The Plover: A Novel (14 page)

What happened to you and … Wendy?

Wanda. Eventually she figured out that another way to be a new person all the time was to leave. So she left.

Did you miss her?

You know, weirdly, yeh, I did. She was a sweet girl. She was like an excitement junkie, that girl.
Everything
totally made her day. You never saw anyone so delighted by a cup of coffee, for example. She was
appreciative,
you know? Panappreciative. She was a sweet kid. I haven’t thought about her for a long time. I think to be honest I was sort of hurt that I wasn’t exciting enough for her to stay so I deliberately forgot her. My family was real good at deliberately forgetting stuff.

Why is that?

Ah, who cares. Next.

Taromauri stood up, her epic arms loose by her sides.

You don’t have to stand up, you know, said Declan. This isn’t church.

But Taromauri brought her hands together in that same odd gesture, as if her hands were meeting for the first time, and she said, I will tell you about the husband I used to have. He was a good and gentle man. His name was Kekenu, and his people were the turtle people. The thing he was very good at was catching someone’s last breath and saving it to blow on the next child who came into that family. He was
very
good at that. He had the quickest hands, and he could catch that last breath coming out and save it in a little bone jar. He could catch last words and songs also. Not everyone can do that but he could and he became famous for it. But then he changed when our daughter went down in the ocean and didn’t come back up. He forgot how to catch last breaths and songs and words. But that was his work and he wasn’t good at any other work. He started writing letters to our daughter and leaving them on the beach at low tide for the ocean to take to her. Every day he wrote a letter and staked it to the sand and every day the ocean came and took it. But he never got a letter back from her. He thought maybe she had become an eel and was living in a reef somewhere. He thought maybe the eels had called to her that day on the boat and that’s why she went down to see what they wanted. He thought that if she read his letters she would understand that we understood what she had done but that we loved her and would be very happy if she would leave the eel people and come back and be our daughter again. He thought you just had to ask politely and it could happen. You couldn’t go fight the eels over what had happened, of course, but you could just explain calmly how
you
were seeing things, and perhaps they would explain how
they
saw things, and an agreement could be worked out, like perhaps our daughter would be a woman sometimes and an eel other times. Things like that happen. But we never got a letter back from our daughter, and the eels never said anything either, and after a while Kekenu stopped writing letters. When he stopped writing letters and leaving them in the surf he stopped being Kekenu. He had been a good and gentle man, and I loved him, and our daughter loved him, but when he stopped being Kekenu he stopped being good and gentle, and so our time was finished.

*   *   *

The gull heard all this, of course. Sure she did. And she figured that since Pipa never spoke,
she
would tell a story, which she did, with the usual rough glee of the gulls, and her story went like this.

We have saints and criminals too, you know. Did you think you were the only people with saints and criminals? Every people has saints and criminals. Sometimes in the same person. Sometimes saints are criminals who were awakened. That is the story I am telling. There was a gull who was a great thief. He was the biggest and strongest and fastest and smartest gull anyone had seen in as many years as the oldest of us was. Because he could do whatever he wanted he did so. He took whatever food he wanted and mated with anyone he wanted and killed anyone he wanted. Sometimes he plucked the eyes of sharks and spit them back at the sharks. Sometimes he mated with a gull and then killed her and ate her. Sometimes he stole jaeger chicks and dropped them screaming into the fires of people. There were many worse things he did. I do not want to have those things in my mouth. But one day something happened to him. We do not know what it was and he could not explain it himself. He went another way. He shared food. He fought only jaegers. There were many other things that he did. No one can remember all the other things that he did. No one knows why he went another way. Not even he knows. But he went another way. That is the story I am telling you. Now I am finished with my story!

*   *   *

On the beach they had watched openmouthed as the gull squawked and warbled and bobbed, finishing with a little hop and bow, and Piko laughed so hard he got the hiccups. Sweet blessed Jesus, said Declan, who
is
that bird and what is he going on about? But he calls us to order, shipmates. Away to the billowing sea! And set the fishing lines because we are out of fresh fish and I am starving and if I see another blessed almond on this trip I will throw you all overboard. Batten the hatches and ready the sail. Hoist the anchor and feed the gull. All hands on deck. Strap in the pip and let’s get ready to hit the road. We leave at dusk on the button. East, my hearties! One hour of all sails and then bare poles and low motor. Away to the impacific Pacific! Away to the mother of all mothers! Away to the hatchery of most of the fish in the galaxy! Away to the ocean that eats people! Away to storms that make you puke and wonder why in heaven’s name you are not at home by the fire in a house with a lock to keep the wind out! Away to wind funnels that make you pee in your pantaloons and wonder why you are not living in the desert where no water can find you and drown you and melt your skin and dissolve your bones! Away to the ocean wherein are animals no man nor woman has ever seen or probably will ever see no matter how cool our coolest instruments! Away to the ocean wherein lie bones uncountable from beings uncountable of species uncountable! Away and avast, two men and a woman and a child and a gull! Avast and away, four hominids and an avian and whatever else we have on board I do not yet know about! Awast and avay!

*   *   *

The minister for fisheries and marine resources and foreign affairs had no wife. He had no children. He had many friends but he was peripatetic personally and professionally and no one friend or colleague ever knew where he was at every blessed moment so that when he vanished it was some hours before his vanishment was noticed. His secretary searched the ministry offices for him and then searched the adjoining streets and then searched the beachfront and then called the secretaries and staffers in the offices of the other ministers none of whom nor their spouses nor lovers nor friends nor sycophants nor lobbyists nor bagmen nor counselors nor lawyers nor children nor neighbors had seen him for some hours either. The hours in which no one saw him lengthened. The police searched for him and volunteers combed the beaches and woods and streets and the police boat set out into the wet wilderness in search of him. But he could not be found. His name was spoken by every fifth mouth, his face pinned and posted and mailed and nailed on walls and boats and poles and palms, but soon he became a memory, a cold case, a rumor. An interim minister was appointed, who made sure he did not have a profile or portfolio as popular as his predecessor; reports were filed, eulogies and elegies sung and spoken; a formal ceremony of remembrance was held in the ministry, again filling the stairs with the rapt men and women and children who had heard the minister speak, and had felt a shiver and shimmer and hunger and spark inside themselves at his words, a yearning to believe him, an urge and itch to live in the world he spoke about, a cousinship of dreams, a companionship of convictions about what life could be like not only in their islands but across all islands, across the whole wild sweep of Pacifica, the huge blue continent that could maybe be a new kind of country; but the canoe in the rotunda of the ministry, the canoe filled to overflowing with notes and flowers, the canoe past which thousands of mourners filed all night long after the ceremony of remembrance, was missing the minister. Long past dawn the next day there were still people in line on the steps of the ministry, waiting to approach the canoe, drop a flower or a letter into it, run their hands along the
kanawa
wood, and whisper prayers for the soul of the departed, that his spirit may evade the watchers in the woods, and walk freely along the beach, and embark upon the sea of the stars from which we all have come and to which we must return. When, finally, just after noon, the last of the mourners had gone and the custodial staff was removing the flowers and boxing up the mountain of notes and letters, a sudden brief shower of rain thrummed the building.
Wan te mate,
one old janitor said quietly to another, that is the canoe of the dead, come for him; and the second janitor, who had been morose and silent, smiled and said
be bon roko raoi wana,
his canoe certainly arrived promptly.

V

5° SOUTH, 160° EAST

MAYBE THE OCEAN THINKS
. How do we know? Maybe the ocean licks its islands every night like mothers lick their cubs. This could be. Maybe it chants their names in its many languages in the morning and makes them rise again toward the sun: Aotearoa, Aranuka, Pukapuka, Tuamotu. Maybe it touches fingers with the other oceans at night just to be sure they are all still there and not drawn away finally by the thirsty void after mere billions of years. Maybe the ocean remembers the old days when the worlds were just made and there was naught upon the waters but storms upon the sea; the ocean’s wild and tumultuous youth. Maybe all the smaller seas and oceans are the children of the mother of oceans, and Pacifica dreams of its swaddlings Coral and Weddell and Bering and Ross and Tasman and Okhotsk. Maybe Atlantica wishes to someday be Pacifica and that is why it gnaws and chews at Holland and Haiti. Maybe not a fishlet falls to the bottom of the sea without the ocean knowing. Maybe the ocean remembers every soul who sank beneath the billows and fell to the floor and slept there for years and finally sifted into the bones of other beings. This could be. Maybe the ocean feels every boat like a scar on its skin and only permits them to pass so that its knowledge of men deepens. Maybe the ocean is made furious by the untrustworthy sky from which come lashes and flashes. Maybe the ocean throws islands at the sky as vengeance, as prayer, as a joke, a shout or song of lava and coral. Maybe the ocean invented the languages spoken over it these thousands of years. Maybe the ocean remembers the ancient oceans that once were and are no more: Iapetus, Tethys, Mirovia, Panthalassa. Maybe the ocean stares at the stars and yearns for the oceans on other worlds: Titan, Callisto, Enceladus, Io. Maybe the ocean remembers the story Atlantica tells, of the man on the shore long ago who stared out and formed the word
okeanos
in the holy cave of his mouth, naming the mother of all things, finding her name with his tongue, telling his brothers and sisters; but maybe that is only one name for the mother, and there are thousands of thousands beyond thousands of her names; maybe those names are the names of the beings who live below her belly; maybe if we spoke those names we would sail home in some amazing unimaginable new way; this could be. How do we know?

*   *   *

Piko and Declan in the cabin.

Where are we going, Dec?

I am thinking of some little atolls east and north. American territories. Islands where only scientists stop by here and there to count albatross peckers or whatever. You’ll fit in there.

Populated?

Usually not, I think, but little atolls like that sometimes have doctors and naval observers and construction guys living there on and off, fixing landing strips and lighthouse beacons and stuff like that. There’s a few islands there that have little villages of fifty people or so. Be good places to just camp out and stretch a little. I’d like to get out of town for a while, maybe haul out the boat and go through everything, clean the bottom, do some fishing. There’s reefs around those atolls so crammed with fish we can probably just ask them politely to jump in the boat. The pip can probably talk to fish like she talks to birds, right?

She sure does have a thing for birds.

Birds have a thing for her, man. Have you noticed the terns? I mean, we are tern central ever since she joined the crew. I never saw so many terns in one place in all the years I have been on the boat and now we are a tern ferry or tern bait or something. Weird. Was she always like that with the birds?

Pretty much, yes, now that I think about it. Walking with her was always a kick, you would be walking down a moist silent street first thing in the morning on the way to the bus or to go fishing and you would swear there wasn’t a bird awake for a hundred miles and as soon as the pip stepped out her front door,
boom,
bird symphony. Like traveling with a bird rock star. I was always shocked they didn’t break out their little tiny cameras and autograph pads, you know? Especially the little birds. You know all the little brown guys, the dusky sparrows and juncos and wrens and bushtits and finches and all those little brown ones the size of your thumb that you can’t tell apart one from another? They loved her best, I think. Maybe because she was their size. But even when she was a baby she would just sit in the grass and birds would come bubbling out of the bushes and run to her like she was dwarf Jesus or something. She would just laugh and they would all be burbling and whistling and hopping up and down like someone poured joy juice in the grass and everything was happy bonkers. Man, it was hilarious. I haven’t thought of that in years. Boy. There were days when the birds got so excited they would climb up on her shoulders and perch in her hair and she would be wearing the birds like a singing jacket and of course they were so excited they couldn’t totally control themselves and I would have to hose her off after a while. Man, that was funny. Even
that
made her laugh. You never saw a kid so happy to have birds poop on her head. Man.