by Rob Swigart
He slowed as he came around a bend into a thick cluster of koloa lau nui, kukui, breadfruit, and the delicate bare stems of ti plants. He felt the presence of pig here. He suspended his breath a moment, listening. It was there, the heavy huffing of the boar. Slowly he let his own breath out as he slipped the recurve Bear bow off his back and notched one of his Game Getter plastic-fletched Easton aluminum arrows. The steel Wasp barb glittered in the greenish light of the rain forest. Trails of low cloud-like steam drifted among the trees, as close to mist or drizzle as cloud could be. Muscles between Renfrew’s ribs ached with the pressure of holding still after the exertion of running.
He crouched on the trail, the knees of his camouflage fatigues pressed into the mud. Off to the left, maybe ten meters, the boar, still not sure he was there, snuffled in the underbrush. Renfrew cocked his head, turned his right ear toward the boar. It was there. Definitely. Renfrew could sense its posture, facing him, legs braced, head lowered, tusks curled yellow in the damp dimness. He was there. All Renfrew had to do was wait.
He told himself that silently, still controlling his breath.
Renfrew, all you have to do is wait. He’ll come back to the trail where the going is easier and quiet. He won’t take to the brush. He won’t. He can’t. He’ll break this way. Just wait.
Renfrew pushed his hair back behind his ear and tugged his cap tight to keep it from drifting back in front of his eyes. He settled himself onto one knee and sighted toward the brush. Slowly he pulled back on the string. The arrow’s polished shaft slid back along the web of his left hand, callused from constant practice. He pulled all the way back to the head, then eased off. The nock was green plastic below his right eye, the fletching stiff crimson. He waited.
Silence settled like mist around Renfrew and the pig. The silence became the glue binding them. The connection between them grew, a psychic bond tightening by the minute, like a rubber band winding around a propeller shaft. Soon the pig would break. The silence deepened. Very slowly other sounds seemed to drift by – bird calls, moisture condensing and dripping from the tips of banana leaves, a distant swirl of water gathering into a rivulet at the bottom of the ravine to his left, below where the pig was standing, his trotters braced against the dirt. Pig breath came shorter, inbreath pulling for Renfrew’s scent amid the thick odors of damp earth, of rotted leaf and snail and death all around, of pollen burst and swelling life, of endless efflorescence and death, sex, and decay.
The air thickened. Renfrew felt it was more rain swelling the clouds this close under the lee of Wai’ale’ale. Pregnant clouds, fat, fatter, fattest, ready to burst again, send torrents down the ravines, sweep away the brush, tumble the rock, churn to chaos the placid river below. Muscles jumped in Renfrew’s jaw, in his shoulder. The barbed tip twitched in front of him.
Then it happened. The sharp crack of underbrush, and the dark striped body broke from cover, headed up the trail, almost out of sight, swerved suddenly and, kicking sprays of watery red mud, homed on Renfrew crouched. The tusks were curved, age-yellowed but still sharp, and the heavy jowl muscles writhed. Renfrew felt the exultation rise as he pulled the arrow fully back and sighted without thinking and loosed the string, heard the sharp whoosh of the arrow springing away, the twang of the string vibrating familiar music and the almost simultaneous padded thunk of the tip burying itself in the thick brisket.
The boar kept coming, though, pumping blood around the shaft protruding from his chest. A horrible gurgling snort drooled from his snout as he slid, splashing mud, legs splayed, churning the air. Oddly, he regained his feet somehow in those terrible fractions of seconds and staggered again toward Renfrew reaching for another arrow, too late. The boar collided with him, hooked back the vicious tusk across Renfrew’s side, still crouched, struggling with the arrow; and Renfrew’s own blood joined the boar’s to mingle invisibly with the red mud now washed by falling rain.
Renfrew’s breath was a whisper under the steady white noise of the rain. The boar was dead, half on top, pinning Renfrew on his bow. He tried to shift sideways from under the carcass, and fire shot up his side, down his leg to the very waffled sole of his guide boot.
He reached across with his right arm and pushed against the heavy boar’s head. By centimeters it moved; at last it fell with a splat into the wet trail beside him.
Then Renfrew went to sleep. In his dreams he was running.
7
Chazz sat in Zen meditation, but there was no peace. His leg ached. His breath was shallow and ragged. He saw the yellow Datsun grinding into the sugar cane. Outside, occasional traffic swished by on the rain-wet pavement, and his mind leaped. There were bodies in the rain, bodies in the forest and the desert and bobbing in the ocean surge. Chazz saw them all in the blurred and swirling white wall before his eyes.
He sat relentlessly, though. He put his mind into the pain in his leg. He sat on the pain, and the pain squirmed. It squirted down his calf. He moved his mind there, and the pain shot to his abdomen.
Dewilliter, he thought. He tried looking at the name Dewilliter, and the name drifted away. Ben Silver arose, leviathan from dark mental waters, streaming sardonic goodwill and wry humor.
What were Dr. Silver’s current research interests? When he directed Chazz’s dissertation research, he’d been working on molecular genetics of simian virus SV-40, a type of cloning later prohibited for a time by the guidelines developed at Asilomar. The clones had been destroyed, Chazz was sure of that. What was he doing now, here?
At some point in the course of the evening Chazz had asked him, wondering why Silver had invited him to DRC, and Dr. Silver had waved his thin aristocratic hand vaguely, indicating some inconsequential item beyond the French doors. Dr. Silver talked instead about kahunas, medicine men, shamans, witch doctors. Silver wouldn’t know that was Patria’s province. Chazz and Patria got married later. Silver had never met her.
Chazz shook himself, his shoulders. He leaned forward, his wrists bent against his knees, stretching. He should go to bed, but the party still swirled in his brain – and the Datsun engine whining in the crushed sugar cane, and Dewilliter’s conspiracies, and lobelioids, and a drowned body bobbing on the ocean surface with a strange expression on its face.
“It’s not my problem,” he said, standing. The white walls surrounded a great deal of glass, which in turn revealed pool and palms, a huge ficus in the courtyard and, in the other direction, a scrubby desolation where cattle once foraged.
It wasn’t his problem. He went for a walk.
There was a moon of sorts whipping merrily along behind dark scraps of cloud. “‘The moon,’” he quoted to the the scrub. “‘A ghostly galleon. Tossed upon cloudy seas.’ Or something like that.”
A dirt road led off into the scrub. The deep tire marks of four-wheel drives gathered pools of silvered water in the oval depressions. Dark splotches dotted the track. It was a long time walking along the road staring at the splotches before he knew what they were.
They were toads, legs splayed out. Toads, pancake-thin, flattened amazingly by truck tires, dried by sun. The farther he walked, the more toads there were on the road, not just the random blotch of dead toad here and there, but a carpet of dead toads, toads toe to toe, side by side, thousands of toads, all dead, all flat, some long-gone and leathery, some still moist with spilled guts and protruding tongues squeezed from their innards, brainless toads hopped onto the dirt from the surrounding scrub to seek mates in the dusk and stupidly run over by beer drinkers from town.
He tried not to step on them as he walked, but it was impossible to avoid them all. Finally he shrugged and stopped watching where his feet fell. It was Patria, of course. His fault. Her fault. His fault. Hers. He took long walks in the Berkeley hills like this after she left for Yucatan, leaving him in the house with the Bay and San Francisco view and garden full of dead vegetables. They’d been fighting a lot, and when the field trip came up, she went to Yucatan while Chazz sat in the library or walked in the hills or taught his aikido class
.
The phone was ringing when he got back.
“It’s three o’clock in the morning,” Chazz was going to say, but Takamura spoke first.
“It’s three o’clock in the morning, Dr. Koenig,” he said. “You’ve been out, I know. I called Dr. Morgan at the DRC. He said you had left. That was some time ago, so sorry, but something has occurred to me and I couldn’t sleep. So I’ve been trying to reach you.” He sounded genuinely apologetic.
“It’s all right,” Chazz said. “I couldn’t sleep either.”
“So. You know something of poisons, perhaps?”
“In a way, I suppose. A number of microorganisms produce toxins of one kind or another. Why?”
“We may have a homicide, Dr. Koenig. Perhaps you could come in as a consultant. I’m afraid the biological expertise of myself and staff is not great. Dr. Shih was unable to identify the substance.”
“Substance?” The moon was tipping down the lanai, almost gone behind the enormous ficus decorating the central plaza of the complex.
“A small puncture wound, Dr. Koenig, on the victim’s left thigh. A powdery substance around a very small wound. Almost too small to notice, that wound. especially considering that the victim was addicted to drugs and was, well, peppered with puncture wounds. ‘Useless,’ as Charlie Chan says, ‘to sprinkle salt on tail of time,’ though. He is dead. We don’t have many addicts in this island, Dr. Koenig, but here is something we do not understand. A powdery substance Dr. Shih thinks resembles pollen. Or spores.”
Chazz could almost hear the shrug over the phone. “Perhaps you could help? I’m sure it would take only a few minutes of your time, and I think I can promise you that as a reward I might persuade Mrs. Takamura to prepare her famous ebi no tempura for you.”
“I could stop by tomorrow. I’m not sure I can help much, but I haven’t really started on my own research yet, and I’ll take any excuse to put it off.”
“Thank you, Dr. Koenig. I feel, like Charlie Chan, that my day’s work has been ‘useless as life preserver for fish.’”
8
Renfrew opened his eyes: Nam again, left for dead, but the smells were different, the sounds too, and gradually he saw the light, and that was different.
Bamboo slats were the same, but the light was yellow and the heat was thicker and his side ached. But most different of all was the man bending over him.
Not the gray hair, long and combed straight back in one huge wave, nor the thick white mustache. Not the faded clothing. Not even the wrinkles under the jaw, along the faintly oriental eyes. None of those. It was the eyes themselves.
They were red, a flaring crimson that glowed in the aqueous light filtered and barred. They were staring into Renfrew. Renfrew closed his eyes, and the red embers winked out to darkness again.
When he awoke next, it was a perfectly ordinary old man sitting by his bed, holding a plaster made of leaves to Renfrew’s side. Renfrew noticed his own stink for the first time in years, cutting through the leaf fragrance. He made a sound. The old man’s eyes flashed crimson momentarily as they swiveled to look at him, then dulled to brown. A trick of the light, Renfrew decided.
The old man was doing something, pulling the leaf away from his side. Suddenly the pain was fire in his side, and Renfrew’s back arched.
“Easy,” the old man said. Tears blurred Renfrew’s vision, but he saw the old man was squeezing something onto his wound. “The fruit of the noni, the Indian mulberry,” the old man said softly. “Though painful, it will help the healing.” Renfrew could feel the flesh pucker together as the old man replaced the leaves. “Plantain,” he said, pressing the broad flat leaves to the wound.
“Who are you?” Renfrew asked. His voice was barely a whisper.
The old man bent low. “Just an old man,” he whispered back.
Later Renfrew asked how he’d found him. “No one uses that trail,” he said.
“Oh.” The old man smiled, showing his teeth. “I’ve seen you before. Your name is Renfrew. And I knew that boar, O’o-a-moa he was called, ‘Death Rattle.’ You were lucky.”
It was a long time later he realized that his question had not really been answered. He was sitting up, back to the thin wall, eating poi with his fingers. It was raining steadily outside, the sound of it so loud and continuous he didn’t notice it until he tried to speak.
“Where are we?”
The old man shrugged. His heavy shoulders shuddered like vulture wings. “Puu Ki. Not far from your trail on Ki’ikolu Ridge. Power lines that way. I suspend time up here. It is a good place, much mango, ti, kukui, plantain. Some old taro terraces beside the stream. Water. Pig, of course. One can live. One can live. You will have a visitor soon.”
“What’re you talking about?” Renfrew asked, though he didn’t care.
“You may call me Kalaipahoa.” He smiled again. Renfrew heard, as a whispered rasp, the words, “Kalaipahoa is poison god,” but the old man had laid his finger beside his nose, eyes red again, and his lips had not moved.
“Witch doctor,” Renfrew said stubbornly. He didn’t believe in magic.
“No.” The old man laughed. “Not a witch doctor. It’s all right, you don’t believe. Not yet. But you would like to know why Oo-a-moa attacked you, yes?” Kalaipahoa said softly. He was looking the other way, and Renfrew did not see him speak. The poison god.
“I am just kahuna.” The old man nodded. The red winked out again. “Your visitor has work for you. He is filled with purpose, your visitor. Listen, you can hear him.”
“I don’t hear anything.”
“No, no,” Kalaipahoa said. “Not with the ears. Never mind, Renfrew. He is here and I must gather some plants. Goodbye.” He got up and left.
All Renfrew heard was rain, mud trickle, pain in his side, breath in his nose. But the old man was right. The visitor came through the door without knocking.
“Hello, Renfrew,” he said. He stood in the gloom just inside the doorway, looking down at Renfrew, who nodded. “How are you?” he asked. “On the mend?” The man’s voice was hard and humorless despite the joviality of his words.
Renfrew grunted, noncommittal. The rain was loud just behind his head, hissing in the walls. He held the tin of poi close to his mouth and ate slowly, eyes half closed.
“Good,” the stranger said shortly, as if satisfied with Renfrew’s answer. He was compact and muscular, with a neat dark mustache; about Renfrew’s age. He had the look of a diver, the special tan, the indentations where mask fit, the lines around the mouth. There were lots of divers in Kauai. “Not like Vietnam, eh?” He swept his arm at the rain forest outside the window.
“No,” Renfrew said shortly. “Not like Nam.”
“So, how’s the hunting?”
Renfrew shrugged. The pain in his side flared and subsided, a flashbulb of pain.
“Heard you got a boar. Heard the boar got you, too.” The man smiled at his little joke.
Renfrew said nothing.
“Huhn,” the man grunted at last. “Well, we have more work for you.”
“Not interested.” The poi was gone; Renfrew set the can aside.
The man nodded. “The old man who saved your life is a kahuna. You know what that is? He’s a man with power, Renfrew. A healer.”
“I’m not interested, John.” Renfrew used the man’s name for the first time. “I told you before. I’m just a hunter.”
“That power could be yours,” John said. “You could study with the kahuna, learn a little magic, eh?”
“I’m not working for you anymore, John. I’m retired.”
“No. Of course, you retired, didn’t you? Imagine, though. To be able to heal with chants, herbs, native medicine. To read people’s minds at a distance. It makes you think, doesn’t it?”
“Yeah, it makes me think. How about you?”
“Oh, it makes me think, too. Listen, Renfrew, we need you, your… expertise.”
“Yeah?”
“Name your price,” John said.
“The old man knew you were coming.” Renfrew said. “He told me you had work. Was that magic?”
“Oh.” John laughed. “Probably not. He told us you were here.”
Renfrew nodded again. “What kind of job?” he asked.
9
“‘Every bird seeks its own tree— never tree the bird,’” Takamura quoted. “Thanks for coming.” He took off his sunglasses and squinted away from the bright sun as he rubbed his eyes, but an imp-grin twitched on his lips. This afternoon there were no clouds.
“The great philosopher Charles Chan?” Chazz smiled back.
“None other,” Takamura affirmed. “I’m glad you could come. This won’t be pretty, I fear.”
Chazz shrugged.
“We have too many bodies today,” Takamura went on. “Dr. Shih is busy. She’s the medical examiner here— a pathologist, really. It’s a part-time job, usually. Shall we?”
The morgue was in the basement of the hospital. Narrow casement windows of one-way glass looked across to the A & P parking lot. Only the tops of the nearest cars caught the sunlight and splashed it back through the window onto a row of glass-fronted cabinets. The glass in turn reflected light back into the white-tiled room and concealed the contents of the cabinets.
There was no one around. Only the thick formaldehyde smell of a morgue.
No one living. Three of the four tables held shrouded forms. Takamura lifted the corner of the sheet that draped the nearest with his thumb and forefinger, and grunted.
Chazz leaned against the second table. He realized it was occupied when his hand touched the body and he jerked away. He laughed nervously.
Takamura sighed, dropping the sheet. “Dr. Koenig, my statistics are shot to hell. It took a traffic accident to bring in this many people last time.”
“Excuse me.” A small woman stood in the doorway. “Lieutenant Takamura. Nice to see you again.”
“Ah,” Takamura said. “Dr. Shih.”
