The Navigator Read online

  Thorkild sat a long moment, sunk in a brooding silence, then abruptly he heaved himself to his feet.

  ‘One more question James.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Why should you care at all, either way?’

  ‘Because,’ said James Neal Anderson, ‘I believe you’re a sounder scholar than the others; and a bigger man than you’ve shown yourself so far.’

  ‘Do you mind if I think it over?’

  ‘Not at all. So long as you let me know before the end of June.’

  ‘Thanks James.’

  ‘For nothing. Would you like a dram for the road?’

  ‘Better not,’ said Gunnar Thorkild ruefully. ‘One more driving offence and I lose my licence.’

  He walked away, a shambling puzzled giant, his blond head brushing the plumeria tree, his shoulders flecked with yellow blossoms, leaving James Neal Anderson to finish his drink alone, in the scented garden under a ragged dying moon…

  For all the disorder of his personal appearance, and the occasional uncouthness of his manners, Gunnar Thorkild’s apartment on South Beretania was spartan in its simplicity and order. He had taken an old clapboard house and divided it into two separate areas, one containing a kitchen and huge living area, the other a study and sleeping quarters. The first was open to all comers, students, friends, lovers casual or constant. The second was reserved to himself alone, an open space lined with books and box-files in which the only furnishings were a bed, a chair and a desk meticulously ordered. Here no one intruded but old Molly Kaapu who lived two doors away and came in daily to clean and cook for him. The windows were shuttered, the ceiling and the floor were sound-proofed so that he could work with no other sound than the low hum of the air-conditioner. It was his boast, but a truth as well, that he never came here drunk or in heat, and that if he slept with his boots on or a woman beside him, he slept downstairs in the living-room. Even there, however, the same order prevailed. His visitors could lounge where they wished, sing, shout or dance – but if they fouled the place with spilt liquor or scattered ash or neglected the courtesies of cleaning before they left, they were never asked again. ‘I’ve lived on ships,’ he would explain in gentler moments. ‘If you didn’t keep your bunk tidy and your cabin clear, it became unlivable in a week.’

  Molly Kaapu was devoted to him, because he talked the old language and made her laugh till her sides ached with his scandalous tales. When he was sick of his own or others’ company he would call her over, and they would sit for an hour gossiping over a glass of tea, and then she would roll up her sleeves and massage the muscles of his back and neck before he went upstairs to his books and his students’ themes. She was the only one who knew and used his native name, Kaloni, the only one to whom he cared to tell the tales of his wandering years in the islands. When he came home from Anderson’s house, she was waiting for him, clucking and frowning:

  ‘Ah-Ah. I know it. Something bad? Take off your shirt Kaloni. Let Molly give you lomi-lomi. Then you tell me, eh?’

  As she kneaded and pounded at the tense, balled muscles, he told her, fumbling sometimes for the words to compass the alien thoughts of the haole in the language of a simpler, older people. To Molly it was all a madness. The haole complicated everything. If a thing was, it was. Why did they have to prove it? The old ones knew. They sailed the oceans by the stars and the shape of the clouds and the flight of birds. They didn’t write things down, they remembered and told them or sang them. Why worry about the haole at all? Why not go back to his mother’s people?

  Why not, indeed – except that he could never go, all of him in one piece; because he was split in two and split again by knowing and again by dreaming and wishing, until there was no self at all but only scraps and fragments blown like dead leaves in the tradewinds. Old Molly understood that too, but she still believed she could put him together again; kneading him like dough in her big hands, crooning old songs out of a forgotten time.

  When he slept at last, she drew the covers over him, switched off the light and left him. When she reached her own house, she found her daughter, Dulcie, drowsing by the television. She handed her the keys to Thorkild’s house and admonished her gently:

  ‘Kaloni has a black cloud on him tonight. Go to him, girl. Make him forget what the haole have done to him. Make him remember that he is still a man.’

  When the girl slid into bed, naked beside him, Gunnar Thorkild stirred and smiled and drew her to him, murmuring a single sleepy word, Ka’u – ‘O breast that comforts me.’

  However he came by it – and it was not in his nature to ask – there was a piety in him, a sense of dependence and of duty. He did not feel it a burden, he accepted it as simply as he accepted the ministrations of Old Molly and her daughter and the casual friendships of bar and waterfront.

  On the last Sunday of each month, punctually at eleven he drove up to the door of the Jesuit Centre on East Moana to collect what they had agreed to call the corpus delicti, being the body of Michael Aloysius Flanagan S.J., one-time mentor of Gunnar Thorkild, one-time Roman Catholic Chaplain of the Faculty of Oceanic Studies, and now a wasting marmoset in a wheelchair with a pair of useless legs and a perennial taste for intrigue and the lower roads to salvation. The body once stowed, they drove down to the old Moana hotel, to sit under the banyan tree and drink planter’s punch and eat grilled mahi-mahi and set the world to rights, or on its ear, no matter which.

  For Michael Aloysius Flanagan, sixty-five years old, twenty years in the Islands, five in a wheelchair, creation was a bloody mess and God a puzzled architect trying to make the best of a botched job. For Gunnar Thorkild, Flanagan S.J. was the man who came nearest to the father he had never known, the man who had boxed his ears and wiped his snotty nose and stood between him and the bullies, and taught him the beauties of logic and the concordance of even the most contradictory notions. Flanagan had long since come to a confused conclusion; that you couldn’t save the world, you could only love it. So, being a celibate in a barren cause, he had centred the last of his loving on Gunnar Thorkild. Which love, he averred, gave him a certain large freedom of speech, which he used without restraint.

  ‘Gunnar Thorkild, you’re a bloody idiot!’

  ‘I am, Father.’

  ‘At a critical time in your career you’ve exposed yourself naked to the ungodly.’

  ‘I have, and I know it.’

  ‘And what did they do?’

  ‘Just what you might expect.’

  ‘So there you stand, bitched, buggered and bewildered, and what do you expect me to do about it?’

  ‘Nothing. I was just talking. Drink your liquor and let’s order another.’

  ‘Hold your tongue, boy, and let me talk. James Neal Anderson is a good man and he had you to rights – for all that he’s a Methodist with no joy in him at all. So now what are you going to do?’

  ‘I wear it or take a job slicing pineapples for the Dole Company.’

  ‘You could put your money where your big mouth is and go out and prove what you wrote. How much money have you got, by the way?’

  ‘Ten thousand dollars, clear in the bank.’

  ‘It’s more than you deserve and a hell of a lot less than you need.’

  ‘How would you know what I need?’

  ‘Because I do my homework – which you had to be driven to do Gunnar Thorkild. If I were you – and thank God I’m not, because you’ve got a load of grief coming to you! – I’d buy me an old island trader, I’d refit it and stock it and crew it, and I’d put some guests on board to pay the bills and be witnesses to my exploits, I’d pick up my old grandfather, and sail away, and I wouldn’t come back until I’d found my island.’

  ‘And if you did find it?’

  ‘I’d look at it; and if I found it good I’d scuttle the ship and stay there! The world’s gone mad, boy! Bombs in the streets and terror in the sky, and politics a gibbering bedlam! So, I’d stay there!’

  ‘Two more drinks,’ said Gunnar Thorkild to the
hovering waiter. ‘And hold the fish. I’ll tell you when we’re ready.’

  ‘I am not about to get drunk,’ said Michael Aloysius Flanagan. ‘I am about to instruct you in the black art of patronage.’

  ‘You know what old Samuel Johnson said about patrons, Father.’

  ‘Sam Johnson was a pompous old ass and a protestant to boot! Any shave-tail novice in the Jesuits could run rings around him. Now hear me, and hear me well. You need a ship. For a ship you need money and on these sweet islands there are people with money running out of their backsides…’

  ‘And not a dollar of it rolls my way!’

  ‘No reason why it should. You get an adequate salary and enough leisure to enjoy it. Nobody owes you a dime.’ ‘So why raise the question?’

  ‘Because my boy, if you put your imagination to work, you could find yourself a sponsor for any sort of madness – from pole-sitting to the conversion of the penguins. Now hold your tongue; because I am about to make a sermon about money and the people who make it…’

  …From which sermon and much scribbling on paper napkins, it emerged that Michael Aloysius Flanagan S.J. had several friends, any one of whom might, for certain commercial advantages like world-wide publication rights and television rights and film rights, be prepared to sponsor a new voyage of discovery in the South Seas. If Gunnar Thorkild had an ounce of faith left, which at three o’clock on this bibulous Sunday he obviously had not, he would begin a novena to the Blessed Virgin and leave the rest of it to his old friend Flanagan who had a lot of time on his hands, and a list of donors he hadn’t tapped for at least five years.

  It was a generous thought and the old man was as elated as if he had the money in his pocket. Gunnar Thorkild was a mite more sceptical. In his day Flanagan S.J. had raised millions. He had built two churches, an orphanage and a house of studies; but in the autumn of his days he still had to wait for Gunnar Thorkild to take him out to dinner.

  When he had delivered the old man safe to the Jesuit house, and settled him to doze in the garden, Thorkild drove out to Sunset Beach where the young bloods went to ride the big surf that came rolling in from the North Pacific. He was too old for the game now, a first-class candidate for a broken back or a split skull; but he loved to watch it, understanding it as a ritual thing, like bull-leaping or swinging from tree-tops by an ankle thong, with big risks and no rewards but the rhythm of the act itself, the explosive orgasm of accomplishment, and the afterglow of acclaim from the initiates.

  There was a sullen majesty in the great waves, fetched all the way from the Kuriles and the Aleutians, curling slowly, folding in upon themselves and toppling in a ruin of foam at the surf-line. There was a heart-stopping beauty in the sight of a man-figure, balanced on a spear-blade of wood, riding down the slope with a wall of water collapsing behind him. There was terror when he was tossed like a fleck of foam high in the air, with his board flying an inch from his brain-box, and then buried in a welter of foam and shingles. Girls and boys, they looked like sea-gods out of some ancient fable, happy and proud and yet somehow cruel, because they were so private and so heedless.

  A girl, in a shapeless muu-muu, with the colours almost bleached out of it, trudged down the beach and flopped on the sand beside Thorkild. Her blonde hair was a tangled mess, her childish face puffy, her lips cracked with sun and wind-burn.

  ‘Hi prof!’

  ‘Hi Jenny. Long time no see!’

  ‘Uh-uh.’

  ‘I missed you this semester. Where’ve you been hiding?’

  ‘Around.’

  ‘Dropped out?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Where are you living?’

  ‘Around.’

  ‘Eating?’

  ‘Enough for two – or hadn’t you noticed?’ She moulded the muu-muu round her swollen belly. ‘Pretty eh? Five months of it.’

  ‘Do I know the father?’

  ‘You used to. Billy-Jo Spaulding. He split as soon as he found out. Big Daddy shot him off to New York. He sent me a thousand dollars and the address of a doctor who would do a nice clean job.’

  ‘But you didn’t want that?’

  ‘I wanted to have Billy-Jo’s baby. I still do. Crazy, huh?’

  ‘Not by me. Who pays the rent now?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Oh, you know…My father still thinks I’m attending courses. He sends me the money for that. I do things, run errands, baby-sit…Gopher Jenny that’s me.’

  ‘Have you got a habit?’

  ‘Can’t afford one…Grass sometimes.’

  ‘I could get you a job and a room.’

  ‘Gee…I dunno. What sort of job?’

  ‘Let’s go look. No likee, no takee. What do you say?’

  ‘You’re sweet Prof, but…’

  ‘You could use a dinner, couldn’t you?’

  ‘Two, even.’

  ‘Let’s go.’

  He hauled her to her feet and they walked slowly back to the car, hand in hand. Before they were half-way there, he was sure he had made a mistake. He had never been attracted to her, as he had to other girls in his classes. She had always been a lumpish one, laconic, vague, irritating but somehow pathetic in her compliance with anyone who paid her the simplest attentions. As a student she had been an eager, but indifferent performer, one of those for whom learning, like life, was always a jigsaw with pieces missing. He asked her:

  ‘Have you told your parents about the baby?’

  ‘Hell no! They’ve got their own troubles. Mother’s just divorced my father and he’s married his secretary who’s going to have a baby by him. It’s too complicated.’

  ‘I guess it is.’

  ‘Where are we going, Prof?’

  ‘To see a friend of mine. We’ll stop at a supermarket on the way and pick up some things for supper. Leibermans is open on Sunday I think.’

  ‘I guess so. But listen, won’t it look a bit funny?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Me like this,’ she giggled childishly. ‘And you with your reputation?’

  ‘I didn’t know I had one.’

  She giggled again.

  ‘Oh Professor! You know what they used to say. “Gunnar Thorkild has the biggest gun on the island and he shoots on sight.” You must have heard it. That’s why you got so many women in your classes. That’s why I signed on.’

  ‘Pity you didn’t stay.’

  ‘Are you mad at me now?’

  ‘No. I just wonder what else they said, whether they learned anything except the details of my sex life. Did you ever learn anything Jenny?’

  ‘You mean about the Polynesians and their voyages and their life and all that stuff? I learned something I guess. But I could never see the point of it.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Well, you know…What did they do that amounted to a row of beans? What are they now? They don’t even own the islands they live on. There’s us here and in Samoa and the French in Tahiti…Here in Hawaii they’re nothing – waiters and beach boys…’

  ‘And what are we Jenny, you and me?’

  ‘Well I mean, at least we’re civilized. We’ve made progress. We…Oh Christ! I really walked into that one, didn’t I?’

  ‘You did baby. You opened your mouth and shut your mind. Try it the other way some time.’

  She was silent then, as they drove down-town. She would not go into the market but sat huddled in the car, tousle-haired and shapeless like a rag doll. Gunnar Thorkild shopped angrily and recklessly – plank steaks and salads and fruit and wine and pate and frozen desserts. He was a big-mouthed idiot who couldn’t mind his own business. Why he had to pick this particular lame duck he would never know; and what would Martha Gilman say when it waddled into her kitchen on this Sunday evening?…As if she didn’t have enough problems of her own: a husband who had killed himself with Chinese heroin in Saigon, a tow-headed hellion of eleven who had to be fed and educated, a thirty-year-old figure that was no man’s dream of delight, stringy
brown hair, a gamin face that was always smudged with poster-paint and printer’s ink, a studio full of work in progress – wahines on black velvet for the tourist shops, picture maps for the land developers, silk-screen prints, wood-blocks and charcoal sketches – and a string of customers shouting down the telephone for undelivered work…Oh yes, she would adore to have lumpish, pregnant Jenny dumped on her door-mat!

  When they arrived at the old frame house, in an unfashionable street off Nuuanu Avenue, Thorkild marched ahead like a tribal legate loaded with gifts for a threatening chieftain. The door was opened by Mark, the hellion, who ran, shouting, to announce him.

  ‘Hi ma! Uncle Gunsmoke’s here with a dame! They’ve come for supper!’

  Martha Gilman, her hair a mess of snakes, her smock stained as if with spilt blood, appeared at the end of the hall. She was armed with a palette and a paint knife and she demanded ominously:

  ‘Gunnar Thorkild, what the hell is this? I work weekends like every other day! If you want to come visiting, you telephone. I can’t afford the time to…’

  ‘I know, my sweet.’ Thorkild smiled at her gorgon image over the celery tops. ‘So I’ve come to make your supper. Martha this is Jenny. As you see she’s pregnant.’

  ‘By you?’

  ‘Not this time. But she needs a job and a place to sleep, and you need some one to baby-sit that monster and clean up the mess you live in. So why don’t you both sit down and discuss it, while I start supper?’

  Holding the packages before him like a breastwork he marched into the kitchen and barricaded himself with a chair shoved under the door handle. He spread the preparations over an hour with another twenty minutes added for safety, wondering at the silence outside, bracing himself against the whirlwind that must surely hit him when he emerged from his sanctuary. When finally he got up enough courage to announce the meal, he found the table laid, Jenny dressed in a fresh muu-muu with a ribbon in her hair, playing checkers with the hellion, and Martha Gilman in house-gown and gold slippers, lighting the candles. As he stood gaping, with the wine-bottles clutched in his fists, Martha said sweetly: