The Moon Always Rising

by Alice C. Early

  Her face to the streaming sky, she let the drops pelt her eyelids and fill her mouth. She stripped off her clothing; the wind-driven water pricked her skin. She lathered all over and soaped her tangled hair, then threw her arms wide and felt the water dance off her shoulders and sluice over her breasts.

  She tossed her clothing through the window and climbed in after it. When she lit a lantern, the kitchen filled with wavering shadows and she caught a glimpse of her naked silhouette, her curls wild and her body elongated and skinny. The last year may have reduced her to sinews, but they were tough and resilient.

  After double-checking the shutter latches, she carried the lantern and putter upstairs and listened at the bathroom door. Wind, rain, but no monkey noises. In the bedroom, she pulled on one of Jack’s shirts and rolled the sleeves. With the storm spending the remains of its fury and the monkeys vacated, she felt safe enough. She made up the bed with stained sheets worn soft and slid in, laying the putter against her hip.

  She smelled cigar. When she opened her eyes, the darkness was velvety, absolute. Her tongue was furry with rum. She listened. The storm had moved on, but she sensed that its enveloping, terrifying presence had been replaced by another presence, equally formless.

  A cigar tip flared, and in its faint light she thought she saw a man’s face, disembodied, floating above the foot of the bed. She sat up, fumbled for the lantern, and struck a match, but she couldn’t light the mantle and succeeded only in singeing her fingertips. She shook the match out and tossed it away from the bed. In its brief flare, the face was all beard and dark eyes.

  “I just had to see if it was you,” the man said, “who bought the house.” His voice was raspy, barely above a whisper.

  She took in a sharp breath. She struck another match and managed to light the lantern. He seemed to be jelling but cast no shadow. He was wearing a rumpled linen shirt. The expression in his eyes was apprehensive, needy.

  She grabbed the putter.

  “It all depends on you now,” he said.

  “How’d you get in?”

  “You let me in.”

  Her mind raced through the house, thinking of ways in, ways out, something left unlocked. She checked the bedside table. No phone. She remembered phones in the study and next to the big leather chair. Hurricane. Lines down.

  He swept the cigar to his waist and bowed. “I apologize for my appalling lack of manners,” he said. “I thought it okay to help myself to one of these, but I should’ve asked the lady’s permission to smoke.” He examined the glowing ash. “I needed this,” he said, “to steady my nerves.” He took an ashtray off the dresser and rolled the cigar in it, sculpting the ash into a neat mound. His eyes glittered as if he was drunk or drugged. “I’ve got more at stake here than you do.”

  “Get. Out.”

  “Don’t banish me, sweet,” he said. He blew three smoke rings and watched them wobble and dissipate. He looked to be in his forties and was tanned and weathered, with dark curls falling over his forehead and pleading eyes. “I came to welcome you, but I’ve blown that completely. My charm isn’t what it once was, obviously.”

  A gust of wind shook the palms. The surf raged.

  “I should have let you settle in first,” he said. He pulled on the cigar and exhaled toward the ceiling. “As Wordsworth says, I was given ‘so much of earth, so much of heaven, and such impetuous blood.’”

  She tightened her grip on the putter.

  “I just can’t get the hang of this.” He stepped back until he was standing in the doorframe. Khaki shorts. Barefoot. “All the rules are changed.”

  He held the ashtray in his laced fingers like a precious vessel and looked at the ceiling. The smoke curled up his torso and wreathed his head. When he looked back at her, his eyes had lost their glitter. They bored into her in a way that was familiar, seductive. “I should be good at befriending a woman as impetuous as I. A woman who glows in the sunset and dances in the rain. I was foolish to think we could take up where we left off.”

  The face and voice were vaguely familiar, his gaze like a remembered caress. “When have we met?” she asked.

  “I was too tired tonight to get back to that younger me,” he said. “This was the best I could do. At least I’m in my so-called prime.” He shifted the ashtray to his left hand and pulled a small bouquet of blue flowers from the waistband of his shorts. He took a step closer.

  “Stay where you are,” she said, but she lowered the putter.

  “Periwinkle,” he said. “Violette de Sorcier. Protection against spirits, if you want it.” He kissed the nosegay and tossed it onto the foot of the bed. “Some of them can be real pests, or so I hear.” He bowed again. “See you,” he said, his gaze on the flowers. “I hope.”

  He looked at her imploringly, saluted, and stepped into the hall, leaving behind a wisp of smoke.

  The rum clotting her head, she hugged her knees and strained for any sound of his footsteps, but heard only the unrelenting surf and the rain, now a mere patter.

  She threw off the sheets and, carrying the lantern and putter, checked every door and window. She lifted the receiver on the phone beside the leather chair. Silence.

  Wide awake at three in the morning, again. The lamp burning up its last film of oil. She’d become used to terrifying dreams but had never suffered hallucinations, and she wondered what twist of alcohol-fueled imagination had produced this apparition. Deciding to blame the vision on the storm, or those magnets in the mountain, or all that silly jumbie talk, she curled up in the chair and dropped the putter onto the floor.

  She listened to the surf hurling itself against the shore until the lamp faltered and spewed out an oily curl of smoke, and, in the absence of its light, she found she could see predawn grayness outlining the shutters. Reassured by the promise of an end to darkness, she settled deeper into the chair and dozed.

  Daylight rimmed the windows. Els went to the kitchen and pushed open the shutter, letting in the clearest early light she’d ever seen. She was ravenous and desperate for the last of the coffee, even with tinned milk.

  “Mother of God,” she said, stopping mid-stride.

  On the kitchen table was the bedroom ashtray, containing a fat roll of cigar ash. Next to it, The Tempest lay open with an earring, a tiny gold skull and crossbones, resting on the page. There was a pencil mark in the margin next to Ariel’s lines:

  Full fathom five thy father lies;

  Of his bones are coral made;

  Those are pearls that were his eyes:

  Nothing of him that doth fade,

  But doth suffer a sea-change

  Into something rich and strange.

  The house creaked, easing itself after clenching against the wind. She took the earring to the window and examined it, its ruby eyes glistening in the sunlight. She’d seen one before. Trespassing at sunset. That enigmatic young man. A sailor’s earring pays for his burial if he dies at sea.

  She ran upstairs and threw open the bedroom shutters. When she flapped the sheets, out flew a small bouquet, its stems bound with a knot of grass, the flowers gone limp. She carried it to the study, let in the light, and rummaged in the desk drawers. Curled photos, mostly of women. A checkbook showing a balance of $593.41, last check written September 12, 1998. A passport. She returned to the kitchen, grabbing the photo of the three men with the mahi-mahi on the way.

  The passport, issued in Barbados in 1990, looked barely used. The man pictured there was older than the sunset fellow, younger than the apparition in the bedroom. In the photo of the three men with the mahi-mahi, the one in the middle was older still, but the resemblance was unmistakable.

  Griggs, Elliott Jackson. Date of Birth: 30 July, 1949, Chicago, Illinois, USA.

  Jack.

  You let me in, the apparition had said. She wondered if that meant she was receptive, though she’d felt unreceptive to just about everything since Mallo’s death. She held the earring and bouquet in her palm, weighing the superstition of banishment again
st the superstition of receptivity, knowing both were in the mind of the believer but wanting to surrender herself to this place, this house, and whatever secrets it might hold.

  She climbed out the window onto the patio. Every wave wore a white cap, but the rising sun was changing the sea from mauve to blue. The peak’s cloud halo was gone, and the sun sprang over the ridge and spilled down its western slope. The breeze brought an undertone of rotting vegetation. Mountain doves, cooing and answering to signal their survival, sat in the court like cinnamon sailboats, each with one wing raised to dry its cloud-gray flanks. The ghaut was a stream in spring flood.

  The periwinkle leaves had lost their sheen. Protection against spirits, she thought. If I want it.

  When she tossed the bundle, the breeze carried it into the palm wreckage. “Impetuous to a fault, Jack,” she said. “That makes two of us.”

  CHAPTER 12

  She picked her way to the gate, assessing the damage. Except for the pergola, the house looked much as before, but the garden was even more smashed and littered, and below the road, newly exposed boulders had trapped the remains of a fishing boat and a small sloop. There was no traffic. By the time a lorry full of workers rolled up to the gate, the sun had dried her damp clothing. The workers looked her over and elbowed each other.

  “Give me a lift to the Resort?” she asked.

  “You wanna job?” called a skinny man standing in the back. “They givin’ good money ta help clean up.”

  One of the passengers got out and climbed into the back, and the other helped her into the high cab and climbed in after her. The men in the cab introduced themselves—Duveen, a line cook at the Resort, and Jaydon, the driver, a landscaper—and she sat wedged between their shoulders, the air heavy with their sweat.

  The truck churned through the muddy streams gushing from the ghauts. People swarmed around roofless houses that seemed to have coughed up their contents onto lawns and into trees to dry.

  “I trust the Resort wasn’t too badly damaged,” she said.

  “Wrecked,” Duveen said.

  “Them waves was just bangin’ and bangin’, all day, all night,” Jaydon said. “Smash it all away. Low Street flatten.” He waited for an oncoming pickup to drive around a piece of corrugated metal. “Resort gon’ lose all a’ this season. But they sayin’ all a’ we got jobs in the rebuildin’.”

  “Rebuildin’?” Duveen chuckled. “Fust, we gotta spend the next six weeks shovelin’ sand. Them guest rooms got sand all on top de beds. De swimmin’ pool full up all to the divin’ board.”

  “I coulda tell dem not to build so close to de beach,” Jaydon said.

  “Nobody axe you,” Duveen said.

  “No, but they shoulda,” Jaydon said. “They shoulda axe Nevis people. I ain’t no engineer, but I know which way water flow.”

  Patches of wet sawdust lined the Resort driveway, and sawn sections of palm lay in the ditches. Duveen helped Els down to join the guests milling among the taxi vans queued in the entrance circle. Jaydon tooted the horn and drove away, trailing a cloud of diesel exhaust.

  From the Great Room she could see that the wharf, though mostly intact, was now detached from the beach, and the sand that had once united them was heaped onto the gardens.

  The assistant manager pushed toward her through knots of guests and luggage. “Ms. Gordon, you gave us a lot of worry,” he said. He glanced at her dirt-streaked clothing.

  She found it oddly touching that anyone would care where or how she was. “I was perfectly safe,” she said. “Sorry to be a trouble.”

  He told her the Resort had run on generators for four days to shelter and feed nearly a hundred stranded medical conventioneers. “I hope you were at least as comfortable wherever you were,” he said.

  “My discomfort was self-imposed,” she said. “I need a bath and a meal.”

  “We are transporting everyone by launch to St. Kitts to meet charter flights.”

  “I won’t be leaving right away,” she said.

  “We cannot ensure your safe passage unless you leave now with the others,” he said. “The entire complex will be closed from this afternoon.”

  “I stand advised,” she said. She watched him process her stubbornness and wrestle with his exhaustion and annoyance, attempting to hold on to his gracious demeanor. “I do appreciate your concern.”

  “Your belongings are in my office,” he said. “I’ll ask the cooks to prepare what they can and will give you access to a room, but it will be just as the previous guest left it.”

  “Nothing new there,” she said.

  She stood at the door to the Resort kitchen, a sanctuary of calm purpose and one of the few parts of the property that hadn’t been ravaged by the hurricane. Three workers in hairnets were wiping down acres of stainless steel, all reflecting the lemony light. One of them dropped her rag and approached.

  “Mr. Hendricks say you run off in the storm,” she said, “and now you gotta eat.” Her name tag read “Eulia.”

  “I’ve survived on stale biscuits and rainwater since the storm began,” Els said. “I’d appreciate anything, Eulia.” She pronounced it to rhyme with “Julia.”

  “Say it Yoo-leé-uh,” the woman said. Her voice was deep, melodic. Her knuckles on her hips, she looked at Els. She had dark brown eyes fringed with long lashes, made all the more striking by her close-cropped hair. There was intelligence, pride, and challenge in the gaze. “Pleased to meet you, Miss Gordon from London.”

  “How do you know where I live?”

  “All a’ we know you not from there, though.” She tied a splattered apron over her equally splattered uniform.

  “What else do you all know?”

  “You got a lot a’ money, and you brave or crazy, buyin’ Jack’s place.”

  “I’ve got a lot less money now,” Els said.

  “Dey’s all kinda rich,” Eulia said, “and all kinda crazy.”

  The other two women tossed their aprons into a bin and strolled, laughing and waving, out of the room. The kitchen fell silent but for the hum of the refrigerators. Eulia said, “You sit over there. I go do what I can with what scraps we got left.”

  Eulia minced and mixed, every movement precise, economical, all the while humming snippets of hymns in a tenor range. Soon, Els sniffed sautéing onions and potatoes. In a few minutes, Eulia placed a frittata, breadsticks, orange slices, and iced tea on the table and sat down opposite, gesturing for Els to eat.

  Els tried not to eat too greedily.

  “You gon’ live in that house?” Eulia asked.

  “It’s not fit for anyone to live in it just now.”

  “Jack leave a mess?”

  “You knew him?”

  “I used to . . . do . . . for him,” Eulia said.

  “Tell me about him.”

  Eulia dropped her eyes. “If you live in that house, you can learn everything he want you to know.”

  “What, did he leave clues?”

  “Things he can’t say, he write them down,” Eulia said. “He say he write away all the pain from his mind right into those papers.”

  “He burned some things.”

  “He destroy in all kinda ways.” Eulia refilled Els’s tea, her gaze on the glass as she poured. “We wonder who he allow to buy that house.”

  “He could hardly handpick his buyer.”

  “Maybe he scare away more than looters,” Eulia said. She stood up and occupied herself with cleaning the stove.

  When Els was done eating, she thanked Eulia for the meal, but the young woman didn’t look up until Els reached the door. “Good luck, Miss Brave or Crazy,” she said.

  Sparrow was in the taxi queue, and when Els pulled her luggage toward his van, he said, “At the port, they got steel pan music and everythin’ to say goodbye.”

  “Take me to a place called Nisbet,” she said. “I hear they have rooms available.”

  CHAPTER 13

  While Tony drove the obstacle course to Jack’s, Lauretta kneeled
on the front seat facing backward, embracing the headrest. Els felt pressed against the back seat by the onslaught of her chatter. She’d grown up in a tiny East Texas town, learned she had a God-given talent for tennis, nearly bankrupted the family training with a famous pro, dropped out of college, married an assistant golf pro working at the same Houston country club, gotten divorced and answered an ad for a position at the Resort, even though she didn’t know where in the wide world Nevis was, and had met Tony, and the rest was history. Did Els play tennis? Well, it was never too late to start, but teaching tennis was only a sideline now because she had started an interior decorating business, and if what Tony told her was true, Els’s house really needed work.

  Els sought Tony’s eye in the rearview mirror.

  “You’ll be glad of a taskmaster if you want that place shaped up any time soon,” he said.

  “Always thinking, Tony,” Els said.

  Lauretta was a study in ginger—hair, eyes, freckles, lipstick, and nail polish, all were shades of tawny brown. “I’ve always wanted to see the inside of that house,” she said, and, finally sitting down, adjusted the headband restraining her frizzy hair.

  They drove through a scene made unfamiliar by the storm’s rearrangement of just about everything. St. Thomas Church looked unscathed, but plastic grave flowers littered the knoll on which it sat. The swampy lagoon at Nelson Spring had inundated the road, and sand had washed across the low stretch near the riding stable. She made Tony drive to Oualie before doubling back to the house, and when she commented on the absence of boats, Tony said, “They’re on the rocks, or in smithereens in St. Maarten’s harbor.”

  Els shuddered that this might be Iguana’s fate, again.

  Barely five feet tall and balanced on the balls of her feet as if awaiting a serve, Lauretta stood in the graveled entry court at Jack’s with a yellow pad under her bronzed and freckled arm. She was wearing a miniskirt, T-shirt, trainers, and tennis socks with white pom-poms at the heels. “Dear God in Heaven,” she said. “Do we ever have our work cut out for us.” She began making notes.