yelled at me, flecks of sausage from her mouth flying across the table. “Bail on me now or stuff it with your drug crap. I’m not a drug dealer. I’m a scholar, a teacher and a mother. I’m a decent, upright person in a jam, and I need help.”
“I could help best if I knew the details.”
She took a sip of coffee. “Don’t ask. I can’t tell you. Just trust that I’m as honest and forthright as I look, as someone with a doctorate in medieval ballads is bound to be.”
She was trying to divert me, get me talking about what a doctorate in medieval ballads might be all about. I kept on. “What do you want me to do tonight when you pick up this package of non-drugs and deposit it at Micah’s Bay?”
“You could hide with a gun. I could tell the contact you’re there and you’ve got me covered.”
I crossed the room and stood on the verandah overlooking the water. “A gun? What in the hell are you into?”
“A mess,” she mumbled.
“Whoever you’re meeting isn’t one of the good guys.”
“There aren’t any good guys in this thing, except for me. I’m the good guy trying to keep some innocent people alive. Now, have you got a gun?”
Wishing I’d taken The Native Son instead of The Yellow Bird back from St. Thomas the day before, I watched her face as I answered. “I’ve got a gun, but don’t carry it around with me. Even the cops here don’t carry guns, unless there’s a major emergency. An unlicensed, part-time private eye who’s trying to live quietly on St. Ursula could get in a lot of trouble with a gun. This isn’t St. Thomas or the States. There hasn’t been a murder here in more than five years.”
She smiled as though she had caught me. “You said they still hanged people at Her Majesty’s Prison.”
“When they have to.” I added that there hadn’t been a hanging in at least seventeen years. I didn’t mention my feelings about her having brought a big ugly chunk of the States to the island and plopping it down right on my bluff at Smugglers Bay.
“The bad guys have guns.” Her flat voice and eyes told me more than she had with all her words of evasion.
I left her standing there, went to my bedroom and got the thirty-eight from the bottom dresser drawer, removing it from a box, unwinding the oiled diaper I kept around it. I’d had the gun for a long time. I don’t like guns, but I’m good with them. The thirty-eight had saved my life on several occasions.
“I can deal with that if I have to,” I told her as I placed it on the coffee table. “It’s my only one. Sorry I don’t have one for you.”
“Do you think I need one?” Her voice rose anxiously.
“How would I know? You haven’t told much.” I grabbed her arm. “What are you expecting?”
She pulled away, rubbing her arm as if I’d contaminated it. “I’m not expecting anything and I want to be ready for anything after what happened in my hotel room.”
I threw up my arms. “Look, lady, I don’t really know you from Eve. You come into my life laying this trip on me with no explanations and you want me to tell you what I think you need? Maybe you need a shrink. Maybe you need a private army. Maybe you don’t need me. I sure as hell don’t need you and your mysterious little games.”
“I need you.” She said it plainly. No cut smiles. No hands on my arm. “I came down here thinking I could handle this on my own. Having someone try to kill me proved I can’t. Help me, Frank.”
I looked away from her, speaking out the window. “If you need me and I need my gun, you need a gun.”
She nodded. “How does that happen?”
“I’ve got an idea,” I said.
I gave up arguing with her. I’d made a commitment to help her, whatever she was into, whatever it involved doing. It didn’t make any sense, flying in the face of my years of carefully honed St. Ursula expatriate survival skills, keeping a low profile and not getting mixed up in anything that might give the authorities an excuse to kick me off the island. The only thing it didn’t fly in the face of was my mother’s oft repeated warning about my romanticism getting me into big trouble some day.
We finished breakfast. I put the scraps in Rumble’s bowl, gave him his morning ration of milk, and scratching his ears told him he had to stay home while Liz and I went to town. He was too busy eating to care.
“You talk to him like he was a child,” Liz said.
“He’s been all the family I’ve had since I moved down here,” I said. Picking Rumble up, I cradled him in my left arm and scratched his belly. He twisted his head around and stared at his half empty food bowl on the floor. “I’ve had him a long time.”
She didn’t answer as she reached over to pat Rumble’s head.
We drove to Chaucer in the Gurgel. I’d bought it six months earlier, planning to take the canvas top off. Rain and salt spray wouldn’t harm the plastic body, and I’d be able to work on my tan as I drove around. Like most stateside people who live in the islands for more than a year or so, I had about as much tan as a Vermonter in early July. With the top off I would at least have a deep tan on my head, the part of my body I’m most vain about. I keep the top shaved clean so no ugly, straggly little wisps of hair blow about. I keep the fringe cut short, but not so closely cropped you can’t see the gray beginning to distinguish my temples. I don’t let my beard get very long either.
I drove as quickly as I could, dodging potholes and other drivers. The sun was making bright reflections in the sea, forcing me to drive with one hand as I shielded my eyes with the other, cursing my stupidity for forgetting sunglasses. I was grateful for the shadow of Wise Mountain as I drove around the west shore of Pelican Bay, toward the settlement there. Glancing up I saw the television relay station at the mountaintop, looking bloated and ominous as it waited to spin its electronic web over the island.
Turning down the west peninsula of Great Harbour I pointed Chance’s boat out to Liz.
“It doesn’t look like much,” she said.
“There’s no way of telling what keeps it afloat. Chance says he has Willis Penn bless it once a year.”
“Who’s Willis Penn?”
I explained and she agreed that if everything I said was true, he just might be responsible for Chance’s good fortune with the boat.
I parked at the roadside and we walked down to the water. Huge boulders set at the harbor’s mouth formed a breakwater, reducing the Caribbean’s waves to small tidal swells, which barely moved the seaweed and flotsam at the water’s edge. Floating against the rocks were pieces of wood and fiberglass from boats and houses torn apart in the last few hurricanes. Here and there a broken mast stuck up through the water.
I pointed out the roofs still covered with canvas tarps, two years after the last major storm. When storms devastate the Caribbean they get twenty to forty seconds mention in stateside newspapers and on the network news broadcasts. When they cross the sea and hit Miami, the gulf coast, or Wilmington, North Carolina and head up the coast toward New Jersey and New
