Bird Skinner (9780802193636) Page 2

  Never you mind the mud. You could open all the doors and windows. You could sit in the sun. You could smell the whole island warming, thawing. Rotten seaweed, fermented leaves, wet grass. Listen to the sound of melt dripping off the eaves of the house and trickling down to the sea. He cleaned up. Leaning forward in the chair, he swept all the cans and papers into big black bags for Sarah to take to the dump in the middle of the island.

  He watched migrants and then the summer birds flock in. Male red-winged blackbirds arriving first like military heralds with their red and yellow epaulets, then yellow goldfinches, and sparrows: the seedeaters. Followed by the insect-eating bluebirds, phoebes, swallows, and warblers. The female blackbirds, the thrushes, and orange orioles. A smell of lilacs drifted in the kitchen door.

  By May, Jim could walk outside, far enough to spread seeds and dried bread on the bird table. He needed both crutches at first, and placed them carefully so as not to slip and make a further ass of himself, though there was only Sarah to see. Then set himself to mastering one. The ground grew firm enough for him to wheel the chair around the house, and later Stillman came and laid a small path of crushed shell so he could wheel right down to the shore. He started to work, tapping out a long-postponed article he’d planned for the museum’s Natural History Magazine.

  Jesus Christ, he likes this place. He’d let himself be comforted by it, by all the sounds and the familiar smells from childhood—if it weren’t for this goddamn girl about to arrive.

  “Who’s coming ov’ah?” Stillman asks, walking around the back of his pickup truck. It’s the first time Jim’s asked to go to town but, by nature undemonstrative, Stillman doesn’t register any outward surprise.

  “Hell if I know,” Jim replies. He hoists himself into the cab, pulling up on the open door. Stillman knows better than to offer help. “You can leave the chair. I’ll not get out of the truck,” Jim says.

  It was Stillman who brought the letter two weeks before. So that, damn it, Jim barely had a chance to reply. He remembers the envelope. It was festooned with big colorful stamps, like a missive in a bottle encrusted with barnacles and limpets.

  “By God with that shoal of stamps, you can’t tell where it’s from,” Stillman observed.

  Jim nodded, though he could tell right away. He could identify each of the birds on the stamps: the Solomon Islands white cockatoo, the ultramarine kingfisher, Sanford’s sea eagle. Jesus Christ, Finsch’s pygmy parrot—a bird he’d collected. Official seals marked the letter’s route from Honiara, via Port Moresby and Brisbane, to Washington, D.C. Forwarded to Jim from Greenwich by his brother Cecil.

  Inside—a letter written on State Department paper with an embossed eagle and signed by a consular agent, whatever that is, with the singular name Sethie Bloom. We know you will be pleased to host Ms. Baketi (like hell he will!) who will be arriving (today!) for a month before her medical training begins . . . (a goddamn month!) allowing her time to get accustomed to life in the United States.

  Jim doesn’t see how anyone would get accustomed to anything staying here with him.

  What the hell’s he to do with a medical student from the Solomon Islands? He’s too old, too drunk to host anyone. Besides he’s a cripple. Jesus Christ, he should have wired straight back, just as soon as the letter arrived. No. Stop. Won’t have her. Stop. He still doesn’t think he ever said yes.

  There was something else in the envelope. He’d held it up and two folded sheets of newsprint fell out, one showing a photo of a girl with a big circle of hair, a full head taller than the white, bespectacled teacher standing next to her.

  New Georgian Girl Headed to New York.

  Top Student at King George VI, Student of Fiji School of Medicine, Wins First-Ever Medical Scholarship to the United States.

  It made front-page news in the official British Solomon Islands Protectorate Newsletter and merited a two-page write-up in what looked like a more popular, local rag called Tok Tok. Competing there with stories on plans to celebrate Fijian Independence Day, a feature on kastom magic, a photo of a local crocodile hunter.

  “Jesus Christ,” Jim swears aloud. He spits out a loose piece of tobacco.

  Stillman watches Jim lift his foot over a hammer, a coil of rope, a wood clamp, all of which lie strewn across the floor of the cab, and wishes he’d thought to clean them out. Turning down the wooded road to town, he glances over at Jim, who stares grimly forward, chewing on the end of an unlit cigarette.

  Jim looks fragile—even more so away from the cove. His shirt is clean and pressed, thanks to Sarah, who sends his clothes over to the mainland to be laundered each week. But still he manages to look disheveled, stick-thin, his eyes bloodshot. The scar down his cheek, where some other boy, Stillman remembers, had caught him with a fishhook. His leg missing. Old man.

  In fact, they’re practically the same age. They’d played together when they were youngsters. Jim had the grand family, the big summerhouse. He had the cigar-smoking grandfather, captain of a schooner with teak decks and shiny brass fittings that seemed to take up half the Thoroughfare. But Stillman lived close to the reed beds, which were their favored hunting grounds. He got to help his pa haul lobsters. Best of all, he got to stay on the island when Jim left—something he knew all the summer boys envied. During the war, he’d considered himself luckier too when he was sent to France while Jim, he heard, went to the Pacific.

  Circumstance has separated them. Even so, Stillman feels the un­spoken camaraderie of boyhood—of squelching through the bulrushes, hot mud oozing between their toes, the wide-brimmed summer hat his mother tied tight under his chin. They’d searched for frogs and birds’ nests, crabs and June bugs, garden snakes, and the small globular jellyfish that floated in the millpond. Jim had always a purposeful intensity about him, insisting they memorize scientific names, then teaching himself to skin. While Stillman was content enough to catch critters, then let them go.

  The sight of Jim sitting rigid and uncomfortable in his truck makes Stillman feel protective and wary of the fresh-faced groups of summer folks assembling in the small lot before the ferry dock. As he pulls in, he finds himself suffering from what he considers a long-outgrown adolescent resentment of these men with their 200-horsepower engines, their money and spare time; these women with their pretty legs. Then feels put out by Jim’s family for letting the old man stay on his own, shunting their responsibilities onto Sarah and himself.

  These thoughts surprise Stillman. He lives on his own too, and likes it that way. Besides, aren’t these folks Jim’s own?

  To hell with it. They’ve all had their trials, their suffering, their luck. Islander or summer person, lobsterman or investment banker: he’d done with such distinctions long ago. His wife Esther died twenty years ago, after her long battle with cancer. He’d had a son too, who drowned. There’s no reason he should feel sorry for Jim. Though Stillman does have Sarah down the road, which is a comfort, no matter how much he grumbles at her.

  He parks, mindful to give Jim a clear view, so he’ll be able to see the ferry come in without getting out of the truck.

  “Boat’s not in for ten minutes,” he says, thinking he’ll check in with Floyd at the boatyard, see if he’s managed to repair an engine part Stillman left some days ago. “I’ll be back once she’s in.”

  Jim grins—a specter-like smile, twirling the unlit cigarette between his fingers. And Stillman feels a twinge of guilt and self-reproach, the kind he used to feel years ago dropping Sarah off at the island school.

  It’s a pity Jim’s wife Helen isn’t still around. She was playful and gay with no airs, so that she’d remember your name no matter who you were, even if she’d only met you once. Tall and regal with that lion-like mane of hair. The opposite of Jim, who’s really an islander at heart—ornery like the rest of them.

  Jim keeps a photo of Helen on his bedside table. Stillman saw it when be br
ought up wood for the fire, and noticed that the frame was turned to the wall. Well, it was no wonder if the old man couldn’t bear to look at her; she was a beauty. He remembers Helen throwing her arms around Jim. Theirs was an outward, visible love, a thing Stillman’s found to be surprisingly rare. His own and Esther’s love had been more fraught, private, strained by her long illness.

  People wave. Excited children wheel round the parking lot on bicycles, climb onto the bollards at the end of the pier, and hang out over the water.

  Jim kicks the cab door open, letting the sun flood in, then fumbles in his breast pocket for a lighter. The small flame dances uncontrollably in front of his face. He can’t say whether these shakes in his hands are due to nerves, old age, last night’s drinking, or all three. Drawing in the smoke, he searches for some focus. Feels his fingers tremble against his lips.

  The ferry blasts a horn as it enters the Thoroughfare, then rounds the red nun to avoid Post Man’s Ledge. Tall and white, it dwarfs the yachts, the fleet of Herreshoffs and sailing dinghies moored closer in, then sets the lobster boats tossing at their moorings. Near the bow, a clutch of passengers gather at the rail. He sees the tall black girl among them, and looks away. Not ready, but will he ever be?

  As he eases himself down from the cab with the crutch, a small girl in a sundress stops to stare openmouthed at his missing leg. He glares back until the girl’s mother pulls her away. Jesus Christ, he looks as out of place here as she will. The sea churns a frothy white as the ferry’s engines are thrown into reverse. The pier groans. Two eiders paddle furiously out of the way. A tern slips past.

  Vehicles off before foot passengers. Jim’s grateful for the extra minutes as each car drives off, making a distracting kachunk kachunk over the metal ramp. Volvo station wagons, a few Subarus, Fords, their roofs piled high with suitcases, cool boxes, duffel bags, bicycles racked on the back, reminding Jim of a stream of refugees fleeing some ­catastrophe—the Okies of the Depression. Hot, steamy children hang their heads and arms out of windows. In the midst of them, a long flatbed truck carries timber. The ferry rises in the water as it disembarks. He breathes in hot tarmac, sea salt, fish, gasoline, carbon monoxide exhaust. Listens to the gulls.

  She’s tall, broad-shouldered, athletic-looking—like Tosca—even in her brightly colored dress with big flowers. Her hair tightly curled in a big wreath around her head like the Afro style popular in New York some years back. She’s pitch black. This has given the other passengers something to ponder no doubt. It shouldn’t surprise Jim, except that it does. Jesus, he can’t be blamed, he’s seen hardly anyone these past months, let alone a Negro. He corrects himself, not a Negro—a Melanesian from the South Pacific.

  And someone must have told her to look out for a cripple because she walks straight to him. She has the same penetrating hooded eyes, the same slightly hooked nose as her father. Here she is, introducing herself in perfect English, which makes Jim wonder if she’s been practicing.

  “Are you Mr. Jim? I am Cadillac.”

  Christ, so that really is her name, not some sort of typo or misprint in the consular agent’s letter. Tosca, his own name bestowed by an ­opera-loving copra trader, begets Cadillac. Named for what—the car, a pop song, a yearning for American largesse? A chance?

  She puts out a hand to him and Jim recoils, a movement he instantly regrets but can’t help. He doesn’t like to be touched. To cover his rudeness, he drops his cigarette. Then forces himself to shake her hand.

  She carries little. A small leather suitcase with buckles that looks as though it might have been lent to her by a missionary. A rolled-up mat, woven with pandanus leaf, the kind Solomon Islanders use for just about everything: shelter, sleeping mats, raincoats, wedding gifts. Good—the less she has, the easier it will be to send her back.

  “Welcome,” Jim says, nodding curtly. He’d help her with the bag, but she can see what shape he’s in.

  “Mr. Jim, he stop close up ’long sea, no ’long bush,” Tosca had said, trying to explain where Jim lives, to reassure his daughter, and not just about the geography. The saltwater people of the Solomon Islands traditionally considered themselves superior to their brothers in the bush, smarter, cleaner and fiercer too—heirs of the headhunters. Though this sort of prejudice was discouraged by her teachers. It could cause fighting, even in her school.

  Standing on the wide porch of Jim’s house, Cadillac looks down across the cove and sees her father was right. The sea just there, almost the same distance as from the thatched platform of her mother’s place at Enogai down to the water of the Kula Gulf.

  She breathes in a great lungful of sea air—happy to be outdoors again, to have arrived after days cooped up in airplanes. New York had been crowded, with its too-tall buildings, reminding her of stacked cages of chickens! All vertical, with no horizon of sea or sky to orient herself, it made her dizzy looking up. There were so many people, she felt she couldn’t move properly.

  Here, standing on Jim’s porch, she feels a childish urge to strip off her clothes, to run down to the water and jump in. She’d do it too, if Ms. Sethie, the consular agent, hadn’t warned her emphatically about the water temperature.

  Fox Island, Eagle, Burnt Island, Penobscot Bay: Tosca had remembered the names of Jim’s sea after all these years. He’d traced a chart in the dirt with his toe. A few of the islands were large and mountainous like New Georgia, he’d said. Others were small wisps of places like the islands of the Wanawana. The Thoroughfare, he’d explained, was like a passage through the reefs. As if everything here would be similar or at least familiar, which she can see it’s not. The blue of Jim’s sea is a dark indigo and the shallows brown-green, rather than the brighter blues of New Georgia. The trees are pointy, needled, and sweet-smelling. The rocks along the coast, smooth, broad, and pink. And grass!

  She remembers peering at grass through the wire fence at the Honiara Golf Club. Its lawns planted along the flat ground the Americans had used as a second airstrip. It was from here their fighter planes took off to shoot down the great Japanese Admiral Yamamoto, the same man who planned the bombing of Pearl Harbor, Tosca had explained, and soon after, the invasion of Guadalcanal.

  She remembers the large red-faced Brits and Australian golfers in their hats and shirts, white socks pulled up to chubby pink knees. It’s how she’d imagined Jim maybe. Not him. Thin, gaunt, he looks more like the bare-chested old Guadalcanal men who carry the heavy bags of clubs, the sinewy salvage collectors who pick up scrap metal from the war.

  She turns to say something, then thinks better of it. “Mr. Jim, him nambawan man,” her father had said, “alsem brother bilong me.” She’s happy to believe it, to look to Jim as a kindly and respected uncle. She’d grown up with war stories, tales of Merika soldia, in which Jim featured largely.

  Behind her, he holds open the screen door as if he’s not sure whether to come out or go back in. A crutch pinned under one arm, he squints into the sun.

  Well, what had she expected—a handsome young marine in uniform still carrying his gun or radio? A mud-streaked GI from the war movies shown at Point Cruz? The cinema itself an old Quonset hut left over from the war, where sudden downpours of rain would erupt on the roof loud as machine-gun fire.

  She can’t remember her father ever describing Jim as young. Tosca had always spoken of him as an older man and teacher.

  Looking at his sharp eyes, his tousled hair, one shoulder hunched over the crutch, the scar down his cheek, she can’t help thinking of a mean dog, one of the lame strays you come across in the market at Honiara. One you need to step carefully around. She notices that he’s taken off his shoe, how he ties the leg of his khaki trousers in a knot under his thigh.

  Kicking off her own sandals, she walks down the porch steps, feeling the dry grain of wood against her feet. Then the grass all short, cool, and tickly between her toes.

  She looks up to the sea, laughs
, and swings her arms. A girlish joy that reminds Jim suddenly of Helen. Grunting, he swivels round on the crutch and turns back inside. Surely, by now, he’s allowed a drink.

  The Laysan rail, Porzanula palmeri

  The small, sandy-colored, flightless bird, with green spindly legs and feet and sharp red eyes—not more than six inches from wing tip to wing tip—was nearly fearless. If you stood still, it would saunter right up to your boot and give the lace a determined tug, in case it might be something good to eat: a worm perhaps or some sort of grub.

  Jim had seen the rails at Midway, the tiny atoll smack in the middle of the Pacific, defended from the Japanese in what was later seen as the most important naval battle of the Pacific war. The turning point at sea, just as Guadalcanal was the place the Americans pushed back the Japanese on land. At sunset, the birds would break out in a reedy chorus, the sound of which one naturalist had compared to a handful of marbles being tossed on a roof.

  He remembers how if you put out a pail of water, the bird would jump in to bathe—reliant as it was on puddles and pools of rainwater. H. C. Palmer, a collector for Rothschild, who first discovered the bird in 1891, wrote of placing a dip net on the ground for the rail to walk right into. It was that inquisitive. Porzanula palmeri: the species was named for him. Bird collectors, as well as the occasional frigate bird, were the rails’ only predators, which went a way to explaining why they were so fearless.

  P. palmeri had certain human characteristics. Brave to the point of foolishness, suddenly terrified beyond reason. If you made a noise or quick movement, it would tear off at full speed, raising its wings to leap over small rocks and pebbles, like a girl lifting her skirts. You couldn’t help smiling at this, whether you’d been there at Midway, or seen ships sunk in the Coral Sea, or if you were fresh like Jim, still anxious to find out just how you’d hold up. It’s what they all worried about—how they’d hold up.