The New Moon's Arms (11 page)

Agway made a little sobbing sound. He laid his head against my chest.

“Next morning,” I said, “I had one motherass hangover, you see? And all I could find in the apartment was a half-empty bottle of baby aspirin. I took about six. Went to the kitchen for some water to wash them down. Found a Banks beer left in the fridge, so I opened that and drank it instead.”

Agway put his thumb in his mouth and stared up at me.

“Don’t look at me like that!” I said. “I was only nineteen! I just turned my back for a
minute
!”

I rocked him. “When I got back into the room, she was sitting on the bed, eating down the aspirin. No safety tops in those days. Such a big grin she had on her face, so proud of herself. She offered me the bottle with three tablets left in it. She wanted to share the pretty sweeties with me. Child always had more heart than sense.”

Agway sighed. He tangled his free hand in his own hair. What was this obsession with grabbing onto hair?

“I called the doctor. He told me to stick my finger down her throat to make her throw up, and if that didn’t work, to go to Emergency quick. It worked, though. She heaved up a little orange ball of baby aspirin.”

Agway’s thumb fell out of his mouth. He took a long, shuddering breath, held it forever, then let it out. Poor thing was deep asleep.

And it was now evening. Time to leave him. I wanted my dinner. My stomach was so empty, my belly button was trying to kiss my backbone.

I took him over to the crib and laid him down in it. He never woke. I pulled the thin cotton sheet up around him and kissed his cheek. I put up the railing. My hands remembered how to work it now. I’d slipped right back into the groove, like three decades hadn’t gone by since Ife had been this small. “I going come back tomorrow, babby.” I reached in and patted his good leg. My hand touched the calloused knee. I jerked my fingers away. Then, curious, I touched the rough spot again. He didn’t wake. The spot was rough and scraped my fingers till I ran them the other way. Then it was smooth. What callous felt like that?

I tiptoed out of the room. Fry bake for dinner. Yes. With butter. And saltfish. Telling Agway that story had put a taste for saltfish in my mouth. And maybe some callaloo for Dadda. His mouth was too soft nowadays for fry bake.

I stopped where I was in the hallway. Rewound my mental tape. Deleted the thought about callaloo. Love them or hate them, people get hooks into you. When they leave, you have to take the hooks out, one by one.

I went to the nurses’ station. The nurse who’d brought Agway’s painkiller smiled at me. “Heading home?” she asked.

“Yes. I going to come back tomorrow.”

The nurse consulted her clipboard. “No, Children’s Services is transferring him tomorrow.”

“So soon? To where?”

She gave me a sympathetic look. “The home where they send orphans. On Gracie Street, by the old post office.”

Oh, great. A baby detention centre. “How long they going to keep him there?”

“Couldn’t tell you, you know. Probably till they find his parents or a foster home for him.”

“I can foster him,” I heard myself saying. Crap. What the behind was wrong with my brain? I didn’t want to foster nobody.

“They have official foster parents. You can’t just volunteer to take a child so.”

“That’s all right, that’s just fine,” I said. “Sure he’s in excellent hands. So good night, enh?”

“Good night.”

I made a relieved escape towards the car park. No way I wanted to mind a three-year-old at this stage of my life.

A
ND WHAT A PIECE OF COMMOTION
when the waterbus reached Dolorosse! Coast Guard and police cars lining the strip of grass around the ferry dock. Light from must be a dozen flashlights dancing over by the low cliff beside the waterbus dock. Men’s voices shouting from over there. Yellow police tape blocking off the edge of the cliff. What in blue blazes…? I drove down the ramp, pulled up beside the little covered plaza where pedestrians could wait for the waterbus.

Mr. Lee was
outside
his booth, pacing up and down
on
the plaza! I almost didn’t recognise him; I only ever saw his head and his chest. He came towards the car.

“Evening, Mr. Lee.” I held up my waterbus pass for him to see.

“Evening.” He held my car door open for me. He wasn’t paying any mind to whether I had my pass or not. He kept glancing over his shoulder to what was going on at the cliff.

“What happening? Like somebody get hurt?”

“Somebody get dead.”

“What?” I peered around him. Over by the cliff, a man was preparing to climb down a rope lowered over the side. It’s a wetsuit he was wearing? I couldn’t see for sure. “Somebody fell over the side? Who?”

“Don’t know yet. They still trying to get whoever it is out of the water.”

“Lawdamercy.” I made it almost to the yellow tape, Mr. Lee jittering along behind me, before a policewoman stopped us.

“Step back, please.”

“But who it is?” I asked. I craned my neck. An inflatable dinghy was bobbing in the water. Three people in wetsuits inside it. The Coast Guard logo shone from its side.

“Just step back, please, madam.”

Blasted woman wouldn’t let us get any closer. Me and Mr. Lee fell back a few feet to where an empty ambulance was parked. He had his arms clasped around his narrow upper body. He looked a little shivery. “You all right?” I asked him.

“I don’t like to be near the dead,” he said. “You ever been to those little islands over there?” He pointed out over the sea.

What that had to do with the dead? “You mean like Dutchie and St. Cyprian’s? They off limits.” Except for the official boat tours. Those islands were monk seal mating grounds, and the seals were Cayaba’s cash cows.

Mr. Lee smiled. “You ever know ‘off limits’ to stop young boys? They didn’t used to guard them so well when I was small. Me and my friends had a way to row over to Dutchie after school. Collect booby eggs, roast them over a fire.”

“Awoah. Nowadays they fine your rass if they catch you with a booby egg.”

“And if Johnson get back in power, he going to turn it to a jail sentence. Anyway, the boys and me stopped going after a while. Shallow water out there, rocks jooking up. Those rocks tear up a slave ship once.”

“Yeah, yeah, and the ghosts of drowned slaves haunt the islands to this day, blah, blah. I read the brochure.”

He hugged himself more tightly. “All right then,” he said. “I won’t tell you what me and Tommy Naya saw out Dutchie way that day. But I don’t like to be near the dead. They don’t stay peaceful.”

My skin pimpled. I was never going to hang out with Mr. Lee again. “You don’t have to stay, you know. You must be done work for the night.”

He gave me a sheepish grin. “I want to see what going to happen.”

So we kept each other company.

Who knew rescue work was so boring? I found out about Mr. Lee’s bad back, his cousin in the Philippines who was a lawyer, and the best way to cook bitter melon. He knew I had a daughter. He even knew her name. “Yeah, man,” he said. “After she been visiting you here for so long now? Sometimes while she waiting for the waterbus, she will get out the car and come talk to me. How she going with her Neurolinguistics course?”

“All right,” I said. So Ife and Mr. Lee were friends. Me, I only knew his name because Dadda had told me it.

There was a hollow shout from down at the base of the cliff. A couple of the policemen ran to look over the edge. “Like something happening,” said Mr. Lee.

Our Cerberus was still guarding the way, but she was more interested in what was happening behind her at the cliffside. She had her head cranked over her shoulder to see better, so she didn’t notice when we snuck around in front of her and went to the other side of the cordoned-off area. It was darker over there; maybe we’d be able to get closer.

“Come under the tape with me, nuh?” I said to Mr. Lee.

“You better not,” came a low voice from the darkness at our feet. Mr. Lee gave a little yip of fear, bit it off quickly.

Jamdown accent. “Hector?” I said, peering into the shadows.

“Yes.” Hector stood up from the ground to his full height. Mr. Lee grabbed my arm. Hector stepped out where we could see him better. This time, the wetsuit had bright blue panels contrasting the black ones.

I patted Mr. Lee’s hand. “Don’t fret. I know him.”

Mr. Lee blew out a hard breath. “Jeezam. Nearly make me jump out my soul case and gone. You nearly kill me, man.”

“Sorry,” said Hector. His voice was flat. He looked to where the police were now yanking on a couple of ropes, pulling something heavy up the cliff face. The flashlights were dancing double time, and the shouted advice coming faster. The policewoman was over there now, shouting along with the others.

“They tell me I have to go down to the station and give a report,” Hector said. “It’s me who found them. The bodies.”

Mr. Lee squeaked, “More than one?”

“Yeah. A woman and a man. I don’t think they were dead long. Not enough decomposition. But the waves mash them up against the rocks.”

I swallowed. “They fell in?”

His face was grey. He looked desolate. “You know how it feel to touch an arm when all the bones in it break?”

“Fuck.”

“Jeezam.”

I asked him, “How you come to find them?”

“I was swimming.”

“At night?”

“That’s when the seals are awake.”

“The seals?” Who watched seals at night?

Over by the cliff side, the policemen pulled up a body bag, heavy with its contents. Then a second one. Hector’s gaze was grim.

“Jeezam,” said Mr. Lee.

Hector said, “I think it’s the little boy’s parents.”

“Don’t joke,” I whispered.

“No joke.”

A knot of people moved away from the cliff side, bearing the two body bags. “Oh! They taking them over to the ambulance!” I said. “Come quick!”

We got there as they were opening the back doors of the ambulance. Three policemen and a paramedic helped the others to load the bodies in. A Coast Guard man, looking around, called out, “Mr. Goonan?” It was Gene.

Hector shouldered his way under the yellow tape. “Right here,” he said. “We going now?”

Gene turned and spotted me and Mr. Lee at the same time that the policewoman did. Gene started forward. The policewoman barrelled towards us, shouting, “I told the two of allyou to remove yourself from the premises!”

Hector said, “They were keeping me company.”

“Madge,” said Gene, “I think they could stay.” Madge glared at us but didn’t say anything.

“Watch it!” yelled one of the men packing the bodies. Too late. The body they were carrying slipped out of the open front of the bag like a guinepe slipping out its skin. It thudded to the ground.

“Ohmigod,” groaned Mr. Lee. Hector put his hand to his mouth.

“Put him back in the bag!” Gene barked. “Now!”

Everybody knew that the Cayaba Police Force and the Coast Guard had a steady rivalry going between them, but right now, nobody bothered to tell Gene that he was out of order for giving orders to policemen. They just started stuffing the man back into the bag.

But I had already seen. A black man, maybe mid-twenties, skin torn and bruised all over. Not a stitch on him; naked as a johncrow scalp. He had a dark patch of callous on the inside of the knee I could see. Agway’s father?

The men were having trouble getting him bagged. His tubby body was loose like a sack of flour, his limbs snaky as noodles. Even with the tangle of dreads, I could see that his skull had a strange dent in it. All the bones broken, Hector had told us. I must have sobbed. Mr. Lee had tears in his eyes.

“Please come away,” said Madge, gently this time.

Mr. Lee nodded and began heading back to the plaza. “I going,” I told Madge. But I couldn’t make myself move off just yet.

The men got the body into the ambulance. As they were closing the double doors, one of the man’s arms flopped out of the bag. In the glow from the flashlights, I could see the webbing between his fingers, like a duck’s. I gasped, loudly enough that Gene heard me.

“Fucking hell,” muttered the paramedic. He rushed between the two policemen, shoved the arm in, slammed the doors closed. I glanced at Hector. He had his head down, a hand covering his eyes. He hadn’t seen.

I said, “Gene, is he…” Like his son? What were the chances that exactly the same abnormalities would breed true?

Gene caught my gaze. Held it. Shook his head slightly. So I didn’t finish the sentence. What? Don’t make like I know Gene? Or don’t ask the question I had been about to ask?

“Mr. Goonan,” said one of the policemen. “Come with us, please.”

“Yes. Of course.” Hector followed him, got into the back of a police car. Gene was still looking hard at me. He pressed his forefinger against his lips:
sshh
. My mind was in turmoil, my heart pounding. But I nodded. Whichever one he was asking me to keep quiet about, I wouldn’t say anything.

I turned and stumbled back to the plaza. The two adults and Agway, in their boat. Got caught in the storm. Blown off course. That must be what happened. The boat, caught in the Shark’s Teeth, just like Captain Carter’s slave ship. Agway’s fat beach ball body buoyed up. Swept to shore. But the adults didn’t make it.

When I reached the plaza, Mr. Lee’s car was pulling out. He stopped and stuck his head out his window. “You’re a drinking woman?” he asked me.

I nodded. “Oh, yes.”

“Then take a dram or two tonight,” he advised me. “I know that’s what I’m going to do.” He waved me goodbye and went his ways.

I was shaking. I leaned against the hood of my car for support. Maybe Gene had only been telling me not to make a fuss, not to upset Hector even more. Hector, swimming through the ink of the sea at night, and bumping into a body whose every bone had been smashed to shards…

The ambulance rolled over to the waterbus dock, followed by the police cars and the one Coast Guard car. Gene wouldn’t let his two eyes make four with mine. I looked for the car that Hector was in. There. He waved at me from the back seat, but before I could go over there, I heard the thrum behind me of a waterbus pulling up to the dock. A waterbus so soon? But they never came on time, much less
early
. Oh. This would be a special run.