by Mary Morris
Douglas says that he’s always been safe. He believes some special energy exists in the universe and that if you tap it, you’ll be safe. Life, he says, will protect you if you respect it. Melanie, who grew up in California, immediately recognizes this as hot-tub mentality and rolls her eyes. Natalie tells proudly that she signs all her letters “Soul” or “Flight.” She says she and Douglas have had a religious experience that changed their lives.
Melanie tries to be polite. “How was it religious?”
“It happened on Christmas,” Natalie replies.
But Douglas is quick to interrupt. “Christmas was just a coincidence.” They’d been camping in the rain forest of Hawaii and he’d gotten pneumonia. “I was going to die,” he says, “right there in the middle of that rain forest.”
“So we prayed.” Natalie’s voice trembles. “We held hands all night and said a mantra over and over.”
“In the morning I was cured,” Douglas announces with great feeling.
“And it was Christmas,” Natalie says.
“I believe in faith.” Mango Jack suddenly speaks. “Some very bad things have happened to me, but I’ve never lost my faith.”
Douglas nods. “I feel what you’re saying, man.”
“I know I look strange,” Mango Jack goes on. “People don’t know what to make of me. Do you know I’ve been refused hotel rooms? Once a guy punched me out in Atlanta, just for walking down the street.”
Douglas shakes his head sadly back and forth.
“I’ve got no home,” Jack says. He points somewhere north. “America’s a sick place, don’t you agree? Don’t you guys just hate America?”
Douglas says everywhere is home if you are at peace. Natalie says she doesn’t hate anything, not even mosquitoes. Douglas comments on how Natalie won’t even swat a mosquito that’s sucking blood from her arm. Melanie and I pay for Mango Jack’s dinner. Then we wander back to the guest house to sleep.
In the middle of the night one of the men from the porch comes into our room. He has put his hand through our screen and opened the door. Melanie turns on the light and shouts at him, “What are you doing?”
“Excuse me.” He looks bewildered. “I am lost.” He staggers out and we hear him collapse in front of the bathroom door.
Melanie crawls into bed with me. We are naked in the tropical heat and I feel her skin against my skin. Her breath in my ear. Our breasts touch. I feel her nipples against my flesh, and she trembles. “I’m afraid of myself in this place,” she tells me.
In the morning we wake to the sound of gunfire nearby. Actually, it is more like shelling. A low whistling sound followed by a big boom. It is rhythmic and consistent, one shell after another. Melanie looks at me and we jump out of bed, hitting the floor. We huddle next to each other as the shelling goes on. But then it seems to go on too long. After a while we grow bored and slip into our clothes. Carefully we make our way to the porch.
Three of the men are on the porch, beer bottles surrounding them, some rolling around the porch. The fourth still lies dead drunk beside the toilet, where we heard him collapse during the night. Natalie and Douglas peer from their screen door, a sheet pressed against them. “What’s going on?” Douglas asks, looking very pale.
We hear the sound of shelling again. One of the men holds up a cage, laughing. Inside is a small green parrot. They tell us her name is Juanita and she is their mascot. They tell us she has survived many shellings in Managua and she is a member of the National Guard. She has learned the language of shellings and she is a survivor. She is a Somocista. They hold up Juanita’s cage proudly. The parrot makes the sound of shelling again. Then bursts out laughing.
After a breakfast of bitter coffee and a stale roll, Mango Jack runs off to try to find Charlie again and get us to the beach resort. “I’m working out a contingency plan,” Jack tells us, “just in case Charlie is on a real binge. Trust me,” he says, and he’s gone.
We pay for his breakfast and go back to the guest house. Natalie and Douglas are beginning to get nervous about the possibility of having to stay in this town much longer, and Natalie longs to find the redheaded woodpeckers, so they leave us in search of the ethereal spirit of the island in the hope that it will enter their bodies and enliven them.
Melanie and I sit on our porch, trying to work out our own contingency plan. “We could fly right to Miami,” she suggests. I am not opposed to the possibility, though our ticket is back from Panama City. A radio plays more Bee Gees, and an old woman with no teeth comes to sell us warm Pepsis.
The Nicaraguans stagger out of their room and plunk themselves beside us. Their drunk friend has waked, and he sits near me. I give him my Pepsi because he looks thirsty. “You trying to get to the Bay side,” one of them says, and we nod. “That crazy guy with you, he won’t get you nowhere.”
Melanie says she was beginning to figure that out for herself. “We got boat,” one of them says. “We got good boat.”
We nod. I wish they would leave us alone, but Melanie seems to be enjoying the attention. “Oh, yeah,” she says. “Where’s your boat?”
“Boat’s right down there.” One of them points to the reeds behind the guest house. “You wanta see?”
Out of boredom, Melanie cocks her head, shakes out her blond hair, and stands up. “Sure,” she says. “Let’s see their boat.” I make a face at her, but she’s heading to the steps. I say to her in English that I’m not sure it’s a good idea. But the drunk one has passed out again. There are three of them, two of us. The odds feel all right. We walk down to the water. The one in the Empire State Building T-shirt says, “You sure you not watermelon people?” We say we are Manhattan people, and he laughs.
Among the reeds we spot a small boat with a folded sail. It is fairly well hidden; we have to go through palm fronds to get to it. One of them points. “Good boat. Got us here all right.” He lifts the sail and underneath we see an arsenal of rifles, machine guns, and ammunition. Melanie puts her hand across her mouth as she gasps. We both start to walk backward.
But two of them stand behind us now and the other reaches down and pulls out a gun. He lifts the rifle into the air and laughs. He hands the gun to me. “Good U.S. rifle. We got good contact. He sell us rifles. Feel this gun.” I’ve never held a gun before and I’m not sure I want to now, but two of them are standing behind us. I reach out for the rifle. “It has a nice balance,” I say, thinking that this sounds like a good thing to say about a gun. I feel Melanie’s arm trembling against me.
They all lean toward us. “We take you to the Bay side,” the one with the mustache who spits on the ground says. “We got time. We got nothing but time.” The one in the T-shirt strokes Melanie’s hair. Then he touches her breasts with cupped hands. I feel a hand reach between my thighs and I shove the gun back into the belly of the one with the T-shirt. I clutch Melanie by the hand and we run.
“We got nothing but time,” they shout as we scramble up the beach, through the reeds, as fast as we can back to the guest house. We hear them laughing, and one of them imitates the sound of shelling that Juanita made.
Mango Jack comes to tell us he’s made a little progress with the speedboat. He tells us to check out of the hotel and he’ll be back for lunch. We pay the bill and head to the beach restaurant to wait for him. As we sit there, Melanie, who has been pale all morning, points in the direction of the reeds. “Look,” she says. I follow her hand and see Mango Jack, tiny and dark, dragging his huge suitcase down toward the water with the Nicaraguans.
We wait the rest of the day, sipping warm Cokes, but he never returns. It takes a while for it to sink in. He left us just as easily as he found us, and we are now short a fair amount of cash. Natalie and Douglas join us at the beach restaurant, and when we tell them we’ve been swindled, Douglas makes some inane comment about how it will all come back to us in time.
Melanie is not interested in his theory of eternal return. She’s interested only in getting to Miami. She says to me, “We could
just go to the airport and wait.” That is when the boat arrives. A black man with a nice smile comes up and introduces himself as Andrew, Charlie’s brother-in-law. “Charlie, he not going anywhere for a long time.” His brother-in-law laughs.
“Where’s Mango Jack?” Melanie inquires foolishly, and Andrew laughs again. “Did he tell you to come get us?”
“That he did, the little gun-runner,” he says. “The little gun-runner, he gone.”
Andrew’s boat is a small speedboat that takes us around to Shark’s Bay, where the rich people live. It is only a thirty-minute ride. In the boat Andrew tries to sell us shells. He has conchs and mother-of-pearl and small colored-shell necklaces. Melanie, trying to be nice, buys one. Then he tries to sell us a shark’s jaw. He holds up the huge jaw. “A hammerhead,” Andrew tells us. “He got seven rows of teeth and the teeth all open when the animal ready to strike.” Andrew runs his fingers over the teeth.
We don’t feel very comfortable in the boat. “Let me tell you,” Andrew says, “every fish out there that you eat, she eat you. The worst is a snapper. Snapper can go to a thousand pounds. Or cuda. One bite from a cuda and you never walk again.
“They all out there. You eat ’em for dinner. They have you for lunch.” He lifts his arm high over the sea. “These waters don’t look dangerous. Look nice and gentle and blue. But you’ve been traveling in a wild, crazy sea.”
Melanie won’t go in the water when we get to the beach resort. For two days she just sits. “But you love the water,” I tell her, and she shakes her head. She sits and stares at the sea as if she’ll never look at it in the same way again. I swim alone and am chased by a barracuda. It follows my gold bracelet and I see its teeth at my heels. Finally I agree to fly back to Miami.
As we are about to leave, we pause for a while on the porch of our hotel with Douglas and Natalie. A redheaded woodpecker, the first Natalie has seen, lands in a nearby tree and she gets all excited. “Oh, Dougy, look, a woodpecker.”
Douglas says, “See, I told you. You’ve just gotta believe.”
I hoist on my pack. “Douglas, are you going back across the Honduran border?”
He looks at me as if I am a lost soul. If the spirit enters your body, he tells us, you are invincible. You are safe. He points to the sky as the woodpecker, indigenous only to these islands, startled, flies away.
The Hall of the Meteorites
BEFORE I LIKED MEN, I liked rocks. I liked to wander the bluffs and ravines where I grew up and collect smooth, weathered stones. I put them on my shelves where other girls kept dolls and stuffed animals, and with my books on geology I identified and labeled them. Slate, mica, quartz, limestone, granite. What I found in the outside world, I brought into the house. Baby birds who’d fallen from nests, spiders that spun endless webs inside jars with punctured lids, the luna moth I captured as a caterpillar and released one spring day when it emerged from the cocoon it had woven in my room.
My mother taught me what I know of dinosaurs. She’d studied biology and wanted to be a teacher of life sciences. Instead, she had three children. But she kept a great love for the giant reptiles that had roamed the earth, for the minerals and elements, for outer space. In the cold wintery Saturdays of my youth, she would take me in the car downtown and we’d visit the Field Museum.
We always began in the Hall of the Dinosaurs, where she’d try to explain how these animals had lived before any of us were born. Often she’d joke and say even before she was born, but it was beyond me that anything had lived before, or would live after, me. I was fascinated by the bones of these long-dead creatures, and there was a place where children could reach up and rub a dinosaur’s knee, smooth and hard as stones.
The one that amazed me the most was the giant marine lizard. There was a picture of it swimming in an incredibly rough sea and a sign that told how its remains had been found in a chalk bed in Kansas. I’d been to Kansas to visit an aunt, and there was no sea in Kansas. When I asked my mother about this, she just said that things change.
We would end our day at the planetarium sky show, where the lights dimmed and the heavens were illuminated overhead. A great disembodied voice would tell us, as we twisted our necks back and craned upward to see, that the universe was infinite, and if you traveled across it in a straight line, you’d end up right back where you started.
Much of this was lost on me, and I would grow tired, trying to understand, but my mother always wanted to stay for hours. Sometimes she’d try to stall before going home. She’d ask me if I wanted to look at the Hall of the Mammals again, if I wanted to buy some new stones for my collection. But usually I just wanted to go home. She’d look sad as we passed the glass cases filled with minerals and gems, the bones of great reptiles, on our way home.
Once as we walked to the car, the harsh wind blowing off Lake Michigan, my mother told me there was a whole side of life I hadn’t seen yet and that none of it would make sense to me until I was as old as she, as old as a time that seemed as distant to me as the age of reptiles, as far away as the visions of the planetarium sky.
In eighth grade I discovered boys. I discovered them the same way I’d discovered rocks and butterflies and dinosaur bones. My mother explained them to me. She handed me a pink book one day and said, “Study this the way you study anything else. Then you’ll know.” And she added, “Well, you’ll almost know.”
I had known before that boys existed. I’d seen them putting on their baseball uniforms for Little League and I’d had snowball fights with them after school. But I’m not sure I understood what they were doing there. I’d always viewed them not as another sex, but as another species, as if I attended classes and went roller-skating with giraffes. But then one day my mother told me all, and I simply assumed I could apply my cataloguing spirit to them as well.
I thought I could collect and label whatever came my way, but I found myself at parties in darkened rooms with unknown entities, unidentifiable objects. Dancing in the dark, I touched bones, the muscles, the veins that coursed through their arms. I detected their scent, which at the time was mostly a cologne called Canoe, mingled with the pungent smell of athletic sweat.
I also began discovering things about my family. My father, for instance, developed a passion for woodworking. He devoted every spare moment to making chairs, tables, hatracks. He paneled the basement and turned it into a recreation room. He paneled bathrooms and put wooden frames around the bathtubs. All night and all day on weekends, after work, we heard him sawing, hammering, sanding.
During dinner, his fingers thumped on the tablecloth, eager to begin his hammering again. My mother said to him that we had enough chairs, enough tables. But he couldn’t stop. He said he was doing it for us. Making the house beautiful for us. He constructed a new fence around the yard to protect us. His hammering became a clock, ticking away in my life, and when he’d built everything he could think to build, he was gone.
I went east to college and fell in love there for the first time. I fell in love with my lab partner, Benjamin Eiseman. I was pre-med, and we shared a lab bench, where we spent the weeks of Indian summer dissecting dogfish, frogs, cats. We opened a cat together, delicately prying it apart, and named every muscle, every vein. Benjamin was huge and clumsy, and at times our hands grazed as we worked inside animals. Before I knew what was happening, I fell in love with him.
One night he called to ask if I wanted to see a film. He said that Superfluid was playing at the physics department. We sat watching a film about the properties of a special liquid and all the time I was aware of the way his arm felt as it rested against mine. After the film, we drank Cokes in a café, then walked out onto the library roof. It was 1965, and as we stood on the roof, the lights of the entire city were suddenly obliterated. The night was as dark as a country road and we stood there for hours, holding hands. Then, when the lights began to come on, he turned me to him and kissed me. We stayed on the roof of that library, kissing until all the lights of the northeast came back on again
.
We began an experiment. We carved windows into the shells of fertilized chicken eggs and covered the windows with isinglass. Under the light of the incubator in the lab we watched chickens grow—the formation of wings, of tiny beaks. And I saw the single path upon which my life was heading. I would marry Benjamin after college and we would have children. He would go to medical school and I would become a teacher of life sciences.
Then one night, after we’d been seeing one another for six weeks, he picked me up at my dorm and told me about Sarah. It was winter and he walked me over to the track, then began walking around the track, circling and circling, little clouds of breath rising from his lips. “I’ve got to tell you something,” he said, “I should have told you a long time ago.” We continued walking. “I never should have let it get this far.” What he meant by that was that one night he had told me he loved me and we’d made love, my first time, in his dorm room while his roommate was out of town.
I can find no label for what I felt that night. Though it was almost twenty years ago and at an early stage in my history, the image is perfectly clear. We walked in that circle around the track, we walked for miles I think, and he told that he was in love with a girl he’d known since he was fourteen. That she sent him brownies that were still hot, that she knitted him the sweater he was wearing so that he’d be warm. That he planned to marry her as soon as college was done.
The earth, my mother had taught me, seeks equilibrium. Volcanoes erupt, hurricanes blow, forests ignite, all so that the earth can re-establish its balance. Nature, she’d told me, has its secret plan. I tried to devise my own and failed. I became obsessed with Benjamin.
He asked if I would keep seeing him and give him some time to make up his mind. I gave him four years. I could not get him out of my mind for a moment. I was like the robin who hears the worm in the ground. My head was cocked. I sensed his presence. I heard his footsteps when he walked into the lab. I knew when Sarah would be coming down, and once, when I saw them together, I followed them at a distance. I followed them for a long time as they walked around campus and I studied them. I noticed how their feet were not in sync, how her body met his well below the shoulder so that he looked as if he were straining when he walked with his arm around her.