The Boat

by NAM LE

  His dad's face momentarily betrayed his distaste. Then he frowned. "I been thinking. We should do that again. Michael too. Would you boys like that?"

  Jamie nodded. He saw, now, how the conversation would spin itself out.

  "We could take the two-stroke."

  When he was little, he used to run down ahead and start the outboard motor. Turn the water over, pump out the bilge. Good boy. Now, his dad looked dead ahead whenever they drove past the wharf, its silent throng of boats.

  "And your mum, she'd probably like us out of her hair."

  "Yeah."

  "We'll have someone come over." You couldn't think of after, you only thought of now, and come to think of it, you didn't do that either – you were left with pools of memory, each stranded from the next by time pulling forward like a tide. The two of you, his mum had told him once, you thought you were so smart – sneaking out on your secret fishing trips. You'd both come home reeking of diesel. Her first relapse had come a matter of weeks after that trip to the rock pier. The seagull. No more time for fishing. After that, Jamie sensed a difference – a dilution – in how his dad treated them; though with Jamie, and to a lesser extent Michael, his attention turned offhand, buffered by wary disappointment. With their mum his behavior took the form of an impeccable courtesy. He moved her studio into the house. He quit his boat, started full-time woodworking. He laundered her sheets. Now, when you looked at him, five years on, and tried to see him without her, there was almost nothing left. What he'd given her, Jamie understood-what he was giving her still-he knew he'd never get back.

  ***

  CALE CAME OVER THE NEXT DAY.

  "Tammie told me to tell you," he said. He closed the bungalow door behind him.

  "What?"

  "Lester said Dory'll meet you after training on Monday."

  "Meet me?"

  Cale shrugged. "She told me to tell you."

  Jamie stood up. It was Saturday: he had two days left. He guided himself, as though measuring distances, all around the small room. He made himself breathe. "I'm fucked," he said.

  Cale didn't meet his gaze. "The final's next weekend," he said.

  "So?"

  "You know," he groped for the right words. "He might. . ." He trailed off.

  "What about Wilhelm?"

  Cale looked at a complete loss.

  "And that Chinese chick," Jamie said. "What about her?"

  No charges had ever been laid. No evidence, or the evidence was inconclusive. Some Maroomba authority came down and said so. What no one said was that Dory and his uncle – a notorious flag-waver – had taken recerttly to assaulting Asians in that part of the bay. The town turning a blind eye. This body, belonging, as it did, to a faceless, nameless poacher, was just another case of no one's business. More than anything, what Jamie remembered was Lester's reenactment: the sheer joy of his punches – their appalling regularity.

  The conversation faltered. Cale grim-faced. Jamie felt a sudden longing to talk to him, tell him everything – he was three years older, after all, had seen that much more of the world- then all at once he wanted Cale to leave him alone. They stayed quiet for a while.

  "She said they weren't even together."

  "Yeah," Cale replied instantly. "Tammie said that too."

  Jamie hesitated, then said, "What should I do?"

  "You're fast. Use your speed."

  "What?"

  "Throw sand in his eyes. Then get him in the balls when his hands are up."

  Jamie stopped, shook his head. The conversation was unreal. "Fuck off. I'm serious."

  Cale considered him, his face rough with the effort of understanding.

  "I'll do a runner," said Jamie. "Like you. Travel around."

  Cale put his hands in his pockets glumly. "Nah," he said. "I don't farkin know." He sat down on Jamie's bed. "You want some mull?"

  "Jesus."

  Cale puffed out his cheeks, sucked them back in, then said, in a low, hurried breath, "That's why I ran away. My old man used to beat up on me." He brought out his hands, rubbing his knuckles. "And I kept telling myself. That every time he hit me, he was telling me he loved me that much – that much."

  Jamie tensed. It clouded him, hearing this.

  "Shit, man."

  Cale closed his hands into fists. Then, doubtfully, he banged them together. The mattress bounced up and down. "Fark. That's bullshit. He never did. I don't even know why I said that."

  Jamie watched on, confounded, as Cale fingered the beads on his necklace. He lumbered over to the window. "Look," Cale said, facing away from him, "I've never been any of those places either."

  "What?"

  "But my ex did give me this." He added quickly, "She's alive. In Cairns. Shithole of a place. She's a horoscopist or horticulturist or something."

  "You're fucking hilarious."

  "Easy, big man."

  He straightened up and came over to Jamie and nudged his shoulder, the gesture itself ambiguous – neither playful nor solemn. "It'll be over soon, man."

  Jamie pushed past, suddenly flooded with an intense rage toward his friend.

  "You fucking stink of fish," he said.

  Cale chuckled mournfully. "You kidding? This whole town stinks offish."

  ***

  SUNDAY AFTERNOON. All day he'd kept to himself – morning he'd spent behind the bungalow, in a lean-to built against the back wall. Hidden from the house's view. He'd sat there holed up and boxed in by his mum's old painting supplies – oil bottles, brushes, wood panels crammed into milk crates – listening to traffic along the coastal road, chatter lifting from the beaches: the stirrings of tourist summer. He'd stewed under the aluminium sheeting. The fight was tomorrow. The thought almost too much to contain, his mind recoiling between that and the thought of Alison, each contorting – neither providing respite from – the other. When the midday humidity got too much he went back inside and lay down.

  Someone knocked.

  "Storm's coming," said Michael through the door.

  "Where's it coming from?"

  "Umm, from the west. I mean, the east."

  Jamie opened the door and Michael slouched in.

  "Does Mum know?"

  He shrugged.

  "Let's go get her."

  The house was empty. The reclining couch in front of the window unoccupied. "Probably at the bluff," Michael said.

  "Is her wheelchair here?"

  His brother checked the closet.

  "Nope." A stirring on his features: "I'm gonna go look for them."

  Alone, Jamie lowered himself onto the couch. The striped blanket crumpled at his feet. He nestled into the indentation of her body – so shallow – and imagined he could feel her residual warmth.

  He looked out of the open window. So this was what it was like. He looked through the green foliage, over the ocean, and felt around him the heat massing in the air, the current of coolness running through it, taking form in the thunderheads. He saw the black energy becoming creatured from a hundred kays away, roaring toward shore, feeding on itself. On the headland, trees bending to absorb the weight of the forward wind.

  "It's coming in," a loud voice said.

  Startled, he turned to take in the room. No one. Then he sat up, craned his head out of the window. A raindrop as large as a marble plopped on his bare neck.

  "Yes." That was his mum's voice. "Thank you, Bob," she said. "It's lovely."

  Silence, then his dad's voice: "It's a good chair."

  They sounded scrappy, as though coming through radio static. Jamie realized they hadn't made it to the bluff; they were nearer to the house – probably on the shaded veranda below – and the wind was reconstituting the sound of their voices, carrying it to him.

  Now their conversation was unintelligible. Then his mum said, "Darling," just as half the sky darkened. "It's coming in," she said again.

  And she was right, the storm was coming in – it was streaking in like a gray mouth snarled with wind, like a shredded howl,
rendering the land into a dark, unchartered coast. The bay turning black. For centuries, fleets had broken themselves against the teeth of that coast.

  "I can almost feel it on my face," his mum said.

  Her voice was strangely amplified, then voided by a detonation of thunder – it shook the house; the remaining daylight dipped and then, with a rogue gust of wind that rocked the couch backward, it was raining – heavy and straight and stories high.

  Jamie sat by the window. The sky dark yellow through the rain. The baked smells of the earth steamed open, soil and garden and sewage and salt and the skin of beasts. Potted music of water running through pipes, slapping against the earth; puddles strafed by heavy raindrops until in his mind they became battlefields, trenched and muddy. The wind swung westward and whipped the hanging plants' tendrils into the room. Wetting his face. He could hear them again.

  "Ask me now," she said.

  Sheets of water sluicing the other windows. The wind rattling them.

  His dad's voice, so low as to be almost inaudible: "Are you happy, Maggie?"

  A breaking of thunder ran through the sky and into the ground. Her answer blown away. Jamie sat in the shape of her body and closed his eyes and imagined the feel of the weather against her numbed face. He felt the sky's cracking as though deep along fault lines in his chest. He tested the word in his mouth: "Yes."

  "I'm sorry," someone said. "Forgive me." Whose voice was that?

  "Yes," said Jamie, "I'm happy now."

  "Oh, you know there's nothing to forgive." He got up from the chair. This wasn't right, listening in like this – he'd go downstairs.

  Michael burst into the room, hair pasted on his forehead and streaming with rain.

  "Where are they?" he wheezed. "I can't find them."

  "They're downstairs," said Jamie.

  "But I checked downstairs."

  Michael moved closer to the window. Water dripped from his chin, his sleeves, logging at the bottom of his shorts.

  "Listen," said Jamie.

  Soft, shapeless, their mum's voice wafted up. Michael turned and smiled tentatively at Jamie. "Bet Mum's getting a kick out of this," he said. The storm crashed around them. Michael seemed, in that moment, caught up simply in the anxiety of having Jamie agree with him. Jamie smiled and nodded. He was always forgetting how it had once been between them.

  "Come on," he said.

  At the door, there came a louder voice – their dad's – broken up by the unruly wind. He was talking about finding something, saying they found something –

  Their mum's voice: "That Townsend kid."

  Michael glanced at Jamie.

  Their dad's voice went on, scratchy and sub-audible. Then the wind lifted the words up clearly. Findings. Findings at the coroner's inquest.

  "What's a coroner?" asked Michael.

  "Shut up."

  "Something wrong with that kid," his mum's voice said.

  "I'm worried." His dad's voice. "Know why they call him Loose Ball Jamie?"

  The sky raining through the rising wind. Clay pots swaying, tapping against the window frames.

  "It means he doesn't go in hard. For the fifty-fifties." A fresh agitation in his dad's voice, laying open the folds of his feeling. "I'm not saying he's gutless – but he freezes."

  Jamie turned toward Michael, who shrank back, face already crimped in fear.

  "Let's go," he said.

  "Don't," said Michael. "Please don't."

  Before they left, his dad's voice floated into the room, loud and raw and plain: "You should remember."

  In the kitchen he got Michael in a headlock. "How'd they find out? You little shit."

  "I can't breathe!"

  "You told them, didn't you?"

  "Everyone knows."

  "What? What'd you say?" He shoved Michael's head against the sink washboard, forced it along the metal ribbing, then dropped him to the floor. Michael's body shivering. The storm muted in here. Slowly, he felt the remorse bleeding into him. Always it came, immediately afterward. He said, "Everyone knows what?"

  Michael curled into a cupboard corner. He lifted his hand to feel the side of his head. He was breathing hard when he looked up, and he didn't look at Jamie's face but at some indistinct point beneath it.

  "That you're gonna fight Dory," he said in his deep voice. "And that he's gonna slaughter you."

  ***

  ALL NIGHT HE COULDN'T SLEEP.

  He threw on some clothes and wandered outside. The rain had stopped. Branches shuddered the water off themselves. The moon was still bright, caught in their wet leaves.

  His mother had fallen asleep on the reclining couch. She was snoring softly. The moonlight poured in from the window and buoyed around her as though to bear her up. It seemed unreal. He pulled the blanket snug beneath her chin. Her mouth dropped open as though its hinges had snapped, and she snorted.

  "Darling?"

  "Sorry, Mum," he said. "I didn't mean to wake you."

  It was as though she were swimming up from some distant pit of herself. The drugs awash in her – he saw it now. With sudden clarity he understood how lost she must feel in her body.

  "God, I'm sorry," she said. Her voice was drawn thin. "I was wrong. Who gets to choose where they die?" Her eyes were barely open, one of them darting about quick as silverfish.

  "Mum, wake up."

  "But the boys love it here. You too." Her face loosened. She said, "You wouldn't believe."

  "Mum." He shook her shoulder.

  "The things I see now. But my hands."

  "Mum." A pulse in her eyes and then her mouth moved. It jerked, then spread slowly into a smile of recognition.

  "Sweetie." She fell quiet. They listened together to her breathing. All through her the odor of bleach, bleach sopped and smeared with a used rag.

  "What is it?" she said.

  A nauseous rush of answers rose up in him but he said nothing.

  "The girl?" She didn't wait for his response. "And that horrible boy. Are you scared?"

  He nodded.

  "You're my son," she whispered. A strange shifting in her eyes, as though grass moved behind them. For a moment she looked lost. Then she said, "My son does anything he wants."

  Gradually her head drooped forward. The muscles around her mouth went slack and he realized she was lapsing back into sleep. This was where she lived most of the time. He felt toward her an immense quantity of love but it was contaminated by his own venom, made sour. He wanted it to stop. When? Monday, after training? What would be enough – what commensurate with his lack? And what if he couldn't? She had come back from the hospital and the first thing she said to him and Michael was, This won't happen to you. I promise. He was rubbish. Whatever he did or didn't do now, he'd hate himself later – he knew that.

  A truck raced by on the coastal road, ripping skins of water off the bitumen.

  Her head still bowed, she said in a slurred voice, "James?" He slid his fingers into the pouch of her right hand. He'd never before noticed how loose the skin around her knuckles was.

  She said, "My wine." After a long silence she said, "Will you pass it to me, please?"

  "Mum."

  "Your father and I love you very much. No matter what."

  "Okay."

  "Okay?"

  It wasn't until a minute later he realized she might be squeezing his hand. "Okay."

  He dreamed he was alone. The glass was cold against his fingers and forehead. He shrank away, went to the next black, steamed window, and the next, calling out as he searched. His voice sounded as though trapped inside some metal bladder. What if the paddocks were empty? And the long white corridors, too, with their waxy floors, and the dark slopes of the dunes he clambered up and down as though drunk? What if he couldn't find him?

  The ocean seethed and sighed in the dark. So this was where you ended up, sick in sleep. Your night a beach and all sorts of junk washing up on shore.

  ***

  AT SCHOOL NEWS OF THE FIGHT HAD SPRE
AD. Monday at last. Everyone watched him and no one looked him in the eye. Even the teachers seemed to leave him to himself, steering their voices around. The semis, the assembly – all of it seemed long gone, preserved elsewhere. He was being quarantined. He'd seen it before. You were dead space, you were off – limits-until afterward. Nothing malicious in it. What made it strange for him was the incongruous buzz around school-everyone getting fired up for the holidays and, in particular, the grand final that weekend. First time in five years, and against archrivals Maroomba too. The tension brinking on hysteria.

  Recess he spent in the C-block toilets. What was the grand final to him? He tried to throw up but couldn't.

  Lunchtime he saw her. Her friends clustered in the concrete corner of the downball court where, as one, they turned to look at him, opening apart, unfurling like some tartan-patterned flower, and there she was, leaning against the wall with large concentric targets painted in white behind her. She held his eye for a second and then the circle sealed shut. He realized he was holding his breath.

  Vague impressions of classes rolled on. Each period ending with teachers saluting the team, rallying everyone for the big game. Jamie felt exhausted. Time pushed him forward. His mind wound out, one point to the next.

  "C'arn, Halfies!"

  He spotted Dory just before final period. Taller than everyone else. Like a dockworker in his school uniform – shirtsleeves high on his biceps, shorts tight across his quads. His eyes too close together, his hair flaxen, floppy. Like some sick cartoon of a dockworker. The corridor packed and noisy. A few people saw them, made space, straggled, but Dory disappeared into a classroom. Lester was behind him, of course, and from a distance Jamie could see his face, pinched up in anger, yelling something out.

  "Fucking retard!" he seemed to be yelling.

  Jamie opened his mouth.

  "Fucking retard mum!" he was yelling.

  Of course he couldn't be saying that. Jamie shook it off – the bog-like feeling that accompanied the thought of his mum. There was his mind again, groping at anything but what was right in front of him. In front of him – wherever he went – Dory. Huge and hard, a thing of horror. He'd been dumped on the beach by his folks. He'd bashed up this guy, hospitalized that guy. He'd killed a Chink with his uncle.