Man Shark

by Knight, Gerald R.

Man cause to fly so!

  Sail to bring tribute from sea,

  sail and cast magical wind.

  I’m sleepy now so

  standing up I sail — waow!

  Boat to catch, boat to catch,

  boat to catch, catch.

  To catch me and kill…

  Off wind will tilt kubaak up

  windward to set to rest.

  “And how does the story end, little girl?” Ḷainjin asked, trying to mimic the patronizing voice she had used earlier.

  “I brace myself on all fours on the top of that rock and stretch my neck and spear my head, screaming at you, Ḷōk-kō-kā-lọk!”

  “And what happens then?”

  “You diak at the last moment. I miss and I gulp water!”

  “And what happens then?”

  “I have to pull my neck back in like a fishing line as you sail away.”

  He questioned her again in the same patronizing tone. “And what happens then?”

  “I brace myself and lunge again, but this time, you’ve reached Anbōd. Again, you tack at the last moment, and I gulp water again.”

  “And what happens then?”

  “Then, as I draw my head back, a shark bites it off and that’s the story’s end,” she said, bracing herself at the mast. Yet another veil of rain slanted toward them from a second, larger raincloud. Her smile beamed bravely and she suddenly scampered at him, landing on the stern deck, sliding there, and nearly toppling them both into the water as she tried to climb onto his hip. He ended up sliding to the edge of the deck with her, her bare legs straddling his knee and her arms around him, engendering warmth amid the threatening gray, the wind, and the rain.

  Then she whispered in his ear. “Well, when we women of Lae tell that story we turn it around. We say the woman’s name was Likōkkālọk and she ate only the men on the island! That is why we all hate her. She ate Paratak’s soul and now she’s eaten Ḷāātre. Go see for yourself. You will find but a shell of the man he was. You are next unless you can resist her charms.”

  He looked into the distance and noticed the boys. “We better diak,” he whispered back.

  When they arrived, Pedpedin and a group of men boldly confronted the increasingly heavy downpour to help them unload the boats and carry them to shelter. Visibly upset, Pedpedin gave Ḷainjin the first hint that Etre’s injury was caused by a blow from the hands of Paratak. Unwilling to warm and weaken himself at Taknaṃ’s fire, he took his cleaned, netted coconut shells and headed along the empty path to his jekaro trees. He passed by the villagers huddled in their cookhouses, the children no doubt still wrapped in their sleeping mats, the breadfruit leaves still lying about the various courtyards where they had fallen during the night. The rainstorm had reached full deluge, and there was a flash of lightening amid the haze and then the rumble of thunder in the distance as he began to climb his first tree. His feet were secure as he placed them, one after the other, in the notches he had long since cut into each trunk with his kapwōr-shell adze. He reached the crown of the first tree and sat at peace, alone amid the heavy rain, his hands and fingers mindlessly going through their routine as they would have on any other day.

  Then the warm colors of life — the various shades of greens and yellows about him — inspired a thought in that intense moment of heavy weather. Emejjia wa ilọmeto! In the storm, he sat there cradled in the immense strength of the tree, feeling protected as he had in his boat out on the water, as though wrapped in the arms of his mother. The answer to his conundrum came to him. Yes, at sea, the best plan may very well be to have no plan but to simply stay aware of one’s position amid the flux. Here, landed — on the other hand — having no plan meant risking being diverted off course by random events perpetrated by pretense, ending in mishap. Either he would summon a plan to overcome the issues he faced, or he might fail to achieve the destiny he envisioned for himself and Liṃanṃan. Luckily, such a plan flashed before him, and he knew, as sure as thunder follows lightning, that he would follow it to culmination. Just as he must set his bird free to follow his destiny, so he must cut his friend Paratak free to follow his. Just as he had respected the screaming of the Chief’s mate, so he must heed Likōkkālọk’s wish to be free of his Pohnpeian friend. Clearly, she would leave neither of them alone until she was free of him. He must be true to them both, though it remained to be seen who, if anyone, would understand his intentions.

  He lowered himself from the tree with his vision firmly in place. He completed his rounds amid his trees and those of his friend, and then brought the brimming shells of jekaro to Ḷāātre’s home. Ḷainjin found the boy lying on a mat, his window propped open, staring out into the surrounding, leaf-covered square. Ḷainjin tried his best not to consider what Liṃanṃan had said, yet he could not help but feel the boy had changed. He asked him about the fight with Paratak. There had not been a fight really. Paratak had taken his spear, left among the others at Likōkkālọk’s island, and clubbed him with it as he descended from his jekaro tree the evening before. He had attacked him the same way he had Ḷainjin, but the result was very different. He showed Ḷainjin the swollen wound on his calf.

  “He can hardly walk! He’s delirious with fever but he won’t close that window!” cried his mother. The family was sitting there watching over him. Ḷāātre turned his face back to the propped-open window. The sounds of the rain splattering onto the coral stones resounded through the window and into the home. Ḷainjin wanted to ask him about his tryst with Likōkkālọk, but this was impossible with his family there. He wiped the water dripping from his face with his hand, bent low to the mat, and whispered to the boy, “Why?” Without looking away from the window, Ḷāātre raised his eyebrows and inhaled sharply. Ḷainjin took that to mean he accepted that Paratak had a good reason to attack him. “The rumors must be true,” he thought to himself, as he rose and asked Ḷāātre’s permission to borrow his spear, propped in the corner.

  Ḷainjin left the shelter of the boy’s house and walked back into the downpour, the sound of which permeated the village and the forest and eerily drowned out the everyday sounds of daily life about him. He knew what he must do. She would not stop until his friend Paratak was humiliated out of control. Had she chosen Etre as her latest supplicant because she expected that he, Ḷainjin, would avenge one friend’s honor against the other?

  In good time, he would learn there was a coconut tree on the ocean side of her island that they referred to as Likōkkālọk’s perch. It was well known among the men and was close to that part of the reef flat where women would go to defecate in the water each morning before dawn. The tree had grown up shaded by others along the shore. Searching for light, it had grown horizontally outward from the strand across the shaded shore for seasons before finally blossoming upward into the sunlight. She would meet her sex partners there before sunrise, during her passion period of the waning half-moon. She would tell Paratak she needed to make ready and would be back shortly. Embarrassed to follow her there, he would sleep as she straddled her latest admirer, mercilessly grinding his rear against the trunk until it bruised in ecstasy. The men claimed they welcomed the pain as a distraction from the seductive nature of her control over them. Truly, she was a woman of a different sort — they all acknowledged that — but to a man, they respected her single-mindedness. They admitted that she bewitched them. They claimed they would take any risk to have her. Truly, like the aorak images carved into the trunks of the oldest trees, she had a way of burning her specter into the souls of the men she engaged in this way. He had little doubt that, one day, one of them would kill his friend Paratak in some cowardly way.

  When Ḷainjin returned to the stilted, thatched house of the irooj, he stepped out of the rain and sat beneath, dripping. He found Ḷaluj, not surprisingly, rolling twine and sipping hot nen tea from a shell cup.

  “Litaknaṃ” — he called to the cookhouse — “bring a shell of nen, please, for your favorite newcomer. He’s as full of sky as he
was the day he arrived!”

  Taknaṃ crossed through the rain with two steaming shells and handed one to each man. She placed her warm hands on Ḷainjin’s shoulders and then covered them with a soft mat before returning to her fire. Ḷainjin let the mat slip behind him but sipped the hot, pungent water.

  “Who should I ask to hack me a new proa?”

  “What’s wrong with the one you have?”

  “Nothing, I’d like another a little lighter.”

  “Well, there are several good boatbuilders on this atoll, but why not let me try?”

  “Good. That way I know the measurements will be perfect.”

  “How long do you want it?”

  “Two and one-half ñeñe, please.”

  “I will need to provide tribute for the tree.”

  “Remember the lure I gave the irooj? I have many more.”

  “One would be more than generous.”

  “Good, and I have more for you.”

  “One would be more than generous of you.”

  “Then it’s settled. When can you start?”

  “Can an old man wait to finish his nen?”

  “Yes, of course” — Ḷainjin laughed — “keep yourself healthy. You have a lot of work to do. Let me know how I can help.”

  “I will need a ri-katak. Is there someone you want me to teach?”

  “Yes, offer the opportunity to Ḷōbōkrōk,” responded Ḷainjin, looking down at the spear next to him. “Give him this and tell him I want him to replace Ḷāātre in my fighting circle.”

  “He will be very happy. He has much admiration for you and even wears your scar on his forehead with pride.”

  Ḷainjin stood, drained his cup of the warm medicinal water, grimacing at the taste, and walked back into the rain, confident in the plan he had just set in motion. He anticipated Liṃanṃan would be waiting for him, naked beneath their sleeping mat, ready to dry his wet skin with her warmth and drain the chill from his body with the yet to be fulfilled passion she had sparked earlier, which had charmed the pounding rain and brightened the gray face of the lagoon waters.

  After a few days, her cousin the bird-watcher appeared and announced that the bird’s mate had appeared and now sat on their egg, and that his bird had gone to sea and was nowhere to be seen. Ḷainjin agreed that there was nothing else to be done. He was truly on his own now. Was that how his friendship with the bird was to pass? That he had little to say and nothing to do but, day by day, continue to twist the fibers of his former life and entwine them with those of this new one? Then so be it, and so it was that this man of notorious action must have appeared to these fellow villagers to be settling in to their normally nonconfrontational mode of island life. He was calmly able to initiate his plan as though sitting in the quiet crown of a coconut palm, making the first clean cut through the tip of a swollen utak and setting in motion a series of events that would unfold by natural order, based on a design he secretly nurtured.

  So, without comment, he went about his daily affairs, progressing through his routines as his jekaro dripped, moment by moment, through the night and during the day, imperceptively faster and more abundantly. The various cycles of his day-to-day routines were disciplined by this single enigmatic purpose. He would rise before first light and wash his jekaro shells on the lagoon shore. He would meet up with the jekaro boys along the ocean path, joke with them, climb with one or another, finish his trees, and return by sunrise to Taknaṃ’s cookhouse. Depending on the tide, he would either go fishing later that morning or wait until after sunset. Battle practice always started at noon and finished in time for their evening jekaro, and if not fishing, Ḷainjin would visit Ḷaluj’s work site, where the old man had constructed a boathouse even before he had sacrificed the valuable breadfruit trunk. There, he would find both Bōkrōk and Ḷāātre fulfilling their ri-katak duties so the two could exchange places during the afternoon, when it came time for Bōkrōk and Ḷainjin to ford the passage between the islands. There, as a new member of the circle, Bōkrōk learned the art of battle from the master he followed with daily admiration and from whom he would freely harvest the invaluable fighting lessons of confident deception, repetitive and distractive grace, and abrupt attack.

  As days passed, Paratak appeared among them — sometimes during, sometimes after practice. He appeared briefly and hesitantly at first but then with more boldness, even as her appearance confirmed the rumors of Likōkkālọk’s pregnancy. Word spread that Paratak had boasted to her that he would surely seek out and kill its father if he found the child not to be his. Ḷainjin showed no sign that he was distressed over the attack on his friend or that his concentration was set on anything other than success in the upcoming battle. Instead, as these days spun into moons and the stars climbed the night sky and, true to season, the ocean quieted even more, he spoke to Paratak about another lobster hunt and a night of bọbo — and to everyone’s surprise, he began instructing him in the art of spear-throwing. Ḷainjin would scratch a circle in the sand, and he and Paratak would take turns hurling a spear high into the air, judging who could land the spear closer to the center of the circle. And Ḷainjin would leave Paratak there to practice by himself while he returned to jebwa with the others.

  Progress on his new proa continued, and they argued out the decisions necessary to its unique design. The length of the kubaak would be the standard two-thirds of the two and one-half ñeñe of the hull he requested, but the distance from its center to the center of the hull would be its full length, which proved to be a central point of contention between the two. Ḷaluj contended this critical distance should be, at minimum, a full handspan shorter per ñeñe. Ḷainjin contended he wanted the greater distance for stability. Ḷaluj countered that this would prevent the kubaak from rising as it should above the waves. It would be able to do so only in the heaviest of winds, making the boat slower and less able to achieve a sharp upwind angle into a lesser breeze. Ḷainjin agreed, but claimed the downwind stability of the boat was more important to him.

  Ḷaluj countered that all the way back to Lōktañūr. “The race has always been into the wind. They raced upwind to Je from Wōjjā, not vice versa. From the beginning, they designed our proa to cut into the wind and not the other way around. With your design, you could sail to Ujae in no time, true, but you will fight an easterly breeze for over a day when returning.”

  Ḷainjin acknowledged his point but insisted he relished the trade-off. Ḷaluj agreed to cut the outrigger booms accordingly but stubbornly stated he would cut shorter replacements in case the newcomer changed his mind once he sailed it. Then, after a moon had passed and Ḷaluj had the boat nearly finished, they battled another round over the length of the mast, the sail spars, and the shape of the lateen sail. The standard is for the spars to be of nearly equal length and nine-tenths the length of the hull tip to tip — or roughly the length of the waterline. Sometimes the lateral boom is cut a hand or two longer depending on how aggressive — how much sail — its helmsman feels he can carry. Ḷainjin wanted the lateral boom to be a hand shorter. Ḷaluj claimed this would prevent the sail from gaining speed in light winds if close-hauled. Ḷainjin countered, much to Ḷaluj’s consternation, that this would make his downwind trip to Ujae even faster and safer in heavy winds!

  Ḷaluj countered, “You sound like you are planning to sail downwind and never come back!” They debated on and on like this, with Ḷaluj suggesting a more classic design that would enhance speed in a close-hauled race into the wind and Ḷainjin insisting he construct the boat to be more effective on a downwind haul.

  Ḷainjin, Paratak, and the others continued to practice, with Paratak perfecting his spear-throwing and the rest repetitively clacking through their mesmerizing four-man motions, faster and faster by the day. Nevertheless, without the nightly interludes that replenished Ḷainjin’s spirit, the unaccustomed monotony of the days between might have caused him to falter and retreat to the simple solitude of the sea from which he came.
He and Liṃanṃan sweated together and contorted themselves in the moonlight and in the dark or by the flickering light of a distant shell of burning oil, and after the passing of several moons, he finally began to suspect that his seed had taken root. It started with a giggle and a glance back at him as she spoke to her sister Joḷọk, from whom she had become inseparable. Then she surprised him by disgorging her morning meal, much to the amusement of her grandmother. A glance and an abrupt squinch of her nose, as her grandmother laughed teasingly, was all the confirmation he needed. She was to bear his child.

  Soon thereafter, the day of the much-practiced-for battle arrived. The tide was high. The night had mostly passed, and the waning moon was setting in the clear western sky when they saw the sails of the fleet approaching along the atoll’s southern fringing reef. In response, they sounded the conch shell to alert all to ready their torches, their spears, and the aje that their women would beat as the men formed dual lines in groups of four. Their opponents beached their canoes high upon the strand at the island’s southern tip. Likewise, their men lined up along the path to the village and their women began their ululations and drumbeating to urge their men onward. As they marched, their spears clacked, one against the other, in ferocious alliance, the frightening sound growing louder and closer with every passing moment.

  Ḷainjin and Bōkrōk stood at the head of their disciplined lines of men, which stretched eastward down the perpendicular path to the ocean. Their women formed their own groups, erratically surrounding their men on either side, and they responded with their own ululations and the beating of drums. Onlookers rushed in every direction, each carrying a dried-and-braided coconut-leaf torch, ready to flare at the appointed time. The men began to clack their spears in rhythm with their opponents as they methodically battled their way, unopposed, along the path from the south. Then, as the interlopers entered the expansive courtyard before the home of the irooj, Ḷainjin and his men closed ranks on either side of his group of four until both dual lines of opponents faced each other.