Floating Like the Dead

by Yasuko Thanh

  “Chingame,” Chato swore. He twisted the edges of the banana leaf together then tried to seal them with spit. Still, the joint came apart. He held the package of mottled leaf toward Tiphaine accusingly.

  “You didn’t bite the leaf enough,” she said. “You must really bite down on the edges before you roll it.” She mimicked a beaver with her teeth. “Its brokenness keeps it whole. I don’t know why you insist on using banana leaf instead of rolling papers anyway. It’s –”

  “Natural and free.”

  “So pretentious.”

  Tiphaine finished rolling the joint for him. When she was done, she stared out across the beach at the tourists, most of them students on break from universities around the globe, ersatz adventurers, soul-seekers, and hayseed gurus. They frolicked topless in the ocean and swayed in encampments bounded by driftwood, the music from their guitars and did-geridoos mingling with the lapping waves. Farther down the beach, a row of overturned fishing dories provided shade for some local teenagers, knobby knees peeking out from under the whitewashed wood, an edge of navy-and-white uniform, the legs of adolescent girls always brave and horse-like. Farther down still, four Catholic Miskito women bathed fully clothed, their waist-length braids flashing in the white heat.

  Sebastian was waving the empty beer can over his head while Chato’s friends laughed, their mouths full of brown teeth. They were the sons of fishermen whose fathers were fishermen, and when they looked at her – a blond French woman, an ex-pat – she wondered what they saw. She preferred to think she was different from the other foreigners, who were too arrogant or sheepishly fawning, proud or embarrassed by their privileged lot. While the locals went to cockfights and the newcomers did yoga, she did neither, preferring to keep her mind on her business and tend to Sebastian when she could.

  Sebastian waddled toward a pile of driftwood. Friday was market day for his nanny, Olivia. Sebastian spent most of his time with Olivia, either down at the beach or playing in the resort’s courtyard, where a pet deer was tied to the mango tree. And though Tiphaine told herself to be happy that her son loved his nanny, she sometimes worried that he might be growing too attached to her. The thought gnawed at Tiphaine, but what choice did she have? A woman running her own business needed a nanny. She tried to push the doubts from her mind. There would be enough criticism of her parenting skills once her mother-in-law arrived from Tegucigalpa tomorrow. Then she’d see even less of her son. Luz took over the whole house and demanded all of Chato’s and Sebastian’s attention whenever she visited. Though it hurt Tiphaine to be relegated to being an outsider in her own home, what could you say to a man whose mother could do no wrong in his eyes?

  Sebastian’s diaper was sagging down to his knees as he ran along the shoreline. Even from where she sat she could see that his chubby legs, with their folds so deep she could lose her fingers inside them, were crusted in filth. She was thinking she should get up and change his diaper when he started to wail, the sound slowly growing in pitch. It was a cry Tiphaine hadn’t heard since his colicky-baby phase, when he had screamed through the night in a hammock woven out of plastic shopping bags that hung from the rafters of their house, suspended by two ropes. Not knowing what to do and anxious for Chato to return from wherever he claimed to be, Tiphaine had huddled in the farthest corner of the room and chewed her fingers, listening to Sebastian’s demanding cries, her muscles growing more rigid by the hour, until Chato finally opened the door. She hated his finding her in the corner like that, and seeing his anger, his disappointment in her, she had sworn she’d do better. More times than she’d like to admit she’d made this promise to herself only to break it again and again.

  As usual, Chato reached Sebastian first, scooping the boy into his arms and kissing his face. As he cuddled his son, Chato spoke into the boy’s ear, in quiet confidence, two men sharing a joke. “Oh pobrecito, you poor little thing. I’m here. Your mother’s too drunk to look after you right.”

  Had it not been for Chato’s friends, watching her with curious faces, she might have crumpled and sank to her knees. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t right at all for Chato to be saying these things. Who was he to be judging her?

  Chato held the toddler out to her. In the end, it was a mother’s work to look after a child. Impatience simmered behind Chato’s smile as she took Sebastian from his arms and examined the boy’s cut. It was nothing, a small wound where the mouth of the tin had cut into his thumb. She nestled her son against her hip. “Hush, hush, hush. You’re a brave boy. Why are you crying?”

  “Chinga a tu pinche madre.” Chato laughed in derision for the benefit of his friends. “She doesn’t care if he bleeds and dies.”

  As though sensing a shift in the mood of the day, Chato’s friends tried to calm her: “It’s nothing, mamacita.” And, “It’s not good for a mother to be too overprotective.”

  Tiphaine nodded and smiled. “See there. Shhh, shhh.” After a minute, the blood had stopped trickling down Sebastian’s arm. She touched her tongue to the red line, first licking then wiping it away with the hem of her skirt.

  Chato cracked open another beer and raised it toward his friends. “My father beat me so many times I can’t remember. The hospital in Tegus has a list this long with my injuries. The one I still remember is ‘beaten over the head with a tequila bottle.’ But every time I got up.” He was staring Tiphaine down, as if to challenge her.

  Tiphaine felt weak. She had never told anyone that some days just looking at Chato turned her inside out, her love barrelling through her with a hurricane force that left her feeling uprooted. The sheer strength of her love for him startled her, even as she suspected there were limits to his.

  She hushed, hushed Sebastian, softening his cries to whimpers. Then she put his thumb in her mouth and sucked on the soft flesh until he began to sleep, his weight hot in her lap, his head heavy against her breast.

  If Chato could earn money from the tourists, why couldn’t she?

  Tiphaine watched the girl with dreadlocks, lying alone in her hammock, pretending to rest although her eyes were wide open. The girl was watching the other guests eating or playing chess, her gaze stubborn yet hungry, on the lookout for something beyond the green palms full of coconuts or the fish splayed open, flat as postcards, drying in the street just beyond the bamboo fence. A few years ago, Tiphaine had worn the same intense expression under a floppy straw hat, sketching in a book full of pencil-coloured seashells. Tipahine sat sideways in the next hammock, her rum eye-opener between her knees, and held out a pack of Belmont Filtros.

  “You like the beach?” Tiphaine asked as the girl took a cigarette.

  She nodded. “The food’s great, too.”

  “And the beer’s cheap.”

  Tiphaine told the girl she owned the place and, as usual, was met with disbelief. Why, Tiphaine was too young! It couldn’t be true.

  Kirstie and her sister, both Spanish majors, were from Antwerp. Tiphaine had checked the girls in yesterday and booked their hammocks for three weeks. Kirstie wore her blond hair in dreadlocks through which she had woven strands of coloured wool. Streaks of zinc whitened the freckled skin on the bridge of her nose and cheeks, giving her sunburned face the look of half-ripe fruit. Next to Kirstie’s raw innocence, her sister, Marie, with her dark hair and skin the colour of acacia bark, struck Tiphaine as exotic and almost world-weary in comparison. Tall and ropy, Marie gazed out at the world through heavily-lidded eyes.

  “Yes, we have different fathers,” Kirstie said, rocking back and forth in her hammock.

  As she spoke, Kirstie’s eyes settled on the young man squeezing orange juice by the sinks; on his lean, perfect body, his hips revealed by shorts worn provocatively low. There was an expression of desire on the girl’s face that made Tiphaine wince; it was typical of Cayo Bonaire tourists to wear their appetites so openly, as they tried to pack it all in – excitement, sex, drugs, suntans – as if stuffing items in a suitcase. To think she’d ever been one of them.

  “H
e lives to love women,” Tiphaine finally said, lowering her head conspiratorially. “It’s what he does, if you know what I mean.”

  Would she like to? Tiphaine asked.

  Kirstie threw her head back as she laughed, her dreadlocks bouncing in the air with the motion. Then she turned to look at him again.

  Five months ago, Austin had run out of money while backpacking. Instead of going home to Clifton, Arizona, he’d rented a shack farther down the beach with no electricity, using his wristwatch for collateral, and lived off oranges. Then he started running drugs for Chato. The day Tiphaine had hired him to work at El Principe – this boy with his slim waist and avocado-green eyes – she’d walked to his shack with some cocaine hidden in her floppy straw hat, expecting just another one of Chato’s lackeys. But what she found surprised her: a copy of William Blake, a set of wood-carving tools, and a sack of oranges on a table he’d built himself from pieces of driftwood he’d found on the beach. She took out an orange and ate it while sitting next to him, cross-legged on the ground.

  Tiphaine had offered him room and board in exchange for doing odd jobs, and now Austin lived in the space they’d built behind the resort for extra storage but never used. He squeezed the orange juice and cleaned the toilets.

  When Kirstie said yes, Tiphaine told her to approach Austin as she would any man to whom she was sexually attracted. Touch his arm. Don’t be shy. Raise your eyes then lower them again. Coy, but not too coy. Say “I like you,” simply, with her fingers brushing his.

  “But you must listen to me very carefully. There’s a certain way to approach this situation. A certain kind of.… decorum. Never mention money. Never mention you are paying for his services.” And Kirstie nodded as if she’d known this all along.

  Tiphaine put Kirstie’s money in her pocket and watched as the girl sauntered toward Austin. A bus belching black exhaust fumes stopped in front of El Principe, its roof piled high with bundles of produce, bolts of cloth, and huge mesh bags. A tourist peered out through the dusty glass panes, and orange-laden boys in torn shirts and bare feet were already gathering around to offer up their riches to the windows.

  As Tiphaine made her way to the bar to serve the travellers, she glanced back at Austin and the girl. She wasn’t sure if she was taking advantage of a fool, or if it was no different than charging admission to the ocean. Austin was a young man with a libido. As far as she was concerned, it was as natural for him to make love as it was for a canary to sing, whether or not it was being watched.

  Still, it was only a matter of time before he found out, before she was caught. Passing beers across the counter, she wondered how long she would have to wait.

  That evening, a group of German tourists showed up at the house asking for Chato. Tiphaine invited the men in and let them play with Sebastian as she called El Principe, but Chato was nowhere to be found. When she grew tired of waiting for Chato and impatient to lose herself, she retrieved Chato’s personal stash. The Germans had come to Central America for the cheap cocaine, and she sold them what Chato had taped to the underside of the toilet tank lid, trying to hide it from her. In gratitude, they let her snort coke with them until dawn.

  After they left, she sat chewing her nails, watching Sebastian doze fitfully after crying himself to sleep, and waited for the alarm clock to go off. Grey clouds slowly crept across the sky, and it began to rain. Then a crack-roar of thunder sent cats scurrying under houses and dogs scratching at doors to get in. Sitting by the window, Tiphaine heard the green palms whisper, snap, and shake, as the now-purple sky flashed with lightning. When she had first come to Cayo Bonaire, she had been overwhelmed by the rain – the sheer force of it as it washed over her, threatening to sweep her away as if she were nothing more than a pebble in a river, while flooding houses, causing mudslides, unmooring trees. Yet its daily siege had overcome her until, worn down, she no longer had the necessary resistance to truly fear its power. The tropical rains became just a rhythm outside her window; let it hammer on the roof tiles or shake the walls, her fight was gone.

  By the time the alarm went off at 7:30, the storm had stopped as suddenly as it had started. Tiphaine rose to turn off the alarm, feeling a gnawing ache in every part of her body. As she tried to shake off her drug-induced reverie, she dressed Sebastian then muscled him, kicking and squirming, into his stroller.

  When she arrived at El Principe, Tiphaine found the cooks cleaning up in the aftermath of the storm. Guests were wringing water from their beach towels and some of the local boys thrust fallen palm leaves at each other like swords. Chato was drinking beer and playing poker with Austin at one of the restaurant tables.

  “Where were you?” she shouted, as she pushed Sebastian’s stroller toward Chato as if in accusation. “All these customers showed up at the house last night and you weren’t there to take care of them. I called everywhere trying to find you. Where were you?”

  “I have enough to worry about with people wanting their money back because their hammocks got wet.”

  “Yes, I can see you are busy.”

  The cooks in the kitchen glanced at one another knowingly over their chopping boards. Resort guests raised their heads from their hammocks or turned from their breakfasts to watch the commotion. Austin fanned his cards and tried to pretend Tiphaine was not standing in front of him, her nose running, her hair in tangles. The wet roads had muddied her flip-flops and her painted toenails. He had never seen her looking so pitiful.

  Chato was telling Tiphaine to mind her own business; he’d had things to take care of last night. From the way her body quivered, Austin knew the thin edge of rage on which she balanced was tipping.

  “If it wasn’t for me,” she was saying, “just look around. If it wasn’t for me –”

  Chato glanced up again from the cards in his hand. “What? You think because you sold the little bit you stole from me you’re a businesswoman? You partied with them like a girl for hire. Don’t look so shocked. When I saw the Germans this morning they complimented me on what a fun wife I have. But you could never manage the deals I do. Our profits would be up your nose if I let you. If I can’t even trust you not to dip into a tiny stash, how can I trust you with anything else?”

  Chato slammed his beer down so hard the liquid foamed in the bottle and bubbled over the lip. The brief silence that followed was broken by Sebastian’s wails. Tiphaine picked him up and tried to quiet him, but he pushed her away, mashing his hands into her face.

  “You want to be responsible for everything,” she said, “but you are not responsible at all. Not even for your own son.”

  “Is that so? Then why he is squirming in your arms like he wants to get away?”

  She crumpled then, and looked so small that Austin suddenly wished he could reach out to defend her. A ray of sun illuminated her blond hair and the halo of light that surrounded her made her appear even more uncertain. She closed her eyes and breathed in and out slowly. After a moment she said, “There was coke there in front of me, in little piles everywhere. I waited but you never came. What were you doing that was so urgent?”

  Chato’s eyes glinted then, but as if thinking better of it, he shook his head and pointed with his beer toward the kitchen instead. “Why don’t you make yourself busy with something important.”

  “While you just sit there and drink more beer. Good. Be drunk when your mother arrives. She’ll be happy to see that.”

  Chato just laughed and picked up his cards. “Play,” he ordered Austin.

  She wouldn’t get near his stash again, Chato was saying after Tiphaine left in a fury with Sebastian. From now on he would keep his personal supply on him, but with the money Austin was earning her, who knew what trouble she might get herself into.

  “What are you talking about?” Austin said.

  “Come, m’ijo. My son. Don’t play the fool. It’s so obvious you like my wife. She’s pretty, a poco no?”

  “Everyone likes your wife.” Not until Chato snorted in amusement did Austin real
ize his words had come out wrong.

  “If you are trying to tell me you don’t know what is going on, then you are even more of a fool than I thought.” Chato took a long guzzle from his beer.

  “Why don’t you tell me, then, Chato. Come on, tell me why I’m a fool.”

  Chato told Austin that Tiphaine had been pimping him for almost two months.

  “Nothing goes on without me knowing about it,” Chato said defiantly. “And I know everything about my wife.” He was a man laying his cards on the table, victorious.

  Then, as if in consolation, his voice as smooth as a scalpel, Chato said, “It’s just a little fun.” He got up and slapped Austin on the back as he left the table. “Some hot, spicy, Caribbean fun. And no one gets hurt, right?”

  The boy felt bruised, his ego wounded: twelve women in less than two months; it only seemed strange in hindsight. Even the bet he’d made with Chato last week, to see who could sleep with more women before the season was out, now seemed a cruel joke. Austin had wanted to be like Chato, who had only to spread his fingers, it seemed, for his hands to be filled. Maybe if he was patient, he thought, he too could live in a whitewashed house within a grove of lime trees, with a wife like Tiphaine. Austin carried his love for Tiphaine everywhere. Whenever he was with a woman, she was always there, just beyond those nameless curves. Tiphaine, Tiphaine, Tiphaine, whose name he sometimes grunted, without any control.

  Now he was their dupe. The shame he felt was lodged inside him, as if he’d swallowed a bone or eaten something spoiled.

  He spent the rest of the day rocking himself in a hammock, smoking endless joints, trying to decide what to do. The nylon had etched its way deep into his flesh by the time he got up because he could no longer stand the flies. Dusk was coming on; he could hear the sounds of showers running and toilets being flushed with buckets of water from the cistern. The smell of bug spray clung to the humid air, wafting off the legs of young women going to one of the beach-front bars to dance and drink. He heard a familiar voice and glanced up from his hammock to see Kirstie push open the gate, hips swaying seductively as she crossed the sand and settled herself into one of the rental hammocks by the bar.