Bad Monkey (23 page)

She said, “Dot’s Prince Driggs. He’s a movie star! You two handsome boys shake honds.”

“No, that’s okay.”

The monkey growled and thrust out a brown paw.

“Better do it,” the woman warned Yancy, “or he fuck you up bod.”

Yancy shook the moist little fist and said, “Well, I’d better be going.”

“Take a ride wit me, suh. I’ll sit on dot strong monnish lap a yours.”

“Thanks, anyway. That’s a spiffy wheelchair, though.”

“Ain’t no fuckin’ wheelchair! You tink I’m a cripple?” To display her agility she hopped up, causing her attendants to flutter and fuss.

Indignantly the woman said to Yancy, “Wot dis ting is, boy, is lux’ry transport. Even got a iPod dock!”

“Sweet.” He leaned closer to read the label on the mobile chair. It was a Super Rollie, the same brand that Nick Stripling’s company had billed to Medicare in imaginary numbers.

“Can I ask where you got this?”

“From a friend. Woman like me has plenny friends.” She resettled herself in the contoured seat and smoothed the folds of her colorful skirt.

Yancy said, “I’d really like to have a scooter like this.”

“Maybe you lucky. Let’s talk sum bidness.”

The woman seized the fly of Yancy’s pants and tugged him halfway on top of her. Zestfully she began to grope, her husky grunts reeking of rum and stale cigars. Yancy was shocked to feel the wiry old drunk fishing for his balls. He fought to get free but the monkey hooked
three sinewy fingers through one of his belt loops. Only when Yancy pinched the hairless web of its armpit did the beast let go, screeching.

“No, no, don’t hoyt my prince!” the woman cried. “Bey, I gon pudda black coyse on your soul! Black as det!”

Yancy pulled out of her grasp and jumped back from the scooter chair. The riled monkey hurled first his tiara and then the diaper, which landed in a sodden lump at Yancy’s feet. As the matrons rumbled toward him, he kicked off his flip-flops and ran.

The last leg of the crossing got rough, and a few passengers began to throw up. Neville watched tall clouds building in the east as the breeze strengthened. The captain of the mail boat said a tropical storm was heading up from Hispaniola, which wasn’t uncommon that time of year. He said the storm was called Françoise, which meant nobody would take it seriously. He said the hurricane forecasters in Miami should give scarier names to the storms—like Brutus or Thor—if they wanted people to pay proper attention.

Neville didn’t own a television so his weather news came from the waterfront. Usually it was reliable. Some of the guides and fishermen had programmed their cellular phones to receive NOAA bulletins and radar loops; whenever they started moving their boats into the mangroves, Neville knew something big was coming. His own boat ran skinny, and he could take it up almost any creek on a low tide and tie off to the trees.

Still, he wasn’t worrying about the tropical storm when the mail boat docked. Françoise could slide north or south, or fizzle to a squall line by the time it touched Andros. Neville was more concerned by what was happening at the family property on Green Beach. He needed a new strategy for halting the construction of Curly Tail Lane, his voodoo scheme having failed. By seducing Christopher’s henchman the Dragon Queen had placed her own lustful urges ahead of her professional commitment to Neville. No crippling curse would be unleashed against the white devil; Christopher would have to be brought down by worldly means.

Neville’s bike was at the airport so he passed on foot through Rocky Town, keeping a wary eye out for Egg. Still bruised from the
beating, Neville longed to sleep on a real mattress instead of a boat deck. Among his three girlfriends the one named Joyous owned the softest bed but the hardest attitude. Neville decided he could endure another nagging if the payoff was a good night’s rest. Joyous slept like a stump and seldom snored.

She lived near Victoria Creek, and the walk brought Neville close to the property on Bannister Point where Christopher and the woman were staying. On a whim he left the road and made his way to the shoreline. The wind had swung southeast, pushing white-topped surf. Neville sat down on a coral outcrop with a rear view of the Gibson place. From behind him came a soft rustle in the bushes—two plump lizards humping in the last of daylight.

Neville was thirsty and tired from the slow rolling ride on the mail boat. His chin dropped to his chest and his eyelids closed as he pondered the difficult path he’d chosen. People said he was mad not to walk away from Green Beach and take the money. They laughed about it at the conch shack and called him a simpleton, which stung. By nature Neville wasn’t a troublemaker; just the opposite. Never in his life had he thrown a punch in anger or caused a scene, but here was a fight from which he couldn’t turn away.

What would he ever do as a rich man that he couldn’t do now? Where would he go, and for God’s sake why? He already lived in the loveliest place imaginable and, besides, he didn’t like to fly. That’s why he took the mail boat back from Nassau, seven hours by sea being more tolerable than twenty minutes by air.

Neville couldn’t think of anything to buy with all that dirty wealth. His old bicycle carried him everywhere a car could go, and it didn’t cost six damn dollars a gallon. Nor did he need a new fishing boat. The one he owned ran like a champ; the motor was a Yahama 150, way past warranty, but never had it stranded him, not once. He wondered if something was mentally wrong with him for being content with what he had …

When he opened his eyes, night cloaked the shore. The lights were on inside Christopher’s house. Neville got up from the rock and crept closer, approaching the landscaped edge of the lawn. Music came from speakers on the screened veranda—American rock.
Baby, we were born to run!
Neville brushed a mosquito from his nose. Through the
windows he saw no movement inside the rooms. By an outside wall stood the plastic garbage can from which he’d pilfered the items he’d given to the Dragon Queen for use in her curses.

Something soft brushed against Neville’s legs and he hopped backward. It was a young tabby cat, probably a stray. As he leaned down to pet it, a man spoke from the darkness behind him: “Don’t move, nigger, or I’ll blow your fuckin’ head off.”

Neville rose slowly and turned. “Don’t do dot please.” The gun pointed at him had a long double barrel.

“Who the hell are you? Why you sneakin’ around here?” Christopher’s face was difficult to see in the shadows though his orange poncho practically cast its own light. It made him appear tall and caped and spirit-like.

“I juss chasin’ offer my cot,” Neville said.

“That’s not your fuckin’ cat.”

“Respeckfully, sir, it looks true like ’im.”

Unfortunately, the tabby wouldn’t play along. It ran off when Neville reached to pick it up. Christopher laughed.

Neville could see the whites of the man’s eyeballs but not his nose or mouth. He perceived that Christopher was wearing a clinging fabric mask similar to what the local bonefish guides used to protect their faces from sunburn.

“Okay, beach nigger, what’s your name?”

“Neville Stafford.”

“Where you from? How old are you?”

“I’m sickty-four.”

“No shit? You’re in pretty good shape for an old fart.”

“Dot I cont say.” Neville wished he was younger and quick enough to grab for the gun. Then he would have pressed the muzzle to the man’s forehead and told him to take his goddamn earthmoving machines back to Florida.

Now all Neville could do was stand still and plead for his life. In his head he said a prayer; then he asked Christopher to please kindly let him go.

“So you wanna make it to your next birthday, is that right?”

“Yah, mon,” said Neville.

“My country, you get free insurance when you hit the big six-five.
Government pays damn near all the bills, you get sick. They got the same deal here in the islands?”

“Dot I cont say. I ain’t been sick.”

Again Christopher laughed through the mask. “Good for you, nigger.” He raised the barrel of the gun. “That means you can still run like a goddamn chicken.”

He aimed five feet above Neville’s head and a bolt of blue-gold fire punched a hole in the night. Neville ran and ran.

Seventeen

Nobody on Andros seemed especially worried about Tropical Storm Françoise. For a day the system had stalled down near Grand Turk; now it was sidling northwest again. The National Hurricane Center said atmospheric conditions were favorable for cyclonic growth. At this announcement, a TV weatherman in Miami began jabbing in febrile excitement at the floridly rendered “cone of doom”—a forecast map illustrating multiple possible pathways of the storm through the Bahamas chain and across toward Florida.

Yancy was watching on a flat-screen television in a second-story restaurant overlooking the Tongue of the Ocean. After the weather update he turned his attention to a bowl of chunky red chowder; submerged insect fragments would be hard to detect among the diced onions and celery. Yancy probed with a teaspoon. The night before he’d squashed seven adult-phase German cockroaches in his motel room; the largest was a flier that had alighted on his forehead as he slept.

The restaurant owner, an American expat with a white-streaked ponytail, asked, “What are you doing, mister?”

“Taking my time,” Yancy said.

“It’s only the best soup on the island. I use fresh-growed tomatoes.”

Eventually Yancy took a sip. He bowed at the man and said, “Outstanding.”

“Damn right.”

“How’s the bonefishing?”

“Super, if you can stand the heat.”

“I love the heat,” Yancy said.

A plane passed overhead, the pitch of the engine dropping during descent. Yancy hurried from the restaurant and pedaled his borrowed bicycle through gusty winds to the airstrip, where he found the white seaplane parked near the small terminal building. Claspers, the pilot, was talking on a cell phone while he set the wheel chocks. Standing alone by the fence was the beefy pinhead with the crumpled ears. He wore a brown guayabera, wet moons under the armpits. One side of his mug was shiny and swollen, testifying to an eventful dental appointment.

Yancy propped the bicycle against a shaded wall of the terminal. Soon a taxi van rolled up and the pinhead squeezed himself into the front passenger side. Yancy opened the sliding door and plopped down on the bench seat behind him.

“My bike’s got a flat. Can I ride back to town with you?”

“I ain’t gon dot way,” the big man said.

“Then we’ll drop you off first. My name’s Andrew. What’s yours?”

It was the driver who answered. “Egg’s wot dey call ’im.” The goon stared ahead, rubbing his jawbone. He told the taxi man to take him to Curly Tail Lane.

“You mean Green Beach?” the driver asked.

“Ain’t wot de sign say.”

“N’how ’bout you, suh?”

“Conch shack,” Yancy said.

The driver chuckled. “Almost lunchtime.”

Egg took a prescription bottle from a pocket and tapped out three oval pills. “Fuck lunch, mon. Juss drive.”

Yancy said he was from Florida. He said he loved the Bahamas and was thinking of buying a place on Andros, maybe a time-share. Egg ignored him.

The van stopped at a construction site. Egg paid the driver, unlocked the chain-link gate and disappeared inside an Airstream trailer that looked like it had been rolled off a cliff. Yancy didn’t see any signs or billboards on the property.

“Is this Curly Tail Lane?” he asked the driver.

“Yah.”

“I heard it’s going to be a five-star resort.”

“Dot’s de plon.”

“They’re just getting started, huh?”

The taxi driver laughed. “It’s not like Miami. Tings move lil’ slower here.”

“You hungry?” said Yancy.

The driver’s name was Philip and he was from Nicholls Town, on the north end. Yancy bought him fritters and a beer at the conch shack, where he flirted equitably with the two women behind the counter. Afterward he gave Yancy a motor tour of Lizard Cay, through the quiet old settlements of Elizabeth, Pindling’s Bluff and Weech Harbor. Along the way Yancy saw a few families boarding their windows, but the prevailing mood was leisurely. When the taxi began to jerk and sputter, Philip pulled over by the ferry dock on Victoria Creek. A squall blew in while he was beating with a wrench on the carburetor, so he scrambled back into the van.

While they waited for the rain to let up, Yancy described for Philip his unsettling encounter with the old woman on the motorized wheelchair. The driver frowned and told Yancy to be careful—she was a man-eater.

“A true sex witch, mon.”

“What do you mean?”

“Wonna my uncles sleep wit her and tree months later he drop dead,” Philip said. “She feed ’im poison coz he won’t screw her no more. Wicked bod lady—you stay ’way.”

“What’s the story with that monkey?” Yancy asked.

The driver said the animal starred in the Johnny Depp pirate movies until he turned rowdy and got fired—the rumor was that he had been caught masturbating on wigs in the costume trailer. Later the monkey was won in a domino game by a local man named Neville Stafford, who’d been working hard to rehabilitate his new pet. Nobody was sure why Neville had gifted him to the old voodoo hag.

“Dey call her Dragon Queen,” he added.

“Where’d she get those crazy wheels?”

“From her new boyfriend, mon. He won’t lost long. Nonna dem do.”

Yancy suspected that her Super Rollie was a demo left over from
Nicholas Stripling’s Medicare-fleecing operation. Christopher Grunion could have conned the “personal mobility device” from Eve and given it to the Dragon Queen, though it seemed far-fetched that he—or any fully sighted male—would start a romance with such a revolting loon.

“Is the lady’s boyfriend a white American? About my age?”

Philip cackled. “No, bey, you already meet de fella! It’s Egg.”

“Oh, come on.”

“Yah, dot’s true. I tole you she’s a witch, dot Dragon Queen. No cock is safe!”

“You know a man named Grunion?”

“Yessuh. Egg’s boss.”

“Show me where he lives,” Yancy said.