by Howard Engel
Three tanned swimmers were sitting near me—two men and a young woman.
“Damn it! It’s another Canadian!” said one of the blond beach boys to the other, dipped in the same vat of Coppertone. He’d spotted the maple leaf on my bag.
“So what, George? We all have to come from some place. Look, for instance, at me.”
“Right. But Canada? I mean …”
“Vicky was Canadian. You didn’t hold that against her,” the other young man said. He had a slight accent.
“You tried holding everything else!”
“And you were more interested in Mary-Ellen. So what does that prove? You got her to cut out of town fast enough. Did she owe you money?”
“She had her own reasons. Besides, George—”
“Are you going to bottle those sour grapes, kid?” This, from the young woman, made George pout like a six-year-old. They were like an old married couple, except there were three of them. George said less than the others. I began to suspect his English might not be up to the cut and thrust of this sort of banter. He tried to interrupt a few times with talk of his dives.
“Oh, not so! One time I was at 140 feet, and had to change my tanks …”
“Balls, you did!” The words might have hurt people with less scar tissue. After a bottle or two of this talk, things got interesting again.
“Isn’t Fiona Canadian?”
“Irish, you ignoramus.” The mention of her name startled me. What had become of her? She did say she was going to follow me, didn’t she? Maybe it was wishful thinking. “What happened to my beer?”
“You pissed it away, you low-life. Isn’t it time you broke down and bought a round?”
“I’m always buying you beer. Didn’t I buy a round when we came back from the reef? Lizzy? Didn’t I?” George’s face looked like it was about to melt.
“Whose memory is that long, George? Poor bleary bunny. Randy, my cup runneth empty.” In a whisper, more like a stage whisper than a real one, she asked: “Who did you say that was?” Randy whispered in her ear and I was examined by three sets of eyes for a second time.
“We’re a little pissed,” Randy said, looking at me. “Do you mind much? Will you join our happy throng?”
I moved my chair closer, although there really wasn’t much room for another.
“Have you come to Takot to dive a wreck or to get a look at the living reef?” Lizzy asked, turning around and staring at me over the chair’s back.
“I’m supposed to meet Fiona Calaghan here,” I said.
“Ah! The Blond Goddess! Circe Reincarnated. Our Lady of the Drum.” George was sniggering.
Lizzy turned on him: “Hell, George, just because you didn’t … You told me Silvia What’s-her-name was a dyke just because she didn’t jump into bed with you. Right now, I don’t fancy you either. Are you going to spread gossip about me too?”
“I think I’ve had too much beer and not enough food. I always know when to stop, don’t I?”
“George, you just get too extravagant when you haven’t eaten properly. You remind me of the old days, before your money came. Remember how you used to hang about the docks and the swimmers who had the price of the ferry ride?”
“Yeah. You didn’t have the price of a tank of air.” Randy was smiling. I didn’t care for his smile.
“I said I’m sorry your sandwiches got wet. Didn’t I? Give me a break!” And so it went, back and forth like a game of tennis, until even they grew sick of it. To me they sounded like rich kids on a holiday: too little responsibility and too much money in their designer jeans. But I was still waiting for Fiona. (The name was back again. Sometimes they went for a minute, sometimes they went off forever.) What happened to her? Why hadn’t she shown up? Why did George call her “Our Lady of the Drum”? I didn’t blame her for skipping this scene; still, she had said she would meet me here. Maybe her albatross clipped her with its good wing. Maybe my growing disappointment had soured me on these young people. Who knew?
When the noise and petty bickering subsided, I asked Lizzy, who was still on top of her drink, where the best outfitters were located. It wasn’t clever, but it was a start.
“Poseidon’s the best. Much better than Lucas & Teera Pramaunech.”
“Yeah, I got a bad outfit from Lucas & Teera when I first came here. The suit just melted off my back. Remember? When we went to that party with Vicky and Jake, to their place up the mountain? I was covered with black stripes. I looked like a zebra.” We all laughed at that. Maybe I laughed too loud, because they stopped before I did and the next question was: “Where do you come from in Canada, anyway?”
I told George about Ontario and Grantham. I wondered whether they would twig to the fact that Vicky and Jake came from there too. I exaggerated the size of my hometown, just in case.
“Hey, isn’t that where Vicky came from?” Randy the mindreader asked.
“Who?” I asked with my eyes open wide.
“Girl we used to know.”
“‘Woman,’ you retard!”
“She was a diver like you?”
“Hell, no! Vicky and Jake started all this. This was their scene long before we got here. You know the marina we were talking about? Poseidon? Well, they started it. But the government took it over.”
“What happened to them? Are they still running things?”
“Boy, you really did just get here! They started the marina, made a fortune. We think Jake ran off with the lolly, the grisby, the loot, the cash. He was a pal of ours, but he turned out to be a crook. Some say it was more than fifty million in U.S. dollars. But they didn’t get to spend it, did they?”
“What happened?”
“They’re dead. You know the routine. They’ve gone west, gone for a Burton, cashed in their chips, gone on ahead.” George drained his glass and slammed it down on the table. “Yeah, no two ways about that. They’re both out of here for good.”
EIGHT
I HADN’T PREPARED FOR THAT. I had been keeping an open mind about Jake, but I wasn’t ready to buy the proposition that I was working for a dead woman. I may be bad at remembering names, over my head here, but I’m not stupid. Hearing that my client was dead, even though it couldn’t be right, was a complete shock. Vicky dead! A ghost! Like Hamlet’s father. Like Banquo! What could I tell people? What kind of claim could I make against her estate? Should I catch the next plane out of here, or what? I tried to collect my wits in a thimble.
“When did all this happen?”
“First he went, then she did,” George said. “Vicky disappeared out on the reef. When was it? Two months ago. They found her floating among the sea ferns. She’d been snagged underwater with an empty tank and no spare. The whole colony here went into mourning. Everybody loved Vicky.”
“And Jake?”
“He’d vanished a couple of weeks earlier. People said the Tam-tams got him.”
“Tam-tams? What has this got to do with cheap taxis?”
“You’re thinking of tuk-tuks. The Tam-tams are the government police.”
“Are they sure it was Vicky?”
“Well, I guess there might be reasonable doubt. She’d been in the water for a few days before they found her. Nothing made of meat can last long near the reef.” George gave me a sharp look and asked, “Are you feeling sick or something? There haven’t been many accidents out on the reef. This was a fluke.”
“I see. I see. Isn’t it odd that two well-trained divers should go so close together?” I was trying to earn my wages, by pushing the known into the unknown.
“I don’t know. It can get crazy out there. You have to keep remembering it’s not our environment, it’s theirs. It belongs to the morays and the sharks, not to vacationing doctors and professors.”
I wasn’t doing much useful thinking. I knew I had talked to Vicky as recently as four weeks ago. Now I was hearing she’d been dead for the last two months. Something screwy was going on and I wasn’t amused. It was then that we paused long enough to introd
uce ourselves. They, according to my notes, turned out to be Elizabeth, an American from Cleveland; Randy, from Seattle; and George, from a few places, most recently Stuttgart. The Mary-Ellen they had been talking about was a Mary-Ellen Brownlow, from Liverpool. She’d left the expatriate community in a huff or a hurry and not been heard of for a couple of months. I gave them my name and told them I was taking a break from the cut and thrust of the highly competitive ladies’ ready-to-wear trade. At least if they asked me questions about that, I could probably answer them. My father hadn’t spent fifty years in the business for nothing. He had me making boxes for dresses and coats as soon as I was old enough to walk.
Fresh drinks were ordered and the old bottles cleared away. The group had started telling hometown stories as we slipped deeper into our beer. When there was a pause, I asked what the expression “Our Lady of the Drum” had to do with Fiona. Smiles were exchanged, but I didn’t get an answer.
At one point I had to excuse myself and went in search of a bathroom. My search led me past a bar constructed from pieces of flotsam and jetsam. Literally. The finishing touch was the figurehead of an old windjammer: a mermaid with cartoonist’s proportions appeared to be struggling against the bonds that tied her to the mast. There was still a bit of gilt paint clinging to her hair. She made up, aesthetically speaking, for the reeking, wet horror of the bathroom, of which I will speak no more, except to say that it made the one back at the hotel look a vision of bliss.
There was a new face at the table when I returned from the john from hell. Although the cigarette-holder clutched in his teeth was now pointed down, not up, I could tell that this was Father O’Mahannay’s friend Thomas Lanier. He had been drinking somewhere and the whole side of his blue suit was stained with whitewash, which he didn’t seem to notice. He looked like a very young teenager, stranded well beyond his limit, with no clear honorable retreat in sight. There was something spoiled-looking about him, as though he was proud of all the schools he had flunked out of. Maybe it was his rather patrician haircut. I don’t know.
“So you’re the good father’s new chum?” he asked, with a touch of a sneer in his voice. “Met him on the plane, I expect. O’Mahannay’s a true democrat. Move in, friend, and join us in a libation.”
“Thanks, but I’d rather have another beer, if it’s all the same.” Suddenly, everybody was laughing. I couldn’t figure these people out. I sat down across from Lanier and watched his face. “This is turning out to be a popular place,” I said to the others. “I thought it was out of the way.”
Randy examined his remaining beer. “Everybody who knows the docks knows Tam’s. It’s the out-of-the-way place for out-of-the-way people. We bring Tam collectible things for his bar, although there’s not much good stuff left on the bottom.”
“I need the smell of brine every three hours. Doctor’s orders.” Lanier grinned, but not at any of us. “Brought up in the smelly business of importing fish. Dear father wanted me in the business, but I’d rather look at the saltwater beach from Tam’s.” This time Lanier’s grin was aimed at me.
“He’s another Canadian, Thomas. Like Fiona. No, she’s Irish. I mean … Never mind.”
“Fiona! That chit! Underwater she’s fine, but on shore she’s got fewer resources for survival than Tess, for Christ’s sake!”
“Speaking of Fiona, why do you call her ‘Our Lady of the Drum’?” Once again my question was ignored.
“Thomas, remember when you were going to try to get us across the Channel on a fishing boat, so we wouldn’t have to pay to go through the Chunnel?” This was George butting in.
“Yes, we settled for trying to sneak aboard the ferry.”
“And got caught!”
“The purser lost interest when he saw my traveler’s checks.” Thomas was staring at the edge of the table, as though he were about to change it magically into a banquet.
“You can’t talk like that about Fiona in here,” Randy said. “She’s a friend of ours. Come on, Thomas, she’s all right. She’s given me diving stuff. Good stuff, too!”
“Saddle yourself with her and you can sell the rest of your gear. She’ll have you whitewashing a picket fence and looking for work in the Times. No, the Daily Mirror’s more her style. Look what I’ve done to this sleeve.” The full extent of the paint damage was still undiscovered. But he was getting closer.
“Who’s Tess? Is that who he’s been talking about?” I asked Liz in a miscalculated whisper. She rolled her eyes. The other divers either shrugged or shook their heads. I asked again.
Thomas opened one eye and said: “Hardy’s Tess. Don’t they have books where you come from?” I thought of Admiral Nelson’s last words, “Kiss me, Hardy,” but they were no help. I put it in my Memory Book for later study.
The jacket stain didn’t hold him long: he was examining his fingernails next. Liz was watching him too until she looked up and saw me watching her.
“Who’s going to see that he gets home?” Liz asked, looking in my direction. “Do you have the price of a tuk-tuk in your jeans?”
“I guess I can afford a taxi. I’ve had enough to drink anyway.”
“Look at him,” Randy said, examining the drunk. “He’s passed out. I say the emergency has passed. Sit down! We’ll get him home. You can see there’s no rush. He’ll be good.”
He was right. Thomas had fallen into a deep sleep. We watched him for a short time. Then the conversation began again, as though there had been no interruption.
“What was your name again? Are you really a friend of Fiona’s?”
“I was supposed to meet her here,” I confessed lamely.
“She doesn’t really hang out the way she used to,” Randy said, peeling the label from his bottle.
“Thinks she’s too good for us,” offered Liz, only to be shushed by the men. “Okay, okay, I’ll grant she’s good looking! But don’t let Circe blind your piggy little eyes to what she’s up to.”
“Balls! She’s doing the same thing you’re doing, same thing we’re all doing: just trying to get enough bread together to hold out for another month. That’s what we do. We hold on from month to month. Then we send a few begging letters home.”
“You may, but that’s not the whole story. I’ve got some money in the bank. I have a job I can go back to. I’ll work for a year, then dive the reefs here and up north for two years. That’s not bad, is it? Two years of play for one of work?”
“Remember Swedish Ingrid? She lasted a good long time before she had to go back.”
The body of the sleeping Englishman coughed, grunted, and rolled in his chair, finally subsiding into silence again.
“Yeah. She was okay. I miss her sometimes. Hell, she was a fun chick.” The two men sank into a boozy reverie, while Liz rolled her eyes at me, shaking her head.
“She was no saint, you guys. She sold dirty pictures. Remember all her cameras? How she used to bug all of us to pose for her. I never did; did you? She sent them back to Stockholm. That’s how she supported herself. To her, you guys were just more alien porn.” She began to giggle at her joke while the two men looked on.
“Why did George call Fiona ‘Our Lady of the Drum’?” I looked into the least sodden face before me: Liz’s.
“She’s found a place to live at the old gate. You know, the one you go through coming into the Old Town of Takot? There used to be an ancient signal drum kept there. Like the one in Kim.”
“Wasn’t Kim, it was The Man Who Would Be King,” Randy volunteered from the depths.
“You’re both wrong,” George said, pulling himself out of the slouch he had settled into. “You’re thinking of a movie called The Drum. An old Korda film with Sabu, the Elephant Boy.”
“What does it matter? I always thought that movie was Drums, anyway. Plural. Doesn’t matter, doesn’t matter.”
I began to get anxious about getting home to my hotel because I wanted to avoid a second encounter with that toilet in the floor. Liz had a word with Tam, if that was Tam, an
d in a few minutes a taxi arrived out front. It was now evident from my halting gait that this was not the day I was going to investigate the Golden Mosque or the Pink Temple nearby. I’d come back, I promised myself. One day I would allow myself to be a real tourist.
I was waved off in high style by my dry-land swimming pals, each supporting part of the drunken Lanier, and sank back into the rear seat of an ancient Citroën, which wafted me off into the developing dusk.
Of course, I couldn’t tell where I was going. I had to take everything on trust. But there were a couple of times when I recognized hotel signs and movie posters on billboards and on the trunks of palm trees. The women on the posters wore red marks on their foreheads. Like everything else around here, it probably symbolized something. As my hotel came into sight, I asked my driver to stop the car while I stepped into the street to become very sick in the gutter. I could see that I was not the first to offer a drunken benediction.
Later on, I dragged myself out again to see the Golden Mosque so I could tell my kids that I had seen the famous temple. There seemed to be only one near my hotel. When I got back, I passed out on my bed dreaming of my former schoolmates Vicky and Jake. He was wearing shoulder pads and a football jersey, and she was waving pompoms.
