Bird Skinner (9780802193636)

by Greenway, Alice

  Through the fog, certain sounds come loud and distinct as if the mind, deprived of sight, casts out for other navigational markers. A heron shrieks. A door slams. A dog barks. He listens to the gentle wash of the waves, the raspy grating of a crow.

  Now he hears something else—a splashing of flippers in the sea. A forced breath of air through a snorkel that makes him think of the hushed exhalation of a whale. Jesus Christ, the girl’s swimming!

  Without thinking, he hollers her name, worried she might lose her way or become disoriented. It happens easily. She might swim out instead of in, then get caught in the colder water of the Thoroughfare. His voice is alarmingly loud, croaky as the crow. A moment later, Cadillac hoots back through the snorkel, cold but safe, and he swivels around, angry at himself for fussing.

  Christ, she made it here, all the way across the globe, on her own. No doubt she can find her way to the dock. It’s not his fault if she insists on swimming in this soup. At least there aren’t many boats out to run her over, as any mariners in their right mind would stay ashore today. Fog so thick, as Mainers say, even birds walk.

  She’ll be happy for some diversion, he thinks, blowing into the fire and putting the kettle on top to warm. He worries she’s swimming because she has so little else to do. She’s bored. As Fergus suggests, Jim’s no sort of company for her, for anyone really. He certainly falls short as a goddamn introduction to the United States, or whatever it is he’s supposed to be.

  “My son’s on his way,” he says when Cadillac comes in cold and shivery. She’ll go upstairs to run a hot bath but first she comes over to warm herself in front of the stove’s open door, and gratefully takes the coffee he offers.

  “He wants to meet you. He’s worried I’m only feeding you whisky and cigarettes.”

  He lights the end of a cigarette with a stick from the fire. Sees the imprint of the mask around her eyes, her skin a frighteningly purple color. She looks delighted. Christ, maybe it’s a good thing Fergus is coming after all. He doesn’t want to care.

  Fergus lifts two heavy canvas sail bags from the trunk of the car, walks toward the house. Before reaching the kitchen door, he pauses to tuck his hair behind his ears and takes a deep breath.

  He’s felt baffled ever since Sarah happened to mention a houseguest. Not just any guest either, but a young woman from the Pacific Islands on her way to study medicine at Yale. A medic who’s been fishing and swimming in his old wet suit. He can’t remember Jim ever having a guest. His old friend Delacour or the Japanese bird expert Iggy Austin, might have slept on Jim’s sofa once or twice, but that’s all. Is he jealous at his age? Is that why he feels suspicious and usurped?

  Picking up the bags again, he pushes the screen door open with his shoulder, then catches it with the back of his heel to keep it from banging. He smells the smoke of frying fish.

  “Good morning, Pappy!” he says, reaching for a cheerfulness he’s not sure he feels. Beset already by the undercurrent of disapproval and disappointment that always lie in wait for him in his father’s house.

  Jim grunts and leans forward to fiddle with some lock on the wheelchair.

  Why is it that his father can never manage to say hello? Why is it that he looks so startled, as if Fergus had taken him by surprise and is not quite welcome? Jim knows the ferry time; he must have heard the car pull in. Surely he could have unlocked the chair before, even wheeled himself to the door?

  At the same time, Fergus suffers a sharp pang of sadness and guilt to see Jim in the wheelchair. His pa, thin, hard-set, pitched forward over the missing leg—an amputation he knows Jim partially blames him for. The cutoff stump juts forward accusingly, the khaki trouser leg tied off in a makeshift knot.

  He strides over and lays a hand on his father’s shoulder. Then turns to see the young woman, who is standing at the stove. She’s tall and barefoot and blacker than anyone he’s ever met. Not at all like any doctor he knows, she wears a bright flowered skirt and ironed shirt.

  He stares awkwardly, waits for the old man to introduce them. But Jim keeps stubbornly silent as if it’s no business of his if they speak, and maybe he’d rather they didn’t. Now, to Fergus’s embarrassment, it’s the girl who steps forward and greets him with a cheerful openness that catches him off guard.

  “Hello, I’m Cadillac Baketi,” she says. “You are Fergus.” When he puts out his hand, she takes it earnestly between both of hers, holds on for longer than he expects. It makes him feel a certain astonished joy—as if she were his long-lost sister after all.

  She sees him glance around the room, taking stock: Stillman’s stack of wood, the pile of old newspapers, Jim’s stubbed-out cigarettes, the book by Hemingway Jim’s been reading, the jar of feathers and a small yellow stuffed bird laid out along the windowsill, two flounder frying in the pan.

  “I hope you’ve been using my fishing rods,” he says. And hears Jim snort behind him.

  He’s taller than his father. In his early thirties—she’d asked Jim that—with thick, sun-streaked brown hair that reaches to his shoulders. He wears blue jeans, a neat T-shirt, a pair of sunglasses tucked in at the neckline. The sort of man who’d have raised eyebrows among her girlfriends at King George VI School. Who they’d giggle about later, sitting on each other’s bunks in the girls’ dormitory.

  Is he a bit too carefully groomed, her girlfriends might ask? Was that a sign of conceit? Or if you asked that, were you one who looked for faults? He’s good-looking, but is he also slightly knock-kneed? You’d have to wait to see him in a bathing suit or pair of shorts to be sure. The prospect of ogling a man’s legs would set them all laughing again. If he was black, that is. She can’t remember ever discussing a white man that way.

  Holding this imaginary conversation with herself, Cadillac misses the company of her friends and people her age.

  “I’ve brought some food,” Fergus says, hoisting one of the heavy canvas bags up onto the kitchen table. Reaching in like a magician, he pulls out ripe pawpaws, a breadfruit, a whole box of yellow mangoes. The island’s one grocery store is short on fruit, or anything much past the basics.

  “Whee!” she exclaims, clapping her hands. She’d begun to wonder if Americans ate most of their food from cans, as she knew they had during the war. He looks at her, smiling at her unabashed pleasure. Happy he’d made the effort to walk up to Chinatown from Wall Street.

  And she sees his eyes are an unusual light color, yellow and flecked with green and brown speckles.

  With Fergus here, the kitchen suddenly feels alive and busy. He clatters in the cupboards, extracting plates and teacups she didn’t know existed, and lays out muffins he brought from a place in Rockland. Then halves and squeezes oranges to make fresh juice.

  She’s pleased there’s at least one wantok, or relative, to care for Jim, to cook for him. That he’s not entirely alone. Though she’s not at all sure Jim feels the same way.

  The day before she’d helped Jim move down to the boathouse.

  “Fergus will need my room,” he’d said gruffly, wheeling himself up and down from the shore. Though she’s not at all sure why; there are more than enough bedrooms upstairs. She’s counted six in all.

  She’d made a quiet inventory of Jim’s belongings. First, his clothes: a stack of nearly identical blue button-down shirts, laundered and ironed in Rockland; several pairs of khaki trousers. Second, a myriad of bandages and creams for his leg—she knows better than to touch any of those. Finally, his papers, notes, letters, books, the typewriter, his binoculars. He’d let her help with all that, reorganizing his papers along the big table in the boathouse.

  “Fergus will want the sitting room,” he’d muttered.

  Cadillac had insisted on carrying down fresh sheets and blankets. She’d laid the small cot mattress out in the sun for a few hours to air out the smell of mold and mildew. While Jim arranged his things along a shelf
in the cupboard underneath the guns and skinning set. She didn’t see what he did with the photo of the woman twirling on the beach.

  “If you want to be useful, you could bring down a couple of bottles of gin,” he’d groused.

  She looks over at Jim now, balancing awkwardly on the crutch as if unsure whether to sit with them or flee. She suspects he’d like to do the latter. Instead, he swings forward and picks up one of the news­papers Fergus has brought, then sits back down on the chair, spreading it across his lap as a sort of defensive barricade. Protective of his stump.

  “Would you like some fish or juice, Pappy?” Fergus asks.

  “No. Not hungry,” Jim replies.

  We had run up the trades to get the wind of the island we were after—I am not allowed to be more plain, the boy Hawkins narrates as the Hispaniola nears Treasure Island. Just why Stevenson needs to be so coy, with most of the treasure lifted, is anyone’s guess.

  It’s Jim’s task to be more plain. He scrolls a fresh piece of paper into the portable Corona, casts a quick glance out the doors to the cove, and types: Just where is this island that Stevenson wrote about and where Sir Edward Seaward was shipwrecked?

  Already, he makes a slip which he has to X out and type over. Sometimes there are so many mistakes, he has to rip out a page and start again. Sometimes, fed up, he retypes a single paragraph or half page and will stick the pieces together with Scotch tape.

  Old Providence, an island in the western Caribbean, is about 140 miles from the coast of Nicaragua. British and U.S. navies put the settled or northeast point at 13° 19' 13". Seaward, in his diary, writes 14°. This difference of one degree is not anything to write home about, considering that latitude was a pretty hit-or-miss affair in 1732, the year of Seaward’s shipwreck. Jim sits back, then adds: Even today captains of small boats in far places think themselves lucky to arrive within ten miles of their intended destinations.

  What baffles Jim is how Seaward, writing his voluminous account, could have neglected to include a chart or even a simple sketch of his island. It’s an oversight that’s caused Jim considerable aggravation as he’s painstakingly collated all Seaward’s geographic descriptions to draw up his own map.

  For a man who claimed to have been a gunner in England, Seaward proved obtusely unobservant. Ever more concerned with food and the safety of his wife and dog, who were both cast ashore with him, than with any proper exploration or mapping. Instead of topographic observations or notes on coastal markers, tides, and the location of fresh water, Seaward gushes over the puddings his clever Eliza made from flour and raisins salvaged from the wreck, their lobster and iguana stews. The antics of his dog, Fidele.

  Jim looks up, out the open doors of the boathouse, where upside-down trees and the muted color of the sky are reflected in the green-brown shallows of the cove. It occurs to him that maybe Seaward and Stevenson left the exact location out intentionally, not necessarily to protect treasure, or even because they loved the place. Oxen and wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island, young Hawkins says. But because the island had become a linchpin. So ele­mental, so crucial to their own sense of identity, that it was important to hold something back, to keep it close. Jim recognizes that instinct—not to give everything away.

  He’s glad he moved into the boathouse. It’s what he liked as a child too—to be down here working long hours on some piece of wood or engine, splicing rope or mending a torn sail. Relieved to be able to reenter this other world of pirates, charts, and shipwrecks, to be close to the sea. Now that he’s alone, he regrets his hostility to Fergus. He could have been more welcoming. He should have eaten the food, drunk the goddamn juice his son offered.

  But why does the boy have to move so fast? Rushing here and there, too quick, too eager to please. Shaking fresh orange juice and ice too vigorously in Jim’s drink mixer.

  “You might improve it with a little vodka,” Jim had interjected unhelpfully. He could see Fergus wince. Even his son’s kindness irritates him. He’d fingered the pack of cigarettes in his breast pocket, drawing one out, as if to purposefully annoy the boy.

  Jesus Christ, he’s already craving a drink—not a good sign.

  It’s a physical pain sometimes for Jim to have Fergus so near. His clean smell; his neat, laundered clothes; his precise, careful manner. A fastidiousness Jim can’t help feel as a rebuke, as if the boy perfected it over the years as a bulwark against parental chaos.

  If only he’d cut his hair, as Jim’s suggested many times, maybe he’d look less like Helen. But then there are his eyes.

  “What color are my eyes?” Helen asks, lifting her face to Jim but holding her palms over her closed eyelids.

  “Green?”

  She grins and asks again.

  “Brown?” He casts about with desperation. How can he not know? “Blue?”

  “No, not blue, brown, green,” she taunts. “Yellow.”

  She lifts her hands and stares straight at him. Her eyes all green yellow, olive, flecked with brown. He’d been right each time.

  She reaches out and her fingers feel cool as she places them over his own eyes. His brown eyes.

  “Kiss me.”

  They slide the kayaks down from the beams in the boathouse, drag them under the outdoor shower to wash away a year of dust, guano, and cobwebs. Then float them off the dock.

  Fergus fetches two life jackets they must wear because of the cold water. “You do swim?” he asks.

  Cadillac nods vigorously. “I love to.”

  She picks up the knack of the double-ended paddle easily, the way you lean back in the boat, legs stretched in front. And wishes Tosca could see it. The boats, so light and quick, draw angles and hypotenuses between bright lobster pots, and leave shallow wakes like water bugs. Resting her paddle for a moment, she imagines herself back in Tosca’s canoe: the small triangular sail lies furled around its mast beside her; the dented tin kettle he keeps by his seat; his fishing line; the waterproof flashlight they can use for spearfishing at night; his basket of nests and eggs. Her father’s bare knees stick up on either side.

  If she shuts her eyes, letting the sea lap and push against the side of the boat, she’s back in the bright blue of the Wanawana. Canoes pass by as men paddle between islands, carrying Trochus shells to sell to the Japanese at Noro, to be made into buttons. Or maybe someone’s caught a great shark with thick, silvery blue skin and glazed deep-sea eyes. She remembers their excitement a few years back when Tosca returned from Honiara with a kerosene lamp and transistor radio, which meant she had a good light to read by and they could tune in to the Solo­mon Islands’ News Roundup in pidgin and the BBC World Service. Whereas before had been the orange glow of palm oil lamps and fires, the screeching of birds and cicadas, the chirrups of frogs and lizards.

  Fergus draws alongside, reminds her of the names of Jim’s Atlantic islands. Fox Island on one side, Carver’s on the other, known for its stonecutters, with the Thoroughfare running between. Behind them, the rocky outcrops that stretch from Jim’s cove are called the Dumplings. And the Sugar Loaves: two bigger islets, which looked small and insignificant from the ferry but now rise steep and lumpy above them. One sprouts thin spiky trees like the hair on the back of a wild boar.

  He dips his paddle, swiveling the kayak, and points to a spit called Widow’s Neck, to Goose Head Light. Good names—she’ll have to write them down for Tosca.

  He takes off his shirt. His chest and back are whiter than his arms, evidence of a summer spent in the office. But by the end of the afternoon, she notices his shoulders are turning a reddish brown.

  The next day Fergus shows Cadillac a place she can swim without the wet suit.

  “Do you mind mud?” he asks as they grab towels and climb into his car.

  Starting the engine, he remembers stories of mud, incessant rain, and foot rot at Guadalcanal and feel
s a bit foolish. He takes the Middle Road, following the course of a tidal river that runs up the center of the island. Then turns onto a badly eroded track, through a grove of birch trees, over the top of a dam, which cuts off the end of the river and traps a large, brackish pond.

  “Owee, it’s warm!” Cadillac exclaims, stepping down the steep bank into the water. Her toes squelching into the bottom send up thick clouds of gray mud just as Fergus warned.

  “Launch yourself out,” he instructs. “Keep your feet up.” There was a saw mill here once but it’s long gone. Shutting down and sold off at the end of the century, along with most of the island farms and fish wharfs. Now only the dike remains, with a large steel pipe embedded in it, through which the tide rushes in and out.

  Across the pond, a dilapidated farmhouse belonging to an ancient uncle of Stillman’s. White paint peels off in strips and there’s newspaper stuck in the windows to keep out drafts. The uncut field running down to the pond is a tangle of Queen Anne’s lace, wild snapdragon, and blue peas. The tall grass gives off a musty smell in the midday heat.

  He peels off his jeans and T-shirt and executes a neat, shallow dive to avoid the mud. Thinking he’ll catch up with Cadillac but by the time he surfaces, she’s streamed ahead.

  By God, he thinks, Yale’s got something coming. He’s not sure what to make of her, this tall woman from the Pacific going to medical school. He doesn’t mean to be prejudiced but Cadillac doesn’t look one bit like anyone he knows who went to Yale or Harvard. Clean-cut men mostly, who wear loafers and oxford shirts after work, women who tie their hair up in ponytails. Then again, she’s not like anyone he’s met before.