“Do you remember,” said Bouman, interrupting the moment of peace, “how I once told you that if I had enough of this”—Bouman raised his glass—“that I would show you my fingers?”
“Yes, yes I do. I remember that.”
Bouman got up and went to the far corner of the room, where the hammock was slung from the beams. Bouman ducked under it and began to rifle through some belongings that cluttered the top of a crude set of shelves. He lit a candle and long shadows began to dance across the wall, animated by each breeze that shivered the flame. Tan could see from the man’s clumsiness that he had had a lot to drink. Karen watched her grandfather for a moment, her face softening, but then growing blank. She stood up and took the baby from the sling. She rocked it softly, then offered the baby to Tan. Tan was chilled. He did not want to hold the child; he shuddered, then realized he had never been in a position to be so cruel.
“I can see you love your baby,” said Tan, finally relenting, extending his arms, and taking the child who, from his estimate, was about four months old. Karen smiled slightly, but her eyes were filling with tears. She snatched the baby back and began desperately cooing at it, even though the baby seemed peaceful and content.
Tan stood up. He had had enough for one evening. His blood pressure, he thought, must be soaring because he was dizzy and heavy pounding had begun in his ears. He was also a bit short of breath. He looked over at Karen. To his surprise, she too seemed to have difficulty breathing. Her lips were pulling at the corners and Tan saw that she had no teeth.
“Here they are,” said Bouman with satisfaction. “Sit down, Tan. It will all be over soon.”
Tan sat down. Bouman was holding a yellowed linen handkerchief. He unfolded this ceremoniously until the two shriveled, leathery fingers were revealed. The nails were brown with age and the fingers had curled, which made them look alive. Bouman set them down on the table.
“To what do I owe this honor?” asked Tan. He was feeling sweaty and weak. Something must have been off in the soup because his intestines were seizing up and he felt suddenly cold.
“This honor? I would like to be buried whole.”
“Why?” asked Tan unsympathetically. “Are you dying?”
“We are all dying,” answered Bouman. His voice sounded distant and muffled.
“Age,” said Tan, “has made you philosophical.”
Bouman laughed. “No, no. We are all dying. I have poisoned us by putting arsenic in the soup.”
The next morning Aya crept into the compound. She had heard the Japanese were finally vanquished and was worried about the old Dutchman, who was an idiot and a drunk, but not evil. She also missed soap and cigarettes, which at this juncture she preferred to betel. Most compellingly, she wanted to know if Karen, who was a daughter to her, had survived the war. Many nights she had stayed awake with her heart pounding, vibrating down to her very wrists, remembering the soldiers dragging Karen by her hair as she struggled to get her feet beneath her. She remembered Bouman’s strong arms holding her back, whispering, “Aya, they will kill her if we protest. Let them go. It will not be long before we are liberated.”
Aya stood in the burnt square of what had been the house. Versteegh’s dwelling was gone too. There was a cigarette half smoked, carelessly tossed into the ruins. She picked this up, smoothed it straight, then stuck it behind her ear for later. Bouman was still alive, still smoking, still wasting tobacco. There was a prahu anchored close by and on it she could just make out the outline of men moving about. Why would a boat be moored so close without Bouman in attention? Perhaps the Nationalists had taken over.
“Bouman!” she called. “Bouman, sir, where are you?”
In response, Aya heard the caterwauling of an infant. Aya’s blood froze. The sound was coming from the manager’s hut. She was not one to be overwhelmed by superstition, but her first thought was that a spirit was tricking her, using the most compelling sound known to woman to draw her into the hut. Who knows what evil awaited her there?
“Bouman, sir!” she called again. “Bouman!”
A canoe had set off from the prahu angling for shore. Aya watched the rise and dip of paddles, the sun glinting off black hair and sweating arms, the sun brightening the surface of the water in bladelike light and purple depressions. She felt the heat beginning slowly in the day, rising up through the earth. Aya found a match in her pocket that she had managed to secure before coming to the house. The baby was still crying. She lit the half cigarette. When it was burned clear to her fingers, she would make the short walk to the manager’s hut. She would boldly greet whatever evil awaited her. She was an old woman and tough. Was there something stronger than she? What secrets and horrors were there that these old bones did not remember, recorded in the very stuff, ringed in the marrow and shell as years are told in the trunks of trees?
Colossus
THERE ON THE GUTTER the icicle hung down like an incisor. The afternoon sun shot through it, then flung the shattered light over the back wall of the porch. A steady drip muted by dead leaves on the step kept time with Jim’s heart. And this taptap reminded him of something that he had once heard, but could not remember. The tide was low and despite the chill the odor of brackish rot was clear from the bay, while from the opposite side of the island, Jim could hear the waves exploding on the beach. At this near point, where Plum Island was two hundred feet wide, the honking of geese mingled with the low warning of foghorns. The dripping water punctuated the day’s waning with its steady beat. On the mainland, the trees rose up like a purple wall, muted and unreal. Here, on this long sliver of barrier island, the land was squeezed tightly between a brilliant Atlantic sunrise and the bayside dip of a cool, evening sun.
The icicle was wasting into water.
What was that sound that he could not place? Was it the IV when Peggy spent that last week in the hospital, before they sent her home to die? He remembered the clear vein of fluid wasting itself into her arm, but the music of Peggy’s illness was her harsh breathing and a beeping noise from some ineffective machine. No. Further back. Maybe when he was a boy. Maybe in his mother’s kitchen. His mother’s legs were traced over with veins and there were splinters in the kitchen floor. She was at the sink accompanied by a rush of water, something useful to complement her industry. He remembered his brother Paul’s sniffling. Did Paul’s life drip from him? Did his passing have a sound other than startling silence? No. Jim had seen life spill, pour silently into the earth. Blood left nothing but a stain — the heart left a knot of stilled muscle. Could the drip of the icicle be just that? A useless process of reduction? Jim thought of himself as having no more blood. He was as desiccated as the gulls killed on the causeway, which, within a week, were nothing but an oblong of leather with a few clinging feathers and a pair of blackened claws.
In the kitchen the radio halted between the football game and the storm, which had been brewing in the Great Lakes for days and was now heading east to Massachusetts. One town in Ohio had been annihilated by the storm’s progression, but Jim had never heard of the town before and he couldn’t remember the name. He understood the announcer’s elevated voice and the force of the deafening wind, the sudden intrusion of static, but it was hard to feel the loss of something that Jim had never known was there. The air was consciously still and Jim watched a woman, parka pulled over her head, dragging an old black dog down the street. The dog’s chain collar jangled as he bounced along. They disappeared where the elbow of the road curved left and soon Jim heard a door slam.