Tremor looked at the apron tied around Professor Cleave’s waist. “The way you talk. Way you walk. Shoes splitting. Wallet falling apart. Don’t know how you keep a wife.”
“I see how you make yourself the big man in front of young girls.” Professor Cleave gestured at Tremor’s arms. “Lying about knife fights and filling your pockets when their backs are turned.”
“I don’t lie to them about—”
“You’re lying now. What happens when everyone starts lying?”
Tremor leaned back and listened to the lurching hand of a broken clock. Professor Cleave dropped a pink slip onto the couch.
“Bring the sandwich to the lady at the bar. In the green cardigan.”
Professor Cleave left the room, and we fumbled about beneath the couch for crumbs, our antennae twisted by strange transmissions moving across the harbor and the nature of the exchange we’d just witnessed. Some of us finally reconciled ourselves to the Ambassador’s meager offerings, shook the dust from our wings, and adjourned to the lounge.
By then, Professor Cleave had calmed himself. When Tremor appeared, he gestured to Helen and walked to the end of the bar to retrieve the bottle of ketchup. Tremor’s expression hardened as he set a plate on the counter.
While Helen struggled to pull a wallet from her sweater, Tremor looked down at the floor, at a badge bearing a corporate logo. On impulse, he swept it from the floor and into his pocket and pressed himself against the bar beside Dave.
“If you need something to relax on holiday, I can get it.”
Dave turned on his stool and struggled to focus on Tremor. “How about some weed?”
Professor Cleave returned with a bottle of ketchup. “You need to collect the newspapers from the lobby. Some are three days old. Take them to the trash if you won’t read them.”
“Don’t want to read them. Nothing for me in any of them,” Tremor said, dragging his fingers along the bar on his way from the lounge.
“Pay him no heed,” Professor Cleave said. “He’s a foolish boy.”
Dave tossed a matchbook on the bar. “Just young and stupid. We all were at one point.”
Professor Cleave furrowed his brow and tried to remember such a point in his own life. Nothing came to his mind. Nothing came to ours either.
Helen picked at the flaccid lettuce edging her plate. We contented ourselves with dropped peanut shells. Last call came as a relief to us, and to Professor Cleave, too. He seemed grateful to avoid Tremor at the end of the night, when he carried a bag of trash to the dumpster behind the kitchen, keeping his face to the sky to escape the smell of decay. He even seemed grateful for our company when he climbed into the taxi.
“It was a long night. As long as the morning.”
At the sound of his voice, we crawled from the vents and into the moonlight falling upon the dashboard. Professor Cleave fumbled with the radio dial, drifting over bits of static and opting, in the end, for silence.
“There is no accounting for taste, my students. Her sweater might have turned your antennae,” he said, pulling from the curb. “Desmond always says you wouldn’t ride a certain sort for practice, but then he can be crude.”
We fluttered our wings, surprised by Professor Cleave’s rare foray into gossip.
“He wasn’t in much of a condition to choose. I wouldn’t have thought either of them fit to walk. Hopefully he’s not fit to do much else. She had the look of someone stumbling toward an open grave. Just like the other one, so many years ago.”
He neared a group of men standing at the edge of an empty lot. One of the men stepped into the road, peered into the taxi, and then let Professor Cleave pass.
“Who knows how he’d act if I didn’t know his father? These are strange times, with gunmen posing as politicians and a growing criminal element governing the streets.” Our antennae quivered. “But you don’t like to hear these things. You are content to squabble with one another and fiddle while Rome burns.”
Beaten down by his deteriorating mood, we remained silent until we reached Stokes Hill.
As Professor Cleave pulled through his front gate, he looked at a light in the front window and took a deep breath. Naturally, we were thrilled to come home to Topsy, a man given to dispensing crumbs and compliments, except when it came to Little Butts and his well-scrubbed ilk, moralizing types, and those who chintzed on cigarettes or chocolate.
“I heard your man Butts on the news today, talking his usual garbage,” Topsy said, rousing himself when Professor Cleave entered the house. He sat up in his chair and coughed. “I could smell his garbage coming right through the radio. Strange, because he’s always drowning in some unfortunate woman’s perfume.”
“It’s after midnight,” Professor Cleave said, unbuttoning his shirt. “I suppose you didn’t drink enough to sleep.”
“You always have a word about everything. Everybody’s doings.” Topsy pulled a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. “I should never have mentioned that monkey’s ass. Now I need to calm my nerves.”
“It’s any excuse with you—”
“Before you go to bed, remind me to tell you a story I got from Morris’s daughter today. About the tailor who worked in the fabric shop years ago. The one who ran off with the rich English lady with big feet.”
Professor Cleave pressed his fingers to his temples and stepped into the bathroom. Beneath a bare bulb, he peeled off his clothes, held his shirt to his nose and then hung it from a hook. To the sound of his father’s voice coming from the front room, he considered a tangle of socks and underwear soaking in the sink, beneath a chalky film of disintegrated suds.
“He wouldn’t give the first thought to anyone else.”
He stepped into the concrete stall and dragged a cracked piece of soap across his arms, twisted his body beneath a miserly stream and watched water trickle down his chest and fall from the tip of his underappreciated penis in tiny beads.
We left him to his mutterings and wandered into the front room, safe in the knowledge that Cora Cleave had gone to bed. We, at least, wanted to hear the story about the rich English lady tripping on big feet into the proverbial sunset with a local shopkeeper of middling status. How improbable and fantastic their love must have been! The social censure their elopement must have inspired! We assembled beneath the buffet and listened, utterly rapt, savoring salacious details Professor Cleave would never have discussed. Love, in all its complexity and wonder, with all its concessions and compromises, often eluded Professor Cleave’s full understanding, and so he generally avoided the subject. It was, far and away, our favorite subject.
That night, we dreamed about floppy feet kissed a thousand times and the joy inspired by a master tailor’s skilled touch.
TEMPEST
PROFESSOR CLEAVE’S FATHER WAS a man given to telling dramatic stories, and for that reason often accused of embellishment by people lacking imagination. To be fair to some of his strained listeners, Topsy’s presentation of certain events didn’t always accord with narratives prevailing in sober circles. Still, we much preferred his stories to Professor Cleave’s lectures. Our favorite story concerned the evening Topsy and his friends set fire to the Markeley house, the largest plantation manor on the island, back when Topsy was a young man and the British still “ruled the roost.”
We remember the Markeley house well. Some of us settled there in 1758, only to find the Markeleys so miserly that their slaves were nearly starving. Miserliness, it turns out, trickles down. Nary a scrap could be found lying about after the Markeleys feasted like hogs. Naturally, we always welcomed the story of Topsy burning the house of “the most miserable rotters on St. Anne.”
At the time of the events recounted, the Markeley place had been abandoned for twenty years. Ruined by the Great Depression, the Markeleys had quietly sold their land for “chicken squat” and abandoned the house, a manor too expensive for any local to buy. Too impoverished to transport their furniture and too proud to sell it, they simply announced plans to “summe
r in England,” carted two dozen trunks to Portsmouth Harbor, and drove their Vauxhall convertible, “a fine automobile for foolish bastards,” onto a waiting steamer, never to return.
The house stood empty for years. Unmolested, we feasted on stale crackers left in pantries, compost abandoned by goats set to permanent pasture, and crumbling paste on peeling wallpaper. In time, the house assumed an air of decrepitude that recalled the moral depravity of the Markeleys’ slave-owning past, and rumors of troubled spirits haunting its hallways began to circulate. Superstition, more than any lock, kept most trespassers at bay.
Topsy declared the rumors “utter rubbish.” One evening, after ten hours “packing bananas for a knuckle-dragging bastard,” he and “a number of lads happened to wander past” the Markeley place and decided to “put foolish tales to rest.” With three bottles of cane liquor and a crowbar, they worked up their courage and pried open a window. That evening, and for many to come, they lounged in dusty claw-footed chairs and toasted their own bravery. Without a music lesson between them, they played bawdy songs on a piano twenty years out of tune. They held boxing matches in the cobwebbed ballroom. At the time, certain elements on St. Anne had been taken with boxing fever on account of Floyd Patterson’s knockout of Brian London, a “British bruiser with no business wearing gloves.” For weeks following Patterson’s victory, Topsy and his friends would wrap their hands in the Markeleys’ moldering linen napkins and “have a go” at one another, rattling the crystal chandelier with each knockdown.
They generally kept us awake all evening, and we led a sleepless existence until Owen Jackson infamously muttered, “The British will never leave, and we’ll be picking bloody bananas ’til the end of eternity.” Incensed by Jackson’s resignation, inspired by Patterson, and intoxicated by beer, Topsy challenged Jackson to “stand accountable for his nonsense.” Without bothering to wrap his hands, he delivered a combination of jabs and hooks that had “his man against the ropes” (the piano) and stumbling into a lantern. Within seconds, the flame from the overturned lantern attached itself to a drape and smoke filled the room. With “fire at their heels and the law certain to follow,” Topsy and his friends scrambled from the house and scattered in every direction. Topsy and Morris alone paused on a hilltop to watch smoke spiraling beneath black rain clouds, knowing they’d done something unpardonable, and in that way irrevocably bound themselves to one other.
If torrential rains extinguished the fire before it entirely destroyed the house, the night’s events nevertheless “changed the course of St. Anne’s history.” In the week following the fire, the magistrate questioned every amateur boxer on the island. Not one divulged a single inciting circumstance. Their brush with the law and their “sworn silence to the last” confirmed a growing sense of solidarity among those who later formed the UGG. In that sense, the right hook that bloodied Jackson’s nose represented a “decisive blow against the British ruling classes.”
Although the magistrate did question Topsy and his friends, we could never confirm Topsy’s version of events. We were in the pantry when the fire started, and by the time we scuttled from the house, Topsy had disappeared. When we returned the following morning to reclaim the cupboards, we found only two beer bottles lying on the ballroom floor.
None of that mattered, though, when Topsy told the story. We’d listen, rapt, as he described flames crawling up the side of the house and his sense, standing beside Morris, that he’d never felt more alive or possessed of such faith in the future, and that he’d just lived through a beautiful moment that would protect him forever against regret, whatever might happen on this earth or in the hereafter.
CHAPTER FIVE
HOW MUCH OUR BINGES had changed since those hopeful bacchanals following the Markeleys’ departure! On the night of Professor Cleave’s anniversary, we indulged without joy in the remnants of club sandwiches and Cane Cutters to forget another day frittered away in dusty air ducts. We awoke the next morning feeling utterly wretched, with crumbs clinging to our carapaces and our antennae glued to the floor by pineapple juice residue. How desperately we wanted to fault others for our predicament, knowing we had only ourselves to blame. If the Americans had ordered round after round of Cane Cutters, we’d gone along, three sheets to the wind and without a single thought to the future.
The Americans were hardly in better shape. Dave lifted himself on an elbow and let his gaze wander from the cobweb filaments dangling from the ceiling to the harbor’s glittering surface. He lowered his feet to the floor and studied the edge of a quivering puddle beneath the air conditioner, dizzied by the feeling of freedom after months of waking in a cramped cabin. He inhaled deeply and his erection stirred. We knew he was lingering in that wonderful moment when pleasant memories of recklessness still reign over incipient regrets and budding headaches. That moment was already fading.
He turned to Helen, curled into herself on the second bed. Her wrinkled sundress was clinging to her narrow frame and damp hair was plastered to the side of her face. She possessed the febrile appearance of someone lost in a labyrinth of nightmares. He massaged his forehead and struggled to remember something of their conversation. At the bar, he’d been relieved by the slow loosening of her speech and a burst of nervous laughter at some joke he’d made. Now, she seemed gripped by renewed misery. Anxious at the thought of her waking, he pulled a pair of shorts and a shirt from his duffel bag. We peeled our antennae from the tiles and sought the cover of dust ruffles and empty drawers.
In the bathroom, he splayed his hand across the wall to steady himself. His urine was streaming into the toilet when he noticed the box of razors and a square of stained gauze beside the sink. His hand grew numb, and when he looked down, his penis seemed disconnected from his body and the drops of urine on the toilet seat. He pressed his lips together to stanch a rising sickness and stepped in front of the mirror. His skin appeared ashen and fragile upon the glass. He was, he decided, more hungover than he’d first realized; she was a greater liability. He used a washcloth to sweep the box and gauze into a wastebasket, tossed the cloth on top of the blades, and scrubbed his fingers until they were raw. When he stepped from the bathroom, she was sitting up in bed, wrapped in her sheet, with her back against the headboard.
He wiped his mouth with the flat of his hand. “Hope you don’t mind that I crashed here. Don’t remember if we talked about it.”
She folded him into a wide stare that encompassed her luggage, the sweater on the floor, and the smudged wall behind him, as if struggling to place him in her memories of the past twenty-four hours.
“I usually don’t get hangovers,” he continued, trying to stave off silence.
“I don’t know what I’m going to do,” she began.
Her voice cracked, and he imagined a deep fracture widening inside of her. He considered her drawn features and sensed the sorrow embedded in everything she’d touched—the cardboard box, the lifeless sweater, the damp sheet twisted by nightmares.
“Right now, I’m thinking about what I’m not doing. At work, I’d be delivering towels to trust-fund kids. Probably see what this place is like before I decide anything.” He waited for her to speak and then walked to the air conditioner. “Want this thing on or off?”
“It doesn’t matter,” she said.
He turned off the air conditioner to silence its rattle, wishing she’d shown some preference or will of her own. He stepped onto the balcony and scanned the harbor, now a depthless metallic grey, and the narrow crescent of a town glutted with idling taxis and flatbed trucks. Beyond the terminal, streets lined with tiny shops trailed into a tinderbox slum. When he stepped back into the room, she hadn’t moved.
“Not even ten, and it’s brutal out there. Town’s pretty small.”
“They didn’t tell me anything about this place. On the ship.”
He nodded slowly. “I’ll go downstairs to see what the front desk knows about flights.” He searched her face for some response, and finding none, turned away.
When he left, she let the sheet slip from her shoulders and examined her arms with the bafflement of Lazarus waking to his botched resurrection. She rose from the bed, started pacing and then froze, recalling the blades she’d left on the counter, his stricken face when he emerged from the bathroom and the way he’d slumped against the balcony railing. Wishing he’d left before she woke and spared her the humiliation of facing him in daylight, she considered locking herself in the room, but he’d left his duffel bag beside his bed. And she was suddenly, and deeply, afraid of being alone. Averting her eyes from every mirror, she collected her sweater and left the room. She found him standing in front of the hotel, smoking.
“There’s one flight a day to Miami. We just missed it.” He surveyed the quiet street leading into Portsmouth. “Airport’s probably an airstrip for puddle jumpers.”
A trickle of perspiration slid down her arm. She tugged at her sleeves and the smell of spent adrenaline rose from her sweater.
“Are there flights to other places?”
“San Juan flight doesn’t leave until this evening. We’d just be stuck there overnight. Probably better than here, but I’m too hungover to decide.” He tossed his cigarette onto the sidewalk. “There’s a tourist office at the terminal. We can book flights for tomorrow there.”
“You can stay in my room tonight. To save money,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t matter to me.”
Thinking only of his dwindling severance pay, he nodded.
They walked in silence with dust clinging to their feet, waving away flies drawn to the moisture in their eyes. At the harbor, they stood beside a retaining wall and watched eddies of brown foam turning along the shore.
“There’s so much sea glass,” she said. “And garbage.”
“Ships dump shit in the ocean all the time. It’s gotta wash up somewhere. Just like us.”
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