B000FC0U8A EBOK (4 page)

Six mornings later Josh splashed in on a water taxi. Immediately he wanted to know why more wasn’t being done for the sick people clumped in the shade behind the kibanda. “Sweet Jesus!” he exclaimed, slathering suntan lotion over his arms. “These people are
suff
ering! These poor orphans!” He crouched over three Kikuyu boys. “Their faces are covered with tiny flies!”

How strange it was to have his son under his roof, to hear him unzip his huge duffel bags, to come across his Schick razor on the sink. Hearing him chide (“You feed your dog
prawns
?”), chug papaya juice, scrub pans, wipe down counters—who was this person in his home? Where had he come from?

The shell collector had always suspected that he did not know his son one whit. Josh had been raised by his mother; as a boy he preferred the baseball diamond to the beach, cooking to conchology. And now he was thirty. He seemed so energetic, so good . . . so stupid. He was like a golden retriever, fetching things, sloppy-tongued, panting, falling over himself to please. He used two days of fresh water giving the Kikuyu boys showers. He spent seventy shillings on a sisal basket that should have cost him seven. He insisted on sending visitors off with care packages, plantains or House of Mangi tea biscuits, wrapped in paper and tied off with yarn.

“You’re doing fine, Pop,” he announced, one evening at the table. He had been there a week. Every night he invited strangers, diseased people, to the dinner table. Tonight it was a paraplegic girl and her mother. Josh spooned chunks of curried potato onto their plates. “You can afford it.” The shell collector said nothing.
What could he say? Josh shared his blood; this thirty-year-old dogooder had somehow grown out of him, out of the spirals of his own DNA.

Because he could only take so much of Josh, and because he could not shell for fear of being followed, he began to slip away with Tumaini to walk the shady groves, the sandy plains, the hot, leafless thickets of the island. It was strange moving away from the shore rather than toward it, climbing thin trails, moving inside the ceaseless cicada hum. His shirt was torn by thorns, his skin chewed by insects; his cane struck unidentifiable objects: Was that a fencepost? A tree? Soon these walks became shorter: he would hear rustles in the thickets, snakes or wild dogs, perhaps—who knew what awful things bustled in the thickets of that island? — and he’d wave his cane in the air and Tumaini would yelp and they would hurry home.

One day he came across a cone shell in his path, toiling through dust half a kilometer from the sea.
Conus textile,
a common enough danger on the reef, but to find it so far from water was impossible. How would a cone get all the way up here? And why? He picked the shell from the path and pitched it into the high grass. On subsequent walks he began coming across cones more frequently: his outstretched hand would come across the trunk of an acacia and on it would be a wandering cone; he’d pick up a hermit crab wandering in the mango grove and find a freeloading cone on its back. Sometimes a stone worked itself into his sandal and he jumped and backpedaled, terrified, thinking it would sting him. He mistook a pine cone for
Conus gloriamaris,
a tree snail for
Conus spectrum.
He began to doubt his previous identifications: maybe the cone he had found in the path was not a cone at all, but a miter shell, or a rounded stone. Maybe it was an empty shell dropped by a villager. Maybe there was no strangely blooming population of cone shells; maybe he had imagined it all. It was terrible not to know.

Everything was changing: the reef, his home, poor frightened
Tumaini. Outside the entire island had become sinister, viperous, paralyzing. Inside his son was giving away everything—the rice, the toilet paper, the Vitamin B capsules. Perhaps it would be safest to just sit, hands folded, in a chair, and move as little as possible.

Josh had been there three weeks before he brought it up.

“Before I left the States I did some reading,” he said, “about cone shells.” It was dawn. The shell collector was at the table waiting for Josh to make him toast. He said nothing.

“They think the venom may have real medical benefits.”

“Who are they?”

“Scientists. They say they’re trying to isolate some of the toxins and give them to stroke victims. To combat paralysis.”

The shell collector wasn’t sure what to say. He felt like saying that injecting cone venom into someone already half paralyzed sounded miraculously stupid.

“Wouldn’t that be something, Pop? If what you’ve done winds up helping thousands of people?”

The shell collector fidgeted, tried to smile.

“I never feel so alive,” Josh continued, “as when I’m helping people.”

“I can smell the toast burning, Josh.”

“There are so many people in the world, Pop, who we can
help.
Do you know how lucky we are? How amazing it is just to be healthy? To be able to reach out?”

“The toast, Son.”

“Screw the toast! Jesus! Look at you! People are dying on your doorstep and you care about toast!”

He slammed the door on his way out. The shell collector sat and smelled the toast as it burned.

Josh started reading shell books. He’d learned Braille as a Little Leaguer, sitting in his uniform in his father’s lab, waiting for his mother to drive him to a game. Now he took books and magazines from the kibanda’s one shelf and hauled them out under the palms where the three Kikuyu orphan boys had made their camp. He read aloud to them, stumbling through articles in journals like
Indo-Pacific Mollusca
or
American Conchologist.
“The blotchy ancilla,” he’d read, “is a slender shell with a deep suture. Its columella is mostly straight.” The boys stared at him as he read, hummed senseless, joyful songs.

The shell collector heard Josh, one afternoon, reading to them about cones. “The admirable cone is thick and relatively heavy, with a pointed spire. One of the rarest cone shells, it is white, with brown spiral bands.”

Gradually, amazingly, after a week of afternoon readings, the boys grew interested. The shell collector would hear them sifting through the banks of shell fragments left by the spring tide. “Bubble shell!” one would shout. “Kafuna found a bubble shell!” They plunged their hands between rocks and squealed and shouted and dragged shirtfuls of clams up to the kibanda, identifying them with made-up names: “Blue Pretty! Mbaba Chicken Shell!”

One evening the three boys were eating with them at the table, and he listened to them as they shifted and bobbed in their chairs and clacked their silverware against the table edge like drummers. “You boys have been shelling,” the shell collector said.

“Kafuna swallowed a butterfly shell!” one of the boys yelled.

The shell collector pressed forward: “Do you know that some of the shells are dangerous, that dangerous things—bad things— live in the water?”

“Bad shells!” one squealed.

“Bad sheellllls!” the others chimed.

Then they were eating, quietly. The shell collector sat, and wondered.

He tried again, the next morning. Josh was hacking coconuts on the front step. “What if those boys get bored with the beach and go out to the reef? What if they fall into fire coral? What if they step on an urchin?”

“Are you saying I’m not keeping an eye on them?” Josh said.

“I’m saying that they might be looking to get bitten. Those boys came here because they thought I could find some magic shell that will cure people. They’re here to get stung by a cone shell.”

“You don’t have the slightest idea,” Josh said, “why those boys are here.”

“But you do? You think you’ve read enough about shells to teach them how to look for cones. You
want
them to find one. You hope they’ll find a big cone, get stung, and be cured. Cured of whatever ailment they have. I don’t even see anything wrong with them.”

“Pop,” Josh groaned, “those boys are mentally handicapped. I do
not
think some sea-snail is going to cure them.”

So, feeling very old, and very blind, the shell collector decided to take the boys shelling. He took them out into the lagoon, where the water was flat and warm, wading almost to their chests, and worked alongside them, and did his best to show them which animals were dangerous. “Bad sheellllls!” the boys would scream, and cheered as the shell collector tossed a testy blue crab out, over the reef, into deeper water. Tumaini barked too, and seemed her old self, out there with the boys, in the ocean she loved so dearly.

Finally it was not one of the young boys or some other visitor who was bitten, but Josh. He came dashing along the beach, calling for his father, his face bloodless.

“Josh? Josh is that you?” the shell collector hollered. “I was just showing the boys here this girdled triton. A graceful shell, isn’t it, boys?”

In his fist, his fingers already going stiff, the back of his hand reddening, the skin distended, Josh held the cone that had bitten him, a snail he’d plucked from the wet sand, thinking it was pretty.

The shell collector hauled Josh across the beach and into some shade under the palms. He wrapped him in a blanket and sent the boys for the radio. Josh’s pulse was already weak and rapid and his breath was short. Within an hour his breathing stopped, then his heart, and he was dead.

The shell collector knelt, dumbfounded, in the sand, and Tumaini lay on her paws in the shade watching him with the boys crouched behind her, their hands on their knees, terrified.

The doctor boated in twenty minutes too late, wheezing, and behind him were police, in small canoes with huge motors. The police took the shell collector into his kitchen and quizzed him about his divorce, about Josh, about the boys.

Through the window he heard more boats coming and going. A damp breeze came over the sill. It was going to rain, he wanted to tell these men, these half-aggressive, half-lazy voices in his kitchen. It will rain in five minutes, he wanted to say, but they were asking him to clarify Josh’s relationship with the boys. Again (was it the third time? the fifth?) they asked why his wife had divorced him. He could not find the words. He felt as if thick clouds were being shoved between him and the world; his fingers, his senses, the ocean—all this was slipping away. My dog, he wanted to say, my dog doesn’t understand this. I need my dog.

“I am blind,” he told the police finally, turning up his hands. “I have nothing.”

Then the rain came, a monsoon assaulting the thatched roof. Frogs, singing somewhere under the floorboards, hurried their tremolo, screamed into the storm.

When the rain let up he heard the water dripping from the roof and a cricket under the refrigerator started singing. There was a new voice in the kitchen, a familiar voice, the mwadhini’s. He said, “You will be left alone now. As I promised.”

“My son—” the shell collector began.

“This blindness,” the mwadhini said, taking an auger shell from the kitchen table and rolling it over the wood, “it is not unlike a shell, is it? The way a shell protects the animal inside? The way an animal can retreat inside it, tucked safely away? Of course the sick came, of course they came to seek out a cure. Well, you will have your peace now. No one will come looking for miracles now.”

“The boys—”

“They will be taken away. They require care. Perhaps an orphanage in Nairobi. Malindi, maybe.”

A month later and these Jims were in his kibanda, pouring bourbon into their evening chai. He had answered their questions, told them about Nancy and Seema and Josh. Nancy, they said, had given them exclusive rights to her story. The shell collector could see how they would write it—midnight sex, a blue lagoon, a dangerous African shell drug, a blind medicine guru with his wolf-dog. There for all the world to peer at: his shell-cluttered kibanda, his pitiful tragedies.

At dusk he rode with them into Lamu. The taxi let them off on a pier and they climbed a hill to town. He heard birds call from the scrub by the road, and from the mango trees that leaned over the path. The air smelled sweet, like cabbage and pineapple. The Jims labored as they walked.

In Lamu the streets were crowded and the street vendors were out, grilling plantains or curried goat over driftwood coals. Pineapples were being sold on sticks, and children moved about yoked with boxes from which they hawked maadazi or chapatis spread with ginger. The Jims and the shell collector bought kebabs and sat in an alley, their backs against a carved wooden door. Before long a passing teenager offered hashish from a water pipe, and the Jims accepted. The shell collector smelled its smoke, sweet and sticky, and heard the water bubble in the pipe.

“Good?” the teenager asked.

“You bet,” the Jims coughed. Their speech was slurred.

The shell collector could hear men praying in the mosques, their chants vibrating down the narrow streets. He felt a bit strange, listening to them, as if his head were no longer connected to his body.

“It is Taraweeh,” the teenager said. “Tonight Allah determines the course of the world for next year.”

“Have some,” one of the Jims said, and shoved the pipe in front of the shell collector’s face. “More,” the other Jim said, and giggled.

The shell collector took the pipe, inhaled.

It was well after midnight. A crab fisherman in a motorized mtepe was taking them up the archipelago, past banks of mangroves, toward home. The shell collector sat in the bow on a crab trap made from chicken wire and felt the breeze in his face. The boat slowed. “Tokeni,” the fisherman said, and the shell collector did,
the Jims with him, splashing down from the boat into chest-deep water.

The crab boat motored away and the Jims began murmuring about the phosphorescence, admiring the glowing trails blooming behind each other’s bodies as they moved through the water. The shell collector took off his sandals and waded barefoot, down off the sharp spines of coral rock, into the deeper lagoon, feeling the hard furrows of intertidal sand and the occasional mats of algal turf, fibrous and ropy. The feeling of disconnectedness had continued, been amplified by the hashish, and it was easy for him to pretend that his legs were unconnected to his body. He was, it seemed suddenly, floating, rising above the sea, feeling down through the water into the turquoise shallows and coral-lined alleys. This small reef: the crabs in their expeditions, the anemones tossing their heads, the tiny blizzards of fish wheeling past, pausing, bursting off . . . he felt it all unfold simply below him. A cowfish, a triggerfish, the harlequin Picasso fish, a drifting sponge—all these lives were being lived out, every day, as they always had been. His senses became supernatural: beyond the breaking combers, the dappled lagoon, he heard terns, and the thrum of insects in the acacias, and the heavy shifting of leaves in avocado trees, the sounding of bats, the dry rasping of bark at the collars of coconut palms, spiky burrs dropping from bushes into hot sand, the smooth seashore roar inside an empty trumpet shell, the rotting smell of conch eggs beached in their black pouches and far down the island, near the horizon—he could walk it down—he knew he would find the finless trunk of a dolphin, rolling in the swash, its flesh already being carted off, piece by piece, by stone crabs.