“I’ll answer your questions, one by one, once you surrender your feet to me.” He began by shaking them randomly back and forth. He would shake them and then stop, address one of her questions, and then shake them again to see if he could catch her tensing back up again. In this way, he used the competitive root of her tension against itself until he could pinch her skinny ankles and shake both feet randomly, in starts and stops, as he began to tell the story of how he met the boys, initiated their jekaro project, and rebuffed Paratak’s attack. Each time she tensed up, he would stop and test her feet until she relaxed again, and then he would go on to explain why he walked naked through the village.
“I was taught to leave an enemy a reason to accept defeat. Paratak may feel satisfied by imagining he caused me humiliation. That may encourage him to consider the matter settled. If so, I will not have to fight him again. My ṃaanpā tricks are unlikely to surprise him a second time.”
“But they’ll say—”
“Does a shark…” He interrupted her, catching her feet as stiff as before they had started. “Does a shark,” he repeated, “care what you say about it?”
“You are like a shark. Everybody agrees on that!”
“The faces in this village and the words that come out of their mouths will always be more important to you than to me because these are the people you grew up listening to. I listen to the ocean and pay attention to the moon’s cycle and the way she governs all the living things about us. I have no interest in letting the people of this tiny place, or any other, determine what comes next. My story is my story! They will know the whole of it only if I, in good time, decide to trust them with it.”
“So you don’t care what they say about you?”
“I will never care what they say, but I will care that you care,” he said, massaging her calves, “and of course, I want them to watch as our story unfolds, and to tell it as best they can when we’re gone.”
“They will tell a story of us! I will make it so!” insisted Liṃanṃan.
“You will be the beginning of one story but the end of another that must never be told.”
“And I will dig the first story out of you … like … like Father opens the breastplate of the papa turtle and cuts out the green sack of bitter juice before baking.”
“And I will cry just like the papa turtle does as you do it! And I will say to myself, ‘How did I ever meet such a terrible woman?’”
Then he squeezed her calves hard, one in the grasp of each hand, and they continued the banter until he could flap her feet at will and feel the strain in her body lax, as would his proa when he eased her sheet and steered her a bit off wind.
She wanted to know everything about jekaro. So he told her, as he continued to press, twist, and squeeze her calves, how his grandfathers fed it to him as a substitute for his mother’s milk. How they learned the process in Pit and then brought it to Namorik.
As the night wore on, he meticulously explained each jekaro procedure, how he would first hitch a knot at the base of the utak where it protrudes between the growing tip of the trunk and its frond, then wrap a tight spiral of twine — following the path of the moon — around the length of the utak, leaving a space no larger than a finger between each coil. How after a few days, it became necessary for him to slice away the sheath at just the tip of the utak and secure the last loop of the coil there before continuing to more tightly wrap the final three knuckles of the newly unsheathed end of the immature bud. Then how, twice each day, he would end all with a tight slipknot that held a freshly cut green leaflet, above which he would make a clean cut across the entire flat-cut surface of the soon-to-be-constricted bursting flower, causing it — after a few more days — to drip, drip, drip its clear and sweet amber nectar.
She questioned him repeatedly during his account, appearing to marvel at the idea of tapping into the immense power and strength of the majestic trees her maternal ancestors had planted — and then planted the fruits of — long before she was born. Yet, as he was earnestly describing these procedures, he was simultaneously massaging the skin beneath her thick hair, causing her scalp to shift about on her skull under the fingers of one hand. With the other, he was kneading her temples to center her thoughts inward.
“The secret of jekaro is patience. Not every man is suited. Women learn their patience from the sleeping mats that they toil to weave. First you cut the leaves off the plant, being careful not to stick yourself with the thorns that edge the leaves you will then singe in your fires, dry in the sun, and pound with your dekein nin. You travel many steps and plan them carefully. In the same way, a woman learns to plan her engagement with the man she has chosen, but most men are at loss for a plan. We lack patience. We are anglers who laugh at the patient one among us who sits in one spot and waits for the fish to come. Instead, we test the waters here and there, always searching out where they might be feeding. We learn the signs. We learn to evaluate the clouds, the tides. As they change, we change. We learn that the best plan is no plan. The best plan is to stay aware. So we forget to plan and choose to drift like a seabird scouring the surface of the sea for its next meal.”
Then, with both hands, he seized the tense muscles in her neck where he sensed her tension was greatest, and she began to sigh in relief, “Ah, ah, that’s good…” She slipped into a less questioning and more passive form of listening as — seasons ago — she had perhaps listened to Ḷaluj recite his stories nightly before dreaming herself to sleep.
“Having no plan, many men become discouraged searching for the good tree. Others tire of perfectly good trees once they realize they must be climbed twice daily for nearly a moon’s cycle before their nectar can be collected in full. Many cannot accommodate the early rise day after day. Others eventually suffer from boredom as their initial success turns into a daily chore demanded by others. The few who are successful drink the nectar themselves and share it with their chosen ones, and both become bonded by the gift of strength and nobility it bestows.”
She lay motionless now, apparently content to listen without questioning. Her thoughts, he assumed, were concentrated on his fingers as they manipulated the muscles of her arms and wrists and fingers, and deep into the bones of her shoulders and back. Finally, he began working his way down her back by kneading the flesh surrounding each knuckle of her backbone. He continued to explain how she must rinse the rancid, white froth from the coconut shells and their nets daily, using the coral sand and stones from the seashore, and leave clean saltwater a digit deep at the bottom of each shell. He kept this one great secret to himself. He would use the saltwater to rinse the tip of the utak before cutting it. The saltwater was the magic needed to retard the fermentation process in the bound flower stems and wash away the bitter, white foam that would otherwise accumulate and burn them.
Then he reached the extreme tail of her backbone and massaged it with his thumb, deep into the crease of her buttock where he was sure she had never been probed before. She awoke from the trance he had inspired with a shriek and a giggle but soon succumbed to the stern fingers of his gentle hands.
Then he delved into the muscle surrounding the back of her thighbones, and deep into the bones beneath the ample, intimate flesh of the buttocks that bulged on each side of the intriguing crease that, unnoticed by her, was causing his manhood to stand, and sweat to begin covering his skin. He reached over her to prop open the thatched window at the head of their mat, allowing the fresh night air and its companion faint starlight, which reflected off the white coral stones surrounding the house to enter. He felt the comforting silence outside. The sounds of the village around them had long since turned quiet, and fewer words were spoken as talking was reduced to a one- or two-syllable reaction to his exploring fingers. She responded when it hurt, relieved pain, tickled, or seemed to heal a part of her body. He found bones she never knew were there, and after a while, they developed a language of their own, he with his strong hands and firm but gentle touch, and she with a painful
recoil, a cringe, a sigh, or a tremble in response.
When he judged her to be completely relaxed, he straddled her, put his weight on one knee, and then deftly lifted and twisted her over in one motion. He began gently caressing her body with his mouth — slowly, deliberately, randomly, as if he were a starving man with great hunger inside but limited appetite from a shrunken abdomen. He tickled the erect nipples of her breasts with the hair on his chin that she had left. She, perhaps feeling his hard manhood caressing her thigh, clutched onto it with the eye of her injured hand. She eased it down between her legs, and clenched it tightly there between the bones of her thighs. She crossed her ankles and squeezed as hard as she could. Then their mouths met for the first time since the voyage. Her pointy tongue darted in and out against his, and each swam in the sea of the other as each soul attempted to escape from its body and creep into the body of the other.
Intoxicated as never before, he crouched on his knees, hanging hers over his shoulders, and bent her back until she was upside down. Then he began massaging her buttocks as he slowly parted her legs with thumbs burrowed deep among the bones he found there. He lifted the lips of her womanhood to his, and as she squealed, struggled, and pretentiously pounded his shoulders with wounded fists, he mixed the water in his mouth with the water of desire and passion that began to spring up from deep within her as she gave herself to him. There was no purpose for words, as his body alone attempted to convey all she wanted said. Her shrieks turned to sighs as his tongue dipped deeper and deeper into her little round well. Then her hips began to rock like a craft upon the crest of each oncoming wave until, after an indeterminable period, she uttered a final climactic sound of fulfillment.
It was a sound unique to that moment, and it reverberated out through the window into the village. However, by that time, the boys had long since returned to their parents’ homes and lay curled in their mats. The night was silent, save for the occasional rustle of a palm leaf high above them or the squawk of a fishing bird returning late from far out at sea. The cooking fires had burned to embers and the village slept, so there was no one — other than they — awake to hear the raw, forever memorable sound that concluded her ardently and courageously awaited first night.
In the days thereafter, they were inseparable save for the time he was aloft among the palms with his young friends. It seemed to him that her every thought was about coupling with him, drawing his seed deep within her, and wishing to conceive. The nights were too short for his body to rejuvenate the seed she required him to provide, so they found secret places during the day to couple — amid the dense kōņņat trees that lined the ocean strand, or even hidden high among the broad, green leaves of the trees from which they harvested breadfruit.
His thoughts were more about the danger of childbirth, how to strengthen her with fish heads and jekaro. He borrowed her father’s joñ fishing pole, and she followed him in the evening to the ocean side, where her father had shown him where to pole fish. After, they would lay a soft nest of kōņņat leaves and couple there beneath the stars amid the busy chatter of the fisher birds. Then, in the early morning, Taknaṃ would gut the fish and roast them in her cookhouse on rocks still hot from the roasted breadfruit. When he returned from the coconut groves, Liṃanṃan would have eaten her fill. They would bathe and couple again in the privacy of the bathhouse — or take the chance of doing it on their sleeping mat in the hope that Joḷọk would not rush in on them, as she was wont to do with fresh gossip about the upcoming battle.
“Liṃanṃan! I just knew I’d catch you playing with your toy again,” she would say, or “Father says Ḷōpako must cut and season his spear before it’s too late.” Then, “He means a real spear! If that toy got cut off, you’d cry like a baby with no tit to put in its mouth!”
Everyone knew that the only place to cut a spear was in the swamp on Kōkkālọk’s island. He realized this was a bone in Liṃanṃan’s throat. Yet the longer he delayed, the more anxiety he would cause her father, whom he suspected was depending on him for fresh leadership.
Each night, the crescent of the moon in the sky appeared larger at dusk, and the time drew near for Ḷainjin to distribute knife blades to his jekaro boys. He decided to show his treasure to her. So one afternoon, he waited for the sunlight to travel below the shade of the thatch covering his boathouse, thus illuminating the interior of the hull, which pointed inland. Then, while no one was looking, he allowed her to watch him crawl into the area where the two had first embraced. “I need to get knife blades for my boys,” he told her, and showed her how to unlock the bulkhead that sealed the storage area Taknoḷ had created inside the prow of his hull, which was now somewhat illuminated. He backed out with an immense bulging alele that he then lugged with both hands through the garden and into the house. When he carefully emptied it onto the matted floor, Liṃanṃan appeared astonished. She had probably never imagined such wealth in one place. There were handfuls and handfuls of finely crafted fishing lures, hooks, sinker balls, stingray barbs, and immense shark teeth — as well as the pearl-shell knife blades he was about to separate out. This was obviously more than a trio of men could fashion in a lifetime. There were also broken pieces of the greenstone she used to trim his beard.
“Where did you get all this?” she asked.
“I traded for it.”
“Traded what?”
“I traded sharks’ teeth — mostly.”
She picked up a large shark tooth. “What will this trade for?”
He scrutinized the pile carefully and began separating out the pearl-shell knife blades. After examining one carefully, he passed it to her. “That would be an even trade.”
“What about this?” she asked, picking up a large, heavy lure of giant clamshell.
“That would take an eel.”
“An eel!”
“You’d be surprised what Raipuinlang will pay for a large eel. The trick is, it has to be alive.”
“Who’s Raipuinlang?”
“The wealthiest chieftain out there.”
“What does he do with the eels, eat them?”
“No, he keeps them trapped in a well on a stone islet they built on a reef.”
“Keeps them for what purpose?”
“He keeps them to maintain the law.”
“What law?”
“The law of the trade. It’s simple. Once a man fulfills his half of the trade, the other must do the same.”
“So if a man reneges?”
“A man can renege, but he has to return what he received or he faces the eels.”
“How many have been eaten?”
“I asked that myself, but never found out.”
“I would have found out!”
“Then Raipuinlang might have taken you to his islet on the reef, showed you the well they constructed over a cave in the reef below, and answered your question by giving you a little shove from behind. Hah!”
She screeched as he pinched her waist and squirmed from side to side to avoid his tickle, and they rolled about the matted floor as he continued. Then she put her chin on his chest, looked straight into his eyes, and in an almost peeved manner, asked, “So why didn’t you tell me you had so much wealth?”
“Because then you never would have jumped in the water to save my life. You would have just drifted off with my treasure instead.”
“No, I would have jumped anyway because I had already chosen you in my throat and I wasn’t going to let you get away so easily.”
“I think you just wanted to give me a good scrubbing because I stunk so badly.”
“Well, that too, and all that hair needed to be cut off. What a mess you were! As things turned out, now I have you all prettied up and trapped in my house and I can have you anytime I want. And I end up with all your treasure anyway! See how smart I was?”
“Very smart! But a bit cocky, I would say.”
“No, cocky is when you are stupid but only think you are smart!”
“No, cocky i
s when you are smart enough to obtain things but lack the wisdom to protect them. Wisdom comes with age, so sorry. By definition, you come up short!”
“Okay, man wiser than me. Try to obtain this!” She protruded her tongue and wiggled it at him, at which point he tried repeatedly to kiss her. But each time, upon luring him closer, she turned her head at the last instant to frustrate him.
“But is it smart to give all these valuable knife blades to a bunch of boys?”
“Yes, because they will produce a jāpe of jekaro! They have proven their loyalty to me twice daily. They are joyful and full of spirit, and because of their youth, they have no pretense because they have little to prove. When their jekaro begins to flow and the smart woman puts the nectar brought down from the swaying palms to her lips and feels the strength it provides, she will be happy with the bargain. Would it not be wise for the smart woman to present such a unique gift to Likōkkālọk when we ask permission to cut spears from her mangrove swamp? She will learn to crave the sweet amber nectar and become a baby sucking your tit in constant fear you might take it away. Such a smart woman can imagine the satisfaction of this type of trade.”
“But you are forgetting about Paratak! He will be red with jealousy and surely attack you the moment you arrive with your jekaro.”
“No lerooj can stand by and let her worker attack another who brings tribute, especially since you will ask your father to accompany us. He needs the spears, doesn’t he?”
“When will the jekaro start to flow?”
“It drips now, but not in earnest until the moon is full. Tell her we will pay her tribute on jetkāān.”
“What is this?” she asked, holding a small bamboo arrow.
“That is a toy arrow that makes you sick like death. Be careful. It has a poison tip — or at least it did — and you don’t want to scratch yourself to find out if the poison is still potent.”
Man Shark Page 17
