When, exactly—and how—did Raoul find out that his chums were cheaters? To explain what prompted his logic and his ad (his farina, if you will), we have to get back to the airport and pick up the story from the gritty floor. The morning’s passengers were due at any minute, remember? And Raoul was running late.
He managed to get to work on time and cleaned-up, if barely, and spent the day consumed by the piece of glass in his pocket. It was a tangible tie to Gustave, of this he was sure to have confirmation from Fred Nettles the following day, and he couldn’t get it out of his head. Now perhaps even Stan Kalpi himself, forced to wait a full 24 hours to determine a variable’s value, would have lost sight of the bigger picture, or at least of the solution’s next logical step. Heaven knows that by the time Raoul went round to see Fred Nettles the next morning on his way to work, his flies had worked themselves up into a terrific frenzy. And when Fred identified the glass! (He held it up to the light and rubbed its facets, but nothing is what it appears to be on the surface, I can assure you.)
“Sure, I know this,” Fred said. “Not too many people around here who can afford it. I just had to order some in for…what’s his name…it’s on the tip of my tongue, you know.” Fred held the broken piece to his forehead as if the information he sought might be transferred from the chunk of glass directly into his brain. “Begins with a G…”
Raoul felt like Mr. Stan Kalpi, spilled at the gates of his village on the morning after a long night’s rain. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and back, not daring to put any words into Fred’s mouth, and stifled a smug grin.
“The Gentle contract! There you go! That’s who I ordered this for.”
“The Gentle contract?” Raoul said the words without hearing them, so deafening was the silence in his head (in utter bewilderment his flies had come to a sudden and dead halt).
“Yes. Gentle. Nat Gentle. Said he saw it over at Puymute’s and had to have it. He’s been doing some work on that cottage of his, you know. It’s starting to shape up real nice.”
If Fred Nettles said anything else after that, Raoul didn’t notice. He was busy lining up his variables, fitting them into the bigger picture that was getting uglier and uglier. What was Nat doing at Puymute’s? And why hadn’t he mentioned his recent renovations when they talked at the Belly? Raoul had gone to Fred hoping to learn about some trouble at the plantation, hoping to incriminate Gustave, and instead he had implicated one of his very best friends.
Uglier, indeed.
But then life rarely reads as smoothly as your favorite book. That much, Raoul should have guessed. Though he longed to speak to Nat right then, to confront him with this latest variable and to exact from his friend what duty was due, it was late and there wasn’t time. The airport’s gritty floor again awaited and Raoul hurried off, wondering if he had bothered to tell Fred “thank you” for his time.
Raoul has to make his way to work, but you might be interested to know how Nat’s piece of glass came to be lodged in the sand on Sinner’s Cove in the first place. It was the fault of the shifty wind, the same shifty wind that Nat had on the brain last time he was at the Belly. It had kept him twisting and turning and wriggling on the beach the night before to shield his dinner of fishcakes and beer from its gusting sandy glaze, and in the process the rainbow chunk had fallen from his pocket.
Nat had just come from his cottage, where he had capped off a day of taxi-driving with a debate on the merits of frosted glass, Fred Nettles having in surplus something in a stylish and subtle green. But Nat wouldn’t crack, and in the end Fred Nettles agreed that beveled glass better suited the front door’s decoration. That Nat had a sample of Puymute’s glass to show him was sheer and innocent serendipity, of the kind fitted so perfectly into the bigger picture you can’t help but wonder how serendipitous it really is. There had been no burglary at Puymute’s, and no kerfuffle, only the careless swing of a machete by a hearty and inebriated gardener named Bud.
As luck would have it, when Bud smashed the glass door at the manor house, Nat was there, exacting his due from Gustave, who had paid him heftily for his night’s work on the beach a few days earlier, and paid him now for his promise of more nights’ work to come. Curious Nat. He had picked up a few of the pieces and, admiring their prismatic effects, decided to install the same glass in his own front door. He took one of the chunks with him, to show Fred Nettles what to order, and so with a rainbow in one pocket and rainbow bills in the other, Nat went home. When he and Fred had finished discussing Nat’s new glass, Nat went out to get some dinner.
He ate his takeaway on the beach—with the wind—tilting his body to withstand its breezy affront, ignorant of the clue that the wind’s tricky fingers had fished from his jeans. The islanders tolerated the wind’s assault, as they did that of the tide and the noisy leaves (what choice did they have?), and though the gusts blew the salt from his food and the foam from his beer, Nat resigned himself, and settled in to enjoy the wind’s company. It blew sand in his ears to drown out his conscience and cooled the heat of his remorse.
Like a storm forgotten in the face of a rainbow, Nat’s guilt was drying up a bit more with every colored bill from Gustave that he stashed away. It dried up until all that remained was the slightest puddle, which Nat avoided by driving his cab.
Simple, that.
Things were not so simple for Raoul, who couldn’t simply drive away his troubles. For one thing, like many of the islanders, Raoul didn’t own a car. For another, neither did Mr. Stan Kalpi, whose journey to the past might have taken a different turn entirely had he set out in a noisy vehicle. He mightn’t have heard the songs on the wind, and he certainly wouldn’t have made the leaps and bounds that finally got him home. No, Raoul would have been loath to find escape behind the wheel.
Instead, he found escape at the airport. Not by plane, but by pineapple. While he worked at his typewriter, flanked and backed by wooden cratefuls of the spiny fruit, his hands completed triplicate forms and doled out sticky gifts in a manner so automatic it allowed for flights of fancy to Puymute’s, to Sinner’s Cove, to Nat’s cottage, to the Belly, and back.
If Nat had been at the manor house to collect his piece of glass, Raoul reflected, he must have gone there to see Gustave. (Puymute himself spent all his time in the patch. Everyone on Oh knew that.) But why would Nat ever go to see Gustave? Creepy, that’s what Nat called him. So why on earth pay him a call?
Raoul passed a pineapple to a man from Canada, who dropped it on the floor. Of course! Nat must have been dropping off a passenger when he saw Gustave’s broken glass. He must have dawdled to chat with the girl from the foyer, the one who answered the phone and sat in her sandaled feet, and serendipity had put a rainbow in his pocket. A rainbow that he lost to Sinner’s Cove. (Nat often went there to eat his dinner alone. Everyone on Oh knew that, too.) Perhaps the bigger picture wasn’t so ugly after all, Raoul surmised as he sized up a Japanese businessman’s passport. Aaah-huh-huh. And yet.
A muffled buzz hummed in Raoul’s brain, a niggling suspicion. In his mind the bigger picture was a jigsaw puzzle that he did, un-did, re-did. There were pieces missing, but what they depicted Raoul couldn’t know. Why didn’t his theory of Nat’s passenger and the sandal-footed girl, of serendipity and Sinner’s Cove convince him? He was overlooking a variable, a point on the graph, but which one? Raoul checked his watch. He wanted to smoke, but the stream of incoming passengers continued to trickle. So he continued to check and to stamp, while his buzz continued to hum.
He thought about Nat’s front door, about how spiffy the cottage would look with its new beveled glass. ‘He’s been doing some work on that cottage of his, you know,’ Fred Nettles’ words came back to him. ‘It’s starting to shape up real nice.’ Why had Raoul learned this from Fred and not from Nat himself ? Topics of conversation at the Belly weren’t terribly numerous. Surely in between cricket and signature cocktails Nat might have mentioned his refurbishments. Maybe it was meant to be a surprise
? Maybe he was planning to invite them all for a little lime once the place was tidied up. Yes, that must be the reason! There could be no other to account for Nat’s secrecy.
But Raoul lacked conviction in this theory, too, and the suspicion in his brain niggled more and more. He saw exactly what was going on. He saw it very clearly. Nat had come into some money. Money for redecorating, money he kept a secret, money that must have something to do with Gustave. Raoul’s mate was in cahoots with the local smuggler.
Wasn’t he? Like the zigs and zags of the visitors arriving on Oh, Raoul’s thoughts shilly-shallied. So Nat had some extra cash. Did that naturally denote a connection to Gustave? Of course not! So Nat had passed out expensive cigars at the Belly. Did that mean he was up to no good? Not necessarily! Still the buzz in some far niche of Raoul’s head would not be silenced. He was missing something, it said. His geometry was skewed. Raoul checked his watch again, his urge for a cigarette growing, but the watch’s old hands were reluctant to scale the Roman numerals the years had faded. Time seemed to stand still. Raoul sized up the slow-moving line before him, just a few stragglers more, and shook his head in resignation. Perhaps the shake jarred loose a cog or agitated whatever fly buzzed inside his skull, but suddenly Raoul understood. Suddenly he was back at the Belly and it was the night before, and his glass hovered in midair, suspended in time along with those of his very best friends. At the time he hadn’t been able to put his finger on it, but now, now Raoul identified the wrench in the clock’s works, the sand in the gears of his friends’ solidarity. The reason time had seemed to stand still.
Guilt.
Gentle, cautious Nat was in cahoots with the local smuggler, and the others must know something about it, too. What a fool Raoul had been!
His buzz was strong and decisive now. Not that of a fruit fly or a housefly or even a blowfly, but that of a taunted and hairy bee. Raoul had to sting or get stung, it told him. So like Jack on a farina-filled stomach pedaling straight to the Post, Raoul hurried the stragglers and stamped their forms and rushed off to place an ad for a smuggler.
Now as Raoul makes his way to the grimy-windowed offices of the Morning Crier, ostensibly to further his investigation into where I came from, let me tell you what I discovered about my birth, a happy (for some) and moon-blessed event, in counterpoint to Raoul’s sad discovery that his loved ones have fallen short.
It was a shiny night when I came into the world. The gibbous moon waxed high in the still, dark sky and beckoned my mother, who went to stroll in its light at Sinner’s Cove, her own Edda’s beach. It was there, while walking with her naked arms bent at her sides and her gauzy, transparent skirt entangled in her ankles and thighs, that she felt the first assault inside her swollen belly. Like the salty strike of the waves upon the shore, a watery tongue prodded her rent middle until she yielded and folded, compliant and pliable host to the tide that splashed and stormed her body’s threshold. She cried out and fell, into the very sand where on her wedding night, to the accompaniment of the singing leaves, Wilbur had first discovered what lay past her hem.
As luck would have it, when Edda collapsed to the ground with a cry, Abigail was there, exacting her due from the moon, whose affairs the midwife often minded, now covering things up nice and even, now balancing both sides of some account. Clever Abby. The island’s nighttime magic, in her had found its match.
Though Abigail hadn’t expected to find Edda at Sinner’s Cove that night, having altogether other business to attend to there, find her she did, and just how fortunate a finding it was, probably only I can appreciate. Abigail had known since early on in Edda’s pregnancy that this delivery would be more delicate than most. She feared for Edda’s health and for the happiness of her blood-sister’s little girl. But not even Abigail had dreamed of the lengths she would need to go to to save Edda’s life.
Had Abigail not intervened, Edda would most certainly have lost her baby. I would have succumbed to the sand as my grandmother succumbed to the snow. My mother would never have survived the sadness of another loss; she knew nothing of the nature of lost people and things, of how they sometimes struggled to misplace themselves, or struggled once they were found. She knew nothing of Mr. Stan Kalpi, of how a man (or woman) can find the way home if he (or she) really wants. My grandmother taught me that to be lost is not always a bad state, and I figured out for myself that to be found is sometimes unsettling. There really are some prisms better left buried in the sand.
Where was I? This part of the story always gets me out of focus. It splits the light of my attention into so many rainbows on the beach. Suffice it to say that I did not perish in the sand that night. I could not count myself among the lost. Abigail harvested what the moon had sown and, happy, the moon took its leave. In the morning my cry marked the end of Edda’s travail, her joyful tears christening the dawn of my journey. Together we rested, then with Abigail’s help we found our way home.
I know. You’re thinking I left out the best part. The guts and the gore, the blood and the marrow. I’ll come back to them, I promise. But my story belongs to Raoul a little longer, and if he thinks newspaper ads stir confessions and one crime solves another, then who am I to question?
“Bruce! Bruce, where are you?” Raoul burst through the door, his enthusiasm propelling him right into the desk of the Morning Crier’s editor-in-chief, copyeditor, reporter and special correspondent.
“Raoul! Hello! What a nice surprise!” (Bruce always officially classified unannounced visits this way.)
“You remember that ad I placed a couple weeks ago?” (Both men knew that he did.)
“I remember,” Bruce replied.
“I need to run it again. With a few changes. Here you go.” Raoul stretched his arm past Bruce’s bulky typewriter, and handed him a piece of paper.
“Uh, what’s that? Run it again?” Bruce recalled the visit Abigail had paid him a few days earlier. He wasn’t scared of a lady, not exactly, but it was always best to stay on the good side of a woman of Abigail’s repute. Although he had defended his journalistic integrity against her accusations once, he shuddered to think what she might do to his integrity should he see fit to run the ad a second time. “It’s only been two weeks,” he stalled. “You can’t expect to get a call so quick, Raoul. These things take time. Maybe a month. Or more!”
Not normally prone to violent outbursts, or indeed to outbursts of any kind, Raoul listened startled as his voice reprimanded Bruce with a vehemence in complete disproportion to the crime. While Raoul ranted, Bruce recalled again the visit from Abigail, weighing the wrath of the one versus that of the other and deciding ultimately that his health would be better served by obeying Raoul’s request. When Raoul finally stopped his shouting, Bruce accepted the piece of paper, along with payment of a rainbow bill, and thanked Raoul for his custom. Raoul thanked Bruce in turn, and left the Morning Crier for the still dark of evening.
To clear his head of the flies and bees that populated it, Raoul took a walk, feeling a proper fool for his explosion in front of poor Bruce. It was fine and dandy, nay, helpful, for the islanders to think him mad, but it was another thing entirely for them to think him a thug.
Raoul was unduly hard on himself. The weeks since my arrival had been tough. He had juggled the demands of a public smuggling case and those of private turmoil. And he was troubled to find them more intrinsically linked than he thought, the common denominators none other than Bang, Cougar, and Nat. On top of that, Raoul had gotten himself blacklisted at the one haven Oh ever offered him, the Pritchard T. Lullo Public Library.
What right-minded, dark-eyed, bespectacled Customs and Excise Officer of the plain-as-noses-on-faces philosophical school, when faced with a red-eyed, cheek-stained, white-skinned grandchild; a red-eyed, cheek-stained, white-skinned smuggler; pineapple-poaching pals who betray him; a blind and desperate daughter; an indifferent and starry-eyed son-in-law; a midwife who won’t go away; a barefooted mathematician-musician mentor; and a ban from the public lib
rary, wouldn’t be moved to threaten the editor-in-chief, copyeditor, reporter and special correspondent of the local paper who had qualms about placing an ad? A blow-up was long overdue.
Raoul’s walk didn’t take him along Edda’s beach, or indeed along any beach, where the geometry was too stark and the secrets that lay buried in the sand too shocking. Instead Raoul walked through town, his legs carrying him, as if by instinct, past the public library just as Ms. Lila was locking up. She pulled the heavy doors shut with a thunk and turned to the road in a hurry, late for her appointment with the hairdresser. When she saw Raoul she gave a start. “Oh! Good evening,” she said.
“Good evening,” replied Raoul, who had been tempted to turn away and avoid her gaze. It wasn’t that Raoul didn’t want to see Ms. Lila. He very much did. But recalling his fit of madness—real madness—on the Tuesday before, and her subsequent fit of pique, he felt a proper fool for the second time that day, and simply couldn’t bear for her to see him. He had been wrong to think there was something better out there than the librarian’s usual offerings.
You can imagine how great his relief when she addressed him: “Raoul, I’m in a bit of a rush, I’m afraid. If you’d like to keep me company a piece, I’m just walking to the next gap ahead.”
They were a perfect match that night, Raoul and Ms. Lila, as Ms. Lila was feeling a bit of a fool herself. No one had ever shown more respect for her material than Raoul, and if something had moved him to tear up her sheets, she might have tried to find out what it was instead of just kicking him out. The shade of the cookery shelf was dark and drab without him, and she waxed nostalgic for Tuesdays past.
Raoul tried to speak, but the apology in his head wasn’t quite sure how to displace itself. Thankfully, Ms. Lila was a clever chickadee, who sensed his embarrassment and remorse even as she struggled to communicate her own. Perhaps if his words and hers were insufficient, those of loftier minds might do. From her bag she removed the book of poetry that he had refused when she offered it on Tuesday, the book with the poems about the beach and with the very nice cover. Raoul accepted it with a grateful nod, one that Ms. Lila returned.
Left at the Mango Tree Page 19