Shark Dialogues

by Davenport, Kiana

  Winging homeward on the thirty-minute flight, Vanya leaned her head against the cold, hard pane. It had been years since she thought of what Toru did in ‘Nam, what he became an expert at. But just then, at the foot of the boarding steps, it came back to her. Demolitions. In his letters home, he had called himself “The Dean of Demolitions.”

  The Wet and the Dry

  * * *

  SHE STARED AT THE PITCH AND YAW of lolloping kangaroos in headlights as the bus to darwin rattled along, frenzied agitation of a moving container carrying human bodies through a night. One thousand miles through the bone-dry heart of australia’s outback to the continent’s top end, a grueling trip on the only paved road, the “bitumen,” stuart highway.

  Outside on the roof rack, spare tires bounced and thudded, jerrycans of emergency water rattled and slurped. Now and then the driver cursed, pulled over for a “road-train,” semis with three attached trailers driven by truckies blind on amphetamines. Inside the bus, humidity was thick enough to bathe in, and the odors—rotting teeth, yeasty socks, white wild buff hunters scratching their filthy crotches.

  A few German tourists smelling of hair spray and polyester, but for the most, the rest were Aborigines with their mysterious wild and earthy smell. And the sounds: hiss of doors opening at desert stops, of breaks whining as cattle strayed into the road, the suck of interrupted snores, a mouth organ bleating down the aisle. Vanya trembled with nausea, looked at the Outback sky, moon huge, stars so close she felt they could sizzle her brain. The idea of a civilized world outside her window seemed alien, something already expired. The bus took a slight turn, blinding galahs bursting from the bush, and for a moment headlights picked up dead cattle ballooned with gas, legs pointed upward.

  Vanya leaned forward, querying the driver. “Is it the drought?”

  “Nah,” he said. “Heat just bloody boils their brains!”

  Nothing but red dust, occasionally a riverbed, skeletons ringing a dry billabong. She dozed until the bus whined to a stop. An Aborigine got off in the middle, it seemed, of nowhere.

  “Gone Walkabout,” the driver volunteered. “On ‘is way to Darwin, a new job, suddenly changed ‘is mind. That’s what they do, trek for weeks, months, no bloody destination. That’s their way of thinking, mind you. Middle of a sentence, they drop everything . . . wander off to the Outback. Year or two later, you come across them, ask where in hell they’ve been. ‘Gone Walkabout!’”

  “How will he survive?” she asked.

  “‘Is wits! They can smell out water in the ground. Real genius for that. Snakes, kookaburra, hell, that’s good tucker to a hungry bloke.”

  Near midnight they stopped at a pub for gas. Bodies creaked alive, staggered off and into the pub, parched for cold lagers. An Aborigine woman plunked down in the shadows beside the bus, pulling a Violet Crumbly from her pocket. Vanya moved close, trying to make conversation, but the woman yanked her hair over her face, went on with her silent munching.

  A half-blood—half Aborigine, half white—stood in the doorway, his body half inside and half outside the pub, his inside arm holding a bottle of beer. Now and again, he stuck his head in, took a slug, then swung it back outside chatting with full-blood Aborigines.

  The driver made light of it. “Owner won’t serve full-bloods, but he compromises with half-bloods. Bloke’s got a sense of humor, I’ll give ‘im that!”

  The half-blood was wearing an Aborigine flag stuck in his knitted cap. He smiled, flirting with Vanya. “Where you from, Missus? Torres Straits?”

  “Hawai‘i.”

  “Oh, mahn, you a bloody Yank!”

  “Hawaiian first. What’s the flag?” Already knowing what it was, a reminder that the presence of whites in Australia was illegal. Aborigines had never signed a treaty, never ceded one square inch of their territories to foreigners. Like Hawaiians, their lands had been stolen out from under them, their numbers decimated by white man’s diseases and superior weapons of death. Sovereignty and land rights were now hot issues, Aborigines marching and calling strikes.

  A white buff hunter swaggered past the flag wearer. “You’re livin’ in the past, mate!”

  The half-blood turned, eyes glittering. “Yeah, mahn, my past. You be careful it don’t catch up wif’ you.”

  Exhausted, Vanya sank back into her seat, closed her eyes, envisioning Darwin, hours ahead. Beery boomtown, time-warped city of the fifties perched on the northern tip of the continent. Australia’s capital, Darwin existed between seasonal extremes, the Wet and the Dry, yielding up nothing but cattle and mining. After a while, she made her way to the toilet at the back of the bus. In the dark, sleeping faces like masks of the dead leapt up at her. She felt the earth moving under the wheels, wondered which way it was spinning on its axis. The bus was traveling at seventy miles an hour. At what speed am I rushing to my destination backwards?

  She had flown from Honolulu to Brisbane for a conference on Pacific Women for Saving Island Environments. The week-long meetings had centered round the extensive mining taking place in Arnhem Land, the Kakadu Forest outside Darwin. Geologists hired by the Aboriginal Women’s Environmental Watch Society had tested and proven that uranium and bauxite mining in the Kakadu was letting loose toxic waste. Acid was being dispersed, dust clouds blowing it all over the continent, leaving whole communities sick, children with mysterious lung infections.

  Vanya had sat on a panel for hours, discussing how the toxic air would eventually meld with toxic clouds from other islands—copper and gold mining in Papua New Guinea, nickel mining in nearby New Caledonia, pollution and nuclear testing in Hawai‘i, Micronesia, French Polynesia—eventually poisoning the air and the sea across the entire Pacific. The Women’s Conference was attempting to draw up petitions against mining corporations operating in Arnhem Land, but a small faction of Aboriginal women lawyers had challenged the petitions.

  A woman with a deep, pedogogical voice had stood up in the audience. “Mining’s income for us, forty percent of Australia’s exports. You rather we eat witchety grub and live on welfare?” She pointed her finger at Vanya. “What are you grousing about? You Hawaiians travel about crying for ecology and land rights, but you’re the ones that bloody well sell out!”

  She was referring to that morning’s headlines in Australia’s leading paper. Amid controversy on Hawai‘i’s Big Island over the proposed $900 million Riviera Resort, it had been discovered that two more Miloli‘i elders had sold their beachfront land to foreign developers for $500,000 each.

  Another woman had stood, challenging Vanya. “And what about those geothermal wells on your islands? By-products from them wells cause acid rain, killing rain forests.” She turned round, addressing the audience. “Lord, I tired of outsiders coming, telling us how to do. The whole Pacific sliding down. Why can’t we profit a bit like everyone else ‘fore its too late.”

  A disembodied voice floated up from the audience, accent of a New Caledonian. “Why we listening to a Yank? We not American property!”

  Vanya had jumped to her feet with no sense of it. “Yes, Hawaiians are American citizens. But you and I share the same ocean continent. We are all Oceanians first!” She raised her hands beseeching. “We’re such small nations, our news gets pushed aside. We have to count on each other, keep each other from dying. You know how the rest of the world sees us? You know what the London Times calls the Pacific? ‘An irradiated lake.’ We’re losing touch with the natural world, the mother-sea, our beginnings!”

  The audience of almost five hundred women turned suddenly silent. Vanya inhaled, stepped to the edge of the stage, as if about to dive. “Sisters, I entreat you! Be iron-fisted! Commit yourself to our future, our children, and our children’s children. Shout! Lobby! So they’ll stop mining out your lands! Fight your husbands and sons seduced by white men’s wages, wasted by his booze. I tell you, the future, our salvation, is in the . .. Hands of Pacific women!”

  They rose to their feet, applause deafening. They clapped until it had a rh
ythmn, until Vanya bowed, heaved herself into the wings where they surrounded her. But later, in the milling of exited crowds, she heard the after-thoughts.

  “Good. Very good to stay angry, keep our husbands from the mines—but, who then buy my children’s milk? Pay for their schooling if husbands go on strike? Who going keep my kids from starving? Keep my husband from beating me when he wants meat we cannot afford?”

  Vanya sat in her hotel room, defeated. Easy for me to preach. Divorced. No mouths to feed. Mother God, what good am I doing?

  A follow-up conference took her from Brisbane to Alice Springs in the dead heart of Australia’s Outback. There she listened to Aborigines challenge lawyers from mining corporations, contending the mines were on lands that had been stolen and they wanted them back. The mining lawyers shuffled their papers, got shouted down, seemed to vacillate between disdain and serious derangement. Exhausted, disillusioned, after four days, Vanya had left to meet Simon Weir. Flights out of Alice were booked for a week and, desperate, she’d caught the night bus to Darwin, the “beetle that crawled up the continent’s backside,” as locals described it, a grueling thousand-mile ride.

  Now she half dozed, feeling him pulling her up the continent, unraveling her resolutions, weaving them into ambidextrous knots. Her spine creaked, imagining him touching her, leaving his mark. She moaned, saw herself a woman on a leash. Leaping the length of my chain for him.

  He sat up in the dark, moved stealthily to the center of the room and listened. After a while he turned to a mirror, leaned close and, for the longest time, just stared. Finally, he eased back into bed. Vanya snored softly, some principle of light playing across her shoulder. Simon leaned over, watching her. The fact that she trusted him enough to sleep so deeply in his presence seemed to him a miracle.

  Months back—already a year?—he had seen in her first glance that this woman would not be incorporated, not easily solved. Much about her was catastrophic, wayward and mean. Yet in odd moments everything fell away but a lyrical delicacy, the girlishness of a child. She was beautiful, but he was not after beauty. He had seen too much of it: delicate Thai whores with the clavicle and wristbones of birds, lush South Americans with porcelain skin, debutantes, prospectors, refugees.

  But this one left him jittery, alert. That so impersonal and animalistic a dignity as hers should be allied with so poignantly human a sensibility was what drew him to his feet. Exactly why, he didn’t know. Maybe he was tired of his life. Maybe he wanted the adventure to be over. He lay back, feeling her warmth along his side, remembering his youth. A boy in the Outback, eyelids creased with red dust, day-dreaming, waiting for the streamlined jet of his future to conjure itself in a blank and white-faced sky.

  Well, he’d fulfilled that young boy’s dreams. Seen it all, done it all. All the voyages he’d made, from which he had returned not quite intact. By the time he first encountered Vanya, he was down to the bare and rusty fixtures of living, begging the past for mercy, begging it to leave him alone. The past, that twisted, tireless magician, pulling dead rabbits from a hat.

  In actuality, he had had no childhood to speak of, father a drinker, mother gone, dissolved into the Outback for the further unknown. Except for Aborigines who’d half raised him, he’d raised himself in the desert alone, running wild with the ‘roos and galahs, growing into a man slightly sadistic and crude, ripe for the Army where he’d proven himself a warrior, a combat hero. Now, he slept, and the dreams began. Just before dawn in humid dark, Vanya woke, hearing his sobs full of a sorrow so distilled she needed to stop them.

  “Simon.” She shook him gently.

  He jumped awake, astonished and angry. “Bloody malaria. Gets into my dreams.” Seeing her there, smelling her, he was immediately erect.

  And when it was over—the tangling of limbs, quick nips, long protracted moans, him steering her ankles like a wheelbarrow, her body responding wildly but her eyes closed, face side-turned as if sealed by a resolution to dismiss the whole scene—when it was over, they lay exhausted as penitents. Catching her breath, she arranged herself into a calm geometry, thinking how easily he possessed her, how relentlessly he reeled her in. Her breasts coated with sweat from his matted chest—ginger-colored sworls—his sperm leaking out of her, she felt such disgust she wanted to whip around and strike him. Strike him dead.

  But something persisted in the soul of this white, rough beast beside her. Sometimes, watching the ugly way he dealt with inferiors, whites working under him, but the gentle way he dealt with Aborigines, and the solemn manner with which he talked about nature, the land, she suspected that deep in his being was an ineluctable hankering for maybe one moment he and another human could understand, a touching of minds, a down-deep nod in the cluttered chaos called living. She lay quiet while he dozed, something inside her tensing, already preparing herself for a journey that would leave him behind.

  His hands a ruddy Outback burn, he deftly maneuvered the toylike chopper, so small it seemed homemade. Flying forty miles southeast of Darwin, Simon pushed forward on the joystick, as they ghosted over “the Kakadu.” Spurred by the discovery of uranium within their lands, the almost seven-thousand-square-mile Kakadu National Park had been created as a sanctuary for its people, the Gagudju Aborigines. From the mining of uranium, they received and invested $2.2 million annually in royalties, each adult receiving $2,000 a year for life. Vanya looked down at rain forests, escarpments, towering waterfalls, parts of it still unexplored, so vivid, it seemed to reach up and tear at her eyes.

  Forty thousand years ago, when Aborigines first set foot on Australia, crossing over from Asia, they had spread across this land of boulder canyons, eucalyptus woodlands and floodplains, and seeped down into the continent. It was sacred, mysterious land where crossovers still existed: platypus cavorting in large ponds, and in mudflats and mangroves, pop-eyed fish swam out of tidal creeks, climbed trees on leglike fins and peeped from branches like birds.

  “Here, things are still coming ashore,” Simon said. “Some things so strange and wild, they still haven’t named them.”

  Yet on its fringes, Vanya could see inroads of mining companies—dump trucks, conveyor belts, huge ore-carrying transport ships.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” he said. “‘Bloody mining devils!’ Well, most of the leases are held by Yanks. And Japanese. Our own government’s too timid, says this area’s not fit to live in. Only local miners are pick-and-shovel boys eking out a bit of change.”

  He eased up on the throttle, shaking his fist. “This is rich, bloody beautiful country. Just need to develop it, is all. Create jobs for the blacks. Instead, they give it away on a plate. Outsiders are taking the minerals, true. But they’re the only ones making improvements here.”

  “Improvements?” she said, incredulous.

  “Proper schools for the kids, computers in classrooms. Hospitals, stores. Don’t you see, without mines they’d still be beggars on welfare. A culture of poverty, drugs, blacks syringing themselves to death in public urinals. God in heaven, why they’ve even got community theaters. And art. Co-ops set up for locals to sell their ‘Dreaming’ paintings.”

  “Art.” Vanya snorted. “A way to keep them distracted. Whites used the same system in Hawai‘i. Give the ‘natives’ brushes and paints, keep them occupied. Art dealers buy up a canvas for a few hundred bucks, sell it on the mainland for thousands. Authentic Primitif, fruits of a dying race. Meanwhile, their stolen land’s being weapons-tested and mined out from under them. Profits of billions. Billions.”

  Simon canted the chopper to the left like a lopsided dragonfly. The earth turned sideways, her stomach flipped, and the rain forest came at them at crazy angles. After a time of staring down at great gorges and plains where herds of wild buffs roamed, she sat back, determined. “Now, I want to see the mines.”

  Simon frowned. “I’ll show you what I can. They catch me, I’m fired.”

  There were no real roads between the Kakadu Park and Darwin. For ten years, he’d fl
own for a helicopter service, bringing in foreigners wanting to view forty-thousand-year-old cave paintings deep in the forests. Now, he managed the company, and spent much of his time flying executives into the mines.

  By some miracle of maneuvering, he put the helicopter down on a patch of grass. When the rotors were still, when it was quiet, he spoke. “Vanya. Who are you doing this for? Abos? You’ll never get to know them. You’re native, but not their native. You’ll always be ‘outside’ to them.”

  She didn’t respond.

  “You’re using them, aren’t you?” he said. “Shoring up your glamour campaign to save the Pacific. For what? The whole planet’s gone to hell in a basket. And what are you giving Abos in return? Their land? Their history?”

  “Simon.” The sound of it, the feel of his name on her tongue was hard. Metallic. She experienced again, that almost palpable loathing for him, for herself for being with him. Her words came out in bites. “You cannot. .. grasp it, can you? With your white .. . supremacist mentality, your colonialist history of . . .”

  “Bloody crap. My great-grandfather came here in shackles. A simple Irish farmer who’d cursed Mother England after a couple of stouts. Died in his excrement, chained to a wall.”

  “A convict background doesn’t make you less white.”

  He shook his head slowly. “God, it’s absolutely daunting. Tough as nails, but you’ve got the perspective of a child.”

  “Look, I’m being paid to gather facts. I have reports to write, I have ...”

  “That the only reason you’re here?” It seemed such a desperate question, he looked away.

  “I can’t face any other reason. How do you think I feel when I wake up beside you. You’re working for them.” She shook her head. “Jesus Christ, haven’t you seen enough destruction. If mining corporations keep moving in, one day there’ll be no more land, no schools, no need for computers. When the earth’s mined out, these rivers and creeks poisoned with acid rain, when people are killing their neighbors for fresh water, Aborigines will be the first people to die of thirst, corraled in some parched hole.” She sat back, sighing. “I know whites aren’t all bad. Some of you feel guilt, give time and money, stand up in Parliament arguing for blacks ...”