The New Moon's Arms

by Nalo Hopkinson

  “We going to do something,” said Mr. Mckinley. “That’s for sure. That’s what we come to tell you. A week Monday.”

  “What happening then?”

  “Johnson having the ceremony to open the new Gilmor plant.”

  “Here on Dolorosse.”

  He nodded. “The fishermen and the salt farmers; Gilmor being doing us wrong ever since they opened shop in Cayaba. Now they going to bankrupt the few salt farmers left on Dolorosse and Tingle. I don’t know yet what we going to do, but we going to do something.” He handed his tackle box to Gerald, shook my hand between two of his. His palms were hard like horn. “Hope you going to come out and support us, Miz Lambkin.”

  “I…well… I’m working that day.”

  “Ah. Be with us in spirit then, yes? I know how you like your snapper. Walk good.”

  I watched them go on towards the next house to spread the word.

  I took the shrimps into the kitchen, to find that Agway had abandoned the sheets of foolscap I’d given him and was drawing on the wall with a purple crayon. “No, Agway! Bad!”

  I put the bowl down on the table and went to get him away from the wall.

  Thursday evening, me and Gene! I tried to weigh who I liked better, Gene or Hector. I picked a surprised Agway up and took him on a waltz around the kitchen. “I’m going on a date, babbins!”

  Agway eyed the shrimps on the table.

  I DROVE MY CAR DOWN THE FERRY’S OFF-RAMP, following the cars in front of me. Traffic moved slowly this morning, with much blaring of horns. February was the height of tourist season, and the hotels at the Cayaba harbour would be cluttered with visitors until early May. Sure enough, there was one of their massive cruise ships, just docked. Bloody thing was the size of a mountain, gleaming white as the mounds of the salt stacks in the distance, from the original Gilmor Saline plant.

  By the time I was able to edge my car out of the harbour zone, I’d had to back up twice to find streets that weren’t clogged, and I’d witnessed three near-accidents as vehicles came close to rear-ending each other. The smell of exhaust and diesel turned my stomach. The noise was abominable. I drove past a big billboard that read, WELCOME TO CAYABA; HOME OF THE RARE MONK SEAL. The picture showed three seals frolicking in the surf—two adults and a child—as though seals hooked up in nuclear family units. At each corner of the image was a mermaid, exotically brown but not too dark. No obvious negroes in Cayaba Tourist Board publicity, unless they were dressed as smiling servers. The fish women sported the kind of long, flowing hair that most black women had to buy in a bottle of straightening solution. They had shells covering their teacup breasts. I would love to see the shell big enough to hide one of my bubbies. My first day going back to work, and already I was in a mood. Agway was probably eating Mrs. Soledad’s green banana porridge right now. Then she was going to take him for a walk, introduce him to the neighbours.

  I turned onto St. Christopher Street, right into a traffic jam that went as far as I could see. Backside. St. Christopher Street was long, one-way, and lined with expensive “boo-teeks” selling all kinds of nonsense: lamps made of old rum bottles covered in glued-on shells (the shells were imported in bulk from China); neon bikinis no bigger than a farthing; a zillion zillion t-shirts, coasters, baseball caps, mugs, and canvas shopping bags, all imprinted with images of monk seals and mermaids and the Cayaba Tourist Board logo (“Cayaba; Our Doors Are Open”). This was the heart of what Cayabans called the Tourist Entrapment Zone. There was no turnoff for a while.

  Traffic crawled. I tried to ignore the tourists clogging the sidewalks, the bright sarongs and Hawaiian shirts embossed with those fucking mermaids, the reggae music already blaring at 8:45 in the blessèd morning from every restaurant I passed. Why we had to import reggae? What the blast was wrong with tumpa?

  Maybe Mrs. Soledad would take Agway to my almond tree. They could collect ripe almonds from under the tree. Eat them down to the bitter, fibrous part. Find rockstones and crack the almond shells open for the nuts inside. Would Agway like almonds? Maybe he knew them already; plenty of them fell into the water. Would he miss me? Mrs. Soledad had better remember that she wasn’t to take him near the water. Didn’t want him trying to jump in with that cast on his leg.

  I hit the brakes; it was either that or hit the young white man who’d stepped into the road without looking. He was wearing only muddy surf jammers and rubber sandals. His shoulders and back were red as boiled shrimp. The colour offset the scrappy blond dreads hanging down his back. He gave me a lopsided grin and made the peace sign with his fingers. “No prahblem, mon; no prahblem,” he drawled in his best Hollywood Jamaican. “Cool runnings.” He staggered across the street.

  “You not in Jamaica!” I yelled at him. Damned fool. Probably high. I was practically growling by the time I was able to turn off St. Christopher and continue to work.

  When I got home, I would read The Cat in the Hat to Agway.

  I parked in the staff parking, went in the back door, through Deliveries. Colin and, what was his name? Yes, Riddell. They were both loading up the bookmobile. Riddell looked up from the low, wheeled booktruck loaded down with that day’s bookmobile reserve requests. “Miz Lambkin!” He put down the box he was carrying and came over to me. Shyness froze my face. I cracked the ice into a smile. To my surprise, Riddell gravely took my hand and shook it. “I’m glad to see you back,” he said, “real glad.”

  “Uh, thank you.” The true warmth of his smile was a balm. Made me shamed; I had barely remembered his name.

  Colin had come up behind Riddell. He nodded to me. “Sorry for your loss, Miz Lambkin.”

  “Thank you.” I released Riddell’s hand. The three of us stood there for a second in uncomfortable silence. “Well,” I said to them, “I talk to you later, okay?”

  “Okay.” They returned to their work, and I scurried away. I’ll talk to you later. People say that all the time. Half the time it’s an untruth. We promise to come back so people won’t carry on bad when we leave.

  You know how it is when you go back to your old school as an adult? How everything looks the same, but different? Children in the hallways and the classrooms, but not the faces you expect to see? The staff workroom was like someplace that I used to know. That clack-clack sound: Myrtle in her ever-present high heels. She wore them even more than me. David Stowar waved at me as he rushed for the elevator. He mouthed the word late. As usual. And he was sneaking a coffee up to the information desk, as always. I checked the schedule tacked up on the bulletin board. I had a workroom period for the first part of the morning. On the checkout desk after break. Good; I could ease into being back at work.

  Mrs. Winter sat at her desk, her chair angled away from it. She had her foot up on one of the library’s wheeled stepstools, with a cushion from the Children’s Department under her ankle. She was pencilling names into a blank schedule grid. She gave me a look as frosty as her name.

  My desk was a mess. Piled high with computer printouts of reserves that hadn’t been filled. I threw the strap of my purse over the back of my chair and got to work sorting.

  “You still looking after that little boy?” asked Mrs. Winter.

  “Last I checked, yes.”

  “You didn’t leave him alone for the day?”

  “He can’t be more than three, Mrs. Winter. You think I would leave a toddler home alone?” I started in on the other pile on my desk: damaged books and CDs that couldn’t be given to the patrons who’d reserved them.

  “Beg pardon. It’s just that your mothering days gone so long now. Easy to forget how to do it.”

  “Nope. Like riding a bicycle.” One CD case looked like somebody had dropped it into a mug of Ovaltine. “Or falling out of a tree.” I hoped Mrs. Soledad had remembered not to sugar Agway’s breakfast.

  “Too besides,” said Mrs. Winter, “you had Ifeoma so young!”

  “Mm.” I was sixteen when I brought Ife to Auntie Pearl and Uncle Edward’s house from the hospital. The first time
I had to change her diaper by myself, I cried for my mother. In those days, I had cried as much as baby Ife.

  Now I was at the pile of sticky notes fringing my inbox. Most of them were reserves questions that staff members had taken from patrons.

  Mrs. Winter scowled at her schedule, turned her pencil over, and erased something she’d written there. “It’s like the two of you raised each other,” she said.

  “Mm.” Mr. Bailey wanted to know why his book on World War One heroes hadn’t come in. He was a war vet. He read only nonfiction books about soldiers. He’d been through every book we had on every war going, and was on his second go-round. I looked up his card number on my terminal, reserved that new biography on Desert Storm for him. He wouldn’t have read it yet. Millie Marshall wanted to know when we’d be getting the new Laurelle Silver novel. Laurelle Silver had died five years ago and there was now a team of six writers churning out breathless novels of sex and scandal amongst the rich and infamous under her name, yet they still couldn’t produce new titles quickly enough for Millie. I reserved a Kelly Sheldon and that new Carrie Jason novel for her; that’d hold her until Ms. Silver posthumously committed bad prose again.

  Mrs. Winter held the completed schedule sheet out to me. “Chastity, pin this up on the board for me, nuh?”

  “Calamity.” I stood and took it from her.

  That chilly smile again. “You know how my head small, my dear. Can’t get my mind around everything you young people get up to nowadays. Changing your God-given names.”

  The phone at my desk rang. It was David Stowar, calling from the information desk. “We need you up here, please.” There was a smile in his voice.

  “Why?” Only librarians worked at the info desk.

  “Just come, nuh? And make sure you don’t have any crumbs from breakfast on your shirt.”

  “I had cocoa-tea for breakfast.”

  “Well, no cocoa stains, then. Those don’t wash out for nothing. And come up here. Now.”

  Mystified, I took the elevator up to the main floor. As I stepped out, I just had time to hear David say, “That’s her,” before I was surrounded by reporters. Camera flashes started to go off. I tried to put my hand up in front of my face. Someone took the hand and shook it.

  “Sister Lambkin,” said the woman, “I’m so pleased to meet you. Such a selfless act on your part.” The woman looked a little younger than me. Probably dougla, with that flowing black hair and those full African lips. Speaky-spokey, too. Come from money. And wasn’t that a Chanel suit? In this heat?

  Oh, shit. It was Caroline Sookdeo-Grant. Shaking my hand. “What selfless act?” I asked.

  “You plucked that little boy from the waves in the middle of a storm—”

  “Agway? But the storm was over by then. And he had already washed up onto—”

  “You kept him alive until the ambulance arrived—”

  “When I got to him, he wasn’t in any danger of being anything but alive.”

  “And now that his family has perished in that tragic accident, you’ve taken him into your home. Such generosity, Sister.”

  “How you even come to hear about me?” I asked her.

  “Mrs. Sookdeo-Grant, Mrs. Lambkin, look this way, please.”

  We looked that way. Sookdeo-Grant grabbed my hand again in one of those disturbingly firm handshakes. We smiled. “Your daughter told me,” she said. “Wonderful person. You must be very proud of her.”

  The flash went off. By the time my dazzled eyes could see again, Sookdeo-Grant was being escorted out of the library. Passers-by were calling out her name. She stopped, shook a few hands, smiled a lot. Then she stepped into the back of a nondescript beige car and was driven away.

  More flashes popped, and someone stuck a microphone that had the CNT logo on it in front of my face. “Just look at me, not the camera,” said the camera man. So of course, after that, I couldn’t see anything but the camera. It was a very big camera.

  “Look this way, please,” said the reporter. She had that glamour that people get on them when they live their lives on television. “That’s good, Mizziz Lambkin. Now, tell the audience; how does Mr. Lambkin feel about you bringing an orphan into your home?”

  “Mr. Lambkin’s dead,” I replied. “The funeral was last Saturday.” My cell phone rang. I pulled it out of my skirt pocket. “Hello?”

  “Grandma?”

  “Stanley?”

  “Well, there you have it, folks,” said the reporter into her microphone. The big camera was pointed at her now. “Not only did this brave woman throw herself into a raging sea to save a child she didn’t know—”

  “Grandma, you really think a kite would work?”

  “—she did so on the way home from burying her husband, who had tragically passed away that same day.”

  “The day before,” I said. “Only he wasn’t my—”

  “For my science fair project, I mean? Remember?”

  “Just a minute, Stanley.”

  “For Cayaba National Television, this is Jane Goodright, reporting live from the main branch of the Cayaba Public Library.”

  “But he wasn’t my husba—”

  “Maybe I could tie a camera to a kite?”

  “Don’t be silly,” I said, eyeing the very large camera in front of me. “A camera’s much too big.”

  “Thank you so much, Mizziz Lambkin. Please sign this release. It just says that you’re okay with us putting this little interview on the air.”

  I took the pen she handed me, and struggled to sign the release and juggle the cell phone at the same time.

  “A small camera, Grandma. A disposable. Only I don’t know how to make it take the pictures from up in the air… Grandma?”

  “Stanley, I call you back later, okay?” I handed the reporter back the piece of paper.

  “But I need to decide now! I have to tell my teacher by next period what my project is!”

  “All right, all right. I think a kite would work fine. Wonderful idea. Call me tonight and we’ll figure out how to do it. Okay?”

  “I can come to the library tomorrow?”

  “Yes. I’ll be here. I have to go, Stanley.”

  I snapped the phone shut and turned to tell the reporter the real story. She and the camera man were gone.

  “I’m going to kill my daughter,” I said to David.

  He looked like he’d had a vision. “That was Jane Goodright,” he whispered. “Standing not two yards from me.”

  The info desk phone rang. David answered it. “It’s for you,” he said. I took the receiver from him.

  “Calamity?”

  “It just might be a calamity. For my wretched girl child, anyway.”

  “Pardon?” It was Gene’s voice.

  “Long story. Look, I not supposed to take personal calls at work. You could make this quick?”

  “Okay. You know that rusty cutlass I had the other day?”

  “Yes?”

  “Well, I told you a little untruth.”

  “Gene, I need to get off the phone.”

  “I found it in the cashew grove. It has Mr. Lambkin’s name on the handle.”

  Ah, shit. How to explain that? No, it was okay. I had Gene half-convinced the cashews had always been there. “And?”

  David said, “You think I should have asked Jane Goodright out? I hear she not seeing anybody.”

  “I’m really sorry,” said Gene. “The lab found traces of blood and tissue on the blade.”

  I dropped the receiver.

  AND WHAT A PIECE OF BUSINESS trying to find someone to watch Agway for me for a few hours on Thursday so I could spend time with Gene! Three days a week was all Mrs. Soledad could spare. Ifeoma was going to a meditation class, or something like that; Clifton and Stanley were going to Stanley’s weekly karate practice. When I had lived in the little apartment building on Lucy Street, and Ifeoma had wanted watching, my neighbour Maxine was more than willing to do it, especially if I kept her up to date on my adventures with my l
atest boyfriend. What had happened to Maxine? I had lost touch with her when I got the library job and moved into a bigger apartment.

  I knew Ev wasn’t free. Wasn’t going to ask Hector. I didn’t know him well enough. And besides, I kind of had my eye on both him and Gene, so it didn’t seem right to ask him to babysit for me so I could go and pitch woo with the other guy. Oh, so lovely to have prospects again!

  But I had to eat dirt to get Agway a babysitter, and I knew it. I dialled the phone.

  “Hello?”

  “Michael?”

  “Yes, Calamity.”

  Uh-oh. I knew that flat tone. He was going to milk my blow-up for every drop of juice he could wring out of it. “How you doing, Michael? Things good?”

  “You have a reason to call me?”

  Fuck. He was going to make this hard. I swallowed. “Well, yes.” Shit, this was like spitting out nails. “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s interesting.”

  “Michael, cut me some slack, nuh? I’m sorry I said those things to you, okay?”

  “You said them to Orso, too.”

  “Okay. My apologies to him, too. Michael, I need your help.”

  “Ah. So you’re sorry because you need my help.”

  “Yes, I… No! I just need someone to babysit Agway for a few hours.” Damn. That didn’t sound too good, either.

  “Calamity, you can’t try to make it up to us just because you need a babysitter!”

  I expected him to sound angry. I hadn’t expected him to sound hurt.

  “I didn’t mean it,” I mumbled. “You know how my temper stay.”

  “True that. And I have to tell you; five years without having to deal with your temper was five peaceful years.”

  Now he was exasperating me. “You’re really so sensitive, Michael?”

  “Of course. Don’t you know, that’s what we faggots are like?” he said bitterly.

  I heard someone speaking to him. “Wait,” he said to me. “Hold on.”