Left at the Mango Tree (16 page)

Abigail was getting no younger, her family had grown, and still she had found no job, her search inevitably and repeatedly interrupted by her growing belly and her growing brood. She was fed up with trying to find work as someone’s assistant, fed up with being plump all the time while her family got thinner and thinner. So Abigail decided to go into business for herself. She had training, didn’t she? She had learned to balance both sides of any account, to cover things up nice and even, and to keep troublesome things quiet. And thanks to the positions she had assumed on a trial basis over the years, she knew about having babies.

Why, she should have thought of it sooner! A midwife, that’s what she would be. The islanders were always having babies. Business would be good. And if anyone on Oh could manage a pregnancy that needed managing, it was Abigail.

My mother’s was to be one of these, though not even Abigail herself could have guessed how much so, until I came along.

“Ouch!” Abigail cried out. She was at home with my mother, sewing the sunbonnet that I would wear on the day I caught Gustave’s eye.

“What is it?” A pregnant Edda, frightened suddenly, lowered her feet from the footstool that held them and raised her torso from the cushion of her chair, poised to rush to Abigail’s aid.

“Now, now, don’t go jumping up in your condition. Just a little poke. My eyes aren’t what they used to be.” Abigail sucked the drop of blood that pooled on her fingertip and threatened the clean white cotton of my tiny bonnet.

“It’s almost night. You should do that stitching in the daylight.”

“You’re right. Your husband will be home soon.” Abigail lifted herself from Edda’s sofa with the ease of a woman ten years her junior. She wore a full gray skirt over hips that bore witness to all the children she had had and a pink blouse that still struggled to contain her large top, though the years were slowly granting an advantage to the thinning cloth. “Time for me to go. I’ll be back tomorrow.” She gave Edda a peck on the forehead.

“Thank you, Abigail. What chance would my baby have without you?”

Abigail collected her things and left. She stepped out into the night that through the windows of Edda’s sitting room had announced itself, warm and soft. In the still, dark sky, the moon shone down on Abigail and followed her home, watching and winking. The leaves sang a song of foreboding as she passed them, the moon’s light splashed across her face, but Abigail paid them no mind. In shuddering choruses their smooth, shiny sides tried to warn her, while their rough, faded halves told her the tale of the moon’s deceit. Of the leaf stitched from two stolen parts and the almond seed sown almost nine moons before. Of the fruit that Abigail’s hands were about to reap. In response, the moon just mocked the silly leaves, guiding the waves that drowned their song and crashed on the sandy shore, gnawing it and soothing it in turn.

10

W
hile we’ve busied ourselves with the story of Abigail Davies, Raoul and Gustave have had their hands full with the solutions’ next logical steps. Gustave’s step landed him back on the paper’s front page, and Raoul’s sent him back to the Belly, waiting on a beer and a little black magic.

“Bastard!” Raoul chuckled. He shook his head over the
Morning Crier
, now wrinkled and tired from the long day’s wear. He was smiling when he said it again: “Bastard!” With gentle movements he smoothed the creases from the headline and, satisfied that it was sufficiently legible, he turned it wrong way round and shoved it at Cougar, who stood opposite him behind the bar.

PARANORMAL PILFERING OF PUYMUTE PINEAPPLES—TAKE TWO

“I saw,” Cougar nodded at him. He glanced at the paper and polished a shiny cocktail shaker with his sleeve. “He got you
again,” he said, straightening his tie in the reflection that grinned and gleamed at him from the curves of the silver tumbler.

“Got me?” Raoul giggled. “Got
me
?”

Cougar was puzzled. He stopped his grooming and looked Raoul square in the face. “Yeah. Got you. You, Customs and Excise Officer Raoul Orlean who still doesn’t know where the first lot of fruit went and now another lot’s missing. Got.
You
. Didn’t he?”

But Raoul didn’t hear Cougar’s question. Raoul was off on that road of holes and humps, zigs and zags, obstacle and illumination that Mr. Stan Kalpi had traveled before him. He was defining his variables, adding them up, and sorting out the solution’s next logical step.

You remember Raoul’s variables lined up on the library table, shaded from the afternoon sun and Miss Partridge’s reign? The hanky, the hard candy, the keys, and the coins? The tiny plastic shoe, as small and insignificant as Gustave’s denials of dear Almondine, and the plum, soft as Raoul’s head when for a moment he believed them? There was a pencil, too, sharp as the buzz from the fly in Raoul’s brain that had said to come up with a plan.

The stopwatch suggested that Raoul take his time and wait, wait for Gustave to slip like the ballpoint that slipped and slid across Raoul’s notebook during their interview earlier that same day. Gustave had orchestrated the pineapple caper for cash and had even offered Raoul a slice of the profits, that time they talked mealybugs over hot pineapple wine. Raoul’s rainbow bills reminded him of that. His cigarettes, side by side in their cellophane pack, those told him that more and more capers would befall Puymute’s patches, though like the chewing gum whose flavor fails when it’s stretched, Gustave, too, would falter, if he tried to push his luck.

Raoul would let him try to do just that, and, like the bookmark, would follow the actions of the story’s antagonist until they grew sloppy and betrayed him. So implied the lip balm that had seeped its gooey wax beyond its cap and onto the inside of Raoul’s trouser pocket before landing on the library table. Raoul must watch and wait, and when Gustave inadvertently handed him a clue, a paper-clipped page in the book of pineapple plots, then Raoul could go back to the library and study up on what to do. This final step he deduced from the sorcery books and the dictionary that he suddenly saw as clearly and as plainly as noses on faces. If he managed to catch Gustave smuggling pineapples
in flagrante
then Officer Orlean would have some bargaining power and might just get Gustave to confess the truth about Edda and Almondine.

Which was why it made Raoul giggle with excitement that Gustave had struck again so soon and why he didn’t hear a word of Cougar’s question.

Cougar, unruffled, went back to his quiet primping, but not before filling one of the mugs that dangled over the Belly’s bar with island beer, and pushing it Raoul’s way. Raoul, newspaper still in hand, sipped and smirked and studied, shaking his satisfied head from side to side. He knew the story by heart, but he continued to read and re-read it, looking for patterns and clues to measure against what had happened and what was to come, confronting the curves and the detours of his dusty path. Confident that in due time it would deposit him, worn but wiser, home.

“You saw?” Nat asked and declared at the same time, as he slid onto the stool next to Raoul’s and swiped his paper. “Just took a lady mountain-climber to Dante’s Mountain. Says she’s always right about everything and
she
thinks we ought to call it Dante’s Hill.”

“What did you tell her?” Cougar asked, passing him a shot of yellow rum.

“Thanks.” Nat took the rum and downed it in one gulp. “I told her she was mad! You can’t go changing a person’s name just like that. Or a mountain’s either. A name’s a legacy. You can’t change your legacy. What if I started calling myself Herbert? Or Gene? You wouldn’t know who I was.” He slammed his empty shot glass onto the bar for emphasis.

“Gene Gentle, huh?” Raoul mused. “That’s not so bad, you know.” (Gentle was Nat’s last name.)

“How about you, Raoul?” Cougar suggested. “Gene Orlean is even better.”

Raoul and Cougar laughed and clunked drinks high in the air.

“Have your fun,” Nat went on. “All I’m saying is a Gentle is a Gentle and an Orlean is an Orlean. A name grows up with a person. Or a mountain. Give me another rum, will you?”

Cougar poured, Nat pored over the paper, and Raoul drummed his fingers on the bar.

“Where’s Bang?” Raoul inquired, his high spirits making him more in want of company and of nonsense than he had been since I first came into the world.

As if in response to Raoul’s wishes, Bang appeared in the Belly’s doorway. He wore a blue beret and carried a fishing rod and knocked the latter against the former in salutation as he neared his buddies at the bar.

“What’s it going to be tonight, then? Songs of zee swordfish?” Raoul teased.

“
You’re
in a good mood.” Bang maneuvered his pole over the bar and into a corner. “Am I to assume you haven’t seen the
Morning Crier
today?” He snatched the paper from Nat and read aloud:

For the second time in ten days, two acres’ worth of pineapples have gone mysteriously missing from the plantation of Cyrus Puymute. The crops disappeared overnight, seemingly without a trace. Police investigations are ongoing, though the earlier case was dismissed for lack of evidence and deemed supernatural. The Office of Customs and Excise will continue to investigate in an attempt to recover lost duty on the apparently-exported fruit.

“You seem too happy to have read
that
,” Bang declared. “Not that I’m complaining to find you in a good mood, mind you.”

“Oh, I’ve read it alright. I’ve read it,” Raoul replied.

“And?” Bang looked at him.

“And what?”

“And you aren’t upset about all this magic business you can never seem to stomach? This is black magic if ever there was any. That’s four acres now that are gone. As if in a puff of smoke.” (Bang’s hands opened into the starbursts that he always circled in front of his face whenever he discussed Oh’s black magical manifestations.)

Raoul just giggled and shook his head.

Bang looked at Cougar, with whom he exchanged a helpless shrug. “Fireflies,” they said in unison.

You see, whenever Raoul giggled and shook his head it meant trouble. It meant that his usual flies had transformed themselves
into bright ideas, bright ideas that like fireflies in a lidded jar would knock about inside his brain until they were freed into the clarity beyond the glass, or until they burned out and died. Like Raoul’s every-day flies, his fireflies, too, came in every size. There were small ones, say, a short-cut that got him faster to work in the mornings or a cup that kept his pencils from rolling off his desk. There were medium-sized ones: a TV antenna fastened to his roof, an irrigation system for the garden in the back of his house. And then there were the biggest and the brightest ideas, like newspaper ads about babies, and now, evidently, a plan to nab a pineapple thief.

“Out with it, Raoul. What have you got in there?” Nat knocked on Raoul’s forehead.

Raoul, his high spirits making him more tolerant, too, of company and of nonsense than he had been since I first came into the world, started to explain about Stan Kalpi and the singing wind, about the mandolin-guitar and Stan’s toes doing maths in the mud, about his own variables—the notebook, the bookmark, the balm and the shoe—lined up on the table at the Pritchard T. Lullo Public Library. He was barely at the part about the soft plum, when Bang, convinced he had cottoned on to the Stan Kalpi maths, excitedly interjected that the plum must mean someone was hungry. While Bang, Nat, and Cougar debated whether the someone were Raoul or Gustave or the phantom of Puymute’s patch, Raoul, somewhat less tolerant than a few minutes before, took back his paper and returned to his quiet sipping, smirking, and study.

The three might have debated all night about the solution’s next logical step had Cougar not noticed the filling Belly and the darkening sky and reminded Bang of the time.

“Hey, you never did say what you’re singing about tonight,” Raoul said, happy to hear that the subject had changed.

Bang bounced onto his feet and raised his waterglass to Raoul, Cougar, and Nat. “Tonight, gentlemen, I sing about friends.”

“Friends?” Nat repeated, confused. “What do you mean you sing about friends?”

“Friends. You know. Mates. Chums. Good friends. Bad friends. Honest friends. Cheating friends.”

“Cheating friends?” Raoul marveled. “What kind of friends are those?”

But Bang was already on stage and didn’t hear Raoul’s question.

“Ladies and gentlemen. Good evening and welcome to the Buddha’s Belly. My name is Bang and tonight we’re going to do some numbers for you inspired by friendship, which we have lots of on this pretty little island of Oh. So find yourselves a friend to sit next to, get yourselves something from the bar...” (He winked his usual wink at Cougar.) “...and enjoy the show.”

Who do I turn to when I need to know

Bang’s voice, announced by the soft, humid tones of the marimba, was met with the usual reverent, if temporary, silence that it garnered every night when it calmed the Belly’s rumblings. Amid whispered orders for tonics and rums (which tasted more forbidden for the sottovoce with which they were requested), the customers tried not to shuffle or cough or scrape their chairs against the floor. Raoul re-read his paper. Cougar tended bar. Nat lit the daily cigar he bummed from Cougar’s cache.