and booklets—barely enough for him to stay in business. He also used equipment that was top of the line when he got it in 1978. The revenue from printing a weekly paper allowed him to upgrade—to Paul’s extreme gratitude, since his journalism training at the University of California at Berkeley hadn’t included cut-and-paste layout, but that was all Kal could handle initially—to a Power Mac with the latest version of Quark and a printing press that wasn’t half the size of the island.

Paul turned to the monitor on his own computer and stared at the headline,
TOURISTS FOUND DEAD ON BEACH.
He shuddered. When he first arrived on Malau years earlier,
he
had been a tourist, on vacation after graduating from Berkeley and before hitting the job market. He wound up staying and running the island’s first “hometown” newspaper since being liberated from the Japanese and gaining independence after World War II.

What didn’t make sense was how the two women died. The official cause of death was drowning, but they only drowned because they got tangled in a fishing net. According to the people they travelled with, one of them was an experienced scuba diver and swimmer. It didn’t make sense that she and her friend had gotten so thoroughly tangled up in a net that, from all accounts, was just sitting there, moored into the sand.

The question now is, do we have the budget for a special followup edition?
he thought.
No way do I wanna wait a week before doing the next one if something breaks.
Paul had wanted the paper to be daily in the first place, but the startup costs on a weekly were steep enough, and while he had the moral and legal support of the Malau government to produce a paper, he was on his own as far as funding went. He had only just paid off the initial loan, and—while pretty much the entire Malau population subscribed and ad revenues had increased steadily since he started—he barely broke even on a weekly, once you subtracted living expenses.

But then, how often do tourists die on the beach?

“Mail call!”

Paul started, then looked up to see Mak, Malau’s lone postal employee, walking into Paul’s office. “Oh, yipee,” he said without enthusiasm. The vast majority of his posted mail consisted of junk or bills. On-island mail—in other words, the interesting stuff—generally came via fax or e-mail or was delivered in person.

“Actually,” Mak said, dropping the rubber-banded bundle he held in his left hand into the wire in-box on Paul’s desk, “there’s one thing here you might like. From the States in a handwritten envelope.”

Paul blinked. “Really? Where from?”

“I told you, the States.”

“Geez, Mak, don’t they teach you guys geography here?”

Mak looked mildly wounded. “Hey, I know all fifty states in the Union. What I don’t know is what all those stupid two-letter codes mean. Dunno why they can’t just write out the state names like sensible people. That entire country of yours is lazy.”

Paul chuckled. “Yeah, yeah,” he said as he grabbed the bundle, undid the rubber band and sifted through, looking for the mysterious envelope.

“Hey, you gonna write about those two girls that died?”

Nodding, Paul said, “Tonight’s front page, actually.”

“Yeah?”

Paul found what had to be the envelope, and was pleasantly surprised to see that it came from his college roommate, Kwame. “Yeah, well, it’s news, y’know? And, by the way, for future reference, ‘CA’ is for California.”

Mak smiled. “Right. Hey, when you gonna come over for dinner again? It’s been over a month since the baby threw up on you. She misses it.”

Laughing, Paul remembered playing with Mak’s one-year-old girl and getting kid barf on his favorite T-shirt to show for it. But he also remembered Mak’s amazing chili.

“Next week, okay?”

“Okay.” Mak waved goodbye and went back to his appointed rounds.

Paul ripped open the letter from Kwame.
Dear Crazy Person,
it started, and Paul laughed. Kwame Davies had been a fellow Berkeley journalism student, and he and Paul had shared a room their final two years, graduating with visions of the
L.A. Times
dancing in their heads. Kwame had repeatedly told Paul that he was crazy to stay in “a third-world country” and that he was wasting his talents. However, he had limited those complaints of late to occasional jabs like letter greetings.

The missive itself brought Paul up to date on Kwame’s life. Among other things, he had gotten a new apartment, a two-bedroom in Sherman Oaks, which he shared with a freelance photographer.

Paul set the letter down and looked out his office window at the clear blue sky, trees swaying in the gentle breeze. He thought about the three-bedroom house that he rented for a price that was less than half of Kwame’s share of a no doubt cramped two-bedroom apartment. He thought about the fact that got to be his own editor, publisher, photographer, and reporter, responsible to no one but himself.

No regrets here,
he decided, as he decided every day that he looked out over Malau.

He stored the file on his computer—
third-world countries don’t have Power Macs,
he thought toward his friend thousands of miles away—and decided to go out for a walk on the beach, leaving the day’s mail unread for once. The day of a new edition was always a slow one—he had dropped the disk containing the week’s issue with Kal first thing in the morning; the paper would hit the stands by sunset—and Paul liked to spend it walking along the beach. Today was a particularly nice day for it.

He locked the office up and walked down to the nearest stretch of beach, removing his mocassins and holding them. Growing up in Los Angeles, he’d spent most of his life on beaches, but the nicest Malibu beach couldn’t hold a candle to the crummiest one on Malau. Less crap in the sand, more blue in the water, less smog in the air.

Within fifteen minutes, he found himself not too far from where Marina Greenberg and Carol Franz met their deaths, and he shuddered.

Then his eye caught something interesting: an array of boxes and cases that looked more or less completely out of place on a beach. A little kid was rummaging through one of them, finally taking out something that looked like a tube. There was something that Paul was pretty sure was a tranquilizer gun strapped to the inside of the lid.

Either that kid is a thief, or he’s got more aptitude than most ten-year-olds,
Paul thought.
Whichever, this smells like news to me.

The kid ran out toward the ocean, sloshing through the surf, and handed the tube thing to a tall man.

“Thanks,” the man said without looking at the item, taking it with his left hand while holding some other kind of gadget in his right. The gadget took his attention for another couple of seconds before he finally looked at the tube the kid had given him. “Brandon, I said I wanted to measure water temperature—how do I do it with this?” The words were accompanied by a smile; a mild reprimand with no anger behind it. Paul noted that.

Brandon, for his part, didn’t seem very reprimanded, so the light tone was just as well. He shrugged and said, “I goofed. Shoot me.”

The man laughed, handing the tube back. “You’re some assistant, pal.”

“You get what you pay for, Dad.”

A-ha,
Paul thought,
a father-and-son team.
He walked toward the adult as Brandon dashed back to the boxes.

“I’ve been trying to figure out what you’re doing, but I give up,” he said.

The man didn’t even turn to look at him. “Measuring water temperature.”

“Interesting hobby,” Paul said by way of a prompt.

Now the man turned to him. “I’m a marine biologist,” he said with a smile.

“Oh, hey, sorry,” Paul said, in case he had given offense with his hobby line. The wheels turned in his head. “Listen, how about giving me an interview?”

“You work for the local newspaper?”

Paul laughed. “I
am
the local newspaper.” He extended his right hand. “Paul Bateman.”

“Jack Ellway,” the man said, returning the handshake. “This is my son, Brandon.”

Paul turned around to see that Brandon had returned, this time holding something that, Paul assumed, would properly measure water temperature. Seeing that Brandon held the thing in his right hand, Paul switched his mocassins from his left hand and extended it for a handshake. “I’m Paul. How you doin’?”

As expected, Brandon had the weaker handshake one expected from the young—quick, light, and eager to be broken, not through any malice, but through wariness of strange adults.
Probably healthy,
Paul thought.

“Doin’ okay,” Brandon said, and handed the equipment to his father.

“Brandon’s my intern,” Jack said.

The kid seemed to wince, then gave Paul an almost conspiratorial look. “Intern means slave,” he explained.

Paul couldn’t help but laugh. He rembered his own internship in the summer between junior and senior years at Berkeley with a local magazine. Sometimes he felt that a slave would’ve been better off.

Brandon wandered away, and Paul turned to Jack. “What brings you to Malau?”

“The recent seismic activity. I want to study its effects on the area’s marine life.”

“This is great. I’m already doing a piece on a famous Australian geologist who’s here to study—”

“Doctor Ralph Hale?” Jack interrupted.

Paul blinked. “You know him?” Hale was a minor celebrity in these parts—though the man himself would be the first to deny it—and Paul was almost done transcribing the interview with him that would run in one week.

“No, but I know his work.”

“Well, maybe you’ll get to meet him. In fact, I can probably introdu—”

“Hey, Dad, look at this!”

This last came from Brandon. Paul turned to see that the kid had unearthed a large jacknife that was dark brown with rust. He started to open the knife up.

“Don’t play with it, Brandon.”

Even as Jack spoke, Brandon cut his finger on the blade. “Ow!”

Jack immediately ran over to his son, Paul behind him. As Jack grabbed Brandon’s wrist to examine the finger more closely, Paul gingerly took the knife from the kid’s other hand. He carefully closed the knife and put it in his shirt pocket.

“Are you gonna say ‘I told you so’?” Brandon asked with the practiced here-we-go-again tone that kids often used with their parents. Paul himself had made a career out of using it with his own father.

“No, I’m gonna say ‘tetanus shot.’ ”

“Can’t you say ‘I told you so’ instead?”

Jack laughed. “ ’Fraid not.” He turned to Paul. “Where’s the nearest emergency room?”