Color Him Dead

by Charles Runyon

  He watched her walk across the room, her slip taut across the rich coffee sheen of her buttocks. She moved in a languid West Indian manner, neck and spine rigid as though an invisible burden rested on top of her head, hips and pelvis swinging forward, then backward, as though the rhythm of love had spilled over into her walk. She stooped to pick up his knee-length cut-down Levis, then straightened with a movement that threw the hair back from her face and settled it on her bare shoulders. In a land where color meant status, Leta had been lucky in her forebears. Her father had been a French-Bengalese refinery worker from Aruba, and her mother had been a mulatto clerk in one of Barrington’s sugar-cane settlements.

  Drew had met her for the first time on the beach at Petty-lay. She’d been watching the other girls swim, wearing her bright red dress and high-heeled white shoes. She’d explained carefully to him that she did not swim naked like a girl from the bush. This snobbery had amused him, and her hair had caught his eye. It was alive, it glowed, it trembled, it leaped with excitement when she laughed and sagged in a lifeless despair when she was sad. He’d been surprised to learn her profession, for she had none of the prostitute’s hardness. She was seventeen, at the peak of that roman-candle flight which is youth in the Indies, followed by the long dying fall.

  Next day she’d come over with the fishing fleet. Drew had bought a red snapper, and Leta had taken it from him, sliced open its belly with a cutlass, and raked out its innards with a flick of her fingers. Then she’d peeled off her old gray dress and stepped into the surf to wash off the blood. Drew had not had a woman in ten years, and he had felt like an adolescent discovering a female body for the first time. He noticed how her skin darkened at the base of her neck, at the bend of her elbows, and the juncture of her thighs. A dime-sized black spot marked the base of her spine; he learned later that she was proud of it, for it showed she had East Indian blood. She turned to face him, naked in the sun, all golden highlights and dark shadows. She smiled the slow serene smile of an athlete about to enter a contest he was sure to win.

  There had been none of those soft opening moves which a man makes with a white woman. Leta was paced sexually like a male; she had stepped from the sea and flowed like liquid to the hard-packed sand, spreading her limbs like a golden flower opening to the sun. He had joined her there amid the soldier crabs and questing ants, and the beaver-tail slap-slap-slap of flesh had blended with the clatter of crab-claws, and the heavy musk of Leta had mingled with the smell of the sea.

  Since then she had come every day. She never spent the night, and that suited Drew. The lock-step existence of prison had left him with a passion for privacy.

  Now Leta handed him his pants and pressed her palms against her stomach. Her face assumed an inward, thoughtful expression.

  “My mind tells me I am making a baby for you, Dudu.”

  Drew smiled to himself; it amused him the way her wishes gestated inside her mind, then burst to the surface as though they’d already come true.

  “Isn’t that what you wanted?”

  “Truly. He will be white, grow up to rule everybody.”

  Drew laughed. He pulled on his Levis and took the crutch Leta held out to him. He slid off the bed and let his weight rest gently on the leg. Something grated; there was a vibrating, oscillating pain, as though a nerve were caught in a pair of pliers. For a second his heart stopped beating and a greasy sweat burst out on his face. He felt Leta’s hand on his arm.

  “You have pain today?”

  “No more than usual.”

  “You must see the doctor.”

  Shaking his head, he removed her hand from his arm, swung to the window, and leaned his elbows on the sill. A breeze rippled the tall grass around the shack with a sound like sliding silk. He took a deep breath and let the air dry the cold sweat on his face. Gradually the pain receded. Leta set the coffee at his elbow.

  “I go bathe now, Dudu.”

  Drew nodded, and her feet padded out. He sipped his coffee and watched the fishing fleet approach the beach. Twenty-odd boats were strung out in a crescent which opened up toward the beach in front of the villa. A few gannets dive-bombed the water ahead of them, and a dozen pelicans sat on a point of land, hunched over like old women waiting for a funeral to begin.

  He looked at the big house. Four days ago, a crew had extended the jetty several feet into the lagoon, out beyond the new sand piled in by the waves. Then they’d tidied up the beach, picking up driftwood, raking sand, sifting out shell fragments. They’d replaced the glass in a broken window, scooped the drifted sand, rat-turds and goat droppings off the terrace, then scrubbed the place down with mops and brooms. And each day since then he’d come to the window with anticipation squeezing his guts.

  But nobody had come, nobody had shown any interest in the island, until yesterday. And that reminded him—

  He found Leta behind the house, where an area of packed earth contained a cook shack and two oil drums for water. On the west, a rock wall rose 50 feet to the ramparts of the fort; to the north, a sheer two-hundred-foot cliff dropped off to black rocks and hissing foam. Leta knelt before a cookpot, her slip taut across her haunches, fanning the charcoal fire through a hole in the bottom. Her lower lip was caught between her teeth, and her face mirrored the single-minded intensity she gave to every task.

  He leaned in the door to watch; there was no knife-thrust of desire in his loins, no electricity crackling along his nerves, only warmth and a feeling of power.

  Now the pan was sending up tendrils of steam. Leta straightened, set the pan on the ground, used a calabash to dip water from a barrel set under the drainpipe, and poured the water into the pan. Then she hooked her thumbs in the band of her slip and with a single, smooth movement, dropped it to the ground and stood naked in the sun. She lifted the hair from the nape of her neck, filled the calabash, and poured the water over her shoulders. She shuddered as it coursed down her back, a single current spreading over her shoulder blades and gathering into the valley of her spine, disappearing into the dark division of her buttocks, diverging into twin streams down the back of her legs, finally trickling off her ankles in little fountains. She picked up her old gray dress and dropped it over her head, twisting her body as she pulled it down over her breasts and hips. The dress showed dark patches of moisture; it would dry quickly in the sun. Drew sighed, regretting the end of the show.

  “Leta,” he said, “do you know a man who wears white riding pants and black boots?”

  She froze like a frightened animal. “Where did you see him?”

  “On the beach at Petty-lay. He watched the island through binoculars.”

  She turned, her lower lip caught in her teeth. “You must leave, Dudu, before he comes for you.” She started past him. “I will pack.”

  “Wait.” Drew caught her arm. “Who is he?”

  “We call him Doxie.” She took a deep breath, then spoke rapidly. “He entered my house yesterday while I was buying stores. He never knocks on Powerhouse Road. To him we are filth, whores. He saw the clothes Maria was washing—”

  “And she told him where I was.”

  “No! She didn’t know. How could she tell?”

  Drew sighed. “Go on. Why should he put me off?”

  “He works for Barrington.”

  “Doing what?”

  “Everything. Anything.”

  “Killing?”

  “He has done this. But that was before the madame came.”

  Drew remembered watching the man walk back to his car. His left shoulder had been raised as though to compensate for an extra weight on his right side; now Drew was certain the man had been heeled.

  “What does he do now? Is it anything to do with the madame?”

  Leta nodded. “He watches her.”

  Drew raised his brows. “Watches her? Why?”

  “Because the white mister is jealous. And the madame makes herself very … interesting to men.”

  And that, thought Drew, was probably the most charitab
le description of Edith ever to come from another female. He released Leta’s arm, then followed her inside. The big room had once housed the radar control equipment; now a tangled viscera of wiring hung from the peeling plywood wall, and rot had eaten into the panels where they joined the concrete platform. Leta had nailed flattened biscuit tins over the holes to keep out the rats.

  Leta was in the larder, repacking the food she’d brought out that morning. Drew reached above her head and took down a bottle of the dark Martinique rum which Leta had gotten from a smuggler. He carried it to a table he’d looted from the servants’ quarters behind the big house. Bracing himself against the wall, he leaned his crutch against the table, then used one hand to hold the glass and the other to tip the bottle. Damn the leg, every move is a problem in logistics. He tipped the glass and felt the rum slide down his throat like oil. It rested for a moment at the bottom of his stomach, then exploded. A tongue of flame burned a path to his nostrils and brought tears to his eyes. He corked the bottle, hobbled to the wall, pulled the binoculars off a nail, and slung them around his neck. “Go on with the packing, Leta. I’m going up to the tower.”

  He swung along the path Leta had hacked through the tall grass. A half-dozen wild goats clattered away and left behind the crushed-orange smell of broken stems. Drew streamed sweat by the time he reached the bottom of the tower. The stone steps had long since crumbled, but he managed to climb the wooden ladder and reach the round flatness at the top. It held a stone pigeon cote, bespattered by the descendants of those who had once carried messages to the fort. His shoes crunched on an inch of droppings and dirt, and he kicked up a green-molded brass button which read 39th Fusiliers. The first time he came up here he’d found two bullet casings, .270 caliber rimfire. When he asked Leta about them, she explained: “Barrington, when he lived here, had a man stand in the tower all day, all night. When fishing boats come near, bang, they shoot in front of him. If he come still, they shoot him dead. Truly. I myself know two he shoot.” When Drew asked how he got away with it, she waved her arm in a wide gesture: “The sea swallowed them. There was no proof.”

  Now he sat down, rested his elbows on the parapet, and surveyed the channel between Petty-lay and Barrington’s Isle. It resembled a funnel, with water pouring over the shallows at the eastern end. Long rollers stretched from shore to shore and marched down the channel like ranks of white-plumed soldiers. Near the western end, a jagged peninsula jutted out from the main island, forcing the water into a narrow, frothy torrent which tore at the rocks below the fort. He looked up, saw the pale coin of the moon chasing the sun across the sky, about fifteen degrees behind it. Tonight would be a flood tide, and whirlpools would hiss in the narrows below the fort. The current would roar like an avalanche; it would swallow any rowboats which came near, chew them to pieces, and spit out nothing but sticks and bones and whitened flesh. No doubt that’s what had happened to the men Barrington had shot; perhaps Doxie had pulled the trigger. He sounded formidable….

  He looked down at the beach in front of the big house. The nets were in, and the women were frantically trapping the tiny fish which flopped like shards of silver on the sand. They had slid their dresses off their shoulders and gathered them up between their legs, tying them up in front so they looked like Hindus dressed in their dhotis. Sweat gleamed on naked shoulders and bare torsos; young virgin breasts with purple-shining nipples, set high and wide on round black chests; mothers’ breasts sagging full and tight like ripe fruit, old dead breasts like empty pockets lying flat on wrinkled stomachs….

  Gradually he expanded his field of vision. To the west he could see the Windward Islands, a few faint blue brush-marks on the horizon. Far to the east, a tanker rode low in the water, laden with Venezuelan oil, headed for a refinery in New Jersey. He turned toward the main island, saw the wide, dry prairies of the northern tip, watched a boy drive a dairy herd into a barn. On the palm-fringed beach at Petty-lay, a garish blue-red-yellow bus stood waiting for the fleet to return with fish for the capital. He turned toward the south, saw the sharp peak of Morne Diable, highest point on the island, with an ancient lava flow scarring its side like a gray bird-dropping. Nearby a tongue of land stretched into the sea, marking the entrance to the capital’s harbor.

  A ship was leaving the harbor. By its sleek lines he knew it was no cargo schooner. She was a pleasure-yacht, ketch-rigged, running on power with sails furled. And her course was bringing her directly toward Barrington’s Isle. It was too far away to read her name. But Leta had spent a lot of time around the waterfront; she knew every yacht on the island.

  He found her dressed in her red dress, white shoes, and purple beret, sitting on his old cardboard suitcase. He took her out on a point of land and showed her the approaching ship.

  She looked at it a long time through the glasses, while her stomach rose and fell with her slow breathing. After a moment she handed him back the glasses and spoke with finality:

  “It is the madame’s boat. She has returned. Now we have to go.”

  She walked back into the house. He followed her, his muscles tense with excitement. “Are you sure she’s back? Maybe the skipper’s just cruising.”

  “The yacht never leaves the harbor without the madame. Never. She is aboard.” She picked up his bag. “I will have the fishermen carry us to Petty-lay.”

  He sat down in the chair and poured out a glass of rum. “Leave my bag. I’ll be along later.”

  She looked at him with her eyes wide. “I have not convinced you of the danger.”

  “It is not a question of the danger,” he said, and smiled inwardly at himself for adopting her stilted speech. “I have something more to do, then I will leave.”

  Her eyes brimmed with tears, and she came toward him with a quick patter of her bare feet. “Ba mwe un ti-bo.”

  He gave her the kiss she asked for, felt her lips trembling beneath his, felt her weight against him, sliding down. Her lips traced a tingling path on his thigh. “You are so white, moi dudu, I am afriad …”

  He laid his hand on the top of her head, squeezed the springy hair in his palm. “Better go, Leta, if you want to catch the fleet.”

  She rose slowly, and there was no anger on her face, just sadness. She turned and pulled the old gray dress off the hook, then left the room. Drew went to the window and watched her walk down the path, carrying the white shoes in her hand. He stayed at the window until she left the island, sitting in the bow of a fishing pirogue with her head bent and her elbows on her knees. A vague sadness squeezed his chest; he might never see her again.

  THREE

  Through the slanted louvres of the shack, Drew watched the Edie III ease cautiously into the lagoon beyond the big house. Her diesel auxiliaries growled a low-voiced complaint; a Negro crewman squatted behind the bowsprit with a sounding line. His measured chant came faintly up the slope:

  “Cing … cing … kwat … kwat …”

  The concrete floor beneath Drew’s stomach was damp from perspiration. He saw Doxie standing self-importantly beside the helmsman, his tight riding pants misshapen by the bulge of his armament.

  “Twa!” shouted the crewman, then, “Doo!”

  The engine whined a higher key as it slid into reverse. An anchor chain rattled, then splashed. The little dinghy creaked down from its davits and rocked in the water. Doxie strode across the deck, paused for a quick look at the shack, then descended the ladder to the dinghy.

  Eh eh, trouble comin', thought Drew, then smiled because the words could have been Leta’s.

  As quickly as he could, he carried out the boxes Leta had packed, then stowed them in the grass thirty yards up the slope from the shack. He squatted beside them and peered through the screening grass.

  Doxie landed on the white beach, climbed over the groins which extended from the terrace to the sea, and walked beneath the gray, somber manchineels which ruled the black sand beach below the shack. He turned right at the big banyan and strode up the slope. He kicked open the door of t
he shack and entered. A minute later he stepped out with deep disappointment inscribed on his face. Damn, thought Drew, the man wanted a fight. He watched Doxie return to the yacht, and thought to himself: Now Edith will come out of her hole.

  But instead of Edith came two dinghy-loads of black men and women with kerchiefs on their heads. They attacked the house like a troop of commandos, scrubbing, sweeping, dusting, and polishing, while the dinghy shuttled back and forth with trunks, suitcases and crates. The tide rose, the current changed, and the Edie III swung out of sight behind the big house. Drew thought of moving to a new vantage point, then decided against it. He’d waited ten years to see Edith alone; a few more hours would make little difference.

  It was four in the afternoon when the purr of the dinghy stirred him from a sweaty doze. He couldn’t see it, but he could hear it whining around the northern tip of the island. He hobbled quickly over the ridge and saw the dinghy approaching a clump of gray rocks about a half-mile out. He glimpsed a green scarf blowing in the wind, a white arm holding the tiller, then the dinghy disappeared behind a large hump-backed rock which looked like a beached whale. In it was a woman, alone.

  But was it Edith? There was only one way to be sure. From his suitcase he took the skin-diving gear which Leta had gotten from a Frenchman in exchange for a week of love. He returned to the shack, stuck his hand into the hole in the wall, and retrieved a flat, canvas-wrapped package from among the tangled wiring. He dropped it into a plastic bag he found in the kitchen, then added a layer of oilcloth from the washstand. He tied it around his waist and dropped it down the front of his Levis. He left the shack and followed the path down the steep northern slope of the island, twisting through rubbled fortifications left by the defeated French. Emerging on a pebble beach, he left his crutch above the high-water line and weighted it with rocks. He crawled to the edge of the water, pulled the swimfin onto his right foot, fixed the mask and snorkel in place, and slid into the water.