by NAM LE
The teacher talked on as Jamie watched the clock.
You had to shut it out. You could see it on players' faces, how they approached him, ready to take damage. You could hear it in your parents' voices. You had to shut it all out, otherwise it would sprout in you like weeds.
The bell rang.
He was headed for the lockers when his geography teacher flanked him, escorted him wordlessly to the principal's office and dropped him off there.
"Go on," said the secretary. She looked up. "Go on. Mr. Ley-land's waiting."
Jamie knocked, cracked open the door.
"There he is," a voice boomed. Coach Rutherford. He was wearing trackies and a Halflead T-shirt, a whistle around his neck. He stood behind the principal's desk. Where was Leyland?
"I was just coming to training," Jamie said.
"Good," said Coach. He waved him inside. Then Jamie saw Leyland – on the couch obscured by the door. With him was Jamie's dad. His mum in her wheelchair. His mum – what was she doing here? Jamie stood in the doorway and didn't move. All these people. All day he'd been waiting-all those days since Thursday night's party – and now it felt as though time had pushed him forward too far, too hard. Everything collapsing into one place.
Coach said, "But today, you get a rest." He smiled curtly and closed his fist around the whistle, shaking it like dice. Jamie's dad stood up and thanked him. He was wearing work clothes, his jeans smeared with oil and sawdust. Then he turned and thanked Leyland.
"Well," said Leyland, rising to his feet, "our students, our business."
Coach left the room. Jamie didn't say anything. He was thinking of Dory, the rest of them, waiting for him on the oval. What they must be thinking. He felt airy in his own body. What they must be saying. He remembered Lester's words in the corridor.
"It's not your business," his mum said quietly, but Leyland didn't hear.
His dad moved to stand behind her chair. "Come on, Jamie."
"It's between the boys. It's not their business."
"Maggie," his dad said under his breath, "we talked about this already."
Jamie couldn't bring himself to look at them. He sensed that to witness a drama between his parents here, now, might wreck him completely.
"Jamie," said Leyland. His voice took on added weight: "I've talked to Dory. He understands – there's to be no trouble whatsoever."
His dad pushed the wheelchair out of the room.
"Alright?" Leyland asked. "It's over."
***
Even from the car he could see Dory. Even at that distance. Tallest in a line of green guernseys, the one moving slower, as though to a separate beat, while the others jogged in place, ran between the orange witches' hats between whistle bursts. Sprint exercises. All the way home Jamie said nothing.
When they pulled up, he got out and unfolded the wheelchair.
His dad said, "Help your mother into the house."
"Bob, I'm okay."
His dad looked at Jamie and then at the house. "I said help your mother."
The front door opened and Michael came out. He stopped – transfixed and tense – as soon as he saw Jamie, staring at him without any of his usual bashfulness. Something like concern, deeper than concern, all through his expression. Then he went over to their mum and took hold of the wheelchair handles.
"I'm going down the jetty," Jamie told his dad.
His mum turned to him with a strange, clear-eyed face. "You're allowed. You're allowed to go. You can go."
***
HE WALKED, ALONE, down to the jetty. It was clogged with tourist families who'd arrived over the weekend. All along the walkway were canvas chairs, Eskies, straight-backed rods thick as spear grass. A mob of fluoro jigs hopping on the water. He found a spot and sat. Someone had a portable radio and music streamed into the air in clean, bright colors. The bay a basin of light.
Could that really be the end of it? Leyland talking to Dory? What would he have said to him? That the school needed Jamie fit for the final? That Jamie's dad had begged Dory to spare his gutless son? That his mum, in that wheelchair, was dying? He sat in the midst of the jetty's hurly-burly, watching and listening. He felt the need of explanation. Here's what he could say to Dory – no, he could say anything, all the right things, and it still wouldn't be enough. Maybe things could be normal again. He'd finish school, run onto the field on Saturday and run off two hours later. He'd take up the job at the fish plant, or, better yet, he'd talk to John Thompson. His dad would take the sheets in. Stop. They'd pot the ashes under the waratahs; leave a handful for the bluff, throw it up and the wind would probably shift and putter it into their faces. She'd like that. No – you didn't think of that.
He got up and started walking. He'd sat there long enough – training would be done by now. He walked down the main street and past the wharf. At the tidal flats he took off his shoes and kept going. He had an idea where he was going but nothing beyond that. Sand spits sank into ankle-deep shoals. The night had been cold and the water chilled his feet. The sky flat and blue with mineral streaks. He passed the rock pier and started picking his way through the sedgeland – sharp, rushlike plants grazing his legs. At every step he dared himself to turn around, but he didn't. He followed a rough trail marked with half-submerged beer bottles, clearings where blackened tins from bonfire rockets were set into the dirt like sentinels.
And Alison. How would he have any chance with her otherwise? He stepped on solid-looking ground and sank to his knees.
The bile rose up in him. Roundabout here was where they'd found the poacher's body. Half stuck, half floating in the marshy suck. No-nothing was worth that. And in that moment he realized, deep as any realization went, that that wasn't what he was afraid of at all. He had to see it through.
He came to the shack in the middle of a muddy clearing. A man sat out front on a steel trap doing ropework. He was surrounded by other traps and old nets, dried and sun-stiffened in the shapes of their failure. It must have been Dory's uncle. He didn't look up.
"Dory," he called out. "One of your little friends is here to see you."
Jamie moved closer. The sides of slatted wooden crates were laid end to end over the mud – a makeshift path – and he stepped onto them. He saw the man's hands, shot with swollen veins and spidery capillaries. The waistband of his shorts cutting deep under his beer gut.
"Dory!"
"I'll come back," said Jamie.
The screen door opened and there was Dory, his body blocking almost the whole space, eyes narrowed in the sun. Hair over his eyes. He was wearing trackies and a stained singlet. He rubbed the bristles on his chin and cheek. Then he came partway down the crate-board path.
"You're here," he said. He sounded surprised.
"Offer him a drink," said his uncle. "And get me one while you're at it."
"We're out," said Dory.
His uncle looked up and chortled, his face orange and unevenly tanned like an old copper coin. Then Jamie heard a whoop from inside the hut. He saw movement behind the boarded-up windows where the wood had rotted off.
"The fuck you doing here?" said Dory in a low voice.
Jamie stared dumbly at him. "The fight," he managed to say.
Dory surveyed the entire clearing behind Jamie. "It's off."
"Why?"
A disgusted look came over Dory's adult face. "Why?" He glanced, almost involuntarily, over his shoulder, then came a step closer to Jamie and said, "You dunno what the fuck you're doing, do you?"
Lester appeared at the door. "This fucker," he shouted, his face splitting into a grin.
"Jamie?"
Alison-that was Alison's voice. She emerged from the hut in her school uniform like some sort of proof. Even here – deep down in this plot of filth – her dress was clean. The mud didn't touch her. She looked at Jamie with an expression of dark intensity.
"I thought. .." He tried to make his voice firm. "There's squid now, down the jetty," he said.
She hesitated, then w
alked toward him, then stopped beside Dory. Her face still amok. Then she put her mouth to Dory's ear and after a moment he laughed, a deep, throttled hack of a laugh.
"See," said Dory's uncle. He lowered the greased rope onto his lap. "Here's what I don't get."
"Alison," Jamie went on. He spoke only to her. But his voice faltered, undercutting what he wanted-what he was trying to say.
"Don't you boys go to school together? Why come all the way out here?"
"Can't hide behind his retard mum here, that's why," said Lester.
Dory gave out another guttural laugh. Then, turning his back, he said, "Just fuck off, Jamie. Okay?"
It wasn't as though he'd planned anything. He hadn't known exactly what to expect. But this – Alison, her shoulders neatly narrowed as though pinned back, spinning Dory around and hissing into his ear, the old man leering on a crab trap in a crater of mud – this wasn't part of it. He stepped up to Dory.
"Okay then," Dory said.
Jamie held up his arms but the first pain came in his stomach – he could feel the air being forced up, spraying out of his mouth. He cradled his stomach and then there was a heavy knock to the side of his head. He sat down. The ground tramped with mud like a goal square.
"Fuck you up!" Lester hooted.
"Right," said Dory's uncle. "Now I get it."
Alison stared at Jamie with a stunned expression. Then slowly, stutteringly, she started laughing too, a thin, uncertain trickle into the air.
Was that enough? The air felt hot in his lungs. He waited for his breath to come back. He stood up. He looked at Dory and realized he'd never looked at another body – not even Alison's – so closely: the hard-knotted chest, the scabbed shoulders. The face a hide stretched over a seat of stone. When it came, he swung at it but his own head whiplashed back.
Seated again. His throat burning. His vision broken into scales. Stay down. Someone's voice – a whisper – he looked over to where Alison had been standing but she was no longer there. On the rock pier that night, under the hot stars-she'd said it into his mouth. She'd been there with him, watching the water wink, moonlight on the surface and then underneath, too, the glow of shucked abalone shells . . . It's different with you. He could still hear her laughing, and Lester yelling – he sounded angry, too angry – as though by proxy for Dory. When his sight returned he saw Michael drop his bike and wipe the sand from his eyes.
"That's enough!" His dad-breaking through the sedge into the clearing. Of course, thought Jamie, slogging through the mire of his mind – Michael. Michael had followed him.
"Stay down."
But who was speaking? The voice was too soft.
"You alright, son?"
"Just stay down." Jamie twisted around and realized, with mild surprise, it was Dory muttering to him.
His dad arrived at his side.
The only sound left was Alison's laugh, which, somewhere along the line, had turned inside out, into a sequence of hollow sobs.
"Let's go, son."
He searched his dad's face – he was ready, now, to accept all its familiar reproaches. But the face he saw was different: shaken loose from its usual certainty. Frowning, though without heat, Jamie's dad bent down, picked Jamie up. At his dad's touch a tremor ran all through him.
"Boys, ey?" offered Dory's uncle with a smile.
Jamie's dad looked at him flatly, then turned away. "Come on, Jamie."
Alison was still standing halfway down the crate-board path, next to Lester. Her arms were crossed low over the front of her school dress, over her stomach, as though it were she who'd just been gut-punched. Her sobbing had subsided. Jamie half made to approach her when his dad squeezed his shoulder.
"Son," he said in a low voice. He shook his head.
Alison's mouth, her eyes – now turned toward them – seemed slowly to shape themselves into a leery cast. She rushed up to Dory. "Wait!"
Dory said something back to her.
"What I wanted?" she cried.
Dory turned toward Jamie and his dad. The expression on his face – a mask concealing another mask, and behind that – what? Minutes ago, Jamie would have said there was nothing: a dark gale thrown into a room and trapped. Now, he didn't know.
Dory gripped Alison's forearm but she flung his hand off.
"Rubbish is rubbish," muttered his dad. "Wherever it comes from."
"You're letting him off!" She was tiny next to Dory, furious. "You know. You know what he said! What he did!"
Everything became quiet. An ocean wind swept over the swale, heavy with salt, carrying the faint shriek of seagulls.
"I told you," Dory replied. His tone was impersonal. It occurred to Jamie unexpectedly that Dory might be talking to him. He looked and looked at Dory but could no longer induce himself to feel anything.
"Come on," said Jamie.
He reached up to touch his face and the touch came earlier than he'd expected. His face was numb. This was how it felt. His mouth tasted of mud, and blood, and it was smiling.
"Jamie?" murmured his dad.
He felt them all watching him, felt the sun warm on his face. A gold-tinged rope of spit dangled from his lips. Dory squared his body around. His demeanor was slack, drained of intention, like a sprinter's after crossing the finish line.
"I'm still here," said Jamie. "Come on."
It hurt to speak: his jaw felt locked and he was pushing, pushing down on it.
"That's enough, son."
He stepped clear of his dad. "I said I'm still here!"
Dory was stumped, you could tell. It didn't make sense. He took a deep breath and then came at Jamie, his arm outstretched. Something grainy about his face, unfocused. Something sounded like balsa wood breaking and suddenly Jamie's dad was on the ground, lying on his elbow, his face flecked with dirt. Everything froze. Then Dory hit Jamie as well: it felt like pity, and Jamie was down, too, in the midst of the mud and the shattered light. Bursts of color so bright they must speak, surely, for something.
No one talked. Then Dory's blunt, blurred voice: "It was an accident."
Alison's voice started up: "Stupid . . . stupid ..."
Lester: "Shut up, cunt."
"I didn't mean to hit his dad – he jumped in. He just jumped in."
"Jesus," said Dory's uncle.
But what if this was all of it? What if, when you saw things through, this was all that waited for you at the end? He lay on the ground and saw the black line of mud and the yellow lines of sand and sedge and then the bottle-green ocean. How wonderful it would be to be out there on the water. The wind scoured in and stung his eyes until they were wet. He'd watched her paint, once, at the courthouse. It was before dawn and he was half-asleep. Blue and blue-green and then dark blue. A hasty white swath. He watched as she turned the bay into a field of color. Then he looked out and, in his grogginess, saw it all through her eyes – the town, the dunes and flats, the foreshore with its man-made outcrops, the bay, sandbars, reef and deep sea. All of it motionless – slabs of paint, smeared on and scraped off, just so, fixed at a time of day that could never touch down. And here was his father, picking himself up from the black sludge, his face in its old grief. Here was Dory, who, despite everything-his emptiness-seemed uninterested, or incapable, of holding Jamie's hate. Michael, who still could. Alison. Watching from within her immaculate uniform. Only Lester's face brimmed with epiphany – a line had been crossed – and nothing had changed.
His dad got to his feet. He was shorter than Dory but spoke straight up into his face.
"That's enough."
They looked at each other and then Dory looked away. A second later, Alison coughed into her hands and ran inside the shack. Michael waded into the mud and helped pull Jamie up. His face, Jamie realized, bore the same clear, graceful expression Jamie had last seen on their mum's face-his hands on Jamie's wrists surprisingly strong. Again – despite everything – he'd chosen to come. Jamie felt himself falling apart. Now, as Michael hauled him up from the ground, he brace
d his pain against his brother's strength. His dad held him under the armpits. Now, for the first time, Jamie gave over his weight to them entirely.
His dad tightened his embrace. He said, "You okay?"
Michael, face tracked with mud, went to pick up his bike, steered it around. He wheeled it close by them. Jamie held fast to his dad's shoulder. At the edge of the clearing his dad stopped, turned, as though to kiss him on the head, then said, "You're okay, son." They started the long walk home.
Hiroshima
KEEP A STRAIGHT BACK, Mrs. Sasaki says. Wipe the floor with your spirit. The floor is still cold from night and stings my knees. On my left, Tomiko makes her back straight and stretches out her legs behind her, left, right, like the morning exercises. She holds each leg for two breaths, in, out, in, out. I look away from her. I look down and see my face in the shiny wood. It looks half-asleep. The rag hides and then reveals my face, left, right, like a spirit peering through the wood. Father knows many stories about tree spirits. The biggest tree at his Shrine in the city is older than Grandfather – than Grandfather's grandfather, he says. The shadows are large and cool even in summer. But Father says its spirit is young in appearance, maybe as young as me. Camphor, he says, teaching me the name. Father's garden is full of spirits. I like it there. Maybe I am a spirit of the pine boards in the hallway between the entrance and the main room. In this Temple up in the hills. I am safe here. Spirit? So foolish, little turnip. This is what Big Sister calls me. Her face is white and filled with the Yamato spirit and I think of it every night before going to sleep. I want to look like her. You don't become a spirit until you die, little turnip. Honorable death before surrender. She says this a lot. The radio says this a lot. Mother says nothing when Big Sister says this, wearing her designated nametag and armband and headband. She looks like a warrior when she comes home from mobilization. Covered in gray dust like she is made from stone. Left, right, on the floor – my knees don't hurt like they did at the beginning but being in this position makes the emptiness of my belly feel even bigger. Do without until victory! After we recite the Imperial Rescript on Education at assembly each morning, Mrs. Sasaki reminds us we are all small citizens. Sometimes, after I dip the rag in the bucket, the wooden floorboards squeak like small dogs. Hungry! they yelp. Hungry hungry! My spirit smiles back at me, more open-eyed now. Some of the younger children like making this noise; when three or four of them do it at the same time they giggle. Children, says Mrs. Sasaki. Citizens.
