A Drink Called Paradise

by Terese Svoboda

  Harry is going off too when he stops where I sit, free of the sand he has brushed from me, watching the moon and none of them, and he asks whether I can dance? He says none of the ladies he has can.

  My never doesn’t even figure, I can’t even hold it in my mouth. As if I am always thinking of dancing, I take his arms, I grab hold of the ones that held the stick, the ones that beat on the last crab and then lifted the juice of its last self up to his lips in a cup, and I dance in those arms in the moonlight over the stink of the shells and the old fire.

  It’s a slow, slow dance, the kind sometimes you don’t even lift your legs for, or turn, and sometimes you nearly fall over it’s so slow. Of course I hum while he says he’s not leaving here, he’s never leaving here, it’s his place forever.

  Beseech thee, I am not lost.

  Ngarima lies face down on the sand, coughing and moaning.

  I beseech thee, she moans.

  I sink my feet deep in the sand and study my way. And study Ngarima, yes, I must study her. It is only a little time since her son sailed off—I think. I am not sure anymore. So many nights, and if you sleep in the day covered by leaves, the days are nights too. It all gets to be night.

  I am not walking anywhere when I walk here in the dark, so I walk closer, but not too close. Her grand bulk is so prostrate, her coughing so loud, those moans so hollow, like an echo off the moon. In the glow of that moon, what glows green in her hand? What hot piece of what?

  Ngarima kisses that ghostly glow, then she plants it in the sand inches from her fingers, upright so it looks like it’s standing.

  It’s a plastic Jesus. A car Jesus that glows.

  Light is power, she says. She knows I’m here, I think. She coughs.

  Are you all right? I ask because that’s what everyone asks me.

  I am fine, she coughs. Nothing is wrong. Nothing. She says nothing the way Barclay says yes, the way I say nothing. And you are walking? She sits up. If you walk alone in the bush, you know, a man is always walking too.

  I like the moon.

  She looks at its shine on her hands.

  The moon is the whole island at night, she says. At night the island lives and we are ghost people. Whose eyes can see in the midday light? Then there’s too much light. Light is power, isn’t that what you call it? She coughs. Light is the sex of life, it is what keeps us going, light is what happens in the night to get the day to rise.

  The Jesus falls over in the sand in front of her. She picks it up like it’s a shell she’s found, turns it over, and pockets it very fast as if I don’t see. She looks up from her pocket. She says, The light that came over the island was in the day, that light, you never think again without thinking of that light, that second sun.

  The palms cut the moonlight into jagged beams that sway.

  She begins to sing “O Little Star of Bethlehem.” Some of the words are hers, high and cracked and coughed. When she stops, she says, That was just the first star. I learned that when the army came and taught us songs.

  She begins to swing her hips in dance. We take what we want of them. You see, she says, flaring her fingers, this is the star. We change the song to include that other light. This is how we do that. She covers her face. You see, we did see. That is what we did do. Light is power, she says. She rises and stumbles forward onto the hem of her vast dress.

  I move to steady her, but she backs away.

  You’re lost? she asks. Not to be here is lost, she says. She says, No one is lost here.

  But she takes the Jesus back out of her pocket and pounds her chest with it.

  I look out to sea the way an old man might, the way a Crusoe might who has not yet eaten his friend or, anyway, has not yet come to that moment of to eat or not to eat that all castaways must either physically or mentally come to, and I ask, Where is a friend?

  This is a Sunday, and everyone is nowhere, they’re all decked out and gone, matching flowers, bolt after bolt, all the women wrapped neck to ankle, all the men in shirts white as seacrest, gone off to that Latter Day preacher’s, to his mission, the cement hut behind the flagpole that says what it says about love.

  I know because I went once, in the pitch of my tourist fever when I had to divine all things island in my few days, the soul and the soup, the mean and the aberrant. I am not an every-week or even every-year churchgoer. I said to Ngarima long ago, The sea is what I worship, but now what is worship when there is no boat? No vessel, such as the son, to float out past the brimstone, to seek rest.

  I’m restless.

  I scratch my bites bloody, the ones that I get in the pit where the wind doesn’t blow, where it’s warm all night and bugs feast. I forget the bad parts while I scratch, I forget what I do every day, whether it’s Sunday or not, I forget and I scratch because that’s the best I can do. I scratch at my scalp, where I haven’t had soap for how long? My scalp itches. I dig into the hot sand with the top of my head where it itches, I stay upside down until the itching is over, and who notices?

  I let my son drain out.

  The singing today is sirenlike, and the wind doesn’t oppose it. I don’t either, I carry it along with me, I dart from tree to tree down the beach as if they are a clef and me the music, I stand Fridayless, on a Sunday, in the lee of the song and look in.

  Three rows of flowered chests swell chastely across from a row of white-dress-shirt-chested men. The missionary—I hardly know him without his helmet—climbs into the pulpit and blesses everyone, and me too, since my standing outside is not blocked by a window or screen but just waist-high pressboard over a row of cinder blocks.

  I am the usual statue the congregation turns to look at when he blesses me.

  I smile my smile that says, Go on.

  The missionary clears his throat, he talks a long time about what the world will be like after it ends, but he mixes all of that with now. In my current state, I can’t sort it out, Who are the angels after? What’s the difference between this ending and the other?

  Mr. Harry, is what he stops with, will you please advance?

  Harry’s three men in, and the others have to turn their knees to the side after he says, Oh, yes in puzzlement. He walks to the church front where the missionary’s moving his big book around on his pulpit and resettling it.

  The sight of Harry facing me, facing all of us, stops my scratching. I lean into the window, my jagged nails pressing into the pressboard. Other women lean into their pews, a woman waves from the back as if it is All right or as if it is Honey, and Harry is up to it: the castaway’s castaway, wearing the island’s starched shirt and dark pants, with a beard covering his most white features, with the rest of his skin dark and darker, but puzzled in the angle of his head, his body shifting.

  You have heard the story of the apocalypse, Mr. Harry? Our text for today?

  Your reverence, he says and bows his head.

  The missionary sighs with satisfaction. In the apocalypse there is a reckoning, he says. More than one. And here, when some time passes, we too reckon.

  Yes? says Harry.

  You have come to stay with us. We are grateful for that, he says. You have come to stir the soil for us. But, he says before Harry can nod again, you must follow the Lord’s laws, even the one that says a man must not know a woman other than his wife.

  Harry can’t find his face—the one he has is laughing, is incredulous, dismayed. I see, he says.

  I am sorry, says the missionary. There is a fine.

  Fine, Harry says after him. Fine?

  Do you need someone to testify the truth? Do you need a witness? asks the missionary.

  The congregation has some ideas about that, they murmur.

  The missionary turns to Barclay before Harry can answer. Can’t you hush them?

  Barclay is not up to hushing them. After his son does not return, I see Barclay on the beach, even my beach, and he looks out the way I do, but the boat he wants is different. Now Barclay stares at his hands as if the missionary’s quieting is cu
pped in them and only after that starts to rise.

  But Harry says, No, no, he will pay, he does not wish the good people of this island to be scandalized further.

  Not in front of your wife, says the preacher.

  This is when they all turn to me. I take a step back from the window, their actual turning is such a surprise. Me? I say.

  You have slept the night through with him, is this not correct? asks the small man up in the pulpit.

  I begin to scratch my head hard. I knew it, I knew it.

  Yes, says Harry. She says yes. Just tell me how much.

  The missionary pretends to consult Barclay, who is looking out the window again to the sea, who is looking at his wife and then all around, then back to the sea. Who is nodding.

  It will be five hundred dollars, says the missionary, but no interest for all the time that has gone by.

  This sum shocks even the women leaning forward, this sum changes Harry from a castaway doing his duty to a citizen in outrage. What about prurient interest? asks Harry. What about greed? Harry turns to me where I am rooted. I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you, he says to me. That’s the way the Arabs do it. Will that do? he says to the missionary up in his pulpit. Can’t there just be fornication now? Or is that punishable too?

  Barclay? says the missionary.

  What? says Barclay.

  As long as they are not pregnant you must pay, says the missionary. A kind of tax, he says. Render unto Caesar, he says. When one is pregnant, you can stop. That’s how it is. We require it.

  Harry begins laughing. Well, you’ll be sorry to learn that if I had five hundred dollars, I wouldn’t pay it. The ladies will all come to me for free.

  But the congregation, especially the ladies’ side of the congregation, the flowered side, makes no noise, no flurry of assent and sighs.

  Two days later, I am looking for the coconuts that sometimes fall on a field where they kick balls when they have them, when I see Harry picking up rocks to make a row that stretches around the goal and on around both sides. I sit down to watch him. It’s worth doing: his furred torso all muscled from picking up rocks, his arms and their flexing from putting them down. He’s alone for once.

  That’s it, he says after he sets down another ten feet of rock. I’m fried, he says. He stirs the sand beside me to get rid of the beach crabs that swarm here and on me, some kind of crab that is too small to eat, or too successful in the sand’s heat, and he sits.

  I shake the hair from my face as a divorcee should, and I say, Is all this in payment?

  Penance, not payment. Five hundred dollars is a lot more rocks. He draws a circle in the sand. He draws another circle.

  Is this two nothings or two islands? I wonder. Or the beginning of male and female?

  They don’t get pregnant easily here, do they? is all I say.

  Look, I can’t really talk to you. Somebody checks up on me. One of the girls. They send down the very young ones now, the ones most likely to get pregnant, to try to speed things up.

  I suppose my being here will increase the number of rocks you have to haul.

  They come at night and put them back. He looks at me. You? You were just an excuse. You don’t count. Anyone can tell you’re not here. You’re not here at all. You’re a ghost. He holds his nose. A stinky ghost but a ghost nonetheless.

  I run away, I scuttle two trees over and search for coconuts under fallen palm fronds.

  Harry rises and stretches. You’ll get fined too, he shouts in my direction. All those belong to somebody, you know.

  I’m smacking a green one against a rock, I’m shaking it.

  He repeats, You’ll get fined.

  Nobody owns these, I yell. But I drop this one anyway.

  Just because the trees don’t look planted by anybody doesn’t mean they aren’t anybody’s property. He comes over to me, he holds me by the shoulders where I shake without the coconut.

  Even the coconuts are hot, I say.

  Is that what you think? says Harry. He takes his hands off me and goes over to the circles he made and brushes sand over them. You know, you sound sane, he says, just loudly enough.

  I sound sane. I giggle and crab-sidle over. The way you say that with just a touch of a question, I say. How sane would you be if just breathing made you sick?

  I would be crazy, he says, turning away from me. I would breathe, he says. Have babies.

  Jelly babies, I say. You jerk, I say.

  He goes back to his rocks. I don’t know, he says, grunting and straining.

  I sit in his way, on the next rock, on the next. My boat hasn’t come. That’s all I care about. I dig my toes into the sand so I don’t fall over, so he can’t move the rock, but he does. I’m dizzy, moving from rock to rock, I’m dizzy all the time now. It comes from not eating right and not too much sleep and weeping. Barclay’s probably told the captain not to come back until they’re all pregnant, I say.

  Harry stops with the rocks. Barclay’s got to get some more of that copra off his docks, he says. He would jump up and down to see the boat again. Come on, the boat probably sank.

  That’s not it, I say.

  The sun is so far down our shadows almost touch six yards away. I look away from those shadows so close together. I get up and go to the water. I don’t see it, it’s only wet and then not, a warm shine on the sand. All I have to do is walk in. I’m walking in the way I have tried a few times before, to get rid of walking, to take in all that water, all that big O of an ocean, the naught of nothing, to just swallow it up and be done with it, I walk and I walk, I’m walking in almost to my neck when I walk into a bottle.

  It’s not mine, the one I threw, but it’s close enough, some beer bottle. I catch it up and wade out, I smack it against a rock to get at the note that I see is inside.

  I know it’s not from him. I know that.

  What is it? asks Harry. Stop crying.

  He takes the note away from me. I hate this place, he reads. I hate the whole seventh grade. Signed, Sheila.

  What’s so sad? he asks.

  I tell him.

  I stop shaking when I tell him, even though I keep on crying. He holds me and holds me. Then I’m laughing, I’m leaning on his shoulder, with my eyes open and teary I start laughing, and I can’t stop laughing, not even when I point, when I say, There it is, and drop the note.

  It? he says. It?

  Part 3

  The winds were headed straight at us for days before and during the test.

  Glen Curbow, former Rongerik weather unit commander for BRAVO, the largest of the 300 H-bombs exploded over the Pacific

  The dot is too far away to be Temu, even the way dots here mean nothing with the sky just more sea the neck bends to. Besides, Temu always floats in the lagoon. Ngarima hauls him back whenever he floats too close to the reef that his brother shot.

  The dot is so far away it’s like an eye test.

  I don’t see anything, says Harry.

  Okay, so you don’t. There it is, I cry. This time I point with both hands. Isn’t it there?

  Calm down, he says.

  Big bullets of tears drop off my face and hit the sand. I turn away from the water. Sometimes, I say, I expect the sand to hiss back when I wet it.

  Right. It’s not that kind of hot. He looks at me a long time, and then he goes over to another big rock right where a rock would block a ball if you were kicking it that way, and he digs at it with a stick.

  The sun is late. When his shadow covers the beach part of the distance between us, I tell him it’s coral he’s digging, it grows there, he’s trying to pull out a tooth that’s rooted and not rotten.

  I wonder why no one’s come to check on me this afternoon, he says.

  It’s the boat, I say. They’re all getting ready for the boat.

  He glances out into the dusk, where there’s no light, no sign of anything anymore. Come on, he says.

  He takes my hand, brushes off the sand that I have clenched in it, and leads me
down the beach into the dark, step by step, slow and slower. I can smell his sweat when he catches me teetering off an outcrop. It’s not here, he says. Get used to it. They tell you it’s coming because they think that will make you happy.

  I don’t think that’s why, I say. But I don’t know why.

  We walk along. More tiny crabs move invisibly in front of us. Things can live here, I say. We could start a pig farm, I say. Show these islanders how to raise them right.

  You are insane, he says. He pulls me with his arm around my waist and then kisses me, moves his mouth over me from start to finish, sand and palm trash all over us. It is dark enough now to do that. But it is not so dark that I don’t see confusion in how he looks at me—or collusion? Don’t ask, he says, so I know what I’ve seen.

  So what if I did imagine the boat, I say as we near the lagoon. I imagine my son every night, how he gets tucked into bed.

  Women are always thinking of bed one way or another, he says as we round my spit. I’m sorry, he says.

  My dreams are all dark.

  We walk along.

  In ads, all dreams are dark, I go on. Or swirly. Or at least badly lit. Good night, I say. That’s how it is.

  He drops me off at my hole in the sand.

  Hey, if there really is a boat out there, he says, remember me in the cigarette department, okay?

  I hit him hard with the side of my hand, my best fake karate.

  I am on Ngarima’s porch devouring the taro she put out for me, licking the tin of mackerel. She is wearing red because ghosts can’t see her when she wears red and it helps her cough. I had a dream your son’s boat came back, I lie to her. Ngarima is not like me, she likes to hear about her son any way she can. After I lie to her about the dream, she looks up from the taro she’s mashing for Temu, she coughs and says, That boat is Barclay’s.