he speaks. I ask him about Mountain. He shakes his head and speaks in his wonderful, fast-talking, backward-accented Caribbean lilt. I lean down and strain to sort it out, plucking out recognizable syllables and trying to jigsaw them together. I think he might be deliberately trying to confuse me, as I did often with strangers as a child.
I gather that he has never heard of Mountain.
“Can you recommend a place to stay for a night or two?” I ask.
Amid more of the songlike gibberish, I am grateful to recognize the word Rockefeller.
“How much is that?” I say.
“Two hundred dollah a night.” He laughs. His eyes shine.
“That’s all the money I’ve got,” I tell him.
Turning almost completely around in his seat, he utters a few remarks that I accept as sympathetic. I nod at him glassy-eyed, hoping an affirmative will cover it. We are brothers after all, sons of Adam, sons of commerce. I resist explaining to him that I plan eventually to return to the wilderness to be at one with nature. He drops the taxi in gear and starts away.
“I hoped to find my friend,” I tell him despondently, looking down into the checkered green lawn of the Queen’s Park Cricket Grounds.
“Come on, Bob,” he says with an encouraging nod, pointing up through the windshield, where the road tilts up past a rundown Esso station and disappears into a hole in the jungle. “Dot de Cross-Eye-Lan Row. Every ting cheapah up dis way.”
The road is rougher than it looks, or the shocks in the cab have been removed. He drives as if he is getting up speed for a double suicide. I notice there is no meter. A rabbit’s foot dangles from the rearview mirror. Like every motor-vehicle operator on the island, he drives on what I consider to be the wrong side of the road. According to the Colorado Springs Encyclopedia, this island was originally claimed by the French, then lost to the British, who installed their culture before selling it to the Dutch, who in turn resigned it to the U S A when the abolition of slavery made the operation of sugar plantations untenable. We pass the Esso station. A liter of gas is $1.29, making it nigh on $4 a gallon. Just before the road vanishes into the jungle, he jerks the wheel and swings off onto a cluttered path, dodging an oxidized refrigerator and a tabby kitten, then stopping all at once in front of a red-roofed two-story house with a gray coral stone exterior and white bougainvillea crawling up the side.
“Maul-veen,” he says, in explanation. “She lib aroun’ de bock dare. Telluh Alvin back loud.” He smiles at me.
I prolong the pantomime of understanding and pay him a dollar over the fare. I want these people to know that I am a Democrat, a civil rights enthusiast, that I voted for the only black kid in our neighborhood for school president, that I am an undying admirer of Martin Luther King, and that the definition of the White Man’s Burden is taking complete responsibility for everything that happened to the black man since the Portuguese landed on the Gold Coast in 1649. If ever I use the word “nigger” it is only when I’m quoting Richard Pryor or Mark Twain.
I drag my bags off the seat and slam the door. It rains. Alvin waves out the window, swings his crate of a taxi around, and clatters away.
Around the side of the gray coral stone house a garden has failed, or rather, a larger garden has prevailed. The walkway is overgrown with giant ferns and elephant grass waist high. Two skinny chickens dash out in front of me before whirling back into the thicket. A red-throated lizard flicks his tail and skitters away. I find the front door, on the porch of which sit three clay pots with pink, white, and black anthoriums, a Boone’s Farm wine bottle, a dissolving cannonball, a ship’s anchor, and an arrangement of speckled cowries and conchs. Inscribed in the wooden lifesaver tied with white-painted nautical rope to the door are the words: GLADYS HOOKS’ BLUE HAVEN INN.
“My Blue Haven,” I mutter, preparing to knock, when a wiry little oil derrick of a mosquito squats on my forearm and promptly begins to drill. I splatter her. Another touches down, then a third. They land fearlessly, without hesitation, without even strategic approach, as if each is infinitely confident in its inexhaustible membership. I smack them as they come, prepared to take on the entire army.
In the middle of slapping myself silly, a dour old woman with crimped, tumbling gray-blue hair opens the door.
“Hi,” I say, now nearly concealed in a tornado of ravenous mosquitoes. “I heard you have rooms available.”
“Dot right, young mon.” She looks me up and down, nostrils flaring, as if I am meat and selling myself by the pound. The mosquitoes do not disturb her. She has no lilting, beautiful, backward-accented words for me. I suppose that the average tourist does not make it this far. You have to tell the cab driver your entire life savings isn’t enough for a single night at the big hotel.
“Ten dollah,” she says, and I pay her.
“Numbuh tree,” she says, giving me a key and a jerk of the head to indicate the general direction of number three. The door closes.
I look about, slap my arms, then hurry down the hill about three hundred feet to the cluster of metal-roofed huts her head-jerk indicated. The key fits in the door of number three. I push inside. The room has a bed and dresser and desk, its own bathroom. For ten dollah, very nice. The floor is cool, bare cement. The windows are tightly screened, like a good prison or insane asylum should be. The multitudinous bloodsuckers hump and hover against the tight screens, singing me high-pitched, tropical love ditties. Here is one group, at least, who are happy to see me. I run the faucet in the bathroom. There are no chips of wrapped perfumed soap, no taut sanitary ribbon across the toilet bowl. I light a cigarette and lean in the doorway. The smoke hangs like wet blue plaster in the air. I write my name inside it, Edgar Donahoe, and then return as the letters linger to add a question mark.
The mattress is firm but I am too tired and anxious to nap. If time is money then life is shorter than I thought. Ten bucks a night even if I don’t eat, I’m out of cash in twenty days. And if I can’t find Mountain I’ll need an alternate plan quick. Too bad I don’t have one. I wash my face and change my shirt and walk back down into town, where up close I see my first two Rastafarians, crabby black hippies playing reggae songs about Bob-eel-on on their boom boxes. Across the way is the fastidiously manicured cricket field called the Queen’s Park Cricket Grounds. A game has just ended. I catch myself disapproving of cricket, thinking that baseball is proof of evolution, and then decide to quit being a snob and learn the game, when I notice a crazy, almost naked, and extremely bowlegged man no taller than a barrel of pickles, with a machete on his hip, arguing with a taller man in blue-and-white cricket silks with a Bible clamped under his arm. I cannot make out what is being said, but the conflict appears to be over religion and has risen to such a pitch I think the men will come to blows. I move closer, my betting instincts whetted. I would definitely wager on the crazy one with the knife. But the Bible carrier is ultracalm in his cool cricket silks.
“Do you know what amen mean?” he is saying.
“I’m not out of dat,” spits the savage one.
The cricket-dressed Christian says: “It mean ‘so let it be.’”
The bandy-legged one winces at this. He seems to be made of mud. His eyes are red as a bull’s. The muscles on his right arm flex as if he is about to free his blade and lay his adversary out like a ring bologna. He growls a gutteral reply.
“Ode it now, Chollie Legion,” someone calls with an almost affectionate snicker from out of the crowd.
“Dot right. Yer too close to de church.”
Civilized Man keeps his chest thrust out, his chin high, like the posture of virile courage I have seen in history books depicting British redcoats being shot down like ducks in a gallery. The man believes his faith will triumph. How quaint he would be in America. And how probably dead in the gutter.
Nevertheless, the bowlegged one finally climbs down off his toes in a disappointing shudder of sneezes and barks, and struts away, looking very much like an offended bulldog, his machete wagging mightily,