Gone to Drift

by Diana McCaulay

  “Lloyd? What you doin here? You want you mother kill you?”

  “Come outside,” Lloyd shouted over the noise.

  “What?”

  “Outside! Come outside!” Lloyd did not like to touch his father, but he tugged at his arm and pointed to the door. His father yelled, “Soon come!” to Miss Lilah and she nodded. Outside, the heat of the day was at its height. Vernon stood with his back to the sun and his face was in shadow. Lloyd squinted up at him, trying to read his expression. “What you want, bwoy?” his father said.

  “You know Gramps don’t come home Thursday. Him go to Pedro from Sunday and him don’t come back.”

  “So?” Vernon took another long drink from the bottle of rum. “Him must just decide to stay. Fishin must be good. What you botherin me for?”

  “Him not answerin his phone. You see him before him go?”

  “Who you think you is, bwoy? To come here put question to me like you is police. You lick you head?” His father grabbed his arm and twisted it and Lloyd smelled Vernon’s familiar smell of rum and sweat and ganja and dirty clothes. “Gwaan ’bout you business! Facety and outta order pickney.” Vernon dropped Lloyd’s arm and pushed him away. “Gwaan home, bwoy. This a big man place.” He flung his arm at him in a go-away gesture.

  Lloyd stood his ground. He took a step back but he did not leave. “Me just want know if you did see him before him leave for Pedro. That’s all.”

  “Me never see him. That crazy old man . . .”

  “Maas Benjy say you and him did have words.”

  “Maas Benjy say what?” Vernon stepped forward and his hands closed on Lloyd’s throat. “What you tellin me, bwoy?”

  “Him say . . .” Lloyd fought for breath. He tried to pull his father’s hands away, but he did not have the strength. He thought about drowning, sinking under the surface of the sea, a weight around his ankles, staring up to the light at the surface.

  “Leave the bwoy alone, Vernon. What do you?” It was Miss Lilah. “You want get arrest for child abuse?”

  “Don’t chat rubbish inna me ears, woman,” Vernon said, but he dropped his hands. “Don’t him is my son? Is for me to decide how to deal with him.” He slapped his chest.

  “Gwaan home, Lloydie,” Miss Lilah said, pushing herself between father and son.

  “You mother awright?” Without waiting for an answer, she said to Vernon, “Modern time now. Can’t just rough up a pickney inna the street like that. Go back inside.” Vernon kissed his teeth and turned away.

  “You hear anything ’bout Maas Conrad?” Lloyd said to Miss Lilah.

  “No, youngster. Me hear say him don’t come back. But mebbe him stop somewhere. Don’t worry you head yet.” Miss Lilah touched his shoulder and Lloyd wanted her help, her strong arms around him. He tried to smile and he knew his eyes shone with the tears he had been fighting since he woke.

  “You a good lady, Miss Lilah,” he said. “You will tell me if you hear anything?”

  “Ee-hee, Lloydie. Gwaan now. You granddaddy be awright.”

  Unable to sleep that night, Lloyd left his mother’s house and went again to the wall at the eastern end of Gray Pond beach. His mother never heard the scraping of the inside bolt if she was already asleep. He had to leave the front door unlocked, for to click the padlock shut would trap her inside. He made his way to the hollowed out place he had fashioned in the stones and lined with an old feed sack. He leaned against a wooden light post, the power lines now ran along the new concrete ones on the Windward Road, and he stared out to sea, looking for his grandfather. There was no moon. He settled into his post and the waves of the starlit night soothed him. He thought of the questions he used to ask when he was much younger.

  “Why you go sea alone, Gramps?”

  “Why you leave out so early?”

  “Why some fish bite only certain time of year?”

  “How you know what bait to use?”

  “Why sometime you drop a line and sometime you trawl?”

  “How you know where to go?”

  “Why you don’t wear a life jacket?”

  I come from a line of fishermen was all his grandfather ever replied. And Lloyd would see that line of fishermen slanting into the sea; a line that could both feed you and cut you.

  He thought of weekend trips with Gramps. He would leave for his anchorage at four in the morning, long before the garbage men started their work in the city and before the dancehalls turned down their music, in the coolest part of the night. He sat on the stern thwart of Water Bird, his hand on the engine, and Lloyd stood in the bow, holding the anchor rope to steady himself, staring ahead, taking the waves with flexed knees. They went together across the sea and they anchored and fished together. When the sun came up, and the ice cooler was full, and the fish had stopped biting, if the weather was calm, they went to one of the Portland Bight cays.

  Tern Cay was Lloyd’s favorite, off Needles Point, encircled by a reef that not many fishers could find their way through, the white sand coarse, the sandflies few. Under a single straggly mangrove tree, Gramps would roast an unscaled red snapper on a square of zinc, the snapper’s skin crusted with salt, the fire small and hot, until the skin of the fish flaked off, leaving the pure white flesh for grandfather and grandson to eat in a thin sauce of seawater and onion and lime and Scotch bonnet pepper. Maas Conrad ate with his fingers and his favorite knife, which he cleaned by sticking into the sand where the waves broke.

  Afterward, they rested in the small shade and Gramps told the boy dolphin stories. “Aah, me son, them animal smart so ’til. Them hunt together and them live together and them will even keep a man company a night-time. Sometime you hear them before you see them, you hear when them come up to breathe air like we. Them swim far and them dive deep. One time, over by Wreck Reef, when a big wave carry me over the reef, is a dolphin show me the way out.”

  Lloyd believed these stories less as he grew older, but he often saw the dolphins that came to the entrance of Kingston Harbour, and he loved their sleek bodies and the way they swam beside boats big and small, like police outriders for high-up people. In the old days, his grandfather said, no fisherman would deliberately harm a dolphin for it was well known that such an action would bring big trouble on a man’s family.

  The lapping of the waves pulled him into a restless, upright sleep and he dreamed of his mother’s flat voice, stating what she knew for sure—as God is my witness, you nah be a fisherman.

  My father was a black man and my mother was St. Elizabeth red with gray-green eyes. We Saunders boys were all different shades of brown. My father, though, was truly black; his skin reminded me of the Kiwi shoe polish we had to use on our school shoes. He came from Little Bay on the north coast, near to Negril, where the beaches were made of pure white sand. Luke was the lightest skinned of us all, with the greenest eyes. The market women called him “puss eye.”

  I was closest to Luke. We were the small boys, only ten months apart in age. There was a four-year gap between Luke and Colin, the next oldest son. That four-year gap was wide; Colin, Lewis, Robert, and Ben were the big boys. They called us tiki-tiki, after tiny fish. We were four to two; not three to three in our family. My big brothers were always men to me and I yearned to catch up with them. They were better at everything—catching lizards with nooses made from coconut trees, stoning mangoes, shooting birds with slingshots made from inner-tube rubber; better at football, better at cricket, better runners, better swimmers. They laughed at our efforts to keep up with them, but everyone knew not to bother the younger Saunders boys because the big ones would come to their rescue. The other members of my family swim in and out of memory, but Luke is always there, the witness of my life, and I, the witness of his. We grew up together; brothers, kin, friends. Sometimes we dreamed the same dreams.

  When it came time for Luke to go to sea in his turn, I begged my father to take me as well. Ten months meant nothing, we were really the same age, I argued. My father was not swayed and although he th
reatened to beat me if I followed, I crept out behind them in the night and settled in the shadow of another old canoe, so long discarded on the beach that vines grew through its holes. I heard the murmur of my father’s voice as he instructed Luke. The almost full moon was hidden by cloud and my father was invisible. What age were we? I am not sure, maybe eight or nine.

  We knew the sea, of course. It was the boundary of our world: the sea gave us smells and winds and weather and it was the subject of nearly all our conversation. The sea gave and it took. It was our food and our livelihood and our recreation, but it could kill men as well. My father often talked of the boat Snowboy, which went to sea with forty-odd men, twelve of them from our fishing beaches of Great Bay and Calabash Bay and Billy’s Bay and Frenchman’s. Snowboy foundered on the way from Kingston to the Pedro Bank in the deep sea. The newspapers said Snowboy had been overloaded. A search was mounted, but not a single man was ever found and the fishing villages mourned for half a year. The sea was vast and yet intimate, dangerous and yet holding us to her bosom, calm and also racked with furies. The sea was all.

  It is that same sea that has brought me to this rock on the Pedro Bank, carved by the waves of centuries into jagged crests of gray and black. There is no tinge of green but there is life here: seabirds, crabs, snails, whelks. There are signs that fishers visit; human waste, a shelter made of a tattered tarpaulin, a plastic bottle tied to a rock full of warm, fresh water. I tried to catch one of the birds but they are much too wily. I catch a small ghost crab and crack it open. I close my eyes to eat the half liquid flesh and it slides down my throat. Perhaps the fishers will be back today and I will return to land with them.

  5

  Lloyd waited for the airport bus on Windward Road. It would take him to Port Royal where he would try to speak to someone at the Coast Guard base. He had waited until his mother left the house to buy the day’s fish and then he washed and dressed in his church clothes from the day before. The only food on the stove was an end of hard dough bread. He made himself a cup of mint tea with three spoons of brown sugar. He sat on the front step and ate the bread. He would be in trouble when his mother found him gone.

  He did not feel tired, despite his night-time wait on the old wall. Staring out to sea was as restful to him as sleep. He knew he had slept for a while, leaning against the light post. Gramps had told him that a man must be able to catch sleep where he can. Lloyd had seen his grandfather sleep in the inch of dirty water that always sloshed around in Water Bird, no matter how much they baled.

  He had never been to the Port Royal Coast Guard base. He knew their boats, Cornwall, Middlesex, and Surrey, named for Jamaica’s counties. He thought they looked like battleships in a war movie, with their gray bulk and mysterious tangle of gear. They were anchored in the lee of the Palisadoes strip and any fisher leaving Kingston Harbour motored past them.

  The gate to the base was right opposite Fort Charles, where an old-time English admiral had walked the walls in the famous town of Port Royal, right at the end of the Palisadoes strip. Lloyd often went to the fishing beach in Port Royal to crew for other fishers or to leave with Dwight and Miss Lavern for Lime Cay, but he had never tried to go inside the chain-link fence to the Coast Guard station.

  The bus came and he boarded, paying the driver. It was almost empty and he sat by a window at the back. He needed a plan to get through the gate at the Coast Guard station to see Commander Peterson, the man Maas Rusty had told him about. He gazed out at Kingston Harbour, looking for the bright colors of Water Bird. Gramps could come home anytime, he thought. One minute the sea could be empty, and the next minute it could deliver his grandfather safely to land, as the sea had done over and over and over. He tried to convince himself that a man could not just disappear, not without trace, but he knew it was not true. A man, especially a fisherman, could disappear easily because the sea held many dangers.

  He tried to imagine dying, but he could not. He could imagine violent acts and violent events, done to him, to his mother, to his grandfather, to strangers; he could hear the sound of gunshots, feel the pain of bones breaking, the fight for breath of drowning, but always his imagination stopped before the final end. In his mind, his father was always the one who held stick, gun, and rope.

  Then he tried to imagine a world without his grandfather. A few days, even a week without him was normal—Maas Conrad lived alone at Springfield—but he ate with Lloyd and his mother at least twice a week, on nights when Vernon was not there. Gramps and Vernon did not get on. Lloyd wished he knew what had caused them to circle each other like wary dogs.

  Lloyd knew bad things happened, but not every fear was realized. Perhaps if he told himself his grandfather was dead, then the opposite would be the truth. No one could tell the future and the worst things were always unexpected, and always lay wait in ambush. On the other hand, if a boy was sure his grandfather was dead, he would not look for him; he would not be on this bus on a Monday morning with workers going to their jobs at the airport. He could not fool the rules of the universe, of fate, of God. He should have paid more attention in church, perhaps he should have asked Pastor Errol to pray for Gramps. He could not make sense of his grandfather’s absence. Was it too early to worry, or too late?

  Too much thinking. It was time to act. He needed a plan to get through the Coast Guard gate. He wished he were a man in a suit in a white SUV, not a boy in too small, too warm church clothes in a JUTC bus.

  The bus stopped near Harbour View and more people boarded. “After work, me going to Gloria’s to eat a fish,” a man said to one of the women.

  “Huh. You lucky. Me on double shift today.”

  Gloria’s, Lloyd thought. Maybe if he waited there long enough he would see Commander Peterson. The man had to eat. Maybe the commander would come out from behind the Coast Guard gate in his uniform and he would sit at a table at Gloria’s and order lunch and perhaps that would be Lloyd’s chance to tell him about Maas Conrad.

  It is hard to sleep on this rock; it cuts into my back and the surf booms all night, but last night I slept enough to dream of my mother. I dreamed she was asking the men of Gray Pond beach to look for me but they refused. As the sky lightens, I remember her songs. I can taste her food. I can see her wearing a white dress and her church hat at our school prize-giving events, wiping her face in the heat. What I remember most about her is a feeling, a feeling of safety and plenty and homecoming. These were her gifts.

  Growing up, I occupied a world of men, of men who went to sea, and we all pulled away from the world of women. I often wondered what it would have been like to have a sister. There were girls at the Sandy Bank primary school, but they were a territory we Saunders boys did not explore. We laughed at their skipping games, their ring games, their games of jacks, the songs they chanted in their high voices. We threw lizards at them and watched them shriek and run away. Now, I wonder if my mother was lonely in our male territory. She died young, before I left Great Bay. I was a young man just turned twenty, I do not know her age. Sickle cell, the doctor told us. Now, I wish I could speak to my mother, man to woman. I wish there was another chance to know her.

  No fishers came to the rock today.

  6

  Lloyd saw it was too early for the lunch trade when he arrived at Gloria’s. A young woman in a torn apron dreamily cleaned tables and the door to the kitchen was almost closed. The tables at Gloria’s occupied the sidewalk and one of them straddled a trickle of wastewater in the gutter; it was made to sit level with folded up newspaper under two of the legs.

  Lloyd looked around for a place to wait, and saw a bench outside a building across the street, but a man lay full length on it, his mouth open, his limbs trailing on the ground. He thought about various places in Port Royal where he could wait—Fort Charles, but there was bound to be an entrance fee there, the Port Royal Marine Laboratory, behind a gate with a security guard, and there was no chance a boy in church clothes could just walk into the Morgan’s Harbour Hotel.

&
nbsp; He walked to the familiar fishing beach and onto the rickety wooden dock jutting out into the Harbour. Here the smell of sewage was strong and there were few boats on the beach. Lloyd sat on the wood, bleached soft and smooth by years, and stared out at the oily calm of the Harbour. Anytime, he thought. The waves shushed and swirled around the dock. A stingray jumped out of the water right in front of him and Lloyd remembered one of Gramps’s stories about the time a fisher had idly shot a stingray and thrown it into his boat. The dying ray had sent its barb through the wooden oarlock. “Respect,” Gramps had said. “Him lucky it never catch him. And the ray was small.”

  Lloyd relaxed against one of the wooden pilings and squinted at the Harbour. Boats of all sizes went by—the small ones like buzzing insects, the large ones bulky and slow. He turned to watch the entrance to the Harbour and just rounding the point, he saw a figure standing on a surfboard. He couldn’t tell the sex of the person—he or she held a long paddle, and, balancing on the swaying surface of the water, the figure dipped the paddle into the water on one side of the surfboard and then the other. Lloyd wondered if the wake of a boat would make the person fall over. It seemed a very inefficient method of transport, but he thought he would like to try it.

  He watched the figure and realized it was moving faster than he had first thought. The paddle went up and down in a smooth, steady rhythm. He saw it was a woman in a wet suit and he wondered if it was the dolphin woman at Lime Cay, the woman who might know about the capture of dolphins. He had seen surfers out at Bull Bay riding the waves, but had never seen anyone standing upright on a surfboard with a paddle. A canoe zipped by the woman and with two strong strokes of the paddle, she turned the surfboard to face directly into the curving wake. Lloyd saw her bend her knees slightly and take the bounce of the surfboard with the paddle held across her chest.