February Heat. Wilson Roberts
me, what are you supposed to do?” I slapped my thighs and sucked my lips as I rose from my chair.
She mumbled around the toothbrush. “I’m supposed to rent a car, meet a plane at ten tomorrow night, pick up a package from the pilot and deliver it to the beach at Micah’s Bay. Somebody in a dinghy will meet me and take it. That’s supposed to be the end of it. I’ll be in the clear as soon as it’s done.”
I didn’t like it. It sounded like drugs, and the thought of getting mixed up in it conjured up visions of the inside of Her Majesty’s Prison with three foot thick cell walls, broken only by air holes so small not even a mongoose could crawl through them. The sanitary conditions were like something in the Moroccan prisons I’d heard of, years of the dark, years of the dank. A gallows stood in the courtyard upon which the island’s occasional murderer would be publicly reviled, then hanged.
It’s a rough place. There are no happy convicts on St. Ursula. Sometimes, walking through the downtown paying my bills, I pass Her Majesty’s Prison as I go between the phone company and the electric company offices and I can hear a flogging. Even muffled by those walls it’s a wet, unpleasant sound, and the voices of those being whipped, their moans and cries, their screams, stay with me long after I’m back at my Smugglers Bay retreat.
“I’ve got to be out of my mind.” I put a hand on each of her shoulders, looking directly into her eyes. Their green was startling. “You’d better not be running a scam on me.”
She looked one last time at the bed. “I’m in real trouble and I’m a nice person. A very nice person in a bad situation. You won’t regret helping me.” She put out her hand. “Thank you.”
I looked at it for a moment and then shook it. Her handshake was firm, her skin cool and dry.
In less than three minutes we were in the Gurgel headed back down Ocean Road toward my place. Before four o’clock I had the spare room set up for her, fresh sheets on the bed, the covers pulled back and inviting.
I was wiped, ready to collapse.
“What do you have to read?” She said when I finished fixing up the spare room and came into the living room where she sat on the couch. Rumble jumped up, appropriating her lap. “The lights,” she added when I gave her a quick look. “Middle of the night. If I turn the lights on they’ll keep me awake, even after they’re off. It happens every time. It’ll be hours before I get back to sleep.”
“There’s a bunch of detective novels, but they probably wouldn’t help much. How does the complete works of Erskine Caldwell strike you? One of the greatest American novelists of the Twentieth Century.”
“I’ve read everything he ever wrote.” She picked up a dog-eared copy of Hustler from the upended half a rum keg I use as a coffee table.
I watched as she ruffled the pages, pausing at the centerfold.
“You have lousy taste in magazines, Frank.”
“It’s not mine,” I lied. “Chance subscribes to it. Sometimes he brings a copy over here to read when he comes for dinner and forgets it. I didn’t even realize it was sitting there.”
“You probably like Charles Bukowski.”
“My favorite living poet,” I said.
“He’s a pig,” she said.
“He’s a poet,” I told her, ready to argue language and poetry if she said anything else derogatory about Bukowski, a self described dirty old man who wrote poems, short stories, novels, screenplays, and managed to write something beautiful from time to time. We should all be so lucky.
She nodded. “He is a poet, no doubt.”
“And that’s all the literary discussion I’ve got in me for tonight. I was jarred out of a deep sleep an hour or so ago, and if I don’t get back to sleep soon I’m not going to be able to do anybody any good.”
She remained on the couch, paging through the Hustler. I waved to her as I walked to my room. She called after me, “You’re a lifesaver, maybe literally.”
Minutes later, I lay in bed, hands folded behind my head. Outside the coquis still sang. My poetry was still in a folder on the dresser, safe from prying eyes. The ocean still sighed against the bluff. The moon still sparkled on the foam. The damp night smells of the warm Caribbean winter still filled the room, carried by the trade winds through the open archways of my home.
But it was different. The violence of the outside world had fallen on Smugglers Bay, St. Ursula. In the morning I was going to escort it around the island.
“Damn,” I said, rolling over on my side.
“Frank. You still awake?” Liz whispered loudly from the living room.
“Barely,” my eyes half open.
“What’s that sweet lovely smell coming from outside. Bougainvillea?”
“Bougainvillea doesn’t have any odor.”
It was quiet for a moment. Then she spoke again.
“Thanks again, Frank. I’m sorry. I really am.”
“Yeah,” I said and shut my eyes.
FOUR
I WOKE UP with a hangover at seven the next morning, threw on a bathing suit and tee shirt and walked into the living room. Liz was sleeping sprawled on the couch, her right arm thrown over her eyes, the Hustler open on the floor beside her, the light still on. Rumble was curled up beside her, his head nestled against her hip.
I like seeing a woman asleep in my house. It feels good, even in such peculiar circumstances. And it certainly was a rare occurrence. Occasionally I’ll hit it off with a woman I meet in a restaurant, or through mutual friends, but I haven’t found someone who stirred me enough to go through the complications of risk and possible commitments.
Liz was complication itself, but I had brought her and her problems into my home. Simple loneliness wouldn’t make me do such a thing. There are deeper needs. Complex needs. Something in her laugh reminded me of Lin. The Lin of long ago, before marriage and children. Before she ran off with another woman to run a college in upstate New York. The Lin of piercing intellect and sexual mystery.
I swallowed a couple of aspirins, ran out to a small local grocery, picked up some bread and sausage, bought a dozen eggs from the farmer next door to me, snatched a lime from the tree by my door, and was back in my kitchen making Bloody Marys and breakfast while Liz was still asleep.
As the sausage sizzled, popped, curled in the pan and the bread toasted in the oven, I took Liz her Bloody Mary and woke her up.
“How do you like your eggs?”
“Eggs are an abomination. Nobody should eat eggs. Their only value is for throwing at someone’s house on Halloween.” She made a face at me and took a long sip of her drink. She choked and her eyes filled with tears.
“Pretty strong Bloody,” she croaked.
“Booze is cheaper here than the mixers.”
She put it down, pulling herself upright.
“Are you still with me?”
“Making the dope switch, you mean?” I yelled over my shoulder as I went back to the kitchen.
“As I said last night, it’s really nothing like that. I thought I satisfied your suspicions.”
“No,” I said. “All I did was agree to help you out of a jam. If this is a drug deal, I am out.”
She didn’t reply. A few minutes later she came into the kitchen and sat at the table, sunlight streaming through the arched entrance to the back patio, hitting and playing with the fiery tips of her hair.
I put a plate in front of her, watching as she stabbed her sausage with a fork, slowly cutting it into