Adrift on St. John

by Rebecca Hale

  It’s been four years now since I moved down to St. John, making me a veteran among the island’s resident “Continentals”—a constantly rotating pool of pale-faced immigrants from the upper forty-eight.

  There’s no shortage of stateside applicants seeking jobs down here in the Virgins. The promise of an idyllic island lifestyle draws individuals from every social class and background. Once they arrive at their dream location, however, few make it longer than a year.

  They all start out the same: so full of hope, so sure they’ve found paradise. After a couple of weeks, maybe a month or two, it begins to fall apart.

  Some discover they actually miss all the mainland conveniences they’d come here to escape. Others run out of money—this isn’t an easy place to earn a living, and a dollar doesn’t go very far in the way of rent or groceries. Many find themselves feeling trapped on the island’s meager landmass, confined by the surrounding acres of uninhabitable sea.

  For a small number of us, though, somehow it just fits. As for me, I’ll never feel at home anywhere else.

  I flew down here on a whim, lured by the promise of an exotic, stress-free existence in the tropics. It was an impetuous act, spurred by an unusual relocation proposal from an admittedly questionable source. But before I could talk myself out of it, I’d hopped a flight and disappeared into this tiny U.S. territory ringing the eastern edge of the Caribbean.

  The gamble had paid off. I’d never once regretted the decision. My only goal had been to make my time in the islands last for as long as possible.

  I picked up my plastic cup from the table and stirred a straw through the liquored strawberry concoction inside. The fruity mixture retained just enough ice to resist the straw’s swirling path and to sweat a coating of moisture on the cup’s outer surface. I dabbed the end of the plastic tube into the fast melting slurry, watching as its frozen thickness dissipated in the rising morning heat.

  You could still smell the aftermath of the heavy rains from the night before, a rinsing sheet of water that had freshened the streets and wiped clean the beaches, erasing my footsteps and obliterating all evidence of my last meeting with the missing Hannah Sheridan.

  I leaned back in the lawn chair as a black rooster with colorful red and blue plumes strutted by on skinny yellow legs. Behind me, a scantily clad waitress in short shorts hefted a bag of refuse into a blue Dumpster located a few feet behind my table. Her cropped T-shirt was emblazoned with the bar’s name and the image of a long skinny carrot.

  My newfound exotic existence, as it turned out, frequently involved lengthy spells watching the foot, vehicle, and chicken traffic of Cruz Bay pass by my seat here at the Crunchy Carrot.

  As the executive manager of one of St. John’s larger resorts, I had a great deal of leeway, geographically speaking, on where I conducted business, and I typically spent several hours each day here at the Dumpster table. As a makeshift office, it had a lot to offer.

  First off, the table’s proximity to the trash bin meant that it was almost always left vacant by the island’s scent-sensitive tourists, reserving plenty of seating space for the scent-diminished expat community. To be honest, the smell coming from the Dumpster wasn’t anywhere near as offensive as that emanating from some of my sweaty compatriots. After much experimentation, I’d learned to strategically position myself upwind of both.

  A little odor discomfort was a small price to pay for keeping up to date on the local gossip. The Dumpster table was the place to get the latest island news. Every informational tidbit of any significance passed through this central transit point.

  In addition, I thought as I took another sip from the plastic cup, the Crunchy Carrot’s policy of serving us expats on a loosely calculated bar tab made the food and drink at this slightly unaesthetic location the best deal in town.

  Finally, the Dumpster table offered the certain prospect of camaraderie—you’d never sit solo for long. If nothing else, you could always count on the company of Richard, a free-roaming rooster who seemed particularly fond of the Carrot’s greasy French fries.

  It was from this spot that I reflected on the night’s events and waited for the local reaction to Hannah’s disappearance.

  A wildfire of whispers had already begun to burn through the island’s sparse population. Speculative rustlings rippled in the ocean breeze, spoken softly so as not to frighten the tourists, but voiced loud enough for anyone who was listening to hear.

  I’d passed several clusters of cleaning staff, groundskeepers, and hospitality workers on my way through the resort that morning, each one a serious circle of quiet conversation. I’d tried not to meet the questioning faces that glanced up at me as I walked by, forcing out a solemn sigh to assure them of my inner sadness—all too aware of how quickly the worm of suspicion might turn in my direction.

  I’d taken one of the island’s many truck taxis into town from the resort, riding in the back bed of a cherry red heavy-duty pickup truck that had been outfitted with a canvas canopy and rows of plastic-cushioned benches. The driver had stopped several times along the route, parking in parallel with similarly decked-out trucks coming from the opposite direction. It had been pointless to protest the delay—on such a newsworthy day, these two- to five-minute stops were almost obligatory.

  I had expected as much, and, in any event, I wasn’t in any hurry. The Crunchy Carrot had never been known to run out of booze.

  The waitress turned from the Dumpster and approached my table.

  “How’re you doing out here, Pen? Can I get you another one?” she asked, nodding at my half-empty cup as she dusted her hands off on her apron. “It’s a strange day, isn’t it?”

  The waitress leaned in closer to me, her bare midriff brushing against the side of the plastic table. “Hard to think she’s gone like that. Drowned, they say. I don’t suppose they’ll ever find her body.”

  The waitress’s eyes drifted to the ground. “You’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but…”

  I nodded with a knowing smile. No apology necessary, I thought bitterly. Not with me anyway.

  Hannah Sheridan had worked as one of the many seasonal recruits my resort brought in at the end of October to help us gear up for the winter months of heavy tourist traffic. I typically ignored such temporary employees; their management fell into the large category of duties I delegated to my able assistant, Vivian. I might never have noticed Hannah’s presence on St. John but for all the trouble she stirred up—and the disturbing familiarity of her name.

  The waitress bent over my chair, her voice taking on a low, conspiring tone. “Do you know what they’ve been saying around town? The day laborers and the taxi drivers…about Hannah?”

  I raised my eyebrows inquiringly, trying not to look too eager. I felt certain no one had seen me with Hannah the previous evening on the beach. No one else on the island knew the true coordinates of her current location. There was no reason for me to worry. I had to remain calm.

  The waitress pulled a second plastic chair next to mine and perched tentatively on the edge of its seat.

  “They’re saying that Hannah was…taken,” she whispered uneasily.

  “From the boat?” I asked tensely. “From the water taxi?”

  The waitress twitched her nose as if she were embarrassed to pass on the rest of the reported rumor.

  “I always thought it was a bunch of superstitious nonsense,” she said, fidgeting nervously with the frayed hem of her shorts. “But now…well, you can’t help but wonder.”

  “What are you getting at?” I pressed, struggling to stifle the guilty blush rising on my cheeks. “What do they think happened to her?”

  The waitress sighed and grinned impishly. “You’ll think I’m foolish, but here it is.” She sucked in on her bottom lip, hesitating for a moment before her words rushed out.

  “They’re saying it was that spirit everyone’s been talking about—the slave girl from the plantation days. They say she dragged Hannah down into the ocean while th
e others hung on to the side of the raft.”

  A pent-up volume of breath eased out of my lungs. There it was: confirmation of the rumor I had been waiting for, the seed that had been so carefully planted sprouting in the fertile ground of the morning’s speculations.

  I took another sip through the straw and shuddered—not out of fear or apprehension, but from the chill of the drink. The effect, nevertheless, appeared to satisfy the waitress, and, with a gracious smile, she stood up from the table and returned inside the bar. I leaned back in my chair, collapsing in relief.

  It is no coincidence that a superstitious nature runs through the people of the Virgin Islands.

  Life in the Caribbean has rarely been easy for its beleaguered inhabitants. They suffer continually beneath the unrelenting heat of the tropical sun. Each year, vengeful, seemingly self-willed hurricanes wreak wanton destruction across the area. Despite being surrounded by an endless horizon of ocean, these islands are particularly sensitive to drought and suffer from a chronic shortage of drinkable water.

  Beyond the inherent ecological burdens of the region, the gloomy historical specter of three hundred years of colonial exploitation and brutal enslavement lurks just beneath the surface of nearly every aspect of society, an oft-cited excuse, justification, and alibi for exclusion, inequity, and entitlement.

  For some portions of the population, it is easier to explain such a concentrated run of bad luck and geography with metaphysical, rather than scientific, rationalizations. Perhaps belief in such an elusive, overarching miasma is preferable to the harsh reality of human malice and greed.

  Regardless, the persistent vein of these suspicions bleeds over into discussions of modern life’s everyday mysteries. Anomalies, if not quickly explained, are frequently attributed to the work of ghostly hands.

  Of late, many of the workers who ride the ferry back and forth to St. John have become convinced they sense a supernatural presence each morning when they step onto the dock at Cruz Bay—a presence leftover from the island’s dark past—a spirit who has become known throughout the Virgin Islands as the Amina Slave Princess.

  2

  The Amina Slave Princess

  I first heard the tale of the Amina Slave Princess a couple of years ago, not long after I moved to St. John. I had been out for the day on the neighboring island of St. Thomas, exploring the shopping district in its main town, Charlotte Amalie.

  A tourist haven set up to maximize trade with day-trippers from docking cruise ships, Charlotte Amalie’s downtown featured a thicket of narrow alleys lined with frigid, over-air-conditioned cubicles where beady-eyed merchants hawked duty-free merchandise and a wide array of gaudy jewelry.

  Inside the cavelike showrooms, I walked past tray after tray of too-flashy-to-be-real diamonds glittering under the focused spotlights of florescent bulbs. My poorly feigned interest didn’t fool the seasoned vendors. They immediately sensed that I wasn’t a cash-dropping snowbird and only halfheartedly tried to entice me with their offerings.

  Beyond the jewelry stores, the only other vendors of note displayed mass-produced T-shirts from China and kitschy tourist memorabilia constructed from recycled aluminum. To find stores stocked with merchandise tailored to the needs of the actual inhabitants of St. Thomas, one had to navigate away from the city center, along the edgier arteries that led toward the east end of the island.

  I suppose I’ve spent too much time sitting around the Dumpster table listening to the tourist-mocking expats, but in the years since that first foray, I’ve never returned to the trinket shops of Charlotte Amalie. In any event, the most memorable aspect of that trip to St. Thomas occurred on the boat ride back to St. John.

  I’d walked down to the waterfront to wait for the afternoon ferry to Cruz Bay. A nasty wind had picked up while I’d been trawling the alley shops, and the sky had begun to darken with the angry, streaking colors of a coming squall.

  As I shivered on the pier in my sleeveless blouse and khaki shorts, a shuttle bus dropped off a handful of new arrivals from the airport. A typical collection of pale soon-to-be-sunburnt tourists joined me in the designated waiting spot for the ferry.

  First came a harried husband and wife, dragging along two overtly bored, gum-popping teenagers. Familial relations had apparently been strained from the hours of airplane travel; not a word passed between them as the group stewed silently on the dock.

  The family of four was followed by a spritely pair of white-haired retirees. The elderly couple hopped happily from the shuttle, clearly intent on enjoying their vacation. Nothing in the airline’s arsenal of passenger torture had dampened their enthusiasm. They strolled patiently along the water, pausing every so often to admire the whirling colors of agitated atmosphere gathering above us.

  The last of the shuttle’s passengers stuck his head out the open exit door and loudly sniffed the ocean air. He was a wiry little man in tight, tattered blue jeans and a worn oxford shirt unbuttoned several notches down from its collar.

  The man’s thinning hair had recently been dyed a false brown color, giving it a reddish chemical glow. He’d made the most of each surviving hair follicle, tying up the meager strands into a scraggly ponytail at the base of his neck.

  The gray chest hair that poked out through the loose buttonholes on the man’s shirt more accurately reflected his advanced age. Self-consciously, I ran a hand over the top of my own head, hoping my gray-masking attempts were somewhat less conspicuous.

  The man hefted a guitar case out of the airport shuttle’s back storage cavity and sidled up next to me on the dock.

  “Howdy, love,” he said smoothly, tilting his head with a broad, suggestive smile. “You headed to Saint John too?” He drew out the two-word moniker of the island’s name, clearly anticipating the arrival at his final destination.

  I tried to grin my way out of a reflexive grimace. “Mmhmm,” I replied, weakly nodding in affirmation.

  “I’m from New York,” the man said proudly, pointing to a faded “I heart NY” sticker on his guitar case. It was one of many appliqués plastered on to the side of the battered container.

  “Mm-hmm,” I replied again, trying to shift my gaze out toward the harbor, but the chatty hippie was intent on making my acquaintance.

  “Brooklyn actually,” he clarified affably. “To be specific.”

  I risked a quick glance at my new friend. The skin on his face was shrunk back against his skull, the tissue weathered and anemic from many years of hard living—and, I suspected, more than a smidgen of recreational drug use.

  “I’m Conrad,” he said, pausing as he waited for my reciprocal identification.

  I sighed uncomfortably before complying. “Pen,” I offered stiffly. “Nice to meet you.”

  “Pen, Pen, Pen…” Conrad mused speculatively. “That’s short for…” He let the sentence hang in the air, waiting for me to complete it.

  “Pen,” I replied curtly. “Just Pen.”

  “Ah, well, just Pen it is, then.” Conrad leaned back in a stretch, seemingly pleased at having extracted my name. The wind plastered his shirt against his narrow barreled chest. You could almost see his ribs protruding through the fabric.

  “So, Pen,” Conrad said, leaning against the guitar case as he looked me up and down, “I’ve been coming to St. John since, oh, let’s see, 1971. I always stay out on the north shore of the island—at the eco-campground near Maho Bay.”

  He pumped the narrow arches of his eyebrows at me. “I’ve reserved one of their teepee tents.”

  Mercifully, the ferry’s crew began to load us. I marched purposefully into the lower deck of covered seating and slid onto a bench seat about halfway down the boat’s length, grateful for the chance to get in out of the wind and hopeful I might distance myself from Conrad’s amorous overtures.

  It was no use. I heard the clunking sound of a guitar case sliding across the metal bench immediately behind me.

  Conrad’s squirrelly head popped up near my shoulders as he leaned forw
ard over the back of my seat.

  “Now, Pen, let me see if I can guess your birthday.”

  My face furrowed skeptically.

  “No, seriously,” he insisted. “I have a knack for these things. Here, first, let me absorb your aura.”

  I felt the pressure of his fingertips against my temples as he began to rub them in a circular motion against the sides of my head.

  “Were you born…ah, say…between January and March?”

  I stared up at the ferry’s ceiling. “No.”

  “Hmm,” Conrad replied thoughtfully. From the confident tone of his voice, his faith in his powers of divination appeared undiminished.

  “How about…er…between September and December?”

  “Nope.”

  “I know! I know!” he exclaimed as if suddenly receiving new information from his massaging fingertips. “It’s between April and May!”

  I shook my head, my lips puckering with wry amusement at his luckless persistence. I turned around in my seat to face him.

  “July.”

  “Aaaah.” He exhaled disappointedly, thumping the flat metal surface of his seat with the palm of his hand. “That was going to be my next guess.”

  Conrad slid slightly to the right and draped his arms over the back of my bench. “So, Pen,” he began again, his brown eyes sparkling with interest, “what’s your connection to the island?”

  He twitched his mind-misreading fingers in the air near my face. “You’re not in transit, not a tourist…I sense you’re something a little more permanent.”

  I sighed tensely, not wishing to prolong the conversation. It would be at least another forty minutes before we docked in Cruz Bay. “I’ve just started a new job. I’m a manager at one of the resorts on the island.”

  “Mmm, interesting.” Conrad made several exaggerated facial expressions while absorbing this information. “And where’d you come from before that?”

  “Oh, up in the States,” I said evasively.

  Conrad assumed a critical stare, waiting for me to supplement my answer.