Saint X (ARC)

by Alexis Schaitkin

  Then there was the story Clive loved best, the one he begged his mother to tell as she tucked him in, about a long-haired woman with hooves for feet who lived on Faraway Cay.

  “Is she real?” Clive would ask.

  “For true. Your Great-Aunt Ruth got lured away by she. Poof. Vanish like so.”

  (“Ha!” his grandmother snorted when he asked if she believed Ruth had been taken by the woman on Faraway Cay. “I believe your auntie had she reasons to get lost; that’s what I believe.”) His grandmother did not tell stories. With her, the world was just itself.

  His mother had been gone less than a year when the island’s first ice plant opened. You could buy a twenty-kilo block of it; men churned ice cream and shaved ice on the pier year-round. You no longer had to wait for the boat from Saint Croix at Christmastime, and you quickly forgot what a wonder it had once been to sit on the pier, your feet dangling over the flickering sea, and taste the coldness of ice cream while the sun beat hot on your shoulders. Not long after that, electricity came to the island’s villages. Soon, lots of people had televisions and the gatherings and the stories ceased. Next the telephone wires went up. In no time, Mayfair Road was paved, and then Investiture Boulevard, and soon all the streets in the Basin. Then the resorts came, and with them the tourists, and everything changed.

  And so, for Clive, the sleepy, magical feeling of childhood was inextricably bound up with the island as it was before—with the smell of kerosene and the sounds of stories in the dark—which were, in turn, bound up with his mother. And as the years passed without her she became, like his father, a disquieting emptiness right at the center of him where he thought there should have been sadness.

  HORATIO BYRD Primary was three times the size of Bendy Harbour Primary, where Clive had attended first grade. It was a low, horseshoe-shaped concrete building painted white with blue trim. On the inside of the horseshoe, children ran and shrieked across the packed-dirt schoolyard. Clive tugged at the collar of his polo.

  “Stop that,” his grandmother said.

  He didn’t know how she saw—she wasn’t even looking at him. He stopped.

  “Go on,” she said.

  He took a few shuffling steps forward. When he turned to look back at her, she was already halfway across the yard. He watched as she strode in her black shoes through the gate and out of sight.

  The classroom was not so different from the first-grade room at Bendy Harbour. The long wooden tables were the same. The girls wore the same jumpers and blouses, only here they were maroon and pink instead of green and white. The boys all wore pink polos and maroon trousers like him, though the other boys did not have their shirts buttoned to the top. He wanted to loosen his but didn’t dare. Somehow, his grandmother would know. On the wall above the blackboard there was even the same illustrated alphabet: a balloon for B, a goat for G, an igloo for I, and, his favorite, a mermaid for M. He looked at the familiar picture, the pink and green scales of the mermaid’s tail, her hair swirling around her head in curlicues, and felt calm.

  The teacher, a tall, kind-faced woman named Miss Forsyth, took attendance.

  “Annmarie Bell.”

  “Present.”

  “Don Claxton.”

  “Present.”

  “Damien Fleming.”

  “Present.”

  As she made her way steadily and inexorably through the alphabet, his mouth grew dry until it stuck together, teeth to tongue to roof.

  “Edwin Hastie.”

  Silence.

  “Edwin Hastie?”

  A boy in the last row shot up as if he’d just jolted awake. “Yes!” Everybody tittered.

  “Yes what, Mr. Hastie?”

  “Yes, I be present.”

  “I am present.”

  “I hope so, Miss Forsyth. You is our teacher.”

  The class broke into laughter. Clive laughed, too, though his was a nervous laughter; his turn was still coming.

  “Sara Lycott,” Miss Forsyth said, cutting off the ruckus like thwacking a weed with a scythe.

  “Present, Miss Forsyth.”

  “Daphne Nelsen.”

  “Present.”

  “Desmond Phillips.”

  “Present.”

  “Ron Rawlins.”

  “Present.”

  “Clive Richardson.”

  He opened his mouth, but his throat wrung itself up. His ears went hot, as if pricked by bees.

  “P-p-p-”

  Thirty pairs of eyes converged on him.

  “P-p-p-”

  He searched the ceiling desperately.

  “P-p-p-present.” The word came out much too loud, like an angry shout. They were all laughing again, harder than they had when Edwin Hastie pulled his stunt.

  “Enough,” Miss Forsyth said. “Thank you, Clive.” She smiled very sweetly at him, which made it worse.

  They spent the morning on maths. Miss Forsyth wrote equations on the board. She had beautiful handwriting. Each numeral was like a flower. She called students up one at a time to work the problems out. If Michael has seven nails and John has twelve, how many more nails does John have than Michael? Marie has seventeen yards of fabric. If she needs four yards to make a skirt, how many skirts can she make?

  Each time Miss Forsyth read a question, Clive’s mind flailed. The words tumbled together, twisting into strange shapes in his head. He tried to sort it out while praying he would not be called upon, because in addition to not understanding the questions, he also had to urinate very badly. He had drunk all of his tea at breakfast. But he could not bring himself to ask to use the toilet because he knew he would not be able to get the words out.

  “Johnny has a dozen eggs. If he eats four for breakfast, what does he have left? Edwin?”

  The skinny boy swaggered up to the blackboard. His trousers were too big for him—they were cinched to his waist with a belt, bunched and sagging. He took the chalk from Miss Forsyth and wrote: g-a-s.

  The class doubled over with laughter. Miss Forsyth allowed herself a very brief smile.

  “The corner,” she said. Edwin swaggered there, too. “You see, class, Edwin might be the smartest boy here but he treats everything as a joke so we will never know.”

  In the corner, Edwin Hastie played with the collar of his polo, flipping it up and down as if he hadn’t heard Miss Forsyth. His eyes flashed as if lit by a brewing storm.

  After maths, Miss Forsyth distributed copies of The Higham Brothers Reader and they went down the rows from the front of the room to the back, each student reading aloud in turn from a story about an American man who planted apple seeds wherever he went. Clive barely heard the words. He was now focused entirely on squeezing his legs together against the unbearable pressure of his bladder. He turned the page of his reader. The American, barefoot and with a tin pot on his head, lay next to a river—blue and white and foamy, full of rushing water. He could hold it no longer. As Daphne Nelsen read in the pinched, nasal voice he would hate forever after, he tentatively pressed his fingers into the air.

  “Yes, Clive?” Miss Forsyth said, cutting off Daphne midsentence. The eyes were on him again.

  “May I g-g-g-”

  It would happen. He would wet himself right here, in front of the entire class, on his first day at his new school.

  “May I go—go—go—”

  Miss Forsyth saw his anguish and understood. “Yes! Hurry!”

  Bent at the waist, fumbling over his feet, he dashed from the classroom. In the hall, he put both hands on his crotch and ran, and when he reached the latrine and released a torrent of urine he felt simultaneously so grateful and so humiliated that his eyes filled with tears.

  WHEN PLAYTIME came, he made for a deserted corner of the yard. As the girls played marbles and the boys engaged in a rough game of tag, he sat, pulling clumps of dry grass from the dirt. He was himself all over again. In his mortification, he found a certain peace. He had his spot in the yard, and every day at playtime he would come to it and keep his ow
n company. He thought of his mother. Where was she now? Did she know it was his first day of school? He pictured her tapping at a typewriter in a white room.

  Boys were coming toward him. The troublemaker, Edwin, was leading a pack of them; he cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted: “Hey, Go-Go!”

  The other boys clapped.

  Don hooted. “Yes! That’s right! G-g-g-go-go!”

  Clive kept his eyes on his lap.

  “Gogo, man, me speaking with you,” Edwin said.

  Clive forced himself to look up. To his surprise, Edwin was grinning down at him, his expression teasing but—could it be?—warmly so.

  “We having a cricket match, we against they.” He gestured across the yard, where a few other boys milled about. Clive sat, uncomprehending, until Edwin exclaimed, “What you waiting for? Get up, man! We need you!”

  Clive stood, wiped the dust from the seat of his trousers, and followed.

  They won the game, though no thanks to Clive, who, for the most part, stood in one place and hoped not to make a mistake. From then on, he and Edwin were always together. You never saw one without the other, and if you did, it likely meant some mischief was afoot of which you would turn out to be the unfortunate recipient. They did many things, Edwin and Clive and the rest of Edwin’s band of brothers, Don and Des and Damien. They caught bait and went to Little Beach, where they fished from the pier, diving and backflipping into the sea when they were hot. They played windball cricket in the sand and had swimming races—first one to the end of the pier, or to the Atalanta moored in the shallows. (“I get you back!” Don shouted when Edwin grabbed his leg to slow him down. “I drown you! I gonna drown you!”) They built traps and caught turtledoves. They shook tamarind pods from the tree in Damien’s yard and mixed the sticky brown pulp with sugar and water. Begged a dollar off Edwin’s mother for sugar cakes. When Clive’s grandmother baked buns, they stole them right out of the oven, slathered them quickly with red butter, then ran out of the house and down the street, tossing the hot buns in the air.

  In fifth grade, they rode their bikes often to the beach that would, a few years late, become Indigo Bay. It was still wild then. The land was covered by pomme-serette trees, and they would pick the fruit, though only one in ten was sweet. The beach stank from seaweed and the seaweed was full of bad things—needles and condoms, which they would lift with sticks and fling at each other. Sometimes they would find two antimen together on the sand. They would sneak and watch them and then Edwin would shout, Go! and they would stampede and chase them off.

  They scaled the chain-link fence and climbed the island’s radio tower, a rickety structure flaking red paint. Clive was a quarter of the way up, far below his friends, when Edwin shouted down to him, “Look out, Goges. Why bother climbing if you don’t see nothing?” He gripped the metal rung as tightly as he could and raised his head. He never forgot it. He could follow the ribbon of Mayfair Road from Horatio Byrd past the governor-general’s pink house and the eggshell-blue prison; he could see how the water fanned out around the island in bands of deepening hues—from a pale, milky green like Claude Félix’s cataracts to a bright turquoise and finally a deep, sparkling blue. If he squinted, he could make out Bendy Harbour—hardly more than the idea of it, a loose sketch of houses, one of which had been his. He could see his whole life spread before him—past, present, future—and the solidness of this image made him want to collect it like a coin and keep it in his pocket forever.

  The island’s first movie hall opened when they were thirteen, and Edwin and Clive made a habit of sneaking out of Everett Lyle Secondary to catch the matinee. They waited until five minutes after the showing time so the theater was dark, then snuck in through the side door, vigilant in case Wilmot, the old man who managed the ticket booth, should come down the aisle with his flashlight. The movie hall showed a mix of old movies—westerns and kung fu, mostly—and new releases. They’d sneak into the same movie many times, timing it to catch their favorite scenes. Clive knew Pale Rider and Way of the Dragon and Ghostbusters by heart. Occasionally he discovered that Edwin had left school without him, and he knew that Edwin was in the warm theater, which smelled of stale popcorn and sweat, watching E.T. cycle across the face of the moon for the fourth, fifth, twelfth time.

  Often the movies had been out in the States a year or longer by the time they reached the island. To Clive this was unremarkable. Everything took time to reach the island. Newspapers came a week late, by way of Saint Kitts by way of Jamaica. The TV stations showed Bonanza and I Dream of Jeannie and The Beverly Hillbillies.

  For Edwin, this was a source of immense frustration.

  “When you getting Rocky IV?” he asked Wilmot one day on the way out.

  “What are you boys doing here with no ticket?”

  “I ask you first. Rocky IV out eight months already. When you getting it?”

  “When the poster go up. When you think?”

  “Come on, man! Bad enough we live nowhere. Why we also have to live yesterday?”

  In the beginning, Clive was wary of Edwin’s friendship. Why him? There were other boys Edwin could have chosen. There was Arthur, for example, not a cool boy by any means and a definite brown-nose, but still miles cooler than him, and besides, Arthur came with the advantages of his father’s convenience store with the satellite television in the back room. Yet Edwin had not chosen Arthur. (Nobody had chosen Arthur, who, for some mysterious reason, had been left entirely outside the world of friendship.) Had Edwin selected him merely because of his size—had he been seeking a protector, an enforcer? Or perhaps Clive had been chosen because he was quiet and went along with Edwin’s schemes. But despite his wariness, Clive knew the true reason went deeper than this. In the end, friendship was not a thing that could be explained. It was a kind of magic. Either it existed or it didn’t. Edwin said they were mates and so they were, and Clive was grateful for it.

  Many years later, he would sit in a small restaurant in an unfamiliar city, as snow—a thing he always assumed he’d die without touching—fell from the sky, and he would trace back through his life and conclude that the moment Edwin approached him in the schoolyard was the moment. The one after which everything that happened was always going to happen. The one you could wonder and wonder about but never touch: What if he’d simply stayed in the grass?

  Ever after that day, Clive was Gogo. First to his classmates, then to his neighbors, then even, at times, to his grandmother. Because it was Edwin who gave him this name, and because it was also Edwin who brought him from the darkness of solitude into the light of friendship, he quickly forgot that the name had begun with his own mortification.

  I wasn’t trying to “control the narrative” by taking that douche journalist from Esquire to the Station. Sure, the kids in this town love the deli because it’s a dive; they show up after lacrosse practice, or late night, six-to-a-Beemer, and chat up the counter guys like they’re just regular kids. The thing is, I like these kids. For all their privilege, they’re mostly unspoiled. It’s a town of Nice Kids, really, just a couple of sniveling “My dad is a lawyer and blah blah blah” pains in the ass here and there. But none of that has anything to do with why I suggested we meet at the Station for the interview. It’s just my usual place. I’m a teacher. Where else in this town am I supposed to go for a two-buck egg sandwich?

  So, no, I wasn’t trying to “control the narrative.” But there are things I didn’t tell him. Things I didn’t trust some sleek journalist with. (Horn-rimmed glasses and a tweed blazer, and I’m the one trying to manipulate the optics? Please.) Things it wouldn’t have done anybody any good to see in print.

  I didn’t tell him about her essays. Alison always developed these wildly contrarian thesis statements. Macbeth can best be understood as a feminist work in which Lady Macbeth is the true hero. Catch-22 glamorizes war. Or my favorite: While it might seem to depict human nature as savage and anarchic, Lord of the Flies ultimately works against the author’s own intentions
and conveys the endurance of civilization and order. She was one hell of a writer, and she did crazy acrobatics in the essays to defend what were, basically, incorrect readings of the texts. Intentionally incorrect. She seemed to be under the impression that the best essay is the one that gets people to believe whatever it wants them to believe, even if that thing can’t possibly be true. I always wanted to tell her in my comments that just because you win an argument doesn’t make you right. But I always felt a bit nervous critiquing her, to be honest. She was smarter than me, I have no qualms about admitting it. She knew it and I knew it. I wanted to tell her that just because you’re smarter than someone doesn’t mean they don’t have things to teach you, but I didn’t tell her that, either. I gave her her A’s and figured somewhere down the line of her education she’d figure out how to apply her talents in a way that went beyond hot-dogging.

  I didn’t tell the journalist about the time I closed the classroom door on that poor chubby kid when he was late on test day, and Alison got in a confrontation with me about it, which was entirely inappropriate. The longer the argument went on, the clearer it became that she had the whole class on her side and I was at real risk of losing their good faith in an all-out mutiny that would screw up the classroom dynamic for the rest of the school year. I’ve always been a really popular teacher, too. Everybody wants to be in Conti’s class. That’s the sway she had with her classmates.

  I didn’t tell him about the way she rolled her eyes at these same classmates when they made a comment in class that she found obvious or dumb.

  I didn’t tell him about the time I went to the Station for a late-night grading session and she was there, alone at a table in the back, eating cheese fries. She must have come from dance rehearsal—she wore leggings and a sweatshirt unzipped over a black leotard.