not have a phone anyway.
13.
FOR ANOTHER HOUR I SIT INERTLY BEMUSED IN THE lengthening shade of the mahogany trees. People are beginning to stare at me : a man gets off the ferry and sits in the plaza with his bags in the rain like a lunatic or a bum. He is either lost or unloved. Got the wrong island. Maybe he is looking for Mountain Moses, who writes prank postcards from San Diego, California. I rise finally and begin to ask around. I feel like a homeless person begging for quarters. Do you know where Mountain Moses lives? He is a big man, a black-haired, big-eared, toothy man, nose like Kilimanjaro and mad blue eyes. He’s a chuckling, enigmatic, brawling, bashful, chess-playing man who talks about the ratio of the ordinate to the abscissa of the endpoint of an arc of a unit and dreams of finding gold. No, I don’t know which side of the island he lives on. You must know him. I ask the man in customs, the sleepy misanthropic woman in the tourist info booth, a taxicab driver. From the looks I get, I might be asking the whereabouts of Nanook the Eskimo.
It begins to occur to me that I must have the wrong island. People would know Mountain. Unless they were keeping a secret. Unless he were in hiding. Or in trouble. Jailed. Perhaps he has left the island already? No, it’s likely he was never here in the first place. He found the postcard in a San Diego coffee shop, smudged the postmark, and shot it off for a practical joke. No, again, not Mountain’s style. Bar fighting and girl-obsession problems aside, he is a noble soul. The fact is, he would not be expecting me. Because of the aborted phone call he would have no idea I was coming.
It rains on me several more times. Besides being wet, I am hungry and tired. The time is past for action. I see a taxi and run toward it, waving my arms. The driver is friendly, with stifffingered Joe Cocker hands that fly about as 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
