First Chapters: Acts of God While On Vacation by Richard Tillotson

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Pump Up Your Book is proud to bring you the first chapters of fantastic books from magnificently talented authors. Not only does this give you a chance to see the author’s writing style, but it also helps in your book buying decisions. Today’s first chapter is from Richard Tillotson’s comic fiction, Acts of God While on Vacation.

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Acts of God While On Vacation
By Richard Tillotson
CreateSpace (May 11, 2011)
Comic Fiction
378pages

Chapter One

“You will die in September.”

“What?” Gordon Coburn stared down at his future as foretold by a fortune cookie from his previous night’s dinner. “You will die in September,” the prediction read. “What kind of fortune is this?” he asked aloud. “Is this some kind of joke?”

Ten miles offshore, a rogue wave furrowed the broad, blue expanse of ocean outside his office, imitating on a hemispheric scale the wrinkle of irritation that creased his normally smooth and happy brow. Unannounced, unseen even by Gordon who enjoyed a superb view, the wave surged towards him and his two thousand aloha-shirted and flower-bedecked guests, many of whom were bobbling about in the surf of Waikiki below like confetti in the glass of a tipsy drinker.

Gordon was oblivious to that vast, watery progress outside. Alone in the teak-paneled, plush carpeted, glass-walled splendor of his office, he held the tiny ribbon of words from his fortune cookie taut between the thumb and forefinger of each hand. The wrinkle of irritation in his forehead deepened into a frown of concern. How did this bizarre, ridiculous prediction get into his fortune cookie? He was General Manager of the Earl Court Waikiki Resort, and he was only thirty-two! He looked up and stared out through tinted slabs of glass directly at the rogue wave rolling towards him.

Rogue waves are not uncommon. Taking the Pacific as a whole, they must be occurring all the time. Generally not large enough to cause a tsunami warning, they are still plenty large enough to scare the bejesus out of a Taiwanese boat captain trying to winch in his nets. Large enough to rear up out of a calm sea and snatch away an unsuspecting reef walker in Fiji. Large enough to fling refrigerator-sized bricks of ice at a cruise ship off Alaska or to upend lanteen-sailed fishing skiffs beached along the coast of Mindanao. What causes a rogue wave is always a mystery. An infinitesimal shifting of the continental plates, perhaps. A sudden subsidence in the Marianas Trench. A grumbling concatenation of volcanic tremblors around the Ring of Fire. Or just a random agglomeration of water. Brownian motion with a motive. Whatever its cause, this wave, ten feet high, fifty yards wide, and three hundred miles long, proceeded in towards Waikiki Beach at a steady thirty miles per hour.

But even though he was staring straight at it, the massive disturbance was invisible to Gordon, nothing but an imperceptible swelling halfway out towards the horizon. He looked back down at his fortune. “You will die in September.” This was January. If it was true, he had nine months.

“Who’s responsible for this?” he asked resentfully.

__________

On the island of Borneo, in the Kanowit longhouse, four days upriver plus a twelve hour hike from the nearest electric light bulb, Kip Stallybrass stood naked inside his sarong, the tube of cloth that served alternately as his pajamas, towel, and personal changing room, and stared glumly down at his private parts. A fat, black leech had affixed itself halfway up his inner thigh.

“Mundi, Tuan! Mundi!” an old Iban woman cried cheerfully, urging him to join the other men who were preparing to go down to the stream to bathe. She squatted in the semi-gloom of the ruai, a kind of covered veranda that looked like a big wooden shed and was the common area for the twenty or so families in the longhouse. Her withered, wrinkled dugs hung flat against her chest as she smiled encouragingly up at him, exposing a few black stubs of teeth and two rows of gums stained red from betel nut. She was squatting just a couple of yards away along with a dozen other old women, naked infants, and young children who formed a semi-circle around Kip and were watching him prepare for his bath with varying mixtures of approval, fascination, good humor, and revulsion. After twenty-five visits to some of the most remote longhouses in Borneo, Kip was used to this kind of attention. He was, after all, the first white man many of these children had ever seen. He was at least a foot and a half taller than any Iban. He wore thick, insect-like panes of glass in front of his eyes. And the hair that covered his arms and legs was a reddish blond shade not unlike that of an orangutan which, literally translated from the Malay, means “man” (orang) “of the jungle” (utan.) Kip knew that real orangutans were few and far between these days, their numbers having been greatly depleted by hunting and logging, so he was probably as close to the legendary “man of the jungle” as most of these kids would ever get. The irony of a newly minted Ph.D. with four years of college and six years of graduate school being mistaken for an intelligent ape was not lost on Kip. He was just bored with it.

Besides, right now, there was the issue of the leech. After much trial and error, he had concluded that the Iban method of dealing with leeches was the best. This involved using a thin blade of polished bamboo and whisking them off with a quick flick of the wrist. The practice of burning them off with a match, while affording a deep sadomasochistic satisfaction, often caused a leech to try and burrow in deeper and increased the likelihood of infection. The difficulty with the quick flick method, however, was that it had to be done at just the right speed and angle, and this particular leech’s choice of venue made that tricky. A downward flick would be extremely awkward to self-administer, but an upward flick might flick him right into leech heaven, so to speak.

“Mundi, Tuan! Mundi!” The old woman grinned at him.

If he was wearing underwear, Kip thought, he might be willing to attempt the upward flick. But he didn’t have any underwear. He hadn’t worn underwear since shortly after his arrival in Malaysia from Minnesota several months earlier. The sudden intensity of the climate combined with his Midwestern attire of Jockey shorts and long trousers had given him such a ferocious case of crotch rot that he had been forced to retreat to Kuala Lumpur’s totally air-conditioned Earl Court Hotel. He had spent four miserable days there, alternately lying in bed, nude, with his legs spread, his scrotum bone-white with talcum powder, or else waddling like a duck in baggy shorts down to the hotel coffee shop where he had to make his way through shoals of immaculately groomed Asian businessmen in sharkskin suits. All the while, the hideously expensive Earl Court had sucked away precious dollars from the meager budget his post-doctoral grant allowed him, thereby endangering his field trip, his study, his paper, and his chances of ever finding a university job.

So he had sworn off underwear. It was a sound practice, notwithstanding his present predicament. It just meant he would have to go with the downward flick. Kip quickly cinched his sarong around his waist and squatted down to fumble in his pack for the blade of bamboo.

“Mundi, Tuan! Mundi!”

But the trouble with the downward flick, he realized as he groped around in his pack, was that it might not work the first time. Or the second. Or even the third. And the sight of “Tuan” standing nude on the ruai inside his sarong, lashing at his privates with bamboo, might tend to compromise his status in the Kanowit longhouse. Ibans loved to joke and tease, particularly the old women. And it was hard enough to gain the respect of the Tuai Rumah. Hard enough to get the old warriors to share their sacred rituals that laid the spirits to rest. They were unlikely to share them with a fool. Or with some perverse, visiting flagellant. And it was uncanny how stories about Kip traveled from longhouse to longhouse, as if the Ibans were all secretly carrying cell phones and calling each other up to gossip about him as soon as he left.

He would have to chance the upward flick.

“Mundi, Tuan!”

He nodded and smiled at the old woman. He wanted very much to mundi. They had started the hike in from the last longhouse at four a.m. when it was still relatively cool. After two hours on the trail, he was hot, sweaty, scratched, and covered with little flecks of dirt and scraps of wet leaves. The thought of plunging into a cool, clear jungle stream in the early morning hour was delicious. He grasped the blade of bamboo, withdrew it from the recesses of his pack and rose quickly.

“Tuan!” The old woman smiled in bashful, mocking appreciation of him as if he had just done something inordinately clever simply by standing up.

“Think that was good, watch this,” Kip said under his breath. He smiled at his audience and uncinched his sarong. Glancing down, he spotted the leech again, bloated with blood and pulsating slightly, probably to the rhythm of Kip’s own heartbeat. He clenched the edge of the sarong in his teeth, stretching his neck and pulling the tube of cloth taut against his back. Reaching down with his left hand, he shielded what mattered as best he could. Then with his right hand he reached down and, peering around the sarong, positioned the bamboo blade. He glanced up, giving one final smile through clenched teeth at his audience, many of whom were staring fearfully at him as if he were about to explode. Peering back down at himself, he took aim and flicked. The bamboo blade deftly whisked off the leech and continued to whisk right on up his inside thigh to give one of his testicles a smart crack.

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