Bird Skinner (9780802193636)

by Greenway, Alice

  Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine,

  August 1973

  When Jim finally sleeps, he dreams of swimming. He’s wearing a mask and peering down into a forest of kelp.

  It’s hard to breathe through the snorkel. The mask keeps filling with water. But he takes a deep breath and dives down. Reveling in it because he realizes he has his leg back. He can feel his two feet chafe against the tight fit of the rubber flippers. Both calf muscles straining against the drag of water. His body, whole, alive, and young. He kicks down until his lungs strain for air. The sun angles down sparkling off flecks of mica in the sand below.

  He’s about to turn back, swim up, when he sees a bird. Its wings beat through the kelp. And all about him, birds swim. Brightly colored green and red sunbirds. Species they haven’t seen before.

  He spins round to signal to Delacour, who must be somewhere close behind. Look here, look what I’ve found. But when he turns, a Japanese is swimming right behind him. He opens his mouth to shout and it fills with water. He can’t breathe, he’s swallowing water. He struggles toward the surface, fighting his way through the kelp, which now threatens to entangle him and hold him down.

  He wakes, sitting bolt upright in the dark, gasping and choking for air, and drenched in sweat. So feverish and disoriented, he’s not sure if he’s back in the Pacific suffering from malaria. The stump’s hard throbbing brings him harshly back to the present. The dream still holding him in its terror and rhapsody.

  He finishes the whisky in his flask.

  The following morning, Fergus brings Jim’s papers and mail, and two large cups of black coffee. Stillman had told him about Jim’s fall and he’s relieved to find his pa already at work, though looking a little roughed up and shaky.

  He puts the mail and one mug next to the typewriter. His father’s books and papers make it hard to sit at the table, so he perches on the cot under the tied-up mosquito net. Glances around at the empty glasses, the Scotch, the stubs of cigarettes Jim shouldn’t be smoking.

  “I’m planning to drive Cadillac down to Yale at the end of the week,” he says. “She needs to be there for orientation day.”

  Cadillac was to leave just after Labor Day. Yes, Jim does remember that. He hadn’t realized it has come about so soon. The girl leaving. The goddamn end of summer. He picks up the coffee.

  “I’m wondering if you’d like to come with us,” Fergus asks. “Your old alma mater. We could make a jaunt of it.” He does his best to sound upbeat and enthusiastic, though he can tell the word jaunt grates against Jim’s more caustic mood.

  Jim grunts and shifts in his chair. His leg seems to be causing him some discomfort, which encourages Fergus to get right to the point.

  “I know you won’t like this, Pappy, but it’d also be a good idea for the doctor to check up on your leg. I can make an appointment.”

  Strange Fergus should mention it now—this morning. It’s too bad he hadn’t asked before—yesterday for instance. Even then, Jim could have shown his son the stump. He could have unwrapped the bandages, unveiled the clean, pink skin to put the boy’s mind at ease. The wound had healed nicely. Jim had taken care of it. He’d followed the doctor’s instructions as to creams and bandaging, even if he hasn’t always managed the exercises. Hell, the last thing he wanted was to fetch up in Rockland with some skin fungus. The whole thing had been healthy-looking if revolting.

  Up until this morning that is, when he’d woken early and changed out of his clothes from the day before. Overnight, the stump had turned a startling blue. The skin is swollen and tender to the touch.

  He’ll not show it to the boy now.

  “You’ll need to see the doctor,” Fergus persists. Goddamn self-­appointed nurse.

  “Make an appointment for me in Rockland then,” Jim says. “I’ll ask Stillman to take me in.” Which means no to New Haven and to coming down with him to Greenwich, but yes to seeing the doctor. Fergus is relieved; he hadn’t expected Jim to agree to that so readily.

  He looks out the open doors, the sea right there, almost as if you are in a boat. It makes him think of an illustration of a coot’s nest afloat which he saw in one of Jim’s bird books. The seaborne roost of the Never Bird.

  Jim peruses the mail. A response from Avery Wright at Harvard to Jim’s query about a species of ant he remembers from Old Providence. The latest issue of Tin Can Sailor, a navy rag. A postcard from ­Delacour—Lunch at the Dominican Place. Ordered our old favorite huevos. Michael asking after you.

  “Goddamn fool Michael,” he says. “Been pestering Delacour too.”

  Fergus smiles. This man’s another person his father dislikes. Jim’s so easily irritated.

  “Listen, I’ll come back up and take you to Rockland myself,” Fergus says. He’ll want to hear what the doctors have to say and knows he’ll never get a clear report from Jim. The old man doesn’t look so well.

  Jim nods, not paying too much mind. When they leave, he’ll have the whole place to himself. Well, he’s glad, if he can just hold out until then.

  War Worker, Public Library, New York,

  August 1973

  There’s the photo—just as Mann described it. A clean-cut, all-American-looking girl, wholesome, prim, pen poised over paper as she gazes down at her Japanese skull. Arizona war worker writes her navy boyfriend a thank-you note for the Jap skull he sent her, the caption reads. Mann even had Arizona right.

  Laina has searched through thick collections of Life magazine in the public library to find it. Michael had asked her out for a drink as soon as Mann left but she’d put him off. Pretending she had a date, she’d come here instead.

  The photo is very posed, professionally arranged. You can see that at once. The girl’s blond hair pulled neatly into a bun pinned with a flower. Her starched collar carefully folded over the lapel of her fitted jacket. Chin in hand, she looks at the skull vacantly, fondly almost, the way you might look at a small dog. At the moment the shutter clicked, she would have been more concerned with her looks than what anyone would think of the trifle before her. Or even the letter to her beau. She would have been flattered by the attentions of the press photographer. Unaware of the furor her image would cause.

  The skull—once a man—stares with black empty eye sockets. It’s artfully turned toward the camera, so you can see the shadowed temple, the high nose, the jawbone with only half its teeth. Had the sailor and his friends extracted the others for their gold fillings?

  Laina wonders if the boyfriend had been reprimanded afterward, or threatened with a court-martial like Jim. Whether he would have held this against his girl when he came home.

  Then again, he might not have come home. May 1944—the bitter war in the Pacific still had a year and three months to go. The ­Allies poised to take Biak Island in New Guinea, then the Marianas, Guam, and Tinian. The battles for Okinawa, Leyte, and Iwo Jima all still ahead.

  But if he had come home? Then Laina wonders if they had lived happily ever after—neatly groomed, hardworking, emotionally callous, all attributes the photo suggests. Or whether her sailor beau might have brought back other demons to haunt them, less tangible than a skull?

  Or perhaps, despite it all, they’d found a wholly different kind of love, one that would excuse the barbarities of their youth. The sort of love she’d always hoped for.

  And what about the Japanese? Who was he?

  Munda, New Georgia, Solomon Islands, September 1943

  Jim was summoned by Halsey, who demanded to know just what the hell he’d been doing skinning birds when he was supposed to be looking out for Japanese ships. He mumbled some explanation about the South Seas collectors but Halsey cut him off. It was easier for Halsey to understand why Jim scalped the dead Japs.

  By then, a cable had come from navy headquarters threatening Jim with a court-martial. Colonel Harding had submitted his medical report. Jim wa
ited to hear whether he’d be summoned home to Washington. He’d seen men commit worse crimes. He thought he could manage the disgrace, so would Helen. But he’d worried what it would mean to his young son Fergus, who’d want him to be a hero.

  “They’ve let you off,” Halsey said gently. He placed a firm hand on Jim’s arm. “But do me a favor, would you? No more head-hunting.”

  And that was it. All it amounted to at the front in Munda. Just this gentle rebuke from Halsey. Even then, Jim could tell The Bull’s heart wasn’t in it. It was Halsey who’d spurred them on with his edict—Kill Japs, Kill Japs, Kill more Japs—posted on a huge billboard at the entrance to Tulagi Harbor for everyone to see. The admiral needed his men to be bloodthirsty, and if beheading Japs, or taking their teeth or ears, boosted morale, then it helped the war.

  He read out two conditions. One, Jim was forbidden to engage in any further scientific activity for the duration of the war. Second, he was being reassigned to an aircraft carrier, which would steam up toward the Philippines. Back to his pilot training, work for which he’ll later be awarded a Bronze Star and citation.

  It’s only once they were winning, once Operation Toenails had secured its foothold, that the military could afford to play by the rules. Dropping the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for example. Up thousands of feet in the air, the pilots who released those weapons would not have heard a single cry, would not have even seen the cities flattened in an instant. Those were bloodless killings, a mass incineration. No chance of defiling the dead there. There wasn’t enough left.

  Layla Island, Wanawana Lagoon,

  Solomon Islands, July 1943

  It was Jim’s idea to skin the heads. His own reenactment of the depraved white man going native in the jungle. A derangement of his scientific ambition and skill. He was the older man, the scientist. He owned the skinning set, for Christ’s sake. He takes full responsibility.

  But damn it, Tosca had his own kastom, and head-hunting lay at the heart of it. Taking heads marked a rite of passage to manhood. It was a way of gaining earthly and spiritual power, the islanders called mana. And raids had continued right up to the end of the nineteenth century, and in a more haphazard way beyond that.

  Tosca would have grown up with tales of the great Chief Inqava and his warriors, tie varane, who journeyed hundreds of miles across the sea to Choiseul and Isabel to collect heads. Of their vast war canoes, tomoko, each paddled by thirty or more warriors. Intricately carved and inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Their carved ebony nguzunguzu figureheads lashed low on the prows, dipped into the waves, protecting the warriors from reefs and evil water spirits.

  To announce their return, Chief Inqava would blow a conch shell and the warriors would bring the severed heads before a priest. Each man striking the ground with his club when his name was called, to tell how many heads he’d taken. And there would be feasts with sacred puddings, which could only be passed to the men by women’s feet. And dancing, with men in one line, women and girls in another. The men decorated their bodies with white lines of lime and red dye extracted from leaves. They wore rings cut from giant clamshells and carried their weapons carved with frigate birds and sharks and lines of human heads.

  Maybe Tosca was happy to get a chance at it.

  Years after the war, Jim had read articles by the anthropologists Hocart and Rivers. Rivers pioneered the humane treatment of shell-shock victims during the First World War. But before that war, the two men had traveled to New Georgia and spent three months on Eddystone Island.

  Rivers described head-hunting as the hub at the center of the wheel, the central tenet that held all parts of society together. When it was outlawed by the British, the birthrate in New Georgia had plummeted. Listless, lacking purpose or interest in life, the islanders had simply started to die off, he warned. He argued that a substitute be found—perhaps in the hunting of animals.

  The white man must have appeared so hypocritical. First came the missionaries, then the colonial agents. Both preached the evils of warfare and outlawed ancient rites. Thou shalt not kill. Thou shalt not steal. More severe sects, like the Seventh-Day Adventists, took the prohibitions further. Thou shalt not sing. Thou shalt not dance. Terrified as they were by the islanders’ open display of power and sexuality.

  Then, only half a century later, within the lifetime of many, war was back. This time the white man was killing on an almost unimaginable scale, with unimaginable weapons. There were battleships, planes, machine guns, mortars, rifles. No more simple club or ax or spear. A war the islanders called Bikfala Faet.

  All these years, Jim worried he might have scarred Tosca, mistaught him, led him down a dark path. He wished the Coastwatcher Donald Kennedy had never sent a scout, and had just left him alone, which is what he’d wanted. He saw himself as unfit to be any sort of officer, or friend, or teacher.

  But Tosca had become a man, a father, a birder too—curator of the Solomon Island Museum’s natural history displays. This was the gift Cadillac had delivered to Jim in the form of a golden whistler. The news that despite it all, he might have been some goddamn use to someone.

  The boy carried the skulls in leaves and placed them on a coral outcrop, looking out to sea. He laid the empty flask of sake and the ornamental sword beside them.

  Layla Island, Wanawana Lagoon,

  Solomon Islands, July 1943

  Tired and wet, after watching U.S. ships bombard Munda in the night, Jim returns to camp to find the boy gone. He’s not down on the beach either, or inside their blind on the coral headland. Jim peers in, hoping Tosca might have fallen asleep.

  Alarmed, he bushwhacks through the mangroves to the place he knows Tosca hides his canoe. Gone too, which at least means the boy has left on his own accord and Jim doesn’t have to worry about finding his young body mutilated and tied to a tree. He hasn’t been abducted by Japs, by a second patrol coming in to search for the first. Turns out he’s just goddamn unreliable. He’s just gone. Absconded.

  Jim treks back to the camp, surprised by his disappointment, his sense of abandonment. He wonders whether the heads spooked Tosca.

  He’s become too reliant on the boy, too used to Tosca’s company. Maybe it’s for the best he’s gone, now that the war’s here. It’s better for Jim to be on his own. Fireworks over Munda last night, he radios late. 0500, three Jap transport ships heading into Kolombangara.

  That night, a blast like a trumpet erupts at the bottom of the canarium tree, loud as a ship’s horn. Jim grabs his rifle, peers down through the ferns. That was the second time he might have shot Tosca. Jesus fucking Christ.

  Scrambling up the tree, the boy presents Jim with a conch shell, a hole cut through the spiral for a mouthpiece. He’s brought two, he says, for signaling—one for either end of the island. His canoe’s hidden back in the mangrove swamp.

  Jim takes the gnarly shell with its skin-smooth pinkish lip. Jesus Christ, a noise like that should be sounded only in an emergency, he scolds, not to play a trick. They can’t afford to take any more risks. They have to keep quiet. Make their radio reports. Stay alive.

  He’s glad it’s dark so Tosca can’t see how pleased he is. His delight and gratitude. Without Tosca, he may never have come home.

  Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine,

  August 1973

  Jim’s finished the Treasure Island piece. Just as well, as the swelling in the stump is becoming worse each day, rather than easing.

  Avery Wright’s letter identified the black ant on Old Providence as Solenopsis geminata, the little fire ant, which will do until someone says otherwise. Jim scribbles its name at the bottom of his addendum, The Flora and Fauna of Old Providence. Then gathers his papers together. Twenty pages in all, if you include the chart and addendum. The whole thing scruffy, coffee-stained, full of typos. Still he’s pleased with it. All the likenesses of Treasure Island and Old Providence adequately set out.
/>
  Just this morning, he’d typed out a final argument. The way Stevenson makes use of the naval surveyor’s warning about the tricky channel through to the harbor, the unreliable depth readings due to tidal drift. “There’s a strong scour with the ebb . . . and this here passage has been dug out, in a manner of speaking, with a spade,” as Silver puts it.

  Straightening the pages, he slips them into an envelope and scribbles Laina’s name on it. Just in time for Fergus to take it to the museum. Now it’s done, he’ll fix himself a drink to celebrate. An icy martini maybe, five shots with just a splash of vermouth—a drink they call the Lone Pine. He’ll wheel himself outside, where the sun is just beginning to set, casting pink reflections across the cove.

  He puts his hand on his hot thigh. Finds it painful to stand.

  It was just at sundown when we cast anchor in a most beautiful land-locked gulf, and were immediately surrounded by shore boats full of negroes, and Mexican Indians, and half-bloods, selling fruits and vegetables, and offering to dive for bits of money—Stevenson’s description of the port the Hispaniola hobbles into, unprovisioned, undermanned, demasted after the mutiny on the island.

  It’s the place Stevenson lets his chief scoundrel free. Where Long John Silver escapes by shore boat with his single bag of treasure. Most likely on the coast of Nicaragua, Jim has argued. I think we were all pleased to be so cheaply quit of him, young Hawkins says.

  It was far less than he’d hoped for. But still, Stevenson allows Silver to evade the gibbet or any other comeuppance that might await him in Britain. The dire fate of Ben Gunn, who winds up keeping a lodge exactly as he had feared upon the island and singing in church on Sunday.