be an asshole, Frank.” He fell into his seat and turned to face me.
Chance is a gentle man, but no one to mess around with, his muscles built over years spent lugging heavy boxes of pipe fittings, hoisting bathtubs onto trucks and rowing his dinghy out to his home aboard The Maybelline, a decaying wooden Chris Craft he anchored in the middle of Great Harbor, thus avoiding having to pay dock fees. He had been on St. Ursula for twenty-five years; sometimes making a lot of money, sometimes going broke in one business or another. He’s been in a number of businesses. He owned a small hotel on the north side for couple of years, but once it was a going concern he lost interest and sold it. When I first met him he was running a successful landscaping business, which he sold to raise the capital for his half of the plumbing supply operation.
Maybe he was right about the potential for television on the island. Chance is a talented and energetic person from a talented and energetic family. His father is the author of sixteen one thousand plus page topical novels, the first of which was made into a successful Broadway musical, later into a movie. Three or four others had also been made into movies. The mere mention of a new book by Chance’s father is enough to have publishers and book club executives running around with the intensity of Spock in heat.
By the time Chance was eight, his father, raking in proceeds from the musical, was pushing him to be the exemplary son of a rich man. Chance played the game until his junior year at Swarthmore. He dropped out to knock around the dens of the Beat Generation for a couple of months, got disgusted with nihilists jockeying for literary fame by embracing nothingness, and finally took a job as a crew member on a yacht belonging to a friend of his father’s. He jumped ship in St. Ursula after the owner discovered Chance was having an affair with his young wife.
Chance has his father’s ability to muster his energy to profitable ends. He does it in different ways, but he is always successful, at least for a while. He’s been rich, he’s been poor, he’ll be rich again, and his father always is ready to finance his plans.
“It’s the wrong business for St. Ursula,” I said.
“And I say you still haven’t gotten over your romantic crush on the island.”
“Like I said, I’m an idealist.”
“Idealist, romantic. It’s the same thing.”
We knew each pretty well and, aware of the pointlessness of arguing, dropped the discussion. He started the Land Rover, ground it into gear and drove weaving along Waterfront to Ocean Road. Resting my head against the back of the seat I stared into the star-broken vastness of the tropical night.
“What are you going to do?” I asked.
“Go to bed.”
“I mean about the television business.”
“Who knows? Tonight I’ll go to bed. I do my best thinking when I’m asleep. Tomorrow I’ll have a better idea what I’m going to do about the television thing.”
We turned off Ocean Road, down the rocky, rutted, twisting, muddy drive to my place.
“You can sleep here tonight,” I said, getting out of the Land Rover.
He shook his head.
“You’ve been drinking as much as I have.”
“Not to worry. Look, I can still stand up and touch my nose.”
Shutting his eyes and keeping one hand on the steering wheel, he stood and brought his thumb rapidly toward his face, poking himself in the corner of the left eye. The car swung into a pothole, lurched through a growth of century plants and came to a stop in a hedge after lightly brushing a small coconut palm. He was thrown back on the seat, laughing as the engine sputtered twice and stalled.
“I didn’t do so well, did I?” He restarted the engine, backed out of the bushes and drove up to my front door.
“You should stay here.” I got out and walked around to the driver’s side. Stretching, I put my hand on his forearm.
“I’ll drive carefully and I promise not to stand up and touch my nose on the way home. I have things to do and miles to go before I sleep. Take care.”
Spinning his wheels, he turned the Rover around and drove rumbling and squeaking toward the main road.
THE CEILING FAN turning above us, Rumble and I lay on my bed watching the 11 o’clock news from St. Thomas. The picture jumped, fading in and out as the signal bounced off clouds and mountainsides. A tourist had been shot in the head outside a nightclub. A teacher had been mugged at the University of the Virgin Islands. A citizen’s group was accusing the Legislature of misappropriating funds for a housing project, and a senator from St. Croix had just admitted raping his nine-year-old daughter. Speculation was that he would be re-elected in a landslide. The weather was going to be mostly sunny with a high of eighty-one the next day, sea swells expected to be one and a half to two feet high, and the garbage collectors were entering the tenth day of a strike.
They showed a commercial three times with a single repeating line:
“One third of all jobs in the U.S. Virgin Islands come from tourists. Think about it!” There was a background picture of tourists descending from a cruise ship. “One third of all jobs in the U.S. Virgin Islands come from tourists. Think about it! One third of all jobs in the U.S. Virgin Islands come from tourists. Think about it! One third of all jobs in the U.S. Virgin Islands come from tourists. Think about it! Be nice to tourists!”
I turned the television off and fell asleep as waves broke against the foot of the bluff, wind rustling palm fronds, and tree frogs whistling from the bush in the damp earth behind my home.
I was jolted awake by the phone and Liz Ford telling me somebody had just tried to kill her.
THREE
LIZ SAT ON the edge of the bed wearing a green and white batik kimono. The pattern, although not the color, matched the outfit she’d been wearing on the boat. She was calm as I entered the room.
“Thanks for coming.” There was no trace of the thin frightened voice I had heard on the phone. Sitting in a chair, I leaned forward, my eyes fixed on hers. She did not look away.
“I’m here because you called me in the middle of the night, saying somebody had just tried to kill you.”
Without speaking, she stood and moved across the floor, opening the wooden jalousie window. Looking toward the sea she rubbed her forehead, sighed and turned. Folding her arms over her chest she walked back to the bed and sat drumming her fingers against her shoulders.
I studied her face. Her lips were slightly compressed, her eyes in constant motion, the sound of her fingers on her shoulders audible across the room. She was clearly tense, frightened, in spite of her calm air. Unfolding her arms, she held her palms open in front of her. She was shaking. Her eyes narrowed and she bit her lover lip. Letting her arms fall to her sides, she spoke.
“I’m not here on vacation. Tomorrow night I have to pick up a package at an airport I’ve never been to, from someone I’ve never seen and pass it on to someone else I’ve never seen who is supposed to show up in a dinghy at a place I’ve never heard of before, Micah’s Bay.”
“Drugs,”
