Adrift on St. John

by Rebecca Hale

  Issuing a perplexed grunt, Manto crossed toward the opposite side of the ring, to the portion located farthest away from the road, where the land sloped gently upward to meet its top rim. He trained his light on a line of small rooms positioned behind the boiler room.

  As the beam flickered across one of the many smooth-limbed, reddish-trunked bay trees dispersed throughout the mill area, a slight movement at the edge of Manto’s periphery confirmed his suspicions. His spotlight found a rain-blurred face peering out from one of the stone entrances.

  Manto raced to the circle’s perimeter, his sandals scrambling on the slick, sodden grass. Slipping with every step, he hurtled over the stone rim, dashed around a mound of rocks, and sprinted up to the now empty doorway. Heart pounding, he stepped cautiously over the threshold and looked inside.

  The roofless room was vacant, save for the spindly trunk of yet another bay tree.

  His frustration mounting, Manto arched his light over the slender branches and then down to the raised roots that snaked across the volcanic-earth floor.

  The sound of racing feet brought him back to the doorway. Something scuttled through the leaves to his left.

  He turned, panning his flashlight toward the Princess’s fleeing silhouette. His beam followed her as she scampered down a short path leading away from the mill. Then the Princess scrambled across a narrow bridge and up a stone-littered hill to the remains of the ruins’ plantation house—all the while gripping the rake handle in her hand, using it like a walking stick for balance.

  Flushed with chill and adrenaline, Manto wavered as his mind argued vigorously with his eyes. He knew it was unwise to follow the Princess, be she ghost or human, much farther into the ruins. But finally, he wiped the back of his hand across his rain-streaked face and continued on.

  The narrow ravine beneath the bridge was quickly filling with runoff; a torrent of water rushed through its streambed. On the bridge’s opposite side, the path leading up to the plantation’s former living quarters was a minefield of slippery roots and loose rocks. Long vines dropped down from low-hanging branches, slapping him across the face with every step.

  Between the struggle for his footing and the constant swatting of the vines, by the time Manto stepped inside the ruins of the main house, he had once more lost track of his target.

  The plantation house was far more deteriorated than the sugar mill. The remaining walls were more horizontal than upright; the structure looked as if it were about to tumble down completely.

  Manto aimed his shaking flashlight at the nearest room, illuminating the barely distinguishable outlines of its stove and chimney.

  At least, he thought wearily, the tree cover provided some protection from the rain. Water was now coming down against his head in discrete plops.

  Drop. Drop. Drop. The sound echoed in his ears, mimicking the staccato of approaching footsteps.

  “You’re all rig’t, Manto,” he told himself, trying to drum up confidence. “She’s nut a ghost.” With a clarifying gulp, he amended, “Leas’, I hope nut.”

  After a quick check to his rear, Manto swept the flashlight toward the house’s top corner. There, at the forest’s edge, just behind the wide fan of a yucca plant, he spied the Amina Slave Princess—still grasping the handle of the missing rake.

  As they faced one another over the rainy forty-foot distance, the Princess brushed her free hand through the spiraling damp curls of her jet black hair. Then her fingers dropped to the amulet hanging from her neck.

  A flash of lightning blitzed across the night sky, illuminating the entire ruins in a ghostly specter of light.

  Temporarily blinded, Manto blinked and refocused his gaze on the spot where the Princess had stood, but she—and the rake—were gone.

  A dark-skinned man with muscular arms watched the scene in the Cinnamon Bay ruins unfold from the thick woods at the back of the property, near the entrance to a nature trail that led up into St. John’s hilly center. Rain dripped down on the water taxi captain through the heavy canopy of the surrounding bay trees, but he appeared not to notice. His attention was focused on the events taking place in the ruins.

  When he saw the Slave Princess make her move toward the trailhead, he slipped into a small rustic cemetery holding the remains of the plantation’s early settlers and waited for her to pass. A moment later, he followed her up the trail.

  As soon as the captain disappeared through the trees, an elderly woman in a soaking wet shirtdress and loose rubber sandals crept out from behind the largest of the aboveground stone coffins. Taking care to maintain a safe distance, Beulah Shah set off up the trail, falling in behind both the water taxi captain and the Amina Slave Princess.

  Charlie carefully navigated his towing rig down the slick and treacherous North Shore Road, keeping his eyes peeled for Manto’s disabled truck taxi. The rain was still coming down in buckets, limiting visibility, especially on the road’s sharp curves.

  When he finally spied the entrance to the Cinnamon Bay parking lot and, in the ruins on the opposite side of the road, Manto’s disabled truck, he could hardly believe the sight.

  “What—did you forget how to drive?” Charlie asked with exasperation as Manto met him at the tow truck’s back hitch. He studied Manto’s wet, disheveled appearance with concern. “What happened to you?”

  “Eye saw a ghost.” Manto gulped, his face deadly serious. “She ran me off thuh road.”

  “A what?” Charlie asked, his brow furrowed. “A ghost ran you off the road?”

  “It wuz a wo-man—thuh Ameena Slave Preen-cess.” Manto wiped a hand across his forehead.

  “The who?” Charlie demanded, clearly confused. “The Slave who?”

  Manto cleared his throat. “She had wone of my rakes.”

  Charlie put his hands on his hips. “A ghost ran you off the road with a rake?”

  Manto nodded solemnly. “Sometin’ lyke that.”

  Charlie covered his face with his hands. Then he pointed to the tow truck.

  “Get in the cab,” he said with a sigh. “We’ll get Bessie out in the morning.”

  33

  The Bug Mon

  Jeff sent word that the dive shop had picked up a last-minute sunset charter, so I found myself without my expected Saturday-night companion.

  I couldn’t imagine why anyone would pay good money to sit on a wet boat on rough water out in all this rain, but there was no accounting for the wild whims of tourists. Regardless, I headed into town on my own, catching a ride on one of the few remaining truck taxis waiting in the resort’s front drive.

  Twenty minutes later, I dashed through the rain, up a flight of green-painted steps into the second floor of a building located to the right of the Crunchy Carrot. With the storm still emptying itself onto the island, the Dumpster table was out of the question, but the bar next door was a perfect alternative.

  The Silent John had the laid-back atmosphere of an old Irish pub—that is, one that had been exposed to the open air of the Caribbean for the last forty years. The uneven wood floor and well-worn furnishings were a perfect complement to the plastic table and chairs of the Dumpster table below.

  Shaking off a scattering of droplets, I crossed the room to a counter and a row of bar stools. A couple of television screens were hooked up to a satellite feed along the back wall behind the server’s station. Underneath the TVs, a rickety shelf held a line of dusty beer cans and bottles, an advertisement of the bar’s beverage offerings.

  The Silent John didn’t serve food—which was probably a good thing, given the sanitary conditions in the place—but the waitresses from the Crunchy Carrot made frequent deliveries up the stairs.

  I placed an order for a fish sandwich and took a stool at the far end the counter. As I stared up at the nearest television screen, my thoughts focused on the hot meal that would soon be headed in my direction. My stomach rumbled with hungry anticipation.

  This sandwich would receive a much better reception than the one I’d receive
d in the backseat of Hank Sheridan’s sedan.

  Down at the other end of the bar, a man in a Hawaiian print shirt knocked back a shot of dark amber liquid. Then he thunked the glass dramatically on the counter next to a dingy baseball cap. Given the molded crease in the hair across the back of the man’s head, the hat had seen several days’ worth of constant use.

  The man licked his lips and announced in a loud drawl to the fellow seated to his left, “I’m from Murfreesboro—that’s in Tennessee. I’m here on my honeymoon.”

  The Hawaiian shirt had been dyed an eye-popping array of vivid orange and pink, the bright-colored blobs arranged into the shapes of oversized flower petals. The top three buttons were undone, revealing the red skin of the man’s neck. This was not the recent sunburn of an island vacation, but the permanent leatherizing texture accumulated over a lifetime of UV exposure.

  Beneath the shirt, the man wore a pair of ill-fitting, roughed-up blue jeans. A circular impression had been worn into the left rear pocket, the residual imprint from countless tins of chewing tobacco. A pair of pale hairy feet poked out from the jeans’ rolled-up cuffs. Chipped, yellowed toenails wiggled freely in cheap discount-store sandals.

  “Have you ever heard of Murfreesboro?” he yelled loudly into his neighbor’s ear. “Merf-fees-buro?” he repeated, his voice slurring even as he overenunciated each syllable.

  The recipient of all this attention was a dark-skinned man with wooly dreadlocks and a tired, blistered face. The West Indian’s body was covered with a permanent layer of long-unwashed grit and grime. The rags of his clothes hung with the same limp, dirt-laden droop. A vacant, drug-numbed expression clouded the man’s eyes. The stench of human decay wafted all the way down the bar to where I was sitting, but the Tennessean appeared not to notice.

  “Actually, this vacation is part honeymoon and part fishin’ trip.” He shrugged his shoulders affably. “A bit more fishin’ than honeymoon-in,” he confessed with a gap-toothed grin that was as ragged as his toenails.

  The man’s grisly neighbor had yet to register any indication that he had heard or understood this unsolicited information, but his stoic demeanor did nothing to dampen his new friend’s enthusiasm.

  “I packed a whole extra suitcase full of miniature Jack Daniel’s bottles,” the Tennessean said, shaking his head remorsefully. “And then, in all the excitement with the weddin’, I forgot to bring ’em to the airport.”

  I glanced wryly at the waitress behind the bar. Still awash in cheap rum over three hundred years after its first sugarcane distillery, the Caribbean seemed an odd place to bring a case full of Jack.

  Tourists, I thought, always overpack.

  “I’ve been having a great time anyway,” the man said cheerfully as the waitress refilled his shot glass from a bottle of whiskey that looked as if it might have been part of the Silent John’s original inventory. The label was peeling off, and a thick layer of dust caked the bottle’s exterior.

  He nodded at his noncommunicative neighbor. “How ’bout one for my buddy here too.”

  The waitress hesitated only a moment before bringing another shot glass from beneath the counter and filling it. The volume of liquid in the second glass, I noticed, wasn’t quite as full as the Tennessean’s, but neither man appeared to notice.

  The honeymooner raised his shot into the air and suggestively waved it at his drinking partner.

  Without a word, the second man suddenly reached for his glass. His bleary, bloodshot eyes honed in on the liquid with a raw intensity that was almost a terror to behold. A deep resonant voice poured smoothly from his chapped lips.

  “Salute.”

  The pair began the shot together, but the West Indian downed his in half the time as his sponsor.

  The Tennessean finally finished the shot, smacking his lips to emphasize his accomplishment. “Ahhhh,” he sighed, leaning back on his stool.

  His eyes scanned the dusty scene on the server’s side of the counter. Then his reddened face lit up as if he’d just received a liquor-inspired insight.

  “You know what this island needs? Do ya?” he asked the other man, who had resumed his laconic, nonverbal state.

  “An exterminator. Yep. A specialist in insect eradication.”

  The Tennessean spun his baseball cap on the counter’s sticky surface and pointed to the cap’s front logo. It depicted a cartooned mosquito in sneakers that appeared to be running for its life.

  “That’s me! I run an exterminator business back home in Murfreesboro. I’ve been talking to the missus about it. We could move down here, set up shop.”

  The waitress looked down the bar toward me with a grin. She’d heard variations on this discourse hundreds of times before.

  For most visitors, it doesn’t take more than a day or two before they begin asking themselves the inevitable what-if question: what if I just packed it all up and moved here?

  Many dream about it, but few actually take the leap. When faced with the true spreadsheet of plusses and minuses, only a handful of people are willing to commit to an island lifestyle—it was one that I was still desperately trying to hold on to.

  There is nothing wrong, however, in enjoying the fantasy.

  “I’ve got a name all picked out,” the exterminator said enthusiastically as he tapped the West Indian on the shoulder. “What do you think of this? I’ll call myself ‘The Bug Mon.’”

  34

  The Signal

  I left the bar and strolled out onto the balcony overlooking the street. For the last several weeks of still, dripping heat, the Silent John’s second-floor bar area had been an almost unbearable location—which was a shame, because the balcony that ran along its front windows was the best place in town to watch the action on Cruz Bay’s new roundabout.

  Construction of the project had wrapped up a couple of months ago, but local fascination with the traffic structure had yet to wane. Located near the center of town, across the street from the main grocery store and not far up the hill from the Silent John and the Crunchy Carrot, the roundabout’s purported rationale was to alleviate traffic—but none of St. John’s residents actually believed that. Everyone knew the roundabout’s primary function was to provide entertainment.

  According to my calculations—based on anecdotal evidence and a random sampling from several late-afternoon sessions on the Silent John’s balcony—at least sixty-five percent of the rental Jeeps approaching the roundabout entered it from the wrong direction. Luckily, the Jeeps were equipped with plenty of traction and maneuverability, so the panicked, befuddled drivers generally wound up off-roading over the roundabout’s center or backing out the steep side slope against the flow of traffic. I’ve never seen such a snarl of misguided vehicles, terrified honking, and obscene gestures.

  To clarify—the situation is lucky for those of us onlookers.

  I can’t remember what we did for amusement prior to the roundabout’s installation; whatever it was paled by comparison to the action at the new traffic structure.

  With the onset of the tourist season, huge throngs of locals had begun gathering around the spectacle, observing in bemused amazement. The front stoop of the grocery store was almost always filled with gawkers, while others crowded the surrounding sidewalk. But in my opinion, the Silent John’s front balcony was the best viewing position, one that came with both comfortable wooden stools and cool refreshments.

  Of course, not even fascination with the roundabout could draw people out during weather like this. With most of the tourists hibernating at their hotels, there wasn’t enough traffic in the roundabout to warrant interest anyway.

  Only one other person had ventured out onto the balcony that evening. A wiry little man hunched over a wobbly table tucked in under the eaves, near the corner of the building where it turned inward to accommodate a dart-throwing lane.

  He was facing the opposite direction, so that I had a perfect view of his scraggly reddish brown ponytail. A hand-rolled cigarette dangled from his left hand;
the plume of smoke hanging over the table reeked of marijuana. The New York hippie seemed abnormally serious as he studied a pile of tattered, dog-eared papers heaped up on the table next to a blue nylon satchel.

  “Conrad Corsair,” I called out as I strolled across the balcony toward him.

  I’d grown fond of Conrad in the years since our first meeting. He was like a crazy neighbor whose eccentricities slowly grew on you over time. This tempered affection notwithstanding, I refused to go anywhere near the Maho Bay campground when Conrad was in town for fear I might be unwittingly lured into his infamous teepee tent. Here on the Silent John’s balcony, however, I felt I could easily evade his overamorous attentions.

  Conrad’s bony head jerked up as I called out his name. The startled expression on his skeletal face quickly stretched into his toothy attempt at a seductive smile. If Conrad had one thing going for him, it was his eternal optimism.

  “Pa-hen,” he replied as he scrambled to scoop up the pile of papers. He tapped the bottom edge of the stack against the sticky surface of the table. Nervously, he shoved the pile into the blue nylon bag, pulled the top flap over the opening, and secured its latch.

  “Well, if it isn’t my favorite St. John resort director,” he said brightly as he jumped up from the table and swung his arms around my shoulders. I grinned through a grimace as he made a show out of dramatically kissing me on each cheek.

  “So…good…to see…you,” I replied haltingly as I stepped back against the wall, suddenly remembering that a little bit of Conrad went a long way.

  Conrad’s googly eyeballs bulged with excitement as he reached back to the table for the nylon satchel. “I’ve got something I want to show you…”