The Clearing

by Dan Newman

  “I’m sorry I didn’t get back to you last night,” Nate said, “I was pretty worn out from the flight in.”

  Smiley waved the comments aside with a meaty paw. “No problem, no problem,” he said dismissively. His skin was a light brown, the color of hazelnuts, and he had a spray of black freckles across his nose and cheeks. “I jus’ pleased you here, man—dat I get dis chance to meet you.”

  Nate smiled uncomfortably. The meeting was something he wanted now, but that position had come at a tremendous cost. Smiley continued. “So tell me, man,” he said, panning his outstretched hand at the beach before them, “has much changed?”

  “You know, I’ve been wondering that myself. The roads are better—still a lot of potholes, though.”

  Smiley nodded in recognition.

  Nate went on. “The cars are newer, and there’s a bunch of new buildings and hotels that were never here when I was a kid, but it still feels the same. Does that make any sense? It just…I dunno, it just still feels like that quiet little island I remember it to be.”

  Smiley pointed down the beach to a wall that marked the property line of a huge hotel. “Dat prob’ly wasn’t dere in ’76.”

  “No,” Nate nodded in agreement. “Back then it was just beach and almond trees. I used to walk this way home from school, and back then the beach was practically deserted. There was only one hotel here—the Malabar—but that was way down the other end.”

  “The Malabar! Yes…you know I had forgotten ’bout dat place. Dem had a pointy red tin roof you could see from de road…”

  “That’s the one.”

  “I think it was blown flat in a hurricane in de ’80s. It a Sun Spree now.”

  They chatted aimlessly, the island’s past their common ground, all the while both men fixing their eyes on the horizon where the arc of the planet was scribed in perfect blue against the sky.

  In his mind’s eye, Nate recalled the stretch of beach they now gazed upon, and could see himself, thirteen years old, running home along the sand in uniform gray flannel pants and a white button down shirt—untucked now that the school day was over. He remembered dropping the green canvas backpack he carried, and stripping down to his boxers, splashing into the brilliant blue of the Caribbean just to cool off. There was a freedom to that life that seemed so foreign to him now, and as the memory strove to reconnect him with the moment, with the sensation of a thirteen-year-old’s carefree romp across a sun-bleached beach, something else in him wanted it all to stop.

  Smiley, to his credit, felt the shift. “So, de research. You want talk ’bout dat?”

  “Yes, sure. That’d be great.”

  Smiley went round to the back seat of his car and returned with a thick manila envelope, stuffed to bursting with paper and photographs. Smiley grinned, and then pulled the documents out and laid them on the hood of the car.

  “All this research,” Nate puffed out his cheeks. “You were able to pull it together without too much, well…fuss?”

  Smiley understood exactly what Nate was asking. “This was all assembled very discreetly, let me assure you. Nuttin’ to worry ’bout.”

  Nate felt suddenly foolish for his insistence on secrecy. “Yeah, sorry about being so cloak and dagger. I just wanted all this handled quietly.”

  “For now,” said Smiley, smiling empathetically.

  Nate nodded. “Right, for now.”

  “Well, man, just as you reques’, I have told no one ’bout your visit. Dat will remain confidential, until you ready…”

  There was an awkward pause, and it was now Nate’s turn to steer the conversation to safety. “Smiley, just as I said in the emails, you get the exclusive. I promise. Professional code and all that,” he said, smiling conspiratorially.

  Smiley nodded. He turned back to the hood of the car and lifted a photograph that sat underneath the pages. He handed it to Nate and watched as it transformed the man’s face, seeming to age it instantly.

  The photograph captured a blond-haired boy, ten or eleven years old, smiling brightly. He was leaning against the upturned hull of a small sailboat—a Mirror dinghy—itself sitting atop a pair of wooden work-horses and having its hull repaired. The boy was slight, small even for ten, but his face was the kind that makes mothers clutch their hands to their chests and let out long, wistful sighs. It was Richard, captured at his most ebullient, bursting with life and gushing happiness from the page. It saddened Nate more than he was ready for.

  Without looking up from the boy by the sailboat, and without fully understanding himself where the question came from, Nate quietly asked, “Do you believe in the Bolom?”

  3

  “Can I get you some water, sir?”

  “No, no.”

  “Is there someone we can call? Someone you’d like to be here?”

  Nate nearly laughed at that one, although there was nothing funny about the scene around him. Christ, he thought. There’s not a single goddamn person. “No. There’s no one.”

  The police officer patted him once on the shoulder. “Okay, just sit tight and someone from VS will be here shortly,” he said. Nate was sure he could sense relief in the man’s voice. He watched as the officer left the living room, pushed the screen door open and went outside. And what was VS? He didn’t care enough to ask. He was too tired.

  From the couch where he sat, Nate looked around the living room, taking it all in like a man suddenly waking up to find himself in a foreign land. Of course, he’d been here hundreds of times before. He’d sat on the couch, often in this very spot, on more occasions than he could remember. But gazing around the room that night, Nate felt it was the first time he’d really looked at the place, the first time he’d really taken it in.

  On the table at the end of the couch was a picture frame. He’d seen it before, but had he ever paid it any real attention? The corners were chipped and the photograph inside was an old Polaroid—square and bordered in white, the colors and images gently fading with time. Nate had a million of them at his own apartment. Everyone his age had a box of them somewhere—refugees from the days before digital, when photographs were something you actually had printed. You kept them handy for a while, maybe even filled an album or two, but eventually they were consigned to the dusty box.

  The photograph in the frame was Nate’s mother dressed in a simple orange summer dress with a matching band in her hair—it was unmistakably ’70s. She was smiling, holding a cigarette high in her left hand and leaning against a railing. There were no other reference points in the photo, just the wooden railing and a bright, clear sky. Nate knew unequivocally it was the house at Vigie.

  In front of him, on the wooden coffee table, was a small stack of magazines, a set of coasters, and an empty 40oz vodka bottle. To his right was the old man’s La-Z-Boy, complete with the woolen blanket that had covered it for as long as Nate could remember. It was an ugly brown shade that hid its stains well, but as he stared at it he saw there was much the color couldn’t mask. He had always meant to wash that damn thing. It probably reeked of his father; for years he had sat on it, drooled on it in his sleep and wrapped it around his bony shoulders during the countless times he had passed out right there on the chair.

  Nate looked around the rest of the room, at the few sticks of furniture that sat there, and suddenly the simplicity, the functionality of it all struck him as entirely cold. How could he have lived like this? The furniture was tired and worn out; every piece was different, unmatched and impersonal—consignment store remnants. The drapes were there when he moved in years ago, and their once-white chiffon was now yellow with dust and age. It occurred to Nate that the whole place was rundown, just south of filthy, and furnished with nothing that offered even the slightest nod toward comfort. But when his eyes settled again on the photograph of his mother, he realized he was wrong. That was what passed for comfort here. At least in this room anyway.

  “I gotta wash that thing,” muttered Nate, staring at the blanket.

  “Pardon me?
”

  The voice to his left startled him and when he twitched around he saw a small woman with sandy hair do the same thing. “Oh, sorry, I didn’t…”

  She recovered her composure quickly. “It’s okay,” she said.

  “I was going to wash that blanket.”

  The woman nodded.

  “I’m sorry. Who are you?” asked Nate.

  The woman stepped forward and seated herself next to Nate on the couch. She placed her hands on his in his lap. “I’m Kathy Taylor from Victims Services.” She smiled briefly, then patted his hands twice and let them go. “Can I get you some water?”

  “What? No.” What was the obsession these people had about getting him water?

  Kathy continued unabated. “Is there anything I can do for you right now? Someone you’d like me to call, someone you’d like to be here with you?”

  “No, I’m good.” Nate was getting annoyed— unreasonably so, he recognized. “Why are you here, exactly?”

  Kathy shifted uncomfortably and as she did so Nate was able to look past her, to the open door of his father’s bedroom. Nate recognized the slippers—they were a gift to his dad last Christmas, wrapped, he remembered, by a pretty woman at the mall. They were gray and lined with sheepskin, and as he stared past the lady from Victim Services, Nate could see three inches of his father’s shins protruding from them before they disappeared under his flannel pajamas.

  The slippers made a wide ‘V’ with their heels together against the carpet, and the toes pointing up and out toward the ceiling. That was all he could see from the couch; the rest was inside the bedroom.

  Just the slippers, three inches of shin and a bit of flannel pajama.

  4

  The question took Smiley completely off guard. Bolom. He realized he had not thought about it since he was a child himself. And on cue his mother’s voice chattered away in his head from some place far in the past. Boy, it gettin’ dark out dere—you get inside dis house now before the Bolom dun take you!

  The man from overseas had surprised him. After the hour they spent at Vigie Beach, Smiley had come to the conclusion that Nate Mason was in fact just a regular fellow. Perhaps a little dark, a little doleful. But quite regular. But this was different. Still, Smiley had to admit that right from the beginning, right from that first email four months ago, he had known this journey would be a dark one for Nate. “What you know ’bout dis?” Smiley asked. It came out unexpectedly short and cold.

  “Well,” Nate said, and then teetered for a moment on the edge of a full explanation, a mea culpa of sorts, perhaps for Smiley’s benefit, or perhaps for someone else’s. “It’s nothing. Fairy tales. Just some nonsense we heard about as kids is all.”

  Smiley eyed him guardedly as the moment between them stretched into infinity. Finally he spoke. “Dis ting—Bolom—dis perhaps not as trite as you think.” His mood became suddenly serious, and the playfulness in his voice, a staple of the St. Lucian accent, departed like smoke before a stiff breeze. “Our little island has all de conveniences of de modern worl’, for sure, but we are fond of our, how shall I put it, our indigenous culture. It be very well rooted here. And very real.”

  Smiley’s tone pulled Nate from the photograph and he realized his remark had perhaps been interpreted as a slight. He backpedaled awkwardly. “Smiley, I didn’t mean any offense. I was just—”

  “No problem, no problem,” Smiley’s meaty paw came up in mock defense. He smiled, the sun shone, and the lazy waves ran up the beach in a perfect blue. “Come,” he said. “You must be hungry. Le’ we get some good West Indian food into you. You like accra? Fish cakes?”

  Nate smiled and nodded. Accra was one of the things he remembered keenly—soft golden cakes of battered fish, deep fried and heavily spiced.

  “Good, good. Hop in. We’ll run down to Gros Islet. The best accra in St. Lucia.”

  • • •

  The drive to Gros Islet, a local community just north of the capital, Castries, was short, but a virtual time capsule for Nate. They passed Choc Cemetery at the far end of Vigie Beach—a boneyard on prime beachfront real estate that Nate remembered passing (at a run, just in case), every day after school. They passed the old school itself, CCSS, a sprawling structure made of breezeblock and tin roofing, and the memories came flooding back. Gray pants, white shirts, plantain chips, and orange Fanta. He could remember the smell of the place, the sugary scent of mango in the many trees throughout the school. In summer, they would droop with heavy fruit the color of sunburns, some of it feasted upon by students, much of it left to fall and spoil beneath the trees in the sweltering heat.

  He watched houses flick by, many seemingly untouched by time, still built in that open and airy style of cinderblocks set widely apart to let the Trade Winds waft through. The stray dogs still bounced along as they had in his youth, chickens still darted into the road, and the lianas and ferns still choked at telephone poles and the edges of houses, still trying to assert the rights of the island’s lush botanical heritage wherever they could. There were new structures, too, glass and smooth concrete, while alongside them third-world commerce in the form of rum shacks with rusting tin roofs seemed to chide them for their opulence.

  Smiley stopped the car and the two men found a table outside of a small wooden shed. Above them a hand painted sign bleached heavily by the sun said Bozu, and before long a stringy dog appeared and curled into a black and white circle at Nate’s feet. He reached down and scratched the mongrel behind the ears, and the little dog began to murmur and groan with pure satisfaction. It made Nate smile and slip into a private memory.

  In front of them three puppies climb frantically over each other, stretching their thin necks and whimpering in excitement. Cody squats down like only five-year-olds can, his hands wrapped tightly about his knees, a smile the size of the Grand Canyon splitting his face in two. He looks up at his father for approval, then reaches into the cardboard box to pet the head of the little black-and-white one. But it’s too fast and begins madly licking the boy’s hand. Cody dissolves into giggles and pulls his hand back.

  Cody leans in and fearlessly scoops the black-and-white puppy into his arms. Its tail spins like a propeller and it licks at the boy’s face, squirming to get closer. Cody giggles in delight, his shoulders bunched about his ears and his eyes shut tight.

  The boy is in an entirely altered state, and Nate knows he cannot—must not—stop the moment. And as he looks on he begins to smile. Mom is gonna kill me, he thinks to himself, watching as Cody falls backwards onto the ground, puppy clutched tightly in his arms while it clambers, wild-tongued, over his face. When we come through that door with a puppy, I’m as good as dead. He smiles again. He knows she won’t be upset for long; the boy and his dog will win her over quickly. She’ll melt, smile and hug them all. Hopefully.

  “Dat ting gone give you fleas, man,” said Smiley. Nate gave the dog a final pat and let the present reclaim him, but thoughts of Cody lingered on long after the dog had loped away.

  At the door of the shed a large black woman with a larger voice boomed, “Smiley, you jus’ limin’ or you gwan have sometin’?”

  “Ah, Ma Joop, come out here, girl!” He briefly introduced Nate, and then dispatched her in patois, laughing as she went. “You’ll see,” he said to Nate conspiratorially, “de best accra in de West Indies.”

  And, true to his word, the food was incredible. Fresh, decadently rich and dripping with spice-laden oil. When they were finished eating, the two men worked at another set of Heinekens and the conversation eventually turned to the envelope Smiley had brought to their meeting at Vigie. It sat at the table’s center, and Smiley pointed at it with the green bottle in his hand.

  Nate raised the empty bottle to Ma Joop who was puttering about at the edge of the shed, and asked for two more. “Let me ask you something,” he said to Smiley, “and I’ll go over everything in the envelope tonight—but is there anything else you’ve dug up that’s not in print? I mean, in my experience
there’s often a whole bunch more being said and felt than hits the page. You know what I mean?”

  “Sure do,” said Smiley nodding. “I know exactly what you sayin’, and yes, there be more. But man, it’s goin’ take a few more of these,” he said, taking a bottle from Ma Joop’s tray.

  Above them the sun arced its way across the sky and made a run for the horizon to the west. In an hour it would be dusk, and with that dusk would come fruit bats by the thousand, screeching in delight as they gorged themselves, sweeping in enormous windblown sheets of black above the tree line. In the all-inclusive hotels, at the swim-up bars and al fresco mezzanines, pink-skinned tourists would be sipping umbrella-laden drinks and watching for the million dollar sunset. But here, on the side of a well potholed road in a part of the island that tourists never saw, the sunset only darkened Smiley’s already somber tale.

  • • •

  Smiley peeled the label off the Heineken and laid it with the others. The sun had set now, and the two men were alone at the rickety table at Bozu—save the impressive collection of moths that swarmed the naked bulb above the sign. It was a warm night, but a breeze gently fanned the coconut trees and their fronds rustled in approval. Smiley went on. “The De Villiers are a prominent family on de island. Always have been. But on de day dat boy died, their family…well, dey lost two. His mother, Collette De Villiers, she never recovered from it. She blamed her brother-in-law, Vincent, who owned the plantation at the time.”

  “You mean Ti Fenwe Estate?”

  “Yes, Ti Fenwe. It still in de family today. Anyway, she nearly tore de place apart for the two weeks it took to find the body. She had great influence at the CID.”