“What’s wrong?”
“De cook say she fraid wit you dead muddah in de freezah. She say she not cookin wit a duppy so close by.”
“All right, I’ll go talk to her.”
“She gone home.”
“All right, I’ll take care of it.” He began to walk away.
“Mistah Till-mahn?” The big woman’s soft and guarded voice made him stop and turn around.
“What, Lemonille?”
“De men come wit de meat, but dey won’t stock it.”
Tillman inhaled nervously. “My mother again, right?”
Lemonille nodded. “Damn!” Tillman said, and scuffed the dirt.
Lemonille had one last piece of news. “Jevanee in a fuss cause you fire him.”
“I didn’t fire him. I told him to take the day off.”
“Oh.”
“Cuffy was there. He heard me.” Cuffy looked into the trees and would not support or deny this allegation.
“Oh. But Jevanee tellin every bug in de sky you fire him. Daht mahn be fulla dread you goin put him out since de day you poppy die.”
“Well, it’s not true. Tell him that when you see him.”
Tillman took these developments in stride, closing the restaurant for the evening by posting a scrawled note of apology at the entrance to the modest dining hall in the manor. For an hour he shuffled the cartons of dripping steaks from the kitchen to the freezer, stacking them around the corpse of his mother as if these walls of spoiling meat were meant to be her tomb.
Event upon event—any day in the islands could keep accumulating such events until it was overrich, festering, or glorious, never to be reproduced so wonderfully. This day was really no different except that his mother had triggered some extraordinary complications that were taking him to the limit.
After showering in cold water, Tillman climbed the stairs in the main house to the sanctitude of his office, his heart feeling too dry for blood to run through it, another fire hazard. What’s to be done with Mother? On a hotplate he heated water for tea, sat with the steaming mug before the phone on his desk. Ministry offices would be closed at this hour and besides, the Minister of Health was no friend of his so there was no use ringing him up.
Finally he decided to call Dr. Layland. If Layland still were running the island’s medical services, the day would have been much simpler, but Layland, a surgeon who had earned international respect for his papers on brain dysfunction in the tropics, had lost his job and his license to practice last winter when he refused to allow politics to interfere with the delicate removal of a bullet from an opposition member’s neck. Although the case was before the Federation there was little hope of reinstatement before next year’s elections.
Frankly, Layland told him, his accent bearing the vestige of an Oxford education, your position is most unenviable, my friend. A burial certificate, likewise permission to transfer the corpse back to its native soil, must be issued by both the national police and the Chief Medical Officer. The police, pending their own investigation of the cause of death, will not act without clearance from the CMO. In cases where the cause is unclear, it is unlikely that the CMO will agree to such clearance, especially for an expatriate Caucasian, until an autopsy is performed.
“But Bradley said it was the peaches, a bad can of peaches.” Tillman jerked his head away from the telephone. How absurd and false those words sounded.
“Unlikely, but I see what you’re getting at. Any cause is better than none, in light of your problem. But you know what sort of humbug that foolish man is. And you shan’t have him on your side since you refused to have him do the autopsy.”
Layland further explained that there was no alternative to removing the corpse from the walk-in freezer unless he had another to put it in, or unless he committed it to the island’s only morgue in the basement of the prison at Fort Albert—again, Bradley’s domain. The final solution would be to bury her at Rosehill, but even this could not be accomplished without official permits. The police would come dig her up. Tillman asked if it was a mistake not to allow Bradley to cut open his mother.
“I’m afraid, Tillman, you must decide that for yourself,” Layland answered. “But I think you must know that I am as disgusted by my erstwhile colleague as you are. Well, good luck.”
Tillman pushed the phone away, rubbed his sore eyes, massaged the knots in his temples. He tilted back in his chair and almost went over backward, caught unaware by a flood of panic. Unclean paradise, he thought suddenly. What about Mother? Damn, she was dead and needed taking care of. Hard to believe. Lord, why did she come here anyway? She probably knew she was dying and figured the only dignified place to carry out the fact was under the roof of her only child. A mother’s final strategy.
Outside on the grounds one of the stray dogs that were always about began a rabid barking. Tillman listened more closely, the sounds of squawking audible between the gaps in the dog’s racket. The protest grew louder, unmistakable; Tillman was down the stairs and out on the dark lawn in no time at all, running toward the aviary.
There was some light from the few bulbs strung gaily through the branches of frangipani that overhung the parking area, enough to see what was going on, the wickedness being enacted in blue-satin shadows. In the gazebo, an angry silhouette swung a cutlass back and forth, lashing at the amorphous flutter of wings that seemed everywhere in the tall cage.
“Jevanee?” Tillman called, uncertain. The silhouette reeled violently, froze in its step and then burst through the door of the cage, yelling.
“Mahn, you cy-ahnt fire me, I quit.”
Tillman cringed at the vulgarity of such a dissembled non sequitur. All the bad television in the world, the stupid lyrics of false heroes, the latent rage of kung-fu and cowboy fantasies had entered into this man’s head and here was the result, some new breed of imperial slave and his feeble, fatuous uprising.
“I didn’t fire you. I said take the day off, cool down.”
“Cy-ahnt fire me, you bitch.”
The parrots were dead. Hatred exploded through Tillman. He wanted to kill the bartender. Fuck it. He wanted to shoot him down. He sprinted back across the lawn, up on the veranda toward the main house for the gun kept locked in the supply closet behind the check-in desk. Jevanee charged after him. A guest, the woman recently arrived from Wilmington, stepped out in front of Tillman from her room that fronted the veranda. Tillman shoulder-blocked her back through the door. She sprawled on her ass and for a second Tillman saw on her face an expression that welcomed violence as if it were an exotic game she had paid for.
“Stay in your goddamn room and bolt the door.”
Tillman felt the bad TV engulfing them, the harried script writer unbalanced with drugs and spite. Jevanee’s foot plunged through the rotten boards in the veranda and lodged there. An exodus of pestilence swarmed from the splintery hole into the dim light, palmetto bugs flying blindly up through a growing cloud of smaller winged insects.
At the same time, stepping out from the darkness of a hedge of bougainvillea that ran in bushy clumps along the veranda, was Inspector Cuffy, pistol in hand. Tillman gawked at him. What was he doing around Rosehill so late? Lemonille had been encouraging him or the investigation had broadened to round-the-clock foolishness. Or, Tillman surmised, knowing it was true, Cuffy apparently knew Jevanee was coming after him and had lurked on the premises until the pot boiled over. A shot whistled by Tillman’s head. Jevanee had a gun, too. Tillman pitched back off the deck and flattened out in the shrubbery.
“Stop,” Cuffy shouted.
What the hell, thought Tillman. Where’s Jevanee going anyway? He was near enough to smell the heavily Scotched breath of the bartender, see his eyes as dumb and frightened as the eyes of a wild horse. Another shot was fired off. Then a flurry of them as the two men emptied their pistols at each other with no effect. Silence and awkwardness as Cuffy and Jevanee confronted one another, the action gone out of them, praying thanks for the lives they still owned
. Tillman crawled away toward the main house. He couldn’t care less how they finished the drama, whether they killed each other with their bare hands, or retired together to a rum shop, blaming Tillman for the sour fate of the island. There was no point in getting upset about it now, once the hate had subsided, outdone by the comics.
He sat in the kitchen on the cutting table, facing the vaultlike aluminum door of the refrigerated walk-in where his mother lay, preserved in ice, her silence having achieved, finally, a supreme hardness.
He wanted to talk to her, but even in death she seemed only another guest at the hotel, one with special requirements, nevertheless expecting courtesy and service, the proper distance kept safely between their lives. She had never kissed him on the lips, not once, but only brushed his cheek when an occasion required some tangible sign of motherly devotion. He had never been closer to her heart than when they cried together the first year he was in prep school, explaining to him that she was leaving his father. She had appeared in his room late at night, having driven up from the city. She tuned the radio loud to a big band station and held him, the two of them shivering against each other on his bed. For her most recent visitation she had not written she was coming but showed up unannounced with only hand luggage—a leather grip of novels, a variety of modest bathing suits, caftans and creams. Behind her she had left Paris, where the weather had begun its decline toward winter. Whatever else she had left behind in her life was as obscure and sovereign as a foreign language. He wanted to talk to her but nothing translated.
The pilot found him there sometime in the middle of the night, Tillman forlorn, more tired than he could ever remember feeling. Roland looked worn out, too, as if he had been stuck in an engine for hours, his cutoff shorts and colorless T-shirt smudged with grease, his hiking boots unlaced, and yet despite this general dishevelment his self-confidence was as apparent as the gleam of his teeth. Tillman remembered him at the beach bar late one night, yelling into the face of a man dressed in a seersucker suit, “I get things done, damn you, not like these bloody fools,” and the sweep of his arm seemed to include the entire planet.
Tillman smiled mournfully back at him. “Roland, I need your help.”
The pilot removed the mirrored sunglasses he wore at all times. “You’ve had a full day of it, I hear. What’s on your mind, mate?”
Like an unwieldy piece of lumber, his mother’s corpse banged to and fro in the short bed of the Land Rover, her wrapped feet pointing up over the tailgate. With a little effort and jockeying, they fitted her into the tube-shaped chemical tank in the fuselage of the Stearmann after Roland, Tillman standing by with a flashlight, unbolted two plates of sheet metal from the underbelly of the craft that concealed bay doors. You can’t smuggle bales of grass with only a nozzle and a funnel, Roland explained.
Tillman was worried that an unscheduled flight would foul up Roland’s good grace with the authorities. Man, Roland said, I’ve got more connections than the friggin PM. And I mean of the UK, not this bloody cowpie. He thought for a second and was less flamboyant. I’ve been in trouble before, of course. Nobody, Tillman, can touch this boy from down under as long as I have me bird, you see. Let us now lift upward into the splendid atmosphere and its many bright stars.
The chemical tank smelled cloyingly of poison. With his head poked in it, Tillman gagged, maneuvering the still-rigid body of his mother, the limbs clunking dully against the shiny metal, until she was positioned. Roland geared the bay doors back in place. The sound of them clicking into their locks brought relief to Tillman. They tucked themselves into the tiny cockpit. Tillman sat behind the pilot’s seat, his legs flat against the floorboard, straddled as if he were riding a bobsled.
The airport shut down at dusk, the funding for runway lights never more than deadpan rhetoric during the height of the political season. Roland rested his sunglasses on the crown of his blond head as they taxied to the landward end of the strip, the mountains a cracked ridge behind them, the sea ahead down the length of pale concrete. Out there somewhere in the water, an incompatibly situated cay stuck up like a catcher’s mitt for small planes whose pilots were down on their agility and nerve.
Roland switched off the lights on the instrumentation to cut all reflection in the cockpit. Transparent blackness, the gray runway stretching into nearby infinity.
Roland shouted over the roar, “She’s a dumpy old bird but with no real cargo we should have some spirited moments.”
Even as Roland spoke they were already jostling down the airstrip like an old hot rod on a rutted road, Tillman anticipating lift-off long before it actually happened. The slow climb against gravity seemed almost futile, the opaque hand of the cay suddenly materializing directly in front of them. Roland dropped a wing and slammed the rudder pedal. The Stearmann veered sharply away from the hazard, then leveled off and continued mounting upward. Tillman could hear his mother thump in the fuselage.
“Bit of a thrill,” Roland shouted. Tillman closed his eyes and endured the languid speed and the hard grinding vibrations of the plane.
Roland put on his headset and talked to any ghost he could rouse. When Tillman opened his eyes again, the clouds out the windscreen had a tender pink sheen to their tops. The atmosphere tingled with blueness. The ocean was black below them, and Barbados, ten degrees off starboard, was blacker still, a solid puddle sprinkled with electricity. Along the horizon the new day was a thin red thread unraveling westward. The beauty of it all made Tillman melancholy.
Roland floated the plane down to earth like a fat old goose who couldn’t be hurried. The airport on Barbados was modern and received plenty of international traffic so they found it awake and active at this hour. Taxiing to the small plane tarmac, Tillman experienced a moment of claustrophobia, smelling only the acrid human sweat that cut through the mechanical fumes. He hadn’t noticed it airborne but on the ground it was unbearable.
They parked and had the Stearmann serviced. In the wet, warm morning air Tillman’s spirits revived. Roland walked through customs, headed for the bar to wait for him to do his business. Two hours later Tillman threw himself down in a chair next to the pilot and cradled his head on the sticky table, the surge of weariness through his back and neck almost making him pass out. He listened to Roland patiently suck his beer and commanded himself up to communicate the failure of the expedition.
“Bastards. They won’t let me transfer her to a Stateside flight without the right paper.”
“There was that chance,” Roland admitted.
All along Tillman had believed that Barbados was the answer, people were reasonable there, that he had only to bring over the corpse of his mother, coffin her, place her on an Eastern flight to New York connecting with Boston, have a funeral home intercept her, bury her next to her ex-husband in the family plot on Beacon Hill. Send out death announcements to the few distant relatives scattered across the country, and then it would be over, back to normal. No mother, no obligations of blood. That was how she lived, anyway.
“Just how well connected are you, Roland?”
“Barbados is a bit iffy. The people are too damn sophisticated.” He left to make some phone calls but returned with his hands out, the luckless palms upturned.
“Tillman, what next?”
Tillman exhaled and fought the urge to laugh, knowing it would mount to a hysterical outpouring of wretchedness. “I just don’t know. Back to the island I guess. If you can see any other option, speak out. Please.”
The pilot was unreadable behind the mirrors of his glasses. His young face had become loose and puffy since he had located Tillman at Rosehill. They settled their bar bill and left.
In the air again, the sound of the Stearmann rattled Tillman so thoroughly he felt as though the plane’s engine were in his own skull. He tried to close his sleepless eyes against the killing brightness of the sun but could not stop the hypnotic flash that kept him staring below at the ocean. Halfway through the flight, Roland removed his headset and turned in his seat
, letting the plane fly itself while he talked.
“Tillman,” he shouted, “you realize I didn’t bolt the plates back on the fuselage.”
Tillman nodded absently and made no reply.
Roland jabbed his finger, pointing at the floor. “That hand-gear there by your foot opens the bay doors.”
He resumed flying the plane, allowing Tillman his own thoughts. Tillman had none. He expected some inspiration or voice to break through his dizziness but it didn’t happen, After several more minutes he tapped Roland on the shoulder. Roland turned again, lifting his glasses so Tillman could see his full face, his strained but resolute eyes, Tillman understanding this gesture as a stripping of fear, tacit confirmation that they were two men in the world capable of making such a decision without ruining themselves with ambiguity.
“Okay, Roland, the hell with it. She never liked being in one place too long anyway.”
“Right you are, then,” Roland said solemnly. “Any special spot?”
“No.”
“Better this way,” Roland yelled as he dropped the airspeed and sank the Stearmann to one thousand feet. “The thing that bothers me about burial, you see, is caseation. Your friggin body turns to cheese after a month in the dirt. How unspeakably nasty. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I never eat cheese myself. Odd, isn’t it?”
Tillman poked him on the shoulder again. “Knock it off.”
“Sorry.”
Tillman palmed the gear open. It was as easy as turning the faucet of a hose. When they felt her body dislodge and the tail bob inconsequentially, Roland banked the plane into a steep dive so they could view the interment. Tillman braced his hands against the windscreen and looked out, saw her cart-wheeling for a moment and then stabilizing as the mauve chenille shroud came apart like a party streamer, a skydiver’s Mae West. The Stearmann circled slowly around the invisible line of her descent through space.
“Too bad about your mother, mate,” Roland called out finally. “My own, I don’t remember much.”
Easy in the Islands Page 3