Left at the Mango Tree (3 page)

“Aye, matey!” Bang bounded into the chair next to Raoul’s, straddling it the wrong way round. He propped his chin on the chair’s back, cocked his sailor’s cap with one finger, and winked.

Raoul responded with a tilt of the head and reached for his sweating mug of beer. “Popeye?” he asked, surveying Bang’s deckhand whites.

Bang feigned indignation and ripped the newspaper from Raoul’s grip. With a menacing crease in his brow, he moved in close to Raoul’s troubled face, where a lopsided smile was reluctantly taking shape. “Part of the act,” Bang said. He swept his arm toward the Belly’s beach exit and, aping a Frenchman, announced, “Songs of zee sea.”

Raoul’s smile filled itself out and he downed his beer. “Aha.” He took back the newspaper and ironed it with his palm, small print mountains flattened into rippled prairies of words that he read again. He shook his head.

Bang straightened and let his arms fall in defeat. When Raoul shook his head it meant trouble. It meant Raoul had something in there that wouldn’t leave him alone. Something that like a fly in a lidded jar would knock about inside his brain until it was freed into the clarity beyond the glass, or until it suffocated and died. Raoul had flies of every size. There were gnats he got rid of quickly, say, a crossword clue or that actress who looks so familiar—what was her name? There were garden-variety houseflies, not big, not small: fixing the washing machine, finding the perfect birthday gift for Edda. And then there were the bluebottles, the blowflies big enough to make the morning paper.

“Make it a double, will you?” Nat had arrived, shouting his order over his shoulder as he squeezed between the tables on his way to Raoul’s. “You saw?” he asked, and nicked Raoul’s newspaper.

“Mm.”

“The wonders of Oh. So what do you think? What’s buzzing in there?” Nat knocked on Raoul’s forehead and sat down.

“I think it’s rubbish. It’s not true.”

Bang looked at Nat but spoke to Raoul. “What do you mean it’s not true? It’s right there in black and white. Puymute Plantation. Two acres. Vanished. Evaporated.”

“What are you, Bang, an idiot? You believe every word you read in the paper?”

Nat came to Bang’s defense. “Well, something’s going on. I saw Gustave and he says every black-and-white word’s true. He ought to know.”

“Black magic, if you ask me,” Bang continued. “Everyone says so. They say it’s been here all the time, right below the topsoil, festering, simmering, waiting. And then...
Voilà
! When you least expect it...” (Bang spread his hands into starbursts that he circled in front of his face.) “...black magical manifestation.”

He slurped what was left of Raoul’s beer and stood up. “Should have planned on mystical melodies tonight,” he sighed. “Let that be a lesson to you boys.” (He bent over the two, a hand on each one’s shoulder.) “Never listen to Cougar. Steer you wrong every time.” He slapped them amiably on the back, clicked his tongue, and was gone, drawn by the noise of shins bumping against microphone stands on stage and the flat-sharp ululations of guitars being tuned.

“So where did you see him?” Raoul reclaimed his newspaper for the second time and looked Nat in the eye.

“Who?”

“Gustave. You said you saw him.”

“Took a tourist up to Puymute’s this morning. Some artist. Paints fruits and vegetables. Said she once so captured the essence of
tomatoes that her real life models turned to pulp before her very eyes. Guess she’s onto pineapples now. She heard Puymute’s were the best. What’s left of them, anyway.
Rotund
, she said they were.”

Before we go any further, there are a few things I should explain. I too am a painter, did I tell you that? I suppose it was only natural that I should seek refuge from my black-and-white world in a palette of colors that I could arrange as I see fit. And I can attest to the fact that the pineapples on Cyrus Puymute’s property were indeed worthy of the most discerning canvas. Not only were they Oh’s plumpest and brightest, but owing to the plantation’s fertility (which, I discovered, rivaled only that of a secluded beach to which my mother was partial), they were by far the most...the
most
per square meter. If enough of them had disappeared to put a noticeable—and newsworthy—dent in such bounty, then something was surely afoot.

It may have been the wind playing tricks. Or Gustave Vilder playing his. Perhaps a combination of the two. Gustave Vilder worked for Puymute, and could have pulled off an inside job easily. He dabbled in magic, too, and was very possibly in cahoots with the moon herself. I’ll tell you more about him after Bang’s song.

Me, I never actually met Gustave, though he figures in my mosaic. He died when I was a baby. The only white man on Oh, at the time, or since.

“Gentlemen!” Cougar said, and nodded in greeting. He dragged along a chair, with which he annexed himself to Raoul’s
table. He gave Nat a tall shot glass (yellow rum), and snapped his fingers in the air over Raoul’s empty beer mug, so that a waiter might replace it with a full one. Raoul raised his eyes from the paper in acknowledgement and Nat raised his rum. A long arpeggio leapt from the piano as if to welcome Cougar as well, and the room fell silent.

“Ladies and gentlemen. Good evening and welcome to the Buddha’s Belly. My name is Bang and tonight we’re gonna to do some numbers for you inspired by the waters that surround this pretty little island of Oh. So order yourselves something to wet your whistle.” (He winked into the audience at Cougar.) “And if you feel like making waves on the dance floor, that’s why we put it there!”

You don’t need me to tell you that when Bang opens his mouth, it’s sometimes hard to take him seriously. Other times, when he opens it in song, he commands the respect of a president or a prince, at least for a little while. So when the music started and Bang began to sing, Raoul shushed the bluebottle buzzing in his brain, Nat put down his rum, Cougar forgot about selling drinks, and the customers stopped shuffling their feet on the floor. The Belly’s insides stilled.

You and me by the moonlit sea, our love our only company.

To the soft accompaniment of sparse piano, solemn bass, and tenuous brushes on drum, Bang’s sounds left his chest, a vague conjunction of heart, soul, and lung, found shape in his throat, and slid past his lips in an audible, airborne kiss. A kiss that expanded and encompassed the crowd until it was a lover’s tongue lapping every listener’s ear. They closed their eyes and leaned into the ticklish pleasure of the notes, smiles of anticipation snaking across their faces.

Still, dark sky, you and I, I will give myself to thee.

They listened until the kiss became happily predictable, until they could determine when the tongue’s melody would turn up, or down, and ready themselves.

When you miss my loving kiss, I want you to remember this—

But the happily predictable is easily overlooked, and before long, the bartender again noisily shook the shaker in his hand. Cougar got distracted by a low-slung sarong, Nat drank, and Raoul let the bluebottle buzz. Soon Bang’s voice was pleasant background noise to the Belly’s rumblings, a lover’s tongue grown familiar, relegated to that realm of comfort and assuredness where it can be sought at will, but robbed of its ability to catch you unawares.

By the sea, look for me, look for me by the moonlit sea.

Cougar re-focused his attention on Raoul. He knew what was in the newspaper that morning, and he knew it meant a headache that Raoul hadn’t dreamed of. “Figures Gustave is at the center of all this. He’s always been trouble. His whole family since they came to Oh, even before Grandpa’s day. What do you plan to do?”

“Get to the bottom of it, I suppose.”

“Raoul, be careful, man. Don’t get mixed up with this guy’s magic or voodoo or whatever the hell it is. What happened, happened. You don’t know what Gustave’s capable of. And it’s not like anybody’s hurt or anything.”

Nat piped in. “You think he...you know,
did
it? Or you think things just...happen whenever he’s around.”

“Of course things don’t happen just because he’s around,” Raoul snapped. “Of course he did it.”

“But how, man? All that heavy fruit? I don’t see how.” Cougar lit himself a cigar.

“He gives me the creeps,” Nat said, finishing off his double.

Your eyes are like the sea, full of mystery.

“Speak of the devil.” Cougar let his tilted chair fall onto its legs with a thud. He watched Gustave walk in from the beach and make his way to the bar.

“The creeps,” Nat reiterated. “Just look at him.”

“Nat’s right, Raoul. He seems weirder than usual. Look!” Cougar poked Raoul. “I bet this front-page business is getting to him.”

“His people are used to attention,” Raoul said. “Bruce at the
Crier
told me Gustave called the paper himself with the story.”

Whenever you look at me, I forget my misery.

The song Bang was singing that night was an old island love song and one, I’m told, my mother Edda sang to me often. When Gustave walked in, as if by magic, the song carried Raoul from his cozy table at the Belly to the cushions of Edda’s sofa a few weeks before. I was less than a week old then and had yet to meet the harsh sun of Oh. I
had
met most of the neighbors (or, rather, they had met me), and more of them were turning up every day. My complexion, it seemed, had become a matter that Raoul could no longer ignore.

Whenever you look at me, I forget my misery.

Edda cooed gently into my newborn ear. I was enraptured by her song, awakened, and I peered up at her, my eyes two roses in the snowy whiteness of my tiny, expectant face.

“Isn’t she beautiful, Daddy?” Edda asked.

Raoul sat balancing a cup of tea on a saucer on his knee. He had been dipping cookies into it and was studying the crumbs
floating on the bottom, hoping that like tea leaves they would tell him what he should say. It’s not that I wasn’t beautiful. What baby isn’t? “She’s very beautiful, dear. Very beautiful,” he said.

I just didn’t look one iota like my mother Edda or my father Wilbur. “It’s just that, well, Edda dear, she doesn’t look a bit like you or Wilbur,” he told her.

“Doesn’t she?” Edda laughed. “But she’s so small, daddy, how can you tell?”

What’s more, I looked very much like someone else on Oh. “She doesn’t remind you of anyone?” Raoul persisted.

“Daddy, don’t be silly.” Edda rubbed her thumb over my cheeks, one of which was nearly completely covered by a mole. It was (and still is) dark brown, an upside-down teardrop covered in soft blond down.

“Edda, you can tell me. I won’t be mad. All I want is to know the truth—and to know you’re happy of course—and I can see that you are. Do you have anything to tell me? I won’t breathe a word to Wilbur. You can trust me.”

“Look at this birthmark, Daddy. It’s like a broken heart, like only half of a heart. Do you know who has the other half ?”

Oh, thank God! Raoul thought, jerking his body and nearly sending the cup, saucer, and prognosticative cookie crumbs to the floor. An answer at last. “Who? Who has it? How did this happen?”

“I do. Her heart and mine will always be connected, Daddy. I’ll always be with her, for as long as she lives.”