The Sea Grape Tree (16 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

T
he diaper bag heavy on his right arm, Joshua heavy on his left, Shad bent down carefully and picked up a stone, feeling the damp spreading under his armpits already. He straightened and pushed his sunglasses farther up his nose with his shoulder.

“Miss Maisie!” he called, banging the stone on the dented number sign on the gate. Shifting Joshua in his miniature blue jeans and sneakers to a more comfortable position, he banged again.

“Who calling?” Maisie emerged onto the porch in a housedress, shielding her eyes from the morning sun.

“Shad, ma'am.”

“What happen, son?”

“I have a problem, Miss Maisie. Beth gone to work and she tell me to take the baby to Miss Livingston next door. But Miss Livingston say she get a message from her daughter and she have to meet her in Manchioneal, and she can't take Joshua today.”

The old lady contemplated Shad, the squinty eyes in her dark moon face sympathetic as always. “You want me to take him for the day, is that you saying?”

“Yes, ma'am, if you can help us.”

“I cleaning the house right now, and with the arthritis it take me a little time, but I can pick him up around eleven.”

“I have to go to work, though.”

“Carry him to the bar and I come for him.”

Back on the main road, Shad headed to work. Two empty taxis roared past, racing one another through the village. Shad yelled after them to slow down, but they were gone in their clouds of dust before he could finish.

“Pshaw, man. They have no respect for decent people walking on the road, nuh?”

Two children passed him in their school uniforms. “Hurry, hurry, teacher going to vex with you,” he said irritably, and the children started running.

A little farther ahead under a bush, a mother hen and her three chicks were clucking around in the sun-speckled dirt. “You see that?” he said to Joshua. “That is how it supposed to be. The mother chicken stay with the baby chickens until they can take care of themselves.”

In answer, Joshua reached for his father's sunglasses, trying to pull them off, and Shad drew back. “Whoa, star, don't touch the shades.”

Behind them, a car came to a stop. “Need a ride?” the driver called.

“Yeah, man,” Shad replied, and Danny leaned over to open the car door. After climbing in, Shad sat the baby on his lap and pulled the seat belt around them. The new smell of the Toyota blanketed him, the best smell a man could surround himself with, in Shad's opinion. Cameron, the real estate guy, had rented a Mitsubishi, but it smelled the same, the newness of both reminding of a better world.

“Going straight to work?” Danny inquired, accelerating back onto the road.

“Yes, and I have to carry Josh with me this morning. His mother gone to work and the lady who take care of him can't do it this morning.” Shad gazed at the familiar houses passing his window and gave a snort. “I tell his mother this was going to happen, but she don't want to listen.”

“That's how it goes with kids, I guess.”

“You have any children?”

“Never had time for it. I was talking to Sarah about that yesterday. I love how on Sundays you see all these cute kids going to church here, all the little girls in their frilly dresses and the little boys in their shirts and shorts. Reminds me of when I was a boy. You see stuff like that and you wonder if you did the right thing, not having kids.”

“It's not too late.”

“Maybe not.”

“Tell me something,” Shad said, ruffling Joshua's thick hair, and the baby looked up at him. “What happen with Janet that afternoon, when the two of you go off in Marvin's taxi?”

Danny said nothing while he parked in Miss Mac's driveway and turned off the ignition. He lowered his sunglasses with one finger, opening his eyes wide. “That's one crazy bitch, man.”

Shad released the seat belt and handed the baby his keys to buy time. “What happen?”

His companion threw his head back onto the headrest. “So we get in Marvin's taxi and go off to Oracabessa, and we come to this place, the Hibiscus Inn. You heard of it?” Shad nodded.

“We go into the place,” Danny continued, “and Marvin leaves before we can tell him when to come get us, but I figure we can get a taxi back. Janet is hungry, so we have dinner—great view, too.” Danny jerked his head up and looked at Shad. “I kept thinking we could use the cliff here for something like that, make it a restaurant with a lookout point, you know.

“Anyway,” he said, settling his head back again. “We get finished with dinner, and I'm ready to come home but Janet wants to go next door. There's a little bar there, she says.” The storyteller was almost locked in a trance now, reliving the scene. “We go into the place, a dark kind of joint, and there are only a few people there. We dance a little. Two hours later we're still there, the place is getting crowded, and I'm getting nervous. I'd promised my mother to call her at ten and I'm not carrying no cell phone no more since they don't work in Largo, you know. I go to the restroom and I come back and I'm drinking my drink, and it's tasting kind of oily. And I tell Janet the drink is tasting nasty, but she just laughs and says I must be drunk.”

Joshua stood up on his father's lap while Danny continued the saga. “She says we can go back next door to Hibiscus, because she's booked a room there—like she's planned the whole damn thing—and she starts to get all romantic, kissing up on me and shit, and I tell her I'm going home. I walk out and stop the first taxi I see. Then Janet comes running out and jumps into the taxi with me, all vexed and going on about how I don't love her no more.

“The taxi is coming back now and it's weaving all over the place, like the driver is drunk, but at least we're heading in the right direction. Then Janet takes a little bottle out of her purse and she sprinkles some of this oil on my hand and she starts to rub it, saying she's giving me a massage. But the oil smells funny, like the drink in the bar, and I tell her I know what she's up to, that it's some kind of black magic she's trying on me, all this oily shit. I know it, because we have it in the Virgin Islands. She starts going on, and the taxi man stops the car in the middle of nowhere and tells us to get out, because he doesn't like no quarrelling in his car. Then Janet opens the door and gets out. I tell her to stop the craziness, just to get back in the car. She starts crying and the taxi man tells me to get out, too, but he's a little guy so I stay right where I am and I tell him not to leave her.

“The whole thing is like out of a movie, man. Janet won't get back in the car. She's saying the only way she's getting back in the taxi is if I promise her I'm not going to break up with her. This time the taxi is driving alongside her while she's walking, walking in them high heels, and the taxi man is cursing all kind of bad words now and saying he's going to drive off and leave her. And it's crazy shit going on, crying and cursing and yelling. So I tell her I'll keep going out with her if she just get back in the car, and she stops crying and asks me to promise, and I promise, and she gets in the car and we come back to Largo.”

The beating of Joshua's little fingers on the dashboard filled the Toyota, and Shad gathered the boy's hands, quieting them. “You seen her again?”

Danny shrugged. “I promised her, you know. It's not like she's a bad person—”

“Puss eat your supper then.” Shad climbed out of the car and hoisted the baby onto his shoulder. The cat had eaten Danny's supper—and Danny.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

E
ric examined his new conch-shell path and wandered into the parking lot. His call to Simone had gone to her voice mail and his imagination was running wild, seeing her with someone, a man, no doubt. He looked at the Jeep, his steed of seventeen years, and kicked a nearly bald tire. It would be a waste of gas to drive aimlessly along the coast, but he sure as hell didn't feel like sitting on his verandah, missing her. He'd tried playing around on the laptop, writing her a letter inviting her to the groundbreaking if it happened, but his fingers had gotten confused on the keys and made too many mistakes. Still without an Internet connection, he couldn't send it to her, anyway, so he'd shut off the computer.

“I'm going next door,” he called to Shad, who was sweeping out the restaurant.

“Mister Keller?” Miss Mac said when she opened the door. She was in her old housecoat although it was only five o'clock, her head tied with a scarf over bumpy rollers. “You paying me a visit?”

“Is Danny here?”

“No, he gone out.”

“I'm paying you a visit, then.”

Sun-spotted hands trembling a little, the woman opened a cupboard and took out two cups. “Something on your mind, I know.”

Eric threw himself into a chair at the kitchen table. “Just a bit restless.”

“Thinking about the hotel—or a woman?” A wrinkly smile played around her lips.

“Let's stick to the hotel. We're taking Horace out tomorrow to see the island, Danny and me.”

“Horace told me.” She always liked to talk about her son,
in whom she was well pleased,
she liked to say.

Her former boarder rapped his fingers on the tabletop. “I hope he's serious about the deal.”

Miss Mac filled a kettle with water and placed it on the stove. “He says he has big plans for the campsite. He sounding serious to me.”

“I hope—” Eric started but snipped the thought. Miss Mac might have been his confidante in the past, but she didn't need to know the ups and downs of bringing the hotel deal together with her own son.

“Something bothering you?” she asked.

Eric crossed his legs under the table. “The whole thing of applying for permits and waiting for the Parish Council to schedule meetings and give approvals, it's taking forever.”

Miss Mac lifted the whistling kettle off the stove and poured hot water into the cups. After inserting teabags, she placed the cups on the table and sat down. She looked at Eric steadily, her glasses sliding down her nose and catching on one of her moles.

“Patience is a virtue,” she said. “Everything in Jamaica takes time, you know that. All these years I waiting on somebody to come along and buy my property, and look how Danny want to buy it now. Pshaw, man, don't worry, everything going to turn out good. You going to have your hotel and I going to sell my house and land, even if Danny don't buy it.” She blew on her tea and cackled. “Then I moving into Horace's house before he put me in a nursing home.”

Walking back to the bar after his visit, Eric sucked his teeth, a tepid but satisfying version of the gesture. His options were disappearing, one by one. He couldn't keep the bar open the way it was losing money, and now his plan B was out. There'd be no moving into a room at Miss Mac's. She'd be leaving soon, one way or the other—and the boardinghouse would be gone.

A bus passed, filled to the doors with schoolchildren on a rare outing, their faces lit up. A few waved at Eric through the open windows and he waved back. When the dust cleared, he saw a woman walking toward him along the main road, a tall, thin woman with a straw hat, the En­glish artist, Sarah. He waited until she looked up, smiled, and made a sipping gesture, suggesting she should have a drink in the bar.

“Thank you,” she called when she was within hearing distance. “I could do with a bit of water.”

A few gulps of ginger beer later, the woman leaned back in her chair at Eric's table. She removed her hat, and bright red hair sprang up in its place, startling him for a second.

“You like walking, do you?” the bar owner asked, rubbing his knees. He felt odd being alone with her, the high cheekbones and plump lips unnerving him.

“Yes, but I try to avoid the beach. The sun turns me into a lobster, so I'm stuck with the dust on the road, I suppose.”

“How d'you like Largo?”

“The scenery is amazing, isn't it? And the people are nice and warm. But what I find a bit—what surprises me, I guess, is the—the—”

“The poverty?”

“Well, that. But I was more thinking of the people's attitudes, you know. There's a way of thinking about life that I wasn't expecting.”

“Like what?”

Sarah pressed her lips together. “Hmmm, let's see if I can describe it.” She took another sip and sighed, and he could see that she'd needed this, needed to unburden herself. “I was expecting a certain level of racism, perhaps, black against white, because Jamaica had been a colony. I mean, what would stop them from hating the Brits after all they've been through with slavery and everything? I know I would. But I haven't found that, I've found a real tolerance for white people. But what I've experienced—and I was thinking about this walking along—is a superiority—the way some local people put other people down.”

Eric put his feet up on the chair beside him. “You mean the class lines, don't you? You're surprised that black people can discriminate against their own.” When she nodded, he lowered his voice and looked around at the few customers. “You know, as one expat to another—I just want to call a spade a spade, no pun intended—one of the hardest things to get used to is the fact that black people can be just as prejudiced as white people. In America we divide people up according to race. You're white, you're black, you're Asian, and so on. That's what we're comfortable with. Most tourists come out here expecting one of two things. Either the same thing that they're used to back home, the same old race prejudices, or the idealistic kind of Bob Marley version of life—peace and love, you know.”

He looked at his scaly toes and twiddled them. “But what we have here, the reality, is that class is more important than race in this country. With Jamaicans, if you're from a family that has been educated for generations, whatever the color, where they speak Standard English rather than patois, where they've gone to the best schools and colleges—then you're upper class, or upper-middle at the lowest. It doesn't matter if you don't make a go of your life, as long as you're from an educated family, you're always considered up here.” He raised his hand, then dropped it. “The bad news is that if you were born down here, you pretty much always stay down here.”

“Can't people work their way up?”

“A few people from the lower classes either have a successful business or get a profession, but that doesn't make them upper class. It takes a few generations for that family to move into the upper classes. That's just the way it is.”

“Rather like England, isn't it? Our accent, our origins, our education determine what other people think of us. Until recently, if you were in the trades, in business, you were looked down on. Even today, although things are shifting a bit, if you speak with a rural accent, even if you make a lot of money, you're thought of as rather crass, really.”

“A holdover, I suppose.”

“Where does race come in here then, or does it?”

“Oh, it comes in.” Eric nodded firmly. “Don't worry about that. You tend to find the lighter-skinned people—the
brownings,
they call them—higher up the food chain. It's been that way for a long time. But things have been changing. There are now educated people, high-class people, who are very dark skinned and in positions of power. It's education and social background that count, ultimately.

Race isn't as important. When it comes to marriage, a lot of those high-class people, black and brown, marry white people, so intermarriage isn't a big thing. In fact, for some people it's rather prestigious to marry a white person, regardless of their class. There used to be discrimination against white people during the seventies and eighties, so I hear, anyway, but that wave has died down and the old class prejudices have come back. You'll even find black and brown upper-class people talking against each other sometimes.” He flapped his hand. “It's all mixed up, kind of crazy.”

“How do you know all of this?”

“I get to hear all sides.”

“What status do
you
have, if you don't mind me asking?”

Eric snorted. “White foreigners automatically fit into upper-middle or upper class, a throwback from colonial days, I guess—even more so when you're a big fish in a little pond.”

“I'm not quite sure where I'd fit in,” the woman said, shaking her flaming head. “Not that it matters.”