Children of Paradise: A Novel (27 page)

—The reverend thought you would lose interest in Joyce if she ignored you.

—You people are playing with a man’s feelings. That’s sad.

The guards say he cannot repeat what they are about to tell him, since it can get them into trouble. The captain leans closer to hear what they have to say. He has no idea what to expect. One second they are warning him to avoid some danger for his own good; the next they seem more than willing to threaten him.

—Our community’s not built to last, not solid like your boat.

The guard raps his knuckles on the port side of the
Coffee
for emphasis.

—You’re different from us. You’re busy planning for the rest of your life. But it’s only a matter of seventy, maybe eighty, years if you’re lucky. Our reverend’s plans are for an eternity. One day you’ll arrive at the port and find us missing.

The guard says this with such finality that the captain holds back the ten new questions that immediately came to mind. He regrets confiding in them. Their loyalty to the commune sounds just like Joyce’s, almost as if their community is a species apart from everything else. He has to be careful not to lose his business by falling out of favor. He feels inferior. For saying too much to men who look like him but who think about the world in an alien fashion, as if this life, given in part and shaped by human endeavor, amounts to no more than a staging post for an as yet unrealized other realm of existence, and so does not merit the attention to alter or improve it, much less do something to help those who might care about the here and now.

He sees how she cannot help thinking and feeling that their spiritual leader miraculously made the rain forest welcome more than one thousand souls. He tried during their first meetings to listen to Joyce’s religious reasoning. What else could he do? She stood close to him as she spoke, needing both hands to keep from her face the masses of her long black hair, its thickness and sheen. Even without makeup she looked clean, her proportions just so, beautiful, yes, a beauty that needed no adornment or embellishment of any kind, just light for his basking eyes. A face so open and keen and ready to smile.

Trina seemed a miniature of Joyce, with just the same quick mind and keen look at things. He loved them both right away. He wanted their trips to last for a lifetime. He watched them sleep and could not wait for them to wake and start again with their questions about the river and the life around it and even the light, they notice the light, and they make him notice it, too, how it changes around every bend and, with clouds on the move, takes on the same quality of a gossamer fabric spread over the landscape. Joyce asked him what is the single most important thing about the place, and he wanted to say the people or the flora or fauna, but after all her talk about the way the light changed minute by minute as the boat cut upstream and around each corner, the surprise of a pool of light among trees or light churning up the river or light falling through her hair, all her talk made him answer that it is the light, yes, the light, and she smiled as if she knew he meant her, that she is the best thing he could think of as he stood with her and her daughter on his boat.

The captain turns everything over in his head while he works on his boat. The story of Joyce in his life takes the shape of his beloved
Coffee
that he cleans, spruces up, and patches. There, somewhere, in his work and reflection, a solution to his problem stares at him and waits for him to meet it face-to-face.

His first mate returns and they refuel and stock up on supplies for the journey and passengers trickle on board and barely catch their attention. The five commune staff arrive with a flurry, four guards with two attaché cases and Joyce flanked by them. They are serious and in a hurry. The air of languid preparation for departure turns tense. Joyce looks everywhere but at the captain while the guards seem to look at him and nothing else as a way of ensuring that he has no contact with Joyce. His first mate whistles Peter, Paul and Mary’s “Leaving on a Jet Plane,” as he runs around in friendly mediation between the captain and the commune people, principally Joyce. The boat passes the places that mean something to just the two of them because of the way they were together in those places: where they swam, where they climbed a waterfall, and where he asked her to listen to the trees. At each landmark the captain looks out at the forest and it seems to brighten just in those places and he wonders if Joyce sees what he sees. If she does, it means they are talking in a language available to no one but the two of them. The captain realizes that for him to share with Joyce in this way makes it more than memory. Their pooled memories, though independent of each other, amount to new experience.

The boat speeds to the commune dock. The clouds race by overhead, and the current rolls at high speed along the wake of the boat. Everything takes on the hurried time of the commune. Every time the captain glances at his watch, the time left for Joyce to be on his boat has dwindled. The first mate sees the captain at the bow and Joyce at the stern, and the guards close to her with their eyes on both the captain and Joyce, and the first mate whistles more and busies himself more between bow and stern.

The captain looks up from his watch and the commune port appears to be marching toward the boat to reduce the time it takes him to dock. The guards and Joyce stand ready to disembark, attaché cases clamped under arms. Joyce looks dead ahead and unsmiling. The first mate whistles Otis Redding’s “(Sittin’ on) The Dock of the Bay” as he readies the rope in loops he will swing and fling to the guard already standing by the water’s edge on the tip of the dock.

The captain looks at the wheel. He cannot bear to lift his eyes to the forest only to see Joyce marching into it between the guards. The forest brought her to him and now the forest takes her away without so much as a goodbye.

That evening the preacher calls a meeting of his emissaries who work in the capital. He tells them to use the opportunity of their trips to advise the captain in ways that make it unequivocally clear that he must forget Joyce and respect her wishes to serve Christ and renounce the world of flesh and sin. He waves the company out of his sight. The preacher summons Joyce and reminds her of her contract with the Lord, the commune, and Trina, who is inextricably bound to the commune. He says before she gives a thought to doing anything stupid, she should consider those things. He tells her to get out of his sight and to watch herself. One good trip proves nothing. She is still on probation.

The preacher’s disapproval of the captain results in a marked change of attitude by the guards. They are decidedly cool on his boat and say only the most perfunctory things to him and his first mate. They rarely look at him, and the few times that he catches their eyes, they do not smile and they look away quickly. He senses the change but is reluctant to pursue the cause of it, partly due to his suspicion that it has to do with Joyce and the preacher and also just in case his inquisitiveness might make matters worse. Part of him hopes that the whole thing will blow over, given time. He assumes another reason for their hostility has to do with his letter to their spiritual leader, in which he is sure he wrote nothing malicious or slanderous. He sticks to piloting his craft. His first mate whistles the Beatles’ “Let It Be” as he fraternizes with the noncommune passengers in the captain’s stead.

One of the commune guards deliberately bumps into the first mate. The first mate says nothing, only retreats with a look of surprise. The commune guard asks if he finds people from the commune contaminated or something. The first mate says he does not know what the guard means. The guard says that his community is viewed by some people as a prison camp and the good work that the commune does goes unheralded while scandalous lies abound about it, and he wants to know if the first mate might be one of those people wagging his tongue. The first mate draws back from the guard and peers at him, not quite sure he heard him right. A cousin of the captain, he came straight from high school to be apprenticed on the boat at about the same time as the commune began. Like the captain, he knows the commune people well and assumes a certain degree of informality in his dealings with them.

—Come again?

—I said you look to me like one of those loose-tongued fellas who go around maligning the good name of the commune.

The first mate says that if he did not know the guard was from the commune, and therefore a declared teetotaler, he would mistake him for a drunk. Before the first mate can say another thing, the guard fishes a knife out of his pocket and slashes the face of the first mate, who does not have time to lift his arms to avoid the swift blade. He screams and covers his face. The knife has sliced from his left earlobe down his jaw to the corner of his mouth. He grabs his face and screams for the captain to help him. The captain dashes from the bridge area, leaving the steering wheel unmanned, an act of madness, he knows, but he cannot help himself, and he runs to his cousin’s aid. He uses a short stick to hit the knife from the guard’s hand. Other guards lunge at the captain and his cousin, and the two men fight off four commune guards, who kick and punch at them. The first mate begs them to stop, but they seem motivated to hurt not just the first mate but the captain as well. Passengers who have nothing to do with the commune rush to the aid of the first mate and one of them fires a pistol into the air, which makes the commune guards stop and draw their guns. The captain shouts at everyone:

—Cool down. Please. Just stop.

He says the boat will hit a bank at any moment and jeopardize all the passengers if he does not attend to it right away, and he says he will allow the boat to crash into the rocks and let them all go to hell if that is what they want. He will resume his captaincy only on condition that all weapons are set aside and if the commune guards promise to stop their assault on him and his first mate. They agree and the captain leaves his first mate with a couple of passengers who attend to the young man’s cut face. The captain dashes back to the wheel. The first mate keeps saying:

—The man cut my face; the man cut my face.

He seems unable to believe the sting of the cut and the blood pouring down the left side of his face. The guard who brought the original message from the preacher advises the captain to make himself scarce; it would be unsafe for him to be seen in the capital and on these waters, that locking horns with the commune would bring trouble, that the preacher views altercations with his enemies as a life-and-death situation.

—You’re threatening me?

—We’re past making threats, Captain. You need to watch your back.

At the port, the captain tells the guards that this is the end of his working relationship with the commune. He puts his first mate in a taxi headed straight for the hospital, and he knocks on the door of the office of the port authority. He complains to the port authority police about the conduct of the commune guards on his boat. He says he wants the men charged with assault of his first mate and explains that the men made an explicit threat to their lives as well. The port officer calls the capital’s central police station, and the central police station calls the chief of police, who advises the central station to direct the port authority police to scrap the charges. The captain waits for two hours to hear that nothing can be done about his complaint. The captain asks the police officer if, in addition to donning the uniform of his profession, he swore an oath to serve the people and to uphold the law. The officer says yes, he did. The captain says if that is the case, how can this officer stand there in a uniform in an official capacity and tell a citizen he has no rights. The officer orders a few of his men to bring the captain from the area of the front desk to a more discreet location inside the building. They try to grab the captain, but he assures them that he will cooperate and they do not need to manhandle him. Once in a back room, the officer says to the captain that if he wishes to practice his trade on this river and keep his prized boat, he had better forget about this incident. They leave him for a couple of hours to think it over.

When the officer returns, the captain tries to say something about checking the arrogant power of the commune, whose members behave as if they are above the laws of the land. The officer raises his voice. He says the captain should persist with the complaint only if he really wants more trouble than he bargained for. Two more officers show up at the office door. The officer wants to know if his uniform is official enough for the captain to comprehend his meaning, because if it is not, they can talk a different language, one less decorous, one more rudimentary. He stares at the captain, who returns his gaze. The two police, poised at the office door, step into the room. The captain looks at the three men and shakes his head and raises his arms in a sign of surrender, shrugs. Before he leaves the building, they copy the details of his boating license.

The commune office in the capital calls the port authority and lodges an official complaint of incompetence and endangerment of the public against the captain. They say they have four men willing to sign an affidavit. They ask for his license to operate a boat on the river to be revoked. The port authority police promise to look into the matter and examine the license of the captain. The guards want to know if they need to take the matter higher up, to, say, the chief of police, or whether the port authority can handle the matter. The port authority police assure the commune guards that it will not be necessary to go higher up, since the matter is in the right hands and they should not worry about it. The guards invite the officer to drop by the commune office at his earliest convenience for a thank-you gift. The officer thanks the guards for their generosity and wishes them a good night.

On his walk home, the captain decides to take a shortcut through the city’s oldest graveyard. The graves are so ancient that some of the tombstones list to one side and the mounted concrete graves look vacant, as though their occupants have risen up and left for the evening. Footpaths twist through the graveyard and resemble corridors in places with graves stacked as high as an adult’s chest and arms’ width apart. In these spots a person can turn a corner and come face-to-face with some stranger whose intentions may not always be good. Robberies and stabbings occur frequently. A person must be in some big rush or entertain some kind of a death wish to take the graveyard shortcut at night. But the captain is not in a hurry and he does not want trouble. He needs time to think, and this place, for all its claustrophobia and dilapidation, seems to offer him solace. Ever since he was a young man, he found the graveyard the best location to be in a crowded city, to capture that isolated feeling in the most splendid and luxurious of ways, because it cost nothing, just a little courage in the dark.