by John Enright
“Nick, Nora,” Asia called out to the dogs, pulling them in. Then, “Hello, Apelu. Still searching?”
“Still searching, Asia. What are you doing?”
“Being dragged around by these dogs,” she said and laughed. The black dog had gotten up to Apelu’s legs and was sniffing him.
“So, this is Nick, I gather,” Apelu said as held out the back of his hand for the dog to smell.
“That’s Nick,” she said.
Nick licked Apelu’s hand, wrist, and forearm with one swipe of his big tongue and became uninterested, looking instead toward the glass door from behind which Mati was watching them.
“And this is Nora,” Asia said, patting the blonde dog’s side. “Those are my names for them. They have Samoan names but I can’t remember them. They seem to like Nick and Nora. I was just taking them out for a walk but they wanted to come home. Is Mr. Strand back?”
“No, he’s not, I’m afraid. Still in custody.” Apelu scratched Nick behind his ears and he promptly rolled over to have his huge chest scratched. “You came and got them yesterday?”
“They were sounding awful lonesome, and they hadn’t been fed, so they came home with me.”
“Well, they look happy enough now.”
“They’re sweethearts,” Asia said. “But at my place I have to keep them tied up. They’ll be happier here in their kennel where at least they can walk around.”
“But without your company,” Apelu said, and then he suddenly realized that since the start of their conversation they had both been speaking Samoan. He looked at Asia.
“Ioe,” she said, yes. Then in English, “I’ll just put them back in their kennel and let you get back to your work. What are you searching for?”
“Reasons,” Apelu said, “just reasons.”
On the way back to headquarters, on the coast road approaching town, coming into the bay, Apelu pulled off onto a gravel turn out at one of the points that stuck out into the sea and turned off the engine. Mati had been silent most of the way back. “What?” he said now, looking back at the passing traffic.
“Matu`u sina,” Apelu said. “Heavy omen. We’ll wait here awhile.” He pulled a pack of Marlboro Light 100s out of his pocket and lit one. He offered one to Mati, who refused with a wave of his hand.
“What’s that you said—matu`u something?” Mati asked.
“A white reef heron. What’s the English word for it? Oh yeah, an albino reef heron, all white. Real ones are always slate gray. It’s been following us. Look.” Apelu indicated with his eyes where Mati’s eyes should look, and there, about a foot above the breaking waves, a good-sized, wide-winged, crook-necked, snow-white bird cruised past them then turned back and alighted upon a wet black boulder just off their point. It didn’t look right at them. But then that was part of the story why the reef heron had become Apelu’s clan’s totem bird—that it didn’t have to be looking at you to see what you were doing. Matu’u was a part of their extended family that lived in the nonhuman animate world. “We’ll wait, see what happens.”
Mati looked from Apelu to the bird then back to Apelu. “Okay,” he said. “Whatever you say.” Then silence as Apelu smoked and watched. “Those things aren’t good for you, you know.”
“So I’ve heard,” Apelu said. In Apelu’s clan whenever you saw a matu`u you acknowledged it, paid attention to it. He had heard of the white one—there were stories about it—but he had never before met it. He must pay very close attention. A wave broke on the rock where the white one was standing, but it didn’t rise up in the air as most birds would. It let the surf froth wash around its feet and legs and remained unmoved. It turned its yellow dagger beak so that it was pointed directly at Apelu, and then it turned back to profile, paused a second, and then with a snakelike motion of its neck took off. Apelu flicked the butt of his cigarette out his window, started up the squad car, and pulled back onto the road, following the matu`u sina, which soon turned out to sea and vanished between wave tops.
The break came on the Rothmans. The case lot numbers Apelu had copied down from Ezra’s hoard immediately preceded the case lot numbers on smuggled cases that Customs had intercepted a few months earlier. Customs had checked with authorities in Western Samoa and had found out that those cases had been reported stolen. So that solved that quandary—they were both stolen and smuggled. And that put the rest of the items in Ezra’s stash in the suspicious column as well.
Tracking down the paperwork had taken a couple of days, by which time Ezra had had his initial court appearance on the weapons charges, and bail had been set at five thousand dollars. But Ezra had refused to pay the bail and was still in the correctional facility. Apelu arranged to interview him there. Ezra had also refused to hire a lawyer, so the court had appointed an assistant public defender to represent him. She was late. When Ezra was brought into the interview room he was wearing a faded cotton lavalava and an equally old short-sleeve shirt with buttons missing. He was barefoot. He refused to speak English. This was a problem because the assistant public defender, a mousy, unpleasant young woman only a year or two out of law school, was palangi and didn’t speak Samoan. She refused Apelu’s offer to act as translator because of his “bias.” Same for any of the guards. The warden was finally sent for, and he agreed to translate, and she accepted, under protest.
Ezra’s name was no longer Ezra. He insisted upon being addressed by his long Samoan name, a title that had been conferred upon him decades before in Western Samoa. It was a title Apelu was unfamiliar with. The assistant public defender had trouble with the name change, but Ezra wouldn’t answer to anything else. Apelu had to spell it out for her. It was fourteen or fifteen letters long, depending on whether you counted a glottal stop as a letter.
Ezra denied that he lived at Piapiatele. His address was the village outside of Apia where his title originated. He knew nothing about the contents of the house. Why should he? He didn’t live there. When asked about the whereabouts of his wife, Leilani, he claimed that his wife had died years before and that her name wasn’t Leilani but Dorothea. Of course, he knew nothing about any shotgun. Both Apelu and the warden accorded Ezra the respect due to an older titled man. His lawyer was dumbfounded and incredulous until she realized she might have a diminished-capacity defense being handed to her and promptly drew a close to the interview.
After Ezra and his lawyer—whom Ezra had wholly ignored—had left, Apelu and the warden were left alone.
The warden chuckled. “Who would have thought old man Strand could pull off such a genuine Apia chief performance?” he said.
“Pretty convincing,” Apelu said.
“I’ll have him moved over to cellblock C with the more permanent inmates. He’ll get more privileges and respect over there, and it looks like he may be with us for a while.”
“That’s good,” Apelu said. “I’ll stop by now and then to see if he needs anything. He doesn’t seem to have any family here.”
“Crazy Ezra,” the warden said and shook his head.
On his way back to headquarters Apelu thought about crazy people. There were a few true local sociopaths locked up permanently at the correctional facility. Then there was the crazy cleaning lady, who spent her days feverishly weeding and picking up trash from selected areas in the neighborhood of the governor’s house, talking incessantly to herself. Apelu had noticed that recently she had adopted a stretch of beach by a stream mouth near the yacht club, which was clear not only of debris and broken glass, but also of all stones. She had assembled a small, makeshift lean-to for herself there beneath a fau tree. There was the crazed slow-motion jogger in secondhand boots that didn’t fit, layers of dirt-dingy clothes, sunglasses, a hat you wouldn’t want to touch, and, recently, a white cardboard cup clenched between his teeth covering his nose. Every day he performed a high-stepping pantomime of slow-mo running up and down the sidewalks of downtown. There were the crazy walkers—all men. Two were shoeless, shirtless Samoans dressed only in soiled lavalavas—one who wand
ered, immersed in an endless unfriendly dialogue with no one, and one who strode in silence, encased in inner fierceness, as if he was in a battle he could never quite catch up to. There was even a crazy palangi walker, a slight young man with sandy hair, always in sandals, shorts, and a clean T-shirt, who could be seen at almost any time of day walking the coast roads. No one seemed to know him. His gaze never wavered from six feet in front of his next step. He always wore an almost-empty schoolboy’s backpack. If he talked to himself, all of the voices were kept inside his head.
None of these people were dangerous. They passed ignored, unbothered, and uncommented upon. They were part of the landscape. When one of them vanished, they were missed, and people would mention their disappearance as if a favorite tree had come down. Stuka was gone—their harmless, gaunt, giant town drunk. And the old white-haired, white-bearded, brain-busted Vietnam vet, whom the kids had called Captain Whacko because he would spend hours at a time just standing up to his beard in the waters off the yacht club beach. He had died a lonely death. People used to wait to see if, when he emerged, he would have any clothes on or not. Sweet, birth-addled Sarge, who, dressed in a metal-enhanced Boy Scout uniform, would open the door for, greet, and salute every patron going into and out of the bank, had been given almost a chief’s funeral when he died. Everyone missed his cheerful salutes. All of these crazies were, or had been, just themselves, played out in full in the public sphere. They were left alone, admired almost for their dedication to being themselves. No one tried to change them, medicate them, or put them away somewhere. No one tried to “feel their pain” because such a leap of imagination seemed presumptuous and wholly unnecessary. They were who they were.
Back in the SFPD, the deranged—or whatever you were currently supposed to call them—had made up a significant portion of Apelu’s clientele. The city was a magnet for them. They were not only strange; they were strangers, unlike here where they were more like family—maybe not his, but somebody’s family. Like Ezra—the scion of a famous family, but, just as important, Leilani’s husband. Family was everything here in Samoa. Family came first, then village. You, as a person, came somewhere down the list.
CHAPTER 4
SINA DIDN’T LIKE it. Tough. Apelu was packing and Sina was in the kitchen, going musu. Musu is Samoan for that state of mind and that demeanor that says, “If you want what is best for everybody, you’d better leave me alone.” It was a sort of silent hostility. There wasn’t any one word in English for it; it was part description, part warning, part excuse. Everyone got to go musu sometimes. It was always best to leave them alone. Apelu had borrowed a many-zippered athletic bag from Sanele, his oldest son, because he had no luggage. He also didn’t have that much to pack. But he would only be gone a night or two. A squad car was waiting.
The assistant commissioner had decided that it would be a good idea for Apelu to go to Apia and follow up in person any further connections between what had been found in Ezra’s house and what the Western Samoan authorities had on similar stolen or smuggled goods. The Apia cops didn’t want to do all that checking, and, besides, it would be a good opportunity for Apelu to find out how they worked over there, what they might know that the department here didn’t. It had taken a couple of days, but the assistant commissioner had persuaded the commissioner and the CID captain that it was a good idea and a bona fide use of travel funds and manpower. The assistant commissioner, however, wasn’t the one who had to convince Sina. Apelu knew better than to get close to her for a good-bye hug or kiss. As he was leaving, he stopped at the door to the kitchen and told her that he would call her from his hotel room in Apia and give her the number.
“Don’t bother,” was all she said in a voice that could have been a telephone recording.
What does she think I am doing? Apelu wondered as he left. Running off to Apia on the department’s dollar for a one-night floozy fling? From Sina’s farewell comment, Apelu figured this would be a class-orange musu, one grade below the rarely reached top level when the red magma of hostility boiled hot enough to crack through the catatonic shield, and furniture, windows, and appliances would get broken in the eruption. But a class-orange musu could go on for three days. Apelu thought about extending his stay in Apia until it blew over. Sina would be okay then—quiet, a little chagrined, and vaguely apologetic for showing so much emotion. After seventeen years of marriage, Apelu thought he knew the pattern well enough.
In recent years, though, Sina seemed to be more often and more deeply irritated with him. Sometimes it seemed like he could do nothing right. Their marriage had changed with the move back to Samoa. In San Francisco they had been a happy enough American couple isolated in their own little world inside the big city, but back in Samoa, they had drawn apart into their separate social worlds. Apelu had his work and his sphere of male friends. Sina had her job at the shipping company, her church, and her various women’s komitis. Apelu knew she had a thing for the new young pastor. Now Sina was more a working mother and church lady than a wife. And, of course, there were the kids, four of them now, not just the one boy they had back in San Francisco. Sanele was fifteen now, entering that dense-as-it-gets phase. Now there were also his two little chubby angels—Sarah was ten and Isabel was eight—and three-year-old Toby. Tobias was the unplanned child and Sina’s special pet.
Apelu didn’t know what he could do differently, how he could change things for the better. In San Francisco they used to go out dancing. It had been years since they had done that. Now Sina had her bingo games three nights a week. From the gossip she brought home, it would seem that a primary conversation topic with her women friends was complaints about husbands.
Sex had become infrequent and routine for them, filling more a physical than an emotional need. In spite of the distance that had grown between them, Apelu still cared for his wife. But where once it had seemed that they shared the same brain, now he often found himself watching her, wondering what she was thinking, and wondering who she was. He had never been unfaithful to her, though he sometimes wondered if that might only be because secret liaisons seldom stayed secret for long here in Samoa.
Although his male acquaintances rarely spoke of their wives, it seemed much the same for all of them. Their brides had become the mothers of their children, and lust had given way to the tug-of-war of living together. Walking on air had become walking on eggshells. And for both husbands and wives, the comfort zones in their lives had become the company of their same-sex peers.
At the airport while checking in, Apelu was displeased but not surprised that Mati was checking in too. As they waited for their plane—an old twin-prop twenty-passenger DeHavilland Twin Otter that made the half-hour trips between the neighboring islands—Mati chatted about his previous travel adventures, nothing that rose too far above the mundane. Apelu only pretended to listen, thinking about Sina and about how he had wanted to make it right before he left. But he knew from many years of various degrees of trying how impossible that was when she went this way, that his trying would only have made things worse and threatened her somehow, like attacking something when it was only an egg before it had had a chance to grow its essential defenses. Fight or flight, he thought, as he strapped himself into his seat across the narrow aisle from Mati, who looked nervous and had stopped talking. It turned out that Mati had never flown in a small plane before. The copilot’s rushed and rote instructions over the crackling PA system about seat belts, smoking, and flotation devices were unintelligible, even though they could see him reading them into his tiny microphone a mere ten feet away. Within a minute or two they were airborne, banking west.
Apelu remembered his first small-plane flight, out of some little private-plane airport east of Oakland, headed for Lake Tahoe. He had been sixteen. Auntie Sia had needed him to fill in for a gone-missing fire knife dancer in a special New Year’s Eve show she had booked at a casino there. Apelu was on Christmas break so his mom had given the okay. It had been freezing cold inside that plane, a single-prop
six-seater. Aside from himself and the pilot, there were only two other passengers, two very skinny chorus girls who spent the whole trip huddled together under a blanket in the back. The pilot let Apelu sit in the copilot’s seat, showed him how to put on the earphones and mike and how they worked. The plane was old, and from the beginning, the pilot was worried about ice building up on the wings. They flew low, beneath the cloud cover, following the Sacramento River Valley through the Coastal Range then across the gray Central Valley, while rain streamed off the windshield. When they hit the foothills of the Sierras, the pilot stuck to the valleys, just below the icy ceiling, until all Apelu could see out his window were walls of tall pine trees, their tops hidden in mist. Apelu remembered the pilot’s almost constant litany of swear words as the plane banked and dove, banked and rose again, searching for gaps between ridgelines and the clouds’ steel-colored floor above them. It was like being a bird. Apelu had never felt so full, so alive. He could have swooped there forever. He stepped out of the plane onto the snow-frozen tarmac at Tahoe a different person from the boy who had boarded the plane. And, as though to confirm that transformation, that trip to Tahoe was the first time that Apelu had gotten laid.
It was one of his sister’s dancer friends. That night, during the finale of the show, he had burned his hands trying to put his torch knives out. The rags he had been given to smother the flames must have been used to wipe up spilled kerosene when the knife head’s fabric had been soaked. Apelu had run outside to plunge his hands into the snow to chill them. The girl—she was just a girl, only a year or two older than he was—had followed him out, concerned. They had ended up fucking in a snow drift beyond the edge of the parking lot’s lights, her on top while his back melted a hole into the snow. Apelu loved flying in small planes.
In Apia, Apelu and Mati took a taxi from the airport to an inexpensive hotel Apelu knew on the edge of the waterfront. Mati had never been to Apia before. Over the years Apelu had been in and out of Apia many times—on family business or on quick getaway vacations with Sina, whose mother’s family was from there—but never on department work. Apelu liked Apia. It was relatively cosmopolitan compared to Pago Pago. There was a real downtown centered on Beach Road surrounded by leafy urban neighborhoods sprawling up into the hills behind the town. There were tourist hotels and nightclubs with live bands. There were restaurants and bars and cheap taxis. Apia was a capital, as opposed to Pago’s frontier town. It was also third-world inexpensive. The exchange rate between the Western Samoan tala and the US dollar was almost three to one.
