All the Finest Girls (25 page)

“What’s that? What yah do —? Oh, Lawd. Get out! Get outta here, yah nasty boy!”

The seam in the day splits wide open. For a time, I don’t know how long, everything is perfectly quiet. Like a silent movie. In one quick movement, Owen is gone. Not pressed against me, not inside me. Gone again, like he was never there. The band starts playing.

I sit up. Lou is in the doorway, her hand over her heart. Her eyes have a drowning look. Just like Mom’s. Cat is flying through space, his claws like spokes of a wheel. Everyone is going again and there’s nothing I can do. Like they were never there.

“YOU get out,” I scream.

My tongue is a spit of flame. I’m lighting the tattered hole on fire.

“Addy —”

“YOU get out. NIGGER!!!”

Nothingnothingnothing. Cat lands at last. His fur covers me. Once I breathe. Twice. We’re burning everything beyond us. Cauterizing the fluttering hole in the day, slipping inside a box that closes, smooth and firm.
Bang bang.
Nothingness is ours.

24

I
WAS BURNED,
sensationally sunburned. When I at last got up from the sand, a nearly radioactive wave of heat rose from my body. My arms were crimson and inflamed. Walking on uneasy legs back to Foxy’s, I tried to judge the hour from the angle of the sun. I had no idea how long I’d been down on the beach, wandering in the dark thicket of my mind. I only knew that I felt as lost as any castaway.

Climbing the terrace stairs, I found my way into the restaurant, cool and empty in the stillness of afternoon. A plump banquette under the ceiling fan beckoned me. Completely overheated, I leaned back against the vinyl and felt my last reserve of energy rushing away from me. Lying there, I drifted off for a bit, grateful to the darkness, and woke to the sound of clacking shoes on the heavy tiled floor.

“Bubbupbup. Don’t yah move,” came a voice behind me. Weak and uncomfortable, I complied and lay back down.

“Yah just rest now.”

A damp cloth was placed across my forehead. I closed my eyes and drank in the scent of bay rum that wafted from the body close by me, and tried to focus on the motion of my lungs, their lift and descent. I was such a shambling wreck at that moment that I wasn’t even entirely sure what was going on. Eventually, though, propriety spoke and I forced open my eyes, wanting to set myself straight. The man who was applying the compress took a seat beside me. When I saw his face, the hair instantly rose on my arms.

Of course. Of course I’d seen Errol before, knew him intimately beyond even the tissue of my deflated brain. His square jaw and smooth brow were just the same, though his hairline had beat a retreat and lay in a thin and graying crown about his head. Just as Philip had said, Errol wasn’t white. But neither was he black in any categorical way. His sloping eyes and angular cheekbones, his smooth, light skin and broad nose made him the ultimate exotic, polymorphic, pandemic. He was still stunningly handsome. His image had riveted me as a little girl; the sensation of him lingered long after I could recall the context.

Lou didn’t keep his picture on display. It was stashed in her bureau, beneath her slips. I discovered it as I was snooping one morning while she took her bath. I had thought, at first, that he was my father, not because the figure looked like him but because I was a child and he was a man. At some point I realized my mistake but was more excited by the feeling the picture itself gave than the truth of the subject’s identity. It interested me that the photo had been ripped in two then carefully taped back together. I liked the paper, its thick stock and scalloped edges. But mostly I was preoccupied by something I couldn’t name, the very Him-ness of the person looking out at me. He didn’t belong in that drawer, I remember thinking. He couldn’t possibly be contained by it. One day he would certainly levitate, explode through the wood, and go away forever. The man in the picture couldn’t be trusted to remain in that static and lovely state for good.

Through my fritzing mind came an old hunger, unbidden. Errol handed me a glass of water.

“Yah an angry red, aren’t yah? Feelin’ badly too, I cyan see.”

His voice was a near whisper, and he smiled warmly as he spoke. I tried to remember an imprecation or two I’d intended for him, but when I opened my mouth, the words had fled away.

“That’s arright,” he said, “ ’sarright. Is it paining you? Just rest. Errol’s here now.”

Reaching into a pocket of his trousers, Errol drew out a handkerchief. I noticed that his hand trembled. Carefully, he wrapped the fabric around his finger and began to blot my tears, which were apparently trickling in streams down my face. I tried to stop them, but it was as though I were paralyzed. Each time he touched me, I cried more. I had no control whatsoever.

“Yah got in a piece of trouble, didn’t yah? A piece of trouble. Don’t fret. Don’t yah fret now.”

I remembered some of Derek’s words to me and an invisible fist socked me in the stomach. My crying continued unabated, though it felt as if only my eyes were engaged. I didn’t make any noise. Powerless, I lay still and watched Errol through my tears. He leaned into me, dabbing the handkerchief along my temple and hairline, but his eyes were flat, unfocused, and seemed to look beyond me. After a while, he leaned back in against the upholstery. His shirt hung loose over his broad shoulders, as if he were a hanger, and his trousers bunched up under his tightly cinched belt. He was disappearing inside the folds of his clothes.

“I’m Addy,” I said finally.

They were the only words that came to mind. Errol nodded, unsurprised, and continued to sit peacefully on the banquette. Besides the idling of his hands, he was motionless. His skin glowed, and I thought he looked beatific, otherworldly. I don’t remember being aware of anything else in the room except Errol. Stirring briefly from my torpor, I tried once to sit up, but he placed a shaky hand on my ankle and I quickly relented. His touch dissolved all my various aches and pains, and time moved in an indeterminate wave. When Errol spoke to me again, it was in a private way, as if he were letting me in on a great secret.

“I cyaant stay long. I’m sorry, but I cyaant. For I got to see my sweetheart.”

I thought of what Thermuda had said on the bus, about Errol acting crazy. He didn’t seem crazy so much as sad and dreamy, like a man talking in his sleep.

“When?” I asked quietly.

“A piece later,” he replied, nodding. He sat back and looked off into the middle distance.

“That’s nice,” I said, at a loss.

A smile spread across his face.

“We’re going for a sail. Cinema Girl and me. My boy say he gonna put out the boat, and then me and she are going for a sail. Yes, we are.”

Oh Lord, I thought. Turning again, he stared me right in the eye, his brow furrowed.

“How you think I look?

My throat felt like I’d swallowed a rock.

“Swell,” I answered. “You look swell.”

Errol looked down at his sunken chest and smoothed the front of his shirt. Then he nodded again and looked back out into nowhere.

“Gonna have to look my best. My girl, she wants to see me again. Said she’d go for a sail.”

My head seemed to lift away from me. All the questions I’d had for Errol were suddenly meaningless. They drifted out and away on the moist air.

“Set me as a seal upon thy heart,” he said, a dreamy smile playing across his face. “Yes, indeed. As a seal upon thy arm. Mmhmm.”

After that, Errol was silent, and in time, I dozed. When I woke I found myself alone, uncertain Errol had ever been there. The clock above the bar read half past three, and with a groan I realized I’d missed Marva and the bus. My arms and legs were murderously painful to the touch. After a couple false starts, I gathered myself and made my way through the empty restaurant and back down the Eldertown promenade.

25

A
DDY
?”

The sea today is glass, smudged with gray. After rain. In the box where we sit, Cat and I, the surfaces are also flat, but made of harder stuff. No door. No in, no out. In this box we move ourselves about, and it seems, if you look at us, normal. But that’s a trick. We know better. We know better, in the box.

“Snooks? Her taxi’s waiting. I want you to come out and say good-bye. This instant. Do you hear me?”

Cat pulls up and down, up and down on the skin of my thighs. Elongates his body, makes the slow crawl up my chest toward my face. Soon he’ll cover my eyes and the wet, sticky fur will clog my throat. This is how it goes in our box. There will be darkness where only I can see. In the light, I am blind.

“Oh, Addy.”

Oh Addy.
Up rises Mom’s voice, then down. Down, sad, disappointed, mad. Too, too bad. Nothing I can do. Clitter clatter of her shoes on the stairs.

We’ll miss you so, Louise, and again, I’m sorry —

Front door closes; the taxi driver,
whoosh,
opens his van. Cat’s fur on my tongue tastes of all the badness I know. I turn away from the ocean view, before nothing closes over me entirely, and watch Lou climb into her taxi.

I knock, once, but my box is hard and closed.

Prrrr
is Cat. Against me.

That is all.

26

I
N THE TWILIGHT,
I made my way back to Eldertown’s center where the cruise ship docks met the main avenue. Before I had left Foxy’s, a tour around the restaurant turned up neither Errol nor Derek. Lunch was long over, the dinner hour not yet begun, and except for two women chopping vegetables in the back of the kitchen, the place was empty. At the sink behind the bar, I drank a glass of water and splashed some on my face. Then I moved along as swiftly as I could, mindful of the approaching evening and Lou’s wake.

Outside, the air was warm and heavy, but the sun had thankfully disappeared behind the hillside. Figuring that Marva hadn’t waited for me, I hailed the first cab I saw. The driver, with a look of alarm on his face, moved more quickly to open my door than I’d seen anyone move in two days. I understood his urgency once I’d finally settled in the cab.

“Whereyouwannago?” he said, eyeing me in the rearview mirror while simultaneously careering around the town’s central rotary.

“Petionville,” I said, hoping I’d recognize the Alfreds’ house when we were near.

My answer wasn’t what the driver expected. He made a quick, hairy right turn at the last minute, away from the harbor road and the big hotels.

“Petionville?” he repeated, slamming on the brakes.

I nodded and, in the rearview mirror, got a good look at myself. Pretty Pearl, as Sebumbo had called me, I definitely was not.

All of my exposed skin was an angry red. The neckline of my dress, under which I was still paper white, exposed the extremity of the contrast. My face was swollen, so much so that my cheeks had puffed up over my lower eyelashes, partly obscuring my vision. Even the tops of my feet and my toes were fried to a crisp.

The next stages I could predict. My skin would turn oily at first, coming to a greasy sheen like that of a roasting pig. Then the burn would begin to subside, the dead skin turning from a dry and crusted brown to gray before it began to fall away. The peeling process would take weeks, and under the flakes of brown would be the pink, defenseless, easily scarred new layer. I would shower dead skin like a snowfall. I sat up in my seat and made myself stare into the mirror one more time.

Brugadung girl. Damn foolish brugadung girl.

“Petionville. Yes,” I said, leaning over from the backseat and trying to smile. “Whatever way is quickest.”

Derek of course was right, and now that I was fully conscious, the truth struck me as if I’d been beaned in the head with a brick. Words and images — the long the tale Marva had told me, Derek’s tirade, Mackie Goodson’s grim face, the lost musings of Lou’s true love — all lay over and against one another. Bright, dark, some bleeding together, others hard and painful to touch, broken at the edges. There were all these people, I thought, strangers to me, who were joined together in every crack and fiber by one woman, whose face I was still struggling to recall.

What in the hell
was
I doing there? The sharp blade of Derek’s pronouncement — that I didn’t much matter in the grand scheme of Lou’s life — cut me with deep force. I had loved Louise Alfred. But was that why I had come? Who was I really mourning?

My taxi driver was patient while I made an effort to direct him along the back roads of Petionville. A big, burly post of a man in a gaily colored Hawaiian shirt, he seemed mostly relieved I hadn’t expired in his cab. At last, after several wrong turns, I spotted the Alfreds’ house. All the lights were on inside, and the faint sound of many voices grew ever louder as we made our approach. On both sides of the narrow road, cars were parked bumper to bumper.

“Yah going to a party, den?” said the driver, grinning back at me. I could tell he was surprised that a white girl, a tourist, was making the scene on this side of the island.

“Sort of,” I said, feeling a wrench of nervousness in my stomach.

“So you gwan have a fine time! We knows how to party on St. Clair. Believe you me!”

“Listen,” I said, interrupting him and pulling some cash from my wallet. “Would you wait a few minutes and then drive me back to Eldertown? I won’t be long.”

The driver craned his head out the window, cocking an ear in the direction of the back lawn. Someone was playing a pretty melody on a steel drum. A joyful cry rose above the beat.

“Why you wanna go, man? Dat’s nice music.”

Plainly, he was waiting for me to invite him in.

“Just give me five minutes!” I shouted, leaving him idling on the road as I scooted inside.

The front of the house was empty, and I was able to sneak down the hallway to Marva and Lou’s bedroom without detection. I slipped inside and went immediately for my bag but was stopped by what I saw out the window over Marva’s bed. I shielded my eyes from the light in the room and leaned up against the screen.

In the greenish glow of the bug-stuck backyard floodlight, I could see Philip up on a chair. He was holding the end of a string of little Christmas lights. Laughing, he shouted back to Mackie Goodson, who stood by the side of the house, holding the plug and waiting. When Philip gave him the thumbs up, Mackie connected the wire. The backyard lit up, twinkling like the Milky Way. A roar came from what I could now see was a crowd of people gathered about the Alfreds’ small square of yard.