by Jacob Ross
‘Invited us?’ I smiled. ‘Nobody. I thought you wouldn’t mind, seeing as so much of my business tied up with yours these days. Just curious, that’s all.’ I gestured at the opulence around me. ‘Fixing boats looks like good business.’
‘We manage.’
‘We?’
I saw the shadow of irritation on his face, felt Miss Stanislaus shift beside me. ‘You good with outboard engines, not so?’
‘I wouldn’t advertise it if I couldn’t do it. That would be—’
‘Criminal, I know,’ I cut in. ‘Fast engines too?’ I narrowed my eyes at him. Something about Luther Caine seemed to change – a reddening of the skin just above the collar, a sudden stiffness. I’d tried to visualise that temper that Dessie had spoken so much about in the days when she stole away from this house to meet me in whatever secret corner of the island we could find. There was never sex between us then. It wasn’t about that at all – just a woman seeking some relief from the words of a man – this man, determined to make her believe she was no good.
Miss Stanislaus had gone very still, her face suffused in a dreamy smile, eyes partly veiled by her lashes. She was following the movements of Luther’s hands, his face – the rest of him. Reading the fella.
‘You didn’t answer me, Luther.’
‘Sorry – it’s Digger, isn’t it?’
‘You know my name, Luther. By heart! We been talking about fast boats,’ I said. ‘Is some maths I been trying to work out, yunno – how many engines I going need to get from Venezuela to Camaho in a day. You figure six will do?’
I felt Miss Stanislaus’s stiffened finger in the small of my back. I put on my best pretend-English. ‘Of course, bossman, if you’d rather we, uh, make ourselves scarce . . . ’
His eyes glazed over for a moment. Then, ‘No-no-no. You’re welcome, honestly. Grab a drink. I’m afraid we’ve already eaten.’
‘A drink will do, thank you. A shandy perhaps?’
‘And for the lady?’
Miss Stanislaus bent a wrist. ‘Mango juice, think you.’
Luther Caine’s face relaxed in what looked like a real smile. ‘Would passion fruit suffice, Miss . . . uhm?’
‘K. Stanislaus. Passion fruit awright, think you.’
‘Scuse me, then. Got to mix a bit. Stay as long as you wish.’
‘We will,’ I said.
A bow-tied youth came over with the drinks.
‘You got a toilet, youngfella?’ Miss Stanislaus handed me her glass. She walked across the room leaving in her wake a ripple of cocked, assessing female heads, and a choreography of underhand male gazes.
‘And who are you?’ a voice asked.
I swung round to face a white gown, a row of smoker’s teeth and a tall slim glass, encircled by blood-red nails and a tired-looking, jowly face.
‘Michael Digson,’ I said.
‘Can’t be,’ she said. ‘Didn’t he die from something?’ She held out a hand. ‘Merna, Luther’s sister. Eldest. You work for him?’
‘No, why?’
‘Well,’ she waved a tipsy arm at the room, ‘all the new faces I meet these days work for him. Quite distasteful, some of them, if I may say so.’
‘Sorry to lower the tone.’
‘Not you. Not at all, Mister Michael,’ she burped, ‘Jackson.’
‘Digson.’
I was barely hearing Merna. My eyes had caught the back of a woman, the cropped black hair, slipping through one of the side doors, her movement so fluid she looked like an apparition. It was the suddenness with which she’d risen that caught my attention. My mind switched to Malan. I wondered where he was – and if he knew his woman was here.
I was tempted to go after her but thought better of it. I turned back to Merna.
‘Yor! If Luther employs more like you, my luck might improve – who knows.’ She laughed out loud. A few heads turned.
‘You said “distasteful”,’ I said. ‘They all look fine to me.’
‘Not theeem.’ She flopped a wrist, licked the spilled drink off her hand. ‘Those . . . are . . . fuuriends. Our fuuriends. I meant the workmen.’ She fanned her face with a limp wrist. ‘Duhffrent. Not like . . . ’
She leaned back, batting her lashes as if she wanted to get a clearer view of my face. ‘Theyyy’re like, like—’ She stopped abruptly.
Luther Caine was at her side, smiling with his mouth. ‘Come on, Merns, the gentleman’s with someone. Let’s get some fresh air. Sorry, Digger.’ He steered her towards the veranda at the back, the tendons of his hand taut with the grip on his sister’s arm.
Miss Stanislaus returned, edged up close to me. She retrieved her glass from my hand and brought it to her mouth; kept the rim against her lips. ‘Yuh girlfriend – Miss Dressy, she here?’ She looked around at the crowd.
‘She’s not, Miss Stanislaus.’
‘You sure?’
‘Definitely – why you ask?’
‘Jus been wonderin.’ She lifted her chin at the crowd again. ‘Missa Digger, what you bring me here for?’
I took her hand. ‘I might need your memory. Come, let’s take some breeze.’ I led Miss Stanislaus to the back of the house. There were people out there on easy chairs with bottles on small tables and glasses in their hands. A swimming pool, blue like a white man’s eye, glittered under a row of daylight lamps. A concrete road, with cars parked on either side, wound up the hill from Temple Valley to a clearing under a giant poinsettia on my left. A leisure boat – the type used for skiing – sat dry-docked on a trailer, an aluminium ladder against its side. On the far right, under an open shed, a large grey sheet of canvas partly covered with what looked like hunks of rusted machinery. An assortment of ropes and pulleys.
‘Miss Stanislaus, you think you could enjoy this life?’
‘Yes, Missa Digger, but with different people.’ Miss Stanislaus raised her face at the sky. ‘So much light up here, Missa Digger, you could hardly see the moon. You sure you didn come here to show off?’
‘I ask you to trust me, so why you harassing me?’
I stepped off the concrete with her in a slow stroll towards the swimming pool. Footsteps behind us. Miss Stanislaus nudged me with an elbow.
Luther Caine approached with Passiflores at his side.
The woman was all smiles. ‘I didn’t get a chance to welcome you, Mister Digson. Is this your—’
‘Partner,’ I said.
Passiflores offered Miss Stanislaus her hand, casting a quick shy glance at her face. ‘Lovely,’ she said.
‘You too,’ Miss Stanislaus replied. ‘How you know Mistuh, uh, Digson?’
‘He used to be a client at the bank. And you – you . . . ?’
‘We togedder.’ Miss Stanislaus sipped her juice.
The conversation dried up. Passiflores’s eyes kept wandering to Luther’s face. He’d stuffed his hands down his pockets, preoccupied it seemed with the dim, jagged rise of the Grand Etang mountains ahead of us.
‘We leavin now,’ Miss Stanislaus said and squeezed my arm very hard. She rested her glass on the nearby table, took mine from me and did the same. ‘Fanks for invitin us.’
I waved a leisurely goodbye and allowed her to drag me out of the house.
We were beside the car when she cocked her head at me. ‘What you went up there for, Missa Digger? That man don like you and you don like him. Why you want to go to the house of a fella who’ wife you got business with?’
‘Dessie tell me they divorced, Miss Stanislaus.’
‘Divorce is a piece o paper, Missa Digger. You don’t see the kinda man he is? He’ll never give up what he think belong to him. He dangerous. Behind your back he watchin you like if he want to rip the flesh off your face.’
‘Let him try, I wish he try . . . ’
‘You talkin like a man, Missa Digger.’
‘I am a man! What the hell you expect?’
‘Right now I tryin to put some sense inside your head. So don gimme no stupid man-talk. That’s why you take me
up there with you? To show you kin come to his place wiv—’
‘Nice woman? Real woman? Like you? No!’ I looked her in the eyes. ‘I been running through the case in my head. I know now that it was from Luther Caine’s account that the money to Dora Wilkinson came. Then it hit me that all this is about boats – fast boats with big engines. Boats that need fixing and maintaining sometimes. Only two people on the island deal in them kinda boats – a whitefella in Easterhall who got a charter and ski business, and Luther Caine who run his boat-fixing business from his house. I went to his house to check it out.’
She fell quiet for a long while, her eyes never leaving my face. ‘And what you find?’
‘A very jumpy fella, especially when me’n’you went to the back of his house, and when I call him “bossman”.’
She nodded. ‘That’s all you see?’
I shrugged. ‘Nuh!’
She looked at me intently. ‘What else you see?’
‘I see a woman I didn expect to be there, and that start me thinking—’
‘It didn look as if you see her, Missa Digger. And you awright wiv that?’
‘You not making sense, Miss Stanislaus—’
‘You wuz a different pusson with Missa Loofer Came,’ she said. ‘You walk’n’talk like them, you even look like dem when you stannup mongst them.’
‘I grow up suckin salt same like you.’
‘Mebbe is in your blood, then?’
‘Miss Stanislaus! Why you so flippin hard on me tonight? I done you something?’
She looked away. ‘Sorry, Missa Digger, I s’pose I upsettin you becuz I upset too.’
‘What I done to upset you?’
‘You didn. I not talkin about it no more.’
On the way home, I left her with her thoughts.
At her little gate, my elbows on the steering wheel, I glanced at her. ‘Miss Stanislaus, ’spite of everything, I enjoy tonight.’
She dabbed at her face with a tissue, her features softly contoured by the blue glow from the dashboard clock. The road ahead was pale grey and glistening under a bright lastquarter moon.
‘Missa Digger, I fink is better for me and you if you go home right now, and I go inside my house.’
‘Sure,’ I said.
I leaned across to open her door. I didn’t know why I did that. I’d never done it before – some impulse perhaps to fill my head with her fragrance that had been intriguing me all night.
I was straightening up when something struck the car. The vehicle convulsed, and it felt as if the night exploded in my head. Miss Stanislaus flung up her arms to shield her face. I lurched backward, my shoulder blades grinding against the edge of the backrest. I felt the sting of glass against my neck and arm. The windscreen had bellied inward.
I threw my weight against Miss Stanislaus.
‘Stay low! Run!’ I shouted.
I reached out, grabbing at her bag and tugging. Miss Stanislaus shrugged it off her shoulder, lurched forward and was up and running, her body bent almost double.
A thunderclap rocked the vehicle and this time the windscreen gave way. Another crash, followed by the hissing protest of what must have been the busted radiator.
Crouched low, I threw myself out of the vehicle, hit the asphalt and sprang to my feet. Then I launched myself forward. I counted five strides, scooped the Ruger from Miss Stanislaus’s bag and spun around to face Shadowman about ten yards ahead of me, a hefty stone in his hand. A long sack hung from his shoulder almost to his knee. He did not throw the stone but rolled it along the road towards me and of course I moved to dodge it. It was then I heard Miss Stanislaus’s voice from somewhere behind me, cutting through the dark. ‘He got a fishgun, Missa Digger.’
Shadowman swung the bag in front of him and with a swift shrug of his shoulder it dropped at his feet. He’d already armed the weapon when I shot him.
He staggered back. I shot him again, watched him do the animated dance of death before he hit the road and stayed there.
And then there came the quiet, disturbed only by the hiss and click of my wrecked car, the screech of an owl somewhere in the hills above us, and the very faint chuckle of seagulls over the waters of Kalivini Island.
Miss Stanislaus appeared beside me. She rested a hand in the small of my back. ‘First time?’ she said.
I nodded.
‘Is not a nice feelin’.’ She prised the weapon from my hand. ‘You got your phone?’
Miss Stanislaus stepped away and picked up her bag from where I’d dropped it on the road. She took out her phone and dialled Recovery. ‘Hulloo, Miss K. Stanislaus here. Criminal man just get shoot down. Kin we have a dead-body bag, please?’
I glanced at my flattened car. ‘I going be needing a vehicle,’ I told her. ‘Mine gone through.’
Miss Stanislaus repeated my words, gave our coordinates and cut off.
She pointed at something on the grass verge – my phone. I retrieved it and sat by the roadside with my shoulder against hers. She kept her eyes on her feet. I gazed at the fallen man, my mind reeling back to Miss Stanislaus taking down Juba. I thought of the readiness with which Malan would point his Sig Sauer at a man and pull the trigger. I wondered if I’d ever get used to it and was terrified by the thought.
Miss Stanislaus gestured at the dead man. ‘Missa Digger, I ask you this before and you never answer me. You an’ me – you think we wicked?’
‘S’not what I been thinking, Miss Stanislaus.’
‘Is de same answer you give me last time.’
I glanced at my watch, my ears tuned to the night for the sound of engines.
‘I want to walk,’ she said, turning up her head at the moon.
She stepped onto the road, lifting each heel in turn to slip on her shoes.
‘Where you going?’ I said.
‘Anywhere,’ she said.
I gestured at the shadow on the road. ‘When Recovery get here, I come with you.’
‘Nuh!’ she said.
I listened to the click of her heels on the road until it faded into the night.
I did not go after Miss Stanislaus. A woman walking on her own in the small hours of a moonlit night in Camaho might prompt a bad-minded fella to approach her with his forwardness. But once he got that look from her, he would change his mind. And if he didn’t – well – good luck to him.
54
I parked the Department’s vehicle on the grass verge of the public road and walked up the concrete driveway to my house. I stood at my door not wanting to go in. I dropped myself on the step and watched the morning light above the Mardi Gras mountains nibble away at the darkness until the shapes of houses and trees emerged out of the foreday gloom.
My mind turned to Dessie, her breath on my face, her love-sighs, my mouth never having enough of her. And it came to me that sometimes love is not enough. There are other things – awful things – that could bind one person to another.
My phone buzzed. I took the call.
‘Missa Digger.’
‘Miss Stanislaus! You been walking all this time?’
‘Eh-heh.’
I listened to the tapping of her heels. ‘You walking on concrete?’
‘Eh-heh. Missa Digger, we got to talk.’
‘Where you now? I come and pick you up.’
The tapping of her heels stopped. I heard her draw breath. ‘Not nerecerry, Missa Digger.’
She cut off the phone and for a moment I had the odd sensation of still hearing her. I narrowed my eyes at my concrete drive. Through the stripped leaves of the banana plants that overhung the path, I glimpsed her shifting figure. I stood up and unlocked my door.
Miss Stanislaus halted at the foot of my step and raised her face at me, her shoulders heaving slightly with the effort of the climb.
I raised my eyes towards the Mardi Gras mountains, the sky above them already lightening with the first brushstrokes of morning.
‘Come inside, Miss Stanislaus.’
She stepped in after m
e. I switched on the light, glanced down at her and saw the tiredness in her face and the numbness in her eyes.
‘How far you walk?’ I said.
She shrugged.
‘You decide to walk around the island to get to my place? Don’t make no sense.’
‘Missa Digger.’
‘It could wait till later? You look half-dead, and me, I could hardly stand up. My bedroom is yours for the time being. No charge. I’ll take my chances out here.’ I swung my arm at the sofa. I kicked off my shoes dropped myself on the cushions.
Somewhere between semi-consciousness and sleep, I heard the shower running then the hefty thuk of my bedroom door. I remembered – before dropping off – sketching the outlines of my report in my head.
I slept through most of the day, woke up to the fuss of the neighbours’ chickens settling down to roost. The bang of buckets and the crackle of burning firewood. Already, there came the chittering of the bats preparing for a moonlit night of marauding.
When I raised myself off the sofa, Miss Stanislaus was at my kitchen table. She’d perched a plate on each of two red bowls. A pair of cups sat on saucers beside them.
The woman looked bright and fresh and alert. Her clothing sat on her as if they had been freshly ironed.
She must have read my mind. ‘Missa Digger, I wash all my clothes and dry them.’ Miss Stanislaus stood up as if to show me, then levelled those eyes at me. ‘You going to have a bath, not so?’
By the time I’d showered and dressed, and returned to the kitchen, she’d boiled sweet potatoes, pum-pum yams and half-ripe plantains, dropped a cocoa stick in a pot of boiling water and flavoured it with cinnamon. She’d raided my tomato plants outside for ripe fruit, diced and peppered them, made finely soused saltfish, stirred them in, and blessed the whole damn thing with coconut oil.
It reminded me of my grandmother’s cooking. And for the memory and the sensation, I felt a rush of warmth towards her.
We ate in silence. I observed the thoughtfulness with which Miss Stanislaus spooned the food and brought it to her mouth – the delicacy with which she held the instrument. A foolish person would think that butter would not melt in this lovely woman’s mouth.