They run down their checklist of who says what and where the minister must sit. Remember not to interrupt and pause to allow the minister to have his say and listen and do not rustle papers or make unnecessary background noises. And remain seated. Do not leave the table. Let the minister do most of the moving and talking. The office manager reminds Joyce to observe and keep quiet and deflect any direct questions from the interior minister to someone else. Joyce says she is not stupid. The office manager says she knows Joyce has a university degree, so if it was not stupidity that got Joyce into a big mess with the captain the last time, what was it? Did she act out of self-interest against the interests of the commune? Surely that could not be it. Joyce says the office manager must sleep really soundly at night, knowing what a perfect person she is. Someone else begs Joyce not to argue.
The interior minister’s Mercedes pulls up in front of the building and settles in the no-parking zone behind the two jeeps. The guard at the monitor alerts everyone in the house to take up their allotted positions. The driver stays with the car. A secretary accompanies the minister. A receptionist holds the door, and the minister steps inside, followed by his secretary. Right away he asks the receptionists how Joyce is keeping, and one of them replies that she has just come back from the interior. The minister looks pleased. The second receptionist whips up a tray of iced Cokes and slices of cake for the minister and his secretary. The guard takes the tray and leads the VIP guest and his secretary upstairs to the second floor. That same offer of an iced carbonated drink and cake is extended to the very appreciative driver, and the receptionist explains something to him as he nods and feeds his face. The receptionist returns inside and locks the front door and turns the open sign to the closed position. The group gathers around a large mahogany table in a second-floor room and launches into their affairs from chairs padded with soft velvet. The minister and secretary examine the contents of two briefcases on the table. Both pat the bars of light and smile. The minister’s secretary transfers the gold to ten plain burlap sacks previously used to store paddy. The minister speaks.
—Gold suits these strong bags much better than rice. The piper must be paid, and there are plenty of them.
The guards repeat the preacher’s concerns about prying eyes and the need for this payment to guarantee strict noninterference.
—Of course, of course. You people speak my language. I hear you loud and clear. It’s a pleasure to do business with you.
And with handshakes all around, the minister tells Joyce how good it is to see her again and how attractive she looks. Joyce remains placid and says nothing. He tells her she must come out and see the town sometime. Joyce looks around the room to indicate to him that she has too much work to consider his invitation and perhaps to remind the minister of their location in the capital headquarters of the commune. She wants to say something much more rude. But she cannot speak. He looks at her and asks if he should read her silence as agreement. The office manager steps forward and shows the minister’s secretary the door. The minister and his secretary grab the sacks with help from the guards and ferry them downstairs and out the front door. The driver pops open the trunk of the Mercedes and hops out of his seat to help them. But the minister insists that they stack the two bags around him in the backseat.
—It isn’t every day that I get to play Monopoly with real bullion.
The moment the minister’s car pulls away, a guard extracts the videotape from the machine, copies it and places the copy in an envelope, seals it with a kiss, dates and labels it Interior Minister, and hands the envelope to Joyce for her return journey. The office manager radios the compound and tells the preacher that everything is taken care of just as he stipulated. The preacher asks for Joyce and checks to see how things went. Joyce confirms everything the office manager said, and she asks after Trina. The preacher says Trina is doing perfectly fine. Joyce asks if she can have a quick word with her. The preacher says absolutely not, that this is not a social, and Trina feels more at home on the compound than Joyce gives her credit for. His tone is irritable. The office manager edges Joyce from the microphone. Another of the office staff casts her a stern look.
For the return journey to the compound, Joyce helps a receptionist fill the empty attaché cases with U.S. currency (low-denomination dollar bills to trade for gold) collected from pensions for the two hundred or so elderly at the commune and for goods produced by the commune, principally pork, and for unspecified security services provided to the government. The commune pays the government under the table. The government pays the commune over the same table.
NINETEEN
The captain stays on the docks for two days and two nights. He dwells on the woman whose company he missed for months only to see her and have her on his boat and not be able to say a word to her, a failure not his but a forced compliance that amounts to rejection, and he watches her leave his boat with a certainty that she will return and give him the same silent treatment and perhaps disappear from his life for several more months. Unless he can come up with a plan. Over a lunch of a shared half-chicken, he tells his first mate that he should take the time off but get back early or miss the boat, since commune folk do not like to linger.
—They keep their own sense of time, and the setting is always on fast forward.
The captain daydreams about Joyce, wonders about Trina, breaks a wishbone with his first mate and wins the bigger portion, and secretly wishes to be reunited with Joyce and Trina. The first mate asks about his wish, and he says it is bad luck to share it but adds that he asked the gods for a boat that never leaks. His first mate waves and struts off the jetty. For two days the captain performs rudimentary repairs and touches up the paintwork of the vessel, repaints the letters on the hull: Coffee. His body performs the actions of boat repairs, but his mind is elsewhere. At each part of the boat where Joyce stood, he stands and broods over the fact of their proximity and talks to her as if she were there.
He remembers the many ways he devised to make discreet inquiries about Joyce and Trina in front of the commune guards. At the time many of the guards pretended not to understand his questions or recognize the pair. But two guards who make the trips to the capital on a regular basis are on friendly terms with the captain. He asks them and at first they pretend they have no idea what he means. They play with him. They say there are literally hundreds of young women and children at the commune and that he will have to be more specific.
His past with her must be summoned in her absence, every detail of it, as his way to get around the silence between them. His mind reaches out to Joyce with his memories of them together. The guards must hear the desperation in his tone.
—Relax, man. We’re kidding with you. We know who you mean. Joyce and her daughter, Trina. The child talks a lot.
—Yes, but smart talk, not just a chatterbox.
Both guards nod at his distinction and take turns to volunteer more about Joyce and Trina.
—They’re doing fine. The child’s a godsend.
—She’s special.
The captain asks some more about Joyce. He says he cannot figure out why she stopped going to the capital on commune business:
—I haven’t seen her for a while.
Both guards warn him that Joyce is married to the commune, and unless he is thinking of joining, he will be better off if he forgets about that particular woman. There is a lull in the talk. He stands with the guards, and they watch the river flex and ripple its muscles as it turns this way and that. The warning in the tone of the guards curtails any further inquiry about Joyce and Trina. The men listen to the water slapping the side of the craft for some time before small talk ensues. And what if he listens to their warning and leaves things right there? He will be a poorer man. He takes a different line in his questions.
—How does a man join an organization like yours?
The guards say that first, the captain would have to believe in God, and second, he would have to believe in their leader or t
he other way around, certainly both.
—What’s third?
—No third, just those two things.
—But they’re enough, my friend, let me tell you, more than enough.
The guards remark that the captain does not strike them as a man who follows orders without question.
—Perhaps that’s why I run my boat and work my own hours.
He cannot help himself, and despite their warning, he returns to the subject of Joyce.
—Joyce is the kind of woman a man would give up quite a lot for, though, don’t you think, boys?
—Yeah, we heard all about your many letters to her, but you know we cannot deliver any messages from an outsider to someone in our community.
The guards tell the captain that they like him but he has to drop his interest in Joyce or it will cost him his business with the commune. The captain says he would not want to jeopardize his lucrative work for the commune, ferrying goods and people back and forth, and he will not mention Joyce again, but he has a last question if they will be kind enough and indulge him one more time. The guards feel obliged to hear him out. The captain gives the wheel to his first mate and walks with the guards to a quiet corner of the boat.
—All this time I wonder why I don’t hear back from Joyce or someone at the commune. Why string me along all this time? Why not just tell me to get lost?
—The reverend thought you would lose interest in Joyce if she ignored you.
—You people are playing with a man’s feelings. That’s sad.
The guards say he cannot repeat what they are about to tell him, since it can get them into trouble. The captain leans closer to hear what they have to say. He has no idea what to expect. One second they are warning him to avoid some danger for his own good; the next they seem more than willing to threaten him.
—Our community’s not built to last, not solid like your boat.
The guard raps his knuckles on the port side of the Coffee for emphasis.
—You’re different from us. You’re busy planning for the rest of your life. But it’s only a matter of seventy, maybe eighty, years if you’re lucky. Our reverend’s plans are for an eternity. One day you’ll arrive at the port and find us missing.
The guard says this with such finality that the captain holds back the ten new questions that immediately came to mind. He regrets confiding in them. Their loyalty to the commune sounds just like Joyce’s, almost as if their community is a species apart from everything else. He has to be careful not to lose his business by falling out of favor. He feels inferior. For saying too much to men who look like him but who think about the world in an alien fashion, as if this life, given in part and shaped by human endeavor, amounts to no more than a staging post for an as yet unrealized other realm of existence, and so does not merit the attention to alter or improve it, much less do something to help those who might care about the here and now.
He sees how she cannot help thinking and feeling that their spiritual leader miraculously made the rain forest welcome more than one thousand souls. He tried during their first meetings to listen to Joyce’s religious reasoning. What else could he do? She stood close to him as she spoke, needing both hands to keep from her face the masses of her long black hair, its thickness and sheen. Even without makeup she looked clean, her proportions just so, beautiful, yes, a beauty that needed no adornment or embellishment of any kind, just light for his basking eyes. A face so open and keen and ready to smile.
Trina seemed a miniature of Joyce, with just the same quick mind and keen look at things. He loved them both right away. He wanted their trips to last for a lifetime. He watched them sleep and could not wait for them to wake and start again with their questions about the river and the life around it and even the light, they notice the light, and they make him notice it, too, how it changes around every bend and, with clouds on the move, takes on the same quality of a gossamer fabric spread over the landscape. Joyce asked him what is the single most important thing about the place, and he wanted to say the people or the flora or fauna, but after all her talk about the way the light changed minute by minute as the boat cut upstream and around each corner, the surprise of a pool of light among trees or light churning up the river or light falling through her hair, all her talk made him answer that it is the light, yes, the light, and she smiled as if she knew he meant her, that she is the best thing he could think of as he stood with her and her daughter on his boat.
The captain turns everything over in his head while he works on his boat. The story of Joyce in his life takes the shape of his beloved Coffee that he cleans, spruces up, and patches. There, somewhere, in his work and reflection, a solution to his problem stares at him and waits for him to meet it face-to-face.
His first mate returns and they refuel and stock up on supplies for the journey and passengers trickle on board and barely catch their attention. The five commune staff arrive with a flurry, four guards with two attaché cases and Joyce flanked by them. They are serious and in a hurry. The air of languid preparation for departure turns tense. Joyce looks everywhere but at the captain while the guards seem to look at him and nothing else as a way of ensuring that he has no contact with Joyce. His first mate whistles Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” as he runs around in friendly mediation between the captain and the commune people, principally Joyce. The boat passes the places that mean something to just the two of them because of the way they were together in those places: where they swam, where they climbed a waterfall, and where he asked her to listen to the trees. At each landmark the captain looks out at the forest and it seems to brighten just in those places and he wonders if Joyce sees what he sees. If she does, it means they are talking in a language available to no one but the two of them. The captain realizes that for him to share with Joyce in this way makes it more than memory. Their pooled memories, though independent of each other, amount to new experience.
The boat speeds to the commune dock. The clouds race by overhead, and the current rolls at high speed along the wake of the boat. Everything takes on the hurried time of the commune. Every time the captain glances at his watch, the time left for Joyce to be on his boat has dwindled. The first mate sees the captain at the bow and Joyce at the stern, and the guards close to her with their eyes on both the captain and Joyce, and the first mate whistles more and busies himself more between bow and stern.
The captain looks up from his watch and the commune port appears to be marching toward the boat to reduce the time it takes him to dock. The guards and Joyce stand ready to disembark, attaché cases clamped under arms. Joyce looks dead ahead and unsmiling. The first mate whistles Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” as he readies the rope in loops he will swing and fling to the guard already standing by the water’s edge on the tip of the dock.
The captain looks at the wheel. He cannot bear to lift his eyes to the forest only to see Joyce marching into it between the guards. The forest brought her to him and now the forest takes her away without so much as a goodbye.
That evening the preacher calls a meeting of his emissaries who work in the capital. He tells them to use the opportunity of their trips to advise the captain in ways that make it unequivocally clear that he must forget Joyce and respect her wishes to serve Christ and renounce the world of flesh and sin. He waves the company out of his sight. The preacher summons Joyce and reminds her of her contract with the Lord, the commune, and Trina, who is inextricably bound to the commune. He says before she gives a thought to doing anything stupid, she should consider those things. He tells her to get out of his sight and to watch herself. One good trip proves nothing. She is still on probation.
The preacher’s disapproval of the captain results in a marked change of attitude by the guards. They are decidedly cool on his boat and say only the most perfunctory things to him and his first mate. They rarely look at him, and the few times that he catches their eyes, they do not smile and they look away quickly. He senses the change
but is reluctant to pursue the cause of it, partly due to his suspicion that it has to do with Joyce and the preacher and also just in case his inquisitiveness might make matters worse. Part of him hopes that the whole thing will blow over, given time. He assumes another reason for their hostility has to do with his letter to their spiritual leader, in which he is sure he wrote nothing malicious or slanderous. He sticks to piloting his craft. His first mate whistles the Beatles’ “Let It Be” as he fraternizes with the noncommune passengers in the captain’s stead.
One of the commune guards deliberately bumps into the first mate. The first mate says nothing, only retreats with a look of surprise. The commune guard asks if he finds people from the commune contaminated or something. The first mate says he does not know what the guard means. The guard says that his community is viewed by some people as a prison camp and the good work that the commune does goes unheralded while scandalous lies abound about it, and he wants to know if the first mate might be one of those people wagging his tongue. The first mate draws back from the guard and peers at him, not quite sure he heard him right. A cousin of the captain, he came straight from high school to be apprenticed on the boat at about the same time as the commune began. Like the captain, he knows the commune people well and assumes a certain degree of informality in his dealings with them.
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