Fire Knife Dancing (Jungle Beat)

by John Enright

  “What’s the business?” Torque clinked bottles with Apelu and said, “Manuia.”

  “Maybe I should talk to J-Cool about that.”

  “You are talking to J-Cool. Like you, I got more than one name. J-Cool is my DJ name. What business?”

  “I want to take a bunch of Samoan music CDs back to the mainland to sell, looking for wholesale. I heard J-Cool was the man to see.”

  “Heard where?”

  “In Apia.”

  “Apia’s a big town.”

  “Yeah, it is.”

  “What you looking for?”

  Apelu named a bunch of the groups he remembered from the inventory of CDs that they had found in Ezra’s bunker and threw in a few others that weren’t there but that his kids played. “Big market for them in Culver, Oceanside, San Diego. I could probably move whatever I could get.”

  “Got family here?” Torque had finished his beer and called for two more.

  “Not really. A couple of cousins back in Apia about all that’s left in the islands.”

  “When you goin’ back?”

  “Soon as I get this and a couple of other things settled.”

  A group of kids came walking up the rocky driveway—two boys in their late teens, then ten or twelve yards behind them three girls around the same age. The boys were dressed in the baggy clothes and the girls in the skin-tight clothes that sartorially distinguished their genders these days. Both of the boys and two of the girls were carrying school backpacks. They nodded and said hello as they filed into the house. Almost immediately a hit song from Apia by one of the groups Apelu had just mentioned sounded from somewhere inside. Their next two beers arrived.

  “Payment?”

  “Cash. I’d need a day to get it.” Apelu finished his first beer but let the second one sit there sweating. He had forgotten how much he disliked insipid Bud Light.

  A phone rang and was answered inside the house, and then the woman who had brought them their beers came to the screen door and said, “Jay, telefone. It’s Tia.”

  “Ioe,” Torque answered. “Excuse me.” And he went inside.

  Another teenage girl came walking up the driveway to the porch. She was carrying two white plastic bags of groceries. She was sweating. It was a long hike up from the main road. When she saw Apelu sitting alone at the picnic table, she gave him a big smile and said hello as if they were old friends.

  “It’s a hot one, isn’t it?” he said.

  “A scorcher,” she said, “but it’s cool here,” and she went inside.

  The sun was indeed hot, and the air was as still as a slab of baked cement, but to the east there was a charcoal gray wall of weather that fell from the top of the sky to the earth. Here and there, inside the dense advancing curtain, distant silent lightning flashed both high and low. There was nothing like these tropical summer open-ocean squalls. No one was like any other except in their insistence on getting and keeping your attention. Apelu had been inside one once in which ball lightning had flashed among trees around him thirty feet above the ground, and the wind seemed to come from every direction at once. Cataract rains, sometimes weirdly horizontal, erased all other information from your visual world, and the children were right: the great noises of the squall—if you closed your eyes—could be heard best as huge angry human screams and moans and laments. This one was coming on fast, but the sun was well to the west and still out of its hard-edged upper reach.

  Torque came back out onto the porch with two handfuls of CDs and dropped them on the picnic table. “This the stuff we got in stock I can get you fast. Anything else you got to order. We don’t ship or deliver. Cash up front.”

  Apelu went through the CDs, making a stack of them in front of him. They were all samples of the bulk CDs from Ezra’s stash. “Cool, dude. I can take eighty at least of each of these, depending on the cost. Quality?”

  “Ninety percent.” Torque didn’t seem at all embarrassed at admitting that they were pirated copies. “But the liner art and print shit is all original. Got a deal with the printer in Apia.”

  “Could I listen to one?” Apelu pulled a CD from the pile at random.

  “Take what you want. Play ’em on your own system. Tell me you hear any difference.” Torque sat down to his unfinished Bud Light and finished it. At which point the sun went out like a door being closed. “Your windows up, man?” he asked calmly.

  “Yeah, yours?” Apelu said, taking a small sip of his warm, uninviting beer.

  “Yo,” Torque yelled over his shoulder into the house, “incoming.” Then to Apelu, “Dorset baby, we ought to get our asses inside.” Between them they collected the CDs from the picnic table.

  The house was much roomier, deeper than it looked from the outside. Its ceilings were low, but it was open all the way through to a screened-in kitchen in the back. Hallways and doorways led out of the big central room. It was also hivishly, humanly busy. There were folks in the kitchen preparing food, folks busy shutting louvers on the east and south sides of the main room, folks just moving about in a purposeful way. They were all young. Apelu followed Torque to a table back by the kitchen. He had left his beer outside. The woman Torque had called Sister asked him if he wanted another. When he declined, she offered him a cup of koko Samoa instead and he readily accepted. It was thick and warm and not too sweet. Perfect.

  “What is this, some sort of dormitory?” Apelu asked.

  “Oh, these are all just Sister’s people. She takes them in the way some people take in dogs or cats. If a kid’s in trouble and their family don’t want ’em, they find their way up here till their shit straightens out.”

  Then the squall was on them like a Viking raid. In spite of the quickly closed louvers, doors slammed shut and curtains went horizontal. Papers flew around the big room, kids chasing them, laughing. You could feel the mist on your face. The gale hammered down on their hilltop roof and raced up the ridge from below, meeting itself in a swirling scrimmage. Loose things in the yard went crashing. Trees creaked and moaned in confusion. The power flickered once then went out. There was a sudden chill in the air.

  “I hope it don’t lightnin’,” Torque said. “I hate it when it lightnin’s.”

  Then right on cue the first flash hit, followed five seconds later by an encompassing dynamite crack.

  “Oh shit, oh shit!” Torque’s eyes were flashing around the room, looking for a place to hide. Sister came running from the kitchen and grabbed Torque just as the second bolt of uila emo arced. Together, Torque clinging to Sister, they raced toward a side door and made it just as the second clap of faititili slapped the house. The next flash and crash were even closer. The girl who had given Apelu the nice smile on the porch slipped into the chair beside him at the table, grabbed his arm, and pulled her chair up against his.

  “Aren’t you scared?” she said. “I am.” She was trembling.

  “Not much we can do about it,” Apelu said, and he reached over with his other hand to hold her shoulder.

  “It’s just that up here it’s so much closer, and…”

  “And you’re not home.”

  “Uh-huh,” she said just as an almost simultaneous explosion took place on top of them, and she pressed herself into his side, her face in his chest, her fingers gripping his shirt.

  After a few more near-miss shockers—and body grips—the cataclysmic line passed on as quickly as it had arrived, and Apelu learned that his gripper’s name was Lucy and that she was a freshman at the community college, no major yet, mainly just remedial courses plus drama. Then Sister reappeared and shooed Lucy away from him. Although the lightning and thunder had passed, the back squall was blowing hard, and there were wind-driven-rain leaks to deal with, dinner still to be fixed, Lucy’s things to pick up. Sister gave Apelu a suspicious look as she rushed on to other duties.

  Torque never reappeared, so after a while of being ignored Apelu went up to the counter between the main room and the kitchen, where Sister was overseeing dinner preparation, an
d told her he’d be going, maybe he could give Torque a call later about the CDs. Sister gave him a look over her shoulder, then wiped her hands on a towel and came over to the counter. She wrote a cell phone number down on a post-it pad, pulled it off and handed it to him without saying a word.

  “Thank you,” Apelu said in Samoan. “Tofa, have a nice evening.” He picked up the CDs Torque had given him and left. It had almost stopped raining, but the road down the hill was a rushing stream of tumbling rocks and debris, and he had to take it super slow, worrying all the way about the Kia’s low ground clearance, wondering if that was their Tia whom Torque had gotten a call from.

  CHAPTER 13

  THE NEXT DAY, beneath secure blue skies, Apelu returned to the place on top of Canco Hill with Asia. Asia would have it no other way. They had talked about his visit when he returned her car. She had to meet Sister. She was sure that it must be the same Tia. Apelu had called Torque first—at the cell phone number Sister had given him—and asked if it was okay for him to come up and close the deal. Torque wasn’t at home at the time—he was on the road—but he said he’d be there later, around noon. Asia insisted that they get there earlier, before Torque got home, and Apelu could see her point—if they were already there when Torque returned Apelu might not have to explain why he had brought Asia along. So it was a half hour before noon when they arrived at the house on Canco Hill. It was quiet. Torque’s wooden-bed pickup was gone.

  Apelu got out of the car and went up to the porch screen door, knocked and called hello. No answer. He knocked again, more softly, and called into the house in Samoan, “Hello. It’s me, Dorset. Anybody home? Torque?” Again no answer. He walked back to the car, where Asia was standing outside the driver’s side door. “Nobody home, I guess,” he told her.

  “Yes, what is it?” Sister was standing in the open screen door, holding a sleeping toddler. “Oh, it’s you. Torque’s not here. He won’t be home for a while.”

  Asia came around the front of the car and walked toward the porch. “Oh, what a beautiful baby,” she said and smiled and went up onto the porch to admire the child.

  “He’s asleep,” Sister said, but she didn’t protest Asia’s approach. “He’s had a fever, teething.”

  The child had long golden brown curly hair of the type highly prized by Samoans. Asia reached out to touch it, and Sister shifted her weight to move his head away.

  Asia pulled her hand back. “He is so precious,” she said in Samoan.

  “He’s my darling,” Sister answered, and for a series of seconds they both stood there admiring the sleeping child.

  “How do you call him?” Asia asked in proper Samoan.

  “This is Peni, lou penina,” Sister said softly, my pearl. “You can wait for Torque if you want.”

  Apelu remained standing in the dirt of the yard, watching, a wholly unnecessary adjunct to this scene. The child stirred in Sister’s arms. She soothed him, and then with a turn of her head and a raising of her eyebrows she invited Asia inside. A tentacle of some sort of bond had been established between them. They disappeared into the house. Apelu went up onto the porch and sat at the picnic table, lit a cigarette, smiled, and shook his head.

  The silence of the place pleased him. He felt an unusual peace sitting there at the picnic table on the porch at the top of Canco Hill, the peace of being someone fictional—Dorset—the peace of being disemployed from bosses and routines, the peace of being with a woman who didn’t feel duty bound to find his faults and outline them like a body at the murder scene of a relationship. It was a bit like what he imagined being in a movie would be like—everyone playing a part not themselves. He was no longer Detective Sergeant Apelu Soifua. Torque was really neither Torque nor J-Cool. What was Sister’s actual name? Tia wasn’t Tia. The kids who lived here—Lucy et al.—were just extras on location, away from home and their own real selves. Was Asia playing Sally the social worker now? What would baby Peni’s given name be when the credits rolled? Maybe it all made better sense when you weren’t playing that character called yourself, when you got to make it up as you went along. Someone had once told him that few people lived more than twenty-seven thousand days, and that number had stuck in his head, as few numbers ever had—it seemed so small, so few afternoons after all to be pissed away being the same person, perfecting inertia.

  Asia came quietly out the screen door onto the porch. She was carrying a mug with a tea bag tag hanging out of it. She sat down beside Apelu. “She’s putting the baby to bed,” she said.

  “Plot line?” he asked.

  “I told her I was your girlfriend, that I came here with you from California on holiday, first visit.”

  “And your command of Samoan?”

  “That I worked with young Samoan women, mostly girls in trouble back in South San Francisco, that that was how I met you.”

  “What? That I was one of the guys that got the girls in trouble?”

  “No, that you were one of the local Samoan businessmen who helped support the halfway house I worked in.”

  “I don’t think I can play that role.”

  “You don’t have to. Ignore it. It will seem like humility.”

  “And are you Sally again?”

  “Yes, Sally Matthews, RN.”

  “And are you?”

  “What?”

  “Either Matthews or a registered nurse?”

  “What a silly question, Dorset. Here she comes. Give me a smooch.” And Asia leaned over, put a hand on the nape of Apelu’s neck, and gave him a quick kiss on the lips. It was nice. It felt almost real.

  “Did she ask you how many kids you have?” he asked.

  “Yes, she did,” Asia said, and she kissed him again just as Sister came onto the porch. She too was carrying a mug of tea.

  “I don’t allow that sort of stuff here,” Sister said, “but then you two haven’t been teenagers for a while, so I suppose it’s all right.”

  “Dorset told me what you do up here for the kids. I think it’s great,” Asia said, playfully pushing Apelu away as if their kissing had been his idea. “I want to hear more. Maybe we can work together somehow. I mean if any of your girls need a mainland escape route or connection to family or something we can do.”

  Asia was writing the script now, and she ran with it. Soon she and Sister were exchanging feminist war stories. Sitting there listening, Apelu felt embarrassed. He had noticed horseshoe pits and stakes in the yard and without excusing himself he got up and walked out to examine them. He found three horseshoes scattered in the weeds nearby. There was probably a fourth somewhere, but he was only going to play against himself. So, as the ladies talked, Apelu clinked horseshoes back and forth between the two stakes. He hadn’t thrown horseshoes in years. That too felt good, a nicely mindless, numbing exercise. He raised a sweat.

  After a while the baby started crying in the house—maybe the clanging horseshoes had awakened him—and Sister disappeared inside. Apelu walked up to the porch railing.

  “You know, that baby’s not hers,” Asia said. “One of her girls in transit just left it here a year ago.”

  “Good for Sister,” Apelu said. “Any other news?”

  “Well, she thinks where Torque is this morning is trying to connect with this girl Tia.”

  “Just another girl in trouble?”

  “Yes and no. Normally the girls find Sister. This time Sister doesn’t know anything about her. She’s always called for Torque.”

  “Is Sister jealous?”

  “I didn’t get that impression. I’m not sure what their relationship is. Maybe they really are brother and sister.”

  When Sister came back onto the porch she was carrying baby Peni again, who was fussing. He had been sweating in the crib, and his curly locks were now stuck to his head in disarray. “Here comes Torque,” Sister said. Apelu could hear a truck struggling up the hill, and in a minute or two the old black pickup turned into the driveway. They could see two people sitting in the front—Torque and a woman.
Sister went back into the house with the baby.

  As Torque got out of the truck, Asia said, “I recognize him from Ezra’s. He was one of the guys smoking the joint.”

  And as the woman got out, Apelu said, “Yeah, that’s our Tia. I recognize her from her passport photo. See the birthmark by her left eye?”

  In spite of the almost black birthmark on her left cheekbone, Tia was a handsome young woman, round faced and round bodied. She was as tall as Torque and was wearing a simple sleeveless sundress. She carried herself well—shoulders squared, head back.

  When Torque saw them sitting on the porch, he squinted, then nodded, then turned to say something to Tia. When they came up to the porch, Tia gave them just the briefest glance and half smile of greeting before going into the house. Torque was right behind her. He managed a “Yo, Dorset, howzit?” on his way by.

  “And we?” Asia asked.

  “Wait,” Apelu said.

  As they waited they watched the chickens, wild Samoan chickens. People liked having chickens around their yards because they kept the insects—especially the centipedes—under control. The chickens weren’t cooped. No one searched for or ate their eggs. No one ate the chickens anymore, either. Sometimes you threw scraps or leftover rice out for them to eat so that they would hang around. Apelu had discovered that the chickens in his yard liked the raw chicken fat he trimmed from his frozen store-bought birds. They would fight over it. They were pretty birds—the hens mainly russet and black with rust-colored heads, the cocks black, gold, and scarlet. They spent all day strutting and pecking and they slept in the trees at night. In Torque’s yard, a new cock was moving in, staying to the edges. The cock of the yard would charge in the young cock’s direction every so often, keeping him marginal. Then one time the new cock didn’t turn tail but stood his ground.

  “Watch this,” Apelu said.

  The feathers on both birds fluffed out, and they half arched their wings—like body builders showing off or pro wrestlers entering the ring. The cocks circled each other head to head. The hens ignored them. Then they simultaneously burst into the air about six inches off the ground, wings out, and attacked. The youngster forced the adult backward, and they broke and circled again. In the next burst, the senior used his height to hit over the head of junior, pushing him down, but junior didn’t back off. They went at it again, talons out into the opponent’s breast.