Fire Knife Dancing (Jungle Beat)

by John Enright

  “Where did you get the gun?” Apelu asked, walking away from it, hoping Asia would follow him. She did.

  “From Ezra, the day you picked him up.” She followed Apelu around onto the patio. “After I heard the police car siren that day I came over to see what was going on, and Ezra gave me the gun and a handful of shells and said he would have to be going away for a while and would I mind guarding his house. Leilani and I had been trying to get that gun away from him for some time, so of course I took it. I didn’t think I’d have to use it, but thus far I have done a bad job of guarding his house. Did they take a lot?”

  “Yes, but nothing personal.”

  “Did they take the meat?”

  “Yes.”

  “Those were treats for Nick and Nora.”

  “Sorry. Tell me about the truck.”

  “It wasn’t new. It wasn’t that big. I don’t know anything about makes and models. The back had wooden sides that looked homemade. The cab was black. They had a lot of blue tarps to cover things with. It didn’t have any license plates, at least not on the front. There were four men.”

  “They weren’t police officers?” Apelu asked.

  “No, I don’t think so, no. No uniforms. Some of them had long hair. There was nothing official about it. No one was marking down what they loaded on the truck. I saw two of them stop and smoke what I took to be a joint the way they passed it back and forth.”

  “You were hiding?”

  “They were scary. You know, without Ezra here anchoring down this end of the cliffs I feel vulnerable. I guess that’s why.” And Asia nodded back at the shotgun, now looking very benign removed from human hands. “I have to go now. It’s just you. I trust you.”

  “Better take the shotgun,” Apelu said. “No point in leaving it here for them to take on their next visit, if there is one.”

  “Yes, I’ll take it. You’ll see that Ezra gets his cranberry juice? They won’t let me see him.” Asia was looking straight at him, and the look of concern in her very blue eyes made her look younger, girlish.

  “Got it covered,” he said, and her eyes smiled.

  “He likes mango seemoy too, if you can find any. Ezra’s like a kid when it comes to mango seemoy.”

  “I’ll see what I can do,” he said. Then as she picked up the shotgun and turned to go, “Be careful.”

  “I’ll do that,” she said as she walked away. “You can count on it.”

  There was a stretch of road by the golf course that on occasion became a toad-killing field. The blacktop was spotted with flattened toads. The toads—a large species—were not native to the island. They had been brought in on purpose fifty years before to eat mosquitoes or something. Another bright palangi idea. Apelu had heard on the radio that there were now several million of them on the island. And they were everywhere. For some reason they liked to come here to die, get run over. Sometimes at night on this stretch of road you could hear them hopping, banging their heads against your floorboards as you drove through. Suicidal alien amphibians, maybe homesick for their native land. The thing about the toads was that even dead they were poisonous, so nothing, not even scavenging dogs and chickens, would eat them. After a while you learned to ignore them. That day Apelu had trouble ignoring them and found himself trying to drive around their pancaked corpses.

  Apelu returned the pickup truck to where Sina had parked it that morning. She probably wouldn’t even know it had gone missing. It wasn’t lunchtime yet. He walked to headquarters to find out what he had to do for this internal investigation the commissioner wanted. No one seemed to know. The captain hadn’t gotten any instructions. The commissioner wasn’t in. Nobody else even seemed to know he had been suspended. The captain told him to go home, but he hung around. He had nowhere else to go.

  Apelu hung around headquarters the next day too, waiting for the investigation to begin. He tried to contact Mati, but was told that he was still on vacation. He tried to reach Assistant Immigration Chief Pouli and was told he was in a meeting.

  The call came in around twelve-thirty when most of the CID officers, including the captain, were at lunch. A body, a floater, had been found beneath a pier at the Marine Railway in Satala. Officer Tupuono was the only one on duty. Officer Tupuono was known for his aversion to corpses. He asked Apelu to come along.

  The Ronald Reagan Marine Railway was a facility for hauling the tuna fishing boats out of the water when they needed refurbishing, scraping, and painting. It was called a railway because the ships were hauled out of the bay on floating frames winched up submerged tracks onto the dock. It was not a technologically sophisticated procedure or facility. It was located adjacent to the SeaKing tuna-packing plant—the territory’s sole major industry—on the far side of Pago Pago Bay. It was only a ten minute drive from headquarters. They got there first, well before the EMS crew.

  The body was that of a woman, a young woman. She hadn’t been in the water long. She wasn’t bloated or badly discolored yet. She had been caught at the waist by the lowering tide at the Y-intersection of two I-beams that held up one of the ship-hauling tracks. She drooped there, facedown, her head and feet still in the oil-slicked water. Officer Tupuono took one look and headed off to interview the men who had found her. Apelu sat down at the edge of the dock above the body and lit a cigarette. His side sent out shots of pain. It wasn’t his job to haul her out. That was the EMS crew’s job. The corpse was wearing a stylish sequined tank top and a pair of denim shorts. Her long black hair was loose and floated up and down with the wave wash. He couldn’t see if she was wearing any jewelry because her hands and neck were submerged.

  “Nice butt,” a voice behind him said.

  Apelu looked back over his shoulder. A young Samoan male with a hard hat on was standing there.

  “Recognize it?” Apelu asked.

  “Can’t say particularly, but it’s one of the boat girls. That’s the outfit.”

  “Boat girl? You mean a prostitute?”

  “Yeah, one of the girls that do the fishermen.” The young man gestured with his head toward the banks of long-liner and purse-seiner ships docked four and five deep at the cannery dock.

  “You know them?” Apelu held up his pack of cigarettes, offering the guy one. He took it. Apelu handed him his cigarette to light it.

  “You mean do I fuck them? No. I don’t ever have to pay for it. They only fuck them Asian and Portuguese fishermen on the boats. They almost live there.” He sounded disgusted. “Samoan girls too, all Western. Just whores. Nobody knows them. They don’t even use their real names. Too ma.” Ma means shame in Samoan, but more than just personal shame, a shame that involves the whole family, chiefs, ancestors, village, and all.

  The young man walked away. Apelu sat looking at the body, whose limbs moved with the bay’s gentle wash in a graceful and obscene parody of dance. Party girl, Apelu thought, or indentured sex slave? Both? More. A girl with little brothers and sisters she once took care of back in her village, whose white Sunday church dress would be found safely folded and packed away in her meager luggage, who would have sent what money she could hang onto back to her family, pretending she was a nanny or a cleaning girl somewhere. Random phrases and chords of an old Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young song drifted into his mind with the rhythm of the waves, a song about children and what their parents shouldn’t know about them.

  The EMS guys arrived. They had to borrow an aluminum outboard skiff from the dock crew to get to her, and she was so wedged in that it took four of them to dislodge her. As they grappled the body into the boat Apelu could see that one side of her face was badly bruised. The EMS guys got her up onto the dock, and before they bagged her Apelu took a look. Aside from the blow to her face there were no other obvious wounds. None of her limbs seemed broken. She had on no jewelry at all, which struck Apelu as strange. Beneath her clothes she was wearing a bra and panties. Her fingernails and toenails were all intricately painted with glittered pink stars.

  Apelu patted the pockets o
f her shorts. They all were empty except her left rear pocket, which held something flat and thin and hard. Apelu borrowed a pair of surgical gloves from an EMS guy to reach into that pocket and he pulled out a soaked Western Samoan passport. He carefully opened it to the ID page, and there smiling out at him was a younger, prettier version of the corpse’s face. She had just turned twenty. She was from Vaimoso. Her name was the same as one of the girls on Lisa’s list. He slipped the passport back into her pocket.

  “Soifua, what are you doing here?” It was the captain. “You’re on suspension, remember?”

  Apelu stood up and took off the gloves. “Officer Tupuono throws up on dead people, remember? No one else was around to come out with him.”

  “Well, get the hell out of here. Where is Tupuono?”

  “Here, sir,” a voice said from the back of the gathered crowd.

  “Wrap her up and get her to the morgue,” the captain told the EMS crew. “Everyone else disperse but don’t leave the premises. Tupuono, get up here. Soifua, get your ass gone. Now.”

  Apelu slipped past the police guards now at the gate of the Marine Railway and started to walk back toward headquarters. The road ran along the water’s edge. A ways down the road the old naval cemetery climbed up the embankment on the inland side of the road. Apelu stopped, then crossed the road and walked up an unmowed path between the graves. Some were raised and rimmed with cut stone. Some had gravestones, some just engraved slabs set in the weeds. Others were just piles of stones or coral slabs. Years before he had learned where Malua the Wild Man’s grave was—a pile of rocks off at the very edge of the burial ground. He went there and sat on the grave for a while, watched the ambulance with the girl’s body speed back toward the hospital under full lights and siren, as if its passenger was in a hurry to get somewhere. There was something wrong about all of this.

  CHAPTER 9

  OFF TO THE left in the bush behind Apelu’s house was a church whose major investment in western religion was a high-powered sound amplification system. They managed to—and were allowed to—disturb the public peace of the village several nights a week and Saturday afternoons with their blaringly bad, over-amped, distorted version of Baptist hymns and squalling in tongues. But Sundays were the worst. It started around ten in the morning. Sina and the kids had already left for their church. Apelu, who almost never went to church—baptisms, weddings, and funerals, only because they were entirely too much trouble to skip—was home alone. Sometimes the awful excuse for music seemed louder or more off-tune or more grating than usual. This Sunday morning it seemed especially gruesome. Over the years he had complained to the village mayor and even the church’s minister—who as a result had amped down his yelping, hysterical sermons—but the music never got turned down. They had one of those electric keyboards with its variety of idiot rhythm settings that could wander away from the most basic melody. There was an all-female choir under the direction of a maniacal obese contralto who, yelling at the tops of their lungs in praise of an obviously deaf or ear-plugged deity, could not hear themselves well enough to be properly embarrassed. Theirs was the self-righteous assumption that they had the God-given right to inflict this travesty of worship not only on their noncoreligionists in the village but also upon all the birds and beasts and peace of the forest. Friends living more than a mile away complained about it, but there was nothing to be done because the torture was being committed in Jesus’s name.

  This Sunday morning Apelu hit upon a new plan of attack. He would borrow a decibel meter from the EPA, put on his sergeant’s uniform, and go over there to the bush church with a clipboard and take readings. He would take readings in his own backyard as well and keep careful records of times and sound levels. He knew that the territory had no noise abatement ordinance and that even if there were such regs he couldn’t get them enforced against a church, but at least he would have evidence. That would make him feel better anyway, and maybe if he was obvious enough he could scare them down a few volume notches, maybe even bring a civil complaint. But that morning there was nothing to be done about it, so he put on the Marshall Tucker Band’s Greatest Hits album and turned it up loud enough to hear it first at least, though there was no drowning out Jesus.

  Between the battle of the bands he almost didn’t hear the phone ringing. No telling how long it had been ringing, so he answered it first, then went to turn down the stereo. It was the captain on the phone.

  “Soifua?”

  “Yes.”

  “Soifua, you having a fucking party on Sunday morning? Are you sober?”

  “I’m sober, Captain. I just had the music turned up to compete with the Church of the Deaf Jesus.”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “Nothing, Captain. What’s up?”

  “Soifua, I’ve got to talk to you.”

  “Now? Can’t this wait for tomorrow morning?”

  “No, I’m afraid not. Can you meet me here at the country club?”

  “Got no way to get there, Captain. Wife took the pickup truck to get the kids to church.”

  “I’ll come and get you. Where are you at?”

  “Only about ten minutes away, in Leone, across from CJ’s Store. I’ll walk up there, meet you in the parking lot.”

  It was less than a quarter mile from Apelu’s house to CJ’s Store. He changed out of his lavalava into a pair of jeans, flip-flops, and an aloha shirt and hiked up there. His dogs followed him up to the road, where he shooed them back. The captain pulled into the six-car parking lot in his tan, no-longer-new Lincoln Town Car, and Apelu got in. They turned back toward town.

  “This makes the CID look like shit, Soifua. And when the division looks like shit my bosses start to think I smell like shit.” The captain wasn’t looking at Apelu as he drove. “What the hell are you doing, fooling around with them whores?”

  “What whores would that be, Captain?” Apelu asked. Now the captain looked at him. Apelu looked back, met his eyes.

  “The whores like the one we fished out of the harbor on Friday.”

  “I didn’t have anything to do with that woman except to see her poor body get hauled up onto the dock,” Apelu said, watching the road now because the captain wasn’t.

  “Don’t give me that shit, Soifua. You were her immigration sponsor, along with a couple of other girls suspected of working that same occupation.”

  Apelu kept looking straight ahead. What had been wrong about the whole scene of the dead girl began to focus a little, but it was still strange and unexplained. “That’s impossible, Captain. I’ve never sponsored anyone to come here, much less women I don’t know.”

  “What?” the Captain said.

  “You heard me. I don’t know what you are talking about. Watch out for that truck.” A pickup filled with churchgoers had pulled casually out in front of them. The captain cursed and swerved around them, on a curve, into a luckily empty oncoming lane.

  “No, Soifua. We’ve got the goods on you—signed immigration forms, your name and info, everything.”

  They drove along in silence for a bit. Apelu didn’t know what to say, what to think. The whole thing was ridiculous. It did cross his mind that when Sina heard these allegations—and she would—there would be no way for him to just dismiss them as absurd. Such stories, even if proven untrue, took on a life of their own in her rumor world, where the ma, the shame, would taint her reputation even more than his. The captain turned off the main road onto the golf course road.

  “Where are we going?” Apelu asked.

  “To see if the attorney general is still at the country club. He wants to talk with you. You’ve made me look like a fool, Soifua. One of my men involved in a prostitution ring, without my knowing it. You inspecting her dead body when you’re supposed to be on suspension. Me okaying your little trip to Apia on the department’s dime to recruit new girls from that Ulifanua woman. Fuck shit, Soifua. The commissioner is not going to want to hear any of this.”

  Neither do I, thought
Apelu.

  The side road into the country club was a washboard of gulleys and potholes, and the captain hit half of them in his haste, but when they got there the AG had already teed-off. His foursome included the commissioner and the publisher of the Samoa News. If the captain had been anxious before, he was now nearly apoplectic. He commandeered a golf cart to catch up with them, flashing his badge and making demands. Apelu refused to get in the cart with him and walked away. The captain, swearing and loudly angry, took off up the first fairway, telling Apelu to wait there for him, that he was under arrest for something.

  Apelu didn’t wait. He left. He walked back up the gullied side road to the blacktop then stopped, looked right then left. His mind and body were very still, the calmness of a captured mouse staring into a boa constrictor’s fascinating eyes. It was a sort of catatonia he’d known before, a familiar numbness. In this state, even though everything was totally fucked up and out of his control, his choices were really quite simple—engage or escape, fight or flight. Nothing normal applied any longer. He looked right then left again. Several miles to his right was his home, where he would be found and arrested, trapped in someone else’s lie, where his wife could choose not to believe him and not to forgive him. To his left was the unknown, solitude, time for contemplation, Wild Man freedom.

  He turned left toward Piapiatele, cutting off the busy road onto side paths as soon as he could, his mind numb, his limbs feeling an energy, an adrenal urgency they hadn’t felt in years. When he hit the jungle paths the world became wonderfully still and a new tune, a melody he had never heard before, began taking shape in his head. Its beat matched the rhythm of his steps; its chorus was the calls of the jungle honeyeaters that announced his solitary passage.

  It was around noon when Apelu approached Piapiatele. The sky was mostly clear, and it was hot and still in the tunnel-like track he had found that twisted through the high pandanus toward the sound of the surf on the cliffs. At one turn in the trail he had surprised a manuali`i, a big purple swamp hen, who screamed an almost human scream, spread its wide but mostly useless wings, and half flew, half crashed away up and then off the trail into the bushes. The manuali`i was an ominous and secretive bird. Older Samoans still believed that the bird’s appearance augured the death of a chief, and they would attack them with stones on the rare occasions when one would present itself outside its jungle keep. It had startled Apelu out of his dense trek reverie, the tone poem that had shaped in his mind like an armoring anthem. He stopped for his heart to slow down and to recapture the melody—E minor, D major, C.