Easy in the Islands

by Bob Shacochis

  “I meant what I said.”

  “I know.”

  “We can do better than this,” I clucked.

  “It takes awhile to get used to you again. I haven’t even brushed my teeth.”

  Her lips looked like a brittle red lariat slipping off the rim of the coffee cup. The gold chain around her neck I hadn’t seen before. It encircled the tendons that arched from her collarbone, an aristocratic sweep of lines that had become more pronounced since we first met, she an auditor sent over to our department to punch holes in our budgetary exuberance. A bead of amber dangled from the center of the chain, what looked like a baby cockroach embedded within, an ancient pest that proved the high alchemic value of whatever is stolen from time.

  “So,” I said, fishing for anything wonderfully nice to say. “So.”

  She watched me expectantly, her headdress bobbing with each of my Sos. I had nothing more to say about her hair. That was to be treated in the same manner as if she had wrecked the car—don’t worry about it, it’s only the fender, we can have it knocked out. But I wanted somehow to reach into her month alone, to extract the thorns she had accumulated deprived of the shield togetherness provides. So I said with all the earnestness of a half-wit priest, “Lindy, I’m sorry I had to be gone so long. I know it must have been terrible for you.”

  I leaned forward on my elbows, pushing aside my mug, ready for her sad account of life without me.

  “Of course it wasn’t.” She laughed in girlish eighth-notes, like a piccolo, a silvery confident melody that made me first ashamed, then defensive. “Oh, Lord, don’t be mad, Sims. It’s nice to have you back, but I have fun, too, when you’re gone. I don’t dry up, you know.”

  “Oh.” I swallowed my coffee like a frog. The cries of the hajis echoed in my ears. What? windmills in the desert. Water sucked forth from barrenness? No, monsieur. No no.

  “Well, don’t be so surprised,” she said.

  “Actually I’m not,” I sputtered. “This is in fact good news. I worry about you being lonely.”

  We had struggled through elaborate discussions before I chose to quit the department and join the press of part-time consultants feeding off the huge carcass of foreign policy. It was for the best, we concurred, if we were ever going to get the boat in shape and one day sail off to what we dreamed could happen in our lives. The gaps that would separate us would be no more than the slight blips, the blind spots, encountered on a dial between one level of intensity and the next, like a furnace building heat, a light increasing wattage. I would fly off, a return ticket in my pocket, and then I would retract like the wandering leg of John Donne’s compass to the center of the circle, the geometric conceit of love well architected.

  “No need to worry about me,” she insisted, giving a cheery toss to the ghost of her hair, a pang of loss sent into my blood.

  She had picked up three new accounts in her freelancing work, read a dozen books, started an aerobics class at Miami-Dade. We were edging back into our rhythm as we talked. I felt better all the time. Her hair impressed me as less angry and ominous than when I first saw it, a loud game that would soon stop. Yet I felt on the verge of unwanted discovery. She saw my look and forced it. Her mouth puckered, her eyebrows plumed. She nailed a finger into my arm.

  “Well, go ahead,” she snapped. “Don’t hedge, it’s not like you. You’re dying to say something.”

  “It’s just that I didn’t expect to find you quite like this.”

  “Quite like what?”

  “Asleep, for one thing. In your clothes, those clothes. Was it wrong of me to expect something else? Now come on, be honest.”

  She was. “I forgot you were coming today,” Lindy said.

  I pretended unsuccessfully that this failure was of no importance.

  “Don’t lock up,” she said, tugging my arm, taking my hand in hers. “I was out too late. I was drunk.”

  I pulled my hand away. “What do you mean you were drunk?” I said stupidly. She crossed her eyes to reinforce my stupidness.

  “I had too much to drink. I was dancing and worked up a sweat. The drinks felt like they ran right through me.”

  “You never sweat,” I reminded her.

  “I do when I dance.”

  I was astounded by the implication of this report. “You don’t sweat when you dance with me.”

  “You haven’t asked me in ages. Besides, the dances are different today.”

  I slammed my coffee mug on the table. I seemed to have been invalidated. “Today?” I said loudly. “Today?”

  “Look, we’ve talked enough for now,” she proclaimed. “You’re just getting mad. I’m going to go shower.”

  I retrieved my luggage and trudged into the bedroom, disoriented from the moment I set foot in there. Our platform bed had completed a 180-degree turn and now faced south, underneath the double windows, instead of north, underneath the full security of a heartpine wall. The batik had disappeared from the wall, replaced by a chrome-faced abstraction, pink paint splashed and dribbled on a beige background, the impression that of a muffled scream. The curtains had turned white as had the comforter on the bed. My antique oak bookcase was gone. Glass shelves climbed the walls. White gladioli thrust from large raku vases with pinched necks, one in each corner. I flopped down on the mattress and lit a cigarette. Lindy returned from the shower, a black towel wrapped like a sari around her, a black plastic bathcap pulled over her scalp. Her face is pretty, I thought, no matter what she does to herself. She stopped abruptly, scrinching her nose.

  “Please don’t smoke in the bedroom, okay?”

  “Why not?” I said, becoming annoyed again. She knew I liked to lie in bed and smoke, think.

  “No stinking up the bedroom. Smoke somewhere else.”

  “Christ.” I reared up from the bed and stamped out, looking for an ashtray. When I came back she was stretched out naked on the sheets, her legs raised and bent, the knees splayed, pelvis tilted. The image I got was of a baby about to have her diaper changed. In a second I realized she was inserting her diaphragm. I regarded her position, her exposure, her assumption. Her hands dipped downward between her thighs, one wrist flipped under, pushing up. She rolled her head and looked over at me.

  “I think you should keep your mouth closed and come here, boy.”

  She had never stooped to such strategy and blatant intent before.

  “It’s different in here. Why have you done this?” I demanded.

  “I was bored with the way things were.”

  “That new canvas on the wall, I hate it. Where’s the batik?”

  “In the garage. Why don’t you climb over here?”

  “Whose rain slicker is that on the couch in the living room? It’s not mine.”

  “It must be Champ’s. He left it in the car.”

  “Who?”

  “Champ Ransome, this guy.”

  “That’s a preposterous, awful, ridiculous name.”

  “I think his name is perfect,” she said, propping herself on her elbows to stare guilelessly at me.

  “For what?” I bitched. A gigolo, a failed actor, a racehorse. “I suppose now you’re going to tell me that you slept with him.” I ripped out of my shorts and pitched them toward the closet where the wicker hamper had been relocated and waited, the scorned man, hands on my hips, unadorned before my fate.

  “My dear Sims,” she said, her eyes inspecting the ceiling, bored with my accusation, “I haven’t slept with anybody but you, believe it or not.”

  I slouched into bed on all fours and hovered above her, sniffing like a bear for the scent of a stranger on the body beneath me, eying the sheets for the stains of carnal labor. She held out her arms for me to collapse into and then, thank God, she smiled, cracking the hard red candy of her lips.

  “What’d you bring me from Africa?”

  “Disease,” I answered, colliding with her bones.

  Our life. The plural possessive pronoun, the singular noun. What a pair they can be. Lindy slo
wly accepted me back into it, yet it seemed more hers than mine or ours. I felt I wasn’t all the way home, I felt I had missed it by a house or two. There was something going on, as if the woman now worshiped strange idols. Meals were more planned and formal. She wanted us to eat at the table instead of the back porch or cross-legged in front of the news on television. Where before there was serendipity, now there were cookbooks. Vegetables became suddenly exciting, artichokes prepared as feasts, vinaigrette splashed on anything. Pasta in drab colors filled the freezer. Coffee beans arrived UPS from New Orleans. Wine was ordered by the case from a store in Pompano. She subscribed to magazines that glorified people whose only talent appeared to be hanging out, the street elite. Jewelry achieved some vague level of meaning. Besides the gold and amber, she took to wearing an elephant’s-hair ring, a baroque pearl, a pop-top from a beer can, and a tiny emerald cluster, all on her left hand, a band of studded leather above on her wrist. A ladder of holes was pierced into each ear, small gems descended to plastic or enamel hardware, household objects, pen caps, and on one occasion, teaspoons. Jogging was also important and she braved the roads at dawn and dusk in wine-colored briefs and a lemon Danskin, a Walkman delivering ska to her brain. In the bathroom you could browse the New York Review of Books or Vanity Fair. For the first time since I knew her she had a girlfriend, a Cuban woman of carbonated personality. The woman would pick her up in a black Firebird to go shopping over at South Beach.

  Here is what I thought I understood, that Lindy was having one last fling with the dazzling, addictive fraud of American culture. She was revving up speed to hurl herself off the edge of the continent, to land with twenty-four dollars’ worth of trinkets on an unknown shore, a parody of the urban frontier, a treat for savages she imagined out there.

  I met up with Lindy’s Champ Ransome down at the boatyard where our ketch had been sitting for two years, riding the dirt while Lindy and I prepared our life. The old ketch was a piece of sea trash I had saved from worms and disaffection. I could see in her lines the boat once had a passion for speed and enterprise. She was almost ready again to flout the crushing wallop of seas, the mammoth torque of full sail, Lindy at the wheel as I tuned the ropes until they hummed freedom.

  Since I had left for the Sahel, the yard, a noisy cluttered city of boats, had dragged up a more unpromising pile of junk onto the rails down the way from the ketch, a stubby tramp freighter, ninety feet of negligence, a broad gray-hulled pig bleeding rust, a pilothouse on its stern like a whitewashed shanty. The craft resembled, remarkably, a giant high-topped basketball sneaker, the victim of brutal play. This filthy creation was Champ Ransome’s ship. I took one look and said There’s a vessel that advertises an association with crime, a dire picaroon. Lindy said no, Champ Ransome was certified clean, a purveyor of innocent cargoes, a man who believed in the benefit of trade. You never know, I said. Any Bowery bum might be a master captain, any saint a sinner. The ocean’s chased by the best and the worst and sometimes you can’t tell the difference.

  “There, that’s him.”

  Lindy raised her weird sunglasses and pointed with her chin. The frames of her sunglasses were lavender and shaped like two obese blowfish kissing on the bridge of her nose. I followed the direction of her Celtic jaw. Up on scaffolding, a man attended a swarm of white sparks, welding a steel plate at the waterline of the freighter. I’ve always admired the concentration of men at work, the ability to calmly direct a tool whether the heavens sink or the doors of hell blow off. I see it as profound intent, the mojo to pull civilization back from the brink. I knew then and there that Champ Ransome was no flea, nor the punk darling I had envisioned, and if he posed a true threat there was no fast remedy for it. If he had cast this change on Lindy, she would stay changed.

  Lindy tucked her fingers into the shallow pockets of her polka-dot bloomers. Rearing back as if she would spit the distance, she whistled like a longshoreman, a trick of hers I wish I had. When the man on the scaffolding didn’t respond, she started to whistle again but I stopped her.

  “Let him finish the bead or it’s no good. The weld will be weak.”

  In another minute he cut the flame on his torch and monkeyed to the ground, the welder’s mask still hanging from his face, his eyes a blur behind the scratched window.

  “Champ Ransome,” Lindy said. I suspected her tone would reveal intimacy but it didn’t. She stepped forward, hooked a finger under the mask and tilted it up on its hinge, his face revealed. “Meet Sims. Of whom I have spoken.”

  “Endlessly,” Ransome agreed. He nodded in my direction. Just nodded. No handshake, no smile, no wink, no Hey, nothing. He gestured with his head, the mask shoveling air. “She steers like a horse tank,” he said, his accent bred in the glades and keys of southern Florida. “We creased her hip docking on the river.” His mustache drooped off the corners of his mouth like Spanish moss, his chin captured underneath, as blunt as the toe of a cowboy boot, and his eyes, clear as they were with anglo blue, seemed perpetually half-lidded, reaching the unseen and far away.

  “We’ll let you be,” Lindy said. She reached up and pulled the black shield over his face again. It shut like a car hood, closing off the expression that was the beginning and the end of Champ Ransome’s social grace.

  We rambled back to the ketch. Lindy slipped her hand down into the waist of my cutoffs, her fingertips pressed smoothly against my rear. I believed she had shown me what I wanted to know, that Champ Ransome was a new friend and nothing more, no cause for furtiveness, no source of strain. So Champ became more of a mystery to me than ever. Champ was a crow out on the clothesline that wouldn’t fly away, a bird that kept watching the house day after day.

  I raised a wooden ladder against the sailboat’s deck and climbed aboard. Lindy watched from below, sheltering her eyes against the sun.

  “You coming up?”

  “Only if you need me,” she said. From my new perspective her head was a cocklebur.

  “No, not really. Unless you feel like getting dirty.”

  “I don’t. Not today.”

  She had done enough anyway, two years at my side in the industry of the yard. The payback wasn’t so far off. The diesel would get an overhaul and the mainmast, stepped before the Sahel, would be rigged and fitted. The lease on the house expired in seven weeks. Our forwarding address would be as thick as an atlas.

  She unfolded a beach chair in the shady lee of the hull and kicked off her pumps, a magazine in her lap, instantly remote. The breeze snuck in off Biscayne Bay and licked the propellor of my wind generator into a lazy spin. I went below, flicking on the cabin lights, inhaling the powerful aromas of canvas, turpentine, machine oil and mold. I crawled into the engine space and dug for gaskets, breaking for the surface after a couple of hours, greased like a cold-water diver. Lindy had abandoned her chair. I saw her down at the freighter, she and Ransome leaning on their elbows into the steel, face to face, their palms against their ears as if they were chatting on the telephone. She in her clownish polka dots and electric jersey, he in black T-shirt, black jeans blushed with rust smears and dark burns. When she wandered back I was on the ground, scrubbing my forearms with a rag soaked in gasoline.

  “He doesn’t eat well,” she said. “Cocoa Puffs and Coca-Cola and hot dogs, crap like that. I invited him for dinner.”

  Champ moved through the house as if it were a fragile affair and he couldn’t quite trust himself under its roof. We drank rum together, spectating from the table while Lindy chucked things into a wok. He had a long brown neck, hands that weren’t easily cleaned. I knew he didn’t want to be my friend. He was taken by Lindy, a boyish infatuation, eager for her words, wary of mine. I only blamed him for the atmosphere of competition he sent through the room, the soft drumming of a have-not. Yet I don’t deny he was a good enough man for me and the evening passed without great event under the dome of Lindy’s fantasy—she would feed us and entertain us, we would love her, perhaps a community would be built upon such rocks. She would be modern,
we would be rugged, so that the three of us together might balance the world on our toes like a circus ball.

  Frankly, I don’t know what Lindy thought.

  Champ Ransome knew. Neither conspirator nor sneak but another restless man who sweated toward dreams like me, he was around when Lindy needed to unload and he carried the weight of the knowledge on his tongue until two days before he left for good, puttering out the Miami River bound for Haiti, his cargo three thousand cases of German beer. The hull repaired, auxiliary fuel tanks installed in the bow, Champ was itching to go. He took us aboard for an inaugural cruise, a cocktail chug out to the continental shelf to determine how the welds behaved before he stacked the hold with pallets, a bon voyage party for all of us, Lindy and I due to set sail ourselves within the month.

  We drove down to the yard late on a Friday morning, the top up on the Volkswagen at Lindy’s request. She had been avoiding sunlight, I noticed, her fair skin fairer by the day. She wore pegged jeans, plastic sandals, a camouflage spandex tube top that squeezed her breasts back to prepubescent nubs, those same fish-kissing sunglasses and a Yankees baseball cap, the bill tugged so far down her face that she had to lift her head to see in front of her. I was better dressed for the squalor of Ransome’s ship—Topsiders, khaki work pants and work shirt with epaulets, the young lieutenant look. We brought along a cooler of ice-cold beer, a jug of red wine, steak sandwiches from the deli. And I would not go without my fishing rod and tackle, for I was a man anxious to rob the sea of all its many pleasures.

  Overnight the yard had eased the freighter back into the water, Champ’s ship, the Southern Wind, which he had rechristened, inscrutably, Sea-Bop-A-Baby, I can’t guess why. There she wallowed, lashed to the capstans on the dock, looking less malignant with most of her bulk submerged, the Stars and Stripes topping a white triangle imprinted with a martini glass, olive included, stirred by cool zephyrs on the flagpole off the stern. The hatchcovers were piled one on top of the other, revealing the grim cavern of the hold. Champ stepped from the wheelhouse, his skull bound in a red bandanna, his stringy pirate’s body bare except for cutoff jeans and oversized work-boots.