Piecemeal the pineapples appeared on the beach, sometimes accompanied by Gustave, sometimes not, and Nat did his part to lift and pass them on to the next set of hands. But on that gray and blurred night he struggled, the crates heavy, unlike the other times when Bang sang, and the moon shone down, and the music of the leaves and the cicadas drowned Nat’s grunts and erased his efforts. What was going on?
“What’s the hold up?” Bang shouted across the Belly to Cougar.
It was nearly eleven now and the stage still glistened silently under its blue and yellow lights, showing no sign that the contest was soon to start. Normally an hour’s delay would mean nothing to Bang, but tonight he was keen, for victory was nigh.
Cougar was less keen. The longer into the night he stretched the concert, the further he stretched his profits and his popularity. But he knew he wouldn’t keep Bang off stage much longer, and so he nodded at him to get the ball, or the marimba mallets, rolling.
“Good evening, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Buddha’s Belly.” Bang stood at the microphone under the multicolored lights. “How about a round of applause for our benefactor tonight? Cougar Zanne, ladies and gentlemen.” He stretched his arm toward the bar, from behind which Cougar, smiles and silk, waved to the crowd.
Bang continued. “My name’s Bang and I’ll be playing for you a bit later. Right now, let’s welcome our first contestant.”
While Kalvin Jones regaled the Belly with marimba love songs, on Edda’s beach Nat’s frustration grew. He was doing more standing around than helping and his back and shoulders ached. With his mounting frustration his courage and rebellion grew bolder, and in his head he composed a telling-to for Gustave, for whenever the latter should next appear.
Aha! There he was. “Gustave!” Nat shouted.
“What is it?” Gustave walked toward Nat, wiping his brow. He looked as if his back and shoulders ached as much as Nat’s.
“It’s a mess, that’s what it is. What’s going on?”
“Just a few hiccups,” answered Gustave, seemingly still in a trance. “A few hiccups is all.”
When he turned to walk away, Nat grabbed his elbow and pulled him back. “What’s wrong with you?” Nat asked. “At this rate we’ll be here all night! Someone’s sure to spot us. You’ll get us all arrested!”
“If it’s Customs you’re worried about, don’t be. I’d like nothing more than to run into Raoul tonight.” With that he dusted his hands on his jeans and set off for the plantation again.
As luck or magic would have it, and despite the rainy curtain that muffled the night’s sounds, Raoul’s ears captured Nat’s “Gustave!” and most of their ensuing conversation. So Nat was a willing participant, not frightened of Gustave after all! (He wouldn’t have spoken to him so brazenly otherwise, Raoul reasoned.) And Gustave was as interested in confronting Raoul as Raoul was in confronting him! Raoul’s mind struggled to decide on which of these two pieces of information to focus.
While Raoul struggled and Nat stood around, and Gustave hoped for a chance to claim his Almondine, at the Belly Bang and Cougar began to worry. The contestants shuffled across the stage, each showcasing his dexterity and his charms, the crowd drank, and the time passed. Soon Bang’s turn would come, and still there was no sign of Nat.
Troubling, this. Gustave’s capers never took so long.
More troubling still, though neither Bang or Cougar could bring himself to mention it to the other, was Raoul’s conspicuous absence. What could possibly keep him away from the Belly on a festive night like this? On a night when one of his very best friends was a shoo-in to take first prize?
Nothing would have made Raoul happier, it’s true, than to drink a beer and watch his friend on the stage. To sit unfettered from the search for variables and crooks. To be warm and dry in the Belly instead of muddy and wet under the mango tree at Sinner’s Cove. But funny things happen on Oh sometimes. Funny, out-of-the-ordinary things that dictate behaviors astray of the islanders’ desires and their routines.
Which is why on that blurred and dreary night Raoul’s heart was too heavy for marimba music, too full for signature cocktails. Why from under a crying mango, a soggy Officer Orlean radioed to the crescent that lay in wait, giving orders to block the path of the boats that piecemeal had stuffed their bellies and their bows. Why Gustave meandered, his hands in his pockets, pining for his little almond instead of minding his pineapples and their soon-to-be-foiled journey to Killig. Why gentle Nat was sure he’d spend the rest of his life in jail. Why, after so many days in hiding, the moon finally fought its way from behind the curtain of rain, ready now to see how the story would end.
19
“Encore! Encore!”
Nat slipped into the Belly just as Bang, the last contestant to participate in the revival of the annual marimba competition, finished his set. To the applause and cheering of the crowd Bang responded with a dramatic pose, marimba mallets raised high above his head, his form a silhouette against the backlit stage, where the colored lights had spent themselves as Bang banged out his last note. It was hours past midnight, but the audience showed no sign of wear, their jovial spirits owing in no small part to the no small quantity of Pineapple Sting that poured within the Belly all night long, persistent and thick as the rain that fell on the island outside the Belly’s walls.
Nat squeezed his way through the crowd, through the whistling, yelling, jumping bodies that smelled of sweat and soap and boozy revelry, until the human swell finally deposited his light frame at one of the short ends of the bar. There, it took him a few minutes to catch the eye of Cougar, who had interrupted his bartending and was gesticulating instructions to Bang on stage, telling him to switch on the loud, recorded music that would occupy the crowd while the judges voted.
“Where’ve you been?” Cougar demanded when he finally saw Nat. “We were getting worried, you know.” Even before Nat could answer, Cougar realized that his worry had not been misplaced. “What’s wrong?” he continued. “You look like you saw a ghost.”
“Feels like one followed me all the way back from the beach,” Nat said. “Give me a rum, man. Double.”
Cougar complied. “What happened? Everything go off alright with Gustave?” Cougar was beginning to get scared.
“No. No, it didn’t. Anyone asks, I was here all night. You never saw me leave the premises.” Nat downed his double rum in a single swallow. “Give me another one.”
Cougar complied again. “Where’s Gustave? Did he go home?”
“He’s under the mango at Sinner’s Cove. That’s where Raoul put him.”
“Put him? Raoul? What the hell are you talking about, Nat?” Yes, Cougar was most definitely scared now.
While Nat gulped his second double, Bang bounced over to him and patted him on the back. “Now, there’s a friend for you. I knew you wouldn’t miss my set. Wish I could say the same for Raoul.” Bang turned to Cougar. “Coug, glass of water.”
“Raoul was at the beach” is all Cougar said in reply, his tone conveying the height to which his fear had climbed.
“Edda’s beach? Did he see you?” Bang cautiously asked Nat.
Nat nodded his head. “He told me to come here. He said if anyone asks, you and Cougar should say I was here all night, I never left.”
“Did he see Gustave?” Bang asked.
“He saw everything. He knew what was going on. He was there waiting. It was a mess. Gustave was…was…I don’t know what was wrong with him. I told him to snap out of it, but he didn’t care. Said he wanted to see Raoul. And out of nowhere there’s Raoul, too, and he tells me to sneak back here and stay put. Then these characters come out of the tide and start fighting. And Gustave, Gustave’s down.”
“What do you mean, ‘down’?” Cougar asked.
“On the ground. Dead. Maybe.”
“Dead?! How? You’re not making any sense.” Bang was scared now, too. “Who came out of the tide?”
“Men, I guess. It was raining and then it
just stopped and there they were, like they came right out of the rain, or out of the sea. They had knives!” Nat struggled to spit out frenzied details in a whisper loud enough that his friends—but only his friends—would hear, while Bang and Cougar exchanged glances that said “what should we do?”
“Where’s Raoul now?” Cougar wanted to know. “Is he alright?”
“I don’t know. He had blood all over him. But he was talking and walking. He said we shouldn’t go to the beach. He said for all of us to stay right here. He made me promise.”
Bang and Cougar exchanged glances again, glances that said “we should go to him anyway,” then they looked away from each other, knowing they wouldn’t budge. Their curiosity and concern for Raoul were no match for their worry and their fear for themselves. They would do as Raoul had said and stay put at the Belly. For once, these fair-weather friends would keep a promise.
They sat at the bar in silence as the marimba-contest judges deliberated, feigning interest in the music that blared from the speakers on stage, watching the crowd on the dance floor, the atmosphere painfully unsuited to quiet contemplation. Now and again Bang, or Cougar, would pose some question to Nat, who would reveal one detail more, his words like brushstrokes on a painter’s canvas, hiding the bare, coarse truth underneath. Each new random fact that Bang and Cougar collected and tried to reconcile made the two men shrug, their perplexity directly proportional to their enlightenment.
Singly they arrived at a common thought. They decided that Nat was a little shook up is all. That his head would clear in a while. That no one (especially not Gustave) could possibly be dead. They decided, too, that, after the judges announced the winner and the winner played one more time, they would take Nat for a walk. In the coolness of the night air, they would ask for his story again, for the bigger picture, starting from the beginning. Then they would decide what they should do.
A common mistake on Oh, this thinking that people know more than they do. Nat knew as much about the facts of that night as Gustave knew about me. Nat had seen steel knives and blood; Gustave, sharp white skin and blood-red eyes; and both had made their deductions. Neither knew a thing about the bigger picture. Neither knew the truth. Thus, there’s no point to your hearing the sketchy version Nat will tell Bang and Cougar later when they walk. The bigger picture, the puzzle pieced together, looks like this.
For the first part of the night the rain continued to pour down, scouring Puymute’s acres and the geometric palms of Edda’s beach. It washed off the singing leaves and the stalls at the market, the library’s heavy doors. It rinsed the dust from Fred Nettles’ truck and the sand from Lullaby Peet’s new shovel, and cleaned up the Sincero’s sign. It even scrubbed the gutters of the seedy port bar. So persistent was the rain, it agitated the island itself, which found little consolation in the play of warm marimba and directed its restless energies elsewhere.
You know already about Gustave’s distracted state, about his heartfelt and sentimental inklings and his murmured, halfhearted commands. You know that Nat was short-tempered and tired, and that Raoul was now sure of at least one friend’s deliberate betrayal. You know of the crescents that like misshapen horseshoes wrapped themselves one around the next, boats around boats around the sandy shore. You know, too, that Raoul had finally had his fill of the so-called magic that had been going on since I was born. At last he had all his variables in line and was about to even the score; real police back-up was on the way.
From his hiding place under the mango, Raoul moved—agitated—to set his sting in motion. He had called to his boats by radio and instructed them to block the exit of Gustave’s boats from the cove. As if Raoul had radioed to the moon itself, the moon began to break free of its watery curtain, thinning the rain and showering the beach with light. The light fell on the bothered features of Nat, who stood, hands on hips, waiting for Gustave, waiting for pineapples to carry, waiting for someone to tell him what to do.
Raoul complied. “Nat!” he called, dashing from his hiding place onto the shore.
“Raoul! What are you doing here?” Nat was too startled to try and offer excuses for his own presence, there on Sinner’s Cove just then.
“I’m working,” Raoul said. “Get out of here. Run, do you hear me? Go to the Belly and stay there. If anyone asks, tell Bang and Cougar to say you were there all night and never left.”
Nat wanted to ask Raoul what was going on, but the urgency in his friend’s voice told him the time wasn’t ripe for questions. So Nat nodded in obedient and frightened agreement and turned to leave. Raoul added in a strong, throaty whisper as Nat walked away, “And stay away from the beach. All three of you!”
Nat got as far as the soft, green brush a stone’s throw from the edge of the sea, when his frightened obedience abated, like that of a child whose shame diminishes with each step that parts him from his angry mum. Instead of running to the Belly like he was told, Nat took up Raoul’s post under the mango tree, from where he spied, hidden, the moonlit stage; and Raoul took up Nat’s post in the sand, where he stood, hands on hips, waiting for Gustave, waiting for pineapples to catch, waiting for something to do.
It seemed that Oh itself waited with him, holding its breath, its rains ever-slowing, its leafsong ever more audible. But none of them would wait for long. Not Raoul, not the palms, not the cicadas or the pregnant mango. Gustave was but a few steps away, his slow cargo by now having mostly made its way from the plantation to the boats that promised passage to Killig. The squeeze of the Customs’ crescent around Gustave’s pineapple-burdened fleet would break soon upon the sandy shore. So soon, in fact, that Gustave would happen upon the hullabaloo in fullest swing.
With the rain suddenly and finally stopped, the tide revealed itself just as Nat had described it to Bang and Cougar. It spit onto Edda’s beach a number of angry bare-chested contrabandists, their heads wrapped in braids and bandanas and their necks ringed in gold chains of varying weight and worth, the overall impression one of latter-day pirates. They were the sort of men ruled by blades, not books, by money rather than moonlight. If ever they bothered about the stars, it was not in awe or enjoyment, but in service to their nefarious navigation between Oh and Oh’s island neighbors.
The leader of these modern-day brigands who stood in a pack behind their captain called to Raoul from the tide. “You know anything about the boats in the cove? My men are locked in.”
“You, your men, and your crafts have been detained pending an investigation by the Office of Customs and Excise of Oh.”
“Investigation? I don’t submit to ‘investigations’ in general, and certainly not by you. I’ve got produce on those boats. I don’t intend to let it rot out there.”
“You have the Customs documents to account for that produce, I presume?” Raoul taunted. “Or did you harvest it on the high seas?”
“Of course I do. I’m not some common thief. See for yourself.” The leader, whose given name was Dennis but was known by his cohorts as Dutch, turned to one of the men ranked behind him, his arm extended and his hand opened as if in wait of the documents to show Raoul. Raoul (naïve Raoul!), meanwhile, ventured into the tide where Dutch and his band of men stood.
When Dutch turned back around, the credentials he presented were not of paper, as Raoul had expected, but of steel. In the palm of his pirate hand, he held a knife that gleamed silver under the moon’s white gaze. “This is my right of passage,” he said, holding the blade at chest-level between himself and Raoul. The men ranked behind him displayed equally incisive dossiers.
What happened next is hard to describe, even from the vantage point of a bigger-picture view, so striking are the distortions effected by the various angles of observation. Raoul didn’t see a knife in Dutch’s raw and weathered hand. He saw, rather, a deadly, saw-toothed mirror, and in its reflection, the unsuitable and unacceptable end of a too-long quest for answers he owed his granddaughter; and so he lunged, careless and determined at once. Nat, from his hiding place behind t
he mango, saw the swirl of gold and silver that had issued from the tide, Raoul at its center; and so he cowered, disbelieving and aghast. For Dutch there was little more to the story than the foolishness of a wild, middle-aged man; and so he reacted as his gut commanded. Gustave, who just then arrived at Sinner’s Cove, having put the plantation and its sluggish activity to bed, Gustave saw a skirmish between his bread and butter and his flesh and blood; and so he, too, lunged into the tide, careless and determined, and commanded by his gut.
I suppose you can decide for yourself which perspective you find most appealing, which the most fair. Me, I always defer to the moon, who, still nearly full, illuminated the happenings on the beach that night from a distance more permitting of objectivity.
She saw Raoul rush toward Dutch and Dutch reply in kind, saw Dutch’s knife stab at Raoul’s heart and fail, repelled as if by Raoul’s sheer force of will. Encircled by the other bandits who watched but did not intervene, the fighting pair grasped onto and hugged each other, spun in a demented and vicious dance. When Gustave arrived and spotted the commotion, he hurled himself into its midst, his gut instructing him to protect Raoul, not the evening’s profits, the former representing his surest course to his misplaced daughter. Which is why, when Dutch struck a second blow at the flesh around Raoul’s brave heart, Gustave heaved his own thick torso into the path of the knife, whose blow, this time, didn’t fail.
As Dutch’s blade pierced Gustave’s body, saturating his shirt with the blood that oozed from the fresh, raw wound, for a fistful of still, dark seconds, time on Oh seemed to stop again, as it had when Raoul and his friends shared a drink at the Belly some weeks before. The gang of Dutch’s men slowly broke up, revealing as it did the crumpled body of Gustave over which bent the figure of Raoul. Moved—agitated—to action at the sight of this gruesome picture, Gustave’s pickers and packers, who had arrived then at the cove for a cool swim after a long evening’s work, retaliated. They set upon Dutch’s men with fists and kicks and stinging words, indignant and in staunch defense of their employer.
Left at the Mango Tree Page 22
