The bowl clattered on the floor, and Orbits’ father said sulkily, “The last supper.”
“Oh god, Papoose. Look at the mess you gone and make.” In spite of what she had just revealed, her tone was one of annoyance. A few minutes later, she turned to Orbits. “Every time he make a mistake while eating he mention the last supper.”
From then Orbits resolved to take his father every weekend to some new spot. That weekend, they visited a pitch lake, where his father ventured close to the oily crater, alarming both Orbits and his mother. But his father was enjoying himself, shouting, “Ten blackbird dead.”
“What he mean by that?” Orbits asked on his way back.
“Boy, your father alone know what going through his head. Look at him digging out the pitch from his sandals and putting them on the seat like if is insects.”
The following day they drove around the village choosing some of the backtraces. His father was mumbling in the rear seat and his mother said, “Well, I never! You know what your father saying, boy? He calling the names of all the owners of these abandoned estates. How he could remember something so when he can’t even remember that his son not here again?” In a playful voice, she asked him, “Papoose, is trick you playing on we or what?”
He clapped his hands and laughed. Orbits’ mother smiled but in a worrying way. She looked out the window and said, almost as if she were talking to herself, “We never know what going to happen. All these tricks that get play on we.” Orbits imagined she was referring to her husband, but she added, “You could never see what coming. All the preparations you make, all that you plan for . . .” She returned her attention to her husband and, in an unexpectedly affectionate act, placed her hand on his leg. “But we have to see it out to the end, not so Papoose? That is we duty. Everybody have a cross to bear.”
Orbits always arrived to work an hour before everyone else showed up. That Monday, immediately after he opened his office’s door, the phone rang. “Hello. You forget our date or what? All weekend I in the gallery watching out for your Kingswood.” Orbits tried to recall if he had mentioned his vehicle. Over the phone, Moon’s voice sounded singsong and a bit pouty, the way a mother would cajole a child.
“I’m sorry. My father not well and I had to . . . to take him out.”
“What wrong with him?”
“He having trouble remembering.”
“Remembering what?”
“Small things. Names and people and places.”
“And you call that small? You realize somebody gone and put a light on his head?”
“A what? Where?”
“Put a light. On his head. I see it happen before. With my own father, believe it or not. The minute my mother pass on, he started to drink. At first, we thought it was Ma spirit taking revenge, but she would never do that. It was her nasty sister. She and Ma never get along.”
“So why she decide to choose your father instead?”
She sighed over the phone. “That is another story. One minute Ma strong as ever, and the next minute she start getting pain in her chest. And guess who name she was calling out? Not Pa or me or anybody else but that wicked sister of hers. Mal yeux.”
“Bad eye? I don’t believe in all—”
“Then you is a fool.” He was taken aback by her candour, but she laughed and added, “How your mother?”
“Healthy so far.”
“Any family you all don’t get along with?”
If Doraymay or Gums had been in the adjoining offices, Orbits would have hurried along the conversation, but he was a little intrigued as to where this was going. So he told her, “Not really. As far as I know they never keep close contact.”
“What about daughter-in-law? That is a big one. Always cat and mouse between the two until one gone”
“Is only me and I divorce a long time now.”
She paused and Orbits, in an uncharacteristic moment of confidence, wondered whether the entire crazy conversation had been to determine his marital status. Orbits imagined Moon moving her hand up and down, tracing the fabric of her shirt. But she asked him, “Your old madam leave anything in the house? Clothes? Perfume? Comb?”
“She never visited.”
“Not once self?”
“Not after our marriage.”
“I never hear anything like that.” She sighed once more, so prolonged that before she was finished, Orbits knew what he would say next. He told her that he would call her later in the week and confirm a suitable day and time.
He didn’t get the opportunity because each morning he entered his office to the sound of his phone ringing. And with each call he received, some of the attraction or lust or excitement he had felt during her brief visit weakened. One day she asked if pieces of cloth had been found in the driveway — she was specific about colour and fabric — and the next day she wanted to know if during the nights, he smelled a mixture of clotted blood and sweet oil. Before the week was over, she had touched on almost every silly bit of nonsense that Orbits had overheard on the buses and taxis. Did he hear the sound of a chain dragging in the night? A dog howling for no apparent reason? A strange bird circling the house? Blue marks on his parents’ legs? A black handkerchief on the porch?
She was angered, though only briefly, by his scepticism, but one Friday while she was remarking on some businessman from her village who had suddenly built a big house, his sudden prosperity due to a little spirit he kept and fed in a bottle, Orbits told her abruptly, “My father is much better.” He then said that someone was waiting outside his door and he had to hang up.
But the damage was done. Gums had arrived early that morning and had been listening intently in his office. “Like you and this woman working obeah, boy?”
Orbits, who never liked revealing too much of his private life, told the other man, “Obeah? You too believe in that nonsense?”
“Nonsense, you say. If nonsense does make a big man behave like a dog or cyat, then is really nonsense.”
Later in the evening during the cook-up, Spanish, who was stirring the pot, said, “I hope you know what you getting into. These people from all these backtrace don’t bite easy, you know.” He tossed in two whole peppers and added, “They don’t make a move until they check all the signs and say all the prayers. They know things that even I don’t know. Be careful she don’t feed you with sweat rice.”
Gums laughed scandalously, puzzling Orbits. “Sweet rice?” he asked, drawing more laughter. In the corner, Doraymay took a deep drink but said nothing.
During his conversations with Moon, Orbits had imagined what his wife and her parents, what Wally would have made of her silliness, but an hour into the cook-up, listening to Spanish and the other workers, he wondered, in an amused way, how he had spent forty years in the island with no knowledge there were spirits hiding beneath every rock. As the first bottle of rum was emptied and another opened, they seemed to attribute every disease, every type of misfortune, all that was unexpected and distressing to mal yeux, prates, bad eye, spirits, jaaduu, potions and chants. Gums spoke of an uncle who was afflicted with “goat mouth” because every negative thing he forecasted came to pass while Spanish revealed that stick fighters came to him to bless their weapons with secret prayers. They described ominous coughs, sneezes, sniffles and other flu-related symptoms. “The only thing worse than a dog howling is a goat sneezing,” Gums said.
“What about you?” Spanish asked Orbits. But before he could answer, Doraymay took out his mouth organ and blew his mournful country and western.
Orbits typically took a drink or two with the other workers and left at dusk with the pretense that his headlights were not working properly. Now he delayed a little longer, trapped by the desolateness of the station in the fading light and by the fully formed stories they each related of their encounters with spirits and prates. He had no doubt they believed all they were relating,
their voices hushed as if there were spirits about listening to them. They claimed to have each seen animals with human features, children appearing and disappearing at will, balls of fire over the ocean. The fire from the three-burner dully illuminated their faces, hardening the shadows and accentuating all the hollows and curvatures. In the distance, the broad leaves of the breadfruit seemed to be dancing and nudging each other; beneath the trees, the fan-shaped dasheen appeared sinuous and silky like the skin of some sleeping animal. In spite of himself, Orbits was captured by the mood. He recalled his childish fascination with clouds, and he felt that the world of spirits and unseen things these men were conjuring was simply an attempt to bend and shape the world into something they understood. Perhaps, in the manner of children or Skullcap the driver or Baby Rabbit, they could only understand the world if it were presented in a few simple brush strokes. That would explain their belief in conspiracies or the urgency they gave to signs and coincidences. Maybe their refusal to believe the world operated in random patterns had led them to create their own shapes, linking and joining as a child might.
It was a romantic view, and the woman who had instigated this topic became tied in Orbits’ mind to this fanciful, shape-shifting world. That night, almost as tipsy as he had been with Wally, he began to see her as unreal and temporary as his co-workers’ mama diglous or la diablesses. The image, which he assumed would disappear with the sobriety of the following morning, held, and during that weekend’s trip with his parents, he imagined he beheld her skittering through the dark cocoa fields or trailing the Kingswood along the forests of poui and bamboo, leaping and floating over ravines and bridges. It was frightening and alluring at the same time.
On Monday when Moon called to ask about his parents, he cut her off and said he would visit her field in the afternoon. He left soon after twelve, carefully following the directions she had given him and trying not to think of why he was going there. It was not too far from the field station, five or six miles at most, but to get there he had to divert to roads that had partially caved and into traces where the boulders had washed away and the surface had been reformed by tractors into thick, muddy ridges. He was pleased that the Kingswood handled the bumps so well, and he recalled Joe the mechanic talking years ago about the soft new plastic cars.
Moon’s house was on a hill, and he drove up and parked next to a wooden stairway. The house, standing on ten-foot teak posts, was well maintained. The wooden walls were unpainted but the windows and doors were uniform. He saw a hammock between the posts, and on the concrete ground, a pair of slippers. The woman appeared by the stairway and held open the wrought-iron gate that led to the porch. There were three high-back rattan chairs, painted white, on the porch, but she walked inside. Orbits, not knowing what to expect, was nevertheless surprised by the articles of domesticity scattered around: the baby crib, a repository now for stacks of newspaper, the photograph of Moon with two children and a man standing against a beach, the safe with decorative china plates, the cabinet stereo set and the almanac with a picture of a lone cactus in some type of desert. Because of her superstitions, he had expected a jumbled house.
He was staring at the photograph when Moon came and sat next to him on a sofa. She was saying something about her plants, and after a while, he was aware that her hands were on him, idly at first, then unbuttoning his pants. Then she stopped talking, but he continued to gaze at the almanac’s picture. How did a single plant manage to live in that hot, forlorn place? And why weren’t there any clouds in the sky? Afterwards, they walked down the stairs and to the back, where he saw an acre of para grass on the incline leading to a ravine and, beyond, a forest of bamboo. She resumed the talk of her flowers, demonstrating the sandy loam in the area by circling with a bare foot the ground close to the post. As she did so, he noticed her thigh exposed, unshaven yet glistening, and the serious way she was talking of her plants and of the soil, as if nothing had happened and the memory of her mouth on him was fake.
She had been tinged the previous night with the drunken, fanciful talk of spirits, but seeing her now in this way, in her home clothes, beneath her house, sharing her concerns about cuttings and insects, reassured Orbits and lessened his guilt about the act. And he carried this feeling during each of their subsequent encounters, always at the same time, always on the couch as if her bedroom was out of bounds. Afterwards, they spoke of her proposed field of flowers and discussed technical details about moisture and sunlight and properly tilling the soil. This had all happened so fast that Orbits, unprepared and so unsuited to recklessness, began to believe he was helping Moon. Beyond this view, he never stepped back to consider why this attractive and unsatisfied woman had chosen him for her affair, or why he had fallen so quickly into it. Afterwards, driving along the abraded road, avoiding the potholes and the landslips, he did not feel as if he had just done something illicit or even reckless. He was a field officer assisting a client; following their moments of intimacy, they spoke only of her plan to grow flowers. And it was this belief that encouraged him to ask of her husband, whose photograph hung on the wall, and about her two daughters, who were in primary school. He offered advice for which, too, he was unsuited. But he was sincere when he told Moon she should work out her problems with her husband and should consider the effect of a separation on her daughters. In the photograph, the husband, though standing at a distance from the photographer, seemed well built and the children smiling and happy.
She revealed that she had no intention of leaving her husband and would kill anyone who stood in the way of her children’s happiness. She said this in the same brazen manner as when she talked about her spirits, and this, too, reassured Orbits. As his visits continued, she stopped phoning, and because Orbits never mentioned anything to the other workers, they moved on to other little scandals involving policemen and politicians and a crooked but powerful businessman everyone called Halligator, who was involved with both groups. “Everything tangle up in this place,” Gums said.
But Orbits tried to keep his domestic life separate from his work. Each weekend he took his parents on a trip, venturing farther with each visit, exploring some new village detached from the others by miles of forests or acres of sugar cane and bramble. These trips with his parents had a somewhat similar tenor to the half-hour or so he spent with Moon each week: in both situations, he was performing a task that seemed prescribed and which brought a temporary pleasure. His only moments of unease were when they were driving through some small town, and his mother asked about his daughter. Then he would be reminded of Moon’s daughters, whom he only knew from the photograph on the wall. He always told his mother that his daughter was studying for her A-levels, which he had discovered not through one of their infrequent telephone conversations but through the assumption that, at eighteen, she was close to finishing her high school. In fact, she was nineteen, had already written her exams and was awaiting her results. From time to time, too, he thought of Skullcap, the maxi-taxi driver who had such easy access to his outsides, as he had termed them, that he was free to drop in whenever he pleased. Orbits had never mentioned his former wife’s remarriage to his parents, nor her move with her daughter to one of the enclaves, vacated decades ago by expatriates and now bearing all the signs of new wealth: elaborate extensions to every house so that small, cottage-like flats were converted into two-storey mansions that seemed to overlap each other, the stone elephants and lions on the gates warily eyeing each other.
During a weekend trip, his father mentioned a name to which his mother answered with the usual rejoinder: “Stop talking nonsense, Papoose.” But a few minutes later, she told Orbits, “You know I think your Papoose talking about one of his family. The last time we see them was when Starboy born, so I wonder how he pull out this name from his head all of a sudden.” She began to question her husband about his reason for exclaiming the name, but he resumed his pointing to street signs and billboard advertisements in a childish manner. “Look, look.” H
e pointed to a billboard where a Bollywood actor was touting some sort of skin-whitening cream. “Just like Starboy.”
Orbits knew what would follow and he quickly asked his mother about the relatives’ location. She mentioned a little coastal town.
“Okay, that is where we heading.” He was also trying to rid his mind of his last encounter with Moon, who had asked if she could meet his parents and who was mentioning her spirits and her malicious aunt even more frequently. The town was close to two hours away, and they had to stop once for gas.
Just after the gas station, Orbits slowed by a roadside vendor and bought a soursop. His father turned the fruit in his hand, examining the spiky skin.
“No, Papoose, don’t dig it like that. Look how you mess up you hand.”
“The last supper,” his father said, sniffing his finger.
A few minutes later she told Orbits, “Who would ever think this is the same Papoose who a few days aback I see writing down names on a copy book. And you wouldn’t believe who names he was writing. It take me a while to figure it out, but it was people who still owe him money for dentures.”
“Maybe we should try to collect the money.”
“How, boy? The only proof we have lockup in Papoose head and he alone have the key.”
Soon they came to a steep incline that led to a Bailey bridge, and his father looked out anxiously, pointing to the spindly mangrove roots. The town itself was filled with steep little hills, and Orbits worried that his Kingswood wouldn’t handle some of these. He stopped at an old grocery built with unpainted wood under a concrete house and asked for directions. The young cashier called out to someone and an oldish man appeared. Orbits mentioned the name and the man told him to look for a big yard with two trucks.
“Hello, hello.” He turned and saw his father out of the car, in the gap. “You remember me?” The man shook his head. Orbits’ father seemed disappointed, and when they returned to the Kingswood, he hunched himself in a corner in an almost petulant fashion. Five minutes later, they came to the yard with the trucks.
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