The Perfect Order of Things (15 page)

It was late afternoon when the minivan passed through San Agatha on the north coast of Isla La Mar. Dozens of young black men standing around the town square, bored, looking for tourists to hustle. We followed the shoreline up into the West End, the landscape speckled with paper cups, bottles, candy bar papers. The bars and cafés, the road itself, they were strangely unpeopled.

“Where is everyone?” I asked.

The driver looked at me in the mirror with an expression of practised, low-level menace. Just on the brink but not quite there.

“They don’t come this far anymore,” he said. He kept his eyes on me. I knew that face, the what-can-I-get-from-this-guy face.

I leaned my forehead against the warm glass. My temples ached. A fat black woman sat on a stoop in front of a shack. T-shirts and knitted caps hanging in the window behind her. It was Pamela waiting for a busload of tourists to sample her hashish cakes on the way to the Café Havana for sunset. Just thinking about her and them and it, that piddly little sunset, made me tired. The driver turned on the radio. Terrible, tinny reggae. A dying art form. No one since Bob Marley.

But what was happening? Why this sour mood change? Clearly it was time for another OxyContin. Running low. Very low. A worrisome moment. But short-lived: munch, munch, pause, munch, munch, and little by little the colour returned to the ocean, the palm trees, the little yellow shacks by the roadside. The music grew attractive hooks. Just this and no more, I thought, if I could just stay like this, all day, every day, I’d be happy for the rest of my life.

And then I was thinking about Nessa Cornblum, about her beautiful young face looking out the van window when we made this drive decades ago, the last golden sunlight playing on her features, me falling in love with her and not knowing it. How does she look now, I wondered?

I asked the driver to drop me off down the road from the hotel. I wanted a slow, sweet return. He pulled over. “Ten dollars,” he said.

“I’ve already paid.”

“No, no, this is a gasoline tax. Everybody must pay it.”

“I’m not paying it.”

He watched me pull my bag from the rear of the van and played his last card. “You don’t like black people?”

“Not especially,” I said. “I bet you don’t hear that very often, do you?”

I walked slowly up the road. There it was, fifty yards away, twenty yards, then ten yards, the awning with the sea-green letters: HOTEL LA MAR. PROPRIETOR MR. DEVANE JOHNSTON. I went up the front steps and looked into the bar where Dexter had danced with the girls from Mississippi. A black metal gate with a comically large padlock stretched across the entrance. I peered through the bars. Old dresses and shirts and trousers and shoes lay stacked on the tables where Nessa had eaten her breakfast, where she had said to me, “Be careful with yourself today.” The bar seemed to have been relegated to a kind of storage room for things nobody wanted. Where were they, those girls from Mississippi?

A light flickered in the interior of the hotel. I went toward it. Devane Johnston, grey-haired now, was sitting in a small, windowless office with a television set playing in front of him; the tube was blown, the screen was green and cast an unpleasant light over him. On the wall behind him was a patch of circular discoloration, a grease stain from where he leaned back to rest his head.

“Devane?” I said. He was asleep.

“Devane?” Eyes opened in a large black face.

“It could have fallen from the ice truck . . .” he said. He was still dreaming.

“Do you remember me, Devane?” He rubbed his features with a big hand and looked at me again. I could hear him breathing through his nose.

After a moment, he said, “You’re still here.”

“Well, it’s been a while, for sure. But yes, yes, I’m back.” I listened to the silence of the hotel. “Where are all your dogs?”

“Somebody poisoned them.”

“You didn’t get any more?”

“No. No more dogs.”

His eyes returned to the television screen. A soccer game.

“Who’s playing?”

“I don’t really know.”

We sat for a moment, the green stick figures dashing about on the screen. He picked up the phone and dialed a number. He said my name and then something else in patois. Then he repeated it more forcefully.

“Is that your wife, Aiesha?”

“Hmm.”

Good, I thought, his wife was always fond of me.

“Where are the other guests?”

“There aren’t any.”

I inquired about a slim, rather wry waiter who used to work there. Gone to the States with an American girl he met at the hotel. I inquired about Devane’s mistress, the one he used to fool around with while Aiesha was teaching school a few islands over in Port-au-Prince.

“Still good.” I asked him more questions, but I soon noticed that the ball never came back over the net. He didn’t ask where I’d come from, how long I’d been in town, even if I was going to stay at his hotel. And this was something of a disappointment. I had told my children perhaps too many times about the famous Hotel La Mar and its commanding proprietor. The former burly police officer who had quit the island’s force, immigrated to England, earned a degree in engineering while raising a family of four, and returned to San Agatha to build the hotel with his own hands. A hotel that had been for many years a favourite getaway for middle-class Canadians and their young families.

To be honest, I’d rather imagined that he might be curious about what I’d been up to during all these, what, twenty, twenty-five years. Apparently not. I mentioned a trip we took once, Devane and I, in his pickup truck to the south end of the island to buy a new refrigerator. No, he didn’t recall that. I reminded him of that time we carried that poor boy from Kansas City to his room (sunstroke). A blank there too.

“Do you still keep a gun in the safe?”

Someone scored a goal and from the little green screen came the rolling, slightly sickening chant of an English soccer match.

“Can we turn off the TV for a second?” I said.

“Of course.”

I gave it a final shot. I reminded him of Justin Straw-bridge and told him the story of the Duane Hickok killing. It appeared to have been the only thing I’d said so far that caught his attention.

“But he’s good now?” Devane said.

“Well, he’s out of jail if that’s what you mean.”

“Well, good. That’s what I’m interested in hearing.” I found this remark puzzling. Was I being too self-congratulatory? Taking too much relish in the misfortune of an old friend?

“I’d like to spend a night or two here, Devane. Can I have my old room, the one upstairs with the balcony facing the road?”

“That’s got air conditioning now.”

“It’ll be a cool night. I won’t be using it.”

“The air conditioning is twenty-five U.S. extra.”

I diverted my eyes to disguise my embarrassment. “Shall I pay now?”

A skinny man appeared in the doorway. He was wearing a pair of jeans several sizes too large secured by a leather belt that was also too long and hung like a snake down the front of his pants. The skinny man, Lee, carried my bag off into the night; I could hear his feet going up the stairs to the room almost above us. To the room with the balcony.

I started to leave. “Oh, Devane. Do you remember Nessa Cornblum? The girl with the beautiful nose?”

“Nessa. . . ?” he said, and tilted his head to the side. “The one that give you such hell?”

“Yes, that one.”

He chuckled and slid a few inches down his chair, settling his hands on his stomach.

“Did she ever come back?”

He thought for a moment. “Yes,” he said. “Five or six years ago. She was looking for someone.”

“Who?”

“A French guy.”

“Did she stay here?”

He thought for a moment, resting his head against the greasy circle. “Just one night. Then she disappeared.” I could hear the croaking of night frogs in the foliage behind the hotel. “She must have found him,” Devane said, and chuckled again.

Was he putting it to me?

“I’m sorry about your dogs,” I said, rising to leave.

“I know who did it, but I can’t prove it.”

Going down the hall, I could hear the soccer game. Like dead men swaying.

I went to the front of the hotel and sat down on the steps. What had just happened? Who was the man in the windowless office? My “old friend” Devane? Oh dear. How could I ever have been so naive? Or was it that he’d just gotten old, an old man with a dying hotel and he didn’t give much of a shit about anything anymore, including his wife to whom he had spoken on the phone in a flat, cold voice, the way islanders talk to their help. Then I remembered that she hadn’t bothered to come out and say hello.

A hand touched my shoulder. I jumped. It was Lee, the man who had carried away my bag. “Do you want me to send a girl to your room?” he asked.

“A girl?”

He nodded.

“Where would you get a girl from, Lee?”

He pointed to the far end of the hotel, an ugly two-floor cement addition that looked like a motel in Florida. A clothesline with a few ghostly shirts hung in front.

“You mean they live on the
property
?”

He nodded.

I said, “When did this happen?”

“When did what happen?”

“How long has Devane let whores live in the Hotel La Mar?”

Over my head, I heard a television go on.

“That’s Larry,” he said. “From Texas.”

“Just me and the girls and Larry upstairs?” I said.

“Yes, sir.” This mechanically, as if he were repeating the obvious. Then he again looked down at me with a pair of shattered eyeballs. “So I fix you up with a lady tonight?”

I went upstairs and lay down on the deck chair on the balcony in front of my room and tried to think about Nessa and Justin and that night under the moonlight. How it had felt, the sight of her on his lap, as if a huge metal pipe had come swinging through the darkness and hit me right here, in the chest. The personification of everything you feared . . . But the deck chair was filthy and I had to go back inside and get a towel and wipe it down. Nobody cleaned anything anymore at the Hotel La Mar.

I had just settled back down when I heard flip-flop footsteps coming up the stairs. It was Larry from Texas. He was a bland-looking man in a green shirt with bright yellow bananas on it; my age, mid-fifties, with a white plastic nose shield. With that thinning fair hair, he must have been especially sensitive to the Caribbean sun. We chatted for a bit. I found his southern ease comforting. Maybe we could have a drink sometime, I suggested.

“Wish I could,” he said, adjusting his baseball cap and squinting down the road, “but I’m going home tomorrow.” He took off his sunglasses, revealing a pair of extraordinarily blue eyes. “I don’t want this summer to be like last summer.”

“I beg your pardon?”

But he didn’t answer. He pointed those bright blue eyes down the road as if he were hoping someone would appear just at the bend, coming this way, but knew at the same time that no one would. It stayed with me for a while, that remark “I don’t want this summer to be like last summer.” There was something mildly sinister about it, something that whispered
Pay attention
. But pay attention to what?

It was dark by the time I set off down the road. I walked along the top of the seawall; I put out my arms like I used to in the old days. (I was a lot thinner then.) A wind had come up; the waves crashed against the wall and for a few minutes I was happy to be there, to be back. But I could also feel something just behind me, a patch of dark, heavy air; as if I were keeping just ahead of it. In the corner of my vision, a rodent scurried for cover among the sea grape bushes.

I took another OxyContin and gradually, moment by moment, it seemed that the night was sharper, the stars were sharper, the air dense with meaning and mystery. I stopped in front of an empty discotheque; red and green lights whirled around the dance floor like a madman with an axe.

I went all over San Agatha that night. I found everything thought-provoking (on the way up), sweetly sad (coming down), amusingly irritating (down further),
un-
amusingly irritating (descending, descending), a persuasive argument for capital punishment (flatlining). Then, a fresh Oxy, ground up between the teeth, things change again. I’m feeling warm and understanding about the Third World situation, at home with the panhandlers and spongers and drug dealers. Live and let live, that’s what I say!

I took a taxi to the end of the beach; I took a taxi far into the cliffs. I walked and walked and walked, and how I saw myself and how I saw my life depended always on where the drug was. Somebody told me there had been a high sea that very morning and a California girl had been swept off the cliffs and out to sea. And someone else said she must have done something to bring on such misfortune.

Near four in the morning, I was crossing the yard toward the stairs to my room when I saw a black girl come out of a doorway at the back of the property. She must have been waiting there. Skinny as a snake in a purple shirt and jeans, she seemed to float across the grass toward me. “You want a back rub?” she said. And I thought, All I need to ruin my life is just to nod and let her trickle back up the stairs behind me, past Nessa’s balcony, into my room. And like a man watching a subway hurtle down the shaft toward him, I thought, I could do this. I could step off this platform into the path of this train and no one would ever know that I only did it because I
could
, because it was so
obviously
the wrong thing to do.

When I got back to my room, I fished through my bag, took a sleeping pill and came back out and lay down on the deck chair on the balcony. After a while I began to taste almonds and I knew that the pill was taking hold, that soon it’d pull me under, slowly, happily drown me. And my last thought was: What a frivolous young man I was.

I slept for I don’t know how long. A car door slammed and woke me up. A woman shouted my name just outside the window; a sudden puff of wind blew into the room, the curtains thrashing about like spirits taking flight. I parted the venetian blinds and looked toward the far end of the property. Someone had taken down the clothesline; the shirts lay spread-eagled on the grass. A pair of headlights flashed on; a red car rolled slowly down the driveway. Music from inside. Passing under my window I saw the dreadlocked driver. There was a girl in purple beside him. She glanced up toward my curtains. I stepped back. The car moved out of sight down the driveway and then I heard it turn and accelerate toward San Agatha.