Saint X (ARC)

by Alexis Schaitkin

  He could not speak to her. By the time he moved from Horatio Byrd to Everett Lyle Secondary, his stutter had mostly faded, but in Sara’s presence it came rushing back and took hold of him utterly, so that not only his tongue but his limbs, his organs, the very air inside him, were twisted and bound. His friends reaped endless amusement from this.

  “Gogo, ask Sara if she wants to come to Rocky Shoal with we.”

  “Gogo, ask Sara if we can copy she maths.”

  “Gogo, Sara left she notebook. Here. Give it back to she,” Don said one day in the schoolyard, shoving a yellow notebook against Clive’s chest.

  Sara was across the yard, giggling with her friends in a bunch tight and lovely as a flower bud. When they saw him approaching they glared at him, a wall of feminine scrutiny that withered his dick to nothing.

  “Why, thank you,” Sara said when he wordlessly handed her the notebook. The girls were varnishing one another’s nails. In the heat, the fumes made him woozy. “How are you doing today, Clive?”

  She was the only one apart from his teachers and his grandmother who ever called him Clive. He was at once proud and terrified to be called his proper name by her, to have her attention on him in this way, though he also suspected that it had nothing to do with him; probably, she called him Clive simply because she would not deign to let so foolish a name as Gogo cross her lips.

  She smiled. She was tiny as a spider. The way she looked up at him, craning her neck, emphasized his bigness until he felt as if the edges of himself may as well have been miles away, for all he could do to control them.

  “I’m well, and y-y-y-you?”

  “Quite well, thank you.”

  She had the power to bind his tongue and she enjoyed it. She turned away from him and thrust out her hand so Saffy Lester could continue varnishing her nails.

  He stumbled back across the yard to where his friends were doubled over with laughter.

  “Check you out, ladies’ man,” Des said.

  “Wise up, bred. Why you try to love a thing that will never love you back?” Don said.

  “’Sides, I hear she mama crazy crazy,” Damien said.

  Edwin patted him on the back. “Don’t listen to these fools, Goges. Someday that girl will be yours for true. And when she is, you remember it was me who knew it would be so all along.”

  GOGO AND Edwin got drunk for the first time when they were fourteen. They were walking home from school one day when Edwin stopped on Mayfair Road and struck up a conversation with Jan, a Dutchman who had been on the island as long as they could remember. He wore linen tunics and leather sandals, and he could almost always be found sipping from a paper bag in the shade of one building or another in The Basin. When Jan asked if they cared for a drink, Edwin said, “Sure,” as if this were something they did all the time. Jan led them to a bar called Paulette’s Place, where he bought a bottle of Olde English. The three of them drank it together at the bar. When the liquid burned down Clive’s throat he was back in his mother’s kitchen, sitting on Vaughn’s lap, the glinting faces of strangers laughing around him. He tilted his glass back again.

  “An old pro, are we?” Jan said, and patted his back.

  Edwin raised his glass in the air, then took a quick sip.

  “Sweet like a woman,” he said.

  “Truth,” Clive replied, though neither of them had yet known a woman’s taste.

  THAT SAME year, for a few weeks, Edwin and Clive and their friends were seized by boxing fever. As soon as the last bell rang, they traveled in a pack down the center of Gould Road—cars honking at them to move to the side, which they didn’t—to Don’s house, because his father was in Tortola and his mother didn’t get off work until seven. Don’s family was worse off than most of theirs. The galvanized roof of his house was badly rusted. Scrawny chickens stalked the yard, pecking at the dirt. There was a rubbish heap nearly hidden in scrub. Against the house, a few desiccated pepper plants grew out of old Nido canisters. The boys liked the roughness of this. In Don’s yard their jaws clenched. Their gaits simmered with an itchy energy.

  They would stand in a circle and send two from among their ranks into the center. They placed bets. They jeered and clapped and egged each other on. When the sun began to set they squared up with one another, trading coins that were sour and warm from their pockets. Then they dispersed, each sore, bruised boy making his own way down the familiar roads to the lights of home.

  When Clive thinks of his youth, it’s this brief span of afternoons that pulses most insistently in his memory. They were after something. They ought to have been men, or so they feared, and they were trying to teach themselves the things men should know. None of them expected him to be any good, and he wasn’t. Big, clumsy Gogo. He punched the air, dodged too slow, got his lip split over and over.

  There was a girl from their form who liked to come around. Her name was Berline, Bery for short, and she was a solid, heavy-shouldered girl who wore her uniform loose, the maroon plaid skirt coming down to her shins. Bery had her heart set on boxing. She showed up every afternoon, lingering and begging to be included. “I been practicing with my brother,” she told them one afternoon. “He says I’m better than he.”

  “We don’t want you to get hurt, Bery,” Don told her in a voice syrupy with false concern.

  “What’s it to any of you if I get hurt? You all does hate me.”

  “Go away, Bery,” Des said in a bored voice. “Can’t you see where you’re not wanted?”

  Bery marched right up to Des. “I’m just asking for one go.”

  “Sure, Bery,” Edwin chimed in. “We’ll let you have a go.”

  “You will?”

  “Why not? You is waiting a long time now. Gogo!”

  “Me?” he whispered.

  “No, my other mate Gogo. Yes, you! Get in there and give Bery she turn.”

  “I don’t want to go with no Gogo! He the worst of all you.”

  Don got up in her face. “You want your turn or not, Bery?”

  She grabbed the gloves angrily from him and stepped into the center. Gogo followed. The worst one, good enough only for the girl. He could hear his friends sniggering as they placed their bets:

  “My money’s on Bery; her face all wreck like a boxer already.”

  “Put me on Gogo. Even he can beat a girl. If she even be a girl.”

  They met in the center, glove to glove. He could feel the humiliation in his eyes connecting with the rage in hers, sending off heat.

  Don counted down from three and stepped aside.

  Gogo swung.

  He felt the impact of his punch like biting into a mango and letting the flesh fill your mouth. Then he heard her scream, saw her hands fly to her face. The circle fell apart as the boys rushed in.

  “Bery, you okay?”

  “Let we see your face.”

  When she took her hands away, Clive swooned. Blood spilled from her nose over her lips.

  “Shit, Gogo. She all cut!”

  Bery scrambled to her feet and ran off, hands over her face. When she was gone, the boys began to laugh.

  “What’s wrong with you, man? Breaking she nose!”

  “Figure he finally throw a good punch now.”

  Gogo looked from face to face to face. When he saw Edwin, laughing with the rest of them, he was seized by an urge to run at his friend and tackle him to the ground. It was Edwin’s fault. He had made this happen, matching him up with her. The blood had been thick and gummy, like the strawberry syrup at Milk Queen.

  But when the sun went down and the boys dispersed for the evening, Edwin walked over to Clive.

  “What you want?” Clive muttered, and kept walking.

  “Come on, Goges, don’t be like that!”

  “Get dead, Edwin,” Clive shouted behind him.

  “Slow up, man!” Edwin sprinted after him. “I’m sorry, okay? For true.” He put his skinny arm around Clive’s shoulders, and though Clive wanted to shove his friend off, he didn’t. “Y
ou know, I think you finally rid we of she for good,” Edwin said. He grinned mischievously, like this had been their secret plan all along, the two of them. And Clive felt better. He grinned back at his friend. Together, they walked the darkening roads home.

  WHEN THEY were fifteen, the island’s first big resort, the Oasis, opened on the south coast. A year later came the Grand Caribbee, and then, in quick succession, Salvation Point, the Villas at Sugar Cove, the Oleander, and Indigo Bay. The arrival of the resorts brought other changes. Sir Randall Corwin Airport underwent a massive expansion and began offering direct flights from New York and Miami. It became unremarkable to see a white family gnawing on jerk chicken legs at Spicy’s. The sleepy streets near the island’s only deepwater port were renamed Hibiscus Harbour as part of an initiative by the island’s Tourist Board; Victorian façades were put up on the fronts of the buildings and stores opened selling duty-free perfume and timepieces, T-shirts and batik sarongs, Cuban cigars and souvenir bric-a-brac: palm frond hats and seashell picture frames and bottles of local sand. The port was rebuilt with berthing facilities for fifty yachts and a jetty that could accommodate up to three cruise ships. Within a few years, the island became a popular stop on cruise itineraries; during the high season, Carnival and Celebrity and Royal Caribbean ships moored at the port daily and disgorged thousands of tourists, and as many as half a dozen competing steel bands waited on the jetty to greet them. Paradise Karaoke opened, then Papa Mango’s, which became notorious for its thirty-two-ounce frozen cocktails.

  The first of their friends to get a job at one of the resorts was Des’s older brother Keithley, who became head of water sports at Salvation Point when they were sixteen and Keithley was twenty-two. The resort offered windsurfing and sailing. There were two speedboats for snorkeling excursions. If for whatever mysterious reason the guests wished to, they could cling to a bright yellow banana boat and get dragged back and forth across the bay. At night as the boys drank and smoked wherever they were drinking and smoking that night—at Paulette’s Place, or behind Arthur’s father’s shop (for by then Arthur had given up his honor student ways and was drinking more than any of them)—Keithley regaled them with stories from work. He had watched parents chase young children across the sand for hours like fools, and a child turn inconsolable when his Shirley Temple arrived with only one cherry. His feet had been vomited upon by a middle-aged woman who drank four rum punches before she rode the banana boat. He had been told to “Take it easy, mon,” when he insisted that a man wear a life preserver to go sailing, as the resort required. He had gazed upon the supine bodies of teenage daughters and honeymooning young wives as they worked on their tans in the tropical sun.

  Keithley had been at the job a few months when he showed up at Paulette’s one night with a small key in his hand. They waited until after midnight, then six of them piled into Keithley’s car and drove across the island to Salvation Point. He killed the lights and the engine at the entrance to the service road and coasted down the hill to the parking lot. They hurried across the resort grounds.

  “Shit, man, check this place!” Don said as they snuck past the main deck with its three swimming pools. When they reached the sand, they broke into a sprint. They pulled off their T-shirts and dashed through the soft waves of low tide with their shirts held in their hands above their heads, to where the speedboat was moored some twenty meters out. Des reeled up the anchor and whispered, “Now! Now!” Keithley turned the key and they sped away from the lights of the resort and out into the night.

  For a few weeks, until they got caught and Keithley was fired, they spent their nights joyriding. (After Keithley was dismissed, he would work for a spell at the gas station on George Street before trying his luck in Liverpool, returning three years later with a wife and a son, Jamie, who would die at nine, the freak consequence of a collision on the football pitch behind Horatio Byrd Primary, one of those moments you could puzzle over for the rest of your life—the millimeters and milliseconds by which you had been given this fate in place of all others.) They cut through the placid waters off the coast and limed on one beach or another; they drank and smoked, tussled in the shallows, blasted Public Enemy and Run-DMC, and shouted up at the stars, which wheeled overhead so fine and bright it hurt to try to understand what they were. Just to be a little bad. During the day, the beaches belonged to the snorkelers and picnickers. At night, they became theirs.

  From the boat, they discovered coves you couldn’t see from land because they were hidden behind thick scrub. One night, they found a small crescent of sand surrounded on three sides by steep rock faces. They returned the next night with a rope. Keithley scrambled up the rocks and tied the rope to a tree at the top of the cliff. They returned to this spot often. They would climb the rope from the beach to the top of the cliff and stand, toes curled around the edge, the moon like a massive searchlight on the water.

  “Do it! Do it!”

  “Don’t pussy out, bro!”

  “Three-two-one, man!”

  The fleeting infinity between when his feet left the edge and when the water sucked him under was the closest to weightless Clive had ever felt. Don, Des, Edwin, Damien, Keithley—each of them in turn left the world ever so briefly behind. You could hear cars from the top of the cliff; they were less than a five-minute walk through the scrub from Mayfair Road, and from there it was less than half a mile to Indigo Bay, yet nobody saw them, or knew this spot. It was a nameless place on an island where they knew the name of every last dog and dinky fishing boat—a promise that this world, these lives, could break open.

  “Someday when I’m making mad cheddar in New York I’m gonna build a mansion right up there, so close to the edge when you look out the window you just see sea,” Edwin declared one night. It was three A.M., and they were lying on the sand at the base of the cliffs with the radio turned down low.

  “Cheddar,” Don snorted. “Man, quit your Yankin’. You’re not going to no New York.”

  “Up yours, Don. Anyway, is what you know about it? When I’m in Brooklyn and you all still live with your mummies, you better not be expecting any barrel from me!”

  “We’ll be sure to keep that in mind,” Damien said.

  “What you want with New York anyway?” Don asked. “Why freeze your rod off doing shit work there when you can do it here where the weather fine?”

  “And hang with we at Little Beach on your day off?” Des added.

  “And with we youths,” Clive whispered. He was so stoned his own words flew at his skin like wind.

  “With we youths!” Don gasped, slapping his knee. “What the ass you talking about, man?”

  “Nah, nah, he right!” Des shouted. “The Goges see it clear! All we liming in the shade with some Cruzan, and we wifeys making chat, and we sons playing windball in the sand.”

  For a moment they were quiet as the vision Des had painted seemed to take life above them in the dark sky.

  “We wifeys nagging and we babies whining, you mean,” Edwin said. “Anyway, I’m not gonna be doing no shit work in New York. I got plans, what you think?”

  “Hear that, breds?” Don said. “Edwin gonna be a big man! What I think? I think you’re full of shit. I think ten years from now you still living with your fat sisters. I think you gonna dead here, same as all we. Except the Doc here.”

  Damien smiled modestly. He had done well on his A-levels. He would be applying to college next year.

  “The frig you know about it?” Edwin continued. “I’ll swim off this island, come to that. Gogo will come with me.”

  “I can’t swim,” Clive said.

  Edwin pinched the fat on his shoulder. “You buoyant.” Edwin shrugged. “You’ll float.”

  “Shit, it’s late,” Keithley said. “We gotta get back.”

  They gathered their things, waded through the shallows to the boat, and rode the calm waters back to Salvation Point. On the boat, Clive, too stoned to sit up, lay on the floor and let the wind blow over his open eyes as
he stared up at the sky. New York was Edwin’s dream, and though he spoke of it as a place they would go to together, Clive sensed the unlikeliness of this; instead, Edwin’s desire for New York seemed to prefigure a future in which he would be left behind—on the island, and in the past.

  For hours after that, until his grandmother woke him the next morning, he could feel Edwin’s fingers on his shoulder as if they were still there, like the ghost of someone who was already gone.

  “WE LIMING on Faraway tonight,” Keithley declared as the boat sped away from shore one evening.

  “We can’t,” Clive blurted out before he could stop himself.

  “Why not?” Keithley asked.

  Clive looked down at his hands. “You know why,” he mumbled. In his mind he saw her—the long black hair hiding her face. Hooves for feet.

  Keithley clapped his hands in delight. “Goges, man, don’t tell me you still believe that old-folk fuckery.”