We arouse each other, and I get it. This is how you escape here, you don’t swim or drink or lie in the sun. You just do this. As advertised. As appropriate. And why not? All the rest of the world has its why nots, its don’ts, its best ways to make the world blank out, the four-letter word work, work, work—somewhere it must be something else, this.
Good, says Harry when I tell him this, even though it is plain he knows it, has not struggled against the cliché-in-your-face. I hold him and escape, but I do not forget that surely one of his women waits not far away. Then he pools coconut oil in my navel and spreads it with his whole body, and I do forget.
I do not want a child with no bones is what I tell him. No bones, no bones. I don’t say disease or even unwanted the way the rest of the world does. He drops rocks into his condoms so they will sink in the lagoon and play anemone with the sea squirts. He fishes out the rest of his packets from his snakebite kit and gives them all to me — I am the only one here who can have this fear. We lie together, hands on each other.
The bushes shake.
I sit up fast, I lean into the dark.
Harry presses his face against his screen, and the rustling stops. He stands up, a bear in moonlight. Who’s that?
Whoever’s outside doesn’t answer, but the rustling picks up. We both look into what light stripes the beach, the edge of the bush where Harry likes to hang his wash.
Between the dark angles of Harry’s newly cut-off suit pants, between his now faintly gray white shirt and a dangling of suspenders, stands no jealous woman hefting her machete. Instead Ngarima’s son and his two friends drag their boat down to the beach. It’s what they work on at night instead of girls, I whisper to Harry. He laughs and strokes my back around to my nipple and kisses me.
We stop and watch them launch the boat with curses and squeals. They shove and they pull, and the boat sits so low in the water I’m sure that when they scramble in it will fill and sink. But they heave over a coil of rope and then something else, and then they fit themselves in, the three of them, and hoist a sail. Then they paddle to the edge of the lagoon, paddle hard, singing softly while they shoot forward in rhythm, then they wait at the reef’s mouth, then they shoot through the reef and disappear.
Hey, says Harry, my clothes are gone.
His suspenders still dangle, but the rest of the bush is bare.
Harry looks all around his shack, but there’s nothing else. All I have left are the legs from the cutoffs, he says.
I’m more woebegone. Harry, I say. You know what just happened?
All my clothes were stolen, he says.
These kids aren’t coming back, I say. They’re gone, they’re out of here, they’ve escaped.
We stare at the reef, its foam sealing their exit. Where are the right stars? that boy asked me a couple of times, says Harry. I didn’t know.
How long do you think it took them to make that boat? I ask. How long would it take? I ask.
A year, maybe, Harry whispers.
~ ~ ~
The dark is all that’s left then. We do what we can in all that dark and disappointment, then we dream. But what I dream is no dream: flying fish did rise over our ship, and a woman did catch one over the lifeboat I slept in, she did slice it open and offer me its still thrashing body, and I did look down at its entrails shining and sinking in the moonlight and say, Yes, please. And the raw fish tasted milky the way men do.
It is too easy: the quaking body, the salty air. I am uneasy. I thrash and wake up with tears on my face. I don’t wake Harry when I have enough light to go. Instead I look for my thongs.
I’m at Barclay’s doorstep when I find them. Thongs have a life of their own here, someone is always taking them, so they show up before you do. Is this someone reporting my night out with Harry? I am still working my feet into the thongs when the first long wail catches me. It’s not a pig this time, this time it is a woman. A woman wails. There’s no other sound like it, it’s female. And there, at the flowered door pulled back, stands Ngarima, wailing. For what? My one night’s absence? Nothing I could do could produce that sound from someone. That sound frightens me. I don’t move, I don’t move or go forward.
Breasts for Three stands beside Ngarima now, and she wails as well. She is holding the moldy comic book that Ngarima’s son kept hidden in a basket in the cookhouse and a broken thong that he’d repaired with tape. Then another woman crowds the doorway behind them. Her wail joins theirs, their three bodies go taut with the grief of wailing.
I stand there. It’s not about me.
Barclay comes around the back of the house. He is rigid, walking forward, holding Temu by the neck, pushing Temu and his windmilling arms around me and the women and into the house without a word to any of us. Barclay is crying.
I sit in the shade in front of Barclay’s place. All day people bring candy wrappers, bits of twine, a tiny toy, a stone, whatever Ngarima’s son touched or liked, a sprouted coconut with Styrofoam insides that Ngarima eats on the porch, salts with her tears. Once a woman comes who wails louder than Ngarima, carrying a yowling cat. She is the mother of one of the other boys I saw with Ngarima’s son, and it is his cat she carries, that claws at her arm. The mother of the third boy arrives, bringing only a pair of the boy’s shorts.
Boys do this, Breasts for Three tells me when she has no breath left. Boys get restless, they build a boat, and then they must use it. How to stop them? Then they get lost. They don’t know how to go — we don’t know anymore ourselves. Sometimes later someone will see them in Singapore or Cairns, but they will not be boys then, they will be the ghosts of boys having gone so far in these boats. But never mind — most boys die.
At sea? I don’t say.
I also don’t say I saw him, I could have stopped him. I say, Maybe they are only trying the boat out.
Breasts for Three says they chose to launch the boat at Harry’s because there no one would see them. We see nothing, she says. I have to agree, I have to nod and look away. She says everyone else knew what the boys were doing, but no one can keep a boy even if he has no money for a fare. Boys like leaving. No one else wants to leave, this is our home — paradise. Only if someone needs medicine do they leave.
It is dark when I decide to slip inside and gather whatever of my things Temu hasn’t gutted or strewn, and I shove all of it under my bag of rice. Barclay holds the boy’s arms back by the elbows when I lift my curtain to go back out. Barclay holds him, but Temu struggles to free himself. He wants to what? Take his grief out on me? Does he have grief? Or does he want to beat me for just being there?
I will go sleep on the beach. Sleeping on the beach is what you’re supposed to do on a perfect island like this anyway, I don’t know why I haven’t done it sooner. Temu certainly wanted me out, even if he does sleep elsewhere, even if Ngarima says I must sleep in his room. Anyway, if the beach is hot, so are the beds. I shake the hands of each of the chief mourners slumped in wailing stupor on the porch, and I touch many of the hands of all the others who have come, who weep too, even the men, whose weeping frightens me, who wail men-wails and beat on the coral and each other, then I go to pick out a stretch of beach that will do for the night, and damn the roving rapists, the dying half lives.
Mosquitoes graze in every depression, they come out of the bush as another sharp, cutting part of the bush, a part that flies. Where two palms grow close, where the wind presses these palms flat the way it is always blowing, where the wind picks up sand in sheets and stings so no mosquito stays, a place not far from where the car parts rust in their coral colors, not far from where a boat might come if it came, I hollow out a place anyway and line it with my flowered cloth. I don’t dig too deep, not to China, not to whatever’s left of a jelly baby. Then I lie down to test my hollow for later, pull palm fronds and scrap leaves over me, and I fall asleep, my sleep with Harry having been slight.