Under Radar

by Michael Tolkin

  Rosalie brightened. “We can go with the Davises.”

  “I already booked the van, and we’re sharing it with another family.”

  “Is there room for us?” asked Avital.

  “I didn’t think so. I’m sorry. I should have come to you.”

  “Let’s go with them the day after tomorrow,” said Rosalie.

  “The ticket’s not refundable,” said Tom, thinking he was probably lying. “The other couple have two children, a boy and a girl. They’ll have fun together.”

  “Not in a van,” said Rosalie.

  “At the falls, then. The Dunn’s River Falls are beautiful. They’ve shot a lot of movies there. I think they shot The Swiss Family Robinson there.”

  The group shared vague memories of the film.

  “Nonrefundable,” said Rosalie, sealing the day. New people would interfere with Rosalie’s purpose for the vacation, to spend undistracted time with the girls. She hated to lose contact with them on vacations even as they needed desperately to run free, no matter that the resort was another tightly pressed bale of the world’s artifice.

  It was time for bed. The families made their farewells. Judge Davis, Tom thought, had let go his suspicions. Tom put his arm around Rosalie; Alma wanted his free hand, Perri held to her mother. Two miles or more offshore—who could judge distance?—a cruise ship with all lights blazing moved to the west, away from the port at Ocho Rios.

  He showed the boat to the girls and felt terribly proud of himself, that this family, this little unit of the world, was his, like a ship over the water. It was so obvious to him why people love watching boats, they see themselves as ships under way, and this is a good and wonderful identification. Look at what you can learn from a ship, how to stay bright under a darkening sky, in an uncertain ocean.

  Shed of the sullen Girl Friday, the family walked slowly to the room, the girls reaching for him, holding on and letting go, Perri’s hand damp and Alma’s soft and cool. Tom’s decision to kill a man gave him wisdom, because it was a secret. He was good at keeping secrets. How hateful to cross the public square with all your inner life on parade. If one was too bland for an inner life, why not break a rule and create a private universe? Hiding something so powerful gave him dignity.

  He would never be a better father than on this walk, witness to his own awesome criminal and loving nature, to the awesome careless and loving nature of his daughters. Slow down, he commanded himself. Watch them. So he let them stop at every flower and follow every lizard, and when a bird sang, he asked, “What is that bird saying?” And he answered, “The bird is saying, ‘Hello, beautiful girls.’” With a hand on Rosalie’s arm that he hoped she would remember as the consecration of his devotion to his children, Tom gently restrained her to give the girls the lead, to give them all the time in the world.

  He helped his daughters undress and stayed with them as they washed their faces and brushed their teeth and said their prayers. The girls relaxed so deeply with him that they asked for Daddy to tell a story instead of Mommy. He invented a character, a prospector who lives in deep tunnels, whose name is a silly sound and the girls meet him by falling down a rabbit hole like Alice’s, but not Alice’s because this hole leads to a long fall into a special lake, and why is the lake special? Because when a little girl falls into the water and swims to the shore, she comes out dry. And the prospector finds a cave filled with jewels, and the girls bring them home to their mommy and their daddy, who ask them, Where did you get those rubies?

  “What happens next?” they wanted to know.

  “I’ll tell you tomorrow.”

  Then Tom and Rosalie lay in bed until the silence in the girls’ room deepened in the mysterious way that announces how already quiet children have fallen asleep and will not be roused by the muffled sounds of their parents making love.

  So Tom and Rosalie brought themselves to each other. Tom used the murder he would commit the next day as a vehicle to bring his grief into the bed, and then he stripped the grief of its selfishness by reminding himself with all his strength that the woman beside him trusted him, and in this true sobriety came mercy and so he was tender.

  Three

  At the hotel entrance, Tom introduced Debra Seckler to Rosalie, hiding a dizzy bravado, as though he still felt another woman’s kiss from a sudden groping in a stairwell. Rosalie said, “I hope we’re not invading your vacation by sharing the van with you.”

  “No, it’s nice to meet new people, and the children can play. And this is my husband, Barry.” Rosalie took Barry’s hand and looked him in the eye, directly, not to look at his stomach.

  “Tom,” said Tom, offering Barry a hand. “How are you?” He hoped this casual greeting urged the steam away from Seckler’s anticipations of more trouble about Alma and the dance.

  As the children were introduced, Barry Seckler took Tom aside. “That was awful last night, what I did. It doesn’t matter how I thought about it at the time. I would feel the same, I’m sorry.”

  “As long as you understand,” said Tom.

  “I do.”

  “Peace?”

  “Life is too short.” This was the kind of bullshit homily that Seckler would surely take as the proof of a truce. But Tom would accept no peace. He finished the sentence to himself: I have deferred enough pleasure. Were life really too short, we should all drop our vendettas and sit upon the ground and weep for time wasted in the hunt for pointless retributions. Rather, I say, Life Is Too Long, and regrets can leech the salts from all contentments. Provide against self-torment over the lost opportunity.

  ...

  The driver said his name, but Tom missed it and had to ask Rosalie. Barry said it: “James.”

  James opened the side door of the white van to let everyone in, and the four children scrambled to the backseats. Perri and Rita, a shy six-year-old, sat together. Tom knew that Perri would have preferred to share the trip with a girl her own age or none at all. Adam, four, sat beside Alma. He was a self-possessed boy with an energetic rasp, the kind of boy Rosalie would talk about later, recalling him with love, his metallic sweaty aroma, the dirt on his neck. She loved boys and their obsessions with ships and machines and war. Tom envied her generosity to the mothers of boys.

  The wives took the bench in front of the girls. Who would sit in front? For the insult to Tom’s daughter the night before, etiquette obliged Barry’s concession to Tom, but the terrible fact of his bloat demanded, for the sake of everyone’s comfort, that he take the front seat to avoid spilling his weight on the women.

  Tom sat beside Debra. Each wore shorts. Their legs touched. She didn’t pull away. So my secret passion reached her, he thought.

  As the van left the hotel, Adam looked out at the world in a way the girls would not. They kept their attention within the van while the boy studied a black man cutting the dead fronds of a palm tree. The boy would have been happy watching the man work all day.

  “Adam, look at how he uses that machete,” said Rosalie. The boy nodded without looking at her.

  Between the two front seats was a cooler. James opened it and offered bottles of water and ginger beer. Barry Seckler handed bottles of ginger beer to the adults behind him.

  “That’s very kind of you,” said Rosalie.

  “It’s a good taste for the tropics,” said Debra.

  “Yes,” said Barry, “because the sweetness hits the tongue first, and then after a few sips, the sharpness of the ginger kind of wakes you up. And then the sugar comes back.”

  Debra said, “I always liked the idea of bittersweet as a flavor. What is it? Definitions, Barry?”

  “Oh, Jesus, bittersweet. Hunh.”

  “We play this game,” said Debra. “We challenge each other to come up with these very ornate definitions for complicated ideas.”

  “Bittersweet,” said Barry. “Okay. There’s that balance of the bitter and the sweet, which we use so often to describe an experience of joy that can’t be permitted without a retrospective of regret
. The damages we have done will always color the pleasures we take. What do you think?”

  “It’s a B,” said Debra.

  Rosalie disagreed. “That was really good. Give him an A.”

  “No,” said Barry, “She’s right, it’s only a B. And I’ve used the ‘retrospective of regret’ before.”

  The van followed the main road along the beach towards the western tip of the island. The misery and the beauty of Jamaica threw up visions at every turn; a fisherman rowed a faded skiff across one side of a bay, towards the rotted stumps of a dead pier, which balanced the composition of the picture, and the whole image seen and then gone too quickly for a photograph; villas behind walls, unfinished.

  The van turned left toward the mountains. The road climbed quickly and passed through a breach in the hills, then was swallowed by them, and they were now hidden from the sea, facing higher mountains, distant but not impossibly far.

  The children were quiet. The Jamaicans they passed, so dark, looked at the van with suspicion. The parents were not guarded against the repellent implications of their presence on the road, the vacation in someone else’s ancestral desolation.

  “Tom, what do you do?” asked Debra Seckler.

  “I’m a lawyer,” he said.

  “So am I. Patent litigation. Yourself?”

  “This and that. General business. Barry?”

  “Lawyer. Mostly on initial public offerings. Rosalie?”

  “My father left me some commercial real estate, and I manage the properties. It doesn’t take that much time; I have good people working for me so I can be with the children.”

  “That’s very nice,” said Barry.

  “My mother won’t visit the third world,” said Debra. “She hates traveling in poor countries because everything has broken down everywhere and she feels helpless.”

  “But the problem,” said Barry, “is that she can’t bear their pain, so she turns it against herself.”

  “Don’t we all?” asked Rosalie, warming to the couple, making Tom sick.

  “Do we?” asked Tom.

  “My mother is a kind of professional skeptic,” said Debra.

  Barry clapped his hands. “Definitions. Skeptic!”

  “Let me try,” said Rosalie. “Skeptic. Okay. Here. You take your anxiety over the world, over your powerlessness, and because you don’t do enough or can’t do enough to save even the little corner of the world that’s yours, you doubt everything as a way of giving yourself an alibi for your own weakness. This is skepticism.”

  “Great,” said Barry. “Beautiful.”

  “That’s an A+, you just described my mama,” said Debra. “If she would only work at a food bank or help with some charity at home, she could travel without feeling so crushed by it.”

  Barry added, “Maybe she’s right. Maybe we shouldn’t be here. I’m just another rich American. It costs me nothing to be friendly down here, and the Jamaicans know that if I were sitting on a park bench or waiting at a bus stop at home, and they were to approach me with the same assumption of their affection that I bring to them here, I’d run from them in fear. They hate us. They should.”

  The road met two other roads in a market town. James pointed to the church behind an iron fence. “That’s from the seventeen hundreds.” The traffic moved slowly and the van was eyed cautiously, no one gave them a smile. They watched the Jamaicans like something seen from a bathysphere at the bottom of a deep marine trench. They were clumped in slow crowds by the road, forced to sell one another T-shirts imprinted with pictures of motorcycles or Jamaican music stars. Tom felt that their lives were the judgment on the lives of those in the van.

  A few minutes past the market town, a thick crowd of Jamaicans filled the road in front of a small church. There were steel drums and flutes, a great noise and excitement.

  Barry Seckler asked the driver to stop, and left the van to take a picture.

  A boy, Tom guessed seventeen or so, ran past them with a machete, following the parade into the church. Tom wished he had grown up with a religion that admitted violence into its ceremonies.

  “What a beautiful thing, all of these people,” said Rosalie.

  “And the generations are together here, the young and the old,” said Debra Seckler.

  As the crowd rushed into the church, Tom saw a white man sitting on the steps, knocked over or kicked by someone. He shielded his eyes with one hand to see who was looking at him, then pulled himself to his feet, wrote something in a notebook, and went inside.

  The crowd was gone, and the van continued. The scene left a small troubled mark on everyone, even the children.

  “Nine Mile,” said James. He made a U-turn and pulled off the road beside a high fence topped with coils of razor wire at the foot of a steep driveway. A few other tourist vans were parked at the entrance, and some small cars with rental agency stickers. Five dark men with long dreadlocks stood at the entrance in front of the ticket booth. They wore knit caps with the rasta stripes of green, yellow, and orange. Two of them wore the same T-shirt, a portrait of Haile Selassie as a spiritual warrior in his khaki uniform with an orange band on his cap. The others wore Bob Marley T-shirts, Bob in black and white, with a lazy plume of smoke, green, yellow, and orange, curling from a joint.

  “Are these the guides?” Rosalie asked James.

  “Don’t bother with them,” said James.

  The first of the Rastas stopped Barry. “You like herb?”

  “Not today,” said Barry.

  “This is herb from Bob Marley plantation.”

  “Not today.”

  “Peace, brother,” said the Rasta.

  Tom bubbled with recklessness. He asked the Rasta, “How many middle-class American tourists with their children beside them buy drugs here?”

  “Everyone but you,” said the Rasta, without a smile.

  The two families passed through the cordon of drug dealers and bought tickets. Inside the gates, an official guide joined them. The families followed him as he explained where they were. They were joined on the tour by a pretty couple from Holland.

  “This is where Bob Marley born. Bob Marley born here in 1941.”

  Barry said to Tom as they walked up the steep hill to the house, “What is it about young Dutch tourists that gives them such an air of annoying holiness? They go around the world with a small backpack, and they’re always so calm. The girls are wildly sexy, completely free of guilt, and impossible to seduce.”

  “You’ve tried?” asked Tom.

  “Well, you know.” But Tom didn’t know.

  At the top of the hill the guide brought them to a small red house with a curtain for a door.

  “This is where Bob Marley born. In that building is where Bob Marley buried.” The mausoleum was about thirty feet long and twenty feet wide, with high windows and a door inlaid with stained-glass lions.

  The guide told everyone to take off their shoes before entering the house. Inside the house, clean small rooms, with no furniture. The guide told them about Bob Marley’s mother. “This is where Bob Marley mother make Bob Marley porridge. Are you from Delaware?”

  It was an odd question, and they all answered, “No.”

  “Because Bob Marley mother live in Delaware when Bob Marley nineteen years old, and she call him to Delaware. Bob Marley work in a factory, making cars, before he come back to Jamaica.”

  Tom tried to imagine Bob Marley as a hidden genius on an American assembly line, and then he wondered what cars were made in Delaware. Perhaps the guide meant Bob Marley had lived in Detroit.

  Perri didn’t know why they were there or what this was for. Tom tried to explain. “Bob Marley was a great musician. The Jamaicans are poor people, and he sang about their lives. His music touched them, and it touched the world. That’s the power of music.”

  The girls listened deafly. They were fascinated by the small house.

  “Did the whole family live here?” asked Perri.

  “Yes,” said the guide.
>
  Tom was embarrassed by his daughter’s question. It reflects badly on me, he thought.

  On the light green walls, the pilgrims had left their offerings: postcards, reverential graffiti in all the languages of the world, cigarette papers, flowers. There was nothing to see once you’d seen it for a few minutes, nothing to study except your own attempt to draw deeper significance from the place. The stoned docent with his thick braids gave few clues to his own character, and Tom, for lack of any other subject, wondered about him. How much did he make in a week?

  “This is the rock what Bob Marley sat on when he wrote ‘Positive Vibrations.’”

  The view was ridiculous, perfect in every detail physically and morally. If a song should come from any place, then let it come from here, on a mountain whose peak is hidden in the clouds behind you. The sound of a hammer hitting a board somewhere down the hill, the clucking of chickens, a radio with the news, a man shouting for help with a heavy box, the heat, the wet air filled with the resins of small fires in crude stoves, the repulsion Tom felt for Barry Seckler, who made Alma dance like a whore; it was impossible not to be completely there, distractions overwhelmed by the thick waters of life, assembled as a rebus Tom could not decipher. Tom wanted to ask Barry Seckler, Who allegorized you into my life?

  Inside the mausoleum, the shock of the tomb’s dignity made them quiet. The marble sarcophagus was eight feet high. The guide told them that the stone was a gift from the Italian government and that the stained-glass windows came from Ethiopia. African instruments, primitive guitars and tribal drums, hung on the wall, none of them grand enough for the occasion. Something larger than a songwriter was buried or remembered here. Barry tapped Tom’s arm and nodded to the Dutch girl, who had settled a joint on the base of the sarcophagus as an offering.

  Barry whispered, “Here’s a definition of the Dutch. They roam the hip shrines of the world and then return to the Netherlands and Scandinavia with their thinness, their frugality, their lack of humor, their aura of sanctity, their affability with the natives, their Charles Mingus tapes, to disappear into their smoky cafés and jazz clubs, huddled in philosophical conversations, and what had impressed us, had threatened us, their independence, their detachment from the disturbances of traveling with so little money, becomes, when you look closely at their lives at home, indifference. Mark this, the flip side of Dutch tolerance is Dutch indifference.”