Flame Angels

by Robert Wintner

  Laying his head down as if onto a pillow, he adds a swallow to the quart of salt water already guzzled. The clenching gut wrenches again.

  And the soul in its tentative connection to the body does not hesitate; it serves, as it must, which isn’t to suggest prayer to a personal God as a default behavior for a waterman in his time of need. No, this reverence is for the Power and Glory of Nature, just like this morning, when a beneficent Sol smiled down on the gently lapping waters. So he sputters: Yea, though I swim through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, because they’re not evil but nature’s creatures completing their task, just as I complete my task on the wheel of life, like being buried under a big, beautiful tree and becoming part of its lush canopy that will shimmer green in sunbeams but different, since a big animal moves through the ocean but also casts its shimmering beauty in grace and movement, till it also weakens one day and — unngggmmmph...

  So Ravid achieves grace, parting ways from what he no longer needs. Except that the burbles don’t stop, and the pressure builds, recalling the tale first told by the ancient charter crews, about a guy with a terrible stutter who couldn’t get a date, because all he could say was, “Wwwooo...wooouulld yyyyou...”

  He went dateless for years till he met this woman who wasn’t bad looking, but she was spastic — couldn’t hold still, twitched like spit on a skittle, especially when she got excited. Well, they had a few dates, and it looked like love, so they planned the wedding. She wore white. He had all his pals there. But they still had the problem of her holding still, especially when she got excited, wedding night and all. So they tied her to the bed, hands and feet, and rigged up the ropes with slip knots and led the ropes into the next room, so the newlyweds could have their privacy. Then the guy with the stutter looked at her and said, “I luuuuuu...luuuuu...lluuuuuuvvvvv...”

  “Come on,” she said.

  So he got her clothes off, and she looked great. So he climbed aboard, and by this time she’s so lathered up she’s straining at the braces, and the guy slips it lovingly to her and yells, “Okay! Cccccc...cccccuuu...ccccuuuuut her loose!”

  So Ravid finds himself adrift at night, wishing the guys could be there to see his perfect delivery of the cherished punch line, cutting her loose in numbing torrents.

  But open mike night is brief.

  Nature hones on weakness. Fear and shit stink — both signal a life in transition. So a man striving to raise his odds must swim quickly from the slick.

  He trails the top half of his wetsuit till he smells nothing more to lose. Feeling good as dead, blinded by salt and darkness, scorched by salt, senseless from water and salt, numbed by fear and salt, without smell, except for salt and a faint residue of shit, he hears no sound but senses movement on all sides. He squints for a dorsal fin — but then the shark you see is never so frightening as the one you don’t. Was that a fin or a shadow?

  That one there.

  He waits for the bump before the hit.

  Then he drifts...

  “Please have your passport open. You must have your passport open along with your boarding pass.”

  “Now you’re fucked,” ventures the slovenly fool beside him, most likely judging by accent that he, Ravid, is traveling on a foreign passport, perhaps Israeli and not French. “It’s the whole wide world, and then the Jews. Am I right?”

  Well, in this case yes, the derelict got it correct. This surprising insight puts a smile on the intrepid Jew’s face, as well as on Skinny’s face, which slides over to make room for Basha Rivka’s face, which isn’t smiling but sternly monitors the events unfolding, by which her good-time Charlie of an ill-advised and chronically unstable son will be allowed passage to Tahiti in spite of her insistence on the special visa back when he could have done it easily, like a mensch, in Yisroel. And he’d refused, as if it would have cost him nickel one, as if he couldn’t perform this little task to please her, his only mother, as if she didn’t have a few good years of experience and wisdom on him. She’d insisted, putting her foot down against his plain common sense. He explained that Hawaii is not Tahiti, and he did not, not, not need to kill another half day chasing a French Polynesia visa around the block.

  Her retort: I’m your mother. Go and do the right thing. Please.

  But he would not go, because a man must draw the line sooner or later between himself and his mother’s little boy. And now look: married! To a shiksa! And not your generally goyisha shiksa either, but a real shiksa chilarium! See how smart, now that you’re a man? And now tell me again, please, what are the children supposed to be?

  The goat beside him bleats further inanity as Skinny smiles benignly alongside his mother’s righteousness, as somewhere in the murk Mano approaches, not so much threatening as ominously present. Mano always swims and must be somewhere at all times in compliance with the first law of physics. So? She was there alongside all night and into the following day. She swims alongside still. So what?

  “We will proceed at this time with boarding of all seats in Zone Six.”

  “Six, schmix. They ought to proceed with the Twilight Zone. You’re too young to remember that, huh? You remember the Twilight Zone?”

  Like a man accustomed to uncomfortably sultry nights and mosquitoes in his ear, Ravid ignores the buzz, rolling over to Minna, who drove him to the airport twice, who insisted on showing her devotion, who would have driven him home in the parking lot or anywhere on the way, as if...

  As if what?

  As if she’s very horny, is what. What the woman from San Francisco not so long ago would have called “bonkers horny.” What an ugly phrase, but perhaps suited to Minna Somayan. Not a bad girl, except for her unscratchable itch.

  Well, that same itch made her perfect not so long ago. No, Minna is perfect. I’m the unsuitable one. Well, she’s not perfect either. She had baggage — huge, messy baggage — including sexual perversion, which didn’t seem so perverse when she was doing it to me, but that was different. That was love — and me. Before that, she wasn’t doing it to me. Was she? And it wasn’t love. It was sick.

  It isn’t even the perversion that’s so troubling, till you consider Cousin Darryl. How could any woman play sexual games with a beer-bellied macho idiot? Hateful to boot, with his beady eyes, his swarthy face, his faint moustache and chin stubble. His grubby hands. Did she actually think she could console me by saying that the cousins aren’t Hawaiian but merely local, cross-pooled from four nations or seven, and none of them island nations to boot, except for the Philippines, which don’t count? That place is urbanized, and they eat dog and kill their reefs with dynamite and cyanide, which puts them as far from the spirit of ahupua‘a as Times Square from a coral polyp. What the hell do I care?

  But no, she insisted that those guys are not her people but interlopers by marriage a generation prior to statehood, which came in ’59. They claim originality and carte blanche reef rights with threats to kill you if you disagree, much less get in their way — and so she could only love me.

  The fuck? Will you get out of my face with that crap?

  What are you saying? Ravid asks her again as he asked two days ago, as if needing to confirm her failure and indiscretion, so he could bludgeon her again with, You did what with that guy?

  Nothing! Oh, she denied reality, straining for a better version based on happiness and light: No! Not like I did with you! What difference does it make? He made me do it. You didn’t. Did you like it? Do you think I’m good? Did you think that was my first time? Did you think, gee, she really has natural skills, this being her first time and all? No, you didn’t. You thought: Oh, God. Oh, God. Oh, God. Because you didn’t want to think of anything but your dick getting all the attention. That’s what I had in mind, too. I’ll tell you something else, Mr. Never-Been-Jealous: I loved your taste. That should make you feel good, but it doesn’t, because you have to jump off the cliff with your stupid question: Compared to what taste? Do you have a problem imagining a dick in my mouth that isn�
��t connected to you? What difference does it make who it’s connected to? Would you feel better if it was a little white dick popping out of some khaki pants?

  No! Ravid doesn’t care what those dicks looked like, not any of them. They all look like dicks, some curved, some blunt, some veiny and some even more disgusting than that. He can’t say he doesn’t care, because she won’t understand. She couldn’t see that it wasn’t a dick in her that troubles him — but that it was Cousin Darryl’s dick. Not that any other dick would be okay, or casual, or anything, just that Darryl is disgusting. Unacceptable.

  Romance? With Darryl? Like with kissing and everything?

  I’ll tell you something else. I never got intimate with Darryl...

  You never got intimate with him? You just told me you did. Now you say you didn’t. What, he didn’t want to get intimate?

  Oh, no. He wanted it. They all want it. I wouldn’t do it. I couldn’t do it — not any more than you could do it. It was too...ugly. Never. Love him? Never.

  But you just told me that you...

  So he hears over and over an obsessive replay of those personal things she shared and then denied — till he turns to the bedraggled man beside him in bittersweet resignation. The man assures him: “Listen to me, Mr. Man-in-Denial: The difference between you and Minna will never go away. She’s practical and focused, while you’re irrational and unfocused — except for your passion and conviction for the reefs and the cat and the women you hate to lose. She understands you. She accepts you, but she can’t make a case for herself because of her casual sex and shaky rationale, which makes you distrust her in all things.” Ravid senses keen insight at hand, and some very bad luck.

  And luck in increments adds up to fate: His own nagging mother had insisted on the French Polynesia visa because fate is often whimsical, and she was right. Which is not to say that shit happens, but rather to respect the powers that be. “You never know! And it’s right here! Right around the corner! I’m begging you!”

  So he didn’t know what would happen. Who ever knows? How can you spend a life safeguarding against stuff that won’t likely happen? Unless you’re neurotic? So he found out. So what? So he was wrong, and Basha Rivka was right, like she knew, which she didn’t; she was only neurotic, which isn’t the same as right, except by coincidence. Still she pressed like she did at his birth, complaining years later about it, calling it “the worst horror of my life, except maybe for the gallstones — now there was a pain!” But don’t get her off the subject — she would not repeat his birth for anyone but him, though he never gave a fig for what she had to say.

  Okay, Mother, here’s your fig...

  So Ravid concedes his mother’s foresight in this and all things, though leaving himself open to chance hadn’t proved so bad either, what with excellent local connections and the wheels of government turning as if he’d been a man of significance.

  Soon he would tell her of the beginning and end of his new family. Pondering that exchange puts the impending flight and the cold, hard future into perspective. How much easier to fly thousands of miles south, reeling from a love mugging, than to admit to his mother the magnitude of his bad judgment.

  The unnerving stranger says, “You know, you look like a shmata just plucked from the washtub. Did your mother not teach you to present yourself like a mensch? That’s exactly the problem. It’s not just you; it’s the whole veshtunkena world. You fit right in, which doesn’t help the situation. Hey, maybe you had a rough time — anyone can show the worse for wear — and maybe you’re a reasonable man. Who knows? But a stabilizing influence, you’re not. Look at you. Would a little effort be so much to ask? Is personal pride completely forsaken? Don’t you care what people think?”

  Ravid runs his palm over a few wrinkles on his shirt and pants to smooth them and then turns away from the nudge next door. Yes, he had a rough time, and he’s not so reasonable as he used to be. Man, some people. What he wouldn’t give for an empty seat somewhere else, but that too is a chronic problem in a terminal world.

  The nudnick next door fondles the raw nerve, testing the limits of patience, so he turns away.

  Tell me something: Would the situation be more palatable, so to speak, if the troubling picture in your mind featured a nondescript man in a tweed suit? Or a pinstripe suit with a vest? Or seersucker, so to speak? No, it would be no easier — and that’s what you’re not seeing. Because a woman’s experience is the same as a man’s, but a man wallows in imagery, debasement and moral compromise. Physically stronger in most cases, few men are nearly as tough when it comes to their once-true love sharing intimacy with others, especially when it comes to romance of a pornographic nature. Is this self-abuse necessary? No, but it does seem to be required.

  Yeah, so? What’s your point?

  What did she expect of a seasoned dive instructor with an established reputation in the Sandwich Islands archipelago? Did she really think he would grin and bear it? Did she not anticipate emotional compost mere hours after the night of humiliating fear — and attempted murder — at the hands of her inbred cousins?

  Like lime on garbage, her callous behavior hurried the disintegration and disgust, taking a waterman down to nitrogen, potassium and the other. Calcium? No. It’s the other one, not calcium.

  Never mind. It’s none of your business, anyway. I’m not sure why I’m even talking to you. So shut up. Bug off. Okay?

  “Whatever you say, brother. I don’t know why it came up in the first place. We’re at the airport, done deal, Tahiti coming on. Let it go, wouldja? What the fuck?”

  Yeah. Whatever.

  Except that something still stinks of fear and loss. Slumped and shrunk, looking like End Shot from La Vie en Rose, Ravid waits for his zone to be called, dispirited and swept away, his sadness inscrutable.

  But he survived — triumphed over insurmountable odds, crawled up from the sea to reclaim life as we know it. Passage through the Valley of the Shadow of Bureaucracy through check-in and on to the gate was a cakewalk next to drifting in the open ocean at night, except for the unnerving anxiety a waterman feels so far from his element.

  That makes no sense, but few things do. He wants to lie down and sleep, which begs the question: The best sleep ever has what in common with detainment and deportation? Easy: Neither one is lost at sea at night. Or wet. Get it?

  Besides that, who cares? Deportation, shmeportation; I’m on the way out, Brudda. José, can you see?

  But this is no time for jokes, especially with vision clouded by their ominous farewell and her groping hands, underscoring her love or her character — who could imagine such advances? She had grinned stupidly, hinting parking lot perversion and whatnot, maybe to provide him with some imagery to remember her by. Usually open-minded to playfulness, Ravid had twitched in decline.

  So she’d leaned on the horn and waved out the window: “Ey! Tita!” Turning back, she explained, “That Leila. She’s a kick. Really fun when she was drinking. Man, twenty-five and no more for her. Terrible.”

  Hmm, yes, no more. Terrible.

  Now waiting at the gate in the solitary confinement of a crushing crowd and life passing before him, he laughs at love’s delusion. Really fun when she was drinking? The shitbum one seat over glances sideways, as if he’s annoyed. Ravid gives back stink eye for stink eye but sees the message in Minna’s eyes. It foretells the road not taken in all its frightful turns, round the bend to forty pounds gained, to the stretch marks and vengeful drinking and denial — or maybe just drinking and drinking and, oy vey, four kids, or six. Her smile skews on a litany of demands.

  Such a future could surely have come to pass, and he, hapless husband, would have revisited this very moment over and over again, each time with a wish upon every coin in every fountain, every graveyard passed, every wishbone snapped, every star in the firmament, first or fallen or otherwise, that the fork in the road had separated them.

  And so it has.

  “Thank you.” With a perfunctory peck on the c
heek such as a friend would give a friend in gratitude for a ride to the airport, he’d turned to the terminal with no look back. A man recently in personal contact with God on the high seas gains clarity in life. Maybe the fatal difference between the principals here is her lack of depth, while he’s in over his head — a dive leader at that. It could never have worked.

  Sure the match seemed obvious at first — an innocent, honest mistake, a ruse of the flesh with nothing common to develop other than recurrence of flesh. How else could things play out other than the way they did?

  Let’s say it was a palm grove on a balmy day instead of four miles into Maalaea Bay on a blustery night; he wouldn’t sweat the centipedes in the wet squeezes under the fronds, not even the nine-inchers. They’re only curious, raising their heads to see who turned the lights on. But it wasn’t a forest or daytime. The fear was dark and deep, and it lingers — and this is what you must see, that I am right now heard, smelt and felt by predators in medium to triple XL, including el tigre. I suppose their appetite is no different than my own — make mine a sizzling rib eye, if you don’t mind. I don’t feel in the least fierce or avenging, only hungry and game for deep gratification on a solid feed.

  Do a knife and fork make any difference to the donor? Or ketchup?

  No, they don’t. The only crux is whether shark is my predator or my guide.

  Oh, they assured: You know by sense, the same as knowing you’re alive. Once known, you can have the faith. The faith renders you fearless, confident in the presence of a powerful friend. If you don’t know, you lack the faith, and then you’re on the menu, because you know something else. Aka Leialoha said too many people claim to know what “the Hawaiians” want, but Hawaiians differ, like all people everywhere. One man’s aumakua is another man’s lunch, which is not offensive or meant to be so. It’s simply how it is.