Man Shark

by Knight, Gerald R.

  “Ugh.” She responded to his silence. “How about these mistakes here?” She touched the ugly scars on his right forearm, which clutched the shank of the oar he was using to helm the craft. “Were these made by a shark?”

  Ḷainjin smiled at her ability to soothe the more disabling scars trapped inside and, for the first time, appeared engaged by one of her questions. “Dāp made those scars! That’s the hand I use to tickle them out of their holes!”

  “Did you cut his head off to get your hand out?”

  “There are other methods.”

  “Like what?”

  “I’ll tell you one day.”

  “Ugh! Grandma, you see how impossible he is! He will not tell me anything! He keeps all these secrets.”

  “He’s not a man to boast. You must empty his throat one word at a time. After you sleep with him, he’ll start singing to you like a bird perched on its branch after a day of filling its gut.”

  “Your grandmother is very wise. What’s her name?”

  “Her name is Taknaṃ.”

  “Litaknaṃ,” he called, saying her name formally. “Can you come and sit here?” Ḷainjin pointed at the spot in front of him, at the yoke just behind the foot of the mast. “I have questions for you.”

  She crawled toward the stern and sat in front of him.

  “Litaknaṃ, we’ve decided to choose one another. What’s your advice?”

  “Stop beating up on her brother! Did she tell you her lands are on Ujae?”

  He nodded.

  “Well, one day, she will need her brother to accompany her there and work the land for her.”

  “No more beating up on him,” he agreed. “That’s an easy thing to keep in mind. What else?”

  “You should ask her father to bring her to you.”

  “What will convince him to do that?”

  “That’s Liṃanṃan’s task, but he’ll be watching you carefully to see if you have desire in your eyes for her.”

  “That’s even easier. Advise me, please. What will be the most difficult?”

  “The most difficult will be resisting my niece, Likōkkālọk. She will do everything in her power to get onto your sleeping mat. She is very cunning, and she will not respect Liṃanṃan’s choice or yours. If you’re not careful, she’ll pluck you out of the water like a fish and swallow you before you know what’s happened!”

  “Wōjej!” he said.

  “Many wanted her because of our lands. When I die, the entire atoll will be hers to control. The man she chooses will be very powerful, but she fears no man will step forward because they all fear Paratak.”

  “Well, that’s easy too, because power is a sickness I avoid. So, who is this Paratak?” Ḷainjin asked, as his eyes followed a flying fish kapiknaklok. That reminded him of the Chief. “Where is he?” he thought, tilting his head upward and looking to and fro.

  “He is the father of Likōkkālọk’s daughter — a very large man from Pohnpei who arrived on our shores in a small fishing canoe and immediately succumbed to her charms. Desire has always been her downfall. She offered herself up to him without thinking that his customs and way of life would be strange. He does not understand how to feed the bird and let it fly, confident it will return when it is hungry. He has strangled her with jealousy. The more he clipped her wings, the more she rebelled. She has gotten more and more desperate to find the right man to run him off. The women of the island hate her because she hunts their men, yet no man steps forward after she takes them because all are afraid of Paratak. Her latest tactic is to prey on newcomers. For the last two seasons now, she has taken every man who has set foot on our shores. She appears irresistible to them until they realize they must fight Paratak; then they flee for their lives. She has seduced him so well he is crazy for her. He follows her everywhere, so she has forbidden anyone to bring food — to force him to gather and go fishing — and this gives her time for her exploits. Half his life is rushing around trying to find her. He shows no respect for her or for himself.”

  Talk about mistakes. He had made many. Like those of any man, they would pass before his mind’s eye from time to time to temper his self-pride, but most involved coming to shore and dealing with islanders. He had to ask himself whether he was he ready for this. He found the way people of these isolated low islands got themselves all tied up in lovers’ quarrels half-amusing, half-annoying. If they had only seen all that he had seen! Nevertheless, the vision they were giving him was just what he was looking for. He was a planner and confident that, given enough information, he could think his way through any problem. Life, he had learned, was so much simpler on the sea, where he could predict and be ready for what came. Life on the island was complicated by people who could be foolish, unpredictable, and on occasion, dangerous. He would prepare for that as best he could. Now that he had met this incredibly brave and lovely creature, who seemed to soothe his spirit and provide hope that his long journey might one day end in happiness, he had a reason to overcome these obstacles and fight to adjust his life to theirs.

  When he looked at Liṃanṃan now, he saw a look of fear like the one he had observed the evening before the storm. Was she worried that her grandmother had told too much? Did she fear he had heard something that would diminish her in his eyes? Would he think her forwardness was motivated by worry that she would lose him to this woman once they went ashore? Truly, she was a woman of the island and knew nothing else, while he was a creature of the sea and must learn to adapt accordingly. He scrunched his nose to squelch her thoughts and make her laugh, and he realized that the happiness of someone else had suddenly become an important element in his life again. Was she about to replace the quest of his youth to solve the mystery of his mother’s whereabouts? That would be exactly what his mother would have wanted.

  He saw a white tern dive into the water ahead. “Enough talk, I’m going to show you how to fish.” Ḷainjin reached below and gave Liṃanṃan his trolling line.

  “I already know how to fish. Don’t I, Grandma?”

  “Okay, how many ñeñe?” he asked.

  “Thirty,” she responded, tossing the pearl-shell lure with its lashed hardwood hook into the water and uncoiling it into the sea.

  “Now what’s your main objective?”

  She laughed. “You sound just like my father! To preserve the lure — not to allow the line to break. And to give the fish just enough line to retreat but not allow it to rush forward and cut it with its teeth.”

  “All right, now the most important thing. Show me you have luck!”

  With this challenge, they sailed off into an afternoon characterized by kapiḷak’s wake — cloudy, breezy, and cooler than the doldrums of the days past, with choppy waves underlaid with rolling swells much larger than those the current conditions could have produced. After a while, they noticed their companions’ canoe following along at a distance behind them. They were approaching the same ocean side of the same green islet at the southwestern corner of the tiny atoll as the day before. They saw islanders on the ocean-side shore, lugging baskets of perhaps snails, collected at the reef’s edge during the earlier tide. The few who spotted their sail raised their arms to welcome them. Clearly, there would be no ugly spirit guarding the passageway into the safety of its lagoon this time. Its peaceful shades of shallow, blue water called out to Ḷainjin. He felt a sense of well-being gradually arise among the three of them as each sat silent, no doubt contemplating what had transpired and what that shared experience would mean to the story each would take from it. As they approached the broad passageway into the atoll, he spotted a flock of birds diving into the water ahead.

  “Okay,” Ḷainjin said. “I’ll teach you a chant that will make you even luckier, but I can’t say it for you. It goes like this: ‘Kok, kok, wōde im ajoḷe.’ The ‘kok, kok, kok’ part is where you call out to the fish to attract them. The ‘wōde im ajoḷe’ part is where you invite them to chew on your lure like a pandanus fruit and gnaw like a rat.”
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  She tried the chant several times, and each time, Ḷainjin and Grandma encouraged her to be more forceful and commanding. Then, as they reached the spot where the birds had been diving, he told her to chant once more with even more determination in her voice. As she chanted this time, her arm went stiff with the tension of a large fish, her eyes grew large again, and a broad, boastful smile of satisfaction crossed her face. Taknaṃ, from the instant of the strike, began providing a torrent of commentary and advice on her every move such that Ḷainjin thought she herself would grab the line at any moment. He felt a sly grin of amusement spread across his face as he silently watched Liṃanṃan struggle with the fish. Then he felt his smile ache as he forced himself to hold it, as he watched the line cut into the pink, uncalloused palms of her hands without any indication of pain on her part. He measured the size of the fish by its countervailing force against the wind in his sail and judged it to be a bwebwe, longer than a ñeñe in size. He shot a glance back into their wake and saw no fish surfacing, confirming his assessment. A billed fish or a sharp-toothed one usually surfaced aggressively to view its enemy, often trying to offensively rush the line and slice its way free. But a tuna of whatever kind would defensively sound as deep as possible into its territory instead, perhaps pretending to itself that the more distance from its adversary, the more likely its escape from the line hooked to its jaw. Ḷainjin loosened his grip on the sheet, slowly allowing the craft to come to drift and turn into the wind.

  Moments passed, and the run of the fish gradually altered from the ocean’s surface to deep beneath them. The amber glow of the late afternoon sunlight illuminated the beads and tiny streams of water that began to stream down Liṃanṃan’s arms, breasts, and face as she pulled on the wet, tightly braided line. Her grandmother gathered the strands of her hair and bound them in a bun atop her head, preventing them from tangling into the gain from each haul of the line that she let fly and lie where it may, over her shoulders or into the hull or back into the sea. He began to sense an expression of increasing confidence grow from the vivacious, darting eyes below her thick brows. Ḷainjin was in awe of the care she was taking to preserve his lure and the pain she must be ignoring from the brine-soaked line held taut by her cut palms. At the same time, he felt chagrined by his knowledge that the pearl-shell lure she was fighting to keep was but one of a collection of several hundred resting amid the plethora of sharks’ teeth, pearl-shell knife blades, and greenstone beneath the prow at each end of his seasoned proa.

  Finally, the black-backed giant, stubbornly still fighting, approached on its side. Its distinctive, yellow dorsal fins were followed by a series of tiny yellow ones, each fluttering down its back and belly like the ak feathers used as telltales along the leech of their lateen sails. The fish one-eyed them with a terror-stricken and confused stare, and Ḷainjin grabbed his club with one hand, reaching into the base of its gill with the other. He gently eased the fish’s head out of the water and clubbed the flat of its skull so hard that blood spurted from its eye socket into his face and onto Liṃanṃan’s skirts. They watched silently as he held the fish in the water while it vibrated violently, tempting a pack of suitor sharks that had been following and monitoring its unhappy struggle. As Ḷainjin lifted the heavy fish from the water and exchanged his grip on it with Liṃanṃan’s, the little pack darted off hungrily into the deep blue abyss below them. As a precaution, she tied the fish down onto the outriggers where the Chief normally perched by tying a line through its mouth and one gill. Ḷainjin, who had noticed their companion craft closing behind them, deftly trimmed sail and brought his proa back upon the wind.

  As they would be required to tack once to get through the passage and again to reach their destination at the southeast corner of the atoll, they agreed to coil his trolling line and prepare to shunt. When they entered the passage, they were captivated by the many colors of the mysterious forest of corals beneath them. Because the tide had turned and begun to rise, the ocean level was higher than that of the lagoon’s more confined waters, and the incoming tide swiftly swept them through the passageway and into the safer but choppier windward waters along its western perimeter. Children playing bwilbwil with their toy proas waved and shouted at them from shore at the islet’s tip, where the incoming tide of ocean water swept into the lagoon. Once inside the lagoon, they could see the long white-sand beach of the atoll’s westernmost islet. It was dotted with outrigger canoes. Some were being unloaded of their cargoes of breadfruit — perhaps harvested by the storm — pandanus, fish, and other provisions, no doubt gathered from other islets around the atoll. Other canoes could be seen higher up the surf-splashed beach under thatched pandanus-leaf canopies along the edge of the strand. Still others of various sizes were under sail, moving from one point to another about the lagoon.

  The course for their first tack took them along the length of this westernmost islet with its broad, crescent-shaped beach that tapered into a southern fringing reef, which connected it to their destination islet, Lae. Along this reef lay a string of small islets, two of which were covered with birds. Looking at their flocks of inhabitants, Ḷainjin hoped that the Chief had overnighted there. Their distance from either of the two principal islets at each end of the reef was short enough that Ḷainjin judged he could easily walk to either and back during a single low tide. He hoped the bird had made its shelter there or elsewhere around the atoll before the storm hit. If not, he could be submerged, with his unsatisfying feathers clogging the belly of some shark, or else cruising above the storm clouds, now so far away he might never return. In fact, at that moment, the Chief was still following his lovely fishing guide along the ocean waters north of the northernmost islet of the atoll. Ḷainjin asked Taknaṃ if her son, the irooj, protected the birds of these islets, and she acknowledged he had made them off-limits for gathering.

  The closer they got to the reef, the lesser the chop of the waves until the lagoon waters smoothed as they sailed nearly to the shores of these twin kōņņat-forested islets. Then they shunted and headed along the lagoon side of the southern fringing reef to their destination.

  Finally, they approached the western tip of Lae islet and sailed along the lagoon side of its calm shore, which sprouted stilted, thatched houses, one after the other, along the strand above its sandy beach. As they passed each house, Taknaṃ ululated in an unusually high-pitched scream to the women who lived there. Ḷainjin supposed that she was announcing their arrival, and there were many ululated screams in response as they slowly glided down the shore. The island became thicker and thicker and the breeze more and more absorbed by the island foliage as they advanced toward the center of the island’s curved shoreline. Ḷainjin was forced to untie his oar and paddle to assist the fading force of the breeze filling his sail. Then Taknaṃ pointed to a spot on the shore where she wanted to disembark, so he gave Liṃanṃan the sign. She dropped sail and stepped back off the prow as he paddled with force to beach the canoe solidly upon the sand.

  By this time, a crowd of surprisingly quiet children with excited, smiling faces had gathered, one after another, as they had progressed along the shore, to grab hold of the old matriarch’s waist the moment she stepped into the water. Under her arm and on her hip, she carried a heavy, nearly full stalk of pandanus that she offered up to the children. Each broke off a fruit and then stepped back for others to take their turn.

  On her part, Liṃanṃan broke off more fruit from another stalk and tossed them to the older children in the water, who grabbed them and passed them on to others ashore. Then she turned to acknowledge her father, who was ambling unassumingly to greet them, a child at each hand. Giving the pandanus to the children, she grabbed his hand with her fingers, and hands swinging, they approached Ḷainjin at the outrigger platform of the beached canoe. “Father, this is Ḷōpako. We met him at sea and he helped us when your boat flipped. And this is the fish I caught outside the passage.”

  “Flipped turtle?” responded the irooj disconcerte
dly. He nodded politely at Lainjen, but his eyes soon turned to his proa, piloted by his son, that was about to reach shore. He waded deeper into the lagoon to greet them, showing no regard for the handsome new kilt he wore. He spoke to the young men for quite some time and then returned to address Lainjen.

  “I must thank you for your timely assistance to my son, his crew, and my daughter.”

  “What about me?” Taknam asked. “What am I, a cast-off, chewed-up pandanus fruit?”

  “And my mother—”

  “It was me who asked him to take us with him when I saw the storm coming!” Taknam continued. “Somebody needs to teach those boys about clouds and how to handle a proa in strong wind! I do not trust their sailing skills! That could have been me flying and crashing into a wave, and coming up an ugly spirit to catch these little ones and eat them!” Then she dropped her chin, made an ugly face, and turned away to chase after a group of children with her arms wide.

  “Catch me, Grandma!” cried one, raising her arms into the air. Her grandmother surrounded her with her arms and blew a loud fart with her mouth on the little girl’s neck.

  Her father, after thanking Lainjen, stood silent in the water, straight as a spear stuck deep into the sand and wearing a warm, broad smile on his face, as if he was expressing his gratitude not with words but rather with his presence. He had tied his hair in a bun atop his head and wore a scented crown of flowers. He had tucked a plumeria flower behind his right ear. Hollow pandanus-leaf earrings filled the enormous holes stretched into his earlobes, and around his neck hung a multistranded choker of bleached white shells with four pearl-shell pendants hanging from it. His manly, well-defined chest sported the characteristic tattoos that, from adolescence, had marked his irooj status.