by John Enright
He dreamed there was a bird in his hair, but it was a deadly bird, a bird with a poisonous beak, so he must remain perfectly still lest he startle it into attack, just stay calm and let it fly away.
“Apelu, Apelu.” The bird had a voice and it was Asia’s. The bird was Asia’s hand smoothing his hair away from his wounds. Asia was sitting beside him on the bed in the twilight. Not all the waves pounding were inside his head. He could smell her—musk, sweetness, and sun-dried hair.
“Apelu, you’re bleeding again. We’ll have to change the bandages. Can you get up?”
“I was worried about you,” he said.
Her hand came to rest on the side of his face. “It’s almost like you were always here in this house,” she said, with that same curious look as before on her face.
“It’s been a long day,” he said and tried to smile, but it hurt enough to make him stop.
“Nice try,” she said, just touching his lips with her finger. “Come on. I’ve got better bandages and antibiotic cream and some codeine and Steinlager, some Chinese takeout. I even brought your bloody shirt back too. You’re not brain-damaged are you?”
“Always have been,” he said, sitting up with a pulse of pain. “Why change?”
Asia took one of his arms to help him stand up. He was still shaky, but once on his feet, with his king-size head at a steady altitude, he was all right. “Say, Doc, will I still be able to play the piano?”
“You don’t own a piano. You’re a cop.”
“Oh, right.”
As Asia ministered to Apelu’s wounds she told him what had happened that afternoon. After the fight, Sister just wanted to get out of the house. Tia didn’t have a single change of clothes, so they drove down to get her something else to wear. By the time they got to the Clothes Mart the baby was asleep, so Asia stayed in the car with the sleeping baby and the air-conditioner on while Sister and Tia went in to shop. It seemed to be taking a long time and Asia was thinking about going in to see what the delay was about when a police car came pulling into the parking lot under siren, and two uniformed officers went into the store. Asia pulled out of the parking lot and backed into a spot farther away on the street, where she could see what was happening but could get away quickly. Then Sister and Tia were both brought out of the store with their hands cuffed behind them and put in the back of the squad car, which drove off under siren toward town. The siren woke the baby up, who started crying. Asia followed the squad car all the way to the police station, but by the time she got there they were already inside. She didn’t know what to do. Who was she? If she went in, what would she say? The baby, who had gone back to sleep while she was driving, was awake again and screaming. She couldn’t leave the baby. She had never been responsible for a baby before. She thought of calling Apelu, but she didn’t know the number of the place on Canco Hill. So she drove back out there, but by the time she got there Apelu and Torque had left. All the young people were there. They knew that Sister had been arrested, but they didn’t know for what. They were glad to see Peni and immediately took him off to change his diaper and feed him. She had left the baby there with them. Was that the right thing to do? Then she came here to Ezra’s house, but Apelu wasn’t here, so she went looking for him.
“Why in the world would they be arrested?” she asked as she opened the Styrofoam plates of Chinese takeout on the coffee table in the front room. “I can’t see them shoplifting.”
“When they came out of the store were there just the uniformed officers with them?” Apelu asked.
“No, actually, there was a man in regular clothes who put them in the squad car then drove off after them in his own car.”
“Immigration guy maybe. Made Tia in the store. That birthmark is hard to miss if you’re looking for it.”
“Then why arrest Sister?” Asia was spooning shrimp fried rice and beef with broccoli onto plates.
“Maybe she tried to interfere, got in the guy’s face or something, caused a scene.” Apelu ate gratefully. The cold Steinlager tasted especially good. “Get anything from Tia?”
“I was saving that. It’s interesting. The poor girl.”
As they ate, Asia told Apelu Tia’s story. “You don’t mind if I get a little graphic, do you? We girls can talk pretty dirty when we’re by ourselves and angry about something.”
“I’d consider it a privilege to be privy to as much unedited reporting as you care to give. I am familiar with most of the common bad words that guys use.”
“Okay. Well, our girl Tia has got quite a mouth on her and she wasn’t shy about dishing to Sister and me. I think she needed a sympathetic ear, and Sister definitely has one. They really got into it. Sometimes they’d forget I was there and speak Samoan when they got excited, but I got most of it. Tia’s not shy about what she did for a living over there. Most of her johns were Korean fishermen, although a few of your fellow law enforcement officers were regulars. There are a couple of back rooms at Woo’s place where the lie-down part of the business took place. There was a set fee—forty-five dollars—that they had to give to Mrs. Woo or the bartender, but whatever tips they could boost on top of that were theirs.”
“In-house then?” Apelu helped himself to more food.
“In-house mostly, and what Tia referred to as their regular boyfriends on the boats. But recently Mr. Woo has had some special clients that they took care of outside, in hotel rooms and a couple of times at Woo’s house.”
“Special clients?”
“Yeah, always Chinese men. That’s how Tracey and Tia got in trouble. I gather they were the senior girls there, the ones that got the outside assignments, the bigger rollers. Sometimes they would spend days with these men, get clothes and big tips on the side.”
“The dark-side big leagues.”
“A little sympathy is in order here, Apelu. The girls were slaves. They didn’t have any say in the matter.”
“They could have walked away, gone home.”
“The Woos held their passports.”
“They could have come to the police.”
“Cops were their clients. Maybe even their sponsors.”
“Don’t go there.”
“They didn’t think they had a choice. Their chance at a life as a potentially respectable wife back in their village was already ruined. No one wants to marry a whore, someone Asian men have been paying to have sex with.”
“Getting graphic.” Apelu was getting a little embarrassed. He wasn’t used to talking with a woman about stuff like this.
“Tracey had been there longest. She was like all the other girls’ older sister or auntie. She would stand up to Mrs. Woo for them, get them things they needed, take them to the health clinic when they needed that.”
There was a pause, but Apelu didn’t fill it.
“You can’t know, can you, what their lives were like? When all you are is just a sum of some of your external parts—your tits, your ass, your mouth, your cunt—nothing more. When even your real name is meaningless. Just a thing to get ejaculated into.”
“No, of course I can’t know that,” Apelu said. No man wants to know that.
He looked up at Asia, whose head was bent down now as she ate—the delicate features of her suntanned face, the fine bones of her brow and nose and cheekbones. It struck him that she hadn’t asked that question to attack him, as he had taken it. It was just a question. A question that not even she could answer. She had never been a prostitute either, but there was empathy there for Tia and Tracey and the other girls that Apelu had never felt, maybe never allowed himself to feel. Which made sense. He had been a cop long enough to know to leave such tender emotions behind when he hit the beat, where they were worse than dysfunctional; they were dangerous.
“Can we get back to Tia’s story?” he asked. “So what happened?”
“So, one night last week Mr. Woo drove Tia out to one of his special jobs, in a motel near the airport. ‘Very important man,’ he told her. ‘You treat him good.’ Tracey wante
d the job, but Woo chose Tia because she was younger. So she goes there, and the guy is a fat pig. He makes her undress while he eats a room service meal. He talks dirty, calls her bad names. He has her play with herself. Then he does all the usual stuff, but he’s cruel and abusive about it. After he’s done and he tells her to leave, Tia asks him for her money and he just laughs at her, tells her he won’t pay for such poor service. He calls her an overweight, unscented, unskilled amateur. He said he had demeaned himself by being with her and that she should pay him for being serviced by the famous Dr. Win Chung. He bragged to her that back home in China he had had the freshest and the best thirteen-year-old girls who were pros compared to her and that soon in Las Vegas he would be enjoying the best professional erotic service available from young blonde American girls. Then he threw her out of his room without paying her.”
“What was the dude’s name again?”
“Win Chung, I think she said, Dr. Win Chung.”
“So what happened next?”
“Well, that night she had to get back to Leloaloa without any money, which is another story, but the next day she and Tracey went to talk to the Woos about her treatment and her not getting paid by Mr. Woo’s special friend.”
“Which is when the fight broke out?” Apelu pushed his plate away and snapped shut the Styrofoam tops of the take-out containers. Asia had eaten very little.
“No, I gathered that the fight was a day or two later. The first time Mr. Woo just brushed them off, said Tia had obviously done a bad job. Then Tracey convinced Tia that they should go back and push it again, that Tia deserved something for her evening’s work. Tracey thought the fact that this Dr. Chung had told Tia he had just come from China and was headed for Las Vegas might be something Mr. Woo would pay to keep secret. This Tracey was something else. According to Tia she wasn’t afraid of everything like the other girls.” Asia picked up their plates and the Styrofoam containers and walked off to the kitchen. Apelu appreciated the peace of the few minutes she was gone.
“It was at that second meeting,” Asia said as she came back, “that all hell broke loose, with Mrs. Woo screaming at them and Mr. Woo throwing a stapler at Tracey, which hit Tia instead, in the forehead. Then Tracey got Tia out of there and stashed her temporarily with some friends in Fagatogo, then she took off ‘like on some sort of mission,’ Tia said.”
“Then dead Tracey?”
“Right. No one heard from her or saw her again until you found her,” Asia said as with her right hand she flicked errant leftover pieces of rice from the top of the coffee table into her left hand. If she had ever worn a wedding ring, it hadn’t been for long or recently, Apelu surmised, watching her hands. There was something about her hands that didn’t match the rest of her. They were older, more used, not as forgiving to look at as the rest of her. They were almost a man’s hands, so strong.
“And the blackmail would be?” Apelu asked.
“Maybe Tracey figured out that a self-important Chinese doctor wouldn’t be legally entering the US through the back door of Pago Pago.”
“Would that be worth killing her for?”
“Can’t let your whores get too uppity. These aren’t nice people.”
As they were talking the wind had picked up, and rain now lashed at the windows with an uneven but increasing frequency. Another seasonal squall was moving in off the ocean. They stopped to listen. The angry urgency of an open-ocean squall line hitting the island’s permanence—like two contrary elemental forces vying to occupy the same space—was always arresting. Here on the exposed, lava-bound coast it was even harder to ignore.
“Nasty out.”
“No thunder and lightning anyway.”
“That usually means it will last longer.”
“Apelu, can I stay here tonight? I’m not ready to be alone in that house after everything that happened today.”
“Okay, sure. We got lots of room here at the inn. Thanks for dinner, by the way, and the beer.”
“Thanks for the company. What are we going to do, Apelu?”
“About Tia and Sister? I’m not sure. Circle our wagons, rally the troops, cash in our chips, pray for rain, round up all the usual clichés.”
“You can skip the prayer for rain. No, really. What can we do to get Sister and Tia out?”
“Don’t know, can’t say. Let me sleep on it. Maybe I’ll think of something tomorrow, make some calls. Right now my head wants to lie down.”
“You can think for both of us.”
“I recognize that line, but you’re not Ingrid Bergman.”
“Can I call you Rick? Can I call this Rick’s Place?”
“Whatever it takes to confuse people.” Apelu got up and headed toward the door to Ezra’s bunker and bedroom. His arms and legs were heavy. “You can have Leilani’s room. If there’s blood on the pillows, I’m afraid all you can do is turn them over.”
“No, I wouldn’t think of throwing you out of your bed. Come on,” and Asia took him by the arm and led him back to Leilani’s room and to the rumpled bed. She turned the blood-stained pillows over and straightened out the sheets. “Rest is what you need,” she said. “I’m going to go feed Nick and Nora. Don’t worry about me.”
Apelu got into the bed and Asia pulled the sheet up over him. She brought him two codeine and a glass of water then turned out the light. She sat beside him on the empty side of the bed. He could still see her face in the light from the other room. With one of her strong hands she smoothed the sheet then softly touched the purple egg on his brow. She had that curious look on her face again. He closed his eyes. She left. The rain scratched and streamed down Leilani’s ocean-side windows. He slept.
He awoke to the momentary chill of the sheet being lifted. Asia’s aroma then her body came softly against him. A hand on his shoulder. It was perfectly dark except for the sound of the rain that defined the boundaries of their safe space inside it.
“Hold me, Apelu,” Asia said. “I want you to hold me.”
Apelu held her, and after a while their muscles relaxed as they felt each other’s warmth, and after a longer while their faces touched, then their lips, their tongues—the taste of comfort—and then deep inside the darkness and the deeper rain their bodies did what bodies do when laid side by side at night. They let their lonelinesses mingle and cancel one another.
In the morning they both were shy. The rain had stopped. At first light Asia left for her house. Apelu went back to sleep. When he finally did get up, he got the cold leftover Chinese food from the refrigerator and sat eating it where he and Asia had eaten the night before. He sort of wished she was still there. The morning light felt incomplete without her. He wondered what she was doing, what she might be thinking. Their lovemaking had been gentle, wordless, lingering, the act melting into the memory. In spite of his aching ribs and head, he was smiling.
Apelu took two more codeine and thought of calling his house, but it was late. The kids would be at school. He did not want to speak with Sina. He did not want to think of Sina. He called Mati at the attorney general’s office. He was in.
“You still on-island?” Mati asked. “The smart money all had you gone.”
“Listen, Mati, what’s going on?”
“After the news of your sponsoring that dead prostitute came out there was talk about how there should be some sort of investigation, but when you vanished the AG let the talk slide by. He even seemed a little relieved that you weren’t around. Where you been?”
“No, Mati, I mean what’s going on about your boss pretending he didn’t know what you were doing with me in Apia?”
“Yeah, he asked me about that. Listen, I can’t talk about this on the phone. Let’s meet somewhere so that I can get you up to speed.”
“All right. You know where Vailoatai is?”
“Yes.”
“Just east of the village along the coast road there’s a bunch of graves, Korean fishermen, right by the road, on top of the cliff. You can’t miss them. I’ll meet you th
ere. When’s good for you?”
“Vailoatai? I’ll be there in an hour.”
“Good. I’ll meet you there. Come alone.”
Apelu got dressed and quickly set out. The sleep had helped his head, though there was no hiding the purple lump on his temple. He was lucky with the buses and got to Vailoatai in enough time to find a comfortable hiding place in the high bunch grass on the incline across the road from the Korean fishermen’s graveyard. Mati arrived about ten minutes later, alone, in a government car with bright yellow LA—Legal Affairs—plates. He parked on the shoulder, got out of the car, walked down to the graves, and looked around. Apelu gave him a couple of minutes to make sure he was alone. This was a pretty deserted stretch of village road. No more cars passed. Mati sat down on a gravestone with his back to the ocean, which Apelu thought strange because the seascape was especially spectacular here. So Mati spotted Apelu right away when he stood up and came down to the road. Mati waited for him on his grave.
“That looks like you, Apelu, only a younger you who has been mugged.”
“Tough life living in the bush.”
“I thought that was you with that Sally woman in the Captain’s Table. It was you, wasn’t it?”
“Yeah.”
“You look good without the moustache, but purple is not your color.”
“Cute. Come on. There’s a spot where we can’t be seen from the road, though I must say that your plates are a bit conspicuous.”
Mati followed Apelu down a crude path to a wide lower shelf in the cliff face where they sat down facing the sea.
“So talk to me, Mati. Tell me things I don’t know.”
“Well, I’ll tell you I think you’re a good cop, an honest cop who’s been set up.”
“I said tell me things I don’t know.”
“I know you weren’t involved with that woman, that you weren’t her sponsor.”
“How do you know that and everyone else knows something different?”
“Because I know who her real sponsor was. I think even you might be surprised at the name.”