Christmas Island by Robin Vigfusson
Jack and Amy Platon had parked next to a schoolyard where red crabs rippled like a river blown by the wind. Thousands of them were also on the road ahead, marching to the sea to lay their eggs.
“How are we going to get out of here?” Amy asked. She and Jack were on vacation in Christmas Island, looking for a decent place to eat.
There was a desperate rap on their car window and a geezer their age stood outside with his blue eyes popping.
Jack rolled down the window.
“Can you help me? I think my wife’s having a heart attack!”
Jack got out of their rented Kia and when he returned ten minutes later, he told Amy the woman had died.
“I want to go home!” Amy screamed. “This is like Hell! You brought me to Hell!”
Jack started driving over crabs and felt their shells crack under the tires. Other people had gotten out of their cars to rake them away since there was a fine for killing them as they were Christmas Island’s main attraction. Jack swerved around them all the way back to the B and B.
He pulled into the driveway of the bungalow and Amy got out, slamming the door. She was a small, wiry woman with dyed auburn hair and Jack, grey and lanky, trailed several feet behind like a drayhorse.
The B and B’s owner sat on a mangy couch in the tiny parlor, telling a guest about the local golf course which was situated on a cliff. Though the owner was American, he called himself Vladimir.
“I really have to talk to you,” Jack said.
Vladimir smiled broadly, showing corroded teeth. He was a widower in his seventies, the same age as the Platons.
“What’s the trouble, Jack? Amy looks upset.” Vladimir didn’t move from the couch, though Jack had wanted to talk to him in private.
“I’m afraid we’ll be cutting our time here short,” Jack said. “Amy wants to go home.”
“Sorry to hear that. Have you called Virgin Atlantic? It might be a week till the next flight to Perth.”
“Then she’ll just have to wait.”
“If she has a nervous breakdown, you can always call Medevac.” Vladimir snorted. Jack felt that crack crossed the line and walked away.
Their cramped quarters had bare stucco walls and no curtains on the window, but like everything else on Christmas Island was absurdly expensive.
Amy sat on the bed with her back to Jack.
“I’m going to call the airline, Amy.”
“I don’t want to spend another minute here!”
“I’m doing the best I can!” Jack yelled. He was a large man and still used his temper to intimidate. He slumped on the other side of the bed, without looking at her.
“I don’t know if I can even eat another meal here,” Amy said.
“We won’t go to the market.” The day before they’d bought cold cuts that turned out to be rancid and a head of lettuce for eight bucks since everything had to be flown in. “There are some decent restaurants around.”
“It’ll cost an arm and a leg.”
“We’ll do what we have to.”
Outside their bare window, clouds rose like steam against a plush violet sky. The environs were spectacular, glittering with iridescent coves and beaches, but Amy was unimpressed. She hid from the sun, was afraid of water and considered wild creatures to be agents of disease. She liked cruises best because the ships were the same as floating malls and once you docked, you shopped and had a meal somewhere nice.
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The Platons shared the bathroom down the hall with a German couple and Jack and Amy rose at six to take their showers. It was still impossible to avoid conflicts since Amy was up a few times a night to pee. At least, the other pair was young with sturdy bladders and the raw white porcelain reeked of Lysol as if to ensure the sink and toilet were clean.
When Amy had vowed not to leave their room she meant it. She hadn’t even left the bed. She sat against the headboard with her arms folded.
“Amy, we’re going to the best restaurant they have,” Jack promised.
“I don’t even like the people. They’re clannish. Have you seen any Blacks or Jews? Or even a Hispanic? And they brag that they’re ‘diverse’.”
“It’s not New Jersey.”
They tried watching television, but the only channel that worked was showing a marathon of an Australian sitcom called “Bump” about a teenager who has no idea she’s pregnant until she goes into labor in the girl’s room at school.
They spent the day reading. Both of them had brought books along for their time on the plane, ‘Moby Dick’ and ‘Infinite Jest’, which they took on all their travels, but never finished.
By evening, the humidity had shriveled their room so that they felt claustrophobic. Jack suggested they go for dinner at The Silver Boatswain, which was supposedly the best restaurant on the island.
The Silver Boatswain was a couple of miles from the B and B, planked with wooden steps that led to a dining space. It looked like any number of seafood dives at the Jersey Shore and as soon as they entered, they caught a minor ruckus at the bar.
“Is it because we’re Asians?” a young man was yelling at the bartender who had his back to him. “When I go home to Singapore, I will tell my friends not to spend their Aussie dollars here!”
Jack felt reassured; he was not just imagining the general hostility. The day before at the Malaysian grocery, he was sure the clerk, who’d struck him as a cross between an ogre and a kewpie doll, had given him the fish eye when she rang up his order.
Their table overlooked the ocean and the view was the main selling point, but tonight the sky looked jaundiced except for clouds resembling marble ruins.
Their waitress was a tall blonde with a ponytail and a contrail of Chanel No. 5, who practically tossed their menus at them.
He opened his and read that a steak cost forty-three dollars.
“I just want veggie pasta,” Amy said.
They heard a shrill vibration like a scream. Microphones, amps and a stool were being set up for a young man in a faux mohawk wearing shorts and flipflops, holding a guitar. A screen had been placed in back of him showing random scenes from movies, none of which Jack recognized.
The young man got up on a barstool and began to sing, “Rock me Mamma, like a wagon wheel-,” Though the kid could carry a tune, his voice was crass and ordinary and he mimicked Bob Dylan’s caterwaul to irritating effect.
When the waitress brought their dishes, Jack wanted to ask if it was possible to eat their meal in quiet, but the other customers appeared to be enjoying themselves, clapping and singing along. The audience was young and the young enjoyed themselves wherever they went, or pretended to.
His steak lay on top of French fries like a dead bird on a nest and the presentation insulted him.
“The pasta is soggy,” Amy said.
“Just eat it and we’ll go.”
“I can’t finish it.”
Jack waved at the waitress who sashayed toward him with her head held high, as if she were on a runway.
“Could we have the bill? Just give us doggie bags. We’re leaving.”
“We don’t do that here.” The girl clearly enjoyed telling him that.
“Don’t do what?”
“Pack meals to take home. It’s not customary.”
“Then throw it away,” Jack said, and left cash for the meal with no tip.
On the drive back, Amy was sniveling.
“They say they want tourists and they treat people like shit!” she said.
“It’s not Hawaii.”
The Platons had been to enclaves like Hawaii and St. Bart’s, where natives were gracious for the sake of their economies. Now, they’d hit an island where that compromise hadn’t been reached, yet.
This trip was their worst one and the Platons went away a lot. They needed to be roused from the torpor of old age and traveling seemed the only way to sate them. Still, it wasn’t as if the world was running out of places to go.
Jack recalled a man he’d met at a party once who’d been to China. The man was a recalcitrant drunk and when Jack asked him what China was like he’d said, “Talk to my wife.” No matter where this man was he’d spend it in his room drinking. He should have come to Christmas Island.
“You know what this place is known for?” Amy asked.
“Its natural wonders?” Jack quoted directly from a travel guide.
“A detention center. It’s Australia’s Guantanamo Bay.”
She spoke as if he’d brought her to a sordid colonial outpost and they were now detainees themselves. For Jack, being here felt more like a waking hallucination, a symptom of approaching dementia. The army of crabs, their B and B and its unsavory host, the ludicrously expensive meal he’d tried to eat, all seemed dreamlike.
When they got back, it was nightfall and the yellow bungalow twinkled in the dark like a garish asteroid. They retreated to their room and turned on the overhead fan, the only reprieve from the heat. The wiring in the house didn’t support air conditioning except for Vladimir’s quarters, where he wallowed in the cool like stolen loot.
The heat bothered Jack more than it did Amy, who was mildly anemic.
“You wanted the tropics. You got it,” she told him the first night they’d spent there.
The only furniture besides the iron-framed double bed was an art deco dresser from the forties that reminded Jack of honeymoon suites in old movies. He took off his Timex to put in the top drawer and found a postcard he hadn’t noticed before which another guest might have bought and decided not to send.
The postcard showed a map of the island covered with angry cartoon crabs marching like red ants. Jack turned the card over and though it hadn’t been addressed, a scattershot message was written:
‘The soul is wider and larger than the destinies life has to offer it’ and at the moment, those words struck Jack as profound and reading them seemed reason enough to have made the trip.
Robin Vigfusson’s stories have appeared in South Carolina Review, Meat for Tea, Glassworks, Tower Journal, Constellations and other literary magazines. Her first collection of short stories “Macular Degeneration and Other Stories” was published by Main Street Rag Publishing Co. in May, 2021.