“I call them AIAs,” he explained, pointing disdainfully at a group of retirees, their heads bent between their knees, buckets filled with shells that they had stooped to collect. “Asses in the Air.”
“But Dad, I saw a bucket of shells at the house!” Donna teased. “Don’t talk.”
“Those weren’t shells. They’re fossilized shark teeth, a million years old. Find one this size,” he said, pointing to the palm of his hand,“and you fetch a hundred bucks. This beach is one of the few places in the world where they exist.”
Five days passed quickly. The weather was perfect and one day blurred into the next. The soft air and gentle breezes made it easy for Donna and me to relax and enjoy each other.
We snorkeled, sunbathed, and collected sharks’ teeth. I found one the size of my fist, but it was broken, and Don said it was only a good souvenir with little monetary value. In the evening we watched TV or played poker, using the teeth as money.
During these games, I encouraged Don to tell me more about his life. I learned that he was underage when he enlisted during World War II, and he had to get his mother’s written permission before the military would accept him. He chose to fly because he didn’t want to walk, and he became a navigator aboard the B-29 bomber. When he had finished his required missions, mostly over Italy, he signed up for more.
“Donald Wilbur Speed. Mr. John Wayne, flyboy!” teased Donna who had long ago stopped calling her dad sir.
Following the war he moved to California with his new wife and young son. Donna was born soon after, in the Central Valley town of Fresno. When she was just an infant, her family moved to urban San Francisco where Don took a job selling business machines.
“Why couldn’t I have been born in San Francisco and not Fresno? It’d look so much better on my résumé!” Donna joked.
Then came the Korean War, and Don was recalled by the Air Force and back into the cockpit, this time in the newly developed B-52 bomber. When that war was over he decided to make the Air Force and B-52s his life.
“I have a picture of me and my brother taken when I was three or four, with Santa Claus,” giggled Donna. “We are both wearing sweatshirts with B-52s on them!”
Although Don offered to drive us to different beaches, we preferred the beach near his house. Looking for the teeth there made each day a treasure hunt.
In the evenings, Donna spread the day’s treasures out on a white piece of paper and sketched them. I marveled at her ability to turn common shells into things of magic and beauty. But art was her life. It was her work and her play. It was her way of defining the world, as well as her way of communicating with it. I envied the clarity she found in her art.
One day as I leaned over to look closer at a drawing, I caught her scent. Its freshness made me dizzy. The daily sun had bronzed her hair, turning it more red than brown. She seemed to glow.
“I’m really glad we’re here,” I whispered. My ambivalence about our relationship was gone, at least for the moment.
She turned and smiled at me, and then went back to her sketching.
On Wednesday I called the airline to confirm our Saturday flight back. Don didn’t have a phone, so I walked five blocks to a nearby shopping mall. When I reached the airline, I learned that Donna’s ticket was set for Saturday but on mine the agent had mistakenly written Thursday, tomorrow. It was a non-refundable, restricted ticket, and there was no way to change it without a huge penalty. I was heartbroken that the great vacation and my time with Donna would be cut short. The only good news came when I checked in with my answering machine. Two photography jobs for next week, a message from my friend Perry about a possible trip to the Philippines, and, to my relief, no death threats.
Thursday morning was clear, with just a few cumulus clouds to the south. They passed and left a hazy sky. Donna and I took our now customary early morning walk on the beach. I carried snorkeling equipment, and Donna carried a big bag with our towels, suntan lotion, and the Shinto god.
“I won’t be long, “ I said, squinting to stare across the Gulf.
“Your plane leaves in three hours.”
I slipped on my heavy black flippers, then wiped sand from my mask and snorkel. Donna handed me the kami, and I removed the white cloth, exposing the Japanese prayer paper covering the stone god.
“Be careful of the speedboats.”
“Be careful, be careful,” I replied teasingly. “Of course I’ll be careful.” I hugged her, drawing her small body against me and kissing her. My back was to the rising sun, hers to the Gulf.
“It’s not too heavy?” she asked as we parted.
“No, I can manage.”
I stepped awkwardly into the cool water. An elderly couple walked by. Their heads were dropped to the sand, AIAs, looking intently for fossilized sharks’ teeth.
As I flapped away from shore using only one arm I thought, This thing is heavy. A motorboat sped by, then a sleek sailboat. I switched the god from one hand to the other, experimenting with different strokes. Keeping my face downward, I watched as the bottom changed from sand to corral, then back to sand. I paused to rest about 1,000 yards out and noticed an empty crab trap resting on the bottom.
Glancing over my shoulder, I saw that Donna was a speck on the horizon, part of the sandy beach. My confidence waned as I realized how far out I was into the cold water. Three large fish darted under me. I let both my arms drag behind me, propelling myself with only my flippers.
Wap, wap. I jerked my head up. The noise, which sounded like hands clapping, stopped as I did. I swam, and the sound resumed. Wap, wap. I stopped. It can’t be.… My skin erupted into a mass of goose bumps. Come on, don’t be ridiculous, that’s only in the movies…but if it is real, I could use this stone, this god…and smash the hell out of…whatever it is. I started swimming again.
Wap, wap. Damn this stone…It’s really slowing me down. It’s heavy. I could swim so much faster without it. I gripped it tighter. The paper wrapping disintegrated, exposing a granite-like stone.
Wap, wap. I turned my head to watch. Wap, wap. Jesus, how stupid. The sound was my fins hitting the surface. I was afraid of my own shadow.
At a second crab trap, a mile out, I stopped. Boats sped by dangerously close. For a moment, I thought about simply dropping the god and returning to shallow water. But I’d come too far not to do it right. I dove. At 15 feet my ears popped; I stopped for a moment, held my nose, and blew carefully, freeing the pressure so I could continue deeper. At 25 feet I hit bottom. The sand was compacted, so I pressed hard, embedding the god. It wasn’t covered, but it was secure. I shot to the surface, gasping for air.
Once in warmer water, I dove for sharks’ teeth, but I didn’t find any large ones.
Now I could see Donna clearly. She was lying on the beach, reading a book. When she saw me she jumped up and waved.
“Why did you have to go out so far?” she asked when I sloshed up on the shore. “I couldn’t see you. I took lots of pictures, but then you disappeared.”
“Just scared the hell out of myself. I thought I heard a shark, but it was just my flippers. Guess I was a little tense. But then I thought to myself: I did it! I placed another god. Whatever barrier prevented me from placing a god at the Lab and on top of Mount Shasta was gone. This isn’t so bad after all.
Flying home was uneventful. I wrote in my diary how perfect everything had been except for the mix-up with the plane ticket. I liked the idea of the broken Shinto sword, lying with the destructive but now harmless and beautiful shark teeth. When I got home, after stopovers in St. Louis and Denver, I went straight to bed and a dreamless sleep.
The sound of the phone jerked me awake. It was Donna, and her voice was anxious. I looked at the clock. It was past eleven in the morning my time, and past two in the afternoon in Florida.
“You won’t believe what happened!”
“Your Dad…”
“No, he’s okay.”
“Then what?” I asked.
“A tornado�
��”
She paused to calm herself.
“…A tornado just missed our house!”
I whistled.
“Where did it start?” I asked.
“At seven this morning. The noise was awful.”
“No, where?”
“You’re not going to believe this,” she answered. “There’s a map in the afternoon paper. It started…it started almost exactly where you placed the god.”
“Off the beach?”
“Yeah, directly off the beach. On the approach to the small airport.”
“How far out?”
“A mile or so. Really, it was right where you placed the god.”
I was speechless.
“We just returned from downtown. Incredible destruction. Entire buildings disappeared. And there is worse news.”
“What?” I asked incredulously.
“Two people died.”
I suddenly felt very cold. It was my fault, of course. I had placed the god and provoked bad spirits. But wasn’t it then not my fault? Clearly it was the fault of the bad spirits. But then again, since I didn’t believe in spirits, I couldn’t very well blame it on them.
In the silence I gripped the receiver even tighter. It had to be my fault. The storm was a manifestation of my own confusion about the project and my inner turmoil about life. The same thing had happened on Mount Shasta with the storm and my friend getting altitude sickness. But at least on Mount Shasta, during the storm, no one was killed.
Donna’s voice brought me back to reality.
“Are you there? Are you okay?”
This is crazy, I thought as I mumbled something back to her. What am I thinking? My fault? Bad spirits? It’s just another coincidence. An unlucky meeting of time and event. Nothing more, nothing less. My god, I’m starting to lose my sense of reality. I’m going crazy.
Finally Donna said, “I’ve got to go. Don is waiting.”
Before we hung up I asked her to do me a favor.
“Go to the beach and see if the god washed up. Will you do that?”
That evening she called. There was rubble everywhere, she said, crab traps strewn all over the beach. But there was no Shinto god.
I tried to put the incident out of my mind, and finally, after an hour of tossing and turning fitfully, I fell asleep.
A little while later, I dreamed I was in the bomb shelter and Kazz was on the phone. I told him about the tornado and the god, and he was excited. I felt an intense feeling of affection toward him and my eyes filled with tears. After a few moments of silence, Kazz hung up, but even after the phone connection was broken I felt his presence. Then I turned from the phone, looked down, and saw a huge, slimy footprint. I noticed the back door was open. An awful shadow passed and I screamed.
The nightmare jerked me awake. It took me a long time to go back to sleep.
chapter 10
On a native vinta in southern Philippines just before the placing.
In 1985, Ronald Reagan was sworn in as president for a second term and Mikhail Gorbachev became the leader of the USSR. The mass antinuclear demonstrations of earlier years had failed to stop the deployment of tactical missiles in Europe and now anti-war activists turned their full attention to another arena of the Cold War—the proxy war in Central America. In January, Daniel Ortega was sworn in as Nicaragua’s first democratically elected president. President Reagan called Ortega a “tin-pot dictator” and continued his support of the anti-government group called the Contras whom Reagan called “the moral equivalent of the Founding Fathers.” The Soviets supplied the Nicaraguan government with MIG fighters and MI-25 attack helicopters. As the superpowers watched safely from afar, the Cold War turned hot and real people died real deaths.
Not long after returning from Florida, I received a call from the public relations agency my friend Perry had called about, asking if I wanted to join a group of travel writers and photographers on a trip to the Philippines. The “junket” was scheduled to leave on June 3, 1985, my 33rd birthday. I wavered. Dictator Ferdinand Marcos’s control of the tattered Southeast Asian island nation was collapsing, making the chances of selling a travel story about the country slim. But then as an afterthought the PR man told me that the flight stopped in Tokyo on the way back and I could lay over if I wanted. Quickly I accepted the invitation. Not only was there a chance to place another god, but I could ask the teacher in Japan about the tornado.
It turned out that the travel junket left very little room for spontaneity or individual deviation. The Philippine travel association had scheduled every minute of our time. After an eighteen-hour flight to the Philippines, we were to rest for a few days in Manila and then fly to the southern island of Mindanao, then to Cebu on the east coast, and finally to Baguio in the north on the island of Luzon. We would always be accompanied by local guides.
The 7,000-plus tropical islands that make up the Philippines have all the ingredients needed for a conventional travel story: beautiful beaches, fantastic swimming and diving, and breathtaking landscapes. But from the moment we arrived, I found myself fascinated by things other than recreation. Few places in the world have seen as much drama as the Philippines, due in part to its strategic military significance. One of the first “tourist” spots we visited was the cemetery for 38,000 Americans who died in fierce fighting with the Japanese in World War II. We later flew over Subic Bay, at the time the major American military base for the entire South Pacific. The bay was a key U.S. outpost during the Cold War, and a supply base for American military adventures in Vietnam and even the Middle East.
And as if the country’s critical geopolitical position weren’t enough, the islands are subject to some of the worst disasters in the world. Earthquakes, hurricanes, and typhoons destroy huge parts of the country with awesome regularity. Cultural and political storms, meanwhile, raged between the Muslims and Christians, as well as between the communists and the government. The sum total made the Philippines a rather adventurous place to vacation.
By the fourth day of our hectic schedule, while our plane circled Zamboanga City in the southern Philippines, I had accepted the reality that the Shinto god I carried in my camera bag might still be with me when I landed in Tokyo.
Looking out my window, I noticed two distinct islands not far from the busy city.“Those are the Santa Cruz islands,” said one of the Philippine guides in answer to my question. “Look, one is shaped like a heart, the other like a dagger.”
“A dagger? Where?” I asked before I noticed the slender strip of land adjacent to a round island covered in green. The dagger was there, but it took an active imagination to turn the other island into a heart.
“There is a legend, told by sea gypsies, which explains the origin of the Santa Cruz Islands,” my guide continued. “It’s about a Muslim girl and her pagan lover who were not allowed to marry because of their differences. One night, under the cover of a storm, the boy fetched the girl in a fishing boat. She was terrified of the wrath of her parents and her God Allah, but the boy, reaching into his belt and pulling out a dagger, assured her she was safe from both. When the young couple was discovered missing, people from both tribes searched all night, but the storm became so violent that they had to stop. In the morning all they found were two islands where before there were none: a heart and dagger, forever separated by a deep channel of water.
“Sad, eh?” he concluded.
That night, at an outdoor restaurant overlooking the harbor, we feasted on giant lobster, grilled fish, and roasted pork. Beyond our terrace we could see the equatorial sun quickly dropping behind the Santa Cruz Islands. The sky went from a deep azure to pink to black.
“No one is allergic to lobster?” a guide asked. “We had quite a problem with the last group.”
“I’ve never seen such a big lobster. It could feed a small town!” said one of the travel writers.
“Tomorrow,” the guide said, “we’ll board native vintas (outrigger-fitted canoes) and paddle to the larger of the isl
ands, the dagger. The heart is used by the military and is off-limits.”
“What about the missing Japanese tourists?” asked one of our group, a newspaper reporter whose slurred voice suggested too much San Miguel beer.
“Ah, you remember that?” the guide said hesitantly. “An unfortunate incident. Don’t worry. The island is safe now. We’ll have a picnic. There is…”
“What tourists?” I interrupted.
“Didn’t you know?” the newspaper man said. “A year or so ago, a few Muslims kidnapped two Japanese tourists as a kind of joke. Things really got out of hand. They panicked and turned them over to the communist rebels. It’s reported that the Japanese government paid a million dollars ransom. Maybe that’s why you don’t see any Japanese tourists,” he said, laughing while he motioned with his hand around the restaurant.
Actually he was wrong. There were Japanese tourists. We had seen them strolling earlier by the pool, powerful-looking men with nearly every inch of their bodies covered with tattoos. They had young attractive women with them. It didn’t take much of an imagination to figure out that these were Yakuzi, members of the dreaded Japanese Mafia, on vacation. These people—yet another shadow of modern Japan—were not going to be messed with by anyone.
“Just what I need for my travel story,” I muttered. “More danger.”
I learned something else that evening. I am allergic to equatorial lobster. In the middle of the night, I woke up with my entire body on fire, feeling as if tiny needles were pricking me. My head ached. I was awake, yet delirious. In my altered state, I recalled the story of the Santa Cruz Islands. I imagined the island shaped like a dagger thrust deeply into the one shaped like a heart. Pouring out of the gaping wound, along with blood and filth, came a horde of Japanese tourists, with cameras dangling from their shoulders. I dragged myself to the bathroom and threw up.
The next day, when I stepped onto the vinta that would take us the short distance to the islands, I felt better. The cool sea air eased my pain, although my skin still felt thin, nearly transparent. The dagger-shaped island was tranquil. Large palm and talisay trees reached across a pristine beach, and bougainvillea bloomed as red and intense as the equatorial sun. While the others picnicked under the shade of the broad-leafed talisay trees, I wandered over to one of the young boys who had ferried us to the island. I decided after the legend and my bizarre dream the night before that the god would go here, in water between the heart and the dagger. With the strict schedule of the junket, I didn’t know if I’d have another chance.
The Sword of Heaven Page 9