The New Moon's Arms

by Nalo Hopkinson

  “Maybe I could come and see you?”

  “Yeah, man.” I smiled. The day was looking bright all of a sudden.

  Mr. Lessing was coming down my gravel road with a kicking and wailing Agway under one arm, and carrying the tricycle in the other hand. Shit. When the backside the boy had left the yard? “I have to go,” I told Gene. I hung up the phone and went to greet Mr. Lessing. He put Agway and the tricycle down. Agway ran into my arms, complaining. I picked him up. He grabbed my ear.

  “I find him down by the Corrolyons’,” said Mr. Lessing, “pedalling that tricycle like jumbie was on his tail.”

  “All the way over there?” The Corrolyons lived about half a mile away.

  “You going to have to watch him, you know? That’s the sea road he was on.”

  “I was watching him.”

  Mr. Lessing only nodded. I gave him a grudging thank you and took Agway inside. I locked the front door and the back. Suppose a car had hit him? Suppose he’d reached the water? My heart sank as quickly as Agway would if he fell into the sea with a cast dragging him down. “Poor baby,” I said to him. “Your home is here now. And I going to do my best to make it a good place for you to live.”

  I would have to put a fence around the yard, with a strong lock on the gate.

  EVELYN SHOWED UP right on time that evening. She was wearing a cotton skirt in beige, A-line, with a tasteful lace trim at its hem. A matching t-shirt. A crocheted cotton shawl, cream colour, as were the espadrilles on her feet. She’d pulled her greying black hair back into a loose bun, let some tendrils of it escape artfully to frame her face. Damned woman was as bad as Orso; always made me feel like I had yampie in my eye corners and stains on the knees of my jeans. “Come in, nuh?”

  She slipped off the espadrilles, left them on the mat outside the door. I showed her into the kitchen. “I running late,” I told her. “Still haven’t shelled the peas.”

  “Don’t worry. I not in a hurry.” We were still bashful and awkward with each other. Probably would be for a while.

  Then she spied Agway. She tossed her wrap onto a chair and squatted down under the table beside him.

  “Hello, precious,” she said. “You remember me?”

  Agway handed her one of the plastic mugs he was playing with.

  “Thank you, my darling. What you want me to do with this?”

  And for the next five minutes, the two of them built towers of plastic mugs, laughing when they collapsed. When she clambered out from under the table, her skirt was wrinkled and most of her hair had come loose from its bun. She was still chuckling. “Well, he looks happy,” she said. She gathered her hair, knotted it, stuck the clip back through it.

  “Yeah, man. He’s doing good here.”

  “Seem he’s in good hands. You got me convinced, anyway.”

  I let out a relieved breath. “Then I rest my case.”

  She smiled. “Same thing you used to say back in school.”

  “True that.” She had laughter lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth. So strange to be seeing Evelyn’s face, but on a middle-aged woman.

  “And you were such a tomboy,” she said.

  “I know. Always getting into trouble.”

  She sat on a chair at the table and started shelling the congo peas I had in a bowl there. I gave Agway a handful of the peas in their pods and joined her in shelling the rest.

  She said, “Remember the time you went up on the roof of the school?”

  The black tar that had melted in the noon-day heat, sticking to the soles of my shoes. I smiled. “Dadda used to call me ‘Calamity Jane.’”

  “That’s where you took your new name from, then?”

  “I guess so. I never really thought about it before.”

  “And is what made you go up onto the school roof?”

  “I just wanted to see what I would see.”

  Sitting on the floor, Agway was cracking open the peas pods and eating the hulls. Raw green peas were scattered all around him.

  I hadn’t had a chance to see much up on the school roof. A loose gable came away in my hands and nearly sent me tumbling three storeys to the ground. “Almost killed myself that day. Good thing that little ledge was there, just below the overhang. Got my feet on it in time, held on to the edge of the roof, and started screaming for help.”

  “Ulric said his heart nearly jumped right out his mouth and died flopping at his feet when he looked up and saw you hanging there.”

  The school janitor. So many years I hadn’t thought about him. Grumpy old black man, or he had seemed grumpy to me then. But the strangest things could make him smile; a little lizard cupped gently in a curious child’s hands, for instance.

  “Ulric was giving me instructions the whole time he was putting the ladder up to come and get me. ‘I want you to breathe slow and even, Chastity, you hear me? Breathe strong. And use them muscles that you got. You good as any boy when it come to climbing. Hold on, girl, hold on; I coming.’”

  Mumma had come to the principal’s office when he had sent for her. She saw me with my skinned-up hands and my school uniform fouled with tar. With her mouth, she’d scolded me, but with her body, she was holding me tightly to her, checking every limb to make sure I was all right, patting my face, arms, and legs and looking at me love, love.

  And I’d looked back at her wearing her cafeteria staff uniform—a hideous dark grey polyester dress—with her hair in a net and a smear of flour on her face, and I’d been ashamed. I’d pushed myself out of her arms and snapped, “I’m all right! You have to come outside in your work clothes and make everybody see you?”

  Her face had closed up tight. She stood, swiped some of the flour off her face with the heel of her hand. “Thank you for calling me,” she said to Principal Cramer. Then she left the office without saying another word to me.

  That had been on a Friday. On the Saturday, she was gone for good.

  I shook the memories off. “You want some wine?” I asked Ev. “I have red.”

  “That sound good. It in the pantry? I could get it.”

  “All right.” I took up the bowl of shelled peas and put them to cook in the pot with rice and creamed coconut. Agway was nodding off, rubbing his eyes.

  I opened the wine Evelyn handed me and poured her a big glass.

  “You not having any?”

  “Soon. I just putting Agway to bed first.”

  “YOU NEVER LIKED THE NAME Chastity, nuh true?” asked Evelyn. She prepared to tuck into a plate of peas and rice, and dry-fried fish with seviche sauce.

  “No. Maybe my parents thought giving me that name would make me meek and biddable. It didn’t go so.”

  Evelyn tasted the fish. “God, this is good. Janet never cooks anything like this for us.”

  “Janet?”

  “We have a helper who comes in during the days. She makes dinner and leaves it for us for when we get home. Maybe your parents just wanted to give you a name that would keep you safe.”

  “Chastity?” I rolled my eyes at her.

  “So that when the boys started sniffing around you, you would try to live up to your name,” she teased.

  I snorted. “And you see how well that worked. Fifteen years old, and me and Michael un-chastitied me one afternoon after school.”

  “Michael? Your good friend Michael?”

  “He same one.”

  “He’s your baby father?”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “But the two of you didn’t stay together?”

  “It didn’t work out. I don’t like to talk about it.”

  “Imagine that. You and Michael. Fifteen years old.”

  “I guess I was precocious.”

  “No, my dear. I beat you to it. Thirteen and a half.”

  I goggled at her. “You?”

  She chuckled. “Me. Whose parents never let her out of their sight.”

  “Who? When?”

  “Steven Baldwin. In the girls’ bathroom after school one day, before Mummy and
Daddy picked me up.”

  I sat back down and looked good at her. “Steve? The one with the big mole on his forehead?”

  Evelyn frowned. “I thought that mole was kind of sweet. Made him look intellectual.”

  “And you did it in the bathroom?”

  “In one of the stalls. Standing up, girl! We could hear Ulric moving around in the hallway the whole time, vacuuming. Knew he was going to come in soon to clean the bathroom. When Steven was about to, you know—”

  I poured us more wine. “Evelyn, you’re a doctor. You don’t get to say, ‘You know.’”

  She giggled. “I do when it’s me having sex I’m talking about. Old training dies hard. When it’s other people, I get to use words like ‘engorgement’ and ‘ejaculation.’”

  “So that’s what you’re trying to tell me? That when Steven was about to come…what then?”

  She was actually blushing. “He pulled out,” she said softly. “It ran all down his leg, leaving this sticky, drippy trail on his school uniform pants.”

  I laughed.

  “As he was, um, coming, he was trying so hard not to make any noise that he roared into the side of my neck.”

  She was smiling, stroking the place on her neck as though she was touching a lover’s skin. “In the hollow,” she said, “right here so. I still remember how his voice felt, vibrating through my collar bone.”

  When Michael came, he’d thrown his arm over his eyes. I guess that way, he didn’t have to see me. I could really pick ’em.

  “Steven had to shinny out the window when we heard Ulric opening the door. He didn’t even have time to zip his pants back up.”

  “Christ on a cracker. And you thought I was brave.”

  “Hormones, man, hormones. Make you do madness.”

  Only they had thought to at least try not to get her pregnant. Pulling out was a risky method, but at least it was a method. I cleared the empty dishes off the table. “I thought you wanted to talk to me about Agway being a sea child?”

  She looked embarrassed and waved it away. “No need, man. We could do that any time.” She stood. “Listen, I don’t like to eat and run, but Samuel going to be here soon.”

  “I know. I was late with dinner.” I frowned. One mention of sea people and she was hurrying out the door?

  “I could visit your facilities?”

  “Sure. Just down the hall, first door on your right.”

  “I could peek in and see Agway, too?”

  “Of course.”

  She was gone for so long that eventually I went looking for her. Door to the bathroom was open, nobody inside. Puzzled, I went to Dadda’s bedroom. Quietly, I pushed the door open a crack. Agway was splayed carelessly on the bed, sleeping the sleep of someone with a clear conscience. Evelyn was bent over him, her ear close to his face. What the hell? I opened the door and stepped inside. Evelyn put a finger to her lips when she saw me. She indicated that we should go outside.

  Agway exhaled a long, shuddery breath. He stirred, but didn’t wake. I checked that he was sleeping comfortably. I planted a kiss on my fingertips—the two webbed ones, for luck—and transferred it to his forehead. Then I went with Evelyn into the living room.

  “Do you know his breathing is interrupted while he’s sleeping?” Her face was really serious.

  “Yeah. But he always starts again. I’m getting used to it.”

  “Calamity, just now he stopped breathing for nearly two minutes. I was about to start rescue breathing when his own kicked in again. I’m scheduling a sleep clinic appointment for him tomorrow.”

  She was frightening me. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “I don’t know until I check. But that pattern looks a lot like sleep apnea.”

  “And what that does?”

  “Causes sleep deprivation, can contribute to stroke. If it isn’t treated, the patient is at risk of cardiac arrest while he sleeps.”

  “Heart attack?!”

  “It mightn’t be anything. Just bring him in tomorrow night, about eight o’clock. He’ll have to sleep in the clinic so they can test him. You can stay the night with him. That way, he won’t be frightened. But keep an eye on him tonight, you hear?”

  “Shit.” I sat heavily on the settee.

  We heard the popcorn sound of gravel under car tyres. Samuel had come to pick Evelyn up. At the door, we hesitated for a split second, then hugged each other goodnight. “Don’t fret,” she said. “Whatever it is, we will handle it.”

  The second they had driven away, I went back to Agway’s room. I watched his chest rise and fall, rise, then stop. My heart hitching in my throat, I counted off the seconds. At one minute, I was about to shake him awake when he coughed and started breathing on his own again.

  I got myself a t-shirt of Dadda’s. I would sleep in that. Or rather, I would stay awake in that. I climbed into bed and lay beside Agway. Even in his sleep, he tried to reach for my hair. I had already started growing it for him. I pillowed my head on my other arm and prepared myself for the alert half sleep of a mother with a sick child.

  “In this morning’s news: it appears that the current government of Cayaba is moving to institute nationwide austerity measures as part of an agreement being negotiated with the FFWD. The general terms of the agreement with the American corporation of the Fiscal Foundation for Worldwide Development were contained in a secret ‘progress advisory’ drafted in Washington last week by Samuel Tanner, economic advisor to prime minister Garth Johnson, and Angelica Gray, the CEO of the FFWD. The advisory report, leaked to opposition leader Caroline Sookdeo-Grant by an anonymous source, was published in this morning’s edition of the Cayaba Informer. The agreement was apparently solidified in advance of the deadline for the Cayaba government to reach an accord on an economic management strategy with the FFWD. Under the terms of the agreement, China and a group of other creditor banks are slated to help Cayaba to repay past-due interest exceeding $750 million on loans from the FFWD.

  “Mrs. Sookdeo-Grant has called on prime minister Johnson to confirm or deny the existence of the agreement. In a press conference called today, Mrs. Sookdeo-Grant said, ‘A few days from now, the citizens of our country will be casting their votes to decide the leadership of this nation. It is therefore incumbent upon the prime minister to come clean about his party’s plans for our future so that Cayabans have full information in order to decide how to vote.’

  “At this time, there has been no response from the office of the prime minister.”

  Stanley came running over to the library checkout desk where I was working. “I found one!” he said. “Come! Come and look!”

  Myrtle of the sky-high heels was working the desk with me. She smiled when she saw him. “Go on,” she said. “Not busy here right now.”

  “Thanks.”

  I took Stanley’s hand and let him pull me towards the computer terminal he’d been using. He pointed at the screen. “I could make a kite! And attach a camera to it, and take pictures of Cayaba from the air!” He took me through a Web site about home-made aerial cameras.

  “All right, so what you need to make this wonder?” I clicked on the link that said “equipment.”

  Stanley’s face fell when he saw the list. “It’s too hard.” His shoulders slumped. “I think I’m just going to help Hector make a seal cam. He said I could.”

  My hackles rose at the sound of that name. “No. I don’t want you having anything to do with Hector. You’re not to talk to him any more.”

  “But why?”

  “He’s not a nice man. You don’t need to be messing around with him and his seals. I’ll help you do this project. Look like a breeze.” Man, what a lie. What the hell was “Picavet suspension”? And where would I find an anemometer? I grabbed some scrap paper from the box of it beside the computer terminal and started making notes. “We going to need a digital camera,” I told Stanley. Maybe we could make the anemometer.

  Someone touched my shoulder. Gavin. “Next shift,” he said. “I’m
relieving you.”

  “Already?” My eye fell on the clock in the corner of the computer screen. Just past five p.m. I leapt to my feet. “Shit. Stanley, I have to run!”

  “But—”

  “I have to get home on time so Mrs. Soledad can leave. I can’t be late.”

  He pouted. “All right.”

  “Good boy.” I kissed him on the cheek. “Call me tonight, all right?”

  His face had gone sad. I squatted down so I could look him in the eye. “This is going to be the best science project in the whole parish. You hear me, Stanley?”

  He glanced at me, looked back down at the floor. “Yes.”

  “You’re going to blow everybody else right out of the water.”

  Again a glance, a little more hopeful now. “Even Godfrey Mordecai?”

  “Why? What Godfrey Mordecai doing for his project?”

  “A robot.”

  “That’s all? Stanley, I used to make robots for fun. Out of shoeboxes and silver paint.”

  He brightened. “For true? And yours were voice-activated, too?”

  “Voice-activated?”

  “Yes. Godfrey Mordecai’s robot is going to have wheels, and it’ll be able to go backwards and forwards, but it’s only going to go when he tells it to.”

  I gulped. “Yes, my love. Your project is going to make Godfrey Mordecai’s look like dog doo-doo.”

  That got me a big grin. “Okay!”

  I kissed him goodbye, waved at Myrtle, went downstairs for my purse, and fled out the delivery exit. Wasn’t till I got home that I remembered that Agway and I were going to sleep at the sleep clinic tonight. And Gene was coming over. Looked like this menopause thing could make you forget your own blasted name.

  I called Stanley and talked to him a bit about his project

  while I tried to prepare supper for Agway. I kept eyeing the clock. When I heard the knock at the front door, I swear my heart started a drum roll. I told Stanley I’d talk to him the next day.

  Not only was Gene still in his uniform, he was a little bit sweaty, too. Loved that smell.

  Agway and I didn’t have to be at the sleep clinic until eight p.m. If I put him to sleep at the regular time, maybe he would doze through the waterbus ride and I wouldn’t have the drama from him that I’d had the first time. So when he started looking sleepy around six-thirty, I put him to bed.