“Comin, Auntie. Comin, comin.”
She opened the door only enough for the naked child to be passed through into her arms, shouldered the door closed and turned back into the room, the little boy clinging to her neck, hysterical, bawling his lungs out. You must love this, Wilson, she said with great unhappiness, pacing back and forth, trying to comfort her baby and having no success, secreta bubbling out of his miniature nose and pinched eyes, his spidery body convulsed with misery, his mouth so wide open with yowling you could stuff an orange into it. Josephine wiped the snot from his face with her sleeve and provided a summary answer to the riddle of her brassiere by unfastening one of its cups like a lid and offering her eggplant breast to the boy, who wrenched his head wildly away, wanting nothing to do with it. What now? she groaned. What de hell, mahn, what now? The child hyperventilated.
Good question. Christ is this weird, thought Mitchell, an expedition into the domestic wilderness of weirdness here, because he didn’t know where he was, or quite how he got there, now that he tried to recall the specifics, and he couldn’t exactly pin down whom he was with except that she was some variety of Catherinian Cinderella and abruptly real, having just taken a plunge back into a life in which he was not automatically eager to express an involvement. Propped up with pillows against the headboard, he watched the drama of mother and child with bleary, lidded eyes, but from outside its realm, miles away and high as Franklin’s kite in another storm that was also diminishing, his senses overindulged and in a state of mindlessness for which there was no better word than cuntstruck. He hadn’t the faintest idea what was expected of him but there he was anyway, established in her bed, following along, not a prince but a mutt, the vapors of her sex still searingly present in each of his inhalations. He closed his eyes and advised himself to snap out of it, yet when he opened them again he had a case of the hiccups and so did the boy, only his, Mitchell’s, were infiltrated with distressed giggles, at first mortifying, then irksome, then mortifyingly euphoric as he lost control.
“Wilson, here now, listen, what is so fuckin funny—hushbaby,” said Josephine, mellowing her tone for the child, as if she were beginning a lullaby, “you mahd, bwoy, hush cocobum, storm gone now, Wilson, if you is laughin at me, suck cock, mahn, hush pretty, hush sweet.”
He was off the bed, trying his best to be calm and wise, deputized into a provisional role of fatherhood and husbandry, waggling his eyebrows like the clown he seemed to be, raising the top sheet open for Josephine and son. She maneuvered onto the mattress, chagrined but also muttering—bloody hell, Wilson—slung with her albatross of child, and this was a shitty shitty joke on love, you know, the sins of the past come home to roost tonight, George James gettin his big revenge now, Wilson, and doan you say a bloody thing to him, and if you is stayin come lie back down, mahn, you enjoyin youself too much, eh?
It made better sense to disappear while she mollified the child, so he took a candle and left the room as she tried again to feed her nipple into the boy’s mouth. He headed toward the rear of the house to the kitchen, hot wax spattering his knuckles, and pawed through the uninspiring contents of the refrigerator: tins of Carnation milk, a jar of Ovaltine, glass jars of baby food and bottles of homemade pepper sauce, a bowl of mottled limes, limp vegetables, eggs, some tubes of medicine, juices and jams but no meat in evidence. He had hoped for a chicken leg but settled for a mango and a lone bottle of beer, eating the fruit over the rust-streaked enamel sink, juice running down his hands and chin. But for an occasional gust, the rain had slacked off, the claps of thunder receding out into the harbor. The wall clock read 4:18, a surprise, considering that he now felt giddy and wired with restless energy. With a butter knife, he pried open the bottle of beer and sat drinking it at the kitchen table, a supernatural sense of peace gathering in the candled silence. The feeling that he had been kicked in the groin by a horse dissolved. The floorboards creaked and he looked toward the hallway—there was auntie in her nightgown, a cloud of astonishment, round and gray-haired and wide-eyed.
“Jesus in Bethlehem! Josie get off she high horse and reach home with a fella, and Lahd Ahlmighty, he a white mahn too.”
If he didn’t mind, she was going to take some treatment, she said. She shuffled wearily into the kitchen, complaining of this ache and that woe, went to a cupboard and sat down at the table with a dark green bottle of ginger wine and two glasses which she filled to the brim, fired hers down in two gulps and took a long but not unkindly look at Mitchell, who was having trouble shaping a response.
“So, you did find youself a bit to eat? We ain keep much on hand, I sorry to tell you,” she said, and Mitchell felt touchingly entrapped by this maternal concern. “Nuh! Wait,” she commanded, remembering there might still be a piece of pound cake under the plastic dome on the counter. She pushed herself up to cut him a slice, and brought it back to him on a paper napkin, sat down and placed him under observation, satisfied with his appetite.
“Thank you,” said Mitchell, finding his voice. It was as if all the night’s incongruities were being filtered through Josephine’s aunt into a clear pool of acceptance.
“You welcome,” she answered, reaching over to pat his hand. “You drinkin daht?” She nodded at the second glass of ginger wine, and when he shook his head, she drank it down, smacking her lips, and made a little whoop. “Baby stop he bawlin, hallelujah.” She stood up, wavering but dignified, fixing him with tender scrutiny until Mitchell realized he was being called on a point of etiquette and stood up too.
“You muss come back, hear?” she said. “Good night, mahn.”
“Good night, Auntie,” said Mitchell, watching her waddle away, leaving behind her bewildering accreditation, an air of warm and absurd harmony, letting him entertain the possibility that maybe he lived there, maybe the house and the lives in it and the island were something ready-made with him in mind. He grabbed the candle and his half-finished beer and returned down the hallway, through the imaginary epicenter of an imaginary life. The kid was still awake but dulcified, curled along his mother’s rib cage, his unblinking eyes glued to Mitchell as he crossed the room. Josephine looked exhausted but she smiled timidly and said she wanted him to come lie down. He couldn’t begin to say why he felt such supreme ease, such an unburdened willingness to accept this vision of himself as he slid his legs under the sheets, smelling the Vicks Vaporub of his own childhood, the little imp between them sucking his thumb, twisting at his waist to stare in wonderment at the white man in his mother’s bed. If she put him back in his crib he’d bawl again, Josephine said. Poor guy, said Mitchell. We can’t have that. She asked for a sip of his beer and they talked but Mitchell had trouble paying attention. She wanted to tell him about the business she had started. She had sponsors, backers—George James was one of them, which he thought entitled him to something that it didn’t, he should keep his ego in his pants and his mind on Rita, the woman he was with at the bar, a model whom Josephine said she kept on retainer, and on she rambled in her lullaby voice, Wilson, de baby asleep now, you have a womahn?
What? he said. Tranquility had entered his lungs like ether and he was nodding in and out.
It please me daht you stay, you know. Well, it is very fuckin strange, mahn, true? but it please me. You is a funny guy, Wilson, sometimes I watch you and tell meself you are a mahn with a troubled heart, but den I muss tell myself, Oh no, not dis guy, dis one carefree and easy. You fallin asleep? Hello? You have been very patient wit me—sometin muss be wrong wit you, bwoy.
The candles burned down and the shadows stretched closer. He felt downright cozy, hidden away in a side pocket of the future, in residence. Wife, kid, in-laws, a community of one’s own. But you could make a principle out of blackness, and never see beyond it, that was the real risk, and where was this baby’s father; had she just told him? He was only conscious enough to realize Josephine had reached over to remove the beer bottle from his grip, but that was all until he awoke trickled in sweat, the sheet beneath him saturated,
sunlight planing through the cracks in the shutters and the world outside the bedroom operating at high volume, the everyday factory racket of the neighborhood, awoke with what felt like a shove from behind, the contraction of his body into consciousness so sudden that it knocked away Josephine, bent over him to mouth the iron-hard knob of his penis that had worked its way out under the elastic waist of his boxer shorts, arriving midscene straight from a dream which was by no means sweet but seemed, in the rawness of his awakening, to cast a perverse silhouette of eerie significance, brutally and blatantly apropos. A caboose—unmistakably a caboose, barn-red with a crooked stovepipe chimney and the grillwork on its platforms overgrown with vines—had been deposited in a smoky clearing somewhere up in the highlands of a jungle. Monkeys shrieked, exotic birds flitted from branch to branch. In the caboose lived an old white man with crew-cut hair, dressed in rags and skins like Robinson Crusoe, and he was being served a dinner of beans by a rasta-haired black youth, shielded from absolute nakedness by a coarse, burlap loincloth. The old white man wanted ... what? It was unclear, unsaid, but Mitchell had the impression the grizzled old bastard was asking to be entertained while he ate his meal cross-legged on the trash-strewn floor of the caboose. “My dear wild nig,” he had begun to say, and then the next thing Mitchell knew he was apologizing to Josephine for conking her in the side of the head with his knee, and she hovered over him, undamaged, neither daylight nor lack of sleep nor sobriety had roughed her up, though her blackness was still a bit of a jolt, as his whiteness must be to her unless she had made white a habit, though he doubted that, and her breasts danced with pendulous gravidity toward his lips, beads of milk startling in their whiteness oozed from the tar of her nipples, and it ended like this, they shared a spermy, milky kiss, and a premonition for the awesome novelty of the future, whatever part of it might collapse in on them.
Mitchell had to go. When he closed his eyes he remembered he had a ferry to catch.
Rain check.
It was an instant bad joke between them. She made him promise to see her again, and he would.
On the streets, even walking downhill, he started to sweat inhumanly. It wasn’t long before he turned a corner and the view opened up. There was the ferry, halfway out in the becalmed harbor, which was what he expected to see, knowing he had missed it even before he left her house. The commercial flight, a twelve-seater, flew at 4:30, and was never fully booked, so he still counted on making his rendezvous with Johnnie. He was in high spirits, quite pleased with himself, smiling at everybody while he stood in the blaze of sun at the jitney stop. He could hear Isaac say, Bwoy, when it rain pussy it pour jackass. Josephine begged comparison with Johnnie but he’d do better to avoid the impulse, keep them separate—and that meant in his mind, foremost—until he saw how things worked out. However his life-among-women resolved itself, his problems weren’t so grandiose and inflated as they had seemed yesterday, they were more like the right sort of opportunities, a source of buoyancy and optimism, at least for the moment. Two blond and blue-eyed Mormon boys bicycled past, their smiles cut and pasted right out of the New Testament, and he raised his hand in a salute—God loves you, gentlemen (it’s your line of work He can’t stomach)—and then the jitney came, a pickup truck with bench seats and a sun awning stretched over a tube frame, a sweatbox even on cloudy days, and this one was already packed with riders. He squeezed in, glad to be among the people. Josephine mildly disapproved of his intention to take a jitney, a taxi would have been more to her liking. Jitney is fah peasant, Wilson, crush up like sardine with fowl and basket and sack and tree and goat and such. But when he said he enjoyed riding in them, he got to meet and talk with people that way, she rolled her eyes and said, “What you is, anthropologist?” and if it was science he wanted then get ready, she was going to make a study on him.
The other passengers responded in kind to his bright mood, We does love de Yankees here, mahn, God bless Kennedy, God bless Carter—Cah-tuh—Bless freedom, Bless liberty, Bless Sesame Street, Bless toothpaste, Bless Coca-Cola. At the next stop he was passed a little girl in pigtails and pink organdy and Buster Browns with lacy white ankle socks to hold in his lap, and she told him the names of the flowers along the roadside. They topped the crest of O’oah Mountain, baking in the canvas oven of the awning, their collective smell as rich and pungent as the steamy land. Mitchell jumped out at Augustine to guzzle down a Ju-C; he bought a bag of bread rolls made fresh that morning and stepped across the road to the village beach to where the catboat fishermen sold their catch, coming away with a red snapper to fry for his lunch,. Then he joined the endless pilgrimage of to and fro along the footpath that paralleled the black, blistering pavement, trudging up the grade formed by the shelf of ironrock dividing Augustine from Rosehill and the other beaches quilted south and eastward along the bight. The air shimmered with moist heat along the lush roadside, the grass was vivid and spongy from last night’s downpour. Orange puddles sat in foot-shaped depressions. The pasture across the way, home to a herd of dewlapped Brahman bulls, had sprouted a new crop of what the locals called duppie caps—psilocybin mushrooms. It was his nature to walk fast and he did, sweat streaming off his brow, his arms slick with it, on up around the turn where the cliffs plateaued and then dropped again farther past his house to sea level. He sang—nothing with a name to it, just words—because that was how you got from place to place on Saint Cee, singing because mangoes were in season and everybody knew they were sweet as black girls, singing because up around the turn in the road another voice was singing along to a good strong rhythm, and in another dozen steps he recognized the beat, the tennis-playing thwock of Mr. Quiddley’s chopping arm. When he rounded the turn he saw the tree was already down, Quiddley hacking at its upturned forest of pale branches. Behind the fallen giant of the poinciana, down the slope of the lawn, vermillion flowers scattered like a spray of burning lava, the front door of the cottage stood wide open, and Mitchell Wilson stepped out of the nonsense song that had risen in him, shed himself of the self-romanticizing cosmology he had brought with him to the tropics, the needling American fetish for altruism, forgot what he was doing or supposed to be doing to make the world a better place and blundered through the gate of righteousness into the precursory nightmare that had become 1977, a pathfinder, a trailblazer, paving the way to the personalized ordeals and impacted terrors of the coming decade with what he still believed in his heart were good intentions.
Chapter 23
On the thundery sapphire sea Adrian surprised her by remembering Charybdis, a Classical Lit multiple choice answer—the Homeric god-in-residence in a whirlpool between Sicily and the toe of the Italian boot, a not particularly worrisome malefactor for a corn-fed mid-western girl but now, however, Sally understood. Understood at least why Charybdis was a god, for what else could she be, with such power, and a god’s diet of brave hearts? The waves were as sudden and shifting as earthquakes, they plunged and soared. Geysers of spray hung momentarily crystalline at every angle off the bow, like plate glass windows in the lobby of a bank, blowing out. It wasn’t a day to be crossing the channel in an open speedboat but here they were, doing it, which was supposed to be fun but, really, they were off the scale of excitement, beyond thrills. Criminally irresponsible bravado was more like it—if this was fun then so was the Normandy invasion.
Doc Travis, with his sadistic grin, set a high standard for macho disregard. His feet braced wide apart against the jolts, he stood posted at the steering console in the center of the boat, inscrutable behind his wraparound sunglasses, so filmed with salt Sally doubted he could see. Because he had done his residency in Detroit, Doc preened Motown—the shades, the executive-cut Afro, the jewelry, the urban hipness—but this devil-take-us-all posturing was homegrown. He wrestled the torque of the wheel while sucking on a baby bottle secured to a lanyard around his neck. The plastic bottle of course was filled with rum, the idea being not to spill a drop during nautical maneuvers—the real idea being that he was clever, knew what h
e was doing, had a long and winning relationship with the ropes and the tricks. In some part of the world other people—terrorists—found full-time employment doing what Doc did for free, without the ruse of ideology. Besides the speedboat, he gave of his time to the National Hospital, the director of surgery, which meant he got to boss around the only other surgeon, an orthopedics specialist, on the staff. Speedboating though was his first love, supplemented by his hobbyist’s interest in foreign affairs, an international collection of interchangeable women culled from the nursing and volunteer communities, young darlings afoot in the world, keeping their own count on the coup they took in the bedroom of personalized diplomacy. Saconi was not the complete deterrent she would have hoped to Doc’s advances, but the likelihood of her membership in the harem was zed, zero, and lately Doc expended no more energy toward her than that contained in an occasional verbal memo of routine lust: I could make you feel so good. Doc’s Hippocratic refrain, the best he could do. Sally was less than enthused but she bore him no grudge, other than her willingness to believe in his reputation for professional carelessness, though she also understood he was overworked, like everyone else at the hospital.
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