A Bird in the Hand

by Lynn Stansbury

  He was silent for a moment, then he nodded. “Okay. What does it mean that I have a headache every morning?”

  “About tonight?”

  “No. I’ve had a headache every morning for the last week and a half.”

  “Is it there all day, or just in the morning?”

  “Sometimes. Mainly in the morning.”

  “Had a cold any time recently?”

  He shrugged. “Jenny had a cold when they got back here.”

  She grunted. “Usual story: children as the bottomless well of respiratory infection. She presumably passed her imported virus to you, and then you were just a sitting target for whatever bacterium came along. Or that you had vegetating in your nose already.” Knowing she was making a mistake but unable to resist, she walked over to him. “Move your neck, forward, back, side to side. Any of that hurt?”

  He shook his head.

  “This would work better if I had an otoscope—an ear-looker—but.I’m going to touch your face.” His expression went flat. She knew that look, too: pleasure, amusement, anticipation, but not wanting to give any of it away. His hands lifted toward her waist. “Forget it. Imagine I’m Welly or Neil.” He laughed, just a quick expulsion of breath, but he reached for her anyway. She ignored him, arching back away from him, tapping across his forehead with a middle finger. When she tapped his right cheekbone, he flinched.

  “Sinus infection, most likely.” She shifted out of his grasp, even so, treasuring the feel of his hands across her flanks as she pulled away. “You allergic to any antibiotics?”

  “What do you know about the chiefly structure of Nu’ufou?”

  “You are tangential tonight. I don’t know anything about the chiefly structure of Nu’ufou other than that dump’s being there. Talk to Welly and Sa’ili. One of them holds a lesser title there, I think. Maybe through Welly’s wife. I think I heard that once.”

  Han’s face was tense, his eyes a narrow brush-stroke that she couldn’t read.

  “Why,” he said slowly, “If one or both of them knew I was interested, wouldn’t they tell me that themselves?”

  “I have no idea. On the other hand, I could be entirely wrong about their having connections there.”

  “How about flying to Apia with me tomorrow? We could get a room at Aggie Grey’s.”

  She laughed. She wanted to say yes so badly she caught her breath to keep the word from escaping. “When was the last time you had a night’s sleep?”

  “You probably know that better than I do.”

  “What is it? The girl in the dump?”

  “Maybe. Also, the guy you and McGee saw throw the Birdman off Nozaki’s dock yesterday morning, Thorvald Pedersen. You know he’s dead too?”

  “No,” she said. “My God.” She took a breath, and her chest felt stiff. The girl in the dump was a horror, a reminder, if you will, of the inevitable but not, somehow, this kind of surprise. She could see the big red-bearded man, young, not un-handsome, standing on Nozaki’s dock, ogling the girl pulling the crate across the dock, staring at her and McGee.

  “Saw you go off in McGee’s boat today. Thought he would have told you.”

  “No,” she said again. She heard the jibe in his voice about McGee. It just didn’t seem to matter. The whole business, Han, McGee, looking stupid or being stupid or whether her relationship with Han was really hopeless: they all seemed like emotional luxuries. “What happened? Was there another fight?”

  “Don’t know. If there was a fight, we didn’t hear about it. Fisherman pulled up bits of him out of the bay. Identifiable bits.”

  She shivered, and it wasn’t all the air-conditioning.

  With an air of being generous with information, Han went on. “Found about dawn this morning. Haven’t found anyone who saw him after about mid-day yesterday.”

  Ann stared blankly at the dark window over Han’s shoulder. “I certainly didn’t. I mean, I’m not sure I could tell the three of them apart, but, after we got the girl’s body to the morgue, I never left the hospital grounds. No farther than Faga’alu village, anyway. So I never saw any of them.”

  Suddenly, her mind was filled with the face of an angry Samoan matron. A very high-status and very angry Samoan matron, the honor of whose family had been degraded by the mistreatment of one under its protection. Ann had assumed Sa’ili could—and would—modulate that anger. But Sa’ili was a high chief now. With a talking chief who was about as useful in his traditional role as a monkey on the floor of the Senate. She did not believe that Welly Tuiasosopo would advocate violence. He spent too much of his life repairing the damage people did to themselves and each other to advocate more of it. But that was his surgeon, his palagi, side. Like with Sa’ili, she suddenly wasn’t sure exactly how far his Samoan side could be pushed before it exploded.

  “Let’s go over to the wards,” she said. “I can rustle you up a couple of doses of antibiotic and write you a prescription. You can bring it in to the hospital pharmacy tomorrow.”

  “Fair enough.” They passed into the dimly lit breeze-way that led to the wards.

  Just to talk, she said, “Do you think this guy, Pederson, had something to do with the death of the girl in the dump?” Han’s face was closed now. Not tense or belligerent or blank, just not available for her. Or perhaps for anyone else either. She shivered again, despite the warm night.

  He nodded. “Still no ID, but she’s got to be the third girl, the blond one, off their boat.”

  With another of those near-audible pops, Ann remembered the two Hawaiian girls. “Um “ she said. And came face to face with the opening of Grayson’s cubicle, right across from the nursing station. From where she was standing, she could even see Sakiko’s vase of flowers. Han, on her left, would be able to see the man lying there as well. You did it. You brought him here. Fortunately, the fluorescent strip light over the bed was off.

  “Um,” she said again. “Here.” She sidestepped to the right, moving behind the nursing station desk like diving behind a redoubt, trying to engage Han’s eye, get him to look at her. What are you trying to do? Do you want him to know or not? What will he do? But he was standing, looking around, doing his thing, examining the physical spaces as minutely as a Samoan would the human relational spaces. He had just turned to follow Ann when a warning rattle of IV pole and plastic tubing sounded from inside Grayson’s cubicle. The younger nurse leapt up from behind the desk and was through Grayson’s doorway in two strides. They heard a high-pitched metallic clank and then the sounds of things falling. The second nurse trotted after the first. Then came the crash of pottery shattering on the floor. Ann was transfixed, unable to help, unable to run. Han stood, his face pure cop, waiting for the moment when a private disturbance becomes a public one.

  “Let go of me, bitch. I just want to piss. You put all this shit “ There was a soft sound of body impact and a short cry from one of the nurses, quickly stifled. Han moved forward into the room. The light came on.

  “Okay, sir.” A quick slapping sound. Ann could guess: Han’s hand around the other man’s wrist. Then the civilized rumble of his voice, its tone outlining remaining options: calm down or I’d be happy to put you in restraints. “Why don’t you just let these good ladies get you sorted out. Very good.”

  Ann moved to the doorway. Grayson was sitting on the edge of his bed, working his un-bandaged wrist back and forth, staring at Han with the same concentration he had brought to Han’s wife’s flowers. The nurses were righting the IV pole and sorting out the tubing. Miraculously, nothing seemed to have come unstuck.

  The senior nurse looked at Ann. “All okay.”

  Han glanced at the nurses then back at Grayson. “You need help getting to the bathroom?”

  “No,” Grayson said.

  The senior nurse said, “We just take it easy, okay?” Han stepped back but not out of the
room. Grayson stood, clutching his gown behind him, a nurse at each side, one of them guiding the IV pole, and they progressed in sad and comic state toward the toilet down the hall. Ann glanced back into Grayson’s cubicle, now filled, in her mind’s eye, with hibiscuses and broken pottery. As if her vision were so powerful that it had intruded into Han’s consciousness as well, he bent forward and picked up the largest shard, recognizably most of the base and part of one side. He turned it over in his hand and then dropped it on the bed.

  “Um,” Ann said. “Thanks for your help.”

  “Oh,” he said. “All in a day’s work.” He followed her out into the hallway and looked down to where the two nurses were now getting Grayson and his encumbrances through another doorway. “That Sa’ili’s Birdman?”

  “Yes.”

  Han grunted. “Never did get around to asking him about Pedersen throwing him off the dock.”

  “Please don’t do it now,” Ann said quickly. “He seems to have had a psychotic reaction to his antibiotics. Happens sometimes. He’s hard enough to keep settled as it is.” Han looked at her for a moment, his face as inscrutable as a stone Bodhi-sattva.

  “Okay,” he said finally. “I’m certainly not looking for work just now. And he is.. “ His gaze moved around the hospital ward with its high open rafters and screen walls. “.Contained. More or less.”

  She gave him his starter doses and the written prescription, accompanying both with a patter on allergies and side effects to which neither he nor she herself appeared to be paying much attention. He lifted the prescription over his head in the Samoan gesture of thanks and walked off the ward, looking one more time down the hall to where the nurse stood on guard outside of the toilet cubicle.

  Finally, she had no more excuses not to go home. She walked across the silent hospital grounds, not even taking her usual care to stay within the islands of illumination from the overhead floodlights. Irritated by the sound of her flip-flops, she carried them in one hand, padding, silent as any other night animal, up the cinder block steps of the terrace and across toward her flat. You did it said the inner voice. He knows now. Proud of yourself? What have you done to that woman’s life? What have you done to his life? His baby’s life?

  She uncapped a beer and sat down at the kitchen table, staring out at Samoan night. Aware, as a scientist, of the reality of here: hot night air, the rattle of a neighbor’s air conditioner, the cool of the blue linoleum through the skin of her bare feet, her own pulse. Aware, as a conscious being, of being alone. If you exist in a state not recognized by the culture in which you are living, do you cease to exist? Don’t you just wish! For your deeds stay with you, wherever you are: conscious, conscience.

  Rain began again, hard, the droplets bouncing up off of the edge of the lanai into the light.

  CHAPTER 23

  As the rain began, Ioane Ioane moved off the bottom step of the fire-escape and under the archway that was the back entrance of the station house. All of the back offices were dark; the only light came down the central corridor, reflected from the main office in front. The radio was quiet. The officers on duty were quiet—indeed, they were probably asleep—but that was not Ioane’s concern. He was locked in an Old Testament struggle with what another culture might have called his conscience, though instinct told him that he would be lucky to get away with nothing worse than a dislocated hip. It was not right that the police station should be located so near to the Gooney Bird. Not fair that he should, in the normal course of his duties, hour after hour, go back and forth in front of that place, see those girls with their laughter and their shapes and their availability, in no way accountable to village life, tripping and tangling him in his own thoughts. And yet, withal, to be remembering Pua and his friends and all the rest of that as well. He had come to hate the night and had no hope of sleep. The boy becomes a ghost, having never become a man. Fifteen strides, it was, from where he stood in the doorway. Fifteen strides along behind the jail, across the narrow gap beyond to the near back corner of the Gooney Bird, along the back of the Gooney Bird to the foot of the ladder. And what would he find there when he got there? Certainly not Pua: Pua started day shift at the hospital tomorrow and was most particular about proper sleep and getting to work on time. No: a shadowy mystery, hoarse-voiced, offering the temptations of a woman with the hands of a man.

  He stepped out into the rain and was almost run down by a jeep that swung around the corner between the station house and the jail and jerked to a stop at the foot of the fire-escape. He stood for a moment, blinded by the headlights.

  The lights went out, the door of the jeep flew open, and an irritated voice said, “Short road to a coffin, boy, stepping in front of cars. Why the hell aren’t you home in bed?” The lieutenant bounded out of the jeep, in under the partial shelter of the fire escape and then into the archway to the back corridor. Ioane followed him. The irritated voice went on. “Probably because you have no way to get there. Here.” Ioane heard the keys rattle before he saw them, arching towards him, glinting in the far light from the front office. He caught them. “Not afraid of ghosts, are you?” The rain stopped abruptly.

  Ioane grinned at the lieutenant’s silhouette. Even if he were afraid of ghosts, he would not have admitted it at that moment under torture, having found his faith once more. “No, sir. I drive you home?” The lieutenant’s house was just around the point on the far side of the bay. As close as that distance was as a bird might fly, it was almost half the driving distance to Ioane’s aunt’s home at the far end of the island. They had done this before, Ioane picking the lieutenant up again in the morning on the way in.

  “No,” Han said, turning away toward the stairs. His profile, backlit for a moment by the glow from down the hall, might have been a mask made of metal. “I’ll bunk here.” He started up the stairs, his words syncopating into his steps. “First thing tomorrow morning, we get those girls off that boat.”

  The work of chiefs, Ioane thought, heading outside to the jeep. Under orders, he was cheerful again, part of a community, safe from himself. He slipped the key in the ignition and felt the jeep thrill with the connection. His only regret was that the drive to Tula was not longer. He backed the jeep down the alley, out into the street at the edge of the green, swung around, crossed sedately across in front of the Gooney Bird, dark now at midnight, and headed home.

  The jeep died in front of Paki’s Bar and Grill.

  Ioane had little more notion of cars than keys and gasoline, but he did shove the clutch in and let the vehicle roll into one of the parking spaces in front of the restaurant. He sat, for a moment too mystified by the defection of this inorganic object to even be angry. Then he became frightened. Paki’s, like everything else other than the occasional street lamp between here and Pago village, was dark. He tried the keys again, forgetting to put down the clutch. The jeep lurched forward and hung its front end with a horrible metallic squawk on the strip of concrete blocks that edged the parking area. Finally, deciding that he was more afraid that someone would appear at this hour of night and find him in this predicament than that they would not, Ioane got out of the jeep and slapped a few mosquitoes. Sleeping in the jeep was not an option. Shutting down all notions other than being a police officer annoyed by the failure of his vehicle, he started on foot back toward Nozaki’s and Fagatogo.

  At least the road was lit. That is, there was a light pole at Paki’s, and there would be lights at Nozaki’s. The power seemed to be on tonight, though it rarely went out in the middle of the night when little but the street lights were drawing on it. All the same, he was very grateful, as he walked into the double-s stretch around the point where you couldn’t see Paki’s behind you and only the lights at the very end of Nozaki’s outer dock ahead of you, to find another street light. He had spent much of the day in this tiny cove with his searchers, but it could be the other side of the moon, it seemed so unfamiliar. He was walking in the mi
ddle of the road, near-certain death during the day but certainly the safest footing at this time of night. The only sounds were the cannery refrigeration units humming mindlessly to themselves on the far side of the bay, the faint lap-and-gurgle of the bay at high tide on a calm night, and the sound of his sandals, scritch, scritch, on the sandy asphalt. High above him on his right, he knew that a scattering of tiny traditional houses clung to the hillside, dark now, their families and even their dogs deeply asleep. He thought about the dead sailor, Pedersen. The man must have died right about here and right about thirty-six hours ago, by the lieutenant’s estimate (confirmed, to Ioane’s mind, by the old fisherman, who knew more about flesh and water than any pathologist). Funny that the thought didn’t worry him. He had no thought that Pedersen’s soul would haunt the place. He didn’t think of the sailor as having a soul. Or at least not one with any interest in staying in Samoa.

  He stopped. On his right was the stretch of drainage ditch where the old ladies who had seen Pedersen sitting on his rock and singing would have been walking to avoid becoming roadkill themselves. To his left was the edge of the road and the brief bouldery slope to the water. Something wasn’t right. In his mind, he flooded the scene with noonday sun, with two old ladies with bundles in their arms. Why hadn’t the old fools just waited for a jitney? What could possibly have been that important? Or did they come from the sub-village of poor-relations on the slopes above him and have no choice? But they hadn’t waited for a bus, and they did have the sense to walk in the ditch. He walked to the edge of the ditch. The light from the lamp twenty yards on up the road wasn’t enough to see the bottom clearly, but the sound of water moving through it from the burst of rain a while ago suggested that it was at least two, maybe as much as three feet deep. He stepped gingerly down to stand in the ditch. Then he looked across the road. You couldn’t see boulders from here. He himself had to be a good foot taller than the taller of the old women. And he could not see the humpy rounded forms of lava rubble that formed the outer edge of the road bed and the couple of yards of steep slope above the water line. Stepping cautiously, he walked another few yards along the ditch, but the perception never changed. There were no rocks along that stretch of road that those old ladies could have seen anything bigger than a fruit-bat sitting on. So either they had been hallucinating in the noonday sun. Or whoever they had seen there hadn’t been sitting on a boulder.