“So this your big day for drinkin.” Rudy slid a pint bottle along the bar and resettled on his stool. “Don’t you be startin that war buddy rap with me, now. I ain’t in the mood.”
“Shucks, Rudy!” Prince adopted a southern accent. “You know I ain’t war buddies with no nigger.”
Rudy stiffened but let it pass; he gave a disaffected grunt. “Don’t know why not, man. You could passyourself. Way your hair’s gotten all crispy and your skin’s gone dark. See here?”
He laid his hand on Prince’s to compare the color, but Prince knocked it aside and stared, challenging.
“Damn! Seem like Clint Eastwood done wandered into town!” Rudy shook his head in disgust and moved off along the bar to change the record. The two men at the rear drifted across the room and whispered with him, casting sly looks at Prince.
Prince basked in the tension. It further fleshed out his frame of reference. Confident that he’d established dominance, he took a table beside the shutter, relaxed, and sipped his rum. Through a gap in the boards he saw a girl stringing up colored lights on the shanty opposite the bar. His private holiday had this year coincided with Independence Day, always celebrated upon the third Friday in January. Stalls would sprout in the public square, offering strips of roast turtle and games of chance. Contending music would blare from the bars—reggae and salsa. Prince enjoyed watching street dancers lose their way in the mishmash of rhythms. It emphasized the fact that neither the Spanish nor the islanders could cope with the other’s presence and further emphasized that they were celebrating two different events—on the day that Queen Victoria had granted the islands their freedom, the Honduran military had sailed in and established governance.
More stupidity.
The rum was sitting easier on his stomach. Prince mellowed and went with the purple lights, seeing twisted black branches in them, seeing the twilit jungle in Lang Biang, and he heard the hiss of the walkie-talkie and Leon’s stagy whisper, “Hey, Prince! I got a funny shadow in that bombax tree ...” He had turned his scope on the tree, following the course of the serpentine limbs through the grainy, empurpling air. And then the stutter of automatic fire, and he could hear Leon’s screams in the airand carrying over the radio . . .
“Got somethin for help you celebrate, Mr. Prince.”
A thin hawk-faced man wearing frayed shorts dropped into the chair next to him, his dreadlocks wriggling. George Ebanks.
Prince gripped the rum bottle, angry, ready to strike, but George thrust out a bristling something—a branch of black coral.
“Dis de upful stuff, Mr. Prince,” he said. “Rife with de island’s secret.” He pulled out a knife and whittled at the branch. Curly black shavings fell onto the table. “You just scrapes de color off and dass what you smokes.”
The branch intrigued Prince; it was dead black, unshining, hard to tell where each stalk ended and the room’s darkness began. He’d heard the stories. Old Spurgeon said it drove you crazy. And even older John Anderson McCrae had said, “De coral so black dat when you smokes it de color will rush into your eyes and allow you vision of de spirit world. And will allow dem sight of you.”
“What’s it do?” he asked, tempted.
“It make you more a part of things. Dass all, Mr. Prince. Don’t fret. We goin to smoke it with you.”
Rudy and the third man—wiry, short Jubert Cox—sidled up behind George’s shoulder, and Rudy winked at Prince. George loaded the knife blade with black shavings and tamped them into a hash pipe, then lit it, drawing hard until the hollows of his cheeks reflected a violet-red coal. He handed the pipe across, a wisp of smoke curling from his tight-lipped smile, and watched Prince toke it down.
The smoke tasted vile. It had a mustiness he associated with the thousands of dead polyps (was it thousands per lungful or merely hundreds?) he’d just inhaled, but it was so cool that he did not concern himself with taste and noticed only the coolness.
Cold black stone lined his throat.
The coolness spread to his arms and legs, weighting them down, and he imagined it questing with black tendrils through veins and arteries, finding out secret passages unknown even to his blood. Drifty stuff . . . and dizzying. He wasn’t sure if he was sweating or not, but he was a little nauseous. And he didn’t seem to be inhaling anymore. Not really. The smoke seemed to be issuing of its own volition from the pipe stem, a silken rope, a cold strangler’s cord tying a labyrinthine knot throughout his body . . .
“Take but a trifle, don’t it, Mr. Prince?” Jubert giggled.
Rudy lifted the pipe from his numbed fingers.
. . . and involving the fissures of his brain in an intricate design, binding his thoughts into a coralline structure. The bright gaps in the shutter planking dwindled, receded, until they were golden straws adrift in the blackness, then golden pinpricks, then gone. And though he was initially fascinated by this production of the drug, as it progressed Prince became worried that he was going blind.
“Wuh ...” His tongue wouldn’t work. His flesh was choked with black dust, distant from him, and the coolness had deepened to a penetrating chill. And as a faint radiance suffused the dark, he imagined that the process of the drug had been reversed, that now he was flowing up the pipe stem into the heart of the violet-red coal.
“Oh, dis de upful stuff all right, Mr. Prince,” said George, from afar. “Dat what grows down to de root of de island.”
Rippling kelp beds faded in from the blackness, illuminated by a violet glow, and Prince saw that he was passing above them toward a dim wall (the reef?) at whose base thousands upon thousands of witchy fires burned, flickering, ranging in color from indigo to violet-white, all clinging (he saw, drawing near) to the stalks and branches of black coral—a bristling jungle of coral, stalks twenty and thirty feet high, and more. The fires were smaller than candle flames and did not seem as much presences as they did peepholes into a cold furnace behind the reef. Maybe they were some sort of copepod, bioluminescent and half alive. He descended among the stalks, moving along the channels between them. Barracuda, sleek triggerfish . . . There! A grouper—four hundred pounds if it was an ounce— angelfish and rays . . . bones showed in negative through their luminous flesh. Schools of smaller fish darted as one, stopped, darted again, into and out of the black branches. The place had a strange kinetic geometry, as if it were the innards of an organic machine whose creatures performed its functions by maneuvering in precise patterns through its interstices, and in which the violet fires served as the insane, empowering thoughts within an inky skull. Beautiful! Thomas de Quincey Land. A jeweled shade, an occulted paradise. Then, rising into the murk above him, an immense stalk—a shadowy, sinister Christmas tree poxed with flickering decorations. Sharks circled its upper reaches, cast in silhouette by the glow. Several of the fires detached from a branch and drifted toward him, eddying like slow moths.
“Dey just markin you, Mr. Prince. Don’t be troubled.”
Where was George’s voice coming from? It sounded right inside his ear. Oh, well ... He wasn’t troubled. The fires were weird, lovely. One drifted to within a foot of his eyes, hovering there, its violet-tipped edges shifting, not with the randomness of flame but with a flowing, patterned movement, a complex pulse; its center was an iridescent white. Must not be copepods.
It drifted closer.
Very lovely. A wash of violet spread from its edges in and was absorbed by the whiteness.
It brushed against his left eye.
Prince’s vision went haywire, spinning. He had a glimpse of the sentinel sharks, a blurred impression of the latticework of shadow on the reef wall, then darkness. The cold touch, brief as it had been, a split second, had burned him, chilled him, as if a hypodermic had ever so slightly pricked the humor and flooded him with an icy serum, leaving him shuddering.
“Dey bound him!” George?
“Be watchful down dere, Mr. Prince.” Jubert.
The shutter banged open, and bright, sweet, warming sunlight poured in. He re
alized he had fallen. His legs were entangled in an unyielding something that must be the chair.
“You just had a little fit, man. Happens sometimes the first time. You gonna be fine.”
They pulled him up and helped him out onto the landing and down the stair. He tripped and fell the last three steps, weak and drunk, still shivering, fuddled by the sunlight.
Rudy pressed the rum bottle into his hands. “Keep in the sun for a while, man. Get your strength back.”
“Oh, Mr. Prince!” A skinny black arm waved from the window of the gaudy box on stilts, and he heard smothered giggles. “You got work for me, Mr. Prince?”
* * * *
Severe physical punishment was called for! Nobody was going to get away with bad-tripping him!
Prince drank, warmed himself, and plotted his revenge on the steps of the dilapidated Hotel Captain Henry. (The hotel was named for Henry Meachem, the pirate whose crews had interbred with Carib and Jamaican women, thereby populating the island, and whose treasure was the focal point of many tall tales.) A scrawny, just-delivered bitch growled at him from the doorway. Between growls she worried her inflamed teats, a nasty sucking that turned Prince’s saliva thick and ropy. He gave old Mike, the hotel flunky, twenty-five centavos to chase her off, but afterward old Mike wanted more.
“I be a devil, mon! I strip de shadow from your back!” He danced around Prince, flicking puny left jabs. Filthy, wearing colorless rags and a grease-stained baseball cap, flecks of egg yolk clotting his iron-gray whiskers.
Prince flipped him another coin and watched as he ran off to bury it. The stories said that Mike had been a miser, had gone mad when he’d discovered all his money eaten by mice and insects. But Roblie Meachem, owner of the hotel, said, “He just come home to us one mornin. Didn’t have no recollection of his name, so we call him Mike after my cousin in Miami.” Still, the stories persisted. It was the island way. (“Say de thing long enough and it be so.”) And perhaps the stories had done some good for old Mike, effecting a primitive psychotherapy and giving him a legend to inhabit. Mike returned from his hiding place and sat beside the steps, drawing circles in the dust with his finger and rubbing them out, mumbling, as if he couldn’t get them right.
Prince flung his empty bottle over a shanty roof, caring not where it fell. The clarity of his thoughts annoyed him; the coral had sobered him somewhat, and he needed to regain his lost momentum. If Rita Steedly weren’t home, well, he’d be within a half mile of his own bar, the Sea Breeze; but if she were . . . Her husband, an ecologist working for the government, would be off island until evening, and Prince felt certain that a go-round with Rita would reorient him and reinstitute the mean drunken process which the coral had interrupted.
* * * *
Vultures perched on the pilings of Rita Steedly’s dock, making them look like carved ebony posts. Not an uncommon sight on the island, but one Prince considered appropriate as to the owner’s nature, more so when the largest of them flapped up and landed with a crunch in a palm top overlooking the sun deck where she lay. The house was blue stucco on concrete pilings standing in a palm grove. Between the trunks, the enclosed waters of the reef glittered in bands and swirls of aquamarine, lavender, and green according to the varying depth and bottom. Sea grape grew close by the house, and the point of land beyond it gave out into mangrove radicle.
As he topped the stairs, Rita propped herself on her elbows, pushed back her sunglasses, and weakly murmured, “Neal,” as if summoning her lover to a deathbed embrace. Then she collapsed again upon the blanket, the exhausted motion of a pale dead frond. Her body glistened with oils and sweat, and her bikini top was unhooked and had slipped partway off.
Prince mixed a rum and papaya juice from the serving cart by the stair. “Just smoked some black coral with the boys down at Ghetto Liquors.” He looked back at her over his shoulder and grinned. “De spirits tol’ me dat I must purify myself wit de body of a woman fore de moon is high.”
“I thought your eyes were very yellow today. You should know better.” She sat up; the bikini top dropped down onto her arms. She lifted a coil of hair which had stuck to her shoulder, patting it into place behind her ear. “There isn’t anything on this island that’s healthy anymore. Even the fruit’s poisoned! Did I tell you about the fruit?”
She had. Her little girl’s voice grated on Prince, but he found her earnestness amusing, attractive for its perversity. Her obsession with health seemed no less a product of trauma than did his own violent disposition.
“It was just purple lights and mild discomfort,” he said, sitting beside her. “But a headache and a drowsy sensation would be a good buzz to those black hicks. They tried to mess with my mind, but . . .”He leaned over and kissed her. “I made good my escape and came straightaway.”
“Jerry said he saw purple lights, too.” A grackle holding a cigarette butt in its beak hopped up on the railing, and Rita shooed it off.
“He smoked it?”
“He smokes it all the time. He wanted me to try it, but I’m not poisoning myself anymore than I have to with this . . . this garbage heap.” She checked his eyes. “They’re getting as bad as everyone else’s. Still, they aren’t as bad as the people’s in Arkansas. They were so yellow they almost glowed in the dark. Like phosphorescent urine!” She shuddered dramatically, sighed, and stared glumly up into the palms. “God! I hate this place!”
Prince dragged her down to face him. “You’re a twitch,” he said.
“I’m not!” she said angrily, but fingered loose the buttons of his shirt as she talked. “Everything’s polluted down here. Dying. And it’s worse in the States. You can see the wasting in people’s faces if you know how to look for it. I’ve tried to talk Jerry into leaving, but he says he’s committed. Maybe I’ll leave him. Maybe I’ll go to Peru. I’ve heard good things about Peru.”
“You’ll see the wasting intheir faces,” said Prince.
Her arms slid around his back, and her eyes opened and closed, opened and closed, the eyes of a doll whose head you manipulted. Barely seeing him. seeing something else in his place, some bad sign or ugly rumor.
As his own eyes closed, as he stopped thinking, he gazed out past her head to the glowing, many-colored sea and saw in the pale sky along the horizon a flash of the way it had been after a burn off: the full-bore immensity and silence of the light; the clear, innocent air over paddies and palms blackened like matchsticks; and how they’d moved through the dead land, crunching the scorched, brittle stalks underfoot, unafraid, because every snake within miles was now just a shadow in the cinders.
* * * *
Drunk, blind, old John Anderson McCrae was telling stories at the Sea Breeze, and Prince wandered out onto the beach for some peace and quiet. The wind brought fragments of the creaky voice. “... dat cross were studded with emeralds . . . and sapphires ...” The story about Meachem’s gold cross (supposedly buried off the west end of the island) was John’s masterpiece, told only at great expense to the listener. He told how Meachem’s ghost appeared each time his treasure was threatened, huge, a constellation made of the island stars. “... and de round end of his peg leg were de moon shine down ...” Of course, Meachem had had two sound legs, but the knowledge didn’t trouble John. “A mon’s ghost may suffer injury every bit as de mon,” he’d say; and then, to any further challenge, “Well, de truth may be lackin in it, but it capture de spirit of de truth.” And he’d laugh, spray his rummy breath in the tourists’ faces, and repeat his commonplace pun. And they would pay him more because they thought he was cute, colorful, and beneath them.
White cumulus swelled from the horizon, and the stars blazed overhead so bright and jittery they seemed to have a pulse in common with the rattle of the Sea Breeze’s generator. The reef crashed and hissed. Prince screwed his glass into the sand and settled back against a palm trunk, angled so he could see the deck of the bar. Benches and tables were built around coconut palms which grew up through the deck; orange lights in the form of p
lastic palms were mounted on the trunks. Not an unpleasant place to sit and watch the sea.
But the interior of the Sea Breeze bordered on the monstrous: lamps made of transparent-skinned blowfish with bulbs in their stomachs; treasure maps and T-shirts for sale; a giant jukebox glowing red and purple like the crown jewels in a protective cage of two-by-fours; garish pirate murals on the walls; and skull-and-crossbones pennants hanging from the thatched roof. The bar had been built and painted to simulate a treasure chest with its lid ajar. Three Carib skulls sat on shelves over the bottles, with red bulbs in their jaws which winked on and off for birthdays and other celebrations. It was his temple to the stupidity of Guanoja Menor; and, being his first acquisition, memorialized a commitment he had made to the grotesque heart of acquisition itself.
Universe 14 - [Anthology] Page 21
