He remembers once on Guadalcanal, a sudden scuffle in the undergrowth, the reverberating throaty cry of the large buff-headed coucal, Centropus milo. How he’d watched a whole patrol panic, mistaking the bird for a Japanese ambush. Men shooting in the dark, recklessly exposing their position.
It helped if you knew what you were hearing. It helped if you could hold your fire. That first night after being dropped off by the Black Cat, Jim heard the far-reaching whistle of the shining cuckoo, like a boy calling for his dog. He heard the gentle hoots of a boobook owl, crescendoing into a louder, more tremulous braying.
There was rustling in the dry leaves at the edge of the beach. The Solomons—home to hundreds of lizard species and at least twenty species of rat, including rare giant pouched rats. Coconut crabs with powerful claws as big as a lobster’s. On Guadalcanal, he’d met up with hairy fruit bats—their red eyes would stare at you in the dark—and the marsupial cuscus, both nocturnal. And everywhere, whining mosquitoes, any one of which might inject you with a potentially lethal shot of cerebral malaria.
What Jim listened for was more specific. The sound of a man’s footstep, the clearing of a throat, the metallic snack of a rifle. In the dark, there was nothing he couldn’t put a name to. Except just before dawn, when he heard a strange, wet smacking noise that made him clutch his gun tighter.
When the sun rose, he saw it was fish slapping and flipping all across the surface of the sea.
Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine, July 1973
Sarah comes in the kitchen door with Cadillac. They’ve met on the road somewhere the other end of the island. The girl striding along in flip-flops and Sarah taking a good look in her rearview mirror before pulling over.
Saturday’s her half day. She will have closed the post office. Most likely she’s come to spend the afternoon rootling in the garden. She plants masses of vegetables and flowers for summer folk who aren’t here in time to plant them, or are just too damn lazy to get down on their hands and knees in the dirt. She makes a good business of it too, no doubt, though Jim’s not exactly sure what he needs flowers for. Maybe Cadillac intends to help. But no, here they are, with other ideas.
“We’re thinking Cadillac might like to use Fergus’s bike—the one down in the boathouse,” Sarah says somewhat defiantly as she knows Jim’s been peculiar about the place. Not letting her father open the boathouse even to air it. “I can clean it and pump up the wheels.”
“Fair enough,” Jim says, stubbing a newly lit cigarette in his empty tin mug and pushing his chair back from the table. He can tell she’s surprised by his willingness. Even more so when he wheels down the hill with them, on the sloping path Stillman laid.
Hell, maybe it’s to make amends for getting drunk. For not making contact with Tosca earlier, when it turned out it was so easy to do so. He’d like to make up for it now, to help Tosca’s girl. Sarah’s showing him a way.
Shoving the chair up against the shingles of the small house, he fumbles for the key in its hiding place, on a nail behind the wood soap dish of the outdoor shower. Then struggles to force the sticky lock.
Inside, it’s dark and stuffy. Streaks of sun angle through closed shutters, falling across a large trestle table and upturned dinghy. There’s an overpowering smell of mold and mildew. Stillman was right; they should have opened the place earlier. Now Sarah strides forward to lift a heavy latch and pushes open two large doors that swing out over the sea, letting in air and light and brown-green reflections of the water that play along the knots of the weathered pine walls. The doors wide enough to haul up a small boat and high enough to bring a boat round at low tide to fix the rigging.
“Here it is!” she says, finding the bike propped against the wall. She rolls it along, checking for rust and squeezing the brakes. It’s right enough. They’ll just have to clean the guano off.
Jim had felt too dispirited by the thought of all the things he can no longer do, to want to come down here. But now, he’s caught off guard by a disquieting anticipation—the boyhood thrall the place still casts over him. He looks about at all the familiar things. The table where he’d spent hours clamping wood, fixing motors, plotting courses for his own small sailing journeys. The two cots built against the walls, where he and Cecil used to spend nights. The kitchenette. The black potbellied woodstove with its pipe going right up through the beams. The tools hanging from nails in the walls, with black outlines behind them to show where each goes. Jars of nails, screws, cleats, linchpins. A box of rolled-up charts. The fishing rods. An Aladdin’s cave of treasure, shut up at the end of each summer, awaiting his return. Abracadabra.
Still other things: the ship-to-shore, the kerosene storm lanterns, the half-burnt green mosquito coils. A jar of wildflowers dried to their brittle skeletons so that they’d crumble and disintegrate if he touched them.
He glides the chair slowly across the room, wedges the wheels against the thick plank lying across the threshold of the sea doors. Leaning forward, he peers down into the green-brown water, watches a crab scuttle around the weedy cement blocks that hold up this end of the house. It’s a place he and Cecil used to sit, pulling up mackerel on handheld lines. Legs dangling over the side.
Cadillac’s interest is drawn to a black shape hanging from a hook, looking like a discarded skin or some sort of misshapen fishing trophy. Fergus’s wet suit. As children, Jim and Cecil and their sister Ann would hold their breath and leap off the dock or out the boathouse doors. Whooping and plunging into the cold sea was a rite of summer. For this reason, Jim supposes, the wet suit rankled. He’d felt put out when his teenage son arrived with it years ago and spent the summer snorkeling round the cove. He’d thought it sissy. The same way he never liked the boy’s plastic kayaks, unable to understand how Fergus could prefer that to sailing.
It’s apparent the girl feels differently. She reaches out, fingering the mask and snorkel, eyeing the flippers as if to gauge their size.
“Go on, take it down if you like,” Jim says, unintentionally gruff and dismissive. “Try it on.”
She turns to him, beaming. Holding up the suit, like the Australian divers’ skins in Munda. Hell, she can’t be expected to get used to the temperature of the water here. He realizes he hasn’t seen her swim.
“Jesus Christ, take anything.” He spreads out his arms. “Just don’t ask.” The material’s a little cracked and dry. It ought to have been oiled.
“Looks just about perfect,” Sarah says. Fergus must have been seventeen when he brought it, and the girl’s tall.
“Let’s swim,” Sarah says, “I’ve got my suit in the car.”
Black skin over black skin, Cadillac steps into the cracked wet suit. The suit accentuates the broadness of her shoulders, the shape of her muscles. When she arches her back to pull the zip right up the back of her neck, Jim looks away as if it’s a thing he shouldn’t see.
She looks like a navy SEAL or a deep-sea creature, hooded, frog-stepping across the room in the awkward flippers, the mask strapped to the top of her head.
“We can go in right here.” Sarah lifts the old wood boat ladder from where it hangs on the wall, fits the curved ends into two holes in the floor.
“What will I see?” the girl asks, looking at Jim.
“Kelp, I expect.”
“Crabs,” says Sarah. “You can swim down to take a look at my old man’s pots. See if we caught any lobst’ah.”
Cadillac lowers herself over the thick plank, stepping down the ladder one rung at a time. The cold presses against the legs of the wet suit, leaking in icy around her feet and ankles. Head level with the floorboards, she stops and spits into the mask, as she’s seen the Australian divers do, then turns and launches herself. Whooping, Sarah jumps.
Hearing Cadillac’s distorted voice through the snorkel, listening to the splash of her flippers, Jim feels a keen yearning, a regret for things he will
never do. It puzzles him that he’d swum with a mask in the Solomons with Tosca, alert to every coral and colored fish, but here he has used one only to cut or untangle rope from boat propellers. He has no clear view of his own seabed.
Sarah climbs up the ladder again, to dive out the boathouse door this time.
Tosca traces a tall A in the sand, the shape of a New Georgian diving frame made from tall saplings. Trying to persuade Jim to let him build it, just for one day, a single morning. Then they can dismantle it. The boy eager to show how he can he can fly off the top, boasting that he can flip two or three times in the air—at least. “Swim ’long sky,” he calls it. “Alsem bonito fish.”
Jim shakes his head. Wait until after the war, he promises, not realizing how little time he’ll have.
Hearing Sarah shout, Cadillac swivels and watches her splash in. Through the mask, she can see Sarah’s pink legs treading water. She lifts her head and grins, her teeth biting into the mouthpiece of the snorkel. Then kicks out to see if she can warm herself.
The crawl, our greatest export. She recites to herself the patriotic boasts of Silas Wickham, a handsome boy who goes around with her brothers. The Olympic stroke introduced to Australia by my grandfather! he’d say—lest they forget.
Silas’s grandfather Harry Wickham had gone to school in Australia and thrilled the Aussies with his Solomon Islands swimming stroke. Even more famously, his brother Alec broke the world record for high diving in 1918, by plunging off a two-hundred-foot cliff above the Yarra River—a feat that left him unconscious for days. It’s an inheritance Silas loved to crow about, using the exact same words each time, so that Cadillac and her girlfriends would fall about laughing. Or, if they were already in the sea, they’d struggle to stay afloat.
Somehow his words come differently to her here, so far from home. As if he was pointing out something important and brave. As if he is cheering her on: here’s a thing we can do as well as anyone else, maybe better.
Silas’s father had come to the airport to see her off, part of a startlingly large delegation. “Put the Solomons back on the map,” he’d urged, slapping her arm as she stepped up the stairs onto the plane for Brisbane. They all knew she’d be swimming for the Yale team, as part of the way to repay the university for her scholarship.
She won’t be able to practice her strokes in this constricting suit and cold water. But how fast the flippers make her go. And how clearly she can look down into the weeds, rocks, and mud with the mask, a thing she’d always coveted at home. She revels in the freedom, the release from gravity, the novelty of using the mask in Jim’s cold, green Atlantic.
A little way out, just off the submerged beach, she looks down where rays of sunlight flicker through a tall forest of kelp, glittering off the sandy seabed and silvery halves of muscle shells.
When she climbs up the ladder, Sarah’s waiting with a cup of hot, sugary tea.
Jim had opened the tall cupboard, turned on the pump from the well, and run the water clear. Along the shelves, Cadillac sees jars of tea bags and sugar and matches, their lids screwed on tight to keep the moisture out. Next to them, boxes of fishing tackle, bird shot, and a half-drunk bottle of whisky. To her surprise, two shotguns are lodged up on a high rack. Guns are illegal in the Solomons. After the war, the British had rounded up all guns and had thrown them into the sea. It was still a source of bitterness though Cadillac’s mother insists it was a good thing. “We have enough trouble without those guns,” she said.
Cadillac peels off the wet suit, wraps herself in the colored laplap she’d worn over her bathing suit, and takes the hot tea gratefully, laughing to find her hands shaking as wildly as Jim’s. Her teeth chattering against the tin cup.
“I’ll be swimming for the Yale team,” she stutters, as if she needs some kind of excuse, a reason—though she’s well aware she just wanted to try the wet suit and to swim. “At least in my first year.” When she will be studying as a premedical undergraduate.
Lifting the mattress board off one of the cots, Jim leans forward and takes out a woolen blanket. She wraps it round herself, smelling a sharp scent of mildew.
“Th-thank you.”
“For Christ’s sake, you’d better go run yourself a hot bath,” he says.
“Come on,” Sarah says, putting her arm around Cadillac and walking her back up to the house.
Layla Island, Wanawana Lagoon,
Solomon Islands, June 1943
Jim never found Guadalcanal beautiful. To him, the Canal would always be a dark, brooding place, with fetid swamps and lowering mountains. Where rotted, bloated faces and other body parts lay half-buried in the black sand of its volcanic beaches. In his mind, he would always associate it with the deafening air raids of Henderson Field, the mud, the stench of it.
Maybe that’s why, the first morning after being dropped off by Black Cat, Layla revealed itself to him like an awakening. The sun rose hot and sudden. The sand was white and the beach strewn with orange flowers. He stepped out onto it like a boy. He picked up delicate spiraled cone shells with pale yellow markings and tiny sand dollars the size of dimes and held them in his palm.
Here the sea was clean and blue with great pools of paler blue over the shallows. A small white line of surf curled far away over the outer reef. He could hear the distant hum of it. All around, other small low-lying islands seemed to float like mirages, with small clumps of palm trees sticking out of the ocean.
It was as if the war had been erased by sleight of hand. He knew this wasn’t true. He’d seen the supply dumps building up at Honiara. The bulldozers, heavy trucks, big guns. More than 50,000 tons of equipment and tens of thousands of fuel drums ready for the New Georgia campaign. He’d seen aerial photos of the Japanese airfields at Segi, Munda, and Kolombangara.
But from Layla, a tiny slip of a place in the Wanawana, the sharp outline of Kolombangara looked like a child’s drawing of a volcano. A small, white, triangular sail of a dugout canoe passed innocently. A flock of shrieking parrots flew in like miniature squadrons, and from somewhere across the island he heard the plaintive cooing of doves. The palms stood tall and still.
He knew his sense of peace was illusory but he was happy to embrace it, and be embraced. He was alive. He’d survived the night. He’d survived the Canal. After the crowding on the aircraft carrier, the bunks that smelled like locker rooms, the rain and mud at Henderson Field, the terror of the bombing raids, he felt an ecstatic joy at being alone, in a place that wasn’t immediately in the Japs’ sights. A place of beauty. He’d grown up reading about explorers on islands like this.
He struggled to untie his boots, pulled off his clothes, then sprinted bent over across the beach, all the while holding a palm frond over his head to hide himself from enemy planes.
Schools of fish shimmered in the bright sun of the morning, as they flipped this way and that. The sea teemed with what seemed to him a biblical richness. He plunged in. The salt water stung his bites and rashes, the itchy fungus that had taken hold in the folds of skin between his toes and fingers, behind his knees and around his scrotum. The fish brushed his legs.
He felt so supremely happy, he shouted out loud. Startled by his own voice, he dove underwater and held his breath as long as he could in case a Jap soldier was still waiting to take him out. He felt like Tom Sawyer out on the Mississippi with Huck, after he’d run away from home.
The thing about war was you never felt so goddamn awful and then, all of a sudden, you never felt so goddamn good.
Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine, July 1973
The others gone, Jim shuffles over to the cupboard and dislodges one of the guns with his crutch. A single-barreled 12-gauge, made in England. It feels good and solid in his hands. Opening the breech, he peers down the barrel, which is badly blackened. He really shouldn’t have left the guns down here with the moisture and salt air. Bad as the tropics.
In the bright sun, a deep shadow exaggerates the groove running up the back of his neck from the knobby line of his vertebrae. His left shoulder is hunched. She sees the way his ears stick out, the sun-spotted backs of his gnarled hands.
Something about the boathouse is familiar to her, its one room with doors opening out to the water, its roof curving like a Chinese hat. Something about Jim too, so thin his blue buttoned shirt hangs off him and his shoulder blades jut like fish fins beneath the thin cotton, his intensity. She stifles a grin, realizing what it is he reminds her of—Jim, like one of those Japanese soldiers still said to be hiding out on the islands. An MIA in his sea cave.
“No go walkabout way ’long bush,” the old aunties call out after Cadillac and her brothers as they head back into the brush with their bush knives. “Suppos Japani him catchim you.” The aunties sit under the big mango tree, their legs straight out in front of them. Their mouths are stained red from chewing betel and the ground around them is stained with blotches of red from their spit.
Cadillac’s brothers roll their eyes. “Don’t worry—we’ll give him Cadillac,” they tease, pinching her arm.
It’s not that Jim scares her. The old women’s stories of Japanese MIAs always intrigued rather than frightened her. It’s that he fits the picture she’d formed of these men. Jim, alone here, cleaning his guns when there’s no more war to fight, maybe no bullets left to fight with.
Some, the old aunties said, had gone kranki, or crazy. Others didn’t know the war was over. Cadillac imagined there were others who’d just grown used to living in the bush and didn’t want to go home anymore. It’s not a comparison Jim would like.
Bird Skinner (9780802193636) Page 8