Mysteries of Motion (22 page)

Lievering and she, they learned, were to be married out on the fields, and as arranged by Odgers and delighted mass sentiment, on the very patch she and Lievering had worked. The marriage was to take place in the presence of everybody, which here was felt to be presence indeed. When, left alone, she searched her straw bag and this time tore open Vivie’s star-papered going-away gift, her eyes smarted. Back home there was a woman on an island near theirs who made huge-sleeved blouses pieced of tiny, fluttering, leaf-sized parts, each attached at one point only. Brides queued up to buy them. Vivie had offered her two, each folded like a parachute, the one red-black, the other tawny and blue—vine and sky. She chose that one.

From the crowd of watching girls dressed in a range of work outfits dramatizing what they were here as, one girl, in khaki and clogs but capless and with a crinkled waterfall of hair, tore open packets for her to blot the road dust from her face. Getting into the spirit, another in bandanna and thongs from which swollen toes protruded brought her a bucket for her feet. She wiped her sandals herself. She always had spare jeans; no one else’s ever fitted her. She let someone squirt perfume. Except in those cuddles of self-savoring which kids had, or for Lievering and the metaphor, she didn’t really want to smell. It was then that the plumpie girl had sneaked up and hot-whispered her advice—to be a giver. Three glee-club-trained sisters then opened their mouths wide as fledglings and serenaded her in one angelic voice. Through all this she wondered what the men might be doing to Lievering. When she was ready she was offered a wreath crown, but refused.

When she saw him approaching her over the sharp stubble in the center of a ragtag wedding procession like her own, tenderness locked her throat. At that distance, away from his intensity and from her so recent enfoldment by it, she saw again how the beautiful head was too large for him, the rest of him a degree too small. He wore the shirt he had washed, open at the throat, and his town pants. The wreath they must have offered him was around the preacher Odgers’s neck. No one could make Lievering do what he didn’t want to—at least not in the small things. What he did want, that was another matter. He’d succumbed to this ritual somewhat as she had, because it coincided with rites of his own. But she would never have to pray to remember him with dignity. As he came to a halt beside her there was a tinge of irony on the near corner of his mouth. She could admit that there must be a number of categories he had escaped.

After this wedding there’d be one more. She closed her eyes for it. Odgers, maybe from unease, married them—or made his pantomime—hurriedly. “Now, do you take—” he said suddenly, from a mixture of verse and admonition, saw that bride and groom, each sunk in reverie or willfulness, might never respond, and with a mutter went on without. “By the authority vested in
you
—” Odgers said, “I pronounce you man and wife.” Lievering had no ring but gave her the locket. She gave him nothing, as brides were allowed to do. And as in her heart prepared. For a minute there seemed to rise an awful brass admixture of song sadly falling off, and squawked instrument. Then much too many cheers. Someone snapping pictures, hands high. Oh Vivie, you won’t want those.

Then she saw that the whole field had turned from her and Lievering toward a small cortege circling the fields—a soldier on motorcycle, followed by a soldier-driven jeep with a sole occupant, a bearded man in the same khaki cap as those the camp issued, backed up by a very small, monotonously tootling band. It was the Agenda, with Music.

A wave of people melted past the two of them and toward it, like movie extras driven by a blow-horn. She was in luck. She reached out and gave the stunned Jimmy Odgers a push. “Time to pray. Why not to him? Castro. Looks like a good guy. Go on. Git.” He seemed guiltily glad to, not waiting to be thanked. “Why—” she quavered, watching him spring in a wide circle, dipping elbow on the turns before he took off straight, “he’s high on something. Don’t believe he is a preacher. Want to bet he’s not even ordained?” Then she was alone, with Lievering.

“Good-bye,” she said. “I don’t ever want to stop,” she’d said. “Not like you imagine it. But we both got our wish.”

Then she ran, hobbling and slithering her way across a field that was like a patchwork of good intentions, though in one corner a stand of cane was still uncut. Four of the students, one morning rising earlier than the rest to join their disgruntlement over “conditions,” had been found chanting “Stand-out, Sta-and-out,” against “bosses” who they couldn’t quite be persuaded were themselves, or their representatives. It had been a curious political fact that the four had been among the most physically conservative in the camp as well as among the richest—as one of the loose-smiling Bridgetown thugs had said, “People not used to wearing each other’s socks.” Credit-card radicals, who’d wished to keep the revolution as tidy as themselves, and as conventionally rich.

“Save me from organized protest meeting, rump or any other kind,” Tom Gilpin would one day say. “If you can protest only by shooting off your mouth
en masse
or standing on some sort of regulation, you’re no use to us. We want people who are their own protest, in every cell. People who’re surreal naturally—and I don’t mean freaks. Powerful mutants, who will never want to be the main drag. But who in spite of themselves may end up being it.” That’s what Tom’s ambition had been then, though ambition was a dirty word with him. It had been appropriate that back there, hacking her way across a field and away from her own false wedding, she’d been about to meet him for the first time. The man who, as he sometimes told her, was the asexual influence in her life. Who comported himself as if he meant to be that in everybody’s.

When she reached the dirt road which led to the mess hall, she bent forward to a wind though there was none, stretching into a long, chopping stride; these legs of hers could run. They breezed her right into the middle of the hall before she could rein up at the sight of the two boys she thought of as thugs—punks wasn’t quite the word either—going through a row of people’s bags.

“Just lookin’—” the tall one named Marcy had said lazily in the American rock-singer talk they both affected. “Like the ladies in mah brother’s shop.” On the island his brother ran a smart boutique. “We didn’t take nothin’,” the fatter one, the sidekick, said. The first one clicked his teeth. “Tuh—should have done. For the symmetry.” If they had, where would they put it, wearing those scroungy T-shirts and sharp, pocketless jeans? “You looking for dope?” she’d said. The sidekick had giggled, teetering. He opened his mouth wide and took out a bridge made of four or five teeth. “Got it in Amsterdam.” In places it was crudely hollow. “Leaks a little,” he said happily. “Look over here,” Marcy said, pointing to her bag. “Miss anything?”

Against her will, she searched. “No. Yes.” Vivie’s other blouse. “Look down the line, missy.” She didn’t want to. The blouse, tucked well under, was in the third bag down, belonging to the plump girl so interested in her wedding night. “Imagine—” the other boy said, popping in his bridge. “Pinching your going-away outfit.” Marcy was rescattering all the duffel bags, backpacks and suitcases in canny disorder. Spies, were they? And for whom?

At Miss Lacey’s the pimps, stool-lolling in their wild livery and five-pound shoes, had talked a code as complicated as lying, though their brains were caramel—which clearly these boys’ brains were not. If the two weren’t pimps, which she was sure of, nor yet quite students, which she would bet on, nor merely thieves, then what profession did they belong to which gave them a tinge of all three? And whom did they work for?

“Let her have the blouse,” she’d said. “Let her have him. If she can wear them. It wasn’t really a wedding, was it?” She glared at them hard, convinced they would know.

“I sure suspicion not.” The expression of Marcy’s face was quite brotherly. Not like Ali. Like an elder brother for real.

“If it wasn’t, why’d you go through with it?” The giggler had a pie-face which said nothing. Maybe other parts of him than his bridge were hollow too.

She scowled hard over his question. Why had she? Outside, strains of music were approaching—that band. And probably all the followers, streaming after it across the fields like in some movie the extras themselves were making, on location the world, and scarier than any Hollywood. “It was on the Agenda, I guess.”

They burst out laughing. Years later, bumping into them in Amsterdam, she would spend an evening with them in a café on the Singel Canal, learning that they still spoke of her, and that two things only counted with them: money and wit. Who they worked for was no mystery—themselves. After that, anybody. Even Castro.

“Looky here—” she said on her wedding day, “will you help me get to New York?”

“Go from Barbados,” Marcy said.

“Vivie’d never let me. I’d have to finish out the term.”

Plainly they knew of Vivie.

“Can’t get to the U.S. straight from here,” Marcy’d said severely, lifting his long, cropped skull and cleft upper lip. Long gray peanut of a boy, with smart-curved principles not good enough for his brain.

“I’ll go anywhere. On the way.”

“Like us.” The fat one giggled.

“I’ve got money.” She fanned out her travelers’ checks and hard dollars. Vivie’d given her the year’s tuition and allowance all at once, to put her on a par with the rich girls whose parents were money-training them.
Not that you’re not money-trained, lova-bunny. But to have confidence.

She’d had it—her own brand of it. She had it yet—what would others call it? Nothing, if they didn’t have it themselves. That deep fund of the will to live, will to express, into which, when trembling, she could dip as into a purse.

“Whee, lookit what she got,” the sidekick said. “Look at all that lovelly paper.”

“Lovely,” Marcy said. Absently he waved the money aside. “What say we check with his nibs? About a plane.” She was made to put the money away; on the Singel they’d laughed at how little it had been. Her ticket back to the island was acceptable; the sidekick pocketed it. “Take your bag with you,” Marcy said. “Okay, you want to leave her the blouse?”

“I’d like to leave something here.” Sky filled the mess hall’s high window. The troupe’s scattered goods, from rush baskets to chromed record players, glinted with a second-sight doubleness. Memory had already painted this.

“Ain’t you?” the sidekick had said. “Ain’t you already done that?”

They led her outside the mess hall, across the beat-down grass where cars and trucks were parked hit-or-miss, and out to a break in the road, where they planted her.

“Stand just here,” Marcy’d said. “Just as you are. Don’t move.”

Here the road branched. One way led to the village two miles away, where if you were bored with end-of-the-world talk, as some of the flightier Americans labeled the afternoon seminars, you could wander in and out of the sandy bare post office, once a chapel, where only a native could mail a letter anyway—that is if the postmistress was in attendance, instead of only her hound bitch. Or you could go into the café, as Veronica and Lievering had done, and have iceless syrup soda in which floated some slippery berry said to come from palm. The other branch of the road led to the cottage from which she had come.

Far down the road to the village she could see the trailing crowd, now almost orderly. What they were following was hidden, but must be the jeep. For some reason she felt herself to be watching a battle. Perhaps it was the way the two roads deployed, clean as map tracings under the fiery sun. Behind her, all the random vehicles seemed aimed at the post office and café, at the garbage cans, at her. Scraps of half-known battle words filled her head: advance guard, sentinel. Was that what she was? The sun beat down. The music was only distant noise now; then with a last
whang
of brass it stopped.

She’d forgotten her hat. Maybe the woman had found it by now, and adopted it. Or maybe it still lay on the nail where she herself had hung it, watching the departures of people as only objects can. Let it. She hated the thing. She began to cry for it, in hate. There was a handkerchief in her bag but she wouldn’t bend for it. Stand there, they’d said. She bent her head to one of the big sleeves which puffed out on either side of her. The crossroads made a breeze here, lifting each point of cloth on them. The motion of her own dress always seemed to her part of nature’s motion. As much as any of those insects called the Articulata, who were all segments, she too was bodywalk and brainwalk joined together, centered in a circle of its own traversing. She began to laugh.

Luckily. The staff car, the jeep, emerging from behind its ambush, the crowd, was bearing toward her, creeping so slowly it seemed not to move, only to be steady on the air like a mirage, in its own plane of light. The khaki figure in front, khaki-capped, held binoculars, trained on her.

Twenty yards or so from her, the jeep stopped. She held steady, estimating the yards—about the same distance she’d once measured from Vivie’s island house door to their landlord’s, after which their own garden could legally begin. The binoculars came on, didn’t lower. She could feel the gaze behind them, not only the one known from movies of the face, or pictures, but brown and intimate, boring into her. The jeep wobbled—bad terrain, your nibs—but the hand and the gaze held firm. So did her sleeves, not billowing. The jeep came to a stop.

For a minute, she’d thought he was going to motion her into it. Instead he said something over his shoulder, from behind the binoculars. The two thugs, who were in the jeep in back, scrambled down. Then, lowering the binoculars, he doffed his cap to her, and she saw that he, too, was laughing. The brown glance was as she had felt it would be. There was a military name maybe for its mixture of geniality, chill and range. He said something. The jeep wheeled at his signal, ground the dirt and took off.

The two boys ambled toward her, looking the same as before; they might have just dropped off a bus. They’d stayed that casual the whole time, all the way to the plane.

“What did he say?” She wasn’t going to leave this to guesswork.