A Drink Called Paradise (6 page)

When she saw what it was, she was out of the car. When they bore him away, she followed them. I followed her. I wasn't going to sit in the truck and wait around. I wasn't going to drive away with her truck either, though I did later. What I remember most about following is the women who rose up out of the big clumps of dirt and wailed over the boy. The blue and pink walls of the cliffs wailed.

We waited a day. It was decent of us, decent of them to bring us food, they who unrolled mats and let us lie in a warm room all night, lie without sleeping. The room had a hole in the roof that children and birds passed over. Only those who brought food came down the ladder that was left for us against that hole. I used it only once in the night, to pee off the roof.

She didn't talk about how much she loved that man that night, she didn't even talk about the boy, who he could have been. I didn't make hippie talk. I showed her my flute. Did you have a flute in those days or just a piano?

I had a flute.

Well, then, you know how I could try to sound Afghani with my flute there in the dark. But I also did “Yankee Doodle,” “Hi-Ho Silver.” She wanted me to play anything. I didn't know her, she was an older woman with a man who didn't want her and a job waiting for her at the end of her drive. She dug latrines because she was a woman. That was what women did then, you know, to be women, to show they could be men if they wanted. She was helping the people, and she had another job at the end of the drive to show she could help, though she hadn't been helping long—she knew about as much of their language as I did. After I put down the flute, I smoked what I had—she was asleep by then—and listened to the wailing.

We climbed out in the morning. Goats were swarming all over the place, as noisy and jammed up as they had been the day before on the road. But now no one was straightening them out. More people than lived in these places had come to wail, men to one side of a clearing, wailing women on the other. The boy was carried between them on a litter, wrapped tightly in blue and pink cloth. You could believe cocoons made butterflies, I remember thinking then.

I wasn't so stoned that I couldn't get the ladder out of the hole and over the side of the wall. She made a big deal out of helping me and almost fell off. The men met us at the bottom. They were all weeping now, not wailing—I had never seen so many men crying before. One of them put out his hand and she took it.

That was dumb, I say.

She said, It is raining, and pointed at their eyes full of tears, and they smiled. She lived with them, or with people like them where she came from. I don't think it was dumb.

So they hung her?

He doesn't look up at the plaiting that hangs from the ceiling, the only thing hanging, the thing that makes shadows out of the moonlight that plays here.

They ignored me. I waited around for her to come back, but she didn't, so I walked back to the truck, thinking I would drive it over, pick her up, and get going, but once I swung myself up into the driver's seat—there was still blood on the windshield—I realized she had the keys. I had to walk back to the village, over all that humped earth that the women seemed to come out of the day before.

And yes, there she was. I was so set on the keys in her pockets in that weird way you get when you are stoned that I remember panicking because she was nude, not because she was dead. Then I tried to run away. Nobody would let me. Not even the goats that came swirling around the first corner of my running. Who can get away in the middle of a bunch of goats? But it turned out that all they wanted was to give me the body. They didn't want a body that wasn't theirs, they didn't want to bury a body that had buried one of theirs. It was up to me to cut her down, to wrap her in her clothes—her arms and legs already were no good to move—and carry her now wood-heavy body over all those dirt clods back to the truck and drive her away.

And the moral of the story?

He looks around. Is someone listening? He says, Don't think you can help.

I can't help. I wasn't even thinking of helping. I'm angry I missed the boat. I just want to get out of here.

I keep watch on my hands. He is very attractive now, without his women, with all this scotch and his story.

He stretches way up and takes down the hanging, plaited pandanus.

We're not really here for them anyway, I say. We're here just to eat and sleep, I guess, but not for them. We're in the way for them.

He drinks the rest of what's in the coconut.

You know, it's not the secret of life that people always want, he says. That's easy, that's a man and a woman, we can even do that with test tubes. It's the secret of death. What happens after life isn't too interesting. So what if you could live death, wouldn't that get you a little closer?

You are guessing now, I say. What am I not seeing? I once heard a hairdresser ask, and I felt fear. It's not funny.

You know what else about this island? he says when he stops laughing. The most famous story about this island?

Listen, the ticket agent didn't even spell this place right, let alone tell me about it. I came because the main island was a bore, because the crew for a drink called Paradise got tired of me playing the piano backward at night, because all I could get in the seashells was car roar and not waves.

You want another story?

I like you, I say.

You wouldn't look at me someplace else.

This is an island, after all, I say. Tell me the story, I say. You have to keep inventing or else the island closes in, goes cold with too much truth.

He looks out his window. The first white woman to set foot on this island was the mistress of a Captain Goodenough, who wasn't quite good enough, and so he left her—in payment of a debt. Or in a hurry? Who knows? Or had he just had enough of her and wanted to exchange her for an island woman? Or did she give him syphilis and he knew it?

She liked the place, she wanted to stay.

Whatever. Anyway, she got herself in trouble immediately. Whoever couldn't have her fought with the rest until they realized nobody was having her. They decided to solve the problem most democratically—by eating her. A little of her for everyone.

Sex and food, men are always getting them confused. So, what about it? Are you trying to warn me? I'm the dainty little dish set before the king?

I'm not a bit drowsy now.

Don't think you can help, he says, and he pushes me toward the door.

Hey, I don't know any more about you, I say.

You'll think of something. He frowns, patting his chest where a cigarette might be.

Aha—an addict? I say. I know you better already.

Oh, no, not me. He grimaces.

Veelu waits outside. She can't look in, there are no windows except toward the water. She can only listen. I walk past her with the swagger of someone who knows more than she, of someone who has heard his stories and understands what he means.

Later, I'm sorry.

This week I will stay in the water up to my neck until the boat comes, and in the meantime the island will wash off and I will have nothing to fear. Besides, I will drink and eat nothing, especially not drink. I will be safe.

I am sane. I am sane. This is the sane thing to do.

I slump into the water, just letting my nose and mouth stick out, but I'm so white, white-faced and white-headed, that I can't be a rock or a seal or a post. I wish for Harry and his whiteness beside me, a hundred Harrys dimpling the lagoon so I can't be picked out by color, so I can't be picked out. Oh, if I have to be here, let me be fitted with the parentheses of a tourist, the ones that let you not be where you are and not be at home at the same time, the ones that are safe.

Ngarima says a stupid girl can't stay in the water all the time like a dog with bugs. You'll get sick and we'll be blamed, she says. She asks how I am.

Fine, I say. Just in for a morning dip, I say.

Ngarima has been slapping what I think is rope against a rock. She watches me.

Who's more interesting than me? Here, when I open my mouth, everyone else shuts theirs. Here, when I say I'm going nuts, nobody says anything until two hours later, when someone asks, Is this where the nuts are?

I am not facing Ngarima. I am answering her with my face to the sea, as if I should not take my eyes off it, as if a boat will pass by if I do. If only I could climb to the top of the tallest coconut and keep watch and stay in the water at the same time. What was screaming this morning? I ask, half submerged.

A pig. Pigs don't like to die.

I clear my head from the water. Just a pig. Good, I say.

It was the pig you gave your bottle of soy to, that fat one.

That one? Oh, yes, right. I did buy a bottle of soy sauce. I shut my mouth. That pig was happy with that soy sauce. What about its bottle? I arch my neck over the water to see if it's still afloat. Things do float against the morning brightness—is that a bottle? Or Temu?

I can't tell.

We are having a celebration, she goes on. For you, she says. And for the other one, Harry. We haven't had visitors for such a long time that we are making a party to show our respect. But for such a party, we have to wait for the sauce to sour, for one of the pigs to get big.

Ngarima, I say. I am stopped from saying what a fine thing this is to do, but unnecessary, how many pigs do you have? let alone how ungrateful I am to be here where pigs scream first thing in the morning and deformed babies roll out of mats and giant sponges lurk, and what's wrong with Temu anyway? when I see what's coiled on her shoulder. Intestines, garden-hose long. They are all clean, I see that, flat and clean, there's a bottle of Joy in her hand, I see its bubbles not far away, a little extra foam, and a little something brown swirling around me in the water.

So much for the water.

I get out and shake myself dry.

Another pig is dying behind us. Why not a woman? The scream is high-pitched enough, furious and animal enough. A woman in high heels, a hoofed woman. The lagoon goes red, and deep inside it starts glowing, it starts to scream itself.

A boat is coming, isn't it? I say. In time for leftovers?

Ngarima starts. A boat will come, she says. Yes, she says. Her
yes
sounds like
yes
, it is possible a boat will come like the sun will rise, the day end.

Behind us men throw dice against the church wall, the noise of their play followed by soft ha-ha's that could be laughter or something else I don't understand. One of them flicks on a cordless razor. It has to be cordless—there are no plugs. Then he brings that buzzing razor over to the dead pig and begins to shave it.

When was the army here last? I ask.

The army doesn't come here, Ngarima says She is watching the surf the way I do, but the way she watches is better—she can see past it, she can see into it.

But Barclay says it comes. He told me they showed movies.

She squeezes her hose again. Yes, a sort of army still comes. She gives me a look that I equate with their present tense: every word she says revealed to her as she says it.

Over the sound of pig death begin the quick strokes of a drum. They are a heartbeat's, doubled. Ngarima's son walks down the beach from where that sound is coming to take the hose from Ngarima.

Go practice the dance, she says to me. Until it's time.

I look out at the empty ocean. The dancing faces it.

In second grade we had to dance, I say to Ngarima's son. We put on skirts made of paper cut into wavy lengths that stained, and we had to wriggle. I wriggled hard the way a robot would so no one would laugh. I hated it when they laughed.

Ngarima's son is already smiling.

I follow him to where four women weave something about birds with their hands over their hips, and their hips say something else in circles, each hip saying it exactly the same way as the next woman's. Only the size of the hips varies, and as fast as I see this, the size doesn't matter, one matches the other in what they say with how they move. It's not that collecting-shells kind of dancing, that bursting forth, but the engine of the island in serious precision. Maybe this is Morris dancing, maybe this is square dancing, but when the men waggle their knees open and shut and dance close and dance closer to the women's hips, it isn't folk, I can't dance it with my parents paying for the outfit.

Ngarima's son dances, boy enough to make a farce of the dance and its peacock engagement, and the other men are old, the other end of what wags. But they wag, they shimmy and wriggle up to me, scissoring their knees and legs while the drum tats louder and harder and I start to sway.

You have to put your arms up to sway right. The hips need room. But with your arms up, men find places to hold on to, the curve and the bulge where the breasts grow, though they don't touch me. But then I don't sway much.

At a nightclub on the island where we shot Paradise, all the tourists were asked to dance. I either kept to the back or else I did it, with my face flushed and watching the back the way a ballerina would, to keep from falling into their precise swaying that pressed toward me again and again without touching. Touching is never the point. Everyone who is not an islander is a Methodist when it comes to this not-touching dance, we have no limbs that correspond to theirs, all we can do is touch and not sway that well.

I try not to breathe, I try not to let any of the island into me. I just dance and forget that I am here by being so here. I say nothing to anyone, even when they shout
Vagina Mouth
and clap out my path.

I am saying no to their beer that they make out of what? when Harry comes and says, Don't be stupid. Hearing that so soon a second time makes me think I might be. If a boat comes this time, even they will miss it is what he says when it's almost dark and doesn't matter.

I think of my son. This island I'm on is a planet drifting farther and farther away. Not drifting the way planets do on film but screeching along at a pace, that second per second they calculate that wrenches us away from the other stars and wandering planets. My son is standing on a street corner on another faraway planet—just like one of those classroom models—and he's waiting for the traffic to part so he can run across and somehow join me, but the traffic is part of the orbiting too, it's the ocean, and the street corner I'm on drifts farther and farther away.