The Sex Lives of Cannibals

end of the atoll to the other. The pickup truck was a perk of the job for Sylvia. When not needed to transport people and material for FSP-related business, Sylvia was allowed to use it for her own needs. She was meticulous about what constituted proper use for an FSP-owned vehicle. Everyone on Tarawa knew that this particular pickup truck belonged to FSP. People would talk if they saw a couple of I-Matangs barreling down the road on a workday with surfing gear jutting out of the bed of the truck. Even though I handled much of the maintenance for the truck, and I did spend an awful lot of my time ferrying FSP staff from one thing to another, Sylvia was a stickler for propriety and unlikely to be moved by a request for a favor.

“Hi,” I said when I reached her on the phone at the office. “I need to get another gas canister.”

“Again? I thought we got a new one last week.”

“It must have been half-full. Anybody using the truck?”

“No.”

“Okay. I’ll be there in a few minutes.”

Mike and I parked the pickup truck on the side of the causeway and gazed toward the waves. It would be a long paddle just to get there, nearly a half mile of swimming, but once there the hard work would be over. A narrow channel had been blasted through the reef. It was used by fishermen and allowed us to bypass the break zone.

“This is the best I’ve seen in seventeen years,” Mike said.

I put my flippers on and settled on my body board, which, truth be told, wasn’t much of a body board. It was more like a small paddle board used by little people learning how to swim, but it was enough. We followed the channel and spent a long time lingering beside the break zone, mesmerized by the waves. There is something hypnotic about their motion: the protuberant swell suddenly rising from the blue void, gathering a coiled height and becoming a pure force that rises into a funneling wall of water, and then a long, tense moment until it dissipates in a thunderous climax. There are times when I could spend hours just watching waves, but this wasn’t one of them. We paddled ahead and lined up and for the next hour caught wave after wave, each more perfect than the last. I edged deeper into the break zone, determined to catch my waves at their maximum height and extend my rides, spending a long minute carving loopy Ss. And that’s when it appeared.

The rogue wave. The wave that has swallowed several other waves. The wave that was born in some tempest in the southern ocean; the wave that grew into something monstrous and horrible during a week of gales in the central Pacific; the wave we had feared on the torturous journey home from Maiana. This wave was now approaching. We were caught inside. Waves such as these do not explode where other waves do. They do their violence farther out. Mike turned his board straight toward it. His arms were like cartoon arms, spinning and spinning like paddle wheels in overdrive. As the wave took him, he was stretched vertically on its face, and I could see that the wave was three times bigger than he. He clawed at its face, climbing this liquid mountain. He ascended, peaked, and disappeared over the frothing lip.

I was too deep. I could not follow Mike. The wave began to pitch and totter. It sucked in ever more water. I moved high up on my board, freeing my arms, and then swam faster than any man has swum before. I was headed diagonally into the face of the wave, trying to outrun the initial break. But the wave detonated. It boomed. I knew then that I would not get over in time.

And then I became stupid. I was abandoned by good sense. My survival instinct took a holiday. There was only one sensible option and that was to dive as deep as I could, but this I did not do. I did not have a leash connecting me to my board. If I dove, I would then have to swim all the way back to shore to retrieve my board, and somehow this little inconvenience caused my brain to stop working. Instead, I turned the board around, thinking, despite all evidence to the contrary, that I could catch this wave at its very peak, zip down its face, and then establish enough momentum to outrun the break. I was wrong.

I can attest now that having an eighteen-foot wave break upon your head is a remarkably unpleasant experience. There is the physical dimension, in which the wave rips off your board and your flippers, and suddenly you do not know up from down, you cannot breathe or see, but you can hear, and what this wave is telling you is that it can destroy you. There is crushing, and pounding, and hurtling. And there is pain. And there is panic. And it is terrifying. This wave is immensely more powerful than you, and it scars the psyche seeing this demonstrated in such a personal way. When I emerged, bruised and panting for air, I actually prayed, saying thank you for sparing me here, I will be very good from now on, et cetera et cetera, and then I scoured the beach for my board, found my flippers bobbing in the shallows, and I returned to the waves, to the ocean, with respect and humility.

“Did you catch that monster?” Mike asked, as I lined up alongside, my eyes on the swells and what they would become.

“No, dude,” I said. “But it caught me.”

CHAPTER 14

In which the Author explores the World of Dogs on Tarawa, particularly the world of his dogs, who grew up to be the Biggest Dogs on Tarawa, possibly because he fed them, which led him to look upon his dogs in a different light, particularly when the dogs were described as kang-kang (tasty).

One day, Vaclav, a timid green-eyed dog with white fur, given to us by Tiabo—because he looked like an I-Matang dog, she explained—arrived home from his reef explorations with the dog we had always referred to as the brown dog. This dog soon became affectionately known as Brown Dog, because Sylvia would not let me name her Olga. Brown Dog in turn brought her mother, a gentle long-snouted dog with black fur, known in the dog community as the neighborhood slut, and soon called by us Mama Dog, who in turn brought her most recent litter, four shrieking puppies, more pathetic than cute on account of their mangy baldness, but smart nonetheless, who quickly recognized that Sam, our cat, had claws and did not like to be trifled with. And so it came to be that we suddenly found ourselves with seven dogs and one cat, which was not ideal.

The cat was the first to arrive. He had run away as a wee kitten, proving that he was an exceptionally clever cat. I would estimate that the average life span of a cat in Kiribati is about five hours. The I-Kiribati regard cats as useless, inedible, and harbingers of black magic. Litters are generally scooped up as soon as they are found, placed in a bag, and drowned. The I-Kiribati do not have soft and mushy feelings for the animal world. Even children, whom one would assume to be the most sympathetic to the plight of small animals, amuse themselves by flinging a kitten or puppy around by its tail until they grow bored, whereupon the animal is tossed into the current of an outgoing tide. Sam the cat, however, somehow managed to escape this fate and find his way to an I- Matang house, where he mewed and moaned and made such a sorry spectacle of himself that we felt obliged to let him in. He quickly made his way to the couch, clambered up, settled himself belly up, and promptly fell asleep underneath the ceiling fan. His fleas too made themselves at home.

Zeus was next. We had only recently arrived on the island and still maintained Humane Society–type feelings for dogs. That would change. Very soon I would be pleased with myself when the rocks I flung drew blood, but at the time such behavior was unimaginable. Zeus was a pitiful sight. A small puppy that had already lost every scrap of fur to the mange, he also had a belly distended by worms and nicks and cuts that were clearly infected. I should have broken his neck right there and then and put him out of his misery. But he was scrappy and personable, and when I made the mistake of giving him some bread, he looked upon me with such happy, grateful eyes that I didn’t know what to do. There was no veterinarian on the island. The last one, a volunteer from Finland, had left when he more or less lost three-quarters of his right leg to a toxic infection caused by a scrape against the coral reef. The new vet had yet to arrive. When Mike wandered by one day I promptly asked him if he would like to have this dog. “He’s very friendly,” I said.

“Do you mean this cruel joke of a dog?” he asked. “The only thing to do with a dog like that is to crush it with a rock.”

“Yes, well, I can’t quite manage to do that.”

“Give it time.”

In the end, we decided to bring the dog to FSP, where we were sure it would grow up to be a much-loved guard dog. We named it Zeus, figuring he could use a little ego boost. Sylvia reported that Zeus had lasted exactly