by Dan Newman
Over Rodney Bay, the light was changing. The sky was still a perfect blue, the island breeze still moved the humidity along in warm ebbs and flows, but the afternoon was surely laying claim to the day. On any other occasion—any other occasion where Nate might have found himself on some tropical island paradise—the waning of another perfect day would be like a long, calming exhale. But today, here among sun-kissed tourists, the ageing day was daubed with foreboding. For a moment Nate let himself flounder helplessly; he had nowhere to go, nowhere to be tonight, and it struck him that he was, at least temporarily, homeless.
With his father unreachable—some things were the same in life as in death—thoughts of his mother crept in. Should he try to reach her? He knew he wouldn’t—he wasn’t even sure if he had a current number for her back home. But something in him softened for her, too. There was so much new information in that single manila envelope, so many new avenues of thought that would take years to fully explore. He thought of her up at the house in Vigie; it was the best image he had of her, and one he tried to keep as the go-to mental snapshot. But soon it was shoved rudely out of the way by another, less flattering memory.
In it her face was hard and expressionless. She looked down at Nate, an awkward, pimply-faced sixteen-year-old, and it was clear there was something she had wanted to say. But instead she looked away, at his father, who stood with his back turned staring out of the window. She stood that way for a long time, watching him, waiting for something to happen. When it was finally clear that nothing would, she picked up her suitcase and walked out the door.
He glanced down at his watch and was happy for the distraction. He would need to find a place to stay, perhaps a little food to eat. He looked up and down the boulevard and there were plenty of options, plenty of air-conditioned restaurants boasting cuisines from around the world.
Perhaps it was the cliché of the newspaper held to obscure his face, or the fact that virtually everyone else around him was so clearly a tourist that made the man stand out.
He stood leaning against a wall about forty paces away, halfway between Nate and Smiley’s car. He was facing Nate’s direction and apparently reading a newspaper. He was well dressed in white pants, a blue T-shirt and sunglasses, but something about him drew Nate’s full attention.
Had Nate seen him before? Nate stared at him plainly, and the man abruptly folded the newspaper under his arm and slipped around the corner of the building. Was he watching me? Nate wondered. Was someone following me? It was an absurd idea. A ridiculous notion. And so why, Nate wondered, was he now hustling down the sidewalk to see where the man with the newspaper had gone?
At the corner he saw nothing, just a pathway leading down to a boardwalk that followed the edge of the manmade lagoon. Nate hurried down the path, looked left and right at the bottom, but there was no one, save an old couple walking hand in hand toward a flotilla of moored sailboats.
Jesus, get a grip, Nate, he scorned himself. He bombarded his thoughts with logic. No one was following him; no one knew he was even there. Why would anyone follow him? It was ridiculous. But his mind wouldn’t be so easily discouraged, and soon he was thinking of the man he had seen through the window of the Breadfruit Tree Inn at breakfast barely a day ago, the one who had held his stare just a little too long. Could it have been the same man? Nate rationalized that it was impossible to tell—between the newspaper and the sunglasses the man’s face was largely covered, and in truth Nate could hardly recollect what the man at the inn looked like.
Stop it, he said to himself aloud, then turned back up the path to the boulevard and the car.
The man with the blue T-shirt and sunglasses was standing at the top of the pathway, newspaper held loosely at his side, watching Nate. The sight fully stopped Nate, and the two men stared at each other until at last the man in the sunglasses casually dropped the newspaper, turned, and walked out of view. A car door slammed, an engine revved, and somewhere around the corner a vehicle moved off down the street.
Finally Nate moved. He trotted up to the boulevard, and saw that whatever car had been there was now gone, as was the man in the sunglasses. By his feet, the newspaper fluttered on the ground. Despite the breeze it remained anchored to its spot on the carefully mown and perfectly green grass. It had been weighed down by a black chicken. It was clearly dead, and its feet were bound tightly with course string in coils like a hangman’s noose. Its feathers seemed slick and oily, and as Nate stooped to look closer he could tell it was blood. He nudged the carcass with an outstretched foot, rolled it over on one side and then kneeled down beside it. The dead bird had apparently been gutted, and something had been stuffed into the cavity. It looked like a small bottle wrapped in leaves and shoots of some kind, and from what he could see there appeared to be more blood inside the small vial.
With his eyes locked on the bird, Nate stood and became suddenly aware that he was grimacing unabashedly at the thing on the ground. He looked around and realized he was drawing curious glances, so he dropped his head and walked quickly to the car. Whatever this was, whatever it meant, whatever it was somehow supposed to convey, Nate was convinced of one thing without reservation: the message was for him.
It was as if a door in a long-sealed and airless room had been forced open—and Nate knew without question where that door could be found. It was part of an old and decaying house on the far side of the island, where its rusting tin roof and dark archways were slowly being suffocated by a tangle of vines and wild thickets. He couldn’t leave the island without doing what he’d come to do, even if it killed him. The thought calmed him some and as he focused on it, he realized that this momentary weakness was just a small matter of a failure to remember. He cast his mind back, immersed himself in the memory, in the horror of his past. Moments later, the courage—or at least a sense of grim determination—came flooding back. He was here for a reason, and with that focus once more set, Nate was able to pull himself together and get moving.
Back in Smiley’s car, he reached over the seat to his hastily packed case, unzipped it and slipped his hand inside. It felt rigid and latently powerful in his hand, as it always had, even through the folds of the worn brown paper bag. And with that sensation came others—a swell of emotions so complex that Nate had to pull his hand from the bag to calm himself. He took an even, steady breath. He was here to fix it all. He would make it right.
Nate started the car and looked in the rearview mirror. Across the street, a police Jeep sat in the deep shade of a broad almond tree. He couldn’t see for sure, but it looked like there was someone in it, and if he let himself, he could quickly be convinced they were watching him, too. Nate shook his head, refused to be drawn into the conspiracy.
His path was clear. He would drive away, find a place to spend the night, and in the morning he would make his way back into the past, back to Ti Fenwe Estate, back to the hollow in the forest where his life had been so clearly and regrettably defined.
16
“Tristan!” shouted Vincent, his eyes flashing wildly as he watched the gun track across the little group of boys. At the same moment, he lunged and snatched at the gun, and Tristan instinctively recoiled like a meek dog that had known many a beating. His arms automatically retracted, and his father’s grab missed wildly.
“What the fuck you doing, boy?” cried Vincent, lashing out for the gun. This time he seized it firmly with both hands and wrenched it from the youngster. The others cringed at the reaction, and as they watched Vincent’s anger gather in the space of a fractured second, they all felt a sharp and dangerous shift in the room. Vincent’s face pleated like an unruly blanket, and the veins in his neck rose. Tristan had folded inside himself, retreating in every way that he could. His eyes were cast downward, covered by his thick and disobedient hair, and his arms were raised in a slight defensive posture across his chest and held nervously at the ready.
And in the very next instant the boys saw why.
Without another word, Vincent’s h
and sliced through the air like a tennis player driving through a backhand, and it caught Tristan cleanly on the side of the head. The boy never saw it coming; his hair exploded at the impact and he was sent reeling back against the windowsill. A second later Vincent’s finger jabbed in his face. “Don’t you ever, ever, point a gun at someone else unless you damn well mean to kill them, boy!” he shouted, and a fine spittle crossed the narrow divide between them. He reached down and lifted his son’s chin with a sharp jerk. “You don’t see your little cousin behaving like this, do you?” he spat, and something in Tristan shrank further still, twitching inward to a place from which part of him would never return.
Richard, too, reacted, and like an automated response, he reached out and took the other two boys by the elbows and quickly began walking to the door. The two didn’t resist, and walked trance-like down the hall to the kitchen. Richard left them there for a moment with a gesture, and then returned to the room and closed the door on Tristan and his father.
In the kitchen, Nate and Pip looked at each other in total astonishment. Above them, the second of only two lights in the house burned starkly against the darkness, and neither was able to speak. What they had just seen was their first real glimpse of violence, actual violence—not the choreographed haymakers on The Six Million Dollar Man—but the real deal. They stood looking at each other, unable to process what had just happened, stripped down to the core of their boyishness. They were children. Alone, unprepared and incapable of understanding what they had just seen.
In the other room they could hear Vincent’s voice raised and shouting, although the words were entirely lost. Pip finally lifted his hands and covered his ears, and Nate could see the wetness gathering in his eyes. “I wanna go home,” said Pip in barely more than a whisper. “I wanna go home now. Right now.”
Pip flinched when Richard’s hand came to rest briefly on his shoulder.
Finally Nate spoke. “Rich, is Tristan okay?”
Richard busied himself in a cardboard box of food on the table. “Sure,” he said without looking up. “There’s some cookies in here somewhere.”
Pip dropped his hands from his ears. “But he hit him. I mean, he hit him hard.”
“Ah ha. Here they are.” Richard, produced a bag of ginger snaps. He offered Nate a cookie.
Nate took one, sat down on an old kitchen chair and bit the cookie mechanically. “What should we do?” he asked hollowly. In the distance they could hear Vincent’s voice, still raised and taut with anger.
Richard chomped at one of the hard cookies and offered the bag to Pip, who shook his head silently. Outside, through the open windows, the darkness was complete. There was no ambient light from towns or villages this far inland, and the thick tangle of the rainforest crowded around the house claustrophobically as if to cut them off and isolate them. Nate looked at the naked bulb above them, and at the cluster of moths that swirled about it.
The three boys sat in silence, listening to the muted shouting, the occasional sound of what sounded like a slap, and the thud of someone hitting the floor or a being driven against the wall. It went on for almost five minutes, and when it finally quieted, Richard collected a flashlight from the cardboard box and stood. “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go.”
“It’s pitch black out there, and we can’t go in there…” said Nate, gesturing back to the bedroom.
“Follow me.”
Richard led the boys out of the stark light of the kitchen and into the main hall of the house. It was even darker than the outside, and from the main hall the windows seemed to offer some sense of light, or at least something less black. They moved quickly through the hall, floorboards creaking, always following Richard’s little pool of light, and out through the open front door and down the steps. They turned right, along the front of the house and the dark arches that supported it, and passed between the bay window of the bedroom and the pole with the car battery on it. They stayed on the track and walked in a tight cluster toward the workers huts, and as they made their way further from the house, the purr of the generator under the bedroom gradually faded and was finally lost to the night sounds of the estate. Nate looked back at the plantation house, at the glow from the upper window, and at the long line of impossibly dark archways that made up its base. Something about the place made him shudder, and he moved a little quicker to keep up with the others.
On their right the boys passed the square building they had seen earlier—the copra oven—and Nate noticed that a new pile had been made beside it, although what was piled there was impossible to say in the darkness. It was dark and lumpy, and Nate gave it all a wide berth.
“Come on,” said Richard, sensing the unease in the group. “We’re almost there.”
Finally the boys reached the workers huts: a collection of rickety, ageing wooden shacks that seemed unchanged and unimproved in fifty years. They were scarcely larger than tool sheds, and without electricity, the only glow that came from their windows and through the many gaps in the twisted planks of wood that formed their walls, was from flickering candles. The dancing of their flames cast eerie, shifting shadows on the grass verge, and the boys were all washed in soft golden tones. Around them, behind the tiny huts and swallowing the track they had just walked down, was a carnivorous blackness. Nate looked back toward the plantation house again and could just make out the shape of the roofline and the bank of windows in the bedroom. The light was still burning, and it still cast sinister shadows on the bush-line on the opposite side of the track.
The boys stopped just short of the shacks and Richard stepped forward alone. Nate and Pip watched as he stole silently forward, his face an expression of nervous anticipation. As he moved into the doorway, his expression changed and then a voice inside spoke his name with mild but happy surprise. Richard went in briefly and before the others could get concerned about being abandoned, he was out again, motioning them forward and smiling happily.
Inside there were three large women, each a dark ebony with faces punctuated by brilliantly white teeth. They were dressed in simple colorful clothes, worn at the seams with a tear here and a fray there, but they were relaxed and happy in their home. On the walls were a series of simple shelves lined with a few blackened cooking pots, a row of plastic cups and an assortment of bags and cartons. Above the door was a framed and faded print of Jesus, eyes closed and hands pressed together in prayer.
The women sat at an old wooden table that had at some point been painted bright blue, but was now chipped and faded and worn through in most places to the natural wood. They shuffled along the benches to make space for the boys, and patted the vacant spots beside them, cooing and giggling like schoolgirls despite the fact that none of them was less than sixty. Richard sat, and motioned for the others to do the same. He said something to the women in patois, and the three of them roared with laughter and one of them folded Richard into her bosom. Before long there were loaves of bread and jars of homemade guava jelly on the table, and the boys were heaping spoonfuls of the sticky amber jelly onto pieces of fibrous brown bread and feasting upon it through bouts of laughter focused on nothing.
Then, from somewhere far off in the bush to the north of the house, came the sound.
It was half-shriek, half-howl, and it stopped the conversation cold. Everyone in the room turned to the yawning maw of the open doorway, frozen, listening, straining to hear the sound again. Moments later it obliged, this time shorter and more guttural, far away and muffled by the forest and the darkness, and as it ceased one of the women muttered something in frightened tones and brought her hand crisply to her mouth.
To her left one of the other women reached out and touched her arm reassuringly, then spoke calmly in clear and plain English. “Der gwan be much trouble now,” she said, shaking her head woefully. “Much trouble.”
17
The pain started not long after the drive began. It was an itch at first, but it soon grew in intensity and began to throb. Within the hour, the f
lesh around the cut seemed to take on a new weight and with every bump in the road, it tugged at the stitches. Halfway to Castries, Nate pulled over to the side of the road and turned the rear view mirror to his face. He gently peeled back the tape, and then tugged at the gauze that had fused into a hard mat of dried blood. It eventually came free, and Nate was able to have a good look at the wound and the five stitches that held it together.
The cut was just below his left eye and off to the side, tracing an inch-long arc like a smile on the point of his cheekbone. It was an angry red hue, and the meeting point of the smile’s lips was crusting over with dots of yellow. When Nate touched it, he was lanced with a sharp pain for his efforts, but still he was compelled to probe it. It pulsed in time with his heartbeat, which he was suddenly and strangely aware of, and the bruising around the cut was creeping toward his left eye.
He put the car in gear and pulled back into traffic, through the potholes in the shoulder and onto the paved surface. Each jolt of the vehicle was magnified in his face, and he wondered if the pronounced pain he was feeling was normal, or if the yellow dots were the telltale sign of an infection setting in. He was in the tropics. He had been treated by someone who was allegedly a doctor, or an archivist, or perhaps something else. Was it all done in a sanitary fashion? He tried to think back to the kitchen table he was treated on. Was the guy wearing gloves? Was there sterile packaging?
Another jolt from a pothole brought the pain to his cheek again, sharp and hot, and focused him on the present. He probed at the wound with his fingers, testing it, even squeezing it gently to see if there was any real pus inside. And within a half mile Nate was convinced there was a tropical infection setting into his face that would rampantly consume him.