Fire Knife Dancing (Jungle Beat)

by John Enright

  He approached Ezra’s house from the cliffside, keeping the house between himself and the kennel. He did not want to set off the dogs. What he wanted was silence and solitude. Without going near the house he found the sand-filled cup in the cliff where he had sat before, but his body was still too restless to sit. He took off his flip-flops and his sweat-soaked shirt and stashed them under a rock, then he picked his way down and across the cliff face to a shelf he had seen just above the wave break. This was better, closer to the action. He found a spot to sit at the edge of the spray. Why had the girl been killed? How had she gotten there? How had her face been smashed in? Why was the only thing she was carrying—her passport—the last thing someone like her would be carrying? What had she done to deserve such a fate?

  Apelu saw the rogue swell rising a good minute before the wave broke. He pressed himself farther back into the hollow he had chosen to sit in until his back was against the rock cliff face. He was sitting cross-legged and he found two outcrops to hang onto. His injured ribs flamed at the effort. The crest of the wave broke five feet above his tucked-down head. The force of it implanted him against the rock. But its retreat was worse than its attack—its suction trying like a banshee to suck the air from his lungs and him from the rock. He almost lost his grip as it pulled his legs out from under him, twisted him. He grabbed a lungful of air before the second, weaker crest in the rogue set hit and he crouched fetus-like, leveraging himself in as many places as possible within the rock. This time it was more like a Jacuzzi of sea-foam, a game the ocean was playing with him. He stood and faced the third, final, and weakest wave of the set, his feet braced and his arms locked against the rock lip above him. It rose only to his knees.

  Apelu picked his wet way up the cliff face in the opposite direction from where he had entered. At the top he stopped and sat again. He thought he had seen it just as the last wave broke, and there it was, the white reef heron, circling, one wing tip down, a hundred yards offshore where the waves were born. It circled slowly again then headed off west along the coastline, away from Ezra’s. Apelu rose and followed the white heron around several coves. The white one would always wait for him or circle back. Then it disappeared down into a deep cove that cut farther than the others into the black lava and basalt cliff. From the edge of the cliff Apelu could see the white heron alight on a boulder close to a hardscrabble beach at the end of the cove. Apelu searched and found a way down, almost a trail, from boulder to boulder. He squatted on the final rock at the edge of the broken-shell berm. The bird was still there.

  He didn’t notice the spot of white until it moved, far out on the facing wall of the cove. It disappeared into the shadow of an outcrop not far above the wave break, then reappeared a little higher, moving slowly. It was a white T-shirt, he realized, a tank top. As it moved toward him he could make out a pair of tan shorts, then tan limbs and a splash of pale hair. Asia, her face to the rock, moved as surely as a crab up away from the wave break, closer to him, back toward the end of the cove. It took her another ten minutes. When she finally jumped from the wall onto the dry berm, the white heron took wing, wheeled, and vanished among the tops of incoming breakers.

  Asia stopped when she saw Apelu sitting on his boulder. She paused, then waved and came toward him across the rough tumbled rocks and shells of the beach.

  “You look like you’ve been in for a swim, Apelu. You didn’t just wash up here, did you?” she said as she walked up to the base of his rock.

  “No, I came the hard way,” he said, gesturing with his head up the cliff.

  “Oh, the way all us other mere mortals have to get here?”

  “The hard way.”

  “To use an old line, come here often?”

  “I always go bird watching on Sundays,” he answered.

  “Is it Sunday?” Asia asked, truly curious.

  “Most places, yes, but not here,” Apelu said, indicating with a glance the beach, the cove, and the ocean.

  “I always liked Sundays.”

  “I’ve always hated them.”

  “Good thing we don’t have them here then,” she said, echoing his glance around them.

  Asia untied a thin cord around her waist that held a cinched burlap bag full of something hefty and propped it on his rock. On her belt there was a sheath with a short-bladed boat knife snapped in it.

  “So, I suppose this is your front yard. Out gardening?” Apelu asked.

  “Gathering, actually,” Asia said as she opened the burlap bag. “Dinner.” And she reached into the bag and pulled out a palmful of glistening black shells the size of large foreign coins.

  “Sisi!” Apelu said. “Where in the world did you find them? I thought they were all gone, harvested out years ago.”

  “I have my secret places,” Asia said and smiled at him.

  “Seafood of the gods. I haven’t seen them since I was a kid.” Apelu reached out and picked a large shell from her hand, turned it over to see the lucent still-alive muscle of the delicacy inside. He looked up at Asia with a slight raising of his brows. Her eyes smiled and her eyebrows answered his. With a single motion he raised the sisi to his mouth and scooped it loose with his teeth. He held the fragrance of its freshness in his mouth for a moment before swallowing.

  “They’re really good with a cold beer,” Asia said.

  The route that Apelu had found down to the beach was roughly the same route by which Asia led him out. It was, in fact, her front yard. The weakness in the rock that had allowed the deep cove to form continued inland up a narrow cleft of eroded tree-shrouded valley. Implanted there was a small house raised on concrete piles above the bed of an intermittent stream, its back set into the incline. A veranda fronted it. They ate on the veranda. Asia brought out two bowls—one filled with the sisi, the other with fresh limu seaweed—and two bottles of cold Steinlager. They didn’t speak as they ate and sipped their beers. They chucked the empty sisi shells over the railing of the veranda as they emptied them. Beneath the constant pounding of the surf, the place was very still. They emptied both bowls and both bottles, and Asia took them indoors and returned with two new bottles of Stein.

  “Have you been here in a storm?” Apelu asked.

  “No, not yet.”

  “I don’t know if I would stay here in a hurricane.”

  “I don’t know if I would either. Would you like a shirt?”

  “No, I’m fine.” Apelu felt his jeans. “I’m getting dry.”

  “Tell me something about yourself, Apelu, anything.”

  And for some strange reason Apelu told her everything that had happened in the past few days, starting with his suspension and his visit with the attorney general right through to his walking away from the country club. Asia was a good listener. As he told the story, Apelu found himself questioning things, speculating, saying things like, “Don’t you think it strange that…?” and “That doesn’t seem right, does it?” Asia would make a small, noncommittal sound in the back of her throat and take another sip of beer. She didn’t watch him. She only listened.

  At the end of his story—when he had decided to walk to the cliffs to escape and think—Apelu fell silent for a while. Asia said nothing.

  “I guess I had to talk that out,” he said. “Thanks for listening.”

  “That poor girl,” Asia said. “I can’t imagine being caught in such a cruel trap.”

  “I’ve wondered if it was a suicide,” Apelu said, “if she jumped, and the damage to her face came later, like if she hit something submerged when she jumped. She left all her valuables behind for the other girls, just took her passport so that when her body was found someone would know it was her.”

  “Maybe, but I don’t think so,” Asia said to the view off the veranda. “I don’t think she would have thought that way. Is it true about the boat girls?”

  “I guess so. We never get involved in it. I guess because no one complains. I mean no crime is ever reported.”

  “Who is ‘we’?” Asia asked.


  “The police department, the Criminal Investigation Division. I’ve been on the force ten years now and I can’t remember one bust for prostitution or promoting prostitution. Every so often the Immigration guys will make a sweep of the boats and pick up four or five girls as overstayers and deport them back to Western. We never hear about it until after the fact. It always seemed sort of random and haphazard to me.”

  “But someone must be organizing it, profiting from it. I mean, an eighteen-year-old girl doesn’t just one day decide, Gee, maybe I’ll be a whore, that would be fun.” Asia got up and walked to the railing at the far end of the veranda. “Why would your captain tell you he had all this proof that you were her sponsor when you’re not?”

  “Don’t know. Her name was on a list of names of missing girls that the authorities in Western Samoa were concerned about. I was trying to find out the identities of their sponsors over here.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  “Collect my shirt, my shoes, and myself and head back into the real world to try to find answers to some of those questions, I guess. What else can I do?”

  Asia came back and sat on the railing in front of him. “Will they arrest you?”

  “They might. While they’re inventing things they might as well invent a crime or two.”

  “Will you get a lawyer?”

  “Do you think I should?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “Probably.”

  They stared at each other in silence. They were only about three feet apart.

  “Look, I didn’t mean to—”

  “That’s all right,” Asia interrupted him. “I’m just sorry that—”

  “Don’t be,” Apelu interrupted her back. “Thanks for the great meal.”

  “I guess you better be getting back,” she said, “to the real world.”

  “Yeah, I guess I’d better do that,” Apelu said, standing up. “Thanks again, for everything.”

  Asia reached out and put her hand on his arm as she stood up. “You know, I feel like you’ve made me an accomplice in all this now. You will have to let me know how things turn out. I want to know.”

  But as Apelu walked back along the coastline he realized he wasn’t ready to go back to the real world yet. He had no plan. He had no information. He had no idea what might come down next against him. He retrieved his shirt and flip-flops and went back to Ezra’s house. The patio door was still unlocked. From the phone in Ezra’s bunker he called his house. Sanele answered and wanted to know where he was. He said working and asked to talk to Mom.

  The first thing that Sina asked when she got on the phone was also where he was. Her tone was not good, sort of shrill but controlled at the same time. He didn’t answer but asked her if there had been any calls. Yes, the captain had called, looking for him. The captain had told her that if Apelu came home she should keep him there and call the captain immediately. She wanted to know what was going on. He asked her what else the captain had said. Well, she had also asked the captain what was going on, and at least the captain was man enough to answer her question and tell her that Apelu had been suspended and was under investigation for his activities in Apia and for being connected to some dead prostitute. Thanks, Captain, Apelu thought, I’ll do the same for your home life someday. Then later a squad car had stopped at the house, two uniformed policemen looking for Apelu, and what about the kids and what the neighbors must think, police cars coming to the house? And had he also caught some sort of venereal disease in Apia that made it too painful to satisfy his own wife? And who was this prostitute he was connected to? Was that why he worked late and on weekends so often? What girlfriend’s house was he calling from now? What had he really been doing in Apia? Where was that really nice shirt with the skyline of Manhattan on it that she had given him? Sina’s shrillness had lost its earlier control. Apelu hung up, glad he wasn’t in the same room with her. This was condition red, high musu.

  So, there was no going back right now. The catatonic numbness returned. Apelu went and sat in Leilani’s chair with the lace throw at the front windows. He sat with his hands clasped between his knees, where his elbows rested, his head bowed. He sat like that, very still, for a long time, his brain a thought-empty, unused bruise. He sat like that until the sun through the windows was low enough over the ocean to soak all of him. He sat like that until he gave up.

  Apelu stood up and took off his clothes. He emptied the pockets of his jeans onto the chair, and then, naked, he took his shirt and jeans and briefs to the washing machine in the hallway behind the kitchen and tossed them in with some laundry soap he found there, set the water level to low, and turned it on. He went to Leilani’s room and in one of her drawers found a flowered silk lavalava that he folded to loincloth length then cinched around his waist. From Ezra’s bunker he took the fire knives and, standing in the middle of the front room in the dying sunlight, he started the twirling and passing patterns that his teacher, Seutia, had taught him twenty-five years before. He did them slowly, super slowly, as if in a trance. The pain in his side didn’t matter. He worked through the basic drills, remembering them perfectly. The grips of the knives felt slender in his hands. The knives felt light. His right heel began beating out the drum’s rhythm. He felt his back straighten and his shoulders push back. On their own his arms extended away from his body. In slow motion the knives took on a revolving life of their own. He imagined their ends on fire. This was the warrior’s dance, the dance of defiance. Now he was stomping with both feet, his knees bent. He began passing the blades between his legs and around his shoulders and neck, still slowly, getting into it, going back.

  Then the dogs started barking and he thought he heard a voice. Apelu carried the fire knives with him back to the kitchen. The washing machine had finished its cycle. He went to the storeroom with a window that looked out at the kennel. Asia was there. He ducked back from the window into the darkness of the room, but she hadn’t seen him. Her back was to him. She was outside the fence of the kennel, scooping dry dog food from a galvanized garbage can into a plastic bucket, all the while talking to the dogs. When she straightened up and turned, Apelu stepped sideways out of her line of sight. Asia felt along the two-by-four ledge above the gate, and her hand came down with the key to the Yale lock and unlocked it. Nick and Nora were going wild in greeting and anticipation. Then they all moved out of his view deeper into the kennel. When the dogs stopped barking Apelu figured they were eating. Asia was still talking to them. He could hear water running into their tin tub water basin. Then Asia reappeared, carrying the empty plastic bucket, left the kennel, and locked the gate behind her, putting the key back up on the ledge. She placed the bucket upside down on top of the garbage can and left. From a kitchen window Apelu watched Asia’s back disappear across the back lawn and into a break in the pandanus he hadn’t noticed before.

  Apelu found the codeine pills in Ezra’s bathroom and took some. He moved his clothes from the washer to the dryer. He returned the knives to Ezra’s bunker and took a shower. He found a can of soup and some crackers in a kitchen cabinet, fixed the soup, and ate in the final light of the day. He had decided against turning on the lights inside the house—no need to advertise his presence—but then as dusk settled in a timer somewhere clicked and outside lights went on. Perfect. Enough light came into the house for him to move around in interior darkness. He would spend the night here and let tomorrow take care of itself. Something about the darkness made the surf seem louder. He locked the patio door.

  In Leilani’s room, with windows that looked out only on to the ocean, he closed the door, drew the drapes, and switched on the bedside lamp. The bedsheets were musty but clean. Along one wall was a low bookcase filled with photo albums labeled by years. The earliest one, Apelu discovered, held yellowed clippings and programs and faded black-and-white photos of Leilani as a young girl dancer in Hawaii more than sixty years before. They were all lovingly, carefully, artistically mounted with little cutout paper hearts and c
olored strips and stars, every page its own creation of a girl’s musings and dreams—a young male dancer’s glossy publicity shot with ancient outline traces of a lipsticked kiss across his bare chest; a Matson Cruise Lines performance flier with a photo of four young beauties in coconut shell bras, one of them Leilani, another with a drawn-in moustache and randomly blacked-out teeth. Storybooks, Apelu thought as he paged through them, watching Leilani grow from a child troupe performer to a strikingly pretty young woman headliner.

  Apelu had an idea and did the mental math. He skipped ahead and pulled out the album for the years when he would have been sixteen, seventeen years old, the years when he sometimes danced for Ezra and Leilani’s company. And sure enough, in a group photograph of the whole troupe posing in costume at the entrance to the Sands Casino in Las Vegas, he found himself, bare-chested in a grass skirt, shell armlets, and a modest Afro, at the end of the back line, holding a fire knife above his head.

  Who was that young, skinny guy? At least he wasn’t a fugitive. Well, maybe a fugitive from his youth, but not hiding out like some perp on the run. Apelu put the photo album back in its place on the shelf, opened the drapes, and turned off the lamp. There was a half-moon over the ocean. His mind searched for a thought and found none. He went to bed and almost immediately to sleep.

  CHAPTER 10