Bluebeard's Egg (20 page)

They passed a man riding a donkey, and two cows wandering around by the roadside, anchored by ropes around their necks which were tied to dragging stones. Christine pointed these out to Lilian. The little houses among the tall cane were made of cement blocks, painted light green or pink or light blue; they were built up on openwork foundations, almost as if they were on stilts. The women who sat on the steps turned their heads, unsmiling, to watch their taxi as it went by.

Lilian asked Christine if she had any gum. Christine didn’t. Lilian began chewing on her nails, which she’d taken up since Don had been under pressure. Christine told her to stop. Then Lilian said she wanted to go for a swim. Don looked out the window. “How long did you say?” he asked. It was a reproach, not a question.

Christine hadn’t said how long because she didn’t know; she didn’t know because she’d forgotten to ask. Finally they turned off the main road onto a smaller, muddier one, and parked beside some other cars in a rutted space that had once been part of a field.

“I meet you here,” said the driver. He got out of the car, stretched, turned up the car radio. There were other drivers hanging around, some of them in cars, other sitting on the ground drinking from a bottle they were passing around, one asleep.

Christine took Lilian’s hand. She didn’t want to appear stupid by having to ask where they were supposed to go next. She didn’t see anything that looked like a ticket office.

“It must be that shack,” Don said, so they walked towards it, a long shed with a tin roof; on the other side of it was a steep bank and the beginning of the water. There were wooden steps leading down to a wharf, which was the same brown as the water itself. Several boats were tied up to it, all of similar design: long and thin, almost like barges, with rows of bench-like seats. Each boat had a small outboard motor at the back. The names painted on the boats looked East Indian.

Christine took the scarves out of her bag and tied one on her own head and one on Lilian’s. Although it was beginning to cloud over, the sun was still very bright, and she knew about rays coming through overcast, especially in the tropics. She put sun block on their noses, and thought that the chocolate bar had been a silly idea. Soon it would be a brown puddle at the bottom of her bag, which luckily was waterproof. Don paced behind them as Christine knelt.

An odd smell was coming up from the water: a swamp smell, but with something else mixed in. Christine wondered about sewage disposal. She was glad she’d made Lilian go to the bathroom before they’d left.

There didn’t seem to be anyone in charge, anyone to buy the tickets from, although there were several people beside the shed, waiting, probably: two plumpish, middle-aged men in T-shirts and baseball caps turned around backwards, an athletic couple in shorts with outside pockets, who were loaded down with cameras and binoculars, a trim woman in a tailored pink summer suit that must have been far too hot. There was another woman off to the side, a somewhat large woman in a floral print dress. She’d spread a Mexican-looking shawl on the weedy grass near the shed and was sitting down on it, drinking a pint carton of orange juice through a straw. The others looked wilted and dispirited, but not this woman. For her, waiting seemed to be an activity, not something imposed: she gazed around her, at the bank, the brown water, the line of sullen mangrove trees beyond, as if she were enjoying every minute.

This woman seemed the easiest to approach, so Christine went over to her. “Are we in the right place?” she said. “For the birds.”

The woman smiled at her and said they were. She had a broad face, with high, almost Slavic cheekbones and round red cheeks like those of an old-fashioned wooden doll, except that they were not painted on. Her taffy-coloured hair was done in waves and rolls, and reminded Christine of the pictures on the Toni home-permanent boxes of several decades before.

“We will leave soon,” said the woman. “Have you seen these birds before? They come back only at sunset. The rest of the time they are away, fishing.” She smiled again, and Christine thought to herself that it was a pity she hadn’t had bands put on to even out her teeth when she was young.

This was the woman’s second visit to the Scarlet Ibis preserve, she told Christine. The first was three years ago, when she stopped over here on her way to South America with her husband and children. This time her husband and children had stayed back at the hotel: they hadn’t seen a swimming pool for such a long time. She and her husband were Mennonite missionaries, she said. She herself didn’t seem embarrassed by this, but Christine blushed a little. She had been raised Anglican, but the only vestige of that was the kind of Christmas cards she favoured: prints of mediaeval or Renaissance old masters. Religious people of any serious kind made her nervous: they were like men in raincoats who might or might not be flashers. You would be going along with them in the ordinary way, and then there could be a swift movement and you would look down to find the coat wide open and nothing on under it but some pant legs held up by rubber bands. This had happened to Christine in a train station once.

“How many children do you have?” she said, to change the subject. Mennonite would explain the wide hips: they liked women who could have a lot of children.

The woman’s crooked-toothed smile did not falter. “Four,” she said, “but one of them is dead.”

“Oh,” said Christine. It wasn’t clear whether the four included the one dead, or whether that was extra. She knew better than to say, “That’s too bad.” Such a comment was sure to produce something about the will of God, and she didn’t want to deal with that. She looked to make sure Lilian was still there, over by Don. Much of the time Lilian was a given, but there were moments at which she was threatened, unknown to herself, with sudden disappearance. “That’s my little girl, over there,” Christine said, feeling immediately that this was a callous comment; but the woman continued to smile, in a way that Christine now found eerie.

A small brown man in a Hawaiian-patterned shirt came around from behind the shed and went quickly down the steps to the wharf. He climbed into one of the boats and lowered the outboard motor into the water.

“Now maybe we’ll get some action,” Don said. He had come up behind her, but he was talking more to himself than to her. Christine sometimes wondered whether he talked in the same way when she wasn’t there at all.

A second man, East Indian, like the first, and also in a hula-dancer shirt, was standing at the top of the steps, and they understood they were to go over. He took their money and gave each of them a business card in return; on one side of it was a coloured picture of an ibis, on the other a name and a phone number. They went single file down the steps and the first man handed them into the boat. When they were all seated – Don, Christine, Lilian, and the pink-suited woman in a crowded row, the two baseball-cap men in front of them, the Mennonite woman and the couple with the cameras at the very front – the second man cast off and hopped lightly into the bow. After a few tries the first man got the motor started, and they putt-putted slowly towards an opening in the trees, leaving a wispy trail of smoke behind them.

It was cloudier now, and not so hot. Christine talked with the pink-suited woman, who had blonde hair elegantly done up in a French roll. She was from Vienna, she said; her husband was here on business. This was the first time she had been on this side of the Atlantic Ocean. The beaches were beautiful, much finer than those of the Mediterranean. Christine complimented her on her good English, and the woman smiled and told her what a beautiful little girl she had, and Christine said Lilian would get conceited, a word that the woman had not yet added to her vocabulary. Lilian was quiet; she had caught sight of the woman’s bracelet, which was silver and lavishly engraved. The woman showed it to her. Christine began to enjoy herself, despite the fact that the two men in front of her were talking too loudly. They were drinking beer, from cans they’d brought with them in a paper bag. She opened a Pepsi and shared some with Lilian. Don didn’t want any.

They were in a channel now; she looked at the trees on either side, which were all the same, dark-leaved, rising up out of the water, on masses of spindly roots. She didn’t know how long they’d been going.

It began to rain, not a downpour but heavily enough, large cold drops. The Viennese woman said, “It’s raining,” her eyes open in a parody of surprise, holding out her hand and looking up at the sky like someone in a child’s picture book. This was for the benefit of Lilian. “We will get wet,” she said. She took a white embroidered handkerchief out of her purse and spread it on the top of her head. Lilian was enchanted with the handkerchief and asked Christine if she could have one, too. Don said they should have known, since it always rained in the afternoons here.

The men in baseball caps hunched their shoulders, and one of them said to the Indian in the bow, “Hey, we’re getting wet!”

The Indian’s timid but closed expression did not change; with apparent reluctance he pulled a rolled-up sheet of plastic out from somewhere under the front seat and handed it to the men. They spent some time unrolling it and getting it straightened out, and then everyone helped to hold the plastic overhead like a roof, while the boat glided on at its unvarying pace, through the mangroves and the steam or mist that was now rising around them.

“Isn’t this an adventure?” Christine said, aiming it at Lilian. Lilian was biting her nails. The rain pattered down. Don said he wished he’d brought a paper. The men in baseball caps began to sing, sounding oddly like boys at a summer camp who had gone to sleep one day and awakened thirty years later, unaware of the sinister changes that had taken place in them, the growth and recession of hair and flesh, the exchange of their once-clear voices for the murky ones that were now singing off-key, out of time:

“They say that in the army,
the girls are rather fine,
They promise Betty Grable,
they give you Frankenstein …”

They had not yet run out of beer. One of them finished a can and tossed it overboard, and it bobbed beside the boat for a moment before falling behind, a bright red dot in the borderless expanse of dull green and dull grey. Christine felt virtuous: she’d put her Pepsi can carefully into her bag, for disposal later.

Then the rain stopped, and after some debate about whether it was going to start again or not, the two baseball-cap men began to roll up the plastic sheet. While they were doing this there was a jarring thud. The boat rocked violently, and the one man who was standing up almost pitched overboard, then sat down with a jerk.

“What the hell?” he said.

The Indian at the back reversed the motor.

“We hit something,” said the Viennese woman. She clasped her hands, another classic gesture.

“Obviously,” Don said in an undertone. Christine smiled at Lilian, who was looking anxious. The boat started forward again.

“Probably a mangrove root,” said the man with the cameras, turning half round. “They grow out under the water.” He was the kind who would know.

“Or an alligator,” said one of the men in baseball caps. The other man laughed.

“He’s joking, darling,” Christine said to Lilian.

“But we are sinking,” said the Viennese woman, pointing with one outstretched hand, one dramatic finger.

Then they all saw what they had not noticed before. There was a hole in the boat, near the front, right above the platform of loose boards that served as a floor. It was the size of a small fist. Whatever they’d hit had punched right through the wood, as if it were cardboard. Water was pouring through.

“This tub must be completely rotten,” Don muttered, directly to Christine this time. This was a role she was sometimes given when they were among people Don didn’t know: the listener. “They get like that in the tropics.”

“Hey,” said one of the men in baseball caps. “You up front. There’s a hole in the goddamned boat.”

The Indian glanced over his shoulder at the hole. He shrugged, looked away, began fishing in the breast pocket of his sports shirt for a cigarette.

“Hey. Turn this thing around,” said the man with the camera.

“Couldn’t we get it fixed, and then start again?” said Christine, intending to conciliate. She glanced at the Mennonite woman, hoping for support, but the woman’s broad flowered back was towards her.

“If we go back,” the Indian said patiently – he could understand English after all – “you miss the birds. It will be too dark.”

“Yeah, but if we go forward we sink.”

“You will not sink,” said the Indian. He had found a cigarette, already half-smoked, and was lighting it.

“He’s done it before,” said the largest baseball cap. “Every week he gets a hole in the goddamned boat. Nothing to it.”

The brown water continued to come in. The boat went forward.

“Right,” Don said, loudly, to everyone this time. “He thinks if we don’t see the birds, we won’t pay him.”

That made sense to Christine. For the Indians, it was a lot of money. They probably couldn’t afford the gas if they lost the fares. “If you go back, we’ll pay you anyway,” she called to the Indian. Ordinarily she would have made this suggestion to Don, but she was getting frightened.

Either the Indian didn’t hear her or he didn’t trust them, or it wasn’t his idea of a fair bargain. He didn’t smile or reply.

For a few minutes they all sat there, waiting for the problem to be solved. The trees went past. Finally Don said, “We’d better bail. At this rate we’ll be in serious trouble in about half an hour.”

“I should not have come,” said the Viennese woman, in a tone of tragic despair.

“What with?” said the man with the cameras. The men in baseball caps had turned to look at Don, as if he were worthy of attention.

“Mummy, are we going to sink?” said Lilian.

“Of course not, darling,” said Christine, “Daddy won’t let us.”

“Anything there is,” said the largest baseball-cap man. He poured the rest of his beer over the side. “You got a jack-knife?” he said.