Suncatcher

by Romesh Gunesekera

  Then, ten yards ahead, by the water’s edge, a dry coconut frond sailed through the air. Gerry’s war whoop followed. No glint of sunlight on gunmetal that shone in the pages of my favourite Westerns; nothing gleamed under the coconuts. No white Stetson, nor bent eagle feather.

  I raised the BB gun. Jay was right: the gun made the game real. No need to imagine a bullet reaching out to the target; no one would have to pretend to be hit, or argue against it. If the aim was good and I shot straight, Jay would be hit. There will be no need to negotiate. The green splat would be proof. He’d be dead. That was all I had to do: make him dead. The point was to shoot straight, not pretend, and be somewhere almost real. The idea was liberating.

  Jay’s rifle had telescopic sights, cross-hairs; mine had a simpler V and ball, but that was enough. I was learning to believe in natural gifts: how to still the mind, let every sound, smell, waft of wind, press the outer layers of the senses and reveal the state of things. To live, as Jay urged, in one universal breath from now to infinity. Slowly, his beaming face came into focus: the high cheekbones catching the sun, glistening, his fringe mussy and wavering below the hat, his tongue peeping as he searched for us. I closed my eyes in a marksman’s prayer, tasting metal, a hint of the corrosion that lay ahead in the journey out of a shell into a world that would mingle light with darkness, doing with undoing.

  Then my hat was hit – smack in the middle of the crown.

  ‘Got you, asshole,’ Jay’s exaggerated Wild West shout echoed. ‘Out for three minutes.’ His motor spluttered into life and he set off.

  Downed, I counted the seconds, furious not to have fired a single shot.

  Gerry let out another whoop and hurled a branch, leaping out onto the open ground where we had abandoned the raft: in plain view, his half-length sarong flapping. I could have splattered that easily, probably even hit the headband, if Gerry froze for a second, but the three minutes were not up. With another whoop, Gerry plunged into a grove of cardamom plants and orange trees.

  I retrieved my hat and discovered a hole in it. Could a gandapana seed, a berry, do that? I counted the final thirty seconds and set off after the other two.

  Although the sound of the motor provided enough of a trail, I kept checking the ground, converting the indentations in the sand into hoof marks and searching for two horses up ahead instead of a hand tractor with a baby horsepower rating. Country lore was not the point. What thrilled me most was the single-mindedness of the pursuit. Nothing could detract from the fullness of the moment, a pleasure that would stay with me forever. The thrill of hunting: the search for a memory, a word, a friend, a spark of hope in a careless world. Chases that would sustain me when nothing else could.

  Then, the motor ahead stopped again. The air settled. No birdsong. No wind. No intrusions. The strings up in the trees were zipped and hushed. The silence grew immense until a bird, unable to bear the emptiness, pricked it with a sharp, long, fluttery trill. Another followed, and another. A chorus of new birdcalls rippled from tree to tree. Among them was Jay, teasing me for not being able to tell one kuk-kukuroo from another. No doubt Gerry could; he must listen to them every day. He would know them all. The trills, the chirps, the warbles, the squawks. Maybe Gerry was doing birdcalls too. The two of them in cahoots. This was, after all, their game. Gerry would know exactly where to run, where to do his war whoop, where to shoot his arrows and where to fall dead. For he must. Jay could not be the one who is hit and falls. It dawned on me then just how far this game surpassed any I had ever played at home.

  I took the next bend low. The small hide on stilts at the edge of the paddy fields twenty yards down promised an advantage. A woodshrike flew ahead. The twang of a bow. An arrow flew in a slow curve and fell short into a clump of copperleaf. A moment later Jay’s air rifle fired three shots in quick succession. Could he reload and fire so fast with gandapana berries? Without lead pellets in the automatic feeder?

  I saw Jesse James shift his position behind the cadjan screen of the hide. A moment later, the rifle was firing again. I rolled over and took cover behind a walrus tree. Jay had not spotted me. I took aim and fired, forgetting the rules of engagement, hoping to hit Jay anywhere I could. All I wanted was to hit him. Smack, smack, the gandapana berries exploded against the tightly woven coconut fronds of the screen. Jay turned his fire on me, snapping one of the branches nearby with a shot. I found a better angle; this time the berry-bullet burst on the post close to his face. Jay ducked. I ran towards the next tree, but was hit by two fast shots, one in the arm that stung like hell and the other in the hat again. ‘Down,’ I yelled and fell, playing dead. The green splodge on the hat and my arm proved that Jay’s last two shots, at least, were definitely seed-berries.

  Jay fired some more at Gerry who dodged and danced from tree to tree. Then Jay did his own war cry and leaped down from the hut. With a howl, Gerry retreated. Jay chased him into the bushes, and emerged moments later with the abandoned bow and a couple of arrows. My three minutes of being dead a second time were almost up.

  ‘Truce, we need some time out,’ Jay announced, examining the bow. ‘He never does it properly,’ he complained. ‘See? The string has to be a lot tauter, I keep telling the fool.’

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘You join my gang. No more sheriff. I’m going to show him how to really use a bow and arrow.’ He had a pistol tucked into his belt.

  ‘You have two guns.’

  Jay patted the handle. ‘This? Nice repeater, but no pressure. Only good at point-blank.’

  ‘But that’s not fair, is it?’

  ‘I’m an outlaw. It’s not about being fair.’ He pulled out his bowie knife and cut off the pointy end of the arrow and split the end open.

  ‘Now what are you doing?’

  ‘Like a blunt pencil, this. Useless. It needs to stick in when it hits something solid. You know, like in the movies. Thud – and there it is, quivering in a tree trunk by his head.’

  He opened a small brown case strapped to his belt and pulled out a small packet of fishhooks, pins and nails and some twine.

  ‘You putting barbs?’

  ‘Don’t want to torture the bugger.’ He picked out a couple of slender narrow-head nails. ‘This is what we need.’

  He fixed one of the nails to the split end of the arrow and wound the string around it to hold it in place with an inch of the metal point sticking out. ‘What d’you reckon?’

  ‘Looks mean.’ I hesitated. ‘Were you using real pellets back there?’

  Jay laughed. ‘Just one or two to fizz things up.’

  ‘You got my arm, not just the hat.’

  ‘Let’s see.’ Jay quickly brushed away the flecks of green pulp still on my skin with his fingertips. ‘That’s a berry mark. Didn’t hurt much, really, did it?’

  He fixed up the second arrow and then tested the bow, putting his foot on one end and flexing it and tightening the bowstring several notches more. ‘I’ve shown him how to string it so many times, but bloody fool just doesn’t get it. He could never be a real Geronimo.’

  I didn’t see Gerry as any kind of fool; only a boy with no choice. Did he even know we had paused the game? Might he be stealing up right now? ‘We track him, or what?’

  ‘That’s it. The tables are turned.’

  ‘Does he know that?’

  Jay’s mouth broke open into a coarse, haphazard grin, as he did his Jesse James drawl: ‘What matters is that it is time for us to nail him.’

  He strapped his air rifle to his back and carefully slotted the string of the bow in the notch of the arrow and held it in place between the fingers of his right hand; the shaft and the bow he gripped with his other fist, along with the second arrow. If determination was the route to victory, Jay was assured of success.

  ‘What happened to the bata-thuwakkuwa and his tomahawk?’ I asked as we passed Gerry’s last stand.

  ‘The dickhead just dropped everything and ran. That’s no way to win.’

  I no longer knew
where the boundaries were, but I followed Jay along the path up to the cowshed where Jay said Gerry always ended up.

  ‘You draw him out and I’ll show him what an arrow can do.’

  Jay grinned and I grinned back, unable to resist, entranced by the sleek, modernised arrow, the plastic fletches primed to guide it to pierce the veils of boyhood dreams.

  An alu kobeiya flapped its broad wings and took to the air, and soon a chorus of panicky birdsong ricocheted high to low.

  In Jim Corbett’s jungle book, to flush a tiger out of hiding you should create a line of sound combing across the scrub. Then the tiger thinks a giant claw is scraping the land and doesn’t see that at any point it is just a single man moving in, banging a drum; one man that it could tear to pieces with ease. To flush out a boy with nothing to defend himself would surely hardly compare, especially Gerry who did not understand the earnestness of our fantasies.

  I gave a war whoop.

  Our prey leapt out, over the back wall, into a banana grove. I stole around the side of the shed.

  A moment later, Gerry appeared again, peeping from behind a carriage of green bananas.

  ‘Over there,’ I said to Jay who had come up and crouched down behind.

  ‘This’ll scare him shitless.’ Jay pulled back the bowstring taut and then sprang out with a roar and let the arrow fly, aiming at the carriage of bananas.

  Gerry jumped forwards instead of back and yelped as the arrow got him in the leg. He crashed into the bushes.

  ‘Damn fool,’ Jay swore. ‘Why’d he do that?’

  We ran up to Gerry. He lay on the ground, baffled, holding the arrow stuck in his thigh. A red stain bloomed in his sarong. His face had darkened where he’d been hurt as he fell; his left eye thick and bloody.

  Jay snatched Gerry’s headband off and hitched up the boy’s sarong. ‘Here, put this quick around your leg.’ He pulled out the arrow and tied the headband tight around the puncture. He swore again, under his breath. ‘Damn. Better go back to the house and put some Dettol on it.’

  ‘In the cart?’ I asked.

  ‘Nah. It’s only a small thing.’ Jay let go of the end of the sarong. ‘Can walk, no?’ he asked him.

  Gerry was trying hard not to cry. His bad eye fast swelling up in fat rolls, the flesh turning crimson; the socket looked buckled. ‘Can’t see,’ he moaned.

  Jay gave him a hanky to cover his eye and started to pull him along; I followed a few steps behind. The sand exposed a trail of red blobs. I felt sick. All the lonely dread, which over the last two months had ebbed away, rose again, breaking the veneer of camaraderie I had carefully fitted to our joint enterprises. Gerry let out a whimper as he half hopped, half limped along, but Jay seemed not to notice. The trees sagged, mute. A solitary hornbill arched its wings.

  Up at the house, Jay made a cold compress for the eye and dabbed antiseptic on the wound. As he was dressing it, Elvin turned up.

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’

  ‘First aid,’ Jay said. ‘Wounded, no?’

  ‘Bloody hell. Who’s going to take my telegram to the tomtom shop now?’

  That night, Gerry was confined to the kitchen where he was told to rest while Ivan, the watcher, was drafted in to help with the evening chores. I fretted over the spectre of blindness, or tetanus – the thing that led to lockjaw and death by slow star vation. Gerry suffering for our misdeeds.

  When we got under our nets to sleep, I asked Jay if he had brought his Bible.

  ‘I found what I was looking for.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Elijah. A lonely prophet, like Moses, and a fighter for God. Jews, Christians, Muslims, all call him the herald.’

  Something in Jay’s voice made me feel relieved. ‘Moses…’

  Jay pushed his face close to the net. ‘Seriously, I wanted to know who Elijah gave his mantle to, and how.’

  ‘Like a crown?’

  ‘A cloak. But really, it’s his powers; magic powers that part the seas, get ravens to bring him food during the great drought. The day his life ends, he vanishes in a whirlwind, giving his mantle to his disciple, Elisha, who then has to fulfil the things that have to be done.’ He paused, relieved by the retelling.

  ‘In Russia, it is the people who have the power to change things.’ My father’s pamphlet seemed to offer a much more practical programme. A safer world.

  By nine the next morning we were ready to head back home. The jeep packed with the same paraphernalia we had come with, minus the provisions – anything we had not consumed, we left for Sulaiman and his family and Ivan the watchman. Gerry didn’t turn up to help. Sulaiman said he was still complaining about his eye.

  ‘He wasn’t shot in the eye, was he?’ Elvin asked.

  ‘When he fell he says a branch got him just there and now the boy can’t see a bean.’

  Elvin made a tsk sound. ‘You better take him to hospital this afternoon when you’ve finished that other business. Use the tractor.’

  ‘Can’t we take him to a doctor now?’ I asked.

  ‘There’s no room in the jeep, son. Can’t be going up and down, I have an appointment to see Percy and that clown today.’

  I didn’t want Gerry going blind because of us. ‘He can squeeze in the back with me.’

  Elvin paused, measuring conscience to pragmatism. ‘Bundle him in then. Sulaiman, you hang on to the back plate. I’ll drop the two of you in the town but I can’t be waiting, you understand? You’ll have to sort it out from there, eye or no eye.’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  Not far from the bridge we found a house with a red cross painted on a board but the doctor was out on a call; we left Sulaiman and Gerry to wait and drove on.

  ‘Helluva thing to do, son, crippling that boy. Fellow usually runs behind us down the road hooting, no?’

  ‘His fault. Jumped straight into the line of fire. Never learns what’s what.’

  Hearing them, I felt a growing sense of both guilt and betrayal.

  ‘So, you boys catch any fish in the end?’ Elvin honked the horn at a bullock cart on the road.

  ‘Got fantails for the aquarium. Big jam jar full.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  ‘What about you, Uncle?’

  ‘Trouble is I can’t tell whether I am the fisherman or the fish, but someone is definitely hooked somewhere.’

  ‘Mr Tinki?’

  ‘Small fry. Have to wait and see.’

  At Ambepussa, I saw a sign to another medical centre and sickened again at the picture it brought back: the gross, mangled eye, Gerry whimpering. We turned into the rest house; Elvin parked under the flimsiest of trees.

  ‘So many bloody trees here.’ The bonnet steamed. ‘Do we need to roll the top on?’

  Jay studied the trees above the jeep. ‘Nothing’s gonna perch there.’

  Up at the rest house, Mr Tinki paced the veranda clutching a spoon; a man twice his size burped loudly in a brown lounger, finishing off a bowl of porridge.

  ‘You boys go and get yourselves a cream soda,’ Elvin said, heading for the showdown.

  Jay went in search of a waiter; keen for some time on my own, I wandered into the terraced garden.

  Down a level, I discovered a cell cut into the side of the hill and secured by thick, black iron bars; inside, shredded poles of bamboo had been scattered on the floor. In the far corner, a dark, furry bundle swelled into a small black bear that ambled slowly towards me. I inched back.

  Jay, who had followed me, saw the bear and immediately started to croon; he slipped his hand in through the bars and tickled it behind the ear.

  ‘Don’t do that. He’ll bite your hand off.’

  Jay slapped the bear’s snout as it swivelled its head, baring its fangs. ‘Fellow just needs a cuddle. Some affection.’

  The bear took a swipe at him, but Jay’s hand was swifter and out of the cage. ‘See? Just wants to play. This isn’t the life for a bear, stuck in a cage.’

  Back in the dining room, our sodas and
a plate of rolls were already out.

  Each bubble in the soda seemed to me as extraordinary as the highs and lows of the trip: sparkling one moment, empty the next. Nothing, yet everything. Would I ever be able to describe the world I had been in, or what had happened in it? A bear?

  ‘Wanna play Battleships?’ Jay asked.

  ‘You have graph paper?’

  ‘We can make squares.’ Jay picked some paper and a couple of pencils from the bar and set about drawing lines and positioning his ships. ‘Just three ships. No aircraft carrier.’

  I had sunk a cruiser but lost a submarine by the time Elvin came over.

  ‘Who’s winning?’ He placed a hand on Jay to steady himself.

  ‘Draw,’ Jay replied. ‘You?’

  ‘Buggers don’t understand the American mindset, but we are getting there. I feel hopeful.’

  ‘Got your beer?’

  ‘Oh yes, at least I managed a couple of beers.’ Elvin slid forwards and then stopped himself. He patted his stomach.

  ‘Pissoir first and then we’ll hit the road, Jack.’ He chucked the keys of the jeep over to Jay. ‘You boys get started. Reverse the damn thing and get it pointed in the right direction, will you, Jay?’ He hiccupped and ambled off.

  ‘He lets you drive?’

  ‘Sure. He’s the one who taught me.’

  We got in the front, and Jay started the engine. ‘Tough old bird,’ he said, and reversed the jeep expertly. He did a demonstration of the gear changes; he showed me how to coordinate hand to foot, and explained what the different levers were, including the four-wheel-drive stick.

  ‘I know all that. I’ve read hundreds of test drives in the mags.’

  ‘Yeah, but to learn properly you must do it – step by step.’ He killed the engine. ‘Look, sit here and do a run-through without the engine on.’