The biggest attraction at the hotel is the Buddha’s Belly Bar and Lounge. Its local celebrity presence, in the guise of Bang and Cougar, and its islander clientele draw not only the Sincero’s lodgers, but guests from the more exclusive resorts, too, who return to their air-conditioned suites just after midnight, their appetites for local flavor satisfied. The lodgers regard the visiting resorters with dismissal (though you might expect it the other way round), silently condemning their shallow testing of the deep local waters. All of them, lodgers and resorters alike, clink their murky mugs and rub elbows with Cougar’s fine suits, charmed by the sometimes-bare feet of the liming islanders, whose nakedness they mistakenly deem of choice, not of circumstance.
I’ve introduced you to the crooner and the charmer. The third significant joueur in Raoul’s workaday world is Nat, the cabbie. Nat taught my mother Edda to drive—and to smoke a cigarette. Trim and quiet, innately dignified, Nat can’t sing or play the marimba, and he cares little for habiliments. He wears colored t-shirts he buys from a stand at the market. He has no wife and no girl. They tell him it’s because he doesn’t try, but when he asks, “Try what?” they don’t know what to say. Sometimes he drives an American van, or a Japanese one, sometimes an Italian four-door, or a Japanese one. The cars that come to Oh are mostly used, and then presently used up on the pot-holed inland roads. There’s no point telling you what Nat drives now. He’ll surely be driving something else the next time you visit.
Nat grew up on a pineapple plantation, running and hiding in acres of leaves taller than he, knocking his tiny body against the ready fruits. The plantation belonged to his grandfather, and was at the height of production when the trouble started with the pineapple tax. Among the growers immortalized in the ballads of Bang’s grandfather was none other than Nat’s own. When the winds blew out the old administration, Nat’s grandfather tried to make another go of it, but the winds had deposited sand in his own gears, too, and he gave up. The land, undisturbed by the gusts and tariffs, was fertile. It garnered a healthy profit when Nat’s grandfather sold it, a profit that fed both his own generation and the next. But by the time Nat was a young man, there was not so much as a song left for him, let alone enough to buy a marimba.
Nat’s birthright boiled down to unemployment. He had no livelihood, or rather, any livelihood he might want to entertain the thought of, and at the end of the day considered himself a terribly rich and lucky man. He could be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a cook, or a painter—not an artist, but a man who hung his weight on ropes and pulleys and painted church steeples and schoolhouses. In the end he decided simply to earn a modest living.
With the failure of the pineapple industry, the rest of the island decided the same. A negligible amount of pineapple exportation went on, but the cost of picking, packing, and shipping the small cargoes became too expensive to make it worthwhile. The tourism industry boomed in the meantime, and most of the islanders sought their tiny fortunes there. They taught island dances, sold island dishes, embroidered island cloth, and drove taxis. Nat didn’t know many dances or recipes, and had never threaded a needle in his life. So taxi driving it was.
His first car was a van, a Volkswagen that appeared to him both round and square at the same time. It was noticeably succumbing to the early ravages of rust, but the interior was nicely intact, and Nat kept it washed both inside and out. No small feat, this, transporting wet and sandy beach-goers, or sweaty tourists carrying dusty suitcases and pineapples. Yes, the pineapple custom at Customs existed even then, though it would become a much messier affair some three years later, when Bang would set up his pen-knife table, and passengers began peeling and slicing right in the back seat.
In no time at all Nat had just what he wanted, or what he fooled himself into thinking he wanted: a simple and modest living. Driving his taxi paid for fish and vegetables and gasoline, and a sensible place to live. He could afford almost any t-shirt from the stand at the market and the almost daily nip at the Buddha’s Belly. He collected and deposited passengers every day at the airport and the Sincero, and by virtue of daily sightings became friends with Raoul and Cougar, and eventually Bang.
Now on the road that borders the stretch of sidewalk outside the airport, Nat leans against his Volkswagen, or his Toyota, or his Fiat and watches as the travelers file out, juggling their loads, swabbing their brows, glancing from the sun to Bang’s gesticulations and back in disbelief. Staggered by the heat and by the spectacle, you don’t even notice when Nat approaches and asks, “Where to?” He rounds up a couple more passengers headed to the same destination, shouts a word at Bang (who acknowledges it with a shrug of one shoulder), and completes the transaction with a shove on your posterior that plunges you into the car. You find yourself stuck to vinyl upholstery, an Albanian on your left, a sprouting duffel on your right, and a pineapple on the floor between your knees.
Except, of course, on Tuesday. On Tuesdays at Oh the airport is closed. There is no flight in and no flight out, no triplicate forms to stamp and crease and slip inside your passport, no gratuitous fruit to negotiate. Raoul doesn’t size up passengers with his aaah-huh-huhs, and passengers don’t hop over rolling pineapples to claim their baggage. Bang doesn’t set up his table, or sell knives or perform. Nat won’t be waiting in his clean Chevrolet to take you over the gritty roads to Cougar’s hotel. Sometimes on Tuesdays even the wind hardly stirs, and the sand keeps clear of your mailbox, your ears, your pockets and toes. Always on Tuesdays, Raoul lies in until 10:25, wakes to his breakfast of coffee and milk and oatmeal, dons his favorite blue shirt with the stripes, and goes to the library, where he spends almost the entire day. (I’ll get to his business there later.)
This is how it’s been as long as anyone can remember.
That is, on every Tuesday but one. One very distinct Tuesday some 20 years ago, Raoul woke up early, and troubled, at 8:25. He had tea with honey and whipped eggs for breakfast, and wore a white shirt with no stripes at all. He thought about his daughter—his daughter Edda Orlean, who never told a lie and only ever slept with her husband—and he did not go to the library. He went to the grimy-windowed office of the Morning Crier, and he placed a classified ad.
Someone on Oh must know how Edda got pregnant!
And so while other baby girls are heralded with cigars or balloons or pale pink ribbons on the front door, my unusual, even magical, birth was from the first denoted in black and white. Not announced, exactly, not in glossy black ink on sturdy white stock with a photo of my newborn self tucked lovingly into the envelope, heavens no! My birth was to be inferred, from a want ad in the morning edition, the black of the ink flat and impermanent, the paper flimsy and white-ish at best.
2
Bad things are supposed to happen in threes. When they’re really bad, even the bad things themselves know enough to stop at two. Why, on Oh, they don’t know any better than to splash themselves across the pages of the newspaper, I couldn’t say. Poor Raoul found himself sandwiched between two such cases in point. As if I (his white granddaughter) weren’t bad enough, he was faced with a real humdinger of a Customs affair. So he did what he always did, when he wasn’t quite sure what to do. He went to the Belly, ordered a beer, and waited for his three best mates to show, which (sooner or later) they always did.
“Bastard!” Raoul whispered loudly to himself. He crumpled the Crier’s front page in his fist and slid it from the table to his knee. His little Almondine the talk of Oh and now this? He needed a pineapple-smuggler to worry about like he needed, well, pineapples. He had crumpled and smoothed the paper so many times that day, it was covered in thumb-prints and the newsprint was smudged.
“Aye, matey!” Bang bounded into the chair next to Raoul’s, straddling it the wrong way round. He propped his chin on the chair’s back, cocked his sailor’s cap with one finger, and winked.
Raoul responded with a tilt of the head and reached for his sweating mug of beer. “Popeye?” he asked, surveying Bang’s deckhand whites.
> Bang feigned indignation and ripped the newspaper from Raoul’s grip. With a menacing crease in his brow, he moved in close to Raoul’s troubled face, where a lopsided smile was reluctantly taking shape. “Part of the act,” Bang said. He swept his arm toward the Belly’s beach exit and, aping a Frenchman, announced, “Songs of zee sea.”
Raoul’s smile filled itself out and he downed his beer. “Aha.” He took back the newspaper and ironed it with his palm, small print mountains flattened into rippled prairies of words that he read again. He shook his head.
Bang straightened and let his arms fall in defeat. When Raoul shook his head it meant trouble. It meant Raoul had something in there that wouldn’t leave him alone. Something that like a fly in a lidded jar would knock about inside his brain until it was freed into the clarity beyond the glass, or until it suffocated and died. Raoul had flies of every size. There were gnats he got rid of quickly, say, a crossword clue or that actress who looks so familiar—what was her name? There were garden-variety houseflies, not big, not small: fixing the washing machine, finding the perfect birthday gift for Edda. And then there were the bluebottles, the blowflies big enough to make the morning paper.
“Make it a double, will you?” Nat had arrived, shouting his order over his shoulder as he squeezed between the tables on his way to Raoul’s. “You saw?” he asked, and nicked Raoul’s newspaper.
“Mm.”
“The wonders of Oh. So what do you think? What’s buzzing in there?” Nat knocked on Raoul’s forehead and sat down.
“I think it’s rubbish. It’s not true.”
Bang looked at Nat but spoke to Raoul. “What do you mean it’s not true? It’s right there in black and white. Puymute Plantation. Two acres. Vanished. Evaporated.”
“What are you, Bang, an idiot? You believe every word you read in the paper?”
Nat came to Bang’s defense. “Well, something’s going on. I saw Gustave and he says every black-and-white word’s true. He ought to know.”
“Black magic, if you ask me,” Bang continued. “Everyone says so. They say it’s been here all the time, right below the topsoil, festering, simmering, waiting. And then… Voilà! When you least expect it…” (Bang spread his hands into starbursts that he circled in front of his face.) “…black magical manifestation.”
He slurped what was left of Raoul’s beer and stood up. “Should have planned on mystical melodies tonight,” he sighed. “Let that be a lesson to you boys.” (He bent over the two, a hand on each one’s shoulder.) “Never listen to Cougar. Steer you wrong every time.” He slapped them amiably on the back, clicked his tongue, and was gone, drawn by the noise of shins bumping against microphone stands on stage and the flat-sharp ululations of guitars being tuned.
“So where did you see him?” Raoul reclaimed his newspaper for the second time and looked Nat in the eye.
“Who?”
“Gustave. You said you saw him.”
“Took a tourist up to Puymute’s this morning. Some artist. Paints fruits and vegetables. Said she once so captured the essence of tomatoes that her real life models turned to pulp before her very eyes. Guess she’s onto pineapples now. She heard Puymute’s were the best. What’s left of them, anyway. Rotund, she said they were.”
Before we go any further, there are a few things I should explain. I too am a painter, did I tell you that? I suppose it was only natural that I should seek refuge from my black-and-white world in a palette of colors that I could arrange as I see fit. And I can attest to the fact that the pineapples on Cyrus Puymute’s property were indeed worthy of the most discerning canvas. Not only were they Oh’s plumpest and brightest, but owing to the plantation’s fertility (which, I discovered, rivaled only that of a secluded beach to which my mother was partial), they were by far the most…the most per square meter. If enough of them had disappeared to put a noticeable—and newsworthy—dent in such bounty, then something was surely afoot.
It may have been the wind playing tricks. Or Gustave Vilder playing his. Perhaps a combination of the two. Gustave Vilder worked for Puymute, and could have pulled off an inside job easily. He dabbled in magic, too, and was very possibly in cahoots with the moon herself. I’ll tell you more about him after Bang’s song.
Me, I never actually met Gustave, though he figures in my mosaic. He died when I was a baby. The only white man on Oh, at the time, or since.
“Gentlemen!” Cougar said, and nodded in greeting. He dragged along a chair, with which he annexed himself to Raoul’s table. He gave Nat a tall shot glass (yellow rum), and snapped his fingers in the air over Raoul’s empty beer mug, so that a waiter might replace it with a full one. Raoul raised his eyes from the paper in acknowledgement and Nat raised his rum. A long arpeggio leapt from the piano as if to welcome Cougar as well, and the room fell silent.
“Ladies and gentlemen. Good evening and welcome to the Buddha’s Belly. My name is Bang and tonight we’re gonna to do some numbers for you inspired by the waters that surround this pretty little island of Oh. So order yourselves something to wet your whistle.” (He winked into the audience at Cougar.) “And if you feel like making waves on the dance floor, that’s why we put it there!”
You don’t need me to tell you that when Bang opens his mouth, it’s sometimes hard to take him seriously. Other times, when he opens it in song, he commands the respect of a president or a prince, at least for a little while. So when the music started and Bang began to sing, Raoul shushed the bluebottle buzzing in his brain, Nat put down his rum, Cougar forgot about selling drinks, and the customers stopped shuffling their feet on the floor. The Belly’s insides stilled.
You and me by the moonlit sea, our love our only company.
To the soft accompaniment of sparse piano, solemn bass, and tenuous brushes on drum, Bang’s sounds left his chest, a vague conjunction of heart, soul, and lung, found shape in his throat, and slid past his lips in an audible, airborne kiss. A kiss that expanded and encompassed the crowd until it was a lover’s tongue lapping every listener’s ear. They closed their eyes and leaned into the ticklish pleasure of the notes, smiles of anticipation snaking across their faces.
Still, dark sky, you and I, I will give myself to thee.
They listened until the kiss became happily predictable, until they could determine when the tongue’s melody would turn up, or down, and ready themselves.
When you miss my loving kiss, I want you to remember this—
But the happily predictable is easily overlooked, and before long, the bartender again noisily shook the shaker in his hand. Cougar got distracted by a low-slung sarong, Nat drank, and Raoul let the bluebottle buzz. Soon Bang’s voice was pleasant background noise to the Belly’s rumblings, a lover’s tongue grown familiar, relegated to that realm of comfort and assuredness where it can be sought at will, but robbed of its ability to catch you unawares.
By the sea, look for me, look for me by the moonlit sea.
Cougar re-focused his attention on Raoul. He knew what was in the newspaper that morning, and he knew it meant a headache that Raoul hadn’t dreamed of. “Figures Gustave is at the center of all this. He’s always been trouble. His whole family since they came to Oh, even before Grandpa’s day. What do you plan to do?”
“Get to the bottom of it, I suppose.”
“Raoul, be careful, man. Don’t get mixed up with this guy’s magic or voodoo or whatever the hell it is. What happened, happened. You don’t know what Gustave’s capable of. And it’s not like anybody’s hurt or anything.”
Nat piped in. “You think he…you know, did it? Or you think things just…happen whenever he’s around.”
“Of course things don’t happen just because he’s around,” Raoul snapped. “Of course he did it.”
“But how, man? All that heavy fruit? I don’t see how.” Cougar lit himself a cigar.
“He gives me the creeps,” Nat said, finishing off his double.
Your eyes are like the sea, full of mystery.
“Speak of
the devil.” Cougar let his tilted chair fall onto its legs with a thud. He watched Gustave walk in from the beach and make his way to the bar.
“The creeps,” Nat reiterated. “Just look at him.”
“Nat’s right, Raoul. He seems weirder than usual. Look!” Cougar poked Raoul. “I bet this front-page business is getting to him.”
“His people are used to attention,” Raoul said. “Bruce at the Crier told me Gustave called the paper himself with the story.”
Whenever you look at me, I forget my misery.
The song Bang was singing that night was an old island love song and one, I’m told, my mother Edda sang to me often. When Gustave walked in, as if by magic, the song carried Raoul from his cozy table at the Belly to the cushions of Edda’s sofa a few weeks before. I was less than a week old then and had yet to meet the harsh sun of Oh. I had met most of the neighbors (or, rather, they had met me), and more of them were turning up every day. My complexion, it seemed, had become a matter that Raoul could no longer ignore.
Whenever you look at me, I forget my misery.
Edda cooed gently into my newborn ear. I was enraptured by her song, awakened, and I peered up at her, my eyes two roses in the snowy whiteness of my tiny, expectant face.
“Isn’t she beautiful, Daddy?” Edda asked.
Raoul sat balancing a cup of tea on a saucer on his knee. He had been dipping cookies into it and was studying the crumbs floating on the bottom, hoping that like tea leaves they would tell him what he should say. It’s not that I wasn’t beautiful. What baby isn’t? “She’s very beautiful, dear. Very beautiful,” he said.
Left at the Mango Tree Page 2