Left at the Mango Tree (6 page)

“Mind your tongue. Anybody hates you, they have enough bad magic in their veins. It’ll poison their blood soon enough. Now get to school and stop talking that way.”

Gustave got up and went, willfully leaving two big spoonfuls of oatmeal in the bottom of his bowl, the lumpy stodge a monument to his angry independence, his flagrant infraction of mother’s rule that he must always clean his plate. “She hates me most of all!” he decided, swinging his bag of books so hard that the corner of his maths book poked clean through the cloth. “I wish she would die!”

This scene played out more or less every morning at the Vilder household. The setting was almost always the kitchen, biggest room in the comfortable shack where Gustave lived with his mother and father, yellow curtains with daffodils embroidered in cross-stitching bustled by the breeze from off the water. The props changed sometimes, toasted bread with egg on top or spicy sausages instead of oatmeal. Sometimes his father joined the cast,
affecting the disposition of the other actors with his slow bulk and supporting the lead female with nods and listen-to-your-mother-nows. But the lines and gestures were otherwise nearly imperceptible variations on a theme, and Gustave had the bruises in the flesh over his heart to prove it.

The morning the scene played out for the last time, Gustave ran out with a particularly vehement delivery of the wish for his mother’s death, his mother who, as Gustave would discover, was perhaps not so wrong about the magic he harbored in his heart. For surely it was his own impassioned wishing, he decided, that did his mother in that day. When he returned from school, she was dead.

“Snakebite,” his father said and jostled his head from side to side. The old man survived long enough after that to see Gustave through his early teens, frying him sausages for breakfast and turtle steaks for dinner, though he said and did little more after his wife died than “snakebite” and jostle his head.

As Gustave grew, so did his loneliness, which he hid beneath an armor of hubris and cockiness that, coupled with his reputation and looks, made him even scarier to most of his schoolmates than he otherwise would have been. In truth, most suspected he wasn’t too powerful at all if he couldn’t save his mother from a snake. But others suspected it was Gustave who had sent the snake to get her. Gustave was among these, as I said, and when his father finally died, he forgot his exaggerated pride and accepted his family’s legacy of separation and slouched shoulders, not genetic, but instilled by years of solitude.

A proclaimed pococurante, the one thing Gustave couldn’t ignore was his hormones. A young man with no friends or guidance, he couldn’t ease into love the way Wilbur did, in the sun’s
rays with a kind but unremarkable girl. No, Gustave made his discoveries under the shade of night at the island brothel, with Miss Lulu Peacock. He had to pay double, on account of who he was, but a Vilder always knows where to find money when he (or she) needs it. At least there’s that.

Miss Peacock introduced Gustave a number of times to what Wilbur would find out about for free. But she did so much more than that! In her embrace Gustave discovered a familiar, beastly energy that lay hidden inside him. He let it surge, a homecoming somewhere in his gut. It crushed his guilt and puffed his chest, sloughed off the droop his shoulders had assumed. After that he didn’t sit alone so much in the shack his parents had left him. He was an islander like all the others, he told himself, born and raised there, and had as much a right as they did to fit in. Which he did, nicely, at least in a seedy bar near the port where the girls were too drunk or too desperate—for money, rum, or attention—to care a tinker’s damn about who or what he might be.

Soon after is when Wilbur’s life found itself connected to Gustave’s, or vice versa, though neither would know it until over nine months had passed, and only one of them would ever know how to explain exactly what happened.

It was at dusk on Wilbur’s wedding day, the day he’d lift Edda’s gauzy and transparent skirt on their secluded strip of sand, that Gustave would end up under Wilbur’s mango tree, in the soft, green brush a stone’s throw from the edge of the sea, with a girl from the seedy port bar.

The leaves cooed softly as Wilbur spread the white coverlet on the cold damp sand and the moon began to spread its light across it. Edda sat down and reached to remove her sandals, but Wilbur stopped her and guided her head to the ground. He kicked off his shoes and knelt down to remove hers for her. He stroked her shins and kissed her knees, exploring her inner thighs with his fingers. Edda’s heart thumped a beat that was unfamiliar but comfortable, and the leaves hummed in her ears. Her legs fell open as his fingers found hers and their hands interlocked. She squeezed until her knuckles felt white, while Wilbur licked the soft skin that finished in her hidden and pale something-blue wedding satin. She was afraid, impatient, and reluctant at once and steadied herself for Wilbur’s hands on the elastic, wishing him to free her hips so she might know what would follow. But his hands tricked her and fell onto the opalescent buttons of her dress instead.

Gustave meanwhile heard hummingbirds as he left the dusky beach behind him and entered the darkness of the soft green wood. His hand was wrapped around a girl, her neck in the crook of his elbow, and their bodies bumped awkwardly against each other as they walked out of step, owing to the excess of alcohol they had swallowed. Gustave kicked off his shoes and pushed the girl onto the ground, nearly collapsing next to her. “You alright?” she giggled, competing with the leaves to be heard. Gustave didn’t say yes or no. He put his hands on her waist and with grunts and jerks pushed down the tight jeans the girl wore, rolling them into an inside-out bundle at her ankles, unable to pull them past her complicated strappy sandals. The girl’s heart thumped a drunken din that echoed from her chest to her ears. Her legs fell open as Gustave’s hand found hers and pulled it to his middle, while his other hand guided her head. Her hands fell onto the zipper with
which she’d come face to face, and she maneuvered his pants down his body. She was afraid, impatient, and reluctant at once, suddenly and acutely aware of who her companion was, and steadied herself for the taste of Gustave in her mouth.

Wilbur, somehow freed now of his pleated matrimonial trousers, finished with the buttons of Edda’s dress. His tongue found her breasts but the cicadas’ vibrations kept her low moan a secret. He licked her neck and her ears. His warm breath on the wet saliva made her shudder. They kissed finally and Edda thought she would suffocate when his mouth overwhelmed hers. She closed her hands around his neck and her legs around his waist, still separated from him by her satin of pale blue.

Both the beach and the brush had fallen into darkness by this time, though the evening’s curtain was thinned by the moon. It had risen up fully now, exerting its pull and release on the waves that crashed loudly and rolled to shore. Gustave pulled the girl’s head to his face and kissed her, rolling her over so that he lay on top of her. Wilbur ripped the pale blue material, removing the last barrier between him and his wife, and climbed onto Edda.

The couples grappled, Gustave and the girl under the mango, and Wilbur and Edda in the sand just far enough away, or so they thought. Mouths gasped for air and lips covered lips. Gustave pushed inside the girl. Edda, startled, eased into Wilbur’s rhythms, frightened and aroused. Edda’s hair mingled with the damp sand, the girl’s with the dry twigs of the brush. Hands caressed faces and thighs. Feet caressed feet.

The mischievous moon smiled down on them all and sent the sea into a violent, enchanted rush, guiding the female contractions that mimicked the waves. Spurred by the sea’s urgency and assisted by the wind, the leaves sang even louder suddenly, in harmony with
the cicadas and the hummingbirds who didn’t know if it was night or day. The song crescendoed to a frantic, fevered buzz; it fell on top of the naked lovers, like a thick blanket that might smother them all.

They could hear nothing for the noise that filled their ears, the living sound that seemed to populate the air around them. They tried to ignore it, to escape it by closing their eyes. The girl focused on Gustave’s body. Edda rocked hers in time to Wilbur’s, which moved in unison with the island’s quiver.

The magic moon laughed at the lovers’ struggle. The waves were too agitated, the wind too strong. It ripped the leaves from the very trees that bore them.

The fracas finally culminated in a guttural human cry that confirmed a superhuman deed, and the moon silenced the waves, calmed the cicadas, and finally closed her eyes. She was placid, the mighty moon, and pleased. Her finger had poked a hole in the soil of an earthly womb and dropped an almond seed into it, stitched together as if from two stolen sides of leaf.

In the dark, the lovers slept. Tired, sticky-skinned, spent heavy limb on spent heavy limb. The leaves were sleepy, too. They trembled still, and shuddered a broken lullaby, while their shiny sides awaited the sun.

4

M
y grandfather Raoul once read a book with just a line on every page. He thought, maybe one line was enough, enough for the reader to fill in what was missing and write between the lines, as it were, on the blank pages in his (or her) head. Raoul didn’t mind the book. He found it rather bold. But then Raoul knows how to hold his own with fancy raconteurs, even one so clever as to write a whole book without writing a whole book.

This wasn’t always the case. Time
was
when Raoul had little patience for know-all volumes (and littler still for the folly of fiction) and took things at face value—meaning that what wasn’t as clear as a nose on a face didn’t much interest him. While he simply had no use for books, his wife Emma Patrice devoured them. Every night when he crawled into bed he found her there, rustling pages and shushing him. She told him it was her way of escaping, though he could never imagine what a modern housewife with the market place a hundred meters away and a pearl-handled sewing basket could have to escape from. Even less could he imagine how one could escape from whatever there was needed escaping from into the brittle world of those colorless pages. It smacked somewhat of magic, and if there’s one thing a man who takes things
at face value the way Raoul did cannot tolerate, it’s that. Which is why, when Emma Patrice skied off that day and Raoul was left to raise Edda alone, he quietly removed his missing wife’s books from the house, stirred by the strange but sure sensation that the bound nuisances had in some way contributed to her disappearance.

But don’t infer from Raoul’s boycotting of books that he wasn’t smart or clever. In an old-fashioned sort of way he was. He worked hard, had a headful of common sense, followed complicated orders with ease and efficiency, and kept matters in pineapple-pie order, or at least looking like they were, which is sometimes even more important. In fact, he built quite a Customs career for himself with this handful of bricks, a feat smacking somewhat of magic itself.

All the same, there came a time when Raoul’s disdain for the less-than-obvious gave way. There were things his daughter Edda wanted him to teach her. And though Raoul had seen his wife bake a million cakes and pies, when he showed Edda how to mix the sugar and the butter and the eggs, what they drew out of the oven at the end of the lesson was lumpy or greasy or crumbly. So it was that Raoul set out one day for the Pritchard T. Lullo Public Library on the island’s east end to find a recipe for fritters. He would work his way up to cake.

The library was housed in a square stuccoed building of lime green. An open, welcoming porch with two low steps and thin white columns wrapped in bud-dotted vines announced double wooden doors, whose colored panes gave a reverential glow to the single room on the other side. There, bathed in natural light, dark wooden bookshelves lined the four white walls and kept watch over the six-drawered altar of Miss Lila Partridge, head librarian, positioned squarely in the center. A book-fearing man with no knowledge of
card catalogs or Dewey decimals, Raoul couldn’t ease his way into a hardback the way Emma Patrice could, the secrets between the covers urging every page that was turned. No, he needed help, and thus his first discoveries—in the shade of the Cookery shelf—were under the guidance of Miss Lila. Miss Lila showed Raoul all the ways to fry and manipulate dough, from fritters to crullers to buns. But she did so much more than that! Her offerings lured him back to the library again and again, and from behind her eyeglasses she watched the slow process of seduction the demanding pages exerted on him. From cookbooks to almanacs to memoirs and more, he set about exploring every fold in the library’s soft skins and found what he needed there to fill the void in his head and his heart. He found solace and science and knowledge and, yes, escape. Before he knew it (or maybe without ever really knowing it at all) he had become something of a philosopher, one who takes things at face value, but backs up what he sees with books.

Typically Raoul did his exploring on Tuesdays. Miss Lila would show him the week’s new arrivals, if there were any, and he would acquaint himself with them at a table in the corner, with who-dunnits, biologies, biographies, tragicomedies, and poems. On the Tuesday that I’m going to tell you about, however, he wasn’t reading for philosophy or fun. He was far too pressed for that.
This
Tuesday Raoul was there on business, the business of debunking his least favorite thing.