A Drink Called Paradise (13 page)

Harry doesn't pick up rocks anymore. He tells me he doesn't have to. I've done it, he says. To whom is not clear. In this climate, buds burst on cues I can't sense. That is, all these flowered cloths billow loose, all these women leave their shoes outside his house, and others. But only Veelu runs down his shoes now, smokes his last all-dried-out cigarette.

The two women wreathe me in white flowers. What's this? I say.

Nothing bad, says Clam Hold, if that's what you mean. It's just that you smell like water that sits. She pulls another layer over my head.

I used to steal coconuts, I say as I sniff the buds.

You used to be crazy, says Breasts for Three. Or a baby. Wanting to drink that hot milk instead of him.

They really laugh now.

Have I made them up? Thick-limbed with coarse skin, wide hands, and scarred necks, they have names but don't use them, they have children but can't keep them.

Clam Hold tells me it is the end of Christmas week, but those aren't quite bells I hear out the window—two machetes banging into each other. All men into their houses is what that clanging means, she says. No one's coming to gut and roast me.

Here is the needle, Breasts for Three says. She gives me the long, sharp tool for stringing flowers. You can finish these. She heaps the rest of them into my lap. You Old Coconut, she calls me as they leave, as they rush off.

An old coconut is coconut through and through, no milk, no slick fruit, sweet but inert and dry. They leave me to go roaming. Today—once a year—despite the Milo missionary and these flowered cloths that conceal so much—the men stay inside the houses and all the women switch.

But I am the Old Coconut.

They know my boat is coming, that radio has me already boarding it.

Say you stay with one man but another one wants you, but not forever. How can you know how long that is? Is that tomorrow, or is that until you die and take time, its long fall, with you? Or is it just for Christmas? Imagine how that man will try to impress you here. This is no ritual rape, this is contest. The men cook, they keep food out at all times. I can hear one sing how much coconut oil he has to rub in.

It's so warm today I take off my shirt and doze, still wreathed. These flowers are not meant to go into a cooler and be kept. They must be crushed and worn, their scent released. A bee wakes me, checking the folds on the buds that have opened. He is so anxious, burrowing in. Does he look for another bee and not food? Has he lost love?

Christmas and children.

I shake myself awake. I remember my shirt and its heat, but I pull it on anyway, pull up the flowers to settle my shirt under them. I am no South Pacific maiden. I lean out for my crutches, a fresh set made from
y's
of wood, all the prickles planed or sawed off, the two stumps almost level, and it's then that I see the loose flower.

It's bruised and brown in its creases and sweet-scented like the others, but all its petals have grown lopsided, every petal hooks to the center, but every petal on it is different, defective, unmatching, then every petal falls soundlessly to the floor between my fingers as I hook them off the middle with effort, pulling them apart so they're no longer confused, no longer growing wrong and bad.

He loves me, he loves me not
.

Shush, shush
, go the grass skirts on the women.

I gather myself on the crutches.

I go to find a house.