My comfort, my refuge, my grace.
“How the hell did I get myself mixed up in this?” Nat muttered to himself. And Bang sang.
11
Gustave Vilder had a vague recollection of my mother’s pregnancy. A vague recollection of the way her body bloated, swelled, and puckered under her clothes and inside her sandals, and of the islanders’ respectful nods when she passed them by. Vague, because though he saw her counting her rainbow bills at the bank or standing in line at the office of the Island Post, he never thought of her as relevant and therefore paid her little mind. Edda Orlean was simply part of the scenery in front of which Gustave’s daily errands and efforts played out, like Cordelia’s table of spices and marmalade at the market or the dried-up leaves of the flamboyant tree that crunched under Gustave’s feet near the seedy port bar. A silly pregnant girl was just that.
His vague recollection of Edda’s burgeoning middle is maybe somewhat like your own recollection of Cyrus Puymute in his patch. You remember, he was stomping the ground for rock-hard evidence when Pedro Bunch let it slip that Raoul had been spying nearby; then he bounded, like an angry ostrich across a plain, toward the manor house for a parley with his General Manager. A silly stomping plantation owner is just that, you thought, part of Oh’s flamboyant scenery and no more relevant than the flamboyant’s crunchy leaves.
But like Edda’s belly (if perhaps not to the same degree), Cyrus Puymute’s clumsy trek was indeed relevant, for it culminated in a tête-à-tête with Gustave that serves a dual purpose: it puts our angry ostrich’s head back into the sand, and elucidates the moods of Cougar and Nat in the previous chapter’s rendezvous at the Belly, where the two were ruffled and torn up, respectively.
It all started the day the sun entangled itself in my hair, causing Gustave to stumble. It wasn’t just my shiny locks that shocked him, but rather the resemblance that my face bore to his own, a resemblance for which the magical Gustave had no explanation. None came to him as he stumbled at the market. None as he walked himself back to the manor house at Puymute’s plantation. None as he sat at his desk, feet propped on the dead Mr. Boe’s account book, and decided to smoke a cigar. Not even when he lined up his variables, while looking for a match, did he come up with one (all they told him was what magic to do next).
As Gustave tidied his desktop, dropping the variables back into their drawers to cover his tracks, Cyrus Puymute’s clumsy bird-ish trek ended, and the latter bounded into Gustave’s office without so much as a knock.
“Vilder! Vilder! I’ve got news!” Puymute’s arrival put an end to Gustave’s tidying and to his ponderings, which no doubt would have lingered on the still-unexplained subject of Edda’s baby Almondine. No matter, he told himself. Almondine would wait. Which she did, for what else could she do?
“Calm down, Cyrus. You’re in a state! What news?”
Cyrus proceeded to recount how he had been in the patch stomping for rock-hard evidence of pineapple smugglers (human or superhuman, he didn’t care which), evidence that he could take to the police to clear his name and erase his excise fine, when he found Pedro wandering around with a sack. “‘What are you doing here?’ I said, ‘lugging your supper round the wrong side of the mountain?’”
Gustave nodded and Puymute continued.
“Well, you know Pedro. He went on about candles and clippers and lightbulbs and lava, goldfish and jelly and moss. Sea turtles—”
“Cyrus! Please!” Gustave huffed, not nearly as angry as he seemed, for he knew well that an encounter with Pedro could leave the best of men (and goats) out of sorts.
“Yes, yes. Sorry. First, I wondered what Pedro was doing by the patch, but good thing he was there. He caught Raoul Orlean sneaking around while I was stomping.”
“Sneaking around? Sneaking around where?”
“Up Dante’s Mountain.”
That Raoul should be sneaking around in the vicinity of the plantation didn’t strike Gustave as odd, for Raoul was the Customs Officer assigned to investigate the case. Nor did it strike Gustave as odd that this fact should be lost on Cyrus Puymute, who was often out of sorts, whether Pedro Bunch could be blamed for it or not. It was also obvious to Gustave, though there was no way it could have been to Cyrus, that Pedro was “lugging his supper round the wrong side of the mountain,” headed for Gustave and the manor house, so as to report on Raoul’s not-so-suspicious sneaking. Gustave had charged Pedro with precisely this function: wandering around the plantation looking for sneaks, and alerting Gustave immediately should he find any. (Gustave had never instructed Pedro to launch any threats; that, Pedro had done of his own overzealous accord.)
The last thing Gustave desired on that late, hot afternoon was a debate with Puymute, but he let the man unburden himself of his theories: conspiracy at Customs and Excise, planted evidence (though neither the police nor Puymute had found any), and, possibly, Pedro in on it all the while, for surely his talk of crabs and silk and electrical sockets was designed to distract attention from the truth. Puymute conjectured and Gustave nodded, until the sun set.
When Gustave was satisfied that Puymute’s excitability no longer posed a threat (things were complicated enough without an anxious plantation owner bounding about like an ostrich, stomping and spouting theories), Gustave pointed out that perhaps Raoul’s presence was legitimate, seeing as the case was his, and he assured Puymute that Pedro’s loyalties lay within the confines of the plantation and immediate vicinity, which were under his constant and secret surveillance. That a chatterer like Pedro made for a dicey sort of spy never dawned on Puymute, so had the sun’s setting calmed his temper. He listened to Gustave’s reassurances, rose, suddenly hungry after his long day’s stomp, and walked out into the dusk, just as the dusk was sneaking into Gustave’s open office window.
Though its heat still seeped forth from every beach and hillside, the sun that tormented the island by day was finally gone. It had relinquished Oh to the whims of the gibbous moon that—bloated, swollen, and puckered under the clouds and amidst the stars—presided over the darkening sky. The moon’s light invaded Gustave’s office and splashed over the desk, illuminating the variables that Puymute’s interruption had kept Gustave from putting away.
“Bloody fool,” Gustave said, shook his head, and began to tidy again.
A fool, Puymute may well have been; it bears little on Raoul’s story, or mine. But the fact that foolish Puymute arrived on that late afternoon in which Gustave would have rather been pondering the roots of one little almond, that bears a great deal on Raoul’s story—and mine—and on Raoul’s journey along the road that burrowed into the heart of my brief past. Had Puymute never presented himself at the manor house that day, Gustave would have tucked away his variables and left, gone off to the seedy port bar where the leaves crunched under his feet and the seedy port girls caved under his stare.
His variables had told him to pull out all the stops. He had seen it very clearly and he was satisfied. He would have strolled beneath the rays that shined from the moon’s roundness (as relevant as Edda’s, though Gustave paid it as little mind), mulling over his next move. He would never have noticed the marbles.
Three of them shone on the desktop, three leftover and undefined variables, their smooth, loyal surfaces reflecting the moonbeams that trespassed now through Gustave’s window. (It’s really as much the moon’s fault as Puymute’s that the marbles caught Gustave’s attention.) Mr. Stan Kalpi couldn’t have seen their meaning more clearly: Bang, Cougar, Nat. What better way to circumvent Raoul’s meddlesome investigation than to make allies of his enemy’s best mates? They knew Raoul’s patterns and his movements, and they needed money (well, Bang and Nat did, anyway, and Cougar would never turn any down). The solution’s next logical step.
Gustave finally did put away all the variables that littered his desktop. He tucked them into the dark musty drawers of the desk, where not even the moon’s pervasive gleam could reach them. He did not, however, go off to the seedy port bar
, no. He lingered, replaying in his head the day’s earlier events: his trip to the market, the glint of my hair, and my eyes that reflected his own, like the marbles reflected the moon.
What would Mr. Stan Kalpi have to say about those? Gustave didn’t ask himself this question, for he knew nothing of Mr. Stan, despite having stumbled into some Stan Kalpi maths. But Gustave was wondering about my eyes. He would have done almost anything to explain them.
And in this, he was not alone.
“Bang!” Nat shouted from the window of a pristine Peugeot, as he pulled up to the airport, Cougar next to him in the car. “Jump in for a minute,” he said and jerked his head toward the empty back seat. Bang abandoned his card table of pineapple slices and pineapple knives and obeyed.
“Well,” Cougar started, once they had driven past the stretch of sidewalk outside the airport and parked under a tree of what appeared to be giant buttercups (scientifically speaking, they were some other plant entirely), “what are we going to do?”
None of the three was willing to admit how afraid he was of saying no to Gustave, who had approached them all that morning with his marble plan. Furthermore, Gustave had been right. Bang and Nat needed money, and Cougar would never turn any down. But what about Raoul? Were fear and poverty (or in Cougar’s case, greed) reasons to turn on a friend? Or might betrayal be justified, if it served a friend’s best interests?
Fortunately, the ugliest of actions is rendered palatable by pretty design, which is why when Raoul’s three chums were approached by Gustave and asked to take part in the smuggling scam, they ultimately agreed. For, they thought, what better way to circumvent Gustave’s denials of Almondine than to make an ally of their best mate’s enemy and perhaps find out the truth? The three of them might—single-handedly—solve the mystery of red-eyed, white-faced me! Thus they sliced their inconvenience, like the cubes and rondelles of Bang’s airport pineapples, in order to digest it more easily.
So it was that the second pineapple pilfering heralded by the Morning Crier took place with their help, which is why, as Bang sang about friendship that night at the Belly, Cougar was ruffled by, and Nat was torn up over, their role in the rotten affair.
If I didn’t bother with the particulars of the second pilfering before telling you of their effect on Cougar and Nat, it’s because on Oh, as in many places, a deed’s repercussions echo farther and louder than the deed itself, often little more than a fistful of stolen minutes under cloak of night. Nat’s troubled demeanor after the fact warranted prompter attention than did his participation. He didn’t relish cheating his friend. Neither did Cougar, which is why he leaned, ruffled and silent, against the wall of bottles by the bar. Bang spent the evening on stage, as you know, and I’m not sure what he was thinking or why on that, of all nights, he sang of good friends, bad friends, honest friends and cheating friends. But the three of them were grown men, men who should have known better than to steal a fistful of minutes that could never be given back.
That being the case, here’s how the fistful unfolded.
It was a shiny night that witnessed the first conspiring of Gustave with Bang, Cougar, and Nat. Against the background of the still, dark sky, the light fell from the growing moon onto the water that rippled and refracted it in every direction. From his hiding place under a mango tree in the soft, green brush a stone’s throw from the edge of the sea, Gustave saw the beach laid out before him, a series of wavy silver reflections that illuminated the wax and wane of the tide on shore. The leaves sang their shhhhhhh shh! of sides knocking sides, their chorus complemented by the chirp of a thousand invisible island frogs.
When Bang, Cougar, and Nat arrived at the beach as instructed, Gustave went to greet them. An impressive sight he was, flanked and backed by wooden cratefuls of pineapple, so many crates that the chums couldn’t tell where the plywood slats ended and the soft, green brush began. Dulled by the sight, the scent, the oddity of the scene, they extended their hands to Gustave with the trepidation of those who, knowing not what else to do, rely on empty formality. Gustave, who had his faults, was not entirely uncivilized, so he met their hands with his own and with a nod.
“Wait here,” he said, and headed into the water’s shallow edge.
Rooted to the ground like trees, the chums looked at one another in silence until Bang broke it. “Where do you suppose they came from?”
“So many!” Nat gasped, incredulous.
Incredulous indeed. Two acres’ worth, picked and packed and transported to the beach and not a single picker, packer or transporter in sight. At no point during the operation that night, however, did they ask Gustave for an explanation, not only because they soon grew distracted by the work at hand, but also because they didn’t truly wish to hear one. To the chums’ knowledge the only companions Gustave had were the Vilder legends that flew around the island. And though they now believed no supernatural determinant responsible for Puymute’s disappearing crops, they were not exactly prepared to abandon the common belief that Gustave still had a few supernatural connections. Some rather strong connections, evidently, if they had managed to pick, pack, and transport two acres of pineapple, unnoticed, to the shore, where Bang, Cougar, and Nat were to help Gustave load them onto boats headed for Killig.
“How on earth are we supposed to manage this lot?” worried Cougar, the most practical of the three.
“I say we make a run for it!” Nat whispered, as forcefully as a whisper allows.
Before they could decide, Gustave’s nearing silhouette came back into view. “We’ll carry them out to those boats. They’ll go back and forth until we’ve finished.”
“What? Just the four of us?” a brave Cougar objected, elbowed by a not-so-brave Nat. “He’s barking mad!” Cougar muttered. “It would take days!”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Gustave replied, amused. “You underestimate your strength.” With that he picked up a crate and held it in front of his body. When he verified that each of them, too, had picked up a crate of his own, he walked toward the beach and soon was heard sloshing into the water where the shallow boats awaited.
“Just humor him till his back’s turned and then we’ll do a runner,” Bang ordered.
As it turned out, a runner wasn’t necessary. The three men followed Gustave and soon found themselves sloshing into the sea, Cougar first, followed by Nat, followed by Bang. They watched as Gustave passed a crate from his own hands into the dark, musty hands of a stranger, whose shadowed face they couldn’t see. They heard the clunk of wood on wood, slatted crate on slatted boat, then Gustave, empty-handed, turned and emptied the hands of Cougar, who emptied those of Nat, who emptied those of Bang, until all four crates had been passed along to the stranger and had clunked inside his boat.
The passage complete, instinctively Bang turned and walked toward the waiting mountain of packed-up pineapples, his laceless sneakers full of water and his pant-legs heavy and stuck to his shins. Behind Bang, still incredulous in soggy sandaled feet and short pants, followed Nat. Behind Nat, barefoot so as not to ruin his calfskin shoes, and still directing objections (“Days!”), followed Cougar, who was followed finally by Gustave. But somewhere between the water’s edge and the pineapple-mountain’s, the original order re-established itself, as it is wont to do, and when the four set out on their second run, Gustave was again in the lead.
Again, too, Gustave passed his load to a waiting stranger’s hands, though whether the hands of the same stranger, the chums had no idea. Crates clunked, one, two, three, four. The passage once more complete. Like a music box whose melody never varies, the passage played out over and over (slosh, clunk, slosh clunk), while the four men waltzed in time (step, turn, pass). They danced throughout the night and as they did, the crates grew lighter and the mountain smaller. The strangers’ hands were sure and silent; their boats swift and strong. The wooden crafts glided back and forth from Oh to Killig as easily as the tide, emptying their cargo as if the crates were clouds that simply floated to their corre
ct position in the sky. Cougar eventually stopped objecting; Nat remained incredulous, but for different reasons now; and Bang, he sang.
He couldn’t help it. The rhythm of the melody and the dance were too palpable and continuous to ignore. The leaves, which always sing on Oh, sang even louder suddenly, in harmony with the cicadas and the hummingbirds who didn’t know if it was night or day. The combined song of man, sea, flora, and fauna crescendoed to a frantic, fevered buzz; it fell on top of the cheating chums, like a thick blanket that might smother them.
They could hear nothing for the noise that filled their ears, the living sound that seemed to populate the air around them. They moved in unison with the island’s tremble, lifting and turning, passing and pausing, four men dismantling a two-acre mountain and sending it adrift on the sea in sugary snippets. Confused, the chums tried to ignore the noise, tried to escape it by closing their eyes, but in the end they danced—step, turn, pass—as if unawares.
The magic moon laughed at their struggle. The leaves were too agitated, their chorus too loud. Loud enough to drown the chums’ collective conscience, which reminded them of Raoul. Had one of the three actually heard it, the heavy pockets of the other two would have brought him squarely back to earth.
The fracas finally culminated in a guttural human cry that confirmed a superhuman deed, a celebratory cheer born of the incidental fellowship created by common objective. The moon, without whose light Gustave and his fellows would never have completed their task, was pleased. Her hands had stripped a garden and carried off its fruit, yanked the roots from so deep within the earthly soil that one would hardly discern which seed had ever been planted there, pineapple, plantain, or almond.
In the dark, they walked home, the chums, now four instead of three. Fresh, cool, their limbs and spirits light. The euphoria of the night’s stolen minutes still wracked their bodies, while their minds (three of their minds) still struggled to understand how they had been seduced by the moon’s silver glow and the pastels of the island’s rainbow bills. The guilt of these same three would rise with the sun on the following morning, a morning dressed up like any other (clear, new sky; fishcakes and herbal tea wafting from next-door Shirley’s), the cuckold ignorant of the previous night’s betrayal. Like dreamers waking from a hazy, pleasant dream and struggling to return to it, the chums would find instead the gnaw and suck of the truth that tore their edges and rent their middles, devoured them as Nat did the shiny transparent yellow hard candies he kept in his cab.
Left at the Mango Tree Page 13