Under Radar (15 page)

“Is this a joke?” Tom asked, spitting out eggshell and coffee grinds. He tasted something even uglier.

“Do you want to stay a pollywog?” asked Jan. “Answer me. Yes or no? Do you want to be a shellback?”

“Where's Eddie?” Tom worried that they were going to drop him into the ocean. So my punishment
has finally come, he thought, the hanged man did not save me.

“There is no Eddie on this boat. There's only King Neptune and his bride. And I'm not the bride today, my little pollywog. Come here.”

Jan twisted Tom's right ear and forced him to the stern, where Eddie sat on the end of the hull naked, his belly covered in grease from the diesel's oil pan. He wore a gold-foil party crown.

Jan picked up the boat hook and knocked Tom's shoulders with the handle. “Kneel in front of the royal baby.”

Tom crouched down, facing Eddie's filthy stomach.

“He's not dressed right,” said King Neptune. “He can't marry me if he's not dressed right.”

Jan went below and came back with a yellow bra stretched between her hands like a cat's cradle. “Take off your shirt and put this on,” she demanded.

Tom obliged her, seeing no choice.

“Come on,” said Eddie, “join us. Kiss me. Kiss my belly.” He said this in his own soft voice, putting aside King Neptune's bluster.

Tom reflected that his life had carried him to strange places, and now he was on the equator, closer to the sun that he had ever been, with the world of water around him. What did he have to lose?

He pressed his face into Eddie's gut, covering himself with slime, when Jan whacked his shoulders. His body
folded around the pain, and he fell to the deck. Jan hit him again. “Stay down,” she said, while Eddie pulled the storm sail out of its bag and spread more garbage on it. Then they wrapped him like a cigar and made him crawl out of it. Of course this is birth, he thought. I know that much.

And then they threw him into the ocean.

When he came to the surface, caught in a trough between waves, the catamaran was gone.

Tom treaded water, stirring the current and summoning the coldest layer six miles deep. A swell lifted him high enough to see the mast of the
Mimesis
coming towards him. He grabbed the hammock's netting from below, and the boat dragged him through the water. Jan and Eddie watched without comment as Tom swung himself to the hammock's leading edge, resting until he found the energy to pull himself to safety.

When he came back on board, Eddie was clean. Jan gave Tom a little printed card of a sea turtle.

“I don't know what it means,” said Jan. “It's an old sea tradition.”

Tom knew but kept it to himself. The sea turtle, like Tom in prison before release, is self-condemned to lasting sorrow and penal hopelessness, never mind that he owns the ocean.

They never spoke of this again.

So they sailed without crisis for a year, from South Africa to the Indian Ocean. They stopped in lonely Chagos and traded stories with the cruisers who cast off from shore and spend the rest of their lives at sea; they
sailed below Sri Lanka to Malaysia, where a freighter cut across their bow with ten feet clear because the freighter had a bad spirit aboard and offered the ghost another ship to haunt, but Eddie wasn't afraid, “because I don't believe in Malay ghosts.” Eddie taught Tom how to fix a diesel engine, and when they pulled into a harbor and needed cash, they'd find other cruisers with trouble and fewer skills and help them.

...

So a year and a half passed. By and by they stopped in Fiji, where the
Mimesis
dropped anchor in a lagoon on the coast of Taveuni Island, below a colony of bungalows on a low bluff.

Eddie said, “Look at this place. There's two well-fitted dive boats, and a few skiffs for fishing, but no sailboats. We could spend a few months here running sunset cruises and make some money, enough for a year.”

“If they'll have us,” said Jan.

“There's only one way to find out. Tom, you stay on the boat while Jan and I make a useful friend or two.”

An hour later, they returned with Pete and Beryl Poole. From Pete's first “G'day mate,” Tom pegged them for professional Aussies, an exhausting type, forever playing the role of the free man, but he wanted to pave over his wariness with some benevolence; they were innkeepers with years of forced affability, and perhaps after time they'd show Tom some of their despair.

The Pooles were in their forties, and there was something grim about each, thought Tom; he saw, underneath the manic friendliness, a defeated expectation. This would have made them sympathetic, but his caution increased the more he watched them. Pete was handsome and Beryl was pretty, without either being interesting to look at, like career officers stuck in the middle ranks, Tom thought. Their movements were precise and quick. Things happen slowly for a long time, and then everything is new and fast. Who are these people? Why are they here? Something begins with them. What?

“How long have you been here?” asked Tom.

“Okay, the story, quick,” said Pete. “We're from Australia, we came here seventeen years ago and built the club from scratch.”

Beryl explained, “The Taveuni Reef Club.”

“Yeah,” said Pete, drawling the word. “It's a club with no membership dues, but a club all the same. You don't come here unless you know what you're doing. We take expert divers only, there's no instruction, and the best come from around the world. The reef out there has coral fans—”

“That are six feet tall,” said Beryl.

“And when you're down below, you can look up sometimes and see the bellies of a thousand tuna going down the channel. We're like you people, we gave up the rat race, as they call it, and followed our dream, to make money at what we did for fun, and what we did for fun was scuba dive. We have a boy, Alan, he's sixteen, and I
expect you'll meet him soon enough. He's the boy I wanted to be, and I'm the father I wanted to have.” Pete finished this self-congratulation with an astonishing giggle, a tee-hee-hee, just that. This repulsive trill convinced Tom that Pete's story, in its general outline, was true, but about the father's pride in his beautiful son, he knew that Pete was lying.

The couple poked about the boat, declared her “clean enough for the job,” and so the business was set; Pete and Beryl would let them stay here on the island “until we all get sick of each other or until the business fails,” and the
Mimesis
would take resort guests, up to six of them, for late afternoon-sunset cruises. The Pooles would split the receipts fifty-fifty, and feed the
Mimesis
crew four nights a week, drinks half price.

...

That night, Jan told Tom, “I don't trust them.”

“Does Eddie?” asked Tom.

“Not really. Neither do you.”

“No. What prime souls are they?”

“He's a chopped salad of chastised priest and vengeful disinherited firstborn, with some hunter thrown in for the fat.”

“And Mrs. Poole?”

“Beryl is the neglected younger sister of a pasha's second-favorite concubine.”

“You're making that up.”

“I don't know what she is. She's strange. How about that for a category? Strange?”

“That fits all of us.”

“And that's why we're friends.”

“But we don't like her, and if she's strange and she's one of us, then we don't like ourselves.”

“That's what makes us
strange
.” Jan set an emphasis on the word.

Tom thought about Jan's appraisal, and the way that both of the Pooles incited images of displacement, firstborn, second-favorite. What did Jan know about them? What did she know about Tom? Why were the Pooles in Fiji? Their reasons could be no less complicated than Tom's, the past sin, need to escape, nowhere to go. The self is everywhere.

The resort's guests, spending hours underwater, eagerly gave themselves over to the crew of the catamaran. In the late afternoon, a wind came down the channel, and the boat reached its noisy hull speed. With so little draft, Eddie raced above the coral heads.

Jan, wanting to know more about Alan, invited him to sail. He was quiet on the boat, but he jumped to every task. She told Tom, “I don't get him. I don't understand him. But you, Tom, have been studying that boy. You're not ready to say, though, what you suspect.”

She was right. Tom had watched Alan, but nothing yet added up. The boy kept to himself and seemed to have few friends. Tom saw him early most mornings, when he
paddled a blue kayak through the lagoon carring a spear gun. He always returned with fish. And during the day, Alan was always moving, always doing something, hauling gear to the dive boat, carrying furniture in or out of bungalows, varnishing the teak in the main lodge. There were a dozen other white children like Alan on the island, most of them the children of innkeepers, but whatever their society, Alan either wanted no part of them or they, sensing his difference, kept him out of their games and conspiracies. He seemed perpetually on a quest, as though every moment were the crucial test of an initiation ritual. The boy didn't seem to mind his isolation from the gang; or rather, whatever burdened him filled his inner life with more than enough noise to cover the buzz of rejection. Besides, the other children went to school, while Pete and Beryl followed a course of home tutoring. When Tom asked why, Beryl answered, “Are you an expert on education? Are you a father?”

Tom answered, “No.” This was no time to tell her his story, how he had been a father of beautiful children and, by his own agency, had thrown them away.

“Then you don't know. You don't know what schools are like, do you? You don't know what they teach.”

“It's been awhile since I was in school.”

“Right. It has been. We're teaching Alan all he needs to know. And don't interfere. It's our way.”

...

After four weeks, with fresh changes of guests every six or seven days, Tom saw the visitors as the Pooles must have seen them, as on a moving scroll. Tom said to Jan, “This isn't a pleasant life.”

She said, “It could be, but it's not for them.”

One evening after dinner, while Tom and the Dodges played a game of darts in the lodge, an American threw a paperback against the wall, cursing. Pete looked at the book. “Stephen King,
Insomnia
, page five-fifty-four, eh?” Alan was nearby, doing his math homework.

“Yes,” said the American. “How did you know?”

“It's a goddamn crime!” shouted Pete. “I can't stand this anymore!” He grabbed the book.

Tom saw Alan watching his father while pretending to keep his eye on his work.

“Here it is, you were on page five-fifty-four, and then the next five pages are missing.”

“Right,” said the American. “But how did you know? I brought this book with me. It's not your copy.”

“They're all the goddamn same, mate. All the same. It's how they print them. And obviously no one complains, that's what scares me. No one complains! It's the world. It's the whole badly made world. That's why I came here, to get away from the badly made world, but it follows me. It follows me.”

The American looked at his book. “It was printed this way? A few pages didn't just fall out?”

“That's what I thought the first time. That's right. I thought, It's the glue. But it's not the glue. I've taken these books apart, it ain't the glue. It's the printing. Alan, how many is that?”

Alan looked up. “I dunno. Fifty?”

“Try seventy-five.”

The American didn't understand, exactly, and Pete explained. “They're printing them badly. Missing pages. Some books are worse than others. It's mostly the popular writers, your Stephen Kings, your Elmore Leonards, your Patricia Cornwells. They can't print 'em fast enough, and they get greedy and sloppy.”

The American put a hand on Pete's arm. “It's just a book. I'll get another.”

“Sorry for the temper,” said Pete. “Let me buy you a drink.”

On the sunset cruise the next day, Tom asked Alan what was really happening with the books.

“Why are you asking me?”

“I saw you looking at your father yesterday. While he was yelling, you were happy. I hadn't seen you smile until then.”

“Why are you watching me?”

“Tell me about the books.”

“They're badly printed.”

“You've seen seventy-five books with missing pages? I haven't.”

“You don't read the right books.”

“I saw something in your eyes when your father was
talking. Contempt and satisfaction. That's a brutal combination in a sixteen-year-old boy.”

“He told you his story, did he?”

“Yes.”

“Leave Australia, follow your dream, make money doing what you'd do for fun? That story?”

“Yes.”

“And you think it's a good story.”

“It might be. I couldn't tell.”

“I can't help you.”

...

A few nights later, Tom sat on the
Mimesis
deck, looking at the stars, when he heard Alan on the beach, talking to a British nurse who had been on the
Mimesis
the day before. She was in her late thirties and, unusual for the Reef Club, alone. The men had circled her from the moment she arrived, because she was independent and easy to look at, but she kept them at a distance, eating with the group but returning early to her bungalow. And perhaps the men hated her for not letting one of them into her bed.

Their voices weren't clear, but the two of them, the boy and the woman, frightened Tom, and he was curious about what his fear would uncover. He slipped down the swim ladder and swam to the beach to get a better view. He hoped his movements would be lost in ripples. He crawled onto the sand and listened from behind a tree.

“Oh, God, it must be neat to live out here,” said the nurse. “Really neat. Swiss Family Robinson, my my my, how delicious, now pure. I'm probably the first person to say so.”