Bird Skinner (9780802193636)

by Greenway, Alice

  The knight’s armor was impressively shiny, but how could you possibly fight in all that metal, they ask. You’d boil up. Even the petrol can on your head makes you hot and dizzy, the boy testifies. He sits next to Cadillac and grins; he’s a little high on the fumes.

  And what happened if a knight’s canoe tipped over and he fell into the sea, someone points out. He’d go right down to the bottom.

  Remembering this, she laughs aloud, then takes the books. Jim’s relieved to find he’s forgiven.

  “It’s hot inside, Mr. Jim,” Cadillac says. “Would you like me to push your chair outside?”

  “No,” he snaps rudely. For God’s sake, he doesn’t want to be pushed. He likes it here, half in, half out the door, nursing his one-o’clock gin and tonic. He wheels backward to let her past. The heat wave has settled in, with temperatures in the nineties, more like what you’d expect in Boston or New York. He smells the heat radiating off the cedar shingles of the house, the cut grass, the dank smell of seaweed.

  Even the birds have retreated, all except the fish hawk circling above the house, both parents working to feed their chicks. Sarah’s hot-weather flowers droop in the flower beds: black-eyed Susans, purple echinacea, feathery cosmos, tall hollyhocks, sunflowers already shoulder height. He looks out at the grove of apple trees and the woods beyond.

  “Do you want me to take you for a walk?” she persists. “I could push your chair down the road.”

  “No, goddamn it!” She won’t know that he doesn’t go anywhere, that he hasn’t left this place since he arrived, except the once to pick her up. And how would he explain it? A self-imposed exile or self-­incarceration. A useless protest that punishes no one but himself, unless he intends it to punish Fergus, who insisted on the operation.

  To the girl, he’d seem like a petulant boy who refuses to do what’s good for him. Holed up here, drinking, smoking, sulking—doing exactly what the doctors said not to. Unless it’s a mild agoraphobia, something they failed to warn him about. Though, for Christ’s sake, they regaled him with every other possibility.

  Watching her walk round the side of the house, he pulls a crumpled cigarette pack from his top pocket and taps it lightly on his knee to loosen one. Christ, he can’t be blamed. He didn’t ask for this. He’d just as soon have died of a heart attack, or rotted, or whatever else they were worried about.

  Lifting the stump to stretch the muscles, he feels a damp patch of sweat between his thigh and the nylon seat of the chair and wonders whether he should have at least tried a prosthesis. If only they’d offered him a timber leg with piratical appeal, instead of that newfangled fiberglass contraption. Still, he might have got around better.

  The scars itch in this heat. He lowers his thigh back down, presses his bare foot against the wood threshold of the door, and feels the roughness of the dry weathered grain so distinctly in the missing foot, he glances down to make sure it’s not there. The doctors warned him of this too. A phantom limb—like an overly vivid memory of things past. He’d like to push down the missing toes, stretch them with simian dexterity. He’d like to walk.

  Wheeling himself back to the drinks table for a second gin, Jim notices distinct ruts drawn in the weave of the oriental rug like a well-worn path gouged by an animal. Signs at watering hole: three-quarters-empty clear bottle of Talisker’s Scotch, half-empty green bottle of Tanqueray gin, green bottle of French vermouth in similar state, clear bottle of Mount Gay rum.

  A package arrives for Cadillac. Sarah delivers it along with Jim’s newspapers, a postcard from Fergus, and Jim wheels it in to her when she comes back from a walk.

  Cadillac’s hardly ever received mail, only short, infrequent letters from her mother when she was studying in Fiji. All correspondences from Yale had come through Ms. Sethie, the American consular agent. So her heart leaps when she sees her name. The words Yale School of Medicine printed in blue letters along the bottom. This means they know she exists! They’re expecting her.

  She unsticks the envelope carefully, so as not to rip it. A thrift Jim associates more with his own generation. Inside, her own book—The Yale Medical School Course Prospectus—and a letter welcoming her and explaining the undergraduate courses she’s to complete during a premedical first year designed specifically for her.

  She sits on a chair at the kitchen table and reads the letter to Jim. “Introduction to Anatomy, Genetics, Biochemistry, Mathematics.”

  As if it were goddamn poetry. He stumps back into the big room.

  She knows the need for doctors. The advances made during her own childhood. First the cure for soreleg, or yaws, the open pus-filled sores that covered the legs of so many children in school and could infect and warp the shinbone. A British medical officer and his New Georgian assistant had traveled by boat delivering single injections of penicillin—a miraculous treatment Cadillac’s mother called the needle.

  When Cadillac was twelve, a malaria eradication team arrived. Her mother scolded the men from Honiara as they handled her clothes, baskets, and cooking utensils, removing everything from the huts. But Cadillac remembers admiring their official-looking badges, which showed an X stamped over a blue sickle shape. It was the Plasmodium falciparum parasite she would later become so familiar with, examining blood slides in Fiji.

  The spray left the walls damp with a milky solution of DDT. It had a strange smell. Bugs, insects, and dead geckos fell from the leaf roof, and her mother had to sweep them up. Cats died. But the chemical had useful properties. At school, they found that if they rubbed their heads against the damp thatch, they could relieve themselves of head lice. Cases of malaria dropped eighty percent in one year. Lives were saved.

  It turned out there were vaccinations to be given against tetanus, polio, and whooping cough. Cadillac remembers the time before the clinic was built at Enogai, when her own baby sister died.

  She looks down at the Yale book, studying the cover photo of students peering through microscopes, books, and petri dishes spread in front of them on wide counters, and is relieved to see that there are one or two black students, and a number of Chinese and Indian too. That almost half are women.

  America prides itself on being the melting pot of the world, Ms. Sethie had promised, at the same time warning Cadillac that she wasn’t likely to find any fellow pupils from the Solomon Islands. We don’t usually make it this far, she thinks.

  At George VI, and at the Fiji School of Medicine, students shared a few coveted pieces of equipment. The shelves in the library were half empty.

  A Drawer of Parrots,

  American Museum of Natural History,

  New York, July 1973

  I think I might have what you need,” Laina says, peering round his office door.

  Michael can’t help but take this in a way it’s not intended. He follows with an expectant lope in his gait.

  Wearing calf-length jeans and a plaid shirt tied casually in a knot around her waist, and carrying a shallow drawer from the collection cabinets, Laina might be mistaken for a pizza delivery girl, except that a sharp smell of mothballs wafts down the passage after her. Her Australian inflection.

  She puts the drawer down on a long table in her office. It’s filled with parrots: skinned, stuffed, and laid belly up, side by side, like plump colorful cigars. At one end, a pygmy parrot, which can’t be more than three inches from beak to tail. It’s green with a blue crown, the yellowed field label tied to its leg half as long as it is.

  “Finsch’s pygmy parrot,” Laina says, picking it up. He takes the bird in his hand, expecting her to address some irregularity on the label, a possible misattribution. Of all the curators, Laina’s the most exacting, tirelessly checking and cross-checking field notes and journals to determine, for instance, whether a collector actually shot a bird himself or whether the specimen might have been brought in by a tribesman eager for a plug of tobacco. In which case, as she r
ightfully points out, the data may be questionable owing to gulfs in language and understanding.

  Having assumed these are New Caledonian birds or some of the type specimens she’s been cataloging, Michael is surprised to read Jim’s name scrawled on the label.

  Micropsitta finschii tristrami. ♂ juv.

  Layla Island, New Georgia. Solomon Islands.

  June 19, 1943.

  Lt. Jim Kennoway

  She smiles and hands him another parrot as if she’s letting him in on an intimate secret. He wishes she were. This one’s a red and green lorikeet with a bright yellow band across its chest.

  Vini margarethae Tristram. ♀.

  Lunga River, Guadalcanal. Solomon Islands.

  December 26, 1942.

  Lt. Jim Kennoway

  A whole drawer of parrots collected by Jim and by a T. Baketi, who must have been with him.

  Leaning over, Michael picks out the largest. Larius roratus, a bird he remembers from his graduate studies. The male’s a beautiful green with blue wings and tail feathers, and a brilliant red patch under its wing. The female, an equally striking red and blue. Together, they represent a classic example of sexual variation in plumage. For many years, the two sexes had been mistaken for separate species.

  Cape Esperance, Guadalcanal, February 11, 1943, he reads.

  “Don’t you see?” Laina pipes up cheerfully. “The skins establish where Jim served, and provide dates. It’s all here in the collection rooms.” February was the month the Japanese secretly evacuated their troops from Guadalcanal, she reminds him.

  He’s astonished, stunned by her resourcefulness. He remembers moaning to her, but not in any serious way, about not being able to pinpoint Jim’s military record. Here’s a way to track it, though he’s not about to spend hours searching through the skins.

  “Jim wasn’t the only one who sent back specimens during the war,” she says. “Oliver Austin and Tom Gilliard also collected.” Laina’s parents had lived and worked in New Guinea soon after the war, he remembers. Her father was an ethnographer, her mother an amateur Lepidopterist. Gilliard had once joined them on an expedition and taught the young girl to skin. Oliver Austin had stayed on in Japan to serve as chief wildlife officer in MacArthur’s occupation government. What opportunity they’d had despite the adversity of war.

  “Though so far I haven’t been able to find any of Jim’s specimens sent after the Solomon Island campaign.” Her voice, high and girlish, belies the serious nature of her professional accomplishments. Her thick auburn hair is piled ingeniously on top of her head.

  “Perhaps Jim just got busy fighting the war,” Michael suggests, halfheartedly. It seems reasonable enough. After all, his own life, though far less grand, has interfered with his work. Resting his hand on a tall wood sculpture, he looks down to see a painted man standing rigid and upright, his head caught between the jaws of a shark. A carving from the Eastern Solomon Islands. Her office unnerves him with it Aboriginal bark painting, its baskets arranged on top of bookshelves, its Pacific Island masks, carved clubs, axes and shields decorated with feather, fiber and shell hanging from the walls: objects more suited to the anthropology wing. Its general disorder.

  At first Laina had seemed put out when Michael mentioned his profile of Jim. Touchy enough to make him wonder whether she’d taken offense that Mann hadn’t given the assignment to her. It would surprise him. As sole woman curator, Laina’s always been enviably immune to interdepartmental rivalry.

  Certainly, she has enough work, judging by the piles of books and papers on her desk, Michael thinks enviously. His own compilation of the vernacular names of South American birds has been put on hold. The fact is he needs to go back to Argentina to finish it, but that’s just where Nita is. His wife having quite justifiably left him to return to her home.

  “Of course, you could just call Jim and ask where he served. That would be easier,” Laina admits. She looks at him over the drawer of parrots, suddenly prickly and self-conscious, embarrassed perhaps by her overabundant enthusiasm.

  Michael can’t imagine asking Jim about the war, especially without the basic facts to fall back on. He can’t imagine Jim taking kindly to being asked about anything.

  She has something else. Riffling through her desk drawer, as messy as the desktop, she pulls out a small six-by-four photo—another thing Michael has had trouble locating.

  “Voilà,” she says more brightly. “One photo of Jim.” She holds it under her desk lamp, so they have to stand side by side to see. Can he read this as encouragement?

  He reaches out to take the photo, but is surprised to find that Laina holds on tightly.

  Jim acted like a hunted animal, Michael scribbles on a piece of paper. He covered his tracks.

  An unpromising beginning for an obituary of a man not yet dead. He crumples this up and tosses it aside.

  The man was obsessively secretive as well as unpleasant. That won’t do either.

  He starts again, this time simply noting the facts he’s established so far.

  Jim Kennoway. Born Greenwich, 1903. Graduates from Yale, 1925. Accompanies Jean Delacour to Madagascar and Indochina, 1929. Appointed Assistant Curator, Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology, 1932. Collects in the Caribbean 1932–1938. Joins Delacour’s last expedition to Indochina, 1939. Studies Drepanidinae in Hawaii, 1940.

  Somewhere along the line, Jim had got married and had a son who, Michael has heard, is a successful investment analyst here in New York, quite different from his father.

  “What happened to Jim’s wife?” he’d asked Laina. Was it his imagination, or did she flinch? He doesn’t need to write much about Jim’s wife but he should at least mention if she died or they were divorced. Or had she just got fed up with him and walked out, like Nita?

  Laina had handed him the photo, then turned away with a deflated shrug, so he almost wished he’d kept quiet.

  Swiveling around in his chair, Michael examines the framed departmental photos on his wall. It’s surprising that he’d never noticed before Jim’s absence from every one. His refusal to pose for even a single official portrait.

  A pity. It might have been intriguing to examine past images. Though Michael can’t imagine that Jim changed very much. A few scruffy jackets, tweed or seersucker, and a battered cloth hat were Jim’s only variations on museum dress code. He’d served as a naval officer in the war. He kept his hair short.

  It’d be more interesting to find out what Jim thought of recent changes in the field. Sibley’s controversial egg white protein studies and DNA hybridization threatening to overturn the taxonomic order Jim and his forebears had spent their lives perfecting. It’s a sea change Michael himself finds hard to adjust to.

  There’d been improvements too, of course. A new interest in field identification that coincided with the improvement of binoculars. A growing interest in bird behavior, life cycles, and ecology, which could make the earlier preoccupation with skins seem dull. The entry of more women into the field. Like Laina. Like this pretty Japanese woman in the staff photo from 1966, lithe and neatly dressed in a fitted silk jacket, while the rest of them wear loosened ties and sideburns in a nod to the times.

  What was her name? He peers at the typed caption. Ms. Misako Yamatori. Yes, he remembers her now. She was a visiting student from Hawaii, writing her dissertation on, of all things, the tongue shapes of Hawaiian honeycreepers, Drepanidinae.

  He recalls his crush on her at the time, one he’d had to stifle pronto—being engaged that year to Nita.

  “You should talk to Delacour,” Laina had suggested after Michael asked about Jim’s wife. “He knew Jim best from those days.”

  Of course, she’s right. He should have thought of it himself. Delacour, the esteemed French ornithologist who’d taken the young Jim under his wing, spiriting him away to Madagascar, then Indochina.
Who’d kept a desk in Jim’s office.

  Kagu, Rhynochetos jubatus

  She looks down at the itinerary for her expedition to New Caledonia, the small French-ruled archipelago lying to the southeast of the Solomons.

  It’s astonishing how she can remain levelheaded in the field, calmly dealing with the crises that will occur—porters deserting, students coming down with dysentary or skin rashes, village chiefs taking offense or just being difficult—but her concentration will fall to pieces if she thinks about Jim.

  As soon as she handed Michael the photo, she regretted it. She must make it clear she’ll want it back. Not that she needs it. All she has to do is shut her eyes and there is Jim standing in the door of her office. His eyes bloodshot, his eyebrow arched, they way he tilts his head slightly as if challenging her. Shoulders hunched. Edgy. Bristly.

  She draws her hair out of her face, retying her scarf. She and her group of students will spend three weeks trekking in mountain forests along the Blue and White Rivers, then move up to the forests above La Foa, surveying numbers of kagu. A quirky, spirited ash-gray ground bird, the kagu, she’s argued, may represent an intermediate between a small heron and a crane, with its wispy crest and long red legs. It’s the sole surviving species of the family, Rhynochetidae, named for the small corn-shaped flaps above its nostrils. A group of birds thought to date back to the time when New Caledonia, far older that the other volcanic and coral islands of Melanesia, was part of the Gondwana Continent. Now highly endangered due to the introduction and predation of dogs. Her own estimate is that barely 700 remain.

  She’s been studying kagu populations for years, advising both French officials and the local Kanak chiefs on conservation measures, and often acting as a go-between. Relations between the two had been prickly since the days of blackbirding, when islanders were lured onto trading schooners and forced to work on Queensland Plantations. In 1878, a native revolt ended when the French decapitated the Kanak leader and put his head on display in the Paris museum.