We had a formula, self-conscious, dutifully applied to each country and quickly disposed of: "Would you go back there?" I would ask.
"No. They discriminate against Americans."
Or "Would you like to stay here?" he would ask,
"Yes. They smile at their children."

We kept up this line of inquiry until a certain afternoon in Tonga, the Friendly Islands, after which I was embarrassed by it.

We had docked for several days. The night before we and several of our shipmates had been driven in a van to a lovely beach where we were fed seafood and suckling pig and invited to watch Tongan dancing, no different, in my opinion, from other recent South Pacific meals and dances. Aboard ship, Charlie had vomited, no differently than either of us had before, on occasion, so that day I walked into town by myself.

It was terrifically hot and humid. Thinking to welcome the sun, any sun, after months of cold rain and snow in the deep of Iowa's winter, we had perhaps chosen the wrong season to visit the South Pacific, now in January the midst of summer. The town is like one you'd expect to find in the poorest part of rural West Virginia: ingrained dust, holes in walls, mysterious unpleasant odors, peeling paint, hand-lettered signs, rusty cans, rusty cars, a few new cars, starving dogs. I walked to the bank and post office, trailed up and down main street, browsing in a handicraft store and stopping in several little shops, and finally found what I was looking for--bug spray--in Morris Hedstrom, the only real store in town. The other stores, tiny hovels, sold make-up, ice cream, and a few canned goods, primarily mackerel and corned beef, or bolts of cloth, tea kettles, and cans of mackerel and corned beef, or ice cream, shoes, duct tape, mackerel and corned beef. Service was not lively, and I decided that Tongans are large and rude. So much for friendly islands.

I started back to the ship, grateful for the breeze along the shoreline. The sea was slate colored and rough, and the little islands in the lagoon, looking like the tops of drowned heads some with hair standing on end, appeared to bob in waves. About halfway to the ship, I stopped at a restaurant, little stand really, with picnic tables in sand, shaded by a thatched roof. A radio played louder than I would have liked. A blond woman behind the counter, an Australian or New Zealander, sold me a can of passion fruit soda. "She'll bring it to you," she said nodding toward a Tongan woman who stood by. They apparently had no Coke, Pepsi, water or ice.

I sat at a picnic table and was immediately joined by the only other customer in the establishment who had been sitting on a stool by the counter. His accent clearly identified him as American. He introduced himself and asked if he could sit down. I wondered briefly why he would want to talk to an old white-haired lady and decided it was a case of compatriots sticking together or English speakers striking up conversations with any persons likely to understand. His name was A. Roy Painter, and he was from California. I should have been warned then and there: I've never trusted people--they're always men--who announce themselves as Initial Something Something. (Men who wear white dress shoes are of dubious character as well.) I would have guessed he was in his mid-thirties. He was dressed like a Tongan. I wondered if he had any idea how bizarre he looked wearing a wrap-around skirt and, worse, a fringed mat roped around his midsection. He was clean-cut with short hair and wire-rimmed glasses.

He was extraordinarily good-looking.

"I-I-I. . . will always . . . love you-o-o", sang the radio.

We passed the time of day. He had come back to Tonga on an extended visit. I wondered where he got his money, but couldn't think how to ask without appearing nosy. He had been in the country, working, ten years before. "I was a poet and business man . . . a businessman poet. I was a different person then. I drank alcohol and took drugs. My character wasn't developed. By the time I left I had changed. I wanted to be here as the new person I was. I hated to leave. I promised myself I'd come back."

He was a nice young man, I thought. "Why did you leave, Roy?" I asked.

He turned away. The Tongan woman had come up to the table with my can of soda. She plopped it down. It was warm, a straw stuck under the ring. "Do you have ice?" I asked.

"No," she said.

"One doesn't get ice in Tonga," A. Roy said. "This country is going through an interesting transitional period. Unsettling. The future zooms toward them with great speed, while in many ways, they remain passively lounging beneath the shelter of the past--a shelter as flimsy as this." He pointed to t he roof. "Think of this. Ten years ago, one could name the owner of every vehicle in Tongatapu. Now the streets are rivers of traffic. Yet no provision . . . what do you want Lupe?"

The Tongan woman was still standing at the table, biting her lower lip. She leaned forward and addressed me in a low voice. "She want to know. It is okay he talk to you?"

I looked toward the worried blond proprietress and away. "Oh, yes! It's perfectly fine. We're having an interesting conversation." I wondered, what does the woman think--that he's trying to hustle me? I glanced at A. Roy. Inconceivably, he hadn't heard, or preferred for some reason to pretend he hadn't.

I told him about my shopping experiences. "In one place the girl said they didn't have any. Actually she just shook her head. Then as I was going out the door I saw some on a shelf. I didn't want to embarrass her, so I just left."

"You didn't want to embarrass yourself, you mean," he said. "You were afraid when you caught her in a lie, you'd be uncomfortable. Be honest."

Mr. Pedantic, I thought. "Well, I thought she might not have understood . . ."

"It doesn't matter. She wouldn't have been embarrassed. She would have just handed it to you without explaining, without apologizing. They're lazy. She wasn't in the mood to walk over and take the can off the shelf."

"And then in Morris Headstrom, I asked the woman if they had any, and she wouldn't answer, just raised her eyebrows at me. I had to find it myself. I think, unbeknownst to the King, there's a covert communist system set up here.

He frowned. "What do you mean?"

"They don't care if they sell anything."

"No, no," he said. "That doesn't make sense. It's the culture. They share everything. No one goes hungry. Everything is shared."

"I was joking."

A water-spotted glass with a few uneven chunks of ice appeared in front of me. My drink was almost finished, but the Tongan woman was smiling at me, and I smiled back. "Oh, you did have ice."

"I got it from the neighbor."

"Thank you," I said, touched. "Thank you for going to the trouble. Is this why they call Tonga the Friendly Islands?"

"We're talking, Lupe," said A. Roy. "Don't interrupt."

When she had left, he took a deep breath and let it out through his mouth. "There was a murder here, you know."

"Here? In this restaurant?"

"No," he said impatiently, "In Tonga."

"Were you here?"

"Yes! Of course I was here! If you'd just be quiet for a few seconds."

I wasn't sure whether or not I should be insulted and tell him so, but I was suddenly quite curious, so I let him go on. He looked away from me to the sea.

"She was a beautiful girl. Cassia. It means "cinnamon bark." She had a . . . I call it a china doll's face, long and oval and very white. Her hair was pale red, the color of the clouds at sunset. Almost a washed-out color which contrasted strongly with her spirit, her elan. She was a shooting star in Tongan skies.

"There was an unfortunate young man we'll call Andy." He paused and looked at me, I looked at him back. He had been speaking without inflection, as if reciting from memory. No he laughed, his lips pulling back reluctantly from pointed canines. "Andy, andy, andy, andy, andy, andy, andy, andy, andy, andy, andy, andy, andy. If you say it often enough, it sounds so-o-o silly. Try it sometime."

He looked at the sea again and, in his sing-song voice, resumed. "One day a few months after they met, Cassie told him she was interested in him. He hadn't had any indication of her 'interest' before and knew that the word was being used as a euphemism. Oh, he had had plenty of women before . . . he was a handsome guy, I guess. But he was used to doing the choosing and chasing. He told her he was not accustomed to being approached in that manner. He was offended. Andy Andy sent her on her way. Stupidly sent her off.

"He couldn't stop thinking of her. Too late he saw that she was the one who was different the one he was waiting for. The others had all become clinging . . . whining . . . in the end. But now she was playing a game. When he asked her for a date, to go out to dinner, she pretended she had lost interest. He knew she was suffering from hurt pride and playing a game of hard-to-get, but all his attempts to stop her came to nothing. She pointedly ignored him from that time forward.

"Then she became involved with a Tongan. Andy Andy saw the dangerous game she was playing, trying to get a jealous reaction from him. He could see how laughable the whole thing was. He went to her house to reason with her. The Tongan had nothing to offer her--it was as simple as that. Andy Andy knew him. He was a teacher, but virtually uneducated by Western standards. Cassie persisted in her nonsense, saying what she loved most about the man was that he didn't hold back his feelings. Andy Andy was amused." A. Roy seemed to be running out of breath. "The irony, Andy Andy imitated an ape, scratching under his arms. There was argument. He hadn't wanted to argue. He wanted to trace her pale lips with his finger . . . lick her pale eyebrows. Things got out of hand, and she was accidentally killed. Stupid Andy Andy.

She had lived in a little house on the campus of a primary school. One the Monday after they took away her body, Tongan school children looked through the open door and window and saw great splashes and delicate, lacy fans of blood on the walls, the only exposure to abstract art most of them would ever have. Later, they would be asked to sweep the place out. They did a good job. I saw it, later, and one wouldn't have known. . . ."

Sweat prickled on my scalp. I swear, it wasn't until that moment that I knew he was Andy. I thought, do I get up now? Do I just walk away?

"They wanted to give her a Tongan burial, though her body wasn't here anymore. Peace Corps had shipped it back to the States. I wondered if she would have forgiven him. If he cut his hair . . . How could it have happened? It was so quick. Oh, God, hear me I'm so sorry. Of course they were both to blame, but how could it . . . ?

"Anitelu. You want to come home?" A large Tongan man put his hand on A. Roy's shoulder.

A. Roy twisted on his bench and looked up. "No, Po'uli. I'm talking, I'll come later."

"Anitelu, I think you must come now." The man, in his early thirties, dressed in a skirt, shirt, and tie, looked concerned.

A. Roy started speaking quickly and authoritatively in Tongan. His voice rose and shrilled. Suddenly the man reached out and cuffed him across the head. A. Roy's shoulders sank. He rested his forehead on the table and put his hands over his eyes. The man, reaching under A. Roy's arms, lifted him gently and supported him as they walked through the sand to a late model Toyota. The man opened what mistakenly thought was the driver's door for A. Roy, and when they drove off, A. Roy still had his hands over his eyes.

Drivers sit on the right in Tonga

"Further outlook for .Nuku'alofa . . . mainly fine," said the radio.

I stood up and staggered through the sand to the counter. "He told me about a girl being killed. A few years back. Is that story true?"

"Yes." The blond woman looked uncomfortable, and the Tongan woman impassive.

I hesitated. "He did it, didn't he?"

"Yes. Look, I'm awfully sorry you had to . . . "

"No, no. No problem. I'm just curious. How did it happen?"

"He told you she was killed accidentally, is that right?"

"Yes."

"He stabbed her twenty-three times."

"Oh, my God."

"Then he ran away. They didn't find out for days who did it."

"Why isn't he in prison?"

"Well, they sent him back to America to stand trial, but they put him into some sort of institution instead of gaol. Then he was let out a few years later."

"How did he get back here?"

"He just came, I guess. I don't know the legal ramifications. He just turned up a few years ago."

"How does he support himself?"

"I don't really know. He turns up here and there around town, seeking out palangis to tell his story to. He must have told that story a thousand times. You might ask Lupe here. He lives with her family. That was her nephew who came and got him. In fact, that was the girl's fiancée."

"What?" I turned to the smiling Tongan woman. "He lives with your family?"

"Yes."

"That was your nephew?"

"Yes."

"How could you . . . how can he . . . how can you let him live with you?

"He know us."

"But he murdered your nephew's girlfriend. He's probably ruined his life."

"He is . . . " she looked at the blond woman. " . . . puke."

"Sick. He's disturbed."

"Yes, I could see that. But still . . . did your nephew love her?"

"Yes, he love her. He not get marry any more."

"Then how could he have him in the house?"

"In Tonga, we take care of this people. We not take them away." She turned to the blond woman and spoke Tongan.

"She's saying that Tongans take care of their handicapped in the family. A crazy person might get out of the house and wander away, and soon someone from the family will go looking for him and lead him back. She said palangis don't protect their handicapped. She means that we hide them away in institutions."

"But still," I said. "That young man is not a Tongan." This is insane, I thought. I raised my eyebrows and shrugged for the benefit of the blond woman. She didn't respond.

"You're right to be proud of your country, Lupe," she said. "Tongans are generous people," she said to me.

I asked Lupe, "Aren't you at all angry at him?"

She smiled, "No worries," she said.

"Bullshit!" laughed Charlie. "The guy's probably getting disability or something, and they're sucking him dry. It's their way of getting revenge."

I did not feel so.

The next day we sailed out of the harbor, through water glinting jewel-like-sapphire, turquoise, aquamarine, emerald, beryl--past the little drowned heads, some with palm tree hair.

Charlie asked, "Would you like to live here on the Friendly Islands?"

I said, "I don't know."

© 1997 Ingrid Richardson
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