Ghosts of the Pacific

by Philip Roy

  Oh sleep! It is a gentle thing.

  Beloved from pole to pole!

  To Mary Queen the praise be given!

  She sent the gentle sleep from Heaven,

  That slid into my soul.

  I reached over to push each soldier into the water and watch it sink. But . . . I couldn’t do it. I didn’t know why. For the first time, perhaps because of the words of the poem, I felt more than fascination for the soldiers. I felt sad for them. Now I was unsure that this was the right thing to do. I stood and thought about it. Nope. It wasn’t right. I didn’t know what to do but I couldn’t do this. Shoot! Now I had to swim back down and bring up the sunken skeleton and the other head too. Oh boy.

  It took eleven dives! What a lot of work. It wouldn’t have been so hard if all of the bones had stayed together. Some of the smaller bones of the hands and feet were missing but I decided not to worry about that. They were too hard to find even with the floodlights on. I just didn’t count them. Getting the two skulls up was the trickiest part. I took potatoes out of a burlap sack and carried them up in that, along with some of the other loose bones. I piled everything on top of the card table and told Seaweed to leave it alone.

  After two days I decided to check on the typhoon. I shut the hatch with Hollie and Seaweed inside, took the dinghy to the ledge and climbed into the passageway by myself. It was a lot easier alone and I even enjoyed it. I could see why some people enjoyed cave exploring the way I enjoyed free diving. Both required self-control, clear thinking and lots of physical energy. Both were personally rewarding.

  As I approached the opening I realized there was no humming sound. The typhoon had passed. I wondered how much damage it had done. I stuck my head out but didn’t bother climbing down. I wanted to go back and let Seaweed out so that he could fly. To do that, I would have to take the sub out into the sea.

  So, I returned to the sub and we submerged and went through the narrow tunnel. The undertow pulled us against the rock a few times on our way out. When the periscope broke the surface I looked around. It was clear so I opened the hatch and Seaweed came right up, took a peek, then jumped into the air. He was one happy bird. Hollie and I went back into the cavern.

  This time I packed a lunch, put it in a bag, put Hollie in the tool bag, took the camera and climbed through the passageway one more time. It was a lot to carry, but my confidence in knowing the way made it so much easier. Coming out of the final tunnel, I felt like toothpaste squeezing out of a tube. Then we jumped down into the sunshine of a brand new day.

  It looked as though giants had stomped all over the island, crushing trees and leaving broken branches, roots and fruit everywhere. Saipan had coconuts, oranges, bananas, lemons, papaya, mangos, and a bunch of other fruits I had never seen before. And they were all over the ground. There were also puddles of water everywhere, as if a tsunami had rolled over the island, though no tsunami could reach so high. I followed the path that led down past the Grotto and onto a road that was well paved. The road wound like a coiled snake. I saw a sign that pointed uphill towards the “Suicide Cliffs, ” and downhill towards the city of Garapan. I let Hollie out and we started up.

  It was extremely hot and humid. I was sweating a lot and Hollie was panting. But the sky was blue, the sun bright and the view very pleasant. We could see ocean all around. After a while I heard a bus coming from below. As it passed us I saw it was filled with Japanese tourists. Everyone waved and took our picture. I waved back and took a picture of the back of the bus as it coughed and wheezed its way up the hill. When we reached the top, I saw three more busses and a small crowd of tourists spread out among a handful of monuments near the edge of the cliffs. Most of the tourists were taking pictures but some were kneeling at the monuments and some of them were crying. I was surprised by that because the war had ended such a long time ago.

  Hollie and I went to the edge of the cliff where there was a railing. If you climbed over it you would fall right off the cliff. I was a little nervous that Hollie might get too close to the edge but he was even more careful than I was. From where we stood we could see far across the Philippine Sea. We could see the green hills and jungle of the island, which from the distance didn’t look affected by the typhoon at all, and we could see a dozen beautiful white birds, like doves, gliding around and around in a spiral below us. It was a beautiful view from the top of the Suicide Cliffs.

  I tried to imagine people jumping from this spot, because this was where it had happened—a sign sticking out of the ground said so in several languages. The busloads of Japanese tourists said so, especially the people kneeling on the ground crying.

  I tried to imagine it, jumping from here. I shut my eyes, opened them and looked down, shut them, opened them . . . no way! I could never do it in a million years. It would be impossible for me to jump. Nothing in the world could have made me. They would have had to shoot me; I would not have jumped.

  But others had. I had read about it. Women and children, even women with babies, lined up in rows and jumped. They helped each other jump. They held hands and jumped together. I couldn’t imagine it. There was something missing in my understanding. I had no idea what it was; I just knew there was something missing. Nothing here made any sense to me.

  And then, almost as if he knew what I was thinking, a man who had been kneeling at the monuments came over to me and touched my shoulder. I turned and looked at him. He stared into my eyes and smiled, but it was a sad smile. He had been crying. I wasn’t used to seeing a grown man cry. I felt awkward and wondered why he had come to me. He wanted to shake my hand, so I gave it to him and he shook it, all the while staring me in the eye. Then, he closed his eyes. But he was still holding my hand. It looked like he was praying. He said something to me in Japanese. I didn’t know what to say back so I just said, “Thank you.” He bowed, so I bowed back. Suddenly he let go of my hand and reached into his pocket for a notepad and pen. He drew a picture of a woman jumping off the cliff and showed it to me. I dropped my head. I didn’t know what to say. Then he drew another picture. He sighed heavily and handed me the notepad. I took it and looked at it. It was a man sitting inside a cave.

  I stared at the drawing. I wondered if his father had died in the caves. He said something to me in Japanese. It sounded like a question. But I couldn’t take my eyes off the picture. He put his hand on mine again and said something and questioned me with his eyes. How could I tell him that I had just found five skeletons in a cave? How could I show him? I couldn’t really. He was too old to climb through the caves, and I couldn’t carry them out. Nor did I want to take them out with the sub. And yet it felt so wrong not to do something or say something. But what could I do?

  He started to go. I had to think of something. I reached over and touched the arm of his jacket. He turned around very surprised. I pointed to the notepad and made the gesture of telephoning. Would he give me his phone number? He didn’t understand and so I kept trying until he did. Finally he wrote down his phone number. Then he asked for mine so I wrote Ziegfried’s. We shook hands again and he wandered back to the monument.

  I took pictures from the edge of the cliff. I took pictures of the tourists, the monuments and busses, then we started back down the hill. Seaweed spotted us and joined us. Oddly, it felt as if we could have been walking down any road back home in Newfoundland on a hot summer’s day. But we weren’t. We were in Saipan. Things had happened here that were worse than my worst nightmares. But I didn’t understand any of it.

  And I wanted to.

  Garapan, Saipan’s only town, was four miles away. After a mile or so we began to see houses and shops, and the farther we went the more we saw. Everything was made of concrete, and I could understand why. Anything else would have blown away in the typhoons. Along the road we saw broken trees, branches and fruit strewn everywhere. I picked up two bananas and four oranges on the way and ate them. There were large crabs scurrying across the road too, as if they were lost and confused. Had the typhoon blown them so f
ar from the beach? Or did they live in the jungle? Were these the coconut crabs that I had read about? There were so many of them. Hollie sniffed at them cautiously. Seaweed attacked and ate one. I didn’t interfere. If I had, he would just have flown farther away and eaten another one. Seaweed didn’t take orders from anyone when it concerned what went into his belly. How free it must have felt to be him, I thought. When you were a bird you never had to worry about war or suicide. All day you could just eat, sleep, and fly. I smiled. The longer I lived with Seaweed, the more I felt that birds were smarter than humans.

  Chapter 25

  THE CIRCUS SHIP looked like a worn-out traveller. She sat moored to the dock as if she had sailed in on her last breath and gone into a deep sleep. But I was excited to see her, more excited than I thought I would be. Across from the pier was a park. People were clearing broken trees and branches from the ground and setting up tents. The circus had come to town.

  Hollie and I wandered over. I saw people from the ship. Then, I saw Cinnamon, and she saw me. She came running and I was pretty sure she left the ground before she hit me. Her arms were wide open and her hug knocked me off balance and we both landed on the ground.

  “Alfred! You came! You really came!”

  “Uhhh, yah. I said I would.”

  “But you did! You really did! I can’t believe it. I’m so happy.”

  She jumped up, grabbed my arm and yanked me up. I was reminded how strong she was. Suddenly her face darkened. “You left without saying goodbye.”

  “You fell asleep! I asked Megara to say goodbye for me. And I told you I would meet you here.”

  She eyed me suspiciously. “You should have woken me.”

  “Sorry.”

  Her face brightened again. “It’s okay. You’re here now.”

  I looked around. “So, you survived the typhoon?”

  “That was just a little one. They say a bigger one is coming next week. We’re setting up really fast. Do you want to help?”

  “Uhh, I suppose I could.”

  Cinnamon looked down at Hollie, and Hollie looked up at her, but she didn’t bend down to pat him. “You’d better keep a close eye on your dog though. There are lots of boonie dogs in Saipan, and the locals eat dog.”

  “Oh. What’s a boonie dog?”

  “Just a stray dog. They’re the dogs that are left behind when people move here for a few years then leave. They leave their pets behind. And they form packs. They bark at you a lot but they’re actually really afraid of people. They know that people eat them here. They’re really unfriendly to new dogs, especially little ones. Sometimes a boonie dog will wander onto the ship. Not a good idea. You know what happens then.”

  “Yup.”

  I spent the rest of the day helping the circus set up, which meant carrying poles, boxes, tables, tarps and staging across the dock to the park. Everything was pulled from the ship with a pulley system, swung around and lowered onto the dock. Hollie spent most of the day sleeping in the tool bag. Sometimes he was on my back and sometimes beside me on the ground but never out of my sight. When it turned dark we stopped to eat supper. Pierre had set up a barbecue and had grilled a fresh tuna with rice and served it to everyone who helped. It was the best thing I ever tasted. After we finished, Cinnamon said she was free to take a walk with me.

  We strolled along the road and the beach. Hollie walked close to my heels. He always sensed my caution and imitated it. The road was littered with branches and the beach was covered with rocks, shells and seaweed thrown up from the typhoon. I asked Cinnamon if she had been frightened by it.

  “Not at all. I’ve seen lots of typhoons. And bigger than this one.”

  “What will you do if a bigger one comes?”

  “We’ll stay here in the lagoon. That’s the safest place for a ship. What will you do, stay on the bottom of the sea? I want to go in your submarine again.”

  “Actually, I found a cave where I am keeping it.”

  “Really? You found a cave for your submarine?”

  “Yah. It’s really hidden. Nobody would ever find it in a million years. It has skeletons in it.”

  She stopped. “Skeletons?”

  I nodded. “From the war.”

  “Weren’t you afraid?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I don’t know. You get used to that, I guess. I’m pretty used to it now.”

  She shook her head. “How do you get used to skeletons?”

  “I don’t know, you just do. Living things are scarier than dead things when you think about it.”

  “They are?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmmm. I don’t know about that.”

  “They are. Trust me.”

  We walked in silence. There were small concrete pavilions on the beach. As we passed one, Cinnamon pointed to an old man sitting there staring out at the sea. He was surrounded by dogs. “He was in the war.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Everyone knows. He’s crazy. They say he was here as a young man during the fighting and that he never left. Now he’s an old man and he collects boonie dogs.”

  “Does he eat them?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  I counted thirteen dogs as we passed. They were big and small, though none as small as Hollie. Hollie eyed them nervously but the dogs stayed with the old man. I tried to take a closer look at him but he kept his head down. He was wearing very old, faded military fatigues and his hair was long, grey and stringy. He looked like a hobo but the dogs seemed to love him. I was curious. “Do you think we could talk to him?”

  “No way! He’s crazy!”

  “How do you know he’s crazy?”

  “Everyone says that. And look at him. He talks to himself all the time. And who would stay around after a war for the rest of his life? You’d have to be crazy.”

  “I suppose.”

  I thought of the soldiers in the cave. They never had a choice.

  After our walk, I said goodnight to Cinnamon at the ship. She asked me where I was going to sleep.

  “I don’t know. Somewhere.”

  “In a cave with skeletons?”

  “Not tonight. Maybe on the beach.”

  “You’re coming back tomorrow, right?”

  “I am.”

  “Do you promise?”

  I nodded. I didn’t know why she liked me so much, but I didn’t mind.

  Long after darkness had fallen and Cinnamon went inside the ship, I was still wandering along the beach, slowly sifting my feet through the warm sand. It was still hot out, and I loved that. Hollie still had lots of energy, which was amazing. He never wasted opportunities to run around on land. He ran back and forth between the water and me, sniffing everything. Seaweed dropped by for a while, then disappeared again. Eventually I sat down and stared at the moon. The sand was soft and comfortable. I wondered how to tell the Japanese man about the skeletons. Could one of them have been his father? Imagine! I really had to do something.

  I sat until I got sleepy, then spread my jacket beneath me, lay down and went to sleep. Hollie curled up beside me. I heard him snort sand out of his nose as I drifted off.

  In the morning I raised my head and saw the old man. He was down at the edge of the water, surrounded by his pack of dogs. Maybe he had seen me, but he was ignoring me. I was curious. Would it be so bad if I talked to him? So what if he was crazy? I could just walk away.

  Cinnamon was right, he was talking to himself. But he stopped when I approached. He must have been surprised to see someone coming towards him. He raised his head but didn’t look at me. I couldn’t tell if he was crazy or not. “Good morning.”

  He looked uncertain. He was struggling to speak. “Mornin’.”

  He had a deep voice and a heavy accent that was probably from the American south. I decided to come right out and ask him what I wanted to know. Why not? “I was told that you served in the war here.”

  His eyebrows lifted up and he turned
and looked at me as if he were staring at a ghost. “Suppose.”

  “And . . . I heard that you’ve never left the island since then. Is that true?”

  His eyes went into a stare and they went far away. He didn’t answer. Slowly, he came closer. His eyes focused on Hollie in my arms. Then he looked at me as clear as day. “Would you like some coffee?”

  Chapter 26

  HIS NAME WAS Paul Lafayette. He was from New Orleans. I walked with him to his tiny concrete house across the road, opposite the beach. It was almost hidden beneath coconut trees, lemon trees and bushes. The back half of the house was open, just a roof covering a table and an open kitchen. There were hundreds of yellow butterflies in the bushes. I smiled when I saw them.

  The dogs came in and settled on the floor. I had put Hollie inside the tool bag but Paul said not to worry; the dogs would not hurt him. He was right. When I let Hollie out, they treated him like a friend. There was a lot of butterfly flapping and dog-tail wagging in Paul’s kitchen.

  “We don’t see too many visitors,” he said. “In fact, you’re the first one in about ten years.”

  “Why do you have so many dogs?”

  He filled the kettle and put it on the stove. “Most abandoned dogs join the packs. These are the ones that were rejected. They usually end up on the beach. Sooner or later they find their way to me.”

  He toasted two whole loaves of bread on the grill, buttered them and shared them with the dogs and me. He served me a cup of very strong coffee and sat down. He held his cup in two hands, blew across the top and started to talk. It sounded like a confession, as if he had been waiting a long time to tell it. I listened in utter fascination as he told me how he came to the Pacific as a young man on board a navy ship. He was a marine. Climbing into the landing barge to take Saipan was his first taste of combat.