The Clearing

by Dan Newman

  On the ground lay candy bar wrappers, bottle caps, ripped and faded comic book pages, empty Coke and Fanta bottles. And at the center of the clearing, like the hub for the ragtag bits of furniture, sat a large wooden industrial-wire spool laying on its side. Its four-foot diameter dominated the clearing like an altar, and on top of it sat an old wooden box with a hinged lid.

  With as much drama as he could muster, Tristan opened the box and produced two Wrist Rockets and a bag of chrome half-inch ball bearings. Like a well-choreographed response, Nate and Pip stepped forward together and said the same thing at exactly the same time: No way!

  The two boys were in nirvana. Wrist Rockets: For Nate and Pip there was nothing more wondrous than this. This was a slingshot made in a real factory, not some forked tree branch rigged with a slice of inner tube. No, this was the real deal. The ultimate slingshot. It had steel uprights that dropped through a moulded plastic pistol-grip handle, then bent 90 degrees and back, extending over the top of your wrist for real torque. It had a genuine leather pouch, two heavy-duty surgical tube elastics, and it could fire a stone into a tree and make it stick. These were legendary. They were also illegal, or so everyone said, because (according to Tristan), they could kill a kid at a hundred paces.

  Nate and Pip were awestruck. Tristan tossed one to Nate, and he held it like a revered work of art, turning it in his hands and taking in every part of it. He’d never held one before, but he’d seen them often on the backs of comic books. Everything about it was perfect: the knurling on the grip, the words genuine leather branded on the pouch, and the raw power he could feel waiting to be unleashed by the hard yellow elastic. He was about give it a test stretch when Tristan took it back, loaded a ball bearing into the pouch and drew the tubing back to his chin. His hands quivered with the force of the elastic. Thwack!

  The ball bearing rocketed forward and punched a hole clean through one of the polystyrene blocks in the tree, and a small cloud of white pellets floated to the ground from behind it.

  Pip and Nate squealed with delight, and when Richard let fly with the second Rocket, the sound of it cracking through the polystyrene block made them jump. Tristan joined in on the laughing, and the boys spent the rest of the afternoon firing shiny ball bearings through the blocks in the trees and then searching for them to fire again.

  Finally Tristan looked up through the top of the clearing. “We need to get going soon.”

  “Just a few more shots,” implored Nate, stretching the elastic to his chin and taking a bead on a small piece of polystyrene in the tree. His tongue crept out of the corner of his mouth, and finally he let the ball bearing fly. “This is soooo cool!”

  “Okay, last five shots,” said Tristan, and the boys each took their turns, marvelling at the amazing hits and wild misses with equal enthusiasm. When the last shot was fired, Tristan placed the two Wrist Rockets, and what ball bearings they had left, back in the wooden box on the wire-spool table.

  The boys watched somberly as the Wrist Rockets disappear into the box. “Can we come back and do some more tomorrow?” asked Nate.

  “Yeah, can we?” Pip joined in.

  “We’ll see,” said Tristan, drawing in a full breath through a raised nose. He was enjoying the control the boys were heaping on him.

  Richard put a good natured elbow into Pip’s rib. “We’ll come back, but there’s tons of other stuff to do up here.”

  Tristan set off down the path with the others in tow, winding through the darkening shades of afternoon green. “You did not touch them, you liar!” said Richard, shouting to the head of the single file line to Tristan who was leading up front. The conversation had turned, as it often did among the boys, to boobs.

  “I did too. Just ask her when we get back,” he boasted. “Maggie will tell you it’s true.” The path eventually wound down and out of the green mass, and deposited them on the track about four or five hundred meters from the plantation house. They could see the grassy lawn area up ahead, but for a moment the house itself was obscured by bush. The boys turned and formed a line four abreast, and ambled on toward the house. “I bet Nate’s touched Rachael’s boobs, right Nate?”

  Nate felt a crimson rush at his neck and fought it, unsuccessfully. He didn’t want them talking that way about Rachael.

  “Yeah, look he’s blushing! He did it for sure!”

  Nate tried to shrug it off. “Shut up, Tristan.” But there was no stopping it now.

  “Come on Nate. Fess up!” said Pip, prodding him in the back with a stick he had picked up from the side of the track. Nate swung his arm at the stick and missed.

  Tristan turned to Richard. “Are you going to stand for this? That’s your little sister’s friend he’s been feeling up.” He laughed and shook his head. But there was no rise coming from Richard so he moved on.

  Up ahead, about halfway between the boys and the plantation house stood another structure. It was an almost perfect cube, about the size of a single car garage. It was made from old and heavily whitewashed brick, and topped with a flat, rusted tin roof that sat propped up about ten inches above the top of the brickwork on cinder blocks at each corner. There were no windows, just a single and oddly-wide doorway on one side of the building.

  Beside it sat an aging hand cart and a pile of fibrous coconut husks as high as a man’s waist. Nate didn’t remember passing the building on the way in, but it must have been there, as it sat at the side of the road a mere two hundred meters from the house itself. “What’s that for?” he said, pointing at the building. He didn’t really care; he just wanted everyone to stop talking about Rachael.

  “It’s the copper oven,” said Richard, “They use it to roast the coconuts and turn it into copper.”

  Tristan was on it instantly. “Copra, you twit.”

  And again Nate felt it. He knew instinctively that Richard’s mistake was deliberate, and that the boy knew full well the difference between copper and copra.

  “It’s a copra oven.” Tristan shook his head at Richard and swallowed the bait whole. “Come. I’ll show you guys.” He led the boys over to the wide door, and as he wrestled it open, Richard and Nate exchanged a secret glance. It wasn’t quite a smile, but it was something very, very close.

  The heavily rusted hinges on the door groaned in protest, and finally Tristan folded it back flush against the outside wall. Inside, there was an empty room the size of a single car garage with a dirty floor that looked like the bottom of a fireplace after a hasty cleaning. Exactly halfway up the building was heavy wire mesh that extended across the whole structure like a horizontal chain-link floor. The only place where it wasn’t connected to the building was against the wall where the boys stood in the doorway. “That,” said Tristan pointing at the wire mesh mezzanine, “is the rack. We put freshly split coconuts on it, across the whole thing, then set a fire with old husks down here underneath,” he said, pointing at the floor. “The husks kind of smoulder all night, and in the morning the laborers come and clear out the husks, let everything on the rack cool and then bag the copra for market.”

  “So copra is just cooked coconut?” asked Pip.

  “The boy’s a genius!” declared Tristan, but no one really laughed.

  Instead Nate asked a question as well. This was all new to Pip and him, and all so, well, fascinating. “What do they do with copra?”

  Tristan switched gears easily into the role of information provider. “Suntan oil,” he announced.

  “Really?”

  “Yep. Monday the copra oven, Tuesday the market, Wednesday some tourist’s fat white arse.”

  The boys all burst out laughing and spilled out of the oven, but once outside the laughter quickly evaporated. Before them stood a slender black man with a very serious face. The man’s clothing was worn and stained with sweat, and on his head he wore a tattered hat woven from dried palm fronds. His hands, large, callused and black-nailed, hung loosely at his sides. He eyed them each with an expression that told them that he was—at the ver
y least—agitated by their presence. Finally he turned to Tristan and began to speak.

  What was being said was a mystery to Nate and Pip, but they noticed that Richard looked down and away as the stringy man spoke his Creole in slow and measured tones. Tristan listened and did not talk back, even though it was clear that the man was in some way reprimanding him. Seeing Tristan in this apparent state of subordination was something Pip and Nate had rarely seen, and in truth it was a little unnerving.

  Finally the man gave the group one last disapproving glare, then turned and strolled off down the track toward the laborer’s quarters.

  “What was all that about?” asked Nate.

  Tristan clenched his jaw tightly. “Nothing,” he said. He turned and set off toward the house ahead of the others.

  With Tristan out of earshot, Pip whispered to Rich. “What was all that? What did that man say to Tristan?”

  “It’s nothing, really. Just that Tristan was supposed to do some chores and he’s forgotten to.”

  It felt vague, and Pip pressed him harder. “What chores?”

  “Nothing, forget it.”

  Nate joined in. “Come on, Rich, what chores?”

  “It’s no big deal.”

  Nate and Pip exchanged glances with well-raised eyebrows. “What?” asked Pip.

  “Nothing, seriously. Just leave it alone, okay?” He gave them a forced half-smile, and then set off toward the house. “Come on. It’s getting late.”

  14

  It took a few kilometers and at least one close call, but Nate eventually got the hang of driving on the wrong side of the road. He ran Smiley’s car down through Reduit Beach, north along the road that would take him past the manmade Rodney Bay and on to Cap Estate. In his youth Rodney Bay was an empty lagoon with brown water and choked with weeds, but today it was Millionaire’s Row.

  In the years since Nate had left the island, developers had seized upon the area, and now condos and private villas lined the shores of an inland water system that was calm and clear and littered with expensive pleasure crafts. Nate drove the car slowly through the development, watching as an endless stream of well-heeled tourists strolled happily about and perched in front of natty coffee shops. It was as welcoming a place as could be: bright, shining, dotted with perfectly straight palm trees and alive with smiling people whiling away their holiday hours, and yet Nate felt entirely alone.

  He swung the car into a parking lot in front of a line of condos, and sat quietly trying to calm his spinning thoughts. Finally, he shook his head in disgust. Come on, Nate, what the hell are you playing at? The wallowing had to go, and Nate decided that the whole incident with Smiley and Ma Joop was just too ridiculous, too bizarre to explain, and the best thing to do was to simply forget it. If only for now. He would take Smiley’s advice. He had wheels, a beautiful Caribbean island underfoot, and hours ripe for the spending. He decided, for the second time since landing, that for the next eight hours at least, everything in his world was just fine.

  And for a brief sliver of a second, he marveled at the capacity within himself that permitted such a definitive parsing of reality. It was an ability he’d used often in his lifetime, and one, he was aware, that tended to have ramifications that weren’t always the most comfortable. Still, even as the thought came he shuffled it aside, too. For now, everything would be just fine.

  Nate reached into the back seat, and among his hastily thrown belongings, found the manila envelope Smiley had brought him when they met yesterday. He thrust it under his arm and slipped out of the car, round the front of the condos and found a pathway ringing the bay that was dotted with well-shaded park benches. He settled into one and began to pore through the contents of the envelope.

  The first thing he pulled out was the picture of Richard—the one that had so arrested him the day before. He looked at the picture again, and realized that the setting—the white sands and the upturned Mirror dinghy sailboat—was the St. Lucia Yacht Club, a place seared so perfectly in his memory that for an instant he could smell the fiberglass resin they used to fix the old tubs. He ached to be back there. The Yacht Club was the place Nate learned to sail, the place he won his first trophy in anything (a third place finish crewing for one of the best sailors in the club—a local kid named Charles), and it was the place he had first kissed a girl.

  In fairness, it was really the place he was first kissed by a girl, but time and boyhood bravado had spun things round so that he was the one doing the kissing. Her name was Rachael Stanton, and she was the most beautiful thing Nate had ever seen.

  It had been the night of the big regatta, where the Commodore came out and thanked the club members for a great season of sailing with a barbecue and fete—a party that spilled out onto the beach and the dark open spaces around the club. Back then there were no hotels on Reduit Beach, save one at the very far end, and the only thing next to the Yacht Club was a huge white concrete slab running hundreds of meters inland. It was being slowly split and reclaimed by the sea grapes and tropical grasses, but the old abandoned World War II landing strip still served as an ideal beachside retreat for anyone looking for a quiet place to park or stroll.

  For Nate, as he walked with Rachael along the beach and sat on the seaward edge of the great concrete runway, it was all he could do to take deep breaths and try to stop his hands from shaking. Everything about Rachael was amazing: her smell, the awkward way she smiled and tilted her head forward when she looked at him and, most amazing of all, how soft her hands were. That night, when she had reached out and taken his hand he had flinched, and then spent the next few moments trying desperately to reassure her that no, he didn’t mean for her to stop, he just thought, well, a big bug had landed on him. Then he realized that he had just equated her touch with the landing of some giant creepy crawly, and so he backpedaled again. Eventually she laughed, and Nate was released from the terror of screwing up the most incredible moment of his life.

  And then she leaned forward and kissed him. It was awkward, and impossibly soft. It lasted barely an instant, and once it was over, they both retreated in embarrassment, and sat rigidly straight staring out at the water.

  Eventually, with Nate showing no signs of life at all, Rachael said she had better get back, and all Nate could utter was, oh, okay, sure. And that was it. They caught glances of each other at school after that, and occasionally Nate thought he saw a reserved smile, but he never had the guts to do anything about it. And so, in its own due time, Rachael’s interest faded.

  Nate slipped his hand back into the manila envelope and pulled out a bundle of newspaper clippings, all carefully held together with a large black paperclip. He flipped through them, and realized they were all in chronological order, starting from the day after Richard was reported missing. It was an exercise in time travel, and as Nate moved from one day to the next, he saw parts of 1976 unfold that were invisible to him all those years ago. It was like discovering a parallel universe that ran unseen beside his own, dotted with familiar places and names, filled with corollary events that swirled at arm’s length but never touched him. He had been barely thirteen, and although he knew his mother and father had likely wrapped him in a protective buffer, he also knew, without the benefit of evidence of any sort, that there was probably insulation he had put there himself.

  As he looked at the pages it occurred to him that even in hindsight, even after decades had passed, he had not considered any of it—not the De Villiers family’s anguish, not Richard’s mother’s unravelling, not the police inquiry, and not the effect it had had on his own family. It was a chilling moment—in that terror of grown-ups yelling, shouting, demanding answers and imploring him to tell, tell, tell—Nate had most likely learned to gather it all up, for the first of many times in his life, and simply put it all away for safekeeping.

  A picture of his mother brought him back to the present. There was more there than just his mother, but she was caught clearest in the photograph, looking back over her shoulder on the
front page of the paper. She was walking briskly, one hand linked through Nate’s father’s arm, the other placed protectively on the shoulders of a small boy in shorts whose face was turned from the camera.

  He read the caption and the story, which was largely about an inquiry that followed Richard’s disappearance. The boys and their parents were all summoned to the police station where presumably they were each questioned. Again Nate was astonished by the newness of the information—information that he had been directly involved in making, and of which he had almost no recollection. On his bench at Rodney Bay, Nate laid the papers in his lap and wrestled with his mind, forcing it to cast backwards, back to the cusp of thirteen, back to the moment that photograph was snapped in Castries and the hours that would have followed it. He searched for moments, fragments, anything that might open the gates and let the memories come flooding back in. He primed his thoughts with visions of stark rooms, bright interrogation lights, weeping mothers and frightened glances between boys separated by heavy panes of glass—anything and everything that Hollywood might have supplied him over the years that could jar loose an actual and valid memory. But there was almost nothing there.

  Nate pushed on through the clippings. Most of the coverage was about the De Villiers, about the discovery of the body, about the staggering loss to the family, the funeral, the investigation and the many lingering questions about what really happened. And fascinating as it was there was another area of inquiry that received a quiet but consistent level of coverage. It was a line of reporting that popped up four times in all, but never for more than two or three column inches. It was buried deep in the paper’s interior, after the front page and well before the sports, and over the four insertions it told its story with almost no fanfare at all.