The Boat (21 page)

"Dory," he called out. "One of your little friends is here to see you."

Jamie moved closer. The sides of slatted wooden crates were laid end to end over the mud – a makeshift path – and he stepped onto them. He saw the man's hands, shot with swollen veins and spidery capillaries. The waistband of his shorts cutting deep under his beer gut.

"Dory!"

"I'll come back," said Jamie.

The screen door opened and there was Dory, his body blocking almost the whole space, eyes narrowed in the sun. Hair over his eyes. He was wearing trackies and a stained singlet. He rubbed the bristles on his chin and cheek. Then he came partway down the crate-board path.

"You're here," he said. He sounded surprised.

"Offer him a drink," said his uncle. "And get me one while you're at it."

"We're out," said Dory.

His uncle looked up and chortled, his face orange and unevenly tanned like an old copper coin. Then Jamie heard a whoop from inside the hut. He saw movement behind the boarded-up windows where the wood had rotted off.

"The fuck you doing here?" said Dory in a low voice.

Jamie stared dumbly at him. "The fight," he managed to say.

Dory surveyed the entire clearing behind Jamie. "It's off."

"Why?"

A disgusted look came over Dory's adult face. "Why?" He glanced, almost involuntarily, over his shoulder, then came a step closer to Jamie and said, "You dunno what the fuck you're doing, do you?"

Lester appeared at the door. "This fucker," he shouted, his face splitting into a grin.

"Jamie?"

Alison-that was Alison's voice. She emerged from the hut in her school uniform like some sort of proof. Even here – deep down in this plot of filth – her dress was clean. The mud didn't touch her. She looked at Jamie with an expression of dark intensity.

"I thought. .." He tried to make his voice firm. "There's squid now, down the jetty," he said.

She hesitated, then walked toward him, then stopped beside Dory. Her face still amok. Then she put her mouth to Dory's ear and after a moment he laughed, a deep, throttled hack of a laugh.

"See," said Dory's uncle. He lowered the greased rope onto his lap. "Here's what I don't get."

"Alison," Jamie went on. He spoke only to her. But his voice faltered, undercutting what he wanted-what he was trying to say.

"Don't you boys go to school together? Why come all the way out here?"

"Can't hide behind his retard mum here, that's why," said Lester.

Dory gave out another guttural laugh. Then, turning his back, he said, "Just fuck off, Jamie. Okay?"

It wasn't as though he'd planned anything. He hadn't known exactly what to expect. But this – Alison, her shoulders neatly narrowed as though pinned back, spinning Dory around and hissing into his ear, the old man leering on a crab trap in a crater of mud – this wasn't part of it. He stepped up to Dory.

"Okay then," Dory said.

Jamie held up his arms but the first pain came in his stomach – he could feel the air being forced up, spraying out of his mouth. He cradled his stomach and then there was a heavy knock to the side of his head. He sat down. The ground tramped with mud like a goal square.

"Fuck you up!" Lester hooted.

"Right," said Dory's uncle. "Now I get it."

Alison stared at Jamie with a stunned expression. Then slowly, stutteringly, she started laughing too, a thin, uncertain trickle into the air.

Was that enough? The air felt hot in his lungs. He waited for his breath to come back. He stood up. He looked at Dory and realized he'd never looked at another body – not even Alison's – so closely: the hard-knotted chest, the scabbed shoulders. The face a hide stretched over a seat of stone. When it came, he swung at it but his own head whiplashed back.

Seated again. His throat burning. His vision broken into scales. Stay down. Someone's voice – a whisper – he looked over to where Alison had been standing but she was no longer there. On the rock pier that night, under the hot stars-she'd said it into his mouth. She'd been there with him, watching the water wink, moonlight on the surface and then underneath, too, the glow of shucked abalone shells . . .
It's different with you
. He could still hear her laughing, and Lester yelling – he sounded angry, too angry – as though by proxy for Dory. When his sight returned he saw Michael drop his bike and wipe the sand from his eyes.

"That's enough!" His dad-breaking through the sedge into the clearing. Of course, thought Jamie, slogging through the mire of his mind – Michael. Michael had followed him.

"Stay down."

But who was speaking? The voice was too soft.

"You alright, son?"

"Just stay down." Jamie twisted around and realized, with mild surprise, it was Dory muttering to him.

His dad arrived at his side.

The only sound left was Alison's laugh, which, somewhere along the line, had turned inside out, into a sequence of hollow sobs.

"Let's go, son."

He searched his dad's face – he was ready, now, to accept all its familiar reproaches. But the face he saw was different: shaken loose from its usual certainty. Frowning, though without heat, Jamie's dad bent down, picked Jamie up. At his dad's touch a tremor ran all through him.

"Boys, ey?" offered Dory's uncle with a smile.

Jamie's dad looked at him flatly, then turned away. "Come on, Jamie."

Alison was still standing halfway down the crate-board path, next to Lester. Her arms were crossed low over the front of her school dress, over her stomach, as though it were she who'd just been gut-punched. Her sobbing had subsided. Jamie half made to approach her when his dad squeezed his shoulder.

"Son," he said in a low voice. He shook his head.

Alison's mouth, her eyes – now turned toward them – seemed slowly to shape themselves into a leery cast. She rushed up to Dory. "Wait!"

Dory said something back to her.

"What I wanted?" she cried.

Dory turned toward Jamie and his dad. The expression on his face – a mask concealing another mask, and behind that – what? Minutes ago, Jamie would have said there was nothing: a dark gale thrown into a room and trapped. Now, he didn't know.

Dory gripped Alison's forearm but she flung his hand off.

"Rubbish is rubbish," muttered his dad. "Wherever it comes from."

"You're letting him off!" She was tiny next to Dory, furious. "You know. You
know
what he said! What he did!"

Everything became quiet. An ocean wind swept over the swale, heavy with salt, carrying the faint shriek of seagulls.

"I told you," Dory replied. His tone was impersonal. It occurred to Jamie unexpectedly that Dory might be talking to him. He looked and looked at Dory but could no longer induce himself to feel anything.

"Come on," said Jamie.

He reached up to touch his face and the touch came earlier than he'd expected. His face was numb. This was how it felt. His mouth tasted of mud, and blood, and it was smiling.

"Jamie?" murmured his dad.

He felt them all watching him, felt the sun warm on his face. A gold-tinged rope of spit dangled from his lips. Dory squared his body around. His demeanor was slack, drained of intention, like a sprinter's after crossing the finish line.

"I'm still here," said Jamie. "Come on."

It hurt to speak: his jaw felt locked and he was pushing, pushing down on it.

"That's enough, son."

He stepped clear of his dad. "I said I'm still here!"

Dory was stumped, you could tell. It didn't make sense. He took a deep breath and then came at Jamie, his arm outstretched. Something grainy about his face, unfocused. Something sounded like balsa wood breaking and suddenly Jamie's dad was on the ground, lying on his elbow, his face flecked with dirt. Everything froze. Then Dory hit Jamie as well: it felt like pity, and Jamie was down, too, in the midst of the mud and the shattered light. Bursts of color so bright they must speak, surely, for something.

No one talked. Then Dory's blunt, blurred voice: "It was an accident."

Alison's voice started up: "Stupid . . . stupid ..."

Lester: "Shut up, cunt."

"I didn't mean to hit his dad – he jumped in. He just jumped in."

"Jesus," said Dory's uncle.

But what if this was all of it? What if, when you saw things through, this was all that waited for you at the end? He lay on the ground and saw the black line of mud and the yellow lines of sand and sedge and then the bottle-green ocean. How wonderful it would be to be out there on the water. The wind scoured in and stung his eyes until they were wet. He'd watched her paint, once, at the courthouse. It was before dawn and he was half-asleep. Blue and blue-green and then dark blue. A hasty white swath. He watched as she turned the bay into a field of color. Then he looked out and, in his grogginess, saw it all through her eyes – the town, the dunes and flats, the foreshore with its man-made outcrops, the bay, sandbars, reef and deep sea. All of it motionless – slabs of paint, smeared on and scraped off, just so, fixed at a time of day that could never touch down. And here was his father, picking himself up from the black sludge, his face in its old grief. Here was Dory, who, despite everything-his emptiness-seemed uninterested, or incapable, of holding Jamie's hate. Michael, who still could. Alison. Watching from within her immaculate uniform. Only Lester's face brimmed with epiphany – a line had been crossed – and nothing had changed.

His dad got to his feet. He was shorter than Dory but spoke straight up into his face.

"That's enough."

They looked at each other and then Dory looked away. A second later, Alison coughed into her hands and ran inside the shack. Michael waded into the mud and helped pull Jamie up. His face, Jamie realized, bore the same clear, graceful expression Jamie had last seen on their mum's face-his hands on Jamie's wrists surprisingly strong. Again – despite everything – he'd chosen to come. Jamie felt himself falling apart. Now, as Michael hauled him up from the ground, he braced his pain against his brother's strength. His dad held him under the armpits. Now, for the first time, Jamie gave over his weight to them entirely.

His dad tightened his embrace. He said, "You okay?"

Michael, face tracked with mud, went to pick up his bike, steered it around. He wheeled it close by them. Jamie held fast to his dad's shoulder. At the edge of the clearing his dad stopped, turned, as though to kiss him on the head, then said, "You're okay, son." They started the long walk home.

KEEP A STRAIGHT BACK, Mrs. Sasaki says. Wipe the floor with your spirit. The floor is still cold from night and stings my knees. On my left, Tomiko makes her back straight and stretches out her legs behind her, left, right, like the morning exercises. She holds each leg for two breaths, in, out, in, out. I look away from her. I look down and see my face in the shiny wood. It looks half-asleep. The rag hides and then reveals my face, left, right, like a spirit peering through the wood. Father knows many stories about tree spirits. The biggest tree at his Shrine in the city is older than Grandfather – than Grandfather's grandfather, he says. The shadows are large and cool even in summer. But Father says its spirit is young in appearance, maybe as young as me. Camphor, he says, teaching me the name. Father's garden is full of spirits. I like it there. Maybe I am a spirit of the pine boards in the hallway between the entrance and the main room. In this
Temple
up in the hills. I am safe here. Spirit? So foolish, little turnip. This is what Big Sister calls me. Her face is white and filled with the Yamato spirit and I think of it every night before going to sleep. I want to look like her. You don't become a spirit until you die, little turnip. Honorable death before surrender. She says this a lot. The radio says this a lot. Mother says nothing when Big Sister says this, wearing her designated nametag and armband and headband. She looks like a warrior when she comes home from mobilization. Covered in gray dust like she is made from stone. Left, right, on the floor – my knees don't hurt like they did at the beginning but being in this position makes the emptiness of my belly feel even bigger. Do without until victory! After we recite the Imperial Rescript on Education at assembly each morning, Mrs. Sasaki reminds us we are all small citizens. Sometimes, after I dip the rag in the bucket, the wooden floorboards squeak like small dogs.
Hungry
! they yelp.
Hungry
hungry
! My spirit smiles back at me, more open-eyed now. Some of the younger children like making this noise; when three or four of them do it at the same time they giggle. Children, says Mrs. Sasaki. Citizens.

Last night there were no warnings and it was hard to sleep. Behind the paper door where the teachers sleep, the radio did not speak but made the sounds of a sick person breathing. My mat is four mats away from the radio. I sleep in the front corner of the room with all the other girls, next to one of the stone Buddha statues. The boys sleep at the back of the room by the
Temple
doors. If I lie down and look at the ceiling, on my left is Tomiko and on my right is Yukiyo. Tomiko is my friend and Yukiyo is one year older than me but she is nice. She is in the fourth grade. Two days ago, Yukiyo told me her father is a science teacher at the
Prefectural
Technical
School
and chief of the air-raid evacuation team in Yokogawa-cho. She said he was studying in
Tokyo
to be a doctor but went to
China
to fight our reviled enemy after the Manchurian Incident in the sixth year of Showa, period of enlightened peace. Father went to
China
too, I told her. He hurt his legs serving the Emperor with unquestioning loyalty. She nodded in approval. I did not tell her he came back to become a Shinto priest in Zaimoku-cho. Mother says we are at war and that some people do not wish to be reminded of the gods. She tells me to press my hands together for those people.