The Plover: A Novel (21 page)

*   *   *

Declan is in the cabin on deck staring at his charts. He is eager to be at sea. Enrique is in the cabin on deck staring at his charts. He is eager to reach the island. Taromauri is on the beach with Pipa. They would not at all mind staying on the island for another month or nine. Piko is walking through a forest negotiating the purchase of pork with a woman who says she is one hundred years old but looks older. The nurse at the clinic is still listening to the minister for fisheries and marine resources and foreign affairs who has now moved smoothly into his ideas for education in the nation of Pacifica, specifically ways and means to accomplish universal literacy despite problems of geographical enormity which seem insurmountainable but which actually are utterly surmountainable largely through the invention of media which seem unimaginable at present but which will soon be invented primarily by brilliant children who are not aware of the impossibility of the project. The gull is aloft, quite high, so that she can see the
Tanets
with one eye and the
Plover
with the other; she is singing something to herself. The doctor at the clinic, a naturalist by avocation, is studying slides of eel scales in an effort to determine if the eel species on the island is indeed as he suspects not only native but unique, occurring nowhere else, and occurring here not from seeding from foreign shipping but from a peculiar set of natural circumstances such that the freshwater of the lakes is occasionally infused by brackish water from inlets opened and closed by storms. Danilo is walking along the beach and will meet and greet Taromauri and Pipa in seven minutes. The Rapanuian and the Rungarungawan are together at the stern of the
Tanets,
silently watching for the island, the sighting of which is their sign to slip overboard, the Rapanuian carrying the book. Some of the molecules of what had once been Something Somethingivi
ć
wash up against the western beach of the island, a few of them touching the sand for an instant, until they are drawn gently back into the sea. By now Something Somethingivi
ć
in his new form has traveled much farther than he ever did while a coherent whole; he now stretches from Russia to Australia to Japan to this beach, where sanderlings and whimbrels and turnstones and curlews and plovers sprint and skitter, chasing savory flashes in the surf.

*   *   *

Piko follows the woman who says she is one hundred years old to her village, which looks to be about twenty tiny houses on a tiny lagoon. Twice she says the name of the village but Piko cannot catch the word; the word sounds like otter. Behind the village is the tallest hill on the island, which looks to be about twenty feet high. She says the name of the hill, but Piko cannot catch the word; again it sounds like otter. Here I am in Otterville, at the foot of Otter Mountain, he thinks. She leads him to a tiny enclosure in which three large pigs look annoyed at the interruption. She gestures that he should choose one and cut its throat but pay for the privilege first. He offers her dollars and she picks through the dollars looking at the engravings of men’s faces until she finds a face she likes: Hiram Ulysses Grant. Piko, grinning, asks if she is absolutely sure she does not want to choose the brave and admirable Abraham Lincoln but she insists on Grant and he grins and hands her the fifty. By now several neighbors have gathered to watch the proceedings and stare at Piko’s silvery beard and ponytail. A small girl tiptoes closest and reaches for the gleaming coin in his beard. Piko squats on his haunches and says ah I cannot give you that coin, little fish, that is a gift from my own daughter, but if you want to braid something in there yourself, be my guest, and she runs away quick as a cat, and Piko stands up again thinking maybe he has scared her and thinking of Pipa running just that way just that speed quick as a thought, but just that quick the girl is back again with a tiny wriggling green lizard, which she carefully imprisons in Piko’s beard. The neighbors laugh at the way Piko’s beard is now alive and squirming at the tip. Piko offers the girl dollars but she backs away. The woman who says she is one hundred years old is growing impatient to have one less pig and she gestures again that the time for murder has come. Piko contemplates the long walk back to the boat with a serious amount of deceased pig on his shoulders. He asks the neighbors if they would mind sharing the road and the load but they laugh and say no thanks in their language. The woman hands him a knife. Piko chooses the smallest of the pigs and snags her by her right rear leg and as she shrieks he deftly slits her throat and lifts her rear legs so that her head dangles and her blood drains into the sand in a wild gush and the small girl laughs and claps her hands.

*   *   *

It takes Piko a while to get back into the hang of dismantling a being that was a moment ago alive and coherent, but his hands remember the thousand times he has edited fish, and soon what had been a pig is several piles of steaming interior, some of which will become energy inside people and fish and birds and a little of which will become energy inside a brilliant dog who at the moment is watching from the hillside and considering his options. This dog is one of the most amazing dogs in the history of dogs, a dog with unbelievable intellectual and physical gifts, but with none of the arrogance that so often is the price for even a small genius. You would say that this dog is blessed beyond belief, if you were the sort of person who used the word blessed. There’s no reason you can see why this dog would be gifted far beyond the usual gifts of dogs, but the fact is that he
is
so gifted; he learned to swim by watching the little children in the village learn to swim, he watched and remembered as schools of fish chose certain refuges in the tiny lagoon, he has explored the island’s lake and knows how to catch eels, he noticed that catchbirdtrees actually do catch birds and lizards and insects on their sticky fruit, he understands almost all of the languages he hears from people and other animals, he knows who among the villagers tends toward kindness and who toward greed, he knows the arrival and departure times of the cargo planes, he knows which of Danilo’s fellow workers at the airport is smuggling drugs in secret compartments in copra shipments, he knows which ships illegally dump sewage at night in the harbor, he knows when a subtle change in the wind means cyclone and when it means a stretch of rare blue weather on this most humid and rainy of islands. He knows that there are other islands beyond the horizon, some of them vast, for he has heard and pondered what people say of the world beyond the island of eels; and while he feels a small curiosity about other islands, he is brilliant enough to know that horizontal travel is not as nutritious and revelatory as vertical travel; so he has concluded already, at what would be age twenty for a man, to explore and plumb and plunge into his own island so thoroughly that he would know something of everything; the work of a lifetime, perhaps several; but perhaps we are issued several lifetimes, and are not apprised of those before and after the present one, for reasons of decorum or bookkeeping. This could be.

*   *   *

Even with one arm Declan works the boat. Examines the hull patch with a cold and ruthless eye; is that going to last through a cyclone, a ferocious storm, a scorching dry lull when wet wood shrinks? Finds one last bag of almonds, each one so dry and brittle it snaps like a twig in his teeth. Examines all hoists and junctures. A boat is not unlike a body in which the joints are crucial and surrender first to gravity and entropy. Indeed a boat has knees, and can be said to shoulder through the sea, and how often the
Plover
has elbowed its way through a crowd of other fishing boats the other crews jeering the horse of a different color, the orphan of the species? He examines the sails, looking for the inevitable flaw, a poorly stitched seam, a thin place;
caol ait
in the old tongue, thin places, the windows between this world and the others, the worlds everywhere extant but never seen, everywhere sensed but rarely explored. He examines the engine and the engine house and the hatch and the hatch cover and the running lights and the rigging and the wheel and his chart box and the life preservers and life jackets and sight reduction tables and collected speeches of Éamon de Búrca. He sighs over the paint and stares at the creosote daubed thicker than paint at the bottom of the mast. His father had given him that creosote, or rather sold it to him, at cost plus ten percent; and while he had done the daubing himself, cursing the old man’s penury and thrift, the fecking cheap old goat, he had known full well that the ten percent would be soaked back into the land where he was born, into the cows and timber of that slice of Oregon where he and his sister and brothers were raised by the snarling old man, bitterer than ever before after his wife their mother left one day wordlessly dragging her suitcase thumping down the driveway, so that the small profit he made over to the old man would come back to him snarling probably as food; and now that he sat and remembered the transaction he recalled that for once the old man had ill-temperedly said hell, he would help tar the mast to make sure it was done right and not done piss-poor as you have so many times done ill, boy, and Declan had as usual paid the old man in the same coin, and snarled back that he would do it himself and do it right and not have a crank as consultant, and now Declan, sitting in Pipa’s chair in the stern, saw that maybe the old man was opening a tiny window in his castle that day, and that his oldest son had slammed it shut, slammed it in his face, slammed it without the slightest thought that it was anything but bile. So it is that I have become my dad, thinks Declan, quick to think ill and quicker to speak it.

*   *   *

Danilo, walking home through the palms and pines, realizes he has come to a crossroad in his life; a man can only savor not being dead and frozen for so long before he wonders what he
should
do. What
was
his work? Why had he been spared in the winter woods? Should he find his brother, who must certainly by now be a man of substance in their country? Should he return to their country and do what he could to make it whole? Should he join a new country, and add his salt and song to a new national music? Go to sea? Sink roots in this island? Seek a wife, build a small country of their children? Try to earn his living with his singing? Enter holy orders, and be like the Reverend Mister, whom he much admired for his cheerful grace and lack of ego? Danilo was young and muscled, healthy and hale, unencumbered by debt or despair, draped and adorned by no responsibility at all; but he was wise enough even at twenty to see that what many would call an utter and admirable freedom was also a sort of thicket or wilderness, in which, by virtue of being able to take any path he chose, he was lost in a dense jungle of the possible, the sheer welter of which sometimes overwhelmed him. The irony was, he thought, that as soon as you chose a path, you mourned and regretted the ones you did not choose; but to choose none was to moon uselessly over them all, and thus be imprisoned by impasse. How very many people, he thought, as he walked through the catchbirdtrees by the lake, were frozen by the weight of their potential, the imposing alps of their dreams? There must be so many people who, because they could do anything, did nothing. Was this the secret cost of civilization, perhaps, that once people were free from want, free to act as they liked, they did not act at all, but only stared at themselves, sentenced to solipsism?

Thus his line of thought in the dark as he made his way along the west rim of the water, listening with all the eleven ears his years in the forest had given him. He heard a dark thrash in the lake and thought of the fabled eels, and wondered if the sound was courting or fighting; and then with a start he saw a brilliant white bird caught fast by feet and wingtips to a cluster of catchbird fruit. It was a tiny tern, which he freed with one hand while guarding his eyes with the other. The tern, loosed from its sticky trap, vanished so suddenly that he spun around looking for evidence of its flight; to no avail.

*   *   *

Piko divvies up the pig, handing pieces hither and yon, and everyone is smiling and laughing, and soon there are cooking fires, and he sits with two men on the beach grilling a little of the meat before he sets off back to the boat, and he teaches them how to throw firesticks, they take a few sticks from the fire and he shows them how to throw
into
the wind, with a snap of the wrist to impart spin, sort of like throwing a curveball, he says, so the stick actually
floats
out over the water for a moment; and he explains with a smile that you can throw fire a lot better when you have some elevation and an updraft, and they are fascinated, and they keep practicing until there are no more sticks in the fire, and then, consequently, no fire. In his capacity as veteran fire-throwing consultant Piko advises them to try it after dark from the hill behind the village; while the wind will have reversed, and be blowing out rather than in, still, they might have enough lift to get some serious throws in. It was all a matter of practice and experience, he said gravely, and then smiled to remember the time he had been so confident of his skill, finally, after much practice, and had thrown a
papala
stick at exactly the wrong angle, at exactly the wrong instant, and nearly roasted his hair and that of his close companions on the mountain in Makana. In the old days, one of his friends had said, the people out in the sea in canoes would try to catch the firesticks, and mark themselves with the ember of the stick they caught, to make a sign on their skins of the occasion, and these scars were honorable and revered, but in his case their marks would have been earned by the worst throw in the history of fire throwing, which would certainly be memorable, if not exactly revered.

Piko gazes out at the ocean, watching fishing boats and children in the surf, and there’s a whisper of breeze cooling everything, and gulls and terns float past like incarnated bits of the wind itself, and the men are smiling as they teach him lewd and vulgar words in their language, and Piko thinks, you know, all in all, this is better than a stick in the eye here, this is a kind of life we could live, this wouldn’t be a bad place for the pip, I bet we could get a cottage for ten bucks here, and I could fish, and maybe recruit some grant money for scientific study of this particular finger of the ocean, and the weather’s decent, and there’s plenty of freshwater, and the neighbors seem generally decent; but then his relentlessly honest scientist’s eye begins to see beneath the bucolic. The children are thin; more than a few are scrawny. There is a mound of broken liquor bottles behind the village; a modern midden. One woman has a black eye; another has a bruise on her shoulder exactly the size of a large man’s fist. Several half-hearted fences are missing slats and look like broken teeth. Several men and women are missing teeth. Several houses have broken windows or no windows and shreds and shards of useless things scattered about them like old accidents. Several dogs are mangy. The house nearest to where he sits on the beach, he notices, is listing slightly to starboard; as he watches, a man emerges from the back door, squats in the yard to defecate, and then walks back into the house; over the back door, Piko notices, is a faded painting of Queen Victoria. A line from his grandfather pops back into his head:
Her Majesty Victoria, by the grace of God, Queen of Britain and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, Empress of All India, the scabrous old battleship, enslaving the poor for her baubles and beads, all queens should be put to work scrubbing floors, and all washerwomen elevated to thrones.…