Serpents in the Sun

by Cave, Hugh

  "Jump in."

  They had tried opening a door of each car so that Millie might somehow stretch herself from one car to the other, but it hadn't worked. In the end Millie had taken off her shoes and crossed over by stepping down into the water.

  They talked all the way to the Bay and then at the bank while Alison waited for her turn at a teller's window, as one always had to on a Friday. After that, with Glencoe's pay bill money safely locked in the boot of Alison's car, they had gone shopping together, and it was as though a dam had burst or floodgates had been thrown open.

  They talked about everything under the sun. About each other. About the upcoming election and the vigorous campaigning already going on—both of them agreeing that the socialist leanings of the PNP candidate were frightening. Jamaica, Mildred predicted, could so easily become another Cuba if Michael Manley, the son of Norman W. Manley, were elected. And with his charisma and flair for public speaking, he just might be.

  Side by side they toured the town, neither of them wanting to put an end to this unexpected renewal of their friendship. They discussed their mutual friend Kim Tulloch, who had sold her house in Trinity Ville and now, one hundred and three years old, was living with the Bennetts at Glencoe, still proudly independent but not quite able to live alone any longer. And while that life drew to a close, Alison pointed out, another was about to begin Luari and Cliff would soon have a second child.

  At one point in their walkabout, they heard recorded music being played through a shop's loudspeaker, and the voice was that of the Caribbean Solitaire. "Des and I just love her," Mildred said. "We have every record she's made, and we play them over and over. Who do you suppose she is, Al?"

  "I haven't the foggiest. But we love her, too. All of us." Never, though, did their talk turn to coffee. Not even for a moment.

  Tom Kirk pushed himself to his feet. "Shall I have a look at Luari while I'm here?"

  For the first time since they had left Lyle's bedside, Alison laughed. To be sure, it was only a small laugh, but it put life in her face again. "Only if you're up to a bit of walking," she said. "She decided she ought to have some exercise and went down to the Gut. Andrea's with her." It was hard to believe that Andrea, Luari's firstborn, was now five years old.

  Kirk smiled. "How about Kim, then? She isn't with them, is she? Not that I'd put it past her."

  "No, she isn't with them. When I last saw her, about an hour ago, she was in the schoolroom, reading."

  "A book about Jamaica, no doubt."

  "Actually a book about socialism that she got at the library in the Bay the last time we were there together. She's worried about what this island may be coming to, she says."

  "So am I," Tom Kirk growled. "So am I, Al. Anyway, let me look in on her; then I'll be going."

  He went down the hall to the room where the Bennett twins, on first coming to Glencoe, had been tutored by their mother. What a long time ago that had been, Kirk thought; now Cliff was about to be a father for the second time, and Leora also had two children, although one of Lee's was an adopted black Haitian child. With an open book in her hands, Kim Tulloch sat in a rocker by one of the schoolroom windows. Even now, Kirk realized with a touch of awe, the old lady was able to read without glasses.

  "Hello there," he said. "How are things going?"

  She lowered the book and looked at him. "Not too bad, I suppose. You know something, though, Tom Kirk? I miss my cats."

  Her Tai-Tai had died several years ago. Yum-Yum, the Bennetts' Blue Point, had finally passed away last year at the ripe old age of twenty. "Why not get another?" Kirk suggested.

  "No, Tom. There's a time to acquire things and a time to let them go. In my long lifetime I've had cats and dogs, a pair of geese and a donkey. Now I'm alone except for friends like the Bennetts and you, and that's the way it should be. You want to take my blood pressure and listen to my heart, I suppose."

  "Unless you have some objection."

  "Of course I do, but you'll talk me into it anyway, so come get it over with." A grin suddenly found its way through the mass of wrinkles that was her face now. "While you're at it," she added, you might give this old girl a kiss, to brighten the day for her."

  And brighten my own, too, Tom Kirk thought as he complied.

  2

  In a rented house in Pétionville, the daughter of Lee and Carey Aldred sat in a shaft of afternoon sunlight on the veranda, writing in what she called her Haitian Diary. One day, she had decided, she would write a whole book about her life in Haiti, so it was positively necessary that she put down her thoughts about every single day's happenings. Being only eleven years old at present, she was perhaps too young to attempt such a book just yet, but soon she would be smart enough.

  Before beginning to write, she turned back the pages and reread a long passage she had composed a month or so before.

  I like it here in Pétionville, she had written then. At first, when Mother and Daddy decided to give up our house in Verrelle and move here, I didn't think I would. This town is so much bigger than Verrelle. But even though it is a sort of suburb to Port-au-Prince, which is so crowded and noisy I don't like it at all, Pétionville is high up and cool. It's pretty, too, with lots of nice houses and several schools. I don't go to any of the schools here, though. I go to one in the capital for children who speak English. Some of the children there are Embassy kids and some belong to American business people and some are Haitian kids who come from wealthy homes and speak English or speak a little and want to learn more. Daddy does not work at the Kelleher Hospital any more. He and Mother decided they were no longer needed there. But they were still needed in Haiti, they decided, so Daddy has a Private Practice now. His office is a building in the yard here that was supposed to be the Servants' Quarters, but we don't have any live-in servants except Tina, and she has a room in the house. We have a yard boy named Theaud—you don't pronounce the "h"—but he lives down by the market and walks up here every day.

  You would think that Daddy would have lots of rich paytients because this is a place where lots of rich People live. I mean, People who are called the elite here, meaning they have good clothes and always wear shoes and live in nice houses with lots of servants and drive cars and mostly speak French. And Daddy does look after some of them, but he looks after poor people too and the rich ones have to wait their turn in his waiting room just like everybody else. Mysister Virgilie is learning to be a nurse and she helps Daddy a lot.

  Nothing much of importance had happened yesterday or today, Carita decided, but after some thought she described a conversation she had had with Theaud while he was washing the Jeep. He liked to go to cockfights, he had said, and had told her all about how the cocks were trained and how people bet on them when they fought. Encouraging cocks to kill one another just so people could bet on them was not a nice thing to do, she decided, but it was part of what happened in Haiti so she had better record it. Finished, she closed the notebook and carried it back to her room.

  There, repeating a procedure established when they had first moved into the Pétionville house, she carefully hid the diary behind other books on the top shelf of her closet. Most of those were schoolbooks. Two, though, were histories of Haiti that never failed to hold her interest, and one was a book on how to be a writer. Her mother had sent away for that one after learning she was determined to do a whole big book about Haiti someday.

  "Let me tell you something," Daddy had said one day after being asked to read what she had put down in the notebook. "It's all right for you to say things about Papa Doc and the Tonton Macoutes in this, but you mustn't repeat them outside this house or let anyone but your mother and me see this book of yours. Do you understand that?"

  "Why, Daddy?"

  "Because we never really know who we're talking to now, and if the President or any of his Tontons or friends find out you've written bad things about them—"

  "Carey," Mother had protested, "you'll frighten her!"

  "Better be frightened tha
n buried," he'd said with a big scowl, and then he had told them about a patient of his. The man's name was Deland and he owned a shop in Port-au-Prince and one day when he was driving home from the airport to Pétionville by the back road, something terrible happened to him. That road was a short way home but it was not paved and in dry weather it was always very dusty— so much so that cars churned up whole big clouds of dust behind them. Mr. Deland was driving home that day and there was a bigger car than his in front of him, with four men in it, going very slowly for some reason, and his own car was being covered with dust. So he sounded his horn and passed the big car and then of course he was in front churning up the dust. What happened then was that the men in the big car got angry and they speeded up and passed him, and then blocked the road so he had to stop. And they dragged him out of his car and took him to Fort Dimanche and beat him up, all four of them taking turns at hurting him. Then they called his wife to come and get him, and she did, but he was unconscious and she had to take him to the hospital. "Today he is in a wheelchair," Daddy said, "and he probably never will walk again. He didn't know, you see, that the four men in that other car were Tonton Macoutes. So you see, darling," he added, turning to Carita, "you must be very careful. You remember when I drove downtown to the school for handicapped children last Sunday afternoon to look at a child La Petite Directrice called me about?"

  Yes, Carita said, she remembered.

  "Well, something happened that I haven't told either of you about," he said, and looked at Mother. "On the way back, by the College St. Martial, a man stepped off the curb under a street lamp and flagged me down. I was going to ignore him because it was dark and getting late, and then I thought, Oh-oh, what if he's a Tonton? So I stopped, and he got into the Jeep without even being invited and ordered me—ordered me, mind you—to drive him to Kenscoff."

  "What?" Mother said.

  "All the way up the mountain to Kenscoff. No explanation, no anything, just "Take me to Kenscoff" as if I were his chauffeur. And, of course, I did. Because you have to these days, unless you want to be found dead in a ditch somewhere, or have your brains beaten out at Fort Dimanche by Duvalier's goons. Someone who should know told me the other day that the Tontons far outnumber the regular army now. And you can't tell who they are because many or most of them dress like civilians. So," he said, turning back to Carita, "you must remember to be very careful, darling."

  And Mother added, "Yes, dear. Always. The best thing is never to talk about what's happening here. Just think of Haiti as a sick country and pray that it will someday be well again."

  Carey had set tongues wagging when he opened his Pétionville office. His colleagues shook their heads at him. It was stupid, they said, to think he could solve the ills of the world all by himself. Laughing, he said he knew the ills of the world were beyond his reach, but the complaints of this poverty-stricken Caribbean country were squarely in front of him wherever he turned, and why not try to do something about them?

  He amazed his colleagues in another way, too. When mountain people who could not come to him were in need of his help, he sometimes went to them, jamming a few essentials into a knapsack and riding off into the mountains on horseback. Sometimes he went alone; sometimes Lee or Virgilie accompanied him. The Haitian girl, eighteen now, was studying to be a nurse and spent much of her time at the General Hospital in Port. It was a good thing Theaud could drive, Lee had remarked. With one girl having to be jeeped to school and the other to the hospital almost every day, she would be running a taxi service if he couldn't.

  In Jamaica, on the twentieth of April, Luari Bennett gave birth to a second daughter. She and Cliff named the child Glenda—"because it's pretty and it sounds like Glencoe, which brought us together," Luari said. Like Andrea, the new baby had Freeland Elliot's blue eyes and Luari's near-black hair. Unlike Andrea she had a voice, Cliff insisted, that would have shattered any equipment used to record it.

  The day after Glenda Bennett was born, President Papa Doc of Haiti died.

  Daddy says he had been sick a long time, Carita wrote in her notebook, and he died of a heart attack while he was eating his supper in bed at the Palace. There has already been a referendim to settle who will be the new President of Haiti, but Daddy says the people did not have any choice because Papa Doc had already changed the country’s Constitushun so that his son, Jean-Claude, would be the one. I personally have never met or even seen Jean-Claude but I know what he looks like because there are billboards everywhere that show him and Papa Doc together, with Papa Doc saying "I have chosen him." He is only eighteen years old and very fat.

  3

  "You talked in your sleep again last night, Roddy." Olive turned from her dressing table to frown questioningly at her husband, who had just sat up in bed and swung his feet to the floor. "You kept using the word 'judge' again. Who is this 'judge', Roddy?"

  A small alarm clock on the dressing table indicated the time was two minutes to six. As usual, Olive had awakened just before the alarm was due to go off, and had stopped it. The room's curtained windows were turning gray with daylight.

  Naked, Roddy shook his head as he looked away from her intent gaze and got to his feet. For some reason he felt tired this October Saturday morning. "'Judge?' I've told you I don't know, hon. It must be part of some crazy dream I keep having but don't remember after I wake up."

  "This time you kept repeating another word, too," she said. "'Heather.' You said it several times. 'Heather.' Does that mean anything to you?"

  He shook his head again. "Sounds as though I've been reading Bobby Burns, doesn't it?"

  Olive shrugged and went back to making up her face. "What shall I do with Sharon today? Any suggestions?" Sharon DeCosta, the New York friend who had accompanied her to Le Refuge on her initial visit, annually returned for a week or so and washere now. "She wants to take a native sailboat over to La Tortue."

  "Today?"

  "No, not specifically today. But that's her big project this time around, she says."

  "Well, if you're planning to go to the island with her, you'd better make it Monday, don't you think?" Roddy began to get dressed. "We're bound to have the usual run of Haitians today and tomorrow."

  It was true. More and more Haitians had discovered Le Refuge, and they usually came on weekends. Most were from nearby Cap Haitien, of course, but a few came all the way from the capital. The other guests—Americans, Canadians, a few Europeans—seemed to enjoy having them around. There had been a lot in the media about Papa Doc's death in April, and a lot of speculation about what kind of President-for-Life his son would make. The other guests liked to ask the Haitians what they thought about it all.

  It was probably the beach that drew the Haitians themselves, Roddy reflected. Especially those from Port-au-Prince. While their country boasted some great stretches of golden-sand shoreline, few beaches worth going to were within reach of the capital, and none of those had the unspoiled beauty of the one at Le Refuge.

  Dressed, Roddy turned to Olive and kissed her, vividly remembering how passionate she had been before they fell asleep last night. Then he went along the first-floor corridor to the lobby. Judge, he thought. Heather. He was not telling the truth about the dream, of course. He remembered it all right, every vivid detail of it, and knew exactly what it was. It was a recreation, in his subconscious, of that unforgettable night when Judge McKenzie had come home earlier than expected and caught him making love to Heather in the study. Even when awake he still could not recall those ghastly few moments without wanting to crawl away somewhere and hide. Whenever his mind conjured up the memory, it was as though the confrontation had occurred only yesterday instead of years ago.

  The dream wasn't a nightly thing; thank God for that. He sometimes went for months without having it. But then it would haunt him every night for four, five, six nights in a row, and evidently while tormented by it he moaned and groaned and used the word “judge” in his sleep. And of course Olive questioned him about it. Had he moaned He
ather's name, too, last night? God help him, he must have.

  Did she believe the lie when he insisted he didn't know what he dreamed about? She might, he told himself. They had a good marriage—a great one, actually—and she had to know he wasn't cheating on her, at least not here in Le Refuge. How could he, when the only place he could go to get away from the job was their own suite, where she might walk in on him at any moment without warning? Nor could he be unfaithful on their infrequent trips to Jamaica, because they always stayed at Glencoe.

  That left Miami. How many times had he been to Miami alone since their marriage? Two? Three? She must know that if he had a girlfriend there, he would have found excuses to fly over there a lot more often than that.

  No . . . she couldn't suspect anything. And she loved him as much as he loved her. Really loved him, in bed and out. He simply could not think of hurting her by telling her what the dream was all about. It was not even to be considered.

  No one was in the lobby. At the desk he checked the day's reservations, noting that two Cap Haitien businessmen were coming with their wives and children, and a couple of young medics from Le Cap's Justinien Hospital with their girlfriends. The place would be almost full for the weekend. To tell the truth, it was now a small gold mine.

  The trouble was, to keep it producing the gold you had to be right there doing the mining. Turn your back on things for more than a few days at a time, and you could open a Pandora's Box of problems.

  He was just thinking of going to the dining room for some breakfast when Dela Basile appeared. The mother of the blind boy Carey and Lee had almost run over was head housekeeper now and the most reliable person on the staff. After checking the lobby to be sure the maids had tidied it up, she stayed to chat for a moment.