Death of a Whaler (13 page)

‘Yeah,' says Flinch. Thinking,
Well there's the
bleeding obvious.
Wondering what is coming next.

‘Lucky bastard,' says Drew.

Flinch walks slower than usual back towards the commune. He hopes Drew will go on ahead, so that he might sneak back to the ute unnoticed, hide in the back while he decides what to do. But Drew just circles him, talks loudly and constantly, walking backwards occasionally so he can address him face to face. When Flinch pauses, Drew takes the opportunity to act out the scenario he is describing. Wild hand gestures, rubbery facial expressions. Flinch finds him amusing and laughs despite himself.

‘Enjoying yourself?' she asks without smiling.

‘Hey Karma, this dude is, like, stuck here.' Drew nods when he talks, as if everything he says has to be reaffirmed.

‘He must be,' she says.

‘Hi again,' says Flinch. Tries on a sheepish grin.

‘We're having a singing circle tonight.' She looks at Drew when she speaks. ‘Starts at sunset.'

‘Cool, man,' says Drew. ‘Dude, can you sing?'

‘Um. No. Not really,' says Flinch.

‘Hey, cool, neither can I.' Drew bursts into raucous laughter, more snorting.

Karma walks away.

Flinch knows he can't sing. Even when he's drunk. Even when Nate insisted that together they were melodious. Lying under blankets in the dinghy while it drizzled down upon them. Drunk as vicars, Nate had declared. Ten straight minutes pounding on the door of the pastel house before Flinch had awoken, a couch cushion over his ear. Nate strangling a bottle of rum in each hand and two long-necked bottles of beer under his armpits.

‘We're on early shift tomorrow,' Flinch had said.

‘We'll manage.'

‘Mate, I dunno.'

That sly grin, the raised eyebrow. Nate had already had a few.

‘Come on, captain. Live a little.'

And later, both of them singing an unstructured melody that consisted of the choruses from a jumble of songs.

Oh Danny Boy

The pipes, the pipes are calling.

O whim o whey o whim o whey

The lion sleeps tonight.

In the jungle, the mighty jungle

The lion sleeps tonight.

Oh Danny Boy, oh Danny Boy

I love you so …

The goats roused from where they napped near the house, moving off down the hillside and into the thick silence of the scrub.

Flinch remembers waking in the morning with dawn. Wincing into light stark as ice. A pain between his brows that he felt would crack him right open. Nate sprawled across the plank seat in the dinghy snoring and immovable. And he remembers the singing. Joyful, ardent and painful even to his own ears.

Flinch spends the remainder of the afternoon in Drew's tent. It is one of the tents shaped like a pod. Drew has sewn camouflage army fatigues on the inside, over the entire sheeting.

‘Welcome to the jungle,' he says as they crawl inside, and laughs.

The sleeve of a jacket that has been sewn to the roof has come loose and hangs like a limp arm, brushes the nape of Flinch's neck as he crawls underneath it and sends shivers up his spine.

Drew flicks on a torch that hangs by string from the wall of the tent. The inside of the dome is cluttered. Blankets, mismatched clothing, tins and tins of Spam, jars full of odds and ends, thread and needles. A woman's tiny beaded slippers. Drew takes a safety pin from a jar and pins the loose sleeve back onto its jacket. Over the place the wearer's heart would be. Flinch notices the other sleeve is pinned out from the jacket, bent at the elbow as if saluting.

‘Insulation,' Drew says. ‘Courtesy of the United States Armed Forces.'

Drew sleeps on a bundle of clothes.

‘This is comfort, dude,' he says, taking a sock from the bundle and stroking it like it was a pet. ‘You should have seen how we slept in 'Nam. If we got to sleep, that is.'

He laughs again, and Flinch laughs along to be polite, but still doesn't understand the joke.

Drew swings the torch as he talks, absentminded, like a habit, lighting up different objects at random. One jar full of bullet cases. Another full of what looks like blonde human hair. Pinned along one side of the dome, hanging evenly and reflecting the light when it catches them, seven army dog tags.

From one of the containers, Drew takes a pinch of weed, deftly rolls a joint and hands it to Flinch, then lights one for himself. Flinch lies back on a clump of clothes that smells like a mixture of other people's sweat and smoke.

‘It's a funny place, this corner of the world,' says Drew, and sighs.

‘Yeah,' says Flinch. Coughs. The drug is strong. It goes straight to his head and he feels the tent start to spin slowly, taking his body with it.

‘Hey man, what's the worst thing you've ever done?' Drew says it as casually as he might if he were asking Flinch his favourite colour.

‘What?'

‘C'mon dude.'

Flinch registers panic, subdued by the drug but rising steadily. He feels like prey lured unaware into a trap. Drew holds the torch under his chin, lighting up his face, demonising his features. The drug is making Flinch feel untouchable, as if he is floating in a bubble. Safe and far enough away from the world to confess.

‘I killed my friend.'He's never said it like that. Out loud. Not since the police reports. Though the local constable, first on the scene, had quickly convinced him not to say ‘killed' or ‘murdered', and had even crossed out ‘manslaughter' as a cause of death. The report was filed under ‘Accidental deaths'. Everyone had agreed in whispers loud enough for Flinch to overhear that he had a tough enough life already.

‘Whoa! Really? Like in a murder? Was it over money?'

‘No,' says Flinch. ‘It was an accident.'

‘Heavy.'

‘Yeah.'

‘What did you say to his mom?'

‘I never knew his parents. He never mentioned them.'

‘I have to say a few things to various moms when I get back to the States one day. Guys I had hardly known before they were shot to pieces begged me. Here,' he says, emptying another container full of shredded bits of paper. ‘Here's where everyone's moms live, and what they wanted me to say to them.'

Flinch picks up a scrap of paper.

The writing on it is scrawled, almost indecipherable.

Jerry Simons
, it says.
Mayville, Chautauqua, NY
.

Love you mom and just want you to be proud and
don't be sad for me because no more pain where I am now.

He picks up another one.

Another name and address. But an almost identical message.

A third (
David Dougherty, Fort McPherson, GA
) reads:
It's in the back of my closet, tap for the loose board
and you'll find it.

But when he unfolds a fourth it reveals the same sentiment as the first two. A message to a mother.

He wonders if Nate wanted to say these things to his mother as he lay dying. Things that appear to be universally what young men say on their deathbeds when their lives are cut short. Flinch has always worried that Nate's family never received the priest's letter. He thinks perhaps that he should find the family, to tell them what became of their son. Makes up his mind then to do that. He will return to the pastel house tomorrow and prepare for a journey. He'll endeavour to make things right, in some small way.

Drew takes a long drag on his joint, breathes out very slowly. His eyes watering.

‘Well then, what does yours look like?' he asks, between exhalations.

He sidles closer to Flinch and leans near enough to hear a secret. His breath rich and rank with stale smoke. Strings of pasty white spittle form when he opens his mouth to speak. Up close, the thing behind his eyes that Flinch thought might be the drugs looks more like a long-standing panic, something that may have fused there permanently.

‘I don't know what you mean,' says Flinch. He looks around the tent, tries to shuffle away, but the dome is small and doesn't allow for much movement.

‘Yes, you knowwhat I mean.'Drewraises his voice.

Flinch clears his throat. ‘Are you okay?' he asks.

Drew snorts loudly and starts chuckling. Tears leaking down his face leave glistening streaks.

‘I'll tell you,' he says, in the tone of a conspirator. Suddenly serious. ‘I'll tell you what mine looks like. It has horns. Big as a bull. It's black, but it has red eyes. And — get this. It hunts me, man. I can feel it all the time. Stalking me.'

‘Do you want some water or something?' says Flinch.

Drew appears not to hear him. ‘I think it's like a jungle spirit, or something. At least that's where it started hunting me. The fucker followed me right down to the swamps, all the way to the Mekong Delta. I saw it once right behind our boat, just its horns, poking out of the water. And the water, dude, it was
boiling
. All around it. That's how I knew where it was.'

Flinch nods but doesn't look at him. The stench of his breath when he exhales his words almost overwhelming.

‘Everyone who killed someone got something like that following them around. Not everyone admits it but I can see they do. That's just what mine looks like. Nasty fucker.'

He seems almost nostalgic now. Shuts his eyes. Almost in slow motion, he tips sideways and collapses onto Flinch's shoulder. Flinch leans over and pushes him gently away and he falls backwards onto his pile of clothes and lies still.

‘War,' he says. It comes out as a small sigh, like a whimper. His eyes stay shut.

He falls into a sleep that seems to Flinch like a coma. Flinch curls up in a corner too, wraps a mottled sweater that reeks of Old Spice and mothballs around his head to block out the sound of Drew's snoring.

Just before sunset, they wake. Drew stretches, yawns, takes a container from the pocket of one of the jackets that is sewn to the canvas. He removes a small capsule and puts it in his mouth.

‘And here's one I prepared earlier.' Grins as he swallows.

When they crawl out of the tent, Flinch is surprised to find it is still light on the outside, even though it is dusk.

Flinch can't sit cross-legged. It's his knees. They ache. Too many times folded into the crow's nest on winter days. Snap-frozen and salted like a fillet of cod. He ends up leaning forward and clinging to his knees like a monkey in a barrel. They come up to his armpits and he can't get them to the ground.

‘You know, if you practised a bit of yoga, you'd manage it,' says Karma, standing over him.

He winces. Says nothing.

‘I'm glad you stayed,' she says, sitting next to him. ‘See. It was meant to be.'

Flinch starts to tell her a thing or two about Milly but she shrugs her shoulders.

‘Either way,' she says, and looks away.

The singing ceremony turns out to be not so much singing as chanting. After a while Flinch's buttocks start to numb. His right foot buzzes with pins and needles. He is hungry, too. Darkness outside and he figures it is well past six pm. He fidgets and bumps Drew, who is sitting next to him, but Drew doesn't seem to notice. His eyes are glazed and his pupils have expanded almost to the size of his irises, like a cat meditating on prey. On the other side of him, Karma hums under her breath, sounding like a bee trapped in a jar. Flinch tries to rub his aching foot without being conspicuous. Just as he leans back to rearrange himself, he notices someone else stand up on the opposite side of the tent. Recognises the shadow that falls long and dark in front of the lantern. Jed.

‘What's he doing here?' Flinch says out loud.

Karma opens her eyes and stops humming.

‘I thought he'd left.' Flinch says it in a whisper but it comes out like a hiss.

Karma shrugs. ‘It's a free world, Flinch,' she says. But Flinch watches and sees that she doesn't shut her eyes until Jed walks out of the tent.