The Rhythm of the August Rain

by Gillian Royes

  The narrow, twisting road ended a few hundred yards farther on at a small, dark shack surrounded by thick bushes. “This must be it, star.”

  “I have to come with you?”

  “What you think I paying you for?” Shad creaked the car door open. “I don’t like to come to these kind of places alone. Time to big up like a man.”

  The moon was three-quarters full, enough to help Shad find his way around the undergrowth behind the shack, Unity breathing heavily behind him. A ghostly building, its shuttered window covered by vines, suddenly appeared to their left.

  “Raas claat!” the youth whispered loudly.

  “Look like it empty.” Rounding the structure, they saw a circle of abandoned houses, a dozen or more. “Plenty people was living here one time,” Shad commented.

  They moved slowly, hunkered down, stepping over and around the tall grass between the houses. At the back of the yard, hiding behind the empty buildings, was a cottage from which a weak light emerged.

  “I good, boy,” Shad muttered. “Somebody still there.”

  The yellow light of a kerosene lantern glowed behind a tattered curtain, more holes than cloth. Gesturing to his companion to go around the back of the house, Shad tiptoed to the front door. The smell of thyme poured out of the shack’s window.

  “Anyone home?” He knocked, knocked again on the thin wooden door.

  The only sound was the tinkle of a spoon being placed in a pot.

  Taking his handkerchief out of his pants pocket, Shad wiped his forehead. “I looking for a gentleman name Dread,” he called.

  The door opened an inch. “Who you?” a voice croaked.

  “Excuse me, please. My name Shadrack Myers. I had a friend . . .” He trailed off as the door opened slowly, allowing the odors of seasoning and sweat to pour through. The large, dark shape of a man humped with age stood before him. He was leaning on a stick as tall as he, the lamplight behind him, and lumpy, dangling dreadlocks fell to his knees.

  “I asking about a woman—”

  “I don’t know no woman,” the man growled, and slammed the door.

  “A Canadian woman,” Shad called.

  The door opened a little, stopped. “What you say?” The rumbling voice could have come from a tomb.

  “I asking about a woman who disappear—”

  The door was yanked open. “I look like a murderer?” The man raised the stick.

  Shad stumbled backward and fell to the ground. “Wait!” Shad yelled. “I just asking—”

  “Who send you?” Over the Rasta’s shoulder, something glinted above the torn curtain. “You is police, right?” He raised the stick again, but this time someone held it and pushed the old man and his stick back into the house.

  “Leave him, brethren!” Unity shouted. “The man don’t do you nothing. Is so you think Jah want you to act?” After the fellow slammed the door, Unity held out his hand to Shad. “I man enough for you now?”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  * * *

  Eric stood on the edge of the low dune and waved his arms. “Don’t go out so far,” he called.

  Eve waved before bodysurfing with Casey back to the beach. As soon as their feet touched sand, they headed back to meet the next wave.

  It had been a long morning for her father, and he was already looking forward to the lunch Jennifer had promised. The day had started early because snorkeling was best done before nine, he’d assured Eve.

  “You ready?” he’d asked her when she came out of the Delgados’ door that morning.

  “You forgot to wish me happy birthday,” she’d chided him when she reached his car window, and he’d started singing the birthday song.

  “It’s okay, Dad. You can skip that part.”

  “I thought you wanted me to—”

  “Is that my birthday present on the seat?” She’d torn open the gift, trying on the mask of the snorkeling set inside. “Can Casey come with us?” she gurgled through the mask.

  “Of course.”

  Eve had run into the house, and her father had waited in the Jeep until he could wait no longer.

  In the kitchen he’d found Miss Bertha cooking what looked like an elaborate omelet, Sheba at her feet. “Mistah Eric, you want a johnnycake? I just cook some.”

  He’d munched away at the fried bread and inquired about her son Isaac, who’d worked at the hotel as a gardener.

  “He too frisky, I telling you. His sister is the steady one, but he have one woman after another. He already have three children by three different woman, and he only twenty-seven. What you think about that?”

  “I hope he can support them.”

  “Pshaw, is the cock crowing all you men.” The woman had sucked her teeth.

  Eric had blushed a deep crimson, glad she’d turned her back. The phrase erectile dysfunction—the poetic words hiding the terrible meaning—had haunted Eric since Shannon’s hasty departure on Monday morning. It had been weighing down his forehead as if he were carrying a metal sign tacked to it with the initials ED. He was now officially impotent, he kept telling himself, something he’d heard his mother calling his alcoholic father through the thin bedroom walls. He’d never had a problem before, and he’d always smirked at the ads in magazines touting cures. Just the year before, sex had come easily with Simone, and there’d been no need to think about it in the chaste months since. But here it was at last: he couldn’t get it up.

  The only person he could share his dilemma with was Lambert, but Eric was too ashamed to bring it up. His best friend had a lusty sex life himself. Cringing already at the cost of seeing his urologist, Eric had spent Monday afternoon fiddling with the computer, determined to get answers. That night he’d discovered Google. On Tuesday, when Shad wasn’t looking, he’d visited websites that gave him the information he was seeking.

  Impotence, according to one site, was caused by alcohol, medications, or chronic illness; none of these applied to him. Eric had read on, one finger on the screen, that impotence could be a signal of heart disease. Another website said he should protect his erection by eating healthy produce (all those mentioned unavailable in Jamaica), avoiding fatty foods (the core of his diet), and controlling obesity, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol (all of which he probably had, he was sure). By the time he got to warnings to curb smoking and get regular exercise, a feeling of doom had descended and he’d gone to bed depressed.

  “Isaac too randy,” Miss Bertha had continued, spooning more fried bread into the basket. “He must be taking Spanish fly or something.”

  “Spanish fly?”

  “Is a thing that make men—you know—give them plenty juice. Make them get it up and stay up. So they say, anyway.”

  Eric had just gotten up the nerve to ask where one would buy this miracle medicine when Eve and Casey rushed into the kitchen with their gear, Jennifer right behind.

  “We’re having a little birthday party for Eve this afternoon,” Jennifer had pretend-whispered. “You should come.”

  “I’d love to.”

  “And, of course, we’ll have lunch waiting for you when you get back from the beach.”

  The snorkeling at Sugar Bay had been more fun than he’d thought it would be. He and Casey had helped Eve put on her mask and fins, and the three of them had paddled around the cove’s coral outcroppings, signaling each other underwater when they spotted a colorful parrot fish, or once a stingray lying on the sand. When the waves picked up, they’d stopped snorkeling and the girls had opted to bodysurf. He’d sat on his towel under the same coconut tree where he and Shannon had made out long ago, and he’d been reminded, yet again, of their disastrous night in bed. Only after he’d bought three lobster patties from a man walking on the beach did Eric realize that, if he went to the birthday party, he’d have to meet up with Shannon.

  On the drive back home, with Eve and Casey squeezed into the passenger seat, Eric decided that he’d have to go to the birthday party and face his shame. He wasn’t sick, he had no p
ressing appointments, and he’d look like a moron if he didn’t go to his daughter’s birthday party. Plus Shannon would think him a coward. When they got back to the Delgados’, he ambled into the kitchen behind the girls. The first person they ran into was Shannon, lifting cookies off a baking sheet.

  “Can we have some?” Casey asked.

  “Please, don’t. They’re for the birthday party.”

  “I was just wondering what time the—the party was,” Eric stammered when she glanced up at him, the memory of Monday morning creating a fog between them.

  Her voice was even, no emotion. “About four o’clock.”

  “Righto.” He rushed back to the Jeep without lunch.

  At the bar, Shad was wiping glasses and setting them on a towel.

  “Didn’t Solomon relieve you?” Eric asked. “Isn’t it your break time?”

  “Boss, I stay here with Miss Mac while they was tearing down her house.” The bartender shook his head. “She start to cry, and I almost cry myself. Is a sad, sad thing when you see your house mash up like that. The old roof just give way, then the walls come down, easy, easy. You would never think that they stand up to all them hurricanes.” He sniffed hard. “They should have said a few words before, though. The bulldozer have no respect, man. All them years she live there and bring up her son, all them people who stay in her boardinghouse, all the time we used to sit in her kitchen and talk—just gone with the dust when they smash it. I decide that I don’t want to learn to drive a bulldozer. It don’t know the difference between right and wrong.”

  Eric murmured his sympathies and walked down the conch-lined path to what had been the house next door. The nine acres of land that had belonged to Miss Mac now lay bare, a few cedar and mahogany trees standing over the wasteland. In the middle of the property was a pile of concrete chunks and old beams: Miss Mac’s demolished three-bedroom house. Although the land now belonged to the Largo Bay Grand Hotel Company—the name already making him uncomfortable—it still belonged to his former landlady, Miss Mac, in Eric’s mind. True, she’d wanted to sell her house and land, she’d been saying so for years now, but that didn’t change her stamp on it or fill the emptiness she’d left behind.

  As Eric stared at the rubble with a heavy heart, a fat, brown rat ran up a beam lying askew. When it got to the end, the creature turned its head—sensing an observer—and locked beady eyes with the new owner.

  “Get ready, bud,” Eric announced. “Your life is about to change.”

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  * * *

  Blow them all out!” Shannon urged the birthday girl.

  “Make a wish,” Rickia added as Eve blew out the thirteen candles, sweeping her head around the square cake with her name in the middle.

  “Don’t tell us the wish or it won’t come true,” Casey said.

  “I wasn’t going to tell, anyway.” Eve was wearing an orange dress that Casey had given her, and her hair was swept away from her face in a fluffy ponytail. She looked older to Shannon all of a sudden, her face longer and calmer, its former sulkiness almost absent.

  “Don’t the senior citizens get cake first?” Lambert called from the adjoining living room.

  “Coming right up,” Jennifer said, carving into the cake.

  The first slice went to Eve, who held it up and crowed, “Chocolate, my fave.”

  “I better not have any,” Shannon heard Eric say behind her. He had come to the party on time, and he and Lambert had retreated to the sofa, a safe distance from the women and the seven children clamoring around the table.

  Shannon handed Joella a slice of cake for Baby Josh, standing shakily clutching his sister’s skirt, the dead stamp of Shad in his little jeans and sneakers. Behind them, Shannon heard Lambert lower his booming voice, saying something about a lack of testosterone. Eric’s reply was too muffled to hear. Intrigued, she cut two large slices of cake and walked them to the men, determined to show Eric she didn’t care if he had a lack of testosterone or not. Lambert thanked her when he took his plate, and Eric mumbled something, turning as pink as the rosebuds on his cake.

  As she spooned out ice cream for Rickia, Shannon knew—felt it for the first time in the depths of her—that there was no going back to what could have been with Eric. Red flags were flapping all over the place. He hadn’t pursued her, hadn’t told her about his girlfriend, and—the biggest flag of all—he couldn’t get it up when they were making out.

  The feeling that the relationship was over had been coming on since she’d left him on Monday morning, and she’d spent the rest of the day feeling despondent. But Tuesday was a new day, and she’d resolved to focus on the tasks she had to complete before leaving the island, helped by the news that Shad had sprung on her.

  “I met an interesting lady Rasta,” he’d said when he called at midday. “The one we start to visit the night of the Nyabinghi, but the road was blocked, remember? Aziza is her name. Anyway, she tell me about the man she and her husband bought their land from, an old man who live by himself. I went to visit him.”

  He’d related his encounter with the angry Rasta and clucked his tongue. “Not a nice man, not a nice man at all.”

  “Did he know anything?”

  “He just vex. He thought I was police.”

  “I guess we should rule him out.”

  “Yeah, no woman would want him,” Shad had quietly mused. “Something funny, though.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “When he open the door, I see something strange. I see a piece of glass, like a diamond hanging on a string in front of the window.”

  “That doesn’t mean anything.”

  “I never see nothing like that in a Rasta house yet.” The would-be sleuth paused. “Anyway, we still don’t know what Ras Redemption was going to tell you.”

  Shannon had lifted her lip. “I really don’t want to go back. I’m pretty sure they don’t want me back—and I don’t trust him.”

  “And I can’t help you now. I have to do all kind of thing before the wedding, pick up flowers, suit. Mistah Eric lending me the Jeep.” And the following week, before the groundbreaking, he explained, he had to collect people from the airport. She wondered if he meant Simone.

  Not long after, Miss Bertha had called Shannon to the phone again. Richard Ransom was returning her phone call from Monday. He apologized for calling back a day late; he’d been entertaining a visiting colleague from Scotland. He didn’t use any pronouns.

  “I heard you left the Nyabinghi in a hurry,” he added in his radio voice, this time with a soft laugh.

  “I’m sorry we had to leave—”

  “What happened?”

  “It was my fault. I took out a camera, and the folks around us weren’t happy. Stupid mistake, one I’ll never make again.”

  “I’d never have known about it if I hadn’t asked where you were. One of the drummers told me you’d gone because of some confusion—that’s what he called it—and I-Verse got me a ride down the mountain. When I left, everybody was celebrating. You wouldn’t have known that any drama had gone on.”

  “How did you get back to Largo? I saw that your car was gone—” She broke off, about to reveal that she’d seen his car missing from the car park early Monday morning.

  “I took a taxi when I got down to the main road.”

  “That’s a relief. I felt terrible leaving you, but things got a bit hairy. I thought I was going to be burned at the stake.”

  “I hardly think so, although I’m not surprised you got some verbal threats. They’re suspicious of outsiders, you know, for good reason. They’ve been outcasts for so long. But they’re a peaceful bunch, Rastas; they really don’t want any trouble.” His deep voice rumbled into a laugh. “I’m sorry to tell you, but burning a foreign journalist would bring them far more attention than it would be worth.”

  “You’re probably right, but what about Katlyn?” Shannon inquired, the journalist in her scavenging for any crumb he’d gained from Redemption. “I w
onder if she was ever threatened. I’m glad to hear the Nyabinghi would never have actually harmed me, but maybe she wasn’t so lucky.”

  “Redemption never mentioned a word about her. He only wanted to reason with me, best me at Rastafarian philosophy.”

  Shannon updated him on Shad’s visit to Sister Aziza and the man named Dread. “I’m sorry I never had a chance to talk to Ras Redemption,” she added, a little dig.

  “He might be worth another visit.”

  “I’ll have to think about that.”

  “You know, I was thinking about another community I know that’s not far from Gordon Gap. It’s in a place called Heron Hill. I did some research there a few years ago. Maybe we can go up there one day. They might know something.”

  “Whatever I do, I need to do it soon. I want to get out of here by the middle of next week the latest. Shad can’t help me, though. He’s busy getting ready for his wedding Saturday afternoon.” She’d wondered if it was too big a hint.

  “Getting married, huh?” Ransom had said, accompanied by the sound of pages turning, as if he was consulting a diary. “I could help you Saturday morning. That’s the only time I can do it, because I’m having company after that.”

  “Would you?” She’d grinned into the phone, deciding that she could deal with this man—even if the company was female.

  Eve’s birthday party moved on to the opening of gifts: a book from Shad’s children and a return ticket to Jamaica from the Delgado family, at which Eric had looked a little chagrined about Lambert’s helping him out again. Eve had hugged everyone, saying she would read the book on the plane back to Canada—and then come back next year.

  Shannon’s gift had been opened at the crack of dawn when Eve shook her awake. “It’s my birthday.”

  “Happy birthday,” her mother had moaned as Eve jumped into her bed, the first time in years. “I know you’re here for your gift.” She’d chuckled as she kissed her daughter.

  The teenager had pulled away. “I bet I can guess what you’re giving me.”