The Tattoo Artist (16 page)

“What are you doing?” I said. “It’s our home, Philip.”

Without lowering the flame, he moved methodically around the eaves, torching all four corners.

The fire began crawling skyward. He slid down the ladder and pulled me clear of the house. The eaves reddened, the bamboo rafters shook violently, then the entire roof exploded into flaming straws that rained down on us.

The men on board saw
that.
They waved and shouted to those below.

The swiftest of the villagers, young men mostly, were already coming through the trees, adorned for the whale hunt in their prize finds—bullet nosepieces, copper-wire armbands. They raced toward the sea only to stop short when they spotted the men on the spine of the steel whale, men who had the sorcery to master a monster.

Holding fast to their harpoons, they hooded their eyes and squinted at the hybrid of ship and fish. Philip joined them at the waterline, holding the bayonet over his head, flashing the blade again so that sailors would see that there
were
survivors present, if not from last week’s shipwreck, then from another disaster.

The sailors unlashed a rubber boat from the deck and heaved it into the sea. Ten more men climbed out of the hatch and everyone scrambled aboard, save for the man giving orders.

Philip reeled around, looking for me. I was standing by the ruins of our house. It now lay in a heap of smoking thatch.

“They’re coming for us, Sara! We’re saved!”

The next throng of villagers had just arrived, young women and children kicking up sand as they ran. They, too, had bedecked themselves for the hunt. One tall thing had powdered her hair with the life jacket’s innards until it was as white as a barrister’s wig. Another had knotted a Japanese bandanna around her waist. When the women and children spotted the sailors motoring shoreward, they began assembling themselves into their “welcome” tapestry. They left spaces for their elders.

The boat was now riding the breakers over the reef, but the waves kept crashing short. It almost capsized. It fishtailed sideways, then rocketed forward. I could now make out the wet, frightened faces of the sailors on board. They looked like the shy Japanese cabin boys who’d served us afternoon tea on the
Pearl.

Philip shouted for the sailors to watch out for the sandbar. It was directly before them. He fervently pointed to the danger with the bayonet, and the young fishermen up to their thighs in sea water beside Philip brandished their harpoons as pointers, too.

The bottom of the boat hit the sandbar and the sailors were tossed about. When they regained their balance, the sailor steering the skiff stood up and pointed at Philip and the charging young men.

Philip was out front, shouting that we were Americans, steamship passengers from a Japanese vessel, that we’d been marooned here for almost a year. He cried out my name and his, and the young men cried out their names, too.

The sailors lifted their rifles and fired.

Most of the men were up to their armpits in water. They didn’t fall backward. They simply sank beneath the surface. Those left standing blinked mechanically at the spot where their brothers had vanished. The only sounds were the surf and the whine of the boat’s propeller. The birds had fallen mute.

All at once, the bodies floated up. Most bobbed facedown, but a few were thrashing.

I looked for Philip. He wasn’t among the standing. I searched for his blond hair in the water. The sea was darkening with blood.

The gulls started shrieking again, and the cockatoos exploded out of the trees, and the women and girls wailed. Those with children swooped them up and ran for cover. I couldn’t make myself move. Ishmael and the other old men had only now reached the beach. They, too, had ornamented themselves in bullets and talismans. When they saw their felled sons, one or two covered their mouths in anguish, while the rest hurried toward the sea.

I threw myself onto the sand.

The sailors took aim and fired again. The first line of old men fell on the beach near me, fifty feet short of their sons. Ishmael simply sat down, one foot folded under him, and stared curiously at the spot where the bullet had entered his stomach, rupturing his design. Each time he exhaled, a bubble of blood distended from his open lips.

I crawled toward two girls sharing a hole in a dead tree and tried to squeeze in, but there was no room. I had to hide behind a bush.

The soldiers had finally freed the skiff from the sandbar and were motoring through the bodies, using bayonets to skewer those still alive. One young fisherman escaped by swimming underwater, bullets pocking the sea around him; another dove under the cover of the reef, and a fourth got as far as the mangroves before disappearing into the shadows. Any one of them might have been Philip.

The soldiers landed the boat and fanned out across the beach. They ignored the moaning old men and bayoneted the tall grass instead. They even jabbed at the smoking heap of our house. One of the soldiers stepped toward the jungle and looked directly at me. I held my breath and tried to shrink into the foliage. For a second or two, he appeared to stare right into my face, into the very veins of my tattoos. Then he abruptly about-faced.

Another soldier was shouting. He’d pulled a military boot off a dead elder’s foot and was comparing the boot to his own. They looked like a match. He bent down and tore a copper wire off the old man’s earlobe, then kicked him in the head to see if he was still alive. When the old man didn’t respond, he lanced him with his bayonet just to make sure, then ordered the others to loot the bodies. My soldier trotted back, and, tramping upon the moaning and the dead alike, he and his mates stripped the elders of their talismans.

I looked around for Philip again. The floating dead had bunched together by the sea grass, along with a flotilla of coconut husks. I couldn’t tell blond hair from black, short from tall. I couldn’t even distinguish a coconut husk from a human head. Suddenly, I began sobbing in silent, racking shudders. I don’t believe it was grief yet. I was weeping from gratitude that I could still hope that Philip was among the lucky ones who’d escaped the bullets.

The women muffled their babies and began fleeing into the thick jungle. I ran with them until we reached the muddy banks of the swamp. Hoisting their babies over their heads, they waded into the black water. I was handed a toddler as I entered the ooze. Just as my chin sank under the surface and the child in my arms flailed, just as my foot plunged into the bottomless muck and I felt myself going under, a wooden bridge materialized beneath my feet. Only halfway across did it occur to me that I was stepping on Ishmael’s wooden masks and carvings.

On the far side, the mountains began in earnest, rising perpendicularly out of the canopy. We hurried up the slippery footpath, clawing at handholds.

Some five stories high, in a fold of rock above the village, was a narrow passageway that opened onto a massive limestone cavern. In places, the rock was so porous sunlight pierced through.

We all huddled together and listened for the soldiers. The chamber amplified every sound. Even the distant surf reverberated off the walls.

Suddenly, we heard squealing. It sounded human to me, but Laadah said it was the pigs, that the soldiers must be in the village killing the pigs.

I could feel the hysteria. On the beach, we’d each been crystallized in shock while our men had been slaughtered, but here in the semidarkness, we wailed and wept for the pigs.

No bullets were fired. The soldiers must have been slitting the animals’ throats with the bayonets. Each time a pig let out a death squeal, the women cupped their hands over their ears and rocked on their bare knees. I pressed my hands over my ears, too. Only the scent of food stirred me. The soldiers must have torched the yam stores. The vines cloaking the entrance suddenly rustled. The women grabbed their children and buried them beneath their bodies. I balled myself up, too. A fisherboy crawled inside. He was wet, shivering, still wearing his regalia for the whale hunt. One old woman rushed over to him, mashed her brow against his, and touched his face. I recognized the boy. He’d been standing beside Philip when the soldiers fired.

In a voice that sounded, to my ears at least, as shrill as a death squeal, I pleaded to know what had happened to Philip.

The young man turned his head very slowly in my direction. Even in the cave’s poor light, I could see an opaque glaze of shell shock dulling both of his eyes.

I sat down again.

We waited until the pinpricks of daylight vanished and the porous rock grew red. Then we waited for outright darkness. No one spoke. Weeping was muffled. No one so much as stirred, save to shift a numb foot or rock a child.

Around midnight, I was sure I heard men shouting to one another in the village, but Laadah said it was only the monkeys.

Just before dawn, two more boys crawled into the cave. Everybody had to touch their faces, rub foreheads with them. Then an old man showed up, his hair wet with blood. He kept assuring us that it wasn’t his own, but his wife wouldn’t believe him. She made him kneel down and lean against her thighs while she parted his hair, fastidiously scrutinizing his scalp as if she were scouring for lice rather than open gashes. Later, eight fishermen arrived. They’d been caught down-current when the shots had been fired. They were besieged with questions.

I kept waiting for his blond head to emerge through the opening. Each time a new arrival crawled in and it wasn’t him, I found myself glaring at his rejoicing family with something like hatred.

Finally, someone called to us from the swamp below. He shouted that the soldiers were gone, that the whale had left. Even from five stories high, I knew it wasn’t Philip’s shout.

I forced my way out into the light with the others. The sky was colorless, the sun gray, the air thick with ash. I could smell the carnage before I saw it. When I finally reached the beach, others dropped to their knees and whimpered, but I walked right up to Philip.

He was in the shallows with a dozen other bodies, his left foot trapped between two rocks. When the tide drained backward, all the bodies floated with it. When it surged forward again, they all came back. Anchored to the rocks, Philip never strayed. He lay under about a foot of water, faceup. I knelt down beside him. His eyes were open. One minute, the frothy sea would rush into them and turn them milky. The next, it would ebb away and his eyes would become alive under the glimmering water. The bullet had entered his throat just above the ship, where his clavicle bone joined his rib cage. The hole itself was black-edged and bloodless: it looked as though it might have been tattooed on.

Other women began wading into the shallows, too, searching for their husbands and sons. When they caught hold of a body, they grasped it under its arms and dragged it ashore, or if it was only a skinny boy, they bore him in their arms. They must have lined up over two dozen wet shapes on the beach.

The fishermen finally came for Philip, but I wouldn’t let them take him. I held him tightly around his chest. One of the men reached down and lifted the rock pinning Philip’s foot. I could feel the ocean immediately start to pull him away from me. A fisherman caught hold of his arms and helped me drag Philip up past the waterline. I made them stop right there. I knew where they would take him and I didn’t want Philip in that line. That line looked so permanent.

I sat down beside him. The sun was merciless. It highlighted the dead strips of skin, the waterlogged flesh, the marbled eyes. No more pretending for me that he might cough and miraculously come alive.

The fishermen returned to their own dead. They draped the bodies over their shoulders and staggered into the jungle. The women staggered, too, drunk with grief.

We were finally alone on the beach.

I couldn’t quite get myself to look at Philip, yet I couldn’t quite look away. He was lying on his back, his neck twisted, his limbs queerly posed. The six black bars covering his face were the most familiar thing about him.

For what remained of the day, I kept vigil over him, shooing away the gulls, picking off the scout ants, chasing away a hungry pig who’d escaped the massacre. When night fell, the giant coconut crabs came out and scuttled toward him in the moonlight, their claws opening and closing like pinking shears. I’d flatten them with rocks, then return to my Philip and brush away more scout ants. At some point, I fell asleep because the next thing I knew, it was dawn and the ants had returned with their armies.

Around noon, the villagers came back to the beach, shouldering their dead. They ferried them in crude bark canoes. They’d even made one for Philip. It had to be for Philip: it was so much longer than the rest. After setting the boats down at the sea’s edge, the pallbearers tottered from fatigue, while an old woman broke away from her daughters and tried to climb into a coffin. Mostly, though, people wept into their tattooed hands, or stood swaying, blinking at the dead. In the wet, unstable sand, a couple of the canoes had tipped over on their sides. I could see the bodies inside. They’d been wrapped in banana-leaf shrouds, but the leaves didn’t cover everything. I saw what they had done to the bodies. They’d rubbed off the skin.

Laadah came over and sat beside me, running her hand lightly over Philip. She ignored the ants, who were now filing into the hole in his chest. She ignored the loose blue-white skin and the blue-black fingernails. She ignored the odor. She straightened out his rigid arms and legs as best she could, then opened the one eyelid that had fallen shut. She spoke to me in Ta’un’uuan, but very slowly, so that I would understand each word. She said that Philip had to leave with the others—right now—or he’d surely get lost, that the current to the next world isn’t all that easy to find. She said I should have allowed her to rub off his tattoos last night because the deities have no use for tattooing, but it was too late now, the tide was going out. She motioned for a couple of fisherboys to come get Philip and put him in his canoe: the other coffins were already being launched. She said the body is only temporarily leased to the living: it should be returned in the same unmarked condition that it was lent.