“Dey just markin you, Mr. Prince. Don’t be troubled.”
Where was George’s voice coming from? It sounded right inside his ear. Oh, well … . He wasn’t troubled. The fires were weird, lovely. One drifted to within a foot of his eyes, hovering there, its violet-tipped edges shifting, not with the randomness of flame but with a flowing, patterned movement, a complex pulse; its center was an iridescent white. Must not be copepods.
It drifted closer.
Very lovely. A wash of violet spread from its edges in and was absorbed by the whiteness.
It brushed against his left eye.
Prince’s vision went haywire, spinning. He had a glimpse of the sentinel sharks, a blurred impression of the latticework of shadow on the reef wall, then darkness. The cold touch, brief as it had been, a split second, had burned him, chilled him, as if a hypodermic had ever so slightly pricked the humor and flooded him with an icy serum, leaving him shuddering.
“Dey bound him!” George?
“Be watchful down dere, Mr. Prince.” Jubert.
The shutter banged open, and bright, sweet, warming sunlight poured in. He realized he had fallen. His legs were entangled in an unyielding something that must be the chair.
“You just had a little fit, man. Happens sometimes the first time. You gonna be fine.”
They pulled him up and helped him out onto the landing and down the stair. He tripped and fell the last three steps, weak and drunk, still shivering, fuddled by the sunlight.
Rudy pressed the rum bottle into his hands. “Keep in the sun for a while, man. Get your strength back.”
“Oh, Mr. Prince!” A skinny black arm waved from the window of the gaudy box on stilts, and he heard smothered giggles. “You got work for me, Mr. Prince?”
Severe physical punishment was called for! Nobody was going to get away with bad-tripping him!
Prince drank, warmed himself, and plotted his revenge on the steps of the dilapidated Hotel Captain Henry. (The hotel was named for Henry Meachem, the pirate whose crews had interbred with Carib and Jamaican women, thereby populating the island, and whose treasure was the focal point of many tall tales.) A scrawny, just-delivered bitch growled at him from the doorway. Between growls she worried her inflamed teats, a nasty sucking that turned Prince’s saliva thick and ropy. He gave old Mike, the hotel flunky, twenty-five centavos to chase her off, but afterward old Mike wanted more.
“I be a bitch, mon! I strip de shadow from your back!” He danced around Prince, flicking puny left jabs. Filthy, wearing colorless rags and a grease-stained baseball cap, flecks of egg yolk clotting his iron-gray whiskers.
Prince flipped him another coin and watched as he ran off to bury it. The stories said that Mike had been a miser, had gone mad when he’d discovered all his money eaten by mice and insects. But Roblie Meachem, owner of the hotel, said, “He just come home to us one mornin. Didn’t have no recollection of his name, so we call him Mike after my cousin in Miami.” Still, the stories persisted. It was the island way. (“Say de thing long enough and it be so.”) And perhaps the stories had done some good for old Mike, effecting a primitive psychotherapy and giving him a legend to inhabit. Mike returned from his hiding place and sat beside the steps, drawing circles in the dust with his finger and rubbing them out, mumbling, as if he couldn’t get them right.
Prince flung his empty bottle over a shanty roof, caring not where it fell. The clarity of his thoughts annoyed him; the coral had sobered him somewhat, and he needed to regain his lost momentum. If Rita Steedly weren’t home, well, he’d be within a half mile of his own bar, the Sea Breeze; but if she were … Her husband, an ecologist working for the government, would be off island until evening, and Prince felt certain that a go-round with Rita would reorient him and reinstitute the mean drunken process which the coral had interrupted.
Vultures perched on the pilings of Rita Steedly’s dock, making them look like carved ebony posts. Not an uncommon sight on the island, but one Prince considered appropriate as to the owner’s nature, more so when the largest of them flapped up and landed with a crunch in a palm top overlooking the sun deck where she lay. The house was blue stucco on concrete pilings standing in a palm grove. Between the trunks, the enclosed waters of the reef glittered in bands and swirls of aquamarine, lavender, and green according to the varying depth and bottom. Sea grape grew close by the house, and the point of land beyond it gave out into mangrove radicle.
As he topped the stairs, Rita propped herself on her elbows, pushed back her sunglasses, and weakly murmured, “Neal,” as if summoning her lover to a deathbed embrace. Then she collapsed again upon the blanket, the exhausted motion of a pale dead frond. Her body glistened with oils and sweat, and her bikini top was unhooked and had slipped partway off.
Prince mixed a rum and papaya juice from the serving cart by the stair. “Just smoked some black coral with the boys down at Ghetto Liquors.” He looked back at her over his shoulder and grinned. “De spirits tol’ me dat I must purify myself wit de body of a woman fore de moon is high.”
“I thought your eyes were very yellow today. You should know better.” She sat up; the bikini top dropped down onto her arms. She lifted a coil of hair which had stuck to her breasts, patting it into place behind her ear. “There isn’t anything on this island that’s healthy anymore. Even the fruit’s poisoned! Did I tell you about the fruit?”
She had. Her little girl’s voice grated on Prince, but he found her earnestness amusing, attractive for its perversity. Her obsession with health seemed no less a product of trauma than did his own violent disposition.
“It was just purple lights and mild discomfort,” he said, sitting beside her. “But a headache and a drowsy sensation would be a good buzz to those black hicks. They tried to mess with my mind, but …” He leaned over and kissed her. “I made good my escape and came straightaway.”
“Jerry said he saw purple lights, too.” A grackle holding a cigarette butt in its beak hopped up on the railing, and Rita shooed it off.
“He smoked it?”
“He smokes it all the time. He wanted me to try it, but I’m not poisoning myself any more than I have to with this … this garbage heap.” She checked his eyes. “They’re getting as bad as everyone else’s. Still, they aren’t as bad as the people’s in Arkansas. They were so yellow they almost glowed in the dark. Like phosphorescent urine!” She shuddered dramatically, sighed, and stared glumly up into the palms. “God! I hate this place!”
Prince dragged her down to face him. “You’re a twitch,” he said.
“I’m not!” she said angrily, but fingered loose the buttons of his shirt as she talked. “Everything’s polluted down here. Dying. And it’s worse in the States. You can see the wasting in people’s faces if you know how to look for it. I’ve tried to talk Jerry into leaving, but he says he’s committed. Maybe I’ll leave him. Maybe I’ll go to Peru. I’ve heard good things about Peru.”
“You’ll see the wasting in their faces,” said Prince.
Her arms slid around his back, and her eyes opened and closed, opened and closed, the eyes of a doll whose head you manipulated. Barely seeing him, seeing something else in his place, some bad sign or ugly rumor.
As his own eyes closed, as he stopped thinking, he gazed out past her head to the glowing, many-colored sea and saw in the pale sky along the horizon a flash of the way it had been after a burn-off: the full-bore immensity and silence of the light; the clear, innocent air over paddies and palms blackened like matchsticks; and how they’d moved through the dead land, crunching the scorched, brittle stalks underfoot, unafraid, because every snake within miles was now just a shadow in the cinders.
Drunk, blind, old John Anderson McCrae was telling stories at the Sea Breeze, and Prince wandered out onto the beach for some peace and quiet. The wind brought fragments of the creaky voice. “ … dat cross were studded with emeralds … and sapphires …” The story about Meachem’s gold cross (supposedly buried off the west end of the island)
was John’s masterpiece, told only at great expense to the listener. He told how Meachem’s ghost appeared each time his treasure was threatened, huge, a constellation made of the island stars. “ … and de round end of his peg leg were de moon shine down …” Of course, Meachem had had two sound legs, but the knowledge didn’t trouble John. “A mon’s ghost may suffer injury every bit as de mon,” he’d say; and then, to any further challenge, “Well, de truth may be lackin in it, bit it capture de spirit of de truth.” And he’d laugh, spray his rummy breath in the tourists’ faces, and repeat his commonplace pun. And they would pay him more because they thought he was cute, colorful, and beneath them.
White cumulus swelled from the horizon, and the stars blazed overhead so bright and jittery they seemed to have a pulse in common with the rattle of the Sea Breeze’s generator. The reef crashed and hissed. Prince screwed his glass into the sand and settled back against a palm trunk, angled so he could see the deck of the bar. Benches and tables were built around coconut palms which grew up through the deck; orange lights in the form of plastic palms were mounted on the trunks. Not an unpleasant place to sit and watch the sea.
But the interior of the Sea Breeze bordered on the monstrous: lamps made of transparent-skinned blowfish with bulbs in their stomachs; treasure maps and T-shirts for sale; a giant jukebox glowing red and purple like the crown jewels in a protective cage of two-by-fours; garish pirate murals on the walls; and skull-and-crossbones pennants hanging from the thatched roof. The bar had been built and painted to simulate a treasure chest with its lid ajar. Three Carib skulls sat on shelves over the bottles, with red bulbs in their jaws which winked on and off for birthdays and other celebrations. It was his temple to the stupidity of Guanoja Menor; and, being his first acquisition, memorialized a commitment he had made to the grotesque heart of acquisition itself.
A burst of laughter, shouts of “Watch out!” and “Good luck!” and old John appeared at the railing, groping his way along until he found the stair and stumbled down onto the beach. He weaved back and forth, poking the air with his cane, and sprawled in the sand at Prince’s feet. A withered brown dummy stuffed into rags and flung overboard. He sat up, cocking his head. “Who’s dere?” The lights from the Sea Breeze reflected off his cataracts; they looked like raw silver nuggets embedded in his skull.
“Me, John.”
“Is dat you, Mr. Prince? Well, God bless you!” John patted the sand, feeling for his cane, then clutched it and pointed out to sea. “Look, Mr. Prince. Dere where de Miss Faye go turtlin off to de Chinchorro Bank.”
Prince saw the riding lights moving toward the horizon, the indigo light rocking on the mast head, then wondered how in the hell … The indigo light swooped at him, darting across miles of wind and water in an instant, into his eyes. His vision went purple, normalized, purpled again, as if the thing were a police flasher going around and around in his head.
And it was cold.
Searing, immobilizing cold.
“Ain’t dis a fine night, Mr. Prince? No matter how blind a mon gets, he can recognize a fine night!”
With a tremendous effort Prince clawed at the sand, but old John continued talking.
“Dey say de island take hold of a mon. Now dat hold be gentle cause de island bear no ill against dem dat dwell upon it in de lawful way. But dose dat lords it over de island, comes a night dere rule is done.”
Prince wanted badly to scream because that might release the cold trapped inside him; but he could not even strain. The cold possessed him. He yearned after John’s words, not listening but stretching out toward them with his wish. They issued from the soft tropic air like the ends of warm brown ropes dangling just beyond his frozen grasp.
“Dis island poor! And de people fools! But I know you hear de sayin dat even de sick dog gots teeth. Well, dis island gots teeth dat grows down to the center of things. De Carib say dat dere’s a spirit from before de back time locked into de island’s root, and de Baptist say dat de island be a fountainhead of de Holy Spirit. But no matter what de truth, de people have each been granted a portion of dat spirit. And dat spirit legion now!”
The light behind Prince’s eyes whirled so fast he could no longer distinguish periods of normal vision, and everything he saw had a purplish cast. He heard his entire agony as a tiny, scratchy sound deep in his throat. He toppled on his side and saw out over the bumpy sand, out to a point of land where wild palms, in silhouette against a vivid purple sky, shook their fronds like plumed African dancers, writhing up, ecstatic.
“Dat spirit have drove off de English! And one day it will drive de Sponnish home! It slow, but it certain. And dat is why we celebrate dis night … Cause on dis very night all dose not of de spirit and de law must come to judgment.”
John’s shoes scraped on the sand.
“Well, I’ll be along now, Mr. Prince. God bless you.”
Even when his head had cleared and the cold dissipated, Prince couldn’t work it out. If Jerry Steedly smoked this stuff all the time, then he must be having an abnormal reaction. A flashback. The thing to do would be to overpower the drug with depressants. But how could old John have seen the turtling boat? Maybe it never happened? Maybe the coral simply twitched reality a bit, and everything since Ghetto Liquors had been a real-life fantasy of amazing exactitude. He finished his drink, had another, steadied himself, and then hailed the jitney when it passed on its way to town, on his way to see Rudy and Jubert and George.
Vengeance would be the best antidote of all for this black sediment within him.
Independence Day.
The shanties dripped with colored lights, and the dirt road glowed orange, crisscrossed by dancers and drunks who collided and fell. Skinny black casualties lay underneath the shanties, striped by light shining down through the floorboards. Young women danced in the bar windows; older, fatter women, their hair in turbans, glowering, stood beside tubs of lobster salad and tables laden with coconut bread and pastries. The night was raucous, blaring, hooting, shouting. All the dogs were in hiding.
Prince stuffed himself on the rich food, drank, and then went from bar to bar asking questions of men who pawed his shirt, rolled their eyes, and passed out for an answer. He could find no trace of Rudy or George, but he tracked Jubert down in a shanty bar whose sole designation as a bar was a cardboard sign, tacked on a palm tree beside it, which read “Frenly Club No Riot.” Prince lured him outside with the promise of marijuana, and Jubert, stupidly drunk, followed to a clearing behind the bar where dirt trails crossed, a patch of ground bounded by two other shanties and banana trees. Prince smiled a smile of good fellowship, kicked him in the groin and the stomach, and broke Jubert’s jaw with the heel of his hand.
“Short cut draw blood,” said Prince. “Ain’t dat right. You don’t trick with de mighty.”
He nudged Jubert’s jaw with his toe.
Jubert groaned; blood welled from his mouth, puddling black in the moonlight.
“Come back at me and I’ll kill you,” said Prince.
He sat cross-legged beside Jubert. Moonlight saturated the clearing, and the tattered banana leaves looked made of gray-green silk. Their trunks showed bone white. A plastic curtain in a shanty window glowed with mystic roses, lit by the oil lamp inside. Jukebox reggae chip-chipped at the soft night, distant laughter …
He let the clearing come together around him. The moon brightened as though a film had washed from its face; the light tingled his shoulders. Everything—shanties, palms, banana trees, and bushes—sharpened, loomed, grew more encircling. He felt a measure of hilarity on seeing himself as he’d been in the jungle of Lang Biang, freakishly alert. It conjured up cliched movie images. Prince, the veteran maddened by memory and distanced by trauma, compelled to relive his nightmares and hunt down these measly offenders in the derelict town. The violent American legend. The war-torn Prince of the cinema. He chuckled. His life, he knew, was devoid of such thematic material.
He was free of compulsion.
Thousa
nds of tiny shake-hands lizards were slithering under the banana trees, running over the sandy soil on their hind legs. He could see the disturbance in the weeds. A hibiscus blossom nodded from behind a shanty, an exotic lure dangling out of the darkness, and the shadows beneath the palms were deep and restless … not like the shadows in Lang Biang, still and green, high in the vaulted trees. Spirits had lived in those trees, so the stories said, demon-things with iron beaks who’d chew your soul into rags. Once he had shot one. It had been (they told him) only a large fruit bat, deranged, probably by some chemical poison, driven to fly at him in broad daylight. But he had seen a demon with an iron beak sail from a green shadow and fired. Nearly every round must have hit, because all they’d found had been scraps of bloody, leathery wing. Afterward they called him Deadeye and described how he’d bounced the bat along through the air with bursts of unbelievable accuracy.
He wasn’t afraid of spirits.
“How you doin, Jube?” Prince asked.
Jubert was staring at him, wide-eyed.
Clouds swept across the moon, and the clearing went dark, then brightened.
Year's Best Science Fiction 02 # 1985 Page 58
