To Ḷainjin, all this had occurred quickly and he had been below the water but a few moments. But to Liṃanṃan, who had probably never seen a man attempt such a dive, he must have been gone for an eternity, and she dried his cold face with her hands and her mouth the moment it popped out of the water.
“Ḷōpako, I’m so sorry I caused you to do that!”
“I needed to cool off anyway. It is nice and cold down there! Next time, I’ll let you try!”
There would be no next time. For the remainder of the afternoon, she fished much more conservatively and, in fact, caught fewer fish. Their basket full, Ḷainjin steered them to the long but narrow bird islet they had approached that first day they had entered the safety of the lagoon. They hauled their canoe from the sparkling, clear water up onto the calm shore of fine coral sand amid the blazing colors of the afternoon sun. White and black squawking terns were flying in all directions, those of the speckled variety hovering directly over their nests on the beach above the high-tide mark. The neap tide had reached its low point for the day and had begun its patient ebb. During the morning, he had fileted two of the largest fart fish and laid them out on the platform to bake in the sun.
“Ḷōpako, can we eat now?” she asked, as she untied the basket from below the outrigger platform and placed it on top, in the area newly shaded by the still-standing sail. Not waiting for his response, she grabbed one of the fish with one hand, unfurled her matted skirts with the other, and waded naked into the glistening ripples of the cool, clear water. She rinsed the raw, scaled, and sun-seared fish and parted a strip of its serrated flesh from the limp skin with her clenched teeth. As she twisted the strip about her tongue and worked it into her mouth with her finger, she chewed provocatively and beckoned him to join her, waving the remainder in her other hand. He likewise removed his kilt and joined her. As their mouths met and he smelled the scent of her sunburned face, she pushed a piece of unchewed fish into his mouth with her tongue. And so they ate, and so she fed him in this provocative manner as each anticipated what was to come next. When they had eaten their fill of the fish, she tossed the remainder into the lagoon. He followed her through the water, prostrate as a crab, as she backed onto the sand under the shelter of the outrigger platform. He rested his chin on her thigh, and she raised the other knee and asked him to kiss her there as he had done on her first night. So, lying prone on the shore, in the shade of the outrigger’s platform, with the cool lagoon water sloshing gently over him, he eagerly met her request.
Across the islet’s broad beach and likewise sheltered from the hot afternoon sun, the Chief peered between the low-hanging kōņņat branches, his keen eyes focused primarily on the remaining fart fish half hanging from the outrigger platform above them. As he spied the basket of fish next to it, with the tasty-looking fins sticking through the spaces between the coconut leaves near the top, he could not help but be distracted by his inept worker struggling to bite his mate — but in the wrong place. “Maneuver her onto her knees and bite her back!” He wondered why it had taken his worker so many days to bring him fish and then hung his head in embarrassment over this pathetic display of malehood — and before the entire island! The terns must be spilling their pouches over this! He had known from the start that this female human would distract the commoner from his work. “Could it possibly take all these days to figure out what needed to get done? He doesn’t even know the basics!” Then the Chief watched the female cunningly wrap her spindly legs around the commoner’s massive back. Clearly, she had managed to trap him there, successfully preventing him from getting into proper position. He felt sorry for his feeble worker as he watched him pinned and unable to struggle free. And then he suddenly propped himself on his hands with a terrible look on his face, apparently writhing in pain — and gave up! Without question, it was the most embarrassing exhibition of sexual ineptitude he had ever witnessed.
The Chief watched as his worker’s new mistress took his fish, his perch, and all. She was undoubtedly rejecting his worker due to his inability to satisfy her butt-bumping desires. Then he watched the canoe sail off, leaving the commoner there dejected and with but a single, puny fish. He wandered off aimlessly in one direction and returned after a long while from another, looking skyward and crying out. No doubt, he was fruitlessly apologizing to the island’s considerable in-flight population for his display of sexual ineptitude. Finally, the Chief watched his worker leave the islet, fish still flopping tantalizing from his hand, and cross the reef to the neighboring bird islet to the west, where he spied him repeating the same antics and then disappearing out of sight.
The fish needed cleaning and cooking, so Ḷainjin let Liṃanṃan sail their catch on to her uncle’s island to the west. He was planning to walk there by crossing the relatively short distance on the reef as the neap tide slowly receded. He still held hopes of sighting his black-feathered companion but expected to find him standing out among the din of this white flock of hovering fowl, not sitting there beneath low-hanging branches weighted down with their shiny kōņņat leaves. He looked for him soaring high above, or at least perched high in the upper branches of a tree for easy takeoff, as his ilk was wont to do. When he had no luck spotting him aloft on the first islet, he had crossed the reef to the second, the last islet before the final stretch of fringing reef leading to her uncle’s island. That islet was, so to speak, the last islet — or tip of the thumb — before the ocean passageway that separated it from the tip of a curling index finger, or long contiguous fringing reef, that led to a northern islet, and then all the way around again to where he stood. Like the eye of a hand, it reminded him of Namorik, except that Namorik had no passageway whatsoever to the ocean.
When he found no sign of the Chief anywhere around the periphery of this second bird islet, he set the fish on the shorehead, hoping it might yet attract his friend. He tore the crown of kōņņat leaves from a branch and sat down on the coarse sand at the water’s edge of this last isletless gap on the reef to rest, wait for the tide to ebb a bit, and let word of his approach spread among the islanders before crossing. As a current will encompass a stone in its path, the breeze from the east enveloped the tiny islet and blew gently across the sweat on his back. The sun glared hot on his face and chest. He looked out toward the rippling, light blue waters at the lagoon’s edge that bordered the calm, grayish-green water of the basin before him. It separated this last islet from a series of sandspits and rocky cays that led to the white sands and dark green foliage of her uncle’s island, which filled most of the horizon before him.
He clutched onto a handful of sand and allowed it to pour slowly through his fingers. He pondered how many generations it would take for these incessantly screaming, ever-defecating birds, the corals, and the fish that ate them and then pooped their sand into the ever-dispersing action of the waves to expand the beaches of this string of small, sparsely wooded islets into one or two substantial islands — as had happened over the ages, he supposed, to Namorik. This atoll beneath him was slowly growing through the constant efforts of untold numbers of heroes who unknowingly, day by day, advanced its emergence into the light of day amid the surrounding abyss that threatened to swallow it up again.
Then he crossed his fingers, cupped his hands under his head, and lay back on the coral stones that led down to the shallow pool between him and the first sandspit ahead. These remaining islets had been his last hope of finding his friend, who had been a companion to his loneliness for so long. For seven seasons of Jebrọ and seven seasons of Tūṃur, they had stayed together. They had marveled together at the sight of the immense stone villages with their thatched roofs nearly blocking the tops of the mountains in the distance behind them. They had crossed the ocean from one island to another and had shared the incredible hardship, the tragedy, and the rewards of these adventures. And now, had it all to come to this inconclusive end? He clutched onto another handful of sand, and as he allowed it to pass through his palm, he wondered whether the storm had
blown his friend away into the obscurity of some other, perhaps uninhabited, place. And he questioned whether he would be able to survive on his own without him. Then, as he had been taught, he trained his mind away from the fear of what might have occurred or what would perhaps occur in the future to the truly magnificent story that they had been witness to, which had made him who he was. He placed the crown of leaves over his face to shade it from the sun and decided to comfort himself with a nap.
“Wa jab depet āne,” he thought. He had learned to live by this mariner’s rule of relations. This was the strand he rolled into the only line he could use to tie it all together. This was why he had sent the fish ahead with Liṃanṃan. This was why he had brought tribute to Likōkkālọk when he crossed onto her islet. It was why he had given his valuable fishing lure to Pedpedin when he first arrived, and supposed, initially, it was why he and his friends for life had fought the sharks off Anbōd. In the absence of that wealth they had dared to earn, he would never have felt welcomed enough to begin the search for his mother. Gift giving was essential to him and his ilk. This tradition was his mother’s legacy and his only inheritance. It was part of who he was. He could envision Liṃanṃan arriving and presenting their basket of fish to her uncle, and him thinking, “The gifts of this newcomer precede him.”
Ḷainjin awoke from a dream with the image of his friends hauling his feverish, sunstroked body by wrists and ankles and floating him beneath the sun’s glare into the dark hut above the sea and placing him on the slatted floor, where the beautiful, bald Ngalen splashed him with pwentang after pwentang of cold ocean water. Liṃanṃan was standing at the water’s edge before him, teasingly splashing water to wake him up. A second figure, a boy, shorter and even more slender — most likely a relative — stood beside her. He sat silently, and soon it became apparent the boy was wanting to lead them somewhere. Ḷainjin arose, shook off his daze, and followed them around to the ocean side, to the islet he had left behind him. The boy marched quickly and without speaking, as on a mission, paying little attention to either of them. He hopped across the shorehead, then the coral rubble that led to the sandy beach along the southern edge of the strand as birds cried and hovered about them. Liṃanṃan said nothing, as though captivated by the boy’s mission. Ḷainjin followed, speechless, taking one step for each of theirs.
When they reached the lagoon side of the narrow islet, close to where they had landed a while before, the boy bent nearly to the sand and reached below a tuft of low-hanging kōņņat branches. After a noisy, flapping scuffle, he emerged, holding a large, black bird with a red pouch as high into the air as he was able. The long bird hung upside down, its skinny body motionless as if dead, with the head moving only occasionally from side to side, its beak opening and closing, and its eyes only periodically blinking to show it lived.
Finally, the boy spoke. “This one hasn’t eaten since the full moon. It may have been abandoned by its mate.”
Ḷainjin looked at Liṃanṃan for an explanation. “He is my uncle’s bird-watcher. He reports directly to him.”
“We don’t have many of its kind here. Father wants the egg to hatch. We know its mate, but we have seen no sign of her for many days now, and we are worried for him.”
Still hanging the bird high from his uplifted hand and balancing on one foot, the boy gently pushed aside the branch of the kōņņat with the other to expose the ragged, goo-caked nest and exhibit the single, large egg the bird had been protecting. Ḷainjin bent to pick it up, but the boy snapped the limb back and motioned no with a quick and silent but authoritative snap of his head. Ḷainjin turned his attention back to the bird dangling before him.
“Could it be him,” he thought. He knew his companion by his personality, not by any particularly distinguishing features. This bird’s gular sack was much larger than that of the Chief. His feathers lacked luster. They lacked the Chief’s iridescent purple sheen, but then he had never seen a bird so sickly and thin.
“Can I feed him?”
The boy abruptly tossed the bird a few feet into the air. It miraculously righted itself, landed on its feet, and then waddled off to sit back on its nest beneath the tree.
Shrugging his shoulders, the boy responded, “Father says feeding makes the birds lazy.”
“That’s true, but if the bird dies, so will its egg, and even if it hatches, you will end up feeding the chick if its mother does not return with food.”
“We will ask Father,” responded the boy.
“No, we won’t ask Uncle,” said Liṃanṃan. “This bird belongs to Ḷainjin. Only the egg belongs to Uncle. I have seen this bird on Ḷōpako’s boat and will vouch for that to Uncle.” She turned to Ḷainjin. “Can you find something to feed him?”
The Chief sat indignant upon his nest and watched his worker stumble into the narrow forest behind him. Then, as expected, he watched him burst forth empty-handed. “Did he expect to find fish there?” Then he watched him head back to the islet to the west, enter the forest there, and emerge after a few moments dragging a long, straight, skinny branch. “Octopus!” His eyes bulged!
Ḷainjin waded into the lagoon. If he focused properly, he should be able to find one at the edge of the lagoon back reef between the islets in the now currentless passageway. He let the butt end of the stick dangle from one hand as he floated, allowing it to bump along the back reef in the shallow water and periodically placing his face in the water, trying to spot the identifying sign of his prey. The light of the subsiding afternoon sun angled perfectly to shadow the bottom and allow him to find what he was looking for through the cool, clear water, which gradually became less and less blurry to his sight. He cautioned himself repeatedly to relax, to search carefully so as not to miss what he was looking for along the bottom below. He searched a zigzagged path as he slowly punted his way across the channel. He breathed slowly but deeply and moved slowly to relax himself as he searched, so he could hold his breath for as long a stretch as needed once he found what he was looking for. Finally, as luck would have it, he found it and raised his face to laugh.
The Chief, nestled over his egg upon the strand above the passageway, had been watching his worker’s every move, and from experience, he knew the consequences that followed from a laugh like that. His eyelids retracted to the extreme, and he waited in motionless, alert expectation with his keen eyesight focused upon the commoner, who was floating and bobbing in the water but a short bird’s distance away.
The method the too-crafty octopus always used, hiding the entrance of its hole in the reef, never failed to amuse Ḷainjin. Upon exiting, the creature left its stones scattered on the reef, but upon entering, it carefully gathered them again and piled them into a small mound with its sensitive tentacles, to seal the narrow entrance of its little cave. He supposed this trick worked well enough to protect it from marine predators, but to the islanders, the pile of stones not only marked its spot but also served as a sure sign that the octopus was home and vulnerable.
He began breathing heavily to prepare himself as he flipped the ends of his stick, set his face back into the water, brushed the silly pile of stones aside, and poked the slim end of the stick into the hole. He immediately felt the pliable, springy feel of his prey trapped beneath him. His objective was not to try to spear and kill it, but rather to irritate it until it crept out on its own accord. Holding the butt end of the stick, he could surface, gulp air, and periodically view the creature as, arm by arm, it attached its powerful suckers to the aggravating stick and cautiously, unwisely crept from its hole. Then, when he judged the time right, Ḷainjin took one last breath, dove, and began to more aggressively jam the head of the creature still lingering in the hole. He simultaneously slid his hand down the stick, encouraging the arms to attach themselves irresistibly to his warm hand and arm as he continued to jam it, knowing his warmth would entice it upward.
“Yes, it’s me that’s doing this to you! Come and stop me!” he said without speaking, and he smiled at its re
d, droopy-eyed face as it appeared and clung to his arm through the black cloud of liquid smoke it excreted. He knew it was on its way to his shoulder and then his back. Luckily, it was moving too quickly to take painless, exploratory bites of flesh — as its kind was wont to do — until it found the bone it would crunch into as if he were an ignorant lobster in a house that could be entered.
Ḷainjin slid his fingers into the slippery pocket at the nape, at the back of the octopus’s head and then, leveraging the incredible sucking force of its firmly attached arms against it, pressed its slithery face outside in with his powerful thumb until its hood tore open, its brain inside out under the sunny sky. As he surfaced, he tore its suckers off his upper arm and held the octopus as high as he could above the sparkling surface of the lagoon channel, close to the shore where Liṃanṃan was standing and bursting into her ululating scream.
“U-waa tak-li!” A few kicks later, he was approaching Liṃanṃan and the boy on solid reef. “U-waa tak-li!” he repeated, as he waded slowly through the gradually shallower water toward the shore where they waited, still apparently astounded at how quickly he could achieve his objective. Once he reached shore, he had to lift the head of the dying thing high to prevent its tentacles from touching the sand, and the other two joined him in his victory chant, beaming.
U-waa tak-li!
Come from west to place where
they ba-baked my son there.
They cook-cooked his soul there,
under that tree called kiden.
Kiden, what kiden?
Ḷainjin broke off a branch of the kōņņat tree that was overhanging the bird, sharpened the broken limb with his ring, spiked the head of his prey from one side through the other, and hung it there to glisten in the late afternoon sun. The octopus was still changing colors from black to greenish gray to purple as if it wanted to blend itself into its background, which was its wont. Then he severed one of its slippery limbs and turned to the boy, who — still beaming at him — gently lifted the branches away from the bird. And if any had doubted if the bird was the Chief himself, all ambiguity vanished when they saw his greedy reaction. Still sitting, he lifted his head high into the tree, stretched his neck skyward, and opened his beak wide to accept the butt end of the arm’s-length tentacle as it slipped quickly through Ḷainjin’s hand down into his throat. Still unsatisfied, the bird maintained his pose until Ḷainjin managed to cut another leg free and slide it likewise into the gaping beak of the demanding bird. Finally, true to the Chief’s ungrateful personality, he dismissed all three, lowered his head, squatted back down to his mission, and ignored them as though they were but chunks of coral rubble on the shore before him.
Man Shark Page 24
