He felt no pleasure in noticing this and would have been rueful if the other man had recalled the threats to report him and the woman to the minister. Orbits thanked him for bringing the letter of transfer personally and he meant it. The other man saw sarcasm and told Orbits he had gotten what he deserved. Orbits took this as a kind of sensible fatalism and nodded. The woman began to sniffle, and Orbits wanted to tell her everything was alright, but at that moment, the boss walked to her side and said, “Is back to the fields for you. That is where you belong.”
***
His new job was at a field station about fifteen miles from the coast, the opposite end of the island from his former job. It was in a concrete building with three rooms and a large waiting area where the visiting farmers and fishermen came for price listings, hunters for seasonal permits, and the general public for one of the colourful brochures on horticulture and home gardening. The rooms, one of which was assigned to Orbits, were shabby and dusty, the concrete fallen away to expose the red bricks beneath, and there was the perpetual odour of guano that seeped from the leaking Celotex ceiling and which reminded Orbits of his stint in the caves. His room had two small windows: from one, sitting before his table, he could see the tractors and pickup vans of the visitors arriving through the dirt track that led to the main road; from the other, standing close to the door, he could see the trees at the back, mango and cashew and pommecythere and avocado and broad-leaf breadfruit, in the distance. The windows of the agricultural department in the capital had opened to a high brick wall beyond which he could see the poui and samaan planted generations earlier now wilting from exhaust fumes and smoke blown from the burning garbage dumps in the shanty town at the edge of the city. The windows there had to be kept open, so he had grown used to the sound of cars and hammering of construction vehicles. At the field station, the noise was less abrasive, and he felt it was because the breeze here scattered the fragrance of ripe tonkobeans and cashews into his small office.
He could smell the alcohol, too, on many of the farmers and fishermen who sat on the chair opposite him, and he guessed it was their tipsiness rather than his position that made them so deferential. When Wally had spoken about the differences between country and town people, Orbits had assumed it was simply to mamaguy him, a country bookie, but the men and women he saw each day fitted his friend’s descriptions: they were simple, excessively deferential and perpetually grateful though Orbits suspected there was more to their silence than they were letting on. At the ministry, he had overseen huge sums, but he had been an anonymous figure, unknown to the people who may have benefitted from his diligence; at the field station, he was the man in an office who stamped permits and handed out official forms. He could facilitate or withhold permits if he chose.
He worked at the field station for much of the remainder of his life, and his first years there were among his happiest. Each evening his mother expressed her relief that he was working closer to home, the distance to the field station was less than a third than to his former place of employment. When he began to bring home hands of plantain or parcels of plums and cherries and mangoes or muddy yam wrapped in newspaper, all bribes and tokens of appreciation from those he had granted permits, his mother said, “Orbits, you giving my backyard garden real completion.” She said this even though the garden had dwindled to a few string beans that grew wild and seemed to resist every type of weed or vine.
At first, Orbits did not pay much attention to these comments or even to the sight of his father, his dentures all broken, chewing toothlessly at some pulpy fruit. But daily the inertia that had gripped him since the departure of Wally fell away. Since Wally’s departure from the ministry, he neither spoke to nor interacted with anyone, but the field station was always a buzz of noise and activity. Vehicles grinding, fishermen joking, a drunken disputation renewed in the compound. The people who came to him were, at first, more reserved than the men he had met in the capital city, but with familiarity, they became regular oletalkers. The fishermen described their trips to catch cavalli, carite and grouper and the frequent mishaps — running out of fuel, drifting for hours in the Bocas, caught in storms — in a colourful way that matched the accounts of the hunters who got lost in the forests, were injured by trap-guns and claimed to regularly spot entities like Papa Bois, the reputed protector of animals. Orbits was never sure where fantasy began or ended with these men. Each Friday afternoon there was a cook-up, either a fish broth with tubers and vegetables and kingfish simmering in a massive pot on a single burner or all three burners fired up and the aroma of curried duck or goat or wild meat and rice and a peppery sauce filling the compound.
The cooking was always done by one of the employees of the field station, an old wiry cocoa-pañol everyone called Spanish. The two men who peeled and washed were the other employees: Gums, a perpetually smiling man, and Doraymay, his opposite, always serious even when he drunkenly whipped out a mouth organ and played the only song he knew, a country and western sung by Jim Reeves. This world is not my home / I’m just a-passing through. Orbits, who knew nothing about cooking, was nevertheless invited, and to his relief, the hefty appetite that had been stoked during his regular sessions with Wally did not resurface, the food, both blazing hot and extremely spicy, a real deterrent.
Spanish, pointing with his pot spoon, gave a running commentary on the ingredients. “A proper cook is like a scientist. He have to know how much and in what order. One little mistake and everything kilketay. For instance, you throw in the seasoning with the oil first and when it begin to sizzle, then and only then you toss in the plantain, dasheen and yam.” About ten minutes later, after he had taken a couple drinks of rum, he added, “Okay, now for the grouper. The best fish for broff.” A few more drinks later, he would ask, “How it smelling? You getting the taste of the lime and the pepper in the air? Eh?” He would then peel a block of salted butter. “Now for the finishing touch. Golden Ray.” He would lever the entire block into the pot, stirring until the liquid was golden yellow.
“The best thing to increase cholesterol,” Gums said, and Orbits wasn’t sure if he was joking. “You finish with the mother-in-law?” he would ask Doraymay, referring to a bitter melange of cucumber, pepper and eggplant.
At times, while he was looking on and listening to the commentary, Orbits wondered what Wally, with his gourmet sensibilities, would have made of this scene. His friend had a good sense of town people, but Orbits sensed that, apart from the farmers who came to visit, he had little contact with men like these. But he would fit in for sure. He had that way about him. Orbits liked the simple conversations of the men, but he could feel no connection apart from the duties they shared at the field station. He never moved beyond a single drink and once, while he was listening to the trio knocking the pots and singing a parang tune, he wondered whether in his mind these sessions were different from his limes with his old friend because the cook-ups represented the uncontrolled and unpredictable life — the swift descent from jokiness to indignation, the reflexive gossiping, the casual retreat into fantasy — from which he was trying to escape.
Once, while he was caught in this reflection, Gums told him, “I know you grow up in a place just ten miles from here but you is a hard fella to read.”
“Eat some more, Orbits,” Spanish encouraged. “This is real healthy food. No chemicals and preservatives. Blue food. Eddoes, dasheen and tannia.”
The following Friday, Gums said to Orbits, “The way Spanish does be mouthing off while he cooking you must be know all these recipes by heart now.”
“Leave the man alone. He is the book man not the cook man. Always dress up in stiff long sleeve and pants with seam. Not like the rest of we with muddy clothes.” Sometimes Orbits felt there was some bitterness in Doraymay’s bland observations, but the other workers did not seem to notice, and Orbits let it pass.
But Doraymay was right; once it was established that Orbits was efficient with paperwork and f
iling, that area of the job was left to him. So he was usually in the station while the three other workers tramped about in the field. There was no real competitiveness; all were in the same pay grade and the supervisor never visited from his office in the capital. Within three months, Orbits felt he had gauged the culture of the place — the drinking, the liming, the penchant for ignoring particular laws, the little outbursts that seemed to hide deeper pockets of violence — and in six months, he had settled completely in his job, his time at the ministry a distant memory. He continued calling his daughter once a month, and he no longer felt awkward when her mother or stepfather answered. Their conversations were brief, and it was usually Orbits himself who terminated them, having nothing to say other than his inquiries about her school and her exams. Her responses, also brief, never varied: she was doing well. Once, when he called, she mentioned she was in form six, and he was surprised at how many years had passed. He told her, “Just now you will be independent.” He heard some of her old irritation when she said she had been so for a long time.
Following the conversation, Gums, who had been listening in the next room, asked him, “So you and the madam separate, boy?”
When he nodded, Gums began to talk in a general way about the ways of modern women, and Orbits felt obligated to defend her. He told the other man that his former wife was smart and practical and had, until recently, been single-handedly raising their daughter. Their marriage had failed not because she was modern or he old-fashioned or anything like that, but only because she always knew what she wanted. He may have phrased it wrongly because Gums began to make sympathetic noises, beating his tongue against the roof of his mouth. Orbits tried to joke it off by saying, “She had her foot on the ground and my head was always in the cloud.”
“That is why you do weather studies?”
“Exactly.”
Following the conversation, Orbits considered his neutral responses. On his way home, he knew his defence of his wife was partly because of the dim local view of a divorced man, but he also felt during the brief conversation he had been describing a stranger he once met fleetingly. When he tried to recall their intimate moments, these had the vague familiarity of a scene from a movie or a conversation he had overheard — familiarity, but no real connection. As the months passed, he had to actually remind himself that he had once been married for seven years. He was surprised that he wished nothing of his former wife nor anything from her.
He felt at peace: not the dull stupor that had enveloped him following Wally’s departure but something close to satisfaction. Yet there were moments, in the evenings while the other workers were out in the field or at a rumshop and he was alone at the station, when he would hold in his hands one of the booklets describing organic farming or instructions on rearing tilapia and feel a slight unease at his sense of comfort, which he knew never lasted and always presaged some disaster. He also reflected as to whether the startling distance from reality that he saw everywhere — the belief in spirits and unlikely conspiracies and crazy rumours — was beginning to also infect him.
***
One evening while he was reading one of these booklets, a woman appeared before him. She was tall, dark-brown and alluring in a robust way. She sat on the chair at the other side of the table and began to talk. Orbits was lost in her monologue not only because she spoke breathlessly, without pauses, but because of the way she was constantly leaning forward and fanning her chest with a brochure. He tried to look away from her unbuttoned blouse. Eventually he had to interrupt her. “So what is it exactly that you want, madam?”
“Madam? Madam is only for old people. I look old to you?”
“No, you don’t look old.”
“Thank you! Now tell my husband that.” As she went on, he gathered that her husband, a teacher, drank heavily and spent more time with his friends than with her. Orbits felt uneasy at this recollection, and his mind drifted to his own marriage. “The only thing that would change him is if I put a good horn on him.” She laughed, loudly and scandalously. “Look how you blushing, mister. You never hear that a horn is the best tune-up for a marriage?”
“No, I never hear that.”
“Then why you was staring at my tot-tots the minute I enter your office?”
Orbits heard a low giggling from the office next to his and he asked once more, “So how I could help you?”
“I nearly say something else but let we say that I interested in planting some flowers. Not the common kind like daisy and zinnia, but these kind that you could export.” She unrolled the brochure and read. “Heliconia. Ginger lily. Hawaiian torch. Anthurium.”
He tried to muster some kind of formality and he asked her, “You have any prior experience in horticulture?”
“No, but I need to find some hobby, something to do real fast, otherwise . . .”
Once more, Orbits heard giggling from the other office. “Well, we have these brochures here that can give you a start.”
“I need something else to give me a start.”
“What?” he asked uneasily.
“I want someone to come and tell me if the land is fertile and if it suitable for planting anything.” She leaned forward, her hands on the table, wrists to elbows, and her breasts were pushed upwards. Orbits tried to distract himself by focusing on a tiny skin tag beneath her left ear. “I need proper guidance from a professional.”
“We have other officers here who are more experienced in fieldwork.”
“Who? These three others? They must be in a rumshop right now drinking with some fisherman—”
“Hello. I right here.” That was Gums from the adjoining room.
In the end, Orbits agreed to visit her place on the weekend. She wrote her address with much flourish in Orbits’ appointment book, circled it inside a heart, and left with several brochures. She returned almost immediately and said, “I didn’t get your name.”
“Orbits!” Gums shouted.
He decided to accompany the woman to her car. She walked close to him, brushing his shoulder. “Orbits. In that case you better call me Moon.”
“Why?” Orbits asked uneasily.
“You figure it out,” she said a little angrily. “According to what I hear, your head always bury in files and folders.”
When Orbits returned to his office, Gums pushed his head into the doorway. “You make a real pick up, Orbits.”
“Just doing my job.”
“I think that woman have a different job in mind.”
“Is just flowers—”
“I think she want you to plant something else.” He smiled and his upper lip rose to touch his nose, giving him the appearance of an amused horse. “Why you think she didn’t bother to come to me or Doraymay or Spanish? We too old to satisfy she.”
“You shouldn’t be saying that about an innocent woman.”
“What! If she innocent, then I is the best-looking man in town.”
Orbits felt awkward with these little taunts, but at home he looked at himself in the mirror. Once his wife had complimented him on his nice body. That body had been cloaked a few years later in blubber. He had lost much of that, and he now saw himself as an average-looking man, slightly heavy but not buttery looking as he had once been. He was not handsome — his lower lip from his days of gluttony still hanging out, his smallish eyes sloping down at the sides, the skin on his neck loose and tinged with the dark-brown spots that he now noticed were on both sides of his cheeks — but neither was he spectacularly ugly. He wondered what the woman — if Gums was right — saw in him. At forty, he was younger than the other workers, he dressed neatly and disguised his shyness with an air of formality. Perhaps he looked respectable, and he wondered if he should get a pair of spectacles to complete the look. He circled an eye with his thumb and index finger and felt a thick-rimmed frame would suit him.
He had not been with another woman since hi
s breakup. For a short while, he suspected that Wally, who knew so much about the city and its inhabitants, had been seeing a prostitute, but he never asked directly, and Wally never actually confirmed his suspicions. He thought of the woman during dinner, and his mother, who noticed his mood, asked, “So you and all worrying? He becoming a new man in his old age.” She spoke in a fatigued manner with the trace of amusement she used whenever she was concerned. “I used to think it was joke he was making. Tying to provoke me like when . . . like before, but I beginning to feel something seriously wrong with your Papoose.”
Orbits glanced at his father on the sofa, a bowl of soup in his hand, staring at the space between him and the small black-and-white television. Orbits had bought the set with the first pay cheque he got at the field station, and now his father rarely moved from the spot. “He just getting old,” he told his mother in a low voice.
“Sometimes he get vex and quarrel with the people in television.” She pressed her hands to her lips and laughed, but she soon regained her distressed look. “From the minute Starboy die your Papoose change. I thought it would be me who would never recover, but something inside your Papoose break that day. Something that could never join back.” She cast her gaze in Orbits’ direction, but he couldn’t tell if she was looking at him or at some object beyond. “The worse thing that could ever happen to a mother or a father is to lose a child. It not suppose to be that way. Not suppose to be . . .” Orbits thought of his daughter and how they had lost whatever minor connection they had possessed. He heard his mother saying, “He still enjoy the little drives though.”
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