A Drink Called Paradise (3 page)

Boom—pink shredded plastic and streaks of pepper sauce and ketchup, a full jar of mayonnaise, all three of the family's forks ricochet off the kitchen walls, and its cooking pot, its charcoals and tinder, are smeared into the mess with one more whirl of his long, long arms, with one more great gob of sound.

Back, shouts Ngarima's son. Back to Auntie, go on back to Auntie. Go on.

The boy is coming for his room, my room, my room that was so empty when I came, and now I know why—those long arms pull down anything in their windmilling radius. But I'm too stunned by the boy's tiny head, let alone the whipping arms, to stop him from going into my room, to connect what has happened in the other room with those arms that whip toward my clothes, books, passport, money, ID, sun lotion—and his space.

Ngarima's son raises the boy's board, the one the boy floats on with his long arms, and he hits him with it, he tries to herd him away from the room by beating him with its hard foam. The boy falters in his furious beeline, he turns in circles beside his brother in the staccato of the beating.

His brother hits him again and again.

I do not scream, seeing the boy being beaten. Speech and the power of speaking leave me. I do not scream, not even as the boy begins to cry, not even when a plate comes down from the back wall with a tremendous crash and splinters into shards that cut my skin in the painless way of razors. Cut too, the boy scuttles away from the broken plate and then his brother hits him again, this time across the back of his tiny head.

That head sinks to pale knees.

The boy pulls him onto his back and carries him out of the house. Temu, the boy explains as he passes me, and dumps him in the shade with his board.

I rush over, I put my hand out.

The boy is already on his feet but turning as if he doesn't know where.

Wait! Ngarima clumps from the bush to herd him away from me, away from the house, using a switch of coconut frond. He stumbles and reaches for her between switchings. She drops her switch and starts to coo, she cups his tiny head in her knife-scarred hands, rubs his cloud of hair, touches his welts and cuts, all the time cooing except when she snaps out an order, catching sight of his slinking-off brother, who doesn't bother to point to the dish broken at the door, or at me.

She holds Temu close.

They stand together for a long time.

After a long time, I follow Ngarima's son into the bush. But follow isn't exactly what I do, I just take his path. I am so confused and full of fear for the small head, the wind-milling arms, the beating, I just walk. I guess I choose the bush because that's the way the boy went who beat him back, who saved me, and if I need saving again he is the one to follow. I don't care about the things in my room anymore—or I forget to care, it is his room anyway. I am the trouble if there is trouble to be pointed at, to be windmilled away.

Ngarima's son is gone from the path by the time I take it. I walk and walk and see no one, no brother or child or man wandering with a machete. I walk and I am pregnant with that child, the boy is flailing his arms around inside me, I am wondering what's wrong? Then the head is too easy coming out, I smile at the wriggling arms until I see the rest and can measure what's wrong against what's right.

My son is about Ngarima's son's age, stalkier though, less woe-eyed but just as fidgety. My son's fidgets are mine. I have to keep going, I have to keep working. Even when he was a baby I worked at this business of illusion, putting con in the game, the game in the con of telling people they must drink things like Paradise in a bottle. I have an imagination that makes that work. But I'd never imagined a child in paradise being wrong.

I'm afraid of people, yes, even children, who aren't right, whose heads are too small or too large or wrong. I suppose I'm more afraid of them when I'm on an island. In another country where you drive past or stare and then turn your head and leave money and move on, I'm not so afraid. It is part of the country, why you are not them.

Now I have his room.

I walk on and on, but I know I can't keep the shore from showing up. I want to avoid it and its lagoon with the tiny head maybe already back in it. Let they who seek out the uneasy bits all islanders bury, seek. I will walk.

I walk until I see a pig in the way, a big pig. I walk to one side of the path and give way to that pig, his bristly back, his huge behind. But his front bears tusks, and he's annoyed, I've annoyed him as he roots with those tusks at a fallen fruit and has to lift his tusked snout just as I am passing on veritable tiptoe past his fruit.

He makes his noise.

I pick up a fruit and hit him in the face with it. He blinks, sniffs it, then crushes it between his jaws, the juice coming through real animal's teeth.

Then he makes his noise again.

I run.

Off the path, everything scratches. I rip my shorts, my legs bleed, my hands tear as I lurch away from the boar into the bush, into the real bush. They may as well tack up boards covered with nails as grow all this stiff stuff so ready for sex that scratches, cuts, jabs, lances what is already dish-shard-sliced.

The bush thickens further with its knife-sharp plants, and I stop. I have to. Besides, the pig's not in pursuit, nor is the windmilling boy. I've gone too far. I have to be lost, though lost on this small island can't be too bad. Maybe lost is good, is just somewhere else. I force myself to smile. I turn as if that's what I want to do.

Where the bush thickens most there's the leftover of a path that veers around it, and I take it more to avoid the plants than for a direction, and at the end of that path is a palm with a wire running up its smooth side, like one plant throttling another. Then I see the house below it.

It is made with fiberboard nailed crookedly to planks and tarpaper and air, but the rusted bolts and barbed wire all around its bottom give it a look of growth, of a succulent's succulent with greening thick walls, of something made fast and abandoned slow.

I look for an opening, a reason for all the bolts and barbed wire, why it's here and not on the beach. Surely the wire's an antenna, surely something inside bounces sound around, if not picture. Inside must be a radio, if not a phone.

I'm free, finding a phone makes me free. The boat is already coming if I can tell it to.

I keep circling.

My ex will send a boat. Although he is the man who forgot me, he is someone who shrinks refrigerators and blows up people for a living, one special effect or another, none of them very special to me after he forgot to pick me up post-delivery, and other better-forgotten events, he could send a boat. But I don't think he thinks of me now.

I hope he doesn't, I hope he's forgotten.

There has to be some place to get in.

It is my son whom I'd call. Miss you, I'd say to him if I could, but it would come out, Brush your teeth. Then I'd make the loud sound of a smack that's supposed to embarrass him, the one that leaves a red butterfly on a cheek.

I stop to think about that butterfly, that call, and then I find the lock.

It's covered with vines and all rusty, a lock I can't knock off with one blow of a machete the way any islander could. I have no machete. I'm probably the only person on the island who doesn't carry a machete.

The shack can't be empty.

Maybe the rust fills in instantly where a sweaty palm turns, or the plants surge over the suddenly bared spot in a single afternoon.

And over what other bared spots on single afternoons? One square mile of island, and how many secrets can such an island harbor?

My shoulders against the door don't so much as flake off rust. I give the door a good kick.

Barclay will open it.

Barclay, I say, let me radio.

Who would look for him in the cemetery? Ghosts, says Ngarima, you don't want to go there. But there he is, drinking, his back up against one of the stones that all lean one way, like recliners, that angle, and hard to see if you are walking by at a clip, which I am, short-cutting and wending and feeling my way back. But I do see.

He gives me his film-star profile, his wet lips settling around a bottle.

Barclay, I say, I've found the shack.

Barclay drinks. The label's imported. What's not imported here?

I squat to his level. At his level, each plot is fenced to the size of a bed and mounded as if there are covers pulled over. In some places the covers are cracked and open. I thought everyone here was afraid of this place, I say. Talk to me, Barclay.

Everyone is afraid, he says. Aren't you? His voice is down deep where darkness sits in a man, where rumble meets those chemicals that make a man or make him weep.

They're not my dead, I say.

No? It doesn't matter, he says. The spirits have blown away anyway. He purses his lips to show me
blow
. All of the spirits.

Quit being so mysterious, I say. It's bad enough you wouldn't take me to the radio.

Radio? says Barclay, sitting up a little. You know, boats used to miss this island even when they started having radar, he says. He drinks again. This is where they always put the inches-to-miles on maps because there is so much blue here they can't resist it, it makes the map look good. He says, Watch the sunset tonight and you will see green fire. Or you used to. He takes another drink. I used to meet women here, he says. No one would bother us.

Barclay, I say, let me radio.

Clare, he says. He says Clare perfectly. The radio doesn't work.

No? I say.

I am a man, and I don't like to say what doesn't work, and I don't like to say it to you, who is not subject to me, but the radio doesn't work. It has no part, the part is gone, I don't know.

He drinks.

You could have told me sooner.

You had your hope.

So when is the boat coming?

It comes when it comes, he says. You should not be so sad.

I like order. Here I can't order up or out, I can't order a thing.

You are a woman.

The inflection sounds kind at first, a little pitying, then it's something I should have thought of, a woman alone with a man.

He offers me his bottle.

Thanks, I say, and I go on with my walk.

Don't mention it, he says after me so that I know it's the mention of the brokenness of the radio that he doesn't want anyone else to hear, not that I shouldn't consider him generous.

I shiver as a mist mists the path in swaths, the way a ghost would, then I run away with an anger that is huge, that cracks.

I wake in a dream about my son, who is falling, who falls fast and hard, and I can hear his breath in surprise suck by the air at my ear, and I run to throw myself to be under him, a pillow, when someone knocks me down. I writhe to sit up, to see if my son's all right.

Then I rear back and hit hard.

The part plunging into the air I can't see, this being a pure night, starless and moonless. I'm not seeing anyway, I am trying to find a scream where it's made, clutched tight or asleep, when he and his big hot part get tangled in my hit and pull down glass, which shatters on the side of the crate I know is there.

What can I see? I can't see anything.

Get out, you eruption on god's ass, you problem noise and ghostfucker! That is Barclay, above me. You should think before you creep so.

Barclay's beating at the curtain that's the front door, its flowers smoke against the darkness my eyes try to sort. I stand beside it, wound in more curtain, the sheets here, the dress here, surely even the slid-off shorts of the man who stood over me are flowered and red or yellow. I am so sleepy and shocked I think the red is bleeding into the yellow, or is that because the bleeding should be mine?

Oh well, says Ngarima from her mat, he will be back and try better. Or someone not so clumsy. You see, she says, as I hear Barclay lower himself beside her, they can't break a lamp getting in, they can't fall over things.

It is a custom we should give up for visitors, says Barclay. Let them have the little girls. Look at her, she's not one for them.

Rape, it's called, I say.

It's her fault the lamp is broken, says Ngarima as if I can't hear, rolling over on her stomach beside him.

The boat will bring more glass, says Barclay.

I don't say, Sorry. I don't. I'm having trouble breathing. It must be anger, after that punch. I used the karate of my hand, all that I have, this row of fingers, this bluntness untrained except from the movies, I used it where it hurt, and he tangled his legs together in surprise as he flailed backward and broke the lamp.

I heard him before he broke it, says Ngarima. He was useless, a boy.

They will always try, says Barclay, then he sleeps, drawing the air out of every corner, the loud, sudden snoring like yet another person in the house.

Could Barclay himself be the culprit? I resist crawling between the two of them. I consider fleeing to the shed a few yards away. But there's all that dark between the shed and the house—I could be caught by someone else sneaking up or away. Or is Ngarima's son who sleeps there of an age that slips into houses? Twelve? What do I know? Could it be Harry? I step back behind my curtain.

No guidebook says not to sleep because men make a sport of tupping the tourists. Now only the broken glass protects me. Thank you, Temu, for sparing the one lamp that could break. It certainly wasn't you, you who can't even aim pee without wildness.

I keep my eyes open to the broken glass. No one else, clumsy or not, will tiptoe over it tonight without me hearing his cut cries. Tomorrow I will find the man who did tiptoe by his bloodied feet, the one who fled the room over the lamp pieces, the one who is probably still running over the sharp coral that faces the beach.

Unless he has calluses like all the rest.

Not the sex I expected. I review the few men I've seen here: all smooth-chested adolescents except Barclay and the old men who gamble next to the flagpole at the wharf. Do more men hide in the crevices of this island, lazy ones who don't come down to move copra, who howl with the roosters before dawn and sneak onto women's beds of rice? Men happy about the boat's delay?