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Captain Miller Duckworth was losing things. Pitch ran off with the circus. Yaw fled with the milkman. Roll was a degenerate gambler in Siam. The fuselage of his corsair had more corrugations, craters, scrapes and wayward gases than a teenage meteoroid. The instruments were becoming emotional, smoke and steel wreckage was trailing from his wings and Miller Duckworth was a little drunk. He could've sworn that Zero had come from out of nowhere, when in fact his red-spotted nemesis had been flying fifty yards off his left wing tip for more than five minutes. Before the actual shooting started, Duckworth had already been cannonaded by two Japanese aviators who were scourging him with vicious insults concerning his pink pallor, the size of his feet and his rudimentary eating utensils. Duckworth had been nodding off behind the yoke at the time. Very nearly fully alert now and caught in the wake of Japanese munitions and derisive chortles, Miller knew he was going down. He carefully positioned his goggles, violently evacuated his bowels and clumsily leapt from his abused aircraft. Skipping forward. The heat was thick and wet and pressed in on him like two obese hookers made of steamed tofu. Duckworth clawed his way through the porridge of humidity and jungle clutter till he reached a stretch where the canopy above was three, four, five layers thick. Duckworth felt like a midget on a rainy day. He also felt the vinegar and love-bite twinge along the back of his neck and spine that signaled either he wasn't alone or a cobra was nesting in his undergarments. Nearly a dozen natives, pygmies one and all, burst from the underbrush, Lilliputian spears held aloft. They looked like a junior national javelin team and Duckworth found himself longing for stowaway cobras. He lifted his hands in the most placating manner he could muster, and let the grin stretch slow and languid across his maw like a chocolate pudding puma in a sunbeam. The grin that relieved men of their mistrust and women of their lingerie. The natives reacted strangely. Two unceremoniously collapsed, three keeled forward with their hands on their knees like a defensive point guard in the forth quarter, and still more dropped their spears to extract shiftless teeth that didn't have what it took for a life of pink imprisonment. Duckworth thought he should drop to the ground screaming, if only to make his would-be captors feel better. The awkward silence was elbowed in the ribs by two more thuds as a pair of his runt-ish assailants fainted. Skipping forward. After an hour of rest and a dental holocaust, his gummy attackers led Duckworth to their village. As he moseyed among the huts and marshes of mud and malaria, he noticed that these backwater little-people were covered with bruises. Here and there, those carrying water or bundles of wood dropped to the ground as if some subterranean villain had tied a rope to their waists and tugged sharply. The clammy finger of dimly remembered basic training was jabbing at him and drawing little circles on his frontal lobe. The slow, slow workings of his indolent mind and his procession were brought to a halt in front of a very old man. He was brandishing more cracks, folds and creases than an old leather boot dipped in molasses and left to cure in the sun. He fixed Duckworth with a single rheumy eye, a scallop swimming in cream sauce, as his loamy tongue began polishing the back of his remaining tooth, a waxy obelisk in a sea of blood and spume. A spindly cinnamon-stick of a finger, warped and burled and useless for pointing out anything smaller than a mountain range was aimed either at Duckworth's chest or the stretch of beach directly behind the old chief. Saying nothing, he curled up and passed out. Duckworth's captors, sensing he was as incompetent as a dyslexic calligrapher, trudged off and left him to his own devices. Moving backwards. A middle-aged native, who's name can only be pronounced by the pygmy tongue, was drowsing in a primeval orchard, sampling the citrus-y fruits and lamenting the demands of his many wives. The stress produced by his shrewish harem of black-hearted hags had given him perforated ulcers. The brow-knotting, body-buckling pain combined with a heart capable of loving many women and not much else caused a massive coronary. He was found with a sweet-and-sour slick of pulp and tacky residue on his face, dead as disco, the guilty fruit still perched in his leathery hand. Being pygmies, they immediately declared the fruit to be cursed by a grumpy god. The fishing trade was brisk and polygamy outlawed. Knee jerk lawmakers thrive everywhere it seems. Skipping forward. Duckworth wandered through the orchard and stood on the very spot where an oversexed fisherman was slain by a homicidal cousin of the tangelo. One in every family. He gathered and stuffed as many of the fruits as he could into a makeshift knapsack fashioned from his bomber jacket and reeds. They were truly scrumptious, like little amber drops of sweat beading on the thighs of a virgin princess. Skipping forward. After initial waves of shock, suspicion, rage and condemnations of devil worship and being a tall, pale, pink demon, Capt. Miller Duckworth was sentenced to be whipped, the pain of the lash would evict the evil spirits squatting in the Duckworth Arms. He was tied to a tree and flagellated with a whip that might be used by a baby driving a team of Shetland ponies. He didn't mind very much. Forty whacks with a wet noodle Duckworth! Skipping forward. The pygmies began trying the succulent honey-drop nectar bombs at Duckworth's behest, and began making a miraculous and near instant recovery. One morning he was awoken and met with great fanfare. His snack-sized companions led him toward a large bluff overlooking the sea. There was a massive carving of a fierce man-serpent with no arms. The elderly chieftain who before could hardly muster speech was now chattering and grinning for all he was worth. His one-toothed smile. A one word exclamation of a smile. A single shot of rum smile. Slowly, slowly, slowly it dawned on Duckworth that his reduced-calorie confederates were going to elevate him as a living deity. "Yes, you sun-dried rubes! Behold for I am your god! I alone cured you of your scurvy!". His body was festooned with flowers, vines and lizard offal. He was brought forth and made to kneel before the great handicapped totem, and his minute worshippers cut off his arms.
Fresh is a melody, Eric E.
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