The New Moon's Arms (29 page)

“Thank heaven for that.” I put the shells into a plastic bag and threw them in the garbage.

“Mightn’t be anything to worry about,” Hector said. “In fact, the salt plant is good for wading birds; they eat the brine shrimp and so on you find in some of the evaporation ponds. But Gilmor can’t pump toxic levels of bittern too close to shore. You know the fishermen been complaining from since that the fish getting scarce? Your Fisheries Department been checking it out, and it’s true. Thirty percent reduction in some stocks.”

“Shit. You find out whether they dumping it for true?”

He shook his head, frowning. “Composition of the water around Cayaba is normal one day, and too high in bittern the next. The outlet pipes from both processing plants lead to deep water like they supposed to. But still the fish stocks going down. I been trying to find out if it’s affecting the seals. And I can’t get a good count on the blasted things to save my life! Different numbers every three days. Making me crazy! Nothing wrong with my instruments. I using the same procedure I use every time. Worked in Turkey, worked in Hawai’i. It’s just a simple census! Should be easy!”

He took off his t-shirt and mopped his brow with it. He had the kind of tubby barrel-body I liked in a man. And skin that made you want to lick it. I poured him some more pine drink. “I don’t know much about you,” I told him. “You have a poor, long-suffering wife waiting on dry land for you while you spend your nights out on the water watching the seals?”

He glanced at me, kept painting. “No wife,” he said.

“Oh.”

“Or girlfriend either.”

“Oh.”

“My ex-wife remarried last year. I guess she got over me faster than I got over her.”

“Oh!” Nothing to worry about, then. I poured myself some drink, shifted over a little closer to him. Was I even his type? Was I coming on like some of them old women trying to pose as twenty-one? Damn; this used to be so much easier.

He looked into my eyes. Hah. Bet you I knew what that sultry gaze meant. We were playing on my court now. He said, “You not easy to figure out, you know.”

“Lady has to keep some mystery about herself.”

“I see the side of you that’s smart, and generous, and funny. The side that could sing ‘Jane and Louisa’ together with a stranger, just to keep a scared little boy from being more scared.”

I sketched a mock bow from the waist up. “Thank you, sir. I do my best.”

“Well, don’t dig nothin’, but you have kind of an ugly side too, you know.”

But wait. “How you mean?”

“Well, the way you talked to Michael and Orso.”

Play it light, Calamity. “Oh, that!” I said with a guilty giggle. “I really went overboard, nuh true?”

“Yeah.”

“Hormones,” I said. “You know how it is with women sometimes.” Let him think I meant my period.

He didn’t look up from his painting. “Those were some rahtid hormones.”

Chuh. Man barely out of little boy short pants, and he scolding me? Second wrong note he had hit. Three strikes and you out, Mister. All right; for that behind, I’d give him four strikes. “Hector, I can’t tell you how sorry I am I subjected you to such a scene.”

“Not just me. All of us.”

Watch it, son. You easing towards number four. “Yeah. And now I’m just embarrassed, you know?” Coy it up, warm him up. “Sometimes I’m not so very smart after all.”

He nodded! The bastard man nodded! “You been really nice to me, Calamity. Inviting me to visit, introducing me to your family. I would like for you and me to be friends.”

“Mm-hmm…”

He looked unhappy. “So I need to speak plain,” he said.

I had an uncomfortable feeling in the pit of my stomach. “Go on.”

“You see,” he said, “this thing not joke in the Caribbean. I learned the hard way to keep my distance from people who have a problem with me being bisexual.”

It’s like somebody threw cold water on me. I froze right where I sat. “What?”

He gave a regretful shrug. “When I heard how you talked to Orso and Michael the other day—”

“You’re gay? Just like Michael?”

He looked perplexed. “You really didn’t understand the joke the rest of us were making the other day? I like men and women. Mary
and
Joseph. True a little bit more Mary than Joseph nowadays, though that have a way to change.”

Stupid, stupid, Calamity. Shame. I blurted out, “And I just ate from the same dish as you?”

And for the first time, I saw Hector Goonan get angry. He jammed the lid back onto the paint, hammered it on with the handle of the brush. He slammed the lid back onto the container that the fried plantain had been in. “Let me just take this back with me then, since my contaminated lips touched it.”

I stood up. “I don’t know why you getting on so bad,” I said, my voice trembling with fury. “It’s not you who got lied to.”

His hands were shaking as he put away his tools. “I never lied to you. Who have ears to hear will hear. I said it right in front of you only a few days ago.”

“And how I was supposed to understand that two-faced chat the four of you were doing?” I hated the tears running down my face, hated the weakness they showed.

He stood up. “You know, you don’t make it so easy for a person to speak plain.” He headed round the side of the house towards the front yard. I followed him.

“You’re sick!” I snarled at him. “Can’t even make up your mind. Going back and forth from women to men, spreading diseases!”

He stopped so suddenly I almost ran into him. He turned to face me. “Actually,” he said in a low, dangerous voice, “
I
know I’m not sick. Get tested every year, use barrier protection. I bet you money
you
don’t do the same.”

The memory of Gene’s naked cock sliding into me betrayed me. Words stuck in my throat.

Hector saw my face fall. He kissed his teeth. “I thought so,” he said. “So it seem to me that you’re the one who stand a chance of putting your lovers at risk, not me. It’s people like you why I make sure to use latex. You tell you last lover yet that he should get tested?”

And he slung his bag over his shoulder, turned on his heel, and walked away.

I found my voice. “Faggot!” I cried. He kept on walking. I followed. “Anti-man! Dirty, stinking, lying
hen
!” My voice cracked on the last word. I was crying so hard that I had trouble getting my breath. Everywhere I turn, another one of those nasty men, thiefing away any joy in my life. It’s like somebody curse me.

What right he had to be angry? I was the injured party! Me!

On the big ship one of the sailors who brought them the thin pap that was their only food was an Igbo man. He joked that the whites were cannibals who were going to eat them. It could be true. Why else truss people up like chickens for the market?

Every few days the sailors would open the hatch, cursing and holding their noses against the smell. It was the only time when the people got a glimpse of sky, a sip of fresh air. The sailors would remove the dead and dying. The more that died, the more space for those remaining. The dada-hair lady was heartsick at the relief she felt when another body was removed. The Igbo sailor described how they threw the dead bodies over the side, how large fish with sharp teeth were following the ship now, waiting for their next meal.

After a lifetime of a misery she could never have imagined before this, the sailors came down one day and took them out of the hold, those who could stand. So long the dada-hair lady’s eyes had been yearning for the sight of the sky, but now the light pierced them like knives. Fresh, cool air to breathe made the dada-hair lady feel almost drunk.

The men had been brought out of their section of the hold, too. So thin they were, and weak-looking! The dada-hair looked at her own arm. Yes, the flesh had wasted.

The sailors sluiced them down with buckets of salted water. The water made her shiver. The salt stung the chafed skin on her wrists and ankles where the shackles rubbed.

There was a child near her, maybe eight years old. She hadn’t seen him before. It’d been too dark in the hold. He dragged two empty shackles where his fellows should have been. He shook and blubbered with his fear, and wailed softly in his language. The dada-hair lady didn’t know what he said, but “Mamma” would be a likely bet. She knelt. Her two shackle-mates had to kneel with her. She took the boy in her arms. He came, wriggling his way in among the chains binding her wrists, hungry for loving touch, his tiny body like chicken bones wrapped in skin. He had weeping yaws on his legs.

The sailors doused everyone with oil, signalled for them to rub themselves down. The dada-hair lady rubbed oil into her skin, and into the little boy’s. It made them gleam, as though they were healthy. “Maybe they’ll throw perfume on us next?” joked Belite, who had lain beside her in the hold. She was a young Arada woman. They were Igbos and Ewes and Aradas in that place. Different languages, different ways, but they had been learning each other’s speech in the long dark misery of their days.

The scrawny boy fell asleep in the dada-hair lady’s arms.

There were tree branches floating in the water, birds perched on the sails. There was a shadow on the horizon. The white man who looked like the boss man was conferring with another, looking at a sheet of paper. They pointed at the shadow and babbled their nonsense talk. They frowned, and the sailors near them looked nervous. Was that land? She had to do something soon.

Truth was, she hadn’t reckoned what she was going to do. All she could think was poison. For them all to take poison to shunt them into the world beneath the waters.

If she were at home, and free, she could easily have found the ingredients to make a strong dose. But she had nothing here, only the chancy power of the blood in her, and starving on the ship, she hadn’t been bleeding. But some few days ago, their rations had been increased. Now she was only constantly a little hungry, not half-fainting her days through from starvation.

A flurry in the water beside the ship caught the dada-hair lady’s eye. Efiok—the Efiok whose place in the hold was two souls over from hers—she saw it, too. She looked to the dada-hair lady, jerked her chin in the direction of the disturbance in the water. The dada-hair lady moved a little closer to the edge.

At first the dada-hair lady could see nothing. Then her soul leapt in her breast; a head, grey-brown with curious black eyes, staring after the ship! Had one of their band jumped, then?

Then the person dove down into the water. The dada-hair lady had only a brief glimpse of its body slipping bent as a sickle forward into the sea. It was cylindrical, curved, and fat with good food. Sea cow? Seal? At home, the older people sometimes talked about sea cows who lived in the coastal waters, how you shouldn’t look directly at them, lest they drag you down to the depths with them for your presumption. The dada-hair lady had never seen one up close, but the fishermen described them: they stole fish from their nets.
Momi Wata
, thought the dada-hair lady respectfully to the thing she’d seen,
beg you please take a message to Uhamiri for me. Tell her we need her help here. Tell her I am hers. I pledge to always faithfully be hers, but please would she help us now, before we land and the white people eat us.
The dada-hair lady peered at the water, but she couldn’t see any sign of the sea cow, or whatever it had been. Her heart ached for what she’d promised: the women who were called to serve Uhamiri remained barren.

But she’d made her plea, and her pledge. The dada-hair lady held the boy’s small shivering body and whispered in his shell of an ear, “Soon. Something will happen.” It must.

Agway tried to go on tippy toes to reach for the kitchen sink, but the cast was cramping his style.

“I know what you want,” I told him. “Let’s set you up first, all right?”

I carried him into the bathroom and got the fancy neoprene cast protector out of the cupboard under the sink. The hospital had given it to me, and it was a wonderful thing. Back in the kitchen, I sat him on the floor. He watched gravely as I covered his cast with the cast protector, attached the air bulb, and pumped all the air out.