“Good afternoon, Edgar. Welcome to St. Luke. Did you enjoy your flight?”
“Yeah—and I loved the landing.” He turned to look back at the truncated runway. “Short, you’re in the drink; long, you’re in the trees.”
“The St. Luke airport is not currently for the faint of heart,” agreed Coffee, leading Pender into the terminal, which was basically a cavernous lean-to. “But according to rumor, all that mahogany will be coming down one of these days—then they’ll level that near hill, extend both runways for the big jetliners, and we’ll be in a position to duke it out with the Virgin Islands for the tourist trade.” He sounded pleased by the prospect.
Coffee’s car, a cream-colored vintage Mercedes-Benz, heavily upholstered and polished to a buttery sheen, was parked at the curb, in the red zone. The airport road looped back to the Circle Road, the island’s only major artery. Pender yelped and braced himself against the red leather dashboard as Coffee began driving down the left-hand lane of the two-lane highway.
“We drive British style on St. Luke,” Coffee explained coolly. “No one’s quite sure why: we haven’t been owned by the British since the Napoleonic Wars.”
“But the wheel’s on the left,” Pender noted, as they slowed down behind an ancient pickup truck. “How do you pull out to pass?”
“It helps to have a passenger. If not, you hit the horn. If you hear somebody else hitting a horn, you don’t go. Not that anybody’s in all that much of a hurry.”
“God forbid,” said Pender.
Coffee grinned. “You’re livin’ on island time now, me son,” he said. “You’d better get used to it.”
7
Auntie Holly was late. Marley didn’t mind—it only gave him more time to practice penalty kicks in the field behind the school with his friend Marcus Coffee, the goalie on their championship Youth League soccer team. Dawn, however, sitting alone on the school steps with her backpack and Marley’s book bag beside her, grew more forlorn with every minute that passed, though it was not all that unusual for Holly to be late picking them up.
Eventually one of the other kids—the schoolyard was by no means abandoned—told Marley that his sister was bawling out front. He’d been looking to one side and shooting to the other all afternoon, so this time he looked left, faked right, and shot left, yelled Goaaaal! one more time, then foot-dribbled the soccer ball Auntie Holly had given him on his birthday (the leather was already scuffed away in patches) around the side of the school to the front steps, stopped it on a dime in front of his sister, and sat down next to her.
“Geez-an-Nate, gyirl,” he said gently, in the deep island dialect he and Dawn used at school, and sometimes among themselves. “Whatcha bawlin’ about now?”
“I’m scyared somet’in happen a’ Auntie.”
“Poppyshow,” he scoffed. “She be ’long soon.”
“You promise?”
“Sure.” He cocked his head. “I hear Daisy comin’ now.”
“Doan mek naar wit’ me,” Dawn said, shaking her tawny plaits angrily—to make naar meant to tease.
“Meyain’ mek naar—listen cyareful.”
Then she could hear it, too, the distinctive I-think-I-can-I-think-I-can putt-putt of old Daisy’s engine. Dawn slung Marley’s book bag over his neck for him, then ran to the curb as the minibus came around the corner.
“Sorry I’m late—I had to stop off to pay the rent.” Holly reached across the passenger seat to open the door. “What’s the matter, baby doll?” Dawn was still sniffling as she clambered into the back to open the sliding door for her brother.
“She’s scyared something bad happen to you,” Marley explained, while his sister closed the door and fastened his seat belt for him.
“Poppyshow,” said Holly, who’d picked up a little dialect herself, over the last couple of years. “Me so lucky, Mistah Rabbit, he want to wear my foot for luck.”
Dawn laughed in spite of herself. “You cyan’ talk Luke, Auntie—don’ even try.”
8
After the twin disasters of Hurricanes Luis and Marilyn in ’95, when housing was at a premium on St. Luke, Lewis had the interior of the overseer’s house on the old Apgard sugar plantation gutted and subdivided on the cheap into three smaller bedrooms, a kitchen, bathroom, and sitting room, all with freestanding plywood walls that did not reach the high, lozenge-shaped ceiling.
In the autumn of 2002, the Drs. Epp were the sole tenants, but the plywood dividers still stood, so each Epp could enjoy his or her own bedroom, as could their Indonesian companion, Bennie. Another advantage of the setup was that air flowed freely, allowing the house to stay cooler than it otherwise would have.
A disadvantage was that sounds carried from room to room. Emily, who’d retired to her own bedroom for a nap after Holly’s delightful and healing massage, was awakened by the sound of typing in the next room. She wrapped a red-and-yellow lightning-bolt-patterned cotton skirt sarong-fashion around her waist (Emily preferred going topless in the heat of the day; letting the big ’uns swing free, as it was known in the Epp household), left her bedroom, rapped on her husband’s door, then opened it.
Phil, also shirtless, looked up from the old Remington portable he’d set up on a card table. “I think you missed a step there, hon’. First you knock, then you wait for an answer. If it’s come in, then you open the door.”
Emily ignored him, as always. She crossed the room, peered over his shoulder. He covered the sheet in the typewriter with one huge paw—Phil’s hands were the size of giant tarantulas, and nearly as hairy.
“What are you writing?”
“About us. Our story.”
“Do you think that’s wise?” She picked up the pages he’d typed so far, and read the first two sentences of the first page aloud: “They met at S University. He was her professor, and although he was over a quarter of a century older than was she, it was love at first sight.”
He snatched the pages back, held them away from her at arm’s length—which in his case was lengthy indeed. “I think it’s important. There’s no guarantee we’re going to live forever, and I think it would be an unholy shame if our knowledge dies with us. It would be a disservice to science and humanity both. A secret like ours could knock the ten-thousand-year-old behavior-modification program known as organized religion into a cocked hat once and for all.”
“And destabilize civilization as we know it.”
“Tough titty for civilization as we know it,” said Phil. “Besides, nobody’s going to see it until after we’re both on the other side—what do we care then?”
“I want to read it.”
“When I’m finished.”
“Pretty please with sugar on it?” She pressed up against him until his face was buried in her bosom.
Back in her bedroom a few minutes later, Emily chuckled as she donned her reading glasses and propped herself up with several pillows. Titty power: even after all these years, Phil was still a pushover for her big ’uns. He’d only given her a few pages—but they were the pages Phil knew she’d be most interested in, as they covered perhaps the only critical moment in their shared history at which Emily had not been present.
Chapter III
As much as P still adored E, there was no denying that they had begun to grow apart after Indonesia. Her relationship with B was only part of the problem. More pressing was E’s growing obsession with what he still thought of as her Grand Delusion. No doubt because of the traumatic circumstances surrounding the death of Halu and his father, she grew more and more obsessed with the Niassian conception of the eheha.
She researched the African and Amazonian cultures that shared similar beliefs and continued to insist that there had been something both transcendent and transformative about her experience, although she was unable to articulate it in such a way that P could make sense of it. It was as though E had joined a cult. A cult of one.
Or perhaps two: B seemed to believe her as well. B all but worshipped her, rarely letting her
out of his sight unless she insisted, and she insisted less and less frequently, even allowing B unlimited access to her bed. Threesomes became more common than twosomes, and while P had long since evolved beyond jealousy, nevertheless he found himself missing their former intimacy. He took to frequenting prostitutes again, although once again he found it so difficult to achieve orgasm with said prostitutes, that the experience was often more frustrating than it was fulfilling.
Until that evening in a city not far from their new university. P was at this time in his late fifties, distinguished-looking, if not conventionally handsome. The prostitute appeared to him to be in her late thirties. It was a neighborhood bar, not quite a dive, but on its way. He offered to buy her a drink. She asked him if he were a police officer. If he were, asking up front would save them both time and energy, she explained. If he weren’t, it would spare them an otherwise inevitable awkward moment later.
He asked her if he looked like a police officer. She admitted that he didn’t, but told him she had a rule: if she didn’t get a straight answer the first time she asked the question, she had to see his wallet. He removed his cash before handing over the wallet.
Her concerns allayed, they left the bar separately, met on the corner, and walked to her apartment, a third-floor walk-up, one-bedroom efficiency. The living room, separated by a high counter from the kitchenette, looked like a college kid’s first off-campus housing, Indian bedspreads and flea-market throw pillows and a rabbit-eared thirteen-inch TV on the floor. Wary of being slipped a mickey, P refused her offer of a drink. She poured herself a stiff one.
They settled their finances before moving on to the bedroom, most of which was taken up by the only genuine article of furniture in the apartment, a king-size bed with a brass headboard. She emerged from the bathroom wearing a filmy, wraparound peignoir. P was sitting on the bed, leaning back against the headboard. He had stripped from the waist down, and his erection was already blue-veined and shiny-headed. She might have thought this was not going to take long, that she’d be lucky to get the condom on it before the thing went off.
She could not have been more mistaken. He insisted on straight missionary, and although she probably knew every trick in the book and tried most of them, or at least all the ones she could employ on her back, from talking filth to milking him with her vaginal muscles to inserting her middle finger up his rectum, there was no change in the quality of his erection, which might have been carved from ivory, his scrotum, which was clenched like a fist, his breathing, which was steady, or his expression, which was grim.
After what was no doubt the longest hour of her life, the woman would probably have done, or have let him do, anything, at no additional charge, just to have it over, but he was deaf to both her offers and her pleas, and when she tried to wriggle out from under him, he shifted his weight and pinned her wrists to the mattress.
She told him that was enough, that she wasn’t kidding around, and that if she screamed, someone would be there within seconds. This might have been an untruth. It was certainly a mistake. He put one hand over her mouth. His other hand had both wrists pinioned. She tried to bite him. He cupped his palm. She bucked and heaved and twisted her hips until she had dislodged him, then pressed her thighs together. His erection thrust blindly, futilely, sliding across the top of her pubic bone.
Panting for breath, P told her they could do this the easy way or the hard way. It was a line he’d cribbed from a dozen bad movies. She went limp, presumably opting for the easy way. He nudged her thighs open but was unable to insert his penis again. She tried to tell him something. He raised the hand covering her mouth, but kept her wrists pinned. She told him there was a tube of lubricant in the drawer under the bed. He allowed her to retrieve it. She crawled to the edge of the bed, reached down and opened the drawer, and pulled out a small, chrome-plated revolver. He slammed the side of his fist against the side of her head.
When she came to, her hands were tied behind the rail of the headboard. He was on top of her again, thrusting away. She could feel the barrel of the pistol digging into her side, just below her rib cage. She began repeating the word please. She might have meant please stop or please finish or please don’t kill me, or all of the above. He didn’t want to hear it. He pinched her nostrils shut with his free hand and covered her mouth with his own.
Her breath was moist, acrid with converted adrenaline. Please, she tried to say again. Something about the way her mouth moved under his, the softness of her lips, the slight increase in pressure when she pronounced the plosive, seemed to excite him further. Soon, he whispered into her mouth. She may have sensed his interest beginning to spike. Please, she mouthed again. Then the gun went off.
It wasn’t very loud. His lips moved against hers again. Oh shit, were the words he mouthed. It is possible, from her lack of an immediate response, that she thought for an instant the bullet had missed her. Sometimes, in the case of point-blank firearm injuries, P later learned, all the victim feels at first is the skin burn from the muzzle flash.
Soon the real pain must have begun to blossom, but hopefully not for long. If first-person accounts of similar but obviously nonidentical experiences, though necessarily unreliable, are to be believed, her consciousness would have begun to narrow, concentrating itself from a bright flare into a beam, then to a rod, then to a pinpoint of fierce white light.
All this while he was, improbably, still inside her, still thrusting. She sighed her last breath into his open mouth. As P sucked it deep into his lungs his hips jerked, his testicles roiled, his penis spasmed, and he spurted his semen into the condom with a cry that was equal parts agony and triumph.
Well, I’ll be goddamned, P said to himself afterward, lying there stunned beside the cooling body. He couldn’t wait to tell E.
Emily had to admit, the man had a certain talent for erotic narrative. She finished reading the excerpt with her hand tucked comfortably between her legs.
9
If St. Luke was to some extent an island out of time, its infrastructure having been badly damaged by Hurricane Eloise in 1975, by Hugo in 1989, and then again by Luis and Marilyn in 1995, and its tourism industry dealt a near-mortal blow by the Blue Valley massacre in 1984, then the former Peace Corps training camp known as the Core was an island within an island.
It wasn’t technically a sixties commune—everybody paid their own rent—but the ethos and the facilities harkened back to that era. Rustic cabins, Quonset huts, and A-frames, no phones, electricity only in the most expensive dwellings, communal shit ’n’ shower. Good people, hippies, neohippies, neo-Luddites, down-islanders from even more impoverished islands. Holly’s idealistic-to-the-point-of-otherworldly sister Laurel and her two mixed-race love children had fit right in.
It wasn’t the worst fit in the world for Holly, either, much as she missed her life in Big Sur. But although the reduction in her earnings had been extreme, the reduction in living expenses had not been. Not only did she have to support a family of three now, but almost all the necessities that appeared magically on the shelves of even the dinkiest groceries in California had to be shipped or flown into St. Luke, oil prices were through the roof, and since the majority of the property on the island was owned by a tiny minority of the population, rents were kept at an artificially high level.
After dropping by Apgard Realty to make her rent payment (of which a larger percentage than usual had come directly from the pocket of the extremely grateful Lewis Apgard himself), Holly took stock of her financial resources and discovered that she had been reduced to a few hundred in the bank and twenty in the pocket. Fortunately, in addition to being rent day, the first of the month was also tempura night at the Core.
Tempura nights were the brainchild of C. B. Dawson, an eccentric (insofar as the word applied at the Core) woman who grew her own vegetables behind her cabin and was given to disappearing into the rain forest for days on end. There she made a slim living from the fruits of the trees, never the trees themselves. Brac
elets and necklaces strung from wild tamarindillo seeds, necklaces from the seeds of the elephant’s ear tree, incense holders and paperweights fashioned from sandbox tree fruits, bowls and gourds from calabash and cannonball trees, that sort of thing.
Dawson was the first friend Holly had made on St. Luke, and the closest. At fifty, she was remarkably self-effacing for such a striking-looking woman. Her hair was still naturally dark and her figure impressive enough that last year a man who’d met her on the beach and claimed to own a modeling agency, had given her his card, and told her she could make a six-figure income modeling swimsuits for the mature, full-figured woman—a growing niche, apparently.
But she’d thrown the card away. She told Holly it was out of the question, but wouldn’t say why. Sometimes Holly had the impression Dawson was hiding from someone or something. Why else would a woman who was so broke she could barely afford the rent on the cheapest structure at the Core—a Quonset hut at the very top of the clearing—turn down that kind of money?
But tonight was tempura night, the one night a month that nobody, not even the poorest, green-cardless-est down-islander, went hungry at the Core. Dawson gathered firewood from the forest, set up a wok the size of a microwave antenna in the center of the hillside, established a perimeter of kerosene torches to keep the mosquitos at bay, and spent the next few hours dancing her wok dance in the flickering light of the tiki torches. She peeled, sliced, diced, battered, dropped morsels into the boiling oil and fished them out with a flourish when they floated golden brown to the surface. Young Marley helped by working the bellows with his feet, and the rest of the Corefolk kicked in whatever foodstuffs they had on hand or could afford to buy.
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