Easy in the Islands

by Bob Shacochis

  “Look here, Willessly. If I were you I wouldn’t smile when I say that.”

  Giggling erupted among Willessly’s comrades. His bright smile only increased. Davis glared down at them all. Willessly wouldn’t withdraw his hand.

  “Me hungry, mahn. Please fah a piece ah bread.”

  “Jesus, he’s so good-natured about it,” I whispered to Davis. “Why don’t you give him some? There’s plenty.”

  “You don’t get it, do you?” he said, turning on me. His look was empty of everything I thought it should be full of—the intimacy we had established in Norfolk, cultivated in the garden of Nevis. “It would be a sign of weakness. When you give to people like this, they’re not grateful, they don’t respect you. What happens is they hate you. They think you’re a fool for giving in to them.”

  “But, Davis, he’s just a little boy.”

  “Me hungry, mahn.”

  “Let’s go,” Davis said, stuffing the loaves into his haversack. “Go eat a coconut,” he said to Willessly. The audience of kids thought this statement was extremely funny. They laughed, not at us but at Willessly, teasing and taunting him. A game was being played here but I couldn’t tell what it was. There we stood in the tiny square of the marketplace, the stalls abundant with a rainbow of fruits and vegetables, the air luscious with the smells of spices, of frying coconut oil and garlic and cumin, the scents of frangipani and lime. Palm trees sprouted up everywhere against the cloudless sky like exaggerated flowers. Calypso music screeched from several radios in the nearby buildings.

  “Me hungry, mahn.” Willessly bent down, scraped up a handful of dirt and put it in his mouth. The black kids responded as if this act were inspired.

  “Look de boy dere goin ahll out.”

  “He mahd. Him dizzy.”

  “Oh, sweet Lahd, him eat de dirt now.”

  And a shrill little-girl’s voice sang, “Momma goin beat you, Willessly. Momma goin strike.”

  “Let’s go,” Davis said. He spun me around and we started walking away down a grassy alley that led to the water. I looked over my shoulder. Willessly was spitting out the dirt. He wiped his mouth with the bottom of his T-shirt, leaving muddy streaks on the overbleached whiteness, and followed us.

  We walked along the beach away from town. I could hear the kids behind us having a grand time.

  The ocean on this side of Nevis was like a mountain lake, serene and glassy, bluer than the sky. As you walked along the shore, the water was so transparent you could easily spot fish. Long skinny fish like Willessly, fat clown fish, fish dressed for carnival, sleek hot-rod fish. The bay was crescent-shaped and we stopped in the middle of it to eat our food, a shadowy grove of sea grape and palms behind us, the cool sea in front. We sat in the sand and stripped down to our bathing suits. Willessly advanced on us. Somewhere he had gotten hold of a baby. Maybe the infant had been with the kids all along and I just hadn’t seen her. He toted her haphazardly, his arms wrapped under her arms and around her chest, the rest of her dangling loose, facing us, her cheeks like bowls of chocolate pudding.

  “You want to buy dis baby?” he asked Davis.

  Davis squinted at him. “How much?”

  “Twenty dollahs U.Ess.”

  “Get lost,” Davis said, chewing his bread.

  “She too dahk fah you? I cahn get you a clear-skin one, ya know.”

  Davis didn’t bother to answer. The kid handed the baby over to one of the girls backing him up. Willessly spoke directly to me for the first time. “You husbahnd doan like blahck peoples.” It was no accusation; there was no bitterness.

  “No,” I said nervously. “No, I don’t think that’s true. You shouldn’t say that.”

  “Yes, it’s true.” He insisted upon it in such a friendly, straightforward way, his dark eyes playful but firm, that I smiled. “He doan care fah de color ah shit.”

  “What?”

  “God made blahck peoples from his own shit,” he said, holding out his thin arm as if the evidence were there.

  That’s the most terrible sentence I ever heard anyone speak, let alone a child. I think my heart shrank and burrowed into my stomach when he said it.

  “Who told you that?” Davis snapped.

  “Me muddah.”

  “Your mother’s dead.”

  “Yes.”

  “You are full of shit, you little bastard.”

  “Davis, don’t say that.”

  “Where’s your pride, boy?” he demanded.

  Willessly had a quizzical look on his face, a veteran player determining his opponent’s newest strategy. He rubbed his snotty nose, went over to his group of friends and came right back to us.

  “You want to buy dis?” He held out an old swim fin, its rubber cracked and faded.

  “No,” Davis said. “I want you to get out of here right now.”

  “You want to buy dis?” Willessly now had in his small hands a conch shell that looked as though it had been lying in the sun for years, all but a trace of its inner pinkness burned away.

  “Go away. I told you I don’t want to buy anything.”

  “Lady, you want dis?” I shook my head no.

  “I give it to you. Fah free.” He thrust the shell into my lap. I thanked him and he retreated back to the group.

  I stretched out in the sand, letting the sunshine cook me. If you’d taken a picture of us it would have made a nice postcard, I guess, another enticing image for a travel brochure. The kids were in the water, splashing and laughing with no thought for keeping their clothes dry. The baby was left by herself propped in the bone-colored sand. A schooner under full sail edged by close offshore. The jungle soared behind us, climbing the volcano to a height that could no longer support it. And here was this rugged fellow beside me, my man, ready to kick the world’s ass.

  After an hour or so we started back to Charlestown, the kids still tagging behind us. We planned to catch the morning bus—not a bus, really, but an old flatbed truck with benches nailed down to it—to the windward side of the island. Davis was going to skin-dive for lobster on the barrier reef; I had heard about some women in one of the villages over there who still made pottery the same way the Arawak Indians used to, and I wanted to watch them.

  We stopped in a rum shop near the corner where we were supposed to pick up the transportation. It was dark inside and smelled like rancid butter. An old phonograph played reggae music, intolerably scratchy and loud. We had not entered into this shop before. It was full of black men who stood along the counter or sat balefully against the wall. The atmosphere was oppressive. For the first time I felt we were unwanted here, that we were resented. All our immunities were canceled: We were not tourists spending money. We were just there sharing the island.

  Willessly followed us in, the other kids crowded around the doorway. Davis bought a can of Tennant’s ale and some Aristocrisp peanuts that came packaged in old Heineken bottles. The peanuts were grown and roasted in St. Vincent, the mother island of the Grenadines. Davis loved them, said they were better than any you could get in the States. He shook some out of the green bottle into his mouth, crunched on them, took a gulp of his ale.

  “You want anything?”

  “No,” I said. “Just to leave.”

  “Mistah, buy me a Coke,” Willessly said. He had not retired his smile. I decided I liked him a lot. He didn’t care that Davis was deaf.

  “I’m real tired of you annoying me,” Davis said. I thought he was going to challenge the boy to a fight from the way he spoke.

  “Please fah a groundnut,” Willessly persisted.

  “Piss off.”

  “I’m going,” I said. “We’ll miss our ride.”

  I started toward the door. Faces creased with malice loomed up at me, thick, gagging smells, unhealthy air. The shop seemed more crowded than when we first came in. I had to push through people, all men, their muscles tight, their eyes reddened with an appetite foreign to me. Someone began to hiss, pssst. The sound was ominous but it only made me fe
el hard. The younger men scowled at me and called out, “Busy, busy.” In the islands, a “busy” woman is a whore. I wasn’t going to let it penetrate me; my determination to handle it all coolly just kept building. I should have been afraid but if I was I can’t remember. I was being bumped around. I looked back for Davis and felt a hand grab and pinch one of my tits. That did it for me. I felt walled off by sharks on one side, this righteous lion on the other, me and the kid in the middle trying to stay alive. There was this teenager in front of me, cocky and leering. He winked at me and snarled with laughter. His teeth were dirty and he wore a red beret that was puffed up with the wool of his hair. I knew he was the one who’d grabbed me. I reacted without even considering the consequence. I punched him in the ear.

  “Wha I do?” he protested, his high voice wounded, a charade of injustice received, waving his hands in front of him. “Wha I do? I doan do a dahmn ting. Dis bitch womahn cra-zee.”

  “Don’t tell me that, man,” I screamed at him. “Get out of my way.”

  He stepped aside and I passed out the door through a chorus of snickers, Davis and Willessly in my wake. I felt as if I had blood all over me and that that entitled me to anything I wanted. I kept on screaming.

  “Davis, goddammit, give the kid a peanut.”

  I waited with my hands on my hips. Davis didn’t do anything. Actually, he finished off his ale and chucked the can into the gutter.

  “If you don’t give the kid some peanuts, I swear to God I’m going to go back to the boat right now, unlock the shotgun and write you a good-bye letter on the sails in buckshot.”

  “Okay, okay,” Davis said reluctantly, although I believe he had a private desire to see me play out my rage. He called Willessly over. “Here,” he said. He gave him a peanut—one lousy peanut. I would have smashed the bottle out of Davis’s hand if it hadn’t been for the way Willessly responded.

  He held the peanut up in the air like a trophy. He jumped up in the dirt street, displaying the tiny gold nut to his friends. They each examined it enviously. He went from one to the other until they had all seen it.

  “What I tell you,” he called out to them. “What I tell you, Mahcus? You owe me, mahn. I tellin you now, I ahm de best.”

  They weren’t concerned with us anymore. I watched as they tramped back toward the marketplace, Willessly in front of them, walking backward, full of bravura, ten feet tall, the peanut still raised triumphantly between his thumb and index finger.

  “You see that,” Davis said. “All he wanted to do was make a fool out of me.”

  “All you wanted to do,” I told him, matching his awful smirk, “was teach him a lesson he didn’t need to be taught.”

  That evening, under a waxing moon and sharp northeasterly breeze, we took up anchor and sailed away. I knew that going out to sea would not be an act of war this time, and I saw, like Eve, that paradise had become just another place to leave behind. I felt good about that, because I could tell myself that across the waters, with the winds and sometimes against them, somewhere there would be another. I could move ahead without even thinking about it. And to hell with Davis.

  Lord Short Shoe Wants the Monkey

  There’s a jazz club in Barbados that you end up in after hours. You come in hot from the streets, fight your way to the bar for an ice-cold Banks beer, and take it easy taking it all in. Tonight there’s a big deal going down. Lord Short Shoe wants the monkey. He says he’s willing to pay.

  The tropical night is kinetic and full of potential. In a place like Bridgetown, there’s something going on somewhere, and it won’t be right—you’d be stealing from yourself—unless you’re there, too. So you come in from the streets, a damp ocean breeze coaxing you through the wrought-iron gate that leads up the stairs to the second story of this run-down Victorian relic, its pink gingerbread crumbling with termites. You are already sort of perfectly oriented—the fact is, you feel great. On the streets the people were good-looking, carefully dressed, friendly. There’s no rampant poverty here to close you up or make you defensive. You have witnessed the subliminal movement of moon from sea, the silhouettes of palm trees and sailboats framed in its orange hoop. Dinner at the Frangipani was excellent, the superlative cuisine of this island: flying fish, baked christophene, an arsenal of curries, blood pudding. You drank a rum punch that turned out to be a solvent for every piece of trouble and bad luck you ever experienced. The conversation at the table was full of adventure and brotherhood and, between the men and women, love was ripe and sticky and abundant—enough for all. You felt so much a part of it, and to be a part of it all is what you’ve always wanted.

  So you push through the crowd at the door, into an atmosphere of latent sex and laughing words and jazz, past the drunks and the heroes, past the world-class drifters and lean sailors, the silent dealers, the civil servants, and the deadly men with politics in their heads, the sunburned tourists and the beautiful Bajan women who flare their dark eyes at you as you rub past them and say, “Here now, watch yourself, boy. You think you cahn handle a brown skin gy-url?”

  At the bar you wait several minutes for your bottle of Banks to be snapped down in front of you by a lanky bartender who’s got on Ray-Bans and an undersized T-shirt with the logo Survival Tour ’79. It’s not like the rum shops on the side streets and alleys; there’s paint on the walls, no one pays attention to you, and the clientele seems safely cosmopolitan.

  The jazz is sweet enough to keep a dying man alive until the set is over. Sitting in at a table next to the musicians, there’s a stunning black woman singing a soft scat that explores the melody just below the acoustical level of the instruments. You think you recognize her and you’re right, you do. The lady is Melandra Goodnight, backup vocal for the calypsonian from Antigua, Lord Short Shoe. The group performed earlier tonight at the cricket stadium. Melandra’s still dressed in the white sequined gown she wears onstage, a piece of sartorial luminescence in front of the spotlights, string straps supporting coconut breasts that spark like the flashbulbs of paparazzi, the skirt slit on both sides to the top of her hipbones. What a sight Melandra is onstage when she spreads out her glowing black legs and the front and back flaps of her gown swing down between them like a long, elegant loincloth, her hips marking the beat while she grips the microphone with both hands and sings, sings with every muscle of her body. If you’re a woman you respond to her with awe and envy. If you’re a man, the sight of Melandra cripples you with lust.

  Eyes closed in concentration, her head bobbing, she’s floating in the music and you stare at her freely, wondering if you should move closer, be bold enough to sit at her table, buy her another Coca-Cola, which she seems to be drinking. At least she has one hand wrapped around a half-empty bottle of it, the long, red-tipped fingers encircling the glass. The inevitable image rises in your brain and you can’t get rid of it, can’t stop imagining that hand on you, so you turn away to watch the musicians. There are seven of them, seven old black men, five parked on wooden chairs arranged in a semicircle in the shadowy corner, the sixth on one side caressing the keys of an ancient upright, the seventh dusting the traps on the opposite side, behind Melandra, all of them unmindful of the audience, unmindful of the years by the dozens on the road spreading the gospel of jazz to houses that loved the message but not always the messengers. They have come here, like you, to take it easy, to do what they want. Luckie Percentie, the octogenarian on the alto sax, a New Orleans man with a lot of wind left. Shake Keane, the man who conquered Europe with his trumpet. After twenty-odd years he’s come home to the islands. The Professor on clarinet. Few people in the States know he’s still alive. Little Dalmar Gibson on the big baritone sax. It was Mezz Mezzrow who showed him how to blow the beast, in Harlem back in the thirties. Dulceman Collins hasn’t been back to East St. Louis since he was a teenager, but they still call him Poison Ivory there and talk about him like he never left. Rubin Hopper, the dark-skinned Krupa, and Les Harvey, the guitarist, both Chicago-born and bred on the blues. There’s n
o way you can put your finger on what they’re doing. One ear hears a tangle of roots, the other a hedge of flowering hibiscus, and Melandra’s voice dipping from bloom to bloom like a hummingbird.

  You stand there taking it all in, drinking two or three fresh Banks, brewed down the street. More and more your attention returns to Melandra. You begin to throb; it starts in your heart and works its way down. Your hand shakes somewhat as you light a cigarette. She’s moaning now, following the saxophone up into the hills, into the bush. The air is suddenly wet and dripping and all you smell is her sex. A monkey screams nearby. Something somewhere is howling. People turn to look at you. My God! You reel down the length of the bar to get outside on the balcony.

  On the narrow balcony that hangs over Front Street, Harter and Short Shoe are squeezed around a tiny café table. Several bottles of Guinness between them, the white man passive and serious, the black man passive and serious, trying to come to terms. The monkey is there, too, behaving itself, eating coco plums and a wedge of papaya. Both men look up briefly at the guy who comes staggering out from inside the club, knocking into chairs, his eyes glassy, his crisp chinos stretched by a terrific hard-on. A coke head, thinks Harter. He looks back at Short Shoe, who nods with insincere pity.

  “Dere’s anuddah white mahn come too close to Melandra,” Short Shoe says. Harter, irritated by the calypso singer’s sly, mocking tone, sighs and flicks his cigarette down into the empty street.

  “What’s wrong, bruddah?” Short Shoe says. “You cahnt take a joke?”

  Harter insists he doesn’t want to sell the monkey, says he loves it, but talks like he has a price even though his one proposition so far was said in jest, at least that’s what Short Shoe figured, and Short Shoe wants the monkey, wants it to put in his act to promote his recent hit, “Dis Country Need a Monkey”:

  We need a monkey

  To govern dis country

  Take any monkey

  From any monkey tree

  Give him a big car