by John Enright
THE MOLD ON what once had been coffee grounds inside the coffeemaker was so fascinating that Apelu took the whole filter bowl out into the early sunlight to look at it. There was one type of mold growing on another type of mold with a wholly different type of ferny mold growing out of that up the sides of the stained filter bowl. What it most closely suggested was a healthy coral reef of many self-sustaining vivid species and colors—pinks and grays and bold greens with sick yellows. He sniffed it. It smelled alive, not rotten at all. He wondered how long it had been left alone to become so much itself. At least as long as Leilani had been gone. He knocked it out against a tree beside the back patio. It was a lovely morning. A flight of maybe a dozen bright Ruddy Turnstones took off in squadron uniformity from the lip of the surf-sprayed lava cliff, then turned in perfect synchrony, flashing their russet and harlequin plumage as one and vanishing over the edge.
Apelu found the ground coffee but not the coffee filters, so he used a paper towel. His clothes were clean and dry, but he was still wearing Leilani’s silk lavalava when he took his mug of coffee out and sat at the patio table. He wasn’t yet ready for the real day—the day involving other people—to begin.
“I was wondering if you were still here. You look right at home.” It was Asia, coming up behind him from the break in the pandanus.
“I’m hiding out here. It’s a secret. You’re not supposed to know. Would you like some coffee?”
“Yes, I would. Thanks.” Asia took a seat at the patio table as Apelu stood up. “Black?” he asked.
“White,” she said, “one sugar.”
When Apelu returned with her mug of coffee, Asia handed him the morning’s Samoa News. “Page three,” she said.
“Sorry, no milk,” he said and sat down to read page three.
“Foul Play Suspected In Satala Drowning,” the headline read. The story was reported straight enough. The victim’s name was not given, but she was identified as a nineteen-year-old Western Samoan currently staying in the village of Leloaloa at a house where Immigration officials had previously apprehended young women overstayers to be deported. They didn’t say anything about prostitution—no one, including the News, wanted to go there—but the neighborhood, her sex, age, and situation implied all that. Then there was a sentence that stood all by itself as a paragraph:
“The Samoa News has learned that the young woman’s immigration sponsor is a member of the Dept. of Public Safety, Sergeant Apelu Soifua, who is currently under internal investigation.”
“Oh my,” Apelu said.
“Yes, right,” Asia said, taking off her sunglasses. “You’ve been outed.”
“Screwed is more like it.”
“You’ve got yourself some serious enemies, Apelu. Know why?”
“Haven’t a clue, not a clue.”
“Do you know where that house is?”
“The one she was living in? Yeah, I think I know the house. The captain sent us out there once on a follow-up after an Immigration sweep, trying to look involved. Not a nice place.”
“Let’s go there,” Asia said, looking at him.
“Why?”
“I’m worried about those other girls on your list. Maybe they’re there. Maybe we can find them through there.”
“That’s not exactly your business, is it?” Apelu said, looking back at her.
“I couldn’t sleep, thinking about your story and those girls. When I came over here last night to feed the dogs I watched you working out with your dance knives and I knew you were thinking about them too. I saw the look on your face. Those girls are in trouble and scared. One of them is already dead. We’ve got to find the others and get them back to their families.”
“We do?” The fate of those other girls hadn’t really been on his mind.
“You’ve got to do something to defend yourself, find the other girls, and find out who their real sponsors are. It’s we because I have to do something to help them. So, I’ll help you and you’ll help me and we’ll help them. It’s a win-win-win situation.” Asia took a sip of her black coffee. “No milk, huh? Tastes like mold.”
Apelu got dressed and followed Asia to her house. She had him wait while she changed and reappeared wearing a sleeveless, scooped-neck, dark blue belted dress and sunglasses. She had done something with her hair. It was a different Asia. She was carrying a purse. “Let’s go,” she said. Her car was parked at the end of a gravel driveway a short hike into the bush behind her house. She had a brand-new Kia sedan, black with dark sunscreened windows. Like so many vehicles on the island it had no license plates. The Office of Motor Vehicles was habitually, almost traditionally out of new license plates. No new cars had had plates in over a year. The air-con made the Kia quickly cool.
“Let’s take care of Ezra first,” she said. They stopped at one of the bigger bush stores and bought three two-liter bottles of cranberry juice. Then they stopped at a small bush store and bought several small bags of mango seemoy candy. They put it in the box with the juice and labeled the box “For Ezra Strand.”
“Will he get it?” Asia asked.
“No guarantee,” Apelu said. “Just tell the guard at the gate that it’s on doctor’s orders and with the warden’s permission. It’s weird enough for the guard to run it by the warden, and he’ll get it to him.”
At the correctional facility Apelu stayed in the car behind the darkened windows and watched Asia walk with the box through the open gate. She had to wake up the uniformed officer on duty there to give him the box and the instructions.
“Good system they’ve got there,” Asia said when she got back in the car.
“Makes you feel secure, doesn’t it?” Apelu said. “Sort of an honor system.”
On the way into town Apelu asked Asia how she happened to end up living alone above the cliffs of Piapiatele. She was straightforward about her story, almost as if the quicker she could tell it the better. In Hawaii she had met and married a Samoan Army Officer, Armored Division, Schofield Barracks. He had been killed in action, she said. After his death she came down to Samoa on a visit because this was where Paulo—her husband—had grown up and she had never been here. Paulo used to talk about his golden island childhood. His family was all up in Hawaii or on the mainland now. Well, a couple days’ visit turned into a couple of weeks, and she had found the house near the cliffs for rent, and she was still here these few months later. There was something about the island and the people and the pace that reminded her of Paulo, comforted her.
“You know, nobody hassles me, but everybody is friendly,” she said. “It’s very affordable, and every day is warm and interesting. The solitude out there is very peaceful.”
“No wonder,” Apelu said. “That piece of coast is well known for its possessions and disappearances. No one is going to hang around there.”
“That’s why I was surprised to see you in the cove. I thought at first they might be right about the ghosts, all glistening wet in the sunshine.”
Apelu decided not to ask any questions about her husband, like in what action he had been killed or his family name. He didn’t want to hear her talk about him. “No kids?” he asked instead.
“No. That’s a very Samoan question, isn’t it?”
“Is it?”
“That’s like the second question every Samoan asks me. After ‘Are you married?’”
“So, it’s important information.”
“In the States that would seem such a woman’s question, askable about ten minutes into the conversation. You’re a guy; you’re supposed to ask me what I do for a living.”
They were coming into the town area now. Traffic was getting heavier and crazier.
“So, what do y’all do for a livin’?” Apelu asked in as poor of a Southern drawl as he could manage.
“I’m not going to tell you now. You already know the nonsecret about my nonkids. That’s enough for one day. How about you?”
“Me?” Apelu said. He was appreciating her fine driving.
“Married? Kids?”
“One wife, four kids,” he said.
“Only one?”
“Well, considerably less than one right now, but, yep, only one.”
“No wedding ring,” Asia observed.
“Kept losing them. Wife finally gave up on buying me new ones.”
“Pity.”
“Yeah, they always made surefire Christmas presents for me, a no-brainer—another wedding band for hubby. Figured I was doing her a favor.”
“And I already know what you do for a living.”
“Right, I’m a cop collecting a paycheck for being on the run from the cops.”
Leloaloa was the bayshore village just past the village that the cannery and marine railway had taken over, less than a mile hike to the tuna boat docks. Apelu remembered the house referred to in the News story because it had been a problem house even before the Immigration raid. One of those places, a run-down rental that belonged to a family whose kids had all left island. God knew who the transient renters of the place paid their rent to, some Korean or Filipino agent probably. There had been fights there, 911 calls, neighbors’ complaints. The house was one-story, built on the concrete bank of a deep junk- and litter-filled drainage ditch that periodically became the course of a raging mountain stream on its final furlong race into the sea. You couldn’t drive to the place, which was just as well. Apelu had Asia park in front of a sewing shop down on the road.
“No black-and-whites,” Apelu said. “No government plates. Let’s walk up.”
There were two ways to get to the house—a cement step and sidewalk route along the drainage ditch to its front door and a side route through a struggling patch of banana trees. Apelu led Asia the second way. The first thing he noticed was the absence of any yellow-and-black police line tapes around the house, no officers in evidence. As they got closer to the house they could hear a radio playing. It sounded like the Samoan pop music station from Apia. They stopped to listen. They could also hear voices, women’s voices speaking in Samoan, an argument or else one person telling someone else off. Apelu went around to the front door, Asia right behind him. The door was open. There was a worn bead curtain. Apelu knocked on the doorjamb and the voices stopped. Asia stepped forward and pushed the bead curtain aside.
“Hello,” she said in English. “We’re here from Human and Social Services to see if you ladies are all right.”
No answer.
In Samoan Apelu said, “Can we come in or will you come out?”
“We don’t need your help,” was the Samoan answer.
Then the argument continued, in hissing whispers. Someone began to weep, a low, muffled, regular sobbing. Asia went through the bead curtain. She was speaking Samoan now. “We are just here to help, to listen to your story and see if there is anything we can do. It’s terrible what’s happened to your friend. You must feel awful. It’s so sad.” Asia’s Samoan wasn’t that good, but it did the trick. It surprised them into listening.
Apelu just stood at the doorway and watched. There were four young Samoan women in the room, one of whom abruptly left by another door into a rear room when Asia entered. The other three women were all on the floor on mats. There was no furniture in the room. Two were sitting cross-legged; the other was prone, crying into a pillow.
Asia sat down on a mat across from the girls, tucking her legs beneath her, palangi style. They began to talk, sometimes in Samoan, sometimes in English. Apelu stayed standing by the door, occasionally smoothing over the language thing with translations, but he let Asia do the talking. After a while the fourth girl rejoined them, slipping into the room, stooping down and finding a mat to sit on along the far wall, removed from the rest but listening in. Asia was good. She soothed the girl who had been crying. She assured them that everything would work out fine. She introduced herself as Sally and got their first names—or at least the names that they gave to her. When it came to getting their story, however, they were more reticent, the three girls looking over at the fourth girl against the far wall, but slowly it came out. In the process, the fourth girl got involved and ended up giving the most precise information.
Neither police nor Immigration officers had been to the house, but the woman had come two days before on Saturday and told them to pack, that they were being deported back to Apia. They called the dead girl Tracey, although Apelu knew that wasn’t the name in her passport. At the mention of her name the crying girl started crying again. There was another girl, Tracey’s friend, whom they hadn’t seen since the night Tracey didn’t come home. They were worried about her. Maybe Sally could find her. One of the girls went into a back room and came back with a Western Samoan passport to show them the missing girl’s photo. Apelu took a look at the passport and noted the girl’s name and particulars. She was one of the other names on Lisa’s list. Maybe he had sponsored her too.
“Who is the woman you mentioned,” Apelu asked in Samoan, “the one who told you to pack?”
“Mrs. Woo, Atalena,” the fourth girl said, angry.
The girls believed that Atalena, who was Samoan from Apia, and her Chinese husband, Mr. Woo, were their sponsors now. They worked for them. This house where they lived belonged to the Woos.
Neither Asia nor Apelu asked them what work they did for Mr. and Mrs. Woo. Apelu asked if they had any idea what had happened to Tracey and the other girl. Silence.
“They just never came home that night,” the fourth girl finally said, and the crying girl started crying again.
“She didn’t come home from work?” Apelu asked.
The crying girl nodded agreement.
“Where did she work?” Apelu asked.
“At the Captain’s Table,” the fourth girl said, “as a cocktail waitress.”
“Like all of you?” Asia asked.
Their collective silence shaped an affirmative response.
Suddenly from down by the road came a chorus of car doors slamming and the indistinct squawk of a police radio. Asia looked up at Apelu, and he motioned with his eyes toward the back of the house. There was the sound of shoes on the drainage ditch walkway. All the girls’ heads turned in that direction as if they could hear with their eyes.
Asia got to her feet. “We’ll find your friend,” she said, “but only if those people”—she nodded toward the walkway—“don’t know we were here.” And she followed Apelu through a door to the back of the house. They were out a kitchen door before they heard a man’s voice declaring, “Immigration. Everybody stand up and nobody move.”
Apelu and Asia found a way down into the ditch along the roots and limbs of an overhanging ficus tree, then retreated up the streambed, picking their way over boulders and box springs, fallen limbs and rusted pieces of appliances, a trashed swing set, a very dead and bloated dog.
Once they got far enough beyond the dog so that they couldn’t smell it, Apelu said, “I think this is far enough. No one is following us. They got what they wanted.”
They were above the village now and its trash, back in birdsong and spotty sunlight through the jungle canopy. They were both sweating. They sat in silence for a while on adjacent stones at the edge of the stream.
“I get so pissed off when I think about the girls,” Asia said, staring down the stream.
“Those girls?” Apelu asked.
“Those girls and all the others here given nothing to choose from. The Filipino girls in the sewing shops, the Vietnamese girls imprisoned in the garment factories, the Tongan house girls making next to nothing. It makes me sick, the female slavery that no one seems to care about.”
Apelu didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing. Fruit doves cooed in the forest above them.
“I mean, this place is paradise. Why do people have to screw it up?”
“To be rich like other people,” Apelu said. “To have what they never had and never needed before. To become someone other than themselves, other than their parents. You can get crazy going there. I know. You don’t want to go there
. Sometimes it is best to pretend that all of those people like that, the ones who only care about themselves, belong to a different species, a species so low it doesn’t deserve to be studied. Good Christians too. Just ask them. True believers in the total truth of the word of the Good Book, and doesn’t Deuteronomy tell them that they may beat their slaves because their slaves are their property?”
Asia just looked at him and didn’t say anything. The jungle birds entered into a long conversation, and after a while Apelu and Asia moved wordlessly down the streambed, past the silent and empty house, and to her car.
They couldn’t see Apelu’s house from the road, whether there were any cars there or not, but they drove in anyway, slowly.
“No stakeout, nobody home,” Apelu said. “I’ll be quick.”
He had to get some things. His son’s zippered bag from the Apia trip was still slouched empty against the front room wall. He took it into the bedroom and stuffed some clothes into it. He got his keys and cash that he had left behind the day before, his ID and badge case. From the bathroom he got his razor, toothbrush, deodorant, and Tylenol. He was rushing. He wanted to get out of there before he started thinking about the kids. The phone on the kitchen wall started ringing and he almost bolted. But he stopped himself and made himself go into the kitchen as the phone was ringing to look and see if Sina had left him a note anywhere. She hadn’t. The phone stopped ringing. He left. Asia had turned the car around. The engine was still running, the windows up, the air-con on.
On the ride back to Piapiatele Apelu asked Asia about her Samoan. It was not a language white strangers often knew. Outside the islands there was no reason to know it, and even in the islands the vast majority of palangis never made any effort to learn it beyond hello, good-bye, and thank you.
“It’s not bad,” he said. “It’s not especially good, but it’s not bad.”
“It’s a very different language,” she said.
“Oh, how so?”
“Well, it’s ergative, for one thing.”
“Which means what?”
“Well, there is no passive voice, among other things. And its grammar is very relative. Context supplies a lot of the sense markers.”