Bird Skinner (9780802193636)

by Greenway, Alice

  Round the back, their heavy oxygen tanks stand propped up against the house, metal canisters of air that let them stay underwater for hours. Their black rubber suits hang from the line like sharkskins. The shiny glass masks that cover their eyes and nose—how she and the other kids would like to try those. And the flippers for their feet!

  So Cadillac’s not afraid when she finds Jim in her room, shirtless, looking disoriented and confused. Stuck, as if he can no longer manage the crutch.

  “Mr. Jim, do you want to sit down?” she asks, coming into the room. She heard him shouting from down at the beach and rushed up, worried he might have fallen.

  “No,” he says, his words slightly slurred. “Just help me to my room.” Not bothering to explain why he’s here or why he called. She reaches out to take his arm, the one on the side of the missing leg, turns her palm up under his, lays her other hand on top for support.

  His grip is strong. There’s surprising strength in it. She can feel the bones of his forearm, the sinewy muscle and tendons. He was never a big man, not tall like her father. Physically he was more like her brothers, slight and lithe. His bare chest is thin, with white hair, but his skin is firm, not yet wrinkly or saggy. His shoulder blades jut from his bare back like wings.

  “All right, that’ll do,” he says when they reach his door but she helps him across to his bed anyhow. He sits and she pulls up a pillow behind him, straightens the sheets, and picks up a shirt draped over a chair.

  On Jim’s dresser, she sees a framed photo of a woman twirling across a great, long beach. Her arms are spread out. The woman looks right out at the camera. You can tell she’s twirling because of the way her dress and hair fly out.

  She picks it up.

  “Leave it alone,” Jim snaps.

  USS Copahee,

  En Route to the Solomon Islands, October 1942

  The pilots are young and eager and already tanned a dark brown from going shirtless. They try to keep fit, running laps up and down the flight deck, doing pull-ups from the wings of the planes. Twenty Grumman Wildcats parked wing to wing, bound for Guadalcanal.

  He remembers how they look up to him. He’s older, married. He’s assistant curator at the Harvard zoology museum while many of them have yet to hold a first job. Jim is jungle veteran, hoary lieutenant. Long John Silver. Their Ancient Mariner.

  Except no, he wasn’t old then, or crippled. He was a boy himself, thirty-eight to their eighteen. A teacher, a young uncle, which is maybe how they relate to him.

  Too old to be commissioned, he’d wangled his way in through Naval Intelligence, like so many other East Coast Ivy League men, all determined to sign up after the carnage at Pearl Harbor. He’d been assigned to the Pacific front, to the USS Copahee, a civilian boat hastily fitted out as escort carrier. She is top-heavy and unwieldy.

  Strong, muscular, any one of those boys could have knocked him down. Jim was thin and slight but tough. He’ll come to find that he can survive on almost nothing. He can outlast them. He’s not homesick either, even though he has a wife and baby. He’s hard that way. Professor they call him. Pappy. Later, on the Canal, they call him Jungle Jim, owing to the fact that he keeps volunteering to scout alone, to go off into the jungle. They call him Bird Man, after they’ve pushed the Japanese west toward Cape Esperance and established safe perimeters and he starts shooting birds and drying the skins in his tent.

  In the port of New Caledonia, he fishes a coconut from the sea, splits it open with a rock to let the boys get used to sucking out the milk and eating the sweet flesh. In town, he goes to the market and buys breadfruit and mangoes. He finds cassava root with the stalks still on, so they will know how to recognize it. Shows them how to mash and cook it to remove the natural toxins. He won’t let them starve just because they don’t know what to look for.

  What really impresses the pilots is how Jim can shoot a tern from the moving deck, take out a flying fish mid-leap. They admire his .410 shotgun. A Harrington and Richardson folding model. Single-barreled, which makes the target harder to shoot. Trickier than a 12-gauge but smaller and lighter to carry. He doesn’t point out that birds are all he’s shot until now. That the jungles where he collected with Delacour were never more than a week or two’s journey away from the decadent luxuries of French Indochina: the Metropole Hotel in Hanoi; the splendid villa of Jabouille, Resident Superior of Hue, with his cages and aviaries, his tame leopard chained to the front steps. Where five-course meals were served on eighteenth-century Bleu de Hue porcelain. The luscious scent of frangipani mixing with the more earthy and human smells of the Perfume River and the smoke from wood fires.

  That alongside his experiences of jungle campsites and arduous treks through thick undergrowth sit other memories that might surprise them. Playing tennis in the highlands of Tonkin with the French resident’s wife. His delight at her Parisian airs. How she turned out in immaculate whites as if going to her club and playfully scolded her pet gibbon, chastising him like a wayward child as he scampered back and forth in the trees above, excitedly following the trajectory of the ball.

  He doesn’t point out that it can be bad luck to shoot a bird at sea. Remind them of their Coleridge:

  “God save thee, ancient Mariner,

  From the fiends, that plague thee thus!—

  Why look’st thou so?”—“With my cross-bow

  I shot the Albatross.”

  No, he will let them look up to him, milk some confidence. It may be all he can give. Gourmand of the jungle. Connoisseur of wind, reef, and tide. He briefs them on the southeast trades that blow steadily from May to November lashing the islands’ so-called weather coasts, on the less predictable northwesterly monsoons that set in after. The likelihood of squalls when the wind backs from north to west.

  Solomon Islanders forage for more than half their diet, Jim instructs the pilots. He reads the sentence aloud from some handbook printed hastily by Naval Intelligence, or perhaps he makes it up, surmising. Chestnuts, almonds, ngali nuts, wild roots, and edible fungi. Fish, ­turtle, wild pig, crocodile, the possum-like cuscus, snails, ants—all can be eaten. Fresh water collects in natural bowls at the hearts of tree ferns and epiphytes. You can survive solely on coconut milk and meat for days.

  He has talismans too to pass around. Silk maps from the Hydrographic Office. The islands crisscrossed with minutes of longitude and latitude, stamped with compass rose and magnetic variations, arrows and isobars depicting average wind force and speed and directions of currents. As if all this could impose some order. As if wet and soggy, struggling with hatches of cockpits and parachute strings, escaping fire, fearful of sharks, the pilots would have time to consult and plot. He gives them fishing line, iodine tablets for purifying water, waterproof matches. Tiny compasses, small enough to hide in their assholes. Thin phrase books of Melanesian pidgin. Cards printed with British, American, and Dutch flags with instructions to natives:

  Dispala masta i gifim pas long yu 1 peren bilong Gavman! The white man holding this paper is a friend of the government.

  Gifim wara bilong dring olsem kulau. Bring him drinking water and also coconuts.

  Gifem kaikai, olsem kokuruk nau kiau nau banana mau nau popo nau ol gutpala kaikai. Give him food such as fowls, eggs, bananas, pawpaws, and other suitable foods.

  Sapos Japan ikam kilostu yupala. If the Japanese come. Haitim. Hide him.

  The cards are no doubt useless. Few of the islanders can read. Most of them are on our side anyhow, instructed by their colonial rulers before the fighting broke out. Organized into scouting patrols by the British, Australian, and New Zealand Coastwatchers. Traders, planters and district officers who’d stayed behind, risking their lives to spy on the Japanese.

  Still the pilots hold on to the cards. Carefully, they slip them into navy-issued water­proof wallets, secret them away in the inner pockets of their flying jackets—the same way,
Jim remembers, Hemingway kept a lucky rabbit’s foot or stone or horse chestnut.

  Cadillac’s back. She’s brought some coffee in the tin mug. A cup of water, which she puts on the table by the bed. She wraps her fingers over his, making sure he has a good grip.

  Damn nice of her. The coffee’s strong and bitter, the way he likes it.

  “Some of our boys were scared of your people,” Jim says. He remembers pilots asking him about cannibalism and head-hunting. He’d had some fun, reassuring them that the missionaries had long put a stop to all that—the ones who weren’t eaten, at least.

  “We didn’t know then how many pilots would be rescued,” he says. He’s unsure if he’s making any sense.

  Card or no card, map or no map, dozens if not hundreds of Americans were pulled from the sea, carried into the bush, fed, washed, cared for by natives. Secreted back to American bases or to the Coastwatchers. Some of the islanders paddled hundreds of miles to carry wounded men to safety, skirting close to the shore at night, putting into mangrove swamps during the day.

  He sips the hot coffee and wonders what it must have been like to make that journey, to travel by night bundled in the shallow of a dugout canoe, faint, feverish, wounded. He imagines the splash of the paddles, the canvas of stars, the ominous shapes of huge warships slipping past in the dark.

  He must remember to tell the boys how the islanders turned out to be friends. Not only because the British said we were allies but because of their own bravery and kindness. Besides, they liked the Americans, especially the black soldiers. They liked the way American Joes would sit and eat with them, sharing food and provisions, learning enough pidgin to swap songs and stories.

  He must tell them how PT boat captain John F. Kennedy was rescued by two New Georgians. By Biuku Gasa and Eroni Kumana, sent by the Australian Coastwatcher Evans on Kolumbangara. How Kennedy and his men had survived on coconut and water for six days. The Americans had given them up for dead after their PT boat, cut in half by a Japanese destroyer, went up in flames.

  It had become legend—the story of how Kennedy had swum for hours towing an injured crew member by gripping the life jacket strap between his teeth, then carved his S.O.S. on a coconut husk. Native knows position. He can pilot. 11 alive. Need small boat. Less well known that Gasa and Kumana paddled that message some thirty-five nautical miles to the Americans on Rendova. And later returned to take young Kennedy to Evan’s hideout, from where he coordinated the rescue of his men.

  In this way, Solomon Islanders helped set the future of American history. But of course, Jim wouldn’t have known that then.

  And what if you were one of the pilots who didn’t come back? What if you were one of the men who caught fire and fell burning into the sea? What if you were too badly injured, or too sick? What if you got lost, or stumbled into a Japanese camp or patrol by mistake? Jesus Christ, he’d seen what could happen then.

  The coffee’s strong and hot. The sun, coming in the window, is hot on his face and bare arms and chest. It works its way like fingers through the khaki trousers, massaging the cramped muscles of the stump. Cadillac sits at the end of the bed. He likes her there.

  He remembers the pilots, how they all took off their shirts. Lean, brown, muscular, clean. Not sick and dirty yet, like when they went ashore. Not shell-shocked or bandaged or mutilated or dismembered.

  “I was in Hawaii,” he tells her, hoping he might make some sense if he goes back to the beginning, to Pearl Harbor. “I was looking for honeycreepers, at their tongues.” He’d been working with Bryan, a curator at the Bishop Museum in Honolulu, examining how the tongues of different species evolved to adapt to the different flowers of particular islands.

  “At home, our sunbirds and honeyeaters have long tongues like straws, to help them suck nectar from orchids and hibiscus flowers. Some have little brushes on the ends of their tongues.”

  Did she really say that, or is he imagining it?

  Glossy Swiftlet, Collocalia esculenta

  When Jim shuts his eyes, he’s on Guadalcanal, near the Matanikau River. There’s a cave he wouldn’t have seen except for the tiny blue-black swiftlets darting in and out, the way their feathers glimmer with a bright metallic sheen as they catch the sun. Glossy swiftlets with their blue green feathers, white bellies, and long pointed primary feathers, performing lithe acrobatics. Not unlike the barn swallows that nest over at Stillman’s place.

  He enters entranced by the birds and shines his flashlight up along the nests that plaster the cave roof. Pale pouches made from spit with small openings through which the adults hunch in and out. He listens to the thin, high-pitched twitterings echoing in the dark wet.

  As he lowers the beam along the cave, it falls on a low natural shelf and illuminates something there. A small stash of rations—Japanese. He fumbles, struggling to switch off the light. At the same time, dodging to one side in case someone has already taken aim. Crouching against the wet rock.

  As his eyes struggle to adjust, he imagines another man leering at him, a Japanese soldier toying with him, like a cat with a mouse. He waits. Far longer than he needs to. Trying to keep stock-still, not to breathe so loudly. There’s no movement, no sound other than the birds darting in and out, their short, husky vit vit vit. It’s so quiet he can hear the chicks now, fuzzy, featherless things, moving around in their cupped nests, their faint chirrups, their mouths opening for the bugs their parents bring.

  He steps forward and takes the Japanese food, stuffing it down into his own pack. A ration of rice, a tin of dried seaweed. Best of all, two ceramic bottles. Poor bugger, who hadn’t come back for these.

  If you’re lucky, he tells the pilots, you’ll get picked up by canoe. If you’re lucky, you might find something better than coconut milk to live on. Yo ho ho and a bottle of sake. If you’re lucky, you might see swiftlets, or even better, hear the gentle cooing of the superb, or the red-throated fruit dove.

  If you’re lucky, Helen will still be there when you get home.

  Layla Island, Wanawana Lagoon,

  Solomon Islands, June 1943

  They flew him in at night. It was dark, except for the thin sliver of a moon. The weather was fine and the pilot flew his plane at just fifteen feet, skimming the reefs. He wanted to see just how low he could take it, or maybe he was experimenting with the new airborne radar. Jim looked to either side for enemy boats. New Georgia was as yet behind Japanese lines.

  It was a short noncombat mission. The plane freed of its usual payload. It isn’t safe to land in the sea with two five-hundred-pound bombs lodged under your wings. But the crew had brought their own ammo: a cache of empty beer and Coca-Cola bottles to drop over Munda on their way home. The bottles make an eerie wailing sound as they fall, the gunners boasted—like she-cats in heat, enough to drive the Japs wild. They were excitable as a bunch of schoolboys with fireworks.

  They called their plane a Black Cat because it was practically invisible at night, with its nonreflecting black paint. Officially, the plane was a patrol bomber, a PBY Catalina with a hull built to land at sea and four gunners, two lodged right up in the nose and two in blister capsules that bulged to either side.

  “What a beauty,” the pilot said. Jim wasn’t sure if he was talking about the plane or the night or something else he dreamt of as he flew.

  He landed skillfully, easing the plane’s belly down in the water between two reefs. Jim could see the heads of coral marked by phosphorescence in the black lagoon. The pilot cocked open the hatch and Jim climbed out into a hot night, filled with stars.

  He moved quickly, sliding down the nose of the plane. The rubber boat swayed beneath him as he reached up for his pack and guns, then for the cumbersome radio with its heavy battery pack and hand-cranked generator.

  At that moment, he knew he was a perfect target. Any half-assed sniper on the island could pick him off. The Coastwatcher on the
main island of New Georgia, Donald Kennedy, had sent scouts to patrol just days before. But who was to say a Jap hadn’t landed since? He paddled from the bow with a single oar, his mind too primed by things he had seen in Guadalcanal. He could imagine exactly how his knees would buckle, his body jerk forward, how his blood would pump out to darken and thicken the already black water. If he was shot, he was to overturn the dinghy in order to wreck the radio. Those were his orders.

  Behind him, the Black Cat’s propellers whirred. The gunners were covering him, but he’d vowed early on in the war never to trust his life to anyone. Spooked, he leapt out too early, jumping into water up to his chest. It was warm and he felt protected there. Part of him longed to dive down and swim away. He waded in, pulling the boat up and over the beach, into the bush. Then turned and saluted and watched the plane back out and swing round, lifting itself heavily from the sea like an ungainly seabird, a pelican perhaps. Or a dragonfly with those strange bulbous blister hatches. Or a frigate bird.

  It flew up, all black, just a shadow, and disappeared. Then he was alone, cradling his gun.

  On those islands, tucked under the equator, there’s a nightly cacophony of birds, lizards, insects. A full orchestra, but all its instruments strange and discordant. To Cadillac, who grew up there, these night noises would be the sounds of childhood, a jungle lullaby. But to the uninitiated, the unfamiliar sounds could drive men mad so that they jumped up and knifed each other in the dark. The jungle itself could seem to breathe.