It happened one evening as Edda lounged on one of the chairs outside the house, the chairs that saw her tête-à-têtes with Abigail, and Wilbur’s lonely stargazing. Abigail hadn’t visited on this particular night, and Wilbur had swapped the stars for my shining eyes. Inside the house he gave me my bath, studying the twinkling lights that illuminated my face as if they were suddenly two North Stars in the Earth’s one sky.
Raoul was still in the thick of his investigating on that day, thick, the operative word, for half a week of spying, snapping snapshots, and magnifying the ground had in no way thinned the veil that continued to hide the truth that he was seeking. He hadn’t found a single clue.
As darkness neared, my mother heard him approach, his paraphernalia clanking around his neck with every step. When he reached the porch where she lay, neither said a word. He simply bent to kiss her forehead, then sat next to her, and in response she smiled. Under the climbing moon they held hands until finally Edda broke the silent night. “Are you calling it a day, daddy?”
“I haven’t decided yet,” he answered. “I just came by to see my granddaughter. She isn’t asleep yet, is she?”
“Wilbur’s giving her a bath.”
Raoul rose to go into the house, but Edda stopped him. “Wait,” she said. “Daddy, are you alright?”
Raoul sat down again, balancing his binoculars on his knee. His reflection stared back at him from the black of the lenses and he studied it, hoping it might give him the answer to his daughter’s question. It’s not that Raoul wasn’t alright. He was. “Of course I am, dear. Of course.”
He just didn’t feel one iota like himself. “It’s just that, well, Edda, dear, maybe I’m not quite myself these days.”
“No?” she asked.
In fact, Raoul felt very much like someone else, though he didn’t dare associate himself aloud with the formidable Mr. Stan Kalpi, especially not now, when his road of holes and humps was leading him in circles. He had been around the whole island twice.
“Are you sick?” she insisted.
“Sick? Certainly not! Just a bit more work than usual, but nothing you should bother yourself about. I’m sure it will all be settled soon.”
Edda insisted a bit more. “How soon, daddy? I don’t like the way people are talking about you. They think you’re acting strangely. Are you sure you’re alright?”
“Edda! Now who are you going to listen to, them or me? I told you. I’m fine. Once this case is solved and all the guilty parties have explained their wrongdoings, then we’ll all sleep easier. All of us.” Raoul hugged her, and though Edda had no trouble sleeping whatsoever, at least not as long as her father behaved himself, she decided not to insist any further. Maybe tomorrow Abigail would have something to say about what was going on. Edda would give Raoul the benefit of the doubt for a little while longer.
“You better hurry inside if you want to see Almondine before Wilbur gets her to sleep.” Edda patted Raoul’s hand, before he made his way into the house.
Wilbur was just coming out of my room. I was already fast asleep and Raoul could do little more than peek into my crib a few seconds, for fear of waking me up. He joined Wilbur in the kitchen, then, which still bore the puddled signs of my recent bath. Soon he found a beer in his hand, for Wilbur was attentive and polite, if not talkative, though Raoul never stopped hoping that on one of his visits, or during one of their weekly nights out, Wilbur would suddenly come to his senses and blurt out the same questions and the same anger that, respectively, filled Raoul’s head and heart.
Although this wasn’t to be the night for such effusions, not even Wilbur could overlook Raoul’s strange and rugged appearance. “Raoul, are you alright?”
Again. “Of course, I’m alright. Of course I am.” Raoul found the sound of his own voice irksome in its lack of conviction.
“It’s a warm night. Why don’t you leave all that equipment here and go for a walk on the beach. Do you some good,” Wilbur suggested.
Whenever Wilbur mentioned the beach, he meant what he called “Edda’s beach,” that small private piece of the shore where as a boy he first spied on her. The beach the tourists didn’t know. The one where he and Edda had honeymooned. It was his favorite, and the only beach he frequented, though it wasn’t the easiest on the island to reach.
“Maybe I’ll do that,” Raoul answered. He liked the idea. Not because of the warm night or the good that a walk on the beach might do him, but because he suddenly realized that despite having circled the island twice, he had never once gone out of his way to check out that little bit of Oh. “I’ll keep my things with me, so I can take them home after.”
Raoul quickly downed what remained of his beer, shook Wilbur’s hand, thanked him, and pecked Edda on the forehead once again as he rushed past her and headed out. He jogged in the light of the moon, which had climbed even higher in the sky and followed him, watching and winking. When he reached the coast and bent his head to survey the sandy shore, she splashed her light over the beach before him. Not even with the moon’s help, however, was Raoul in any shape to look for variables. It was late and he was tired. His Stan Kalpi journey was taking its toll.
Raoul cleared a space under the mango in the soft, green brush a stone’s throw from the edge of the sea and stretched out. In the shine of the morning he would have a look around, but not tonight. Tonight he was sleepy, his energy suddenly gone, his hopes as deflated as the song of the now sleepy leaves. In fact, a good many things were deflated that night on Oh: Raoul’s hopes, Abigail’s worries, and my mother’s anonymity.
Only the moon was full. It perched, high and blue, over Edda’s beach, a promise of the secrets that lay buried in the sand.
14
Raoul’s obsession with Mr. Stan Kalpi wasn’t lost on his three best mates (or on two of them, rather), though the significance of it was. Try though they might, they couldn’t figure out what Mr. Stan had to do with anything.
“Stan who?” Cougar asked Bang, whose eyebrows were barely visible behind the glossy book jacket with Stan Kalpi’s black-on-white silhouette.
“Stan Kalpi,” Bang replied.
“Who is he?” Cougar asked.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out, if you’ll pipe down a minute.” Bang read while Cougar drummed his hands on the Belly’s bar. “Says here he’s a maths teacher with no mother and no father who hears messages on the wind.”
“Give me that!” Cougar snapped, yanking the book from Bang’s hands. “You must have it wrong.”
“Read it for yourself then,” Bang shrugged.
“What’s a mad maths teacher have to do with Raoul? He’s been walking around with this book for days.”
“Beats me,” Bang answered. “The librarian said it’s his favorite. Maybe he’s just reading to keep his mind off his troubles.” It was Bang’s turn to peer at Cougar’s eyebrows over the profile of Mr. Stan. “’Course, she did also tell me he ripped up some books last time he was there.”
“Ripped up some books?” Cougar repeated, incredulous, resting the book on the bar. “That doesn’t sound like Raoul. You must have it wrong.”
“What doesn’t sound like Raoul?” Nat asked as he slipped into the Belly and looked from Bang, in front of the bar, to Cougar, behind it. “Who’s got what wrong?”
“Shh!” Cougar silenced them, or tried to, and put his nose back into the business of Mr. Stan.
“What’s going on?” Nat asked. He was confused, and rightfully so. It wasn’t often that one found Cougar wrapped up in a book jacket.
“That’s the book Raoul won’t put down,” Bang explained. “About a man who hears messages on the wind.”
Nat was still not sure he understood, Cougar in a book and messages on the wind, but as luck would have it, it was an especially windy night on Oh, and so it seemed to him not inappropriate to respond with “He’d get plenty of messages tonight!”
“Don’t listen to Bang,” Cougar interrupted. “It’s not messages he hears,
it’s songs. He hears songs on the wind.”
“Ah, well, that clears it up then, doesn’t it?” a cheeky Bang replied.
“You’re the musician,” Cougar countered. “It ought to clear something up for you.”
While Bang searched in his head for some musical answer to the Stan Kalpi riddle, or, failing that, a clever retort, Nat nattered on about the wind. Or tried to. Cougar kept shushing him, depriving them all of Nat’s account of his takeaway dinner the night before on the beach, where the wind was so strong it had snatched away the salt he sprinkled on his fish cakes before the grains could ever grace the golden dough. And in its plastic cup, Nat’s equally golden beer had had its head blown off before he could sit himself down in the sand to drink it.
“Not now, Nat,” Cougar said. “Raoul will be back any minute.”
As if to vindicate the poor shushed Nat, the wind rushed in and blew Raoul’s reading glasses across the bar. Bang bolted to catch them before they slid over the edge and crashed to the floor.
“Where is Raoul, anyway?” Nat asked. He couldn’t help but feel as if he were only getting half the picture. Maybe the strong wind had muddled his head.
“Toilet,” Bang said, as he modeled his chum’s rescued specs.
Nat wanted a drink but didn’t dare interrupt Cougar’s reading one more time. He decided to wait until Raoul reappeared, when presumably the book would be returned to its owner’s hands, freeing up Cougar’s to pour a shot of yellow rum—rum, Nat hoped, that would undo the wind’s damage.
On Oh the wind is shifty. All the islanders know this. It’s curious and capricious, advancing and retreating at whim. It spars with the moon and the leaves and trespasses through the islanders’ homes and heads. But it was not to be blamed for Nat’s befuddlement on this night that found Cougar retracing Stan Kalpi’s path to the past. No, if Nat was confused, it was because lately he had let the island gossip, as sweeping as the wind though it was, blow into one ear and out of the other, forbidding it to stop in between. He hadn’t heard a word about Raoul and Mr. Stan.
I’d like to attribute his indifference to tact or integrity or some emotional maturity that he might have attained, but it was in fact Nat’s dishonesty that occupied all his mental faculties, leaving little room for the luxury of idle tales. Yes, he had agreed with his friends that befriending their best friend’s enemy was wise, but their wisdom had so far served only to fatten their bank accounts. (Indeed, Nat had never had a bank account before and now he did.) Their wisdom had done nothing for Raoul. Nothing to ingratiate themselves with Gustave. Not really. They were his stooges, not his friends. Nothing to bring anybody any closer to implicating him in Edda’s pregnancy. The so-called sleuthing on the part of Bang, Cougar, and Nat was nothing more than a profitable betrayal.
Still, profits were hard to come by on Oh, those rainbow bills never quite numerous enough. And so to avoid the ping-pong of shame-on-me’s and yes-but’s that bounced inside his head like so many of Raoul’s flies, Nat drove his taxi. Since the caper on the beach some few nights before he had driven by night and by day, talking a blue streak with every visitor who graced his cab. Anything to keep his mind off the match going on inside his head. The tactic had worked, sparing him the island gossip, too.
So Nat had no idea that Raoul was creeping around the island with his clunking camera and his Kalpi book, no idea that his friend was the butt of the islanders’ jokes. Bang would enlighten him only after the show, when Nat offered Bang a lift home. In the meantime he settled himself at the bar and awaited his rum, confident that his conscience was safe at the Belly, for he knew neither of the other stooges would bring up the matter there, with Raoul so close by. What he didn’t know was that each was trying to ignore a ping-pong match of his own, Cougar with his nose in a book and Bang with his eyes glued to a pale blue piece of paper.
“What is it with everyone today? Has the library shut its doors? What are you reading now?” Nat asked Bang.
Bang held the page between his thumb and index finger and waved it in front of Nat like a shiny bell. “They reinstated it.”
“Reinstated what?”
“The annual marimba competition. This is the entry form. My entry form, to be exact.”
“You’re a shoo-in, but what happened? The contest has been dead for years.”
(Remember I told you about the annual marimba competition that Bang’s grandfather won ten years running? Well, this is the one. When the pineapple trade on Oh bottomed out, so too did the accounts that the government’s Agency for the Promulgation of the Indigenous Arts used to sponsor the annual event.)
“I’ll tell you what happened.” Bang read from the paper in his hand: “‘It is with great delight that the Agency for the Promulgation of the Indigenous Arts announces the reinstatement of Oh’s annual marimba competition’…blah blah blah…‘historic island tradition’… blah blah blah…here it is…‘held under the auspices of Mr. Cougar Zanne, owner of the Sincero Hotel, where the competition is to take place in the Buddha’s Belly Bar and Lounge.’”
“Cougar! You?!” Nat knocked on the spine of Raoul’s book, still propped in Cougar’s hands.
“What?”
“The annual marimba competition. Why didn’t you say anything?” Nat asked.
“Wanted it to be a surprise.”
Something didn’t add up. “Since when are you a promulgator of the indigenous arts?”
“I’m not. I’m a promulgator of profits. I put up the prize money and the space, and in exchange I get a packed house, hot thirsty bodies. I’m working up a signature cocktail to serve in honor of the occasion. I mix up a few batches beforehand and I’ll refill their glasses faster than they can say ‘marimba.’”
Nat still felt like half the picture was missing, but Raoul returned right then, snatching the book from Cougar’s hands, and so Nat’s thoughts turned finally to the rum that would soon be burning his throat. He motioned to Cougar to pour him a double shot. Meanwhile Raoul, who had barely muttered a hello, propped the book open on the bar, plucked his specs from Bang’s nose, and resumed his reading.
Nat knocked on the book’s spine again. “Raoul, you heard about the reinstatement of the annual marimba competition?”
“I heard.”
“Bang’s a shoo-in. What do you think?”
“Yep.” Raoul closed the book with Mr. Stan’s story and set it reverentially on the bar, resigned that he would get little reading done that evening. “You enter yet, Bang?”
“Got my entry form right here. I’m taking it into town tomorrow.”
“Good luck.” Raoul raised his glass, which was met by those of his three best friends. Double rum against water, against beer, against a yellowish concoction in Cougar’s hand, murky glasses joined in that most banal of outward signs of solidarity. They had clinked their glasses thousands of times before, but on this particular night the rum and the water and the beer and the yellow goo hovered in the air between them as if suspended in time.
As far as I know, time has never stopped on Oh, but for what they perceived as a fistful of still, dark seconds, the four mates would have sworn that it had. Three of them, guilty-headed, had some idea as to why it might have suddenly halted dead. The fourth could only sense that it had done so, and he made a mental note to note it, for surely it was of importance. It was he, then, who knocked the island clock back into motion. “Cougar, what’s that cloudy mess you’re drinking?” Raoul asked.
“Mango surprise.” Cougar swished a mouthful and then swallowed. “Too sweet. Back to the drawing board.”
“The drawing board?” Raoul asked.
“He’s working up a signature cocktail for the marimba contest night,” Bang explained.
“Ah.” Raoul looked at his watch, perhaps to reassure himself that time had kept its meter. It had. “Bang, shouldn’t you get a move on?” he said and cocked his head in the direction of the stage.
“Yes sir. I’m off.” Bang bounced off the bar stool and was
up on stage before Raoul could ask him what he planned to sing about.
Nat knew. “He’s singing about money. Must have the marimba prize money on the brain.”
“Who could blame him?” Raoul responded.
Indeed.
To witness this exchange between Raoul and his mates, so typical of their nighttime reunions at the Hotel Sincero’s bar, you would hardly think that anything was amiss or guess that Raoul was having any difficulty at all in distinguishing Stan Kalpi’s path from his own. In truth, things were very much amiss and Raoul very much in difficulty, still scouring the island for variables, but finding more questions than answers in the process (though he was making some headway, which you’ll hear about soon enough). Even so, like Nat and the others who dodged ping-pong balls at the bar, Raoul found solace that night in the Belly of his friends’ company, where he, too, knew that certain matters were certain not to be discussed.
“Ladies and gentlemen, good evening and welcome to the Buddha’s Belly. My name is Bang and tonight I’m going to sing about something we all love, something we all need, something most of us on this pretty little island of Oh never seem to have enough of. So hold on to your wallets and let go of your troubles!” And Bang’s show began.
When I was just a very young lad,
By now you know all about the silencing, soothing effect of Bang’s voice on the noisy, grumbling crowd, the cool coating it splashes, at least temporarily, on the Belly’s burning walls. Tonight was no different.
Left at the Mango Tree Page 16
