Fire Knife Dancing (Jungle Beat)

by John Enright

  “You had it there for a minute.” It was a woman’s voice, speaking English. She was standing on a patch of sea-spray-browned lawn below the patio, looking up at him.

  “I was distracted by all the applause,” Apelu said, going to retrieve the dropped knife. “Who are you?”

  “My name is Asia. I live down the cliffs that way,” she said, nodding her head over her shoulder. “I was wondering what was going on over here.”

  Apelu looked west down the cliffs in the direction she had nodded. He didn’t know there were any houses down that way for at least a mile, until you got to the edge of the village of Vaitogi. He couldn’t see any houses.

  Asia was very Scandinavian-looking—tall, broad-shouldered, blonde, with weathered outdoor skin, and a half smile. From the ground up, she was wearing sturdy leather sandals, a short brightly patterned piece of lavalava material wrapped around her waist, and a faded blue work shirt with the sleeves cut off. She was neither young nor old. The sea breeze kept her long hair off her face.

  “My name is Apelu,” he said. “I’m a police officer. We are here conducting a search of the house.”

  “I thought I heard a siren earlier,” she said. She had very pale blue eyes.

  “And a gunshot?” Apelu asked.

  “No, no gunshots. The surf makes those sounds sometimes, though, in the blow holes. Is Mr. Strand all right?”

  “Oh yes. Ezra’s fine. The commissioner took him downtown for a visit, some questions.”

  “I’ve been worrying about Mr. Strand recently. He’s become so removed, so gruff, almost unfriendly.”

  “You see him often?” Apelu put the knives down on a table and walked over to the edge of the patio, sat down on its edge.

  “No.”

  “Oh.”

  “When his wife was here, sometimes I’d visit.” Asia folded her arms across her chest, cocked her head to one side, and studied him. “That’s blood all over your shirt, isn’t it? Maybe you shouldn’t play with those knives.”

  “They’re not self-inflicted wounds,” Apelu said and smiled.

  She smiled back. “Is it a new style I’m not aware of?”

  “Police chic,” he said, “badge of public service and all that. So, how long has Mrs. Strand been gone?”

  “A couple of weeks at least.”

  “Do you know where?”

  “No,” she answered matter-of-factly. “Well, Apelu, nice meeting you.” Asia stepped over and held her right hand up to Apelu, who shook it. It was a strong hand. “Good luck with your search, for whatever it is you’re looking for, and keep up the knife dance practice. I think you may have the knack. Tofa.”

  “Tofa,” Apelu said to her back as she turned and walked away. “By the way, Asia, do you have a last name?” he called out after her.

  “Yes,” she said, “several.” She waved the back of her hand at him as she stepped down off the lawn onto the rocks.

  Apelu picked up the fire knives from the patio table and put them back where he had found them in the corner of Ezra’s bunker. The captain set two men to cataloging anything of interest that was discovered in the house. The other men, including Apelu, he dismissed, telling Apelu to take the rest of the day off.

  Apelu had learned it by rote.

  “By god, you will do it the way I teach you, or I’ll cut off all your little pricks and feed them to my dog,” Seutia would yell at them from his wheelchair, trying to get close enough to whack them with the bamboo switch he brought to classes. They would all take one whack, then dance away from his reach. “Back, back, from the start, you little worthless pieces of shit.” The two wooden drum pate players would again initiate their double-time syncopation, and Apelu, Tavita, Junior, and whoever else was there would start the fire knife routine from the top. Seutia knew—it was how he had been taught and performed—that if you had the opening down and knew how you were going to end it, the middle part would take care of itself. For each dance, the beginning set up whatever you would invent later. It was like a philosophy of life for which dancing was only a metaphor.

  Seutia was right. He was a good teacher. Apelu had cried for hours when they buried him, missed his wisdom and his whacks. Apelu had been only ten then, but now, more than a quarter of a century later, Seutia was still a regular in his dreams. He was scolding him, telling him to keep his back straight, how to open his body to the audience, how to be a servant both to them and to the dance itself, how to make it all about the dance, not about himself, and how to take care of his fire knives.

  “Remember, you are nothing,” he would tell them. “Everyone’s eyes are only on your flames, make them sing.”

  Part of Apelu’s current routine was writing crime reports. He enjoyed doing them and he liked to write them when everything was still fresh in his head. So he didn’t take the rest of the day off; it was still early in the afternoon. He got a ride home in one of the squad cars and while the driver waited—snoozed, actually—he showered, shampooed, and changed his clothes. He put his ruined shirt in a plastic bag and buried it in the garbage, woke the driver, and they drove back downtown to headquarters.

  As he was writing up his report, it struck Apelu that if the shotgun was still anywhere on Ezra’s premises it was probably in the kennel, the one place they hadn’t searched. He didn’t put that in his report, though, because it would just make them look stupid. It would be easy enough to check the next day—if anyone wanted to walk into that cage with those dogs—hungry dogs, by then. He also didn’t mention the captain’s proficiency with lock-picking tools, or even the fact that they had entered that room before the search warrant had arrived. Crime reports were meant to be helpful constructive tools, not potentially damaging confessions.

  Ezra had been booked on charges of reckless endangerment and unlawful discharge of a firearm, and would be spending at least the night in jail. He still claimed it wasn’t him who did the shooting. Apelu carefully block-printed out his report and turned it in to the captain, who again told him to go home. He did, or at least he headed that way in his pickup—west along the coast road—when he left town. But his mind kept returning to those dogs and how hungry they must be getting as the day slid toward sundown. There would be no one there to feed them, to make sure they had enough water. So, at Futiga he turned back on the golf course road, and took the turn onto the road out to Piapiatele. His old Ranger pickup truck with the big plantation tires was more suited to that road than the made-for-freeways police cruiser. On his tape deck he was playing an old slack-key Hawaiian rock-and-roll tape by Moondance. At the last bush store he stopped and bought himself a large, cold bottle of Steinlager. Maybe after taking care of the dogs he would sit on the cliffs and watch the sun set. It had been a fairly nonroutine day; he could use some downtime.

  The sun was still a ways above the horizon when Apelu pulled up to Ezra’s chain and turned off the engine. He took his cold bottle of Steinlager with him and walked toward the back of the house. No barking greeted him. In the now nearly horizontal brassy sunlight he could see that the kennel was empty. His first impulse was to freeze and look around himself. He followed that impulse, switching his grip on the Steinlager bottle to make it a club. The thought of those dogs out there foraging for dinner was a bit unnerving. But he was all alone, and when he walked up to the cage he saw that the gate had been relatched. Animals don’t tend to be so tidy when they manage a jail break.

  Apelu went into the kennel. At least he could search for the shotgun without having to figure out what to do about the dogs. He had hoped that their routine would be to get fed around this time of day, and that he could find their food, or some food—maybe those T-bone steaks—and feed them so that they would have reason to trust him enough to share their kennel with him while he searched it. No need now. There was a strong doggie smell, not unpleasant, but the kennel was quite clean. He searched it. No shotgun, though on a shelf under the eaves of the house he found a partly empty box of shotgun shells. He latched the gate behind hi
mself when he left, leaving the box of shells where he had found it.

  Apelu found a good seat on the cliff top above the surf. It was a natural cup in the rock filled with coarse sand that faced more west than south. People had probably been coming to sit here for thousands of years, he thought, a perfect spot. He opened his bottle of Steinlager with a church key on his key chain. The first swig of beer relaxed him. Below him the big waves built up white heads to slam against the cliff face. Farther out as they rose in height, the slanting acetylene sun turned them momentarily transparent turquoise before they broke. That was the waves’ routine—beauty and the burst. He looked west along the high, broken coastline, where the scene was repeated in cove after foamy cove with rhythmic hypnotic regularity, no two explosions the same. It was comforting—nothing human-made in sight, no lights besides the sun setting into the sea. He watched for the famous green flash as the sun vanished, its light now living only in the clouds, but was again denied it. Far off in the distance he heard a deep-chested dog’s howl, then another join it a half octave higher in harmony, making, along with the waves’ tympani, some sort of nature chorus. By the time he finished his Steinlager only the highest clouds still held the light, and he stumbled in the dark on the way back to his truck.

  CHAPTER 3

  IN REALITY, AMERICAN Samoa’s identity crisis should have been much more pronounced than it seemed. A chain of six tiny islands with a total land area of seventy-six square miles, for more than a hundred years now it had been a “possession” of the United States of America, five thousand open ocean miles away. It was the only piece of US territory in the southern hemisphere. The relationship never had made any sense. It was just one of those uncorrected accidents of history, the result of a minor tactical move in nineteenth-century gunboat diplomacy that had remained so far removed from the great powers’ attention and so unimportant as to never get set back right again.

  For fifty years the place had been run by the US Navy as if it were a ship with an unfortunate cargo of natives. Then the distant territory’s administration had been ironically transferred to the Department of the Interior, the folks who already oversaw the rest of America’s reservations. Traditionally, the governorship had been bestowed upon naval commanders who couldn’t be trusted with a real, sinkable ship and, later, to hack redneck politicians who had been voted out of office back in Arkansas or East Texas. The result was eighty years of short-term, appointed, white male governors of varying degrees of racist assurance and administrative acumen; they were rarely stellar. Only in the last generation had American Samoans been enfranchised to elect their own governor and legislature, though the Secretary of the Interior still held veto power over everything. Technically, the islands were “an unincorporated and unorganized” territory of the greater USA. Apelu had never been sure exactly what that meant, but it did sort of explain—or at least sum up—a lot of his feelings about his home and its governance. He had been born here on Tutuila, the main island, and for all but ten years of his adolescence and young adulthood he had lived here. He had no plans to go anywhere else.

  But America’s backhanded adoption of the islands had led to a strange set of circumstances when it came to allegiances. It was like a child whose father is palangi—Caucasian—and whose mother is Samoan. The father is benevolent, speaks English, and pays the bills, but he is seldom home and doesn’t understand basic stuff about how everything fits together. The mother speaks Samoan and makes each day work. She is always there and knows all the gossip and why everything happens or doesn’t happen. Whom do you love more? Your father or your mother?

  Apelu was a good enough example, even though he wasn’t afakasi but full-blooded Samoan. At work—a palangi job being a cop—he wore palangi clothes; at home Samoan, a simple lavalava and no shirt. At formal affairs these styles clashed together, and current custom dictated a tailored gabardine skirt and suit jacket with a wide colorful tie. Although the vast majority of his conversations took place in Samoan, most of his reading and writing was done in English. His plantation supplied much of what his family ate, but for lunch he had palangi fast food. Sina could use old home remedies to fix most of what his kids came down with, but the hospital was always there as a scary alternative. And from there the divide went deeper into the order of things on the list of what’s really important, into what you would fight for, whom you would choose to forgive, what children mean, what a chief is—things that palangis would never understand.

  Of course there was the other side—the fact that the standard of living here was considerably higher than in any other islands in the region, from New Zealand to Hawaii. Thanks to the US dollar, US aid, Pago Pago had become a sort of border town—a town on the relatively richer side of the border. A frontier town surrounded by ocean. The lure of America drew the strivers and climbers from places as close as Western Samoa and Tonga, and as far away as Korea and the Philippines. That was a big reason why the population of the territory had increased threefold in Apelu’s short lifetime, nudging up toward sixty thousand people now.

  Ezra’s bunker had become a warehouse of commercial treasure, but, as in the kitchen, volume not diversity was the guiding principle. Ezra seemed to deal only in case lots. The list that the CID guys had drawn up of what was in there was fascinating in a way that was new to Apelu. Crazed consumption, but something else too—a disconnect. Among other hoarded items there were cases of Rothmans cigarettes, but neither Ezra nor Leilani smoked; there were no ashtrays in the house. Cases of tampons, though Leilani was decades past menopause. Cases of disposable diapers and motor oil, but no babies and no vehicles. Cases of both blank and recorded CDs—none were opened and there was not a single CD player in the place. The recorded CDs were packaged commercially in shrink-wrapped lots of twenty, each lot a single album by a different group or performer, all island sounds.

  The morning after Ezra’s arrest the captain had given Apelu the search warrant list to see what he could make of it. Ezra seemed an unlikely suspect for a smuggler, but that would be the most likely explanation for such a cache. The cigarettes especially spoke to that. Rothmans were a New Zealand brand made in Western Samoa. Without all the import and territorial taxes, they were much more profitable when smuggled in. Apelu wasn’t sure about the other items on the list. Maybe there was a big enough difference in the prices of tampons and Pampers and motor oil between the two Samoas to make their untaxed transfer profitable. Apelu didn’t know. Or maybe they were just stolen goods. In order to find that out they would need more identifying numbers than the officers had written down, box lot numbers and such.

  Apelu pointed that fact out to the captain, and shortly thereafter he was on his way back out to Ezra’s place to take a second look. As Apelu was leaving headquarters the assistant commissioner stopped him and asked him to wait up a minute. There was someone here from the attorney general’s office to go with him. Apelu gave the assistant commissioner an incredulous look and said “What?” Normally the AG’s office would not be involved until a crime report was submitted to them with a recommendation for prosecution.

  “Just wait,” the assistant commissioner said. “And cooperate.”

  “Yes, sir,” Apelu said and shrugged. More irregular bullshit.

  The young man was small, compact, but very well put together, with the solid, muscle-rounded shoulders and light gait of an athlete, as brown as Apelu but slender, not a Samoan. He introduced himself as Matthew Sparks. “But everyone calls me Mati,” he said with a distinct Kiwi accent. He had a youthful smile. He was carrying a camera bag. “Pleased to meet you, Apelu. I’ve heard about you.”

  All the way to Piapiatele, as Apelu played road solitaire with the potholes, Mati talked, but Apelu didn’t listen very closely. Mati talked about himself. It was as if he had some nervous need to confirm his existence by reciting his past. What Apelu registered of the recitation was that Mati had been born in Niue—one of those really small and isolated islands somewhere to the south—but had grown up i
n a Polynesian ghetto in Auckland. Through a cousin in California he had parlayed his natural ability in soccer into a scholarship at USC, where he had majored in criminology. The job at the attorney general’s office as an investigator seemed like a natural choice—back in the islands, his field. He was single and lived alone in an apartment. The only thing wrong with the story was that Mati was older than he initially appeared. And, though his manner and speech were lively, his eyes somehow never got fully involved in the fun. His glance would patrol and then focus, like someone on a conning tower, focusing on a house or a person by the road, almost as if he were taking photographs with his eyes. He would take long looks up every dirt side road as he kept talking, turning his head and leaning back as they passed.

  They were an hour or so into their work at Ezra’s—luckily, Mati shut up when he worked—when Apelu heard the dogs. It sounded like they were barking a greeting to the house. The sound got louder, and Apelu walked out to the patio. Coming across the lava field, a straining leash in either hand, was Asia. She was leaning back as she walked, pulled forward by the dogs’ enthusiasm. They were still a ways off. Apelu waved and the dogs barked louder. Asia jerked them in, and they calmed down a bit. Just as they were coming up onto the lawn Mati came out onto the patio and stood beside Apelu. The dogs went off again. Mati bolted for the sliding glass door into the house with a “What the fuck!” and swiftly slid the door closed behind him.