The Tattoo Artist (10 page)

Then, one by one, the grommets ripped open, and the cables came loose. They began flogging the canvas. Next, the poles pulled free of the wet sand, and the pegs gave way. During one particularly fearsome gust, the whole tarpaulin popped open like a sail and took off into the night sky, pulling the poles with it. The pegs hurled back and forth on the snapping cables, like a cat-o’-nine-tails.

Philip and I remained supine on the air mattresses, the rain pelting our faces: we were crystallized in shock. The sensation was somewhere between losing your umbrella to a sudden gust and losing your roof to a tornado.

Philip raised his head to assess our damage, but the blowing sand forced his eyes shut.

“We have to get off this beach, we have to find shelter,” he shouted. He rolled over and pushed himself up against the hurling debris, shielding his eyes with one hand while helping me up with the other.

I put my jacket over my head and tried to take our bearings. The surf was to our left, the knocking palms to our right. The wind was blowing in the direction of the village.

We ran for the village.

If the jungle had unnerved us by day, it horrified us in the pitch-black tempest. Wet fronds slapped our faces. We stumbled into knee-deep potholes filled with grasping mud. I tore my ankles on firethorns, my soles on limestone rock pinnacles.

At one point, I simply knelt down in the muck and begged Philip to give up, too, and die with me here, now.

That’s when a blue sphere of lightning, no bigger than a basketball, shot out of the clouds and landed in the jungle about a hundred yards away. Every palm trunk, every individual hair on every palm trunk, the pores in Philip’s blanched face, the stilt huts on the far side of the X-rayed trees, were all scored on my retinas. I shut my eyes in fear of going blind. The rumble of thunder that followed fractured over my cranium, as rushing water does over a rock.

We hurried toward the closest hut. Aside from the faint beacon of its cooking fire, we couldn’t see anything, not even the tree-trunk ladder. I stumbled into it as one does an outstretched leg in a dark theater aisle.

The trunk was wet, the rungs slippery.

“I don’t think I can climb it,” I said.

“For God’s sake, Sara, just go. I’ll be right behind you.”

He gave me a boost, and I clung and scraped my way up. I had no prior experience: East Side children never learn to climb trees. When I reached what I prayed was the top rung, Philip gave me a final heave, and I was at their front door.

All eyes were fixed on me as I crawled through the low archway into the smoky straw parlor. The occupants—a teenage boy with a harelip, a toddler, a mother and infant, and two young girls—sat huddled around a large stone bowl of flaring embers. The fire illuminated their faces from below, jack-o’lantern–fashion.

“We lost our tent: it just blew away,” I explained. “We’re very cold.” I hugged myself to illustrate just how cold we were. “And we were almost struck by lightning.
Please,
may we stay?”

Philip crawled in after me. Even on his hands and knees, he crowded the already packed space with his sheer size—the whole house wasn’t much bigger than a tenement parlor.

“We’re friends of Ishmael’s,” Philip said. “Do you know him?”

Nobody appeared to recognize his Christian name, or if they did, no one said.

Another ball of lightning started its descent. Its trajectory was so brilliant and intense, it flashed through the bamboo walls and reversed the firelight. The red coals became dull gray, while the black shadows under our hostess’s eyes turned incandescent.

Judging by the abrupt thunder, the fireball must have landed nearby.

The toddler put his hands over his ears and began whimpering. Over the diminishing booms, I thought I heard shouting outside. The young mother must have heard it, too. She handed her infant to one of the young girls, then stepped over Philip’s outstretched leg and stuck her head out the door. When she drew it back inside, her hair was dripping and her face looked shocked.

Everyone heard the next scream. Thunder couldn’t muffle it. Philip stood up. He almost punctured the low roof with his head. “Stay put. I’ll be right back,” he told me.

“I’m coming, too. Don’t leave me here alone,” I said.

The rain had turned to drizzle. The wind had died down to sporadic gusts. A branch of lightning struck the top of the mountains, but the thunder sounded faint. In the direction where the shouting had been, huts stood peacefully in shrouds of mist, save one: its roof was sparking, the fireball having been blown through its thatch.

Philip slid down the ladder, while I lowered my foot into the wet night, groping for a rung. I could smell fumes: a blend of metallic electricity, rank sulfur, and scorched straw. I could hear the sharp clang of metal striking metal. An iron church bell rung to summon help?

When I finally reached Philip’s side, he was standing in front of the smoking hut along with a half-dozen other men. I recognized Ishmael. He kept his hand mashed over his mouth as he tried to fathom what had happened. When he noticed our runaway tent wrapped around the hut’s roof, he turned his eyes on Philip and me. During the storm, our tent had evidently flown over the treetops, parachuted into the village, then jackknifed around the hut, catching on the eaves. It now hung in tatters, its cables clanging, a tent pole impaled in the scorched roof beside the smoking hole.

Philip and I were transfixed at the steel pole.

Ishmael hurried up the ladder, waving his arms to bat away the smoke. Three other men followed. When they entered the hut, we heard them choking. When they exited it, they couldn’t stop choking.

The first body they lowered onto the ground looked as if it had been fabricated out of chalk. It even came apart like chalk. It left marks on the ladder.

The next body was smaller and obviously a woman’s. I recognized the young breasts. From the throat up, the skin was covered in white ash. The tattooed bottom lip looked dusted with flour.

Ishmael sank onto his knees and pressed his brow against his granddaughter’s, rolling his head from side to side. When he finally sat up, his face was covered in ash, too.

“I’m scared, Philip,” I whispered. “I think we should leave.”

“And go where?”

Two more bodies were pulled out of the smoke—a small boy’s and a large dog’s.

Philip took off his shirt to cover the boy’s body, but Ishmael snapped the shirt out of Philip’s hands and hurled it into the night. Ishmael then sank onto his haunches and locked his hands between his thin thighs.

“Ishmael,” Philip said, “I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Ishmael slowly turned around and stared at Philip. “Why did you come to my island?”

“We only came because we so admired your carvings.”

Ishmael jerked his head sharply, as if to clear his ears of rainwater. “Because of my carvings?”

He opened his mouth again, then abruptly shut it and let his head fall forward until his chin scraped his chest. The rain varnished his back and shoulders until each tattoo shone with nuance and clarity.

What did grief look like under the splendor of these designs?

It looked exactly like grief.

The villagers came out of their huts and stood over the bodies. One tiny boy kept rubbing his eyes with his fists as if to screw them back into focus.

The Ta’un’uuans don’t believe in acts of God. The idea that their deities would randomly and senselessly annihilate the innocent is inconceivable to them. Death is never random to the islander because it’s never natural—lightning, fire, tidal waves, undertows, fevers, dysentery, even death by old age— none of it is natural. Death is always caused by your enemy, and if your enemy can’t be seen or felt, then by a more insidious agent: your enemy’s sorcery.

I looked around for Philip. Surrounded by a knot of angry young men, he was calmly and rationally trying to explain to them how the tent pole wound up on the burning roof. He used words like “velocity” and “chance.”

I was more heedful of sorcery than he was. I was reared on the evil eye. A steel shaft in a flaming hut was proof enough for me of malignant forces.

I signaled Philip to slip away with me into the jungle, but he was too intent on convincing these men that there was a plausible explanation for the tragedy. He made an abrupt gesture with his hand to indicate our airborne tent.

One of the men took out a wooden knife and brandished it at Philip, then began muscling him toward what looked like a livestock pen. Philip cast his terrified eyes around for me. I ran over to the young mother who’d given us shelter during the storm.

“Tell them my husband was with you when it happened: tell them he isn’t to blame. Tell them we were
both
with you when the fireball hit.”

She acted as if she’d never seen me before.

I turned to Ishmael. He was still on his haunches, staring intently as a large fly feasted on his granddaughter’s lip. “Ishmael,” I said, “Philip sang for you and your granddaughter. We danced for you. You know we meant her no harm.”

The old woman who had confronted Philip and me when we’d first come ashore was standing over Ishmael. I recognized her regal air. She silenced me with a vehement shake of her finger, then took me tightly by the wrist, as she might a child, and led me toward the livestock pens, too. I didn’t resist. When she opened the stake gate for me, I actually said, “Thank you.”

Philip was in the adjacent enclosure. Our stalls were made of bamboo staves. Six piglets shared mine. Philip’s contained a huge hog with tusks. The hog was rooting through the folds of Philip’s sarong to see if Philip had brought anything good to eat.

The guard watching over us almost laughed, then remembered the heinousness of our crime. He picked up a stick and prodded the hog into a thrashing fury. It kicked Philip on the thigh, then tried to bite his calf, but its tusks got in the way.

Finally, our guard threw down the stick and the hog calmed down. The man, however, didn’t. He leaned over the gate and raged at Philip and me in one inexhaustible exhalation. Spoken anger in Ta’un’uuan sounds like a man blowing out a trick candle that won’t die.

Philip sidled past the pig’s tusks over to the far corner, then hunkered down into a protective ball. The hog was panting. I reached through the bars and touched his cheek. “You all right?” I whispered.

“I think so.”

“Are they going to kill us?”

“I don’t know.”

“Should we try and run?”

“Where would you have us go?”

“The interior. We can hide in the mountains until the ship returns for us,” I said.

“The mountains? We couldn’t even assemble our tent properly. I’m going to try and reason with them, Sara. It wasn’t our fault. They’re human like us. They have to see that.”

When the first pencil lights of dawn outlined the village, Philip arose to watch a group of men coming toward us. I stayed on my knees, peering through the bars. Ishmael was flanked by six ornamented, taut, eager young men, and trailed by a throng of villagers.

He opened the hog pen and addressed Philip in Ta’un’uuan. His wrath might as well have been the babble one hears before fainting.

Philip put up his hands as if he was silencing not a bereft grandfather but a vast noisy courtroom of jurors. With great passion, he started arguing our defense in the name of humanity. He continued arguing it as Ishmael ordered the warriors to lead Philip into the forest.

Dawn came and went. The sun flashed away all the puddles. The pigs were let out of the pens to sleep in the shade. Noon burned overhead. I was made delirious from the heat, frantic from thirst. Finally, the women came for me, the old woman accompanied by six female guards. Again, I followed her with something like gratitude.

She and the others led me into the forest in the opposite direction from where the men had taken Philip. The canopy’s dampness felt sublime. I was allowed to rest now and again under a dripping tree, but when I opened my mouth to catch the leftover rainwater, she forbade me to drink.

We walked up and down footpaths, around bogs of black stumps, through partitions of ferns, until we came to a tall wooden structure in an overgrown clearing. It seemed to have been assembled entirely out of old European ship parts. The roof was an upside-down schooner hull, the rafters planks of bleached ribbing. Eight six-foot-high columns of mast held the hull aloft. There were no walls. The floor was decking.

The old woman led me under the boat and told me to lie down, faceup. I saw portholes brimming with daylight. Finally, she gave me something to drink, a bowl of what tasted like dishwater. I downed it greedily. When she offered me a second helping, I swallowed that, too. If it was poison, I wanted the quickest dose.

A physical inertia as close to divine serenity as I’ve ever known amassed in my limbs, pooled in my hands and feet. My head felt as hollow as a gourd. One would have had to have drunk a whole ocean of absinthe for this effect.

She poked my cheek with her fingernail: I couldn’t flinch. She lifted my wrist, then let it drop: I couldn’t jerk it away. She fed me another bowl, then got up and left, followed by the others.

I stared up at the ship. I didn’t dare close my lids (the only muscles that still obeyed me). Whenever I did, I lost my footing on the deck, and was plunged into the open sea and left to sink in that cold vastness.