Bird Skinner (9780802193636)

by Greenway, Alice

  Back at the museum, it’s sweltering. Michael strides across to the window and throws it open, only to be met by an even hotter, stuffier wall of city air.

  He looks across the green copper dome of the Planetarium to the windows of the Ichthyology Department, then down at the North Entrance, where a group of children, part of a summer science camp, gather under the shade of plane trees.

  How had he not seen it before? Laina’s infatuation with Jim—and not just professional. A monkey’s ass, Jim called him. It seems that’s exactly what he is.

  Looking down, he sees a small girl standing slightly apart from the others. A girl with dark hair, pulled back in braids, who reminds him painfully of his wife Nita—what she must have looked like. He lingers, watching as a boy turns a cartwheel, then kicks his legs up into a show-off handstand walking hand over hand along one of the benches. Impressive and quite wonderful, until a counselor rushes over to scold.

  So why doesn’t the counselor take charge of the dark-haired girl, who now sits down at the end of a bench, opening her afternoon snack all by herself, ignored by the others?

  He wonders when it was that things started to go wrong between himself and Nita. Just when it was he’d stopped seeing her as one of his greatest discoveries, and instead looked on her as a stranger he’d brought back from Argentina, almost mistakenly, along with his crates of skins and field notes.

  He looks down at the girl. Wonders if he folds a paper airplane and throws it out the window, whether it would float down to her.

  Cumberland Island, Georgia, 1917

  Helen’s wild, unbridled, proud, naive. Jim might have seen a recklessness, a certain imbalance in her then, if he’d chosen to look for it. He did not. What he sees is that she’s the only child of an outdoorsman politician who’s away from home much of the time, a ­singular-minded mother who loves horses and believes strongly in letting children be. It’s an existence he envies.

  She knows every part of the island and leads him to dunes where they sift the hot, dry sand through their fingers, searching for sharks’ teeth until they each have a fistful of the sharp, serrated, blackened fossils, thousands of years old.

  She can call alligators too, cupping her hands and making a strange whistling noise, a trick she learned from her mother’s blacksmith. She warns Jim that alligators will come right down on the beach, swim in the surf, following the coast until a burst of brackish water alerts them to the mouth of a creek. He thinks she’s trying to scare him until he sees one, a small four- or five-footer, slinking out of the trees along the sand. She dares Jim to get close enough to touch its tail with a long stick and laughs heartily when he leaps back. The creature flips round like a highly wound spring.

  What does she do the rest of the year? He can’t imagine her at her boarding school in Virginia, obeying the unspoken and sometimes baffling rules of other girls, spending long, cold winter evenings indoors.

  One night, she comes into his bedroom, the same way she comes into the room where he skins, unannounced, without knocking. She walks across to the bed and shines a flashlight right onto his pillow and over his face.

  “Wake up,” she demands. It’s a full moon, they should go swim. Outside, she wants him to take the Ford and drive down to the beach. It’s a hot night and the moon bathes the flat sandy road and the gnarled moss-covered oaks on either side, turning it to moonscape. He turns off the road, along two slats of wood Uncle Fergo has laid across the soft sand, down to the high-water mark, then veers along the shore away from the house. The waves of the Atlantic boom around him.

  “Stop!” Helen says and points. There in the headlights, two lines like tire tracks, as if someone else is already here. He looks at her quizzically and she smiles and climbs out.

  In the moonlight, they walk back up the beach until Jim sees what looks like an enormous rock heaving itself along. A sea turtle, a loggerhead, hoisting her huge shell, paddling the sand with muscular flippers.

  When they catch up, she pauses and rolls back her great doleful eye with turtley resignation. Here, after her long journey across the Atlantic, her laborious trek up the sand—intruders, potential predators. It’s too late now to turn back; she’s halfway up the beach.

  Slowly, the turtle drags herself above the high-tide line where the sand is soft and retains some heat from the day. Jim and Helen move off to a considerate distance. They sit up in the dunes at the back of the beach, wait in silence as she digs her hole, then shudders her huge body over it, depositing her clutch of a hundred or so eggs. Listening to the turtle’s soft moaning, her sad, choked lullaby to the unborn, the eggs she will leave here, the tiny loggerheads that will hatch months from now and, without any guidance from her, make their own treacherous rush down to the sea. Easy prey for seabirds and gators. The ones that make it will ride the ocean currents hundreds of miles, following some secret instinct that will take them all the way to the feeding grounds of the Sargasso.

  Helen touches Jim’s arm. And when he turns to her, she unbuttons her dress and lets it slip down her back. She leans toward him and kisses his mouth and he draws his hand across her shoulder, along her neck behind her hair.

  She stands up completely naked. “Let’s swim.” Leaving her dress on the dry sand, she runs down into the waves. Her skin is white and smooth, and all around the moon-bleached sand and dune grass. He remembers the firmness of the dunes beneath his back, the sharp grass, her hair falling down into his face, into his mouth like rain. Soft and young.

  By the end of summer, when he has to return to Greenwich and they both have to go back to school, he’s in love. It’s a wonder to him now that he’d ever loved anyone.

  VII

  Japanese Bones

  Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine,

  August 1973

  He’s drunk too much. He shouldn’t be here. He should have excused himself. Jesus, he can always blame the leg.

  He came to the island to be alone, his desires simple. Now here they all are, jabbering and getting in his way. Cadillac, Fergus, Sarah too and Stillman at Fergus’s summer dinner party. Though Stillman, Jim suspects, is about as keen on socializing as he is.

  He’s helped himself to several martinis, even before they arrived. The effect of the drink is an opaque, muffled haze, hard as glass. An irritability roused by sudden sound or movement. By Fergus at his side, serving a plate of crabmeat laid out on endive leaves as if they were at a goddamn New York restaurant.

  “For Christ’s sake, sit down,” Jim snaps. Half aware of a silence that falls over the table, as if this is all happening somewhere else, to other people. He feels himself slipping away, somewhere beyond his control. He sips his martini, having dispensed years ago with wine at dinner. Though the boy makes a fuss over some bottles of rosé he’s brought from New York. He misses standing up to eat where and when he likes, washing his own tin plate, his cans of corned beef. He misses not eating. At last the boy sits down.

  Jim’s not deaf. His hearing’s keen even when it comes to kinglets and waxwings. He can hear the chicks in the fish hawk nest, can’t he? But here, with the clatter of plates and cutlery and talk, sounds are muddied and unreliable. Worse still, the undercurrents, not the words themselves but the desires underneath, the needs, demands, hurts. Even more treacherous, his own.

  They’re talking about their trip to Rockland and the storm, the rain that sent them running into the Rockland Diner.

  Now Fergus turns to Jim. “A colleague of yours at the museum called me, just before I left New York,” he says. “A man named ­Michael.” Jim glares. “Did you know he’s assembling a retrospective of your work?”

  “Michael writes obituaries,” Jim snaps. Well really, did the boy expect to get very far talking about that fool?

  Fergus takes another tack, struggling to draw his father out with a persistence Jim finds demeaning. Saying something about repairs to th
e house, a cracked windowpane, blown fuses, all things Jim used to look after. Yes, he’d noticed. He’d noticed the broken banister on the veranda, wood rot in the latticework under the porch. Jesus Christ, no need to consult him anymore. Nothing he can do about it. Goddamn cripple. Besides, he’d just as soon let the house be, let it grow old around and with him. Let it crack, disintegrate, rot. Be a home to mice.

  “When do they need you back in New York?” he asks. Sarah almost chokes on her food.

  Jesus, he’s wheeled himself up from the boathouse. Isn’t that enough? Do they have to expect him to join in? And yes, he’d like Fergus to go away, the girl too.

  Stillman leans forward to fill the glasses, for everyone except Cadillac, who doesn’t drink, good girl. Jim sees him wink at the boy. They need a drink to cope with me, he thinks. Christ, he needs one too.

  It’s always been this way. Jim, rude, aggressive, bullying. Especially to his son. His brother Cecil had been a better father to the boy than him. Jim resents that too, though he’d be the first to admit he’d relinquished his place, forfeited. Just another example of his inadequacy, his failure. Jim, the drunk, the misfit. He’d been unable even to care for Helen.

  Suddenly, he can bear it no longer. He feels claustrophobic and trapped. He feels the room swelling and pressing in on him, the hallucination he’d suffered as a feverish boy. As if all the things that matter to him have been smashed, destroyed, or just whisked away. Tosca, a name, a lead character in an opera, not the sixteen-year-old Solomon Islands boy Jim once knew. Cadillac, a girl his son likes, not a ghost from his past sent to free him. His son, not his son. Unable to stifle this growing despair, he declares too loudly, he’s going out for a smoke.

  Even then it’s not easy. There’s a god-awful commotion as they move back, out of the way of his wheelchair. Cadillac jumps up to move a sail bag, a pair of flip-flops. Even these ordinary things become major obstacles and he has to back up and swivel the chair to get round them. Goddamn it, it’s not even easy for him to stumble out drunk anymore, or to slip quietly away.

  Outside it’s warm and still, with only the thinnest sliver of a moon, like the glint off the blade of a knife or sickle. The dark exaggerates the stars, making them appear closer and far more numerous. The sky swathed in the gauzy filament of the Milky Way.

  He wheels himself around the side of the house, listens to the quiet jangling of boat shrouds and stays, the sea sucking quietly at the rocks and around the dock, and feels so grateful for it, he could weep.

  The others must be breathing a sigh of relief too, to be rid of him.

  He lights a cigarette and inhales the sharp smoke and soft sea air. The small flame illuminates his palms and face as he leans into it. Down in the shallows along the shore and dock, phosphorescence flickers where the water stirs and he imagines a silent communion between the stars and the tiny luminous protozoa, the tip of his cigarette glowing red each time he sucks in. Each light follows a particular pattern, a quiet rationale that can be deciphered and relied on. Like the light at Goose Head, the rhythm of his breathing.

  He won’t go back in. He’s too drunk. He’ll go down to the boathouse, divert himself reading Hemingway or tuning in to the ship-to-shore where he can listen to people who expect nothing from him.

  He bends down to unstick the brake, jerks the wheels forward, and feels a fresh surge of anger at being stuck in this goddamn chair, one-legged and unable to ever walk properly again. When what he’d like to do is run. Run down the hill. Plunge off the dock into the phosphorescent sea.

  Clamping the cigarette between his teeth, he spins the wheels hard with both hands. Even when he reaches the slight slope, where he should be holding back, he pushes forward furiously, recklessly. Until the chair veers off the path and hits a rock or a hard hummock of grass, and he feels himself lifting, rising up on one wheel. Swinging the weight of his upper body to counterbalance, he tries to bring it back down but it’s too late—past the tipping point. The chair topples slowly. Then his shoulder hits the ground hard and there’s a sharp, painful bang along the tender edge of the stump.

  Stunned, he listens to the upturned wheel spin in the air above him, looks up to see its spiked silhouette against the black sky. The stump throbs violently and he feels confused and disoriented by the ninety-degree shift in perspective. The metal arm of the chair beneath him digs into his ribs.

  Goddamn, this is a fine predicament! A goddamn poor piece of luck to fall on this side rather than the other. To make matters worse, he realizes he left the crutch up at the house. It had got in the way during dinner and he’d leaned back and propped it against the wall.

  He gropes forward, trying to disentangle himself from the chair, and sits up. Twisting around, he runs his hand eagerly along the upturned side of the chair, slips it into the opening of the side pocket to grab the hard, cool flask. Thank Christ for that: emergency rations. He takes a long swig, and another. Fumbles forward for the cigarette that flew right out of his mouth when he hit the ground.

  He remembers a jar of fireflies his sister Ann brought him the time he was sick with fever, after Pieter died.

  “In case you get scared of the dark,” she whispered, standing by his bed, placing the jar gently next to some books on his bedside table.

  He remembers lifting the jar up onto the pillow beside him. When the twilight fades, draining from the room like the ebb tide, he unscrews the lid and lets them fly out. Watching each one as it slowly crawls to the lip of the jar, then lifts off, up into the dark eaves of his room. Where they blink on and off. Glowing like tiny, floating Chinese lanterns. Yellow-green. Like lighthouses. On, off.

  Beetles really, not flies. From the family Lampyridae. It’s not the whole beetle that lights up, only the final section of the abdomen, or if it’s female, the last two sections. Each species flashing its own specific pattern, which is how they recognize each other. He tried to time the on-off cycle. If the periods of dark are longer than the light, it’s called oscillating, as opposed to flashing; those are the words you use for a lighthouse. Marked Osc., as opposed to Fl., on a chart. Except that the purpose of the fireflies’ light is different—to lure rather than warn, to attract a mate.

  Jim cried and when he cried his face and eyes felt even hotter and more swollen. His body shivered with fever. Here I am, the fireflies flash. See me. Love me. I am here.

  It’s Stillman who finds him. He hasn’t much to contribute after dinner’s over, so he excuses himself, thinking he’ll have a drink with Jim. He’d heard the old man had moved down to the boathouse. It hadn’t surprised him.

  “Forgot my crutch up at the house,” Jim says simply when Stillman almost stumbles over him in the dark. “Can’t right the goddamn chair.” He’s more shaken than he lets on. So’s Stillman, to find him tumbled onto the ground.

  “Guess we’ll have to fix you up with a horn,” Stillman remarks, pulling up the chair. Leaning forward, he takes Jim’s hands between his. “Steady, steady,” he mutters as if talking to a runaway horse or rabid dog. Jim’s arms are surprisingly strong though Stillman can feel his hands shaking. He lowers Jim into the chair and wheels him down into the boathouse, paying no mind to whether Jim likes it or not.

  “Hold on please,” Jim pipes up before Stillman can flip the light. Not ready for the glare of electricity, he strikes a match, holds it to the wick of the kerosene lantern. For a moment the flickering yellow flame lights the deep creases of his forehead, the old scar running down the left side of his face, his reddened eyes, the terrible shaking in his hands set off again by the fall. Ravaged, Stillman thinks and wonders if he should ask Jim just how much he’s been drinking. Or is it best just to offer up a steady, silent comradeship? It’s what Stillman himself would want.

  “Came to join you for a nightcap,” Stillman says.

  Jim produces a flask from nowhere. He must keep one in his pocket. Then swivels the chair t
o grab two glasses from the counter and Stillman sits, surprised to find himself looking right out the doors at the dark of the sea and sky. He wonders if it’s safe to leave them open and the question makes him feel old and disloyal. He so clearly remembers the boy Jim hanging from his knees.

  He listens to the night sounds. The water lapping against his lobster boat moored in the cove. A gull’s wing beat as it flies past in the dark. He looks at the stars.

  “Orion’s belt,” he says. The Dipper turned on its side now in late summer. Jim nods.

  After throwing back the Scotch—he has some catching up to do—Stillman slides his glass along the table for a refill. He leans out of the light, which casts a yellow glow like a campfire, and drinks more slowly. He hears the short bark of a night heron. Breathes in the good smell of Jim’s tobacco and the sea. Each of them aware of the other sliding away into his own thoughts. Both familiar enough to guess what these thoughts might be—or how utterly unknowable—Helen. Stillman’s wife Esther, his son Elias. The war.

  Stillman raises his glass and it all comes back to him so strongly, he can’t recall afterward if they said anything out loud or if they just drank together in silence.

  Layla Island, Wanawana Lagoon,

  Solomon Islands, July 1943

  It wasn’t difficult. A brief scuffle, what you might call a scrap. Looking back, it was shamefully easy. Not even a fair fight.

  Jim hears the soft rumble of the boat asserting itself in his sleep. Then Tosca is shaking him awake, already kicking over the lean-to, scattering dirt and leaves over their campsite while Jim struggles into his boots, which are tight because he’d been going barefoot. They hurry down the narrow path to the beach, wedge themselves under a thick cover of branches and palm fronds propped against a jagged outcrop of coral—one of several camouflaged blinds.