The Moon Always Rising

by Alice C. Early

  “That’s beyond the call,” she said, wondering what Jason had told him and if the two of them might feel entitled to horn in if they decided to invest.

  He smiled his gee-whiz smile. Maybe Jason hadn’t or wouldn’t even consult him and her assumptions were working overtime again.

  “If I swallow some aspirin and lie down for ten minutes,” she said, “I can manage the rest of the night.”

  “Take as long as you need,” he said. “I’m a rattling fool with a cocktail shaker.”

  “Call me if anyone wants their check,” she said.

  She never let a guest see her open the secret door; she waited until Mr. Whitehair and family were in the court before slipping upstairs.

  Her waking was a kind of swimming into consciousness. When she opened her eyes, Liz was standing beside the bed. He wore an expression she’d never seen before, tender. Light from the torches danced on the gauze curtains. A Keith Jarrett arpeggio wafted from the lounge.

  “I called and knocked, but you were out cold,” he said. “Several parties are ready to leave. I can handle the checks.”

  She hadn’t intended to sleep; her head felt stuffed with cotton. The headache had faded to a thickness behind her eyes. She rolled onto one elbow. “I’m fine.”

  He held out his hand and she took it, and he drew her up. He turned her around and massaged her shoulders, his work-roughened fingers kneading the knots in her neck, making them yield. She melted against his hands and caught his familiar scent. “Is massage another service you provide your guests, Captain?” she whispered.

  “On very, very rare occasions,” he whispered back. His fingers circled her neck and touched the blue bead hanging from its silver chain just below the hollow of her throat. “This becomes you,” he said. “Makes your eyes more blue than stormy.” He massaged her scalp, drawing the pain out through the top of her head.

  “Burtie, my nanny-mother, called my eruptions ‘fireworks,’” she said. She relaxed against his chest, and he crossed his arms over her waist. “I’ve been working very hard on being less volcanic.” She leaned her head against his collarbone.

  “I’m trying to tread very carefully in your space,” he said.

  Laughter burst from the gallery. The frog chorus sang from the ghaut.

  He inhaled. “That fragrance. It’s not tropical. Why can’t I place it?”

  “Roses,” she said.

  “Who’d think a guy from up north could ever forget that?” he said. “But it’s all new, anyway, on you.”

  “Els?” Genevra called from the gallery. “People need pay dey bills.”

  “Right there,” she called back, and moved to step out of Liz’s embrace. He ran his hands up her arms, squeezed her shoulders, and let her go.

  “Don’t come down with me,” she said.

  “Why?”

  “Gossip.”

  He grinned and sang the chorus of “Let’s Give ’Em Something to Talk About.” When she frowned, he said, “I’ll go out the shower window.”

  He sat on the bed while she checked her makeup in the bathroom. When she passed the bedroom door, the light from the torches illuminated the tips of his unruly hair, but his expression was lost in shadow.

  She walked over and kissed his forehead. “See you at the bar.”

  She loved sitting on the patio in the early morning, the light diffuse and gentle with the sun still behind the peak and the sea calm. She cursed out loud when the gate rattled. Jason had parked his truck outside and was walking up the drive.

  She squared her shoulders and stood, determined not to appear as needy as she felt. “Aren’t you the early bird.”

  “I’m busy later.”

  “And your answer is?”

  He gestured to the chairs behind her. “Can we sit down?”

  She nodded. “Tea or coffee?”

  “No time for that.” He settled into a patio chair and removed his sunglasses. “I’ll do the deal.”

  She looked toward the sea. A tiny sail—surely Finney in the Maid—was already far beyond the protection of Oualie. “I detect a ‘but’ in your tone.”

  “There are conditions.”

  “I’d be a fool not to expect that.”

  He teased a hatpin with a lion’s head from the ribbing of his hat and reinserted it. “I want a piece of the action.”

  A lamb or kid bleated; she sat up straight, fearing one might have gotten into the garden, but caught sight of it scampering down the road.

  “I need a loan, not a partner,” she said.

  “We’ll all be better off if we treat this as an investment.”

  She stood up and paced. “Next thing I know, you’ll be telling me how to run things.”

  “I already have several businesses to run.”

  “Does Liz know about this?”

  “It’s not his capital,” he said. “But I’ll tell him if you accept the deal.”

  She hugged herself and looked out to sea, wondering how or if Liz figured into his thinking. “Why are you doing this?”

  “It’s convenient for one of my investors to stash some money,” he said. “If there’s a tax loss for a year or two, that would be welcome.”

  She bristled at the implication that Jack’s would be in the red that long. “Would it have anything to do with making sure I don’t hightail it back to the UK?”

  A hint of a smile. “Nevis needs this kind of business.”

  “Give me a minute,” she said.

  She walked through the garden and citrus grove to the back fence, the highest point on the property, and looked down at her home—the sturdy house, the gardenias gleaming in the sun, Toad Hall, the cascade of bougainvillea at the secret garden, the lilies of the Nile bursting from the copper, the wide swath of sea and St. Kitts. She threw a rotting lime as hard as she could into the bush and heard it strike leaves and thud to the ground. Then she gathered the ripe limes and returned to the patio, where she set the yellow-green fruits on the table. Jason had helped himself to a glass of water. She felt a wash of anger and wondered just how proprietary he might become.

  “I’ll cut you into the business but not the real estate,” she said.

  A little smile. “I expected you to say that.” He picked up two of the limes and rolled them in his huge hand. “The business isn’t worth much by itself. Yet.” He spilled the limes onto the table, caught them before they rolled off, and lined the harvest up in a row. He sat back and looked at his handiwork. “Can’t separate Jack’s from Jack’s.”

  She turned her back and watched the mountain doves chase each other around the court while she took deep breaths and tried to quell her mental noise. “I guess I have a new partner, then,” she said.

  “An excellent one,” he said.

  She bit back a remark about his arrogance.

  He stood up and extended his hand. His long fingers closed around hers more gently than she expected. When he released her, she leaned against a pergola support, suddenly woozy. While he spoke of having his Puerto Rico staff draft up the agreement, she stared into the garden, puzzling at her simultaneous rush of relief, hope, and apprehension. Her home and livelihood were secure for now, but with what future strings or entanglements, she could not guess.

  “We’ll keep it as simple as possible,” he said, and left her. She watched him go through the gate and drive away, then gathered up the limes and carried them into the kitchen.

  CHAPTER 36

  The bonfire shot sparks into the night sky, and its glow turned the beachfront palms into shaggy silhouettes. Liz parked Wilma behind the cooking shed, came around to the passenger side, and opened Els’s door. He took her hand and led her toward the blaze, where dancers kicked and shimmied in the sand.

  She hadn’t visited Sunshine’s in months, and the bar, rebuilt more sturdily since Lenny leveled it, had already taken on the quirky ambiance of its predecessor.

  “Bee?” Liz asked. She nodded and he plunged into the scrum at the bar, high-fiving and shaking ha
nds as he went.

  When he’d invited her to dinner on his last night in port before charters would keep him away most of the time until Christmas, she’d debated what to wear and settled on her batik sundress and the blue bead. She sat on the end of a picnic table bench and stared at the flames, enjoying the fire’s warmth when the sea breeze ruffled her hair.

  Liz returned with their drinks, sat on the opposite bench, and looked into the fire. After several minutes he rapped his beer bottle on the table and said, “Let’s dance.”

  When they joined the dancers near the fire, the sand was warm on the surface, cool underneath. Elvis was rocking and twanging about his burning love. Liz pulled her into his embrace and ignored the beat. Resting her chin on his shoulder, her lips close to his ear, she inhaled and then let her breath out in a sigh that caused him to draw her even closer.

  “You know I ran into Jason in San Juan,” she said, trying for a casual tone.

  “He told me about the loan, too, but it’s none of my business.”

  “He’s raised as many questions as he’s answered.”

  He spun her under his arm and back into his embrace so her back was to him. “I guess it’s my turn, then.” He spun her out again and gathered her chest to chest. “What do you want to know?”

  She pulled away enough to look into his eyes. “He refused to tell me how you and he met, became partners. How you came to be here.”

  The song ended, but he continued to hold her and sway gently in place. “Let’s go for a walk,” he said.

  Hand in hand, they walked to Charlestown and back, and he told her he’d been a huge disappointment to his corporate executive father because he dreamed of being a rock musician and a sailor. He’d messed about in boats from the age of seven, anything to be on the water and away from his suffocating mother. A summer crewing job on a superyacht led to a winter berth in St. Thomas. He’d dropped out of Wesleyan in the middle of his junior year and sailed the Caribbean ever since.

  “I never saw my mother again,” he said. “She died about fifteen years ago. I thought I’d try to reconcile with Dad this past Christmas, while there was still time, but he lay there with tubes coming out of him and got all red in the face and said he no longer considered me family.”

  They were nearing the bonfire, its shrunken remains glowing. The bar was still crowded, and the aroma of grilled chicken and fish hung on the breeze. The music was Motown. He led her to the trunk of a fallen palm where they could sit facing the water. The firelight burnished the right side of his face.

  “How is following the call of the sea a disownable offense?” she asked.

  A dinghy crossed the moon’s path and its wake set the masthead lights bobbing against the black sky. “I chose an unacceptable woman,” he said. “He accused me of wanting to pollute the family bloodlines.”

  “That sounds like something out of another century.”

  “He was an unapologetic bigot,” he said. He sifted a handful of sand through his fingers. “Okay, here goes,” he said. “Dora was part Arawak, part Venezuelan, part Portuguese, raised in Miami. She was a tiny thing, barely five feet. But fiery, a bundle of enthusiasms. As far as my father was concerned, she was a nigger, and when he called her that, we stopped speaking.”

  He picked up a stick and began drawing in the sand between his feet—a child’s rendering of a sailboat. “Dora and I sold everything we owned to buy a small sloop named Feather. The plan was to sail her to Venezuela and get married in Dora’s grandfather’s village. She was pregnant, barely showing.”

  The story came out haltingly. When they were just north of the Los Roques archipelago heading for Bonaire, they were overtaken by pirates in a speedboat who’d mistaken Feather for a boat carrying drugs. The pirates spoke little English and Dora knew some Spanish. Holding Liz and Dora at gunpoint, they ransacked the cabin, and when they didn’t find any drugs, the leader grabbed Dora and ripped open her shirt. Liz knocked him down. The other two pirates grabbed Liz, and one of them hit him with the butt of his rifle.

  “When I came to, I was sitting on top of the cabin,” Liz said. “My torso was bound to the mast with duct tape. They’d taped my wrists and mouth, and I could taste blood and my right eye was swollen shut.”

  He propped his forehead on the back of his hand for a few seconds, then gave his shoulders a little shake and began speaking again in a softer voice.

  He described how the pirate leader instructed the others to hold Dora and began to unzip his jeans. She clawed at her captors, screaming in a mixture of English and Spanish, and when the leader stepped closer, she kicked him hard in the genitals and he doubled over. When he recovered, he grabbed a gun and shot her twice in the abdomen. She crumpled onto the deck. Liz yelled against the tape. The pirate smiled, flicked open a switchblade, and cut a zigzag on Liz’s calf that healed into that lightning bolt scar. Laughing, the pirates got back in their boat and set Feather adrift.

  “Dora couldn’t move to cut me loose,” Liz said. “We stared at each other until her eyes closed. It took her hours to bleed out.”

  The music shifted to Etta James belting out “Tell Mama,” and he cocked his head to listen. He’d drawn a stick figure next to the mast on the sailboat. He erased the drawing with his foot. “If I hadn’t been such a goddamned hothead and gone for the guy, maybe . . . .”

  He looked out at the boats long enough that Els thought he might end the story there. Etta switched to a yearning ballad backed by dissonant horns. He tapped a few bars on his knee.

  “Jason was delivering a boat to Aruba and came upon us,” he said. “I don’t know how long we’d been drifting.”

  He said that the rest of Jason’s crew regarded Feather as a cursed death ship and wanted nothing to do with her, but when Jason came aboard and saw Liz was alive, he sent the other boat on its way and sailed Feather after them. He took gentle care of Liz and cleaned up the boat. He washed Dora’s body and, praying over her the whole time, wrapped her in a sheet and put her in a sail bag. Liz wanted to slip the bag over the side, but Jason persuaded him that dealing squarely with the police in Aruba was the best course.

  Liz was so weak he could barely trim a sheet on the run to Aruba. Once there, Jason dealt with the authorities, arranged for the sale of Feather, which Liz never wanted to see again, and got them berths on a crew delivering a ketch to St. Kitts. From there he took Liz home to Nevis. Along the way, they scattered Dora’s ashes at sea.

  A car revved its way out of the sand behind them. Liz stood up. “I need a beer.”

  Els pulled her knees under her skirt, gathered her shawl around her shoulders, and watched wisps of cloud scud across the moon’s face.

  Liz returned with his beer already half-consumed and handed her a Killer Bee. He sat closer this time, his thigh touching her elbow. He screwed his beer into the sand between his feet. “You really want to hear this?” he asked.

  “Everything.”

  “Jason saved my life, and I don’t just mean on the boat,” he said. “For over a year I was drunk most of the time, got into a lot of fights. Jack and I became good buddies, but I was never a match for him in the drinking and brawling department. I crashed at his place a lot. We were both just rotting with anger.”

  He told her Jason repeatedly got him out of jail, got him sober, but sooner or later he’d end up on another tear. One night Jack decided they should break the Killer Bee consumption record. After the eighth, Sunshine said the rest were on the house and a crowd gathered. Jack made it to fourteen, two over the previous record, still spouting poetry, but Liz only learned that afterwards, having passed out at nine. He woke up on a picnic table the next morning. Jack was under the bar, naked, a dog licking his balls.

  “I decided I’d better shape up or I’d succeed in killing myself,” he said. “Which I guess is what I’d been trying to do. Jason was buying his first boat, a sweet cat. He let me earn my way into the business. We did day sails, sunset cruises. He wanted me to do the talking, said I had all
the charm.”

  “He said he lets you pretend to be the boss.”

  “He and I are real clear on what’s what.” He took a swig of his beer. “He gave me good work at sea, which is the only place I belong. It helped me pull myself together.” He looked into her eyes. “Only the three of us know what I’ve just told you. Many of his debtors know how kind he is. People think what they want about him. Most of them are wrong.” He looked out at the boats. “I never picked another fight or drank like that again.”

  “Or loved,” she said.

  A motor yacht with underwater lights that made it seem to float in a private emerald pool slipped its anchor and headed for St. Kitts, twinkling like a small liner.

  “Or loved.” He set his beer on the sand again and cradled it with his feet. He showed his teeth. “I could have gotten this fixed,” he said, running his finger over the broken front tooth that gave his grin a cartoonish air. “I barely notice the eyebrow scar anymore, but then I’m not a guy who looks in the mirror much. But the tooth, I feel that all the time.”

  There were whoops from the bar and chants of, “Six, six, six.” Liz smiled. “Some fool trying to break Jack’s record. Nobody’s come close.” He took her hand. “I promised you lobster.”

  At a table made from a weathered wire spool, they sat close together facing the water. He freed her lobster from the shell, cut up the tail, and fed her the first bite with his fingers. As they ate, he coaxed out her stories: Cairnoch, Harald, Burtie, her childhood with Mallo, school, work, the chain of impulsive decisions that resulted in her self-imposed exile to Nevis and Jack’s. He looked at the boats as she talked, as if studying her face would be an invasion. The bar crowd was thinning, and the Killer Bee record challenger was cheek down on a table.

  “You keep touching on this Mallo guy, then changing the subject,” he said.

  The near-full moon, low in the western sky, was tangled among the boats, speared by the tallest mast. She felt equally impaled, as if her heart had been lanced. Whenever she mentioned Mallo’s name the fury flared, and she had to tamp it back down or be unable to speak. She pulled her shawl tighter. He moved closer and put his arm around her, and she nestled into his shoulder.