Steve Katz - Kissssss - A Miscellany

He spent the night by the side of the road, and in the early morning started to climb into the hills. The road rose slowly at first, then steepened through the plantations of coffee trees. The red berries glowed in the evenly planted rows like tiny lamps at a celebration. He picked some berries and bit them. They were sweet, very unlike the taste of coffee. He could not account for his good cheer, considering what he thought he remembered from the past week. He tallied his losses. Tignee lost his wife. Tignee lost his baby. Everything connected with his livelihood, Tignee lost. Tignee lost his house. Tignee lost his boy. Tignee lost his business. Tignee lost all his whalebone netting needles. Tignee lost his spindles. Tignee lost a recently sharpened set of scissors. Tignee lost his village. Tignee lost his nets. Tignee lost the box of jewelry his wife had asked him to keep for her: a gold ring, a ruby bracelet. Tignee lost his three-wheel truck. Tignee lost his mother, and her friends. Tignee lost his knives. As much as he kept adding losses, nothing could defeat his sense of well-being, the feeling that everything was in order, all for the best, everything had a purpose. How could that be? His calm was unshakable and disturbing. This was a nasty way to feel about what had happened. He began to suspect that perhaps he wasn't this Tignee of his thoughts, but a different person who witnessed this catastrophe. But if he wasn't Tignee, from where did he get his thoughts of Tignee? And who could he be otherwise?

Beyond the shallow slopes of coffee trees, the jungle stretched upwards towards the clouds. Palm fronds and broad leaves covered the road. They slipped under his feet, making him stumble. Occasionally he stepped through a smoky breeze that smelled almost human. Sounds, at first dim but slowly getting louder, reached him as the road rose into the clouds. They were inviting him upwards, beckoning him into obscurity. An occasional scooter or truck passed, leaving an acrid perfume of exhaust, refreshing. Sounds of birds and monkeys filled the dense jungle. They said peeweep peeweep sweet sweet some sweet mapa pama . As he ascended the sounds articulated more into words, phrases too complicated for the birds— Jasmine eats the bugs; bake the butter cookies six potato seven potato eleven potato . He slowly penetrated the layer of clouds and rose to a broad plateau of trees. What he saw there among the trees made him wonder. Children lived there in the limbs. In each of the live oaks, among the branches, and in the flowering jacarandas, and in the wild cocoa, and the gumbo limbo, clambering from limb to limb, a human child lived its monkey-life. Below each tree, the adults, the parents, or what he took to be the parents, beseeched the children to come down. “That's enough now of your shenanigans.” “Come down, no more monkeyshines.” “We're going to leave without you. We're not fooling.” “Okay, come down now. We're ready to go!” “This is your last chance. Bye bye.”

Where would they go, he wondered? Where was there to go, he wanted to know?

Their entreaties, perfunctory and hopeless, flitted up through the dark leaves like moths, into the blue, cloudless sky. He wandered among the families, if that's what they were, listening to each of them entreat their children. It was a wide plateau of trees — lychee and bottlebrush, mahogany and sprawled weeping figs. Under almost every tree a small fire burned as the families prepared to cook. From high in the branches of a trumpet tree a dark-eyed boy stared and blinked and stared some more, long enough for him to think it might be his son. What was the name? He approached the tree. “Ekey,” he called, as he remembered. “Maniwan,” called someone approaching from the other side of the tree. Maniwan was not the name of his son. The woman spoke a language he didn't recognize. “Maniwan,” she called, waving him down from his perch with a bandaged hand. The boy ignored her, and looked away from Tignee. A man carrying a baby followed. She lowered one side of her smock, cradled the baby with her wrapped hand, and took the child to her breast. The child burrowed into her breast with a loud suck. Down to the reddish curl that spiraled from above the brow, the baby looked exactly like the infant he lost when his wife plunged. He wondered if the woman had injured her hand. The husband filled a bucket that the boy in the tree had lowered on a rope with some flatbread cooked in a pan on their small fire, a bowl of soup, and an earthen jug of water.

He approached the couple, and spoke, “Hello.” The man rose from where he had been kneeling by the fire, and bowed to Tignee, who bowed back, though it wasn't his custom.

Tignee put his palm to his chest, which was his custom. “My name is Tignee. I come from… ” He pointed towards the sea. He was reluctant to speak the name of his obliterated village.

The man lifted a pan off the fire and offered Tignee a wedge of the flatbread. “Kemekme,” the man said. Tignee didn't know if that was his name or the word in his language for the bread he was offering.

The bread, crisp and slightly sweet, crumbled in his mouth. “What is this place? Why is everyone here?” he asked, looking from the man to the nursing woman. Neither answered him. “When did everyone come here?” They didn't understand his language, he guessed. They seemed friendly enough to answer out of courtesy, but they gave no response. Tignee looked away. Throughout the forest small fires bloomed as if it was a happy season.

The baby sucked hard because it wanted to be alive. Sweat beaded its forehead. The mother changed supporting hands to wipe the child's brow with her bandage. The babe backed off the breast from time to time and threw its head back, milk trapped in the creases of its pucker, to stare up at the brother who gazed on it from his treelimb.

“Do you think the baby will join its brother in the tree?” Tignee asked, not expecting an answer.

The father squatted between the tree and the fire, sharpening a set of chisels. He gathered some small saws, small knives of various shapes, miters, calipers, all tools of the joiner's trade. He rolled these implements carefully in leather, and placed them in a pack, and when he was done he slung this across one shoulder. He kissed his wife, and the baby, saluted the boy in the tree, and set off in the direction opposite to what Tignee would have expected, were he going to lend his skills where Tignee knew they were needed, to help rebuild by the shore.

The mother put the child down after it stopped nursing, and watched it crawl along a tree root. She smiled at Tignee as her baby, moving like a lizard, started up the tree trunk to be with its brother. Tignee bowed to the woman, and turned to wander among the others in this vast encampment.

A long file of men walked in twos and threes, carrying the tools of their various skills, headed in the direction that Tignee had been taking as he fled catastrophe. They were fleeing nothing. Where were they headed? It was early evening, and the sun was setting in the direction they were going. How long would they walk? How far would they go?

He turned away to wander off in the twilight through the woods from one small fire to the next. He whispered the name of Ekey, speaking it to himself, repeating Ekey over and over, until it became pure sound, void of significance. That sound was absorbed into the hum of the wind pumps, which the people had built here and there among the trees to pump water from shallow wells. Along a strip of rocks that bisected the plateau people filled bladders and bags with a gas that escaped from small vents. It smelled like iodine and hyacinth, and was lighter than air, so that using these bladders as balloons, they could float provisions to the small ones in the trees.