Fire Knife Dancing (Jungle Beat)

by John Enright

  The waitress—a new one, younger and flirtier—had just brought Apelu his third beer when Mati came in the front door. Apelu could tell he was not a regular because he stopped a few steps inside the door to study the room before he went and took a stool at the bar away from everyone else, and it took the bartender a while to come and get his order. Apelu noticed that Mati had on his good loafers and was otherwise overdressed for the place. So this was the FBI in action, Apelu thought. There were five law enforcement officers in the room, but if anybody had called out Pin the Tail on the Pig, everyone in the place would have pointed at Mati.

  One of the waitresses, though—Apelu now counted four of them, all dressed for the evening in shorts and halter tops—went over to Mati and leaned against the bar beside his stool, flirting with him. Apelu’s waitress returned to ask him if everything was okay and if he wanted to dance. Apelu shook his head in his best gangsta imitation, and she shrugged and walked away. A couple of patrons and girls were already dancing. Apelu watched them in the disco light. His beer was empty. He ordered another, along with a shot of Johnnie Walker on the rocks, a bag of chips, and another pack of cigarettes. The music switched to Motown. His waitress again asked him to dance, and he scowled at her.

  Mr. Woo came out of the door behind the bar, said something to the bartender, and headed for the front door. Apelu sat up and swung his legs out of the booth. Might as well follow him out. Then he saw Mati get off his stool and brush past the bar girl now seated beside him, cutting to head Mr. Woo off before he got to the door. Apelu sat back down again. He couldn’t hear through the music what was said, but Mr. Woo barely stopped when Mati confronted him. He waved Mati off with a furious shaking of his head, pushed him away, and fled. To his credit, Mati didn’t follow him but returned to his barstool. The bar girl had split.

  Apelu ordered another Johnnie Walker, and a new waitress brought it to him. She also asked him—almost as if it were a joke—if he wanted to dance, and he said yes. It was a Smokey Robinson song. She wasn’t much of a dancer, but she smiled a lot and kept touching him. Apelu asked her about “his friend” and he gave the name from the missing girl’s passport.

  “Who?” she asked.

  Apelu repeated the name and added that she used to work there.

  “Oh, you mean Tia. Tia doesn’t work here anymore. They fired her.”

  “For what?”

  “Don’t know,” she said and smiled an end to that conversation.

  Apelu was beginning to wonder what he was going to do with the rest of the evening, how he would get home to Ezra’s, when Asia walked through the front door. She was dressed in jeans and a dark T-shirt, her hair pulled back. She didn’t see Apelu as she slipped into an empty booth. Apelu watched Mati watching Asia as she ordered a drink.

  The Smokey song ended and the dancing waitress gave Apelu a little too-lingering peck on the cheek. He went back to his table, picked up his drinks and cigarettes, and went and sat down across from Asia in her booth. He was still wearing his Ray-Bans and backward Chargers cap. Asia was stony and only glanced at him briefly before looking away.

  “To use an old line, come here often?” Apelu said. Asia looked at him, and he removed the sunglasses.

  “You almost look like someone I know,” she said.

  “That’s good,” he said. “I like it like that. Call me A-Cool.”

  “How did you get here?” she asked.

  “The hard way.”

  She reached out and touched his upper lip with an index finger. “Tender?”

  “Ouch,” he said.

  “Find anything out?”

  “Well, I believe our Mr. Woo has come and gone, but no Atalena. I asked about the missing girl, whom they call Tia, and was told she had been fired.”

  “Who’d you ask?”

  “One of the waitresses.”

  “She called her Tia?”

  “Tia.”

  “Let me try,” Asia said, and she got up and went to the bar, where she got the bartender’s attention then leaned across the bar to talk with him. She was three or four stools down from Mati, who took a good look at Asia’s trim body as she bent forward. Asia didn’t notice. When she turned and came back to the booth, Apelu made sure his back was to the bar. He didn’t want to talk with Mati in this place, in these circumstances. Mati had ferreted through his things in Apia, looking for secrets. Apelu wanted to keep his new secret, his anonymity.

  “Yeah, according to the bartender, Tia got fired the same night Tracey, the dead girl, got fired. Mrs. Woo fired them. There had been some sort of disagreement in the back room. Tia came out crying with blood all over her face. She told the bartender and the other girls that Mr. Woo had thrown a stapler at her. Then Tracey came out of the room and grabbed Tia and took her away. That was the last anyone here saw of them.”

  “The night Tracey died?”

  “Yeah, four nights ago.”

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, that Mrs. Woo hasn’t been around since,” Asia said. “Though I don’t necessarily believe him.” Then she stopped and looked up over Apelu’s shoulder.

  “Hi. Can I join you guys? Buy you a drink? It’s sort of lonely over at the bar.” It was Mati’s Kiwi voice from right behind Apelu’s baseball cap.

  “Sure, why not,” Asia said. “I’m Sally.”

  “And I’m out of here,” Apelu said. “Got some shit to do. Be cool, Sal.” Because of the Ray-Bans Apelu couldn’t send her any eye signals, and he slipped out of the booth. “Later, dude.”

  Mati hardly noticed Apelu’s leaving. He hadn’t made him. His eyes were only for Asia.

  Apelu walked to the taxi stand beside the deserted market and caught a cab to near the turn-off to Piapiatele then walked from there. It was a peaceful walk. None of the dogs that barked at him got farther than ten yards away from the houses they considered themselves protecting. Why were they barking at nobody? Apelu wondered.

  CHAPTER 12

  APELU WAS AWAKENED by the dogs. It was dawn. He had been dreaming about a house he had once lived in as a teenager in San Francisco. It hadn’t been much of a house, just one in a row of identical run-down flat-faced two-story wooden houses running up a steep hill street in Hunters Point with a Bay view of docks and cranes and derelict ships. It had been their first house in the States and the one they had lived in the longest. His sister had written him that it was gone now. That street was now lined with new redbrick semiattached condominiums. In his dream he could remember every window, board, doorknob, and creaky stair of the place. In the dark he knew where the light switches were and how to sneak in or out of the pantry window without making a sound. He went back there now, all alone in a home that existed only in his long-term memory, as real as a smell. The dogs barking would be Mrs. Ybarra’s paranoid Dobermans two backyards away. The night fog was thick off the Bay. Where was he going? Up the alley between their house and the Simpsons’ house, then right up the hill to get out of there the hard way. Then the dogs again, the Dobermans going wild.

  Only they weren’t Mrs. Ybarra’s Dobermans. They were Nick and Nora, and Apelu was now wide awake, his dreamed-up youth slipping away from him. He was in an old lady’s bed in a house on the edge of a cliff. Breakers were softly booming below him. At least he was still alone. The dogs were still barking.

  Apelu pulled on his jeans and walked to the back of the house. From the window in the kitchen storeroom he could hear Asia’s voice as she talked to the dogs. She was apologizing as she fed them. Apelu splashed water on his face at the kitchen sink, then went back to Leilani’s room to get a T-shirt. By the time he came out the sliding glass door Asia was sitting at the patio table pouring coffee from a thermos into its plastic screw-off top.

  “Get a cup,” she said. “This doesn’t taste like mold.”

  He did. As they drank their coffees, Asia talked. The night before she had figured by the way Apelu had instantly split that Mati was some sort of cop. Their conversation hadn’t gotten very far b
ecause he just wanted to know about her—where she was from, what she was doing—and she just wanted to know why he was there and what he knew. By the time he got around to pitching her his pickup line she was ready to leave. She left him there. Apelu confirmed that Mati was an investigator from the AG’s office, but said nothing about FBI, holding onto that card. Asia wanted to go after Mrs. Woo. Someone had to know where they lived. Maybe the missing Tia was being held there. Surely Apelu could find that out.

  Apelu made a number of phone calls. He had some contacts and old owed debts uncollected in the Korean community. The Koreans had nothing to lose by ratting on the Chinese. There was no love lost or shared there. He got an address—well, a location, really, because there were no street addresses on Tutuila. The house was at the end of a back road by the airport. Really by the airport—the road to it ran along the main runway’s peripheral fence. For years that side of the airport had been just one long forest on both sides of the fence. Then these new fancy houses started going up, and the wild land along the outside of the fence began to disappear. But the mini-mansions were still buffered from the runway proper by the forest inside the fence. Then the whole federal airport security thing became a big deal—even here where the biggest threat to travelers was that their flight might be cancelled—and the jungle inside the fence was cut and bulldozed too, for security reasons. Apelu explained the changes to Asia as they drove down the dirt road.

  “Why more secure?” she asked.

  “Line of sight, I guess. Maybe something left over from Vietnam—no jungle for the bad guys to hide in.”

  “By which logic a desert would be the best place to be.”

  “See ’em coming a mile off.”

  “It is pretty ugly.”

  “But the folks in charge of what’s inside the fence feel more secure. A trade-off.”

  At one point along the road a construction company had set up its staging area and equipment yard along the fence side of the road. The six-foot-high chain-link fence was all that separated the big front loaders and dump trucks from a cleared-land rumble to the main runway.

  “If you thought like a terrorist, that would look fairly inviting,” Apelu said.

  “Makes all the check-in security routines at the terminal look pretty meaningless, doesn’t it?”

  “I’m beginning to like the way you think.”

  “When I sound like I’m thinking like you,” Asia said and laughed.

  “Well, it’s a perfect example of what happens when the feds come in here with all their off-the-rack mainland rules and regulations. It just fucks up a good thing, a nice place, so that we can adhere to some paranoid palangi federal standard that we never agreed to nor wanted and is totally unnecessary. I ran across this term once—‘administered world.’ Know what that means?”

  “I think I know what you mean.”

  “A world where, like, there’s a whole class of people whose job it is just to make up more bullshit rules, like in a church or a cult or something.”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, that’s what the feds are like. We already have our own set of rules, our own ways of making things come out even. We got to avoid more rules, outsiders’ rules. They screw up the balance. We got to avoid being pulled any further into that administered world. Like making us cut down the trees to be more secure, just like them. What bullshit. We live in the jungle, for Pete’s sake. Cement is nice and secure, but you can’t grow anything to eat in it. Fucking feds.”

  “I feel your pain, Apelu, but I don’t fully understand it.”

  The Woos’ place was one of the newer trophy houses. The landscaped plants around it had not yet begun to grow. There was a collection of newish SUVs and trucks and sedans parked on the cement apron in front of the house when Asia and Apelu drove up the driveway in Asia’s Kia. One of the SUVs had its back hatch open. A house girl was loading luggage into it. Apelu told Asia to stay in the car. The house girl looked back over her shoulder at Apelu as she walked back toward the house.

  Apelu called out to her in Samoan, “Please, Miss, could you tell me if Mr. and Mrs. Woo are home?”

  “Ioe,” she said. “But they are just leaving.”

  “Airport?”

  “Ioe. They are going to Apia.”

  At that point Mr. Woo came out of the house, carrying a briefcase. “What? What you want? Who you? Go way.”

  Apelu pulled his badge and ID case out of his jeans pocket and held it up for Mr. Woo to see. “Police. I have a few questions about your missing employee.”

  “Already talk police. Girl dead, too bad. Not good girl. Too much trouble. No more question. You go.” Mr. Woo walked past Apelu to the SUV and shut the back hatch hard. “No want trouble. You go.”

  “No, Mr. Woo, I’m not asking about the dead girl, but about the missing girl, Tia.”

  “We neither employ nor know any girl named Tia. May I see your identification, please?” Mrs. Atalena Woo was coming up behind Apelu from the house. She was one of those Samoan women—indefinite age, forty, plus or minus five years, fifty pounds over an ideal weight, no neck to speak of, hair that had been so frequently colored and permed that it looked like orange thatch, fat wrists and fingers heavy with gold. She was wearing a tailored flowered tent. Apelu pulled out his badge case again and handed it to her.

  “Oh yes, Sergeant Soifua. I read about you in the paper. You’re on suspension or something, aren’t you?” She handed his ID case back to him.

  Apelu said nothing.

  “Well, I guess we’ll be going.” She pulled out a cute little cell phone and said, “If you don’t leave this property immediately, I’ll call 911 and report you as trespassing and threatening. Good-bye, Sergeant.”

  Mr. Woo was already sitting behind the black glass of the SUV’s passenger side door. Atalena got in the driver’s side and drove away.

  Asia got out of her car, which was parked down the driveway. “What was that all about?” she asked as she walked up to Apelu.

  “Well, fuck her,” Apelu said and he walked up to the front door of the house and knocked. The house girl answered. In Samoan he told her they were looking for a young Western Samoan girl named Tia. Did she know her? Had she seen her? The house girl seemed frightened. She knew nothing. There was no one else in the house, she said. Asia and Apelu left.

  “I’ve got another lead,” Apelu said. They were sitting in the car, eating meat pies in the parking lot outside a bakery in Nu`uuli. The car was still running, the air-con was on, and the windows rolled up. “But this one I got to run alone. Can I borrow your car and drop you some place?”

  Asia gave him a long look, then said, “Sure, drop me home.”

  “The top of Canco Hill” was a pretty nebulous address, so Apelu just kept driving up. There was only the one road up there, which branched near the top. He figured he knew who lived on the right-hand branch—only a couple more high-scale palangi houses—so he cut left at the fork. He heard the music first, its bass through the bush. He turned into a crushed-rock driveway toward it. It was midafternoon. No dogs came out to bark. There were a couple of past-their-prime pickup trucks parked in the shade and the weeds at the edge of the driveway, and in a carport was the truck from Ezra’s that Asia had described. Apelu pulled up behind it and turned off the engine. He had his Ray-Bans and backward Chargers cap back on. When he got out of the air-con car, he was smacked by how hot the still-air day had become, and the Ray-Bans fogged up. Finally, a dog barked. The music was turned down.

  Two young Samoan men came out onto the porch of the house. They were both bare chested and barefoot. One wore a lavalava, the other a pair of cargo shorts. Normal-looking guys in their twenties.

  “Yo, I’m looking for J-Cool. Is this the place?” Apelu called to them. He had decided he would be from California, play it that way. He had decided his name would be Dorset.

  They didn’t say anything. One of them went back inside, and the other one—the one in the lavalava—walked slowly toward the car
. “What’s up, dude?” he asked.

  “Just looking for J-Cool, hoping we could do some business.”

  “This the place. Who are you?”

  “Dorset. Name’s Dorset, from San Francisco. Yours?” Apelu stuck out his right hand.

  “People call me Torque,” the man said and shook his hand. “Come on up.”

  Thus far they had been speaking in English, but on the porch Torque returned to his natural tongue—the simplified street slang Samoan of Pago kids, peppered with American phrases and terms.

  “Get yourself down,” he said, gesturing to a wooden bench beside a picnic table on the porch. Then he went to the screen door and called in, “Please, Sister, bring us two beers, thank you.” He sat down on the bench across the picnic table from Apelu. “Dorset? What sort of name is Dorset?”

  “Made up,” Apelu said. “But I made it up so long ago and I’ve been using it so long that it’s become my actual name.” His Samoan sounded sort of stiff compared to Torque’s—which was just as well. “It was the name of a street in the neighborhood I grew up in.”

  “Which was where?”

  “San Francisco. Ever been there?”

  “No, never been mainland.”

  A young Samoan woman came out of the house, put two cold bottles of Bud Light on the picnic table, and went back into the house.