A Drink Called Paradise (5 page)

I take a few steps down the path toward the shop where I bought the soy sauce. It's closed. Then I turn around and put down my bag and walk to the end of the wharf, where I stand and stare. Even with sunlight streaming out over the lagoon in white-hot sheets, even with my hand held over my brow in strict pirate fashion, I can see nothing, no boat past the reef.

I take a seat.

I dangle my legs over the water. I take off my shoes and let my toes slide in. I take out my hat because sun like this will cook me. It's not as if I can't learn. I apply lotion.

Island time, I sigh.

People do come later, a man with a rake, children I don't know who beg for more of my candy—word gets out—a bevy of nameless women who giggle away at something. I ask them all if I'm in the right place and all of them nod, they
yes
me.

I walk back to Barclay's at midday to ask once again if he's heard anything about the boat. As usual, he's not home. Men are not “owned,” says Ngarima. I don't know where he goes, she says. She has Temu in a hammerlock and is spooning something green into him that sprays the walls when he sees me.

It's my problem, the boat.

Exiting, I take back my thongs. I'm still angry at Ngarima for how she saw the man in my room as what I had come for, what I needed, what everyone wants. Not that that wasn't what I wanted. But there is swimming and the peace of nowhere and the trinkets of somewhere. Why exactly did she delay me the first time?

I flip-flop all the way around the island, just a quick tour in case a lighter has landed in some unlikely spot I don't know about. No one else is out. The sun is hot: I could be either the mad dog or the Englishman.

I return to the wharf and take up my vigil. I suck candies all afternoon. I give out a few to the children as if the children are a magic that can move events along if they're happy. I don't swim to pass the time. That giant sponge is part of me now, my foot cannot forget the way its swell met me, its size a shiver to be shaken off and pressed out. I am not as haunted by Temu, I'm almost used to his bean head just out of the water. But I'm leaving and taking my pity with me.

Come home, says Ngarima, extending her hand. The sunset's beginning behind her, a deep yellow and red, her hand's color.

Part 2

We call you Vagina Mouth, says the first woman. For those small bites of taro you take. And my name is Spreader. She is Breasts for Three, she is Clam Hold, and Ngarima we call Mouse Touch. You can't guess why.

We are tapping holes into tiny shells. It takes concentration. I have none. I am taking in air like a son of a gun, the names shock me so. More shocking is that they don't laugh. These are their “real” names.

Vagina Mouth! I can't smile now, I can't do anything with my mouth.

I laugh.

The ladies laugh too, finally, but not at my name—at how all my shells fall to the floor when I laugh. We have spent the morning bent over wet rocks, picking these tiny shells off their undersides, and now I have to pick them all off the floor. I wish the little shells would walk away into the cracks the way they do on the rocks so I won't have to, so my bad back won't be part of their talk.

But I like their talk. When laughing women on the way to the beach woke me, I followed them. Ngarima said not to, that in the Bible women together are only trouble. But that's what I need, trouble. You can't live on a missed boat or a book or Barclay's bum radio. You can't stay up all night, watching the door in the rain, or even sit on the wharf day after day as I have done for another week. Besides, Ngarima is full of the Bible since the missionary's visit, or maybe she was full of it before, but I thought that was how they talked here.

Vagina Mouth.

Dresses sewn to the neck the way missionaries like them dry on rocks now bare of all the tiny shells. The women work wrapped in their flowered sheets. For the first time I see the tops of breasts and arms of the island women, pale, thick-muscled protrusions—and the necklaces.

Not the necklaces of shell, which they are putting over their heads as quickly as they are strung, but the necklaces that these necklaces hide, a stitching of scar where the shells lie, a scar so neatly stitched around each woman's neck that I wonder if they're born with it. But surely they die without it, whatever's been taken out having grown huge with the dull sex of multiplication. I have never seen someone with that kind of scar, those operated-on necks. I ask one about the stitching with my eyes and touch my own neck, but the woman won't say, she is singing, they are now all singing and dancing.

The tin roof of the shed rumbles with their singing. I think they pick the shed because it makes singing sound louder. I can't get the words, they sing so many parts it could be a hymn—but it's definitely sexy. The women undulate in their seats, they jump up and hula with each other, hip to hip, hip to crotch. Their flowered cloths threaten to fly open with the swaying, their wild undulations. How many are old? Not one. How many ugly? None.

It beats being depressed or boat-nuts. Why have I stuck with Ngarima for so long? Fear of the natives? Of knowing their names? As soon as I know their names, I know too much, I'm accepting the fact of my becoming a castaway.

Now I really know too much, I know their nicknames.

They are poking holes in the shells again, stringing and poking and murmuring the tails of song back and forth, as if they are still singing, as if they never stopped talking. I don't, in my life of phone chat and cocktail talk, often experience women as a whole, as beings together. Now my hands move as slowly as the women's, my hands are not fidgety, trying to leave the island on their own. I make each tap on a shell deliberate, not done to be done. Not even sitting on the porch with Ngarima is being together like this, not even opening her tins of fish, peeling her taro, lighting her stove for food. Barclay must make the difference, the deference to his authority. Instead of asking about the necklaces, I ask, Why doesn't Ngarima come with you?

The ladies smile, the ladies ply their nylon line through the shells. Ngarima, says Breasts for Three, you are not the one for her. The others say I should come to their houses, they will feed me, they will show me.

And besides, says Spreader, her son isn't with the others.

The ladies cluck.

You mean the one with the small head? I ask.

They laugh at me, they toss up their hands as if he hardly counts. It's the other. He won't seduce the girls, says Breasts for Three. All the other boys go off with girls except for him. Except for that other boy and one more, says another. Some other boys who don't like girls.

One fewer hiding for me in the night, I decide. Does he like boys? I ask.

I have crossed a line. They gasp their shock, but I see some hide smiles, so I know that their shock is for me, not for them. He is not that, they say, straight-faced. Oh, no. He doesn't sleep with the girls because he is working.

I have to laugh. I don't want to because it's not right to laugh at what others believe, but I do. A twelve-year-old boy scorned because he's working instead of putting in time with the girls? I have to laugh, and they laugh too, but it's not the same laugh, it's an uneasy, pro forma, what-will-she-do-next? laugh.

The laugh is interrupted by a cry.

The cry comes closer, and the women quiet, they stop their laughing and their plying of line. They look at each other.

It's just a baby, I say.

A young girl, the one men paint when they paint islands, wanders in with the crying bundle. She sits on the ground beside us, she tries to quiet it. Her breasts, hard against a band of flowered cloth, are two dark stains of seeped milk, dark as her eyes that say
tired
and
faraway
together when she lifts them once, trying to loosen that band, trying to get the women to help her loosen it and quiet the baby.

Breasts for Three and two others surround her, they talk low to her about holy water and the missionary and what he told her, then they take the baby away, very slowly, as if the baby will stop crying just by their gentleness. They tell her everything will be fine, and one of them lays the baby in a nest of palms outside the shed while they talk to her, while they tighten the band around her. The young girl begins crying now like the baby, so quietly, while the women stroke her hair and murmur about the baby and the young girl and about how she must leave it.

I walk across the shell-strewn floor, each step crushing more shells that are crawling off.

The baby's still crying, so low it could be two boughs of trees that don't grow here crossing each other in a cold wind. Why let it cry? I'm about to lift up the bundle when I have to feel around it to get a grip, and this grip-getting pulls back its blanket, and despite the dazzling sun after the dark shed, I see its one eye. Where the other should be is skin. A sort of skin. But pulling back the blanket that much frees it, lets all the baby out. It rolls free, it shakes to a stop on the ground like jelly, and you can see it has no anus, you can see too why the jelly—it has no bones.

I turn my head as if that will block what I've seen, then I get up out of my crouch over the baby. It's still making its noise. I fling the blanket over it, then I try to put it back together, jelly, eye, and all.

Clam Hold takes it away from me.

It's almost dark, dusky enough so that a single gull overhead looks pink from below, when I find Ngarima's son. I've been walking in circles to get land to continue under my feet as if it will lead somewhere. As if by walking I could get there, get to where the boat must be. I walk to be nowhere, and there is Ngarima's son, with two friends. Each of them is digging into driftwood with a sort of hoe just the way I have seen people do it on film, and they are digging with these hoes to make a hole wider just as I come crashing through the bush.

I thought you said there were no boats here, I say as I come right up to them and their boat through the dark.

Tupaka
, they all screech, and run off together.

I am reaching behind with both my arms, holding my arms backward, fingering the keys. Or what would be keys if a piano stood in Harry's shack. I am humming all the parts to a melody I once liked, ghostly and grand, that I know will impress. I always impress when I play the piano backward, humming or singing. Though less in parlors than in bars—so few parlors with pianos, so few pianos unless they're in bars.

I am thankful for Harry. Harry knows the tune, he even knows the score, he knows this is a piano I am gesturing toward, he can see I can finger. Without a piano, no one can say you missed a note or you play without feeling, mechanically, like a parlor trick. Anyone else on this island without parlors would want to lock me up for the strangeness of it—or laugh. People laugh at the strange first. But maybe not at jelly babies. Even Harry did not laugh at that. But perhaps Harry would have laughed at my playing the piano if I had not told him what I was doing. Perhaps the others would understand if I told them about it first, pianos being the missionary's power band, the thumping equivalent of salvation earned, those gold chords. Perhaps old ivory from a missionary's piano could be dug up, an F sharp sticking up out of the coral, with the car parts.

Harry has plied me with drinks, and that is how I begin to play. “To ply” suggests that I am pliable. I play. He empties the last of a bottle of scotch into a pitcher—no, a cracked coconut half, all he ever drinks from. He's scraggly-bearded now, and all around him lie playing cards from tricks and games he's tried to teach his ladies, but they won't play, he says, they want only one thing. That one thing, I repeat, but my piano playing drowns me out, I am drowned.

It is time for him to tell his story. He can tell his story if he wants. But he doesn't have to explain what he's doing here if he doesn't want to. Instead, he tells about being in Afghanistan as a hippie. It was a long time ago, he says, and I believe him. His hair was that long, he says, he says he had plenty of it then. It hung in clumps, the blue and pink dust of the cliffs that they passed clumped it, with the grease that was part of having that hair.

Why am I telling you this? he asks.

You said you don't like things hanging. I point with my pinkie at the twist of straw and feather dangling over us. Someone hung it there, the Valkyrie, who is away, who is coming back any minute, who is gone just for now.

Oh, yes, he says. Veelu is afraid of the
tupaka
. You know, ghosts? This is supposed to catch them.

I touch my hair the way a woman does who was born brunette, who remembers she's blond. Ghost. I start playing something soft with long, tiddly fingers, something that would scare boys in the bush.

She was hung, the woman I was with, he says.

Good grief. I stop playing and sip at the scotch from the coconut's rim. Hung how?

She drove the truck. I was a hitchhiker, her hippie. She was going somewhere she was told to, and she was sad because in the same mail as the assignment the man she wanted wrote that he wanted someone else. She drove the truck fast through all that pink and blue, she was a cloud with wheels when she picked me up. We camped when she came to a stop and a cloud of blue and pink settled in our hair, our teeth, and our necks. We zipped our bags together, we wormed our way over the cinders of the fire I built from blown-around bushes, burning the bags a little, and we laughed about it, about that kind of love. That was the only time I heard her laugh.

I am looking out his window, where the moonlight is too bright. I want to interrupt, but I can't get the words arranged. He stops talking, and what am I supposed to say? I sip and watch the shadows that the twist of straw and feathers make against the moon.

She could drive fast over those rutted, washed-out tracks. She drove as if she could drive out the bad letter she carried, as if driving away drove him away. She drove hard into a herd of goats. Goats were always on or off the road. She drove in and hit one. Or so she thought. The dust of the goats, the dust of her truck slowed down—who could tell?