Headhunters on My Doorstep

by J. Maarten Troost

  And so the hours passed, until finally Felix declared that he was fini. I took a look at the crowd, trying to read their faces. C’est bon, a few said. Others gave me the thumbs-up. Some, however, maintained inscrutable faces and wandered away, silently, without comment, and they troubled me greatly. Felix had a pocket mirror available, but I declined, preferring to study just what, precisely, I had done to myself when I got back to my room on the hill. I was told to apply coconut oil to the tattoo for the next few days. Also, I must keep it out of the sun for at least the next week. Really? Out of the sun? In the South Pacific? In this heat? It was probably just as well, I soon thought. I generally wore an athletic tank top and was developing the most ridiculous tan lines, as if I were spending my days lounging on the beach in a woman’s one-piece swimsuit and shorts. A proper T-shirt will at least get me to a respectable farmer’s tan.

  I thanked Felix and walked back to my room and headed straight for the mirror. My first thought, upon seeing the tattoo, was that I wanted another one, on the other arm, and perhaps a couple more on my torso, and maybe my calves. I liked this tattoo. I was Island Man now. True, my tattoo was of a turtle, but it was a tough turtle, possessed of otherworldly grace and harmony and . . . did that fin not align with the other one? And why is the shading uneven? And . . . is it crooked? Was it not straight on my arm? Did it look like it was trying to swim away? For a long moment, my heart stopped beating. And then I thought, well, I’m a little crooked too, and I breathed again and continued to stare at my cupcake. It’s a flawed tattoo, but it’s mine, and if this past year has taught me anything, it is to be satisfied with imperfection. Also, never trust a French Foreign Legionnaire or a tattoo artist under the age of thirty.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Not many people would assume this, but I’m a big fan of Rick Perry, the governor of Texas. Wait, I can hear my friends say, isn’t Governor Perry that politician who couldn’t remember the three departments he’d cut should he become president, the guy who agitated for secession upon Obama’s reelection, the one who spends more time shining his cowboy boots than reading policy papers? Yeah, that’s the guy. But you know what? He runs with a laser-sighted .380 Ruger with hollow bullets holstered on to his waist. And you know, he ain’t afraid to unload should some critter pester him. There are coyotes in Texas who rue the day they encountered Governor Perry on his morning jog. That is, if they were still alive. Don’t fuck with him, animal world.

  The cheese-eating surrender monkeys in French Polynesia, however, won’t let you run with a holstered gun, which is a travesty. I found myself on Fakarava—yes, let’s say it again, Fakarava—an atoll in the Tuamotus, an island group long known as the Dangerous Archipelago, a constellation of islands and poorly charted reefs, swirling currents, and a population that before the arrival of missionaries was known mostly for their ferocity toward outsiders. I’d arrived by prop plane in the late afternoon. It had been a turbulent flight, not because of storms or angry clouds, but rather due to the suffocating heat, causing warm air thermals to rise and wreak a little havoc in the sky, though this hadn’t prevented the captain from turning off the seat-belt sign approximately a nanosecond after takeoff and keeping it unlit for the duration of the flight. I had gotten up to stretch my legs in the small plane just as we encountered an air bump, which resulted in me slamming my head into the overhead compartment, causing my fellow passengers to laugh with unrestrained glee. That’s exactly what the I-Kiribati would do, I thought—laugh—and this pleased me. I had once again entered the world of atolls. Difficult geography makes for an easily amused people.

  I’d found a guesthouse on the outskirts of Rotoava, Fakarava’s lone settlement, and after depositing my backpack in a plywood fare that stood overlooking a luminescent lagoon, headed out for a run. It felt good to be back on an atoll, “lying coiled like a serpent, tail to mouth, in the outrageous ocean,” as Stevenson described it. It had been a difficult sail for Stevenson and his party. Indeed, setting out from the Marquesas, where they left behind the Japanese cook, who had been jailed for drunkenness, replacing him with a young Chinese man, Ah Fu, who had been marooned on the islands as a child, they hadn’t intended to make landfall on Fakarava at all, but rather at Takaroa, another atoll some thirty miles distant. Alas, they were hit hard by squall after squall. “We were swung and tossed together all that time like shot in a stage thunderbox. The mate was thrown down and had his head cut open. The captain was sick on deck; the cook sick in the galley. Of all the party only two sat down to dinner. I was one. I own that I felt wretchedly . . .”

  The weather had caused them to become lost, no small danger in this part of the world, with its boat-shredding reefs and shark-infested waters, and so when Fakarava was sighted, with its clear, open passage and its promise of safety, they anchored there, in the lagoon, seeking a respite from the treacherous ocean.

  I could not envision a more placid scene than the one I now beheld, however. An atoll is but a sliver of elongated islets, with tufts of coconut palms and pandanus trees, and a beach that radiates like a mirage on the lagoon, and another, just a hundred yards distant, that is often tumultuous and violent, where the ocean rages ashore, leaving a scene of ragged desolation. On every atoll, life, what there is of it, is focused on the lagoon, which was now as smooth and unrippled as a mirror, reflecting a few billowy white cotton-ball clouds in the near distance, hovering in a windless sky. I ran in the direction from whence I came, toward the village and beyond to the small airport, the end of the paved road. The heat was as intense as any I’d felt, so hot that you feel strangely cold, your skin reacting to the blazing furnace much as it does to an arctic wind. There were a few people out on bicycles, the kids lazily peddling their oversize bikes in the middle of the road, unconcerned with traffic for there was none. Even in the village itself, all seemed quiet and undisturbed. What few people I saw lingered in the shade they could find. There are about eight hundred folks living on Fakarava, nearly all concentrated in Rotoava and I suspected most were lying prone underneath a slow-moving ceiling fan, inside their tidy cinderblock bungalows, some of which were fronted by graves ringed by coral stones. There was a lone church—Catholic, of course—dating from the nineteenth century, which was painted a sun-reflecting white on the outside, and inside, as I saw through the open doors, a sky blue, with an interior decorated with streamers of shells and a mother-of-pearl altar. Near the jetty were two small general stores, a handicraft shop, and another that specialized in pearls, as well as a couple of dive shops, which together seemed to make up the entirety of the island’s economy.

  They came out of nowhere, ferocious and unrelenting, beasts from hell, all noise and fury, snarling, barking, their ears flattened, teeth flaring, on the chase, hunting, full of malevolent intent. I stopped running immediately, the sweat steaming from my pores, my heart racing. There were three of them, heinous mongrel dogs, and they swarmed around me, a cacophony of noise and threats, lurching forward, lunging for my legs, their mouths frothing. Mad dogs and Englishmen, indeed. I walked on, slowly, but with purpose, trying not to look into their eyes, striving to maintain a quiet neutrality, silently kicking myself for not having the foresight to carry rocks. Think, I told myself. The dogs continued with their thunder, their charging, until finally one nipped me right where my shoe met my Achilles tendon, and now I was furious. But I walked on. You cannot go mano a mano with three agitated dogs. I could not turn back because that would establish their dominance and then they’d tear me to shreds. I could only walk forward, which I did, in the middle of the road, where otherwise all was still and silent, wilting in the heat. And then I crossed whatever invisible boundary marked their territory, where they stopped following me, the crescendo of barking died, and once again I was enveloped by silence, the lagoon still tranquil, the palm fronds unmoving.

  At the edge of the village, I resumed my run, if only so that my activity would match my heart rate, which was going boom-boom-boom. Nothing li
ke a wild animal attack to get the blood flowing. I ran along a lengthy causeway, seeking to pass underneath what few trees there were for their miserly shade. There was an old stone lighthouse built like a Mayan temple of yore in the distance, on the ocean side of the atoll, beyond a cluster of coconut palms, and I briefly considered a detour for a little look-see, but I was dissuaded from leaving the road and stepping foot on another’s property. One dog attack was enough for the day. And so I plowed on, stewing in my bitter bile, fantasizing about violent scenes of vengeance that involved a shotgun and three dead dogs, and for the first time in my life, it occurred to me that maybe I could live in Texas.

  I ran parallel to the runway, followed it to its end, where the road crumbled into a dirt track, and turned around. I could see Rotoava near the elbow of the atoll, a few sailboats anchored in its shadow, and then let my eyes follow the length of the island as it stretched toward the horizon. The total landmass of Fakarava is a mere six square miles. It is but a speck of dust on this planet, but those six miles are long and distended, and one would need to travel thirty-six miles to get from one tip to the other. The lagoon, in contrast, encompasses nearly five hundred square miles. It is immense and joined with the sky, each reflecting the other, so that looking beyond the last vestige of visible land was like gazing upon infinity. And infinity is blue, a startling, eye-piercing blue.

  Serene and calm as the scene was, I didn’t hesitate to pick up the largest, sharpest rocks I could find, the kind guaranteed to leave an attacking dog crippled or unconscious should I be lucky enough to hit it, and as I again approached the village, I slowed my pace to a walk, my senses acutely attuned to any canine threat. Come on, you demons from hell. I’m ready for you now. I stalked up the lone road, armed and ready to roll, almost eager in my anticipation of primal combat, which, in retrospect, was probably not ideal in terms of making a good first impression on the fine citizens of Rotoava. Who was this asshole, they probably thought, sauntering through the village, a steamy haze rising from his body? What kind of half-wit runs in this kind of heat? And why is he carrying rocks? And what’s with that crazed look? And would you look at that punk-ass crooked tattoo? My seventeen-year-old nephew does a better turtle than that.

  The dogs did not stir. I saw them, lying next to a dive shop, the three of them blithely snoozing now, and as I walked by, they gave me a heavy-lidded look and went back to their slumber, their job done, which was apparently to cause cardiac arrest and/or a sudden appreciation for Rick Perry, governor of Texas. But it was when I returned to the guesthouse that I realized my adventures with sharp-toothed creatures were only just beginning. There was a pier that extended about fifty yards over the lagoon, and I walked upon it to catch my breath for a moment, before going for a swim into water so alluring as to be nearly intoxicating. At the end was where the guesthouse hoisted its dive boat, near a meshed enclosure wherein a couple of dozen fish swam and did fishy things. And on the outside of this meshed enclosure? That’s right. Sharks.

  Being naturally predisposed to avoiding sharks and to assuming each and every one of them is capable, at the very least, of shredding a limb or two, I never really bothered to learn how to recognize all the different varieties of shark. And these two had me completely bedeviled. They were fairly big. One was a good seven feet in length, the other about five. Their tail fins were stretched and elongated and reminded me of the fins one sees on classic cars from the 1950s. The other end looked almost feline, with alert eyes and a comparably small mouth, and they busied themselves by trying to figure out a way into the fish enclosure. Just then, I was joined by the son of the owners, a friendly French-Tuamotuan couple who also operated a pearl-farming operation. I took the son to be about eighteen and was pleased to soon learn that he spoke some English.

  “Are you aware that you have a shark problem?” I said.

  He laughed easily. “They are nurse sharks,” he informed me. “And look over there,” he said pointing toward the wooden tables and chairs that he and his parents had placed in the shallows of the lagoon, near the beach. “There’s a blacktip reef shark. And two more over there,” he said, now pointing to the other side of the pier. “Ah, and look closely,” he said, gesturing toward the clear water below us. “A stingray.” And now, all around me, in an otherwise still lagoon, I saw ripples and fins, the stirrings of large creatures prowling for dinner. I looked at him, saucer-eyed, and noticed for the first time his tattoo, which covered most of his torso, from hip to shoulder. It was of a shark.

  “So you’re saying there are a lot of sharks around here.”

  “Many, many, many sharks.”

  I pondered this for a moment. “Look,” I said, pointing toward my tattoo. “I’m a turtle guy, not a shark guy. This is not my milieu. But is it to safe swim here? Now?” Even with the dorsal fins, that water looked outrageously appealing, and I wanted nothing more than to immerse myself in it.

  “Yes,” Shark Boy said. “No problem. Unless you are bleeding, the sharks will leave you alone.”

  Okay, I thought. If you can’t trust an eighteen-year-old kid with a giant shark tattooed across his body, who can you trust? I thanked him and turned to walk back down the pier, toward the beach, and the promise of a sweet postrun swim.

  “Monsieur,” Shark Boy called out.

  “Yes.”

  “You are bleeding.”

  And so I was. The back of my sock, where the dog had bitten me, had reddened with blood. It’s not often that you wish French Polynesia was more like Texas, but at this moment, I yearned to be able to run, free and armed, with a laser-sighted .380 Ruger holstered on my waist. I don’t particularly care for guns, nor do I advocate cruelty to animals, but perhaps suffering from heat stroke, I decided that if Rick Perry ever runs for president again, there’s fifty bucks coming his way.

  Reading In the South Seas can be a bewildering experience. It weaves wildly from place to place, leaving even the most informed readers confused as to where, exactly, we are now. Stevenson might begin a chapter as a travelogue, capturing the reader with his eye for detail and his ear for the moment, and then suddenly he’ll lurch on to some tangent, describing what he heard, years later, on his verandah in Samoa, or he’ll fly off on a long discourse about ghosts. In one paragraph, we’re in the present, in another the past, and then we’re in Hiva Oa, and now, suddenly, we’re deposited on Abemama, in the Gilbert Islands, and then off we go comparing the relative merits of Catholic versus Protestant missionaries. As usual, Fanny gets to the source of the problem, writing in a letter, as quoted from Neil Rennie’s excellent introduction to the Penguin Classics edition of In the South Seas:

  Louis has the most enchanting material that anyone ever had in the whole world for his book, and I’m afraid he is going to spoil it all. He has taken into his Scotch Stevenson head, that a stern duty lies before him, and that his book must be a sort of scientific and historical impersonal thing, comparing the different languages (of which he knows nothing, really) and the different peoples . . . and the whole thing to be impersonal, leaving out all he knows of the people themselves. And I believe there is no one living who has got so near to them, or who understands them as he does.

  Later, she’ll write:

  If I were the public I shouldn’t care a penny what Louis’s theories were as to the formation of the islands, or their scientific history, or where the people came from originally—only what Louis’s own experiences were.

  And again:

  He has always had a weakness for teaching and preaching, so here was his chance. Instead of writing about his adventures in these wild islands, he would ventilate his own theories on the vexed questions of race and language. He wasted much precious time over grammars and dictionaries, with no results, for he was able to get an insight into hardly any native tongue. Then he must study the coral business. This, I believe, would have ruined the book but for my brutality.

  Now in fairness to Steve
nson, the book we now call In the South Seas was published posthumously in 1896, so we can’t be certain how, exactly, he would have structured it should he have lived longer. He certainly intended to go big or go home, writing in a letter to his friend Sidney Colvin: “My book is now practically modeled: if I can execute what is designed, there are few better books now extant on this globe; bar the epics, and the big tragedies, and histories, and the choice lyric poetics, and a novel or so—none.” Stevenson did, however, soon recognize that he had a problem on his hands, describing it as one of “architecture,” but he fiercely resisted the idea of writing a simple personal travel narrative, as Fanny and others encouraged him to do, with its easy rhythm, describing the where, when, and how of the narrator’s adventures. He called such minutia “infantile and sucking-bottle details. If ever I put in such detail, it is because it leads into something or serves as a transition. To tell it for its own sake, never!”