‘Katie,’ said a few others, some squatting, chewing, drawing, weaving. The old man Sanjo had found one of Fen’s cigarettes and chewed on it slowly. Katie, the room murmured. It was like breathing life into something long inert. No one had ever said her name in their house afterward.
There were no women visitors today. There were not often many, as they fished in the morning, but today there were none. And the men who’d come were agitated, scowling, full of complaints.
Old Sanjo pointed to her typewriter in the big mosquito room. His skin stretched across his armpits like a bat’s, so thin it was nearly transparent.
She had promised him she would show him how it worked.
‘Obe,’ she said to him. Yes.
Nearly everyone got up.
‘Only Sanjo,’ she said.
She took him into the room. He poked at the netting, firm in its wooden frame. He drew back to poke harder.
No, she told him.
He looked all around, tracing the lines of this ten-by-ten frame of netting they were in. He looked like he wanted to leave. Everyone else was peering in, noses against the screen.
She ripped a piece of paper from her notebook and spun it around the platen.
Sanjo, she typed quickly. He stepped back at the noise. Several children screamed. She pulled out the paper and handed it to him. ‘You. Sanjo. In English. In my talk.’
He touched the letters she’d typed. ‘I have seen this before,’ he said. He pointed to her books. ‘I did not know it could be my name.’
‘It can be anything.’
‘They are powerful?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘I do not want them.’
She realized he saw the letters as part of his ‘dirt,’ a piece of him like hair or skin or shit that enemies could steal and put a hex on.
‘It is not your dirt.’
He handed it back to her.
‘I will keep it here,’ she said. ‘Then it will be safe.’
Fen did not return for lunch, so she was able to get out early on her rounds to the women’s houses. She had been visiting these twelve houses for six weeks now. They each contained several families, minus the men and the initiated boys, who slept in the ceremonial houses closer to the lake. Despite her daily progress with the language, she felt she’d reached an unexpected plateau with the women. The men, though harder to access because she was not allowed into their houses, were free with their words, included her in their talk of who would marry whom, and what would have to be paid, and to whom, while the women had far less patience for chatter. She had never known a tribe where the women were more reticent than the men.
Because the rains were late, the road was a desiccated crust, hard as marble underfoot. Ripe fruit exploded when it hit the ground. Hot air blew down from the high trees, their dry fronds cracking against each other. Bugs aimed for her eyes and mouth, looking for moisture.
At the turn in the road she found Fen with a few men, scraping out the last bits of wood pulp from the hollowed trunk with flat rocks. As usual, even for manual labour, the Tam men wore many strings of round yellow shells around their neck, armbands of bamboo fiber, and fox fur pubic covering. Their hair was curled and festooned with parrot feathers. The shell necklaces clacked rhythmically as they worked. Three skulls, leather-brown with age, were propped up against a tree nearby to oversee and bless the work of the descendants of their clan. One skull was missing its jaw. Nell looked for it and sure enough, it hung around the neck of Toabun, the clan elder.
‘Good day, Fenwick.’
‘Good day to you, mum,’ he said, straightening up.
The other men stopped their work to watch them.
He peeked into her basket. He’d taken off his shirt, and his chest was shiny with sweat and stippled with bugs and flecks of wood pulp. ‘Ah, the usual bribes, er, enticements, I see.’
‘They like a sweet canned peach at this hour.’
He was an athletic man, so unlike the men in her family. He’d been a rugby player at school. His father told her, the one time they’d met, that Fen could have played for the Wallabies if he’d wanted to.
‘Don’t we all,’ he said, leaning in and peering down her dress. ‘A nice round white peach.’ He reached in, but she blocked him. The men behind him wheezed with laughter.
He had begun to do this lately, perform for them in this way.
‘What’s going on today?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Something’s going on. Have they said anything?’
He didn’t know and didn’t care. He kissed her and the men slapped the canoe and cackled.
‘Get some work done, Mr. Show-off.’