The Sex Lives of Cannibals (17 page)

His house, an airy bungalow that took him two months to build after a fire reduced his old place to little more than flickering embers, overlooked the lagoon. It was as much a workshop as a home, and I stopped by one day to get some help repairing the sail I used for windsurfing. A tumble on the reef had created a foot-long gash. As John set about lining the tear with sail tape I set about prying stories from him. John is a modest man, friendly in that wholesome American kind of way, but hardly one to expound unbidden, but eventually he told me about the girl he’d found floating in the ocean.

“We were sailing off Abaiang when Beiataaki noticed something strange in the water,” he began. “At first we thought it was a turtle, and then as we got closer we saw that it was a body, a little girl, couldn’t have been more than seven or eight.” His eyes widened, as if to say,
Can you believe that?
“We sailed alongside. She was just bobbing in the water. Her eyes were closed and we thought she was dead. She was about ten miles or so from land. And, I’ll never forget this, swimming through her hair were all these little fish, little colorful fish, blue and red, like flowers. We were about to pull her in, when suddenly she opened her eyes. Well, that was a surprise, I can tell you. We got her aboard and gave her some water and some food. She had been drifting since the day before. We took her back to her village and arrived right in the middle of her funeral.”

“My goodness,” I said. John was the sort of person to whom you could say
my goodness
without feeling self-conscious. “How did she end up drifting in the ocean?”

“She saw her father and brother fishing from a sandbar in the lagoon. She tried to get to them, but the tide got her. They tried to reach her, but couldn’t, and so she drifted right on out of the lagoon and into the ocean. The entire village set off in canoes looking for her, but they couldn’t find her.”

“You must be a popular figure in Abaiang.”

“They’re good people. They’re all good people here.” He paused for a moment. “Well, there are a few bad apples, just like everywhere.”

Once, when I happened to be elsewhere, Sylvia noticed two drunks lurking around the house. It was during the day, which was unusual. Sylvia called John, who immediately rushed over. He is a big man, and he literally picked up the two men, and threw them out onto the road, loudly shaming them for their behavior. “And don’t you ever come back!” And they didn’t.

John had decided to move to Abaiang. He had leased a plot of land that stretched from lagoon to ocean, where he planned to build a house, a few more boats, and live out his remaining years. “Too many people on Tarawa,” he said. “And the smell is beginning to bother me.” It was true. Where he lived, the fetid stench of sizzling shit at low tide was breathtakingly foul. He had no plans to return to the United States. Only once in the past thirty years had he set foot on American soil, and he understood that the U.S. was no place to be for a sixty-year-old man with just fifty dollars to his name. He would have been fine were it the nineteenth century, but millennial America no longer had room for his form of self-reliance. He joked about pushing shopping carts.

Sylvia chartered
Martha
, to take Bwenawa, Atenati, and ourselves to Maiana. John, however, would not be sailing her. Our captain would be Beiataaki, John’s longtime crew member. He brought Tekaii, a young Baha’i convert, to help out on board. Beiataaki had sailed the boat the length of the lagoon the day before, and we boarded
Martha
in Betio, where if conditions were favorable it would take us a day to reach Maiana. John was there to see us off and I mentioned how much I liked
Martha
’s toilet. It extended off the stern of the boat like a whimsical throne. It was exactly what Salvador Dalí would have done.

“Yeah . . . when it gets rough it’s like that French thing.”

“A bidet?”

“Yeah, a bidet.”

The weather was faultless. A steady breeze brought lazy whitecaps to the lagoon. A few scattered clouds drifted above, their colors evolving from green to a translucent blue as they passed the lagoon. Blighted Betio began to recede as we sailed toward the channel. Waves broke on the long shoal that extends north of Betio and already we could see the green islets of North Tarawa. A sailing canoe appeared and as it neared I saw that it had an unusual black sail. Peering closely, I noticed that the sail was in fact an ingeniously cut garbage bag. “Look,” I said to Sylvia. “A floating metaphor.”

As we cleared the channel, Bwenawa let out a long fishing line baited with a plastic squid. He knotted the line at the stern of the boat and every now and then he tugged at it.

“Maybe we’ll catch something here, but I think when we are near Maiana we will catch many fish,” he said.

“I want a shark,” said Atenati. “A big shark.”

Atenati was the scourge of Bwenawa’s existence. Her last name was O’Connor, and she exhibited the devilish twinkle of her beachcomber ancestor. Atenati and Bwenawa feuded like an old couple that had been married much too long. For years, they had worked side by side in the FSP garden. Each had firm opinions about what constituted ideal growing conditions for tomatoes and eggplants, and both were stubborn. I joked with Bwenawa about the dangers of provoking Atenati. She was not above using magic.

“That’s right, Bwenawa. You listen to the
I-Matang
or I will put a spell on you,” she said.

“Ha-ha. You’re
tokonono,
Atenati.”

I could tell Bwenawa was wary of her magic. Like all I-Kiribati, at heart he believed in taboo areas, spirits, and magic. Christianity simmered at the surface—Mike called it tribalism, the need to belong to a group competing against another group—but in most ways the spiritual life of the I-Kiribati remained uncorrupted by a century of missionaries. This is why even on crowded South Tarawa there still remained swaths of land devoid of homes and people. Spirits lived in these places, and spirits were not to be trifled with.

As Tarawa receded I marveled that we had made this dust speck of an island our home. The utter isolation of it. Its starkness. Its fragility. Its beauty. Its sordidness. Its people, so engaging, so violent. That it was beginning to feel very much like home was a realization that sometimes frightened me. Most
I-Matangs
sent to Kiribati lasted only a few months before sickness and the oppressive claustrophobia of island fever drove them elsewhere. The couples that arrived generally dissolved. Everything was permitted on Tarawa. There were no rules. There were also no secrets. That was too much for many.

I, however, could not think of any place I would rather be than on a homemade wooden trimaran plying the sun-dappled water between Tarawa and Maiana. Beiataaki had caught a ray and it was drying on the mesh that laced the hulls at the bow of the boat. Sylvia was happy. It was impossible not to be. Traversing this patch of sea tinted the lush blue of the great depths in a trimaran painted a fading carnival yellow with blue trim under an equatorial sun between two tropical green isles is to have an experience in color that I did not know was possible without the aid of pharmaceuticals. At the boat’s stern, Bwenawa continued to jig his fishing line, coaxing a bite. Atenati provided commentary: “Have you caught my shark yet?”

By mid-afternoon Maiana became visible and I realized that this was how atolls ought to be approached. From the sea, there is first the luminous clouds drifting over the lagoon, and then a glimmer of green that enlarges and continues to lengthen, the slender ridge of a sea mountain cresting low above the ocean, and then the water begins to change, its blue revealing the sand and coral below, and everything seems somehow both untamed and serene. Bwenawa was getting excited now.

“Aiyah, aiyah. Birds!”

Beiataaki maneuvered the boat toward where the seabirds were hovering.

“
Aiyah!
”

Something had bit. Bwenawa strained to pull the fish in. His hands clasped the line. He heaved himself back until he was lying nearly parallel to the deck.

“Aiyah, aiyah!”

“Yah, Bwenawa!” Atenati rooted.

Bwenawa began drawing the fish in. It was clearly a big fish. Bwenawa’s muscles were pulled taut. He was sweating heavily. I had never seen him happier.

“Aiyah, aiyah!”

He pulled the fish in, each handful of line a small victory. The fish began to lose its fight. As Bwenawa drew the line in, one hand over the other, I recognized the motion from a traditional dance that I-Kiribati men perform. Finally, gleaming in silver light below the surface was a yellowfin tuna. Beiataaki hauled it in. The fish must have weighed a good twenty-five pounds; it would have been worth several hundred dollars in Japan. On deck, the tuna continued to leap spasmodically until Beiataaki took a club to its head. Crimson blood splattered all over the boat, and by the time the fish succumbed, the deck looked like some horrific crime scene. This surprised me. I had never associated fishing with blood.

Bwenawa retrieved the hook and the plastic pink squid and tossed the line back into the water. Below the surface, we could see outcroppings of coral and a sandy bottom and this made the water take on ever more permutations of blue. Visibility must have been at least a hundred feet. Within minutes, Bwenawa landed another fish. It fought even more ferociously than the tuna.

“Aiyah, Aiyah!”

I worried that Bwenawa might have a heart attack. He was ecstatic. Again he hauled with all his might. Watching him was like watching a heavyweight tug-of-war. He heaved. He worked the fish. He released a hard-fought yard of line and then pulled it back in. As the fish neared, I could see that it was long and slender. “What do you think, Beiataaki? A sea pike?”

“No,” he said. “That’s a barracuda.”

A great barracuda. It was nearly four feet long. It was a primordial fish. It looked like it belonged in another era, when the size of one’s teeth was the most important thing in determining whether you survived or not. It too was clubbed, more thoroughly than the tuna. Even so, Bwenawa could not bring himself to retrieve the hook. “I don’t like those teeth,” he said. Beiataaki gingerly unclasped the hook from Jaws and again the line was drawn out behind the boat.

“Let’s see the
I-Matang
fish,” Atenati taunted.

“I may need some magic,” I replied.

I took the line, but not before applying some more sunscreen. After a day sailing the equatorial Pacific, I could feel my freckles mutating into something interesting and tumorous. I tugged the line and just like that I had a fish; and just like that I realized that applying sunscreen a moment before grasping a wispy fishing line that was connected to a fish, and I believed it was a mighty fish, was not a particularly clever thing to do. I don’t think Hemingway would have made the same mistake. Then again, Hemingway had a fishing rod, which as I struggled with this behemoth from the depths, struck me as an eminently useful tool for fishing. I held on to the line with one hand, while trying to wipe the grease from the other on my shorts. I was dangling precariously over the edge of the boat. My arm felt like it would soon spring from its socket. I believed I had hooked a tiger shark.

“Hey,
I-Matang
!” Atenati yelled. “In Kiribati we fish with two hands.”

Atenati was always helpful. Just as I was finally able to maintain a firm grip on the line, I began to notice a stinging sensation on my hands, which as I battled with my sea beast, began to rapidly spread to my arms and chest. It was a burning, itchy feeling, the kind that soon leaves its sufferer in a state of frothy madness. “I itch!” I cried. “Something stings!”

“It’s only sea lice,” Beiataaki informed me.

What the fuck were sea lice? So typical, I thought. Even the ocean in Kiribati has lice.

Atenati began to cackle. I wondered if she had anything to do with it. I gave her the evil eye.

I struggled with my monster. I heaved and hauled. My muscles ached. I put my legs into it. I was engaged in an epic confrontation between man and beast and I was determined to win. I would demonstrate my prowess as a hunter. I would serve notice to the fish world that there was a new master in town. This shark was mine.

Only it wasn’t a shark. Nor was it a great barracuda. Or a tuna. No, it was an itsy-bitsy trevally, a little more than a foot long, and as I finally hoisted it out of the water, I was struck by its dainty color, a shimmering blue-green. No one clubbed my fish.

“Aiyah, Aiyah,” Bwenawa said, with a decided lack of oomph.

I continued to itch.

“I feel sorry for the fish,” Sylvia said. “Look, its colors are fading.”

We stared at the fish.
Flop, flop. Pant, pant
. And then it was no more. I felt like my dominance over the fish world had not yet been conclusively demonstrated. And then Atenati yelled: “
Look!
”

We all turned.

Oh-oh.

The sea monsters depicted by early explorers in the Pacific no longer seemed so fanciful. Not far off the bow was an immense
creature
. We watched its dark silhouette displace water like an indolent torpedo. It could only be here, at reef’s edge, for one reason. It was hungry.

“Is it a whale?” asked Bwenawa. “A pilot whale?”

“It’s huge,” Sylvia noted

“Jesus,” I said.

Beiataaki stared long and hard. “Thresher shark,” he declared.

I suddenly noticed how small our boat was. I remembered that it was made of plywood. Thin plywood. Thin and old plywood. Thin and old and rotting plywood. Thin and old and rotting and easily breached plywood. Imperceptibly, I moved to the middle of the boat. What were we thinking, washing fish blood off the deck in shark-infested waters? A patch of water where sharks can be confused with whales.

About forty yards distant, we watched a tail fin, a tail fin that rose four feet out of the water, of which it followed that another four feet were under water, suggesting a tail fin of eight feet—an eight-foot tail fin!—and it was coming our way.

“There’s my shark!” Atenati declared. “Bwenawa! Catch me that shark!”

Bwenawa was already rummaging around for a stronger line and a bigger hook. Beiataaki was slicing up his ray. The shark was nearing.
Swish-swish
went its eight-foot tail fin.