Left at the Mango Tree (23 page)

“What is it with everyone today? Has the library shut its doors? What are
you
reading now?” Nat asked Bang.

Bang held the page between his thumb and index finger and waved it in front of Nat like a shiny bell. “They reinstated it.”

“Reinstated what?”

“The annual marimba competition. This is the entry form.
My
entry form, to be exact.”

“You’re a shoo-in, but what happened? The contest has been dead for years.”

(Remember I told you about the annual marimba competition that Bang’s grandfather won ten years running? Well, this is the one. When the pineapple trade on Oh bottomed out, so too did the accounts that the government’s Agency for the Promulgation of the Indigenous Arts used to sponsor the annual event.)

“I’ll tell you what happened.” Bang read from the paper in his hand: “‘It is with great delight that the Agency for the Promulgation of the Indigenous Arts announces the reinstatement of Oh’s annual marimba competition’...blah blah blah...‘historic island tradition’... blah blah blah...here it is...‘held under the auspices of Mr. Cougar Zanne, owner of the Sincero Hotel, where the competition is to take place in the Buddha’s Belly Bar and Lounge.’”

“Cougar! You?!” Nat knocked on the spine of Raoul’s book, still propped in Cougar’s hands.

“What?”

“The annual marimba competition. Why didn’t you say anything?” Nat asked.

“Wanted it to be a surprise.”

Something didn’t add up. “Since when are you a promulgator of the indigenous arts?”

“I’m not. I’m a promulgator of profits. I put up the prize money and the space, and in exchange I get a packed house, hot thirsty bodies. I’m working up a signature cocktail to serve in honor of
the occasion. I mix up a few batches beforehand and I’ll refill their glasses faster than they can say ‘marimba.’”

Nat still felt like half the picture was missing, but Raoul returned right then, snatching the book from Cougar’s hands, and so Nat’s thoughts turned finally to the rum that would soon be burning his throat. He motioned to Cougar to pour him a double shot. Meanwhile Raoul, who had barely muttered a hello, propped the book open on the bar, plucked his specs from Bang’s nose, and resumed his reading.

Nat knocked on the book’s spine again. “Raoul, you heard about the reinstatement of the annual marimba competition?”

“I heard.”

“Bang’s a shoo-in. What do you think?”

“Yep.” Raoul closed the book with Mr. Stan’s story and set it reverentially on the bar, resigned that he would get little reading done that evening. “You enter yet, Bang?”

“Got my entry form right here. I’m taking it into town tomorrow.”

“Good luck.” Raoul raised his glass, which was met by those of his three best friends. Double rum against water, against beer, against a yellowish concoction in Cougar’s hand, murky glasses joined in that most banal of outward signs of solidarity. They had clinked their glasses thousands of times before, but on this particular night the rum and the water and the beer and the yellow goo hovered in the air between them as if suspended in time.

As far as I know, time has never stopped on Oh, but for what they perceived as a fistful of still, dark seconds, the four mates would have sworn that it had. Three of them, guilty-headed, had some idea as to why it might have suddenly halted dead. The fourth could only sense that it had done so, and he made a mental note
to note it, for surely it was of importance. It was he, then, who knocked the island clock back into motion. “Cougar, what’s that cloudy mess you’re drinking?” Raoul asked.

“Mango surprise.” Cougar swished a mouthful and then swallowed. “Too sweet. Back to the drawing board.”

“The drawing board?” Raoul asked.

“He’s working up a signature cocktail for the marimba contest night,” Bang explained.

“Ah.” Raoul looked at his watch, perhaps to reassure himself that time had kept its meter. It had. “Bang, shouldn’t you get a move on?” he said and cocked his head in the direction of the stage.

“Yes sir. I’m off.” Bang bounced off the bar stool and was up on stage before Raoul could ask him what he planned to sing about.

Nat knew. “He’s singing about money. Must have the marimba prize money on the brain.”

“Who could blame him?” Raoul responded.

Indeed.

To witness this exchange between Raoul and his mates, so typical of their nighttime reunions at the Hotel Sincero’s bar, you would hardly think that anything was amiss or guess that Raoul was having any difficulty at all in distinguishing Stan Kalpi’s path from his own. In truth, things were very much amiss and Raoul very much in difficulty, still scouring the island for variables, but finding more questions than answers in the process (though he
was
making some headway, which you’ll hear about soon enough). Even so, like Nat and the others who dodged ping-pong balls at the bar, Raoul found solace that night in the Belly of his friends’ company, where he, too, knew that certain matters were certain not to be discussed.

“Ladies and gentlemen, good evening and welcome to the Buddha’s Belly. My name is Bang and tonight I’m going to sing about something we all love, something we all need, something most of us on this pretty little island of Oh never seem to have enough of. So hold on to your wallets and let go of your troubles!” And Bang’s show began.

When I was just a very young lad,

By now you know all about the silencing, soothing effect of Bang’s voice on the noisy, grumbling crowd, the cool coating it splashes, at least temporarily, on the Belly’s burning walls. Tonight was no different.

But what of the singer himself ? I’ve never told you what happens to Bang when the music starts, when his voice escapes that vague conjunction of heart, soul, and lung from which the shapeless sounds are born. It’s not unlike what happens to you or me when we succumb to sleep at the end of a day, our coursing thoughts relinquished to the custody of the night. Bang’s songs take him over like the rhythmic tide invades the sandy shore.

I walked one day with my old granddad.

Like a mindless sleeper who takes mindful part in the dreams that invade his head, so, too, Bang, while his song kept its meter unthinking, contemplated the thoughts that like flies or ping-pong balls played inside his brain. With a mental dexterity akin to the acrobatics performed by his marimba-playing, pineapple-chopping, knife-carving fingers, simultaneously Bang sang and Bang reasoned.

We went to a beach that was still and serene,

Sometimes he calculated the number of people in the Belly, sorted out the locals from the foreigners and decided where the latter were from. He guessed at the topics of his chums’ conversations by
the bar, imagined Cougar’s quips and Raoul’s reactions. He observed the dance floor, sized up the expectant men and measured the curves of the ladies underneath their skirts. Sometimes his thoughts wandered farther. Should he re-paint his peeling window frames now or wait until Christmas? How much time until Christmas anyway? Didn’t Jacob Wilson’s baby sister look mighty grown-up bent over the breadfruit at the market the other day!

The strangest beach I’ve ever seen.

On this particular windy night, like Nat, Bang struggled to ignore fuzzy and distant recollections of a not-so-distant beach on a not-so-distant night; like Cougar concocting his signature cocktail, Bang toyed with melodies for the marimba competition and with means for spending the profits after the fact; like Raoul, Bang was there at the Belly, physically, but his thoughts wanted to be somewhere else. They were jumbled up, hugger-mugger. Guilt and Raoul and Cougar and the contest and Nat and the night at the beach. Yes, definitely the night at the beach.

Instead of palms on the sandy shore

What bothered Bang about that night on the beach with Gustave was not the same thing that bothered Nat. Bang had entered into the affair light of heart, as he does most things, genuinely convinced of his moral sacrifice, an ugly but necessary deed to help a deserving friend. That Bang should score a bit of cash along the way was just an added bonus, one that meant little to the kind of man who not only knew what the “indigenous arts” might be but even excelled at a few. The rainbow notes he’d ever known were few and far between, but he got by just fine, and without compromising either his melodies or his principles (the latter consisted of two simple aphorisms, “A man’s got to walk to his own rhythm,” and “Happiness is what life’s all about.”).

There were money trees with coins galore

What bothered Bang about that night on the beach with Gustave was that something or someone had stolen his rhythm and imposed a new and strange one upon him. His helpless feet had stepped, as if of their own accord, in time to a cadence he had never known before. Bang couldn’t figure out how it had happened, how he had
let
it happen, or if in fact it had truly happened at all. Perhaps his imagination had simply played a trick on him.

That dropped like fruits on the soft, white sand

Bang tried to recall the night in all its detail, but couldn’t quite. He remembered his first thought when they arrived at the beach to meet Gustave: it was Edda’s beach. The beach where she walked as a girl with her hair tied up in a dancing white ribbon; the beach where she walked as a young woman, her hair freed and her arms bare.

And felt so good nestled in my hand.

He remembered the shiny night and the sheen on the moon, whose light rivaled Bang’s own brilliant heart. He heard again the
shhhhhhh shh!
of the leaves and the chirp of the invisible island frogs. He saw the wavy silver of the tide and he saw Gustave, surrounded by more pineapples than Bang could count. He sensed again the puzzlement, fear, and awe that was mirrored in the eyes of his mates and he recalled the touch of Gustave’s hand on his. He remembered the paralysis that rooted them all to the ground like trees.

“See that tree?” my granddad said.

Bang’s mind then fell upon the sea, where bobbed the boat or boats and silent boatsmen who awaited their prickly charges and swept them away, their crafts as if captained by the wind. Into the sea Bang trod all over again, his feet sandaled and soggy, his arms
wide to accommodate his load. There his memories faltered. All Bang could recall next was the music. Music, dance, and song. To sloshing and clunking as regular as the tick of a clock, sloshing and clunking that couldn’t possibly have come from his own steps and twirls into the sea or from the deposit of crates he himself had borne, to this mysterious rhythm Bang had somehow lost his own.

I saw. In awe I nodded my head.

Next he knew, he was singing in time with the dance. How it all started was fuzzy, as if it had simply always been. The wind shook the leaves and coaxed the cicadas and Bang was surrounded in song. Had he not succumbed, he would have been smothered. So he had opened his mouth and let himself be seduced.

“It’s a tree of gold for you and me,

In unison with the island’s tremble, lifting and turning, passing and pausing, Bang danced and Bang sang and his burden grew light and his pockets grew heavy and his sacrifices in friendship’s name were forgotten. He reasoned that the shifty wind and the meddlesome moon were to be blamed for that night’s befuddlement, but his reasonings, he knew, fell short. The crumple of rainbow bills in his pocket and the jingle of island coins was not the kind of music that suited a man of his rhythm, no sir; and yet, he could no more ignore it now than could Mr. Stan Kalpi the songs on the wind. Was this, then, the music to make Bang happy? And wasn’t that what life was all about?

A golden tree by a silvery sea.”

“It’s a tree of gold for you and me,

Cougar and Nat smoked cigars silently (Nat could now afford to buy cigars) as they listened to Bang’s song and did some reasoning of their own. If Nat was to remain in the dark about Raoul’s strange behavior and about the island gossip until later when he offered Bang a lift, at least the fog was thinning where Cougar was concerned. Promulgator of profits, indeed! Were Cougar’s recent patronage of the indigenous arts orchestrated merely for profit, then Cougar could have fronted the money to reinstate the annual marimba competition years ago. Even
he
was feeling guilty, Nat marveled. He was looking for some way to get rid of the cash.