I Am Sorry to Think I Have Raised a Timid Son (30 page)

A few drops of rain began to pop against the tin hull. The customer wondered if he would ever find a companion as companionable as detachment.

What we need first, though, is girls,
Dave continued, punting the dinghy out of the creek and into deep water.
Some nice sheilas would be good. Some nice female partners who aren’t bitches. Though I figure that’s hard to find.
He tugged the engine’s pull cord.

Dave had been thinking a lot about Oriental birds. They’d probably do right-o on the island.
I’m so far out of the loop, mate,
he shouted.
I need to go to love school!
He’d tried online dating. Five years ago, a female WWOOFer set up a profile for him. There was a tremendous response—but from depressives and alcoholics. He tried all those damn websites.

Something hit the line, hard, yanking the customer’s right arm behind him. Then it went slack again.

I got this TV bird coming,
Dave said.
She’s rather prominent, I reckon. Knows a lot about the wellness industry. And she just split up from her hubby! She has kids, which I’m not certain how that will work out.

He circled the reefs that had grown around the scuttled
trawlers.
No,
he said,
there’s nothing wrong with a bird coming and trying before she buys. Have a nice seafood dinner. Who would you invite to dinner if you could? I would take the Dalai Lama and Obama, for the peace, love, and understanding, and then I’d have Osama, for the opposite. Not including the bird, obviously.

They fished for another hour, unaware that they were towing empty monofilament. The wire leader and the whole lure had been bit off a ways back.

All desert-island stories are in some sense about waiting. Waiting for rescue; waiting for madness; waiting day in, day out for time to be transcended. By this point in his stay, the customer was waiting for Dave to shut the fuck up.

Dave’s babbling was impersonal and often senseless. It was always going and just loud enough to hear, like an Orwellian radio, or self-consciousness. Tense-wise, it was never simply present but always progressive. The customer’s eyes were going a little cross from so much sustained contact. And all that polite smiling and contorted pseudo-concern—his
face
was exhausted. Sometimes he brought an empty coffee cup to his lips and pretended to tip back the dregs, just to give himself a moment’s relief.

While oystering, while gathering palm fronds, stacking coconuts, spinning fishing lines—while siphoning gas—Dave kept on keeping on. He’d lecture about Australia’s 10 percent goods-and-services tax. The relative value of Canadian economic geologists. Laser nuclear power. Corn subsidies. The prices of: Kenyan cattle, land in California’s Central Valley, the water necessary to grow rice. He speculated on the fortunes to
be made in table compressors, stone cutting, olive oil, ski lodges based out of ancient castles (of which there were many for sale, don’t worry), opal.

At first, his customer had tried to redirect the monologic torrent. But Dave was inexorable; he just steady beat on like the sun. His ceaseless reasoning debilitated. It melted whatever steering queries or transitional declaratives the customer had in mind. Over time, he became stupefied, able to answer only
Yeah
or
Right,
the conversational equivalent of rubbing away eye floaters.

One afternoon, he thought to get away by taking a rusty pitching wedge and sneaking off to a patch of fallen plums at the edge of the clearing. Violet pulp splacked his face and bare chest each time he teed off; the rain washed him clean. After a dozen strokes, he looked up, and there was Dave, his logorrheic caddy, yippy-yapping about: trickle-down economics and the importance of job creators (
There being nothing wrong with making money!
). Carlos Slim and the state of the Australian telecom industry (
A bloody fucking monopoly!
). How one gets only two or three opportunities in one’s life to make serious money (
The idea being a hop-on, hop-off bus, like Ken Kesey’s, but for backpackers in America
).

The customer waited less and less hopefully for a connection to develop between himself and the man. He was beginning to feel stronger swirls of dread—a bad case of déjà vu—as though in meeting Dave he had skipped forward along one possible branch of his own
Choose Your Own Adventure
and needed to work out how he got there. So, he went on the offensive. He asked Dave about the first time he confronted the deep water of real, prolonged silence. He wondered whether what happened inside Dave’s headspace was anything like the unpacking of luggage. He wanted to know: In renouncing the world, did Dave discover a pure and gentle sympathy with all other men? Did
the island lead him to understand that true solitude is not mere separateness, but rather a discipline that tends only toward uni—

Right, no. You don’t come here to reconnect with no hoo-doo. I want to point you in the direction of fixing yourself. Get you to look inside, get down to the nitty-gritty.
With both hands, Dave pantomimed an hourglass figure around his customer.
You know, I could never understand song lyrics until I came out here? I like myself way more now than I ever did.

Dave had wanted to come ashore because a package was waiting for him at the inn. Getting to it took several hours, as first he and his customer had to borrow a truck from a bush family, and then they had to fix the tire that blew out on the rutted way there. When Dave had finally retrieved the padded mailer, he pulled it open slowly, with his fingertips. Inside were discs containing an hourlong television special the BBC had filmed about him some months back. Dave was going into Lockhart River to give copies to everyone he knew.

About eight hundred KuukuYa’u lived there, though that number fluctuated seasonally. They made up one of the most isolated and economically disadvantaged communities in Australia. Lockhart River is a twelve-hour dirt-road drive from Cairns, the nearest city, and a four-hour drive from Weipa, the nearest town. The unemployment rate there hovered around 20 percent, three times the national average. The community was almost entirely dependent upon government aid. They had gone so far as to ban alcohol six years earlier, an emergency measure, because their life expectancy had fallen to an age two decades younger than that of white Australia.

It took a decade for them to trust me, to stop calling me “white cunt,”
Dave said, pulling the loaner truck onto the gray beach outside of town. The sky there was like a lint trap, the sea rough and opaque.
Now I see myself as an agent of the KuukuYa’u.

He and his customer tore into prepackaged meat pies purchased from Lockhart’s exorbitant general store. The pies and occasionally some fresh veg were all that Dave allowed himself there; his real supplies—canned goods, flour, cooking oil, natural gas—he bought in Cairns during his annual trip. He had to have that tucker shipped to the island via barge, a great drain on the ten-thousand-dollar pension he made do on.

We’ve got to get these government blokes out of here,
Dave said, his mustache baubled with gravy.
There’s ten saviors for every one they’re trying to save. Lockhart River’ll save themselves when they’re ready.

Erika had put in five years working for the government in Lockhart, and what had that got her? Government was always tossing this money about, building new facilities. But the people? Erika had been a literacy aide, and a
volunteer
culinary instructor, and still they made her live in a back room at the employment bureau. She didn’t even have her own fucking bathroom! A sheila without a bathroom. What a bloody waste of potential. Dave wouldn’t have treated his employees that way thirty damn years ago.

All these yobbos, but did you know government don’t have a full-time drug and alcohol counselor here in Lockhart?
Dave asked. He was going to use the money from Erika’s estate to fund one.

He put the loaner into gear and showed off Lockhart’s sole restaurant and then its arts center, where two English bird-watchers recognized him from the BBC program. The town proper reminded the customer of the depressed agricultural villages ringing Lake Okeechobee, only much direr: there were brightly colored shotgun homes, hit-or-miss lawn care, a lot
of stripped-down cars, and too many feral dogs fighting in the street over bones that were three feet long.

They left the truck and walked into an open-air pavilion behind the church, where a well-attended shire council meeting was just concluding. Adults milled; kids and dogs schooled like fish. Dave had working knowledge of everyone present and a rapport with most. A few locals answered his personal questions cheerlessly; a few others tolerated him like pupils do a hammy administrator. Still more begged for home brew. But many were plain happy to see him, calling him “old fella,” a sign of respect. They were so accustomed to white men coming and going, implementing things and then flying away, that Dave’s continued presence proved him to be true blue,
dinky di.

Dave grabbed a couple of complimentary plates of sausages and buttered bread and took a seat at the long councilmen’s table next to his good friend Paul Piva, a genial South Sea Islander fit to bursting with muscle.

How we met was Paul’d come to the island to sneak a beer and have some fishing,
Dave said. They hit it off immediately, owing to Paul’s latent entrepreneurial instincts. He followed Dave’s advice, and now he ran a small business renting salvaged cars to the myriad government employees who flew into Lockhart every week.

I tried to get him to run for mayor once,
Dave said.
Now I’m trying to teach him whitefella law. I don’t want any whitefella thinking he can come in here and take advantage of Paul just because he’s a blackfella.

Years ago, Dave had made sure Paul was there on the island the one time its leaseholders tried and failed to evict him in person.
The fucking wankers,
Paul said of them, flashing a wide smile of kerneled teeth.
The fucking ding-a-lings.
Damn right Paul would dong anyone who tried to get rid of his friend. But he didn’t think he’d need to; he was convinced Dave would be
coming up with the money to buy back his share.
The climate’s no bloody good,
Paul said,
so alls Dave has to do is hand them five hundred thousand dollars, and they’ll fucking jump.

That fucking island,
Paul continued, rolling up the hem of his polo shirt to rub the oak dome of his stomach.
Fuck, it’s a gold mine for us! The jobs! If I thought Dave’s plan was bullshit, mate, I’d tell you straight up.

After the meeting, having distributed copies of the BBC documentary around Lockhart, Dave and his customer snuck into a KuukuYa’u ceremony put on for white benefactors and executive out-of-towners. Along the dreary beachfront, children danced in grass skirts while singing a sad hymn about the Devil disguising himself as a crocodile and stealing a baby in the night.

With his tongue, Dave joggled the edge of his loose left canine while eyeing the business types. No doubt it was terrible how the KuukuYa’u got addicted to things, he explained. Grog, government money. Smoke-o, even. They had been a nomadic people, you see, not accustomed to surplus. More than your regular yob, the KuukuYa’u were going to eat or drink or take whatever was on hand until it—or they—were gone.

But if there was one thing that had carried over from Dave’s days on the mainland, it was finding a niche and filling it first. Business abhors a vacuum, after all. He leaned in to his customer, whispering,
Don’t you reckon these blokes would love to have a shout and a session? But they can’t here in Lockhart. That ain’t civilization. It just ain’t. No, I plan on rebuilding the canteen. Have it be a club-type atmosphere, but strict. Anybody who comes in to crack the shits will be tossed. Paul’s against it. But she’ll be right, mate.

Robinson Crusoe
is no longer required reading, but that’s only because it doesn’t need to be. The desert-island story has so permeated our culture that it has become its own meta-genre: the Robinsonade. There’s
Cast Away
and
Survivor
and
Lost,
obviously, but also
Life of Pi, The Hunger Games,
and any one of the seven hundred movies that came out this summer that had to do with what comes after Armageddon. If it touches on isolation, tabulae rasae, or close encounters of a new kind, or if it has a character commenting on society from without—it’s a Robinsonade. The island need only be metaphorical. It’s all about the lone protagonist ad-libbing his life.

So, no, we don’t make kids read
Robinson Crusoe.
Instead we’ve got them reading the domestic version,
Walden.

Unlike Crusoe, Henry David Thoreau did the American thing and
chose
to live apart from the world. He erranded into the wilderness voluntarily, hoping there to find a purer, more deliberate way of being.

He was a huge admirer of Crusoe. There are allusions to the man everywhere in his writing—from the notched stick Thoreau measures time by, to the umbrella he sometimes carries, to his long, addled digression in
Walden
on hats made out of skin. In his letters, Thoreau compared himself with Crusoe a lot, and unfavorably. Crusoe had “the callous palms of the laborer,” which were “conversant with the finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the heart.” Crusoe could philosophize
and
carpenter a coffin for the dudes he shot. Thoreau wanted to be a hero in that mold.

Thus did he borrow an ax, go into his pal Emerson’s backyard, and clear a space for the repurposed cabin he bought from an Irish laborer. He detailed in a journal how he dug his cellar,
maintained his hearth, and struggled with weeds and poor soil in his garden. Just like his man Robinson, Thoreau kept track of himself via credentialing lists, commonsense routines, and economic pursuits. He walked in the woods and went for some swims. He labored after a conspicuous authenticity.