“We can’t make this sort of decision now,” she murmured.
“Why not?”
“You said it yourself. You’re shell-shocked. So am I. And I don’t know how I feel about…everything.”
“Everything? You mean me?”
She made a noncommittal noise, closed her eyes, and after a moment she said, “I need time to think.”
In Peter’s experience when women said they needed time to think, nothing good ever came of it. “Jesus!” he said angrily. “Is this how it has to be between people? One approaches, the other avoids, and then they switch roles. Like insects whose mating instincts have been screwed up by pollution.” He registered what he had said and had a flash-feeling of horror. “Come on, Sara! We’re past that kind of dance, aren’t we? It doesn’t have to be marriage, but let’s commit to something. Maybe we’ll make a mess of it, maybe we’ll end up boring each other. But let’s try. It might not be any effort at all.” He put his arms around her, brought her tight against him, and was immersed in a cocoon of heat and weakness. He loved her, he realized, with an intensity that he had not believed he could recapture. His mouth had been smarter than his brain for once—either that or he had talked himself into it. The reasons didn’t matter.
“For Christ’s sake, Sara!” he said. “Marry me. Live with me. Do something with me!”
She was silent; her left hand moved gently over his hair. Light, distracted touches. Tucking a curl behind his ear, toying with his beard, smoothing his mustache. As if she were making him presentable. He remembered how that other long-ago woman had become increasingly silent and distracted and gentle in the days before she had dumped him.
“Damn it!” he said with a growing sense of helplessness. “Answer me!”
XI
On the second night out ’Sconset Sally caught sight of a winking red light off her port bow. Some ship’s riding light. It brought a tear to her eye, making her think of home. But she wiped the tear away with the back of her hand and had another slug of cherry brandy. The cramped wheelhouse of the lobster boat was cozy and relatively warm; beyond, the moonlit plain of the sea was rising in light swells. Even if you didn’t have nowhere good to go, she thought, wheels and keels and wings gave a boost to your spirit. She laughed. Especially if you had a supply of cherry brandy. She had another slug. A breeze curled around her arm and tugged at the neck of the bottle. “Goddamn it!” she squawked. “Get away!” She batted at the air as if she could shoo away the elemental, and hugged the bottle to her breast. Wind uncoiled a length of rope on the deck behind her, and then she could hear it moaning about the hull. She staggered to the wheelhouse door. “Whoo-oo-ooh!” she sang, mocking it. “Don’t be making your godawful noises at me, you sorry bastard! Go kill another goddamn fish if you want somethin’ to do. Just leave me alone to my drinkin’.”
Waves surged up on the port side. Big ones, like black teeth. Sally almost dropped the bottle in her surprise. Then she saw they weren’t really waves but shapes of water made by the elemental. “You’re losin’ your touch, asshole!” she shouted. “I seen better’n that in the movies!” She slumped down beside the door, clutching the bottle. The word movies conjured flashes of old films she’d seen, and she started singing songs from them. She did “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Blue Moon” and “Love Me Tender.” She knocked back swallows of brandy in between the verses, and when she felt primed enough she launched into her favorite. “The sound that you hear,” she bawled, “is the sound of Sally! A joy to be heard for a thousand years.” She belched. “The hills are alive with the sound of Sally…” She couldn’t recall the next line, and that ended the concert.
The wind built to a howl around her, and her thoughts sank into a place where there were only dim urges and nerves fizzling and blood whining in her ears. Gradually she surfaced from it and found that her mood had become one of regret. Not about anything specific. Just general regrets. General Regrets. She pictured him as an old fogey with a white walrus mustache and a Gilbert-and-Sullivan uniform. Epaulets the size of skateboards. She couldn’t get the picture out of her head, and she wondered if it stood for something important. If it did, she couldn’t make it come clear. Like that line of her favorite song, it had leaked out through one of her cracks. Life had leaked out the same way, and all she could remember of it was a muddle of lonely nights and sick dogs and scallop shells and half-drowned sailors. Nothing important sticking up from the muddle. No monument to accomplishment or romance. Hah! She’d never met the man who could do what men said they could. The most reasonable men she’d known were those shipwrecked sailors, and their eyes big and dark as if they’d seen into some terrible bottomland that had sheared away their pride and stupidity. Her mind began to whirl, trying to get a fix on life, to pin it down like a dead butterfly and know its patterns, and soon she realized that she was literally whirling. Slowly, but getting faster and faster. She hauled herself up and clung to the wheelhouse door and peered over the side. The lobster boat was spinning around and around on the lip of a bowl of black water several hundred yards across. A whirlpool. Moonlight struck a glaze down its slopes but didn’t reach the bottom. Its roaring, heart-stopping power scared her, made her giddy and faint. But after a moment she banished fear. So this was death. It just opened up and swallowed you whole. All right. That was fine by her. She slumped against the wheelhouse and drank deeply of the cherry brandy, listening to the wind and the singing of her blood as she went down not giving a damn. It sure beat puking up life a gob at a time in some hospital room. She kept slurping away at the brandy, guzzling it, wanting to be as looped as possible when the time came. But the time didn’t come, and before too long she noticed that the boat had stopped spinning. The wind had quieted and the sea was calm.
A breeze coiled about her neck, slithered down her breast, and began curling around her legs, flipping the hem of her dress. “You bastard,” she said soddenly, too drunk to move. The elemental swirled around her knees, belling the dress, and touched her between the legs. It tickled, and she swatted at it ineffectually, as if it were one of the dogs snooting at her. But a second later it prodded her there again, a little harder than before, rubbing back and forth, and she felt a quiver of arousal. It startled her so that she went rolling across the deck, somehow keeping her bottle upright. That quiver stuck with her, though, and for an instant a red craving dominated the broken mosaic of her thoughts. Cackling and scratching herself, she staggered to her feet and leaned on the rail. The elemental was about fifty yards off the port bow, shaping itself a waterspout, a moonstruck column of blackness, from the placid surface of the sea.
“Hey!” she shouted, wobbling along the rail. “You come on back here! I’ll teach you a new trick!”
The waterspout grew higher, a glistening black serpent that whooshed and sucked the boat toward it; but it didn’t bother Sally. A devilish joy was in her, and her mind crackled with lightnings of pure craziness. She thought she had figured out something. Maybe nobody had ever taken a real interest in the elemental, and maybe that was why it eventually lost interest in them. Wellsir! She had an interest in it. Damn thing couldn’t be any more stupid than some of her Dobermans. Snooted like one, for sure. She’d teach it to roll over and beg and who knows what else. Fetch me that fish, she’d tell it. Blow me over to Hyannis and smash the liquor-store window and bring me six bottles of brandy. She’d show it who was boss. And could be one day she’d sail into the harbor at Nantucket with the thing on a leash. ’Sconset Sally and her pet storm, Scourge of the Seven Seas.
The boat was beginning to tip and slew sideways in the pull of the waterspout, but Sally scarcely noticed. “Hey!” she shouted again, and chuckled. “Maybe we can work things out! Maybe we’re meant for each other!” She tripped over a warp in the planking, and the arm holding the bottle flailed above her head. Moonlight seemed to stream down into the bottle, igniting the brandy so that it glowed like a magic elixir, a dark red ruby flashing from her hand. Her maniacal laugh went sky-high.<
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“You come on back here!” she screeched at the elemental, exulting in the wild frequencies of her life, at the thought of herself in league with this idiot god, and unmindful of her true circumstance, of the thundering around her and the tiny boat slipping toward the foaming base of the waterspout. “Come back here, damn it! We’re two of a kind! We’re birds of a feather! I’ll sing you to sleep each night! You’ll serve me my supper! I’ll be your old cracked bride, and we’ll have a hell of a honeymoon while it lasts!”
THE BEARDED YOUNG MAN who didn’t give a damn about anyone (or so he’d just shouted—whereupon the bartender had grabbed his scaling knife and said, “Dat bein’ de way of it, you can do your drinkin’ elsewhere!”) came staggering out of the bar and shielded his eyes against the afternoon glare. Violet afterimages flared and fizzled under his lids. He eased down the rickety stair, holding onto the rail, and stepped into the street, still blinking. And then, as he adjusted to the brightness, a ragged man with freckled cocoa-colored skin and a prophet’s beard swung into view, blocking out the sun.
“Hot enough de sun duppy be writhin’ in de street, ain’t it, Mr. Prince?”
Prince choked. Christ! That damned St. Cecilia rum was eating holes in his stomach! He reeled. The rum backed up into his throat and the sun blinded him again, but he squinted and made out old Spurgeon James, grinning, rotten teeth angled like untended tombstones, holding an empty Coke bottle whose mouth was crusted with flies.
“Gotta go,” said Prince, lurching off.
“You got work for me, Mr. Prince?”
Prince kept walking.
Old Spurgeon would lean on his shovel all day, reminisce about “de back time,” and offer advice (“Dat might go easier with de barrow, now”) while Prince sweated like a donkey and lifted concrete blocks. Work! Still, for entertainment’s sake alone he’d be worth more than most of the black trash on the island. And the ladinos! (“De dommed Sponnish!”) They’d work until they had enough to get drunk, play sick, then vanish with your best tools. Prince spotted a rooster pecking at a mango rind by the roadside, elected him representative of the island’s work force, and kicked; but the rooster flapped up, squabbling, lit on an overturned dinghy, and gave an assertive cluck.
“Wait dere a moment, Mr. Prince!”
Prince quickened his pace. If Spurgeon latched on, he’d never let loose. And today, January 18, marked the tenth anniversary of his departure from Vietnam. He didn’t want any company.
The yellow dirt road rippled in a heat haze that made the houses—rows of weathered shanties set on pilings against the storm tides—appear to be dancing on thin rubbery legs. Their tin roofs were buckled, pitched at every angle, showing patches of rust like scabs. That one—teetering on splayed pilings over a dirt front yard, the shutter hung by a single hinge, gray flour-sack curtain belling inward—it always reminded him of a cranky old hen on her roost trying grimly to hatch a nonexistent egg. He’d seen a photograph of it taken seventy years before, and it had looked equally dejected and bedraggled then. Well, almost. There had been a sapodilla tree overspreading the roof.
“Givin’ out a warnin’, Mr. Prince! Best you listen!”
Spurgeon, rags tattering in the breeze, stumbled toward him and nearly fell. He waved his arms to regain his balance, like a drunken ant, toppled sideways, and fetched up against a palm trunk, hugging it for support. Prince, in dizzy sympathy with the sight, tottered backward and caught himself on some shanty steps, for a second going eye to eye with Spurgeon. The old man’s mouth worked, and a strand of spittle eeled out onto his beard.
Prince pushed off from the steps. Stupidity! That was why nothing changed for the better on Guanoja Menor (derived from the Spanish guano and hoja, a fair translation being Lesser Leaf-shaped Piece of Bird Shit), why unemployable drunks hounded you in the street, why the rum poisoned you, why the shanties crashed from their perches in the least of storms. Unwavering stupidity! The islanders built outhouses on piers over the shallows where they bathed and fished the banks with no thought for conservation, then wondered why they stank and went hungry. They cut off their fingers to win bets that they wouldn’t; they smoked black coral and inhaled gasoline fumes for escape; they fought with conch shells, wrapping their hands around the inner volute of the shell so it fit like a spiky boxing glove. And when the nearly as stupid ladinos had come from the Honduran mainland, they’d been able to steal and swindle half the land on the island.
Prince had learned from their example.
“Mr. Prince!”
Spurgeon again, weaving after him, his palm outstretched. Angrily, Prince dug out a coin and threw it at his feet.
“Dass so nice, dass so kind of you!” Spurgeon spat on the coin. But he stooped for it and, in stooping, lost his balance and fell, smashing his Coke bottle on a stone. There went fifty centavos. There went two glasses of rum. The old man rolled in the street, too drunk to stand, smearing himself with yellow dirt. “Even de sick dog gots teeth,” he croaked. “Just you remember dat, Mr. Prince!”
Prince couldn’t keep from laughing.
Meachem’s Landing, the town (“a quaint seaport, steeped in pirate legend,” prattled the guidebook), lay along the curve of a bay inset between two scrub-thatched hills and served as the island capital. At midpoint of the bay stood the government office, a low white stucco building with sliding glass doors like a cheap motel. Three prosperous-looking Spanish men were sitting on oil drums in its shade, talking to a soldier wearing blue fatigues. As Prince passed, an offshore breeze kicked up and blew scents of rotted coconut, papaya, and creosote in from the customs dock, a concrete strip stretching one hundred yards or so into the glittering cobalt reach of the water.
There was a vacancy about the scene, a lethargy uniformly affecting its every element. Cocals twitched the ends of their fronds, leaning in over the tin roofs; a pariah dog sniffed at a dried lobster claw in the dust; ghost crabs scuttered under the shanties. It seemed to Prince that the tide of event had withdrawn, leaving the bottom dwellers exposed, creating a lull before some culminative action. And he remembered how it had been the same on bright afternoons in Saigon when passersby stopped and listened to the whine of an incoming rocket, how the plastic flags on the Hondas parked in front of the bars snapped in the wind, how a prostitute’s monkey had screamed in its cage on hearing the distant crump and everyone had laughed with relief. He felt less irritable, remembering, more at rights with the commemorative nature of the day.
Beyond the government office, past the tiny public square and its dusty-leaved acacia, propped against the cement wall of the general store, clinging to it like a gaudy barnacle, was a shanty whose walls and trim had been painted crimson and bright blue and pink and quarantine yellow. Itchy-sounding reggae leaked from the closed shutter. Ghetto Liquors. He tramped heavily on the stair, letting them know within that the drunkest mother on the island, Neal His Bloody Majesty Prince, was about to integrate their little rainbow paradise, and pushed into the hot, dark room.
“Service!” he said, kicking the counter.
“What you want?”
Rudy Welcomes stirred behind the bar. A slash of light from a split seam in the roof jiggled on his shaved skull.
“Saint Cecilia!” Prince leaned on the bar, reconnoitering. Two men sat at a rear table, their hair in spiky dreadlocks, wraiths materializing from the dark. The darkness was picked out by the purplish glow of black lights illuminating four Jimi Hendrix posters. Though of island stock, Rudy was American-born and, like Prince, a child of the sixties and a veteran. He said that the lights and posters put him in mind of a brothel on Tu Do Street, where he had won the money with which to establish Ghetto Liquors; and Prince, recalling similar brothels, found that the lights provided an excellent frame of reference for the thoughtful, reminiscent stages of his drunk. The eerie purple radiance escaping the slender black cannisters seemed the crystallized expression of war, and he fancied the color emblematic of evil energies and sluggish tropical demons.
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“So this your big day for drinkin’.” Rudy slid a pint bottle along the bar and resettled on his stool. “Don’t you be startin’ that war-buddy crap with me, now. I ain’t in the mood.”
“Shucks, Rudy!” Prince adopted a Southern accent. “You know I ain’t war buddies with no nigger.”
Rudy stiffened but let it pass; he gave a disaffected grunt. “Don’t know why not, man. You could pass yourself. Way your hair’s gotten all crispy and your skin’s gone dark. See here?”
He laid his hand on Prince’s to compare the color, but Prince knocked it aside and stared, challenging.
“Damn! Seem like Clint Eastwood done wandered into town!” Rudy shook his head in disgust and moved off along the bar to change the record. The two men at the rear drifted across the room and whispered with him, casting sly looks at Prince.
Prince basked in the tension. It further fleshed out his frame of reference. Confident that he’d established dominance, he took a table beside the shutter, relaxed, and sipped his rum. Through a gap in the boards he saw a girl stringing up colored lights on the shanty opposite the bar. His private holiday had this year coincided with Independence Day, always celebrated upon the third Friday in January. Stalls would sprout in the public square, offering strips of roast turtle and games of chance. Contending music would blare from the bars—reggae and salsa. Prince enjoyed watching street dancers lose their way in the mishmash of rhythms. It emphasized the fact that neither the Spanish nor the islanders could cope with the other’s presence and further emphasized that they were celebrating two different events—on the day that Queen Victoria had granted the islands their freedom, the Honduran military had sailed in and established governance.
More stupidity.
The rum was sitting easier on his stomach. Prince mellowed and went with the purple lights, seeing twisted black branches in them, seeing the twilit jungle in Lang Biang, and he heard the hiss of the walkie-talkie and Leon’s stagy whisper, “Hey, Prince! I got a funny shadow in that bombax tree…” He had turned his scope on the tree, following the course of the serpentine limbs through the grainy empurpling air. And then the stutter of automatic fire, and he could hear Leon’s screams in the air and carrying over the radio…
The Jaguar Hunter Page 18