All the Finest Girls (16 page)

I felt a flush of pride for solving the mystery. Despite himself, Derek laughed.

“Richard who?” he said.

“Murder on the Orient Express,”
said Philip. “Yah, she’s right. Mumma must have seen him at the cinema.”

Minutes later we reached Clifton’s. Behind a chain-link fence appliquéd with hubcaps, Philip’s Cadillac sat up on blocks, open-hooded in the moonlight. Clifton was in the driver’s seat, his head bobbing to a reggae-tinged rap thudding out of the car radio. A dozen other men lounged among the rusted appliances, car parts, and corrugated tin, the air rich with the funk of marijuana. We walked in from the back, unnoticed by Clifton. Derek was practically in the passenger door before the mechanic looked up through heavy lids.

“Colonel,” said Clifton, his rubbery lips wandering into a toothless smile. His eyes were as yellow as egg yolks. Philip and I stood at the back of the car and Philip nervously pulled on his beard. This was obviously not his scene. Derek and Clifton began to talk in a rapid island patois, not one word of which I understood, and while Philip listened in, I walked around to the front of the car. The place was illuminated by three clip lamps, hung off the fence and juiced by a string of jumper cables hooked to an overhead power line. The lights dimmed and flickered, nearly in time to the music. Nice disco, I thought. Not that I felt much like boogying when I saw the damage to the front of the Caddy. It was decidedly worse than I remembered. The passenger-side headlight winced at me, and the fender buckled up against both front tires. Through the windshield I could see Clifton peeling himself off the seat as slowly as physics would allow.

“Bakra Man,” he said, ambling around the hood, “how come yah didn’t say yah brothas wit de Colonel? Him and me partners from way back.”

Philip smiled uncomfortably and looked at Derek, who said nothing.

“Well, you know,” Philip answered, “he doesn’t like me advantaging his good name.”

Clifton snorted and scratched the little curls on his bare chest. His cutoffs slipped so low on his hips that I turned quickly away and looked toward the far end of the yard. In the shadows, someone was gesturing to me.

“So,” Philip said, “what’s the deal?”

Squinting, I could make out a dark figure with what looked like an enormous head, seated on a pile of tires.

“Clifton ain’t nuh Detroit man,” the mechanic was saying as I wandered away. “Ain’t nuh assembly line here.”

Getting closer, I began to see the contours of a tall man with a huge beehive of hair stuffed up inside a woven red cap. He was smiling, beckoning me with a long finger. When I got near and could see his T-shirt, I recognized him as the fisherman who’d been outside the bar that afternoon. He held out to me an enormous joint. I waved it off as casually as possible, feeling a familiar bullet of anxiety trying to pierce through my mild drunkenness.

“Yah don’t lick corn?” he asked, with a floppy warble that, by comparison, made Clifton sound like Henry Higgins.

“Nah,” I said, adding a lame just-not-in-the-mood shrug.

“Cool. Das cool. So what ya doin’, den?”

“Hmm?” I replied, floundering. “Nothing. Not much. How about you?”

“Jes’ chillin’. Jes’ limin’.”

I waited, figuring he wanted something. He lifted his chin. “Whas ya name?”

When I told him, he slowly shook his head.

“Addy? Nuh. You more a Pearl to me. Like yah skin,” he said, pointing to my arm. “Yah. Pretty Pearl. I’s watchin’ yah before. Nice.” He took a long hit off the joint, which glowed like a taillight in the darkness. Two other men, sitting on a washing machine not far away, laughed quietly as their friend hopped down and put out his hand.

“I Sebumbo.”

I shook his hand.

“’Syah boyfriend?” he asked, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the Cadillac.

“What, him? No. Neither of them. No.”

“Husband?” he asked leaning in close enough that I could smell his wicked breath.

“Nope.”

“Yah dance wit me?”

The absurdity of my situation finally got to me, and I began to laugh. The truth is I was so uncomfortable at that moment I thought I might wet my pants. Encouraged by my laughter, Sebumbo put an arm around my waist. When I tried to pull away, he pressed me against himself. The music bumped and jived from the open car doors.

“Yah jes’ chill, mama. Yah wit Sebumbo now.”

Using his hips like a gyroscope, he swung me out onto his sandy dance floor. The more I resisted, the tighter he held me. His friends, whom I could see in the distance, were bobbing their heads in appreciation. “Relax,” he whispered, following the music’s heavy pulse and pulling my face to his shoulder. He put his hand on my ass, and I felt a spark of tension begin to blaze at the back of my head. I was having trouble breathing. The man smelled horrible. An unmistakable hard lump of an erection soon sprung up between us, and Sebumbo, making sure I didn’t miss it, ground himself into my belly button. The song was eternal. I moved about gamely, tried to be cool, but beneath my silence I was hysterical. It was not a new tune but a firm voice that finally set me free.

“Bumba. Letta be.”

My partner slowly unhanded me, and I turned to see Derek, arms folded across his chest. I was soaked with sweat. Sebumbo said something under his breath I didn’t understand, but the purr of it was decidedly raunchy.

“Check yah latah, Pearl,” he said as I moved quickly to Derek’s side. Trying to recover, I offered a pathetic wave. Back in the light, Derek eyed my soggy frame and looked me in the eye.

“You arright?”

I nodded, rolled my eyes. My head was killing me. The good news was I no longer felt remotely drunk.

“He’s harmless. Brain-dead.”

Before I could thank Derek, he gave me his shoulder and walked away. Over by the car, Clifton had an arm around Philip, hanging on him and putting on a long face.

“Grievous sorry ’bout yah mumma, my man. I’ll be fixin’ yah car straightways. But it won’t be fah tomorrow. Maybe de next day.” Clifton lowered his voice, looked around his yard before adding, “And me not even charge you regulation price.”

Philip nodded slowly, puckering his lips, then pulled out his wallet. As Derek and I began to walk away, Clifton shouted out to us.

“Colonel! Yah certain yah brothas wit Bakra Man?”

Derek nodded. Clifton waggled a pink tongue.

“Dere be a whitey inna woodpile, huh?”

The mechanic’s laugh ricocheted off all the metal surfaces and followed us back down the long road.

Exasperated by me, my ex-boyfriend Daniel Moss once said I was like a Komodo dragon. Shortsighted, cold-blooded; you could be pretty certain I was dead until, unblinking, I stretched my maw and swallowed you whole. A born naturalist who wanted to be a travel writer, Daniel loved metaphors, especially when they rationalized my “primitive behavior.” Hunger, lust, rage, I subverted every emotion into a strange, reptilian repose. I know he was trying to get a rise out of me with his armchair zoology. And I wish he had. The fact was, I didn’t feel much of anything at all when I was with Daniel. And when we fell apart, over and over again, I felt even less. In a sense, his metaphor was entirely accurate. I flat-lined, then sucked him into the black hole of my trance.

He would have loved this moment: Addy unhinged, up a tree, in flight. He’d have laughed at my helplessness, and I would have let him. I think I would have put up with much worse to have Daniel there with me. My hands tingled, and my feet felt numb. I focused on my toes while we waited for Philip, who jogged up to meet us.

“Well, that ain’t good,” Philip said, hitching a thumb back toward Clifton’s. Derek began climbing the hill, his older brother at his back. I fell in step behind them.

“Derek?”

“Mmhmm?”

“I’m meeting with the lawyer at noon.”

“Yah.”

“You sure you don’t want to be there?”

“Yup.”

“So. You think you might bring Papa up, then? When you come back?”

Derek stopped, halting the line behind him. He looked up at the sky and dug his hands into his pockets.

“Why would I do that?”

Finally angry, Philip marched up and stood nose to nose with Derek.

“Because he’s your goddamn father. Because they loved each other, all right?”

Derek’s eyes flickered. He poked his brother in the chest.

“Fuck off, Phil.”

There was a smell in the air, of violence or of fear, that blew down toward me on the light tradewind. Derek’s eyes flashed white, and there was tenseness to his body that made it tremble almost imperceptibly. For a long time no one spoke. Finally, without a word, the two men continued up the hill. I kept my distance, walking slowly. At the top, Derek turned to his brother.

“I don’t want to talk about dis shit anymore, all right? None of it. As far as me being concerned, he killed her.”

“Oh Christ, Derek. Come on!”

“Might as well, he lighting her up wit all dat talk. I mean, what do yah tink she was doing down dere, by de water, when she cyaant swim?”

“She was out of her mind, Derek!”

“He gave her ideas. Yah don’t know nothing. I lived wit her. I saw her dat night! Yah don’t know.”

Philip put a hand on Derek’s shoulder, but Derek pushed it off and walked on ahead. Before disappearing into the darkness, he turned back to his brother one more time, his voice dead calm again.

“And by the way, Phil, I know I didn’t go to college, but I do know a few things. I remember Patrice that day, Independence Day. I remember Patrice being with us on Buck’s Hill.”

When we got to the house, Derek was nowhere to be found.

On the living-room couch, Floria slept curled within the folds of her dress. Seeing her, Philip forgot quickly about me. I snuck a last glance as he bent down to his wife’s ear, delicately kissing it before whispering to wake her. I turned away and made for the bedroom door that had been left ajar for me. Marva shifted once but slept on. When my eyes had adjusted to the sheaf of moonlight coming in the window, I found my bag and quietly undressed. Then I lay down on Lou’s bed beneath her collage of news clippings. Again the ghostly impression of ink emerged on the paper’s edges.

“Growing smart as you!” it said beneath a story announcing Philips place on the honor roll. Another, about the purchase by Errol and Patrice Hodge of the Eldertown Cinema: “Looking for a visit from my Cinema Girl!”

The last words I deciphered before my eyes began to ache were written on an aging photo of Philip, his back to the ocean. His hair was a mess, his expression surly and adolescent. A man’s arm was draped around his shoulder, but the person to whom it belonged had been ripped away from the picture.

“We bought this boat for funning around. Please —” it read, and then the jagged white line of torn paper interrupted. In my head, I tried to finish the sentence, but soon gave in to sleep.

15

S
IXTEEN MUSSELS.
T
HIRTY
-two black-and-blue bruises. Or open coffins I’ve lined up in a sandy graveyard row beneath Edith’s dock. Across the necklace of beach, kids are playing rag tag off the club pier. Leaping from pilons, they drop like bullets into green water, leaving on the air the rat-a-tat-tat of laughter and streaks of color piercing the haze. When I press my ear to the sand, I can hear a mermaid chorus and the volcanic rumblings of the sea.

How long? How long would it take them to notice if I left? Across the harbor, traffic rolls in a steady stream across the Bay Shoals Bridge, and I can see myself, tiny from here, walking the footpath across the span. Like a hobo, I could get a red bandanna and a length of stick. Or maybe just make a dive and swim. How long before they missed me? But then again, who cares? Face pushed into the sand, eyes closed, I fill my brain with a balloon of nothingness.

No noise; Cat has left for good, it seems. I’m all for nothingness now, nothing’s biggest fan. Nothing is like our house in Coldbrook this winter past. Silent like death, and where there used to be people, only slippery ghosts. Laughing hollowly in the living room, whispering in the low-ceilinged hallways upstairs, breathing fog on the glass patio doors. I like this new silence, the nothingness that grows inside my head. I think I am beginning to disappear myself. I finished the year at the bottom of the fifth grade. I waited for my mother and father to react, but summer blew in beneath the doors and windows, and no one said a word.

Not even Lou.
Brugadung girl,
I thought she’d say.
You a brugadung girl, but me knowing you a smart ting. Yah just got one eye on trouble is all. One eye on trouble
Lou said nothing at all, only sighed and looked out through the window over the kitchen sink. A blue bunting pecked at the glass feeder, turquoise coat glistening. Lou fingered my report card with her wet dish hands, but her eyes were a blank. She is more and more that way, closed inside herself, lost to her Bible and pictures of the boys.

Below the dock, I scream nonsense into the sand, down farther and to the earth’s core, where no one will hear me. I sit up, chew the pebbly grains.

Just above the seawall, my grandfather’s studio is an old man, wrapped in a blanket of rose hips and briar. The windows forlorn, salty, tear-stained. The sign Edith has placed before the door looks like a pipe in the mouth.
PRIVATE PROPERTY. NO LOOKIE-LOOS.
I brush the sand from my stomach and elbows, leave behind the shell cemetery, and climb back up the rickety stairs. Lou is in town visiting the lady who owns the dry goods store
I’m wanting to drop in on old Mrs. Cohen, fi she gets very lonesome.
The afternoon is mine.

I’m an aerialist, a tightrope walker on this high stone wall. Look at me. Ssh. Don’t say a word or I’ll fall, tumble back down to the beach below.
Poor girl. Lost her footing. Dashed her head on those rocks right there. Yes, she was my granddaughter. Nothing but seafood soup now, though.
Poor Lou. There she is, standing by my coffin, raining tears.
My white daughter, she was my white daughter. Lawd, I should never have gone to town dat day.
And Mom, with her arm around Dad. When she faints, Dad holds her up, carries her to a chair.
Amazing grace, how sweet the sound, that saved a wretch like me