Easy in the Islands

by Bob Shacochis

Ahnd a pretty secretaree

  Den dis little monkey

  Make a big monkey

  Outta we.

  There are four more verses, each progressively broadening the insult against the island’s prime minister.

  When the record aired on Radio Antilles last month, the fellows at Government House in Antigua sat down to discuss the pros and cons of grabbing Short Shoe and giving him a lesson in lyric writing. He got the word that the bigshots were visibly unhappy with him, knew it was only temporary but decided it was time to take the band out to the islands, work down the chain to Trinidad, and then maybe a couple of dates in Georgetown before taking the show north to Brooklyn and Toronto. He was airborne in a yellow Liat Avro before the bookings were confirmed. The performances they did were sellouts, sneak-ins, crowd crazy. The record shops in each place couldn’t keep the forty-five stocked.

  But Short Shoe knows that something is missing in the repertoire. He has a fondness for props and gimmicks and drama, anything that will make him stand out and contribute to his growing legend. Wearing shoes with the toes cut out of them was a decision of this nature. They symbolize, he says, his boyhood and his humble background, his ties with the people. When his momma couldn’t afford anything but trouble, her son inherited charity shoes from the Bosom of Love First Baptist Church. No size seemed to fit his awkward feet, so he chopped off the toes of the pair that appealed to him—dusty black wingtips—with his machete. He wore them for eight years. Now he wears Adidas with his meaty toes poking out the front. He will not tolerate any humor about big feet. The shoes, he says repeatedly, are a symbol, not a joke.

  Melandra first joined the group with the debut of “Coffee Grinder.” During the chorus Short Shoe would leap up against her and grind away from behind. With the song “Leggo Tourist Lady,” he became more ambitious. On the beach, he found a plump white girl down vacationing from the States. Prepared to pay, in one way or another, for her services, he was still not at all surprised when she immediately agreed to accommodate him in any way she could. He waited for carnival and the calypso-king competition. He waited until the end of the set to do the song. As he began the second verse, she pranced out onstage from the wings and took his arm, put her pink cheek against his chest. “Leggo lady,” he sang and shook her off. She persisted, hugging him around the waist. “Leggo tourist lady,” he sang breathlessly, and danced away from her. She fell to her knees and crawled after him, wrapping her arms around his shins, trying to pull him down. “Leggo tourist leggo.” The crowd on the parade grounds took up the chant. The percussionists banged down into it with brake drums and congas, unleashing total bacchanal, a frenzied, drunken spree. Short Shoe sank lower and lower onto the white girl until almost on top of her. Then the horns drilled back into the beat and Melandra, undaunted Melandra, pulled Short Shoe up by his ear and kicked him in the ass. He finished the song in triumph.

  The King.

  He realizes that he has a reputation to uphold, that he must give the people all he can, and in return they will love him and allow him the wealth they themselves will never have. There’s a vision he’s had since he first picked out the notes of the monkey tune on the old Buck Owens guitar, red-white-and-blue paneled, he keeps next to his bed. He sees himself as he knows his fans must see him under the lights: clean and big and randy, his beard the right stroke of revolution, a savior in extrasnug white bell-bottoms, or at least a prophet, the voice of his people, a bull, a rogue angel, a star.

  He sees himself onstage. The shrill brass salutes Melandra’s entrance with the monkey. They dress the little fucker in an executive blue shirt jac and schoolboy shorts. The word Boss is screened on the back of the monkey’s shirt in red letters. Melandra straps a toy holster and pistol around the primate’s waist. The monkey dances around in a circle, does back flips, pretends to shoot at the crowd with the gun. At the end of the song the monkey hops onto Short Shoe, climbs him like a tree and balancing on top of Short Shoe’s ropey head, pulls down its tiny shorts and moons the audience. Glorious. This is what Short Shoe pictures in his mind, but so far he hasn’t been able to re-create it for the world.

  The first time they tried to use a monkey was in St. Kitts. The monkey bolted offstage as soon as Melandra let go of it, never to be seen again. In Montserrat, Short Shoe made his next attempt, asking around if anybody had a domesticated monkey for sale. Nobody had one on hand, but as soon as the news spread that Short Shoe wanted a monkey, every ragged kid on the island went up into the mountains to find him one. Out of the many brought down from the bush, he chose the one that seemed the calmest. He purchased a light chain at the hardware store; some ganja-soothed Rastafarian in a leather shop took an entire day making the monkey a little collar. The calypsonian introduced the monkey into the act three nights later. Short Shoe clipped his end of the leash around his wrist so his hands would be unencumbered while he danced and sang. When Melandra tried to put the clothes on the monkey, the monkey sprang onto Short Shoe’s thigh, viciously biting him over and over. The music stopped, the band members rushed to help. The monkey drew blood from all of them before they could unfasten the leash from Short Shoe’s wrist. But the dream still lives for Short Shoe. It is a good idea, and good ideas make money. He knows he can make it work if he only finds the right monkey. As always, the knowledge that he must give the people what they want drives him onward.

  Indeed, before he even reached Barbados two days ago the word had been passed through the grapevine that Short Shoe was looking for a monkey. Anybody who gave any thought to the problem arrived at the same solution: Hahtah got himself a good monkey. And that’s what they told Short Shoe when he landed.

  “So what about it,” Harter says. “You like this jazz stuff?”

  “Yeah, nice,” Short Shoe answers quickly, peering around like his attention should be elsewhere. He’s tired of bullshitting, which is a very new feeling for him, but all he can think about is getting the monkey. They’ve gone through five rounds of Guinness and gotten nowhere. Harter has been tonelessly monologuing diesel engines and Hollywood. The monkey looks bored, rolling a papaya seed under his hairy forefinger around the wet tabletop. Short Shoe decides it’s good strategy to call for a bottle of Mount Gay.

  Nobody knows much about Harter, but everybody claims to know him, and everybody has a different version of who the slim, aloof, sandy-haired Californian living in quiet luxury out on Bathsheba Beach is, and what he’s doing on the island. He’s going to build a hotel, he’s filming feature-length pornography, he runs a safe house for Bolivian smugglers, he’s a retired pirate, he’s involved in some baroque deal with the government, a casino or banking scam, he’s a Hollywood star who decided to dump it all, he’s CIA investigating that Cuban plane somebody blew out of the air awhile ago. Nobody knows, but everybody’s sure it’s something big, because in his quietness, in his stylish solitude, in his tense but confident movements, Harter appears to be a man of importance.

  The waiter brings the bottle of gold rum, two clean glasses, a small bucket of melting ice. Short Shoe pours a full load for both of them. As politely as a Boy Scout, the monkey reaches into the bucket, fishes around, and takes one small piece of ice to suck. He watches Harter expectantly, letting out little chirps every once in a while, birdlike and questioning.

  “My monkey here has a lot of talent,” Harter says assertively. “You couldn’t ask for a better monkey.”

  For lack of much else to do, Harter has been training the monkey for the last six months. Somebody out at Bathsheba shot its mother for a stew, found the terrified baby clinging to a dead teat underneath her protective arms. Harter heard about it and on impulse went to see the hunter. The mother’s skin, pink and fly-covered, was stretched and nailed to dry on the door of the man’s shanty. Not knowing exactly what to do with the baby, the hunter placed it inside one of the many empty oil drums in his dirt yard for safekeeping until the proper time came for him to study the situation. Harter stared down into the darkness and saw the honey-sheene
d, cat-sized ball of baby monkey hiding its face, trembling in the absurd immensity of the drum. He paid fifty cents for the three-month-old vervet. He named him Frank. They had had some good times together.

  “Dese monkey too much like politician,” Short Shoe says, now readily suspicious of both breeds. “How I know dis monkey trustable?”

  “Because I said he is, pal.” Harter is trying to work himself up to the deal.

  “Take it easy, mahn.” Short Shoe explains what it is he wants the monkey to do in the act. Harter, another State Express stuck in his mouth, stands up and slaps the surface of the table.

  “Come here, Frank,” he says. The monkey scurries out of his chair onto the table, stops erect in the center of it at the point Harter has indicated. Like a gymnastics coach, Harter works through a dry run of a black flip with the monkey, picking him up and turning him in the air and setting him back down. He does it three times, finally rewarding Frank with a coco plum from a canvas bag next to his chair.

  “Okay, Frank,” Harter says, taking a step back from the table. He snaps his fingers and the monkey executes a precise back flip, landing in a half-crouch right in place, the bottle and glasses undisturbed. “Again,” Harter commands, snapping his fingers. Frank does it again. Harter takes another step away from the table. “To me, Frank, to me,” Harter says. The monkey back flips off the table, onto Harter’s shoulder, and is given a coco plum. Frank squeezes the fruit as if it were a lump of clay.

  “Hey,” yells Short Shoe, jumping up from the table. “Hey,” he yells to nobody in particular. “You see daht? My God, mahn, dis a smaht monkey. I must have dis fella.”

  “Sit down and let’s talk about it,” Harter says. All three of them, black, white, and monkey, take their former seats. Harter doesn’t want to sell the monkey, but he does have something else in mind, something that lodged there like a wild bullet the first night Short Shoe brought the band to the island and Harter went to catch the show. There’s an urge gnawing away at him, growing out of control. He makes his proposition, the same one he joked about before.

  “Holy Christ,” Short Shoe says, withdrawing, but he’s already puzzling over the diplomacy he will have to use to make it happen.

  The success of their negotiation can be measured by the bottle. Two-thirds full and they’re both still insisting the other wants too much. At the halfway mark, Harter is assuring himself that Short Shoe will come across, and the calypsonian realizes he will, after all, leave the place with the monkey. The details just have to be fleshed out. With only a shot left for each of them in the bottle, the deal is struck, and they toast each other. Short Shoe will take the monkey on tour for six weeks and then return him to Barbados. Harter will take Melandra for a night. The monkey has fallen asleep, curled up on the seat of his chair.

  Was there coke, too, a little snow to clear the muggy air? You can’t remember. Nor can you remember the woman you were with earlier in the evening, nor why you left her and came here to the jazz club. Lately life has seemed so fragmented, a blurred series of wonderful postcards, of clever vignettes. There are so many excuses available: the dizzying tropic sun, the high-octane rum, the lethargy of many days at sea, the casual violence of West Indian streets, the wrenching juxtaposition of an expensive sports car racing through the ghetto. Yet you have resisted the slow disintegration of moral certitude that is a part of it all, right? The unexpected blow to your senses that plunged your brain down between your legs was nothing more than a normal reaction to an exotic woman, and what you imagine is not lurid, sweaty sexual acrobatics but a seaside cottage, Melandra singing for you alone, toffee-colored babies playing in the sand, a milk goat in the yard, a parrot in the lemon tree. Sounds nice.

  Leaning on the balcony for the last half-hour, trying to calm yourself, to regain the cool you walked in with, you have eavesdropped on their conversation. And now, you think, it is your responsibility to speak. Possessively, protectively, you approach the table where the imposing black man and the humorless expatriate face each other. With obvious satisfaction, they are polishing off the last of their bottle of Mount Gay. You stand there unsteadily but with righteous fortitude until they glance up. Maybe Harter figures you want to pet the monkey. Short Shoe guesses you are a fan of his, that you will congratulate him, ask for an autograph. You clear your throat, which wakes the monkey.

  “Gentlemen, forgive me,” you say. “You cannot trade a woman for a monkey.” It sounds so right, so absolute. You are pleased with yourself.

  “Where dis fella come from?” Short Shoe cries. You recoil from the threat in his voice. “People buttin around like dey own de fuckin world. Mind you own business, Jimbo.”

  “Get lost,” Harter adds, scowling at you.

  You suddenly feel fatuous, and a little hurt. You escape to the bar.

  Short Shoe wanders back in, the monkey clinging to his side, and sits down next to Melandra. Her hair has become less sculptured in the humid air, the silver eyeshadow blotchy and creased, her lip gloss flat. She is dying to get back to her room at the Holiday Inn, slip off her dress and high heels, take a shower and collapse into bed.

  “Let’s go, Shorty,” she says. “I am tired.”

  “Rushin, rushin, ahlways rushin,” Short Shoe says. “Gy-url, I believe you mus be communist.” Instead of laughing, she cuts her eyes at him. “Look here,” he continues, “I get de monkey.”

  “I see it.”

  His mood changes abruptly. Melandra’s enthusiasm, he thinks, should match his own. Leaning over the table, he strokes the monkey and looks straight at the woman with what he hopes is the right amount of regret.

  “Darlin, I get meself in a terrible jam wit dis white fella,” he says with great seriousness. “Be nice to him ahnd he say he forget de whole thing.”

  Melandra’s eyes narrow as if she’s taking aim on Short Shoe. She feels on the edge of a temper but pushes it back. Her voice is her pride and her living: to let anger race through it would be like dropping a cooking pepper into hibiscus honey.

  “How you mean, Shorty,” she asks, her silky voice just the slightest bit strained, “ ‘be nice’?”

  The monkey fidgets in his big hands as he pets it harder. Short Shoe knows he was lucky to find such an exceptional monkey, luckier still not to pay cash. The woman is not going to ice such a sweet deal, even if Short Shoe has to hold her down himself.

  “Doan play de fool wit me, womahn,” he says, shaking a finger in her face. She looks at it, a mongoose watching a snake. Then she sighs wearily and turns away.

  “Do ahs I say.”

  “No.”

  “He want more dahn just a night, ya know. I tell him no. I thinkin in your best in-trest” “No.”

  Short Shoe’s voice rises an octave. “How you mean, ‘no’?” he shouts, and smacks the table loudly with his palm. “I tellin you yes. You forgettin a lot ah things, darlin. How many wornahn in de world want to sing with Short Shoe? Ahnswer me daht.” Short Shoe is proud of the fact that he always takes an international view of his affairs.

  “Shorty, doan do dis to me.”

  There is such a look of disappointment on her face that Short Shoe is momentarily confused—actually on the brink of catastrophe, because he is never unsure of himself. But the people in the bar begin to applaud the jazz musicians, who have just finished their set. Short Shoe multiplies the applause thousands and thousands of times and throws it all down on himself, letting it swell his chest with glorification. His is the voice of the people, he must give them what they want.

  “Go now, I tellin you,” he orders her. “Go!”

  She smooths her hair back over her ears and then fans herself with a paper napkin. Melandra realizes that whatever magic Short Shoe performs onstage, however great he truly is in front of an audience, he can still be a clod at the dinner table, a half-literate fisherman. She likes him enough so that working with him isn’t a hardship, she is grateful that it was her he chose to sing with him, because that changed her life in a way she never
believed could really happen, but Short Shoe is like most men she has ever met—selfish and single-minded. Men were all just schoolboys in uniforms diddling with their little peckers.

  She pictures herself out in the countryside at her momma’s house back in Antigua. She and Momma are in the kitchen, talking about all the troubles and woe men does give dem. Melandra opens the cupboard and takes out the tin can Momma keeps full with hibiscus honey. She takes it out to the garden, to the pepper bush, covered with the small green cooking peppers that must be taken out of the stew before they burst and make the food too hot to eat. One cookin peppah, two cookin peppah, tree cookin peppah—into the honey. She takes the can back inside and puts it on the kerosene stove. Momma, I goin to boil dis up ahnd give it to de next mahn try to make a fool of me. Momma looks at her and shakes her head sadly. Gy-url, you does de boilin ahll you life den.

  “Ahlright, Shorty,” she says in a deadly voice. “But dis monkey goin come bahck to haunt you, ya know.” She sneers, sucks her teeth in disgust, and walks away. On the way out to the balcony she brushes up against Shake Keane, the trumpet player, and whispers in his ear, “Bruddah mahn, check me out in a while, hmm? I goin outside fah some action.”

  “Yeah, baby,” Shake says. “What’s up?”

  “Showtime,” Melandra answers wickedly.

  There’s been too much rum. Harter really doesn’t know what he’s doing but he knows there’s more than just a rum spell on him, that he has a powerful yearning for a black woman, that he heard their skin is always, permanently, as hot as the Tunisian desert, and it sends a fever running right through you, that some white men can’t stand the heat, their blood pressure or something can’t take it, but for those that can, heaven is a step closer. And he knows that Melandra is one of the most majestic women he has ever seen, and that these moments with her might knock him out of the drift he’s been in for the past year.

  Harter watches Melandra approach his table. She stays in focus and everything else gets blurred. His head hangs loosely but his eyes are geared up and he watches her, watches her perfect hips dance through the mostly empty chairs and tables, the long graceful dark arms shining, her huge chestnut eyes, her thin nose that suggests some East Indian blood, lips as full as pillows, straight shoulder-length hair that he recalls puffed up in a big Afro on Short Shoe’s last album cover. She has taken a pink hibiscus flower from one of the tables and placed it behind her left ear. Harter can feel his pulse struggling up through the alcohol.