The Plover: A Novel (7 page)

Maybe.

I don’t know anything about kids but I think so.

Didn’t you take care of your kid brothers?

They took care of themselves. We weren’t that kind of family. You and Elly were that kind of family. Not us. We were on our own from the start. Like fish eggs. Probably why I am stuck at sea.

Speaking of which, when are you going home?

Not. This is home now.

You’re going to spend your life on the boat?

I don’t know, man. I am just sort of winging it here.

Destination?

Unknown.

Agenda?

Don’t sink.

That’s it? Don’t sink?

Yup. Ambition can creep as well as soar, says old Ed Burke.

What?

Edmund Burke, man. Ed is like the patron saint of the
Plover
.

You
are a nut.

Yeh.

Are we ever going to land?

You in a hurry?

No.

Well.

I guess we are at sea too.

Yeh.

Sorry to poke, Dec.

No, man, it’s a pleasure to have you here. And I really like the pip. I never told you how sorry I am about her and Elly. I am really sorry, man. Maybe the boat will be good for the pip. She’s already had wild adventures on the
Plover,
right? So maybe that’s good. Maybe excitement is good for the little peanut. Get her jazzed up, am I right? That could be.

That could be.

That could most certainly be.

Later, lazily:

What was this fire-throwing stuff you mentioned back on the island? What was that all about?

Oahi,
it’s called. You really and truly throw burning logs out over the ocean. You wouldn’t believe how far some guys can throw those things, like a
mile
.

What’s the point?

Old tradition. Kind of a holy thing. Ceremonial, celebratory. I just got fascinated by it and got really absorbed and who knows why. We came to the island after Elly died and something about
oahi
just was … healthy. I can’t explain it very well. Pipa liked sitting in the dark and watching the firesticks go flying out over the water. The wind hits the mountain there and rises and if you get your feet set and throw right your fire just floats out there forever. It’s the wildest thing. You wouldn’t believe someone can throw a burning log a mile and it just hangs there traveling slowly on the wind until it finally hits and sizzles. Incredible.

Any wood’ll do?

Best is
papala
or
hau,
real light dry woods. Papala you can light one end and throw it like a javelin and the fire burns through it as it’s in the air. Hau mostly you would light both ends and whip it so it spins end over end. It’s hard to learn to do it right and it’s no picnic climbing up the mountain carrying wood but when you see it done well, or even better when you occasionally
do
it well, there was some powerful magic in it, man. The people who really get it don’t talk about it much. They taught me because I respected it and didn’t talk about it, and because they saw what it meant to Pipa. She would be down on the beach wrapped in blankets with the aunties and they told me she peeped all night long like a chick hatching. They sure liked Pipa. They called her Peepa. One of the aunties told me the pip was learning how to use her new eyes and ears, which I don’t know what she meant but it felt good to hear something other than
poor kid
and
cripple
.

You get good at throwing fire? We could use you in battle.

I was decent. It’s not strength as much as balance, is what they taught me. I am not the strongest guy but I did okay. It’s not for fighting, though, you know. More like praying, I guess.

Huh.

We spent a lot of nights there, Pipa and me, Pipa on the beach with the aunties and me up on the mountain with the throwers. Good guys. We’d make a fire and tell stories and then throw. Sometimes people would be out there in boats trying to catch the sticks as they fell. In the old days it was the height of cool to catch a stick and mark yourself with it, that was heavy medicine. One friend of mine, he was a master at gauging the wind, and he’d shoot over in his canoe and grab the burning stick just before it hit the water. Incredible hands. You met him—he was the guy who delivered the letter. Kono. Excellent guy. There’s a lot of stories about that guy, and he’s a great storyteller himself, he’s like the storycatcher in his town.

Tell me one.

There was a kid named Nou who wanted to be a firethrower so bad he could taste it, but he was a little kid, and back then only the top men were allowed to do the deed. Nou sneaks up the mountain anyway one night, but it’s a hell of a climb, as you know, and he’s beat, and stops to rest, and he hears a small voice calling for help. It’s a
menehune,
like a wood elf, and Nou, a decent kid, frees the elf from the rock that trapped the guy. The
menehune,
also a decent sort, says he will help Nou throw his fire the farthest that night. So Nou gets up to the top of the mountain, but the older guys are furious that he’s there against the rules, and they want to toss him overboard, but Nou makes them a bet that he can throw the farthest, if he loses they can throw him over. Okay, fine, they say, probably snarling, you know, like in the movies, and he whips his log, but it’s his first time, and he’s little, so his log just falls straight down toward the forest below—but the
menehune
is on task, and he asks the wind for a little help, and the wind catches Nou’s stick and sails it so far out it looks like a star on the horizon. New world champion of firethrowing: Nou.

That’s a good story. What happens to Nou later?

Oh, they killed him later anyway. But his friend the
menehune
cursed his murderers’ feet for that, and they could never climb the mountain again, the end.

When bad men combine, the good must associate, said Declan, else they will fall, one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. Old Ed Burke.

Man, what is your deal with old Ed Burke?

Brilliant Irish guy, said Declan cheerfully. One of those guys everyone thinks they know what he said but hardly anyone actually reads what he actually said. I just dig the guy. No one reads him anymore and I feel bad for him so I figure
I’ll
read him, at least. Keep the man alive. So at least one regular person in the world is reading him for fun rather than to chew some obscure detail to death like they do in colleges. Did you know he would give a speech first and then sit down and try to write down what he said? Incredible. Who does that anymore?

You
are a nut.

A guy throwing burning sticks into the ocean from a mountain is calling
me
a nut.

Just trying to learn a useful trade.

Haw. Let’s eat. You better wake the pip or she’ll miss dinner.

This is good, being here, Dec. Thank you.

No worries.

It’s real generous.

I needed a crew. You were the first two that applied.

Thanks, man.

No worries.

*   *   *

But he did worry, in his bunk, at night. How was this going to work? What about food and fuel and repairs? What if Pipa got worse and needed a doctor? And not to be overly selfish about the whole thing, but this was not the plan. This was a solo voyage. Now there’s three of us. I wasn’t looking for company. Not having company was the point. Company just expects things from you. Other people are kind of fences, aren’t they? Assumptions and expectations. I don’t want anybody expecting anything from me ever again. I was just going to float. Now we have to go somewhere and do something. But they are rootless too. They are flying solo. What are we going to do for money? What do I do when Piko finally says it’s time for them to go home? He’ll have to land her at some point. She’ll need wheelchairs and ramps and machines and visiting nurses and stuff and he’ll have to get a suit job to pay for that. Poor kid. That kid is a cripple forever, I bet. No mother, no house, no voice. Poor little fish. Jesus Christmas. Almost lost that kid. Shouldn’t have her on board. Irresponsible. Probably illegal. No permit for that. Jesus blessed Christmas.

And thinking of Christmas Declan suddenly got a wash of old old memory from when he was maybe ten years old and his sister Grace was maybe eight and the boys were little crawlers, this was before their mom left dragging her suitcase down the driveway and never came back, before the old man froze up inside totally and hated everyone and everything, and he was sitting by the fire, a roaring winter fire of cedar and oak, a frozen mist like a blanket outside weighing down the spruce trees, the cows all huddled together for warmth in the barn, the radio playing something deep and gentle, some cello thing like deep voices humming, and Grace was half-asleep with her head on his feet in a little castle of pillows they had built by the fire, and the little brothers were tipped over like bowling pins asleep on each other on the huge dark couch, and his mom didn’t hate his dad yet, and his dad was listening to her at the pine table, she was carving something in the air with her hands like golden birds in the gentle light from the kitchen, and his dad had his face propped in his hands like a pear in a bowl, and maybe he was even smiling, the old goat. A Christmas night long long ago. No tree, no presents, no special dinner, but no punching or screaming or cursing either; and everyone together. Best Christmas
ever
.

*   *   *

The
Tanets
survived the storm also, with less damage, being bigger, but at the height of the storm the pilot, smoking a cigarette, had stepped out of the cabin to relieve himself and been swept overboard so fast that Enrique, sitting in the cabin poring over his charts, shouted at him to close the door! before he realized there was no one there to do so. He leapt for the thrashing door but knew it was too late even before he gauged the rage of the water. He had expected this, in a sense. He had expected to lose his pilot somehow, in the same way he would eventually lose his massive impassive crewman; pilots and crew came and went, died or fled, stole and ran; it was the nature of people to die or flee, it was their natural end, the spin of the wheel. He made an effort to remember the name of the pilot but could come up with nothing more than the end of his first or last name, he couldn’t remember which: ivi
ć
? Something Somethingivi
ć
. Nor could he remember quite when the pilot had joined the crew. Probably Vladivostok, when they had to leave in such a hurry and he grabbed the first man who could read a maritime chart. The wordless crewman was different; he had come aboard on the blackest night Enrique could ever remember, many miles south and west of Hawaii, where there was no land for hundreds of miles. The man must have had a boat, but there was no boat or canoe to be seen near the
Tanets
when Enrique and the pilot found him standing silently in the stern, wrapped in red cloth from his armpits to his knees. Even with a pistol in his face he would say nothing more than
taromauri,
his quiet answer to every question, and Enrique, who ultimately could not care less about origin and explanation, put him to work; he was immensely strong, seemed to know his way around ships, and ate like a bird despite his mountainous size. For a few weeks Enrique kept his pistol at hand, wary of the man’s strength and sudden mysterious appearance, but after some months neither he nor the pilot even noticed the crewman much. He ate alone, always sitting cross-legged in the stern, and always wore his vast red cloth, and when not working seemed content to sit calmly in the stern, eyes closed, either sleeping or plotting savagery, as Something Somethingivi
ć
said with a leer. He and Enrique called the crewman Taro, after what seemed to be the only word in his vocabulary, and had even stopped speculating idly about Taro’s sins and crimes a few weeks before the pilot stepped out of the cabin to relieve himself and never came back.

*   *   *

But the
Tanets
now needed a pilot. Enrique could maneuver and navigate a bit, but if he was busy piloting, the
Tanets
had no brain, and brains led to money, and the whole point of the
Tanets
was money, and the impassive crewman appeared to have no piloting or navigating skills whatsoever, so Enrique contemplated where he could get a pilot in a hurry. He sat in the pilot house, smoking the cigarettes Something Somethingivi
ć
had left behind on the chart table in a crumpled golden packet. He could go down to the Line Islands, half of which had the advantage of not being American and so were less chained by rules and regulations, and there hire or borrow or steal a pilot. He could go west and south to Tungaru or the Marshall Islands, also small entities with less fanfare about laws and papers, and there hire or borrow or steal a pilot. Or he could press a pilot into service off the first boat he saw; the best plan, he thought, as it entailed less travel, an infinitesimal chance of police interference, and a minimum of witnesses. Come to think of it, he remembered, that was how Something Somethingivi
ć
had come aboard in Vladivostok; Enrique had made an arrangement having to do with boxes he had picked up one night in the disputed islands near Japan, and Something Somethingivi
ć
had awoken at sea, displeased but not especially surprised to find himself suddenly the pilot of a boat of changing nationalities and identities depending on situations. This sort of thing had happened to him many times, beginning at age fifteen, when he sold himself to an army for the price of his younger brother being shoved stumbling into an icy forest at night to make his way across a border, which he might well have done, despite his tender years; even at twelve years old the younger brother, quick and silent, knew how to find the eggs of wild birds, how to trap fish, how to wait in the snow by schools in the morning and steal food from smaller children. Something Somethingivi
ć
in fact had drifted over the years toward coastal cities like Magadan and Vladivostok for the express purpose of finding little Danilo, certainly little no more, if he was alive at all; the rough chaos of land’s end, where many men and memories crossed paths, was where a man might find news, a clue, a trail to follow; so that suddenly finding himself at sea, in a tramp boat bent on commerce of any shade of legality, was not so bad a way to listen more widely for news of a missing man. He would be in his twenties now, Danilo—probably tall, like all their tribe, and probably not a drinking man, given the demons that had savaged so many of their clansmen, and probably alluring to women, given his heavenly voice. Even at the age of eight, when Danilo opened his mouth and began to sing, people stopped in the street, people pulled cars and trucks to the side of the road to listen, people wept as his voice strummed the joy and pain and memory in the hollows of their bones.