inept loner. I wish I could explain it to him. Would he care if I were reading the complete works of Aristotle? Would he share with me his insights on Augustinian reflections on time and form? I wipe my hands down my apron and stride across the kitchen to answer the phone.
“Deadwood?” Mountain bellows, his voice wavering and crackling, as if he’s calling me from a walkie-talkie.
“Mountain?” I shout back over the clank of dishes and bawling of waiters, my heart trilling. “Where are you?”
It sounds like he says Paris, but I can’t make it out exactly.
“Where?” I shout, desperately jamming a finger in my ear.
Blythe, a waitress who is always slugging me in the shoulder, passes and threatens me with her pig knuckle of a fist. I would slug her back if I did not hope to sleep with her. Fortunately this is mistaken for chivalry. This is perhaps the essential microcosm of chivalry.
“You didn’t get my card?” he says amid the tangle of crackle and fuzz.
“No!”
“Goddamn it. Hey, you were [garbled].” A whistling drowns his next few words. “[Static] out, man,” he says. “I gotta [place?]. You’ll love it.”
I gesture at a passing waiter to let me use his pen. “Give me your address.”
“Yeah, it’s—“
The connection is lost.
10.
TWO NIGHTS LATER, RETURNING HOME FROM WORK, still forlorn over the mysterious whereabouts of Mountain Moses and wondering how I might be able to contact his father, I find a mangled postcard waiting for me in the mailbox. My breath stops in my chest. On the front of the card is a picture of a gorgeous tropical island with the seductively lovely name of Poisson Rouge. “Lose Your Cares on Poisson Rouge Isle,” reads the legend across the bottom of the card. On the back are five words in careful, small print block letters: “I found your Paradise, Johnny.” I flip the card hungrily over and over for more. No return address. No explanation of where the island is or how I might find it.
I am overcome by the fear that I will never have the courage of my convictions, and this blended with disenchantment and the prospect of a lifetime of line cooking melts quickly to resolve. This is the ticket out, the dawn, the door, the kind hunter opening the trap. I may only have one chance. The body’s euphoria rises and begins to kindle and knock liked good premium grade in the engine of a General Motors subcompact. I calculate my net worth: deposit back on my apartment, eight hundred blue book for dented, oil-burning, not-quite-paid-off Vega with 98,000 miles and cracked windshield, plus four hundred in my savings account equals …not much.
My hands tremble as I read the summary from an encyclopedia from the Colorado Springs Library and learn that Mountain’s Poisson Rouge is an island dependency of the USA.
USA? Why haven’t I heard of it then? At a pay phone I call a travel agent, who gives me the eager pitch. Dollar the currency of the realm. No passport, smallpox vaccination, or visa required. Hit the bull’s-eye and win a free teddy for your girl. “You’ll love it there,” he says. “They got white beaches and blue seas warm as swimming pools. Pretty black girls. They still bottle rum in an ancient stone distillery on the east side. You heard of the Mariner’s Trove?”
“I’m not really looking for a tourist spot.”
“Nobody knows about it yet. Only 3,700 people live there. Can’t reach it by plane. You only got one hotel on the west side, and two thirds of the island is National Park. Can’t touch it. Pretty rustic. Plenty of room if you want to roam.”
“I’ll call you back as soon as I sell my car,” I say.
“We’ll be here,” he says.
Poisson Rouge has such a silky feeling on the tongue, like dahlia petals or the flesh of a tropical fruit. I will find myself a pretty black girl, settle into a hut on a beach, and write a novel, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Mango. Of all the beasts of the earth, Mountain is the only one who understands. Mountain knows. I must find him. I want to call him, tell him not to leave. I need to move fast, before he decides to mistakenly return to the plagued and merciless shores of the USA.
11.
NOBODY SEEMS TO WANT A VEGA, ESPECIALLY ONE THAT so bigheartedly burns oil and (why didn’t I examine it more closely upon purchase?) has obviously been in a wreck. The few who come to look at it offer me peanuts for it, junker prices. That isn’t enough to buy my TICKET, I want to explain. Look, they say, the windshield’s cracked. It looks like somebody rolled the thing. I’ll have to get new tires for it. How much oil does it burn? (Only about a quart every time I fill it up, I concede.) But eventually a man who knows very little about cars offers me four hundred (I’m asking six) and I sign it over to him before he can change his mind, cracked windshield, crumpled hood, Gumby doll still folded obscenely in the glove box, and a half-case of Quaker State thrown in for good measure.
I should be giddy at the prospect of my lifelong adult dream of escape from America coming true and the chance to reconstruct and master my consciousness in the garden where my innocence was lost, not to mention meeting up with Mountain again, but instead, from the moment my plane lifts from the tarmac of Stapleton Airport, I am unable to quell this whirligig of dull panic suspended just above my diaphragm. I feel as if I am making some grave and irreversible error. It isn’t that I’ve spent all my money on a pipe dream or the possibility that the island may be a bust or that I continue to take risks without reward as if some firm, catastrophic pattern beyond my ken is in place. It’s something about that damn island, an unshakable foreboding, an instinct that foul play awaits. If something goes awry, I won’t have the money to bail out. If I’d picked the place myself, made plans, saved more money, it would be different. The lurking premonition of doom blossoms into full-lipped certitude as the nose of the plane breaks through its first membrane of clouds. Ridiculous, I think, trying to shake it off. The inevitable traveling-alone-to-a-strangenew-place jitters. Too late to turn back anyway. I’ve got $232.32.
In the round decorative mirrors adhered to the hat of the old woman sitting next to me I catch several greenish, wincing reflections of myself.
“First time flying?” she says.
“No,” I say.
“If you’re going to be sick,” she says, jingling her mirrors, “they have the bags in the pouches in front of you.”
“Thank you,” I say, smoothing the wrinkles on my shirt. “I’m not sick. Just a bit nervous.”
She studies me with a mixture of pity and concern. “Where are you going?”
“Poisson Rouge.”
“What is that?”
“It’s a tropical island in the Caribbean.”
“Oh really?” she says, revolving her mirrors. “Are you on vacation?”
“No, I have a home there, a wife. I’m a geologist.”
Her eyebrows levitate above the frames of her glasses. “You seem young to be a geologist.”
“I got my GED when I was sixteen,” I say, beginning to leaf through the seat pocket before me, looking for that airsickness bag. Instead I find a Rocky Mountain News folded back to a pagethree article about a girl who killed her boyfriend in Florida and disappeared. Now they’re looking for two other missing boyfriends. I study the grainy photo of the murderess. She looks like a man. Her name is Janie Flame. In green ballpoint ink in a distinctly feminine hand, someone has written, “Go Janie Go.” This is exactly the sort of thing I’m leaving, the formal rules of selfishness, ritualized enmity between the sexes, a society that turns its monsters into pop stars. I return the article. The old woman stares at me. I realize I should not have told her I was nervous if I was returning home. I need to stop misrepresenting