Chapter Nine
Ten minutes later, Arris and Nereika were in the study of Onorien’s mansion, retelling the story of the beach. The room was dominated by a large wooden desk piled high with books, paraphernalia and items Arris figured were some sort of collectibles, but there were no photographs, which Arris thought odd. This was the kind of room in which most people had photographs of the important or meaningful events from their lives and Onorien had none, just some framed oil paintings of still lifes and one of a castle on a hill. Onorien listened patiently as Nereika recounted the events, asking no questions as she detailed the precautions she had – unawares to Arris – taken on the trip through the jungle and onto the beach. Arris watched the dynamic of the two carefully, noting that Nereika was doing everything she could to assure Onorien that she had adhered to some rules set that had been established for trips outside of the mansion’s grounds. Arris was certain that Nereika had been told to observe and guard him, though he had to read between the lines of Nereika’s re-telling of the events of that morning to come to that conclusion.
There was something in the dynamic of the relationship between the two that Arris couldn’t put his finger on, but it did not exactly describe the condition of a professor and a student. And certainly, Arris concluded, Nereika was no mere “understudy slash personal assistant,” as she had described herself. She was something else entirely, if Onorien’s demeanor was anything to go by.
“So, what the hell were those things they were shooting at us?” Arris asked after Nereika had finished her story. “I’ve never seen anything like them.”
Arris had to stop himself short on that last line, almost giving himself away as someone who’d seen something more than he wanted to let on to. He had, of course, seen about everything that could explode, shoot or blow up; he just didn’t want to give any information up about what kind of person he really was, and not because he suspected Onorien was in cahoots with the drug runners, but because Arris was starting to come to the conclusion he was on some sort of hermitage. What kind, he hadn’t a clue.
Onorien made the barest of shrugs. “Well, Mr. Arris, they are laaien bols, the Dutch for, I believe, ‘fire globes.’ They are small parchment sacks filled with a homemade explosive material and, sometimes, bits of shale or tiny pebbles that the natives will fire at you with a slingshot. They are more of a firework than anything else, though, I suppose, enough of them could harm you.”
Arris nodded. “Any idea why they’d bother attacking me – you … us – at all? If they found me washed up on the beach, couldn’t they have just done away with me then? Why go through the trouble of setting some sort of trap?”
It made no sense to Arris, none of it, and he wasn’t confident that Onorien would have a good answer. Not considering that Arris was on a private island in the Caribbean with a clan of slave descendents living in isolation on one end of it. Neighborly folks would’ve settled any disputes long ago, especially given the apparent time frame the ‘natives’ had lived on the island.
Onorien let out a slight sigh. “I have light skin, Mr. Arris, and so, I suppose, the natives believe I am here to enslave them. While the natives are a mixture of Dutch and African ancestries, it is the oral traditions of the Africans which have dominated their culture over the last two centuries so they see me as someone who would seek to enslave them yet again.
“This is not the case, I assure you. I have made attempts over the years to try to make peace with them, to integrate them into some sort of greater island community. Indeed, they pretty much ran the entire island until I showed up some years ago to reclaim my family’s property and make improvements to it. They resented that, thinking that the island was theirs, not my family’s, and so, in the initial years, there were feuds not unlike that which you experienced today, attempts to scare me off the island, to make me abandon the home that my ancestors had established,” Onorien said, walking about the room.
“I told them to stay if they wanted to, that I would not kick them off, that they were free to remain here, on the island, so long as they agreed to the bargain that they stayed on their end, and I on mine,” Onorien said. “And, for quite some time now, that has been the case. But they have been growing increasingly restless over the last few years, as if they have begun to tire of our arrangement. They make frequent incursions into my area of the island and, on most days, they have someone stationed down on the beach, keeping tabs on me. This is how they discovered you, Mr. Arris, when you walked out of the surf and collapsed on my beach.
“But none of them have attempted to actually contact me in quite some time, nor have they tried to leave the island. So, I have no idea what motivates their activities. I do know, however, that they won’t intrude upon the grounds, so you are perfectly safe so long as you remain behind the hedgerows.”
Arris looked around the room, following Onorien as he told his short story. “So, why didn’t they just slit my throat on the beach last night or throw spears at us today? If they’d wanted to kill me – us - they had the perfect chance when they ambushed us. They didn’t need to use pyrotechnics.”
Arris said this while eyeing Nereika and he noticed she watched Onorien with a look of total curiosity, as if she were intensely interested in knowing the details of the answer to his question, too. Onorien took no notice of her and made a disinterested face.
“Perhaps that is the Dutch in them, Mr. Arris, restraining them from unnecessary brutality,” Onorien said.