Easy in the Islands

by Bob Shacochis

  “Stone ahnd bone ahnd broken pot,” he said. “Indiahns doan leave much.”

  Bowen wanted to return to the intimacy that he had experienced between them when they were walking the gardens. There was a level in each man’s work that bonded to the other—a sublime level—and Bowen felt he was on the verge of identifying it. The feeling needed expression but he felt doomed to the visible, the prosaic, for only this was left in each piece after the wonderful burn of the first touch.

  “All the pottery fragments you see on the table are called adornos,” he said. “They are images of an animal, a fish, a bird, or sometimes humanoid, that were formed onto vessels. Like cooking pots or bowls. Water jugs.”

  Marcus picked through them. “Why is daht?” he asked.

  Pick them up and feel them and listen, Bowen wanted to answer, but couldn’t. Doc can tell you better than me. He has seen them, graced with a vision in the Yambou Valley; he swears he was among them for a morning. Before our history there was this, this silent world of men and birds and fish. Am I saying it right? Bats swarmed the air at night and were gods or devils or something not men, not man, with knowledge and power. In the silence that covered the planet, manatees somersaulted in the lagoons, sea turtles rasped lungfuls of air on the empty beaches, squeezing their eggs into the land. Man was no different and when he killed he was satisfied with that act. Women spoke a spirit language of clay and fire. Here the clay suffers, here the clay honors man and here it pities him. The potter, a girl, a young woman, marked these lines with her fingernail. In these indentations, put your own flesh; she has found you then across time and the pot knows your touch, the pot is whole again, has waited and waited for it and recalls the day of its creation. The blood moves again into the head of the lizard thing that lives dormant in this pot, that watches through this image. Do you understand? She was just a child and forbidden to speak the same words as men. She took dolphins from the waves and twisted them into clay. I do not know if there was happiness in this act, but there was knowledge. Power.

  Bowen finally answered, his sense of futility lessened by the interest evident in the stern set of the black man’s jaw. “We are classifying them in terms of period, character, function—whatever helps us identify them. Usually they were formed as handles or spouts. Occasionally they were merely ornamental, although ornament is most often expressed through geometrical patterns and color.” He stopped. The words were not what he wanted, only what he couldn’t prevent. But Marcus was listening so he continued. “Some, like this frog, have the nostrils hollowed out. A powder, primarily jimson weed, would be placed in these small bowls and sniffed during ceremonies.”

  Marcus flipped an adorno over and over in his hands, put it down, looked for another. “Very simple work, mahn. Like a cahtoon, no?” He took another piece made of darker clay. It had been burnished to make it shine like vinaceous enamel. “What is dis?” he said, frowning.

  The face itself was flat, the features plain but inscrutable. Triangular mandibles erupted from it into a peaked snout, thick, fanged, forceful. “A bat,” Bowen said. “Bats were special to them.”

  “How you mean ‘speciahl’?” Marcus persisted. “It too fuckin ugly.”

  “I don’t know,” Bowen said, recoiling from the sudden disgust in Marcus’s expression. He had looked at Bowen as if the white man were responsible for encouraging a bad habit. “The Indians were primitives. The Caribs associated magic with the bats and wanted their power.”

  Marcus grunted disapproval and quickly replaced the adorno with one of the rare shards that showed the man-image. Rarer still was the emotion of the face, grief-stricken, eyebrows collapsing down over deep concave eyes, the mouth an imperfect hole, utterly helpless. Both men were mesmerized by the clay’s countenance. Nowhere in the room was there another piece to balance it, to match or offset the pathos. The rest of the work, a millennium’s worth—demigod, man, animal, reptile, bird, fish—was all expressionless, detached and accepting.

  Bowen told himself that the artifacts were not inconsequential to Marcus; perhaps he had found a friend and fellow seeker. There was something there in the inanimate fragments, a weak memory or emanation of humanity, but he suspected that here, as they stood together, the past bothered them both more than they could casually admit, it suffered mutely in the pale orange face of the man-image, a tiny death mask denied mortality. If they could find a way to speak about this there was no telling what might come of it.

  Outside the windows a pickup truck had stopped at the maintenance shed across the drive from the museum. Two men rode in the cab, a third rode back in the rusty bed, clinging to the sides to keep from bouncing out. Marcus observed their arrival and returned the adorno to its position on the long table.

  “Daht’s Henry Wilkes. He come to collect dem patchouli.”

  Through the windows, Bowen watched Marcus exit the building and walk toward the truck. The black man had left without saying anything more; Bowen was both disappointed and petulant, a part of him reacting like a missionary who had lost his first convert.

  Driver and passenger climbed out. The third rider reached into the bed and raised aloft a large broken mass of brown feathers. Marcus spoke to the man but Bowen could not understand what was said, the words more quickly fired and less carefully enunciated. He knew he should get on with his work, most of the morning was gone, but he wanted to see what the man had held up from the truck so he went out to it.

  Overspiced air was steaming out of the jungle above them. Back toward Kingstown, above the treetops, the slate of ocean was canescent with glare. The carnival colors of the gardens were drained and shadeless. A single-barrel shotgun and several red-papered cartridges were placed precariously on the truck’s sloping dashboard. Marcus was laughing appreciatively at the driver’s story of the hunt. The man’s two companions held the bird between them to measure its wingspan. It was a pelican. The long canelike bill was missing, and without it the lolling head, only eyes and skull, looked mammalian, monkeylike, its mouth a bloody circle. Bowen’s revulsion was immediate.

  The men began plucking the bird, tearing out the soft chocolate feathers in patches that separated from the skin with dull, sucking pops. Bowen watched aghast as the pelican was reduced to a purplish bloated lizard-thing. In the air the bird was so stylized, such a bold silhouette, a pterodactyl soaring effortlessly through history, adjusting its tremendous wings with the most delicate trimming, intelligent and masterful—an aviatic dolphin. Now it was an obscenity. Bowen turned to walk back to the museum, commanding himself to forget about this business, there was nothing he could do, but as he passed the rear of the truck and looked in he saw two more pelicans there. One was limp, its chest split by buckshot. The other was alive; one wing raised at his approach, the other wing hung loose and glistened with a coat of blood. The bird clacked its bill defiantly.

  One of the men came beside Bowen to get the second bird, the dead one, for cleaning. “Dis bird meat very sweet,” he said. “Bettah dahn chicken.” Because Bowen could only stare grimly he explained further, “Pelicahn is fish-fed, mahn. Daht make it tendah. Fowl is pebble-fed. It just peck de dirt ahnd grow tough.”

  For the first time on the island, Bowen spoke in anger. “Why don’t you kill the damn thing?” he demanded, pointing at the remaining bird.

  The man opened his dark eyes in mock surprise and smiled. “Yes, mahn. Doan worry bout daht, suh. Cahnt eat him wit de flahp still dere, ya know.” He winked, already pulling feathers from the bird he held.

  When the man refused to respond to his sense of outrage, Bowen felt abandoned and betrayed by his own emotion. He was not a man of action but now an obligation seemed to echo from his words. Several of Marcus’s boy-guides had gathered around to see what was happening; tourists wandering by came over as if attracted by blood. “Poor thing,” Bowen heard an American voice saying. Bowen glared at the anonymous white faces lingering on the perimeter, expecting to see the old woman from the taxi. She would blame him for some
thing like this, wouldn’t she.

  Bowen climbed into the truck, taking his pocketknife from his shorts, and pinched open the single blade. He paused before grabbing the pelican to register the sadness within it, and its final dignity, but the bird’s eyes were remote. Marcus and the hunters had stopped what they were doing to watch him, and their eyes, too, when he glanced over at them, were indifferent. As he reached out the pelican snapped his hand with its ridiculous hooked beak; it felt like bamboo, hard but almost weightless. He took the bird up. Its body seemed pathetically small in his hands, awkward in design, all elbows and knees and no substance. In his fingers the neck rolled under the feathers like a long silk cord. He laid the edge of the knife against it and started to cut. The bird struggled against him but he held on. The pelican’s supple neck, covered in short dense feathers like fur or velvet, would not cut. He crouched above it, sawing and sawing, waiting for the flesh to break and the gush of blood but the blade had been dulled by digging shards out of the dry volcanic soil of the island. It would not open the bird’s throat. He was determined to kill the bird and when the knife wouldn’t cut, he could not see through his frustration to an alternative. He felt increasingly imbecilic, slicing at the slippery wires of the bird’s neck. Someone laughed, and someone called out, “What de hell, mahn, bite de head! Step on de belly.”

  The three men from the truck were no longer paying attention; they joked loudly with each other and began to gut the first two birds with a machete. He saw Marcus shake his head and signal over one of the young boys that worked for him in the gardens. The boy listened to his instructions and then searched the ground, found what he wanted and leapt into the truck with Bowen. Bowen still gripped the pelican at the top of its neck, unaware of what the boy was up to. He had decided to puncture the bird with the point of the knife, but by then the rock had smashed the bird’s head, delivering a flutter of death into Bowen’s palm. He dropped the pelican and saw the boy standing there, smiling confidently, undaunted by Bowen’s hatred. He took the pocketknife from Bowen’s hand and pressed a finger down along the cutting edge.

  “Dis knife no good, mistah. You need a stone to rub it.”

  From the crushed eyes of the pelican, the blood flowered in little round blooms, ixoralike pinwheels. Bowen’s legs had been splashed by blood and he tried to wipe away the stains with his bare hands. Marcus was there, offering him a work rag to clean himself. Bowen would not dare look at him for fear he had shamed himself. Marcus took the rag back when Bowen had finished, said he would stop by the museum again soon to see how everything was progressing. Then he ordered the boy to take the white man’s knife and sharpen it.

  Hunger

  Here in the cays away from Providence and the villages, there was a fellowship among the fishermen in their isolation. They did not mind that they were utterly alone and apart from the world—this was their life. The darkness completed itself around them, throwing the horizon across the water until it lay beneath them and they could walk it like a tightrope, toeing the distance underfoot. The great distance, the cusp of nowhere from which they worked a living.

  Among them only Bowen, a white man and an outsider, did not share their history and so the solitude was more powerful for him. The sea had fuzzed out into invisibility, joined to the sky in a solid cliff of darkness. From where he stood on the cay that was like a shallow china bowl turned upside down on the water, the sea was still in his hair, in his eyes, everywhere, a wetness that wouldn’t wipe away. There was nothing he could do about it. It pushed in when he opened his mouth to speak, and swept out again when he exhaled, stinging his tongue. It blew against him in the night breeze and added weight to his salt-encrusted clothes. Air and water and small scab of land wrapped into each other and floated the men in the middle of darkness. Not even his grave held such magnitude for Bowen, not even that seemed so empty as this darkness. This was Bowen’s feeling. It didn’t worry him; it made him hungry.

  On the mother ship Orion, anchored in the lagoon, a light in the galley flickered on. The light weakened and broke into particles only a short distance from the ship, a globe of blurry color suspended in the dense moisture. The silhouette of a man in a straw Panama passed across the yellow moon of the galley’s porthole. The moon blinked. On the cay, matches were struck and placed to wood. A line of cooking fires wavered on the sand but the light revealed nothing more than the shapes of men crouched close to the auras of slow, lambent flames.

  Bowen brought up more firewood from the beached cat-boat. He could see each arm of flame playing with hundreds of grape-sized hermit crabs that clicked and tumbled and rolled over onto their shells, escaping the heat and illumination.

  The crabs provoked Gabriel. He grabbed any he could between his thumb and index finger and snapped them into the fire. He didn’t want them crawling on his face at night, he said, he didn’t want to awake to one of them picking its way across his cheeks or down his neck. In the flames, the tiny animals shrank in their red-white shells, burst and bubbled. It was a game Gabriel liked, but he was not a malicious man, not like Sterling, the murderer, who shot his mother’s lover in the head with a speargun and raped the boys who were his cellmates in prison. Or Ezekiel, who was drunk all the time and let his wife and children go hungry. Everybody found it easier to forgive Sterling than to forgive Ezekiel. No one cared that Gabriel burned little crabs.

  The night ran up the long shadows of the boatmen, merging with their black outlines as they tended the fires. Heavy iron caldrons and sooty Dutch ovens were shoved down into the coals as the flames waned. Into each pot was placed something different to cook. Men moved in and out of the shadows joyously, with clear purpose, racing back and forth to the boats from light to darkness to light again, carrying calabash shells brimming with portions of the first day’s catch. The work they had done after setting up camp at the banks that afternoon was for themselves alone. No unseen white man could put a short price on the fish, not even on the tiniest mullet; no sprat had to be ferried aboard the Orion tonight and packed into the ice holds. The real work would come tomorrow when the Dutchman brought his scales ashore, and his tally book. But tonight was jubilation. Tonight every man was free to eat as much as he wanted. It was a spree, an eating fete, and everybody was happy. We feedin weselves, mahn. Nobody else! Bowen listened out of curiosity for a moment and then went about his business. No dahmn bean big wife makin babies in she belly, five, six, sevahn kids cryin “poppa”; no grahnmuddah, uncle, ahntie or cousin John Robinson ten times removed and livin in de mountain so a boy must go up wit a dish fah de guy. No coolie mahn stockin de freezah in he shop, no tourist place on de mainland, no big goddahmn Texahn cowboy. We eatin everyting we got.

  Sterling’s boys fixed the birds’ eggs. They had pilfered them from the nests on Southwest Cay when the Orion stopped there earlier in the day to report to the four lonely soldiers sent to guard the fishing grounds from Jamaican poachers. With perverse authority the mainland government dropped off young recruits here for their first duty, left them with a sack of rice, fishing line and hooks, no boat and no shortwave radio, hundreds of miles from the shores of their homes, for six, eight, sometimes nine or ten months to enjoy the skeleton of a freighter, their only skyline, locked onto Pearl Henry’s Reef.

  It was this freighter, the Betty B, that the men on the Orion first sighted after their long passage from Providence. The massive wreck perched on the bleak, sun-scarred horizon like something ripped away from a city and dropped out of the sky to crumble and rust secretly, away from mankind. Captain Sangre anchored the Orion in water as transparent as coconut oil, over a sandy bottom dotted with thousands of conchs five fathoms below. One of the fishermen’s catboats was unlashed from the deck and lowered over the side. The captain was rowed ashore to deliver the government permit, a preposterous formality, since the soldiers were helpless to enforce anything out here. Sterling and his boys went along to collect the eggs from the stick and pebble nests of the boobies, the frigate birds, the gulls and
terns. The soldiers insisted that the eggs were under their protection and the fishermen couldn’t touch them unless they paid a tax. After stone-faced negotiation, a bottle of rum, an old coverless Playboy magazine, and twenty pounds of cassava were handed over to the military.

  From the rookery Sterling had gathered perhaps two hundred of the eggs speckled pink and blue and brown. After leveling the bed of embers, the boys boiled a ten-gallon can of seawater and threw in the eggs. The Bottom Town men stewed fish heads: triangular jaws gaping as the cartilage that held them melted, poking through the steaming surface of the liquid among an archipelago of eyeballs and flat discs of severed brain and bone. At another fire one man tossed the backs of spiny lobsters and their thick antennae into the vapor of his pot. The tails earned the best money and were saved for the Dutchman. All of the fishermen agreed the meat of the lobster, except for the fatty parts, was too rich-tasting anyway.

  White gleaming wings of mashed-up conch simmered in another stew. Hot lard splattered and sizzled, foaming over dark orange sacks of roe. Turtle eggs that looked exactly like Ping-Pong balls boiled in the pot at the center of several men who poked a wire leader through the shells of uncooked ones and sucked out the raw yolk. Bowen was called over and given one as he passed cautiously by in the darkness on his way from scrubbing the fish slime from his hands in the wet sand at the water. He sucked the shell hollow but the egg felt syrupy and inedible in his mouth and tasted like something that shouldn’t be swallowed. He spit it out in his hand to examine what was there, squatting down near the light of the fire. It was all bright viscid yolk threaded with a design of red capillaries. He slung the mess out into the night for the crabs.