Dreamboat Dad (16 page)

THE MAN CAME UP TO
the front desk and asked to book four double
bedrooms; he was a local and his guests were overseas business friends.
Even though he dressed casually, his clothes looked expensive. He paid in
advance with a business cheque, commented that he looked forward to his
guests touring the sights of Waiwera.

Lena told him of her fill-in role as a guide, that she never tired of
showing visitors around her village, how she always found something new
herself.

His cheque bore the name Welsford Enterprises Ltd; he introduced
himself as Ralph, managing director. And did she know that for all his
international travel he still rated Waiwera's thermal sights as the best he'd
seen?

Henry came along just then, nodding formally as he passed, in keeping
with his manager's role being taken seriously even by his own wife. He
never lingered; it was a wonder he employed her here in his domain.

This morning Henry had woken her early and had his way before
he went for a bath. Two weeks earlier he had repeatedly slapped her
over something so minor she could not remember it. So, much as he had
mellowed over the years, the leopard still had spots.

Ralph said his visitors were from America and a wry smile must have
shown on Lena's face for he asked, why the smile, had he said something
wrong, did she not like Americans?

She looked up at him, instinctively judging whether to trust the man;
found herself chuckling.

Oh, I like Americans all right, some would say too much. On one
occasion at any rate.

He was trying to read her face and with his own smile forming. Looked
such a worldly man. A few years older than she.

He said, not sure what you mean. And by the way, I don't know your
name. It's Mrs . . . ? Looking at her wedding ring, which had long felt a
farce.

Lena Takahe. That was my husband who just went past. He's the
manager.

Ralph Welsford's face fell. He's Henry Takahe, right? I've heard
about him. A fine man. Sorry, your comment about Americans must have
confused me, as I thought—

Lena stopped him by holding up one finger. One American, I meant.
Back in the war days.

Wondering why she had told this to a complete stranger. He was
distinguished, but not handsome. Greying, probably prematurely. Very
self-confident which gave him a certain presence. The sort of man who
could own several hotels like this, and other businesses, and not bat an
eyelid. Not that she knew anyone so wealthy.

And do you regret it? The question came softly, as if for no ears except
hers.

She shook her head and gave a firm little smile, her gaze unblinking.
No.

Ralph shrugged, said, how interesting. Everyone our age remembers
them here during the war. I missed out on military service because I—

Had flat feet? Every man says that. Especially round here as Maori
men are so ashamed if they didn't fight in the war. Are there that many
flat feet?

You didn't let me finish. I had two children and of course a wife.

Lena said she was only kidding. Told of her being pregnant when
Henry volunteered and him not mentioning that fact to the recruiting
authorities. She did not mention having had a child to the American. Not
yet, might be going too far. Might put him off.

Ralph lingered, even while Lena took care of a hotel guest. When
they resumed talking, he spoke of his love of Waiwera gained from a
school friend, someone whose name Lena knew.

As high schoolers Ralph and his Waiwera buddy had roamed the place,
known every nook and cranny, every thermal hot spot. But he kept me
away from the river. Maybe that's where I got my hunger for money from,
seeing all you lot making this easy pocket money from the tourists. My
parents didn't approve of the inter-racial friendship, wanted to send me off
to a private school. Old-school thinkers themselves, born into a little bit
of money and a big bit of silly class and race snobbery. That friend, by the
way, manages my Wellington branch these days. And I told my parents,
just to let them know: you treat people as you find them.

Lena thinking, as you find me, mister, more and more interested.

Figuring that Henry's roaming route as manager would bring him
back this way, she said she had better get on with her duties.

But Ralph just stood there. Staring but trying to make out he wasn't.

Then he said, this is one foolish move if I'm reading it wrong, but
would you like to meet up again somewhere more private?

The Lena who responded was not the same person of the last twenty
years. This Lena got frightened and excited in the same moment and let
out another Lena who started sorting through office papers and answered, I
don't think you read it wrong. Without the slightest tremor in her voice.

Looked up at him then and in a normal voice said, thank you, Mr
Welsford. Those rooms are confirmed and here is your receipt. In handing
it over she asked, and where might this more private place be? Let her eyes
do all the talking.

But heart now hammering. Hammering. Not least because Henry was
heading this way.

Ralph handed over a business card. Call the private number after six,
any night.

And your wife?

Long gone.

See you again, sir. Good evening.

Ralph was at the door going out when Henry sidled up to reception.
Talkative bloke wasn't he?

Yes, Lena said. You get those. A good friend of Tip Taiaroa.

Oh, he must be Ralph whatshisname—

Welsford, Lena said. Thinking: you were inside me this morning yet
barely look at me. Offer not one little intimate touch to say we are husband
and wife. You hit me. You root me. It's all the same to you.

I hear Tip's done very well, one of the man's managers. Good on him.
Wish we had more Maoris in managerial positions. Walked on, oblivious
to his wife's state, of her wanting him to turn around and for once say he
loved her. Yet wanting him to walk right out of her life so she might be
quite another person again.

Staring after her husband with electric signals and lights
flashing in her mind. And the strongest sexual tingling, a feeling she'd not
known in — why keep counting? It was back.

Perhaps the excitement has her in heightened appreciation of the stars
up there as she walks to an address two suburbs from home. Or she has
grabbed them as distraction. Her Maori ancestors used these lights as
navigation guides to sail their open canoes across that vast Pacific Ocean;
at nights it must have felt as if they were crossing the universe itself, the
great heaving force they were riding, times of howling storms, the pitch
black, not knowing where they were. Their minds must have been born
of isolation and narrow outlook, Lena figured, yet probably gave them
the unquestioning courage to leave their home islands in search of other,
better lands, with eyes fixed on the heavenly pointers.

But how did they know they would come across land in the emptiness
of the Pacific Ocean? Who made the unbelievable decision to just set sail?
And surely some did miss finding land and sailed right on south into the
freezing Antarctic waters? How many perished? What island did the first
voyagers start from? In what altered state of mind did they arrive at these
untouched shores? Why did they adopt war as the singular culture, no
progress as its consequence? Surely some strong leader must have seen this
and could have imposed a change?

She thinks of her own uncharted waters. Of the courage required
therefore to turn her back on her tiny home island. Of her husband who
never really was one. Of what people think of her.

It's Saturday so Henry will have his work cut out running the hotel.
Wiki is legally old enough to marry and there might be something going
on between her and Chud. Now that would be a turn-up for the books,
my daughter and a man assumed to be in for a lifelong criminal career.
Henry won't approve, has always wanted the best for his daughters, though
I always believed Chud had great potential. Well, Mata lives with a most
ordinary man in Auckland, though she writes and says he's a marvellous
husband and father. Manu is thirteen now and more his father's son. He'll
be out late with his mates, a lazy boy and overweight at such a young
age with the fatty diet his father has fed him. Roast mutton for breakfast
indeed. I never got a say on what my children ate, except on Yank's diet.
Now look at him: tall, lean, handsome — the boy I called special because
I feared he would grow up troubled by being fatherless and now look at
him.

As for Barney, drinking with his old war mates, battering their ears
with his newfound means to speak again. Now everything he says bores
her. Hell, she wants a man who can talk about anything under the sun.
Someone she can express her true self to, ask questions about the wider
world and how it works. Someone to discuss the deep emotions with,
dreams and fears, real and irrational. The life you got born to, Lena, before
you became Mrs Takahe.

House lights of just about every residence occupied by, she well
knows, white people. Living in a separate world to Maoris, though the
working class are at the same level: usually renting. Pakehas understand
money; they live and breathe it according to Mrs Mac, who's told Lena
like some friendly informer from the other side. Hell, I'm on my way to
meet another man.

Now guilt sets in, not about what is imminent, nor to do with Henry.
It's Barney. I used him. I gave him a voice he didn't really possess, deluded
myself it was him and that was what attracted me. Wasn't I crafting another
Barney from my own imagination in giving him a more lively personality?
Even the laughter was more my own since if I laughed so did he.

And what does he love about me, if not my beauty he goes on about
as if any other attribute I might possess does not count? Yet he made love
more than he made lust, and he is a good man.

But Lena wants more than a good man. Wants a more complete man.

Gets her to wondering what kind of house Ralph lives in, how he
lives and what are the social rules of the rich? Worries he will find her too
unsophisticated, but tells herself: be proud of who and what you are. He
must have seen something about me. Remember, you've been compared
to a legend of beauty. He ain't seen nothing yet.

House parties she's walking past, so much quieter than the exuberant
often volatile parties at her village which too often end up in brawls. Not
this lot, they have things under control. Like their orderly lives.

And suddenly, look, a shooting star: make a wish for Yank, his music,
his father. The music star Yank might turn out to be. Hope Yank will
make up his mind and go to America. I think they'll get on.

She reaches the sign saying the street Ralph lives on. Makes her mind
go kind of blank and yet in another way as clear of purpose and intent
as those stars are clear in the sky. Her face flushes. A woman she has not
known in a long while smiles up at those stars, wondering where they are
guiding her. Or if direction even matters.

I AM OVER A QUARTER
Negro. Sure, you are where you're raised — mostly.
But nor can genes be denied. From the thirteen photos I now have, I know
his face like my own; we are quite similar on closer comparison. He is a
darker complexion and his hair is kinky while mine is thick and wavy.

I am a diluted version of Jess Hines, Negro resident of Whitecave,
Mississippi, United States of America. I have missed most of my mother's
physical aspects.

I've thrown myself into my music performances, less for the audience
than as a duty to pay homage to the music. Which gets the audience loving
us the more. Often I will not be aware of their adulation, so engrossed in
the music do I get. Nigel, now my soul buddy, beat me to that state.

I start to think my music career might have better chance of being full
time if I lived in America. Soon develops into an obsession that, if I don't
go, if I don't meet my father, my life will be spent regretting it. Anyway I
have an emotional need to see him, meet my father in the flesh. Everyone
needs a father and Henry denied me even a small taste. Not as if I am going
to a father who lives in poverty like near every Negro does in the South.
My
father has money. A lot of other qualities besides.

I WOKE UP EARLY ONE
morning in my mid-thirties able, finally, to face
what my brother and I had seen. We'd buried it in our vulnerable
youth, drowned it in alcohol, the both of us. Afraid that even in just
acknowledging what we'd been witness to, they'd come back for us.

We ambled several miles upstream, looking for fish in a flood-muddied
river. I was fifteen, my brother eighteen, but kind of my father
since our daddy left when we were young. The sons who didn't need a
father: let him rot in hell.

Got to this woods area the one side, a bridge going out of a small
township the other. Dusk was coming on. There were several colored
settlements on our way back. Might have some fun on the way home,
Josh was teasing, get you con-joined with a wo-man—

When suddenly we heard a clamor of some sorts. We knew white
voice tones and their different talk in the instant, even not having had
much experience of white folks up close. So instinctively we knew to
slip into the woods.

Two black boys of perfect complexion to blend with the shadows,
we were suddenly our rootless ancestor slave runaways about to
witness something. For it was plain this mob heading for the bridge
were in a fury.

Squirrels flowed up and down tree trunks. Birds and insects made a
last cacophony to the dying day. Somewhere a hornets' nest droned. An
armadillo shuffled right by oblivious to us on its own scent trail. Our
mother cooked real nice 'dillo. Tastes like chicken. You had to boil it for
hours before frying with onions and gravy.

The yelling got louder, we saw they were pushing someone along
in the front, couldn't tell if a man or woman, just the color — black
— starkly alone among the white complexions. Blacker than our white-diluted
skin.

The dying sun turned the clouds to blood, laying a golden cloak over
this pastoral scene. The hollering group such a violation in contrast.

Flowing up on to the bridge, there they stopped. I looked at my
brother for a lead but he was staring, had that look of hooded eyes,
glazed-over eyeballs, and he said, Gawd help us, I think it's a lynchin'.
Let's get closer, he said.

Close enough to see it was a woman.

I asked my brother how come they lynching a woman?

Josh said, I don't know. It's our color I guess.

Our grandmother had witnessed her share of Negro lynching and
told us why they choose a bridge: same as a tree represents Christ's cross,
a hanging taking place over water is symbolic — water being used for
baptisms, as well the bridge representing death's rite of passage. The great
crossing over, Grandma used to tell us with those wide frightened eyes in
recalling. It was plain exactly what was unfolding here.

I could hear Grandma saying in her old-style talk, it be a passage to
deys own salvation, de ritual of murder.

She meant to a place without sin or evil, since these are embodied
in the victim God created as a born offender for His white subjects to
punish.

In dey minds , Grandma said, dey doing God's will in putting
out a life over His good water. That's how Southern white folk think, that
dey got God-given right to done murder us.

They keep pouring on to the bridge, seemingly a leaderless ooze of
excited humanity. But ringleaders there somewhere in the front, or just
behind the victim, whipping up the frenzy till it turns, till it curdles like
butter cream in the sun. We know that much.

Up front a struggle, not a heaving mass of flailing bodies and loud outcry,
no gunshots to warn or calm everyone down. Just a yelling, whooping
movement of people around a silent few of fixed purpose pinning the
woman's hands behind her back, putting a rope round the neck.

The non-human's neck.

And she stands there, moving not, close enough to see her fixed stare
it's almost serene, but not close enough to know if she's with awful fearing
or gained that Negro resignation: a state impervious to the physical harm
and assault on dignity. Every nigger knows it, even before it's our turn to
experience it. Pick it up from the older niggers. Dream of it even before
we experience it, the state of being nigger.

Looking back, the whites are close enough to see one thing they have
in common. It's spread like a single broad brushstroke across a painting.
Not wiping out their expressions, no. This is the portrait of Indifference.
Total indifference to nigger pain, empty hearts for our suffering. Indeed,
we can see the joy in the faces.

Oafs then, buffoons and village idiots, slow-witted galoots, men
reduced by their bigotry, suddenly turned to a frothing state of not quite
frenzy, the next stage before; missing-tooth grins, close-together eyes with
knitted brows declaring low minds working away simplistic and venal
behind each skull. Smiles as broad as the river flowing below, that yet
never reach the eyes.

HAYNG THE NEEGGER BEECH!

We hear and see this like runaway slaves watching one of our own
captured sisters about to be strung up. Our African sister wears a long
dress. Of tight, tiny floral pattern, sold cheap at general stores everywhere,
cheaper from traveling salesmen, cheaper still from a thief.

We brothers look at each other with same thought: how is her last
flimsy bit of dignity going to fare as she droops from the bridge with dress
lifted up? She might have nothing on underneath, and then what'll they
say, what will howl mockingly from their sneering mouths? It's sure to be
sexual reference, one of their verbal themes being niggers' genitals, our
dangerous sexuality, that we're animals of no self-control.

What does God think of His subjects acting like this, to a woman?

We don't think: that could be us. It just is us.

The woman is lifted suddenly in the air over the railing, by sets of
strong pale and sun-burned male hands. The rope's looped through the
gap in the concrete, she'll be crying out any second, another futile calling
to God to come please save her. The sun is dying fast, bleeding all along
the bridge line.

I'm thinking, even before she calls Him, He ain't coming, sister.
Motherfucker God ain't never coming.

Then she's pushed.

Hands have reached up from behind and shoved the Negro woman at
feet and backs of her calves. So she slips clean down in a short descent yet
so rapid it's not till the figure jolts to a halt — the crowd gone utterly silent
— bouncing a couple times, I think she bounced, that realization takes the
place of the lowering sun. Faces hidden in their own shadow yet we see
them clear as clear: evil in the massed flesh.

I don't think she screamed or made any sound. But not sure my ears
were hearing anything then. I was in that process of shutting down before
the pain got me.

Now, like a hundred years later, from out of the darkness I see her
head is at an angle and her dress did not end up over herself to expose the
last of her twitching thighs and shuddering feet, catch the forcibly ejected
urine running down slender naked legs; it flared briefly from the short
passage of air her weight had forced under it. But dignity stayed where
she'd intended in dressing this morning.

She is just as if out walking and paused to cock a curious head at
something caught her eye. Unaware of the craning heads above her looking
down with gimlet eyes and broken-out teeth in portraits of grin, smile and
grimace, chuckle, soft glad moan and satisfied sigh. Looking down as if at
a big fish spotted below and everyone rushed to look, wanting to kill it.
Or to confirm it's already dead.

She does sway, a grandfather clock pendulum swing slowing to her last
moments. The river flows as rivers always do, this one given of symbolic
justification from God in heaven no less, that He is truly pleased with His
white subjects and their work over His good water crossing.

A wooden cross rears up a dim silhouette against the darkening sky,
bursts into flames like a symbol of the sun commanded back. White hoods
appear of men announcing membership of some strange tribe. Countless
arms rise in salute to the burning symbol of Christ's last living place. When
it would have been their kind that killed Christ.

Our nigger minds are reeling, our brains are on fire. Our young age
has no references to grab at and hold for dear life — it is empty air we're
groping at. I'm thinking, I can't take this, my mind is going to break.

We watch till the last has dispersed and still we stay there, in case.
Trembling like shivering owls. The body hanging suspended is so still.

Sure enough the headlights of a police car come slowly on to the
bridge. Another police car comes from the other side, roof lights flashing
and yet of same unhurried progress as if at a funeral cortège.

Car doors open and close, two torches identify each other with a little
quiver wave of light spears. Then the beams sweep along the lower bridge
and stop.

Illuminating an apparition. Of a strange fruit dangling from a concrete
span.