Left at the Mango Tree

by Stephanie Siciarz

  Typically Raoul did his exploring on Tuesdays. Miss Lila would show him the week’s new arrivals, if there were any, and he would acquaint himself with them at a table in the corner, with who-dunnits, biologies, biographies, tragicomedies, and poems. On the Tuesday that I’m going to tell you about, however, he wasn’t reading for philosophy or fun. He was far too pressed for that. This Tuesday Raoul was there on business, the business of debunking his least favorite thing.

  Magic.

  Raoul’s atypical Tuesday (the second in as many weeks) had started off badly. Seeing as how it was Tuesday, he should have slept in until 10:25, awoken to his breakfast of coffee-milk-and-oatmeal, donned his favorite blue shirt with the stripes, and gone to the library. But duty called, and the recent hullabaloo at Puymute’s, namely the mysterious disappearance of two acres’ worth of ripe pineapple, required the attention of the Excise Office, day of the week notwithstanding. So Raoul awoke at 9, rushed through a breakfast of espresso and bread that he didn’t fancy at all, and forwent his favorite blue shirt for a less worn and less comfortable yellow one. Then muttering under his breath about “that damn Vilder” and the newly-arrived New Modern History of the Silent Stage that he wouldn’t get to read at the library that morning, Raoul set off on the two-mile walk to the plantation.

  It was a warm day, as they all are on Oh, but the cotton of his shirt kept him cool. The porous fabric, a bit tighter than he’d have liked, was dampened slightly with his sweat and felt cold against his skin as the wind blew on it. It was a windy day, too, as they almost all are on Oh, and Raoul wore sunglasses to shield his eyes from both the blowing sand and the scrutiny of Puymute’s neighbors, should he run into any on the way. He had decided to take the tight path that led up Dante’s Mountain (it’s really a big hill at best), from the top of which he’d be able to survey all of Puymute’s property and possibly find some clue. It mightn’t be a bad idea, after all, to get a view of the whole situation before he took himself wading around in the muck of it.

  Halfway up, Raoul stopped to smoke a cigarette and to catch his breath. He wouldn’t be able to see Puymute’s place until he got to the top, but from the side of the mountain on which he stood he could see the island’s far end. Buildings of pink and yellow and beige dotted the landscape, themselves dotted with roofs of red and brown and orange. Here the bushy green head of a palm, there the humble gray spire of a church. All of it wrapped in a white-sand ribbon tugged at by the sea, whose water looked more silver than blue in the early sun. It was a mosaic fashioned by man and god, as perfectly imperfect as any Raoul had seen in photograph at the library. A trompe l’oeil in which the sharp edges of the rainbow buildings cut out the dirt and the dust from which they sprang. The air was filled with salt and sand and the two mingled with the sweet taste of the tobacco Raoul drew into his lungs, as if his very cigarettes were made of the tide.

  Sometimes at the airport he couldn’t help but wonder about all the visitors to Oh, what it was they could possibly wish to see here. But on this Tuesday morning when he should have been reading about shaded actresses and newsreels and was instead climbing a makeshift mountain for clues that might lead him to a pineapple smuggler, Oh’s beauty fell upon him like one of the island’s weighty fruits. How easy not to see the air you breathe! He wondered if it was a blindness that struck everywhere, or only there, where the constant sun played tricks on the eyes. On the faraway shore the tide slithered inland. Raoul listened to its marvelous silence and watched as he exhaled and blew it back to sea in white smoky wisps.

  His reveries, alas, were short-lived.

  “Oy! Mr. Orlean! Oy there!”

  Along with sun and sea and tide and trees, Oh is full of pests. Mosquitoes, mice, gnats, fleas. And Pedros. Or, rather, one Pedro Bunch, though his company is as exhausting as if you were caught in a whole swarm of him. Pedro Bunch means well enough. The trouble is that he lives on his own, and off the beaten path, and suffers from an incurable desire to be heard, a condition exacerbated by his encounter with any creature who can hear. Even the goats hide when they know Pedro is coming, for fear of some long and futile conversation that it would be impolite to run away from.

  Panting, Pedro rushed toward Raoul, as much as a man of a certain age on a mountainside and carrying walking-stick and sack of cassava can do. “Oy there, I say. This is a treat to find yourself here.”

  “Yes, well, felt like a day for a walk.”

  “Didn’t look to me like you were walking.”

  “Just taking a breather.” Raoul crushed his cigarette out against a rock and dusted his hands against each other elaborately, hoping that to Pedro the gesture would indicate some sort of business awaited. “Forgot about the view from up here.”

  “Ah, yes. Finer, they don’t come.” Pedro had positioned himself in Raoul’s path. “So where’s this walk of yours headed, then, Mr. Orlean?”

  “Oh, I don’t know. Thought maybe I’d finish the climb and go down the other side. I see you’ve got your hands full. Don’t let me keep you.” With that, Raoul patted the man on the back and squeezed past him.

  “Don’t mind a climb up top myself, now you mention it. Mind you, I’m not as quick as you are, I expect, but you can hardly hurry past a view fine as this one, then, can you?”

  Certainly not today, Raoul thought, annoyed that his sentimental musings may now well cost him a good half-hour. There was little use in protesting. The quicker he got Pedro moving, the quicker he’d get where he wanted to be. So he took up the old man’s plastic sack and nudged him on. To the rhythm, as sure and regular as a military cadence, of Pedro’s observations on subjects as diverse as trout with lemon, telephone listings, and eyebrow tweezers, they made their way up. Pedro was nothing if not indefatigable.

  When they got to the top, three-quarters of an hour later, Raoul’s patience was wearing thin. Puymute’s plantation stretched out before him, as much a sea as the one made of water on the mountain’s other side. Its waves of tall stalks rippled their long, thin leaves into pointy crests of green and gold that stretched off into the horizon, peppered with the bobbing heads of sweaty, black-haired pickers. At intervals the sun-baked sea was divided into smaller bodies by pathways cut into its thickness to ease navigation. Raoul let his view relax and fall over the undulating activity of the scene below him, hoping some irregularity might catch his eye.

  “Ah, yes. Finer, they don’t come.” Pedro moved close to Raoul, helping himself to a portion of the panorama and warming Raoul’s neck with his hot-pepper breath. Clearly, it would be impossible to concentrate with Pedro’s chatter—Heavens, he’s worse than Bang! Raoul thought to himself—so he thanked Pedro for his company, pointed out that Pedro’s house was on the opposite side of the mountain from that on which Raoul planned to descend, gave back the old man’s plastic sack of cassava and nudged him on again.

  “Well, if that’s that, I’ll just be on my way, then, won’t I?” With the help of his walking-stick Pedro straightened his curved back into a stretch and turned to go back down the mountain. “Now don’t linger, Mr. Orlean. No telling what might befall a fellow finds himself hanging round here. No telling.”

  Raoul, intent on surveying the plantation below, took a moment to register the words and detect something of a threat therein. He looked behind him, from where the words had come, but Pedro was gone. “Pedro!” Raoul shouted. “Pedro!”

  Odd, this.

  Raoul looked all around him, but there was nothing to see. He strained to hear his companion’s receding steps and for a moment was sure Pedro’s voice rang out it’s warning again. “No telling, Mr. Orlean. No telling.”

  Perhaps it was just the clever wind.

  Bothered by the echo of Pedro’s words, Raoul finished the climb down Dante’s Mountain. He decided finally that the misgiving he sensed in the old man’s tone was on account of the rumors that some supernatural swindler was responsible for Puymute’s missing crops. It was neighborly concern and nothing more.

  Pedro ne
edn’t have troubled himself. Raoul didn’t believe in anything he couldn’t explain, so a supernatural solution was out of the question. And even had he been inclined to consider such a hypothesis, it didn’t make sense to him that whatever cosmic prankster had punished the island with all those pineapples would someday simply up and steal them back. Even a phantom must submit to some fundamental logic, surely.

  “Listen to me!” Raoul said to himself and shook his head. “Phantom talk!” Another reason, along with his rushed breakfast, too-tight shirt, and climb with Pedro, that he hated this particular day so far.

  And he expected it would only get worse.

  Raoul was cranky and thirsty when he reached the manor house from which Puymute managed his estate. His long walk had been useless. Nothing on the plantation looked amiss from on high, and on the ground it would be easy enough for Puymute or Gustave Vilder to camouflage the truth. Raoul was hoping to speak to Puymute himself, but he had a nagging suspicion, based on the tenor of the day and on Gustave’s General Manager title, that Gustave would be the one waiting to see him.

  Imagine. It would be their first meeting since Raoul placed the ad about my mother’s pregnancy. They had glanced at each other the night before during Bang’s show at the Belly, but they hadn’t spoken. They had only ever spoken once, in fact, just a week or so earlier, right after I was born—which is what led to the ad in the first place. I’ll tell you about that time, too, but right now let’s finish our trip to Puymute’s, and get Raoul back to the library and to his research.

  The manor house was a welcoming shade of salmon that set off the green-gold sea below it and the light blue sky above, disappearing entirely at dusk and at dawn, like a chameleon on the branch of a tree. Tall potted plants dressed the portico, where in lieu of a visible door, sheer white curtains billowed from an opening eight feet high and eight feet wide. Raoul pushed them aside and entered a lavish foyer, lavish by Oh standards, with white tile flooring and a garish chandelier of gold leaf that had only just begun to flake. To the left of the entrance a young woman, legs crossed, sat at a table with pad, pencil, and telephone, its dangling cord gripped between the first two toes of her sandaled foot. “Are you looking for someone, sir?”

  “Raoul Orlean. Customs and Excise. I’m here to see Mr. Puymute.”

  “Mr. Puymute’s in the patch, but the General Manager’s here. Should I get him for you?”

  “Fine.”

  The girl dialed a number on the phone, mumbled something Raoul couldn’t make out, then hung up and escorted him to an office one flight up. Gustave wasn’t there yet, but he would be momentarily, and in the meantime would Mr. Orlean like some tea? Raoul didn’t fancy the idea of sharing tea with any Vilder, and with Gustave least of all, but the climb up and down Dante’s Mountain had made him too thirsty to refuse. “Yes, thank you. With milk.”

  Gustave arrived a few minutes later, the sandaled secretary trailing behind him with a tray of tea accoutrements. She put the tray on the desk that separated the two men and left.

  “Mr. Orlean,” Gustave nodded. He had just come from outside, his face still damp with perspiration. His shirt was tucked and buttoned and his manner polite and official. If he didn’t extend his hand to Raoul for a shake, it was only because he wondered what he would do with it, should Raoul leave it hovering there, unmet. (His last meeting with Raoul, the one right after I was born, did not end well at all.)

  “It’s Officer Orlean today. May I?” Raoul poured himself a cup of tea, barely watching or waiting for Gustave’s consent. He swallowed a whole cupful and felt refreshed and almost cheerful, until, setting his cup on the tray again, he remembered where he was and why.

  “Let’s get this over with, Vilder. State your name for the record please.” Raoul pulled a notepad and ballpoint from the pocket of his shirt. He could barely look Gustave in the face.

  “Gustave Vilder, General Manager.”

  “Mr. Vilder, I am here in the name of the Office of Customs and Excise to investigate the matter of two acres’ worth of pineapple that seems to have gone missing from the estate of Mr. Cyrus Puymute. As you are aware, any such merchandise leaving the island is subject to excise, and I am here to collect.”

  “That’s true, any such merchandise leaving the island is certainly subject to excise. But if I’m not mistaken, the tax should be paid by the one who sent the merchandise away. That was not myself, nor was it Mr. Puymute.” Gustave sipped his tea and replaced the cup on the saucer in a tremolo of ceramic that belied his complacent demeanor.

  In the meantime, Raoul’s patience had worn as thin as the favorite blue shirt he had been forced to leave at home that morning. He emphasized every syllable of his response: “Then – who – was – it?”

  “I – don’t – know.”

  “Damn it, Vilder!” Raoul pounded his fist on the desk and the tea tray clattered. “You expect me to believe that you have no idea where all that fruit ended up, nor how it got there? What kind of fool do you take me for? You as near as confessed to me before the crime was ever committed! You think I forgot about your little proposition?”

  “Proposition? Crime?” Gustave repeated blankly, and with a hint of satisfaction. “Now, now, Officer Orlean. You read the paper. You must have seen the story in the Crier yesterday.” Gustave produced a copy of the newspaper from the day before, though where it came from Raoul couldn’t see just then, and tossed it on the desk. “Mr. Puymute seems to be the victim of…a curse…magic…the wizardry that we all take for granted around here—that is, until we wake up one morning to two empty pineapple patches and realize that we ought to pay it a bit more mind.”

  “I know all about the story, Vilder. It’s as phony as you are. You tipped off the paper and fed them your version of the facts. You and I both know exactly where those pineapples went.”

  Now it was Gustave’s turn to be angry. “I know I’m to blame for most of the things that go wrong on this floating little shard of Oh, but sometimes there simply isn’t an explanation. Looking for one might only bring more trouble.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Raoul remembered Pedro’s strange farewell.

  “Only that whatever mystical force is at play here might not take kindly to being questioned too much. Or doubted. No telling what it might do if that were the case.” Gustave was standing now, his palms flat on the desk, his fiery eyes looking down on Raoul in his chair. “No telling.”

  The conversation ended there, at least in the conventional sense. For although it was cut short by Raoul’s sudden and silent departure (Gustave had so angered him he’d gone momentarily mute and left), each continued talking to himself in mumbled threats and half-whispers.

  “I – will – get – him. I will prove what he’s got up to. Somehow. And he – will – pay,” spat Raoul. “Babies? Pineapples? Who does he think he is?”

  “He can’t prove a thing!” countered Gustave. “No one can prove anything on this island! Things happen all by themselves and then everyone looks at me.”

  “A curse! Magic! I should have known a Vilder would stoop to something like this. Scaring up the whole bloody island. He’s nothing but a liar and a thief.”

  “Why not a curse at Puymute’s? Or anywhere else for that matter? Should I be the only one bent by the powers of this place?”

  There’s no telling how long the conversation would have gone on had it not been for Nat, who pulled alongside Raoul as he was walking back to town and offered him a lift. They drove in silence, Raoul still thinking about what he and Gustave hadn’t said to each other. The truth is that, though they ostensibly talked about taxes, both men had much more on their minds: that “proposition” for one (which you’ll hear about next), and me. It was mostly me they had on the brain. Pineapples are a dime a dozen on Oh, but a rare and red-eyed almond? That’s worth fighting over, and definitely worth figuring out.

  Finally back at the library, seated at his table in the corner, Raoul felt relieved. Despite the daunting rese
arch that lay before him, he was comfortable for the first time that day, a pearl nestled in the oyster of all those shelves lined with books. He breathed in, relishing the scent of the library air in his nose, a mélange of paper stock, lead pencil, and Miss Partridge’s honey-flavored eau de toilette. He closed his eyes, but soon the crinkles of his worried forehead tugged upward on his brow. Somewhere behind it, a bluebottle buzzed. Raoul opened his eyes and listened a minute. Then he sighed a honey dew onto his reading glasses, polished them up, and got to work.

  5

  Promises aren’t contracts to be entered into lightly. Not anywhere. And especially not on Oh. They imply a pledge, which in turn implies some measure of honor, and an expectation, some rightful return on an investment of trust. Promises on Oh, like in many places, are the currency on which the economy was built. Once, you could promise your day’s catch of mahi mahi to the widow Corinna and she would wash and iron your three shirts. A bushel of spinach could get you hair tonic and a bobbin of thread, and a boon of butter would buy you a nice scrap of leather or a wooden chair for your little one. A chair of your own would cost you some cream and cake as well.