Nam Le - The Boat

And Alison. How would he have any chance with her otherwise? He stepped on solid-looking ground and sank to his knees.

The bile rose up in him. Roundabout here was where they'd found the poacher's body. Half stuck, half floating in the marshy suck. No-nothing was worth that. And in that moment he realized, deep as any realization went, that that wasn't what he was afraid of at all. He had to see it through.

He came to the shack in the middle of a muddy clearing. A man sat out front on a steel trap doing ropework. He was surrounded by other traps and old nets, dried and sun-stiffened in the shapes of their failure. It must have been Dory's uncle. He didn't look up.

"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.