Fire Knife Dancing (Jungle Beat)

by John Enright

  This time it was an old Simon and Garfunkel song that had nothing to do with what was going on. The chords of the song ran through his head, simple chords. He played them on an air guitar even after he’d forgotten the rest of the lyrics. It sure was quiet out here in the middle of the day.

  After the first squad car pulled up, quite an entourage of emergency vehicles began to arrive, including an ambulance, backed up one behind another on the two-rut road. The EMS guys cleaned the blood off Apelu, including some spots on his back and shoulders he hadn’t been aware of. His shirt was ruined. As a detective sergeant, Apelu dressed in street clothes, and the shirt he had put on that morning was one of his favorites—a blue-and-white cotton/polyester mix with the skyline of Manhattan on it. It had been a birthday present from Sina. She would be pissed that he had trashed it. It was supposed to be one of his “good” shirts, not a work shirt. She had even said something about that when he’d left the house that morning. Once more he would have to put up with her being right.

  When Apelu climbed out of the ambulance, he was surprised to see the commissioner’s black Chrysler SUV with its midnight-tinted windows pull up at the back of the line of vehicles. Both the commissioner and the assistant commissioner emerged from it. Then he saw the guns. Firearms were not part of an American Samoan policeman’s standard equipment. They were supposed to prevail without them, and besides, none of the officers were trained to use such weapons. But from the back of the commissioner’s SUV the assistant commissioner issued three assault rifles and twice as many handguns. It would seem that the commissioner—or maybe even the governor—had decided that Ezra taking a potshot at Apelu’s squad car was a serious enough event that red-alert precautions were in order. The officers with the weapons were loading and checking them. Everyone was grim. Except for the metal-on-metal clicks of the weapons the day was almost as quiet as before, but without birdsong.

  Everyone had been issued Kevlar vests as well, black with LHPD in large yellow letters on the back. LHPD stood for Laguna Honda Police Department. The vests were recycled and had never before been used by anyone in this department. Some of the officers needed assistance donning and adjusting them. All this for Ezra? Maybe there was something Apelu didn’t know about.

  Apelu walked over to the commissioner, who was talking with Apelu’s captain, the commander of the CID, which was the police department’s Criminal Investigation Division. The captain was looking down, still fumbling with the buckles on his bulletproof vest. He was sweating. Apelu stopped a respectful distance away, so that he couldn’t be accused of listening in. Apelu realized that—in his now red, white, and blue shirt—he sort of stood out among all the dark-blue uniformed officers in their black vests.

  The commissioner saw him. “Sergeant Soifua, should you be walking around?”

  “I’m okay, Commissioner. Sorry about the car.”

  “What exactly happened here, Soifua?”

  “Well, after the complaint, the captain here sent me out to bring in the weapon and get Ezra’s side of the story. I drove up to that chain that he’s got across the road and PA’d for him to come and talk. He came out with his shotgun and shot the squad car. Then he walked back to his house.” Apelu knew that the commissioner liked things kept short and to the point. “That’s about it. Oh, and he’s got a couple of really good-looking guard dogs. Is there something I don’t know here, sir? I mean, it’s only Ezra. Has anybody tried to call him on the phone and just ask him to come out without his gun?”

  The commissioner looked at the captain, who shrugged and shook his head and looked around.

  “Why don’t you try that, sir?” Apelu said to the commissioner. “It’s bad shit, but it’s only Ezra, and who knows where Leilani is at.”

  Apelu knew that the commissioner had a soft spot for Leilani, who always came and danced for free at his benefits and fund-raisers. The commissioner called his secretary on his cell phone to find Ezra and Leilani’s phone number. The commissioner called the number and looked down the road in the direction of the house he was calling. A surprised look came on his face.

  “Talofa, Ezra.” The commissioner spoke in Samoan. “Ezra, this is Commissioner Papali`i. How are you? Ezra, I’m just down the road from your place. I was wondering if I could have a word with you. It has to do with some gunfire around your house.” Pause. “Oh, I see.” Pause. “Well, Ezra, how about I come up to the house in a bit, and we can talk about it? And, by the way, Ezra, how is Leilani, that sweet girl of yours?” Longer pause. “Oka, oka! You don’t say? Well, you know how women are sometimes, especially the pretty ones. Say, Ezra, I’ll be up to see you in a couple of minutes.”

  Apelu gestured with his hands to the commissioner, who covered the mouthpiece of the cell phone and looked at Apelu.

  “Tell him no gun, no dogs,” Apelu said. He hated to think of those animals getting shot up for nothing.

  “Oh, and Ezra, please—fa`amolemole—just come out yourself. No guns, no dogs. Just a talk. Thank you, Ezra. Fa`afetai tele lave. Fa.”

  The commissioner stood there in silence a few seconds after clicking off. “Ezra says it wasn’t him that did the shooting.” He looked at Apelu.

  “It was either him or his twin, Commissioner,” Apelu said.

  “He also said Leilani wasn’t there, that she was off in Apia spending his money.”

  The assistant commissioner was holding out a Kevlar vest for the commissioner. The commissioner tried to put it on, slowly and with assistance from the assistant commissioner, who was a small man, maybe half the commissioner’s mass; it was a sort of Laurel and Hardy routine. It didn’t work. The commissioner was of a much greater girth than anyone who would have ever been allowed to work for the Laguna Honda Police Department.

  “Screw it,” he said, tossing the vest aside. “Let’s go.”

  The commissioner’s car was the last in line, so he got in the front squad car, which crawled down the road toward Ezra’s. The armed officers tried to spread out in a line on either side of the road but couldn’t because the pandanus was so dense. They regrouped in the ruts behind the squad car. Apelu walked with them, the only one unarmed and unarmored. When they got to the spot where Apelu had stopped earlier, they stopped too, and the armed officers fanned out along the low lava stone wall that marked what Ezra deemed to be his property line. The assistant commissioner got out of the squad car with a bullhorn and approached the chain. No dogs. Good, thought Apelu. He had walked up to stand beside the rear window of the driver’s side, where the commissioner was seated. The assistant commissioner stopped at the chain and called out through the bullhorn in very polite high-chiefly Samoan. He asked Ezra to come out and have a fono—a meeting—with his high chief, the commissioner.

  Ezra’s gray head crested the rise between the house and the chain. Along the line of the wall Apelu could hear weapons being cocked. Ezra was wearing a dark-green-and-blue aloha shirt and a pair of black slacks. He was not carrying the shotgun. His hands were empty. As he approached, he waved to the commissioner in the squad car. The commissioner got out of the squad car and went to meet him, stepping over the chain. They shook hands and then stood and chatted for a while. Then the commissioner invited Ezra to come with him. After they had passed over the chain, the assistant commissioner apologetically and quickly patted Ezra down. The commissioner walked Ezra back to the SUV at the back of the line of vehicles, and they drove away.

  CHAPTER 2

  EZRA STRAND DOES not sound like a Samoan name except to Samoans. The last name had been in the islands for as long as the white man had been—five or six generations. And his first name was biblical—one of the prophets, wasn’t it? A book in the Old Testament. It wasn’t uncommon for Samoans to have biblical names. Apelu’s name, in fact, was the Samoanized version of Abel.

  The first Strand had been a missionary. One of his sons had married a Samoan and opened a store on Beach Road in Apia on the neighboring island of Upolu. That was back when Beach Road was about the only
road there and there weren’t any roads at all on any of the other islands. It became a pretty big clan as the family tree grew. Intermarriages with other afakasi, or half-caste, families kept most of them a shade or two lighter than full-blooded Samoans. They enjoyed the advantages of their small, merchant class in a mainly subsistence society—advantages like New Zealand educations and a taste for imported luxuries. Ezra’s father had run an interisland shipping line and built a mansion at Vailima near where Robert Louis Stevenson had lived in the hills above Apia.

  Leilani was also afakasi, but of a much more mysterious blend. She claimed to be Samoan. Her name was Samoan, and she spoke the language well. But unlike most Samoans, she never bragged about nor even mentioned her forebears. She seemed uninterested in her lineage. She had been born in Hawaii, and her slim figure and fine facial bones testified to an ancestral ethnic mix that included Portuguese, Japanese, and Polynesian. One didn’t learn much about Leilani from Leilani. There were children somewhere off-island, grandchildren. If Ezra’s life was public scrapbook material, Leilani’s was a locked and hidden diary. She had danced professionally all her life, since she was a little girl. It was what she knew of life. That and Ezra. Apelu realized that if he went through the list of the people he liked, a shared trait among them was that they spoke little of themselves. Leilani led the list in that respect.

  After Ezra drove away with the commissioner, a discussion ensued between the assistant commissioner and the CID captain about whether or not they should continue on to the house and secure the shotgun as evidence. The assistant commissioner wanted a search warrant. The captain didn’t agree. He argued it was a crime scene—attempted murder as he gestured toward Apelu—and that they should be allowed to proceed, seize the weapon involved, and secure the crime scene. Those two liked arguing about things like that, pretending that they were lawyers. In the end there was a compromise. The assistant commissioner called downtown on his cell phone to request a search warrant to be issued, and the captain, with the few CID guys, went on to the house, just to find the shotgun and wait on the warrant for a proper search.

  Yeah, right.

  The assistant commissioner had taken back all the weapons and vests after Ezra had been driven away, but Apelu asked the assistant commissioner to reissue one of the handguns to him. He was thinking about the dogs. Apelu reminded the assistant commissioner, who was a prissy, officious sort, that he was one of the few officers in the department with clearance to use a weapon due to his SFPD training. The assistant commissioner gave him a gun, a big automatic that Apelu loaded and strapped on. It felt very strange wearing a gun again, something he’d done every workday for so many years back in San Francisco. He had forgotten how heavy it was. He hoped he didn’t have to use it.

  As they approached the house, the dogs started barking, deep barrel-chested barks, but they sounded more like questions rather than the life-threatening barks of before. The barking was scary enough, though, to make everyone stop in their tracks. Apelu unholstered the gun and clicked off the safety. The sound was coming from the back of the house. Apelu walked slowly toward the sound while the captain and the other officers waited. The dogs were in a roofed and fenced kennel. They barked louder when they saw him, but it was more like they were happy to see him than angry. No foam.

  Apelu thumbed the safety back on and holstered the gun. “Yo, puppies, howzit?” he said and made the kissing sound that always calmed down his dogs. The black one, a male, continued to stand and bark, but the lion-colored one, a female, sat down and started licking her privates. They weren’t wild or unmanageable monsters. They were well-trained and reasonable animals, which meant that they had been ordered to attack Apelu earlier. He called out an all-clear to the others, whose arrival set off a more excited bout of barking.

  “They’re secure,” the captain said. “Let’s leave them alone.” And they all went around to the front of the house.

  “Those were dogs?” one of the officers asked. “I didn’t know they made models that big.”

  The front door and the kitchen door were locked, but on the patio Apelu found one of the sliding glass doors wide open. Inside, the house was not as he remembered it. A plywood wall had been constructed diagonally across the long living room. Some native tapas and prints had been pinned to the wall, but it was unpainted, unfinished. It gave what was left of the room an under-construction feel. At the front, angled end of the wall was a single door. The room had a deserted sense and smell. A pot of past-fragrant potpourri sat on a lonely coffee table. A piece of lace was draped over a stuffed chair by the cliffside windows.

  The wall took a turn at Apelu’s left, into a narrow passageway back along the patio windows that led to the kitchen and the bathroom. Midway along the passageway wall was a locked door. The wall didn’t ascend all the way to the peak-beamed ceilings, but was about ten feet high. The back of the house had an even older smell of mold and things left unmoved for a long time, a hint of sick sweetness—a male geriatric smell.

  They searched the kitchen and its storerooms first for the shotgun. In a back hallway they found cases and cases of two-liter bottles of cranberry juice. One storeroom was filled with unopened tins of sao crackers and cardboard boxes of canned peaches. A freezer in the breezeway was packed with frozen T-bone steaks. But no shotgun. Two of the officers were about to break down the door in the plywood wall when the captain motioned them aside, pulled a small ring of elbowed wires from his pocket, and promptly picked the lock. Apelu couldn’t remember the last time he had been surprised by anything the captain had done.

  Beyond the plywood wall, the old-man smell was stronger. The newly walled room had been ceilinged as well. The room was windowless and dark. Its air was heavy and still. The captain found a light switch that turned on a fluorescent overhead fixture. The room was like an odd-shaped bunker with two original doors in the farthest wall. The room was a warehouse of unopened boxes and shrink-wrapped goods of all kinds.

  To what extent does what we own, what we end up embedding ourselves within, define us? Apelu wondered. He drove a ten-year-old pickup truck, had a job as a cop, a wife and four kids under fifteen. He lived on family land in a house that his father had built and that he had added onto. Apelu owned three pairs of shoes and had a ridge-top plantation of bananas, coconut, and taro to care for. He rarely got to choose what was playing on their one TV set. He still had two guitars, one strung with steel strings. But was that him? A lot of him seemed to escape through that rough net of his few possessions. He would still be himself without his shoes, without his old guitars, his job. It was memory, not things, that held his self together—memories from the past and obligations to the future. Those things defined him, not his possessions, poor as they were. Would it be different if he were rich?

  At the San Francisco Police Academy, Apelu had been taught the Rules of Evidence, how lawyers could make or break a case on the most pointless details of how or when something had been seen or heard. It didn’t matter if what had been seen or heard was obviously accurate. If all the rules hadn’t been followed, the evidence was inadmissible. The mere fact that there were rules made a game out of the whole thing. If the ref didn’t see you step out of bounds, you got to keep the ball. In any event, most of Apelu’s fellow CID officers hadn’t had much training in the finer points of such rules, so it was not a shared concern when they entered Ezra’s inner sanctums. Curiosity was the driving force. They weren’t looking for just the weapon any longer; they were just looking. And the weapon, their excuse for being there, wasn’t there.

  Apelu suggested to the captain that they should withdraw and wait for the search warrant. By now the other officers had discovered that one of the other doors led to a bedroom with walls papered with old Playboy centerfolds. The captain agreed and pulled everyone back to the patio. Then, to keep the men busy, he set them to searching the grounds and the cliff for the shotgun. “Need that weapon,” he said to them.

  They didn’t find it. Word that the sear
ch warrant had been issued arrived an hour or so later, and they went through the rest of the house. No shotgun, no shotgun shells. There was an illegal handgun—all handguns were illegal in the territory—a twenty-two caliber, but no bullets for that either. On the floor beside the bed in Ezra’s bedroom Apelu found the white shirt and khaki shorts Ezra had been wearing earlier. As Apelu suspected, the door that opened from the sunny front of the living room led to Leilani’s bedroom, which from the look and the feel of it had not been occupied recently. But it was neat, with no signs of anything unusual.

  In a corner of Ezra’s bunker-like room they found a pair of dancers’ fire knives. Light, polished, and nicely balanced, they looked as if they had never been used. Apelu took them out onto the patio and hesitantly started turning and twirling them. He tried a little three-turn toss and caught them cleanly coming down. It had been a dozen years at least since he’d performed, but the muscle memory was still there. As he played with the knives, feeling muscles that he hadn’t heard from in a while, he had to laugh to himself. Of course Samoans would dance with knives. Of course they would set them on fire and toss and twist them around their bodies. They liked dancing with long, sharp, flaming personal weapons so well, liked the self-image so well—the warrior for whom danger was just a welcome playmate—that they had made it a traditional cultural feature of their dance performances. After all, these were people, his people, who fashioned cricket bats like war clubs and had made a contact sport out of shark catching. While everywhere else in the Pacific the natives caught sharks the sensible way: with a pole, line, and hook. In Samoa, the style was to attract the shark to your canoe—maybe by splashing your hand around in the water—then slip a hangman’s noose around its snout up to the dorsal fin, jerk it shut, and yank the shark’s head out of the water to beat its brains in with a club that might pass as a cricket bat. Great fun. Try it sometime while balancing in a slender outrigger canoe about the same size as the shark. Fire knife dancing was a natural up-on-the-beach progression from that, as natural as the thrills of rugby or football. You had a weapon in your hand, for one thing. Apelu executed a few slow leg passes and another, higher toss, but he misjudged it on the catch, and the knife hit the patio with a clatter and skittered away on the flagstones.