Green Boy (2 page)

Lou took his finger away. He shook his head firmly. He liked things to be in their usual places, he didn't like change. So I fitted the piece of sandstone back over the little hoard of shells.

Lou grunted to himself and trotted out of the cave to the beach. I followed him, and we went on along the white sand toward a cluster of casuarina trees, the biggest of which was our special tree. That was where we always sat, on the blanket of brown fallen needles prickled by tiny casuarina pinecones, to eat our sandwiches.

The osprey was sitting in the top of the tree, watching us. We came in very slowly and quietly, settling ourselves on the pine-needle carpet, picking out the prickly cones. Still the osprey stayed there. He knew we wouldn't trouble him. Lou grabbed my backpack and took out the two little plastic bags I'd put there, a peanut butter and banana sandwich in each of them, and the bottle of water. He was hungry and he was very young and I knew he'd already forgotten about the sights and sounds in the cave. That was one of the odd things about Lou: he picked things up fast, but they didn't stay to bother him, they ran out of his mind like water so long as you told him everything was okay.

But I was still bothered. I ate my sandwich slowly, without really tasting it. I kept remembering the weird humming noise, and the flickering of the air. Where did it come from? What
was
it?

Lou gobbled his sandwich and took a long drink from the bottle. He slipped out from under the tree and flung his last crust of bread up toward the osprey, though he knew the big bird would rather have had a fish.

The osprey wasn't interested. He rose majestically
out of the tree and flapped slowly away down the beach.

From somewhere close by we heard an excited shout, and we both looked round.

Three men were standing on the beach about twenty yards away, staring at the osprey, pointing, fascinated. They looked like tourists. They wore dark pants, and shirts with short sleeves, and one of them, the tallest, had a straw hat on his head, with a rainbow ribbon. It looked like one of the hats Grammie's friend Esther sold in the center of town, under the big banyan tree.

The men had cameras strung round their necks, and one of them was holding some sort of instrument on a tripod, and a long cylinder like a fishing-rod case. I didn't think they were fishermen, though. The tall one was trying to watch the osprey through binoculars, but the big hawk flapped away over the water, rising higher and higher.

One of the other men caught sight of us, and waved. They all three came toward us. “Hey, kid!” the man called.

I stood still. I felt suddenly very uneasy, though I didn't know why. It wasn't unusual to find a few tourists on this beach; they came out from town in rented Boston Whalers sometimes, to walk on the sand looking for shells, or to cross the beach to the bonefish flats behind.

Beside me, Lou gave a little nervous grunt.

“Hey, kid!” said the man again, close to us now. He had thick black hair, and big sunglasses hiding his eyes. “You Bahamian?”

“What else would they be?” said the tall man. He had an odd accent I didn't recognize. He took off his hat and fanned his face with it.

I said nothing. Lou began to fidget; I could hear his breathing, getting ominously faster. He was sensing something I couldn't feel. I touched his shoulder, and felt him shaking again.

“These birds, they nest here?” the first man said. “They nest on this island? What is this bird?”

“It's a fish hawk,” I said. “I don't know where he nests.” I was lying; I knew perfectly well where the ospreys nested, and had been nesting for four years now, but I didn't want tourists disturbing them.

The third man, a skinny guy in a flowery shirt, was standing there looking at me over his sunglasses. He said to the others, “C'est
un petit gar
ç
on, ou une petite fille?”

“Je ne sais pas
,” said the tall one.
“N'importe, alors.”
Before I could even guess what that was all about, Lou began suddenly to freak out. It was a really bad one. He had been staring at the three men, but now his eyes rolled, and seemed to turn inward. He started grunting, over and over, in a quick rising rhythm, and fighting for breath between grunts. It was a sound I hated, because it scared me. I grabbed him. “Lou—deep breaths—slow down—
deep breaths—”

The men were staring at Lou as if he were some small dangerous animal. “What's the matter with the kid?”

“Est-ce qu'il est malade?”

I reached for Lou's hand, but he took off along the beach, running, stumbling, always making those awful deep unchildlike grunting sounds. I ran after him, calling.

“Lou! Come back! Be still now, be still—!”

I caught up with him pretty soon, round the curve of the beach, in sight of our boat. I grabbed him and held him close to me, talking all the time, telling him to breathe deep, telling him everything was all right, and gradually he began to calm down. That's the only thing you can do with him when he gets like this. Poor old Lou, I wonder what it's like being inside his head; not knowing what's happening to you, and not able to explain it to anyone even if you did know.

He was tired, then, so we got in the boat and went home. There was no sign of the three men, nor of any boat that might have brought them. The tide was rising, the beach narrower than before. Overhead, high up, the osprey was circling, and his mate with him; they wheeled slowly through the sky, and very faintly you could hear their high voices, calling to each other:
peeeu, peeeu . . .

 

Lou was okay by the time we got home. Grand and Grammie were there, in the kitchen. Grammie was mixing up a cake, and she let me have the bowl to lick, and Lou the beater, with a dishtowel under it so he didn't drip. Grand reached out a finger, ran it along the edge of the beater and sucked it absentmindedly, but he wasn't really thinking about cake batter. He had a sheaf of
drawings spread out on the kitchen table, and he was scowling at them. Grand has a white fringe of curly beard, even whiter than what's left of his hair, and normally it makes him look picture-book kind and gentle; but when he scowls, his eyebrows join in the middle and the beard juts out ominously.

“Outrageous!” he said, peering at the drawings. “Unthinkable!”

“What's up, Grand?”

Grammie smoothed the batter in her cake pan with a knife. “Have you called the National Trust?” she said to him.

“Calling won't help,” Grand said crossly. “I'll go to Nassau.”

I put down the bowl and looked over his shoulder. The top page was some sort of plan, with sketches of buildings. “What's the
matter?”
I said.

“Just the death of your favorite place in the world, that's all,” Grand said. “Someone applied to develop it. They want to turn it into Miami Beach.”

“Develop Long Pond Cay?”

Lou made a small noise, and put down the beater on the floor. Grammie poked him with her foot, and he picked it up again and reached it up to the sink. But he was looking at Grand.

“Look,” Grand said. He made room for me to look at the plans. “Look what these idiots want to leave for your generation. Dredge out the channel, bring in fill to build
up the beach—and build condominiums all along the bay, with a hotel in the middle.”

“You can't build there!” said Grammie, her voice high and upset. “The beach shifts—the first big storm will take it all out!”

“That's not all. Look at this.” Grand flipped over two sheets. “Block the tidal inlets, drain the bonefish flats, put in tennis courts and a swimming pool. And a nine-hole golf course!” He turned over another page, and jammed an angry finger down on the next drawing. “And a casino!”

“They can't do that!” Grammie said.

“Oh yes they can, if they get planning permission. You know how they'll sell it to the government—encourage tourism, our biggest industry—boost the out-islands' economy, bring in dollars for the local merchants, create jobs for school-leavers—”

Grammie flopped down on a kitchen chair next to him, as if she were suddenly very tired. “Those people,” she said flatly. “They always the same. Any dollars they bring into these islands they take right out again. Most of the money doesn't even come in. Package holidays—the customers pay for them before they leave home, pay their checks right into the bank in America.”

“Or in France,” Grand said. He held up a glossy advertising folder with a picture on the front of brilliant green palm trees and a bright blue sea. “‘Sapphire Island Resort,'” he read. “‘Your own private Paradise.' Run by
Offshore Island Enterprises, Fort Lauderdale and Paris. There's a bunch of Frenchmen behind it, I'm told.”

I said, “Sapphire Island?”

“Normally known as Long Pond Cay,” said Grand.

I looked at the picture. Under the palm trees, a smiling dark-skinned man in a white jacket was bringing a tray with two glasses on it to two light-skinned people in swimsuits. I said, “You can't grow palm trees on Long Pond. There's not enough water.”

“They thought of that,” Grand said. “They'll have a desalinization plant to make fresh water out of seawater. They'll have sprinkler systems sprinkling it over their palm trees and their golf tees. As for the rest of the golf course, they say they have a special grass that will tolerate salt water.”

“I don't believe that,” Grammie said. She's a plump, cheerful lady with a round friendly face, but her eyes didn't look friendly now.

“But the government might,” said Grand, “if enough experts tell them it's true. What they'll see is foreign capital investing in this island and paying taxes, and not costing them a thing. Not asking for anything except planning permission. We'll just be selling our climate.”

“And our beaches,” Grammie said. She looked at her cake pan, sitting there full of batter, and got up to put it in the oven.

I felt suddenly cold, in spite of the oven. “Grand—this isn't really going to happen, is it?”

Grand pushed all his papers together. “I don't know, Trey. Some of us going to make as much noise as we can. But these Frenchmen have gone a very long way, very quiet and soft—these are detailed plans, and we only just heard about them today.”

I said, “There were three men on Long Pond today who could have been French. They had some sort of measuring instruments with them, and cameras. They were asking where the fish hawks nest, but I didn't tell them.”

“No more fish hawks if the bulldozers come,” Grand said.

Lou was fidgetting, the way he does when something's upsetting him. He can't keep still then; he moves to and fro like a penned-up dog. He wandered out from the kitchen into the living room, and I saw him squat down near the porch in that suddenly intent way he has. He'd discovered something. He brought it back to show us, opening the palm of his hand to Grammie with a mischievous little grin.

It was a shiny black millipede, curled up into a circle. Lou's loved playing with them ever since he was a baby, and Grammie hates them.

“Oh
Lou
!” she said, as usual. “Let it rest! I wish you wouldn't touch them.”

“They don't sting,” I said mildly. “Not like centipedes.”

Grand said, always the teacher, “They don't need to.
They give off this little whiff of cyanide gas that kills their enemies.”

Lou looked interested. He peered closely at his millipede and sniffed it, and Grammie squawked.

“Don't worry,” Grand said, “Lou's not their enemy.” He stood up, his beard jutting, and held up the papers in his hand. “
These
people the enemy.”

R
ight after supper that night, my mother telephoned. She always called twice a week, to make sure we were okay, and to check up on things. It may seem odd to you that she didn't live with her children, but the reason was money, and there was no way round it. My parents had split up when Lou was a baby, and my father just took off to live with another lady, leaving Mam with us two children and no money. He'd never sent her a penny from that day to this. So Mam moved in with Grand and Grammie, and got the only job she could find, checking out groceries in the general store in town.

She always wanted to earn more, to help support us, so for four years she spent all her spare time doing a degree course at our island's Resource Centre, where teachers from the College of the Bahamas come to teach people who can't leave home to go to college. When she'd passed her exams she got a much better job in Nassau, and she moved there, to live in a little room in Grand's brother's house.

It was a horrible wrench for all of us, but Mam couldn't find another job on our own island, and we couldn't go with her; Nassau is a big city and a tough place, and she didn't want us kids growing up there. We miss her, but I think she was right; I've been to Nassau twice and I don't like it. Too much stuff going on, too much dirt and noise.

So Mam calls us twice a week, and comes home whenever she can.

“You still fooling around in that boat?” she said, distant in my ear.

“Sure, Mam. Lou loves it.”

“You be careful now.”

“I always careful. Ask Grand.”

Then she said in a different, tighter voice, “Trey, baby, you remember you father?”

“No,” I said at once. I felt angry whenever I thought about my father, angry at him for running off with someone else, but I had no real picture of him in my head, and we only had one photograph. It showed him with Mam and me when I was about two. About all you could tell from it was that he was about her same height, and wore a baseball cap, and that his skin was lighter than hers.

I'd always taken care never to wear a baseball cap. I didn't want to be like my daddy.