Huia Short Stories 10 (18 page)

Rangatira

Marama Salsano

Hannelore

Every now and then a shadow appeared, fleetingly, behind open curtains. Hanne was used to the busyness and steady lights of the German autobahn, less familiar with staticky radios and winding roads that meandered into deserted gorges, mountains and valleys. She braked sharply as a line of children darted across the road. One, wearing a Barbie dress and purple gumboots, showed Hanne the middle finger, twice, before vanishing with her companions into a grassy field.

Hanne slowed the car to a halt and retrieved the photograph from her tote bag. It had been wedged between her passport and the last precious letter her mama had written. Had her mother, fragile and brittle in her hospital bed, been right? On the back of the picture, a scrawl:

Rangatira marae, 1934.

This was it, the strange little house from the photograph. Figures with bulging eyes and tongues were carved on posts, guarding either side of a concrete verandah. The painted, red skin of each figure had flaked and lifted in places, giving them a wizened, shrewd appearance. Emerald clubs in hand, the figures stared at each other, their toes clawing stony steps that had sprouted fine, grassy hair. Similar carvings framed a tiny door and window, both set against brilliant white weatherboards. At the apex of the building, the carved head of another figure glared at Hanne as she approached. Who are you? What do you want?

Bear

Bloody tourists. Bloody Pākehā reporters. Bloody Pākehā tourist-reporters.

‘Haere atu!' Bear shouted from his collapsible chair in the shade, his bulk shifting ungraciously as he made sharp gestures at the blonde woman sashaying across the marae ātea. Who the hell does she think she is? ‘You're trespassing. Go away!' he yelled. Sweat dripped down his spine, seeking the cavity between his buttocks and the already moist canvas beneath his massive frame. Today, the clouds surrounding the mountains seemed to have sucked in the heat and amplified it across the vale. No wind, hardly any reprieve in the shade and even the air felt clammier than usual – as though the entire valley was being slowly vacuum-packed. He held up his arm, expecting to see plastic-wrapped skin and then humphed at the thought of it. Get a grip, Bear.

In front of him, the skinny woman continued ambling along as though she owned the place. She wore dark jeans, a long-sleeved jersey and sneakers – fat ones, not sensible summer shoes or jandals. Must be pōrangi. A reporter then. Just what he needed to end what had already been a stressful day. His daughter, Ana, had breezed back into the valley unannounced. She'd gotten the bash, again, and her little Stella, who lived with Bear, had promptly hightailed it when her mother arrived. Roaming with her cousins, no doubt. But Stella's disappearance was all Ana needed to accuse Bear of being an unfit caregiver. Talk about a rag speaking ill of the cloth. All he had wanted was peace and quiet. Time to cool down and recite the lessons that were carved into his walking stick. He was finding it more and more difficult to remember them all and needed all the practice he could get.

The woman stood in the middle of the marae ātea, eyes upraised, mouthing something at Pawa. This'd be good. He'd tell her to bugger off, for sure. Bear leaned forward, resting both hands on his walking stick. He squinted, bringing his ancestor's head into focus, and held his breath – or as much of it as his lungs, compressed with the immensity of his chest, could muster. But today, Pawa's grooved and painted frown lines seemed to have softened. Haere mai, Pawa seemed to be saying, welcome. He did that sometimes, though not often enough to be a coincidence. Ana once reckoned it was the light. It filtered through the mist surrounding the valley and made their tūpuna less ferocious looking. A trick, she'd said, laughingly, to lull their enemies into a false sense of security. Bear pursed his lips together. What are you up to, Old Boy? The canvas chair sighed and shuddered as he heaved himself to his feet and strode towards the woman.

‘We're not interested. Go away,' he said.

‘Do you live here?'

‘Leave or I'll call the police,' he answered wryly. They'd be the last people he'd call. For anything. When I die, he'd told his whānau, don't you dare call them cops. Bury me first, they can do their note-taking and investigating afterwards. He'd spent a decade locked up on their account and wouldn't trust a copper to empty his pee-bottle in the middle of the night. Police aren't like that anymore, Ana had said; things have changed. What else could she say? She slept with the enemy and pretended he didn't give her the bash regularly. Bear felt each blow and bruise as though it had been inflicted on him directly.

‘I need to speak with the person in charge, please,' the skinny woman continued. She spoke slowly and deliberately with large, rounded vowels. Māori vowels. Only her rhythm was off. A photo of the whare tupuna, clutched between the woman's slender fingers, caught Bear's eye. Undoubtedly from the archives of some private, Pākehā collection.

‘No one's gonna talk to you. Or give you permission to take photos,' he said.

She'd done her homework. But so had many other tauiwi who'd arrived over the years, charmed the bajingers off his ancestors and then attempted to strip them clean of their land, language and traditions. Not that this one looked like much of a charmer. More like a meerkat from that movie Stella made him watch last year when Ana brought her back to recover from rheumatic fever.

If only Ana had stayed too. If only she'd taken an interest in the lessons he desperately needed to pass on. They were already melting into scraps of dreams, scant pieces of something once weighty and meaningful. Bear knew his iwi would collectively mourn their loss, as would he, but who was interested in ancient rituals these days? It was all about Internet and boom-boom music and idiotic reality television. Upload it to YouTube Ana had told Bear when he tried to explain how rapidly things were slipping his mind. She spoke as if tapu was meaningless, as valuable as a melting iceblock. He was hot and tired and couldn't stand the heat any longer.

‘Just go away and don't come back,' he said, irritably.

The woman turned, hurried across the lawn, and leapt across the ditch onto the road. As she drove away, Bear felt oddly unsettled. Best go home and prepare tea. Ana had brought organic food with her. Pretending to be flashy was her thing these days. She'd conveniently forgotten all the pork bones she consumed before she met that shifty, slip of a man who'd embedded his claws so far into her that when Ana left him, as she did occasionally, barbs still clung to her skin like microscopic parasites. In his younger days, before he got diabetes and gout, Bear would have done something about it. By God, he would have. Now though, his moko came first. Last night's pot of boil-up was still in the fridge – lots of watercress and dough-boy dumplings, Stella's favourites.

Hannelore

As soon as she reached the highway, Hanne pulled over and wept. She'd never been yelled at in such a manner. Her parents had been quietly spoken. Never made a scene, always orderly and logical. Reason over emotion, her father had always said. Secretly, she'd found this a rather cold, Spock-like summation, but what could she do? He was, after all, her father. At first, she'd thought the enormous man who'd charged towards her had leapt from the carvings adorning the strange little house. Absurd, she knew, and she blamed it on the figurehead at the peak of the building. It had been framed by dazzling skies and had blinded her vision somewhat. But the lumbering man was by no means a sleek, carved figure.

On the contrary, he was the biggest person she'd ever seen – and she'd once seen a morbidly obese woman as she passed a hospital room on the way to visit her mother. Three nurses and two orderlies were manoeuvering the woman onto scales. Hanne had lingered at the door, fascinated. The woman's shirt lifted during the process and a smooth, half-moon of stomach flab emerged. Hanne couldn't stop staring at the white, rubbery padding, which hung like a child's corpse from the woman's hips. Once her bulk was coaxed onto the scales, a triumphant sigh rippled through the room. The woman's relatives stood nearby in a ragged semicircle, seemingly relieved that others understood the physicality involved in caring for the woman, yet appalled and slightly embarrassed at watching a replay of their daily lives.

The angry man who'd confronted Hanne had moved a lot more quickly than she had believed was possible. In fact, she hadn't even noticed his walking stick until he was so close she could smell the oily stench of mutton seeping from his pores. He'd leaned on the stick as one might an old acquaintance, while sweat beaded and slid along the lines of his forehead then slipped under his chin and pooled around the creases of his neck. But it was his face, covered entirely in tattoos, that had stunned her. Each pattern interlaced with the next, so that the entire configuration curved neatly, fiercely, around the man's features. But why would anyone permanently disfigure their face? Granted, the tattoos weren't entirely untoward. Hanne had always found a beauty and understanding within abstract art that she could never derive from more conventional pieces. On the other hand, had the man not encroached so far into her personal space, she might have found his appearance rather comical: the ferociousness of his face, set against an aging canvas of too-small shorts, sloppy shirt and sandals with sports socks. Hanne wiped her eyes with her sleeve. She hadn't flown over twenty thousand kilometres for nothing.

Bear

Not again. Bear spied the car as he was about to sit down to a hot mug of tea on the porch. He placed his mug on the railing and trod down the driveway towards the vehicle. His feet crunching on the gravel along with his walking stick produced a rhythmic, three-legged cadence.

‘Have to hand it to her,' he muttered. ‘She's a stubborn one.'

At the vehicle he stopped, stooped and peered through the windscreen. The woman was sprawled at the back, a pile of clothes heaped under her neck, one leg draped at an unnatural angle over the back seat. Spittle caked the side of her mouth and had left a damp mark on her makeshift pillow. For a millisecond, the woman reminded him of Stella. She too slept in circus-like contortions, drooling on whatever her head happened to rest upon.

He rapped his knuckles against the window, more delicately than he expected, and then cleared his throat noisily. It was too early in the morning for confrontations, even the rooster in the field next door had yet to cock-his-doodle-doo. In any case, the way he'd spoken to the reporter had been on his mind all night. It wasn't her fault that the tūtae had hit the fan yesterday.

‘Ugheem.' The woman didn't stir.

‘Hoo-hoo,' he said. This was Stella's special signal to let him know she'd arrived home from school and was heading to the freezer to retrieve a raspberry iceblock. Hoo-hoo, she'd call and, hoo-hoo, he'd respond from wherever he was in the house. No matter the season or weather, Stella always found her koro in the vegetable garden or sitting on the front porch with a hot cup of tea. And as she licked her ice-block, she'd relay the day's events: who'd fallen off the jungle gym, who'd been growled by Nanny Elsie and what games they'd played, the fun ones as well as the stink ones.

Now though, Stella was asleep. It was difficult to get her settled at night, with only one week to go before Hana Koko arrived with pressies. Bear was certain Stella didn't believe in Santa anymore, but she'd brought home so many paper snowflakes, salt dough decorations and paintings of snowy, gumbooted bliss that he knew he had to make an effort. At least a tree with tinsel and a few shiny baubles. He glanced at his puku and wobbled it slightly. Need to go easy this year, he thought, then knocked again on the car window.

‘Hey, girlie. You OK?'

Her leg twitched.

‘You awake?'

Eyelids scrunched together.

‘Wakey-wakey,' he sang, then grinned. Wakey-wakey, hands off snakey. He'd heard this so often, on the inside, that he sometimes murmured it to himself when he was hovering between a state of dreamtime and gentle awakefulness.

Without warning, the reporter screamed. A blood-souring shriek he hadn't heard since prison. Better not be wacky-backy. Her eyes were open, but there was no-bloody-one home. Something wasn't right with her, but what was he supposed to do about that? Over the past few years, nutcases had flourished in the valley. There was the young couple who started a commune in the bush where people danced around in the nuddy, the man who claimed he was incubating a moa's egg in his garden shed, and, of course, the family with over fifty cats who lived on the border of the National Park and drove the Department of Conservation crazy. If only they hadn't all been whānau. That's what made it worse, seeing whānau plastered over newspapers and television as though the entire valley was made up of doongies.

Worst though were the cock-and-bull terror raids, where armed police set up road blocks on the old confiscation line (still a blistering scab on the skin of his people). But the real terror oozed like black tar from the sanctioned Darth Vader figures who'd raided homes for days. Bear, too, had been a target. He was, after all, an ex-con, a mammoth of a man, and Māori. Luckily, Stella wasn't with him at the time: many of her cousins were still skittish around strangers. And none of this had helped soften the betrayal Bear felt when Ana hooked up with one of them – one who, Bear was sure, had been one of the masked terrorists who'd questioned him. The man was arrogant enough to have enjoyed playing God and sadistic enough to then shack up with his daughter. The last thing the Rangatira Valley needed was for some reporter to swing the spotlight back onto their homes.

‘Hey,' Bear said, ‘Wake up!'

The woman blinked several times.

‘Mōrena. You sleep here all night?'

She nodded, wiped the pīkaru from her eyes and began fossicking through the pile of clothes next to her. As she whipped off her jersey and sat there in her bra, Bear scouted for wood pigeons in the cabbage trees. The undressing itself was normal enough. Having spent much of his life on marae, he was used to communal sleeping arrangements – not just farting, snoring, sniffing and coughing, but also bums and boobs slipping out as people dressed. Everyone knew to avert their eyes. But here? On a public road where the protocols of the marae don't exist? Finally, the woman emerged from her car, barefooted and wearing a thin blouse and shorts.