She cradled her arms. He berated himself for upsetting her, and then blamed her for his worsening mood. To draw her attention from the beach, he nodded at a cruise ship approaching the harbor, trailing a cloud of black smoke.
“Surprised that one hasn’t docked. We were always in port by ten.”
She considered the ship with a bewildered expression, and he started down the road, feeling only mildly relieved when she backed away from the wall and followed him.
Near the terminal, men in sleeveless shirts pulled slabs of pork to the edges of oil drum grills to slow their cooking. Women hovered over tarps, arranging mangoes and bananas bruised from anxious handling. Rastafarians stood beside stacks of CDs, casting apprehensive looks at the ship’s fading trail of exhaust, a solitary cloud in an otherwise barren sky.
“Wonder if it broke down,” Dave said. “Somebody usually has to tow them.”
“Like the one that floated off Mexico for days. The Coast Guard airlifted croissants.”
“Almost looks like the Celeste. It’s hard to tell. They all look alike.”
She stared at the ship for a long moment. “Why did you get kicked off?” she asked.
“Sex with some seventeen-year-old from first class. His mom walked in.” He shook his head. “Rich kid blowing the service. Supposed to go the other way.”
“I was a liability. They didn’t want to get sued if I tried again. They had me sign forms stating I’d violated my booking agreement by harming a passenger.”
She trailed off at the approach of a man in a straw fedora. A diapered baby monkey perched on the man’s shoulder trembled within a rope collar. “Photo with the monkey? Five dollars, American.”
“Not interested,” Dave said.
“He’s well-behaved.” The man rapped the monkey’s head. “You see, he doesn’t bite.”
The monkey fanned its fingers over its face. Shaken, Helen turned away and started toward the terminal. Thinking only of his duffel bag, Dave followed her.
Inside the terminal, they walked along a shaded promenade, past window displays of cigarette cartons, coral necklaces, and plastic coconuts. They found the Tourist Office shuttered behind metal grating.
“We’ll come back,” Dave said. He glanced at Helen’s sweater. “Later today.”
For the next hour, they wandered along narrow streets, allowing stretches of shade to determine their direction. In a small park in the center of town, they sat on the rim of a dead fountain. A homeless man with yellow stubs for teeth wished them a good morning, as if it were. Some of us slipped between the loose tiles at the fountain’s base and in short shifts dreamed of clear puddles and soft loam.
It had not been a good morning for Professor Cleave. After an argument with his father about the distinction between class and class consciousness—one that abruptly ended when Topsy insisted that Professor Cleave, lacking the former, had no basis for judgment—he’d arrived at the terminal to find dozens of drivers standing on the curb, staring at the ship just beyond the mouth of the harbor. He parked behind a line of cabs and tapped the cover of Eric Williams’s Capitalism and Slavery. Those of us dozing on the dashboard lifted our antennae.
“I count you among my honors students, though you enjoy only the most relative of distinctions, given the delinquency of your peers.”
Our antennae stiffened, less in response to the qualified nature of Professor Cleave’s praise than the appearance of Desmond, who leaned through the window and blew smoke in our direction.
“You shouldn’t be paid to smoke as much as you do,” Professor Cleave said.
“Rich talk for a taxi driver.” Desmond tapped ash on the sidewalk. “There are times for breaks. I think your union has things to say about this. And your man Marx.”
“Socialism has nothing to do with lazing—”
“This is no time for lectures. You’ll be the first to know, and you didn’t hear it from me. The ship that docked yesterday was turned back from St. Barts last night. Butts refused it here this morning and closed the port.”
“It must be serious if Butts made a decision of any kind.”
“I’d say he has his reasons, but he hasn’t given a statement.”
“He’s never passed a chance to put his face on television.”
“You’re wasting your time here. Find what business you can elsewhere.” Desmond nodded to a group of drivers milling on the sidewalk. “Soon, they’ll give up, and you’ll be competing for scraps. I’m carrying news I shouldn’t, but there’s no good seeing a friend suffer the heat.”
“We scratch each other’s backs.”
“Because too many others would be happy to lash them.” Desmond patted the cab’s roof and started toward the terminal.
Professor Cleave snapped his fingers at those of us circling the radio. “This is not a holiday, and Desmond’s words should not tempt you. I can hear members of your cohort making mischief behind the vents, and you’d have no business mixing it up with them.”
As usual, he’d been too quick to judge. We had reasons for feeling agitated, and not all of them were related to our hangover. Those of us who’d jumped ship the day before had observed strange things aboard the Celeste—odd regurgitations and flecks of blood on crumpled tissues—and our antennae had been stinging all morning. But try to tell that to the judge! We crawled away from the radio, demoralized and dumbfounded, while Professor Cleave trolled cobblestone streets in the center of town. He pulled to the curb when he recognized Helen’s sweater.
“I’m relying on your sense of civic responsibility, now.” He guided us to a vent and leaned out his window. “Island tour? Fort St. George has the best views.”
Dave shaded his eyes, smiled, and stepped up to the cab. “What’ll it set us back?”
Professor Cleave considered the quiet street. “Pay according to your conscience.”
“You won’t make anything that way.”
Professor Cleave tensed, and we scurried beneath the hood. On the way to Fort St. George, he incessantly picked at his thumb, pausing only to wave at groups of women standing on the curb, comparing the contents of plastic grocery bags, and old men gathered on street corners, passing around loose newspaper pages.
“You know so many people,” Helen said.
Professor Cleave startled at her voice. She’d been quiet since climbing into his cab, seemingly consumed with her misshapen sleeves.
“If you follow the road we just passed, you’ll find a village called Stokes Hill. That’s where I live. Where those people are from.” At the outskirts of Portsmouth, he nodded at a woman sweeping dust from a stoop.
“She’s right, though. You know everybody,” Dave said.
“I drive a taxi and belong to two unions, so I know people, for better or worse. Someone once wrote, ‘Hell is other people.’ He was only partly right. I argue with them about politics, but in the end, we all live together. I go to their children’s baptisms and I help bury their parents.”
“Sartre wrote that,” Helen said. “It’s from No Exit.”
“You know the book?”
“I was an only child. I spent a lot of time alone, reading.”
Professor Cleave opened his mouth to speak but then glanced at his rearview mirror and lapsed into silence. Soon, the road curved around sheer cliffs battered by surf. Halfway up the coast, Professor Cleave turned onto a gravel path darkened by drooping vines and the broad leaves of rubber trees. The sky vanished and ditches disappeared beneath bracken. A troop of monkeys loped through underbrush and into the gloom. At the top of a hill, the sky reappeared, and Professor Cleave parked in a clearing before a desolate stone fort crowned with crenulated ramparts and dead cannons.
“This fort has had many lives since 1720,” he began. “At first, it housed British soldiers. In 1840 it became a workhouse for freed slaves, those arrested for vagrancy between harvests.” He squinted at a nimbus of sunlight edging a bell tower. “It became an overflow prison in 1985. Now, it’s a museum.”
/> “Doesn’t seem to be anyone here,” Dave said.
“People come in the afternoon. From the ships.” Professor Cleave said. “You’ll find maps inside and most rooms open to the public.”
He’d just delivered the pithiest of lectures, we thought, as Helen and Dave climbed from the cab. We emerged from the vents, grateful to be spared the superficial nonsense that belied the deeper history of a place we’d known all too well, before every sack of millet had been removed from its cellars and every manacle buried in its courtyard. As we settled throughout the car, Professor Cleave turned his attention to Capitalism and Slavery, only to curse its fine print.
“The sun has twisted things.” He rubbed his eyes and considered us. “In 1969, this man Williams said, ‘It is our earnest hope for mankind that while we gain the moon, we shall not lose the world.’”
Wise sentiments, we might have said, more exquisitely expressed in Gil Scott-Heron’s “Whitey on the Moon.” The point seemed moot, though. As we’d begun to sense, no one would be going anywhere anytime soon.
Professor Cleave peered through the windshield. Helen was wandering along the edge of a parapet, balanced unsteadily with her arms outstretched in sharp relief against the sky. She appeared ignorant of gravity and poised for a doomed flight. And yet, Professor Cleave thought, no harm could come to one so unburdened by history, like so many of the tourists who reveled in the ruins of his past.
“Not long ago, this was no place for tourists. Your relations who once scaled these walls would tell you the same.” He looked up at a rampart with a haunted expression. In place of dead cannons and mounted placards, he saw ghostly rings of razor wire, for in his mind, the walls before him would always be those of a prison.
The day of Professor Cleave’s arrest began like any other. He awoke before his wife and daughter, and after a quick breakfast of tea and bread, he sprayed his cab and turned on its radio to drown out the sounds we made crawling for cover.
“Someday, the meek shall inherit the Earth,” he said, snapping a plastic cap onto an aerosol can. “But today is not that day.”
That day was the last he’d later count among the happiest days of his life. To say he’d been happy in the years leading up to his arrest would be to overstate the case. He’d never shed his ruminative ways or overcome his social ineptitude. Still, he had a wife who tolerated him more readily than she resented him. He had a father who confined his nocturnal socializing to his own stoop. He had the love of his beautifully bookish daughter.
On the night that ended these, his most hopeful days, he’d been driving along the harbor, where Portsmouth’s shops gave way to the collapsing houses of Tindertown. The woman had stumbled into the street, and he might have hit her, if not for her arresting pallor. As he later recounted to a jury, she slurred no more than most late-night passengers when she gave him an address. In the back of his cab, she rested her head against the window. He spoke once or twice to stir her, drawing from a worn repertoire designed to hold the waning attentions of nodding drunks. When the odor of urine filled his cab, he pulled onto the shoulder, turned on his dome light, and took in the bluish cast of her skin. All he remembered of the drive to the hospital were the streaking headlights of passing cars. In the lobby, he screamed for help, knowing she was already dead.
The police came to his house at dawn. The woman had been an American heiress enamored with cocaine, and amicable international relations demanded the appearance of justice. Professor Cleave was the perfect patsy. He was sitting at the table, drinking rum straight from a bottle when the police arrived. While Cora and Irma cowered in nightclothes, the police overturned every piece of furniture in the house, rifled drawers, and produced tiny bags of white powder. They shoved Irma against a wall when she screamed. In the police van, Professor Cleave felt his fist swelling below a steel cuff and grasped the hopelessness of his situation.
At a farcical trial held after the bruises on Professor Cleave’s face faded, a prosecutor depicted him as a sociopath. Through tracts such as Kapital, Cabs and the Coming Crisis, he asserted, the defendant had promoted extremist ideologies of the most corrosive nature. Reading from a notecard, he provided the jury with an abbreviated catalogue of titles in Professor Cleave’s collection of books. Lamentable works such as Crime and Punishment, As I Lay Dying, Slaughterhouse Five, and The Naked and the Dead, he argued, provided clear evidence of a criminal mind and morbid predisposition, while Civilization and its Discontents disparaged the foundations of society.
“He waged a single-handed attack on our nation’s values. He is a social abdomination.”
“Abomination,” Professor Cleave blurted, drawing a small burst of applause from the crowded gallery.
“Did you hear that, you stupid, fat goat?” Topsy shouted in an ill-advised show of support. “My son is a social abomination.”
Professor Cleave’s fate was sealed, not by his pedantic outburst, taken as evidence of his blithe disregard for the judicial process, or by Topsy’s impromptu testimonial, but rather the delicate sobs of the heiress’s well-preserved mother, who insisted her daughter had never ingested any drug before making the defendant’s acquaintance. The hastily assembled jury spent less than one hour in deliberation.
“Crime and communism are no strangers,” the judge said before sentencing Professor Cleave to ten years in prison. “And they have no place on this island.”
Cora crossed herself. Irma shrieked. Topsy lowered his face into his hands. Idiots rule, we thought from the rafters. We’d seen it all before.
Professor Cleave spent his first hours in prison sitting on the cot bolted to the wall of his cell. In alternating states of shock and agitation, he picked at the seams of his orange jumpsuit and read graffiti containing misspelled claims to notoriety and references to sexual positions that defied his comprehension—violent and vulgar statements that underscored the extent of his alienation from prison society. Panicked, he lapsed into territorial behavior, measuring the dimensions of his cell and taking inventory of its scant contents. He examined his urine-stained mattress and pressed his face against a grated window, fingered a roll of coarse paper beside a steel toilet bowl and weighed a bar of soap in his palm. We scaled pocked concrete walls and circled the drain in a tiny sink, wondering at the boldness of his intrusion.
He shuddered at the sounds of us clawing through cracks and clogged pipes, stripped a shoe from his foot, and threw it at the sink. We scuttled down the drain, and by the time we reappeared, he’d spread a thin blanket over his mattress and stretched out on his back. Until the naked bulb above his head flickered and died, he kept his eyes squeezed shut, too overwhelmed to battle those of us brushing against his neck to take in his scent. Frankly, we considered him hopelessly unqualified for prison society.
The following day, though, he joined a roll call of pickpockets and male prostitutes, artless forgers, small-time drug dealers, and wet-brained brawlers, and to our amazement familiarized himself with routines that would guide his passage through a version of hell with intellectual isolation at its core. Beside men too muddled to masticate, he ate boiled cassava and bits of vermin with a plastic spoon. On a kitchen detail, he mopped lumps of gruel from flagstone floors. In a rudimentary workshop, he glued wooden legs to coconut piggy banks destined for duty-free shops. He suffered the company of convicts given to abusing fixatives—people even we’d learned to avoid. The spasms of your average huffer can be unpredictable, and for fear of thrashing limbs, we kept to the workshop’s far corners. From a safe distance, then, we heard Professor Cleave delivering his first prison lecture.
“Let me tell you, that’s no good for the brain,” he said to a baby-faced burglar flaring his raw nostrils over a tube of glue.
“Helped me kick drink,” interjected a toothless man struggling to open a can of epoxy.
Professor Cleave lifted a finger and started in about “enslavement to infernal adhesives.” We should have read the writing on the wall and skittered like hell!
&
nbsp; During calisthenics, he upheld pretenses of exercise, marching back and forth across the courtyard under the watch of impassive guards, led and followed by huffers too dazed to remember their crimes. Amidst twitching souls lost in phantasmagorical scenes, he rubbed his fingers to strip away flecks of dried glue and tried to suppress memories of a ghostly woman caught in headlights. Only packages sent by his daughter sustained his spirit. Every evening, he lost himself in books Irma had pulled from rotting boxes behind Portsmouth’s shuttered library. His world, during these respites from reality, expanded to fit the dimensions of his roving imagination. Transported, he read aloud.
“‘The frontier trail snaked past copses of tall cottonwoods along the arroyo and into the scorched desert,’” he read from The Treasures of Apache Canyon. “‘Suddenly, he saw the dark war-painted stranger sitting on a dappled palomino. He clutched his reins and prepared to defend his saddlebags of gold with his short life.’”
Those of us lazing on the sink turned in Professor Cleave’s direction and twitched. He clutched his book and leaned toward us, unnerved by our electrified antennae. After a moment, he settled back on his cot and contemplated the possibility of insanity’s onset. If only we’d calmed ourselves then. Anyone who has read The Treasures of Apache Canyon can certainly understand our enthusiasm. The following night, he started reading where he’d left off, and we gathered on the sink. He watched our antennae strain toward the book and dragged his palm down the side of his face.
“‘He surveyed the bloody horizon obliterated by saguaro and lowered his rifle, ready to do violence to the feathered stranger until he realized the stranger was his old guide and friend,’” he read, tacking back and forth between narrative and exposition. “It’s a desert, you see, and the sun has gone to his head, although you can interpret this as you wish.”
The Treasures of Apache Canyon wasn’t a complex novel, for fuck’s sake, but we could hardly complain, for no one else had ever bothered to read to us. In any case, he was in the throes of adjustment to prison society, so we went easy on him.
The Wonder That Was Ours Page 9
