The Rhythm of the August Rain (13 page)

“Kind of people?”

“They're different from you. They've grown up differently. They don't have your education—”

“They're people, like us.” Eve had stuck out her chin and given Eric one of her looks. “They're
Rastas
, the same people Mom is interviewing.”

Eric had tapped ash out of his pipe in response.

With Carlton's arrival imminent, Shannon had summarized for Eve the dangers of going off alone in a strange place. “The point is, Eve, you can't just run off with people you don't know in an environment you don't know. I've been teaching you that since you were a little girl.”

Shannon was also the one to administer the discipline: no iPod, iPad, or computer for a week. Looking quite content to let her take charge, Eric had sat sucking his pipe, and Shannon had been tempted to pluck it out of his mouth and chuck it over the cliff.

“Can I still take drumming lessons?” Eve had asked, her only question.

“From whom?” her mother had snapped.

“Bongo, Ras Walker's son.”

Shannon had looked at Eric, who nodded agreement. “Yes,” she'd said, “but it has to be either here or up at the house.”

As soon as Carlton drove up, Shannon had escaped to the taxi, anxious to get away from both rebellious daughter and disengaged father. There had to be some reason, she told herself as she watched Shad climb into the front seat, why the ones you love are the ones who hurt you the most.

She was clear now that Eric had been, would perhaps always be, the love of her life, and although she was still unsettled about Eve's adventure, this was what had kept her awake. Revolving in her head was the intimate moment they'd shared in the Jeep. Before dawn, she'd finally conceded that, as diffident as Eric was, he was still kind and genuine, qualities she'd always loved in him. And—despite his aging body—the little smile that never left the corner of his lips, the heavy hair that fell forward despite his best efforts to sweep it back, the helpless raising of the black eyebrows still had power over her. Even looking into his cornflower-blue eyes (Eve's daily reminders to her) made her breathe a little faster. Her feelings for him were back again. Maybe they'd never left, after all.

In the front seat, Shad turned to her as Carlton sped toward Gordon Gap. “Can I tell Carlton about the Canadian woman?”

When Shannon agreed, Shad summarized for Carlton why they'd started going to Gordon Gap and ended by saying they were going back there again today. “We going to try to find some Rastas in the area, since the woman's boyfriend was a Rasta.”

The road up the mountain seemed longer today, and Shannon fell asleep halfway up. She awakened, hot and damp in the long sleeves, to find they were parked outside a roadside shack, Carlton immersed in a newspaper. Shad was already deep in conversation with someone in the shack.

“You been carving a long time?” Shad was asking when Shannon walked up. Inside the lean-to, a Rastafarian was sitting on a stool holding a chisel in one hand.

“A few years now,” he replied. It was hard to tell his age. He could have been in his thirties or his fifties, the firm skin of his face holding tight to its well-defined features. Coal-black dreads reached halfway down his back, tied in a thick ponytail with a scarf. The writing on his T-shirt said
JAH IN FRONT
. Behind him was a shelf of carvings large and small, all of them heads, most with dreadlocks, and in a corner were a broom and a machete.

“But like how times hard, the carving can carry you through, though?” Shad asked, and Shannon could see that Shad liked him, cared about him already.

“You sell your carvings and buy some good
ital
food, man, and you can feed the family.” The man smiled with teeth whiter than any Canadian orthodontist could have bleached them.

Shad introduced Shannon as
the photographer lady from Canada
. “She talking to Rastafarians for a magazine. She can talk to you?”

The man shifted his gaze, his eyes almost grazing her as he gave her the once-over.

“Just a few questions,” she said, a blush rising with his eyes.

He put down the chisel and tweaked his shoulders. “What kind of magazine?”

“It's called
Culture
, kind of like
National Geographic
—I don't know if you know it—but ours is for Canadian readers. We have articles about people around the world. I have one in my bag. Would you like to see it?”

“Yes, man,” Shad said. “Let him see it.” The man nodded and she fetched the journal from the car.

Leafing through the glossy pages, the Rasta stopped at an article about South Africa and tapped a photograph. “This is a strong man. Babylon fall before him.”

“Mandela's inspired a lot of people, even in Canada. I took those photographs of him.”

“True?” He was impressed, she could tell, but didn't want to show it.

She took out her notebook and rested it on the counter between two carvings. “I've heard the expression
Babylon
a lot. What does it mean for you?”

The man gave her a wary, no-trifling look. “You want information but I and I don't know your name yet.”

“You're right.” She pushed away from the counter. “I'm Shannon, this is Shad, and you're . . . ?”

“Ras I-Verse.” In answer to an unspoken question, he continued, “You would say Uni-Verse.”

She took up her notebook again. “I promise I won't keep you long.”

“You want to know what Babylon mean?” He rolled the magazine tightly and got to his feet. He was taller than she'd thought, his head only a few inches below the shack's roof, and he seemed broader all of a sudden. “Babylon signify the unrighteous—like America and Canada and the Jamaican government. It mean
downpression
, the system that suppress small people, seen? Like how America is a rich country and they have poor people living on the street, no home, no food—is the whole system keep it so. That was what Brother Bob was singing about, the suffering of ordinary people, telling woman not to cry, telling the world that we should be loving, not downpressing one another.”

I-Verse waved the rolled magazine toward her. “You ever listen to the words in Marley music, though? He say that we must be against Babylon, but we must fight against mental slavery first. Rasta is a
free
man, we don't bow down before Babylon.” He looked like a free man, a man whose muscular arms in the sleeveless T-shirt would never be captured for long by any man or woman.

“Do you have a family?” Shannon inquired.

I-Verse glared at her, eyebrows twitching. “You want to talk about Rasta or about me?”

“I—I know family is important in your culture.”

The carver laid the magazine on the counter, where it slowly unwound. A whiff of musky body odor drifted toward her. “I and I have work to do, man.”

“Only one more question, I promise. Is there a Rasta community around here?”

A lock strayed over his shoulder when he nodded.

“Is it far from here—in the mountains?”

“She say one question and asking two.” The man looked at Shad accusingly. “What she really getting after? She want to know if we grow weed?”

“No, man—”

“She sound like one of them drug enforcement people, asking all kind of question about where I and I living.” I-Verse was breathing faster, moving toward the machete in the corner. “Plenty people coming into Jamaica now, say they writing about Rasta, then next thing you know helicopter flying overhead looking for weed. How I and I know she not one of them?”

Shannon raised her hand, her heart racing, the heat from the shirt unbearable. “I'm not DEA, CIA, or anything—”

“She want to find out about a friend,” Shad said quickly, “a woman who live with a Rasta long time ago. She don't mean nothing by it.”

“That's right,” said Shannon. “I don't give a hoot about whether you smoke weed or not. I'm working on an article for the magazine, but I want to find out about someone.”

“What kind of person?”

“She was a Canadian woman, a dancer,” Shannon answered, “who'd been living in Gordon Gap in 1977. She had a Rastafarian boyfriend—she just disappeared.”

“That was a long time—”

“We know for a fact that she died in a hospital and we want to know what happened. I want to find the man.”

I-Verse shook his head. “You know his name?”

“No, I don't.” Shannon rolled up her shirtsleeves.

“That can't help me.” The sculptor picked up the broom and started sweeping wood shavings on the dirt floor. The back of his T-shirt read
JAH BEHIND
.

“What about the longtime Rasta men who live around here?” Shad suggested. “We was thinking that, like, how we just a couple miles from Gordon Gap, the man she went with might have live nearby, you know.”

I-Verse leaned the broom in the corner. Picking up the chisel and a half-finished sculpture, he sat down again. “Sorry, can't help you.”

“May I take a photograph of you, though?”

“Not that neither.”

S
ign there with your initials.” Horace MacKenzie's impatient finger stabbed at the spot. “The first letters of your first and last names,
S
and
M
,” he added, making no effort to hide his disapproval of a semiliterate partner in the hotel.

Shad followed the solicitor's instructions, signing every page he was given with a smile, making no effort to hide his satisfaction about being a partner. If Horace wanted to act as if they hadn't been in elementary school together, that they hadn't played cricket in Miss Mac's yard until dark, he wasn't worth the irritation. Not today, because this was his day, Shadrack Myers's day.

The closing on the property, however, was turning out to be more than the new partner had expected, but he was storing up every detail to tell Beth, how Horace's secretary had brought in a side table where they rested the papers after they were signed, how Horace signed each document first before handing it to Eric, who signed and handed it to Shad, who in turn handed it to Miss Mac, Horace's mother and the seller of the beachfront acreage, who added her signature, eyebrows raised above her gold-rimmed glasses, and placed it on the little table beside her. All their signatures were necessary to complete the transaction, he would tell Beth, because that was how partner business was done, and the whole solemn ritual had a circular movement, which, if interrupted, would cause everything to collapse.

One signature besides Horace's already appeared on each page that he handed to Eric, showing that the documents had been delivered to New York by courier and returned. The clear, square signature in place—
Daniel Caines
typed neatly below each—was a statement that thrilled Shad even more. Even though Eric was putting up his experience and the remains of his property along with the island and the bar, and Shad was the needed Jamaican partner, Danny's signature meant much more. It meant that the deal was absolutely, beyond a doubt, going through. Without him, the new company the three had formed back in February, the Largo Bay Grand Hotel Company Limited (the
Grand
at Danny's insistence), would evaporate.

Shad signed the next paper Eric handed him, glad he'd practiced his signature on the dinette table earlier that morning.

“You sign too plain,” Beth had commented, stopping to peer over his shoulder while clearing the table after breakfast.

“What you mean?”

“If you going to be a big shot and own a company, you need to sign pretty. You have to show you know who you is.”

“You don't see I signing who I is—Shadrack Myers?”

“Yes, but it don't say nothing about
you
. The way the head lady at the library write her name, Lucille Beckman, it slope to the right and go up at the end. It look like she in charge, you know.”

Shad had sucked his teeth. “Is an
s
I have at the end, and it go down.”

Her purse over her shoulder, Beth had shown him how to swoosh his name up at the end, and he'd practiced after she'd left because it would represent his upward future. He'd prepared himself for one swooshing signature that would show them who he was. No one had mentioned that he'd have to sign his initials and full name over and over, or that there was more than one document, and his hand was now tired, the swoosh less swish, and they were only halfway through. Sitting on his left, Miss Mac got more cheerful with each document.

“Don't forget, you moving me tomorrow,” she reminded Shad, placing a form on the table. “I pack up everything already.”

“I coming at seven o'clock, like you told me. Frank and Winston going to help.”

“I'm lending them my Jeep, Miss Mac,” Eric added. “Let me know if there's anything else I can do to help—just not lifting furniture or boxes, what with my back, you know.”

Horace was silent, his eyes surveying the three from behind his desk, his immaculate linen suit and silk tie speaking for him. He was thinking about his mother moving into his big concrete home, Shad was sure, wondering how it would work out, this invasion of his privacy. Still a bachelor, he would be a good catch in Port Antonio, even if he was scrawny and his law office above a bread shop. No doubt he brought women into his house sometimes, maybe high-class women, but how would that work now with an outspoken mother living with him, a woman who spoke patois when she got vexed? Maybe he figured she could supervise the maid and his laundry, help out in the kitchen.

“Time longer than rope,” Shad had assured Frank the night before. “If you wait long enough, everything come around. Horace think he better than me and better than Largo. Now he and his business partner going to rent Simone Island to run the campsite and—guess what?—is
me
he going to have to deal with.
I
going to be one of his landlords.” Shad had whinnied at the thought.