The New Moon's Arms (25 page)

“Clearly that respect don’t cut two ways,” Orso said.

“I think I’m going back to the boat now,” Hector told us.

I glared at Orso, my mouth working. My blood was boiling. I could feel the sweat popping out on my forehead. I rushed at him. “You. Shut. Up. You just shut up right now!”

Something materialized out of the air and landed on the ground between us. It shattered when it hit.

“Now she’s throwing things at us!” hissed Orso. Agway started to cry. “Michael, we leaving this house this minute! I refuse to do any work for that woman.”

From the shards mixed in with a few coins, it looked like the piggybank that used to sit on my little vanity table in the house on Blessée.

Michael cut his eyes at me. “Later, Ife,” he said, his voice low and controlled. “Same time Sunday?” She nodded.

Michael and Orso left the kitchen. As they headed through the living room, Orso said loudly: “I told you that woman don’t have no kind feelings in her heart for you! Never did, never will.”

My ass. “What you know about it?” I yelled after him.

Hector’s eyes were big as limes. He cleared his throat. “Maybe they could give me a lift into town. To buy the things for the tricycle.” And he fled too.

I rounded on Ife. “What he mean by ‘same time Sunday’?”

“Sunday is when we go and see Grandpa,” Stanley piped up, mischief on his face.

“I told you not to tell her!” Ife said to him. “I told you it would only cause trouble.”

Stanley pouted. “Grandpa told her first.”

“And so everything Grandpa do, you going to do?”

The hot flash passed, leaving me shocky and shivering. “You go to Michael’s house every Sunday?” I asked them. “When it’s like pulling teeth to get you to come and see me?”

Ife looked down at her hands. “I finally realised you couldn’t stop me,” she said. “I found his number one day and called him. It’s been good for Stanley to have more men in his life.”

“Men?”
I squeaked. “Michael and Orso?”

“Orso’s teaching me how to play cricket!” Stanley told me. I just stared from one to the other, lost.

Ife stood up. “You happy now?” she asked me. “Now that you’ve tried to make everybody as miserable as you?” She wiped Agway’s hands clean with a corner of her sackcloth dress. “I pity this child,” she said. “Come, Stanley.”

“Okay. Ka odi,” he said to Agway, waving.

“Ka odi,” Agway replied.

“What, like even the two of you talking so I can’t under-

stand?”

“Who have ears to hear, will hear,” Ife told me. She stepped over the ceramic shards, out into the living room. Stanley followed.

I yelled, “You best watch Orso with that child! You hear what I’m telling you, Ifeoma?”

The front door closed very quietly. A few seconds later I heard Ife start up her car and drive away.

“Shit. I really gone and done it now, Agway.”

He climbed backwards off the chair, toddled over to the tv and plumped himself down to watch the cartoons.

I got the broom, started cleaning the mess up. I knelt with the dustpan to sweep up the piggybank pieces. As I did, a stab of pain went through my trick knee. I used one hand on the floor to steady myself, then began brushing the shards into the dustpan.

My hands. When age spots started coming out on my hands? I put down the dustpan, sat back on my haunches. My palms still looked more or less like I remembered them, but the backs of my hands were a roadmap of the tiniest wrinkles. “Next thing you know,” I whispered, “my bubbies going to be neighbours with my navel, and I going to be wearing a diaper.”

Who tell me to set my cap for Hector, anyway? What a forty-year-old man could want with a matriarch? I watched the wet tears plop into the dustpan amongst the pieces of broken crockery.

Uncle Time is a spider-man, cunnin’ an’ cool,
him tell yu: watch de hill an yu se mi.
Huhn! Fe yu yi no quick enough fe si
how ’im move like mongoose; man, yu tink ’im fool?

—Dennis Scott, “Uncle Time”

Someone knocked at the door. It was about the time when Mr. Mckinley came by every Saturday with the morning’s catch. I put my hand over the receiver. “One minute!”

“You have to go?” asked Gene. He’d called to see how Agway was doing.

The knock came again. “Soon come!” I yelled at the door. “Yeah, I have to go.”

“You busy Thursday evening?”

“No. Why?”

“You want to go and catch a bite?”

“Yes! I mean, that would be nice. Listen, talk to you later, all right?”

“Later.”

I swear I sprouted wings and flew all the way to the door. Mr. Mckinley and his two strapping sons had given up on me and were walking away. “Morning, Mr. Mckinley,” I called out. “Morning, Gerald, Leonard.”

They came back.

“What allyou have for me today?”

“Nothing,” answered Mr. Mckinley.

“Nothing?”

“Me and the boys didn’t catch nothing but few little shrimps today. Other than that, not a stinking thing in the nets, pardon my language.”

“But how—?”

“It’s Gilmor. Years now the fishermen been saying that Gilmor killing the fish.”

“You want any of the shrimps?” asked Leonard, a beefy man in his twenties with arm muscles like cable from hauling nets.

“Yeah, give me about two pounds, nuh? Let me get a bowl from the kitchen.”

They ladled fresh shrimp into my bowl. I counted out the money from my purse and handed it to Gerald. “So what allyou going to do about this state of affairs?” I said lightly. “Can’t make us have to import snapper from Trinidad.” My mind was really on seeing Gene next Thursday.

“We going to do something,” said Mr. Mckinley. “That’s for sure. That’s what we come to tell you. A week Monday.”

“What happening then?”

“Johnson having the ceremony to open the new Gilmor plant.”

“Here on Dolorosse.”

He nodded. “The fishermen and the salt farmers; Gilmor being doing us wrong ever since they opened shop in Cayaba. Now they going to bankrupt the few salt farmers left on Dolorosse and Tingle. I don’t know yet what we going to do, but we going to do something.” He handed his tackle box to Gerald, shook my hand between two of his. His palms were hard like horn. “Hope you going to come out and support us, Miz Lambkin.”

“I…well… I’m working that day.”

“Ah. Be with us in spirit then, yes? I know how you like your snapper. Walk good.”

I watched them go on towards the next house to spread the word.

I took the shrimps into the kitchen, to find that Agway had abandoned the sheets of foolscap I’d given him and was drawing on the wall with a purple crayon. “No, Agway! Bad!”

I put the bowl down on the table and went to get him away from the wall.

Thursday evening, me and Gene! I tried to weigh who I liked better, Gene or Hector. I picked a surprised Agway up and took him on a waltz around the kitchen. “I’m going on a
date,
babbins!”

Agway eyed the shrimps on the table.

I
DROVE MY CAR DOWN THE FERRY
’
S OFF
-
RAMP
, following the cars in front of me. Traffic moved slowly this morning, with much blaring of horns. February was the height of tourist season, and the hotels at the Cayaba harbour would be cluttered with visitors until early May. Sure enough, there was one of their massive cruise ships, just docked. Bloody thing was the size of a mountain, gleaming white as the mounds of the salt stacks in the distance, from the original Gilmor Saline plant.

By the time I was able to edge my car out of the harbour zone, I’d had to back up twice to find streets that weren’t clogged, and I’d witnessed three near-accidents as vehicles came close to rear-ending each other. The smell of exhaust and diesel turned my stomach. The noise was abominable. I drove past a big billboard that read, WELCOME TO CAYABA; HOME OF THE RARE MONK SEAL. The picture showed three seals frolicking in the surf—two adults and a child—as though seals hooked up in nuclear family units. At each corner of the image was a mermaid, exotically brown but not too dark. No obvious negroes in Cayaba Tourist Board publicity, unless they were dressed as smiling servers. The fish women sported the kind of long, flowing hair that most black women had to buy in a bottle of straightening solution. They had shells covering their teacup breasts. I would love to see the shell big enough to hide one of my bubbies. My first day going back to work, and already I was in a mood. Agway was probably eating Mrs. Soledad’s green banana porridge right now. Then she was going to take him for a walk, introduce him to the neighbours.

I turned onto St. Christopher Street, right into a traffic jam that went as far as I could see. Backside. St. Christopher Street was long, one-way, and lined with expensive “boo-teeks” selling all kinds of nonsense: lamps made of old rum bottles covered in glued-on shells (the shells were imported in bulk from China); neon bikinis no bigger than a farthing; a zillion zillion t-shirts, coasters, baseball caps, mugs, and canvas shopping bags, all imprinted with images of monk seals and mermaids and the Cayaba Tourist Board logo (“Cayaba; Our Doors Are Open”). This was the heart of what Cayabans called the Tourist Entrapment Zone. There was no turnoff for a while.

Traffic crawled. I tried to ignore the tourists clogging the sidewalks, the bright sarongs and Hawaiian shirts embossed with those fucking mermaids, the reggae music already blaring at 8:45 in the blessèd morning from every restaurant I passed. Why we had to import reggae? What the blast was wrong with tumpa?

Maybe Mrs. Soledad would take Agway to my almond tree. They could collect ripe almonds from under the tree. Eat them down to the bitter, fibrous part. Find rockstones and crack the almond shells open for the nuts inside. Would Agway like almonds? Maybe he knew them already; plenty of them fell into the water. Would he miss me? Mrs. Soledad had better remember that she wasn’t to take him near the water. Didn’t want him trying to jump in with that cast on his leg.

I hit the brakes; it was either that or hit the young white man who’d stepped into the road without looking. He was wearing only muddy surf jammers and rubber sandals. His shoulders and back were red as boiled shrimp. The colour offset the scrappy blond dreads hanging down his back. He gave me a lopsided grin and made the peace sign with his fingers. “No prahblem, mon; no prahblem,” he drawled in his best Hollywood Jamaican. “Cool runnings.” He staggered across the street.

“You not in Jamaica!” I yelled at him. Damned fool. Probably high. I was practically growling by the time I was able to turn off St. Christopher and continue to work.

When I got home, I would read
The Cat in the Hat
to Agway.

I parked in the staff parking, went in the back door, through Deliveries. Colin and, what was his name? Yes, Riddell. They were both loading up the bookmobile. Riddell looked up from the low, wheeled booktruck loaded down with that day’s bookmobile reserve requests. “Miz Lambkin!” He put down the box he was carrying and came over to me. Shyness froze my face. I cracked the ice into a smile. To my surprise, Riddell gravely took my hand and shook it. “I’m glad to see you back,” he said, “real glad.”

“Uh, thank you.” The true warmth of his smile was a balm. Made me shamed; I had barely remembered his name.