As he opened the jagged gate of thick twigs to take his leave, he heard Gustave’s voice behind him.“Raoul! Listen, if you change your mind…”
Raoul hollered over his shoulder, “Call me ‘Mr. Orlean’!”
Poor Gustave.
Inside his head, yet one more detail came un-ticked.
In his bedroom, Raoul sat at the desk by the window, where he usually read. The walk from Gustave’s house had cleared his head, but it hadn’t changed his mind. He wasn’t a smuggler, or about to become one, and he still needed answers, or at least one answer as clear as a nose on a face. Why had he let Gustave off so easily? Was it the wine? He didn’t really believe Gustave knew nothing about the baby, did he? And yet…
And yet.
Another fly hatched right then, still small enough that when Raoul shook his head—no, there’s more to this than Gustave’s telling—he shook it away. Perhaps somebody had seen Gustave creep into the house while Wilbur delivered the mail or dozed on the porch. Perhaps Gustave had bragged of his coup. Just possibly there was a witness, or someone who had heard something. Raoul would have to advertise to find out.
He pulled a lined sheet of paper from the desk drawer and sharpened a pencil. Staring out into the night, he composed the words with silent lips, his eyes fixed on the moon. She had followed him home, watching and winking, and now as he bent his head to write, she splashed her light over the desk and the paper before him. The impertinent moon, full and high and blue, a promise of the gifts wrapped up in the still, dark sky.
6
When Raoul’s ad finally appeared in the paper, it caused quite a stir on the island, as you might imagine. It had the unfortunate effect of getting people talking, about all the wrong things. No one dared implicate Gustave—most were as content as ever to simply accept that he’d had a hand (or worse) in the matter—and no one had any information to share about me. Not a witness came forth.
The islanders did have plenty to say about some of the other Orleans, my mother to start. She was far too kind and gentle for them to accuse her outright, but their suspicions niggled and eventually made themselves heard. Mainly, though, they talked about Raoul. All of Oh was sure my grandfather was losing his mind. While Raoul was sure he wasn’t, he did know he was stressed (and to think that at that point not a pineapple as yet had disappeared). So as was his usual, he sought solace at the Belly. Alas, there wasn’t much there to be found, as you’ll see.
I know I’m jumping around a bit, in place as well as time. Stories on Oh are rarely straightforward. The wind has a way of tossing them about and mixing them up—and our lives along with them—so that often we find ourselves right where we started and sorting our way back to where we’ve already been. Like the tide that claws its way inland every time it’s dragged back to sea.
Just now the wind is blowing us back to the Belly with Raoul. The ad has caused its trouble, Edda’s name is on the tip of every tongue, and half the island (at least) thinks Raoul is wholly mad. For his part, all he wants is a quiet evening and a little cheering up.
“Bastard! He’s making Raoul look like a real fool. Have you seen this?” Cougar stood, elbow propped on the bar’s edge, wide-brimmed whitish straw hat propped on his head, and thrust the Morning Crier into Bang’s hand.
“Seen it? It’s all anybody’s talking about.” Bang knocked his knuckles on the bar and the bartender brought him water. “I know Raoul likes to get to the bottom of things, but this! He’s gonna get himself killed.”
“Killed? What do you mean?”
“Gustave, what else? If he had a hand in this…” (Bang lowered his voice.) “…and we know he must have, then Raoul’s just made himself a nasty little enemy, calling attention to the situation like he did. I told him to mind his business and to keep quiet, I told him.”
“No one’s killing anybody.” Cougar began to light his nightly cigar and paused. “Are they? You don’t really think…?”
Bang leaned close into Cougar’s chest. “Well, if he can magically impregnate a person, I don’t see why he can’t kill one.”
“I guess.” Cougar lit the cigar now and tilted his head upward in reflection. “’Course, he really doesn’t have to. The whole island thinks Raoul’s mad. He keeps this up, no one will listen to a word he says, about Gustave or otherwise. We need to talk some sense into him.”
“Well don’t look at me. I tried. I told him. Mind your business. Keep. Quiet.” Bang gargled softly and warmed his vocal chords with deep hums that rose and fell in pitch and volume.
“There is always the possibility that Raoul knows what he’s doing and that someone will answer the ad,” Cougar suggested.
Bang gargle-hum-choked an “Are you serious?!” He spat the water back into the glass and over a good portion of the bar. “Even if someone knows something…” (He lowered his voice again.) “… and I don’t think they do, who’s going to point a finger at someone like Vilder and maybe lose his job or his wife or his money or his fishing rod, or even fall down and die? Would you? If you knew something about Edda, would you tell Raoul?”
“No. No I don’t suppose I would.” Cougar sent out a cloud of perfumed smoke and caught sight of Nat, who had just walked into the Belly.
“Over here, Nat,” Cougar shouted. “Two doubles,” he told the bartender. “Yellow rum.”
“’Evening,” Nat said and slid onto a barstool. “I just brought you a hotel guest. Lady from Belgium. Had a suitcase full of hazelnuts.”
“No need for those around here. There’s plenty of nuts on Oh already,” Cougar said.
Bang handed Nat the newspaper. “Poor Raoul has gone a little mad, I’m afraid.”
Nat put the paper on the bar and sighed. “Raoul says there’s an explanation for everything. Says there must be a witness. I told him to mind his own business—”
“That’s exactly what I said!” Bang interrupted.
“You know what I think of Gustave,” Nat went on. “Creepy. But I told Raoul to leave well enough alone. Almondine’s healthy, Edda’s happy, Wilbur’s too in love to know the difference. Funny things happen around here. It’s nothing new. But you know Raoul.”
They did, of course, know Raoul, and they also knew that nothing they could say or do would dissuade him from ruffling feathers or looking foolish or doing whatever else might be required to find the explanation he was certain must exist. That was nothing new either. It’s true that Raoul had never resorted to newspaper ads before now, so the particulars were a bit out of the ordinary, but in general he had long been known to noodle. There was no matter on Oh too trivial, no minutia too minute, to escape elucidation by Raoul.
This time, though, the noodling was different. It was public. Normally, Bang, Cougar, and Nat were the extent of the audience to Raoul’s follies, and his three pals preferred it that way. They could affectionately chuckle behind his back (There he goes again, man!), pat him on it when he was around (You’ll get to the bottom of it, mate, no worries!), and all in the privacy of a dark corner table at the Buddha’s Belly Bar and Lounge, where their loyalty was no less true for its discretion.
But Raoul’s latest stunt had flung them from the peaceful anonymity of the audience into the spotlight center-stage. The ad had only just appeared in the morning’s paper and by the end of the day they already felt the burden of their allegiance. Distracted by the questions of the local passersby, Bang had badly butchered almost half a dozen pineapples. Cougar caught his cooks and his chambermaids gossiping instead of chopping and cleaning. And Nat, Nat only had peace when he was locked in his taxi with a tourist who was none the wiser, and that, that only until noontime, by when even the visitors had heard of the ad: say, you don’t know this fellow wanting to know where babies come from, do you? As a matter of fact he did, Nat defended, and of course this fellow knew where babies came from, generally, just not this particular one.
Raoul’s three friends were troubled. They were tired of being hassled (though secretly Cougar hoped his associa
tion with Raoul would bring in curious customers). They were embarrassed (even love and loyalty have their boundaries). And they were scared, though none would have admitted it to either of the other two. All three loved Raoul, I’m sure of that, if each in his own bumbling and selfish way, but none wanted an inadvertent enemy in Gustave Vilder.
And besides being troubled, tired, embarrassed, and scared, they were worried and sorry, worried because Raoul might be putting himself in danger, and sorry because Raoul had become the butt of the islanders’ jokes. Had Raoul kept quiet, the rumors about little Almondine would eventually have needled their way into the fabric of the history and lore with which the islanders inveterately cloaked themselves, the individual threads (Edda’s transgression, or Gustave’s) lost in the weave. Leave it to Raoul, they thought, to tug a loose end and unravel time-honored tradition.
There was little that Bang, Cougar, or Nat could think to do just then to alleviate their symptoms. In fact there was little to be done. So, like many before them and many to come, with no idea of how to solve their problem, they ignored it. At least in front of Raoul. At least for now.
“Alright, that’s settled. Not a word when Raoul gets here.” Cougar raised his glass and the others knocked theirs into it. (Rum. Water. Rum.)
Raoul joined them just then—”Beer, please,” he said—and was greeted with enough superfluous enthusiasm to raise his eyebrows and arouse his suspicion. “What’s the occasion?” he asked, his nose pointed at their glasses, still hanging in the air.
Cougar looked at Bang, who looked at Nat, who somehow managed to salvage their secret. “No occasion,” he said. “Just wishing Bang a bit of luck before the show.”
Raoul didn’t believe them, but he had bigger problems than their antics to concern himself with. “Cheers, then. Good luck.” He clinked his mug against Bang’s tumbler (Beer. Water.) and asked about the show. “What’s on the menu this evening? Pineapple polkas? Jellyfish jazz?”
“Tribute to the night,” Bang replied, unfazed. “Don’t you see I’m dressed in black?” Indeed he was. Pleated crepe trousers, black t-shirt, secondhand tuxedo coat to cover the tiny holes that dotted the t-shirt’s back like freckles.
“Aha.” Raoul smiled. (Bang had that effect on him.)
By this time the Belly was full and the band could be heard tuning up and plugging in and sending random chords into the regular din of the drinkers and discussants at the Belly’s round tables that night. Bang made his way to the stage and in the shadow of his presence, 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 do some numbers for you inspired by the deep, black night that blankets this pretty little island of Oh. So get yourselves something to wet your whistle,” he winked. “And if you feel like blanketing the dance floor, that’s what it’s there for!”
Silly Bang.
Who knows what goes on in the night?
Bang began his song, his voice coating the Belly and soothing it, his notes illuminating the speckled sky that succumbed to the invasion of the loudspeakers Cougar had affixed to the Belly’s outside walls. The tide advanced and receded, but more quietly now, and the leaves of the two thin sentinel palms that overlooked Cougar’s beach-front tables paused in their rustling, not wanting to overshadow the singer. The moon glowed and bristled, Bang’s tongue tickling her ears.
What you’ll find in the morning light?
Raoul, Cougar, and Nat looked from Bang to each other to their drinks. Each was reluctant to break the silence that inevitably fell at the start of Bang’s show, but tonight they were equally reluctant to allow the uncomfortable pause in their conversation to last a moment longer. They all knew exactly what it was they weren’t talking about, and knew that talking about something else, anything else (fishing, storm drains, the price of gasoline), would make their not-talking less trying.
What forces there that play in the dark?
Cougar wished to speak, to say something safe and reassuring to Raoul, but for all his efforts to think of any topic other than the ad, the ad was the very (and only) thing that came to mind. Nat, for all his discomfort, felt that their common distress and the silence were preferable to the singular distress of speaking up. So he, too, held his tongue. The unwitting bad intentions of the very best of friends.
Who hides behind the mango’s bark?
All Raoul wanted was for them to say something, anything, to him. He wanted to hear his friends’ opinions, their assurances, even their barbs. It didn’t matter if they thought he was crazy. It didn’t matter if anybody did. Raoul could handle that. A man who took things at face value the way he did was used to it. A man who respected his principles and pursued truths as plain as noses on faces almost came to expect it. But amidst his principles and his pursuits, at least he had never felt alone. Well, not up to now.
Who knows what goes on in the night?
Bang’s song was an old one. Cougar remembered when it first reached the island: my mother was just a child and his hotel Sincero only just getting on its feet; the memory of Emma Patrice had finally begun to fade, Raoul looking less and less for her face in his line at the airport, for her handwriting when he picked up the day’s mail. He would take Edda to the hotel with him every day after work, partly because entertaining her on his own was too exhausting, and partly because he didn’t know what else to do with her.
While the men sat in the Belly smoking cigarettes (they considered themselves too young then for cigars) and sipping pineapple punch (their drinks grew stiffer as their bodies did), Uncle Cougar let little Edda roam freely on the hotel property. A warrior in the courtyard, she sparred with a garden statuette of Mars, his sandstone shield no match for her twig-sword’s blows. In the rooms, a princess, whose dainty feet must only touch the gray tiles, never the blue, on their way to the three-inch ledge with wrought-iron, fauxbalcony railing beyond which her prince awaited. And peckish, purring feline in the kitchen, where her favorite of the two cooks, a tall, toothless chap called Tripper, fed her bowls of flavored milk that tasted of berries and daisies and slices of ginger.
While the men sat in the Belly smoking cigarettes and sipping pineapple punch, rating and berating the tourists—the lookers, the talkers, the tippers, the snobs—the feline princess warrior turned into a girl.
If in the morning it will be alright?
Cougar remembered this, too, when it first happened, or rather, when he first noticed that it had. A Saturday, and Edda off from school. Raoul was at the airport thumbing passports and passing out pineapples, Bang was filleting them onto paper plates outside, and Nat was transporting them, on the floor of his Renault between pairs of pale Romanian knees. Cougar, left alone with the feline princess warrior who had clearly had her fill of flowery milk, pretend princes, and still statues, suggested a hike to the Crater.
It seems that Oh once had a volcano (“seems” because no one knows for sure), a volcano that supposedly tired of Oh’s sandy winds and sticky scents and meddling moons, so much so that it shut itself off, burned itself out, and settled into silence. The crater it left behind in reproof of the island’s affronts was too much for the islanders to bear. They, too, tired, so much so that they submerged it, drowned it, and turned it into a lake. The lake, as it so happened, loved the winds and scents and moons and decided to stay, to stay and to get comfortable. It adorned itself with grassy shores and stubby trees that were a perfect fit and insisted, rightly so, on a respectable name, Lake George, perhaps, or Lake Burl; but as respectable a lake as it was, no islander had ever called it anything but the Crater, for deep inside that’s what it really was. And even the prickliest islander on prickly, pineappled Oh would figure out, sooner or later, that the deep insides mattered more than a rippled surface.
So you wait for the sun in your bed.
To the Crater, then, for Uncle Cougar and Edda, who found themselves alone on a sunny Saturday afternoon at the Sincero. Armed with a picn
ic lunch prepared by Tripper, tuna steak on triangles of toasted wheat bread, a salad of olive-sized capers and pear, and cream with honeyed peach, they began their walk. Cougar asked Edda about her schoolwork and her teachers, about her friends and her plans. Her studies were going well enough, she said, though she was never in the top of the class. She simply didn’t like books, not since her missing mother’s volumes had been removed from the house by Raoul, and the teachers expected her to read all the time, even when she studied science or history or mathematics, imagine! But she liked her teachers nonetheless and often brought them oleander and poinsettias from the garden behind her house. She had friends at school, yes, the other girls, but they weren’t interested in gardening. She walked with them after school every day on the beach, where the other girls talked only of boys, and, while Edda didn’t mind this (or the boys themselves, for that matter), she didn’t much see the point of it. And her plans? Plans for what?
Cougar laughed. Such a child she was still, he thought to himself. A sweet child. He turned to look at her and, laughing, put his arm around her shoulders as they continued on, past the market and the bank and the grimy-windowed office of the Morning Crier. Tucked under his arm, Edda turned her head to meet his eyes and his laughter, and the meeting left Cougar chilled, as if a breath had blown on the warm, musky sweat that till then rested shiny and ignored on his neck and his dark brown arms, on his dark brown arm wrapped around Edda’s dark brown shoulders.
Odd, this.
Cougar pulled himself away. He looked all around him, expecting to observe the source of the breath that had kissed his skin, but there was nothing to see. Nothing except the wet mark on Edda’s back that still betrayed the sweaty trespassing of Cougar’s skin on hers. Surely it hadn’t been Edda who provoked such a reaction in him? She was just a child, he told himself, Raoul’s child no less, and even Cougar, who was fond of a fresh can of worms now and then, knew better than to stick his hand in this one. He was mistaken about the breeze that Edda’s body had blown through him. He must have been, for he thought he still felt it now, though their bodies no longer touched.
Left at the Mango Tree Page 7