“—The rest. And who’ll pay the hotel bill? I’m already in debt down here.”
“I just paid your AmEx bill in full. You should be OK.”
“An advance. Hmm. But what if I don’t find the sculpture?”
“You’ll write a story about trying to find it. I’ll sell that to a magazine. In fact, I already have one interested.”
*
After Jed got off the phone, he sank back into Mr. Coward’s four-poster bed.
The morning breeze had nutmeg in it and he wondered what kind of luck he was falling into. A salvage job wasn’t exactly his thing. But being in Jamaica in the middle of a merciless Manhattan winter was. Snooping around the premises for a half-a-sculpture might not be half-bad.
He tugged on his old pair of running shorts, went downstairs. Breakfast was ackee and saltfish, the Jamaican national dish. Ackee, that curious fruit that was also a vegetable. The coffee was fresh-ground Blue Mountain. Not low blue, as they say, but high blue, the flavor register measured by the height of the mountain range above Kingston.
After breakfast, Jed rummaged around the Blue Harbor library. Most of the books were sea-salted, silverfish-eaten hardcover volumes from the 1950s. And then—just like that—Jed saw a small reddish sculpture of a man. It was about twelve inches high and ten inches wide, crudely done but not a bad sort of book end. It appeared to be a man shelling ackees with a knife.
The housekeeper, who was dusting the books, said, “Dat one by Mistah Coward. O-rig-in-al.”
Jed turned it over in his hands, looked it up and down. “It’s crummy clay, not even fired,” he said.
The housekeeper’s face lit up. “Dem say if the masteh hand touch such work, well, it must worth something big!”
Jed thought: Hell, if I had to, I could make one of these and bust it in half. But if this is an example of his art or craft, Sir Noel was wise to keep his day job.
The bahama shutters behind the white bookcases were wide open revealing a green wicker garden. Jed poked around a bit more, picked up a science fiction novel and then called Marcia on his cell phone. “Tell me something, Marsh, is it the top or the bottom part of the body I’m looking for?”
“Mmm. Don’t know. Call you back. Just keep looking, will you?”
“I’ll be here. . . or there,” he started to say, but she clicked off. She was as fast on the phone as he was on the computer. And who knows when she’d get back to him.
The day oozed by. He hung around the old, empty hotel dreaming of lunch.
He wasn’t disappointed. Lunch was toasted Jamaican hard dough sandwiches, crusts cut-off, and filled with a rusty substance called Solomon Gundy. A kind of delicious, odd peppery mackerel spread. He imagined Elizabethan sailors chomping it down on hardtack. Anything fish he liked. This was no exception. The crustless bread amused him. Should I call it luncheon from now on?
After eating he strolled the perimeters of the estate, all nine and a half acres. Sea beach on one side, jungle on the other. The middle part was a grove of disease-resistant Maypan coconut trees mixed in, here and there, with some Jamaica talls, those sinuous, slender beauties that suggest the South Seas. He came at last to a small blue natural spring. He was staring into its depths when a graybeard dreadlock stepped out of a curtain of vines and stuck something under Jed’s nose.
“Smell dat, mon!”
Jed took a wary sniff. “What is it?”
“Ganja gum,” he said. The whites of his eyes were bloodshot and he smelled of stale smoke.
“Want some?”
“I have enough problems.”
“You doesn’t know what problems is. You want white lady?”
Jed knew what white lady was. Cocaine.
“No thanks, man.”
“What you want, mon?” the elder asked.
“I want to make a half into a whole,” Jed said with a smile.
“You need a natural mystic fe dat,” the man said.
Then he turned swiftly and faded into the bush.
*
Jed decided the science fiction novel could wait and he spent the rest of the day reading Noel Coward’s play Blithe Spirit. It was a comedy about a ghost, owing a nod to Shakespeare and a bow to Roman comedy. He liked it. It was just about as perky and perhaps as piquant as the Solomon Gundy he had for lunch.
He was fifty pages into the play, sitting upright in a wicker chair, when he drifted off.
*
In the dream, if that’s what it was, he saw Sean Connery at the blue spring. First it was the old Rastaman and then he melted away and morphed into Connery. It was the young rakish Connery of Doctor No. He looked into Jed’s eyes and asked, “Are you a stick fighter then?”
*
Jed woke up, wet with sweat. No, it had rained a little and the sea breeze had borne some droplets in upon him. He looked around and saw an alcove he’d missed before. Jed knew at once that Noel Coward had sculpted there. It was entirely out of the rain, and though the almond trees were dripping, that corner of the veranda was dry. Blithe Spirit was wet, he, Jed was wet, the corner was dry. He made a note of it. Then he heard the cook call him to dinner. She banged a bread pan with her palm.
Dinner was even more delectable than lunch. Fried fish and bammy, banana fritters for dessert, more Blue Mountain coffee for a finish. The first tree frogs chimed. The sun set behind the distant John Crow mountains. Jed felt perfectly at peace except for one thing.
Am I the only guest? Does anyone else ever come here? Why do I keep falling asleep? Even now I already feel the desire to crawl into the sleigh bed upstairs and drift off.
The housekeeper appeared. Her name was Pansy. The cook, a large woman named Julie, came out of the kitchen and Jed fussed over her cooking, saying it was the best food he’d ever eaten. He wasn’t lying. Pansy, an out of work schoolteacher, told a few little stories about Coward and company. And then, as softly as it had begun, night came on with the exclamations of croaker lizards and tree frogs with their three-beat symphony. They had a regular thing going—sing, hesitate, sing again. The croakers clanked in between. A little farther down the hill the sea gathered shells and spread them around, and then retreated, returned, did it again. Hypnotic kinesis, Jed thought. A circadian rhythm designed to slow you down. Or something else. Maybe to put you in a different place altogether. Whatever it is, I’m helpless to resist it.
Pansy offered Jed a delicate crystal glass of sorrel wine, saying that Mr. Coward liked it, a little bit. Jed didn’t. He liked the Appleton’s Reserve rum that was sitting unattended on the sideboard. There was a full rack of Noel Coward recordings. He tried one of them. And sat sipping the five-star rum while listening to Coward’s high-toned, humorous carolings.
A painting above the sideboard caught Jed’s eye. It was what used to be called “primitif.” A portrait in oil of a woman dancing calypso style. Her hair was done in a colorful Jamaican head-wrap. The hotel reeked of bygone times, moldy memories. But the good rum made up for it. Jed thought, There are no more sculptures in the dining room or the downstairs veranda. Just that one red clayey hand-me-down. And how the hell am I going to find anything when I just fall asleep all the time?
He was feeling the resonance of the rum warm him head to toe.
A small white owl flew into the almond trees.
Jed blinked, and just like that, he dropped off, sound asleep, glass in hand.
*
Bond again. Or rather, Connery. “Care to have a go, old man?”
Jed stiffened. But there in his right hand was a bamboo pole. Stout and strong, and smooth except for the ridges.
“I do this, now and again, to stay in shape. How about you?”
Against his better judgment, Jed gripped the bamboo. Then he held it before him, horizontally, left hand at one end, right hand at the other. He seemed, in the dream, to know what he was doing, and he smiled at the ease with which he raised the pole straight above his head. He held it there for a moment. Connery did the same.
T
hen, without a moment’s hesitation, Connery swung his pole forward with his right hand. It was an easy, loose and looping arc. Jed brought his pole down to protect his face, but too late. Connery’s bamboo caught him on the chin. It was a bone-connecting knock.
“That’s one,” Connery said, smiling.
*
Jed woke with a start, rubbing his chin.
A teak-faced man wearing a 1930s porkpie hat sat in the wicker sofa in front of him. “I’m Mackie,” he said, offering his hand, “manager of Blue Harbor.”
“What’s to manage?”
Mackie laughed. “Are you enjoying your stay at Blue Harbor?” His voice was deep, soothing.
“I wouldn’t quite call it a stay. Maybe a snooze.”
Mackie smiled. He had beautiful teeth. His sailcloth shirt was pressed as were his slacks. Even his penny loafers were shined.
“Keep a likkle one eye open when you sleep,” Mackie warned. “So the duppy dem don’t dream you away.”
Jed was about to ask what he meant by that when Pansy said on the stairs that the bed was turned down, that is, if he wished to sleep lying down rather than sitting up. Or standing up, Jed thought.
“Soon come,” Mackie said. He got up and was gone.
Jed tossed back the rest of his rum. Pansy was at the foot of the stairs.
“Where are all the guests?” Jed asked.
“Them soon come.”
Jed went upstairs and took a cold shower. But the moment he stepped out of it, he felt heavy again. They should call this place Sleep Harbor.
Later, reading Blithe Spirit, he was gone again.
When he woke, the moon was high in the sky. Pansy had turned off the reading light.
Jed looked about the room. A shadow rippled across the floor. A floorboard squeaked. The shadow froze. The wind rustled the poinciana tree.
The shadow flowed across the floor and stopped at the bed.
“Who is it?” Jed said, the back of his neck all prickly.
The figure started, bolted.
Jed put both feet on the floor, ran to the veranda.
There was a man standing in the moonlight. He was ragged and small with narrow shoulders. There was something lopsided about him. He had a bamboo pole in his hands. He threw it hard at Jed.
It struck him on the point of his left elbow.
Jed ran at him, his left hand dangling, his body off-balance.
He watched as the dark shape leaped into the moonlight.
Like mercury the man spilled into the air off the second-story veranda.
He dropped twenty feet, landed without a sound, disappeared.
Jed felt a painful tingling in his elbow where he’d been bonked.
Then Mackie came up the stairs, as if nothing had happened.
“You see that?” Jed demanded.
“Him get away,” Mackie said.
“Get a good look at him?”
“No, mon.”
Mackie stared into the moonlit almond leaves, neither curious nor uncurious, possibly amused.
“What was he doing?” Jed asked Mackie.
“What them do all the while.”
“What’s that?”
“Them duppy. Them do what them want fe do.”
Mackie looked at Jed. “Blood fire the Rass. You haff money inna de safe?”
“Safe?”
“Mr. Coward safe. Inna de closet.”
Jed said, “I have a few traveler’s checks.”
“Mek we lock dem,” Mackie said. There was no amusement in his face now.
Mackie went through the open double doors of the bedroom, clicked open the louvered door in the hall. “Mr. Coward safe in ‘ere,” he said.
“Mr. Coward is safe in there?” Jed asked.
“No, mon,” Mackie replied. “Me say there is a safe in there. Belong to Mr. Coward long time back.”
Jed opened the top dresser drawer by the bed and felt around under his socks for the folder of traveler’s checks. He found them. He brought it to Mackie who was kneeling under a bare light bulb in the stale-smelling closet.
The safe was ancient. It looked like it had spent all of its life underwater. Mackie fingered the combination, the heavy door groaned, opened.
There was a black flashlight, flaked with rust. The kind of solid cop flashlight made in the 1950s. A bright beam of light poked out of it. Otherwise the safe was empty. There was nothing in it except that ancient flashlight, beam on.
“Did you look in here earlier?” Jed asked.
“No, mon.”
“Does anyone at Blue Harbor know the combination besides you?”
“No, mon.”
“What the—?”
“Yah, mon,” Mackie said. “Duppy work dis.”
“Old Blue Harbor,” Mackie continued as he punched the button on the flashlight. The beam went dead. Mackie turned it on again; it lighted. Shaking his head, he shrugged. “Whole heap a thing happen ‘ere. Bob Marley him seh, ‘Everyting haffa season, find de reason.’ But not here. No reason fe ting an ting at Blue Harbor.”
“Why?” Jed asked.
“De duppy dem,” Mackie said. He glanced at Jed to make sure he understood. Switching off the closet light, he asked—“You can sleep?”
“Maybe not tonight.”
Mackie dug into the top pocket of his shirt. He handed Jed a tightly rolled spliff that smelled of. . . blueberries?
“Special blem,” he said, and lit it. He dragged deep, offered it to Jed who did the same. After two good draws, Jed returned the spliff to Mackie, stuck a Rothman in his mouth, but forgot to light it.
“How do they make that herb, Mackie?”
“Dem grow with all kinda berry. A real roots mix.”
Jed was marveling at the buzz but, as much as that, the flavor. Blueberry pancakes, a morning in Maine when he was a boy. “What’s it go for. . . on the market?”
“No market dis.” Mackie laughed. “I know the Chinaman what make it. Him do nuff experiment with fruit and honey and ting. When him sure him have it right, then him sell to big time rapper from a-foreign. Shaggy did smoke dis. Me see him.”
“So how much would he pay, if he were paying?”
“For dis one spliff?”
“For, say, a pound. . .”
That made Mackie’s eyes roll. He took a sweet suck of the berry-spliff, exhaled slowly through his nose, said: “The cost of a BMW.”
“New?”
“Paint still wet.”
Jed suddenly felt the need to sit down, as if his legs weren’t there, as if sitting was the only way he could talk. The Jamaican undertaker’s breeze, as they called it, raked across the island. Jed was soaking with sweat. But he felt like jogging up Firefly Hill, 1700 feet above Blue Harbor.
“You good, mon?” Mackie asked.
“Real good,” Jed replied.
On the coffee table between the two wicker chairs, there was a crude cedarwood sculpture of a man toting bananas on his head. Jed’s elbow still tickled with hurt. Reminding him that he’d been struck hard by a bamboo pole. Or did I just imagine it?
“Do duppies throw things?”
Mackie laughed again. “Dem can do what we can do. Only dem do it better, faster. Sometime you don’ see dem. Sometime you do, and dem fix you wid dem eye.
Sweet-Sweet, the old man sing Calypso song dem. Him bewitch by duppy. Like dem say, “Him take a drink of ‘gone fe good oil’—and him gone.”
“What do you mean gone?”
“Him turn fool.”
“And stay fool?”
“Yah, mon.”
For a little while there was silence between them while Jed sorted through his thoughts. The herb had put a soft blur on the night, but he was feeling things and seeing things. A croaker lizard was wedged up into the corner of the roof. Jed watched it, as if it might suddenly speak to him.
Hanging upside down was a ratbat. A relative, Jed mused, of the South American vampire bat. Could be a duppy?
“Duppies can ch
ange into things?”
Mackie smiled. “Change from crab to dog. From dog to cat. From cat to bat and from bat to lizard.” Then he laughed, walked to the edge of the veranda, and spat into the night.
Jed glanced at the ceiling. The croaker with the liquid eyes was gone. So was the ass-pointed-to-heaven ratbat. He went to the edge of the veranda and spat the way Mackie did. It took a long, long time for his spit to hit the ground, and when it did it smacked pretty loud.
Mackie took a swing at something.
Jed jumped, involuntarily. “Something there?”
“Nothing to worry you, mon. Just a likkle bat.”
“You mean that ratbat that was perched up there?”
“No, mon. The bat that was just here, between us.”
“I didn’t see any bat between us.”
Mackie’s eyes sparkled. He grinned. “We call dem ting you call moth, bat.”
Jed laughed. “What do you call frog?”
“Toad.”
“What do you call toad?”
“Frog.”
Jed shook his head. “I see.”
For a while after that the two men sat in silence. Jed enjoyed the cross-island breeze. Cool but not too cool. The night’s pulse quickened. It was coming near dawn. The sky was beginning to get red up the coast on the way to Port Antonio.
Jed was drowning in waves of thoughts, one after another.
The facts: someone was here tonight. Someone got into the locked safe and left a flashlight on and closed the door, and got past me, and then struck me with a bamboo pole and leaped off the veranda, some twenty feet, and landed silently and got away without so much as a dog’s bark. How had the thief gotten in? And out? And the flashlight? The fact: he, or it, was invisible. No, visible, then invisible, then visible, then invisible.
Jed woke. The dawn had come and gone with the fog on little cat’s feet. There was a tiny bit of spliff in the ashtray. Jed got his lighter. He lit and sucked the mystic berries down into his lungs. And exhaled for what seemed to be minutes. The smoke came out of everywhere. His ears, his feet, his fingertips. I smell like a blueberry pancake.
A croaker lizard clacked once from some obscure tree. A flock of tiny green pocket parrots chittered overhead. What if I should live here? I mean, permanently.
Shadows & Reflections: A Roger Zelazny Tribute Anthology Page 13
