The New Moon's Arms (37 page)

By the time I pulled the car up to the house, fingers of fog were stretching through the air. Jumbie weather. Mischief weather, swirling all around me. I couldn’t see more than a few feet ahead. I got out of the car, locked the door.

From out in the fog over by the road, someone called, “Calamity? It’s you that?”

“Mrs. Soledad?”

“You all right, child?” She sounded suspicious. I could see her a little more clearly now. She had someone with her. As they came closer, I saw who it was. Mr. Mckinley.

“I’m fine,” I said to them. Began to say, “Never better,” but with Agway gone only a few days ago, that would sound wrong. I bit it back.

Mrs. Soledad was wearing a pretty flowered dress. Her greying hair hung down in front in two long, girlish braids that went nearly to her waist. On her head, she was sporting a leather peaked cap; purple to match the flowers on her dress. She had it turned backwards. And was that lipstick on her lips?

Mr. Mckinley’s khaki pants were pressed. He had one button open at the neck of his plaid shirt, to show just a little bit of chest hair.

“How come allyou out on a night like this?” I asked them.

“Little bit of fog not going to hurt us,” replied Mr. Mckinley.

Mrs. Soledad reached out and pinched my arm.

“Ow!” I yelped, pulling it away from her.

“You’re real,” she said.

“Yes! What you do that for?”

Mr. Mckinley chuckled. “Jumbie weather. She not taking any chances.”

“Too right,” said Mrs. Soledad. “Thaddeus and I just taking the night air.” She reached for Mr. Mckinley’s hand. He took hers gently, like a gift, and shot her a shy glance.

My brain was looping, on input overload. Mrs. Soledad and Mr. Mckinley were having a hot affair. And on top of all that, Mr. Mckinley’s first name was Thaddeus. Who got named Thaddeus nowadays?

Under his arm, Mr. Mckinley had his battered yellow tackle box. How could the two of them be seeing each other? He was probably a good fifteen years younger than she. And how he could take his fishing hooks out on a date?

“Heavy rain this afternoon,” I said, making small talk.

Mr. Mckinley nodded. “True that. Glad I wasn’t out in the boat.”

“Good thing, too,” said Mrs. Soledad. “Otherwise, who woulda bring me another blanket to wrap my feet in?”

He smiled at her. “Best way to spend a rainy afternoon. Warm in bed, with one blanket sharing between the two of we, and the rain going
prangalang
on your tinning roof.”

“Was like young married days all over again,” she said softly.

Mr. Mckinley coughed. They both looked at the ground, but that didn’t hide the big grins on their faces. They had been in bed together, in her house, listening to the rain. I didn’t know them at all.

“You coming to the protest tomorrow?” asked Mrs. Soledad. “Going to be a lime and a half.”

“I going to try,” I said guiltily. I intended to sleep in tomorrow.

I shooed them off to continue their walk. Even when the fog started to make them difficult to see, I could still hear the companionable rise and fall of their conversation and their laughter. Seem like everybody had somebody for company. I thought about calling Gene, but I stopped myself. Never went good when I tried to force-ripe a relationship. Same thing with Evelyn. I sat on the warm hood of the car and breathed in the milky night. When the fog had me wreathed in cloud, I went inside to bed.

A
LEXANDER LET HIMSELF INTO THE SEAL PEN
, just to be sure. He looked in the water, in the caves. He picked up the sodden piece of paper he found in one of the caves and inspected it. Then, calmly, he let himself back out, locked the high gate—not that it seemed to make any difference—and walked the grounds of the Zooquarium until he found Dennis. “Come and see something with me, nuh?”

Dennis looked baffled, but he followed Alexander back to the seal pen.

“How many seals?” said Alexander.

“No seals in there, sir.”

“Not a one?”

“No.”

“It’s not just me imagining it?”

“No, sir.”

“That’s what I thought.”

He handed Dennis the yellow foolscap sheet. It was one of the flyers that had been pinned up everywhere for a few days now. The workers’ co-op people were staging a protest at the new Gilmor plant this morning.

Dennis flattened out the soggy sheet as best as he could. “What this is?” he asked, pointing to some marks on the paper. You might get marks like that if you dampened a nugget of seal chow and scraped it on the paper. “Look like writing,” said Dennis.

“You think so?” Alexander replied in a weary tone.

“Yeah, but half of it wash out.”

“True that.” They both stared at the flyer. If you used your imagination, the smudged marks could look like “BACK SOON.”

“I considering becoming a drinking man,” said Alexander.

I
T WAS THE SCENT
that woke me up next morning. Right in my bedroom with me, the strong smell of the sea.

I sat up and looked around. Something on the floor. My eyes were still blurry with sleep. I reached for my specs and put them on. Between me and the bedroom door was a pile of bladderwrack as high as my shin, and so fresh it was still wet. On top of that was a slit, L-shaped tube of white plaster, half-dissolved, but recognizable as Agway’s cast. Lying on sea grape leaves beside that was a pile of fresh raw shrimp, a good five pounds of it. The heads were still on.

I picked up my cell phone and went to check the rest of the house. Out in the hallway, I nearly tripped on Dadda’s old duffel bag. I’d put it in my closet until I could get around to burning the sealskin inside it.

But the bag was empty. I combed the whole house looking for the skin. I ended up in Dadda’s room. There was the window Stanley had broken when he threw Dumpy. I’d swept all the broken glass out of it, taped plastic over it.

The plastic was torn.

The empty pane was plenty big enough to let a person through.

I let out a whoop. “You see why I live in Cayaba?” I asked myself. “Never a dull moment.”

Ife was in charge of arranging Sookdeo-Grant’s appearance at the protest with a group of opposition party supporters. She had been fretting about all the details for days now.

I double dog dare you, Mummy
.

I called Ifeoma’s house. “Hector, it’s you that? Awoah.” I let that sink in, then said, “Put Ife on the phone for me, please?”

Ife came on the line. “Mummy? Something wrong?”

“Not a thing. I’m as right as rain. So, where exactly this protest is? Yes, I know it’s on Dolorosse, but
where
? You have enough water for everybody you looking after? Bottled water? Good. You have ice? No, don’t worry. You doing good. I will stop off at Mr. Robinson’s on the way and get some bags of ice. How you mean, how come? I can’t come and show my daughter some support? You could use a extra cooler? And you have food? Only patties? That not enough. I going to make a big pot of curry shrimp. See you at ten, then? Okay.”

I hung up the phone and went to the kitchen for a bowl big enough to hold five pounds of shrimp. “If allyou ever find any snapper,” I announced to the empty house, “I would be very grateful.”

N
ALO
H
OPKINSON
was born in Jamaica and has also lived in Guyana, Trinidad, and Canada. The daughter of a poet/playwright and a library technician, she has won numerous awards including the Ontario Arts Council Foundation Award for Emerging Writers, and her award-winning short fiction collection
Skin Folk
was selected for the 2002
New York Times
Summer Reading List and was one of the
New York Times
Best Books of the Year. Hopkinson is also the author of
The Salt Roads
,
Midnight Robber
, and
Brown Girl in the Ring
and the editor of
Mojo: Conjure Stories
. She lives in Toronto.