The Plover: A Novel (18 page)

We call it Maraia, said Taromauri.

Maria?

Maraia.

What does that mean?

It means dangerous.

Oh, lovely, said Piko. Just lovely. We are going to land on an island named Dangerous. Lovely. Why don’t we slide past Dangerous and land on Undeniably Safe?

Quit pissing and moaning, said Declan. Better be despised for too anxious apprehensions than ruined by too confident security: Burke. Let’s pull in there. We need the water, and I wouldn’t mind hiding out for a few days in a corner of a lagoon or something. Be good to get the pip some fresh food too, you know? North by west. Bag of almonds for the first person to see land.

*   *   *

Are we still all telling stories? asks the gull. Because I have a good story.

God, says Declan, what
is
it with that bird, she doesn’t say anything for days and then you can’t shut her up.

Well, says the gull, a little offended,
we
don’t keep babbling away with small talk,
we
only say something when we have something to say.

Man, listen to her shriek and cackle, says Declan, you would think she’s telling a dirty joke or something. There were these three gulls in a bucket …

See, that’s just rude, says the gull. I
was
going to tell you a story about this particular island, but if I am just going to be insulted I have other matters to attend to.

I tell you, says Declan, I would give my left nut to know what she’s saying. If she’s a she. I haven’t checked. Not that I want to know. Maybe she’s a boy gull.

Do
I
make sniggering remarks about
your
genitalia? answered the gull. I do not. And how easy it would be to observe that
you
do not have a mate.
I
have a mate. Could it be that none of your species wishes to mate with you because you are rude and insulting? Could that be?

It’s almost like she’s saying something tart and blunt, you know? says Declan. Look at her with her face like a schoolmarm. She looks like an old preacher reading me the riot act.

Fine, says the gull. Fine. You think this is funny. But I have stories to tell that would make your head swim. There’s a boat hunting you, did you know that? I have seen it with my own eyes. Where do you think I go when I leave? And this island is indeed dangerous. We do not land here. No gull has set foot on this island for more years than there are fish in the sea. Even the albatross people will not go near it. And why is that? I could tell you but you are not interested in what
I
have to say. I thought we were shipmates.
You
enlisted
me
. You asked if I was in it for the long haul, and I was honored to be invited, and I signed on for the voyage. But here I am being mocked and insulted. After all we have been through! Fine. You are the captain, you make the decisions, I will just zip my lip. You go right ahead. Land where you shouldn’t and stop moving when you should be moving twice as fast. Fine.

*   *   *

Minutes later as Taromauri and Pipa were sitting in the bow they saw … something we should investigate, said Taromauri quietly to Piko. Declan aimed the
Plover
at the object. Not a boat, not a mat of vegetation or garbage, not a dead animal. So much of what we see we identify by what it is not. It was a raft. There was a body on it. Declan hove to. The raft was raw—a few logs lashed together, not carefully. The body was a man. He was clothed but barefoot. His right foot hung over the side of the raft. His hands and feet and face were so burnt by the sun that strips of blackened skin had peeled here and there showing bright pink stripes of newer skin ready to burn in its turn. The raft knocked politely against the
Plover
. Piko slipped overboard and felt the man’s wrists and neck. Alive but not by much. Declan slipped overboard and he and Piko lifted the man up to Taromauri. Pipa felt for a larger soul but there was no answer. They laid him on the hatch and crouched alongside.

The raft?

Let it go.

Young guy.

Yeh.

He’ll barf whatever we give him, you know.

Yeh.

Too bad we don’t have ice.

Yeh.

They dripped water between his cracked lips and after a while his tongue woke up and tried to explore the water but it took a while for the engineering of his face to get back into gear. His face was cracked and burned something awful. They spread salve on all the cracked and burned parts they could find easily and figured his shirt and pants had protected the rest. He had a jacket, it turned out, which he must have been using for a pillow or blanket on the raft, because it was rolled up tight and stuck to his neck, which had cracked and burned so that blood had seeped into the jacket and hardened and now the jacket was glued so tight to his neck that the shock and pain of removing it was what woke the man from his coma. It took a while for him to get his eyes all the way open, the skin on his eyelids also being badly cracked and burned, and it took him an even longer while to get his voice up from his chest and through the raw desert of his throat and across the blackened waste of his lips, but after more water and salve and hard work on everyone’s part he got his parts all moving together again and after a brief period of croaking he said
you
and
yes
.

Excellent start, said Declan. Good word choice. If
you
is a question, the answer is that this is a boat called the
Plover,
and yes, we will carry you to a doctor, we are heading that way anyways.

The man looked at Piko.

Just along for the ride myself, said Piko.

The man tried to say something else but his voice had retreated to croaking again and Declan said my sincere advice is for you to stop talking and keep sipping tiny drops of water. Also the more salve you get on the better. The ship’s medical officer here will remain in attendance. Dr. Piko?

Dr. O Donnell?

Your patient, sir.

Thank you, sir.

*   *   *

The island was small but thorough. It was three miles long by one mile wide and there was indeed a lake with eels in it, some of them mammoth. Most of the island was dense with palm trees that seemed as if they had never been cut in the whole history of the world. There were coconut crabs everywhere and lorikeets and terns and boobies and turtles on the beaches. As the
Plover
slid past the landing wharf Piko pointed out egrets and plovers along the shore. There was one airstrip and six coconut plantations and eight small villages and one village almost big enough to be a small town. The smallest village had thirty people and eleven dogs in it and the biggest village had hundreds of people including a doctor and a reverend mister and a skid row district and more than one hundred dogs. Piko jumped out and roped the boat to the wharf and Taromauri stepped off carrying Pipa on her shoulders like a nut on a tree.

You not coming, Dec?

Nah. Stuff to do on the boat. I’ll stay with the guy and you find the doctor.

You coming, gull?

Nope, said the gull. I believe I made it clear that we do not set foot on this island, and indeed even being roped to it like this is unnerving.

I tell you, said Declan, every time you ask that bird a question now she answers right quick. I think she understands us. I would give my—

No no, said Piko, keep your nut, you and your pal keep an eye on the boat and we will see what’s up. What’s my shopping list, fruit and water?

And fish and coffee. And the doctor. See if there’s pork to be had. And cigars. Cigars are important.

Why are you not coming? The burned guy isn’t going anywhere.

Stuff to do on the boat.

Why really are you not coming?

I don’t want to land.

Pardon?

Not ready to land yet.

You don’t even want to set foot on a beach? After all those days on the boat?

Nope.

Okay. Fruit, water, pork, fish, coffee, doctor.

And cigars. Cigars are—

Important, yeh, I got it. All right—see you in a couple hours.

*   *   *

In the second-largest village there is a chapel surrounded by ferns. The chapel is made of palm trees and screw pine and catchbird tree and there are little exquisite worked details cut from breadfruit wood. In and around the chapel are strings and pots and bunches of frangipani and hibiscus. To the west of the chapel there is a grove of guava and to the east there is a grove of papaya. At the foot of each tree in both groves there is a nameplate with the name of a deceased person whose used body was turned to ash and the ash planted with a new seedling so that as a person died a tree was launched and the person’s energy fed the tree from which came food for the families of that person and for other families if the person’s tree was especially generous.

In the chapel this evening the choir is practicing. The choir has eleven members, one of which is the Reverend Mister, who sings bass or baritone, depending. The Reverend Mister was almost ordained a priest but not quite. Matters conspired such that he completed his study and training and took final vows but found himself pastor of the chapel and its small attendant congregation before achieving ordination. It is a long story and not especially interesting, as he says. It is the stuff of low drama. Whereas our choir is the stuff of elevated aspiration. The choir is his baby and his pet. He recruits widely and well. Among the members are two boys with voices as nearly perfect and pristine as you can hear in this world. This perfection cannot last but we will savor it before it flees into croaking maturity. There are three young women who sing like birds like angels like the murmuring sea. There is another man who sings bass if the Reverend Mister sings baritone and vice versa. They call themselves the Alternators when they are in their cups. When they are in their cups they sing Jimmy Rushing songs. There are two older women who love to sing and do not sing at all well but they sing with passion, and awkward passion is so often so very much more admirable than mere achievement, isn’t that so? We also have a new member this evening, a visitor from another island, where he was a man of great service to his community; let us welcome him with our usual grace and warmth, and assure him that here he is among friends. You stand back row center, sir—bass far left, baritones center, tenor to the right. With that nose, you are surely a baritone. Tonight I will sing baritone and our broad-shouldered comrade Toba here will sing the bass line. Our tenor … but ah, here, as if entering from the wings on cue, is our tenor, prompt and punctual as always. Danilo, welcome. Ladies and gentlemen, “Be Thou My Vision,” on three …

*   *   *

Taromauri carries Pipa along the beach. Terns swirl around them like sentinels. Your legs are longer than they were yesterday, says Taromauri. Are you growing an inch a day? And soon you will be eighteen feet tall? Eventually you will be tall enough to walk in the ocean and pull the boat? Pipa the Giant! With one foot on one island and the other on another far away. Birds will build nests on your shoulders. Or you can be a bridge from one island to another and people will walk along your spine and think it is a range of lovely gentle mountains. It is not so bad to be big. I have been big forever, I think. When I was little I was big. People were angry that I was big and for a long time I wondered why they were angry and then I figured out that they were frightened of me. Yet big people are rarely frightening. It is small people who are frightening because they are frightened. This is the way of the world, I think. I was so big when I was little that people didn’t talk to me. People shouted at me like I was a stone or a storm. The first person who spoke gently to me was Kekenu. I think that is why we married each other. He understood that I was a person inside my big body and I saw that he was a person inside the powerful armor of his body. He had tides and storms inside but his face was set like a stone or a sea and people thought he did not feel things painfully but he did, very much so. Did I ever tell you about the last time I saw him? He was on the beach and he took the last letter he had written to our daughter and he made a little fire and he burned it. I watched him do this thing. Then he took her clothes and toys and a book she loved and her sleeping mat and her bracelets and hair-twists and a flute she loved and he burned all those things too. He sat by the fire with a stick making sure that everything burned properly. I watched him do this thing. Poking the fire with his little stick so that every single thing burned away. He crouched there for hours until the fire burned everything through and burned down to ash and blew away. That was the last time I saw him. I miss him very much. I wish that we could see into each other again but I don’t know if we will ever see each other again. That is the way of the world, I think.

*   *   *

The doctor in the largest village, on hearing about the man found on a raft at sea, sent a truck and two men to carry him from the boat to the clinic. The two men were small and silent and efficient and they shouldered the burned man gently into their truck. One of the men had lightning bolts tattooed on his cheeks and the other wore intricate blue-and-green feathered earrings that hung to his shoulders. After they drove off Piko and Declan stashed the fruit and water Piko had bought, and made coffee with the o my gawd fresh coffee he had bought, and commiserated that sadly there was no pork to be had whatsoever absolutely, and Piko with a flourish produced a bright golden box of cigars, and said me personally I suggest that we wait to enjoy these until we have circumnavigated the island, and walked it stem to stern, and explored the teeming jungle, and quartered the compass, and spent a whole blessed day on terra firma, a boat that doesn’t rock even a little.

Nah, said Declan. I am staying with the boat.

The boat’s not going anywhere, man. Let’s wander and wonder.

Nah,
misneach,
stay with the boat, rule number one.

We’re not
at
sea, for a change, Dec. Come on, man, Taromauri will keep an eye on the boat and the pip, let’s have an adventure. Why else did we land on land?