Adrift on St. John (14 page)

My speech-thrifty friend worked for the company that ran the dive shop at my resort. He had been out on their sailboat all day, tying up ropes for the captain and slinging rum and cola drinks for the passengers. Per company policy, he’d turned his red dive-shop-issued T-shirt inside out, so that the logo wasn’t visible to the Crunchy Carrot’s other patrons.

You wouldn’t know it from his scruffy, rumpled exterior, but Jeff dreamed of moving up the company ladder, maybe even manning his own boat someday. He was taking nautical classes in St. Thomas on his days off and would soon finish the necessary qualifications for a promotion to first
mate—a job that focused more on tying ropes and less on pouring drinks.

Jeff and César lived in a small basement apartment tucked into the side of a hill a few miles east of Cruz Bay—they were just two of many in an ever-rotating list of roommates.

Long-term accommodations on St. John were expensive and hard to come by. At last count, there were at least seven people crammed into the apartment’s dark moldy living space; the number fluctuated between high and low tourist seasons.

St. John wasn’t the kind of place where one spent a lot of time indoors, but in such cramped living quarters, the occasional petty conflict was inevitable. Roommate grievances were often aired out at the Dumpster table. As Hannah leaned forward and gingerly shook César’s greasy hand, I thought I sensed the friction of a pending dispute in the air. César, I mused, was about to let loose.

“We’ve had a death in the family,” César announced somberly as Hannah settled nervously back into her plastic seat. “A member of our family has passed away.”

Jeff took a long sip from his beer. The slightest hint of a question creased his placid expression.

Hannah carefully studied César’s short round Hispanic face and Jeff’s long Anglo one. She rolled in her bottom lip, apparently sizing up the slim possibility of the two sharing a direct blood relative.

“I’m so sorry for your loss,” she said sympathetically, opting for a neutral tact in her response. Despite her initial reaction to the trashy smell of the Dumpster table and the disheveled appearance of its occupants, she couldn’t tamp down her innate curiosity. “Was it someone who lives on the island?”

César nodded emphatically up and down, as overemotive as Jeff was reserved. “Yes, yes, yes, she lived in our
apartment, in our home. We were very close.” He sighed with exaggerated sadness. “She was like family to me.”

Hannah leaned over the table, her tender face filled with compassion. “One of your roommates?” Perplexed, she glanced back and forth between César’s exaggerated show of grief and Jeff’s blank stare. “That must have been…tragic.”

A quizzical wrinkle furrowed Jeff’s forehead as he rotated his chair toward the chunky Puerto Rican.

César tilted his face skyward. His eyelids fluttered shut in remorse. “Yes, it is a sad day for Kaká.”

I slouched back in my chair, watching the scene play out, as Richard gulped down the last stray French fry. He cocked his head toward César and clicked his beak hungrily.

Jeff stared skeptically at his roommate. His blue sea-worn eyes narrowed suspiciously before he murmured a barely discernable, “Who?”

César pouted in frustration, then huffed indignantly, “Kaká, Kaká! Surely you remember Kaká?”

Hannah pushed even farther forward in her seat, her face muddled with confusion. I picked up the plastic cup of water our waitress had just placed in front of me and hid my face behind it, trying to straighten the grin tugging at the corners of my mouth.

César strummed his thick fingers on the table’s sticky surface, reflecting.

“Each day, when I got home from work, I would walk through the door, and there she’d be, peeking around the kitchen counter at me, welcoming me home.”

He shook his head, his plump lips tutting with remorse.

Jeff sighed, his expression one of silent resignation.

Hannah ventured a tentative guess. “Was…Kaká…a pet?”

César thumped his hands against his chest. “Aaaaye, yes, yes, yes, Kaká, you could say that. A pet. Yes, she was a pet.”

He stroked the air with the point of his finger, his voice pipping coarsely up and down. “But, but, but—she had her own spirit. She was free!” He wagged his blistered finger back and forth in the air. “She never lived in a cage.”

The left side of Jeff’s face twitched with the shadow of a grimace as César continued to build momentum. The Puerto Rican knew when he’d hooked a live one; he would take his time reeling Hannah in.

“She couldn’t see very well, so she would sniff the air to tell if it was me. Her tiny pink nose would quiver, just like this.” César made a wet snorkeling sound into his beer bottle. “And I would call out to reassure her, ‘Kaká, I’m home!’”

He let out another sad sigh. “But she will never be waiting to greet me again.”

César
thunked
the bottle back down on the table, causing Richard to squawk and fly off. He leaned across the debris-strewn surface toward Hannah, the fleshy contours of his face squishing up around his mouth.

“Kaká, she was always glad to see me. Her whiskers would wiggle back and forth…and the tip end of her tail, it would sort of rise up in the air. That was her way of saying hello. I tell you, Kaká, she was so friendly.”

Hannah’s eyes widened. She thought she had figured out the species of the deceased pet. I moved the plastic cup even closer to my face as she began, “Was Kaká a ca—”

Jeff sighed tiredly, cutting her off. His voice, flat and unemotional, rolled out, “It was a rat.”

César fell back in his chair as if he’d been slapped. “But, but, but—she was a
good
rat, man. You know what I mean? A
good
rat.”

Jeff rolled his eyes as César bounded forward again in his seat.

“You remember, man. There was the thing she would do with her tongue, flashing it in and out.”

César performed his best Kaká imitation, ending the effort in a loud
slurp
as Hannah’s face returned to its previous green pallor.

“And her fur too,” he said, rubbing his hands together in the air above the table. “It was so smooth and silky. A rich brown color. She was very clean for a rat.”

Hannah had now plastered herself against the back of her
chair, but she managed to issue a second condolence, this one far more shocked than sympathetic.

“I’m so sorry for your loss.”

Jeff slowly blinked his eyes in derision and muttered, “Dude, it was a rat.”

This was turning into an extremely verbose afternoon for Jeff. In all his visits to the Dumpster table, he’d never been known to issue so many complete sentences.

But César ignored him, focusing all his attention on Hannah. He wasn’t quite ready to let his fish off the lure.

“I guess
some
of our roommates didn’t appreciate Kaká’s contributions to the apartment. They just couldn’t see how she was such a
good
rat.”

He swiveled in his chair and glared furiously at Jeff. “They put out some poison,” he said accusingly. “That’s what killed her.”

Jeff bent his head, threading his fingers into the tangled mass of curls as César pointed reproachfully at him.

“I bet she had babies, man. Cute little rat babies, and now they’re wondering what happened to their momma. Like she said, it’s
tragic
, man. They’re going to hunt you down and get their revenge.”

Jeff glanced up and sent me a pleading look across the table.

I coughed lightly and tilted my cup toward César. “What did you do with the body? Is there going to be a funeral?”

César nodded up and down, welcoming my contribution as Jeff sent me a withering glare.

“I found her under the refrigerator. There was just the tip end of her tail sticking out on the floor.”

He reached his chubby hand into the air over the table and wrapped his fingers around an imaginary tail. “I grabbed hold of it and tried to pull her out from under there, but the skin just—
whomp
—slipped off.”

Standing up from his chair, he gestured as if his hand were still wrapped around the loose skin.

Hannah looked as if she might throw up at any minute.

Jeff sighed, finding one last comment. “That’s gross.”

César plunked back down onto his seat. He reached into the pile of refuse at the center of the table, pulled out a cold limp French fry that Richard had somehow missed, and popped it in his mouth.

“Aaaaye, Kaká, she was a
good
rat, man,” he said sadly. “I tell you, a
good
rat.”

That was the first and the last time Hannah joined us at the Dumpster table.

14

Just as Manto’s truck taxi pulled out of the resort’s driveway onto the main road to Cruz Bay, Beulah Shah scrambled into the last bench at the rear of the bed. She hunkered down behind the backrest of the next-to-last row of seats, her eyes level with the bench’s upper edge. Her gaze focused in on the two women at the front of the canvas-covered seating area: the resort manager and her new curly haired employee.

All the way into town, Beulah maintained her hunched vigil, even as the truck bounced over the numerous bumps and ruts in the pavement. When at last the taxi stopped outside the Crunchy Carrot, she waited until Pen paid the driver and ushered Hannah toward the Dumpster table before making her own exit.

Taking care not to be seen, Beulah circled around the block to the narrow alley that ran behind the Crunchy Carrot, her bony feet clunking in her loose rubber sandals as she crept along the rough dirt path.

Ignoring the rancid odor, she crouched in the dirt behind the Dumpster’s metal wall and pressed an ear against its rusted iron sheeting. She gazed, unseeing, at the dusty
ground as she listened to the conversation unfolding at the table on the opposite side.

Tonight, Beulah was only marginally interested in the woman who called herself Penelope Hoffstra—she had recognized her as an imposter the moment she first set foot on the island nearly four years earlier. She had kept a close eye on the lazy resort manager and knew her routine. The phony Pen was, predictably, settling in for another long night of drinking with the other expats.

Beulah spat at the dirt dismissively. On this particular evening, she was primarily concerned with the younger woman, the new arrival with the empty personnel file who was staying out at Maho Bay.

Beulah rocked back and forth behind the Dumpster, listening to Hannah Sheridan’s debut with the expats. As the banter at the table followed its typical banal course, Beulah’s thoughts drifted back to a tale she had once heard as a small child—about an Amina Slave Princess with dark curly hair and skin a creamy cocoa shade of brown.

It didn’t take long for Beulah to decide that she had heard enough. Dusting off the worn threads of her navy blue jumper, she emerged from the alley behind the Crunchy Carrot and hobbled the short distance to the ferry dock, where she joined the regular afternoon crowd waiting for the four o’clock boat to St. Thomas.

The truck taxis had filled their designated line of parking spots on the road running perpendicular to the dock, waiting to pick up fares from the incoming load of tourists. The bright-painted metal and fluttering canopies provided a colorful contrast to the orange stucco building that contained the ferry company’s ticket booth and operating offices.

A gated barrier stretched across the concrete dock, holding back the ticketed passengers until the ferry pulled into its slip. Several clumps of workers, most still in their service-industry uniforms, waited under the open-air pavilion
attached to the building. Many more spilled out into the shaded park across the street where a half dozen green wooden benches flanked a statue memorializing the 1733 Slave Revolt.

The iron bust commemorated the moment the Amina stormed the Danish fort on the opposite side of the island and sent shots from its cannon to signal the start of the rebellion. As cannon fire reverberated across St. John, the bellowing blast of conch shells passed the message on to every plantation, mill, and field.

The memorial depicted the head and torso of a shirtless man, positioned defiantly on a plinth looking out across the Pillsbury Sound toward St. Thomas. One hand wrapped around the smooth curve of a conch shell, holding its horn piece to the statue’s firm lips, which were puckered in a defiant blow.