“Cadillac!” he yells. Cupping the small bird in his hand, he swings across the room with the crutch and pushes open the screen door. She’s sitting outside, along the flat balustrade of the porch, feet up, reading.
“Is this yours?” he demands, thrusting the small whistler forward. It occurs to him suddenly that maybe someone from the museum had snuck in and left the bird as a practical joke. No, only she would lay it out on his worktable like that, on leaves like an offering. And besides, here’s Tosca’s name.
“Where the hell did it come from?” he demands, waving the small bird at her.
“A gift from my father.” She smiles, swinging her legs down the side of the balustrade. Then laughs, no doubt because he looks so bewildered.
“Mr. Jim, my father’s a bird skinner. He learned it from you.”
So it’s true—Mr. Jim doesn’t know anything at all about her father and their life after the war. Just as Tosca knew nothing of Jim’s leg, or, most likely, of his bad temper and drunkenness, or he might not have sent her here.
Jim leans awkwardly on the crutch.
“When we were small, my father kept skins all about our place,” she says. “Bird skins mostly but others too: a stuffed cuscus, a crocodile, a wild pig.” She tilts her head upward, drawing her hands through the air to show him the sweep of the pig’s tusks, remembering how some of her school friends would run home when they saw that.
They’d kept live birds as well, parrots and cockatoos tame enough to eat pieces of fish or bits of cassava pudding out of their hands. And Tosca would lure honeyeaters and sunbirds in from the bush with red hibiscus planted in half coconut shells, and wild orchids tied to the house posts. Cadillac’s favorite was the hornbill Tosca raised from a chick, until her mother complained it ate too much and made him row it back to Kohinggo.
“No one understood what he was doing and some people said he was a witch doctor.” Her voice, low and easy, holds Jim, even if he’s not sure he wants to hear too much, to think too closely or too far back to those islands. Perching on the edge of a rattan porch chair, he pats his breast pocket for his cigarette pack, which he seems to have left inside. She lets a brief silence fall between them.
“My father learned all the bird names,” she continues. “Not only in Roviana but in English and also their Latin names. He learned these from the book you sent him. His favorites are the whistlers. He can whistle all their tunes: the whistler from Tetapare, the whistler from Kolombangara, this whistler he sends you from Wanawana.” She leans forward, gently touches the bird he still holds in his palm.
“Some of my friends were scared of him. Because their parents told them stories that he was talking to our ancestors, or to dead Americans.”
Adaptive radiation. It makes sense of course that birdsong changes and evolves, just like bill shape and plumage. Slow but inevitable variations that take place after a parent species disperses and adapts to different islands. Darwin discovered this studying his finches from the Galápagos. Wallace came to the same idea, marveling over his birds of paradise in Papua. It’s what Jim and Bryan had been looking for in Hawaii—adaptations in the tongues of honeycreepers. And now Tosca, mapping the evolution of birdsong. He’d have a knack for it, the ability to mimic the subtle variations. He was already skilled at that when Jim knew him in the war. Jim doubts any Westerner could match the islanders’ fine-tuned hearing, or eyesight. Even Griscom with his musical ear. Jesus Christ, how would you account for the evolutionary advantage of a new tune?
Stroking the bright feathers of the whistler, Jim’s startled by the shaking in his hand. He draws it back and tugs self-consciously at his earlobe. He’d like to massage the stump, which is beginning to cramp, but won’t do it in front of the girl.
He feels unnerved by her, sitting so close. This girl with Tosca’s skin, his height, his eyes. His forthrightness too. Unraveling Tosca’s story of bird skins, wild boar, and children.
Jim feels suddenly suffocated, unable to breathe.
He rolls up his canvas skinning kit and carries it down to the blue sea, wedging it under the rough-hewn seat of Tosca’s canoe.
“Belong you,” he says, using pidgin. Trying to explain to the boy he’s going back on one of the big ships. That he’s been ordered by Admiral Halsey to stop collecting.
Tosca grins and takes his hand. “Tankyou tumas.”
It’s the kit Sanford had given Jim years before and he wonders what Sanford would make of it. The jet-black boy in his British military shorts, bare-chested. The war that rages all around them, among these islands where Sanford had sent his collectors. The corruption of Jim’s skills as a bird skinner.
He puts his hand on Tosca’s shoulder and leaves it there a minute. The boy’s skin is hot from the sun.
“My father never learned to write,” Cadillac’s saying, seemingly unaware of Jim’s discomfort. “He can read but it was my mother who copied out the names onto labels. Then, after I went to school, it was my job.”
At first, Tosca’s enthusiasm had intrigued Cadillac’s mother. His whistling was a good way to put the children to sleep at night. But then, as the children grew older and the huts began to fill with stuffed specimens, when Tosca didn’t get a job, she started to complain. She wondered, as others had, whether there might be something wrong with her husband. Whether he’d gone slightly kranki in the war.
Cadillac remembers a day when her mother declared she’d had enough. She wasn’t going to write one more label, ever. Tosca should go find a proper job. At least he should spend his time fishing or helping to clear the bush for the garden—like other men. Tosca glanced over at Cadillac, his girl, and she’d immediately raised her hand as if she were in school and promised to write all labels for him. Her mother glared but Cadillac was too proud of her writing skill not to offer. She was ten and already the smartest in her school.
When Cadillac pauses, Jim stands. Even this minimal movement offers some relief. The clenched muscles of the stump stretch and relax.
“Hold on a moment,” he says, lurching to the screen door. Putting some space between them.
Inside, Jim lays the whistler gently back down on the leaves and glances at his watch. Safely past one. Christ, he’s due a drink. He makes his way to the kitchen for ice, then to the drinks table in the big room where the bottles line up against the dark wood paneling. It’d be a good deal easier if he kept the gin by the fridge but he sticks to the ritual of the cocktail hour, which gives a veneer of respectability, an illusion of restraint.
So, Tosca kept the skinning set and put it to some use. Also the book Jim sent, Mann’s Birds of New Guinea and the Solomon Islands. It was a wartime publication hastily printed to satisfy the sudden demand for all and any information on the Pacific. The names Guadalcanal, the Coral Sea, New Georgia, momentarily on everyone’s lips. Mann, who’d collected on these islands before the war, had kindly sent a copy to Jim in the Philippines, and he’d sent it directly to Tosca, scrawling Baketi on the envelope and entrusting it to a pilot flying the supply run. It was as much a punishment to himself as any act of generosity, because he believed then that his birding days were over. He was beginning to lose hope of ever going home.
Jesus Christ, he never knew if Tosca received the book or cared to. Frankly, he hoped the boy’s interest may already have been diverted. New Georgia by this time was safely behind the front. Munda rebuilt with piers and Quonset huts and supply depots and jeeps careening along the road from shore to airfield, he’d heard. And weekly movie pictures.
Tosca had been at a Methodist school in Munda, before the Japanese came to build their airfield. As war approached, the missionaries sent the boys home, Jim remembers. Aged sixteen, looking for excitement, Tosca had sought out the former district officer Donald Kennedy. A barrel-chested, hotheaded New Zealander, Kennedy was one of the key Coastwatchers. Known for his brutality as well as his brav
ery, for his tight-knit group of local scouts and his willingness to ambush, rather than simply spy on, the Japanese.
Jim pours the gin slowly, watching the clear, viscous liquid splash into the cold glass and crack the frosted ice. Breathing in the good, sharp tannin of the juniper, he swirls the glass deliberately, lovingly—allowing the gin to chill before he adds the tonic water. Each act offers its own distinct pleasure, a promise of relief he’s eager to prolong. The smell of quinine in the tonic. The fresh tang of lime.
He lifts the glass and drinks. Gin and tonic: the staple of colonial officers, who believed the quinine helped hold off malaria. He pours himself a second glass, knowing his own infection could still recur.
The last time Jim had seen Munda, it was a blackened wasteland, gray with ash, pockmarked by bomb craters. Its broken palm trees jutted from the wreckage like jagged crosses. He remembers watching Tosca paddle away toward the Roviana Lagoon. He’d felt a great sadness then, and a distinct envy. A small measure of the grief, the abandonment, he’d suffer later when he came home.
Easing himself down in the wheelchair, he rolls back out onto the porch, grabbing the cigarettes off his worktable as he passes.
Jesus Christ, why does he need to be so wary after all this time? Even with this girl whom he hardly knows, who will disappear again in just a few weeks, who means nothing to him?
“When I was twelve, everything changed,” Cadillac begins, then stops, waiting perhaps to see if Jim wants to hear the rest.
If not, she’d be happy enough to sit back with her book or go down to the boathouse to swim in Fergus’s wet suit again. She’s a good storyteller, he’ll give her that. Like Cecil, telling him things he suspects he should already know. He rests the glass on the balustrade, pulls out a cigarette. Thus armed, he looks straight at her.
“What happened then?” he asks, sucking in the good tobacco smoke.
She lifts her legs onto the balustrade and leans back against the shingles of the house. “That was the time a motorboat came across the gulf from Gizo Island.” It was a plastic boat with a three-horsepower outboard. “In it were three people: Chief Sunga, we knew him; a second man in a suit; and a white woman.”
It was the woman who interested her most. She’d seen white women before but this one was different. She wasn’t wearing a bathing suit or sarong like the Australian girls at Munda, but was formally dressed in a skirt and jacket and heeled shoes. Her black curly hair was tied up on top of her head and she wore big, heavy necklaces made of rings from clamshells and beads of ebony. To Cadillac and her brothers, it was clear this woman was some sort of chief from the way she walked, the respect the others showed her. She spoke in pidgin too, not in English, and also could speak some Roviana.
Cadillac looks at Jim. She’s grinning. “You probably guessed who she was, right?”
“No.” He shakes his head. How could he know?
“She was Ms. Sethie, Ms. Sethie Bloom. The one who helped me apply for a scholarship. The one who wrote to you.”
Jim frowns, remembering with distaste the bossy letter on the State Department paper, reading like a summons or command rather than any sort of request. He realizes with surprise he’d assumed Sethie was a man. Cadillac sits beaming, apparently holding a much more favorable impression than he has.
“Word had got around about the skins,” she explains. “Are you the bird man?” they asked Tosca. “The man in the suit was a zoology professor from the University of the South Pacific in Fiji. He and Ms. Sethie had helped build the Solomon Island Museum in Honiara. They wanted to exhibit my father’s bird skins. Once they met him, they asked him to take charge of the natural history displays.”
It was because of the skins Tosca got a job, because of the job, Cadillac went to school in Honiara. It was because of her success at school, Ms. Sethie encouraged her to study in the United States—to come to Jim.
“Ms. Sethie always has many projects,” Cadillac adds proudly after a short silence. Jim nods. Cadillac’s apparently one of them, and he too by extension.
He finishes off the last drops of gin, slightly dazed by how all the pieces fit together. Like iron filings attracted to a magnet, spinning round and colliding into each other. The war, the girl’s scientific upbringing, the golden whistler, the interference of a bossy American woman. It might have been a damned sight easier for him if Ms. Sethie had just minded her own business and left the girl well enough where she was.
Jim swivels the wheels of the chair, turns away to look out over the sea. Trying to keep hold of the things he’d kept to himself for so long. Trying to fend off his past and the presumption of Ms. Sethie Bloom.
Layla Island, Wanawana Lagoon,
Solomon Islands, June 1943
I met your father June 6, 1943, on Layla Island in the Wanawana Lagoon,” Jim says.
It was mid-morning, the first day after the Black Cat dropped him on the reef, when Tosca appeared from nowhere. A tall, slim boy whose arms and shoulders were just beginning to fill out, with hawkish eyes like hers, slightly hooded, which made him look oddly scholarly.
He whistled like a small bird and when Jim turned, there he was, squatting. Just a few feet away—as close to Jim as the girl is now.
“Me come ’long Kennedy,” he said, explaining the Coastwatcher had sent him. He was sixteen, six years younger than Cadillac. And he grinned, pleased to have snuck up on Jim.
“And it’s a damn good thing I didn’t shoot him,” Jim adds.
She stares, watches Jim run his tongue wolfishly over his teeth. She wouldn’t put it past him. With his drink finished, his cigarette stubbed out, he seems vulnerable and unpredictable.
“What I mean is, I didn’t see him arrive. I didn’t even hear him.” More likely, it was Tosca who could have killed Jim if he’d needed to. Shot him with the Jap gun the Coastwatcher had given him, or just knocked him over the head, which was the way of headhunters. He was that stealthy.
June 6—they had a month before D-day of the New Georgia campaign. Jesus Christ, it seemed a lifetime. They’d handed Jim too much freedom maybe. Time enough for him to create a whole other world.
“I know Layla,” she says. “It’s a place my father takes us to cook fish on the beach and look for fruit doves.”
“Here’s a coincidence,” Jim says, turning to face her again. “He brought me a fish, just like you.” It was a reef fish hanging from a reed hook. They cooked the fish over a fire, which was Jim’s second breach of regulations. The first was swimming in broad daylight. It was a time of day, Tosca assured Jim, that Jap planes didn’t fly over. The fire was a risk but the fish tasted like heaven. Though the boy was more interested in Jim’s canned rations of ham and beans.
He wore a pair of British khaki shorts. There were small raised scars on his chest, some sort of tribal marking. A woven band of dyed leaf around his upper arm.
Layla was Tosca’s name for the island. The Americans didn’t have a name for it though Halsey and Kennedy agreed to call it Bird’s Eye.
There were few accurate maps at the start of the war. They’d relied on British, Dutch, and, ironically, German charts and pilots, filling in details with local knowledge. Later they had their own aerial photographs and sent patrols to reconnoiter.
Layla was a slip of a place, three miles across by six miles long, flat with few places to hide. You could walk right round it, though going through the middle was tougher because of the brush.
The reefs of the Wanawana prevented anything larger than a transport boat from coming close. But Admiral “Bull” Halsey chose it because of its perfect sight lines: southeast to Rendova, east to Munda, northwest, up through the Wanawana, toward Kolombangara. Just as he singled out Jim as a loner and nonconformist. Someone who, as he put it, didn’t fit comfortably in the military structure.
The war was about to move here for a time and Jim’s mis
sion was to keep watch and report on Japanese ship movements. In particular, he was to warn of any Jap reinforcement of Rendova, which was to be one of the key landing sites in the forthcoming invasion.
The Coastwatchers were already in place. Hiding out on mountaintops and in the thick bush with their cumbersome radios. Protected and helped by Solomon Islanders who acted as their guides, guards, runners, and scouts. Halsey pointed to small flags on his map. Josselyn on Vella Lavella, Harry Wickham (of swimming fame) in the Roviana, Dick Horton on Rendova, Evans on Kolombangara, and Donald Kennedy of course at Segi Point.
But the Bull wanted a few of his own men too. Jim remembers standing awkwardly in the admiral’s Quonset hut listening to Halsey outline the four-prong invasion plan. Operation Toenails they called it, because although they’d secured Guadalcanal as a foothold, they were still just hanging in.
Jim suggested Sitting Duck as his own code name. Halsey chuckled, glancing around at the others, as if this confirmed the lieutenant’s credentials. Halsey was only half-joking when he said he’d been looking for some godforsaken outpost to stick his maverick, Jungle Jim. The island would be perfect.
Here’s what Tosca owns. A spear. A bush knife. A pair of shorts. A captured Japanese rifle. Fishing line made from hibiscus bark. A cooking pot. A canoe hewn from the trunk of a qoliti tree.
He watches with eager curiosity as Jim turns out his pack. Squatting back on his heels, he picks up Jim’s things one by one to examine them. Jim’s tin plate and fork and knife, his razor, his helmet. Holding up a small mirror, he smiles sheepishly into it and mimes brushing his teeth, pulling up his lip to inspect his gums.
More intriguing is Jim’s field book. He leafs through it thoughtfully, the list of skins Jim collected on Guadalcanal.
Hemiprocne mystacea, female. Lunga River. April 15, 1943. The whiskered tree swift.
Bird Skinner (9780802193636) Page 11
