Bird Skinner (9780802193636)

by Greenway, Alice

  She should slow down, wait for Fergus, be careful not to show off, but she’s too taken by the sheer pleasure of it: the thrill of her muscles working again, her limbs stretching, her pulse quickening. Real swimming, free from the cold and the restriction of the tight suit.

  The pond must be about sixty meters across, longer than an Olympic swimming pool, though she’s never swum in one. She races across. Reaching the far shore, she floats into a small inlet and finds herself eye level with a squelchy forest bed of moss and lichens. Through the low branches of pines that overhang the edge of the water, a rivulet runs down from the wood, and black water bugs dart across the shady surface.

  Turning back, she dives down. Underneath, the pond’s a brown-orange color with a slight taste of rotting leaves. It’s cooler but not cold, soft, more freshwater than salt. She turns a somersault then floats some feet below the surface, blows out air, and watches the bubbles rise up and burst against the bright sky.

  She feels a hand clasp her ankle and bolts up to the surface.

  They laugh, blowing out pond water.

  “OK, I guess I’m not going to ask you to race,” Fergus concedes somewhat breathlessly.

  “Aaii, I thought you were a crocodile.”

  He dips his head back to get the hair out of his face, while Cadillac, he notices, can shake her hair practically dry. He’d like to reach out to touch it. They laugh again, their heads and shoulders bob at the surface, their bodies disappear under the murky water.

  A heron starts up and glides away from the pond on huge wings.

  Living down in the boathouse, Jim finds he takes to certain routines. Each morning, he’ll turn on the ship-to-shore radio, tune in to weather updates and shipping forecasts. In the evening, he’ll listen to mariners: captains of yachts and fishing boats being put through to shore by Camden Marine, checking home with wives and boatyards.

  At night, he lights the kerosene storm lamps and the mosquito coils so that he can leave the big doors open over the sea as long as possible. Finding some mosquito net rolled up in the closet, he rigs it above the cot; and after that, on clear nights, he doesn’t shut the doors at all. When he lies on the cot, the large doorway frames the sky like a star map.

  He finds cleaning the guns calming. The smell of the gun oil, the catch of the breech as soothing to him as mixing a drink. He wheels his bottles down from the house and lines them up on the kitchen counter between the sink and the small fridge: scotch, gin, martini, rum. He drinks liberally, more than before. After all, Fergus is here to look after the girl now.

  On cooler nights, he lights the potbellied stove and stokes it in the morning. He brews a strong pot of sugary tea or coffee and has it ready for Cadillac when she climbs out of the sea. She swims each morning, briefly because of the cold, to the other side of the cove or out toward the Thoroughfare.

  Some mornings he hears Stillman, fitting his oars into oarlocks at the far end of the cove, shout a good morning to her. When she climbs up the ladder, her feet leave wet prints in the dry wood floor. He works. He rereads Hemingway.

  “Mr. Jim!” Cadillac crows, bursting into the house. “Fergus has shown me a warm place to swim and to practice my strokes.”

  The millpond. A place he used to go look for great blue herons and swamp sparrows, belted kingfishers and yellow warblers. Greater and lesser yellowlegs pecking in the mud along the drained bed of the tidal stream. Christ, he could have told her about it if she’d asked. Of course it’d be a hell of a lot warmer.

  So what rankles then? He takes a good sip of the gin he’s treated himself to—a martini, now that the boy’s brought olives.

  The next morning, he finds himself waiting, listening, and curses his own heart for the way it leaps when he hears Cadillac humming as she walks down from the house. He tries hard not to smile when she comes in for the wet suit, busies himself with his work as if it’s no matter to him.

  In the Solomons, there’s the stinging tree, which can give you a blistery, itchy rash if you stand under it in the rain and its sap splashes onto you. The blind-your-eye tree, found in the mangrove swamps, full of milky, poisonous sap. The vomiting tree. There are centipedes that can drop down on you and whose bite will make you break out in fever and convulsions. Deadly rockfish and lionfish and fire ­corals you have to be careful not to step on, or brush against when you swim.

  When she was small, she learned to avoid these dangers. Just as she learned to harvest yams and cassava with her mother in the garden, and to find wild fern hearts and cabbage in the bush. How to split the stems of pandanus, of sago and bamboo, for house making. How to grate coconut kernels to make soap, and which vines and flowers you can boil to perfume it.

  She’s eager to learn the names and uses of plants here. To be able to identify the birds, fish, and animals, and know their habits. The familiar fish hawk she knows from home. The way it will swoop down in front of her and grab a fish out of the sea with its talons, turning its prey forward to lower wind resistance. The orangey seaweeds and kelp that wash along Jim’s seabed.

  It’s a way of orienting herself, of understanding the place. Just as another might study a map or read a guidebook, or a sailor would consult the chart and coastal pilot.

  At the same time, she wants to know more. What’s in the stinging tree that makes you itch? What’s in juniper that repels bugs? Each plant and poison potentially used for a cure or antidote, or at least a balm. The way her mother uses betel to settle an upset stomach or take the pain out of a bad tooth, the juice of ginger to disinfect, or a guava thorn to lance a boil.

  Walking up to Jim’s house, she feels eager for her medical training to begin. Her initiation into the invisible, microscopic world of cells, bacteria, germs, and medicine. It’s a knowledge still associated in the Pacific with the spiritual power of kastom men. Cadillac’s well aware of the opposition she will face, not only as a Western-trained doctor but as a woman.

  Still, she knows the importance of good doctoring. She remembers, age ten, watching her newborn sister die. Her mother’s growing desperation as she tried to nurse the tiny baby between violent seizures and frightening bouts of rigidity. Most likely, her sister died of neonatal tetanus, Cadillac had learned at the Fiji School of Medicine. The bacteria all too easily introduced if the umbilical cord was cut with a dirty knife or mothers followed the traditional practice of wrapping it in soothing leaves. A disease now almost eradicated, thanks to a simple course of tetanus toxoids offered to pregnant women.

  Cadillac’s uncle too, her mother’s brother: she remembers the time he was horribly burned after a World War II mortar exploded under him. He’d been trying to extract explosives to use for flares in night fishing. She and Tosca had paddled him as fast as they could to the hospital in Munda. After the panicked canoe ride, the calm proficiency of the Methodist sisters in their ironed uniforms had made a lasting impression.

  Even more miraculous were the surgeons, particularly the Irish surgeon Dr. Tony Cross. She remembers Dr. Cross’s patients gathering outside Central Hospital near George VI School. It was a terrible sight. Many were victims of a polio outbreak in 1952 and had been reduced to dragging themselves along the ground like crabs. ­Others had withered, useless arms that hung down.

  Dr. Cross could see up to a hundred patients a day, curing cripples and helping men walk again. Some he operated on, cutting and lengthening the tendons. Others he fitted with splints and calipers. Once on a school visit to the hospital, he’d showed the students around the new rehabilitation center and enthusiastically pushed them in a wheelchair he’d built, welding a hospital chair to large bicycle wheels—sturdy enough to run across rough coral.

  Jim would have liked to see that.

  The boy’s laid a full, cooked breakfast out on the picnic table under one of the apple trees: bacon, sliced papaya, a pot of hot coffee, and formal place settings.

  Jim whe
els over, positioning his chair downwind so the smoke from his cigarette won’t bother them. Looking out to sea, he listens as Fergus talks to the girl about getting to Yale, about going to see some of the other islands.

  “Do you drive?” he asks.

  Cadillac shakes her head, not sure how to explain that if you had a car in Munda, you’d only be able to go a few hundred yards to the end of town, where the road stops abruptly, ending at a thick wall of brush.

  “There are so many islands, we go about in canoes.” Jim senses she’s worried about sounding backward.

  Like gondoliers in Venice, Fergus thinks, though he knows better.

  She could mention the small fleet of plastic outboards with their five-horsepower engines at the Munda guesthouse, the ones used to take Australian divers. But after seeing the massive engines here, forty times more powerful, she thinks she won’t.

  Or the overnight ferry from Honiara, the one she and a handful of other New Georgia kids would ride home at the end of each school term. The women sitting out on the deck with baskets of scrawny chickens and bushels of onions and ginger, chatting loudly, laughing, spitting betel, and shelling peanuts they’d bought from the market at Honiara. Or chewing ginger if the seas got rough. The men carrying home sacks of rice or spare engine parts. The children getting seasick over the side. Pigs. Dogs.

  At night, they’d spread their woven mats along the deck if the sky was clear, or huddle near the cabin if it rained. The boat trailing its fishing lines behind. And if someone had a transistor radio, they might tune in, sing along to Solomon Dakei’s Bamboo Band.

  “We have planes, of course.” Megapode Airways, named for a flightless bird, had recently been rebranded Solair.

  “We have the runways built by your Seabees during the war,” she says, turning to Jim, hoping he’ll back her up. “At Munda, Gizo, and Henderson Field.” Wondering if he remembers the names, the geography. It worries her the way he retreats into himself, even more withdrawn and silent since Fergus came.

  Damn right, Jim thinks. The runways laid with crushed coral and Marston mats, watered down with rain, sweat, and blood. He remembers the goddamn geography all right. The switchbacks and steep ravines, the coral outcrops, the streams that turned into flooded rivers, tangles of rattan. Topographic details that aerial ­photos couldn’t pick up.

  The men of the 169th and 172nd Infantry were green and untested. Guided in by native canoes and scouts, they were dropped off in a jungle so thick they could hardly see more than a yard ahead. Unseen snipers camouflaged in trees picked them off. In the dark, Japanese soldiers shouted out and fired rounds. Those first nights, failing to lay trip wire or to dig in properly, the men of the 169th began to panic. Imagining Japanese all around, they mistook rotting phosphorescence for Jap signals, the thick unfamiliar smell of decay for poison gas. When land crabs scuttled through the brush, they imagined Jap soldiers inching forward on elbows and knees. They jumped up, firing indiscriminately into the dark, threw hand grenades that bounced back at them from coconut and nutmeg trees, then mistook the rebounding shrapnel for enemy ambush. They knifed each other.

  On the second day, they ran into their first Japanese trail block with machine-gun emplacements dug into the ridges above, and riflemen pouring down fire. It took them three days to reach the Barike River, only a few miles away, which was officially the regiment’s point of departure.

  The Munda Trail was a major thoroughfare for native islanders, passing as they did singly, quietly, barefoot. But beneath the boots of companies and platoons, of soldiers carrying mortars, cables, machine guns, it quickly churned into a muddy morass.

  Jim was on Layla. From their lookout in the canarium tree, he and Tosca watched the destroyers and transport ships slip by in the early hours.

  June 30, D-day. The dawn landings went largely unhindered but by eleven hundred hours, Jap and American planes tussled it out in the air. The flagship McCawley was struck. Two days later, bad weather from the south held the American planes down in Guadalcanal, and Jim radioed frantically, as more than fifty Jap planes flew in, circling like sharks behind Rendova peak before diving in for the attack. The Americans hadn’t had the chance to set up their radar or antiaircraft guns and Jim saw the great blasts of the fuel drums exploding, the fires, the smoke. Early morning July 6, the USS Helena burst into flames in the blackest part of the night.

  He saw the casualties at the end of the campaign. The physical and mental carnage. Men missing legs or arms, or both. Men with their faces bandaged. And other men, uninjured, who dragged themselves along slumped over, mumbling, staring out with vacant eyes. Jesus Christ, as if they were dead already.

  He remembers why he hadn’t wanted the girl to come. The last thing he needs is the past and its ghosts rising up, unbidden. It’s hard enough coping with the goddamn present.

  Seventeenth Division Field Hospital,

  Rendova Lagoon, Solomon Islands,

  August 1943

  Colonel Harding, slim with thick glasses, ushers Jim into his tent marked Surgeon’s Headquarters and pulls up a chair.

  Jim worries the doctor might be overly impressed by his background, that Harding won’t treat him squarely as a patient. Already he’d pressed for details of Jim’s work at the Harvard museum, confessing that a trip there with his mother had been a highlight of his boyhood.

  Harding’s tent is an outpost of rationality, orderly and quiet, amid the scenes of lunacy outside. There’s a straight row of three army-issue desks piled with neat stacks of folders and charts. A pretty nurse in a clean uniform who, to Jim’s regret, gets up to give them privacy, placing a file on the surgeon’s desk as she leaves. It’s the end of Operation Toenails; the troops now will move on to Bougainville.

  “We’ve had an epidemic up here,” Harding says. “Unlike anything we saw on Guadalcanal. Some fifty to a hundred mental cases a day.” Panic, fear, and collapse had swept through the troops as virulently as malaria or dysentery, he explains. Hundreds of men had simply broken down, refusing or unable to do their work. They’d climbed out of foxholes, stood up behind sandbags, and simply walked away. In the middle of firefights sometimes. They’d screamed out in the night, putting other men’s lives in danger. Or they’d just given up.

  Some must have been shot, Jim imagines, by the Japs or by their own comrades desperate for them to keep silent. He imagines men wandering lost in the jungle. They can’t lose their way here because the hospital’s on a small island in the Rendova Lagoon.

  “War neurosis is the current diagnosis,” the doctor continues. “And these men are lucky,” he adds with empathy. “In past wars, it was called desertion.”

  He jumps up and produces a bottle of bourbon from one of the filing cabinets, riffles around for two glasses, and fills them generously, as if realizing all of a sudden what the older man might want. Damn right. It doesn’t seem to Jim that Harding’s any kind of drinker. He ­exudes a high-strung, intellectual excitability, so that Jim’s not sure how he’d hold up under fire himself, or under too much bourbon. He looks far too young for his responsibilities, though Jim doesn’t doubt he’s a damn good doctor.

  He sees the way the men relax and grow saner in Harding’s presence. The ones who cower and whimper if you come near, calm when he talks to them. The ones who look right through you, focus as the surgeon quietly persuades them to change the trousers they’ve wet or to shave. Even the man who crouches all day behind the empty supply boxes wringing his hands, looking like a goddamn beetle searching out a place to hide, will emerge, take hold of Harding’s proffered hand.

  “Kentucky Straight Bourbon Whiskey,” Harding reads from the label. He himself is from Chicago, he tells Jim. He’d not yet finished his medical degree when war broke out but his interest was already in psychiatry.

  “Damn nice of you,” Jim mutters. He doesn’t deserve this special treatment but senses the doctor’s starv
ed for half-sane conversation, for anyone to talk to with at least a smattering of scientific knowledge. Or maybe it’s just because Jim’s older. Everyone else here is so goddamn young.

  The war presents Harding with an opportunity. As a doctor, he might never again be handed such a vast array of raw material and data. It’s the same chance Mann had collecting his white-eyes, each species endemic to its particular island. Jim stands to examine a large chart behind Harding’s desk with names of patients, their division, and date of arrival, all arranged according to diagnoses—subspecies of illness.

  He sees a short list of names under the heading “Atabrine-induced psychosis.” Even their antimalarial pill could drive men mad. It was a drug many men refused to take anyhow, because it turned your skin and eyes yellow. “Alsem Japani,” as Tosca put it.

  One of his findings, Harding explains, is that men with a borderline defect, even a squint or a lisp, bad teeth or flat feet—men who in the past might have been disqualified from war—are far less likely to break down.

  “It’s not what you’d expect, is it?” Harding asks animatedly. The war’s thrown so goddamn much at him. “But a disability can spur men to overcompensate, to prove themselves, it seems.”

  A more predictable conclusion is the role of experience. “Men like you who saw action on Guadalcanal simply didn’t suffer the same way,” he says with admiration. “It’s why your work in jungle training is so crucial.” Which is one of the reasons he’ll recommend Jim be put back to work.

  Harding’s method—simple but effective—has been to separate his patients into two groups. To distinguish between those suffering from physical exhaustion—men who could be bathed, fed, rested, and sent back to fight—from those he calls “psychoneurotics”: men who’d suffered true mental breakdown and who were now useless, if not detrimental, to the war and needed to be sent home. Already he’d been commended for conserving resources.