The Rhythm of the August Rain (32 page)

She sat up slowly and brushed off her hands. A buzz filled her head at the temples. She blinked hard, trying to clear it. He must have drugged them with the bush tea he'd offered—
a little welcome present
, he'd called it. Mixed with the cannabis, it had knocked her out cold for several hours. In front of her were the filthy, old pants she remembered. Fresh dirt clung to the torn edges.

“Where am I?”

“You don't know where you is?”

She rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand. “No.”

“You must have forget.”

Her sandals were beside her, placed by the man, no doubt, and she slipped her feet in, trying to control the shaking, willing her racing heart to slow down.

Oh, God,
she prayed,
please don't make him too crazy, please don't let me cry.
It was her fault again, her fault for suggesting a visit to the old camp before returning to Largo.

“We might as well,” she'd urged her companions.

Richard had had his doubts. If he was as violent as Shad had said, maybe she should come back another day with more people, he suggested. Carlton had wanted to turn back. But Shannon had kept thinking that she wanted to get this search over with, wanted to get out of Largo and Jamaica as soon as possible, had to see the man now. They were so close.

“If he's that old, he can't be too dangerous,” she'd urged Richard, who'd finally agreed to go to Dread's camp.

Shannon looked around slowly. They were in a small clearing surrounded by bushes. They must be close to Zadock's house, since he'd be too old to carry her far. Where was Richard now? What had Zadock done to him?

“You have to take me back,” she said as crisply as she could. “Dr. Ransom is waiting for me.” She started to stand up, and he pushed her gently back to the ground. “You can't make me stay.”

His smile displayed the few teeth left in his head, glinting yellow in the lamplight. “You forget is
you
come looking for me. I didn't come to you.” He set the glass lamp on the ground and lowered with a moan next to her, the stink of him closing in.

She leaned away, not too far. “Why did you bring me here?”

“You don't remember?” He squinted at her, the lamp beneath making his mole-patched face gruesome. “Remember, this was where we first make love?”

Shannon's heart leaped to her throat. He thought she was someone else—Katlyn, perhaps? “I don't—I don't remember.”

The man seemed puzzled, almost hurt. “You don't remember how we used to come up sometimes and smoke little
sensi
and have a
picnic
, you used to call it? You like it here because it have a nice view. You can't see the view now because it too dark, but you used to love it up here. I think you would remember—that bringing you here would make you remember everything.”

Shannon shook her head. “I don't remember.”

“It will come back.” He gathered the straggly, gray dreadlocks around his face and pushed them back.

She stood up quickly and strode to the edge of the clearing. The weak moonlight showed a valley sloping down to what must be the ocean with a couple distant lights, not much to go by, and no path out of the clearing.

She returned to stand over him. “You can't keep me here.”

Only a cackle answered her as Zadock set down his stick.

She lowered herself a couple feet from him. The man was confused, clearly delusional, but probably harmless. If she could get him to talk, maybe she could get him to take her back.

“What do you want from me?”

“I bring little food so we can have a picnic, like the old days. We too old for sexing now, but we can still eat.” He brushed off his hands and took a crumpled bag of crackers out of a pocket. From another he took a plastic bag and started opening it, revealing a lump of cheese.

“If we have a picnic, can we go back?” She'd eaten worse.

Crumbs fell onto Zadock's dirt-blackened shirt as he bit into a cracker. “Take time, man.”

Redemption's revelation had been worth the $200: Zadock was, without doubt, Katlyn's lover. After Shannon had knocked at his door and called his name, the old Rasta had opened almost immediately. His height and the thick, black moles that intertwined across his cheeks had frightened her at first and she'd taken a step back. But he'd invited them gruffly into the one-room shack and told them to sit down, talking to them, talking to himself, even talking to the stick he was leaning on. Yes, he was Dread, he'd said, but call him Zadock. He didn't know how they'd found him, but he was glad they'd come. He didn't use Rasta jargon, perhaps from being alone so long, and he'd mumbled in patois as he fussed around a two-burner stove, the smell of kerosene swamping the room.

While he made tea, Shannon had looked around the home at the faded paintings of angels, fairies, and dancers that hung on the walls, one of them looking like Isadora Duncan on tiptoe, another of an angel balancing on one leg, the other extended. She'd felt transported back in time to meet Katlyn, and she could almost feel the Canadian's presence around her imprinted in the pictures, the dirty cushions she'd probably tie-dyed herself, and the ragged chiffon curtains that were once blue and green. She pictured the young woman in the peasant blouse hanging the pendant over the window, the crystal that was still bright beneath a rusty dragonfly.

Shannon reached for a cracker. If she could engage Zadock long enough, Carlton and Richard would surely find her. The cracker was dry in her mouth, no saliva to soften it.

“You still sweet, my queen, and you getting gray like me.” Zadock reached out and patted her hair and she ducked.

“My name is Shannon, you know that, right?”

He smiled, chewing cheese with his mouth open. “You come back with a different name, but your voice give you away. I know you was Akila when you call my name at the door.”

“My voice might sound like hers, but—”

“You come back like you say you was going to. You don't look the same and your name is different, but you speak the same. You the same sweet girl. You think I don't know you? You used to believe in all this reincarnation business, and I used to tell you is foolishness.” He was in a reverie now, chewing and gazing at nothing. “You say you was going to come back in another body. You say you would find me and we would stay together. I used to tell you to hush your mouth—but you come back, just like you said. You never lie to me, you was always good to me. You always say I was the
love of your life
.” He gave a low, coarse laugh.

“It was raining plenty when you move up here end of August, and we used to love up in the little bed when the rain was falling, you remember now? And next morning you would cook my porridge with nutmeg and cinnamon, just the way I like it. You was a good-good wife, even though you say you miss your family and friend. I sorry you couldn't write them no letter or send them no photograph. You say you don't want to tell them you turn Rasta because they would make you go home or send police to find you. But you say one day you would take me up to Canada to meet them, remember?”

“But I got sick.” Better to identify, she figured, give him less to worry about.

“You wouldn't let me take you down to the hospital because you was afraid they arrest me. You ask for the Rasta doctor and you let her treat you with them herbs. You say you put yourself in Jah hands.” His lips and voice quivered. “Nobody cook for me after you get sick and die, you know. They all leave me. I would starve here if it not for the boy who get me a few things from the grocery. I still have little money left from the land I sell, and is that I give him. I tell him not to tell nobody that he see me or Jah will strike him dead and he believe me.

“I know if anybody see me, they going to arrest me. They going to say that I kill you, I cause you to dead. They going lock me up and throw away the key. Worse, they could hang me.”

“Why didn't you—”

“You gone and get
sick
,” he insisted, swinging toward her, the moles of his face inches away, making her heart leap to her throat. “
Nothing
I could do for you. You stop dancing, stop teaching the children, stop eating. I try everything, all the bush tea and coconut water and herb the Ras doctor bring, and even that couldn't help you. All I beg Jah to save you, and you still get sicker. Nothing could stop the running belly, all blood start to come out of you. I wipe you up and clean you up, but you still have it coming down and you still don't want to go to hospital.
Babylon,
you say.” His age-reddened eyes glistened in the lamplight, water gathering on the lower lids.

“I'm sorry.” She was.

“You tell me where you want me to bury you”—he coughed and spat—“and that where I bury you.”

Shannon's voice went low. “It was you. Where did you bury me?”

“But I didn't, no, no,
no
,” he proclaimed with a vigorous shake of the head. “I didn't want you to dead. I carry you down to St. Ann's Bay Hospital in a friend taxi one night when you was so weak and poorly you wouldn't even wake up. I was hoping they could do something. But I had to leave you because I know they was going to arrest me if they know I bring you. They hate Rasta, and you was an upper-class woman and they would have lock me up, like how they lock me up and send me to the madhouse after they burn down Pinnacle. Next thing they going to say that I poison a white woman and charge me with murder.”

He brushed the crumbs off his shirt, matter-of-fact all of a sudden. “So we put you in front of the hospital, and I put your purse with you so they would know who you was, with your passport and everything. I stay far and watch you lying on the steps until they pick you up. I hoping they can save you, even though you tell me yourself that you was going to dead.”

“How did you find out she—I had died?”

“I go back to the hospital the next day and I see a nurse leaving. I ask her if she know what happen to the foreign woman and she tell me you was dead.”

“And you took the body?”

Zadock looked down at the old pieces of tire and twine that made up his sandals. “I cry, you see, cry and cry, like my heart break. But you make me promise that I must bury you under the Julie mango tree, because you love Julie mangoes and you could see the sea from there, and you show me the spot.” He sat up straight with his justification, still blameless. “I have to get your body, have to get it.”

“How—how did you do it?”

With a triumphant smile, the old man snorted. “Who Jah bless, no man curse. I take all my money, twenty-three dollars—big money them days—to pay one night-shift guy who carry the stretchers, and he bring the body out the back door that night on a stretcher with a sheet over you. We put you in the taxi, and we drive and come back while it was still night, so nobody see us bring you inside the house. I wrap you up in the pretty spread you always like, the one with the flowers. The next night now, I dig the grave right where you say you want me to bury you, and I come back for you and bury you. I have a funeral for you, just me one, and I ask Jah to take care of you since I not there to do it.”

The cheese finished, he rolled up the bag of crackers. “But life hard since you gone, everybody leave me.”

“Will you show me where you buried—?”

“I going dead, but you know that already. I don't need no doctor to tell me. I have pain morning time, afternoon time, nighttime. I ready to die, the sooner the better.” Leaning on his stick, he groaned his way to standing.

“After that little man come asking if I know a Canadian woman, I know you was coming back. He like John the Baptist, telling me you was coming. I realize you know that is my time now to dead, and you coming to take me back to wherever you come from, so I ready for you when you knock on my door. But I have to get rid of the university man with you, so I mix up the bush tea I use when the pain come on bad and I can't sleep. When the two of you fall asleep now, I did bring you up here to rest little bit. And while you was sleeping, I get things ready for us, so we can leave and go back to your home. I want to do it decent like, so I make things nice, and I do it before I get too sick and don't have the strength.”

He bent down and picked up the lamp. “You want to see our burial ground? Come, I will show you.”

N
obody lives here,” Eric whispered as he knelt beside Lambert. The light from I-Verse's flashlight bobbed up and down between the compound's weeds and houses, coffins of darkness.

“We have to wait until they give us the all clear.” Lambert held the gun upright and ready.

A mosquito whined around Eric's ear and he slapped his cheek. “You're making me nervous with that thing.”

“I'll only use it if I have to.”

The flashlight went out. In the pale light of the moon they could make out the shadows of Shad and I-Verse sidling along the wall of a house, advancing to a window. The flashlight popped back on and was directed into the house. After a minute, the light was turned upward before it went out again.

“The signal,” Lambert said, and they hurried across the bushy yard to join the advance team.

“The man not here,” Shad whispered.

“The window open, though,” I-Verse said. “Like somebody living there.”

“Shine the light inside again,” Eric said. “Maybe we'll see something.”

I-Verse pulled the ratty curtain aside and directed the light into the house. The one-room shack had a dirty mattress, a few pieces of furniture, and several framed pictures on the walls. Two enamel cups sat on the crude table in the middle.

“Interesting decor,” Lambert noted.

“I see something on the floor,” Shad hissed.

I-Verse ran the flashlight around the floor. A black purse with a long strap sat beside one of the chairs.