A Dolphins Dream

by Carlos Eyles

  “Does anyone else carry on these old healing practices, besides Mama Doc and Dilolomo?”

  “Some, but they are all afraid. Everyone knows a little bit, eh. If you want to fix the eyes, you find Jeremiah. If you want to fix the mouth and the belly, you see Ruthie. Mama Doc, she take care of the children.”

  “What would happen if they put Mama Doc in jail, where would the village children go?

  “They have to go to the hospital on Taveuni but the people who go there get sicker. It be very bad for everyone.”

  “I didn’t see many old people at the Half Done Village. What’s the life span of the people on Qamea?”

  “Not many old ones in that village but in the Genuine Village they live a long time. They don’t stop, eh. They weave the mats and sometime they fish. There are some who are eighty years. They don’t sit around like the ones in the Half Done Village. They eat the better food but the food is bad in both villages. They eat too much taro and cassava and breadfruit. I learned from my father that you must eat the vegetables and fruit. I tell them but they don’t listen. That is why the women are fat.”

  “Maybe they’re not getting enough sex,” Compton said playfully, more curious about Fijian sexual practices than he would wish to reveal.

  “If the men screwed them more they might be thinner,”

  Moses giggled. “A woman is a woman, eh, fat or thin. Their soul is either alive or dead. Look how beautiful the white woman is. I saw them everyday at the resort. They smile but they never laugh. They look pretty and you want to screw them but they are without themselves. They are unhappy and have a sadness in their eyes they cannot hide. Not Fiji woman. They are always laughing and singing and dancing. When we go to the Genuine Village, you will hear the singing every night.”

  “When can we give the village another shot?”

  “We must find someone to speak for you. I think Vito do that. I ask him when I’m there. Chief Isikeli have you for savusavu and you take the kava and tobacco. He listen to why you should come into the village and then decide.”

  “When are you heading that way?”

  “Be in no hurry, Keli. You can’t push the time, eh. It won’t be an easy thing. Jokatama might speak against you. He doesn’t want his daughter to be with you. Chief Isikeli already knows that you are here. I’ll watch and listen for the time. If there is talk, I have Vito speak for you. You have in your favor that you are a spear fisherman. They know you are not like the white people who come to the resort.”

  The rain ended its assault and sunlight was piercing the low ceiling like a searchlight, spangling the windswept, white-capped seas, suggesting to Compton an open blue gray mouth flashing glistening, carnivorous teeth.

  Moses rose from the table. “No fishing today. Go home and work in the garden before the sun comes out again. Do you wish me to find you some crabs for bait?”

  “I’m not a fisherman.”

  “Then I give you the pole spear to feed yourself. No big fish, just the little one, eh. You know how to use it? Take the rubber off the gun and tie it off the bottom. Then you…”

  Compton waved him off. “I used a pole spear when I was a kid. Thanks, it will keep me in food.”

  Moses handed him thoroughly rusty, almost unrecognizable spear that had lay undetected in the bottom of the boat buried under debris. He felt its heft. “How long have you had this?”

  “Many years. The New Zealand man gave it to me, but I never use the spear.”

  “Okay, thanks, it’ll have to do.”

  26

  Moses did not return to Orchid Beach for several days. Perhaps the fishing was poor, reasoned Compton, or the farm was demanding more of his time. He hoped it was nothing more than that. While he missed the conversations, he enjoyed the solitude of the beach and spent time scribbling random notes to himself.

  This business of Sinaca and the Sea God is disturbing. There’s no sorting it out. It’s impossible to know the truth. Whose truths? My truths seem to be losing validity, while the Fiji truths gain power and momentum. I should be frightened, but I’m not. I’m more curious than frightened. It’s like letting go to the unknown and believing in something that is unbelievable…

  Finishing the notes, he realized he had not been wearing his glasses and that he was using them with less frequency. Miraculously, his eyesight had improved since he had been diving with the facemask without the corrective lenses. Under other circumstances he would have been astonished but merely acknowledged yet another unexplained phenomenon and determined that the glasses were no longer of use or value.

  Jokatama’s boat hovered at the edge of the coral as Compton set aside his glasses. All on board waved and shouted like old friends. Jokatama said they were going far around the island this day to hunt for clams and would not be diving these reefs. No invitation to join them was extended and when they swung out again Compton looked for Sinaca. She was among the women, half hidden in the stern, her hand resting on a gunwale. She lifted it ever so slightly when their eyes met and he lifted his hand in the same manner. In that moment he wanted her more then he imagined he could ever want another person and actually felt sick to his stomach as the boat made its turn and disappeared around the point. Were it not for the tide he might have stayed on the sand until he had withered away in morbid despair but the sea rolled to his feet as if to remind him that a sanctuary awaited which would wash away the freshly opened wounds of love.

  He descended into a bucolic sea of blood red and vivid purple soft corals that grew out of their stone cousins like mini-explosions of colored gasses that the water held in mysterious suspension. The ivory escarpments of coral ran wild with the multitudes of fish probing the unscented corals like birds feasting in a vast orchard. A light surge, as an indecisive wind, swayed the root bound corals in rhythmic movement to music that was as silent as the orchard was scentless.

  Compton speared a small emperor fish with the pole spear and let it dangle at its end until a white tip appeared. Slowly he brought it up, testing his nerve. The shark tracked the invisible bloodline upwards until it was ten feet from the man-creature who floated on the surface, then broke off its pursuit. Compton was tempted to drop the fish down again so the white tip might stick around but the shark meandered off and so he returned to the beach, five feet closer to his fears and relieved of the lovesickness that had earlier consumed him.

  Moses appeared in the late afternoon bringing supplies and dinner of breaded eggplant, coconut meat, small potatoes topped with shaved coconut, shallots and peppers. They gorged themselves. In the twilight Moses announced, “Tonight we go fishing. It feels the right thing to do. Tonight we catch a big one.” He bounced down to the beach and began to dig with his foot, searching out the hollow places in the sand that held the crabs.

  “These buggers cover their holes better than a Suva virgin.”

  Finding a crab, he dug down with his hand and pulled it as scentimmediately plucking out the protruding eyes, flinging it back on the sand where, in its blindness, it held its pinchers high against the black unknown. “Cruel, eh,” he said, eyeing Compton gaping at the helpless creature.

  He found three more and blinded them all, picked each up and casually dismembered it as they walked to the boat. Under the afterglow of day, Moses arranged the boat into a loose sort of order and let it drift out over the coral. Baiting the hook with a piece of crab, he swung the line over his head and cast it out into the blackened waters. The third cast produced a small red fish. “This one has the poisonous spines, be very careful.”

  “Everything in these waters is either poisonous or toxic or deadly in one way or another,” said Compton flatly. “It’s a miracle you can survive on the sea at all.”

  “It is all of life and all of death, all together. I get stung and bitten and infected and sick but I don’t die.” He struck the head of the red fish twice with the handle of the cane knife and tossed the fish aside. They motored over to the East Point where Moses lowered the brake drum anchor. He
rigged up a kerosene lantern that hung by a crude wooden support that extended over the side of the boat, this to attract the small bait fish that, like moths, flew to the light, attracting the larger fish that fed upon them, an uncommon nocturnal treat in an otherwise shadowed sea. The lantern was rusty and the fragile support was held together with bits of wire and string and nearly disintegrated when Moses mounted it on the gunwales. In their small universe of light Moses cut up the single red fish, double hooked a piece of meat and lowered the line into the water. He handed the spool to Compton. “Take it down to fifteen feet. If nothing happens right away, take it down to the bottom.” He then cut another piece of bait, hooked it and dropped the line overboard.

  Despite the lantern light the spherical sky gathered its stars in platinum trifles, glowing like acetylene blown sparks in the moonless evening. Unfamiliar constellations sprang from every compass point and Compton located what he thought to be the Southern Cross. Moses said no, that it was low, behind the island yet and could not be seen from where they sat. He pointed to a star that rose directly out of the east and rested low on the horizon. “There is the star we place our boats on when we fish the far reefs at night. It is due east and moves straight up from its place.”

  “With that single star,” said Compton, “a navigator could find his way just about anywhere. The stars of the Northern Hemisphere swing in great arcs during a night. Only the North Star remains somewhat fixed but it is high and difficult to navigate by.”

  “There are others which move little,’ said Moses, “but they are not as bright as that one. More miracles, eh. How can such a thing be there for us?”

  “Well, I’m not sure they are there for us.”

  “Who is it for if not for us? It is all here for us. The trees, the ocean, the wind, the sky, the stars, the air, all free to use. They cost nothing, eh. They are given. We use what we need and leave the rest for our children…”

  Suddenly Moses arm jerked. “Missed it.”

  Compton felt his line move and jerk down. “I’ve got one!”

  “Pull the bugger up.”

  Compton pulled hand over hand and brought up a small, twenty-four inch barracuda.

  A change came over Moses. He stopped talking and held the line in one hand gently, almost caressing it, gazing out into the nothingness of the night sea. Every fiber of him concentrated on the line. He did not move or utter a sound for five full minutes.

  No fish came.

  “That must have been the only hungry fool in the school. We go to the bottom.” He quickly let out line and Compton followed suit. Suddenly Moses jerked the line and hauled up another barracuda the same size. Then Compton caught one and another after that. Moses ht ht two more and they waited, expecting the biting to continue, staring at the line, saying nothing, waiting for God to show up.

  Compton’s line jerked with tremendous force and the line thundered out of his hand in a blaze, the spool jumping crazily, disgorging itself in the bottom of the boat.

  “Pull it! Pull it hard!” shouted Moses. “Stop the fish! Set the hook!”

  Compton was reluctant to tighten his grip on the line for fear it would cut deeply into his hand. “It’s going too fast!”

  Moses reached over beneath Compton’s hand and grabbed the line and pulled back with a mighty heave, standing up as he did. An instant later the line went slack and he nearly fell backward into the sea. “Too late, we give him too much line. That was a big mackerel or barracuda, maybe a jack. We are in the right spot.”

  Moses re-baited the hook with a piece of barracuda and lowered the line again. Compton was as keyed up as Moses now and all his focus was on the line. After fifteen minutes with no activity, he began to feel dizzy in the rolling boat on the blackened sea and tried to refocus on the stars, embarrassed by the sickness that was overtaking him. Sensing Compton’s discomfort, Moses relaxed his vigil and began to tell one of his Fiji stories when his lined jerked and he pulled in a small jack that made a strange guttural sound, which he imitated. “That’s how we call the mackerel.” Compton attempted to mimic the sound and Moses burst out laughing, “That sounds more like a poofta doing a job on somebody’s dick.”

  “How would you know?” asked Compton. They were both laughing when the lantern went out.

  “Shit, the lantern is out of fuel,” muttered Moses. He brought down the lantern and its support, lifted the oars and began to row back to the beach.

  “When the current is right, it is better to move without the noise of the engine. I’ll use the jack tomorrow and troll for marlin. I caught one last August on the deep reef with the hand line. I fought it four hours. My hands bled and were sore for a week. They took my picture at the Indian store when I brought it in.”

  “That sounds right out of Hemingway.”

  “Where is Hemingway?”

  “It’s not a place, it’s a man.”

  “Same thing, eh.”

  27

  The water appeared as a plane of glass off the beach, its clarity so sharp that Compton could easily see schools of colorful fish hovering about coral heads like otherworldly bees suspended on a kaleidoscopic hive. The current was running strong from east to west and he had to swim in shallow on his way to the East Point to avoid the apex of its flow. When he reached the far point, in the transition zone where the fish collected, there was a lee in the current just inside the point. There the water was still as a pond and the fish population seemed oblivious to the energy that raged by its shores. Encouraged by last night’s bite, he wanted to scout the outside water for mackerel or jacks but the current prevented any diving, for just holding position against it would take all one’s strength and leave nothing for the dive, so he stayed close to the reef and worked the caves.

  Feeling particularly sharp this day, he took two good shots with the pole spear within the first hour and inexplicably missed the fish completely. In the next hour he attempted to stalk the relatively easy emperor fish but missed yet another opportunity. The sharpness felt earlier gave way to the sense that something was out of place in the water and while he could feel it on some dim level, he could not quite identify it. It was similar to being in a familiar room and having a piece of furniture moved just enough for the room to look the same but be different. There emerged an ominous feel to it and it was pervasive enough to send him to the outside so that he might catch the current back to the refuge of the beach.

  Diving to fifteen feet, he caught the full force of the current that propelled him like a petrel on a thermal lift. Flying as that selfsame bird and in the survey of the sea, he saw at the fringe of his visibility, in the brilliantly clear water, a shape materialize. It was a mammoth creature, a whale, running at the edge of the drop off, heading in his direction. In his elation he moved to intercept. It would a first encounter with a whale. It was either a bull pilot whale or perhaps a gray. In the moments that passed, as the creature came into clear view, he realized with crippling fear that it was not a whale at all but a shark, one of gigantic proportions. If it remained on its present course it would pass twenty feet beneath him and thirty feet to his right on the outside. It was greenish brown, the color of a tiger shark but too big to be a tiger shark, too wide, too long. Now he could see it clearly and judged its size to be twenty-five feet in length and five feet across the back with four-foot long pectoral fins jutting out on either side of its body. Its overall width was close to thirteen feet. Such statistics with the shark nearly upon him were insignificant, for they couldn’t begin to convey the awesome power and omnipotence of the beast. Compton was consumed with his imminent death and struck immobile in full body paralysis. The shark moved with effortless speed and with a will that obliterated every idea of shark that had ever been conjured in his most morbid fantasies. A dark, broken line near its tail was its only marking against the bile color of its skin. Its mouth was slightly ajar and exposed a set of primordial teeth that launched him into a pre-shock numbness that terminated all thought. The creature rolled slightl
y to its left for a better look at him and in its cold, black eye there was reflected the dull instinct to feed. Compton’s heart pounded like a jackhammer, signaling the terror, the surrender of a helpless prey. Though the pole spear was pointing in the direction of the shark it would have had no more effect that the prick of a pin on a charging rhinoceros.

  The shark inexplicably peeled off toward the deep fringe and was out of sight in moments. Compton could not move. It required a supreme effort to get his legs to respond. Terrified to his core, he slid from reef to reef hugging their edges as a wounded animal might when adrift on the Serengeti, awaiting the return of its executioner. It was in this way that he was able to work his way into the beach. In that short swim he speculated what might have occurred had he been carrying a bleeding fish, which was usually the case. Thoughts of Sinaca and her alliance with the Sea God bloomed in his contorted imagination.

  Compton was sitting on the beach in his dive gear when Moses came in the boat.

  “I was working in the garden and got a terrible feeling,“ he said. “I came straight away.”

  Compton told the story, describing the shark and its markings near the tail. “What kind of shark was it?”

  Moses gazed out past the coral line where the shark had swum, blinked and licked his lips before slowly turning to Compton. “It was the Sea God.”

  Compton smiled in acknowledgement of the observation. “Well, if ever there was a Sea God, that was it. But what’s the species?”

  “It was a tiger,” said Moses, resuming his gaze on the water. “But everyone knows it is the Sea God. Very dangerous shark. Only one other man has seen the Sea God when he was in the water and lived and that was before I was born.”

  Compton wiped his mouth with his forearm.

  “You have no worries,” continued Moses. “If the shark did not eat you, that means you are safe from all sharks.”