The Sea Grape Tree (6 page)

CHAPTER SEVEN

T
he big man slid onto the bar stool opposite, scowling brows low over his eyes.

“Another rum, Mistah Caines?” Shad asked.

“Yeah—and call me Danny.”

Shad turned the radio dial, cutting off the strident soca with a woman singer describing the grinding of cocoa beans for her man's breakfast (complete with panting between grinds), and found a soft country and western with a woman crying over a heartless man.

“Why you turn off the good-good music?” Tri called from the far end of the bar counter where he'd been arguing with Eli about Kingston politicians.

“Pshaw, man,” Shad said, grabbing the bottle of Appleton rum. “Too much grinding make a person stupid.” And only served to remind him of his own lack of grinding, Beth's body being off-limits, at least for the time being.

“I saw you running on the beach this morning,” he said to Danny as he placed the drink in front of him. “Look like you enjoying Largo.”

“It's beautiful.” Danny sipped and licked his lips. “But I don't like surprises.”

“You get a surprise?” Shad said, keeping the smile bright to fight off the sinking feeling in his stomach.

“Yeah, I need to put more money into the budget for water and solar panels on the island.”

After he'd gotten a round of drinks for a distant table, Shad settled down on his bartender's stool. “Why Horace can't help with the cost of the solar panels?” he asked.

“It's not his property.”

“Maybe he can put up some money, and we can take it off the rent, slow like—you know, not all at once. That way he have to rent the island a long time to get back his money.”

“Possible, possible,” Danny said, and looked up at Shad. “So how come you all didn't think of this before?”

“We was waiting for you to come down. We know you would ask some good questions, get us thinking. That's what partners supposed to do, right?”

“Yeah, but not surprise you with a new bottom line, man.”

Even though Shad didn't understand what
bottom line
meant and he wasn't going to ask, he knew that Danny had eased up in his anger, because the grooves on his forehead weren't as deep and his accent was starting to sound more Caribbean.

Shad leaned in. “I know you have an answer for the water, though. What you think is the best way to get it out there?”

“Cisterns,” Danny answered with a firm mouth.

“Cisterns?”

“Almost every house in the Virgin Islands have them, because we don't have rivers like you guys.” Danny rested his elbows on the bar and put his broad fingertips together in a peak. “See, you have a house with a pitched roof and gutters. The gutters lead the rainwater down a pipe that drains into a big underground tank—that's the cistern—and every time it rains, the cistern fills up—”

“And we can collect the rainwater.”

“Exactly.” The investor nodded.

“We just have to build a tank under the ground.”

“And we have to put in pipes and a pump to bring it up to the surface. But it'll be even more expensive to put roofs on the buildings for the rain to collect on.”

Shad ran his fingers across his scalp. “We could use zinc, right? Zinc is cheap; all our houses have zinc roofs. I could get the men in the village to help put them up over the ruins. We could give them a little goat-head soup and make it into a party. We could put that up in one day, put up some beams and nail the zinc to them.”

“And we could run the gutters around the zinc when that's finished.”

So it was, on that night at the end of January, that Shad and Danny solved a problem and became friends, one man respecting the other's ideas. And just when Shad was beginning to feel comfortable enough with his new friend to talk about Beth and the wedding problem, the arrival of a third party shifted everything, the way it ­always did.

“Good night,” Janet purred, depositing a large handbag on the counter. She flashed a smile at Danny that showed the gold tooth on her incisor to full advantage.

The dressmaker took Danny's outstretched hand and clambered onto the stool beside him, wriggling her hips around until she was comfortable. She was wearing a red dress with a neckline that framed her breasts and made her skin look more coppery than usual. Her arms were gleaming like she'd rubbed them with some kind of oil and she was smelling musky sweet—a scheming woman on a hot night.

“I want whatever he's having,” she said with a simper that would have made Beth roll up her eyes. Shad turned to the fridge and sighed.

“I remember you,” Danny said behind him. “You came to my welcome party, right?”

“That's right.”

“You had on a white—”

“We talked for a few minutes, but you was so popular . . .”

“I'm sorry, I don't remember your name. There were a lot of people—”

“Janet.”

When Shad placed the drink in front of the woman, she raised her eyes over the rim of the glass and gave the bartender a look that told him to back off. She turned again to Danny, the hoop earrings swinging as she eyed him up and down.

“So, what you think of Largo, Mistah America?”

“It's great,” Danny said. “I want to see the rest of the area, though.”

“It sound like you need somebody to show you around,” she replied, batting her eyelashes. Shad tried not to suck his teeth.

“I do, yes,” Danny said. He kept rubbing the glass with his thumbs, sliding them up and down.

Shad folded his arms. “I can show you around during my lunchtime,” he said, “from two o'clock to five.”

“If you're free tomorrow,” Danny said, looking at Shad but leaning toward Janet.

“I can't go tomorrow,” Shad said. “I have to go to the clinic with Beth and Ashanti. The nurse come on Friday.”

“I can go,” Janet piped up.

“You can?” Danny said, turning to grin at her. “That's cool. Where should we go first?”

“Blue Hole,” Shad said, trying to ignore Tri's beckoning finger. “You should take a trip to Blue Hole in Port Antonio, man, beautiful lagoon with deep, deep water in the middle. We can go Monday. Is my day off.”

“What about tomorrow?” Janet asked.

“Tomorrow is good,” Danny said. “I have to take a taxi to Port Antonio to rent a car, but then I'm free.”

“My cousin Marvin can take us to Port Antonio,” Janet said. “He always charge me half fare.”

Shad strolled to the other end of the counter and refilled Tri's glass. The aging fisherman slurped a bit off the top. “Look like Janet have the hotel man under heavy manners already,” he said.

“If she get her claws into him is worse than a crab,” Eli whispered. “She never let him go.”

“I just hope he don't catch crabs.” Tri snickered, slapping Eli on the arm, and the two men doubled over.

“Shush your mouth,” Shad muttered. “Next thing, the man hear you.”

“Is not true?” Tri said, his thin frame still trembling. “You don't see how she working it?”

“She a seamstress, you don't know?” Eli hissed. “She sewing up the business.”

“You mean, she going to pump his treadle?” Tri laughed so hard he almost fell off his bar stool, and his friend had to steady him.

Waving their foolishness away, Shad moved back to his stool in front of Danny. He might as well not have been there, the man was so engrossed in Janet's description of the sights she was going to show him. She was waving her hands around, telling him which beach was best, and then talking about a night club in Ocho Rios she wanted to show him, and how she would teach him to dance the reggae like a real Jamaican. And Shad could see that there was no going back now, just by the way Danny was smiling, his fingers tapping the counter halfway between him and the woman, a few beads of sweat on his forehead above the delighted smile, the increased budget forgotten. When he laughed, he gave a throaty laugh, full of desire and of feeling desired, and if the two of them didn't sleep together tonight, Shad knew, they would do it tomorrow night.

After they'd left—Danny insisting that he had to walk Janet home—Shad washed up the dirty glasses at the bar sink, worrying, sometimes bringing God into it, that the dressmaker would mess up the hotel deal and his dream of a prosperous Largo. Maybe he should warn Danny that Janet was only looking for a husband to give her a green card. But if he warned him, Danny might think that Largo people just wanted to use him and his money, and he wouldn't see that they were good people who talked the truth most of the time.

He tried to see how it would end if Danny fell for the
leggo gal,
the hussy, and it made his stomach go from a churn to a knot. No scenario had a happy ending. He saw them lying side by side on a beach, drinking and dancing in a club, ripping off each other's clothes, and tumbling into a bed. He visualized (too clearly, he chastised himself) Janet straddling Danny, her sumptuous breasts swinging as she worked him and worked him, felt the sweaty exhaustion as they lay together in a heap afterward.

This was followed by the even more troublesome thought that, a few months down the road, Janet might dump Danny because his penis was too small or he was too cheap or he was already married, and Shad was sure that, having found fault with Danny, she'd put his business in the street the way she always did. Then (
oh, God!
) he envisioned the opposite: Danny dumping Janet and going back to America without her. She'd be enraged and tell everyone what a
bumba claat
no-good he was, because she was not an easy woman. And, either way, Danny wouldn't come back to Largo. Every possibility Shad imagined concluded with the investor pulling out of the deal and the death of the new inn.

The next morning over breakfast, Shad told Beth about Janet's offer to be Danny's tour guide.

“I telling you,” he said, and slurped his ginger tea, “the woman just outsmart me. I was offering to take him around, but she just bounce me out of the picture.”

“We know she only after one thing.”

“And you know what I realize yesterday? Is not only a conniving woman that can mash up the hotel plan. An innocent woman can do it, too.” While Beth unbuttoned her blouse and settled Joshua at her breast to feed, Shad told her, scene by scene, the way he always did, something disturbing he'd seen the previous afternoon, a wake-up call about the future of tourism in Largo.

It was close to five o'clock, and he'd been making his usual trek back to the bar for his evening shift when he'd glanced across the road. Between two houses, he'd had a straight view of the beach, where three people were in conversation under a coconut tree. He'd strained for a better view of the three, because one was a white woman he'd never seen before. She was so tall and lanky, her hair so red-red, that he would have remembered her if he had. And her legs and arms were so pale, pale as the sand she was standing on, that he knew she'd just arrived.

Standing on either side of her had been two local layabouts, one thin and the other stocky, both a head shorter than her. The youths were doing all the talking, it looked like, and the woman was looking uncomfortable but smiling politely. The bartender had waited until a pickup passed, crossed the road, and walked between the cottages to the beach.

“What up?” he'd called out as he approached the group. The boy who was talking had broken off and all three had turned around. The woman had started edging away.

“You just come to Largo?” Shad had said to the redhead, speaking slowly so she'd understand. She nodded, and the flaming hair nodded with her. She'd been a nice-looking woman even if she was thin—
mauger,
Beth would call her—the kind of woman who was too well mannered to say no. Trouble waiting to happen.

“Zebediah,” Shad had asked the skinny youth, “you not bothering the lady or anything, right?”

“Why I want to do that?” the boy had said, and glanced at the other. “We making friends with her, seen, like how she just come to Largo.”

“Well, I come to take her to the restaurant,” Shad said, waving the two away. “So both of you can go about your business now.”

“We not doing nothing—”

“Go on,” Shad insisted, and the two teenagers had sauntered away, sucking their teeth.

“You mustn't do any business with them, you hear, miss,” Shad had explained. “They want to take your money from you. Don't have nothing to do with them.” The woman's face had relaxed and she'd thanked him for helping her.

“They wanted to sell me some marijuana, I think,” she'd said in a nice English accent. “I couldn't understand them, but they said something about
ganja
and I know what that is.”

“We don't have a lot of visitors, you know, and they see a chance to make little money. The boy Zeb, his grandmother can't handle him, you know. He sell weed now and again, and he getting his friend into it, too. Bedward was bright-bright in school, but he stop going to school and start making mischief with Zeb.”

Guiding the woman back to the main road, Shad had told her he worked at the bar. “You want to come and have a nice drink, a coconut water or something?”

“I better be getting back,” she said. “I was taking a walk on the beach—”

“Better you walk with somebody else,” Shad had advised, smiling so she wouldn't be too afraid, “or walk on the road. Not that anybody going to hurt you, but some people might see you as a stranger and want to take advantage of you. They think you have a lot of money.”

The woman had thanked him again and they'd gone in opposite directions. Shad had walked back to the bar in a trance, realizing for the first time that Largo might not be ready for the inflow of tourists that would come with a hotel because, in the eight years since the boss's hotel had closed, the young people had gotten more desperate, their options fewer by the year. A new hotel would attract every lazy, good-for-nothing youth for miles around, every one of them looking to make easy money off the guests. If they didn't get work, they'd be all over the tourists with offers of weed and sex and hair-braiding.