The Rhythm of the August Rain (24 page)

“He looking for Shannon.”

Eric had popped open the soda and looked at the man, now wiping his forehead. “You're the professor from the university.” Eric had shaken his hand across the counter. “Eric Keller.”

Shad wondered about all the handshaking taking place and why the boss hadn't mentioned that he owned the bar.

With the couple at the end of the bar eavesdropping, not looking but not talking, Eric had started asking about the trip to Gordon Gap, his voice loud as he asked the questions, not like himself at all. Ransom had answered that he didn't know much about the area or the Rastas there and that's why he'd come.

“You want something cool to drink?” Shad had asked.

“Maybe a—”

“A Planter's Punch?” the bartender guessed. You could tell a lot from what people drank, he'd always thought, so it had to work the other way around, guessing their drink from how they looked. Ransom was a Planter's Punch man, cool, sophisticated, but not too heavy on the liquor.

“I was going to say a glass of water, but that sounds much better,” Ransom agreed.

“You sure you don't want some lunch?” Eric asked. “The chef is in the kitchen, ready when you are.”

“A Planter's Punch is fine, thank you. I had lunch on the way.” The professor had sat at the counter and watched Shad take out the ingredients: grenadine, bitters, curaçao, club soda, and juices. “What about the rum?”

Shad had taken a bottle off the shelf. “I use my family's rum, Myers rum, man.”

“Your family?” Ransom said politely, not the kind to say Shad wouldn't have relatives who owned a rum factory.

“He's a comedian,” Eric had chimed in.

Shad had chuckled. “Them is the rich Myerses. I come from the poor ones.”

“I don't think they even make it in Jamaica anymore,” Eric said, elbows on the counter.

“I heard a Puerto Rican group bought them out,” Ransom said as Shad plopped a maraschino cherry on top of the concoction.

“Just what the professor ordered, right?” Shad said as the man sipped the drink.

“I've forgotten the long drive already.”

When Shannon walked into the bar, Eve beside her, Ransom's face had brightened.

“Hi, Shad, hi, Dad.” It was the first time Eve was wearing a dress, shapeless, but a dress nonetheless.

“Hi, honey.” Eric had come around the counter to give her a hug. “You're coming to help me and Solomon this afternoon, eh?”

“Yup.”

“This is Dr. Ransom. He's a famous authority on Rastafarians.” Eric had turned to the professor, one arm still around Eve's shoulders. “This is our daughter, Eve.”

“Pleased to meet you,” Ransom had said, shaking her hand. His eyes flicked questioningly from Eve to Shannon.

“I see you found the place,” Shannon had said crisply.

“Yes, I passed it and had to double back. I'd never noticed it before. It's sort of . . .” Ransom had covered the insult with a long sip of his punch.

“I glad you're coming with us,” Shad had said. “Carlton, the driver, like to stay in the car. I ask a Rasta guy, Bongo, to come with us because I felt it would be good for three of us to go inside together, you know, but Bongo tell me this afternoon that he can't come. He say that since he in a different Rasta group, he don't want to be disrespectful and go to a Nyabinghi without an invitation.”

“Probably a good thing,” Ransom had agreed, just as Carlton came to a stop outside the restaurant.

“You can manage things here?” Shad had asked Eric.

“I'm helping him,” Eve had said, and they'd all laughed.

“Everything ready for you, boss. I cut up the limes and oranges—and ice in the freezer. The tourist people have four Red Stripes, but they don't pay yet.”

Shad had hustled to the taxi after the other two, looking forward to the drive to Gordon Gap, even if it made him a little carsick. There'd been pure stress all day, something Shad hadn't needed after the flopped party, which still hovered over him. Beth had insisted he go to church with the family, and he'd sat through the dull service dreading telling the boss that he couldn't pay him for the liquor. Then he'd rushed to the bar with the bad news, driven with Eric back to his house for the guitar, taken the younger children to Miss Bannister after extracting her fee from Beth's money jar (which she'd complained about the whole time he was eating lunch), and then run back to the bar to set things up for Eric before he left. A Sunday-evening drive through quiet countryside, the sun lowering gently behind the western hills, should settle his soul.

“Anybody know why they're having this Nyabinghi?” the professor was asking, tossing it out to the group like a school quiz.

“Don't they have them periodically?” Shannon answered.

“This one is to celebrate the emperor's birthday tomorrow, July twenty-third. That's one of the four Rasta holidays.”

While they chatted, Shad touched his elbow to Carlton's. “What up with you?”

“Nutten,” Carlton said, staring straight ahead.

“When people say
nutten
, they really mean
plenty
. Your jaw looking stiff today, like something running on your nerves. Is either woman or money business.”

Carlton's lips quivered.

“Is a woman then,” Shad acknowledged. “If it was money, you'd be frowning. I never see a man who don't frown when it come to money.”

The quiver became a weary smile. “You is the detective.”

“Is something about your new girl, the one you was telling me about?”

Carlton looked out his window. “She gone back to Kingston.”

“I thought you was looking a work for her.”

“I find one for her in Port Morant, cleaning a woman's house. Easy job because the woman live alone and gone to work in the days.”

“She start already?”

“She start messing around, you mean. I notice every time she get out of Largo and get phone service, she calling and leaving message for somebody. And sometimes she get a call and she tell them she working, but she don't want to tell me who she talking to. ‘Is a friend,' she say. Then yesterday I walk into the kitchen to find her. She was using the people phone, but like she was quarreling with somebody, a man it sound like. And I hear her saying, ‘If you love me, you have to trust me,' is so she was saying.” Carlton sucked his teeth. “When she see me, she look like a
duppy
frighten her. She slam down the phone.”

“Her conscience bother her.”

“I tell she—”

“Carlton, you've gone too far,” Shannon said from the back. “I think you passed the road to Gordon Gap.”

“Pshaw, man,” the taxi driver muttered as he braked to a stop. “You see how a woman can take your mind off your work?”

H
ow's the drumming going?” Eric asked when Eve returned from serving curry goat to two women.

“Okay.” She started writing out the invoice and looked up. “Did you know that the drum represents the heartbeat to Rastas?”

“I didn't know that.” He was squeezing oranges for fresh orange juice. Someone usually wanted juice on Sundays, and although no call had come for it yet, he wanted to be prepared. He could always drink it later. “And did you know that I play the guitar?”

“You don't play—”

“I'm telling you, and I've been practicing.”

From the kitchen came a crash and a curse. Solomon had been in a cooking frenzy all afternoon, chopping garlic, thyme, and scallions, banging pots around, answering criticism by saying he was practicing for Shad's wedding reception next weekend. Two batches of fried chicken and three versions of curry goat had been on the stove when Eric had last visited the kitchen. The old chef had been standing in the middle of the room slurping from a spoon. Never one to read a recipe or admit that he couldn't read, he always relied on his seasoned tongue.

“The curry goat still not the way I like it,” he'd snarled. Fifty years of white rum had finally killed the man's taste buds, Eric had decided before retreating to the bar.

Thankfully, there'd been more customers than usual. Though only six o'clock, five tables had already ordered, and Eve had been trotting back and forth to the kitchen, slapping her drink orders on the bar counter like a pro. Eric wished he had a video camera to capture her counting and recounting money from her departed customers, matching it with the invoices, stashing her tips in the pocket on her chest, and giving him the balance for the cash drawer.

“Making quite a haul, huh?”

She nodded, patting her pocket before rushing to a table.

Eric gazed off at the island with its ruins, looking mysterious now in the gray cloak of early evening. He usually rowed over once or twice a year to inspect the condition of the ruins and the grounds, more often when Simone was out there. A couple weeks to go and she'd be here. Would things be the same? Would
she
be the same? She sounded a little different on the phone since she'd gone back to Atlanta, more cheerful, not as sardonic. He flipped on the switch next to the refrigerator, bringing to life one lightbulb above the bar and two above the restaurant. Running his hand over his ponytail, trying to distract himself from thinking of Simone's running into Shannon, he made a note to stop by the beauty salon for a trim.
Thick and nice,
his hairdresser, Rose, would comment as she brushed it.

He watched Eve's back in the baggy dress, her slightly bowed shoulders reminding him of his mother. She was going to be tall like her parents, had already stretched up while she was here, he was sure. He was glad she was working with him tonight, seemed to have either forgotten his rude comment about her friends or gotten over it. Her directness, her honesty, was thirst quenching, like springwater to a man tired of alcohol.

Chatting to some customers, thanking them for the tip, she was waving, telling them to come back. A smile lit up her face when she returned to the counter. “You should see the tip those people left me. I feel kind of guilty taking this money away from you.”

“As long as they pay my bill, I'm good.”

“They bought a lot of food, four thousand five hundred dollars!” She added the tip to the money in her pocket and washed her hands at the sink.

Eric folded his arms. “What are you going to do with your money?”

“Buy some souvenirs, I guess.”

“For yourself?”

“Yes—and a friend.”

“Boy or girl?”

“Girl, of course. We don't—we're not tight, but we're friends.”

“No boyfriend?”

She sniffed, trying hard to control her mouth while she dried her hands. “Why'd you think that?”

“You're kind of cute—and you're thirteen this week. Shouldn't I expect it?”

“I'm cute?”

“Of course you are. You have gorgeous blue eyes, a nice—athletic figure, and your hair is shiny like your mom's.”

“It's frizzy here.”

“Everybody's hair is frizzy here.”

“I have to clear that table.” She dashed off.

“Do you know,” she asked at her next break, “why my name is Eve?”

“Your mother chose it.”

“She wanted my name to start with an
e
, like yours.”

“She never told me that.”

“There's a lot you don't know,” Eve said with a look of old-soul wisdom. “You didn't know the name of that shell—”

“I know you like a certain boy.”

Her eyes popped wide. “I like a boy?”

“I saw you walking with Jethro yesterday. You thought you could just sneak past the bar, didn't you?”

She blushed a shade pinker than her sunburn. “We were going up to the house to practice drumming, that's all. We're just friends.”

“I saw how you looked at him. You were giving him that—that look that girls have when they like a boy—you know, all attentive with a big smile on your face.” Eric remembered how Jethro had looked at his daughter as they walked along, his dreadlocks shaking as he talked, and how he'd started gesturing with one arm, the other wrapped around a drum. Although it was a bald-faced lie that he'd seen Eve smile, because she was turned away from the bar, he'd been able to tell she was fully engrossed, nodding, as they made the turn into Lambert's driveway.

He'd wanted to call out and interrupt them. Instead, when he'd gone up later to the Delgados' to spend the night, he'd asked Eve if she'd help him out on Sunday afternoon when her mother and Shad went off to Gordon Gap. It would give him a chance to say something. He'd say nothing to Shannon, who'd accuse him of being anti-Rastafarian, fitting him into the slot of the aging conservative.

Up to the instant he'd seen the two young people together, Eric had thought of his daughter as a permanent child, her detached cynicism when she'd first arrived as a childish game. His abrupt reframing of Eve as a teenager had begun minutes after watching the two young people walk up the driveway. He began to remember what he'd been like himself at that age, randy, trying to get girls to like him, rubbing against Nadine O'Connor behind the high school athletic building.

The image of Jethro working his way into Eve's underwear kept coming back to him, adding to his restless night in the Delgados' bed. In one version of the scene he'd pictured their hands drifting off the drums and onto each other. Another scene had them lying in the bushes; in another, pressed together behind a shed. Then the horrible thought of Eve's being pregnant—had she even started menstruating?—had made him resolve to say something.

“Jethro's nice,” Eve said with her standard shrug.

“He's also already gotten you into trouble, don't forget.”

“We're not
doing
anything, Dad, if that's what you're worried about.”