St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves (18 page)

“Mr. Ned,” comes a woman’s quavery voice. “
Que te sanes!
I will light a candle for you!”

Sawtooth groans. His neighbor to the right, Zenaida Zapata, has started praying to Undersea Mary on the prow of her boat.

In her previous incarnation, Undersea Mary was
La Rumba
’s plaster figurehead. Her pert breasts used to greet Sawtooth every morning, until she fell into the water after a tropical storm. For months, she lay sideways on the ocean floor. Needlefish nibbled the paint off her lemon meringue bikini. Then Zenaida moved in. She fished the statue out and installed her on a pedestal made out of floral Kleenex boxes and the cushion of a rusty Exercycle.

Now Zenaida courts Mary’s attentions like a lover. She has robed her in sateen bedsheets, celestial blue. She leaves Undersea Mary bouquets of napkin roses in nightmare shades of red and ocher. Today she is lighting waxy votive candles that she stole from the Hurricane Supply Kit. Sawtooth tries to hobble back inside his cabin without acknowledging her.

“You buddy coming today, Mr. Sawtooth?” she calls.

None of your goddamn business, Sawtooth thinks. He glowers at her.

Zenaida nods smugly. “I don’t need no buddy,” she tells him. “The Virgin visits me. I see her in the morning and in the afternoon. I see her during the news shows and during the commercial breaks. Everywhere,” she says, gloating like a child, “I see her everywhere. She is always with me. I am never alone.”

Zenaida turns around and lights another candle. Sawtooth watches as tiny plumes of smoke go curling up to join the gray clouds. What could she possibly have to pray for, at her age? he fumes. Whose lungs does she think she’s filling up there with all her damn fool prayers?

Sawtooth hurries back inside his cabin. He doesn’t understand how he came to be adrift in this sea of crackpots.

Around three-thirty, Sawtooth’s heart starts pounding at a rate that poses a serious health risk at his age. The girl is scheduled to arrive any minute now. He hops around the room like an agitated stork, making imperceptible adjustments in the placement of the lone sofa cushion, the crumpled bill, his pain pills.

He wonders what the girl does with the pills, if she takes them or sells them. He wonders if there’s a chance that she might get addicted, too.

Finally, at a quarter past four, Sawtooth can hear the squeal of tires pulling into the boatyard, followed by a chorus of multilingual obscenities and the chaperone’s cries for order. From his porthole, he can see the buddies come streaming down the dock, in ones and twos at first, then the whole raucous flock of them.

“Permission to board?” the girl chirrups. She is right at the edge of his boat slip.

Sawtooth swallows his chewing tobacco. He licks his fingertips and fluffs his hair into a wispy, silver crown—“the rooster gawk comb-back,” somebody used to call it. An uncle or a brother, possibly a wife. A wife. Sawtooth takes a deep breath and reaches for the door.

“Hiya, Pops.” She grins, pushing past him. She laughs her wind-chime laugh and plops onto the sofa.

“Hello, girl,” he grunts happily.

Today Augie is wearing a potato-colored T-shirt that says
DAPPER CADAVER
and a baseball cap pulled down over her blue eyes. Sawtooth doesn’t understand why she always dresses like a boy, in slouchy black pants that billow around her legs like garbage bags. Sawtooth’s even tried to give the girl shopping money himself on several occasions—although she never accepts money if it’s offered to her.

“Whadda you think, Pops?” Augie pulls off her baseball cap and shakes out her hair. Augie has short, auburn hair, but Sawtooth sees that the damn fool girl has gone and streaked it through with flamingo pink. Sawtooth doesn’t want to like it, but he does. It sparks like copper wire, like the fiery ball of sunset over the swamp.

“You look like a damn fool Easter egg,” Sawtooth snorts.

He’s pleased to see that she’s in one of her penny-bright moods. Some days she just sits on his couch, prickly as a sea urchin, while Sawtooth reaches feverishly for something to say. Some days she arrives seething with a formless rage, a heat that Sawtooth can feel radiating from her pale skin. Once she didn’t come at all. On that day, Sawtooth watched the ebb and flow of the artificial tides and felt like he was evaporating.

The girl pouts and puts her cap back on. She settles back on the couch, and they spend the next few minutes playing a round of This Object Is Older Than You Are. It’s Sawtooth’s favorite game.

“How old are you today, girl? Fifteen? Ha!” He chuckles, his eyes thin and steely as dimes. “You see that flounder thermometer? It’s older than you are. You see this carpet stain? It’s older than—”

“Say, let’s cut to the chase, Pops,” Augie interrupts. “Are you going to show it to me today, or what?”

Sawtooth grins with a childlike pleasure. “Sure it don’t make you squeamish, girl?” Then he starts fumbling with the pin to his trousers.

Ever since Sawtooth mentioned his phantom-limb syndrome, the girl has been fascinated with his scarred left stump. He feels flattered by the attention. Most people look anywhere but his lower body. They pretend not to notice when he limps down the docks. It makes it worse, somehow, everyone pretending that he’s still whole.

Sawtooth rolls up his pant leg coyly, with the practiced languor of a showgirl. They both stare down at the white nub of his thigh.

“So you can still feel it?”

The girl’s fingers hover gingerly over the place where his left leg used to be, shaping it in the air.

“I mean, you’ll be looking at it, you can see it’s not there, and you feel it?”

Sawtooth nods. “You think I’m pulling your leg?”

The girl smiles wanly.

Then she gets down on her knees. Sawtooth holds his breath. He will never grow accustomed to this, but now his uneasiness is spiked with a hot, wincing thrill. It makes him feel like a much younger man, this sort of attention. He learned early on that he could use his own mangled body as a kind of bait, something the girl would keep coming back to nibble at. The girl flicks her pink tongue at the very tip of his stump. She circles around it, once, twice.

“You feel it,” Augie repeats. She smiles up at him, her eyes glinting with a dull satisfaction.

Sawtooth grunts. She is tracing the outline of his ghost leg with her tongue, and he feels it, by God he
feels
it. If Sawtooth could verbalize the hitching in his chest, he would tell her exactly what he feels. He would thank the girl, for making his pain meaningful. Before he started saving his pills for her, his phantom limb used to infuriate him. It was a senseless aching, a bad neural joke. Now the pain reminds him that the girl has been here.

“Your body is haunted,” she intones, with an adolescent portentousness. “Like a house.”

“That’s one way to look at it, I guess.” Sawtooth frowns. The girl has a funny way of romanticizing things.

“So, how much time you got left to serve, girl?” He feels grateful that at his age, the tremors in his voice pass unnoticed.

“Oh, I was meaning to tell you,” Augie says. She stands, smoothing her hair. “Miss Levy got them to lessen my sentence. I’ll be out of your hair soon.” The girl keeps her voice casual, but she still won’t meet his eyes. “Which reminds me, look at the time! I guess I’d better get going. Sign my form?”

Sawtooth stares dumbly at the form that she’s waving in front of him. He tenses, half expecting his ghost leg to cramp up, but there is nothing.

If Sawtooth could put words to the brambled knot forming in his throat, he would tell her: Girl, don’t go. I am marooned in this place without you. What I feel for you is more than love. It’s stronger, peninsular. You connect me to the Mainland. You are my leg of land over dark water.

“Do you want an egg?” he asks instead. He grabs her hand desperately. “Do girls still eat eggs? I could fry you up an egg.”

“No thanks,” she says, withdrawing her hand. “No, I really should get going, the bus will leave without me….” Her smile darkens. She taps at the blank space on the bottom of her form.

“In a minute, girl,” he rasps, panic sealing off his throat. “In a minute…” Sawtooth gets up to go to the narrow bathroom. He leans his cane against the door and squats on the lidless commode, feeling the mechanized sway of the waves beneath him. One, two…he can hear the girl bumbling around outside. Sometimes he has to resist the urge to lecture her on the proper way to burgle your elders. Kids today don’t know the first thing about theft, he thinks. He hopes the girl doesn’t have trouble with the damn fool childproof lid on his Demerol. Three, he breathes, four…

On the other side of the marina, one of the stingrays slides dangerously close to the Wave Assuager. It struggles against the machine’s currents, its stinger pointed like an arrow towards the undertow. The ray gets sucked into the whirring underwater fan, silvering between the blades like a quarter into a slot. The accordion pump of the Wave Assuager lets out an elastic sigh. It sparks and groans. It vaporizes clouds of minnows with its electric death throes.

Then the Wave Assuager sends a final, renegade crest coursing up beneath the houseboats.

Ned Kaufman cracks skulls with his buddy and lets out a howl of real pain. Undersea Mary gets swept back overboard, her votive candles extinguished. When the wave hits, Sawtooth is squatting in the bathroom, his carbuncular ear pressed against the bathroom wall. If he had two legs to stand on, he might have been able to regain his balance. Instead, he spills out onto the living room floor.

“Fuck!” Augie falls backwards into the box of left shoes. The pain pills go flying out of her hands, raining down on Sawtooth’s prone body. Sawtooth grunts and struggles onto his knee. Augie is regarding him with a stricken expression, still holding the empty orange bottle.

“I didn’t see anything,” he wheezes. He sweeps the nearby pills into his clammy palm and holds them out to her. “I didn’t see a damn fool thing….”

“Oh, God…” She starts scrambling to grab her things.

“I know you been stealing from me, girl,” Sawtooth cries. “I know and I don’t care….”

Augie already has her hand on the doorknob before Sawtooth realizes that she’s leaving.

“Girl,” he sputters. “Girl…”

Even as a young man, Sawtooth had a hard time talking to women. Since moving to Out-to-Sea, he’s become tightlipped as an oyster. But he can feel the words pearling on his tongue: Girl, you are my moon. You are the tidal pull that keeps time marching forward.

What comes out is: “I used to steal muskrats.”

Augie struggles with the handle. “Fuck.”

“During the Depression.”

The door swings open.

“Stole ’em right out of the bigger boys’ traps.”

Sunlight spills into the dim cabin. Sawtooth takes a shuddery breath.

“Girl,” he says in a low, throaty voice, not unlike a bullfrog in heat. “I love you.”

Augie pauses, one foot out the door. She whirls around, slowly, and comes to stand over his prone form. Her eyes have narrowed into hard, bright kernels.

“You
love
me, Pops?” Her voice takes on a rib-kicking cadence. It elicits a moan from Sawtooth, like the lowing cry of a sea cow.

“
You
love me?” she keeps asking, her voice flat and pitiless. Sawtooth tries to speak, but can only make little strangled noises. A thin stream of spittle trickles down one side of his mouth.

“You love
me
?” Her voice tightens, and Sawtooth thinks of a hand squeezing some dumb animal’s udders.

“Yes!”

“No,” she says with a bitter little laugh. “No. I don’t think so, Pops. How could you?” She shakes her head angrily, as if Sawtooth is the one who has committed a stupid, indefensible crime. “How
could
you?” As if to echo her own question, she scoops a few yellow pills up from the crease in his flaccid trouser leg and pockets them. Then she strides onto the dock without a backwards glance.

Sawtooth flops back onto the floor. A small puddle seeps into the rug, his empty trouser leg dripping toilet water. He can feel the gravelly pills pressing into his back. He sees no reason to struggle, to get up.

Eventually, Sawtooth dozes off. He has a nightmare about the stingrays. He is lying on his back, naked and whole, on a velvety carpet of rays. There are dozens, hundreds of them, undulating beneath him. They do a cartilaginous dance through the warm salt water. The tips of their wings smooth against his wrinkled skin like bruising kisses. They brushstroke Sawtooth’s pebbly spine, his scrawny ass, the hollows of both knees: all the soft, forgotten places that haven’t been touched for decades. He can’t enjoy it. He lies there, holding his breath with a terrible anticipation. His spinal cord screams like a silver wire. His whole body tenses, waiting for the stinger. In the dream he can see Undersea Mary watching him from the opposite deck, her cheeks shining with painted-on compassion.

When he wakes up, night has already fallen. He goes and peers nervously over the side of his boat. It’s too dark to tell what’s under the surface of the water. Gherkin must have repaired the Wave Assuager, because he can seen Zenaida’s Medicaid Lifeboat bobbing alongside her slip. Sawtooth slumps into his deck chair and stares up at the sky. It’s a drunken sky, the stars hiccupping light. Great gusty clouds go spinning past the moon. The bright planets feel like pinpricks to Sawtooth’s old eyes. Tonight, the phantom pain banshees through him with a pointless fury. He considers taking one of his pills, then thinks better of it. The doctor is reluctant to give him refills. And the girl might come back. He massages the roaring space where his leg used to be. If she needs the pills badly enough, he thinks, she just might.

When he was a boy growing up on the swamp, Sawtooth used to know all of the constellations, but now he has forgotten how to find them. Overhead, the sky lurches in unfamiliar, opalescent swirls. All around him, the muted yellow lamps of his neighbors’ boats blink off quietly, one by one, until Sawtooth is left bobbing alone in the darkness.

Accident Brief, Occurrence # 00/422

“Hooey,” Mr. Oamaru says, working his fork with a silly urgency. A single pea is caught between his square front teeth. “That boy can sing. The boy just needs a friend is all. You be that, Tek. You be that friend.”

My mother’s prim smile confirms that I should be that friend. My Christian sisters nod their earnest, brunette heads. Makeup is forbidden in our household, but my sisters have slathered their lips with beeswax so that each syllable emerges at a blinding wattage:

“Be that friend!”

My sisters all have Bible names that start with a pious growl, “Rrrachel, Rrrebecca, Rrruth.” They eat unbuttered peas and fatty gristle and leave the choicest, glaziest cuts of the ham for Mr. Oamaru and me. They are pretty, and this means that charity comes easy to them. They don’t understand the real cost of what they are asking me.

There is a long silence full of bright, expectant stares and chewing sounds, gulping sounds, tiny metal clinking sounds. Jesus. Peas roll around and around my selfish mouth. Outside, I can hear the reindeer rubbing antlers against the fence wood. Snow waits in the high clouds. Our kitchen window fills with cold early stars.

“Why should I have to do it? Rangi is creepy, Mom. He’s Moa. He’s mute.”

“Son,” Mr. Oamaru answers for her. I don’t look over at him, but I can feel his radiant disapproval. “Why shouldn’t you have to do it? The boy is very nearly your cousin.”

That’s a cheap trick. Everybody in Waitiki Valley is almost a cousin. Marriage here requires an actuary to make sure you’re not blood kin.

“Rangi Gibson is not my cousin.”

“He’s your brother,” Rebecca says unhelpfully, “in Christ.”

“He hasn’t had your advantages, Tek.” Mr. Oamaru twirls a pea on the tine of his fork. “To be orphaned at that age! And Digger Gibson is a heathen and a drunk. He can’t even keep the cemetery grass mowed, much less care for a bastard child.”

My mother winces at the word “bastard.”
Some advantages,
I think angrily.

“Why should I have to be part of the stupid Avalanche at all? Why should I have to freeze my ass off and pop my ears to sing a shitty untrue song about pirates?”

“Don’t curse, Tek.” Mr. Oamaru raises his eyebrows at my mother. “I wonder who he learned that language from? Nobody in this family, that’s for sure.”

There it is, the rustle of dead leaves. Dried sap, a branch crack, the whirring teeth of Mr. Oamaru’s saw. My father—my real father—is a limb that got axed off the family tree a long time ago now. My mother coughs and cleans phantom juices off her silver with a cloth doily. My sisters clench their knives.

“Listen, don’t you bring my father into this….”

“The Avalanche,” peacemaker Rachel recites, “is
very important.
It’s a privilege to sing it. It’s a celebration of our past.” Everybody around the table smiles at her.

“Yeah? Well, I’ve seen how easily the past can get rewritten.” I glare at Mr. Oamaru. “Lyrics change. New authors come along.”

We are flying to the Aokeora Glacier to sing down the snows. It’s one of those rituals whose true meaning is lost in antiquity, a ritual that we continue because of blind tradition and our parents’ desire to booze. You can see the Aokeora Glacier from the red roof of our silo, rising some thousands of feet above our valley. We bake and sell moonpies all year to pay for our trip to the top. (The Waitiki Valley Boys Choir is fiscally dependent on the pity of mothers. Our moonpies look and taste like shoe heels.) The ice planes we hire are four-seaters, and it takes several trips to fly the entire Waitiki Valley Boys Choir up there. It’s a funny sort of concert. We leave our audience so far below us, out of earshot.

Our families gather at the base of Aokeora and synchronize their watches. They can’t hear us, of course, and they certainly can’t see us, but they crane their necks and imagine. At precisely ten o’clock, the crowd slurs along in rough jolly voices: “Ho! Ho! Ho! Ho! The Piii-raates’ Conquest!” For our finale, the choir hits the high C that triggers the Avalanche. We hold that single note for as long as we can. Sometimes the weather cooperates. Then our voices send rocks crunching down the side of the glacier. Snowbursts explode off the cliffs like white fireworks. Chunks of ice plummet into the moat around Aokeora, shooting up whale flukes of water. Two years ago, we sang so well that melt-water hosed our parents’ faces. It’s a way for the parents to hear us, I guess, albeit indirectly. Everybody gets a little sniffly about it, especially the mothers. For some of us, it’s the last year that we can goad our voices to that altitude.

The Waitiki Valley Boys Choir Proudly Presents

In Waitiki Valley, most everyone is a descendant of the Inland Pirates. Our great-great-grandparents sailed along the glacial river, burned their thieving boats, and then moved inland to meet the locals. The Moa were a peaceful, stationary people, who only killed one another. And then our pirate forebears arrived, swilling brandy and sneezing Mainland diseases all over them. We sing a ra-ra tribute to the pirates every year at the Winter Concert, “The Pirates’ Conquest.” It’s our local anthem, these squirrelly arpeggios that celebrate our pirate forebears’ every ancient offense. Verse 1: The quick extinction of the Moa’s sacred red penguins. Verse 2: The depletion of their greenstone quarries. Verse 3: The invasion of their mothers’ bodies. Verse 4: Their stolen treasure. And what did we bring the Moa in return? Grog and possums. Quail pox. Whores.

It’s a weird thing to harmonize about.

Verse 4 is the worst. It’s a lamentation for the pirates’ lost treasure. (Formerly the Moa’s holy relics, although we downplay this detail in “The Pirates’ Conquest.”) Captain Walley and his men hid the profits they’d swashbuckled in the mountains. These pirates assumed, with typical pirate arrogance, that their plunder would stay safely frozen away for an eternity. But maps don’t work in a country of glaciers. The treasure got lost on calved icebergs and crushed into the impasse of moraines. By the time our great-great-grandfathers returned to recover the treasure, X marked a spot that had long since melted into the sea. Bar fights still break out over it every once in a while, the product of our grandparents’ bloody and useless nostalgia.

The grandparents, hoarse and contemptuous, like to remind us of the true Avalanches, their Avalanches, from the early century. They have a knack for making you feel like you are betraying your pirate lineage just by sitting in a car. “How do you like that city-boy juice, city boy?” they’ll ask, watching you pour berry cocktail from a carton. Our grandparents juiced frozen berries with their own teeth. They sang more sweetly than we ever will. They never sold a single moonpie. They got to the top of Aokeora with blood and gumption, crescent axes, and it took them five days. It wasn’t uncommon for boys to die.

All
you
have to do, they wheeze, is nudge a snow lump over the edge with your voice. Easy.

Our Avalanche is a setup. It’s a show for the cheap seats. The choir director, Franz Josef, flies up a few days in advance and takes a hatchet to the powder. He picks out snow that’s survived the melt season: loosened with crampons, in regular contact with sunlight, eager to be sung apart or sunk into our valley. We sing, and we pretend that it’s our frail voices that fracture the glacier. Theoretically, the snow could ball up and fall on us, but our parents encourage this death risk with words like
tradition, heritage,
and
rite of passage.
They like to believe in the old, boulder-rolling power of our songs. They like to see the evidence of our voices, even if they can’t hear them.

With any luck, this will be my last Winter Concert. I’m hoping my voice will change later on this summer, and then I will never have to sing down another Avalanche. I ask God to grant me this wish every night. “God,” I pray, “please deliver me from the choir.” I kneel beside my attic bed on bare, hairless knees, and tune a hopeful ear for damage in my voice. I can hear my prayer coming true in the shower, where I sing test syllables. My voice sounds like the doorbell to a condemned building. Shrill, with a new hollowness behind it.

When I was a much younger boy, my mother was beautiful, but it was a sewn-up tulip kind of beauty. Then my father left. We curled in and blackened. We were heathens, you know, before Mr. Oamaru and his piratical, body-soul conquest of my mother. Mr. Oamaru has had a soft opening effect. He paid her mortage and made my sisters. He made her beautiful again. Everyone notices. Other mothers pay her incredulous compliments, peppered with real jealousy: “Why, you look like a new person, Leila. You look so
happy.
”

And you know what? I hate him for it.

If you’ve seen me in town, I guarantee you don’t remember. Dark eyes, a red lick of hair under a dark hat. I’m not a lacy saint like my sisters, but I don’t think I’m an exceptionally bad kid, either. I love my mother and my sisters, and I do my barn chores enough of the time. My stepdad, Mr. Oamaru, seems most proud of me for the sins that I resist: I don’t chew tobacco, I don’t fake sick, I don’t vandalize silos. Once, he actually complimented me for not “diddling with” the reindeer, as the Tau boys have been rumored to do. These are tough victories to take pride in.

Like most men in the valley, Mr. Oamaru is a reindeer farmer. He grazes his blue-gray stock on ancestral Moa land. He is a good man who takes good care of my mother. He claims he loves to watch me sing. When we sang down the Avalanche last year, Mr. Oamaru collected an eyedropper of the glacial snow. He wears it under his plaids on a fraying noose knot, a vial of melted time. “You sang well, Tek. You make a father proud.” I wanted to smash that vial on sight. Everybody knows that I’m a lousy singer. On my best days, my voice melts into the other boys’ and I swallow my mistakes.

“Dad sure loves your singing,” Ruth told me once, her own voice squeaky with jealousy. “He wears that eyedropper everyplace.”

“That’s just faucet water, dummy,” I heard myself lying. “That eyedropper stuff is all an act. Your dad thinks his pregnant cows sing better than I do. Your dad couldn’t pick my voice out of the choir.”

And then Ruth was crying and I felt like a monster. But everybody knows that Mr. Oamaru is not my real father. Mr. Oamaru is my mother’s husband. He is my sisters’ father. Not mine.

Your father left us because he was in a bad way,
my mother used to tell me.

Tek’s father left us because he is a bad man,
she tells everybody now. She says it again and again. She’s snowing down a new past for Mr. Oamaru, a tough rock of ice in a sea of time. A new memory for our family to stand on.
Tek’s father is a bad, bad man.
It was hard enough to lose my father the first time. Now I can’t even hold on to my memory of him as a basically good person. Mr. Oamaru has taught me that loss isn’t just limited to the present; it can happen in any direction. Even what’s done and vanished can be taken from you. Other, earlier memories that we made of my father sink and revert to water. The past shifts its crystals inside me.

To be in the Waitiki Valley Boys Choir, you need a good attitude, and the ability to sing in a pleasant, undamaged, unchanged singing voice.

—Franz Josef

On Saturday, Mr. Oamaru drops me off on the tarmac in the purple-gray predawn. We argue about “The Pirates’ Conquest” on the car ride over:

“Honestly! Half that stuff is only in there because it rhymes with conquest.”

Any fool can hear, from the first verse onward, how Waitiki’s history has been retrofitted to the demands of rhyme and meter.

“Bronze
breast,
ice
chest,
crow’s
nest,
laid to
rest,
Captain Walley’s scarlet
vest.
Do you really think that Captain Walley wore a
vest
?”

“That song’s truer than you are. Why, we’ve been singing it for longer than you’ve been alive! It’s
history….
”

It’s freezing out. A wreath of icicles forms on the dash. We reach a short airstrip where a bunch of sullen, sleepy choirboys are huddled together, flanked by a small fleet of ice planes. The choir director nods at me and checks a box. Franz Josef has a thick, twitchy mustache and no wife. There’s no magic to his conducting. He waves the metal wand with a grim, efficient panic, as if he’s directing traffic. I miss my cue again.

“Tek Oamaru! You’re a beat behind us. Chin up, eh? Enunciate, eh? You’re singing down into your chest.”

Just Tek,
I whisper under my breath. I hate rehearsing this evil stuff. It makes me feel like “The Pirates’ Conquest” is still happening. Usually I just lip sync the part about the rapes and fires. If I were braver, I wouldn’t sing at all. I have a secret admiration for Rangi, his genius refusal to carry the tune.

Rangi’s been in the choir longer than any other boy. If his voice has changed, it’s done so in secret, with the stealth of wine in a dark bottle. If you ask me, it’s a perverse charity to make the mute boy rehearse with the choir. But Franz Josef says there is music like water frozen inside him. He says he wants the Waitiki Valley Boys Choir to be the heat that melts the blocks of song in Rangi. We think that Franz Josef has fantasies of a TV special, or at least a write-up in the
Waitiki Gazette:

Local Choir Director Hailed as Miracle Worker! Mute Moa Youth Has the Music in Him!

“Sing it with us, Rangi!” Franz Josef says now. He kneels down and pushes his gloved hand into Rangi’s diaphragm, as if he is a doctor fighting for the life of an infant sound. “Me-me-me-ME-me-me-me!”

Rangi looks as if he might bite Franz Josef.

Rangi’s a Moa orphan. His adopted father, Digger Gibson, is the cemetery warden. Digger never comes to our concerts. Most days he spends dreaming in the ditches. White face, gray knuckles around a bottle. On his chest you can watch the shovel rising, the shovel falling, a graveyard metronome.