The Boat

by NAM LE

  At first they stayed with his dad's folks on the southern prom. A family of fishermen. Then, when they got married, they moved up the hill. Before the advent of all the developers and holiday-homers, the winemakers and tourists. Back then, Jamie's dad said, you could buy property for next to nothing: the town was dying, hemorrhaging people and industry first as the bay was overfished, then again when Maroomba poached its port traffic. Only the few hardy locals stayed behind. For the next fifteen years his parents had lived exactly how they'd dreamed, his dad skippering one of the town's few remaining trawlers, his mum working on her landscapes – seascapes, really – low, bleached blocks of color settling on a horizontal line. Sky and sea. It was why she'd picked this place. She needed to live in sight of the ocean as much as his dad needed to be on it.

  Then, five years ago – the diagnosis. MS. The devastating run of relapses. Despite his wife's protests, Jamie's dad sold his stake in the trawler – started working in the home workshop, knocking out shop fittings, furniture. Jamie and Michael kept going to school. Everyone carried on – working through, around, the illness – as though every moment wasn't actually a dare. As though every word wasn't a word more, every act a further act of waiting.

  ***

  MICHAEL WAS STANDING at the mouth of the driveway. His body bleared in the heat haze above the bitumen. Coming closer, Jamie felt a spark of affection toward him and almost called out his name.

  "Dad wants us," Michael said first. He didn't look up from his Game Boy.

  "I'm gonna head down the jetty." He hesitated, watching Michael's thumbs wagging on the gray console. "You can come if you like."

  "They're fighting."

  "So?"

  "I just told you, they're lighting." His voice was too deep for a ten-year-old.

  Jamie stopped himself laughing. "Mum okay?" He peered up the slope. The house was barely visible from the road, blotted out by foliage: ironwoods, kurrajongs, ghost gums bursting up through the brush. The garden was wild. As he started up the driveway, everything described itself as though to Alison: overhanging branches, knee-high grass, yellowed in places by warped, gutted objects – miscarriages of his mum's interest. Sprockets of leaves. Green everywhere plaited with brightly colored spikelets and bracts. There was his bedroom, the shedlike bungalow. Once his mum's studio, it still gave off an aftersmell of turpentine – faint as something leaked by a body in the dark and dried by morning. And there, a stone's throw away at the top of the driveway, was their double-storied house: a worn weatherboard that seemed choked by bushes and creepers, by the old white veranda that buckled all around it. What would she make of it?

  He went round back and into the workshop. The lamps – they must have made it ten degrees hotter indoors. His dad was bent over a long, slightly curved piece of wood, one end wrapped in tape like a boxer's fist.

  "I'm almost done," his dad said. His shirt clung wetly all the way down his back, right down to the apron string. "Figured it out. Front struts were too heavy, that's why it wouldn't rock." Using vise-grip pliers, he clamped down on the taped end with his left hand. With his right he started planing the length of the wood. The top half of the chair – the seat and back – lay tipped forward on the table before him.

  "I'm going down the jetty," said Jamie.

  "Storm's coming."

  "Yeah?"

  "Day or two. I need you to bring in your mum's stuff first."

  "Okay."

  "Make sure you look everywhere. Her stuff's everywhere."

  "Okay."

  "Hang on," his dad said. He put down his tools and turned around. His face and neck – except for two white trapezoids behind his goggles – were plastered in sawdust. It cracked around his mouth when he smiled. "You should've heard them cheering this morning," he said. "For your brother."

  Jamie was confused, then heard Michael's voice: "What'd they say?" His brother stepped around him into the workshop.

  Their father aimed a roughhouse swat at Michael's hair, then wiped his own brow with the back of his gloves, leaving a wavy orange smear. "Sounds like we missed a big game. But we'll make it next week." He nodded at Michael, the smile still tight and dry on his face. Was he taking the piss? "Biggest game of all, right?"

  "We're gonna get slaughtered," said Michael.

  "Shut up," said Jamie.

  Michael shied away, out of his reach. "Everyone says so."

  "Boys."

  "Okay," said Jamie. "I'll move the stuff to the shed." He kicked some dust at Michael. "Come on."

  "Hang on." His dad took off his gloves, then his safety goggles. Sawdust swirled in the lamplight. "I need you boys to do something for me," he said. "For your mum."

  He went to the sink. Using the heel of his palm, he pushed open the tap, then washed his hands under the water violently, absorbedly, the old habit of a fisherman scrubbing off a day's stink. He threw water on his face.

  "I got an offer on the house," he said.

  Neither of them said anything.

  "It wouldn't be till January. But they need our go-ahead by Friday." After a moment, he reached behind himself and untied his apron, looped it over his head. "We talked about this." He glanced at Jamie, "I know you got that dock job these holidays. Shouldn't clash, though."

  Michael said, "I don't wanna move."

  Jamie corked him just beneath the shoulder. He felt his knuckle meet bone: that one would bruise.

  "Don't," said Michael.

  "Don't be such a little dickhead then."

  Their dad frowned at them, blinking water, rust-colored, out of his eyes. Michael massaged his arm and muttered, "That was a good one."

  "But Mum wants to stay here," said Jamie. He was thinking about Alison.

  "Last month," said his dad, "when me and your mum went to Maroomba." He inhaled noisily, the sawdust jiggling on air currents in front of his face. "We talked about this," he repeated. "Everything's in Maroomba. All the facilities. Your mum – right now – she needs to be there."

  "What's that mean, 'right now'?"

  His dad sighed. "Come on, Jamie."

  Earlier that year he'd seen his mum naked, slouched back, knees spread, in the bathtub and his dad kneeling over her, holding a sponge. The water was foamless and he saw everything – most of her body the color of the water except for two large dark nipples, her pubic hair. Dark spots wrinkling under the liquid skin. That time, her eyes were closed.

  "I need you boys to talk to her. Tell her you don't mind. Moving, I mean."

  "She doesn't want to, but."

  "Not if you boys keep acting like this. Like you don't want to either." He ran his hands through his hair, orange sweating down his forehead.

  Her body a ghostly rippling film of her body. Ever since the diagnosis she'd been separating, bit by bit, from her own body. His dad hadn't even fully turned around from the tub. Come on, Jamie – he'd said that then too.

  "What'd the doctors say?" Jamie asked at last. He remembered, before they'd left for Maroomba a few weeks ago, his mum's familiar protests – she was okay, she didn't need to go, not this time.

  "Jesus – what's so bloody complicated about it, son?" His dad was blinking hard now, as if to bully his eyes into some new clarity. "You can't just do what I tell you?"

  Michael, still caressing his arm, didn't look up.

  His dad went to the sink and washed his face again. A stool beside him was stacked high with creased linen and he used a corner of the top sheet to towel off. His face in his hands, he said, "You know what she's like.

  "Sorry," said Jamie. His voice sounded too loud. "I'll talk to her."

  After a few moments, his dad nodded. "So you going down the jetty."

  "Probably the flats first."

  "Sandworm?"

  "Yeah."

  "We need to let the buyers know by Friday."

  "I know."

  By then – Friday – the sheets would be washed, hanging from lines that zigzagged across the backyard. They'd fill with light and puff themsel
ves up like curtains. She'd be upstairs, on her reclining couch, looking the other way. Out toward the water. "You know what she's like," his dad repeated.

  ***

  HE'D FALLEN OFF THE JETTY ONCE. He was with a group of mates, chucking rocks at the moored boats. Longest throw won, loser was a poofter. His turn: one moment he was doing a run-up and the next he was dead – what death must be like – a thrown switch, a fizzling of the senses, the sound sucked out of things. Your eyes a dark cold green hurt.

  He'd come into his mum's studio and offered her his head.

  "This is what I mean," she said in her clear voice. His dad was by the window, leaning heavily with crossed arms over the top of an easel, a sandwich in one hand. Underneath him a canvas was set and stretched and primed – this was years ago, when she would work on several paintings at the same time.

  "I better go, Maggie, I'm late. What happened?"

  Jamie looked up. His dad's forearms seemed as dense as the wood they rested on, scored with scabs, sun lesions. He stuffed the last of the sandwich into his mouth and came closer.

  "You okay, son?"

  His mum poured Dettol on the wound, rubbed it in with her sleeve. The thin, toxic fluid leaked down Jamie's face and into his mouth. In his spit, still, the gagging memory of seawater.

  His mum slapped her palm against his dad's cheek as he was leaving, pulled it in for a kiss. "Of course he is," she said.

  At first she kept it to herself. There may have been minor episodes but Jamie and Michael were both at school, their dad out on the trawler all day. She worked alone. Her city life a lifting impression. By that time she was beginning to make a name for herself painting with big steel spatulas, smearing and scraping her compositions over broad canvases. She mixed her own paint. The house and studio and yard were cluttered with the junk of her labor: glass panes and book dust jackets used as makeshift palettes, improvised seashell slabs as mullers. Every window she passed was thrown open – for ages afterward she'd come across sketches and enigmatic notes to herself crammed between books, weighted down under tins of pigment powder, turps and binding oils. Even before the diagnosis, her work – and it was heavy work-seemed driven by mania.

  As if she knew. As if before it all, she already understood how it would happen: one moment you were bunching up the full strength of your body for a throw and the next you lost your purchase on everything, you'd slipped on squid guts and woke up drowning in paint, your body a hurt, disobedient in paper-thin sleeves. After all, what was to say it shouldn't hurt? – to feel, or move; to push a hand or eye across a plane? If your body endured for no real reason, what was to say you should feel anything at all?

  ***

  SEAGULLS, HUNDREDS OF THEM, wheeled and skirled overhead. Jamie lay down on his back and followed the light-dark specks against the sunlight, tuning out Cale's voice.

  "Easy, big man," Cale was saying. "Easy." He was talking to Michael, his speech already slurry with pot.

  "The backpackers too."

  "Nah, big man, they're not the enemy," said Cale. "Them and the blackfellas, they just mind their own business. They're all right by me. It's the holiday-homers, those rich wankers. And the local bogans."

  "Yeah."

  "And the Asians, hey," Cale added.

  The line tweaked under Jamie's fingertips. He sat upright, fumbled with the rod, but already he could tell the tension had slipped out of it. Seaweed, probably. He sucked down a couple of deep breaths to ease the head rush.

  "Some of them are okay," mumbled Michael. "At school." He was playing with a scuffed cricket ball, sending it into elaborate spins from right hand to left.

  Cale turned his attention to Jamie. "Monster bite, hey?"

  Jamie couldn't remember how they'd become mates. Cale had blown into town a couple of terms ago and started hanging around the beach. Just another shaggy-blond layabout in his twenties. One day he ran up the jetty and helped Jamie gaff a big banjo. They clubbed it dead and Cale held it up under the gills, both of them gape-mouthed, then introduced himself: he was from out west, a surf-chaser: he'd surfed off the coast of Tassie, in Hawaii, around the Horn in South Africa. That leather topaz-studded necklace had been souvenired from his girlfriend's body, wiped out in Europe. He'd glazed his eyes, letting that sink in. Sure, he'd teach Jamie to longboard.

  "You're stoned."

  Cale nodded, almost shyly, then his face sank into its usual easy, thick-lipped smile. "Those Israelis, man. Always farkin stashed." He teetered up in his red boardshorts and reeled in his line. After prolonged examination, he set a fresh worm on the hook.

  "You seen them?" he asked Jamie. "Out near the heads?"

  "The Israelis?"

  "The Asians, you dimwit."

  "What about them?"

  "The reef. That's where they poach now."

  He had, of course, from a distance. Everyone had. Sliding in and out of rubber dinghies, slick-faced – indistinct even about town where they banded together, laughing in low lilts. An impudence in their laughter. And why not? thought Jamie. They pretty much ran the fishing racket in town now – they'd bought out the fish plant when it was going belly-up years ago. He vaguely recalled being dragged to those rowdy town meetings- all the tirades against those money-grubbing Chinks – his parents arguing on the way home.

  "Makes sense," Jamie said. "Hundred bucks a kilo."

  Michael looked up. "A hundred bucks?"

  "That's right, big man. Flog it off to posh restaurants, don't they? And those restaurants, they flog it off to posh wankers – for ten times that much."

  "Ten times easy," said Jamie.

  "Farkin abalone." Cale grinned. "A month's pay, hey?"

  Jamie's parents, finally, had agreed to his getting a job over the break. He'd have cash of his own. He'd be able to buy things. He was starting at the fish plant, where Cale worked as well, but secretly he hoped to get a spot on a commercial boat before too long. He was his dad's son, after all.

  Michael started whistling, then stopped. Jamie lay down on his back. The wooden planks seared his skin for a second, then eased their heat throughout his body. He closed his eyes: a dark orange glow, shadowed fitfully by gulls. He felt, in his bones, the slap of Michael's cricket ball against his palm. Muzzy with warmth, he allowed himself to relive that morning's assembly: the gale of applause ... Alison ... but each time, at that point, his mind looped back around. He found himself thinking about Dory. That huge, mean body-the man's face on top of it. He'd been held back a couple of years. He'd been full forward for Halflead four years running. From the sudden silence, the irregular scuffing of feet, Jamie could tell Michael had tossed the ball high into the air. He pictured it arcing slowly up, out – over the water. The dangerous thought came; he brushed around it, then he let it in: What if they – Alison and Dory – weren't together anymore? When was the last time, anyway, anyone had seen them together? Michael caught the ball. Then, against the planking . . . thump . . . thump . . . each bounce a mottling shape in the sunglow.

  "Cut it out," Jamie murmured.

  The bouncing stopped. Cale wet his lips loudly. Water lapped against the pylons.

  "So," said Cale. "What the fark." Jamie remained quietly on his back.

  "Look who's in a good mood lately."

  He said it accusingly. "Alison Fischer. She got anything to do with it?"

  "What?"

  "Yeah yeah." His mouth made more slopping noises. "What a shifty cunt. You, I mean."

  Jamie sat up, opened his eyes-the world bursting yellow and vivid-and gestured his head toward Michael. His brother's shape crouched over the tackle box.

  "Sorry." Cale lowered his voice. "He's always around so I forget."

  "What'd you hear?"

  "Nothing." He smirked. "She's a bit alright-that's all." He licked two fingers and held them curled upward, then glanced dramatically at Michael. "Remember Stevo . . . Stefan? That Danish show pony? He reckons he got a finger in – you know. After that school play in April."

&nbs
p; Jamie rolled over onto his stomach. He hadn't expected word to come round so quickly. Who was where, with who, how far they got – a town like this spread gossip like the clap. Cale, despite being older, hung out a lot with high-schoolers – couldn't hack being out of the loop. He was looser-lipped than any girl. But it'd only been a couple of hours since Alison had come up to Jamie . . . and – he kept reminding himself – nothing had happened.

  Cale paused. " 'Course Dory never found out... that time."

  "Shut up."

  Of course what Cale meant was: Remember those other times? Jamie remembered. The whole town remembered. There was an element of community ritual in remembering all the things Dory was known or suspected to have done. The worst, of course, being the to – do with the Chinese poacher. Never cleared up. He was only twenty but he stood in as the town's hard man. And Alison – the girl with the silver spoon, the girl with the reputation – was known to give him plenty of reason for it.

  "So?" said Cale.

  "You don't know shit." Cale nodded in satisfaction. "Ahh," he said. "If only you truly believed that."

  Jamie laid one eye up against a crack between two timbers, felt the old, beaten wood on his face. If he could choose a place – if it could be all his – this was it. Strange how trying to think and trying to forget amounted to the same thing here. Cale was still talking about Alison. The sound of his voice familiar, pointless, in keeping with the complaint of the mooring lines, the metal creakings from the wharf's gantry crane across the bay. He was talking about Alison and Jamie wasn't listening but then something dislodged itself from the craw of his memory and the incident was undammed, clear and natural as breathing: Last summer – sun-white day – Jamie crabbing on the flats when word was sprinted down from town: Fight. The thrill in his blood as he raced up the main street. Kids streaking in from every direction, breathlessly swapping accounts on the way: Dory – him and some bloke – Vance Wilhelm, that was his name – who'd been spending time with Alison. Sirens started up to the south just as Jamie veered into the main carpark. Through the mayhem he took in the whole scene at once: a black jeep, its windshield smashed, keeled back at an odd uphill slope; people limping off, nursing arms; the flash of a blood-slagged face. He was about to scatter as well when he saw, on a grassy strip, two bodies asprawl one another – elbows bloody, pebbled with glass – one finally shunting its knee into the other's back, wrenching the head up into an armlock. The face looked full at Jamie. It was to Lester – Dory's best friend. Jamie, it gasped, get him off me.