by Danyel Smith
“Me and Eddie come from Haiti fifteen years ago now,” she called out as they passed a plantation house with a sign before it announcing PIGEON BAY. It was a place collapsing in the slowest of motions. Hot wind scraped Eva’s scalp like a pitchfork. She perspired. She had a worry about Dart, like he required her presence, though he’d said nothing of the kind.
Eva slowed, stopped, got off her bike, and walked it. Audrey pedaled into the distance, past walking tourists in red bathing suits, past a lone minitruck filled with fishing poles and sunburned faces. Eva had no idea whether she was right or not, but she didn’t think the jolting and pumping could be good for her pregnancy. She was fiending for some rules, angry she had no experience, and was too proud to ask Audrey, or anyone, for guidance.
Up ahead, Audrey stopped near a neat cinder-block hut with a tin roof. She stood with the bike between her legs, arms stretched to the broad handlebars.
“You can ride, Eva,” Audrey called out courteously. “It won’t hurt the baby.”
For the first time, Eva sensed in Audrey no smart-ass, no coldness. Eva kept walking her bike, though. One thing I’m not going to do is hurt it by accident.
“You and Benjamin don’t have kids, Audrey?”
“I do,” she said shortly, as they walked into the dank store. “Two girls. In Port-au-Prince.” Audrey cradled a rice sack under her breast. “They work now. Since I’ve seen my daughters. Almost women.”
Audrey picked up a few more things, and when they left the store, Eva got on her bike and rode. Audrey watched as Eva flew down a small hill, not knowing Eva was crying. Pedals slapped her bare feet as she recalled chances. First babies would be in high school. Third one would be in elementary. The other one, seven years old. And this one, right here with me, speaking for its brothers—You ain’t nobody’s mother. Won’t be anyone’s mother. You could have tried. We don’t even rate a grave. Eva claimed the sacrifices she’d made and thrashed against the catch-22’s that knotted her sense of self and always would. I wish I hadn’t had those abortions. My freedom’s not worth those babies never coming to life. If I had it to do again, though, I’d do the same thing. Eva swerved and scraped her leg bloody against a fence post and then crashed into a grassy mound. Eva lay flat on her back, coughing and crying. She was happy, though, to feel sad. And she had a terrifying, concrete feeling that her baby was all right.
“It’s just my calf,” she choked out to a panicked Audrey, who zoomed up and helped Eva to her feet. “Ain’t nobody dying.”
There was one deep, clean V-shaped cut and a distorted graph of abrasions. Eva’s leg throbbed as Benjamin cleaned it with a solution that flowed bright clear red from the bottle and turned the pan of water he was using tea-brown. Dart was awestruck. They were on the Rowe House patio.
“Eddie uses this to soak his iguanas,” Ben said while he washed Eva’s leg. “Betadine.” She braced for a sting but none came. Her blood swirled in the water and made it brighter.
Eva waved away a glass of ginger ale, and Audrey frowned at her, anxious.
“Iguanas,” Dart mumbled, gazing at Benjamin’s fingers. Eva was dizzy.
“Don’t see the point of keeping them,” Benjamin went on matter-of-factly. “Mean creatures, standoffish, picky about their space.”
“Eddie doesn’t keep them anymore,” Audrey said. She looked at Eva, who was looking at Dart. “Keep quiet about them, Benny.”
“Quiet about iguanas?” He shook his head and shrugged. “Quiet about the iguanas.”
“Do you eat them?” Dart asked Audrey.
“Eat them?” Ben stopped rinsing Eva and looked at Dart like he was a child. “They bite and they swing their tails and they stare and stare—”
“Benjamin! Eva’s leg needs to be wrapped.” There was no more blood flowing.
Eva wanted to vomit, but she swallowed, and took the ginger ale when Audrey pushed it on her again.
Audrey handed Benjamin gauze and a roll of tape. “I guess none of the Tylenol or aspirin for you?”
Eva shook her head. She was in pain, but wanted nothing to touch the baby.
Sink your teeth right through my bones/Baby/Let’s see what we can do.
She lay back on the chaise and let the sun wash over her. Eva didn’t feel luxurious, but like the hot light might medicate, make the pulsing pain smaller by comparison, and seal her wounds finally. Come on and make it hurt/Hurt so good. It was a John Mellencamp song, from when he still was John “Cougar” Mellencamp. From the American Fool album. Nineteen … nineteen eighty-something…
Benjamin folded a cushion and put it under Eva’s ankle. “Sleep,” he said. “If you feel like seeing Eddie tonight, you come over—”
“You rest,” Audrey said, and gave Benjamin a sharp look. When she picked up the pan and started away with it, Dart looked up from his daze.
“What are you going to do with that?” He asked Audrey.
“Bathe in it,” Audrey said angrily. “And boil what’s left up for soup.”
Eva was asleep for four hours. When she woke, Dart was showering sand from his body. She washed up and fashioned a dress from a piece of green cloth Audrey’d left her. Eva tightened but didn’t change her bandage.
“You’re sure you want to go.”
“Of course we’re going,” Eva said. “It’s for Édouard.” Like she’d known him for years.
Leaning on Dart’s arm, Eva limped barefoot over to the smaller house. Her leg burned, and she thought it might be leaking behind the bandage.
“You okay?”
Eva pressed her molars together. “No.”
Dart picked her up and carried her into Audrey and Benjamin’s spotless, light-trimmed house, just as guests were starting to arrive for Eddie’s party
Her mind was blown clean. Eva was in the air, helpless and being helped. As Dart sat her on a low couch, and pushed a footstool under her injured leg, there was no doubt for Eva that she’d come to the right place.
This ain’t no record industry after-party.
There was Édouard and Ben and Audrey. A youngish guy with a crunchy natural Ben introduced as his helper from down at Hermitage Rental. Another man old enough, and looking like Ben enough, to be Ben’s father. Ben introduced him as Jeeter. Jeeter was slightly bent over, in ragged canvas slip-ons and neat, creased slacks that had been cut off at the knees and hemmed with a cuff. His palms were amber, and in the place of three fingernails were pinched black scars. Dart was transfixed by Jeeter. Shook his hand solemnly, spoke in an awed murmur. Jeeter was impressed to meet such a polite American boy.
“You like that man,” Eva said when Dart came over to check on her.
She enjoyed being checked on—the status of her pregnancy and her injury and the idea of being Dart’s date at the party. Her leg throbbed.
“Whether I like him,” Dart said, like a new jack quoting Garvey, “is beside the point. “He either knows the way, or he is the way.”
A woman of about twenty walked in with a small box radio, which Édouard promptly attached to three-foot speakers. She had a deep tin of fluffed rice and pigeon peas. Had anklets and earrings and bracelets and necklaces and cornrows so tight her eyes slanted tight toward her temples. She had on a gold spandex dress over a black spandex slip, the thin straps cutting her shoulders like twine in a tri-tip, and the spandex sheaths forced flesh into smooth, tight bike tires at her waist and rigged her rump to the exact dimensions of a standard bedroom pillow. There was no jiggling. Arms wide and flanked with muscle, tough thighs in the shadow of her stride-stretched dress. Calves like small hams, her flat feet soft and slashed with scarlet polish. Silver toe rings. In a way she rarely did, Eva immediately feared comparison. The girl seemed very strong and very free.
“Miss Eva, this is Jenny. My girlfriend.”
Jenny shook Eva’s hand politely, smiled, and then handed Audrey the rice and peas, who set them down next to a plate of maraschinos bleeding on sliced pineapple. Édouard watched his girl with none of the reserve he h
ad for Eva on the boat from Nassau to Cat. Plus he was being kissed by everyone, and was soon engulfed by the fuss of what turned out to be his twenty-eighth birthday.
Absently, Dart picked up pineapple with his fingers.
“First,” Audrey told him, “that’s what forks are for. Second, it’s Eddie’s day, and we’ll eat when he starts.”
At that, Eddie packed a plate, and a line formed behind him. After Jeeter got his food, and music was playing low and steady, and the patio was bright with moonbeams and chitchat and heart-to-hearts and complaint, Jeeter started talking, in the way spry old men do, about the trials of his day.
“Mister Bethel over to the ‘ouse, carping as usual.”
“For bloody’s sake,” said Benjamin. “And what did he have to say?”
“The normal,” Jeeter said. “Stomach problems, and his sadness, and his stress, and his indecision about the big island.”
Dart stopped eating to listen with what had become his usual fascination with anything Cat Island.
“And what did you tell him?” Audrey said, setting out fried grouper and more chicken. “That we all have those problems? That he should be glad his aren’t worse than that?”
“Gave him the doctor’s name in Nassau,” Jeeter said. He spoke haltingly, but only because he was eating. He bundled animal bones on a strip of napkin. “Told him to kill two birds with one stone. To get the heartburn taken care of, and to stay for a few days, fill out the applications, see if he could stay, even if he wanted to.”
“Bethel is undone,” Benjamin said.
“Copying everyone else all the time, one day the monkey cut his throat.”
“Ha!”
Jeeter continued eating. To the side of his plate sat chicken ribs like doused paper matches and bendy needles of fish bone. He tied them in a thin strip of napkin. In the quirk of a methodical man, Dart saw the gestures of a magus. Jeeter scooped the last of his rice with a plastic spoon as Dart minded the old man’s marred hands and odds and ends. Monkey throats and a full moon, murdered birds, fish spines, hearts afire, and blood and stone. Eva could see it in Dart’s open face. He was in the presence of wizardry and aching for a spell.
“You don’t have to speak in code around me,” Dart said.
Jeeter held his spoon in midair. “Pardon me?”
“It’s okay,” Dart said. “I see, and I understand.”
Audrey looked at Eva, who looked at Dart and hated to look at him.
“Play some better music, Eddie,” Benjamin said. “Play it louder.”
Dart touched the bundle of bones. Then he took it from Jeeter’s plate. It was a small, quick action, a theft as unusual as if he’d yanked a strand of hair from Jeeter’s head.
It was Eva’s turn to be transfixed.
Jeeter pulled back. “You want that?”
Like the bones were glowing, Dart dropped them back on Jeeter’s plate.
Eva was grateful when more people came up the walk, wishing Eddie good luck with good cheer. Soft-cheeked women with short hair crisped yellow blond by peroxide. A graying couple both with honey-colored teeth carried a large painting of lobsters and serpents and birds and palms. They presented it to Édouard with shy pride. Eva was full of souse, and had a glass of red punch with nary a kick in it. There was laughter, and the occasional introduction that Eva participated in. People inquired about her leg, offered to get her water or punch or more food. A short man with knobby biceps that stretched a T stamped with IT’S BETTER IN THE BAHAMAS smelled like sand and sea and held Eva’s hand until she pulled it back. His eyes were still in a squint from his day.
Dart had made a pallet of his knees at Jeeter’s feet, and though Eva couldn’t hear a word that passed between them, she could see that Dart was plying the man with questions and that the man was patiently talking to him.
Who knows if Jeeter has answers? Who can answer Dart, anyway?
Jenny shimmied before the birthday boy. She had what looked like a true cocktail, and Édouard bounced like a grizzly might to “Now That We Found Love (What Are We Gonna Do with It?).” Not Third World’s classic and much-maligned 1978 version, which itself was a remake of the O’Jays 1973 original depth charge, a gift also bestowed by songwriters Gamble and Huff in 1977 on Martha Reeves—but the hectic 1992 gold cut from the Overweight Lover, Heavy D. The jam lit a candle in Édouard’s birthday heart. Spread your wings/So we can fly around the world/Harmony, charm of me/Your fingertips are callin’ me. The song went faster, faster. Faster. Faster. It was an eternal question—Now that we found love, what are we going to do with it?— with no answer, so people keep recording it and recording it, making Gamble and Huff rightfully richer and making Dart feel it, right along with Édouard and Jenny and the others who started bouncing, bouncing, dipping on beat, dipping deeper in the pauses, smiling, happy. Eva watching, watching, she liked the song, couldn’t help thinking of it in historical terms, even as she was far away from where that kind of stuff mattered most. It was the way she’d come to think of music all the time: who produced it, when they produced it, what the promo budget was, if it could be sampled or what sample was that and how much it cost to get it cleared, how the airplay was going was the song or the album gonna go platinum first week out—but here it was, “Now That We Found Love,” an old-ass song, written by two hardheaded brothers named Kenny (Gamble) and Leon (Huff) back in 1973—Picasso dying, Vietnam cease-firing, Nixon re-upping, OPEC embargoing—when they were putting together an album called Ship Ahoy for the O’Jays, a group whose lack of inhibition Boyz II Men could only aspire to, an album for which the title song was a reflection on the Middle Passage, an album no one thought would go over, but ended up being, along with So Full of Love, the O’Jays’ pinnacle. And here the song was. On Cat Island in 1998. Here it is. Here it is. And Heavy is ripping it.
The patio, the birthday night, so full of love.
Heavy ripping it right up until the next song, which was one of Sunny’s with a whole different beat under it, and bells around it and chimes above it, and Dart stood and searched for Eva’s eyes and she looked at him to say, Right? It sounds good, huh? and no more than that, but Dart began to dance, and then to jog slowly around the room, but on beat so it seemed, if you wanted to give him the benefit of the doubt, like he was dancing, but if you really looked, he was getting revved, winding himself up or being wound up for something feral. And Eva thought, her not knowing how mania works, that clearly he was about to do something maniacal. When Dart’s head snapped toward Jeeter, who faced his palms to the ceiling and pumped them up, up, like an old man trying to hang at a young man’s party which is what he was, Dart, who’d been mouthing the words to Sunny’s song, began to add sound to his mouthing, to his movement, the circular motion that had to be his soul, manifest.
Dart got louder. To where he stopped moving, and in the doorway of Audrey’s tiny kitchen began singing in his booming voice, and in voices he never used. The main one was like his sister’s—saltant, strong, surely stronger than hers. There was no showmanship from him save vocal richness. But everyone stopped, of course, because he was singing, eyes open and unfocused, and some people looked at him with fear, like he might be crazy; others looked on with sorrow, with curiosity, like he must be in terrible pain. Dart had been damp as usual, and now sweat covered his face, it dripped from his fingertips, and spit was like milk in his mouth, but he kept singing the song as remixed by Édouard to speed up just then, to match, to buss the frantic beats per minute of Heavy’s groove, and Dart stayed with it, his words completely different from Sun’s record lyrics, but his sister still suddenly on the island, breaking up the party with him, freaking it.
Eva was feeling it, too. She wanted to dance to the happiness Édouard put in the beats, the pounces of sound, the pauses, the rings and snaps and slaps, the tremblings of tambourines, and Dart kept singing, singing, chanting now, he was moving again, his jog faster, and just when Eva thought he might drop to his knees because his body had loosened—his hands lo
oked weighted, shoulders low like a boxer’s—he did. Eva didn’t know if it was tears or sweat or both coming down his face, and though they didn’t know her, people looked to Eva because they at least knew Eva and Dart were together, at the Rowe House. They assumed that Dart was Eva’s man. So Eva got up on her tingly weak leg and walked toward him, scared and half-embarrassed as she was, but Édouard, kindly, put an arm out to block her. Then Jenny held Eva steady as she reflexively took the weight off her hurt leg.
Dart began to tweak and wrench. Eva hoped hard that it was real, that he was really crazy or being taken over by something, because if he was faking this she would hate him for having made her believe in him, even if it was just for a moment. She got to her knees gingerly, lifted Dart’s head to the bed of her closed thighs. She could smell the scent of the herb he took rising from his pores. The dried apricot smell repelled her as she held him so his head couldn’t slide down.
I hope, she thought, he feels me.
Close as she was, Eva could see Dart’s tears distinct from his all-day, everyday glaze of sweat. He was still warbling in his sister-tongue, but the words were sporadic. He was blubbering, and the words that escaped were confessions or apologies or promises or requests or regrets or entreaties or maybe all of them, and isn’t that what lyrics were, anyway? Eva and Dart were on the floor by Jeeter with his mangled tips. Dart’s eyes opened. He looked at Jeeter but grabbed the wrist Eva had over his chest with both his hands.
Jeeter wiped Dart’s forehead with the torn yellow paper napkin. Dart looked at the napkin like it was a talisman, like he was being mopped with holy cloth. Dart lay there until Édouard sat him up. And when Jeeter handed Dart the napkin, instead of drying the rest of his face, Dart folded it, tightly and with intense attention, into a tiny, thick square. Some people stayed to watch Eva’s experiment with hope, some walked closer to the shore whispering, some laughing among themselves.
Sunny’s song had faded to the bossiness of the S.O.S. Band’s 1981 “Take Your Time (Do It Right),” and then 1990 Ice Cube (I don’t bang/I write the good rhymes). All the songs were golden charms from other eras. Eva felt uncomfortable with the nostalgia. It had been thrust upon her. She wanted to toss it off, claim it too tight, too big, or, most important, not her style. It clung, though, to every curve of her consciousness. However itchy, it fit. And the sensation led her to think that she would not only get used to it, but that she’d find it comforting and eventually comfortable. Eva didn’t feel old as much as she felt grown. She felt she’d been a part of something larger than herself and that now it was time to take on something her own size. Dart placed the napkin die in his breast pocket. Eva’d folded paper like that. She knew what it meant to take something that was so big and make it as small and hard and crucial as a crucifix.