Ann knew Allen Stewart. The local nickname for Inter-Island was i’i’. The word had various meanings but one meaning was the meat or fish that you contribute to complete a ceremonial meal. Which both summed up the local opinion of Allen Stewart as a physical entity and included his well-known habit of forcing people to leave behind some viewed-as-critical ceremonial gift because it put his aircraft over-weight. Okay, an hour or so round trip to pick up the kid. So, they had maybe two hours to find Welly Tuiasosopo and sober him up. Neil’s voice pushed in. “I want you to go with Allen to collect the kid. Sarge’ll be ready to leave for the airport at five-thirty, pick you up when you get back.”
“So: you going to find Welly?”
Sleep, after Neil hung up, was not an option. Ann lay staring at the darkness for a while, then got up, dressed, made tea, then went over to the hospital. It was an unsocial hour to make morning rounds, but in six hours, which was about what this little melodrama was going to take, she was going to hit the wall. Or that’s the excuse she used. But Neil had also just handed her a way to get the Birdman the hell out of the hospital, out of Han’s way and off her own conscience. And if that broke Sakiko’s heart: too bad. If Grayson mattered that much to Sakiko, she could track him down.
The screen door of the hospital banged shut behind her. She cringed. Loud enough to wake the dead. Or at least half the hospital. She went on with extra care, meeting no one in the breezeways that connected the pavilions. The darkness outside of the screens, the sudden yellow brilliance of a hanging bulb, were eerie. She recognized her usual pre-flight disconnect, the sense that, if she were not overly attached to the reality around her, the letting go would be less painful. You know: lots of very normal people are not afraid of flying.
The surgery wards were quiet. Even the nurses and the night security officer were asleep, the former with their heads pillowed on their arms on the desks, the latter seated on the floor, leaning back comfortably into the corner between a cabinet and the wall. Well, at least they weren’t all sharing a ward bed. Silently, she pulled Grayson’s chart out of the rack: nothing untoward. The shift to oral dosing had apparently been uneventful, and Neil’s evening note had been to pull the IV and discharge in the morning. Well, it was morning. She picked what she wanted from the dressing cart and went into Grayson’s cubicle. Even in the half-light that filtered over the partition, she could see that his flowers were now in a hospital coffee mug. Looking at the flowers, their significance seemed to drain away, as if meaning itself is something imposed by the human imagination, unsustainable when faced with the objects themselves. She wanted to touch them, to see if that changed the magic, but she didn’t.
Grayson’s eyes opened. “I’m going to turn the light on,” Ann said. In the light he was definitely awake, aware and cautious, someone who has learned that early morning hospital visits are usually unpleasant. “You said you wanted to get to Ofu to defend your birds. If your wound’s okay, I can actually get you to Ofu this morning for free, if that’s really what you want.” Grayson was watching his hand emerge from its wrappings. He grunted as the last bit of gauze and the square of Telfa came away. Then he looked up at her and his face was eager, wolfish.
“Just get me the fuck out of here.”
“This may sting a bit.” She poured peroxide into the wound, which refocused the man’s attention. She let the wound fizz a bit and then rinsed it with saline, dried, and began redressing it. “Well, the wound’s okay. You can probably manage it yourself. Or you can have the nurse in the Ofu clinic do that for you. What about your stuff at Sa’ili’s?”
“Nothing important. I live on Ofu.” He flipped his sheet off and swung his legs over the edge of the bed.
“Whoa,” she said. “That’s what got you in trouble last time.” The man’s eyes flashed to her face with an impact that was almost palpable. “Just take it easy. Let your body get used to being upright.”
He seemed to accept the caution but watched her, like someone across a net, waiting for the next serve. She opened the door of the bedside stand. His clothes were folded there.
“You can go ahead and get dressed. But let the nurses come in and do their thing. They’ll be giving you enough of the antibiotic to finish the course you’re on and stuff to get you through at least a couple of more dressing changes “
Grayson shed his gown and began pulling on his clothes as if she had become part of the furniture, inconsequential. She snorted and carried his chart out to the nursing station. One of the nurses was charting; the other, checking the dressings cart. The security man was gone. Grayson followed Ann out to the desk.
“You’re going to have to give us at least a few minutes,” she said. “Besides, Sarge isn’t going to be ready to take us to the airport for another,” she looked up at the clock, “ten minutes.”
Once in a very very great while, routine things happen faster in a hospital than one expects. Or perhaps the nurses were so delighted at the notion of being rid of Grayson that what little had to be done was done double-quick. At any rate, Ann was ushering him down the back corridor of the surgery ward and out the door by the chapel hardly five minutes later. Early morning light crept between the trees, and invisible bird-life fluttered and twittered in the high branches. Across the hospital grounds, the tail-lights of the old ambulance lit up, and its engine started. A police cruiser was pulled up in the quad by the ER entrance. Two loud palagi voices, one male, one female, both drunken, burst from the ER. It sounded like a domestic disturbance that had been going on for some time and was probably where the security man had disappeared to. The ambulance pulled up where Ann was standing with Grayson. Sarge got out.
“He going?”
“Yes. I promised him a ride to Ofu.” Sarge grunted but pinned Grayson with a fierce glance. “You in back. Doc sits in front.”
Allen Stewart looked the Birdman over much as Sarge had. “Yer boss thinks he’s only paying for the med-evac.”
“Tell him I said it was part of my patient’s discharge planning.”
“Tell ‘im what I like, won’t I?”
Ann knew that if she forgot for a moment that she could and was probably going to die horribly in the next moment, the demons of the air would swallow her. She had also, in her four years in the islands, come to love the de Haviland Otters, the little short-take-off-and-landing craft that leapt into the air and slid down onto a runway with a feel of sentience worthy of their name. She sweated cold, guts around her ears, personally lifting the little bird into the air by her grip on the seats. And at the same time, her heart soared as the silver sea passed beneath them, and they flew out into the morning light. The flying machine’s noise was appalling: she wondered if her terror would have been less if the joy her eyes took in were not linked to the beating her ears took from the engine noise. She took a chance on offending the demons and looked out of the porthole. In the early morning light, the open ocean was corrugated into plush grey corduroy, a thousand miles of open water doing its own thing, undisturbed by land.
The linked islands, Ofu-Olosega, appeared as a complex silhouette against the orange and purple morning sky. Ann picked out the chunky quadrangle of Ofu, its village and coconut plantations, the hump of its core. The aircraft banked left around the near end of Ofu to approach the little airstrip. Now Ann could see the long sloping silhouette of Olosega, like Honolulu’s Diamond Head, its heights on fire from the rising sun.
The little aircraft nosed down like a bird and thirty seconds later was rattling down the hard-packed coral rubble of the airstrip and swinging around to a stop. The pilot got out and unhooked the passenger door. Ann and Grayson stumbled out on to the runway. Dawn light glowed from the bleached coral as if the stone were still alive.
Their coming had attracted a crowd. Crack of dawn and Sunday morning notwithstanding, at least a dozen people stood grouped to one side of the airstrip. They were all obviously locals�
��not a tourist to be seen. Across the airstrip and up the slope beyond, the half-built tourist lodge was a garish red slice across the green of the hillside. A single figure in a turquoise lavalava walked from one guest house toward the main building, but there was no other sign of activity.
Among the group on the airstrip, Ann picked out her patient immediately: one very wide-awake five-year-old swathed across the forehead like a ninja. He was attempting to tow the district nurse across the airstrip as if the Otter were a gift personally for himself, and he couldn’t wait to tear into the wrappings. A tall and portly older woman grabbed the child’s loose arm and yanked him back.
The district nurse muttered a few introductions, most of which Ann missed. Introductions in Samoa are like introductions in the southern U.S. or in some levels of society in Britain: if you really belonged here, you wouldn’t need all this palaver about who these people are because you would already know who they are and how you’re supposed behave around them. Ann recognized two of the older ladies as the wives of the most important high chief and the most important talking chief of Ofu village. The woman who had grabbed the injured child was his grandmother and yet another important village matriarch.
“They all wish to go to the hospital,” said the district nurse. “With me.”
Ann relayed this to Allen Stewart. The pilot looked critically at the party assembled beside his aircraft, then he looked at Ann. “Well,” he said, “It’s one of you or half of Granny here. Can’t take these four, the kid, and you. Too much weight. Gotta leave one of ‘em behind.”
“Any thoughts on how to do that without starting a war?”
“Let ‘em all go,” said Grayson. Ann had forgotten the biologist, but he was standing just behind her and the pilot as they assessed their cargo. “Hell, it’s Sunday. It’s not like you have to go to work.”
She was about to recite the usual litany of duty when the subject of her duti-fulness, bored by whatever this adult conversation was about, scooped up a loose stone from the hard-pack and popped it at a seagull who had made the mistake of striding across the airstrip a few yards away. The stone landed right in front of the bird who flipped up into the air, almost overturning, and flew away.
“Missed, ya little fucker,” Grayson said.
Ann laughed. “No. He put that stone right where he wanted it.”
“Look,” the pilot said. “Somebody make a decision or I will. Sunday’s my one day off, and I’d like whatever I can get of it.”
“When are you back here?”
“Eight o’clock tomorrow morning.”
Ann didn’t recognize the moment as a gift or anything else. Just a calculation: Monday was public health paperwork day; Grayson, her only in-patient. Welly could handle the injured kid with his eyes closed and one hand tied behind his back. Twenty-four blissful hours alone in the shaded, screened Ofu clinic with its private view of the ocean and its access to the beach. What is generally referred to as a no-brainer.
Five minutes later, with the key to the district clinic in her pocket, she stood back as Allen waved to her out of the cockpit window. The little aircraft moved off to the far end of the runway, turned, paced lightly down the airstrip, and leapt into the air. It lifted sharply and then turned, the near wing dipping as if in farewell. Ann duly logged the feelings of guilt and ambivalence at having abandoned her charge. On the other hand, she had scored at least a few points in the wider Samoan scheme of things, and there wasn’t a damn thing she could do about it now. She turned, grinning to herself, and followed the remains of the greeting party as they trailed off toward the village on the other side of the ridge.
Grayson hailed her. She had forgotten him again. “Come up to the bird sanctuary with me? It’s a couple of hours walk, but it’s easy. Show you the Tahitian petrels. You can walk right up to them. They’ve never seen humans.”
She yawned hugely. Sleep, what passed for privacy in Samoa, and a day spent surrounded by quiet and landscape was of far greater interest than petrels. Particularly petrels that involved effort. Not to mention the company of the Birdman. Oh, well, she supposed she owed him something for the grace of a day off.
“Okay. Uhm. I’ll go dump my pack at the clinic and meet you?”
“The clinic’s, like, on the other side of the island. In the village.” Ann nodded. Grayson went on. “My shack’s not far from the low spot. You know where that is?” The low spot was the land bridge, a shoal of sand and coral blocks that permitted foot passage between the two islands except in the highest tides.
“Yeah.”
“I mean, like, you could just dump your stuff there. Pick it up when you come back. Trail’ll take you right over the ridge from there into Ofu village.”
Ann did not remember that trail, but, then, she didn’t live here. She looked around, shading her eyes. The morning was suddenly baking hot. Putting in an extra forty-five minutes on any physical activity just now was not high on her list. It was suddenly very quiet. Only the little waves from the bay rustling softly off to their right. The villagers had disappeared. Even the solo figure over at the hotel site was gone. She was conscious of not liking Grayson and not wanting to go with him. Her curiosity about him and Sakiko seemed stupid in the light of day. But he was her patient and you’re not supposed to dislike your patients. Besides, she could use the exercise. She’d be back by noon.
“Okay,” she said finally. “Lead on.”
She trailed behind him, not wanting to talk. Besides, she was so sleepy she could hardly put one foot in front of the other. After about ten minutes walk, she stumbled down to the edge of the water. Tidal change in the middle of the Pacific is minimal, but what little tide there was looked to be way out. She slipped out of her sandals and walked in the warm, foamy shallows. The water should have revived her, but it was too comfortable. The beach curved away ahead, the sand glowing in the early morning light, looking like the light itself, fresh, as if no one had ever walked there before and no one would ever walk there again.
She yawned. She thought again about dumping Grayson and his hike and just going back to the Ofu clinic to sleep. Of course, by mid-afternoon, the entire village was going to know she was on the island. And half them would decide they suddenly needed to see the doctor after Sunday dinner. Besides She dropped her sandals on the hard, wet sand, stepped into them, and followed the Birdman up onto the trail It isn’t going to kill you to be nice to him.
CHAPTER 28
Han heard the scream and rolled to his feet, groping for the pistol he hadn’t carried in two years. Then, he was awake, naked, standing in the middle of his living room with dawn glowing pink through the front screens.
The scream sounded again, off through the screen of trees to the right of the house. Sunday morning: neighbors killing a pig for Sunday dinner. Han looked around, still half dazed. A towel lay crumpled on the floor with a glass of water beside it. He must have taken a shower and then come back out here for something, fallen asleep, dead asleep. His eye caught two tiny gold objects lying in a plastic bag on the kitchen counter
Suddenly, he remembered everything. Christ! At least he had called the hospital: the Birdman was under guard. But now Han needed to get there. Then, like a miracle, he heard the sound of a car engine, coming this way, headed toward Pago. Han was in his uniform shorts and standing in the road pulling on his shirt when Ioane drove into view. He could have kissed the boy. Climbing into the jeep, he grinned to himself. No, don’t do that. Ioane was in uniform: full marks for assuming the worst about a Sunday morning.
The shore road was empty; and the trip, reasonably efficient. As they pulled into Fagatogo, Han was surprised to see Sa’ili Tua’ua’s old Land Rover parked in front of the police station. If Sa’ili was at the police station at six forty-five on a Sunday morning in a car, he, Han, was obliged to stop and find out what it was about. Ioane parked beside the Land Rover.
Inside, the desk officer told Han that he had put Nofonofo Sa’ili in the Chief s office. Han bounded up the stairs to the big office overlooking the bay. Sa’ili and an older Samoan woman sat in front of Sasa’s desk, framed through the dirty picture window by the width of the bay, silver in the morning light, and the bulk of Mount Pioa, the Rainmaker, beyond. The two were in full Sunday whites, like wearing black among Europeans, both formal and funereal.
“How can I help you?” They obviously weren’t there for a friendly chat.
“My sister,” said Sa’ili, equally formal, “Has a concern.” Totally Sa’ili, he radiated both perfect Samoan decorum, respect for the dignity and social power of a sister, and wry Western acknowledgment that it was damned silly to be sitting here all dressed up in their Sunday clothes at not-quite-seven on a Sunday morning.
The woman’s lips tightened like angry matrons the world over. It’ll be stray pigs, Han thought. A neighbor’s kid stealing chickens. Part of his mind still echoed with the dying scream of his neighbors’ Sunday dinner. The woman spoke to Sa’ili in Samoan, her voice calm, her eyes never leaving Han’s face. Suddenly, Han didn’t think this was chickens.
“My sister,” Sa’ili said again and paused. His face and voice were tight with some emotion Han couldn’t place. “Wants to complain about the Birdman.”
Han waited for a few seconds and, when the other man didn’t go on, said, “Well, you know, Grayson’s actually never reported the assault on himself. Admittedly, he’s been in the hospital pretty much since it happened. And his assailant is dead.” There couldn’t be a soul left in either Samoa who didn’t know about Pedersen’s death by now. Both of the island’s papers had headlined it yesterday morning, presumably the Attorney General and the Lieutenant Governor, busy again.
“Um,” said Sa’ili. Han was impressed. Sa’ili’s cultural title was high chief, not talking chief, but he was rarely at a loss for words. “I actually said complain about.” His face creased. “He goes out during evening prayers time.” He looked at his sister and then back at Han. “And he drinks.” Like before, Sa’ili’s voice rang the perfect interval between honor due a sister and between-us-guys.
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