Easy in the Islands

by Bob Shacochis

  He discovered that he was grinding his teeth and the muscles in his jaw ached. Jevanee had slipped back behind the bar, and every time Tillman glanced over there, Jevanee, now bold, tried to stare him down.

  “My mother was an old lady,” he told the inspector. “She was beyond love. She liked books and beaches, fruit, seafood, and rare wines. Traveling. There was no man in her life. There never was. She was even a stranger to my father.”

  “You just a boy,” Cuffy noted in a way that made Tillman think it was a line the inspector must use frequently. “Nobody beyond love, ya know.”

  “So?”

  “So, nobody beyond pahssion, ahnd nobody beyond crime.” Tillman blinked. Damn, he thought, Cuffy’s starting to make sense.

  “Even ahn old womahn need a good roll to keep she happy,” the inspector concluded.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Tillman said, standing up. “I have to get back.”

  He couldn’t get away before Jevanee butted in. Ignore Jevanee and life might possibly go on. The bartender used his mouth like a gun, the words popping spitefully while he focused on whatever spirit he had summoned to witness his oppression.

  “Daht ol boney-bag he call his muddah grabbin aht every blahck boy on de beach. I see it wit me own eyes.”

  “Jevanee, shut up.”

  “Oh, yes, massa, suh. Yes, massa.” He feigned excessive servitude, wiping the bar counter, the cash box, the bamboo supports with his shirt sleeve. The time would come when Tillman would have to face up to Jevanee’s vindictiveness. He had been steaming ever since Tillman had told him not to hand out free drinks to his friends from the village. Jevanee insisted no one but Rosehill’s tourists, who were not regular, would ever patronize the beach bar if it weren’t for him. Maybe he was right. Nobody was coming around anymore except on Friday nights when the band played. More and more, Jevanee wanted Tillman to understand that he was a dangerous man, his every move a challenge to his employer. Tillman was still trying to figure out how to fire the guy without a lot of unpleasantness.

  “Don’t listen to Jevanee,” Tillman told the inspector. “He’s pissed at me these days because of a disagreement we had over a charitable instinct of his.”

  “I give me bruddah a drink,” Jevanee said in a self-deprecating way, as though he were the victim and Cuffy would understand. Jevanee’s mood would only escalate if Tillman explained that the bartender’s “bruddah” was consuming a case of Scotch on his drier visits, so he refused to debate Jevanee’s claim. The inspector turned on his stool with the cold expression of a man whose duty it is to make it known that he must hurt you severely, that he may cripple you or make you weep, if you disobey him.

  “Look now, you,” he said, taking moral pleasure in this chastisement. “Doan you make trouble fah Mistah Tillmahn. You is lucky he give you work.”

  “Dis white bitch doan give me a damn ting,” Jevanee snarled, shaking an empty beer bottle at Tillman. “I work in dis same spot a long time when he show up. Ahnd what you doin kissin he ahss?”

  “Doan talk aht me daht way, boy, or I fuck you up. Hell goin have a new bahtendah soon if you cahnt behave.”

  Jevanee tried to smile, a taut earnestness that never quite made it to his mouth. Tillman arranged chairs around the warped café tables, backing away. “Okay then, Cuffy. I’m glad we had this opportunity to straighten everything out. Stay and have another beer if you want.”

  Cuffy looked at his gold wristwatch. “You will be around in de aftahnoon?”

  “Why?”

  “I wish to view de deceased.”

  “Uh, can’t it wait till tomorrow?” Tillman asked. “I have errands to run in town. A shipment of beef is coming in from Miami.”

  From his shirt pocket, Cuffy had taken a note pad and was scribbling in it. He talked without raising his head. “Okay, dere’s no hurry. De old womahn takin she time goin nowheres.”

  Tillman nodded, now in stride with the process, the havoc of it. “Cuffy, you’re a thorough man. If anybody’s going to get to the bottom of this mess, it’s you.”

  The inspector accepted this flattery as his due, too certain of its validity to bother about the subtle mocking edge to Tillman’s voice. His eyes were relaxed, hooded and moist. Tillman started up the footpath through the palms, kicking a coconut ahead of him, a leaden soccer ball, turning once to check what fared in his absence: and yes Cuffy and Jevanee had their heads together, the bartender animated, swinging his hands, the inspector with his arms crossed on his wide chest. Jevanee had too much energy today. Maybe his attitude would defuse if he were somewhere other than the bar for a while. He seemed to live there. Tillman shouted back down to them. “Jevanee, after the inspector leaves, lock everything up and take the rest of the day off.”

  The bartender ignored him.

  Tillman jogged up the perfect lawn along an avenue of floral celebration—tree-sized poinsettias, arrow ginger, bougainvillea, oleander—a perfumist’s tray of fragrance. On the knoll, graced with a vista of the channel, was the old plantation house, a stubborn remnant of colonial elegance, its whitewashed brick flaking in a way that benefited the charm of its archaic construction, the faded red of the gabled tin roof a human comfort against the green monotonous sheets of the mountains that were its background. Farther south, the cone shell of the windmill stood like a guard tower or last refuge. Tillman had huddled there with his guests last summer during a hurricane, the lot of them drunk and playing roundhouse bridge, the cards fluttering from the storm outside.

  When he was a teenager Tillman had flown down to the island during a summer off from Exeter to help his father build the two modern wings that flanked the manor, one-level box rooms side by side, as uninspired as any lodging on any Florida roadside. Tillman’s father was a decent man, completely involved in his scheming though his interest invariably flagged once a puzzle was solved, a challenge dispatched. The old man had worked for J. D. Root, one of the big ad agencies in New York, handling the Detroit accounts. His final act was an irony unappreciated—he perished in one of the cars he promoted, losing control on the Northway one rainy evening. He had gone fishing up on the St. Lawrence, convinced this time he would hook a muskellunge. Rosehill Plantation was his most daring breakaway but he never really had time for the place. Throughout his ownership, Rosehill lost money and after his death the checks from the estate in New York flowed like aid from the mother country. When a lawyer’s telegram reached Tillman, asking if he wanted to pursue more aggressively the sale of the plantation, he decided to dump the Lower East Side loft where he had been sweating out the draft for two years since graduate school and make his claim on Rosehill. Nixon had just been reelected. The States no longer seemed like the right place to be.

  Awash in perspiration, Tillman turned the corner around the east wing, his blood pressure a little jumpy, the skin on his face at the point of combustion, wondering if all the friction of a fast life could suddenly cause a person to burst into flame. Sometimes he felt as if it were happening. It wasn’t very easy to find peace on the island unless you hiked up into the mountains. Whereas it was very easy to catch hell.

  In the exterior courtyard behind the estate house, the new arrivals, husband and wife from Wilmington, Delaware, were inspecting one of Tillman’s few unequivocable successes, the gazebo that housed his parrot aviary, in it seven of the last rainbow parrots on earth. The project was really the veterinarian’s at the Ministry of Agriculture, a man who hated goats and cows but spent all his spare time bird-watching or digging up pre-Columbian artifacts, storing them in his living room until the far-off day a museum would be built. Together he and Tillman waged a public campaign on the island, the parrots’ sole habitat, to prevent their extinction. A law was passed for appearances, its advantage being that it clearly defined for the bird smugglers who needed to be paid off and who could be bypassed with impunity.

  After the crusade, Tillman decided to contact some poachers himself. They were kids, tough miniature bandits, the nest robb
ers. One was nine, the other eleven. Basil and Jacob, tree climbers extraordinaire, both as skinny as vanilla beans. They lived in a mountain village, a clump of wattle huts, one of the outposts before the vast roadless center of the island, all sharp peaks, palisades and jungle. When the hatching season had ended, Tillman and the boys trekked into the lush interior, camping overnight, Tillman’s neck strained from looking up into the canopy, his ears confused by the wraithish shrieks and skraws—skra-aaa-aw!—unable to pinpoint where the sound came from in the infinite cathedral of growth. But the kids knew their business. They were fearless, scaling to the top of the highest mahogany or madrone, indifferent to the slashing beaks of the females who refused to abandon the nest, shinnying down the trunks with the chicks held gently in their mouths, polycolored cotton balls, the fierce tiny heads lolling helplessly out from between the embrace of boyish lips.

  Tillman thought he would tell his guests from Delaware the story. The woman was scrutinizing the birds rather sternly. She would cluck and whistle at them, tap the chicken wire wall of the cage, but she did so without affection. When he finished talking, she turned to look at him, her eyes obscured behind oversized sunglasses, her mouth in a pout. Tillman guessed she was a bank teller, something that had made her very sure of herself without placing any demand on her intelligence.

  “It’s cruel,” she said.

  “It is not cruel. It’s heroic. These islands have a way of forcing everything but the lowest common denominator into oblivion.”

  “Hero,” she said sardonically. The husband looked skeptical. Light reflected off her glasses and sliced back at Tillman. He shrugged his shoulders. Perhaps he should bar Americans from Rosehill. Canadians made the better tourist. They allowed for a world outside themselves.

  The Land Rover started painfully, a victim of mechanical arthritis. Soon it would take no more to the prosthetic miracle of wire, tin, and hardware junk. Spare parts appeared from across the ocean as often as Halley’s comet.

  Onto the narrow blacktop road that circumnavigated the island, Tillman drove with reckless courage and whipping flair, showing inner strength when he refused to give way to two flatbed lorries painted up like Easter eggs, one named Sweet-fish, the other Dr. Lick, passengers clinging to everything but the wheel hubs, racing down the coastal hill side by side straight at him, Dr. Lick overtaking Sweetfish just as Tillman downshifted reluctantly to third and toed the brake pedal. Someday the lorries would spread carnage across this highway, Tillman thought. It would be a national event, the island equivalent of a 747 going down.

  In the capital, a pastel city breathtaking from the heights above it but garbage-strewn and ramshackle once you were on its streets, Tillman honked his way through the crowds down along Front Street, inching his way to the docks. On the quay, three pallets of frozen steaks destined for Rosehill were sweating pink juice onto the dirty concrete. Beef from the island was as tough and stringy as rug; if a hotel wanted to serve food worthy of the name, it had to import almost everything but fish. He located the purser in one of the rum-and-cake sheds that filled every unclaimed inch of the wharves like derelict carnival booths. There was no use complaining about the shipment being off-loaded without anybody being there to receive it. That was Tillman’s fault—he had been too preoccupied. He signed the shipping order and then scrambled to hire a driver and boys to break down the pallets and truck the cartons out to Rosehill’s freezer before the meat thawed completely.

  There were other errands, less urgent—to the marketing board in search of the rare tomato, to the post office, to the stationer for a ballpoint pen, to the pharmacist, who was disappointed when Tillman only bought aspirin. Most of his regular white customers spent small fortunes on amphetamines or Quaaludes. When Tillman had finished there, he drove over to the national hospital on the edge of town. Without a death certificate from Bradley, Mother was destined to be the morbid champion of cryogenics, the Queen of Ice in a land where water never froze in nature.

  The old colonial hospital was a structure and a system bypassed by any notion of modernity. Someone yelled at him as he entered the shadowed foyer, but it wasn’t apparent who or why. The rough wooden floorboards creaked under his feet. The maze of hallways seemed to be a repository for loiterers—attendants, nurses, nuns, clerks, superfluous guards, mangled patients, talking, weeping, spending the day in rigid silence. One naked little boy asleep on the floor, hugging the wall.

  He found Dr. Bradley’s office and went through the door without knocking. Bradley, chief surgeon, head physician of St. George’s National People’s Hospital, an agnostic operation if Tillman ever saw one, was reading a paperback romance, a man hovering over a fallen woman on its cover. The room smelled of sweet putrefaction and Lysol. The scent of jasmine wafted in through open screenless windows. Tillman sat down on a wooden bench against one bare wall. Flies buzzed along the ceiling. Bradley slowly broke off from his reading, dropping his feet one by one from where they were propped on the broad windowsill. His lab coat, smudged with yellow stains and laundered blood, sagged away from his middle. He recognized Tillman and smiled grudgingly.

  “Mahn, I been callin you, ya know. I examine dem peaches you muddah eat. Dey was no good. I think we solve dis big mystery.”

  Tillman knew this was his chance to end the affair but he could not forgive Bradley his smugness, his careless manner, the suffering he had sown.

  “You’re sure? What’d you do, feed them to a chicken and the chicken died?”

  “Mahn, Tillman, you doan have enough troubles, you must come make some wit me? Why is daht?”

  “You’re telling me she died of botulism?”

  “It seem so, seem so.”

  Tillman was incited to fury. “Botulism, Doctor, causes vomiting and extreme pain. How can you not know that? My mother died a peaceful death.”

  Bradley turned with eyes murderous. “If it’s so, de autopsy prove so. I cahnt know oddahwise.”

  “You’re not touching her. Somebody else can do it, but not you.”

  “Mahn, daht’s irrational.”

  Tillman jumped up from the bench and stood in front of the doctor’s cluttered desk. “You’d be the last person on earth to touch her.”

  “Get out, Tillmahn.”

  Tillman was in no hurry to leave. “Remember Freddy Allen?” he asked.

  “Who?” Then Bradley remembered and his face lost its arrogance.

  “He was a friend of mine, a good one. He helped me out at Rosehill whenever I needed it.”

  “Tillmahn, consider I am only human.”

  “Yes, you are. So was Freddy until he came to you. You gave him bromides for acute appendicitis. The damn vet can diagnose better than you.”

  Bradley stood so fast, his eyes full of menace, that Tillman tensed to defend himself. “Get out,” he shouted, pointing his finger at Tillman. “You muddah now a permahnent guest aht Rosehill till you come to you senses. Get out.” The doctor came around from his desk to open the office door and then kicked it shut behind him.

  Tillman, island hotelier, master of the business arts, student of impossibility, fond of weather that rarely oppressed, a man of contingencies and recently motherless—Tillman knew what to do. Whatever it took.

  Whatever it took, Tillman told himself, back out on the streets, heedless in the late afternoon traffic. Sometimes that meant nothing at all, sometimes the gods spared you muckery, blessed you with style, and everything was easy.

  At the airport he parked next to a single taxi out front, no one around to note this familiar island tune, the prolonged pitch of tires violently braked. Through the dark empty airport that always reminded him of an abandoned warehouse, Tillman searched for his friend Roland, the freelance bush pilot from Australia, a maverick and proven ace. Roland leapt around the warm world in his old Stearmann, spraying mountainsides of bananas with chemicals that prevented leaf spot and other blights. Tillman suspected the pilot was also part of the interisland ring sponsored by the most influential business
men to smuggle drugs, whiskey, cigarettes, stereos—whatever contraband could be crammed surreptitiously into the fuselage of a small plane. He seemed to be able to come and go as he pleased.

  Roland’s plane wasn’t on the tarmac, or in the hangar. Sunset wasn’t far away. Wherever Roland was, waltzing his plane through green, radical valleys, he would have to return before dark if he was coming in tonight. Tillman left a message with a mechanic in the machine shed for Roland to come find him at Rosehill.

  Twilight had begun to radiate through the vegetation as he arrived back at the hotel, lifting the mélange of colors to a higher level of brilliance, as if each plant, each surface, were responding to the passage of the sun with its own interior luminosity. Inspector Cuffy was on the veranda of the west wing, laughing with Lemonille, her eyes flirtatious. They clammed up when Tillman appeared beside them.

  “You haven’t been waiting for me, have you?”

  “Well, doan trouble yourself, mahn. I been interviewin dis pretty young lady.”

  Tillman looked at Lemonille, who averted her eyes shyly. “Perhaps we cahn view de body of you muddah now.” Cuffy said this without the slightest conviction. Tillman understood that, for the time being, the inspector was only interested in chasing Lemonille.

  “I’ve had a hell of a day. Can I ask you to wait until tomorrow?”

  “Daht strike me ahs reasonable,” Cuffy said, allowing Tillman to experience his generosity.

  “Besides, case solved, Cuffy,” Tillman said, remembering the doctor, the hospital. “Bradley says something was wrong with the can of peaches my mother was eating when she died.” If you want to believe such crap, Tillman added under his breath.

  “I will study daht report,” the inspector said. From the way he spoke, Tillman knew the investigation would drag on for days, weeks—especially if Lemonille played hard to get.

  “Mistah Till-mahn?” Lemonille buried her chin, afraid to speak now that she had drawn attention to herself. More woe, thought Tillman. More hue and cry.