Bird Skinner (9780802193636)

by Greenway, Alice

  “May I come back for Thanksgiving?” she asks, trying out the word. It sounds nice to her. She thinks she has plenty to be thankful for. And once she’s a doctor, or a surgeon if she works hard enough, she’ll have something to give back. To Tosca, Jim, her brothers, her country too, which will be independent one day with its own government, like Fiji and New Guinea.

  Jim nods without conviction. November, it’ll be cold. The leaves will have turned and possibly there will be snow. He wonders what she’ll make of snow. He doesn’t celebrate Thanksgiving particularly, or Easter, or even Christmas for that matter. Not since the war. Though Fergus always makes some attempt with him. He wheels himself around to get a drink. He hasn’t got out of the chair these last days, due to the pain in the stump.

  “Mr. Jim, are you going to move back up to the big house?” She makes room for her shells in the closet. “I can help move your things back up before I go.” Going.

  “No,” he says, inhaling the sharp tang of gin before turning round to face her. “Not now.” She looks at him, drink in hand, the crumpled pack of cigarettes in his chest pocket, the habit he has of tilting his head to one side and pulling an earlobe, and considers whether he might be happy to have the place to himself again. The way he was when she came—like a Japanese MIA.

  Mr. Jim’s numbawan man, Tosca told her. The problem is he can’t see that for himself. She doesn’t think Jim’s looking well and she examines his face more closely, with professional scrutiny. Flushed, she notes, the skin around his eyes, blue and puffy. He may be feverish beneath the flush. His skin looks unhealthy and drained of color. The way he moves too, is slow and cautious, as if he might be in some pain.

  “I can stay longer if you are not well,” she says with some concern.

  “Damn that!” Jim snarls over his gin, anger surging through him as he makes eye contact. “Jesus Christ, you came here to be a doctor. Don’t tell me you changed your mind? Don’t tell me you want to be a goddamned nurse!”

  He’s shouting and Cadillac smiles, happy to have roused this ferocity. The mean dog. Jim’s been too quiet and withdrawn the last few days.

  “Of course, I want to go,” she says. A determined excitement in her voice, for the now fast-approaching day when the rest of her life begins. She remembers writing her application with Ms. Sethie. How long ago that was, when Yale seemed a fantastical dream.

  “Then goddamn do it!” Jim snarls. “Besides I want my house back!” He picks up the books she’s returned and puts them back in her open hands. “Keep these.” Pulling her by the arm, he wheels to the cupboard, lifts out the canvas skinning set, and puts it on top of the books. “Take that too.” Maybe she’ll find some use for it.

  He’d like to give her more. He’d like to give her the kettle and the tin cups, the fishing tackle and rods, the butterfly nets. He looks at her shells, the sea glass, the golden whistler Tosca skinned. He’d like to give her the storm lanterns, the mosquito coils, the box of charts. He’d like to give her the whole goddamn house, the cove, the point. Everything but the guns maybe. He’d like to keep those.

  It’s the last entry Jim remembers most clearly. So it seems he might have written it himself, dipping the bamboo brush in water, brushing it against the dry inkstone, tracing small black characters down the thin rice paper. The lieutenant’s final entry—written the night he and two colleagues are given their assignment to scout on Layla, or maybe in the wakeful hours of the morning.

  This evening we received our own assignment. To patrol an island near Rendova. An island they tell us is uninhabited. Ide, Kiyoshi, and myself were all permitted a cup of sake. Later the CO secretly slipped me the rest of the flask to take with us. That night, after I put out the candle I use to write with, I could not sleep. Remembering that my wife, on the night we parted, had washed my back. It weighed on my mind that I had not washed hers.

  At least we are not being sent to Lae.

  When Misako read Jim that, he thought of Helen’s back. Her broad shoulders browned by the sun. He thought of running his soapy hands through her hair, the way her neck curved back against his hands.

  They are camping, high up in the hills above Dalat, in Indochina with Lowe and Delacour. It’s the time Delacour moved out of the little hut into the tent with Lowe to give Helen a proper bed. For a shower, they’ve rigged a barrel on stilts to catch rainwater, fixed a spigot to it. He heats a kettle of water over the campfire to pour over her long mane of hair. The others are away picking up supplies in Saigon. He runs the water along her shoulders, down her spine. Her hair is wet and heavy. The water smells of rain and the burnt embers of the fire. He can feel her shoulder bones beneath her skin. Her bright laugh rings out. Steam rises in the cold air. Soapy water catches in small ­eddies, swirling round, as it runs down the steep hillside.

  When they go, Jim almost faints from the effort of getting up to the house. He’s in constant pain now. The skin of the stump so hot and hard beneath his khaki trouser, it makes him queasy to touch it. A fever too that makes him feel cold and disoriented. He pulls a cigarette from the crumpled pack, determined to conceal his difficulties, his increasing confusion.

  Cadillac’s scuffed brown leather suitcase by the door, is Helen’s small blue suitcase, the one he brought back from the hospital and couldn’t bear to unpack.

  He can’t stop thinking of Helen now, and the war. As if his past, so long pushed back, now threatens to rise up and crash down on him like a giant wave and sweep him under. It’s taken thirty years for him to even begin to look at it. It’s taken this girl, all the way from the goddamn Solomons, to remind him what love felt like.

  “See you in a few days Pappy.” Fergus lays his hand on Jim’s shoulder and takes it away. His boy wary of any further display of affection, in case it elicit scorn. Too late for it to be otherwise. Too late to apologize for being such a goddamn lousy, son-of-a-bitch father. Fergus’s eyes are Helen’s eyes. Fergus’s hair, her hair.

  He’s debating whether to stand, or whether he would collapse, when the girl leans forward and takes both his hands between hers. And he lets her and doesn’t pull back. And now she clasps her hands up along his forearms, as if to fortify him and give him strength. And she’s saying something about Tosca, Tosca telling her Jim’s a good man. And Tosca’s right here, alongside him, crouching down to skin a small bird. And Jim hears the far-off rumble of the reef and he smells the sun beating down, the rough weave of pandanus, their rain-soaked clothes.

  Good-bye Tosca. Good-bye Helen. Fergus lifts the brown blue suitcase into the back of the car. Jim glimpses the skinning set, resting atop the other bags, Tosca’s, Cadillac’s, before the trunk shuts and the car doors slam—one, two. He lifts his hand with the cigarette. Watches them drive off, their hands wave out of the windows.

  He closes his eyes, puts the cigarette between his teeth, and sucks in the good tobacco as if it were oxygen. He listens as a flock of flickers swoop down and settle on the lawn, their communal chattering a busy wick-a, wick-a, wick-a. Gathering for autumn migration.

  They should have left Papa to it the first time. Instead Mary distracted him, sat talking until the time she knew the local doctor would arrive to take Papa’s blood pressure. The great man had been obsessed with that for years. He’d kept charts on his wall, detailing precise measurements, fluctuations in his weight, along with the number of pages he’d written each day. It was the same doctor who helped tackle Papa to the ground, the second time they took him to the Mayo Clinic.

  This isn’t what Jim wants to think of. It’s what he wants to forget most of all. He presses his eyes more tightly, tries to listen to the flickers, to the chicks in the fish hawk nest. How did he ever let it happen to the only person he loved?

  Like Hemingway’s doctors, Helen’s doctors were optimistic. They claimed they were curing her. They subdued her all right. Her bright eyes, dead, drowned Jim with a dull accusation. H
er shoulders slumped. She was overweight, limp, listless. It seemed as if they’d drawn the very marrow from her bones. She dragged rather than walked—like the soldiers in Rendova.

  Her doctors insisted she was improving. Christ, they certainly had an easier time of it after. Helen no longer raving, shouting out, no longer seeing things, or hearing voices that weren’t there. She’d let Jim touch her now, hold her hand, only he wasn’t sure it was her anymore he was holding.

  Subdued—but not broken. Because a week later Helen hung herself in the institutional green-tiled, multicubicle shower room, using strips of towels, which she’d braided to strengthen them. Jim insisted they take him to see the exact place.

  He brings his arms up around his face, burying his eyes in the crook of his elbows. Weeping.

  If only he had looked after her, if he hadn’t gone to war. He thinks that, wonders about it every day now. Why it wasn’t him who died instead of her? Goddamn, it would have been better for the boy.

  Why had he survived? How had he come through it all—the killing, bombing, shelling, strafing, knifing, torpedoes, the boats exploding in the night, the planes falling from the sky—to return to Helen sick in the hospital and, soon after, her suicide?

  He wishes he’d just brought her home and not let them do anything more to her. And just let her be, however that turned out.

  “Knock, knock,” Sarah says, nose pressed up against the screen door. She has a jar of unruly nasturtiums from the garden. A pie for his dinner. “Thought you might need some good food now that the chef’s bailed out.” She calls Fergus, the chef.

  Jim thanks her from behind the book he’s reading, asks her to put the pie on the small stovetop. It’s Sarah’s practical eye he has to guard most vigilantly against. The others will have instructed her to watch out for him, no doubt, until Fergus gets back.

  “Anything else you need?”

  He glances over at the counter. “Another bottle of gin.”

  She laughs. It could be back to the old ways then, if Sarah’s agreeable. His diet of gin, eggs, and hash.

  “Well you take care then.” She’ll be back in the morning with the newspapers and gin, if he’s lucky.

  Fox Island, Penobscot Bay, Maine,

  September 1973

  Jim waits. He waits for a bright day. A warm day when there are no shadows, no presentiment of winter to put him off. A day Sarah’s away.

  He’s thought it through, made plans. Jesus Christ, he’s dying. Waves of dizziness overtake him. At night, dreams hold him with their hard grip. The infection in the stump wreaking its havoc.

  Fergus will have dropped Cadillac in New Haven by now. He’ll be delivering Jim’s article to the museum before heading back to take Jim to the hospital in Rockland. To hell with that. Jim’s not going anywhere. He’s not going to leave this place. There’s just about anywhere he’d rather end up than a hospital.

  Feverish and jittery, he eases a clean cloth down the barrel of the gun and polishes the wood one last time. Allowing himself to be comforted by the task performed since boyhood. Then wheels the chair over the wide floorboards toward the open doors where there will be less of a mess.

  The gun is heavy and solid. There’s purpose in the loading, in the firm catch of the well-oiled breech.

  Just past noon. He inhales the tranquillity of the place now that the others have left. The seductive quiet at the end of the season, with no pleasure yachts or sailing dinghies rushing up and down the Thoroughfare, only the slower chug of lobster boats working the bay. The ferry half empty as it glides past. It’s a quietness most summer folks don’t know. One he’d savor if he wasn’t so sick.

  The sun’s high and it glints all sparkling off the water. He feels its warmth full against his skin, although it doesn’t stop him shivering. He listens to the high chirrups of the fish hawk chicks, soon to be testing their wings. Gulls chivying. The clang of the green gong.

  Out in the cove, the diving frame juts from the placid water, looking foreign and out of place. Like one of the Japanese characters loosened from the rice paper book. He thinks he can read it now. The character says, jump. It says, freedom. It says, I love you.

  Hemingway, the great hunter, loaded two cartridges. Did that show just how far gone he felt? Jim wouldn’t ever want to be that unsure of himself. His own gun’s single-barreled in any case. But Jesus, how do you miss with the gun in your mouth?

  He takes a long swig from the whisky flask to sharpen his mind. Finishes it off. Turns the gun to wedge the butt against the side of the cot. His hands suddenly steady, resolute.

  Now’s the time—before any shadow of afternoon creeps in to under­mine his confidence.

  He’s young again, back on the Mekong with Delacour. Or up in their mountain hut at Phu Kobo. Confounded by the mist that keeps them from hunting, he aches for Helen, wondering why he ever left her. But then, all at once, the mist begins to lift, they head up to the mountains to shoot, and he’s rapturous, happier than he’s ever been.

  He sees his son Fergus, Helen’s boy, teetering at the top of that ­hieroglyph, fifteen feet in the air, then diving down, arms wide, as if he’ll embrace the whole world after all. And Cadillac there to love him. He sees Helen smiling with Lowe’s lemur curled asleep in her lap.

  They came into a cloud forest in the hills above Hue, Le Col des Nuages. Green with tree ferns, epiphytes, and moss. Everything wet, hushed, dreamlike, with glimpses of the emerald sea and coastline snaking far below.

  They trekked up the high peak of Phu Kobo, its slopes covered with orchids, ferns, and ginger. At the top, they came to a tree, devoid of leaves but covered with great red flowers, with hundreds of jeweled sunbirds coming in to feed like bees.

  He hears the whir of fast-beating wings all around him. The gentle brush of ink on rice paper. He feels Helen’s lips barely touch his. The cold of the gun’s metal in his mouth. A quickening of his soul, urging him to leap.

  He brings his foot up along the gun, curls his toe around the trigger. Not yet. Ever the hunter, he holds back, waits just one second longer. Now—just when the iridescent yellow, green, red of the sunbird alights on the red flower of the bombax tree.

  Afterward, Fergus thinks his father had done about everything he could to throw him off. He curses himself for falling for it, for not taking Jim to the doctor immediately when both he and Cadillac had noticed a decline.

  This is what Jim was good at, what he’d trained for. Hiding out. Going to ground.

  Their last evening together, Jim had wheeled himself up to the house and made a noticeable effort to be civil. He’d pressed a thick envelope on Fergus—the article he’d been working on all summer—and asked him to deliver it to the museum. Inside was a chart of Treasure Island so shaky and trembly it makes Fergus ache to think of it. But Jim had seemed pleased and excited to show Fergus his work.

  “Portable No. 3 Corona. Best goddamn present I ever had,” he’d enthused. “Just like Hemingway’s!” It seemed the closest he’d ever come to saying thank you, or I love you for that matter. Should Fergus have caught the allusion to Hemingway?

  The postmortem showed that Jim’s body was rife with blood poisoning and equally lethal levels of alcohol so that the doctors said he might have died from either, if he hadn’t shot himself.

  He’d planned it. You couldn’t dismiss it as a sudden act of rage. He’d waited for the day Sarah went to Rockland, called the island cop to ask him to come round later that afternoon, and scribbled a short note to him apologizing for the goddamn mess.

  When Fergus arrived the day after, rushing from New York, he’d searched for something more. Another letter addressed to him. An explanation. All he found were Jim’s notes for the museum piece. A field book his father was keeping of birds on the Point—great horned owls, a snow goose, eider ducks, loons, red-winged blackbirds, the fish hawks’ nest.

&nb
sp; September 6, the day Jim died—an entry about sunbirds was the only evidence that Jim was suffering from some sort of delirium, because there are no sunbirds in Maine.

  Three weeks later, the morning of Jim’s funeral, Fergus stands in front of the boathouse, which has been closed up and shuttered. He pushes open the door and steps inside. Alone in its slatted shadows, he presses his palm against the weathered pine of the wall and allows himself to imagine Jim’s face determined and hard-set, the intensity of his bloodshot eyes, the fishhook scar down the side of his cheek that made the boy Fergus think of pirates.

  When he called Laina at the museum to tell her of Jim’s death, he could hear her weeping on the end of the line. Fergus had been unable to weep until now. He walks across the room and throws open the big doors over the cove. It’s no use to keep the place closed up, no use to keep anything closed up—better to open it wide.

  Through the doors, he sees Cadillac sitting down at the end of the dock, her knees drawn up to her chest and her arms around them. He walks out of the opened house and down the steep gangway to join her.

  Fergus looks severe and uncomfortable in his black suit and tie. His face is drawn, his eyes red.

  “I am thinking it would have been nice to keep Mr. Jim’s skull in a small shrine down here by the sea,” Cadillac says, as he sits cross-legged down on the dock beside her. “It’s the way we used to keep our ancestors close.”

  He tugs at the tie around his neck to loosen it and when he tucks his hair behind his ear, she notices him pull at his earlobe, the way Jim did.

  “Of course that doesn’t happen anymore,” she assures him. It’s the first time she’s seen him smile since he came to New Haven to pick her up. Apologizing for interrupting her work and promising to get her back in time for Monday classes.

  “I’m not sure what was left of it,” he says bitterly.