He stood up, head-rush, wobbled to the four-poster. Fell like a castaway walking land for the first time. Slept. Gently sea-tugged, forward, backward, side to side, in the surf of unknown dreams.
*
He was awake.
“Hello?”
“Did I wake you?”
“No, I had to get the phone.”
“Funny. And how are you?”
“A bit groggy.”
“All grog maketh Jed a dull bog.”
“Clever.”
“Stephen Wright. Any news on the finding front?”
“No. But someone’s stalking me,” Jed said.
“An herb stalk, perhaps? You sound stoned.”
“What if I am?”
Marcia chuckled. “Well, how’s it going? Really. . .”
“I think someone’s trying to kill me or at least rob me.”
She didn’t say anything. Then, “We’re not paranoid, are we?”
“You were going to tell me which half of the sculpture I’m supposed to look for.”
“Lay off the ganja, will you? It makes you crazy. You’re jumpy and I’m sleepy. I was up all night working on someone’s script. Why don’t you writers learn how to write? I have news. My client owns the top half of the sculpture; he wants you to find the bottom half.”
“How large is the sculpture?”
Marcia sighed. “He said it could sit comfortably on a book shelf. I have a photograph of it for you. Now listen. This man’s really rich. And very much preoccupied with obtaining the bottom half of this sculpture. There’s a bit of a story here. My client knew Noel Coward. Knew him well enough to spend months at a time down there at Blue Bayou—”
“Blue Harbor.”
“Uhuh. So—to make a long story longer, my client not only knew Mr. Coward back in the day, but he also knew the subject of the sculpture. It’s a portrait, you see. A life study, or whatever, of a young, very cute island boy.”
“—And I’m to find his bottom?”
“In a manner of speaking. OK. Gotta go.”
A few minutes later, Jed got a picture on his cell. The youth in clay—naked, handsome. And there were a half dozen locals around Blue Harbor who could’ve been him. . . once upon a time.
Dream away, ganja brain. . .
I’m actually getting a little buzz off the idea that I might be able to solve it. What if I should find the bottom half of the upper half, bringing the two together and making one exactly as the client desires? How much would that be worth? And, if I don’t like the price—considering I’m here and he’s there—maybe I’ll disappear for a while and sort of ransom the thing. All I need is a little help from Mr. Bond. Find it first. Then ransom it. Then spend the next forty years down here inhaling blueberry pancakes.
*
Slept then, sitting up in the familiar wicker, thinking: this has to be Noel Coward’s favorite chair. The indent in the seat, the curve at the back. Curiously, Jed’s ass configured perfectly to the indents.
The long sprawl of dragon coast and the first glimmer of fireflies—blinkies, they call them in Jamaica. Or peenywallies, the ones that stream and gleam as they go jazzing through the darkness.
Jed was smoking the second blueberry spliff Mackie gave him. Veils of delectable smoke. Hint of rain. Patter of drops. Scent of salt. And humus. Then the downpour turning day into night and the raindrops ricocheting off the metal roof and the feeling of nausea fading and the stability of iron rain turning everything to gloss, the almond leaves shining, nodding, dancing in the mad wind off the rugged rocky coast. Snowy breakers thudding on the reef.
*
For the first time it doesn’t feel like a dream. Probably because it isn’t. It’s something else.
Noel Coward with a bath towel wrapped and tied with a string of pandana vine around his waist. Someone beside him, someone else beside him. Somehow I am aware the dark-haired one is Cole Leslie, and the boyish one next to him is Graham Payne, Mr. Coward’s friends and lovers.
They are each similarly toweled.
Mr. Coward looks up when he sees me. His cat’s eyes are piercingly serene. The other two look surprised to see me here, there, here, wherever it is I am. They’re planting something. A small body. I stare at it. A stillborn creature in fetal crouch.
I am trying to see through the rain, but the rain is blinding.
*
I wake—or think I do.
I’m no longer in the night gardens of Blue Harbor; I am back in the trusty four-poster. How did I get here? I turn and face the open doorway through which I can just barely make out the dawning sea. The croakers have stopped shrieking. A flock of West Indian grackles is jabbering in a Jamaica tall.
I feel small fingers combing my hair. Turn and see, a little girl, naked, rain soaked, wavy wet hair down to her ankles. Playfully, she throws her hair over her face and body. Now she is a curtain of tresses. She comes close. She parts her hair, so that just her nose sticks out, nothing else.
She shimmers, goes ivory, goes gray, goes away into the ozone-filled air of mist and pearl. In her place I see the figure of a model, a very lovely model, blonde, naked, golden skin peppered with tiny beads of silver rain.
On second glance, she’s not completely nude. She wears a man’s heavy leather belt upon which a sheath hides part of one shapely hip. A bone-handled knife graces the top of the sheath and makes the woman’s hip that much more noticeable.
“Cut! That’s a wrap!”
The woman is Honeychile Rider from the film Doctor No.
It’s a movie set and I am set in it, and no one can see me; nor can I see myself.
Honey’s personal assistant courteously covers her with a terrycloth robe.
Where’s Bond?
I look at my arm. It’s covered with hair. I’ve not said a word but I know I have a Scottish accent.
*
At breakfast, Julie listened to Jed’s weird tale of the night before. She had the guileless ease of all Jamaican listeners, who hear someone else’s story as if it were their own.
“You’re not crazy, you just see a duppy is all.”
Jed watched her put before him a white plate of green calaloo, a boiled banana and hot fried johnnycake. Jed folded into the food.
“What color she is?” Julie asked as he began to eat.
“The little girl? Blue, I think. Yeah, blurry and bluish.”
“Oh,” Julie said with a shake of the head, “That remind me—your coffee! Soon be back.”
The calaloo tasted like fresh spinach, without the bitterness of spinach. The boiled bananas weren’t the sweet kind from the States, but rather the hard green kind that are boiled to the softness of a potato. It was all savory beyond belief, and Jed left not a single crumb.
“Is blue, you say?” Julie folded her arms, shifted her heavy frame to one leg that she placed at a right angle to her left foot, as if she were about to dance.
“You touch dis duppy?”
“No.”
“What is that there on your arm?”
Jed shrugged. “Bumped into something the other night.”
“Duppy do that?”
A gravelly voice answered her—Mackie leaning quietly against the doorjamb. He was wearing an expensive freshly ironed, lime-colored fisherman’s shirt.
“Him get likkle bonks, Julie.”
“Duppy dat?”
“Tief mon duppy!”
“What de rass!” Julie said, then she and Mackie burst out laughing. Then Julie covered her mouth, shook her head. “Reverend give me grief when I say sintin like dat.”
Mackie’s laughter followed her as she left the dining room and disappeared into the kitchen.
“Is rass so bad a word?” Jed asked.
Mackie nodded. “Nuh suppose to use a word like that. It mean ass. Rass clot, bumba clot, dem is all bad word.”
Mackie gave him a short glass with a milky substance in it.
“What’s this?”
“Aloe. Good for evry l
ikkle ting, ya know. Dem call it sinkle bible. I mix it with fresh, warm cow’s milk, likkle honey and one egg.”
Jed took it down in one swallow. “You mean a lot of honey.”
“Sinkle Bible mean Single Bible cause dem use it for every single ting. Good medicine.”
“Chase wey de duppy dem?” Jed asked.
Mackie laughed. “When you learn patois?”
“Listening to you and Julie and Pansy.”
“Not bad,” he said with a grin. “Good fe right ‘ere, inna de belly. OK. Soon come.”
He returned a moment later with a finger-length of aloe. It was dripping green.
“Put dis on your elbow.”
“I won’t say that aloe-milk tasted good, Mackie.”
“No, mon. Me seh, good fe you. Me no seh good fe you taste. But I like it.”
Jed daubed the oozing aloe on his elbow. The scrape darkened, purplish.
“Good fe hair, too,” Mackie said. “Is why dem call it “one Bible, ya know. Good for all that ail you.”
“What’s ailing me right now is the duppies. Last night I saw a strange little blue girl, Mr. Coward and two of his friends. . . and the actress who played Honeychile Rider in the movie Doctor No. Not one of these phantoms was real, right, Mackie?”
“No, mon. Dem was real.”
“I dreamed them, Mackie, after smoking ganja.”
“No, mon. Them dream you.”
Jed shook his head, shrugged.
“Look,” Mackie said. “Inna dreamtime, there’s no past, no future. Just what is, is.”
“I get that. But you just said they dreamed me. How?”
“Dem pull you into their world.”
“So. . .what you’re saying is, their world is going on all the time, just like this one.”
“Yah, mon. Just the same.”
Jed thought about this for a moment. “My agent wants me to stop smoking ganja and find a buried treasure. Something hidden here on the property. Maybe I’m not supposed to be messing around in such stuff. Maybe that’s why I’m being haunted like this.”
“Duppy no dead,” Mackie said. “Dem live just like we. Maybe you s’posed to find the treasure an ting.”
“Others have looked?”
“Everybody look. Since the time of Henry Morgan. Him place him cannon on the point, y’know.” Mackie aimed his finger at the rocky cliff towards the double bend in the road towards Port Maria. “And him bury nuff gold on Cabarita Island and on Firefly Hill.”
“Mackie, do I look like a man who is looking for something?”
Julie came into the dining room and set down a small plate of sliced naseberry.
Mackie smiled. “Me love dat fruit, ya know.”
Julie said, “Me know, Mackie. Blue Mountain?”
Jed nodded. “Best coffee in the world.”
Mackie smiled again. “Blue Mountain have no acid. No other coffee like that. That why Japan buy up the whole of our mountainside.”
“And charge twenty dollars a cup,” Jed said as he took a sip.
“Maybe your treasure is just some bag of bean from Blue Mountain.”
“At least I won’t go home empty-handed.”
An hour later, he was still thinking of Honeychile Rider as he sucked down his ninth cup of coffee.
*
But that day Jed worked.
Spent the morning and afternoon going systematically through each of the villas. The piano studio, which was now a suite of bedrooms. The guest cottage by the sea. The main house. Villa Rose, Villa Chica, Villa Grande, as they were called by the present owners of Blue Harbor.
It was all sweat, bother, and foolishness. The Coward sculpture, the blithe-spirited, bottom-end, nowhere to be seen. And there were attics and trunks and sea chests and wicker hampers from ancient days. He and Mackie wetted themselves up good, came out smutted with cobwebs and cricket skeletons—but no truncated sculptures.
A friend of Mackie’s named Raggy turned up with the original blue print for the main house, Villa Grande, but that yielded little more than crawl spaces not made for humans. The slumbering dust of the Forties slumbered on.
Raggy, as it turned out, was a charming ragamuffin of indeterminate age who had a typical Jamaican passion for lost treasure. He spoke about the plastic bags that washed up on the beach one day. “Enough cocaine me did see in them bag!” Another drug deal gone sour on the sea. A man’s hand turned up the following day. There was just enough wrist on it for a Rolex. The barracudas had hit the hand and the watch, but the watch was the better for it.
“What about the coke—what happened to that?” Jed asked Raggy.
He flashed a gold tooth and said, “That man, Pirate, y’know, him live down yonder? Him get to the coke last, but the first man there, him think that white dust is house plaster, and him paint the inside of his shack with it. Me see a whole heap of thing at ‘old Blue Harbor, mon.”
“Ghosts?”
“Y’mean duppy dem? Yah, mon. Many a dem. You?”
Jed lit a Rothman. “A few.”
“Y’see de likkle girl?”
“Just the other night.”
Raggy accepted a Rothman from Jed. He sucked on it hard. Smoke plumed from his nose. He chuckled. “Her a dead, that likkle one. Her seem like a living. But she dead.”
“You ever see Mr. Coward?”
“Mr. Coward, now,” Raggy said, cackling. “That mon an old pirate from dem time.”
“He was a great playwright.”
Raggy nodded, blew smoke, said, “Yes, him do dem ting. Him was talent. Him was a batty mon.”
“A batty man?”
“A batty man. A gay,” Mackie explained. “Dem do ting dem should not do.”
“That should nah go happen,” Raggy added, shaking his head.
“But it ‘oppen,” Mackie said. He cleared his throat, spat in the grass.
For a while the three listened to the sea pound the coral heads. The dark shadow of a John Crow rode a thermal and rippled over the lawn, disappearing over by Reef Point.
Mackie said, “There are four brother that work this property long ago.”
“One a dem was Mr. Coward special helper,” Raggy said.
“Special? How?”
“Him was handsome—”
“—handsome to pieces,” Raggy added.
“An that one bwai was the model for Mr. Coward and his artist friends.”
“Nothing wrong with that,” Jed offered.
“But them mek that bwai undress. Him model wid no clothes.”
“Did Mr. Coward do a sculpture of this boy you’re talking about?”
Raggy’s eyes flickered. “You haff only fe see David on the street today fe know how many time he did model fe dem.”
“Why do you say that? Is he still so good looking?”
“No, mon. Him always dead drunk. Stoned on hundred proof white rum. David haff him living wage til death do him part, but him all ready dead. A walking dead.”
“Did you ever see a sculpture of David?” Jed asked looking first at Raggy, then at Mackie. But Mackie looked away and Raggy just laughed. Tossed his head back and laughed. Then he grew serious and his eyes glittered again. “Ya want-y?”
“That sculpture? Yes, very much.”
“Me a go show ya, mon. But me seh right now dat ting bruck.”
“Bruck?”
Raggy smiled. “Yuh noh speak patois?” He laughed. “Me seh bruck.”
“That mean broken,” Mackie said, still looking into the far distance of the reef, and beyond to the hills of Port Antonio.
“You mean, like half of it. . . you know where half of it is?”
Searching my eyes, Raggy frowned. “No treasure dat, mon.” Then: “Get your swimsuit.”
Jed went up to his room on the second floor of Villa Grande. He undressed and slipped on his bathing suit. His hands, he noticed, were shaking a little. Whatever this is, it could be it. So calm down and let it happen. Could be nothing. Could be something. Could be a
whole lot of something.
*
The day dragged. Raggy did not show.
Finally Mackie came “ up top” as he called the second story veranda. Jed was reading Blithe Spirit again, the pages rattling in the sea wind. Mackie had a friend with him and it wasn’t Raggy; it was a small Chinese guy.
“This is Chinkweed,” Mackie said. “I told him you like his herb.”
“You make the blueberry?”
The little man laughed. “I am the one,” he said. “You like it?”
“I love it. There’s nothing like it in the world.”
“You should have more then.”
“I could never afford it,” Jed told him.
The three of them sat down in the wicker chairs overlooking the long, wave-crested coastline. Chinkweed handed a paperbag to Jed, who accepted it with surprise. He looked inside, and the aroma of a summer morning in Maine hit him in the face. It was redolent beyond belief. It surrounded the three men and enveloped them in succulence and the sea could not take it away; the sea could not even put a dent in the overwhelming essence of that tingling blueberry herb.
“I don’t know what to say,” Jed said. “No one’s ever given me anything like this.”
Chinkweed smiled beatifically. He put his palms together. “It is the healing of the nations,” he said. “I was with Bob, you know, during his last big tour. I was there in New York when he collapsed. I was with him when he bravely stepped on stage in Pittsburgh. His last concert. I make this holy herb as a sacrament, a gesture of goodwill to the world. Mackie says you are a good person. That is all. Some pay. Some don’t have to pay. It is that simple.”
The treasure was in Jed’s hands, in the paper bag, and he knew that no matter what else happened this day, this was quite enough. This was the healing of nations, the blessing on high. There was nothing more to say, so the three of them, smoked some, talked some, listened some, and after a while no one said anything.
Jed closed his eyes. . . .
*
Robin Hood stepped quickly and cut a good staff of ground oak, straight, without flaw, and six feet in length, and came away trimming the tender stems from it. Jed trimmed his own staff of light bamboo. Robin saw him, furtively. He was a broad fellow, Robin was, many palms across the chest. “I will baste thy hide right merrily, my good fellow,” he said, and his voice was lusty and loud and rang in the wood and a singing bird answered with a clarion call.
Shadows & Reflections: A Roger Zelazny Tribute Anthology Page 14