Nam Le - The Boat

"Dad wants us," Michael said first. He didn't look up from his Game Boy.

"I'm gonna head down the jetty." He hesitated, watching Michael's thumbs wagging on the gray console. "You can come if you like."

"They're fighting."

"So?"

"I just told you, they're lighting." His voice was too deep for a ten-year-old.

Jamie stopped himself laughing. "Mum okay?" He peered up the slope. The house was barely visible from the road, blotted out by foliage: ironwoods, kurrajongs, ghost gums bursting up through the brush. The garden was wild. As he started up the driveway, everything described itself as though to Alison: overhanging branches, knee-high grass, yellowed in places by warped, gutted objects — miscarriages of his mum's interest. Sprockets of leaves. Green everywhere plaited with brightly colored spikelets and bracts. There was his bedroom, the shedlike bungalow. Once his mum's studio, it still gave off an aftersmell of turpentine — faint as something leaked by a body in the dark and dried by morning. And there, a stone's throw away at the top of the driveway, was their double-storied house: a worn weatherboard that seemed choked by bushes and creepers, by the old white veranda that buckled all around it. What would she make of it?

He went round back and into the workshop. The lamps — they must have made it ten degrees hotter indoors. His dad was bent over a long, slightly curved piece of wood, one end wrapped in tape like a boxer's fist.

"I'm almost done," his dad said. His shirt clung wetly all the way down his back, right down to the apron string. "Figured it out. Front struts were too heavy, that's why it wouldn't rock." Using vise-grip pliers, he clamped down on the taped end with his left hand. With his right he started planing the length of the wood. The top half of the chair — the seat and back — lay tipped forward on the table before him.

"I'm going down the jetty," said Jamie.

"Storm's coming."

"Yeah?"

"Day or two. I need you to bring in your mum's stuff first."

"Okay."

"Make sure you look everywhere. Her stuff's everywhere."

"Okay."

"Hang on," his dad said. He put down his tools and turned around. His face and neck — except for two white trapezoids behind his goggles — were plastered in sawdust. It cracked around his mouth when he smiled. "You should've heard them cheering this morning," he said. "For your brother."

Jamie was confused, then heard Michael's voice: "What'd they say?" His brother stepped around him into the workshop.

Their father aimed a roughhouse swat at Michael's hair, then wiped his own brow with the back of his gloves, leaving a wavy orange smear. "Sounds like we missed a big game. But we'll make it next week." He nodded at Michael, the smile still tight and dry on his face. Was he taking the piss? "Biggest game of all, right?"

"We're gonna get slaughtered," said Michael.

"Shut up," said Jamie.

Michael shied away, out of his reach. "Everyone says so."

"Boys."

"Okay," said Jamie. "I'll move the stuff to the shed." He kicked some dust at Michael. "Come on."

"Hang on." His dad took off his gloves, then his safety goggles. Sawdust swirled in the lamplight. "I need you boys to do something for me," he said. "For your mum."

He went to the sink. Using the heel of his palm, he pushed open the tap, then washed his hands under the water violently, absorbedly, the old habit of a fisherman scrubbing off a day's stink. He threw water on his face.

"I got an offer on the house," he said.

Neither of them said anything.

"It wouldn't be till January. But they need our go-ahead by Friday." After a moment, he reached behind himself and untied his apron, looped it over his head. "We talked about this." He glanced at Jamie, "I know you got that dock job these holidays. Shouldn't clash, though."

Michael said, "I don't wanna move."

Jamie corked him just beneath the shoulder. He felt his knuckle meet bone: that one would bruise.

"Don't," said Michael.

"Don't be such a little dickhead then."

Their dad frowned at them, blinking water, rust-colored, out of his eyes. Michael massaged his arm and muttered, "That was a good one."

"But Mum wants to stay here," said Jamie. He was thinking about Alison.

"Last month," said his dad, "when me and your mum went to Maroomba." He inhaled noisily, the sawdust jiggling on air currents in front of his face. "We talked about this," he repeated. "Everything's in Maroomba. All the facilities. Your mum — right now — she needs to be there."

"What's that mean, 'right now'?"

His dad sighed. "Come on, Jamie."

Earlier that year he'd seen his mum naked, slouched back, knees spread, in the bathtub and his dad kneeling over her, holding a sponge. The water was foamless and he saw everything — most of her body the color of the water except for two large dark nipples, her pubic hair. Dark spots wrinkling under the liquid skin. That time, her eyes were closed.

"I need you boys to talk to her. Tell her you don't mind. Moving, I mean."

"She doesn't want to, but."

"Not if you boys keep acting like this. Like you don't want to either." He ran his hands through his hair, orange sweating down his forehead.

Her body a ghostly rippling film of her body. Ever since the diagnosis she'd been separating, bit by bit, from her own body. His dad hadn't even fully turned around from the tub. Come on, Jamie — he'd said that then too.

"What'd the doctors say?" Jamie asked at last. He remembered, before they'd left for Maroomba a few weeks ago, his mum's familiar protests — she was okay, she didn't need to go, not this time.

"Jesus — what's so bloody complicated about it, son?" His dad was blinking hard now, as if to bully his eyes into some new clarity. "You can't just do what I tell you?"

Michael, still caressing his arm, didn't look up.

His dad went to the sink and washed his face again. A stool beside him was stacked high with creased linen and he used a corner of the top sheet to towel off. His face in his hands, he said, "You know what she's like.

"Sorry," said Jamie. His voice sounded too loud. "I'll talk to her."

After a few moments, his dad nodded. "So you going down the jetty."

"Probably the flats first."

"Sandworm?"

"Yeah."

"We need to let the buyers know by Friday."

"I know."

By then — Friday — the sheets would be washed, hanging from lines that zigzagged across the backyard. They'd fill with light and puff themselves up like curtains. She'd be upstairs, on her reclining couch, looking the other way. Out toward the water. "You know what she's like," his dad repeated.

***

HE'D FALLEN OFF THE JETTY ONCE. He was with a group of mates, chucking rocks at the moored boats. Longest throw won, loser was a poofter. His turn: one moment he was doing a run-up and the next he was dead — what death must be like — a thrown switch, a fizzling of the senses, the sound sucked out of things. Your eyes a dark cold green hurt.

He'd come into his mum's studio and offered her his head.

"This is what I mean," she said in her clear voice. His dad was by the window, leaning heavily with crossed arms over the top of an easel, a sandwich in one hand. Underneath him a canvas was set and stretched and primed — this was years ago, when she would work on several paintings at the same time.

"I better go, Maggie, I'm late. What happened?"

Jamie looked up. His dad's forearms seemed as dense as the wood they rested on, scored with scabs, sun lesions. He stuffed the last of the sandwich into his mouth and came closer.

"You okay, son?"

His mum poured Dettol on the wound, rubbed it in with her sleeve. The thin, toxic fluid leaked down Jamie's face and into his mouth. In his spit, still, the gagging memory of seawater.