The Immanence of God in the Tropics

by George Rosen

  Patel was outraged. He hissed a bunch of Aryan aspirates at her through his teeth. The mother looked offended, whirled around with her sari like a drunken matador, and returned to the small room from which she had emerged. Patel’s glare lingered after her a few seconds, then he took a clean handkerchief out of his pants pocket and wiped his brow.

  “Stomach powders, you know. She is ill and takes these stomach powders from India. Very . . .” His English had been fluffed by the return to Gujerati and his own embarrassment. He dangled for a second. “Very . . . hygienic.”

  The bargaining silence returned. Hank fidgeted.

  “What if I gave you 2500 shillings and promised the police that I’d look out for the boy, that I’d be responsible for him? Would you drop the charges? They won’t go ahead without your help.”

  “Twenty-five hundred shillings?”

  “I could write a check now. The money is in my account.”

  “I think I will do this, Mr. Mobley. I think it is fair. I . . .” Patel stopped again and looked at the portraits of his children. He was almost apologetic. “I think you will give me dollars, though. I will need dollars. The boy’s studies are very expensive. Learning to fly, it takes time and money. The dollars would help me most.”

  “Sure. I’ll give you dollars. That’s fine.”

  “Cash dollars?”

  “Yes, cash dollars.” Hank wanted only to get out and get back home now. He started walking out through the shop past the barrels of nails and clasps, the piles of large, broad-blade pangas smeared with packing grease and not yet sharpened, the plastic tumblers full of ball-point pens. “Tomorrow, I’ll be back here tomorrow. It’ll all be OK.” At the doorway Hank stumbled into the cat, who screeched loudly at him. Patel laughed and called out from the courtyard not to mind. As Hank stepped into the Land Rover the parrot picked up the sounds, chuckling and mewing to itself in the avocado tree while the missionary gunned the engine.

  The drive home up to the hills was hell. A shower turned the road to mud. The four-wheel drive gears kept slipping out, and Hank was blind with rage against blackmail and injustice, incompetence, and all forms of human weakness.

  He stepped to the front door coated with red mud, and Martha made him wash himself off with the hose before she let him in. After he had showered and put on fresh clothes, they took out the cash together and counted it into an envelope for Patel.

  The next day he delivered the money and got Bob out of jail. Back at the mission they lectured the boy, and his activities were limited to cutting the missionary lawns with Hank’s power mower. He agreed to give Hank and Martha half his earnings until he’d paid back at least a good part of the 1500 shillings Hank told him he’d given the merchant. Bob took his punishment quietly, working hard, but spending more time off the compound and less at the Mobleys, though he still came to Sunday dinner. Hank and Martha thought he might be growing up or away, but they didn’t know how to tell.

  Two months after the arrest, at the height of the rains, came what Beulah Whittaker took to calling the night of the long knives. Beulah, from New Orleans, was the newest doctor at the mission, but she was not a missionary nor even a teetotaler. She didn’t believe in the pre-operation prayers of Reverend McCall, though silent behind her surgical mask she would defer to them, bowing her head and tapping her gloved fingers, almost on the table but still in the air, so as not to contaminate them. Then she would send McCall out of the room and get to work.

  Hank admired her matter-of-factness and, when he began to have trouble sleeping, went to her for help. She gave him some mild barbiturates which he sometimes took too many of. On the night of the long knives, the storm, beating on the corrugated tin of the roof, had been keeping him awake. He took some of the pills and was nearly out when the subchief knocked at the door. Mwoya was an important man in the area, chief of the sublocation which lay next to the mission, up the ridge from town. He served on the committee for the Kigeli secondary school where he said little but always gave teachers the impression he was trying to have them fired. He had cousins in important ministries and friends at the Post Office. He knew everything.

  He told Hank there was a very sick man who had to get to the hospital but that he was up on the high road where, with all the muck and rain, only a Land Rover could go. Hank, heavy with sleep, beaded curtains of fatigue dangling in his vision, could barely make out the bulky man wrapped in rubber and canvas standing on the stoop in the rain. But he agreed to go, put on his coat, and plucked the car keys off their hook by the side of the door.

  Hank was soon completely lost in the storm and the barbiturate daze, and he surrendered himself to Mwoya’s directions. Underneath the fresh mud on the road were old corrugations that never disappeared. Between the bouncing and the slipping, the car frame rattled and groaned, and the headlight beam flared in all directions, skidding over the dark green carpet of the small tea farms and the whitewashed earthen walls of the houses, then soaring up against the clouds. As they climbed higher they skirted the edge of the untilled land, the forest, the trees dark against the massy web of vines and the lightening sky with the full moon just beginning to show.

  Mwoya pushed against Hank’s shoulder and told him to make a sharp left into what appeared to be an open meadow, the soccer field of a county primary school. As soon as the Land Rover stopped, Mwoya jumped out of the car and ran toward a small crowd. There were forty or fifty people in the field with a group of old women to one side, arms folded across their chests, talking in high-pitched bursts. A larger circle of men stood around one of the goalposts, some carrying pangas, the blades of which flickered and bent in the moon’s half-light. Mwoya went up to the men, there was a shout, and the circle opened to admit him.

  Hank nodded at the wheel, alone by the path, while a violent discussion in Kigeli floated toward him over the grass. In his years at the station he had never quite learned the language, though it was just at the edge of his understanding, as if he were trying to put together the words of a conversation spoken under water.

  A cluster of four or five men broke off from the circle and started walking toward the Land Rover. There was a tall dark man in the center, his face blank in the night. They all seemed to have pangas, and Mwoya, walking to the side, starting, stopping, dancing around the others, kept jabbing the central man in the arms and side with a closed fist. Hank couldn’t tell if he was beating him or encouraging him.

  They moved closer to the car and Hank finally realized what he hadn’t figured out before, that there was no sick man, that Mwoya had lied in order to get the car or to get him. Now he was alone on the mountain with five armed strangers coming at him. Suddenly they were yanking at the doors of his car. The tall figure in the center lurched forward with a snaky halo of panga blades circling its head, and all Hank knew was he had to stop them, to keep them from the car. He let go of the wheel, reared back his fist, and hit through the open window right in the man’s face, a good old Tennessee punch.

  Then everything was still. The underwater yelling stopped. The mountainside was quiet. Mwoya put one hand on Hank’s arm while, with the other, he held up the man in the center, whose hands were tied behind his back. “Do not worry, Mr. Mobley. You are right. This is a bad man.”

  Hank rubbed his hands and felt the warm blood that covered his knuckles. He looked up at the man’s cut lip, saw the frightened face and the black elastic and spectacles that hung around Bob’s neck like a loose cleric’s collar.

  “He is one of your mission boys, I think, Mr. Mobley. The school watchman caught them here and then sent for me. He and my daughter were . . .” The subchief stopped because he didn’t know how to say in English what they’d been doing.

  The crowd pulled forward and Hank saw the girl in a red school dress standing among the old women, her head bent, fingers waving in her face. She was the daughter of a subchief. It was all out of his hands.

  “You will take us now to Kigeli, to the police. They should deal with the boy.” Han
k said that he couldn’t remember the way, that he was too tired to drive, and he gave Mwoya the keys. Then he got into the back seat, wiped the blood from Bob’s face, and held him all the way down the mountain.

  At the station, after the police gave Bob the usual beating, Mwoya got Patel’s charges revived and Bob was sent to prison at Sungura on Lake Victoria. Hank and Martha went back about their affairs though Hank spent a good deal more time up in the forest shooting with his unregistered shotgun and stuffing the small animals that he killed. The machines still worked for him, but whether through age or indifference he took more time fixing them. He seemed to have lost that edge of earnestness the missionaries required of themselves. After a while, before the stormy season came again, the decision was made to send the Mobleys home.

  When Hank, Martha, and Ross had finished and the whole house was packed into a pyramid of boxes out on the lawn, Hank went back through the empty rooms looking for anything left behind. Mostly there were just the old tables and chairs which belonged to the mission. Then he rattled open the rusty padlock of the toolshed he had built and scraped around inside for a few minutes. When he came back around to the front of the house, he was carrying an old battery-operated power saw he’d rigged up for cutting firewood. “I guess you or Beulah can use this if you want to,” he told Ross, patting the thing on its wooden handle. “But be careful with it. Just you two. This is a white man’s tool, and I don’t want anyone else using it, you hear?” The Scotsman took the contraption from him. Hank’s voice was hard and his eyes were new—dark and brilliant like a desert sky lit by lightning in the last moment before rain.

  New England, 1988

  On the Flats

  Every morning when the weather is fine, I take a walk down Lincoln Street. The views are always gorgeous—Winslow Homer painted several series of watercolors in this neighborhood—but what most reassures me, most convinces me I am home, are the sounds. There are bird cries, some as easily decipherable as an antiphony of robins, one on each side of the street, or the mewing of gulls. Others are harder to figure: complicated rasps and warbles only my wife’s family—who know these things—could identify.

  In the summer, one can hear the human world as well: the hissing of hoses, doors shutting, the rush of faucets. Always, behind everything, is the surprising sound of the bell buoys’ ring, a soft clang, its source invisible, that heightens my sense of how disconnectedly flat and midwestern the frame houses seem, as if not Dorothy, but Kansas, had been drawn up and carried to this cold, northern sea.

  Lincoln Street used to be called Masquash Way. The word means “big moose” or “big rock” or big something in the local Indian speech; the last syllable has always been obscure. In any event, after the Civil War, the residents decided that history outranked nature and the name was changed. The road itself used to wander, hugging the coastline, following each of the string of unimportant coves—Goose and Plum and Rock, Streeter’s and Miller’s—from Eastern Point to the harbor. Now, like a river that has lost its meanders, it plows straight through to the shopping district and, even walking, you catch only glimpses of the shellfish flats that Homer painted, snapping by like postcards.

  In the morning the usual walkers and joggers scrape along, mostly retirees and people like myself who don’t go to the city to work. Mitchell Streeter, a man I’ve represented, is always there, setting off. Mitchell is an ambulatory psychotic. When I first heard the expression—eavesdropping on a phone conversation in a doctor’s office—it seemed to mean someone who managed to get around in the outside world despite his psychosis. In fact, it turns out to be a person for whom getting around in the outside world is his psychosis. Walking is all he does. He goes up and down Lincoln every day, following the same path they use in the Fourth of July mini-marathon, and then goes out to loiter at the traffic circle where the highway comes through. Sometimes he ventures on the shoulder of the Interstate. He never hitchhikes but plods along smoothly with his hands in the pockets of an old army jacket definitely not his own, a short, muscular man in his forties with a face of dissolution and a body as trim as anybody’s would be who walked thirty miles a day.

  Mitchell frequently gets in trouble with the police, but always in small, mostly self-abusive ways. Our community is enormously tolerant of madmen, a place where the psychiatrist and two of the local policemen take a weekly sauna together. Canons of privacy are only loosely respected and everyone is given the benefit of the doubt.

  This tolerance can sometimes become lazy and destructive. Lives of pain are lived here without much notice from the community and not all our local lunatics are as genteel as Mitchell. There are horrible, Gothic figures of genuine evil who live in sleeping bags in the woods at the center of the peninsula in summer, and periodically make the area the scene of fairy-tale murders, Red Riding Hood and Hansel and Gretel killings. To wander alone in the reclaimed pastureland, now turned back to dark forest, can be chancy and foolish.

  Mitchell’s father, a widower who, by the way, himself is no prize, is not unaware of his son’s problems and calls him a bum, a word which now has the archaic ring of terms, like “artisan” and “neurasthenic,” derived from outmoded categories. As a lawyer, I am aware that the line between a bum and a crazy is of interest to governmental agencies. Mr. Streeter, however, simply prefers to live in a world of bums rather than crazies. Of course, he is a crazy himself.

  My next-door neighbor, Bob Streeter, is no crazy, though he is distantly related to Mitchell and his father. Bob is a real go-getter. He jogs, but has already been out and back by the time I make my rounds. Bob has great posture which I used to attribute to his army service, but which is apparently the result of a vertebral fusion. He earns his living as an artist and, unlike me, he is always making toys for his kids. I have not made anything out of wood since I fashioned a silent butler in the eighth grade. I do try to point things out for my daughter Laura. I take her for walks in the woods and show her the signs of former habitation: the old foundation holes, hidden among barberry briars and loosestrife, and the ancient roses and parsley that are the remnants of garden plants in the forest. It makes me sad that this may not be as immediately attractive to her as a homemade doll or a wooden boat that floats in the bathtub, but it is what I can do.

  Bob Streeter is said to be having an affair with Jennifer Moskowitz-Mason, whom I see on my walks, usually stretched out on the ground in her garden. She talks to her flowers and it seems to work. They are enormously gorgeous and healthy, as—when she stands up—is Jenny herself, a tall, imposing blonde who works as a past-lives therapist in town in a waterfront office not far from my own. Jenny is an Indo-Freudian. She believes that reincarnation opens a vast chain of childhoods to screw one up and is willing to pursue troubles deep into the past. Jenny’s school of thought, by being so openly spacey, is less threatening to a lot of local people than more orthodox psychotherapies. Bob was initially one of her clients, though I believe he stopped seeing her professionally when things started to get more serious.

  Because he works at home and because both our wives take the morning train into Boston, Bob and I often share child care. Though we trust each other with our children, he does not confide in me and he has never actually told me about himself and Jennifer, not that he is under any obligation. I suspect Bob feels our wives have forfeited something, a kind of citizenship, by going to work in the city and that what we do here—Bob and I, our children, and more to the point, Jenny—takes place in a protected world that our spouses have no right to challenge. He feels a sense of community and, perhaps, one of complicity as well.

  For my part I have no great horror of adultery, but no inclination toward it either. I honestly believe there are duties associated not with anything as vague and haughty-sounding as one’s position in society, but with one’s personality, one’s biology. I’ve always thought that, for me, being a family man is something to be accepted and not chosen, more a zoological necessity than a moral compromise.

  I fi
rst met Bob Streeter’s cousin Mitchell when he came to our door, shortly after we moved in, to sell me a piece of pornographic scrimshaw. What Mitchell really wanted was to borrow money, but he felt he had to offer me something in return. As fewer and fewer men actually go to sea from this peninsula, there seems to be a corresponding increase in the variety of nautical gewgaws. In fact, it made a lot of sense to me that sailors, alone at sea for months at a time with Rorschachian bits of whale teeth in their hands, would do something like this. Mitchell himself had no idea what he was offering. He did not try to point out the workmanship or, on the other hand, to leer. He must have had an attic full of this sort of thing and, when in need, simply reached in to grab the first trinket he could find and auction off.

  “Is this for use or admiration?” I asked him, thinking myself clever.

  “I could use ten dollars,” he told me, and waited. His eyes scanned our living room of still-unpacked boxes and empty teak bookcases. It obviously made no sense to him. I told him I would loan him the money, if he would pay me back, but I didn’t want the scrimshaw. “That’s no problem,” he told me and called me Wilbur, the name of the former owner of our house. I realized, somewhat sheepishly, that while I was intent on teaching him the values of contract and thrift, Mitchell thought I was someone else. His sense of time was broader than my own. Mitchell would be coming back to explain his lack of repayment to others long after I was gone.