“Yes? I know? But I don’t have to meet Hope until tomorrow. The same way you found time to stop here and eat steak, you could have stopped with her.”
“But you were forcing me, hurrying. You said the party took too long.”
“I wanted to go straight to the hotel too, but you forced me here, promised me all-inclusive.” He waves around us. “You never even asked me to stay in St. Elizabeth. The same way you forced me to come here, you could have forced me to stay. We could have left early in the morning.
“I watch you all day, sit down at some stupid breakfast send-off till it turned to lunch send-off and this woman sitting at your side, knowing you goin’ leave, reaching out to you. Everybody saw it, every man there would have given anything to just have her look at them the way she was looking at you, and kill each other to climb that mountain. You never even slip away to tell her the right goodbye. It does not make sense, it does not jibe.”
My father is a mean and vindictive man and I tell him so.
He only smiles. “Mean and vindictive? That is it? You are not able to venture an explanation?”
“Yes, I can. She is not my type.”
“Okay, the sins of the father have fallen onto the shoulders of the son, is that it?” He makes way for the steak.
“It is not like that.” There is no conviction; it just fell from my lips because it was there to say.
He has pegged me, truly pegged me. He knows that she has touched me in ways that no woman ever has and that there is something in me that wants her. He sees memories of her in my eyes and notes her absence from our conversation as we came here. It seems my feelings are plain as day before him: in the awkwardness of my goodbye and the way I trembled clumsily when she tried to display a rare outward show of her affection. Having waited for me and seeing that I wasn’t going to make a move, she had tried to give me a final hug, near the van, in public, as I left, and I had not given her space or time to do so.
And now I wonder privately how she feels, having opened herself to me and now not being sure how I took it. You goin’ scorn me now, don’t it? Sometimes I wish I had left her there, her head buried inside her shell like a turtle, instead of having drawn her out to offer to me that which I cannot take to hold. But what does she feel now and how does she understand my responses to her?
“She is not my type.” I know I sound as if I am trying to convince myself. “I did not want to hurt her.”
He smiles to soften the mood. Having made his point, he now moves to console. “You know, son, life shorter than you think, and longer than you can ever believe. It has more time for reflection than it has for action. Why you think all these white people walking up and down about the place and come to drink rum punch and look stupid trying to dance reggae music? What you think them doing? They are creating memories. The time will come when all they can do is sit down and remember all of this. That is all I telling you. I know you have your reasons, the old man just teasing you, that’s all. But is a joke God plays. Him give more time to reflect on your memories than Him give you time to create them. That is how it is, son, and in the end, life is nothing else but memories.”
The food is good. So we are through it quickly and take our drinks to the lounge outside where the cabaret is in progress. A young group is going through the paces of popular reggae songs. They are pretty good, but they soon give way to the main event: an old crooner, with locks down his back, named Freddie Rocks. Most people would have heard about him. He has been around the dancehall scene for as long as I can remember and now seems to have settled for the steady north coast gig. He opens up with a popular Johnny Cash song, and creates a buzz through the tourists scattered around the lounge. After a few songs, he invites us to come to the floor and dance.
We are sitting beside a group of four Americans, and Father has already begun to engage them about the Grand Ole Opry. I don’t know if that is a country group or grand Italian theater, but the Americans seem quite enchanted by him and the discussion is intense. He introduces me as his favorite son and they smile and tell me how good it is for me to be here with my father. People are people, I guess, wherever they may be, and compliments that lack originality are as common as ordinary people.
There is a pause in the conversation and we sit for a while and listen as Freddy takes us from Kenny Rogers to Nat King Cole, Ray Charles, and Luther Vandross. He is in the middle of Elvis Presley’s “Make Believe” when Father rises slowly and walks along the edge of the dance floor. As soon as Freddy finishes, Father whispers in his ear and then makes his way back toward us. Suddenly the band strikes up the prelude to my father’s favorite song.
As old Freddy leans into the first lines of “Help Me Make It through the Night,” Father approaches us and stretches his hands to me and says something I don’t quite grasp with all the sounds and conversation around us.
“What?” I shout.
“Dance with the old man.”
“Me! Are you crazy? Don’t do that, Father. I am not dancing with you.”
He has the support of the four Americans and Freddy is looking up and beckoning. But there is no way I am going down there to dance a slow tune with my father.
“Dance with the old man,” Jim the cowboy with the bad teeth says. The look on his wife’s face is even more beseeching. They begin to chant, “Everton, Everton, Everton!”
This is the height of my humiliation; the more I resist, the more the applause increases and the more attention is drawn to me. If Luther Vandross has a song about it, it must have been done by someone before, so I shut my eyes and rise to follow my father to the dance floor.
Freddy is three-quarters of the way through the song and just to spite me, he starts at the beginning again.
And then Father holds me, rests a palm on my shoulder, and takes my left hand is in his right. And we move to the slow beat of Freddy singing, “Help me make it through the night . . .” His eyes are on me, and I try to raise mine to meet his, but it is hard. Even his hands in mine are awkward, not because he is a man, but because he is my father and I have never had to stare at him so squarely. I am not sure what that is in his eyes, and I do not know how to face it. I find my head bowing, for all my emotions are in my eyes, and he will know now whether or not I love him even though I do not know myself. He will see past everything and find the truth that scares me.
“I don’t care what’s right or wrong. I don’t try to understand . . .”
He lets go of my shoulders, does a spin thing like a big, big dancer, the crowd roars, and I can’t help but smile. And as he holds me again, I feel him pleading in his gaze for me to acknowledge what he is saying to me, what he has been trying to say to me all these few days we have been together.
“Help me make it through the night . . .”
I find his eyes, and there is that glitter in them, that flash of light that usually disappears after an instant. But tonight it fills his eyes and it tells me I am there, wherever it is I wanted to be, whatever it is I have yearned for from him, I am there and he is ready to give it. And it tells me too that I am ready to receive, so I am able now to seek and not be afraid of what I will find, to question and not be afraid of the answers, for whatever I find there will be true and strong as this light that glitters in his eyes.
Let the devil take tomorrow. Lord, tonight I need a friend.
Yesterday is dead and gone and tomorrow’s out of sight.
And it’s sad to be alone. Help me make it through the night . . .
Suddenly, I hope she will be there tomorrow, I hope she will not be a fantasy, I hope that when we get to that hill, she will scale the garden like a wind and find his arms, so he can look in her eyes and she can see for herself as I am seeing now that he knows he has been wrong and that he is sorry.
* * *
So now, after the dance, after the cheering crowds, I stand with him on the section that overlooks the glimmering grounds of this all-inclusive heaven and I call to him, though he is right here beside me.
; “You know that story, that Appleton story, about the rum missing from the casks?”
He smiles and nods. “The angels’ share.”
“Yes. I am going with you tomorrow, but I want you to know this: what you’re looking for may not be there—and nothing is wrong with it not being there. For time and God take what they want from your chances in life, and give you what you must get. You don’t have to search for what is missing, the angels have that.”
His eyes are glistening in the darkness. “Life is more than a barrel of rum, my son.”
“I know. But look at you: sixty-seven, fitter than me. You have a good twenty years left. Remember that after seventy is not even your time. It’s God’s time—three score and ten—and if by reason of grace, Daddy, you might get a little extra. So what you lose you goin’ get back.”
He is nodding in the darkness, so I put my hand on his shoulders without fear.
“And that goes for everybody too, you know.” I stare at him deeply and squarely. “Sons who use to think their father never loved them and fathers who use to think they never did enough.”
“Every man,” my father says into the darkness, “should have a son like you.”
TWENTY-NINE
Father stands loosely on the deserted meadow, places his foot on a low wall of some discarded structure, and looks sheepishly at me.
I know we are lost.
I had asked him if he was sure of the turn we made as we rounded the North West Point, and he had merely looked across the seat at me as if to say, Never second guess your old man, boy. So I had turned without comment.
The shrubbery and trees seemed to have extended too much onto the thoroughfare for a regularly used road, so I asked when was the last time he had visited the place. He said he and Una had been about five years ago. But now we are here, in this place, a mile and a half up a hill as steep as the slope of my windshield, and he is about to grudgingly admit that we are lost.
“Maybe it is farther up the road,” I suggest.
“Maybe.” He scratches his head. “But the turn from the hill, just as it about to flatten, is how I remember. I can’t believe that a hill could flatten and turn into a large open space the same exact way for two different places.”
“Well, maybe it’s up the road. Come.”
It has begun to drizzle but that does not stop him from moving away from me. “And the view . . .” He smiles and peers over the hill toward the north coast and beyond. “The view is almost exactly the same as I remember.”
If I had money and could afford to build a hideout or a nice hotel and call it Grand View, I would do it in a place like this. For this must be where all tourist postcards are made.
And the space is large enough—several acres spreading to all sides, broken every now and then by a few gentle slopes. From where we are the land angles down to a small orchard that fronts the dense bush and trees covering the rest of the mountainside.
As I walk the property, I see that there are indeed signs that buildings once stood here and that a large structure has been flattened or bulldozed. Way beyond a cluster of trees, there are heaps of rubble and I can see tractor wheel marks overgrown by grass and weed.
A week ago I would have been angry at having driven all the way up a mountainside for this, but now I just pat my father’s shoulder and tell him to come. “Maybe it’s up the road,” I say again.
“Let us ask that man. He should know where it is.”
I beckon to an old man coming from the bush off to the right, a man about my father’s age, on the back of a donkey with a cutlass across his lap. For a ways he appears to be a moving part of the hill, but gradually he separates from the background and the foliage and emerges as a solid farmer, squinting from beneath an old felt hat.
He seems unperturbed by the strengthening drizzle, and so is Father, for he goes to meet the man halfway across the meadow.
“How are you doing, my good sir?” Father greets him.
“Howdy,” says the old man with a smile. “Onoo lost, man?”
“It seems so,” my father answers, “though all the signs pointed to this place till we got here.”
“We looking for Grand View Hotel,” I call across, as I move to join them.
“Grand View, you say?”
“Yes, a hotel on the hill around the area, can’t be far from here,” Father replies. “Somewhere we must have taken a wrong turn.”
“And you know, sir . . .” The old man leans forward on his donkey like a cowboy. “You know you never make a bad turn at all.”
“How you mean?” my father asks.
“They use to have a hotel on this property by that very same name.”
“Here?” Father looks to the ground.
“Yes, right here so. Hurricane, ’bout four years now. Christopher, you remember Hurricane Christopher, the one they say turn back from Cuba? They called it the Cuban missile. Well, sir, after it passed, they find the hotel roof way down the hill at Point. Mash up everything.”
“Here?” Father is getting wet and something is rising in him.
“Yes.” The man disembarks and wipes the rain from his brow. He then ushers the donkey toward the bush and slaps the felt hat on his pants to rid it of the droplets of water. Satisfied, he points around.
“Some Chinese people did buy out the whole place, say them was goin’ build bigger place and casino. But I hear the father dead so the work stop. Two years now that work stop. One of the tractors still park and broke down over that ridge down that side.”
“Here?” Father blurts again, as the rain intensifies. “But there were reservations. Calls were made. Reservations were made.”
“Come,” I tell him. “We have to get out of the rain.”
“You right about that.” The man trots to join his donkey under a massive poinciana tree. It is closer than the van, so we join him.
Under here the drizzle is unable to pierce the overlap of green leaves and multicolored flowers that spread like a roof on all sides of the massive trunk.
“What you saying to me?” the old man asks as we stop. “You was planning to stay here?”
“Well, yes,” I answer, “if this is the place.”
“And you know, you not the first person. People come from all about looking for it. People use to love this place, all kinda people come. But the owner them get another place near the coast, you know. Place have the same name. Maybe is there you called.”
“They could have transferred the phone number. It is done all the time when people move,” I say quietly.
But Father is not listening to me, nor is he paying attention to the old man; he is walking around the tree in a daze, looking at every corner of the property, like a man faced with news that is too much for his mind.
“You okay?”
“I know I wasn’t wrong, but look how the place just disappeared.”
“What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you want to wait a bit? Maybe she will come. You want to go down and check that other place? Whatever you want to do, old man.” I have to work with him so he comes to his own truth gradually. I am worried about how he looks, how his hair has come undone in the rain; he is beginning to get a wild, unruly appearance. I do not want him to unravel . . . not here . . . not now.
“Okay.” I lead him away and nod to the stranger. “Thanks, this tree won’t hold off the rain for long. We will be going back to the van.”
“You quite right, sir,” he smiles. “But it will hold if it don’t get too heavy. Town people can’t take too much rain.” He says it with such open honesty that I laugh without taking offense.
“Thank you, sir.”
Father also waves his thanks before we trot across the yard to the van. Almost on cue, as soon as we enter the vehicle, the rain becomes heavier.
There is more silence than words now. So I put on an instrumental CD, and though I am not following the music, it gives some sort of flavor to the space.
“What a thing . . .” he finally chuckles. “What a thing. Suppose she comes all the way from Germany and find this place and nobody to tell her what happen. It wouldn’t be good. We have to wait.”
“Yes.” I start the engine and flip the A/C on very low to keep the windows from fogging and the air fresh. The rain is persistent, not hard, just half a step up from a drizzle. The old man under the tree has had enough of it, though, and leads his donkey off down the slope a little ahead of us.
After about half an hour, Father straightens in his seat. “You hear that?”
“What?”
“You don’t hear it?” His eyes are wide with excitement.
I turn the music down and open my window a bit more. Sure enough, there is the sound of an engine laboring up the hill. His face lights up like a bulb. But I am not sure what the reaction in mine is, for though I have taken him here, deep down, I really did not believe she would come. I try for a broad grin. But he sees my discomfort.
“What did I tell you? You don’t have any faith!”
It comes curving from the hill onto the flatland, ghostly through the rain, a gray Mercedes SUV almost merging into the background of gray, cloudy skies and falling rain. I watch it all the way till it stops behind my Pathfinder and I feel my stomach turn and my joints weaken at the sight of the woman stepping from it even before the wheels are still.
Una! Holly! Una and Holly. Holly have a Benz!
Una races through the rain, with Holly chasing after her. Before I can open my mouth, she is hammering her fists against the window. Father throws the door open and jumps outside to confront her with an anger I have never seen in him.
It isn’t something that you want to see often, two old people who you love and fear for going frenziedly after each other in the mud and rain, especially when you have never seen them quarrel before, especially when the anger is fueled by jealousy. For an instant, I am disgusted by my father. What madness this is! He has taken so much from her, that dignified woman I love so much, that now she has to debase herself to try to get some back. And what she wants, ridiculously, is him.
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