Land of Love and Drowning: A Novel (23 page)

Then the stick was lowered, low-low. Jesus, Lord! It could be done. Those who walked on broken glass with their hands could limbo this low with fire in their face, but could this tourist do it? The camera waited while the leading lady breathed and breathed. “I’m only gonna do this once, so don’t mess it up,” she called to the air in a voice that sounded hoarse and older than she looked. The clapping stopped. Everyone waited. She hiked up her skirt and the flames reached out to her thighs. She bent her knees low, pressed the inside of her ankles to the ground, splayed her hands out in welcome, and tilted her torso back-back-back. Her knees first, then her palms.

Then there was the lady’s exposed hips and crotch. The flames licked up. Minister Milford’s eyes widened and averted. Then the lady’s torso with her large breasts and then finally her head. It was her hair that caught aflame. All the stiffness of it simply unable to resist the leap of the fire. There was full-on screeching. And then there was the lady chef letting out a huge kyak-kyak laugh. Minister Milford rushed forward to save his sins, covering the actress furiously with his suit jacket and slapping down the fire.

Anette began to cry. She had done this. Anette had been wishing ill on the woman and Anette knew better than to wish ill on anyone. This was not going to help her get to where she belonged. Not going to help her get gotten by Jacob. She held Franky’s arm and turned her face into his body.

“Is only a wig,” Franky whispered to her like a savior. “Look, see.” And Anette looked to see the leading lady freeing herself from under the
minister’s jacket, and emerging with black hair plastered down on her head and a charred yellow wig in the sand.

The lady stomped on the wig with her bare feet, but without the expected anxiety. Her face was calm and steady, and she kept stomping. “Cut!” someone called. “Don’t you dare cut!” from someone else. And the actress kept stomping, her sandy feet pulping the curly wig into pieces that flew the hair and the sand about, until the leading man, who was wearing too-tight swim trunks, finally stormed through the crowd and grabbed hold of her in a hugging, containing motion. The actress told him calmly to let her go, and then she walked out to the water.

Left in the sand, the wig looked like murdered baby birds.

“That’s a wrap,” the director said into his megaphone. And the dancers, who were doctors and lawyers and pastors and educators and one Coast Guardsman, walked off Honeymoon Beach, back to the dock, and boarded the little boats. Across the water, where words so easily carry, everyone could hear everyone else creating the story of the lady doing the limbo.

Mr. Lyte was not their boatman this time. Anette thought of the lady chef now and felt badly. She was distracted enough to forget her fear of the little boat, though Franky kept his arm around her. Anette didn’t remember any Miss Lady, but how could she? She didn’t remember her own mother. She thought of Jacob, but then kept pushing that thought out to sea.

Once they docked back on St. Thomas, Franky could easily have walked Anette home, but instead they slipped into his car and Franky let the roof down. Anette moved close to him on the front seat and rested her hand on his thigh—something she had never done to him before. “You a star, yes,” he said. And with her dyed black hair blowing around her face and the moon big above and his fast Cadillac swimming them around the corners, Anette believed him.
Franky is a good man
, she thought to herself. If she still thought of Jacob then she must be a fool. Tonight, she would finally kiss Franky. He deserved that at least.

But sensing his time, Franky didn’t wait even a second. He pulled the
car over, walked to the passenger side, opened the door, and got down on one knee. It was just a month into their chaste courtship. Anette put her hand to her chest as if she had been shot. Franky took the hand, isolated the finger, and pushed on an engagement ring with diamonds peaking like a volcano.

“Oh, Franky. Thank you. Thank you,” Anette said, because she couldn’t say yes, but she knew she shouldn’t say no.

Jacob Esau McKenzie hadn’t just disappeared and left Anette unwed and with child. In fact, he’d appeared firmly in medical school in the nation’s capital. If he was going to be a pediatrician, he would have to get through medical school and the years of specialization with focus. No women. No movie theaters. No liming or skylarking. Only child skulls. Baby intestines. The soup of an adolescent cough. These were his foci. And, of course, Anette and baby Eve. He was going back to them. No nurse, no lady doctor could move his mind. Just “be a doctor.” One day—husband and father.

He did not write to Anette back on island. Writing would make it longer. Writing would be “I miss you.” Writing might be “the love is fading.” And also writing to Anette might be the end of him. His mother had said as much. And how wouldn’t she know on that small island? Likely, she’d sweetened the postmaster by gifting him with a concoction that juiced up his wife’s pussy. Something like that. So Jacob didn’t write Anette or anybody—not even his mother. That was his one small rebellion against Rebekah. Though she kept sending him the stewed cherries, stuffed into tiny jars that had been used for baby food. Yes, the world was changing. Baby food now came in a jar. It was even being sold on his island apparently.

Instead of writing or calling, Jacob wound a single rubber band around his marital finger and imagined Anette wearing the white dress. He’d bought her the cloth for that dress, though instead of waiting for a wedding, she’d worn it the day she’d seen him off. But he dreamed anyway.

One cool D.C. day he swore he’d seen Anette’s face on a movie poster. He stared at the poster for
Girls Are for Loving
and decided that it could not be Anette. Despite the familiar fabric of the dress and the familiar face of the woman. No, that was not the Virgin Islands. Not on that poster and not in that movie.

Still, the movie poster churned him enough that he broke down and wrote just a quick note to his brother to check on Anette and the baby for him. But Saul was distracted by his current architectural project and adjoining clandestine love affair. He had not visited the post office until the postmaster himself ran into him on Back Street and let him know that there was a letter waiting. So Saul wrote back to his brother too many weeks later: “Anette engaged to be marry. How you ain hear?”

In St. Thomas, Anette and Franky had become celebrities. The movie posters were plastered around the island.
GIRLS ARE FOR LOVING
was written in red. And below the words was the scene at the dance over at the Gull Reef Club. And there were Anette and Franky, on the poster like they were the stars. They took up more than half of the poster. Never mind that Anette’s dress was flying a little too much. Never mind that her skin was lightened up so she looked very much like a white woman and that Franky’s skin was darkened and his green eyes seemed too green. Never mind, they were the stars! They were making the Virgin Islands known!

The newspaper interviewed them and asked when they were getting
married. Anette, her ring finger glinting, held Franky’s hand and said, “Soon.” Franky was a good man. A fine man, really. In the Coast Guard. He was taking care of his old mother who had hair on her chin. Anette was being a lady—like sister Eeona wanted. No thoughtless thing like with Ronnie. No loveful thing like with Jacob. She had children to consider.

Franky had been giving Anette a ride on the days she volunteered as a history assistant at the private Anglican school. On the morning their interview was printed, Franky waited until she got into the car, and then he laid a copy of the newspaper in her lap. On the cover of the paper was a picture of them, her hand held firmly between his two. Her engagement ring shining like a promise right there on the front page.

On the ride to school Franky swore to build her a living room set and an entire house, one she could live in this time, with his own hands. “Anette, I been waiting to hold on to you since we was children, yes.”

And this was all it took really. Because Ronnie hadn’t seemed able to hold on to her for half that long. And because Jacob, her first love, now seemed like he didn’t want to hold on at all.

Anette spent three hours grading sixth- through eighth-grade tests on Caribbean history and American history, which together now made up our history. Still, she stood three times to go atop the school stairs and look into the harbor to see if Jacob had arrived without her sensing it. It was silly, but she felt a sudden desperation. When the bell rang for lunch, her grading was over and Franky, not Jacob at all, was there waiting to pick her up.

Anette stood at the top of the school stairs to take in her final breaths and then she walked down. “Let we do it next week,” she said. But Franky, who had a sense of timing, said, “Let we do it today, yes.”

“But I don’t have no dress,” she said, looking around and noticing that a few of the teachers walking past were making a big show of pretending not to listen.

“Well, the court don’t close until four and the shops don’t close until five.”

And Anette, with no time to sense the arrival that was coming because it wasn’t yet coming, said, “Well, why not, then.”

This was the correct, the logical thing to do. Franky was a man who would build a house. A man who would care for the girls. A guarding man. Jacob McKenzie had not come floating in. Well, then he was barely a man at all.

Eeona did not like Franky for Anette, but she had consented. Anette had two children. She was lucky to find a man at all. Even a yes man who only wanted to please. Maybe that was for the best. Either way, a low-class man was better than a blood brother, even Eeona knew that.

Anette bought a simple yellow dress. Green was his color and red was hers, but yellow was the island’s and Anette needed this nuptial to be bigger than her alone. At the courthouse, Anette closed her eyes when the judge asked if anyone objected. When she opened them, she saw only Franky, and looking into his eyes, she saw only him loving her and only him staying by her side.

That week Anette and the girls moved out of Eeona’s flat and in with Franky in his modest two-bedroom. He had moved out of his mother’s house long before it was typical for island men to do such things.

Eeona stayed alone in the small one-bedroom apartment.

Now that Anette was remarried, there was no moral obstacle to her promotion and within the week she was called into the principal’s office and told that a teaching position would be available for her in summer school. And if she stayed married, and there was an emphasis there, there would be something permanent when school opened in September.

Franky started looking for land where he could build a house to keep his promise. But before Franky could build the house and before Anette could become a teacher, some other things arrived. First, there was Jacob McKenzie.

Jacob McKenzie did nothing when he found out about Anette’s engagement. Nothing, really. He didn’t study harder at medical school or eat less at the restaurant or reflect on himself or his past failures. He did not take official leave from school or work. Just took one month to gather the money from his earnings waiting on tables—his polished American accent and sandy skin affording him ample tips. Then he just bought a one-way ticket home to the island. Jacob did everything he knew how to do then—but not a thing entered his mind until his plane slid onto St. Thomas and he smelled the rusty hangar and realized that the last time he had seen Anette or his infant daughter was in that very airport.

Other passengers cut around him to get off the plane because he had stopped at the bottom of the stairs. Jacob stooped down and put his face to the tarmac. He didn’t kiss the St. Thomas ground like he’d done when he’d returned from the Army. This time he licked it. He licked the ground that planes rolled on and hundreds of feet a day walked on. He licked it as if it were a woman. And women stared until the pilot rested his hand on Jacob’s shoulder and told him that his land love was honorable but obscene.

Jacob didn’t go to his mother’s house. He was bold-faced and hopeless, so he went to Ronald Smalls’s. Ronnie had stayed in the Army and had kept Anette’s picture as his amulet. In Korea, where he’d most recently been deployed, he’d been as chaste as ever and seen no military action at all. Jacob went to him because Ronald had been married to Anette. Ronald had loved her. Ronald had lost her. Ronald would understand what Jacob was now feeling.

“I had wonder if you would come,” Ronnie said, when the two of them sat down in the parlor. Ronnie’s mother served them guavaberry rum, for it was the Christmas season. She felt bitter on behalf of these boys. She’d
never liked Anette for her son. Those Bradshaw sisters thought they were too good for anybody. Hah. Now look at Anette. She was a tart and the whole island knew.

Jacob nodded at Mrs. Smalls to fill his little rum glass to the brim.

“I don’t know much, Jay,” Ronnie began awkwardly. “I wasn’t there.”

“There where?” Jacob asked, as he felt the rum burn down his throat.

“When they get married.”

Jacob coughed rum back into his glass. “Mother Mary! I hear she
getting
married. I only been gone a few months, man.”

“America eat your brains, Jay? You gone near a year.” Ronnie shook his head sadly, for he understood Jacob’s loss. “Is a nice fellow she marry. In the Coast Guard. Not many of we in the Coast Guard, you know. He does keep the lighthouse. I even went with him for a drink the other day.”

Now Jacob gulped his rum and put the glass down loudly on the table. “Ronnie, you soft in the head? The man marry your wife and you had a drink with him?”

Ronald sucked his teeth and poured more rum. “But Jacob, you make a baby with my wife and I here drinking with you.”

Jacob nodded. In his chest there was a swelling of humility and a tightening of pride and the sweetness of the rum. “Just don’t tell me no more about what the new husband does do. Or what he look like. Or about he character. I just here to make Anette marry me.”

“So you ready for marrying now?”

Jacob shook his head. His hair was knotted into little nappies. His clothes were wrinkled. His eyes were bloodshot. “I just ain ready to see her married to someone else.” His eyes started to water, but then he stood up quickly and walked out of the door. He left his bag and his scarf and winter coat on Ronnie’s bachelor couch. His rum glass empty on the coffee table.

Finally, Jacob went to his mother’s house. He knew his mother wouldn’t be home at this time. She’d be in the market selling her mesple and limes and spellbinding teas. He didn’t want her to see him, for fear she would
spin an obeah that would keep Anette and him apart for life. But Saul might be home and might be able to help.

Jacob opened the door and saw no one. He looked in the two other rooms—the boys’ room and his mother’s room. No one. The piano had been moved to the center of the hall. The sofa had been raised on concrete blocks and sat in front of the piano keys as the piano bench. Jacob sank down into the sofa.

He didn’t really play something. He just played anything. Harmonies of this, melodies of that, humming something different, stamping his foot to his nodding head. To him, it sounded like American blues music. To those walking by the house, it sounded haunted.

Jacob played, feeling the sweat gathering underneath his thighs and the tears running down his face. He was melting. The music slow and dirty. No neatness like a love letter, nor like “I do.” It was messy, like “I’m giving up on medical school and manhood,” like “I know I’m late but I’m here now.” Messy with Anette’s two daughters and now a new husband. But Jacob didn’t actually hear any of that, though that was what he was playing. He only heard his fingers on the piano keys and his foot stamping on the piano pedals and his own mouth bawling. He only heard himself. So when his brother entered, early plans for a new housing development under his arm, Jacob didn’t see.

Saul heard the music and began dancing around the room to a beat that was not of the music. When Jacob heard a man’s steps, he turned his face and he stopped playing. A childhood memory of a man with sea-gray eyes dancing with him in that very spot pulled in before Jacob’s watery eyes and then receded. He wiped his face with the back of his hand.

“I come for Anette,” said Jacob to his brother.

Saul stilled. “I know.”

“You must give her a message for me.”

Saul fixed his face as if he were receiving a disease. “I ain want no part of this. Mama will maim we both.”

“Just help me, nuh.”

“All right, Jacob. I going handle this thing just now.”

“Why not now-now?”

Saul looked at this brother. They had shared a bed growing up, but they did not often express affection. It was not the McKenzie way. Now Saul walked up to Jacob and touched his streaked face.