Nam Le - The Boat

"You been fishing."

"Yeah. With Cale."

His dad's face momentarily betrayed his distaste. Then he frowned. "I been thinking. We should do that again. Michael too. Would you boys like that?"

Jamie nodded. He saw, now, how the conversation would spin itself out.

"We could take the two-stroke."

When he was little, he used to run down ahead and start the outboard motor. Turn the water over, pump out the bilge. Good boy. Now, his dad looked dead ahead whenever they drove past the wharf, its silent throng of boats.

"And your mum, she'd probably like us out of her hair."

"Yeah."

"We'll have someone come over." You couldn't think of after, you only thought of now, and come to think of it, you didn't do that either — you were left with pools of memory, each stranded from the next by time pulling forward like a tide. The two of you , his mum had told him once, you thought you were so smart — sneaking out on your secret fishing trips. You'd both come home reeking of diesel . Her first relapse had come a matter of weeks after that trip to the rock pier. The seagull. No more time for fishing. After that, Jamie sensed a difference — a dilution — in how his dad treated them; though with Jamie, and to a lesser extent Michael, his attention turned offhand, buffered by wary disappointment. With their mum his behavior took the form of an impeccable courtesy. He moved her studio into the house. He quit his boat, started full-time woodworking. He laundered her sheets. Now, when you looked at him, five years on, and tried to see him without her, there was almost nothing left. What he'd given her, Jamie understood-what he was giving her still-he knew he'd never get back.

***

CALE CAME OVER THE NEXT DAY.

"Tammie told me to tell you," he said. He closed the bungalow door behind him.

"What?"

"Lester said Dory'll meet you after training on Monday."

" Meet me?"

Cale shrugged. "She told me to tell you."

Jamie stood up. It was Saturday: he had two days left. He guided himself, as though measuring distances, all around the small room. He made himself breathe. "I'm fucked," he said.

Cale didn't meet his gaze. "The final's next weekend," he said.

"So?"

"You know," he groped for the right words. "He might. ." He trailed off.

"What about Wilhelm?"

Cale looked at a complete loss.

"And that Chinese chick," Jamie said. "What about her?"

No charges had ever been laid. No evidence, or the evidence was inconclusive. Some Maroomba authority came down and said so. What no one said was that Dory and his uncle — a notorious flag-waver — had taken recerttly to assaulting Asians in that part of the bay. The town turning a blind eye. This body, belonging, as it did, to a faceless, nameless poacher, was just another case of no one's business. More than anything, what Jamie remembered was Lester's reenactment: the sheer joy of his punches — their appalling regularity.

The conversation faltered. Cale grim-faced. Jamie felt a sudden longing to talk to him, tell him everything — he was three years older, after all, had seen that much more of the world- then all at once he wanted Cale to leave him alone. They stayed quiet for a while.

"She said they weren't even together."

"Yeah," Cale replied instantly. "Tammie said that too."

Jamie hesitated, then said, "What should I do?"

"You're fast. Use your speed."

"What?"

"Throw sand in his eyes. Then get him in the balls when his hands are up."

Jamie stopped, shook his head. The conversation was unreal. "Fuck off. I'm serious."

Cale considered him, his face rough with the effort of understanding.

"I'll do a runner," said Jamie. "Like you. Travel around."

Cale put his hands in his pockets glumly. "Nah," he said. "I don't farkin know." He sat down on Jamie's bed. "You want some mull?"

"Jesus."

Cale puffed out his cheeks, sucked them back in, then said, in a low, hurried breath, "That's why I ran away. My old man used to beat up on me." He brought out his hands, rubbing his knuckles. "And I kept telling myself. That every time he hit me, he was telling me he loved me that much — that much."

Jamie tensed. It clouded him, hearing this.

"Shit, man."

Cale closed his hands into fists. Then, doubtfully, he banged them together. The mattress bounced up and down. "Fark. That's bullshit. He never did. I don't even know why I said that."

Jamie watched on, confounded, as Cale fingered the beads on his necklace. He lumbered over to the window. "Look," Cale said, facing away from him, "I've never been any of those places either."

"What?"

"But my ex did give me this." He added quickly, "She's alive. In Cairns. Shithole of a place. She's a horoscopist or horticulturist or something."

"You're fucking hilarious."

"Easy, big man."

He straightened up and came over to Jamie and nudged his shoulder, the gesture itself ambiguous — neither playful nor solemn. "It'll be over soon, man."

Jamie pushed past, suddenly flooded with an intense rage toward his friend.

"You fucking stink of fish," he said.

Cale chuckled mournfully. "You kidding? This whole town stinks offish."

***

SUNDAY AFTERNOON. All day he'd kept to himself — morning he'd spent behind the bungalow, in a lean-to built against the back wall. Hidden from the house's view. He'd sat there holed up and boxed in by his mum's old painting supplies — oil bottles, brushes, wood panels crammed into milk crates — listening to traffic along the coastal road, chatter lifting from the beaches: the stirrings of tourist summer. He'd stewed under the aluminium sheeting. The fight was tomorrow. The thought almost too much to contain, his mind recoiling between that and the thought of Alison, each contorting — neither providing respite from — the other. When the midday humidity got too much he went back inside and lay down.

Someone knocked.

"Storm's coming," said Michael through the door.

"Where's it coming from?"

"Umm, from the west. I mean, the east."

Jamie opened the door and Michael slouched in.

"Does Mum know?"

He shrugged.

"Let's go get her."

The house was empty. The reclining couch in front of the window unoccupied. "Probably at the bluff," Michael said.

"Is her wheelchair here?"

His brother checked the closet.

"Nope." A stirring on his features: "I'm gonna go look for them."

Alone, Jamie lowered himself onto the couch. The striped blanket crumpled at his feet. He nestled into the indentation of her body — so shallow — and imagined he could feel her residual warmth.

He looked out of the open window. So this was what it was like. He looked through the green foliage, over the ocean, and felt around him the heat massing in the air, the current of coolness running through it, taking form in the thunderheads. He saw the black energy becoming creatured from a hundred kays away, roaring toward shore, feeding on itself. On the headland, trees bending to absorb the weight of the forward wind.

"It's coming in," a loud voice said.

Startled, he turned to take in the room. No one. Then he sat up, craned his head out of the window. A raindrop as large as a marble plopped on his bare neck.

"Yes." That was his mum's voice. "Thank you, Bob," she said. "It's lovely."

Silence, then his dad's voice: "It's a good chair."

They sounded scrappy, as though coming through radio static. Jamie realized they hadn't made it to the bluff; they were nearer to the house — probably on the shaded veranda below — and the wind was reconstituting the sound of their voices, carrying it to him.

Now their conversation was unintelligible. Then his mum said, "Darling," just as half the sky darkened. "It's coming in," she said again.