Color Him Dead (17 page)

She eyed him skeptically. “There’s nothing but rats there.”

“There’s agouti, manicou, wild goats, birds … I’ll have Ti-Cock drop us on the west side of the island and we’ll look at my ‘gouti traps.”

He could see her face change from open eagerness to a closed wariness. “No … I’d better get back. We’ll be watched wherever we go.”

He shrugged and started the engine. He didn’t speak again until they were walking up the beach from the jetty. “I’d like to sketch you this afternoon, if you’ll wear that green bikini.”

She hesitated, then nodded. “All right. Meet me at the banyan tree after lunch.”

He climbed to the shack and found that Leta hadn’t returned from the capital, where she’d gone for his weekly copy of
Time.
He ate the cold remains of a langouste tail she’d cooked that morning, then went down and found Edith waiting under the banyan. She let him pose her seated on a chunk of black basalt, knees slightly apart, elbows resting on her thighs, and her chin in her hands.

“It’s hard to talk in this pose,” she said as he began sketching.

“After I get the face you can talk. See if you can look thoughtful. Not puzzled, more reflective. Lower your eyelids and relax your lips. Perfect. Now hold it.”

Her look of inward contemplation took shape beneath his carbon pencil—but it was a much younger face than the one before him. It was thinner, sharper and more aggressive, with hair as black as midnight sweeping across her forehead.

“You can talk,” he said finally.

She gave a deep sigh. “What do models and artists say to each other?”

“Inanities. Lovely day, how’s your family? Don’t clamp your knees together, Edith. Makes your hips bulge.”

Her face reddened, but she opened her knees slightly. She sat in an attitude of strained embarrassment. Drew sketched hurriedly, knowing that she was incapable of sitting still for long. Ten years ago the original of the sketch had taken three sittings….

He heard the spash of oars and turned to see Leta’s cousin rowing away from the beach. Leta walked through the hissing surf carrying her white shoes and holding her red dress hitched up around her thighs. She stopped when she saw them, then turned quickly and started walking down the beach the other way. Drew remembered that Leta had testified against Edith in court.

“Leta,” he called. “Over here.”

Leta came dragging her bare feet in the sand. She stopped ten feet away and looked down at her toes. “ ‘Sieur, no magazine. The man say maybe tomorrow—”

“Girl, what are you doing here?”

Edith’s voice was a harsh crackle that made Drew cringe inwardly. He hadn’t thought how rough it would be on Leta.

Leta answered in a near whisper. “I work for the mister.”

“You what? Speak up.”

“I work for the mister …
madame.
”

“Doing what?”

“I cook and wash …
madame.
”

“In
those
clothes?”

The red party dress suddenly looked out of place on Leta. For the first time Drew noticed the faint eversion of her lips, the flatness at the root of her nose. He was sweating with embarrassment for Leta.

“She’s been to town, Edith.” To Leta he said: “You can go.”

When she was gone, Drew looked at Edith. Her lips were tight and she was obviously angry, but it wasn’t because she’d recognized Leta.

“She’s too damn pretty for a servant. I suppose you’re sleeping with her.”

With a half-smile, Drew said: “She has a cot in the next room.”

Edith’s lips pinched more tightly. “You may be interested to learn that ninety per cent of these girls are diseased.”

Drew kept his smile in place. “I’ll get a Wasserman test first thing tomorrow.”

“I think you’d better get rid of her. Lena can clean your shack, Meline can cook—”

“And what function will you take over?”

“You can go to hell.” She jumped up and started pulling on her beach coat.

“Wait, your picture—”

“Let her pose. You can do it in color.”

He watched her stride angrily up the beach with her coat flowing out behind her. Then he shrugged and turned back to his drawing. He didn’t need her for the picture, he could do it from memory. Just change the rock to a bathroom stool, strike out the bikini and leave her nude … there … it was identical to the one which had appeared in the papers.

He walked to the house and knocked on her door. There was no answer; only the hum of a sewing machine. He ripped the picture off the pad and slid it under her door, then stood back and waited. Two minutes later he heard the patter of her slippers on the floor. A moment later came her half-whispered exclamation: “Oh, no! That isn’t
me.
”

“Yes it is, Edith.”

He heard a loud rip, followed by another, then another. His sketch came sliding out from beneath the door in eight pieces. “Don’t ever ask me to pose again, or … anything.”

He knocked once and waited. He knocked again. A glass crashed against the door, followed by the tinkle of fragments on the floor. He touched his finger to the stream of liquid which ran from beneath the door. Rum. He turned and walked down the stairs. At the bottom he met Lena going up with a broom and dustpan.

He found Leta in the clearing beside the cookshack, squatting on her haunches, scrubbing her old gray dress on a flat rock. She wore only a pair of red silk panties someone had given her, with white script embroided above her right thigh:
Good night lover.
It was easy to see how the old dress had grown threadbare; she twisted and flailed it as though it were a live snake which had to be killed. Her brows were drawn into a fierce frown, and each time she stopped to pour water from an earthen jar, she gave a soul-wrenching sniffle and brushed her eyes with her wrist.

Drew watched her for a minute, appreciating the gleaming body, the breasts like oiled bronze, the muscle-tight trembling buttocks. An aching pressure had been building in his loins during the hours with Edith. He walked up behind Leta and put his hand on the nape of her neck. She froze, then twisted her head and gave him a smouldering look:

“She put the fire in you, go have her put it out.”

She turned back to her work. Drew lowered himself to the ground a few feet away and lit a cigarette. Leta was restful, even when angry. When he didn’t like her mood, he waited for it to change. Her tears came and went like summer showers.

“I’m wondering why she didn’t recognize you,” he said after a minute.

“All black girls look alike to white people.” Her voice held only a residual trace of resentment. “You did not know that,
Dudu?
”

“I do not believe it, Leta.”

Silently she twisted the garment into a rope and wrung out the water.

“I did not see her much. The master forbid us to go near her. And in the court she only sit, seeing nothing, like my radio when it is turned off.” She stretched the dress out on the grass, then got up and went into the shack. After a moment he followed her. He found her in the bedroom picking at his old denim shirt.

“What are you doing?”

She jumped. “Just … cleaning your shirt.”

Her guilt made him suspicious. He caught her wrist, opened her palm, and saw a long copper hair. He felt like laughing but he made his voice stern: “You were going to hex her, weren’t you?”

She looked down at her hands. “It was not bad
obeah,
to hurt her. That is against the law. I only wish to make you stop loving her.”

“Don’t waste your magic,” he said. “I don’t love her.”

“No? Then why do you wish her to remember you from before?”

He frowned. “What makes you think I do?”

“Today you call me so that she can see me. You think if she remember me, she will remember you from before you—” She stopped and bit her lip. “From before.”

“From before what?”

She looked up, meeting his eyes. “From before you went to prison.”

He felt the icy calm spread over his body. Slowly he sat down on the bed, lifted his legs and stretched out on his back. He stared at the peeling plywood ceiling until he was sure he had his voice under control, then he said: “Tell me where you got the idea I’d been in prison.”

“I have thought this for a long time.”

“Yes. Tell me why.”

“Well … you remember the first time we … made love? You are so quick, like a young boy with his first woman. After you go I feel sad because your eyes tell me it was no good for you. And when I go to the house you give me a drink and put your hand on my shoulder, gentle for the first time, and you say—you remember what you say?”

“No.”

“You say, ‘Ten years is a long time.’ And I think, where is it that a man lives for ten years without a woman? And my mind tells me, prison.”

“Why didn’t you ask?”

“Because I think, if you wish to talk about it, you will tell me. Many things I wonder, but I do not ask. How old are you? I cannot guess. The eyes say fifty, but the body is hard. I wish to ask, you have a wife? But this is important to me only if it is important to you. I cannot see you share your life with a woman, or come to the island like other
blanc
to keep from paying money to their wives. I see the wounds in the leg and in the side, and I think that a gun has made them, but I do not ask.” She rose from the bed and picked up the kerosene lamp. “I do not ask now. But I listen if you wish to tell me.”

“Have you wondered what will happen when she remembers me?”

She struck the match, and in the yellow light he saw her surprised look. “Why then you will take her away. You could not stay here.”

“You don’t seem to care.”

“I care,” she said in a low voice. “But after you go I will not die of sadness.” She looked down at him, and he saw a look of triumph on her face. “For truly, I am making a baby. Today I learn for sure.”

He raised his brows. “You saw the doctor?”

“The doctor, what can he tell?” She dismissed him with a wave of the hand. “Today I go Groseau where my mother living. She take me to a wise old woman who tells the future. I give her a chicken and she kills it and looks at the blood on the earth and says: ‘Leta, you making baby.’ And I ask, ‘How the baby will look?’ And she says: ‘Like he papa, with skin so white you feel you must not touch it and soil it, with hair curling in and out on he head, soft and warm from he body—’ ”

“You told her what I looked like?”

“Ah no,
dudu.
Everybody know how you look. They talk of you even back in the bush. You are the
blanc
who Chaka have promised will help them.”

“Oh, God!” He felt a cold knot of dread growing in his stomach. Only four days to Carnival….

Leta went on: “Well, and so I wish to ask the woman more, but suddenly she take her bare foot and scratch out the blood on the ground. She turn to me and say: ‘I can tell no more. Only that blood will come between you and your man.’ ”

“What does that mean?”

“That you will die,
Dudu.
”

“You believe this?”

She lowered her eyes, and he didn’t need her words. The old woman’s prediction was as valid to her as an X-ray photograph would have been to him.

“Chicken blood,” he said. “She could just as easily have meant that you would die.”

She looked at him and shrugged. “Maybe. Then I would be out of it. I would not care.”

She left, and he heard her carrying the dishes out to the lean-to kitchen. He got up and looked out the window, saw a light upstairs in the villa. He got his binoculars and climbed up to the fort.

Edith lay in bed, but he could only see her from the knees down. He watched her toes stretch out, pointed straight ahead, then turn as though she were inspecting herself. They rose out of sight, then descended again, widespread. He watched the movement repeated a dozen times before he remembered seeing Carey do the same thing. It was before she had her baby. They were exercises to reduce the waist and hips, but why would Edith—?

Suddenly he understood, and felt like beating his head against the stone parapet. Out of all the reminders he had given Edith that day—the ashtray, the poem, the picture—only one casual statement had made a lasting impression on her mind. Her hips bulged.

Poor, vain, insecure Edith….

Morning came with a blasting wind from the East. White-caps frothed on the open sea, and twenty-foot rollers combed the channel. There would be no skin-diving today, even if Edith were in the mood. Drew decided to see Doc and try to learn what he’d been doing wrong.

He was loading the air tanks aboard the launch when Edith’s voice sounded behind him. “Running out on me?”

She stood on the jetty with her hands thrust into the pockets of a checkered, wrap-around skirt. The wind whipped it away from her legs and revealed the brown shorts beneath it.

“I was going to see Doc … about my leg.” He frowned, trying to fathom her mood. “I thought I’d just get this diving gear ready—”

“You’re mad about yesterday.”

“
Me?
I wasn’t the one who threw glassware.”

“It was one of my bad days. I’m sorry. Today I want to see your agouti traps.” She lowered her voice. “I’ve got something important to say."

They walked around the barren, eastern tip of the island. Waves pounded the low cliffs and shook the ground beneath their feet. The fumaroles hissed, gurgled and drenched them with spray. Edith’s thin blouse clung wetly to her flesh, showing the white outline of her bra. Drew noticed that her legs had acquired a faint golden tone. He felt a tingle of anticipation as they started up the steep northern slope. He dropped to his hands and knees and entered a green tunnel in the tall grass. An agouti was struggling in his loop of cord. It was a curious, conglomerate creature, about the size of a squirrel with the same short red hair, but with hindquarters like a jackrabbit, short, black chinchilla-like ears, and a rump as bare as a baboon’s.

“You want to cook it?” he asked her. “They taste a little like fried squirrel.”

“Oh, no. Turn it loose.”

He freed the animal and reset the snare: a single loop attached to a bent wand, with a trigger composed of two notched sticks and another string stretched across the path. He showed her how a jerk of the string allowed the wand to whip straight and pull the loop tight.