A Drink Called Paradise Read online

  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?

  I can always use my made-up karate again, and besides, for tonight, the glass will have to do. I keep my eyes wide against the darkness until I have to blink, and blinking, they have to close.

  The glass is gone when I wake up. So are the two mountains who sleep but do not guard me just beyond my bed.

  Barclay and Ngarima stand under the papaw tree outside, and their voices carry. They are talking about the sex of the tree, whether it will bear anymore, whether by cutting it short it will have better sex. The chicken under the tree pecking at coconut shreds swivels its head between them and their talk, surveying the ground really, moving its lizardy way forward, neck, then ruff, then the machete Barclay carries shakes at the point he is making about tree sex, but he is really aiming, and that is that for the chicken. Suddenly headless, it takes flight, as much as its bush wings allow, it dances and dies, dances and dies, pumping its blood into the sand while the two of them go on arguing.

  I don’t interrupt.

  I break my strong-tourist vow, the one to never complain or whine to another tourist, which would reveal expectation, and all I really want is to be without that, knowing from the ad business how much of that is made up for you anyway, and I break my vow and leave for the guesthouse. Who is surprised about the path I choose? As I choose it, Ngarima waves at me, chicken feathers rising in a white corona around her hand, and Barclay tips his head the way he does when I say, What about a boat wreck?

  When Harry comes to his door, he is wearing just a wrap of the flowered sheet around his middle, and what shows above it is where the Harry is most appropriate. Since all I have seen him in is what can only be described as planter’s wear, I take the wrap as a state of undress and step back in shock. I didn’t knock, I say. You’re busy, I see, I say.

  Knock, he says. But come in. Veelu is about to go.

  The woman inside is twisting two coconuts together by their husk-hair. Two heads is what they look like to me, bound in her Valkyrie grasp. I’m all ugly angles next to her, where fat is altogether fine, thin is grim.

  She tilts her machete in greeting. Then she lifts her two coconuts and cracks them together so they break open in a single blow.

  I smile, and she leaves to skin and dress the coconuts, whatever you do after such a display.

  Harry, I say, turning back to him slowly. I give him a sorted-out version of my nocturnal visitor. I end with: I just wanted to know how you were getting along. I try not to say that with female inflection at the end, a question.

  I must say the sex is fine, if that’s what you’re after. He stretches his arms over his head so I see more of his navel. I have at least four women fighting over me.

  Oh, good, I say. In turns or at the same time?

  As if on cue, another woman shows up, bearing food and wearing Harry’s once beautiful shoes as slippers, feet shoved in, untied, with the backs broken.

  I’m a happy guy, he says. So you don’t like the customs. He walks over to a shirt and trousers splayed across two spiky plants, testing the clothes for dryness, pinching the fabric between his fingers.

  I wait. The other woman waits. I hate the tableau feeling I’m getting. A breeze flicks at the ends of the flowered sheet that wraps the woman, shoulders exposed. Sex, sex, sex, laps the lagoon behind her.

&nb
sp; He plucks the shirt off the plant and folds it, arm to arm. Well, the boat will take you away soon enough, won’t it?

  You too, I shrug. Aren’t you sorry now you didn’t take the last one?

  He laughs, his flowered loins straining against the fabric. No, not me. No more boats for me.

  I want to swim off Harry and his smug happiness, I want to swim off my own envy—and what? Temu, Barclay—I don’t know, maybe it’s not wanting to know more, I’m the archetypal tourist. I could swim all the way back to the main island not wanting to know more, I could swim straight through the hot, smooth water past the small black head floating on its board all the way home. Where I do swim is as far as the reef, where the roar of the world starts, and it is there, with the water’s violence real and constant, there that I know that I can’t swim back, I can’t even imagine it.

  The ocean, so limitless, such a fence.

  Protect yourself, it says. I float on my back. Cumuli pile over me, shadowing the ocean with boat shapes, boats that are always arriving.

  I sidestroke my return, trying to slice the water thinner and thinner, my small slashes and wounds from the bush ragged bait for anything that swims under me. Fish muscle through the water in sheaves of color. Why would anyone eat canned fish here? Misplaced mercy, the brilliant stripes fading in the frying pan? That’s me, the well-fed one who would change her mind at the first whiff of a fading fillet.

  The great silence the fish slice through soothes. I follow a storm of clown fish to an intersection of red and black, where I drift and they rush around, all life and color, into whatever trouble they look for and enjoy. I think fish until I am, I dart and swirl and enjoy.

  Until I touch sponge. It’s a surprise. I retract my feet because what I touch should have been coral, then I push away only to find more sponge, that sponge sponges up an area a hundred feet wide. Dark green, it could look like coral, it could look like just darkness, but as I bounce along, toes sinking, its blind mouthlessness releases a faint gray. It’s sponge. I’m probably crushing the foreheads of a million tiny sponges in orgy. I swim away, and in the gray of my going bubbles and sponge corpses rise in suspension behind me, pulse and undulate.

  I start swimming to shore, but I’m tired and the shore is so far away and now I’m curious. That was one giant sponge. I dive again to take another look at what I think I’ve seen, but I look in the wrong direction and all I see are sand squirts, more sand and fish. Or has the giant sponge moved? Or did I make up the soft, porous surface, all that yielding? I dive and gasp again and see nothing, then I swim to shore with all of what strength I have left. Flopping down on the sand, I look out at an ocean that has just shown me what? This ocean that roars and plays so silently.

  This ocean that won’t talk.

  I go to where the men bring their chairs, where I have seen Barclay.

  Not many of us sit in the chairs next to the copra shed, midday or not, he says when I ask, Where is everybody? Men leave the island to make money, he says, and the few men there all nod.

  It’s the same where I’m from, I say, men leave for the city.

  Men die without the island, he says.

  It’s a cash economy, I say. Men die on the island too.

  I choose to stay here, he says. He makes his job of greeting visitors, of saying yes, sound very good, makes his place here under the palms on a chair sound great. He is pleased.

  What’s with the giant sponge? I ask.

  Two men stop throwing dice. Giant sponge? Barclay laughs so that others laugh. I have seen those in the movies.

  All the men eye me now, my short shorts, my braless sheet-wrapped top.

  Which movie? I ask.

  She is asking which movie, he says, as if there’s an interpreter, as if I am a voice he has thrown. The army’s movies, he answers. Let me see, once we saw The Fly. Once King Kong.

  One man pulls his undershirt aside to bare some chest, to beat it.

  Nothing’s giant around here, says Barclay, turning to me. Everything’s small. Small coconuts, small island, small people. Compared to yours.

  The army? When was the army here?

  Barclay shakes his shoulders as if the question bites at his back. Come here, come here, he says. He tows me over to the flagpole next to the wharf—there’s no flag on top, just a bit of metal on the rope hitting the pole—and his audience follows. Did you read our plaque?

  It is fastened to the base, I have to squat. Love makes the world go round, I read out loud. I thought it commemorated a battle or something.

  A battle? An actual smile is what happens across Barclay’s face. When we made these houses out of cement, he says, mixing and hauling and spreading, many nights we came to our women exhausted. We did not like that, he says. You see, there’s only one thing that grows big around here.

  I’m too physical—I step back.

  Don’t worry, he says when his friends stop laughing. Why did you come, anyway, if you didn’t want to be part of our customs? The man who came with you has no problem with our customs. And now it’s the water, it’s what’s in the water. Isn’t what’s in the water why all people want to come to an island?

  I leave Barclay and his dice-throwing friends and find the only shop open among the abandoned and half-built ruins that front the wharf. There I buy a bottle of soy sauce, the condiment of choice for taro, from a young girl who has been sleeping across the counter. The soy-sauce bottle is long-necked and corked—just what I need. But I need it empty, and without thinking to save it for Ngarima or even myself, I pour the contents into pig mash that sits souring in a bucket beside the path. I know it’s mash because two pigs fight over it as soon as I leave.

  The girl who has sold me the bottle tells me the sauce will fatten the pigs well, so well someone will pay too much for them. Although her hand is very hot when she gives me my change, along with the advice, she smiles all the way across her face.

  Children smile with fresh muscles, they don’t know where their smiles stop or start. Even in perfidy, they smile so sweetly. I buy a length of suckers from her belt of them and give them out to her and her friends. Except one of the suckers I crack and then wedge down the bottleneck. Then I find matches in my pocket—the Girl Scout in me yet—and the girl lets me buy her last pen so I can write a note on the inside of the matchbook, the perfect-sized paper and tough weight for such writing. Dear Timmy, I print, I miss you and want to kiss you. Here is where I am.

  The map I make shows me in the middle, any tourist’s rendering. I tear off the cardboard and stuff it into the bottle with the sucker. The children puzzle over the waste of the sweet, licking each other clean of every trace of the suckers’ sugar. Except for the smallest, who tucks his little lump-and-stick behind his ear. Then they all talk about what a crook I am to fatten the pig with soy sauce, and I smile wide the way they do.

  They follow me to the wharf. I am happy to have them. I want witnesses. After all, if I get a reply I want someone to say I am the one who threw the bottle. But which way to throw it?

  I take aim to the west, where the boat disappeared, where continents wait and roads end with cars that sit in driveways with answering machines blinking inside houses. I wind up my pitch to the west with a great series of circles, which sends the kids into screams, then I release the bottle, I throw the bottle as hard as I can into that boatless, spongy lagoon, throw it off the only jetty on the island, off the pile of coral I was dumped onto when I arrived. After I throw that bottle as far as I can, throw it, a real Little Leaguer mother throw, and it lands with a bright single splash in the middle of the lagoon, it bobs around as if it is getting its bearings, and then, several small swells later, it begins its float back to me.

  I pack all the shells I can fit into my bag, wrapping them in underwear and shorts and the one long formal dress I was going to wear at some romantic and thus formal moment, wrapping the shells to keep them from breaking but listening to each one before its interment to hear if the beach inside is the same as the b
each outside, to hear if I take their ocean with me.

  Just their ocean.

  I lay money on the counter over the roach drawer, payment for room and board, all the wasted taro, the too-stinky chunks of tinned mackerel I secretly pushed between the floorboards. I leave my paperback for Ngarima’s son, who reads comic books with mold on the pages as bright as the pictures, and maybe Ngarima will like my thongs since she often takes them in the morning before I wake up. I have this wooden fishing spear leaning in a corner, the one Ngarima used to delay me, a seven-foot-long piece of something that surely never grows here and that now no one uses. I’m wondering how to fit it in the airplane that follows the boat: saw it in half?

  I do all this at daybreak since I’ve pretty much given up sleeping after that man-who-broke-the-lamp. You know which one. I may be a little too tired from all this not sleeping, but I try not to forget to pack anything, which might happen if the boat loads at dawn as they do in movies to avoid the heat. So I’m in a hurry when I slap my flowered sheet in the air and see bits of my sunburn float off—always the cost of a good tan for me, my souvenir self—and smooth the sheet flat to my rice-bag bed.

  I skip breakfast. Seasickness will take care of whatever I manage to get down anyway. I squirrel away a few of those candies I bought from the girl with hot hands for later. How about a note to Harry, wishing him well and thanks for nothing? Instead I write one to Barclay. Your hospitality has been generous. Ba-boom. That’s it. What else? Keep that flagpole humming? I write on the back of one of the other island’s brochures, and then I prop it up a few inches from Barclay’s slack, sleeping mouth.

  It’s quiet except for the rooster when I step out. The rooster is personally annoyed that I’m up ahead of him and lets me know it. He actually swoops after me in the fraudulent way that fowls have of flying. Or does he just want to crow at another female? As I hurry up the path to the wharf, I pass a pig eating a broken shoelace. It can’t be spaghetti. One of Harry’s disemboweled shoes? Or is that the end of Harry? The pig grinds down a last delicious morsel.