It was almost sunset and Shad was pouring a drink for Minion when Danny walked into the bar still in the red swimming trunks. He looked angry, sorry, sad, down on his luck, all rolled into one.
“I know you don’t want a white rum,” Shad commented, waving the rum bottle.
“I came to ask if you could take me to the airport on Monday. I know it’s your day off.”
Shad rubbed his head. “You leaving?”
“Yeah, time to get back.”
“I have to ask the boss for the car, but I sure is okay.”
“We need to leave about nine o’clock. Sorry it’s so early.”
“I never knew you was leaving, though, kind of sudden like.”
Danny was all business. “I need to drop the car off in Port Antonio first, so you can follow behind and then drive me to Montego Bay, okay?”
“No problem, man.” Shad finished pouring the rum for Minion. He slid it along the counter before turning to Danny. “Drink on the house?”
“I’m kind of sandy and wet—”
“These bar stools made for water, don’t worry.” The bartender opened the fridge and pulled out a beer. “On the house.”
Popping the bottle open, Shad tilted his head at Danny. “Look like a bad day, man.”
“Life,” Danny said, looking down at his fingers wrapped around the red-and-white label.
“Life rough, yes.”
The big man took a swig and licked his lips. “Maybe Jamaica does that to people.”
From the end of the counter a call went up from Eli for another rum. Shad filled the order and returned to lean across the counter. “You know what happen, star? Problems follow people to Jamaica, and the country throws them back in their face. You can’t run away from yourself, even on an island.”
“I don’t know where you get your wisdom from, boy, but you make sense.”
“How things going with Janet?”
“Same shit, different day. I always seem to attract these kind of women.” Shad raised his eyebrows and spread his hands. “That’s the shit I brought with me, you mean?” The bartender shrugged, leaving the man with his own words.
Danny wiped his forehead. “I tell you, Janet is like a fucking vine. I can’t get rid of her.”
“You play with puppy, you catch its fleas.”
“The lesson I just learned,” Danny said to the beer in his hand. “I should have known better. Forty-five damn years and I don’t know to leave the crazy ones alone.”
Shad walked to the wall next to the kitchen and snapped on the lights. Stark shadows suddenly appeared, his signal to tune the radio to a song that would make the starkness more tolerable, tonight a song about red-red wine.
“How is the artist lady?” he ventured when he turned to Danny. “You not seeing her no more?”
The man’s eyes were dark under the lightbulb, his nose spreading a broad shadow over the lower half of his face. “She left.”
“Left? When?”
“This morning. Just packed up and cleared out, didn’t tell a soul.” Danny dabbed at his scalp with a napkin. “Maybe it’s a good thing, I don’t know.”
Shad frowned and felt for the stool behind him. “What you telling me, she leave Largo and nobody know?”
“She told the maid she was going painting this morning and that’s the last anyone has seen of her.”
“Who told you?”
“I went by the place where she always paints. It was around lunchtime, around one, when she usually takes a break, but she wasn’t there. I figured she was up at the house, so I drove up there. The housekeeper told me Sarah had gone. She said she didn’t say a word to anyone, just left when no one was looking.”
“But she went to paint, you say. She leave then?”
“Apparently, she went out painting like normal, but at some point in the morning she came back and packed up.”
“That sound strange,” Shad mused, looking across the darkening bay toward the house on the far end. “She go painting and then come back and pack up, don’t sound right. And she didn’t say good-bye to nobody?”
“Not even a note.”
Offshore, the island was just a silhouette with the red strands of clouds behind it. It was that slippery time between day and night when nothing looked real. “She don’t seem like a woman who would do that, just disappear sudden like that. I thought she was a woman with broughtupsy, you know, good breeding.”
Danny drained his bottle. “Jamaica does funny things to people, man.”
“And you don’t know why she leave? Must be a reason.”
It took the man a while to answer. “I have an idea, a couple of ideas, really. She might have left because she felt kind of trapped. Roper paid her plane fare one-way from England. He said he’d pay the other half of the trip when she painted even one large picture. She usually paints these little things,” he added, making a square with his thick fingers. “Beautiful things, but always small, but she never painted a big picture the whole time she was here. It was like she couldn’t do it. She might have got frustrated and just gave up.”
“You want another beer? You have to pay for it this time, though.”
Danny nodded. “She said she had a plan, though. She was going to paint bigger and bigger until she got up to a real big painting. Maybe she couldn’t do it.”
“No apology, no explanation.” Shad shook his head and grunted. There was something unnatural about it, a suddenness that didn’t suit the woman’s personality. “You said you had a couple ideas. You thinking she know you don’t like white women?”
“No, I’d gone past that and we were getting along real good. I was doing like you said, just seeing her for who she was inside, a real sweet woman. I was even starting to feel that maybe I’d missed the boat in the past by focusing on the whole color thing with women.” A shrug, a boyish gesture on him. “No, I think it was something else.”
Shad placed a Red Stripe in front of Danny and waited. There was always another reason, every customer had one.
The American took his time, sipped his beer, took a breath. “I told her I’d gone out with Janet again. She never said nothing when I told her, she didn’t even seem upset. But now I’m thinking she was angry and that’s why she left.”
“That sound more like it,” Shad exclaimed. “I knew it! No woman going to leave because of a painting. Women act from their heart, not the head. She was feeling—”
“How much I owe you?”
“Two dollars. You going to call her in England?”
Slapping a couple US dollars on the counter, Danny stood up. “She never gave me her number. See you Monday.”
CHAPTER THIRTY
* * *
Everything seemed to be coming apart, Eric reflected as he looked at the loafers he’d worn to work many moons back, New York written all over them. The upper leather of both shoes was moldy from sitting in his damp closet, and the soles were separating from the rest of the shoes—a metaphor for his life.
“Mistah Keller,” Ras Walker said, tossing his salt-and-pepper dreadlocks back as he bent over the shoes, “I think you have to throw them shoes out. You can’t wear them again.”
“But I’ve hardly worn them.”
The shoemaker rubbed his polish-blackened finger around the edges of the shoes. “No, man, these shoes finished. Like how you going to be a manager again, with a new hotel and everything, you need nice shoes. You can’t be walking around in old shoes or rubber sandals no more. Take my advice, throw them shoes out and buy some new leather ones in Ocho Rios.”
Eric took the shoes from the man and stuffed them back in the brown paper bag while Ras Walker bared his large teeth in a smile, two teeth missing unashamedly from the top row. He leaned on the inverted metal boot in front of him. “I glad you come anyway, suh. I meaning to ask you if I could have a shoe-s
hine stand in the new hotel lobby. Not a big one, you know.” He looked off into the distance, his mental image of the stand painted already. “A pretty red, yellow, and green one, with a sign saying Reggae Boots. What you think?”
Eric grunted. “I don’t know if tourists need that, Ras. They wear sandals the whole time they’re on the island.”
“But when they go dancing at night, they want to look nice, right, or if they having a wedding or something? And I was thinking I could have a little sandal section if they want to buy sandals.”
“You thinking about that from now?”
“I thinking about my nephew Saul. He almost finish school and he going to need a work. He could manage it for me. His mother say she don’t want him hanging around in Port Antonio. She afraid he going to get into trouble.”
“Let’s talk about it when the hotel is further along, Ras. It’s going to be a year or two before it’s finished.”
“So long?”
“Yes, ma-an,” Eric said in his pseudopatois. “We still have plenty paperwork left to do, then we start construction. It’s going to take a while.”
The Rastafarian stroked the metal boot and looked up at the bar owner, his smile fading. “I was speaking to Mistah Delgado the other day. He said it going to take about nine months to build, as long as we don’t have no strikes or nothing. I was talking to him about doing little extra work myself during the building time. My father show me how to do little carpentry, you know. Like how times sort of tight, and not much shoemaker work happening now, I was thinking I could make a little money myself.”
Eric neatly folded the top of the brown paper bag. “Let’s talk about it down the road, okay?”
It was the answer he’d given to at least a dozen Largoites in the last few weeks. There’d been requests for construction jobs, housekeeping jobs, gardening and maintenance jobs. Even Solomon had approached him the week before, wielding a knife and a yellow onion, to ask if he was going to be the chef in the new hotel.
He would be first chef in line for his old job, his employer had informed him. “But you’re going to need help,” Eric had added. “Twenty rooms means forty meals three times a day, plus staff meals. You think you can handle that?”
“Pshaw, man, that just child play,” Solomon had answered, waving the knife. “When I was chef at Three Seasons Hotel in Mo Bay, is three sous chef and four hundred meals a day I have.” Ever since the conversation, Solomon had been as cheerful as a dour man could get. He had been coming to work on time, drinking less at the bar in the evenings, and taking fewer days off for his indigestion.
Nothing like a little hope, Eric thought as he drove away from the shoe repair hut. Everyone in Largo was speaking of the future hotel in glowing terms. The idea, floating only mirage-like on their horizon at first, seemed to have drifted into the villagers’ consciousness and now become as solid as reality. It had become intertwined with their personal dreams. The place had even been given a name: The New Largo Bay Inn, they were all calling it. Every time Eric heard it, it felt like one more thorn in his side, reminding him that it was all or nothing at this point.
That evening, his son drove the point home again. “What do you mean the investor . . . waffling?” Joseph asked. He was speaking on a cell phone that kept going in and out.
“He was all gung ho when he first came, really excited. But things haven’t been working out.” Eric sat down heavily in the kitchen chair. “He’s going back to the States.”
“What’s wrong . . . the financials hold up?” Eric pictured his tall son frowning, the brown curl falling into his eye.
“Your report has held up, no problem.”
“Something must have turned him off,” Joseph commented dryly.
“It’s more expensive than he thought,” his father replied, defending himself during three fade-outs, explaining the setbacks, the time it was taking to get approvals from the Parish Council, the added costs. “And then Horace is holding out about installing the infrastructure on the island, so that’s kind of up in the air.” He sighed and looked out the window. There was a choppy sea today, afternoon glare bouncing off the waves.
“I guess if it’s going to work out, it’ll work out,” Joseph sighed—a different Joseph. His son had never been a fatalist, not that he knew, anyway, but the words could have come right out of someone else’s mouth.
“How’s Raheem?” Eric asked, trying to sound casual.
“I think he has a job coming up in Bombay.”
Eric pictured his son’s elegant friend modeling designer clothes in India, a photographer trying to capture the moment, the crowd and the cows getting in the way. “His parents—I know they’re Trinidadian-Indian, right?—they must be excited—the mother country and all.”
“I’m sure they are.” Joseph paused and his voice rose an octave. “Hey, guess what? I got my first client.”
It was another pivotal moment for father and son, who’d seen each other rarely since Joseph had turned nine, when Eric’s wife had divorced him and moved to Virginia. Joseph’s recent trip to Largo to write the business proposal—at his father’s urging—had created a shift from their former polite exchanges and, when the thirty-one-year-old delivered a fine report, he had won his father’s respect. Eric took a dish from a cupboard while Joseph told of a client hiring him to analyze her agency and write large grant proposals. He recounted the meeting, almost verbatim, and how he’d shown the executive director the proposal he’d written for the new hotel.
“She was impressed, I could tell. I have to thank you for that.” Eric spooned rice and peas onto the plate, grateful that his son had something to thank him for at last.
“You did a great job.”
“They just called me . . . got the job,” Joseph continued, his voice light with happiness.
“Terrific! When do you start?”
“April first.”
A sea breeze gusted through the window and Eric pushed his hair out of his face with his bent arm. “You’re sure you want to start then, April Fools’ Day?” he said, chuckling.
“Dad, you . . . crap like that.” Joseph went back to talking about the hotel. “No, seriously, dude, it’s got to work,” he urged, no longer fatalistic, the boy whose diaper he’d changed in the middle of Central Park, now giving him orders. “You need to get Caines back in that good mood. You don’t have anything else to fall back on—”
A click. Eric found himself holding a dead phone and a plate of cold rice and peas. He’d wanted to mention the laptop.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
* * *
Sunlight had made its way through the leaves of the tree outside the window and fell in small triangles on the snow-white tiles. An unseen dog made whimpering noises while it scratched its fur. A tap dripped in the bathroom. In the distance a car horn; a few minutes later the sound of a bigger vehicle not far from where she was, the rattling engine fading away.
Sarah lay on her side curled up, her heart still pounding in her throat, her arms wrapped around her legs. It would be about two in the afternoon, maybe three. Yesterday she’d started marking off the days with a pencil and there were two one-inch marks on the wall near the floor beside the bed.
She was hungry but her stomach was tight, her mouth sour. A tray sat on the table beside her. Food had been brought for her again, this time a soup with thick bread, and again she hadn’t eaten. When she’d drunk from the tap, the water had tasted metallic, but she’d given in, too thirsty and tired to care.
The room she’d inspected and paced for the last two days was a white bunker, the only furniture being a double bed, a side table, and a plastic chair. A locked wooden door led to the corridor and an open one to the bathroom. On one wall, louver windows, three feet above the floor and six feet long, broke the monotony of the room. Vertical burglar bars covered the windows at four-inch intervals (she’d measured them with her fin
gers) and were intersected by heart-shaped designs, both ensuring her safety and preventing escape.
It was not a new house. She’d known it from the beginning, the stale smells of food and musty furniture reaching her under the hood when the driver had pulled up to the house—Square Jaw beside her still clutching her wrist. She’d heard the driver getting out of the car and opening a gate. He’d driven about a hundred yards before stopping again. Dragging her out of the car, they’d pulled her up some steps and into a room. Someone pulled the hood off, her head jerking back with the tug, the fabric scratching her cheeks. She was standing in a large room with armchairs arranged along bare walls. Visible through the louver windows was the ocean; the house was on a hill.
A thin, worn man with graying hair had been standing in the room smoking a cigarette and staring at her. He wore a white shirt with long sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and his eyes had ashen circles around them. When he spoke, his voice surprised her.
“Anybody see you?” he’d said, his voice high-pitched and nasal, almost as thin as his body.
“You think I stupid or what?” the driver had answered. They’d hustled her down a corridor with several closed doors. They opened one door and pushed her inside.
“What—what are you going to do to me?” she’d managed to say when they released her.
“Rest yourself,” Square Jaw had said. She’d retreated to a corner as they latched the door on the outside. A few minutes later they’d returned with her large suitcase, which they’d thrown down in a corner of the room. She’d stared at it numbly, realizing it must have been in the trunk. The easel box and her painting bags they’d stacked on the folding chair, plopping the large sheets of paper on top. The computer was missing.
Who her captors were and what they wanted she had no clue. They wouldn’t answer her questions and she could hardly understand a word they said, even when they spoke as if she were deaf or stupid.
Shortly after Square Jaw and the driver had left her that first day, a woman in a gingham dress had entered the room with a pillow and a pink flowered sheet. Sarah had been standing in a corner of the room hugging her arms, and she’d been startled to see the woman enter as if she were making up a hotel room. While she was tucking in the first corner of the sheet, the woman had said something without looking up and Sarah had stared at her.
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