To Mitchell’s relief, the music faded into cottony vibrations and then stopped. The liquor on an empty stomach, the thick cloying fumes of jasmine, Johnnie—he had become dizzy in spurts. Dropping their hands away from each other, she froze under his scrutiny, averting her eyes.
“Oh, Jesus,” she said, daring to look at him again, seeing his confusion, the inertia, the twitches of, what? Revulsion? Self-revulsion? “You really hate me, don’t you?”
It was terrible to think she could again be his—more terrible to think he could be hers, that she could swing down the blue arc of the atmosphere with a receipt for five years’ payment on this whatever it was between them, held in escrow. What, after all, would their lives have been had she stayed? He felt the immediate futility of thinking that way.
The music ignited again—raving, ferocious, police truncheons playing the skulls of the mob like blacksmithing. Johnnie and Mitchell were jostled by the dancers; tears condensed in her eyes. He tried to lead her off the patio but with sobering force she pulled his hand back to her waist. Her face contorted; she fought against being overwhelmed but her arms hung limp at her sides, tremors jerked her shoulders, black ribbons unfurled from her eyes. He hated the sight of her alone in the world, the agony of her, her homelessness, yet he still could not comfort her.
“I’m so sorry,” she said, gasping for air. “Mitchell, I’m so sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. Find something else to be. We just met, right?”
Johnnie stepped into him, her fist clenched and unclenched against his shoulder blades, the basket of her ribs so lively, a wetness on his shirt, smeary with mascara, where she pressed her face. He could barely hear her. Something about how she had hurt him, how she didn’t understand how much until—He resented this diagnosis and unlocked himself from her arms, walking away, leaving her there in the mayhem of the dancing. There were empty stools at the bar and he sat down, queasy from the whorehouse perfume of the jasmine banking the patio. “I seem to be getting drunk again,” he told Winston, and then added petulantly, “I deserve to.”
“Who don’t?” nodded Winston. “Daht a very Catherinian declaration.”
“The fucking pledge of allegiance.”
He marked this trespass into the private clubhouse of cynicism and reproached himself for it. There were better ways to disgrace himself than a descent to some sort of glum spiritual unification with a chorus of derelict expatriates slurring dirges to a bottle. The self-exiles, their rotting hearts and negligent remembrance of what they had left behind, this deluded out of the frying pan into the fire reflex, back issues of Punch and The New Yorker growing musty in their parlors.
“Give me something to finish me off,” he said, and Winston brought a coconut mug with the last potent dregs of the night’s batch of toxic waste, tasting of green rum and Kool-Aid. Mitchell asked for a regular glass, just put it in something regular, would you?—“Winston, you drink out of a fucking coconut shell at home?” Winston snorted and massaged his metal knee, hovered nearby funneling a half-empty bottle of scotch into one half-full, disregarding the difference in labels. Mitchell brooded, slipping back into the tide, the sexual undertow, the currents that took him nowhere but down, feeling railroaded, in the midst of a grand entrapment. Winston hobbled down the length of the bar, pocketing tips before the urchins could steal the coins.
Then Johnnie stood beside him, glazed, recomposed, refusing to sit down when Mitchell asked her to. Her capacity for new beginnings, for pouring out yesterday’s wine, was in effect. She had been in the bathroom stabbing cosmetics across her features with sluttish extravagance. Underneath it all the fragility and fatigue were highlighted like never before. She asked in a controlled voice if he were mad at her. No, he wasn’t mad, he wasn’t anything, just high, very high, indecently high ... shouldn’t be this high, he muttered. She wanted to go back to the house. Her period had started, spewing with such quantity into her underpants that she had to remove them in the restroom and throw them away. Mitchell had trouble connecting with her urgency.
“I’m leaving,” she said.
“Wait, wait. Have another drink with me. You can’t walk home by yourself. The boogieman will get you.”
“I can take care of myself.”
“You don’t even know where the fuck you are.”
“Look, damn you.” Her hand went up under her skirt. Mitchell leered at this indiscretion. “I’m bleeding all over myself.”
The hand withdrew, three middle fingers slathered. His vision switched between two or more separate channels as he watched, stupefied, the hand track in segments and stamp his forehead with its pungent brand. She picked up a cocktail napkin to clean her fingers. “Can we go?”
It took Mitchell a second to understand what she had done, this inconceivable act; that she had fouled him. He became infuriated, at his humiliation. In a daze he ran for the sea, his rage spottily illuminating areas of his blurred vision like flashbulbs, and splashed into the bay to scour the debasement that was an acid in every cell of his skin. Galactic fields of phosphorus sparks opened and spread just below the surface, green swirling chips of submerged light that seemed to pour out of his fury and diffuse through the ocean. Johnnie stood at the tideline, a virginal apparition begging him to come out. He had not invented her after all, as he had often wished, and so there she was, and time alone could not evict her from his life. He thrashed in the water, the foxfire blooming brighter with each swipe, until he exhausted everything, all the sorrow and condemnation and acrimony, all gone and even forgiven, expelled with the salty-sweet bile, the rum and brine evacuation of all the emotional troops he had marshaled against her. Finally he crawled out onto the sand, emptied but still gagging weakly, and lay down at Johnnie’s feet. She knelt down and cradled his head.
“Come out of that dark place, Mitchell. Let it go, let it go.”
Didn’t the entire world dream this same dream, the reinstatement of love? They could lie about it, they could deceive themselves until all the endings fused like barrier islands around their lives, but he couldn’t anymore. He wanted to, fought for it, but couldn’t. And in that toppling moment he believed that all hearts had been issued a general amnesty, that the exiled, the banished, the deposed, the deported and the excommunicated, all the expatriates and émigrés of love, could now return to the countries they once inhabited, and even the totalitarianism of families had been at long last overthrown, children and parents reunited in an original state of grace, and old friends who had quarreled divisively were getting back in touch, brothers were mending their civil wars, dogs that ran away were coming home, and everywhere people were excavating the cemeteries of albums and scrapbooks and box cartons of photographs, raising their beloved dead.
She hushed him, saying, Yes, you were right, Mitchell. You were right to keep believing.
They broke a window to get back into the house because Mitchell had lost his key in the water. She tugged off his wet clothes and directed him into his bed while he mumbled feeble protests, mistaking her intentions, before he passed out, breathing loudly through his slack mouth, his wounded nose packed with tissue paper because of its tendency to seep into the pillow at night, and then she doctored her own profuse flow in the bathroom, leaving coin-sized magenta drops on the scuffed wooden floorboards, a smear on the toilet seat, on the side of a stack of Kleenex so that the stain was layered deep into the calendar of the box and would be peeled away, day by day. She went to her own room and, after taking off her clothes, lowered herself into bed, but a few minutes later her stomach cramped violently and she got up from the mattress to go out on the veranda and sit in the hammock. Once she heard Mitchell lumber into the bathroom to cough and spit; when she went to check on him his door was open but he was back in bed asleep. For a while she looked in on him, disappointed that he wasn’t awake, because it was time to tell him everything, to bring the tyranny of the past to a close and start over again one way or another, pure. She went back outside and rolled into the ha
mmock, staring blankly at the canopy of stars, dipping into a crystalline packet with her fingernail.
Sometime before dawn, Mitchell dreamed about the elderly beggar at the airport, saw him walking around the bush, half starved, wearing the bloody shirt Mitchell had given him—the dream woke him up, and for a moment he thought the man was there in the room. He got up and went out on the veranda for air. Johnnie was rocking back and forth in the hammock, a braid of moonlight twisted on the bay, incandescent. She turned her head without a trace of disturbance or surprise, watching him come near her as if she had anticipated or even conjured his appearance. Her eyes were wide and wild in the thin blue light. Suspended in the almost invisible web of the hammock, she seemed somehow at the center of the night, floating, a lone witness to the secrets of complete desolation. A visitor.
“What time is it?”
“I’ve lost track,” she said.
Their voices were feathers, falling leaves, water seeping into its table. He spoke with a gentleness he had been unable to express for a long time.
“What are you doing?”
“I’ve been singing.”
“Oh,” he said, still not fully conscious. He told her he didn’t know any songs.
“It’s easier late at night, when you’re alone, to remember them.”
She shifted and spread the netting with her feet and arms, unfolding and opening, making room for him in the airy expanse of her solitude. He dipped his upper body over the hem and let himself fall, rolled in alongside her, adjusting themselves until they found the place where they were equally balanced, cocooned, harnessed, twins in utero.
Chapter 11
At daybreak Mitchell was roused by the sounds of steady chopping, as mechanical as the tock tock tock of a metronome, the strokes issued with such hypnotic regularity that at first Mitchell thought, Tennis? as if he had been dreaming of two well-matched players engaged in an endless rally. He threw his legs out of the hammock and jerked upright in a clammy sweat of bad sleep and foreboding. He slipped out of the netting, and Johnnie, asleep slanted on her face with her hands above her, stayed put, seemingly undisturbed. She looked like something wild that had died, trying to claw its way out of a trap and it was with this awful sense of respect for the dead that he reached out and stayed the hammock’s lullaby. Unwanted discoveries were on his mind.
He went quickly through the house to the front room and drew back the curtains. At the top of the drive a grizzled madman hacked at the trunk of the royal poinciana with a machete so sharp each double set of blows spit a melon-white wedge from the pulp of the tree. Mitchell stepped into a pair of gym shorts and dashed outside, shouting for the fellow to stop what he was doing.
Despite the man’s age he appeared unaffected by his labor, it was no trouble to him to work with such hot effort, and he looked too bony and juiceless anyway to make a sweat rise to his ashy skin. His flashing strokes, overhand and then underhand, were clean and accurate and had already done irreparable damage to the girth of the poinciana. He acted as if he hadn’t heard the order to cease and Mitchell was compelled to take his shoulder and pull him back out of his cricketeer’s stance. With a final swipe he left the long blade of the machete sunk in the wood and turned, removing his straw hat with an obsequious flourish that dumped a padding of folded newspaper at Mitchell’s feet.
“Is a fine mornin, mahn!” he said with the heartiness of a lifetime early riser. “God give we anudduh sweet dandy.”
Mitchell clenched his teeth and pointed disbelievingly at the damage the man had done. “You’re murdering this beautiful tree. What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Oh, ho!” Mitchell’s anger seemed to take the old man by surprise, but his concern became a polite chuckle and he clapped his hands on the top of his legs, as if he were laughing at a joke Mitchell had not told well.
“Missy Bain say tek de tree out.” He gave a blameless look and shrugged. “Missy Bain mek a lettah to Missy Carlisle and say find Mistah Quiddley and tell him tek de tree out. Missy Bain say daht tree she have up by de road fulla bug, mahn, and—”
“What bugs?” Mitchell interrupted, baffled. “Who’s Missy Bain? What in the hell are you talking about?”
“Well, sah, I ain seen no bug, ya know, but Missy Bain mek a lettah to Missy Carlisle and say find Mistah Quiddley and tell him tek de tree out daht stand by de road, it fulla bug and de bug gettin into de house and eatin up de place so best tek out de tree ‘fah de whole house fall down and de white mahn goes somewhere else and she lose daht money she need to send dem two gy-urls to school up dere where she livin, some place dem callin Toron-to, so Missy Carlisle come by to where I stayin wit me wife and say Missy Bain got a tree she doan want, Mistah Quiddley, and me wife say, Eh, doan boddah wit daht, mahn, St. Catherine fulla trees waitin to drop, but Missy Carlisle reach deep into daht red bag she carry and tek out twenny Uncle Sammys”—the old man fished around in the pocket of his trousers and produced the twenty-dollar bill in question—“and she give me dis same note you see here in me hand and say, Here’s fah de trouble of chop-down, Mistah Quiddley, and Missy Bain say is all right to dig de coal pit right in de side by de drive, and—”
“Wait a minute,” Mitchell said. “This is inconceivable.”
“Eh?”
“Why wasn’t I consulted about this? This tree is ruined.”
Mr. Quiddley scratched his ear thoughtfully. “I stop by, ya know, sah. I come by de ministry.” He maintained the merriest smile possible although his eyes darted, avoiding Mitchell’s, as if he feared his explanation would be misconstrued as impudence and any second he’d end up knocked to the ground by the white man.
Mitchell was furious and unable to shake the conviction that he was being victimized by insensible directives from abroad. He stepped forward to the poinciana to give Mr. Quiddley back his cutlass and send him on his way. The shaft had bit so deep that he had to use both hands to unlock the steel from the wood.
“I loved this tree,” Mitchell said. “No more cutting on it, please. I’m going to talk to Mrs. Carlisle.”
“Tree finish up,” Quiddley reminded him, still with his broad, obsequious grin that was making Mitchell feel irrelevant to the situation.
“Just leave it be,” he demanded. “There’s no virtue in this sort of intervention.”
“Now, you lose me on daht, mahn,” Mr. Quiddley confessed, and grew sullen.
Mr. Quiddley had exhausted him, he wasn’t going to talk to him anymore but went back into the house to prepare for town. He put water on to boil and took a cold shower. While juicing oranges in the kitchen, he heard a vehicle come to a stop in the gravel at the top of the drive, and then a persistent horn, calling him out. There was one of the ministry’s olive-green Rovers. Godfred Ballantyne, the forest ranger, had his head out the driver’s window, chatting up Mr. Quiddley who had squatted in the side yard using his machete to scoop a crater that was already knee-deep.
“Now what, Mister Quiddley,” Mitchell said, advancing. “I thought you went home.”
“Wukkin on de pit, mahn.”
We’re not traveling on the same wavelength, Mitchell thought, surrendering. Not even close.
“Mek a few bagga coals,” said Quiddley.
Ballantyne honked the horn again, as if to change the subject. “I come fah you, Wilson,” he barked.
Mitchell went back in the house for his briefcase, ignored his tea but gulped his orange juice and wrote a note to Johnnie, asking her to go to the market in Augustine, and wear a skirt in public, please, that’s the rule if you lived here, no trashy women in residence!
All right, Mitchell growled to himself as they drove off, I see how it is now. How easy it was for people to disrupt your home and environment, even from distant shores. No one seemed to need permission.
In his haversack, Ballantyne had two fresh loaves of bread, still hot from the bakery oven, and a sixpenny cake of guava cheese wrapped in a sheet of newsprint. Mitchell felt light-headed with hun
ger the second he smelled them, as shameless as a street urchin inhaling fully, his eyes closed in appreciation. Eat, Ballantyne ordered. He loved issuing commands. Eat. Run, quelling any thought of disobedience. Where had he been educated? Mitchell wondered. Were there Jesuits on the island? Greedily, Mitchell tore apart a spongy loaf, crumbling the cake of guava cheese and pressing its pieces into the fragrant center of each hunk. Once his mouth was as full as he could get it, he refocused on the world, chewing more and more pensively as he realized something was not quite right, then faster, once he understood, so he could swallow and speak.
“Where are we going?’
“Leeward.”
“Take me back,” said Mitchell. His neck tightened and he heard an unnecessary urgency in his voice. “I can’t go to leeward this morning. There’s a staff meeting. I have to be there.”
Ballantyne kept his eyes on the road. “No you don’t,” he said. They were speeding along the flat, goat-gnawed coast of Bambarra. Ballantyne turned on the windshield wipers to smear the film of salt exclaimed into the air by the dangerous waves pounding the emptiness of the beaches. The Rover’s engine made an oceanic roar, the rhythmic crash of the sea was like a demolition machine crunching down.
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