Fire Knife Dancing (Jungle Beat)

by John Enright

  It was late in the afternoon when they checked in. The rooms at this hotel were big, if simply furnished, and meant for traveling families. Each room had at least three double beds but little else. Apelu and Mati took a room together, so that Apelu could pocket much of his per diem that could’ve been used toward a more expensive single room. Mati said he was exhausted, chose a bed in a corner as his, and went to sleep. Apelu got a call through to his house and left his Apia phone number with one of his daughters, having her write it down then read it back to him. Sina was out. His daughter wasn’t sure where.

  Sarah and Isabel always played a game on the phone with him; they spoke only in English and tried to sound like the same TV cartoon character, so that Apelu couldn’t be sure which daughter he was talking to. That was the point of the game. It always kept him on the line longer as he tried to determine—by one trick or another—if it was Sarah or Isabel he was speaking with. Those girls were always together. They weren’t twins—Sarah was two years older—but they might as well have been. They lived a part of their lives in a separate world of their own making. S-and-I-ville, Sina and Apelu called it. “Where are the girls?” “In the back, in S-and-I-ville.” One trick Apelu had learned was to get them to laugh. Isabel giggled; Sarah snorted. But then they had learned to get on the phone together. He could imagine them in the kitchen, their little heads pressed in on either side of the receiver, taking turns talking in their shared cartoon voice. They always called him Popo, which they couldn’t say in their disguised voice. This time he tricked them by asking what they wanted him to bring back for them from Apia.

  “Candy!” said one, dropping the silly accent.

  “A dress!” said the other.

  “Okay, Sarah, I’ll bring you some candy, and, Izzy, I’ll bring you a dress. Be nice to your mama, and I’ll be back in a day or two.” Then Apelu did his version of their cartoon voice to tell them he loved them because they were so silly, and they insisted that he was the silly one.

  Apelu took a shower, shaved, and changed. Mati was snoring when he left. Over the ocean the sky was still bright with the end of sunset. There was a stiff on-shore breeze. He walked. The ten-thousand-crowd noise of mynah birds in the tall twisting plane trees over Beach Road was suitably raucous as the early evening traffic of taxis and sedans raced by. At least they drove on the right side of the road, Apelu thought, thanks to the Germans. A hundred years before, when Eastern Samoa had ended up in America’s Yankee watch pocket, Western Samoa—and the other four inhabited islands in the archipelago—had been tucked under Deutschland’s paternal eagle’s wing. Germany was one of those imperial powers that had recognized—unlike the USA—that being a good colonialist was primarily a matter of enhanced bureaucratic suffocation. Even their copra plantations stretched out in perfect straight lines of coconut trees in every direction as far as the eye could see. Then, at the start of the First World War, New Zealand troops, backed by the British Navy, had seized the place without a shot being fired. For the next almost fifty years, the Kiwis ruled here in a manner that would have made the Nazis proud, including a nasty dash of racism they had learned while trying to annihilate the native Maori back in New Zealand during the preceding century. It wasn’t until 1962 that the western islands finally won independence to become one of the poorest countries in the world. New Zealanders still dissed the place by habitually mispronouncing the name of its capital, placing the emphasis on the first, rather than the second, vowel in Apia.

  Apelu wasn’t sure where he was headed; he was just out with a clean shirt on and some money in his pocket. He wouldn’t mind hearing some music, but it was still early. A century before, Apia had earned a reputation as a sailor’s South Seas port. Beach Road had been famous for its sins, saloons, and financial monkey business. Pirates like Bully Hayes had called it home. It had never quite lost that illicit tingle, in spite of all the Christian churches now fronting on the harbor. There was still that sense of being in a place where the potent interface between western wealth and jungle poverty always simmered near the surface, where dirt-poor side streets emptied onto fluorescent glass and burnished metal avenues, and where things officially forbidden had only to be casually asked for. Once, in the middle of the day, only a block or two off Beach Road, Apelu had been surrounded by two gangs in a bloody conflict—a gang of town dogs and a gang of town pigs. They had swirled and snapped and screamed around his legs until he was spattered with their blood. Taxis honked at them to get through. The dogs lost, the pigs won.

  Apelu stopped for a beer at an old open-air saloon downtown across the road from the harbor. It was a place he remembered well, and it hadn’t changed. A draft Vailima—the local beer—was cold and cheap. The other patrons were all locals—it wasn’t a touristy place—clerks and office workers having an after-work beer and some laughs. The tables were sticky and carved with initials. The overused dart boards were chewed up. Regulars reigned at the pool tables. There was a Tom Jones song playing, the only thing in English to be heard. It soon gave way to one by Joe Cocker, but no one seemed to notice, and the noise level remained the same.

  Apelu sipped his beer and felt the rare peacefulness of anonymity. Being nobody was an opportunity that an islander at home was seldom offered. Someone always knew who you were or knew your family or pieces of stories about you—what palangis called gossip but really wasn’t. Within the enclosed and entangled world of island society no one was given the freedom of being a stranger. Even in the bush there were no secrets. There was an old proverb about that—Ua lauliloa e pili ma se, which roughly means, “It is known by every lizard and stick insect.” Secrets weren’t things that no one knew; they were things that no one needed to talk about. You were defined by how your story was woven into the larger writhing, evolving narrative of who everyone was, like a strand of lau `ie plaited into a fine mat, appearing and vanishing, but held in place by the other strands around you as surely as you enmeshed them. It was not a world given to self-definition. Not even the crazies were allowed to be outcasts.

  Within the first ten minutes, Apelu had exchanged greetings and pleasantries with five different people he had never met before. By the time he ordered his second Vailima, he was in a discussion with a young man about junk food. The chap was ordering a round of drinks for his table and was disappointed that there was no more oka, raw fish in coconut cream, to order. He had to take a couple of bags of fried breadfruit chips instead and complained that they never filled him up. He paid for Apelu’s beer along with the rest and invited him over to his table out by the sidewalk.

  There were four other people at the table—two women and two men. Apelu introduced himself and almost immediately forgot all their names. They were all well-dressed young professionals. Apelu’s arrival—there was an extra chair—barely interrupted the flow of their conversation. One of the women, part-Chinese with an array of gold bracelets on her slender arms, was making a point about something to one of the men. She wore stylish gold-rimmed glasses and at regular intervals of around twenty seconds she would push the glasses back up the diminutive bridge of her nose with the index finger of her left hand—no wedding ring, no engagement ring. There was something unintentionally pugnacious about the gesture that appealed to Apelu. The end of her presentation—the point of which Apelu had missed—was greeted with unanimous laughter, including the laughing concession of the man she had been addressing, who held his hands up in front of him in surrender. Everyone took a drink. The other woman gave a little you-go-girl punch to the shoulder of the part-Chinese woman, whose eyes were now on Apelu.

  “So, Apelu…right? Apelu, over from Pago on a visit?” she said, pushing her glasses back up her nose.

  “Yes, that’s right. How did you know?”

  “The Reeboks, the haircut, the fact that you’re Samoan and we have never seen you before. What brings you?”

  “Oh, business,” Apelu said.

  “What kind of business? If I might ask,” she said as she moved empty bottles asi
de on the table to make room for another round of drinks arriving.

  “Police business,” Apelu said. That response was guaranteed to drive a conversation off the road, but what the hell, thought Apelu, he didn’t feel like lying about it, and he had nothing to hide. There was a silence around the table as if everyone was busy examining their consciences or adjusting their self-editing machines.

  “Well, we’re in the same industry,” she said. “I’m a lawyer, with the Department of Justice. What are you working on?”

  “Smuggling.”

  The other people at the table were getting ready to leave, rushing their drinks, looking at wristwatches.

  “Lisa, you coming?” the man she had been haranguing asked, standing up.

  “Yes, I’m with you,” she said, getting her briefcase and purse, looking around her, then standing up. The others were leaving. “Party to go to,” she said. She stopped and fumbled a few seconds in her briefcase before producing a business card and handing it to Apelu. “Give me a call,” she said, “about smuggling.” The others had waved down two taxis, and they all left. Her card, with the seal of the Western Samoa Department of Justice on it, said her name was Lisa Ah Chong.

  Apelu sat alone at the table and sipped his beer. Most of the last round of drinks had been only partly drunk. The table was covered with empty and half-empty bottles and glasses. For some reason it was the custom here for the waiters and waitresses to leave all the empties on the table, as if to announce how much this group of people could afford to drink. He knew no one would come and clear the table until he had left. He sat there and listened to the music—Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings now—and thought that the people on the sidewalk passing by and looking in must think he was very rich and very drunk.

  Apelu ate dinner alone that night at a small, out-of-the-way Indian restaurant he was glad to find was still there. On his way back to his hotel there was a new bar called the VIP Lounge at an old bar’s location out toward the darkened end of Beach Road. He stopped for a nightcap. It was a karaoke place now, but no one was singing along. On a big TV screen a Japanese woman was walking through a park looking wistful, as below her on the screen the English lyrics of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?” were turning word by word from yellow to white. But the music was turned down so low that the conversational drone of the bar patrons drowned it out. Apelu sat at the bar and ordered a brandy straight. All they had was Christian Brothers, so he asked for a glass of ice to pour it over. Another karaoke video started on the TV set behind the bar, but Apelu turned his back on it to look out through the wide veranda at the street. At this end of Beach Road, outside the business district, there was little traffic that time of night, just an occasional taxi racing by. He could smell the ocean across the road.

  Seated like that, Apelu was the first person in the bar to see her as she appeared out of the dark of the road and crossed the veranda into the light. She was tall and dark-skinned, with thick black Samoan hair. She was wearing a simple black sort of evening dress, but she was barefoot and walked like a woman not aware she was wearing an evening dress. She walked—at her own pace, neither hurried nor concerned—as if she were coming into a village from the bush or out of some historic photograph of how Samoan women had once looked. She was quite striking. She walked up to the bar a few stools down from Apelu and without sitting ordered a rum and Coke. No one else in the bar seemed to take any special notice of her. When her drink came, she too turned her back to the bar. She remained standing. Apelu didn’t see her pay for her drink.

  “It is a beautiful evening,” she said in Samoan.

  Apelu knew she was talking to him. “Yes, it is,” he said.

  She looked at him, then came over to stand a barstool away from his. “I’ve never seen you here before.”

  “It’s been a while since I’ve been here,” Apelu said.

  “You’re not much of a drinker, are you?” she said, glancing at his now drained glass of ice cubes.

  “Just one before bedtime,” Apelu said, feeling quickly foolish and slightly intimidated.

  “You were a fire knife dancer once, weren’t you?” she said, still looking at him.

  “Yes, a long time ago. How did you know?”

  “I could tell from the scars on your hands and arms. My brother was a fire knife dancer and had the same scars.”

  Apelu forced a smile and resisted the impulse to look at his hands. “A long time ago,” was all he could manage.

  “It is a young man’s occupation,” she said.

  “And you? Are you also an entertainer?” Apelu asked, looking her full in the face for the first time, a young face that for a moment turned very old with anger, then went young again and smiled.

  “Oh no, not me. I’ve never been an entertainer. What do you do now that you are no longer a dancer?”

  Earlier it had been easy to tell the truth about his occupation—I’m a cop—but this time Apelu wasn’t sure he wanted the conversation to end so abruptly. “Import export,” he said.

  She turned around to face the bar, leaned on it, and gently put down her now empty glass. “You son of a pig,” she said. “You washed-up carrion of a useless fish, you offspring of incest.” Her Samoan words were precise and biting, but not loud. “You insult me and incense me with your lies.” This was now loud enough so that other patrons were turning to watch. “People like you, you many-faced people, are not worthy.” Her voice was now loud enough to quell conversation throughout the bar. There was enough silence now that Apelu could hear the karaoke machine playing “Pretty Woman.” “Fuck you and fuck everyone like you. You’re a fucking cop!” And she turned and left, disappeared across the veranda and into the dark of the road.

  “I guess you pissed her off, buddy,” the bartender said. “Nice work.”

  Then the first rock hit the sheet metal roof of the bar, then another, then one smashed into in an empty table on the veranda, then more hit the roof. They could hear her screaming Samoan obscenities from the dark beach side of the road. Apelu looked at the bartender.

  “Like I said, you pissed her off, copper,” the bartender said.

  “Aren’t you going to call the police?” Apelu asked.

  “She’ll be gone long before they could get here,” he said.

  The barrage of stones and swear words lasted another minute or two, then abruptly halted.

  “Uli was angry tonight,” the bartender said to the room as a whole. Some of the regulars nodded their agreement. Couples began to get up and leave. Apelu followed them out. His temples pounded all the way back to his hotel.

  CHAPTER 5

  POLICEMEN IN APIA wore tailored, grayish-blue polyester uniforms—a lavalava, a jacket, and a very British Colonial-looking topi-like helmet, all the same color. It gave them a very conservative, keepers-of-the-peace look—more like museum or palace guards, though, than like the quasi-military American model. Members of the force—in full, hot uniform plus white gloves, with their helmet straps fastened firmly beneath their chins, and shiny sterling whistles clasped firmly in their teeth—directed downtown traffic from low-rise podiums in the center of the hubbub at the major intersections along Beach Road. Maestros of vehicular confusion amid blue clouds of not-fully-combusted leaded gas exhaust from trucks and buses and taxis, they orchestrated the daily chaos with heroic élan. Apelu was glad that duty was not part of his job description.

  Mati and Apelu were in a taxi caught in the morning rush-hour congestion. They were headed for police headquarters. Apelu had decided, but hadn’t told Mati, that after they got set up with the records they needed to check, he was going to slip away. There were a few items on his to-do list that he would rather do alone. Besides, Apelu was no good with numbers. Too much concentrating on numbers made him physically dizzy. Apelu liked to think it was just a physical malady like motion sickness, but he knew that its roots had to be psychological. He didn’t want to go there. He’d leave Mati checking the numbers.

  That wasn’t th
at hard to do as it turned out. Mati was happy to do all the lot and stock number searching alone, preferred it actually. At police headquarters Mati turned on his boyish charm, and within an hour Apelu was able to leave without anyone especially noticing or minding. Mati was set up at a desk, and people were bringing him ledgers and files.

  Apelu caught a taxi to the small village outside Apia where, years before, Ezra had been given his title. There were still some Strands listed in the telephone directory with that village as their address. He had the taxi driver drop him off at the gas station-store-lumber yard that was the major business in the village. He went into the store and bought a soda and a manapua, sweetened pork inside a rice flower bun. There was a bench out front, and he sat there to eat it. It didn’t take Apelu long to find out where the Strand place was and get directions. He walked there because it wasn’t far. Apelu had been told to look for a white palangi-style house, set back from the road.

  He was standing in front of such a house now, but it was more than just a palangi-style house. It was an old, once-white, Victorian palangi-style house. It had curlicues and fretwork along its eaves and a slightly sway-floored porch with latticework railings. A grass track ran from a break in a wall of hibiscus along the road to the house’s front steps. The yard of randomly spaced, isolated fruit trees and flowering bushes was well tended. Orchids grew from the half husks of old coconuts stuck in low tree notches. As he walked toward the house, Apelu could see a small, open-walled Samoan fale off to one side. As he came to the front steps he stopped and called out a traditional Samoan greeting.