A Drink Called Paradise (8 page)

Boys do this, Breasts for Three tells me when she has no breath left. Boys get restless, they build a boat, and then they must use it. How to stop them? Then they get lost. They don't know how to go—we don't know anymore ourselves. Sometimes later someone will see them in Singapore or Cairns, but they will not be boys then, they will be the ghosts of boys having gone so far in these boats. But never mind—most boys die.

At sea? I don't say.

I also don't say I saw him, I could have stopped him. I say, Maybe they are only trying the boat out.

Breasts for Three says they chose to launch the boat at Harry's because there no one would see them. We see nothing, she says. I have to agree, I have to nod and look away. She says everyone else knew what the boys were doing, but no one can keep a boy even if he has no money for a fare. Boys like leaving. No one else wants to leave, this is our home—paradise. Only if someone needs medicine do they leave.

It is dark when I decide to slip inside and gather whatever of my things Temu hasn't gutted or strewn, and I shove all of it under my bag of rice. Barclay holds the boy's arms back by the elbows when I lift my curtain to go back out. Barclay holds him, but Temu struggles to free himself. He wants to what? Take his grief out on me? Does he have grief? Or does he want to beat me for just being there?

I will go sleep on the beach. Sleeping on the beach is what you're supposed to do on a perfect island like this anyway, I don't know why I haven't done it sooner. Temu certainly wanted me out, even if he does sleep elsewhere, even if Ngarima says I must sleep in his room. Anyway, if the beach is hot, so are the beds. I shake the hands of each of the chief mourners slumped in wailing stupor on the porch, and I touch many of the hands of all the others who have come, who weep too, even the men, whose weeping frightens me, who wail men-wails and beat on the coral and each other, then I go to pick out a stretch of beach that will do for the night, and damn the roving rapists, the dying half lives.

Mosquitoes graze in every depression, they come out of the bush as another sharp, cutting part of the bush, a part that flies. Where two palms grow close, where the wind presses these palms flat the way it is always blowing, where the wind picks up sand in sheets and stings so no mosquito stays, a place not far from where the car parts rust in their coral colors, not far from where a boat might come if it came, I hollow out a place anyway and line it with my flowered cloth. I don't dig too deep, not to China, not to whatever's left of a jelly baby. Then I lie down to test my hollow for later, pull palm fronds and scrap leaves over me, and I fall asleep, my sleep with Harry having been slight.

Real night is about to fall when I wake. Loud singing wakes me, from people who don't see me, filing past, singing with all the lust taken out, with no fists thrust up into the sky, no hips swinging and rolling. They file past my place, and they carry things—the comic book, the thong, the toys—and two men, Barclay one of them, and one woman walk out past the wharf into the lagoon with these things that they weight with stones and make into parcels, that they drop in.

The boys are gone, they are buried.

Returning, Barclay passes me, Ngarima passes. I'm now standing beside a line of moving people, trying to look as if I know what it is that they feel.
There's nothing you can day
is what I would say to excuse myself, but that wouldn't be nothing enough.

I move to the wharf after they've all gone. I expect to see the bright newsprint of the boy's comic book floating back in minutes, the way my bottle did, but nothing shows. A few things do get away. Then a star falls out of the sky, and I know as I watch the bright night with all the strange constellations built into its darkness that even the sky gets away.

My son got away.

He is dead. Dead for a year—a year, is it? Dead for however long it takes to work that hard after. An accident is that hard. An accident is nobody's fault, you're on your own, there's just a doctor to sign papers, your ex to tell you how stupid you were to let it happen. That's why there's no telling anyone, there's no mourning—I am that stupid.

He is not dead. See the stars, see the rain that fell, the ocean?

I get back down into my pit, and I weep at last.

Morning.

Why not walk to where the middle of the island might be, where fewer people walk and where I can't see the ocean over either shoulder?

Why not
not
walk? I stop anywhere, I look into the bush that has bitten me—or is that mosquitoes? I look into it, but there's no picture made in my head of bush or bugs.

I find myself sitting. I find myself making earplugs from the soft centers of flowers, then I curl on my side away from ants and mosquitoes and bush and I shut my eyes. I dream about nothing, I dream about living on a beautiful tropical island that I have made out of nothing, as advertised.

Flowers rain down. I can't sleep anyway. I can just breathe in and out, I can just keep my eyes closed and dream. I sit up. I brush the flowers off with the dream, but they release their smell, the one sense I can't block. I rub their petal silk into my hand and hold one to my face, and this is why people here go on living, this freshness.

I can't not smell it.

Another bunch of petals falls.

I think I see a gray rat body in the thick of the leaves' black against the dead-white sun. I unplug my ears to hear if it rustles in the leaves, and I crouch to run if it does, I do do that, I crouch out of a dream of a rat, of myself as rat. What I hear instead of rustles are giggles. I turn toward them and they're in color, I can see them: giggles that turn into Veelu, who's a branch over, giggling among others peering down from their branches.

I don't pretend I don't notice, I nod and I smile how I remember I smile. Is that Spreader? Breasts for Three? I can't say
hello
, I can't say
good-bye
.

I can't be rude.

Why do you gather so many flowers? I almost say, What a waste of time it is, all these flower crowns and leis every morning, don't you have anything else to do? Don't you have to wail and tear at your hair and not eat? But I smell the petals, the way they change what you want.

Veelu monkeys down a limb. You think we are primitive, she says.

She doesn't say this, she spits it.

I say, I don't think that.

If you have no work to do, says Veelu, you are primitive—right?

I'd say you were advanced if you don't work. I look at my hands. They are purple. Or is that the smell?

That's not what people say, she says. That's not it, not advanced.

All right, I say.

If you are primitive, you might as well be dead—that's right, isn't it? That's what people think, isn't it? Primitive means like an animal, free as an animal, easy to kill because you have nothing to do.

Maybe, out of jealousy, I say. Maybe that's why people kill.

I could run away now. I'm still in my crouch. My beach isn't far.

You are the ones who are primitive, she says. She breaks off a branch full of blossoms and points toward her belly. This is where the ghost you and your people make hurts me, she says. Six times it fills, and six times there's nothing.

That angled branch over that part of her—this is exactly the place a maid on the main island pointed her dust mop when she warned me about what on this island—sex?

No.

Veelu shrieks her
nothing
, and at the end of it comes a cry, a short, high cry, a sound I'm not supposed to hear but have to.

The other women thread their flowers.

I keep my eyes shut against the smoke and walk into a palm. I rub my head where it hit and get into my crouch, gulping smoke in the dusk.

He comes out of the smoke, a god with a stick. Other men have their sticks, and they do a little dance in the smoke with the sticks upright, a dance men know. Then they slap each other on the back, that kind of slap, then they laugh.

They too have their names for each other, all mixed in with bits of their language and mine. Harry's I can't hear, but when it's called he struts with his stick stuck up at the groin.

But all they want is smoke! They thrust a lit stick into the base of a palm, a hole where the sand has worn away, where its root clings. Then they thrust it again into a scrub tree where a hole shows bigger. Then they do it to a tree farther down, each time waiting, sticks in hand, the hollow tree up to the man's arm, the one with the smoking torch.

And one man holds a pillowcase.

They go silent in the midst of their deflowering, except for clinical comments like
over there
or
here
, then they move on tiptoe down the beach, sticks up but wobbling, to another tree.

I follow them, using the smoke to hide behind. I don't want Harry to think I'm watching him, I don't want him to think I want to watch him. I don't want him to think about me at all. He has his women.

The man with the pillowcase trails the others. He's not far from me. It's a deflated ghost he's carrying, bunched in his dark hand. I try not to cough or to cough when he coughs. None of them knows I'm here.

At the fifth tree and after a hike, they all start to shake. They get so excited they shake and their sticks whack at the air, and then the pillowcase gets thrown down. At the seventh tree, they find what they want, but it finds a way to back off.

They light more torches that smoke. In the gloom with all their sticks, they act as one spider, all their sticks raised, the bag in the middle as a kind of globed head. They are determined now, with all their torches and sticks.

When it's finally smoked out of the hole, they catch it in the pillowcase and beat it. The meat is better beaten, someone says to Harry, but the creature inside the case fights as if it knows what is better.

Someone has already brought a pot, someone has already scooped up water from a wave, someone now sets a lit stick to a pile of sticks, and what's inside the bag is dropped into the water. Lacking a lid, the men cross their sticks over the top, they push what they've caught back into the pot.

Children chase the smoke that's left, they chase it all around me. I shiver because I don't run and shout after the smoke like they do. I want to keep on hiding.

Leaning against the tree, I hear from inside it another creature like the one they're cooking, its sound moving like the wind's inside a tree, the way the ocean sounds inside a shell. Of course I think that faint scrabbling is me, my blood inside my head, it is the kind of sound that you always think is your own, the sound of fear. And then the sound stops.

They eat it, they crack its shell, they eat more of it, the claws, they litter the beach with its pieces. There's only one for all of them, but the meat is good, very good. The children pick up the claws and chase each other through the smoke with them, they scrabble sideways, knowing how to move with that kind of claw.

A shadow fixes me. I'm already saying, What? when Harry pulls me from behind my hiding place. He brushes the sand off me. It was one of the last ones, he says without saying hello, as if he knew I was behind the tree all along.

One of the last ones? I repeat.

A nice red it turned, he says. See, there's a bit of the claw left.

The children try to bite each other with the claw.

What if you ate the last one?

I suppose you could let it die of old age, he says. There's always that. It was tough enough anyway. What's last anyway but dead?

The shells protect them, protected them from what fell.

Maybe they ate what fell, he says. Maybe that's why it was the last, or could be. Maybe that's why it was tough.

I watch the men pour a crab's worth of water from the pot into shells. No, thank you, I say when Harry offers his.

A moon rises free of the water while Harry and the others and the children pretend with their sticks to couple again with the trees, to bring forth the crabs, to give birth to them and eat them. Even the smallest of them pretends with his stick. Then—who calls them?—all of them go off.

Harry is going off too when he stops where I sit, free of the sand he has brushed from me, watching the moon and none of them, and he asks whether I can dance? He says none of the ladies he has can.

My
never
doesn't even figure, I can't even hold it in my mouth. As if I am always thinking of dancing, I take his arms, I grab hold of the ones that held the stick, the ones that beat on the last crab and then lifted the juice of its last self up to his lips in a cup, and I dance in those arms in the moonlight over the stink of the shells and the old fire.

It's a slow, slow dance, the kind sometimes you don't even lift your legs for, or turn, and sometimes you nearly fall over it's so slow. Of course I hum while he says he's not leaving here, he's never leaving here, it's his place forever.

Beseech thee, I am not lost.

Ngarima lies face down on the sand, coughing and moaning.

I beseech thee, she moans.

I sink my feet deep in the sand and study my way. And study Ngarima, yes, I must study her. It is only a little time since her son sailed off—I think. I am not sure anymore. So many nights, and if you sleep in the day covered by leaves, the days are nights too. It all gets to be night.

I am not walking anywhere when I walk here in the dark, so I walk closer, but not too close. Her grand bulk is so prostrate, her coughing so loud, those moans so hollow, like an echo off the moon. In the glow of that moon, what glows green in her hand? What hot piece of what?

Ngarima kisses that ghostly glow, then she plants it in the sand inches from her fingers, upright so it looks like it's standing.

It's a plastic Jesus. A car Jesus that glows.

Light is power, she says. She knows I'm here, I think. She coughs.

Are you all right? I ask because that's what everyone asks me.

I am fine, she coughs. Nothing is wrong. Nothing. She says
nothing
the way Barclay says
yes
, the way I say
nothing
. And you are walking? She sits up. If you walk alone in the bush, you know, a man is always walking too.