Fire Knife Dancing (Jungle Beat)

by John Enright

  He was already winded and slowed his pace. In the old days, his second wind would have kicked in about now, but those were the old days. The gravel road rose and fell much too often, and there were occasional washout trenches that were hard to judge in moonlight shadows, but it was the shorter route. At the end of the runway, he had to go back to the paved road and, gasping, he walked it. There was no traffic. He stopped at his spot where he could look down the darkened runway to catch his breath. As he stood there, leaning with his hands on his knees, the runway lights came on, and behind him he could hear the distant drone of an incoming plane.

  He started running again with something like a second wind. At least he found his gait. He cut away from the pavement and back to the fence, where the gravel road had become just a trail. Suddenly, running alongside him was Nora, and then, crashing through the low brush, Nick appeared and barked once. They ran together, the dogs in front, slowing their pace to his. Apelu watched their graceful jumps over hidden low spots and copied them. They hit a pace together, just Nick and Nora and Apelu, out for a little moonlit jog. They covered ground.

  The plane, a Polynesian Twin Otter, had landed. Apelu had to stop again, slowing to a walk, which bored the dogs, and they disappeared. Apelu’s legs hurt. His lungs hurt. His feet hurt. His head pounded and his ribs where Siaosi had punched him weeks before throbbed.

  He started jogging again, and Nick and Nora rejoined him. They were getting close to where the road to the Woos’ house cut in when Apelu heard the plane’s engine again. It was already heading back out the taxiway toward him and the end of the runway to take off. Apelu and his running mates got to the construction yard along the runway fence before the Woos’ place just as the plane taxied by. Three or four guard dogs from around the yard’s shack came out to challenge them, but Nick and Nora went after them, and they fled. A man, the night watchman probably, came out of the shack to see what the ruckus was about and to chase and yell at Nick and Nora. They went after him too, and he fled into the bush across the road.

  Apelu stopped to hold his knees and grab his breath. He was too late. No one had gotten there in time to stop them. Werner and his crew, including Tia and the Chinese men, were out of here.

  He was sweating now. Sweat dripped off his nose and stung his eyes. It dripped from his elbows and his ears. At least he could stop running now. Nick and Nora came back, their giant tongues hanging sideways out of their mouths to cool them off.

  “We blew it, guys,” he told them. “The outlaws are getting away, crossing the border.” The least he could do was tell Asia, he thought, find out where she was, and tell her to stop driving like a madwoman to get there. There was probably a phone in the construction yard shack. He went there and Nick and Nora came to stand guard as they sniffed around. There was a phone on the desk inside the shack, but there was also a board on the wall behind the desk with labeled hooks holding keys to the machines parked outside. The idea took only a second to form a hand and grab him, and he in turn grabbed the half-dozen truck keys off the board.

  Apelu ran back out into the construction yard. There was one long earthmoving truck parked with its nose almost against the airport fence. He ran to it. Nick and Nora followed him, barking. The fourth key he tried fit, and the truck started up. He put it in gear where he thought first should be and revved up the big diesel engine. He tried different dashboard switches until he found the one that turned on the lights, then eased back on the clutch. The rig jumped forward, ramming through the fence. The pipe from the top of the fence smashed into the windshield, shattering it into a spiderweb of refracted light lines. He found second gear. There was a tune going through his head, a ridiculous tune. Nick and Nora ran barking along beside the big truck as it trundled forward across the uneven earth toward the runway. The tune in his head was the theme song from The Bridge Over the River Kwai—“doo-doot, da da doo doot doot doo.” He shifted up into another gear. Off to his left he could see the headlights of the Twin Otter turning at the end of the runway. He put the pedal to the floor. He had figured that he would just park the truck across the middle of the runway so that the plane couldn’t take off, then play it by ear from there. But his timing was slightly off—the plane had already begun to accelerate by the time he bounced the big truck up onto the tarmac. The plane was now speeding toward him, the wing lights of the plane and the headlights of the truck crossing in the middle of the runway.

  As Apelu stared at the plane’s approaching lights from the truck’s driver’s seat, he realized how dumb he really was. Why hadn’t he just let them leave? Who was this fool with some heroic song from an old movie soundtrack running through his head instead of rational thoughts about survival? He always told himself that he didn’t want to be a cop, was a cop only by accident and misdirection. Then why had he just put his life on the line to do a stupid cop thing like this?

  He couldn’t judge the plane’s closing speed, didn’t know if he should slam on the brakes or speed up. He was already near the middle of the runway. He hit the brakes. He could hear the plane’s brakes screeching too, hear the twin props braking. A frozen moment. Then the plane swerved to its left. Its left wing went down and its right wheels lifted off the ground. The right wing clipped the roof of the truck’s cab as it went over him with a tremendous roar.

  Farther up the runway there was a small lagoon between the runway and the taxiway. The Twin Otter came to a stop there, its nose in the water, the rest of it on dry land, tilted forward. Apelu got out of the truck and walked toward the plane. Nick and Nora were already there, barking. Apelu felt numb. Two vehicles were speeding up the runway from the direction of the terminal. The plane’s door flopped open and down, and people started coming down the steps on the inside of the door. The cars reached the plane before Apelu did and more people—Dwayne, Asia, the assistant commissioner, two more FBIers, and one of the CID guys—jumped out of them. Nick and Nora didn’t know whom to bark at, so they stopped.

  By the time Apelu reached the group, Werner was talking loudly, jabbing his finger in the direction of the truck. “The repercussions of this…this outrage are going to be stupendous, international, career-shattering. You have no idea who I am. No idea who these dignitaries are. We are on a diplomatic mission for the independent state of Western Samoa.”

  “I don’t care who the fuck they say they are, take them all in,” Apelu said. “At the very least, they were all attempting to leave the territory illegally.”

  More car headlights were headed down the runway toward them.

  “Nick, Nora,” Apelu said, “let’s go.” And he turned and walked back toward the truck in the middle of the runway, the dogs walking on either side of him.

  “Apelu, wait, wait.” It was Asia running after them down the runway. “You’re headed…where?” she said as she caught up to them.

  “I’m taking the dogs back.”

  “And after that?”

  “I’ll make sure they’re cared for, don’t worry.”

  “That’s not what I meant. You going home, or…?”

  “I don’t think so. I don’t know.”

  She smiled. “Then I’m coming with you. I’ll walk back with you.”

  The runway lights went out, and after their brightness the darkness around them seemed impenetrable. Nick, or maybe Nora, nudged up against his leg. “I don’t think so,” he said, and then he and the dogs were moving.

  They fell into step on either side of him, and within a dozen yards or so, he knew Nora was on his right and Nick his left—Nora kept to herself a bit, and Nick stayed tight against him so Apelu’s hand would rest on his broad back every so often. Even in the dark, he knew who they were. No question. They were themselves.

  “Good dogs,” he said, and they walked on.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I WOULD LIKE to acknowledge the debt I owe to Philip Patrick and Andrew Bartlett of Amazon Publishing and especially to my agent, Peter Riva, for the faith and confidence they have shown in me and my work
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  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photograph by Sean Riva, 2004

  JOHN ENRIGHT WAS born in Buffalo, New York, in 1945. After serving stints in semi-pro baseball and the Lackawanna steel mills, he earned his degree from City College while working full-time at Fortune, Time, and Newsweek magazines. He later completed a master’s degree in folklore at UC-Berkeley, before devoting the 1970s to the publishing industry in New York, San Francisco, and Hong Kong. In 1981, he left the United States to teach at the American Samoa Community College and spent the next twenty-six years living on the islands of the South Pacific. Over the past four decades, his essays, articles, short stories, and poems have appeared in more than seventy books, anthologies, journals, periodicals, and online magazines. His collection of poems from Samoa, 14 Degrees South, won the University of the South Pacific Press’s inaugural International Literature Competition. Today, he and his wife, ceramicist Connie Payne, live in Jamestown, Rhode Island.