They landed at a wharf, one rotting jetty leaning into a calm bay and a few scattered pirogues painted in pastels. Beneath the trees on the far side stood a clump of fishermen’s cottages. “Everyone is at the harbor,” Felix said. “For the regatta.”
He cut the motor and the girl leapt onto the seawall and tied up. Without a word they began ferrying their purchases ashore, and soon the three of them set off, carrying boxes and jugs up a dirt track, a meter wide with tall, heavy grass on either side. Occasional white houses stood back from the trail, small and ragged, with corrugated roofs. A few goats trailed them and dark children watched them pass from doorways and called to the girl, who called back. The sun followed them above the treetops. Red dust rose in small clouds around their feet. Winkler carried a box of eggplant and followed behind potbellied Felix and his daughter, both of them toting bigger loads than his.
They stopped eventually in front of a tiny light blue house with a thin crack running through it, corner to corner, as if a gigantic hand had reached through the sky and broken off the top half and then replaced it. Felix set down his crates. “Home,” he said.
In front of the door they paused and Felix bent over the girl to say something and she produced a clean white dress from a box and pulled it on over her T-shirt. An assortment of stringy-looking hens flapped across the yard and seethed around their feet. Felix produced his flask once more and emptied it into his mouth. Then he ran a comb through his hair and passed the comb to the girl, who tugged it once through her hair and passed it to Winkler.
Inside, three boys, maybe eight or nine years old, in identical white shirts, played jacks on the dirt floor. Behind them a thin woman in a yellow dress and scarf sat in a chair reading. She was, Winkler saw, the woman from the post office on St. Vincent. She set down her book, stood, and held out the back of her hand. “I am Soma. Happy Easter.”
Winkler stood blinking a moment. She laughed. He took her hand. She lined up the children one by one and introduced them and each in turn shook his hand shyly and would not meet his eyes.
Then Soma moved in front of them and made a sort of half curtsy. “I am sorry,” she said, “for my joke at the post office. You must forgive me.”
Felix cleared the boys out to the yard and unpacked the crates of food. “You,” he said, waving a knife at Winkler. “Chop these.” He handed Winkler a sack of small yellow onions and Winkler stood at the counter peeling and slicing. Twice he had to lean over the counter, eyes watering, swallowing bile. The little girl, a miniature of her mother, watched him from the other side of the window, her fingers looped through the wire of the screen.
The walls of the house were unpainted. In places hung photos: a city backed by steep, blue mountains; a rolling grassland dotted with tents; a laminated image of the Virgin in a blue cloak with a snake beneath her sandal. In the corners of the central room were stacks of books, most of them in Spanish: La Igiesia Rebelde, Armas de la Libertad, Regional Socialism in Latin America. And on the sills were tiny, clumsily made boats: models of sloops and yawls, longboats, a scow—some with tiny brass halyards, balsa tillers, tigging made from thread.
Felix cooked in a state of near frenzy, banging pans, inhaling steam, occasionally bursting into song. He wiped away sweat with a forearm; he stole drinks from an unlabeled bottle hidden behind the charcoal box. He ordered Winkler to slice the eggplant in long, fine sheets and supervised each slice. “Thin now. Thinner.” Felix took them up, like strange, wet slips of paper, and fried them crisp in a skillet and tucked them between sheets of newspaper. He made an elaborate mango chutney. He scalded and plucked small hens, slathered them in pepper, and set them in the charcoal stove. From far away, beyond the trees, came the sounds of fireworks, and the boys returned an hour later flushed and sweaty and Felix lifted the sizzling hens from their pans. “Okay,” he said.
They ate at a picnic table at the other end of the room. Felix had covered the slivers of eggplant with chutney and arranged the roasted birds on top. Soma bowed her head and the children bowed with her and she thanked the Lord for the food before them and for the bounty of the island and for preventing one of the boys from failing his mathematics exam the previous week. Then she raised a glass and, holding a hand over her heart, said: “To the health and fortitude of our guest.” The children raised cups of milk and knocked them against one another.
They fell to the food. Winkler faced a window and through the screen he watched swifts hunt insects over the yard. The chickens had gone quiet; a gecko breathed silently on the ceiling. It seemed impossible that he was there, listening to this family eat roasted birds. Felix asked several questions about American cattle raising, sizes and calving rates, and seemed disappointed to learn Winkler knew nothing about it. The boys finished first and sat restlessly over their plates. The girl poked at her meat. Finally Felix wiped his mouth and belched and pushed his plate forward and released presents from under his bench: three small wooden sloops, simple hulls with a dowel glued to their decks as masts and tiny captain’s wheels just fore of the stern. The boys clamored and fought over colors and settled in with their respective selections. For the girl he handed down a glass jar with wire mesh stretched over the top and she beamed and reached for him and hung her arms around his neck.
Soma smiled and said, “Nothing for me?”
“For you,” Felix said and gestured at the children, “is later.” She laughed.
The three boys pretended to crash their sloops into the walls. The girl crawled beneath the table trying to trap a beetle in her jar.
Soma ordered the boys to wash the dishes and they collected buckets from beneath a shelf and went out. He could hear them in the yard sloshing water and clanging plates together.
The light began to fade. Out in the yard the swifts had been replaced by bats. Soma lit an oil lamp and set it at the center of the table, where it hissed and sputtered. Felix leaned back in his seat smiling with a kind of thoughtless beatitude. As though everything was going as planned. As though his small kingdom resounded with harmony.
He lifted the little girl off the floor and onto his lap. She raised her eyes from her jar to Winkler and smiled and blinked rapidly.
“This is Naaliyah,” Felix said. “Our daughter.” A mosquito landed on the girl’s forearm and she watched with astute attention as it pulled blood from her. It swelled, withdrew its proboscis, and disappeared. Naaliyah rubbed her wrist absentmindedly. In her jar a black ant touched at the glass walls with its antennae.
“She is beautiful,” Winkler said. He wanted to ask about her, how old she was, if she went to school, but tears were flooding his eyes and he had to get up from the bench and go out into the night.
The room they gave him was the boys’, in the back of the house, a sun-faded poster of some Chilean soccer player tacked to the wall, two bunk beds built into the wall with a single crosspiece for a ladder. Stacks of their little clothes were arrayed on a shelf in the corner. The boys lay down wordlessly on the kitchen floor, side by side, their heads on a single pillow. The girl lay on one of the picnic table’s benches, beneath the window, still in her white dress, watching Winkler with big, slow-blinking eyes.
Winkler climbed into the lower berth. A scattering of glow-in-the-dark stars shone dully along the underside of the top bunk. The smell was sweet: laundry, and boys’ sweat.
Leaves riding the wind like commuters; filaments of air trapped within the arms of a snow crystal; his mother tamping soil into a terracotta pot. Dreams creeping like shadows from the edges of the yard. When he’d asked about Grace, Sandy had dropped the phone.
Soma tiptoed in, a book in her hand, reading glasses pushed up over her hair. “David.”
He sat up. “I can’t…” he began, but she held up a palm.
“Felix does his best cooking in the morning. You will stay?”
He shook his head.
“Sshh…” She pulled the hem of the sheet to his neck. “For me.”
A beetle crashed into the wall and
dropped to the floor and sat whirring there as if shaking off the impact. He watched Soma sweep away through the doorway and kiss the girl good night and then disappear behind a curtain into the other room in the house. Soon the place was silent, and he could hear the steady, shallow breathing of the boys as they slept, and the clamor of the insects out in the tamarinds along the path.
He felt himself tilt toward sleep. A memory, unbidden, rose: in the evenings, as a boy, he used to crouch beneath his mother’s ironing board as she pressed her uniforms, and the cotton would cascade around him, fragrant and white and warm, and through the folds he’d watch his father in his undershirt smoking his pipe, snapping the newspaper taut as he turned its pages.
5
In the predawn, hens scuttled on the roof of the house and he heard the screen door open and clap shut. When he woke next it was fully light and Felix was singing over the stove. Winkler rose and tucked the sheet back over the little mattress. Had he dreamed? He couldn’t remember.
He put on his glasses. Out the window, in the lower quarter of sky, a group of clouds huddled above a hill. “Rain,” he said.
The girl, Naaliyah, watched him from the doorway. She came to the window and peered out. “The sun.”
He nodded. She said: “No rain.”
“It’s sunny now,” he said, “but see those clouds on the hill? How they are pushed up? Like hats? It means there’s a convective—warm air—rising along the hillside. The air up there is unstable. It means there’s a chance of rain.”
She stood on her tiptoes and hooked her fingers around the sill. “Really?”
He stepped into the kitchen. Felix was wearing a wool watch cap and a teal T-shirt with Miami Dolphins silk-screened onto it. He sliced a mango and handed a half to Winkler with a spoon.
Winkler watched him move through the kitchen on his skinny legs. His hair stuck through little moth holes in his cap. He took a drink from his bottle.
“You are not from here,” Winkler said.
Felix turned. “No. I was born in Punta Arenas. Soma in Santiago.”
“Chile.”
“Yes. Chile.” He rolled the word in his mouth, as if tasting it. He looked at the girl. “But this is home now, isn’t it, Liyah?” She shrugged.
Felix went on: “Soma says everyone on this island is a refugee. Africa, or South America, or Asia. Even the Caribs, this was not their island.” He turned back to the eggs.
“And your sons? They are from Santiago?”
“They are not our sons. Not by blood. Yes, from Santiago. Their parents lived there.”
Winkler frowned. He dug into the mango. “How much,” he asked, “would it cost for a flight to the United States?”
“Maybe four or five thousand? Expensive.”
“How do I get back to St. Vincent?”
“The boys could take you. When they return. They are at school now. They take their mother to the post office. But you are welcome to stay more. Soma has told you.”
“I’d like to repay you for your kindness.”
“You owe nothing.”
He mulled this over. He owed something. But what position was he in to repay anyone? He did not even know the name of the island he was on.
Felix drank from his bottle. After a while he said, “We are building an inn. I am going to be the chef—perhaps you will work there?”
Felix and Naaliyah led Winkler through the chickens and along another path past more houses, each with an air of happenstance as though it had been placed there by the recession of a massive flood. They climbed a hill and traversed a cleared paddock and then descended into dark thickets toward the western edge of the island. Through breaks in the canopy Winkler glimpsed glittering expanses of sea and the ragged white borders of the reef. Every few minutes Naaliyah glanced over her shoulder at the clouds shifting and piling over the hills.
The inn—or what Winkler assumed would become an inn—was hardly anything: a pile of lumber, a pallet of bricks. One tin shed tucked under a welter of bush. Maybe a quarter mile out frothy breakers collapsed over the reef. Wind-stooped palms fringed the place; the clearing was brown and sandy; a single breadfruit tree at the corner of the property was wreathed by a ring of its own fallen fruit. The beach was crowded with drift logs and mats of morning glory and empty cable spools like huge upended coffee tables.
A half dozen men sent a slow volley of greetings at Felix and then they all waited, a few men smoking as they squatted, the lit ends of their cigarettes glowing and drifting in the dimness. Naaliyah chased ground lizards through the shadows.
Eventually a jeep arrived, pressing its way over a tangled access road. A man in a yellow suit got out and opened the hatch and the men filed forward and took shovels and picks from the back. When Felix reached the rear bumper, the man in the yellow suit stooped and they exchanged a few words. Felix turned and waved Winkler over.
“This is Nanton. It is his inn.”
Nanton looked Winkler up and down, then turned and closed the back of the jeep. “What can you do?”
Winkler glanced over at the sullen company dragging tools toward the stacks of lumber and said, “Whatever they can.”
Nanton seemed to consider this. “You work on the foundation today. Work two weeks. If you still here after two weeks, maybe I keep you.” His teeth were a dull green and his breath was salty, as though he had been drinking seawater. “You work today,” he said and his lips eased into a smile. “Maybe you don’t come back tomorrow.”
Nanton had two men haul what looked like a lifeguard’s chair out from the shed into the shallows. He climbed to the top, opened an umbrella, and sat above the crew, watching them and chewing coca leaves.
Winkler took a shovel and followed Felix to the pile of lumber but Nanton called him back. “No.” He waved Winkler toward the lagoon. “You work out here.” Winkler went to the edge and waited until Nanton beckoned him forward again. “Out. At the flags.” Small orange markers had been driven into shallow places in the lagoon. They waved silently with the passage of water. “You dig beneath each one.”
“Beneath the flags.”
“Correct. Now please. While the tide is still low.”
Winkler squinted, then adjusted his glasses and waded out to the first flag. The water reached halfway up his thighs. The flag’s thin shaft was anchored by a bag filled with sand. He began hacking at the rock and coral heads below. The shovel skewed out beneath him in the water and it was nearly impossible to get any leverage.
The sun came fully over the island then, brassy and merciless. The other men worked in the shade, on a stretch of rock at the end of the beach. Their shovels chipped and sparked.
Nanton produced a newspaper and slowly turned its pages. There was a sense of laziness and melancholy beneath the trees and most of the men slunk away at noon to nap or drink rum or stare out at the sea. The blade of Winkler’s shovel bent; the tide climbed his thighs. It was impossible to keep memories at bay: water seeping into the basement; Sandy glowering in the driveway.
These perhaps were his weakest moments. He had fled, yes, but with reason. Grace’s life had been in danger, but surely the danger had passed by now? Yet here he was, surrounded by strangers, hacking away at rocks with a half-ruined shovel. Weren’t there other ways home? He could have been begging or sneaking, selling his labor directly for passage, stealing his way to an airplane ticket. He could pilfer a raft and paddle it home. He could swim. Wasn’t each passing minute a betrayal?
Was it fear? Was it that if he returned, and she was still alive, he might still inadvertently kill her—her fate waiting all this time for him to fulfill it? Was he simply afraid to face what he had left behind? Had he been hoping, all along, to leave, each moment stretched thin with it, exhausted by the pinioning of obligation against desire: the staying, and the longing to flee? He heard Sandy’s voice, echoing down the telephone line: You left. You just got up and left. No. He loved her. And he loved Grace, so much that little fissures scarred in his heart ea
ch time he thought of her.
He stared a moment through the water at the base of the flag and wiped his forehead and realized he had made no perceptible progress.
In the early afternoon sheets of diffuse clouds, dragging scuds, eased off the sea, and it began to rain. Most of the workers retreated beneath the palms, but the girl, Naaliyah, stood in the little clearing, watching Winkler, holding her palms out. Drops spattered the lenses of his glasses; he worked on.
Nanton descended from his perch in the evening and collected the shovels and picks and stowed them again in the back of his jeep. Winkler stood dripping at the fringes of the small excavation and watched Felix speak to Nanton in low tones and finally the jeep drove away.
The rain slowed and the clouds relented. He returned to Felix and Soma’s house. The boys washed dinner plates in the yard. Felix dragged a battered tacklebox out of the back room and opened it on the picnic table. Inside were the tiny makings of model boats, little saws and screwdrivers, dowels, tiny brushes, tubes of glue, jars of model paint. He withdrew a small piece of wood and began sanding it carefully. Soma quizzed him about Winkler’s day.
Naaliyah tugged Winkler’s sleeve. “What else,” she asked, “do you know about clouds?”
Every day Nanton sent him out into the lagoon to hack at submerged rock. “We need half-meter excavations,” he said, but did not elaborate. Winkler was the only white man working for Nanton, and Nanton appeared to take a perverse pleasure in the historical irony of it, occasionally descending from his perch and asking Winkler to hold up a shovelful of rock so he could inspect it and smile broadly and spit his coca juice into the water beside them. The skin between Winkler’s fingers sloughed off; sores bloomed on his palms.