Sylvia looked as if she was not entirely displeased by this possibility. “Make sure you separate the colors from the whites,” she grinned.
Kate, thankfully, went on. “And I’m sure you won’t mind if yet another girl is pulled out of school because her mother can no longer afford the school fees.”
Who was I to deny a child’s education? “So will she be coming once or twice a week?” I asked, silently noting that as the mother of schoolchildren, the housegirl was unlikely to be young and lithe, and she probably wouldn’t undulate either.
Sylvia and Kate departed for the FSP office and I was left alone to ponder the immensity of the ocean and the giant sharks that were undoubtedly lingering behind the house waiting for some stupid foreigner to go for a swim. Probably tiger sharks. And black and white–tipped reef sharks, of course. Maybe hammerheads and blue sharks and bull sharks too, though it’s really the tiger sharks one needs to worry about. I wondered if sharks would swim over the reef. I scanned the water closely. I began to imagine things. Terrible things.
But that water looked outrageously appealing. It was, to reiterate, to stress, to accentuate the point, to leave no doubt, hot. Staggeringly hot. The heat blasted from a contemptible sun; it came unbidden from the white coral sand; it floated in on humid waves. A faint breeze brought nothing but the stench of decomposition and the slight, acrid smell of burning leaves somewhere not too distant. As I stepped outside, little moved save for the flies that gathered around my legs, my sopping shirt, my face, seeking to feed off the salt I was steadily expelling. I yearned for Canada. I imagined tundra. I thought of boyhood winter days when I would return from excavations in the snow, hands so frozen that only with deft elbow movements could I turn the faucet and reclaim feeling in my fingers with cold streaming water. But it was pointless. The powers of the mind could not overcome the reality of the equatorial sun. A choice, therefore, had to be made. I could either melt into an oozing puddle, drop by drop—a slow, torturous death, for certain—or I could ease my suffering with a swim in the world’s largest backyard pool, thereby risking life and limb to the schools of sharks that were, and I sensed this strongly, circling at reef’s edge, awaiting a meal featuring the other-other white meat.
I chose to go for a swim. Death, if it came, would be swift, with the added benefit of it being preceded by relief from the heat. I stripped to my shorts and approached the water. Sweet Moses, it was hot under the sun. I could feel my back swiftly turning into one enormous crackling blister. I put my T-shirt back on and decided that from here on, I would simply cultivate the world’s greatest farmer’s tan.
The reef near the shore had three water-carved steps, and at the base of each crabs scurried in the froth of small collapsing waves. The water was sun-warmed, uncomfortably hot in the shallows, but pleasant, if not refreshing, farther out. Waves, some cresting, some not, the remnants of breakers, rolled in as the tide began to draw water back toward the reef’s edge. I swam farther out, half propelled by the tide’s pull. I felt like I was inside a rainbow. Ahead, the ocean was tinted the blue of great depth, reflected as a metallic sheen by singular cotton- ball clouds. Around me, the blue was sun-dappled like a sharp, morning sky. Near shore, it turned turquoise and a limpid, pale green. A mass of coconut palm trees followed the serpentine curves of the atoll. Green-bottomed clouds drifted over the lagoon. I realized that this was the genuine blue, the pure green, the essential yellow, and until this moment I had never seen anything but dull approximations of color.
At the reef’s edge, the water boiled into swirling liquid chaos. The breakers seemed colossal, looming well above me, and in their precipitous faces they reflected protruding ridges of coral and the translucent shadows of fish. There was an agitated roar, and as each swell rose and gathered height, becoming an incontestable force, there followed a crash like thunder and torrents of broken water. Where I was, twenty yards from the break zone, I could feel the tide and the suction created by breaking waves compelling me ever closer to the edge and the mile- deep abyss. The water was chest-deep and shallowing and I leaned back and began pushing with my feet as if I were walking backward into a heavy gale.
Between the crests of approaching waves I watched an old man resting in his canoe. It was a small canoe, about nine feet long, and it had a single outrigger. As he rose with the swell he seemed to be a part of the sky. When he found a set of waves to his liking, he paddled hard, caught the crest of a six-foot wave and surfed it in for a long moment. Just as the wave began to hollow and sputter, he eased back into the trough, and then he paddled with furious dexterity through the breakwater. The canoe leapt forward. Behind him, another wave rolled in like a shadow, a heaving mound of water. It rose into a steep wall of water, crested, and broke. White water rushed forward, and this sun-baked man, shirtless with sinuous muscles, wearing a ridiculous hat that looked not unlike a fibrous, conical wizard’s cap, shot ahead, riding the white water as it again gathered form and became a rolling wave propelling his canoe to shore.
I followed him in, trudging through the torrent, bodysurfing when I could. As I neared the beach, where white sand and hard, gray coral intermingled, I could see him unloading his day’s catch of fish. He passed the fish to the children that gathered in the shallows. And then he lifted his canoe, balanced it on his shoulder, and disappeared through a narrow trail that cleaved the bush tangle alongside our house.
Now this was the South Pacific of my dreams. Stunning natural beauty. Challenges to test my mettle as a manly man. Sharks! Extreme heat! The pounding surf! Noble natives going about their daily lives with a quiet heroism. I would thrive here, I felt.
And then I saw what confronted me. It rested directly between myself and shore. It was massive. I had never seen anything like it. I sensed its power. I became very, very frightened.
It was an enormous brown bottom.
The possessor, a giant of a man, was squatting in the shallows, holding on to a ledge of coral rock. He emitted. He emitted some more. He was like a stricken oil tanker, oozing brown sludge. When he was done, he wiped himself with sticks. Not leaves. Sticks. Small branches. Twigs.
And they were coming my way. Riding the ebbing tide, the sticks homed in on me. I became the North Star for shit-encrusted sticks. Whichever way I moved, and I was moving very quickly, these sticks seemed to follow. They were closing in. I began to curse. In Dutch. This only happens when something primal is stirred.
I ran parallel to the shore. Swimming would have been quicker, but I dared not dive in. Not here. Not with an outgoing tide. When I thought I had moved a sufficient distance from the shit floating my way, I waded back toward the beach. Two small boys squatted directly between me and land. I calculated angles, the exact direction and speed of the tide, the location of the moon, whether it was waxing or waning. I plotted a course and walked in, diagonal to the shore, between the two streams, making no eye contact with those going potty.
There was a lesson here, I felt. I had no idea what that lesson might be, but clearly, adjustments would have to be made. Expectations would have to be altered. Perceptions changed. We were not in Washington anymore. There is bullshit in Washington, but no shit. Not so on Tarawa. It could be that Kate was right in her critique. Perhaps Tarawa was a disaster. But it felt like Paradise too. It was one or the other, sublime or wretched, never neither. Survival on Tarawa, I decided, would depend on one’s reaction to the absurd, and so I resolved to ignore the shit. Just pretend it’s not there, and focus on the poetic, the humorous, on the Technicolor sunsets and the like. Because the shit on Tarawa could drive you mad. Really.
CHAPTER 5
A long time ago, Tarawa was brought forth by Nareau the Creator. Nareau the Creator was a spider and he looked upon his work and saw that it was good. Perhaps because he was a spider. Nareau the Creator then flung grains of Tarawa to the wind and from these grains other islands were born and together these islands were called Tungaru. He created demigods and people and they procreated but the demigod gene seems to have died out, and so very soon there were just people. He created distant lands and sent Nareau the Wise to tend to the land of white-skinned spirits, the
I sometimes wished that Nareau had been a little more expansive in his ambitions. As the primordial source of life, Tarawa is a bit modest. Which grain was it that led to the Eurasian landmass? Why couldn’t we have kept that one, I wondered. How about the Bora Bora grain? Couldn’t Nareau at least have left a grain or two that could
