We, the Drowned - Carsten Jensen [62]
Now I was headed for Honolulu. It took me a year to get there. I had to sign on and sign off several times: no routes led directly from Hobart Town to Hawaii. I saw a lot on that journey, and there was more than one shore where I was tempted to settle. If Anthony Fox was right about there being two kinds of men who came to the Pacific Ocean, I knew which kind I was: the kind looking for the shade of a coconut palm and a view of a blue lagoon.
Yet I always moved on. I had nothing on my mind but the name Jack Lewis.
I had to wait fourteen days in Honolulu, and if I hadn't been looking for Jack Lewis, I would have stayed there for the rest of my life.
The women wore red ankle-length dresses with bare shoulders, and they wriggled their hips in a way Marstallers would have called indecent. But their lives were governed by a different, more fertile kind of nature than the one at home. The air was thick with perfume. At first I thought it was the ladies, tempting my nostrils in the same way they tempted the rest of me. But the scent came from the flowers. Jasmine and oleander were the only ones I knew the names of, but they grew everywhere—in front of the houses, in the shade of the trees, and along the roads. Instead of gin, the drink of choice here was bourbon, and I'd down it on a shady terrace, watching life go by on the promenade in front of me, listening to the surf.
The houses in the town were white with green shutters, and the roads were straight and wide. Instead of cobbles, I walked on a carpet of crushed coral, shaded by tall trees with leaves that grew so thick, no sunlight came through. The men wore the color of the town: white jackets, white waistcoats, white trousers. Even white shoes—they'd chalk the canvas every morning. And the women wore gypsy hats decorated with flowers.
The Micronesians have light skin, and they like to tattoo their faces. It was the men who struck you the most. They shave their heads and they're tattooed from the neck up, so their faces are just blue shadows, lit up by lightning flashes of white from the glint of their eyes.
Hobart Town and Honolulu lie at opposite sides of the Pacific Ocean, and I've never been to two places more different. I'd first heard Jack Lewis's name in Hobart, but every time I mentioned it here, it was as if I'd brought some of its filth with me. People would eye me suspiciously and make me feel like undesirable company. One man even spat on the ground and turned his back on me altogether. It felt like the whole of Honolulu was shunning me.
An American missionary shot me a look of pity from beneath his broad-brimmed straw hat. He said to me in a fatherly tone, "You look like an otherwise decent young man. Why do you want to talk to that dreadful person?"
I couldn't explain my business, so I just stood there mute. He misunderstood my silence and thought I had something to hide. He walked away, shaking his head.
I felt unclean.
In the end, though, I got the information I was looking for. I learned that Jack Lewis was expected within the next few weeks. But I paid a price for my interest in the Flying Scud. I drank my bourbon alone.
The Flying Scud dropped anchor outside Honolulu, and I was waiting on the beach when Jack Lewis was rowed ashore by his crew, which consisted of four Kanaks. Their faces were covered in blue tattoos and I noticed one had an ear missing. I took the fact that Jack Lewis chose to surround himself exclusively with natives as a sign that he didn't trust anyone. I reckoned this was the kind of company a man preferred if he had a secret to keep. What did he talk to these blue-faced men about? Nothing, I guessed. They had their goals in life, and he had his—and their paths need never really cross.
Jack Lewis was a small, withered man, with skin burned the color of mahogany by the trade winds and the noonday equator sun. His face was wrinkled and his eyes