This year, she will have with her two students who are technical sound experts, eager to make high-quality recordings of the bird’s extended predawn call and response. Most usually described as a crowing or barking gwa-gwa or waa-waa but sometimes including a territorial hiss or shriek. Calls the Kanaks once believed were messages from the spirit world, to be deciphered by chiefs.
After New Caledonia, she and her students will fly on to Papua New Guinea to meet up with her colleague Ian Opal, an expert on birds of paradise.
She should never have let it go so long. Somehow naively assuming she’d have a chance one day. Like that wonderful book she’d read later by Gabriel Garcia Márquez, in which Florentino Ariza waits fifty years to consummate his insuppressible love for Fermina Daza. What she’d failed to take into account was Jim’s age. The fact that he was a generation older, seventy to her thirty-five. Which was part of the problem. She worried that she suffered from a schoolgirl infatuation, that he wasn’t suitable.
She looks down at her papers. It’s important to give her students some downtime, as most won’t be used to the tropics. For this, she’s planned some scuba diving in the beautiful Ile des Pins and, when they get to New Guinea, rafting on the Wagi River. Her more serious students will prefer the days spent in the field. Lying in their tents at night, trying to identify the calls they hear: the loud, explosive snorts of the cuckoo shrike, the screech of the Eastern barn owl.
She remembers her first expedition as a PhD student: waking one morning to the haunting calls of kagu from the hills all around. Her own delight the first time she spotted the bright, eccentric-looking ground bird tearing through the understory.
She remembers herself age twelve, crouching in the bush near a displaying tree of Paradisaea rudolphi, the blue bird of paradise. Not far from her father’s camp at Ubaigubi. Her amazement as she watched the male bird swing upside down and spread his iridescent blue wings. The strangely stirring, otherworldly buzzing throb, unlike anything she’d ever heard. Underneath, his black head with its distinctive white cowrie eye-rings, like a painted mask, while his two long tail feathers quivered above, each with a blue dot at the end.
It strikes Laina all of a sudden that she’d failed to learn anything from the fantastical birds she’s grown up with and studied. That she’s never taken a single cue from their extrovert courtship displays. Unlike the native highlanders, who adorn themselves in feathers and mimic the birds in their dance and songs. Even from the quirky, flightless kagu, which she has seen lift and fan out its crest feathers, display its barred wings, and perform a mad dance. Throwing its wings above its head, as if using them as shields, and skipping back and forth.
She should have taken a chance with Jim. She should have reached out and pulled him toward her, closing the office door behind them. Never mind the differences between them. She should have at least taken his hand. Run her hand along the sinews of his neck, up through his thick hair.
II
A Girl Named After a Car
Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine, July 1973
Jim wakes, groggy and hungover from the night before, the pounding in his head aggravated by a gull screeching from the railing just outside his bedroom. Jamie, Jamie, Jamie. In his half sleep, it seems to him they call his boyhood name.
He rolls over, tries to sit up and swing his legs over the side of the bed, forgetting he only has one. The stump like a dead weight holds him back.
It’s the same each morning. He has to get used to it all over again. Grapple with his own self-pity and disgust. His fingers recoil as they reach around the smooth stretched skin, the hard ridges of scar.
He’s seen worse, much worse. Bellies torn open, guts strewn. Arms, legs twisted like contortionists’, sometimes heartbreakingly graceful. There are faces he still dreams of, black and swollen with rot. A man, face fully bandaged, sucking through a straw, like H. G. Wells’s Invisible Man. Jesus Christ, what did he see when the bandages came off?
He should feel grateful. His own dismemberment put off till now. His operation undergone with the luxury of anesthesia. His blood cleaned away so he hardly saw any of it except a few stains before they changed the gown. The pain, Jesus Christ, you couldn’t compare. But perhaps that’s why he forgets it’s gone. He hadn’t suffered enough to make it real.
Nudging himself upright, he flings his hands in the air and swears loudly at the gull, still screeching from the balustrade. And looks around the room with its familiar Spartan furnishings: his dark wood bureau and desk, his bed with the tarnished brass rails and knobs, the sea-facing windows and French doors that lead to the veranda outside. The soapstone sink in the corner.
Lowering his foot, he stretches his toes against the rough, scratchy weave of the sun-bleached kilim rug. Catches an unwelcome glimpse of the stump in the bureau mirror. The ugly, blunt rounded shape of the thing. Its grotesque pink hue. Nestled against it, his unaroused penis curled in its nest of gray hair.
Welcome to old age, the final decline. He’s still got his mind, as far as he’s aware. He’s not sure in what order he’d like to lose his other faculties: eyesight, hearing, bladder. The inevitable slide. His set of toes looks lost, unmatched, unsymmetrical. His one thin leg unfit for the task of hopping.
He reaches for the crutch and remembers the other thing he’s forgotten—the girl.
Goddamn it! He grabs the stick from under the bed and bangs it on the floor. His head throbs painfully from the sudden rush of blood. And goddamn Tosca! It was utter foolishness of him to send the girl. What the hell was he thinking, letting her travel across the world to a man he hadn’t heard from in thirty years?
Pulling himself up, he clumps over to the soapstone sink. Splashes cold water up onto his face and rubs a washcloth behind his ears as he has since he was a boy. Running his hands through his short, thick hair, down the knobby vertebrae of his neck, he examines the lines of his face, the veins of his bloodshot eyes in the chipped mirror. Counts off the reasons why she shouldn’t be here. One, he’s too old. Isn’t this why Fergus threatens him with a live-in caretaker, or even worse, a nurse? Two, he’s a drunk, and judging by his face this morning, not a pretty one. Third, and most important, he’d like to be left alone. He doesn’t want anyone else in the house. To have to consider anyone else’s needs, or worse, their opinions. He’d like to be allowed to retreat. Is that too much to ask?
He cups his hands under the tap and brings them to his mouth to drink, tastes the slight metallic tang in the water. Looks down at the blue-green stain of copper under the faucet. A taste and smell of his childhood.
Jesus Christ, it’s his own goddamn fault. He lowers himself onto the wooden chair next to the sink where he sits to wash the stump each morning, and every night if he’s not too drunk, and casts his mind back—trying to remember exactly how it was she came.
A year ago, July, it must have been exactly that, when a man from the bank had made a trip up to Greenwich from the city to discuss Jim’s inheritance. Another matured investment from his maternal grandfather, a man Jim had loathed, consequently loathing the money too, which seemed designed to be parceled out throughout his life, so that he can never escape his boyhood fury, rising again each time.
He remembers how he’d stood, skulking in the doorway of his house, wary, drunk—two-legged. The banker in his expensive suit, which was too dark for summer. His too-tight brogues crunching on the gravel and bread crumbs Jim had tossed out the door for the birds. His silver BMW pulled up next to Jim’s beat-up Chevy. Jesus Christ, was it only a year ago he could still walk, still drive?
“Your brother Cecil’s considering investing in the Hawaii Sunshine Plantation,” the banker spluttered. He was puzzled no doubt not to be invited in. Curious why Jim lived here in the groom’s quarters, while Cecil lorded it over the family mansion, a Gatsby-era extravagance, an architectural mishmash of shingle, German baronial, and windowed V
ersailles.
By comparison, the grounds around the disused stables were ramshackle and unkempt. Sassafras and sycamore saplings pushed up the paving stones. It looked more like what you might expect to find on a clapped-out farm upstate, rather than on prime Greenwich waterfront. Good cover for the birds, Jim liked to say.
“There’ve been reports in the local press that a Japanese firm’s about to take ownership. If that happens we can expect shares to skyrocket,” the man informed him.
“Are you telling me, young man, that you want me to help the Japs take over Hawaii?” he’d shouted. He was drunk. He felt like a fighter plane careening off the deck. Though he realized, even as he spoke, that he was serving up another story for Cecil to dine out on. Stories of his misfit, drunken brother. He’s well aware it’s not acceptable to use the word Jap anymore, that it makes him seem mean and coarse.
Jesus Christ, it was Cecil’s fault too. His brother knew better than to send anyone over unannounced, especially after one o’clock, by which time Jim would have treated himself to a cocktail or two. Unless Cecil had done it for a lark, which was entirely possible. But surely someone at the bank would have briefed the emissary, warned him that a Pacific war vet, a man who’d served at Guadalcanal, might not take kindly to Japanese investments—whether it was in pineapples or the goddamn U.S. car industry.
He lathers the stump with antibacterial soap, rinses it, and waits for the skin to dry before sprinkling on talcum powder. Taking the elastic bandage he’d washed the night before, he lattices the stretchy fabric the way the nurses showed him, to prevent swelling.
The banker had blinked, backpedaled fast, staring down at Jim’s feet. No longer seeing an eccentric rich man before him but an unpredictable lunatic. Damn right. Jim wonders if he could intimidate so easily now, from the wheelchair.
“Wait here!” he’d barked, stomping upstairs, letting the screen door slam behind. Why he thought he’d have an address for Tosca, he has no idea. Nor has he any idea how long he took rootling around for one. He came back down empty-handed and even angrier.
“If I’ve got any more of that bastard’s money coming to me, send it to Tosca Baketi in New Georgia.”
The banker looked confused.
“A hundred and eighty miles northwest of Guadalcanal,” Jim explained. From the blank look on the banker’s face, it was clear he’d never heard of Guadalcanal either.
“Tosca Baketi,” he shouted as the man retreated to his BMW. “B-A-K-E-T-I. Write it down!”
“I had to offer the poor man a stiff drink,” Cecil teased Jim later. “He looked like he thought you might have pulled out a shotgun.”
“I might have,” Jim said.
He had to give the bankers their due. They’d found a contact for Tosca, sent Jim a copy of the wire transfer. He hadn’t thought of the matter again. Until just a few weeks ago, when the letter came, festooned with stamps, interrupting his solitude, shattering his peace.
Sending his girl was how Tosca chose to spend Jim’s money. Supplementing her scholarship. For Christ’s sake, how could Jim have foreseen that? He’d thrown his inheritance at plenty of things before. Paying Laina’s salary. Paying for Farrell to study his parrots. In not one of those cases had he ever been expected to play any further role. Jesus Christ, he can’t be expected to babysit. How the hell had Tosca tracked him down? No doubt with the help of that damned consular person.
Stump bandaged, he hops over to the dresser and rummages in the top drawer, where he keeps a flask of Scotch. He takes a good long swig, hair of the dog. Then another, and another. Feels the alcohol seep into his veins and feed his anger. He struggles with the trousers, which only makes him more furious. Having to sit and stand and sit to get the one leg in, the belt buckled round his waist, then to tie up the empty leg. Jesus Christ, he’ll not bother with a shirt.
He’s still drunk from the night before. He shouldn’t drink so much with the girl in the house. But isn’t this precisely his point? He wants to be able to do as he pleases. Drink. Smoke. Walk around naked reciting poetry if he feels like it. Isn’t that why he came in the first place?
He doesn’t want her here.
To hell with it, he won’t put up with it any longer. He’ll tell her to go. He’ll tell her to pack her bag and get out. That easy. And if she won’t agree to going all the way home, she can go to New York, or to Yale. Surely, there’ll be someone there eager to take her. Goddamn money of his goddamn grandfather cursing him again. He won’t have her in the house one minute longer.
“Girl!” Jim shouts. Jamming the crutch under his arm, he swings down the hall like an ape. The rubber top chafing his skin as he negotiates each step. Clump, clump.
The chair waits for him at the bottom, but when he reaches out, it rolls back so that he almost stumbles and has to grab hold of the railing to stop himself from falling. He forgot to set the brake, damn it.
“Girl!” he shouts again. She’s not down here. Now he’s struggling back up the stairs, down along the hall. Leaning against the wall opposite her door, he summons racist slurs, the discredited terms of his youth, to fuel his determination. Darky. Pickaninny. Negro.
Who says you’re not lucid when drunk? He feels a sharp clarity of purpose and determination.
No answer. In that case, he’ll force her out. His heart racing, his stump throbbing with pain, he pushes open the door with his shoulder and steps in. Empty. The bed neatly made. Not only made but not slept in. The top sheet folded exactly as he himself folded it a few days before.
He looks around her room, suddenly confused and disoriented. His anger undercut by a riptide of grief. The bed’s his own, the bed he made after the war and couldn’t sleep in without Helen. Those nights when he rolled himself in a blanket and slept on the hard floor. He wonders if he’s got it all mixed up somehow. Whether Tosca’s girl even exists or if he’s invented her: some immaterial figment of a drunken, febrile imagination. The onset of senility after all. The side effect of loneliness.
I made this bed for you Helen. I limped down the hall with sheets, pillows, blankets. One at a time. The linen smells of cedar and mothballs. I pulled up the chair and sat to tuck in the sheets and smooth the blankets. Why did you not come home?
The bed too soft, too easy, too lonely.
He looks around trying to find his bearings. The brass bed rails, the French doors open wide to the balcony, the fireplace, desk, chest of drawers, the soapstone sink, all like his own room. Then starts to focus. Small things, distinct, exaggerated, disconnected, present themselves to him like a series of close-up slides. At the end of the bed, the girl’s small missionary suitcase. Along the windowsill, a row of sea glass and shells she’s brought from the beach. On the desk, the books he’d lent her, the Yale prospectus. In the open closet, two colorful skirts and three shirts hang neatly. A pair of flip-flops.
The paltriness of her belongings fills him with humility. Testifying quietly to the lightness of her existence, the enormity of her ambition, her leap across the world. The girl owns so little, less than him. And he’s chosen to live this way: a squatter spurning the family splendor.
Lurching to the French door, he almost trips over the girl’s pandanus mat, rolled up with a pillow and blanket folded neatly on top. Jesus Christ, she’s been sleeping here on the floor.
He feels the smooth weave of the pandanus leaf against his cheek, the smell of wet fiber. He turns his face toward it in the dark, breathes in cooking smoke, the salty tang of seawater, the freshness of rain.
“Mr. Jim. Mr. Jim.” Tosca shakes him gently, whispering. It’s not yet dawn and he’s chilled from a downpour in the night that’s left everything damp. He wakes, fully alert, aware of a noise that had already begun to penetrate his dreams. The quiet grumbling of a boat approaching the island.
Now Tosca is kicking down the small lean-to, scattering leaves and dirt to era
se any trace of their camp. Jim shoves his feet into his hard boots. He’s got used to going barefoot these past weeks and the boots are stiff. He grabs his rifle, passes Tosca his captured Japanese gun, and they hurry down a small track they’ve cut through the undergrowth to the shore. Slither on their bellies up to the edge of a jagged coral outcrop where they’ve constructed a small blind of palm fronds.
There—just a few hundred yards out—a Jap whaleboat. A searchlight like the eye of a cyclops sweeps the beach, then blinks off, leaving the night even blacker than before. Across the water, they hear the harsh guttural sound of Japanese. The splashing of boots.
Silhouettes of three men wade in across the reef.
Cadillac knows drunks. The boys that leer at her from the safety of the bars at Munda. Afternoons after school, she’ll stroll through town to pick up supplies for her father at the old Chinese trading shop: more thin netting for trapping birds, arsenic for his skins, a spark plug for the outboard motor.
“Hey pretty brown girl,” the boys call. “You-mi go walkabout ’long bush.” Lines they’ve picked up from radio hits, as if they themselves weren’t brown. The boys her brothers know turn away, pretending not to see her. At the airstrip, the old man in his shorts, so tattered that you don’t want to look too closely, and his rubber gum boots, waiting for Megapode Airways’ twin-engine Piper Aztec to fly in, or the larger DC3s from Fiji and New Guinea, spitting at her or anyone else who comes close.
The Australian divers too, large and garrulous. “Hey Agnes beauty, bring us s’more beer will ya?” they call out from the veranda at the Agnes Guest House. Carousing under a single bare lightbulb and a slow ceiling fan. Singing their drunken songs late into the night: Waltzing Matilda, Tie Me Kangaroo Down, or Slim Dusty’s hit, The Pub with No Beer. Or if they’re feeling maudlin, The Skye Boat Song. Drinking their way through crates of Four X and Victoria Bitter or, if forced to, the local Solbrew, brewed and bottled in Honiara.
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