The Curse of Lono - By Hunter S. Thompson Page 0,38

and his lips seemed to flap as he spoke. "Oh yes!" he blurted. "Oh hell yes. That's the last thing we need!"

I backed away from him, not taking my eyes off his hands. Ackerman was nowhere in sight, but I could hear the staccato bleating of his voice from what seemed like a hundred miles away. He was up on the bow, pacing around with a gaffing hook in his hands, watching for shifts in the wind and screaming at the lights on the faraway cliff.

"You brainless Jap bastards!" he yelled. "Douse those goddamn lights!"

Captain Steve was now leaning over the back of the boat sinking another hot dog down on the end of our line with the flashlight. "What the hell is wrong with those Japs?" he muttered. "Are they trying to signal us in?"

"Yeah," I said. "It's an old Key West trick -- set up a false lighthouse and lure boats onto the rocks."

Suddenly he leaped back and shouted, "Oh my God, a sea snake!"

"What?"

"A sea snake!" he said, pointing down at the water. "Lethal poison, instant death! It came right up to my hand!"

I shrugged, firing another stream of kerosene into the hibachi and sending another balloon of yellow fire up into the night. I grabbed the bucket of water that I was keeping on the deck for emergencies. Captain Steve staggered sideways, shielding his face from the flames. "Be careful!" he shouted. "Leave that fire alone!"

"Don't worry," I said, "I know what I'm doing."

His hands were clawing nervously at his pockets. "Where is it?" he hissed. "Did I give you the bottle?"

"What bottle?"

He fell sideways and grabbed the chair as another big wave picked us up. "The kind!" he screamed. "Who has the goddamn kind?"

I was hanging on to one tin leg of the hibachi, which had almost turned over. Finally, the wave passed and we settled back into the slough. "You fool," I said, "it's gone. You took it over the side."

"What are you talking about?" he screamed. "What side?"

I watched his eyes for a moment, then shook my head and went back into the cabin for a beer. Captain Steve had never tried mescaline before, and I could see that it was reaching his brain. It was obvious from the confusion in his eyes that he had no recollection at all of taking our last bottle of stimulant down with him, in the pocket of his trunks, when he'd gone down with the scuba tanks to secure our anchor line around a big rock on the bottom, about 90 feet down. I had grabbed the bottle away from him when he came up and drunk about half of the salty bitter mixture in one swallow. Ackerman, quickly understanding the nature of the tragedy, had drunk off the rest.

We had no choice. There is no point trying to save cocaine after you've mixed it up with salt water. Captain Steve had missed his share -- which was fair, I thought, and probably just as well. Any fool who will dive to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean with two grams of cocaine in his pocket is capable of anything at all; and now he was losing his grip to the psychedelics.

Bad business, I thought. It's time to collect the knives.

I woke up at sunrise to find Ackerman passed out like a dead animal from an overdose of Dramamine and Captain Steve wandering frantically around the cockpit, grappling with a tangle of ropes and saying over and over to himself, "Holy Jesus, man! Let's get out of here!"

I came awake and stumbled up from the cabin where I'd spent two hours sleeping on a cushion covered with fishhooks. We were still in the shadow of the cliffs and the morning wind was cold. The fire had gone out and our thermos bottle of coffee had cracked open sometime during the night. The deck was awash with a slimy mixture of kerosene and floating soot.

But the wind had not shifted. Captain Steve had been awake all night, he explained, never taking his eyes off the anchor line and ready, at any moment, to leap into the surf and swim for it.

"I'll never understand how we survived," he muttered, staring up at the cliffs where the colony of mean Japs was still clustered around their campfires. "Now I know what they mean about South Point. It is a dangerous place."

"The Land of Po," I said.

"Yeah," he said, reeling in the last of our all-night fishing lines. All the