“Dis stuff make yah seed grow straight, mahn.”
Bowen returned to his own fire. Gabriel was watching intently as Mundo pitched a row of oval fish steaks into their pot: yellowtail and red snapper, hogfish, amberjack, gray vertical sections of barracuda. Bowen was surprised at the amount of fish being cooked, but he did not doubt the three of them would eat all of it. Mundo pulled plantains, brown and soft, and a giant yam from a burlap bag, cleaned and sliced these vegetables, added them to the stew with lime juice, salt, cornmeal dumplings, a handful of garlic cloves, and small green cooking peppers. Bowen took a mouthful of stale water from a jerrican to wash the globs of egg gel from his teeth.
“It’s beginning to smell too good, Mundo. I’m dying from the smell.”
“Oh yes? If you staht to die, Mistah Bone, you must finish, too. Nobody to help you here, mahn. Who goin help? Tell me daht.”
The overpowering aroma of the cooking, as distinct and potent and wonderful as the smell of water in the desert, rose from the pots and encircled Bowen, a warm, copious, life-giving atmosphere. As quickly as that, the sea that had racked him all day and all of last night, the presence that seemed to be a second skin he must learn to move in, abated. Freed from one sensation, he was enslaved to another. The sea was now part of his viscera, part of his strength, and Bowen knelt down to limit the pressure of hunger in his stomach, cloistering the force of it with crossed forearms. It was, he thought, the perfect gesture.
Mundo leaned behind himself into the darkness and reemerged with a young hawksbill turtle, its eyes already shining with martyrdom, the flippers lashed together like hands in prayer with palm fronds weaved through cuts in the leathery skin. He held it by the tail over the pot and cut its pale extended neck with an easy pull of his machete. Black blood squirted into the stew. The act disgusted Bowen but he couldn’t prevent the hunger from swelling up inside him, so foreign and portentous, unlike anything he had ever felt about food. It stunned Bowen to realize he had not learned that hunger was the pure voice of the body, of being alive. He did not know what had insulated him against this knowledge. He would rather have seen Mundo kill a worthless man like Ezekiel, the drunkard and child-beater, than butcher the magnificent sea creature that was so close to extinction, but he imagined the blood hot and salty as the brine that nourished it, the blood spilling from the opened neck of the turtle into his own mouth, seeping under his tongue, filling his mouth completely, gulping it down too fast to breathe until whatever was there that demanded so much was appeased.
Gabriel turned on the balls of his feet, calling out, “Who de hell burnin mahnchineel tree?” Mundo clamped a lid down on the cooking pot and the three of them moved away to investigate the source of the smoke from the poisonous manchineel wood. Bowen’s face and arms had begun to itch and his eyes felt as if soap had gotten into them. The search brought the men to Sterling’s fire. His younger boy, Jambo, was responsible for the wood and had mistakenly put a piece of manchineel on the coals. He should have known better but nobody expected very much from Jambo. The can of eggs was pulled off and the water poured on the fire until the eggs drained. A fat column of smoke, spreading out around them, drove everyone upwind, rubbing their eyes, cursing and scratching.
“You a dahmn monkey, Jahmbo.”
“How daht boy chop dis wood ahnd cahrry it to de ship witout blisterin he hands?”
“How you get a boy like dis, Sterlin?”
“Take ahn egg, mahn.”
“Dey finish up cookin?”
“Dey feelin too hot.”
“No, look. Dis one too juicy.”
“Look here. Dis one nice.”
“Dem eggs no good anyway. Dey too old, mahn.”
“Dis one makin a bird.”
“Teach it to fly, boy.”
The man studied his egg for a moment and then flipped it onto the ground. Bowen bent over to look at it and saw the well-developed embryo of a man-of-war cooked white, almost plastic. Some men were tearing the shells off and popping the eggs down their throats without looking if the meat was bad or not. The close, wet air began to smell faintly rancid.
“Lord, dis guy nevah eat egg before. Sylvestah eatin de shell too.”
“He mahd.”
“How many eggs daht make, Sylvie boy?”
“Twenty-two.” Crumbs and drips of brown-gold yolk stuck to his chin and fingers. “I ready fah someting new.” But Ulysses said he had eaten twenty-three, so Sylvester ate one more out of pride.
Most of them had no desire to eat the eggs since there was an abundance of food at hand to reward patient stomachs after the long sail aboard the Orion. If the eggs were nice, they agreed, that was one thing, but they weren’t: they were rotten. Watching Sylvester and Ulysses gobble the malodorous, runny eggs was good entertainment, but their own suppers were waiting. The groups wandered back to their own fires, stirred their pots and began to eat. Sterling was the only one who hadn’t fished that afternoon. He thought everybody would appreciate the eggs and eat some and then share their own food with him. Mundo called him over to take a piece of fish. His two boys, Ulysses and Jambo, went with the Bottom Town men because they wanted to smoke ganja while they ate.
Sterling, a tall, lean mulatto with stark eyes, sat down in the sand cross-legged, enamel dish in one hand, spoon in the other, stoically waiting to be served. With an empty oatmeal can, Mundo scooped into the pot and overfilled Sterling’s dish until gray sauce oozed across the rim. Sterling’s thanks were harshly whispered; the man seemed obligated to quiet gratitude. To Bowen, the relationship between Mundo and Sterling was a mystery. He had watched them closely ever since Gabriel told him it was Mundo’s first fishing partner, Gabriel’s predecessor, whom Sterling had killed. Dis guy was real dahk ahnd Sterlin crazy from his momma sleepin wit such a blahck blahck mahn so he shoot him in de face ahnd den take a stone ahnd bahng him. Sterlin young ahnd foolish den, mahn. At the time of the murder, Mundo himself turned deadly and swore he would avenge his mate, but for once the police reacted swiftly and got to Sterling before Mundo could. Now Mundo treated Sterling like an older brother would. Frequently they competed against each other in the water to see who was the best sailor, the best diver, the better shot underwater. But never on land. On land Sterling was most often deferential, even helpful. He knew that Mundo’s white friend collected seashells and so the mulatto gathered them when he was working on the reefs, offering them shyly in his cupped hands to Bowen. Bowen was thankful Sterling would rarely look straight at him. There was an exclusive intensity in the fisherman’s eyes, a dangerous fascination. When their eyes met for the first time, it made Bowen apprehensive, and now that he knew what Sterling had done, he could easily tell in his resinous, never-blinking eyes that Sterling had killed a man, that Sterling had watched a man die by his own hand and for a moment had believed completely in his own power and will. It was like a brand.
With his spoon Sterling poked through the food on his dish, ostensibly waiting for it to cool, but he would not eat until Mundo had served himself. For everyone, the first taste was an immense relief, a reassurance that life was good and not only toil uninterrupted day after day. They ate from old cans or held tin bowls between their splayed knees, gouging the sand with their heels to make a trough for the bones and fat, rubbery skin. Mundo was the most serious eater. He had a big family—Gullie, his wife, and her seven children, his wife’s parents and his own half-Chinese grandfather to support under his roof, plus a scattering of outside children, and though he fed them well, he always needed more to eat than he could get at home. He passionately sucked the grouper head he held catlike between both hands—it was bigger than his bowl—licking the delicate flesh of the cheeks and digging out the brain cavity with his fingers. The marble eyes were relished, the bones cleaned diligently: not a speck of meat eluded him. Gabriel would take a handful of snow-white steak and squeeze it into his mouth, chewing until it was all mashed up and half swallowed, and spit out as best he could the needlelike bones. He didn�
��t bother that he lost large chunks of meat in the sand by doing this. Bowen was more methodical. Somewhat self-consciously, he picked the flesh free of bones before he took a bite. When invariably he missed one of them, he rearranged his mouthful with his tongue so that the bone was pushed to the forefront and then extracted, or failing this, he dropped whatever was in his mouth into the palm of his hand and pinched around until he found the damn thing. Judged by the pile of offal in front of him, knobs of vertebrae, long rows of dorsal spines like serrated knives, flaps of mottled skin, Bowen was eating the most, but the opposite was true.
Sterling talked a lot to himself while he ate, sometimes only moving his lips silently with the food, spit seldomly, and hacked without concern when a bone stuck in his throat until it blasted out. Sterling behaved like this occasionally, chattered away like an old woman, and then slipped back abruptly into his diffidence, embarrassed when he realized what he was doing. Like everyone else, he took second and third helpings and curled over his dish to slurp up the spicy gravy. Even Bowen, as careful as he was, had stains all over the front of his shirt, and his fingers and lips were sticky with the paste of boiled cartilage.
The men ate on and on. The darkness no longer seemed bleak but was comfortable and intimate, its vastness a barrier against any force that could possibly disturb the eaters. The fires dwindled to passive ruby clusters of coals, mystical and beguiling, as though something other than wood and flame created them. Stars began to drop through the black canopy of haze. The men did not so much decide to stop eating as they did fall thoughtlessly away from the pots exhausted, collapsing as athletes do after their greatest effort and concentration. They were stupefied by their extended stomachs and patted themselves delicately, croaking with gratification. For a moment Bowen experienced a release, an awakening of something sublime, but he told himself that was nonsense, he had misinterpreted insight or oneness for the dull contentment of a full belly. He let gravity take over and set him back into the broken coral that the sea had outcast to form the cairn of land where they camped. His dirty hands became gloved with flakes of cool sand. All around the cay the prone lengths of the fishermen groaned peacefully; with the increasing quiet, the hiss of the ocean surge on the reefs became audible, absolute energy leaching through the night from the interface of living earth and crashing, merciless water, ghost-white, somewhere in the distance.
One shadow still danced among the cooking pots, a faceless ebony shape that seemed intent on searching everywhere. It jumped from group to group like an obeah man, grunting and devilizing, its rasping steps circling closer to where Mundo and the other three sprawled around the remains of their dinner, not talking much, staring without expression or need for meaning into the sky. The spirit rose out of the darkness before them but nobody paid much attention. It was Ulysses, Sterling’s oldest boy, a burly young man.
“Ahll right dere.”
Sterling shifted, nodding to his son.
“Okay, Mundo.”
“Ahll right.”
“Mundo,” Ulysses asked with quick, deep words that were almost unintelligible, “you got more to eat here?” The features of his round face were knotted together by a big ganja smile.
“Go look in de kettle,” Mundo said with some annoyance. “Sterlin, what’s wrong wit dis boy? How’s daht he doan get enough to eat?”
Sterling shrugged. Somebody was always asking him what was wrong with his boys. Ulysses eagerly removed the lid from the pot and peered in. From under his white cotton T-shirt, his black gut humped downward like the hull of a boat. He dredged the bottom of the pot but found only a few bones there and sucked them dry.
“I still hungry,” he announced.
“Go beg a piece ah fish from Mistah Dawkin.”
“Him finish up.”
“Go ahsk Henry.”
“Dey ahll finish.”
Sterling said to his boy, “Go eat dem eggs. Lots ah dem left.”
“Dem eggs bahd.”
“What de hell, mahn,” Mundo said sternly to put an end to it, “eggs still eggs, even if dey bahd.”
This logic appealed to Ulysses’s sense of gluttony. He retreated back into the darkness headed for the eggs, driven to clear the hunger out of his mind. From where they lay, the four of them half listened to Ulysses bumping into the gear, clanking over pots like a bear in his blind hunt for the eggs.
With his head back facing the stars, Gabriel sighed. “I like it like dis,” he said. After a pause he continued. “But dis a lonely place. Dis place doan even smell like lahnd.”
“I nevah been lonely. Not once,” Mundo said, as though the matter was unimportant.
“Give me a cigahrette, Mistah Bone,” said Sterling quietly. There was no need for politeness here away from everything, away from the world. Among the fishermen, all requests were straightforward and a man either helped another or he didn’t. Anchored by satiation and fatigue, Bowen did not want to move. He invited Sterling to reach over and take the pack of Pielrojas from his pants pocket. Earlier he had been afraid that the men would not accept him in close quarters, but now he didn’t care. Mundo and Gabriel were no problem because he worked with them, but back on Providence the others watched him cautiously, suspicious of his whiteness, never speaking to him. Mundo’s own mother-in-law looked at Bowen as if he had come to steal the toes from her feet.
Sterling never took the cigarette from his mouth when he smoked. He rested back on his elbows and the ashes sprinkled down his bare chest. “Mistah Bone,” he said tonelessly, “why a white mahn like you come to de cays?”
The question amused Mundo. He answered, “Mistah Bone come fah experiahnce. He want to study how hahd de blahck mahn work.” He winked at Bowen and Gabriel as he said this and tugged his red baseball cap down clownishly over his eyes to indicate the absurdity and also the sufficiency of this reply. They did not pretend to understand why the world was the way it was, but among themselves they assumed that a man had good reasons, however offensive, for his actions. That was enough. Sterling’s public showing of curiosity was easily dismissed, for Sterling was a strange man, a man who sometimes couldn’t control himself. The fact was Bowen was there: He and Mundo had befriended each other. That was enough. The others were disconcerted by the enigma of a white man working with them; always and always black men had worked for clear-skinned people. That the pattern was disrupted was easy to see, but only Mundo accepted it nonchalantly as a natural course.
“I watch Mistah Bone takin notes,” Gabriel spoofed, referring to Bowen’s letter writing. “He come to write history of de cay in a big big book. He writin ‘Dese bunch ah blahck men sail up to Serrana, go ashore ahnd eat like hogs!’ ”
Bowen laughed halfheartedly, satisfied that he didn’t have to say anything. He was convinced there was nothing to look back to—not here anyway, not in the middle of the ocean with men so different from him. Secretly, he trembled from a new sense of freedom, not prepared for the truth of it, faithless but full of modest expectation like a baptized sinner, carried to the river by force.
A shot of light, vanishing and then reappearing more brilliantly, drew their lazy attention to the camp of the Bottom Town men where a rag had been twisted into the neck of a soda bottle filled with kerosene and ignited, creating a phantasmagoria of gleaming skin, light sparking from eyes and angles of metal, the choppy flash of a single thick flame, orange and greasy. The men could not relax for long. They had found their second wind, were standing and stretching and beginning to talk loudly.
“Sterlin, come play pedro, mahn. You got money to lose? Mundo, come play wit Sterlin.”
Sterling yelled over, “I smokin dis cigahrette. You wait.” The cigarette was only a nub of ash stuck to the roll of his lower lip. More kerosene torches flared from the camps of the other fishermen.
Ulysses came back clutching his stomach. He went to the white man first.
“Mistah Bone,” he pleaded, “you got some medicines?”
“What sort of medicine?”
“Stomach powdah.”
“No, I don’t have anything like that,” Bowen answered. He was concerned though because Ulysses’s stomach was squealing and making duck sounds.
“Where’d you find the duck?”
The boy began to wail. “Oh, Christ. Oh, me ahss, me ahss.”
He turned to the other men for help but they wagged their heads without sympathy. Mundo said mockingly, “Dem eggs real good, eh?” and Gabriel turned to Bowen and asked, “You evah see a mahn eat like dis?” Bowen had no answer because he was fascinated by the clamoring coming from inside Ulysses.
Now Ulysses’s indulgence was a big joke. He stumbled toward the slick black ocean, stomach quacking hysterically, and Mundo hailed the others to come witness the boy’s trouble. The digestive storm at his center doubled Ulysses over and he crawled the final yard to the water, set his face into the glinting surface of the lagoon and drank like a horse, sucking the water into his mouth. The fishermen banded around him; their hooting chorus of laughter escaped out across the expanse of the sea, breaking against the austerity of the fishing grounds. Ulysses jerked his head out of the salt water and roared. The men catcalled above his noise.
“Look, look, him got enough food in he belly to feed ahll Cuba.”
“Hey, Ulysses boy, you doan has to feed dem fish. Dey get plenty.”
“Maybe he gonna be like dog ahnd eat daht mess right bahck up.”
When Ulysses had finished purging himself, he rolled over and smiled up at the men, not like a fool, and not with shame, but like a man whose relief is genuine, a man reconciled past a moment of bad judgment. His father knelt down beside him and gently lifted his son.
Easy in the Islands Page 19