The New Moon's Arms (13 page)

I
THOUGHT IT WOULD BE LIKE RIDING A BICYCLE
; you know they say you never forget how? But I was beginning to have my doubts.

There I hung where I’d found myself. No, where I’d
put
myself; halfway up the trunk of the almond tree on the cliff, my arms and legs wrapped round it in a grip so intimate it was practically lewd. And I was stuck. Shit. I weighed almost three times what I had at ten years old, and I now had arthritis in one knee.

I managed to turn my head and look down. It was a good seven-foot drop to the ground. Little Chastity would have leapt the distance like a tree frog and barely noticed the effort, but when I even thought of jumping down from that height, I could practically hear my kneecaps warning me of the consequences. They would pop right off, they promised. They would roll down the hill and over the cliff, and nobody would ever find them again, and I’d be lying under the tree, kneecapless and sorry.

I tightened my all-fours grip on the tree trunk. The first crotch of branches was fanned out just above my head. All I had to do was reach up with one hand and grab that nice, sturdy branch right there, lever myself up into the tree by it. I tried to extend my arm. But that caused a quaking in my other limbs. I wrapped my arm back around the trunk.

My left foot began to slip on the smooth almond bark. I was going to slide all the way down the trunk! I tried not to imagine what that would do to my inner thighs.

My toes touched a hard knob of living wood. The Knot! That was how I used to get up into my tree. This tree had a knot just like it. Just like it.

I used to put the toes of my left foot on the Knot, just like they were now. That would give me just enough purchase so that I could reach up around the torso of the tree with my left hand, like so…yes, there was the stub of a torn-off branch; the Handle. I hoped it would bear my weight. I grabbed onto it, stretched my other hand up and got hold of a good solid branch that forked out from the tree’s crotch. I wrapped both my arms around it.

What did I used to do next? I stayed there for a while, catching my breath and trying to remember. Oh, yes. Oh, shit. Was I still that flexible? I looked down again at the drop to the ground. I’d better be.

It took five tries, but I finally managed to lever my right leg up over the branch I was holding on to. By then my arms were trembling like coconut jelly and my fingers were beginning to let go.

But I knew that my legs wouldn’t let me down. “Thunder Thighs,” Mumma used to call Chastity proudly. I hooked one leg around the branch and flexed. I shifted a little. I squeezed harder, used my arms to twist my body. The motion pulled me up into the crook of the tree. I heard the inner seam of my clam-diggers giving away from the stress and the friction, but I’d done it! I had gotten back up in my almond tree, after all these years!

Not as skillfully as I’d imagined. I was lying in the crook of the tree, curled around its trunk. My inner thigh muscles were burning, and I’d probably skinned a few of my fingertips. And I was too exhausted to move. A nasty big greenwhip snake could come down out of the tree after me right now and I wouldn’t budge, not a rass.

But thinking about a greenwhip slipping through the branches towards me, I found that I could move after all. In fact, I was already sitting up and somehow edging my bottom over to that branch over there that looked sturdy enough for me. Careful, girl, careful.

And there I was, wedged into a V of branches like the one that used to be my childhood seat. It didn’t fit my fifty-three-year-old behind very well, but jammed in like that, at least I wasn’t going to fall. My problem would be getting unstuck.

Chuh. Worry about that later. I braced my feet on another branch, leaned against the trunk of the tree and got as comfortable as I could. Now for my book. A lazy morning reading a trashy mystery.

I’d put my book down to have my hands free to climb. There it was, lying at the foot of the tree, at the wrong end of gravity. “Fuck!” I screamed, scaring a kiskedee bird out of a sea grape bush.

A movement out on the beach far below me caught my eye. A man, strolling. He’d better be a resident. There was a kind of tourist that didn’t give two two’s about private property. I wrapped my arm around a branch above me and tried to pull myself free. If that was an intruder, I was going to give him a good West Indian style cussing; burn his ears right off for him and send him on his way.

I pulled on the branch. My ass stayed wedged. I pulled again. Nothing. I pushed down on the arms of the branches entrapping my behind. That worked, though it tore the seams of my clam-diggers open a little more. But I was on a mission now. Full of the fire of righteousness, I swung myself down towards the trunk. It would have worked, too, except that my already exhausted hands wouldn’t hold me. My fingers opened and I crashed to the ground, flat on my back.

“Oww! Damn it all to hell, man!” My body was thrumming like a quattro string. For a few seconds, I just lay where I was, taking stock. Head felt okay, though rattled. Back holding up. Elbow—ouch. My elbow had banged a rockstone when I landed. Hurt like blazes, but didn’t seem broken. Legs? Yes, I could move them. Toes too.

Slowly, I rolled to one side, then up onto my knees. The arthritic one yelled at me.

I was shaking. The muscles in my arms could scarcely bear my weight. But I made it to my feet, started brushing the dirt off my behind.

What was lumpy in my pocket? I put my hand in, and came away with the bread and butter I’d brought for my breakfast, squashed to a third of its former width. It was oozing butter onto my hands. I threw the wretched thing into the sea grape bush and wiped my hand on the almond tree bark.

Oh, that man on the beach was really going to get it now!

I grabbed up my book and stomped down the path on shaky legs, working up a good head of steam. People wandering all over other people’s homes, looking for “local colour,” always going where they weren’t supposed to go.

By some miracle I made it to the shore without tripping. I approached the man.

It was Hector. I couldn’t tell for certain at first. He had his back to me. Sure looked like his kind of outfit; bright green wetsuit with purple inserts. I wasn’t sure about his colour sense, but I couldn’t hate a suit that showed off his assets like that.

He turned and caught me staring at his butt. Oops. “Oh, hi, Hector,” I said with a silly little wave.

He smiled as though someone had just brought him a surprise present. “Calamity!”

I hadn’t had a chance before to look at him good. He was a nice-looking man—the kind of solid, easy-to-smile face you could imagine waking up to see every morning. “I just wanted to find out… Well, these are people’s homes on Dolorosse. You know that, right?” Oh, damn. I was babbling.

“Well, I—”

“Every year we get tourists bothering us.” I have a thing for beefy shoulders. “Sneaking out here, getting drunk…” And that wetsuit was so tight I could make out his nipples.

“But I have—”

“Playing their music loud enough to wake the dead, taking their clothes off…” Whoops. Wrong thing to put my mind on. I tried hard to keep my eyes above the belly button. I almost succeeded.

“Next thing you know, some white woman with more rum in her belly than sense in her head going to mistake a seal for a mermaid…”
Or see a real one.
“…and half-drown herself trying to swim after it…” I stuttered to a halt. Damn. Get me bothered and I get snippy. And garrulous. Not a good combination.

“I have permission to be here,” Hector said.

“Yeah?” If I stuck to monosyllables, maybe I wouldn’t make a total ass of myself.

Now he looked mildly amused. “Yeah. From the government of Cayaba. Research permit.”

“Oh. That’s all right, then.” Then I
giggled
! I don’t
giggle
. Damned man was making me simper.

“I could bring it and show you, if you like.”

“No, that won’t be necessary. I believe you.” Thank heaven for skin dark enough to hide that I was blushing.

“I promise I won’t bring any drunken tourist women to cavort naked on this beach.”

Sheepish silence while we grinned foolishly at each other. Sheepish on my side, anyway. “I saw you from the almond tree on the cliff,” I blurted. That would get us off the topic of nakedness. “I was up in it.”

He looked to where I had pointed. “Wow. Not too many people our age climb trees.”

“Our age? How old would your age be, exactly?”

“Forty-three.”

“Well, I’m one or two years older than that, but I made it up into that tree today. Yesterday, it didn’t even exis…”

Yes, it
had
. It had been there all the time.

But the Knot, and the Handle…?

“Can I show you something?” he asked. He took me to the edge of the surf and pointed to some slabs of rock jutting out of the water.

There were three adult monk seals and two babies, sunning themselves. They usually preferred the small, uninhabited islands.

“Aren’t they marvellous?” He said. “People hunted them nearly to extinction, but they’re hanging on. By rights monk seals shouldn’t even exist, you know. They’re phocids, for Christ’s sake. In the tropics! They’re balanced on an evolutionary knife edge.”

“You mean because they’re almost extinct?”

“Not just that. You know what the biggest problem is for a seal?”

“How to catch fish without any hands.”

A puzzled frown.

“It’s a joke,” I said.

“Oh.” Derailed, he seemed at a loss for words for a second. Then: “Their biggest problem is heat.”

“Well, they solved that. Plenty of heat here in the tropics.”

“But you see, water has twenty times the conductivity of air.”

“Beg pardon?” I had no idea what he was talking about.

“Water will chill your body down twenty times faster than air. Even warm water will do that.”

“All right,” I said, “so seals need to stay warm. That’s why they’re so fat, right?”

“Yeah. Works fine in the water. But they haul out onto land every so often, to sleep, to breed, to moult… And they don’t have sweat glands. So in this part of the world, they start to overheat in about ninety minutes.”

He glanced at me. “Sorry,” he said. “If you start me up on this subject, I sometimes forget to stop. And these seals,” he continued, forgetting to stop, “the Cayaba seals; they have a big mystery to them.”

“How you mean?”

“They’re not Caribbean monk seals.”

“Why not? They’re in the Caribbean.”

He shook his head. “Don’t matter. They’re
Monarchus monarchus
, not
Monarchus tropicalis
.
Mediterranean
monk seals. I’m trying to figure out how they got here in the first place. That’s what I’m studying. But first, I need to get an idea what the real size of the population is: study their movement patterns and return rates, tag any newborn babies, conduct a census of them every few days.” He frowned. “I have to work on that. I keep getting the numbers wrong.”

“The Cayaba government don’t do that research?”

“The Zooquarium does, yes. But they haven’t gotten around yet to figuring out how a colony of
monachus
ended up way over here.”

I was boiling. When the sun got so hot?

“…most primitive living pinnipeds,” said Hector.

God, the heat was getting worse.

“…derelict fishing nets…danger…”

Hector didn’t even seem to notice it. Me, my whole body was burning. I could feel the tips of my ears getting red, my cheeks flushing.

“
Brucella
… Calamity? You all right?”

“I don’t know. Too much sun.” I wiped some perspiration from my brow. My hand came away wet.

“You sweating like you just run a marathon.”

“A lady doesn’t sweat.” Dried sweat was irritating my hand. I rubbed it against the fabric of my pants. “Jesus, it so hot!”

Hector looked worried. “That tree over there will give you some shade. Come.”

But before we could take a step, something soft and light grazed my head from above, then landed at Hector’s feet. “The hell is that?” he cried out. He bent to pick it up.

“It didn’t hurt me. I’m okay.” Much better, in fact. The heat was passing off rapidly. I was even chilly.

Hector straightened up. “Where this came from?” He looked up at the sky. I followed his gaze. Nothing but blue. Not even the cloud that must have just covered the sun and made me shiver.

I looked down from the sky, blinked the glare away. Hector showed me the thing he was holding.

I grabbed her out of his hand. Bare Bear. Chastity’s Bare Bear. Held so tightly and loved so hard that her little stuffed rump was threadbare, her little gingham dress long gone. “Where this came from?”

“Look like it just fell out of the sky.”

“No, man; don’t joke. It must have washed up with the tide.”

“And landed on your head?”

“I don’t know; maybe this was on the sand already, and something else fell on my head.” Bare Bear winked her one glass eye at me. So long I hadn’t seen her. “A leaf from out a sea grape tree, something like that. Right, Bare Bear?” I hugged Lucky Bare Bear to my chest. I grinned at Hector. “She get small over the years. Or I get big.” She still fit in her old place, up against my breastbone.