Under Radar (6 page)

“This is where Bob Marley born. Bob Marley born here in 1941.”

Barry said to Tom as they walked up the steep hill to the house, “What is it about young Dutch tourists that gives them such an air of annoying holiness? They go around the world with a small backpack, and they're always so calm. The girls are wildly sexy, completely free of guilt, and impossible to seduce.”

“You've tried?” asked Tom.

“Well, you know.” But Tom didn't know.

At the top of the hill the guide brought them to a small red house with a curtain for a door.

“This is where Bob Marley born. In that building is where Bob Marley buried.” The mausoleum was about thirty feet long and twenty feet wide, with high windows and a door inlaid with stained-glass lions.

The guide told everyone to take off their shoes before entering the house. Inside the house, clean small rooms, with no furniture. The guide told them about Bob Marley's mother. “This is where Bob Marley mother make Bob Marley porridge. Are you from Delaware?”

It was an odd question, and they all answered, “No.”

“Because Bob Marley mother live in Delaware when Bob Marley nineteen years old, and she call him to Delaware. Bob Marley work in a factory, making cars, before he come back to Jamaica.”

Tom tried to imagine Bob Marley as a hidden genius on an American assembly line, and then he wondered what cars were made in Delaware. Perhaps the guide meant Bob Marley had lived in Detroit.

Perri didn't know why they were there or what this was for. Tom tried to explain. “Bob Marley was a great musician. The Jamaicans are poor people, and he sang about their lives. His music touched them, and it touched the world. That's the power of music.”

The girls listened deafly. They were fascinated by the small house.

“Did the whole family live here?” asked Perri.

“Yes,” said the guide.

Tom was embarrassed by his daughter's question. It reflects badly on me, he thought.

On the light green walls, the pilgrims had left their offerings: postcards, reverential graffiti in all the languages of the world, cigarette papers, flowers. There was nothing to see once you'd seen it for a few minutes, nothing to study except your own attempt to draw deeper significance from the place. The stoned docent with his thick braids gave few clues to his own character, and Tom, for lack of any other subject, wondered about him. How much did he make in a week?

“This is the rock what Bob Marley sat on when he wrote ‘Positive Vibrations.'”

The view was ridiculous, perfect in every detail physically and morally. If a song should come from any place, then let it come from here, on a mountain whose peak is hidden in the clouds behind you. The sound of a hammer hitting a board somewhere down the hill, the clucking of chickens, a radio with the news, a man shouting for help with a heavy box, the heat, the wet air filled with the resins of small fires in crude stoves, the repulsion Tom felt for Barry Seckler, who made Alma dance like a whore; it was impossible not to be completely there, distractions overwhelmed by the thick waters of life, assembled as a rebus Tom could not decipher. Tom wanted to ask Barry Seckler, Who allegorized you into my life?

Inside the mausoleum, the shock of the tomb's dignity made them quiet. The marble sarcophagus was eight feet high. The guide told them that the stone was a gift from the Italian government and that the stained-glass windows came from Ethiopia. African instruments,
primitive guitars and tribal drums, hung on the wall, none of them grand enough for the occasion. Something larger than a songwriter was buried or remembered here. Barry tapped Tom's arm and nodded to the Dutch girl, who had settled a joint on the base of the sarcophagus as an offering.

Barry whispered, “Here's a definition of the Dutch. They roam the hip shrines of the world and then return to the Netherlands and Scandinavia with their thinness, their frugality, their lack of humor, their aura of sanctity, their affability with the natives, their Charles Mingus tapes, to disappear into their smoky cafés and jazz clubs, huddled in philosophical conversations, and what had impressed us, had threatened us, their independence, their detachment from the disturbances of traveling with so little money, becomes, when you look closely at their lives at home, indifference. Mark this, the flip side of Dutch tolerance is Dutch indifference.”

“Bob Marley is a holy man,” said the guide. “He bring the world together.”

They left. Tom tipped the guide. The Dutch couple also gave money. Maybe they're not so bad, thought Tom. It was all Seckler's view of them.

In the van, Debra asked, “Do you think Bob Marley really did bring the world together?”

“Is the world together?” asked her husband.

Rosalie raised her hand with too much bright excitement, annoying Tom. “He did give some poor people hope. That's worth something,” she said.

“It's not an illusion?” asked Debra.

“I don't think so,” said Rosalie.

Nine Mile was at the top of the hill, and from there to the main road taking them to the coast, they listened to music. Debra's cute leg rolled into Tom's, and instead of shifting his leg out of courtesy, he pressed back. Her skin was slippery with sweat, and this conducted, so he wanted to believe, a special charge. If this was the closest he might come to cuckolding Barry Seckler, he would take full pleasure and force Debra to pull away or play the game, to be conscious of the touch. What would Rosalie see if she looked at them? She might see nothing, the contact was so slight.

The van bumped across muddy ruts where the rains had sluiced through the pavement. “The road gets worse before it gets better,” said James.

Tom considered James's simple sentence as the fortune cookie of his day. Do I have to read all of this as a parable of something within me? The road of life? I'm a muddy green island inhabited by the poor descendants of slaves. And the road of my life takes me from hilltop shrines to wherever we are now, let me see how I can conjure this place appropriately, to … to barren fields … to old farms abandoned by their tenants and left to seed?

They drove past farm or plantation fields filled with tall grass and young trees.

Tom thought: Some part of me is just like this? But some part of me is just like some part of every part of the universe.

And if the muddy road was how he felt, ahead was the highway, and from the way the fields rolled downhill to another dense grove, a sense that beyond all of this land the ocean was near, and so the waterfalls were near, and with them finally the place where he would kill Barry Seckler.

Tom stopped trying to think of things to say. The vacation was a ruin already. The children and his wife were having a fine old time. His wife probably thought that the sun and the warm water and the visions released by Jamaica succored Tom's need for profound revelation.

I was a criminal because I needed a story in my life, thought Tom. My secret crimes made me important. The secret made me arrogant, but that private disdain subsidized my occasional benevolence.

The soft leg against his. Nothing to add to that. Even at the moment, the leg's pressure belonged to the past, to what he had wanted, not what he felt now. His desire for her was dimming, dimming, gone. Just this touch was wrong, wrong to his wife, wrong to Debra Seckler, wrong for his children in the backseat. How could he make love to another man's wife with all of their children so close? He pulled his leg away. Their skin had bonded, and the separation, which he advanced slowly, ran between them, the lazy end of a long and funny kiss. For the first time in all their bumping together, he felt her erotic consciousness rising into her skin. This made him even unhappier. He wanted to tell Barry that all that needed mending was the direction of his apology, which belonged not to Tom
but to Alma. But how do you apologize to a little girl for an insult when the explanation of the offense would constitute another violation?

If there was no apology, there was only revenge. The road, representing to Tom that part of him which always descended from glorious mountaintop slum to beachside tourism, settled into the final easy grade to the coastal plain. What would this mean as a spiritual paradigm, he wondered. Signs for restaurants and hotels, nothing so awfully polished as the advertising in America; hand-painted and charming for the pitiful hopes squeezed within the crude caricatures of happy tourists and happy Jamaicans. And then everywhere around them something green, a field, a big tree, and then the ocean, always a challenge for purpose. How to read this now? James made a left turn off the coast road and up a hill into the parking lot for Dunn's River Falls, and into a line of tour buses from the big hotels and cruise ships. Tom understood the scene around him immediately: no entrance to the falls without first navigating the hundred stalls of bad crafts, the carvings of long-necked African queens, the jute handbags, and everywhere T-shirts of Bob Marley. James opened the van's door, and Tom helped his children out. He was happy to hoist them both from the van to the ground, a feeling of solid merit for giving them a lift into the air above him and bringing their faces close to his.

“You have to get special shoes for climbing the falls,” said James. “The falls are slippery.” Jamaicans in booths offered neoprene felt-soled boots for rent.

Debra put on her boots and said to Barry, “How do you define these? The world gives us so many experiences that are impossible to describe. Was it always this way?”

“Definition?” asked Barry. “You say, ‘A knight in armor on a black horse.' Everyone gets that. You say, ‘A man in neoprene boots with felt soles for traction on wet rocks.' Who understands that? So many words to define a thing, the name is a process. Who gets it? I have them on, and I don't get it. Maybe that's why we have so much music in our lives now, so many forms and melodies. The man who first said, ‘A knight on a black horse,' how many songs did he know? How many melodies? How many forms of music? The man who says ‘neoprene boots' is a prisoner. He is speechless. The only language to contain his experience is music.”

The parking lot was at the top of the falls. From the ticket booth they walked down a winding trail, away from the falls to the beach, where they fell in line with a busload from a hotel in Ocho Rios. A guide introduced himself.

“I am Lyall, and I am your guide today. We are all going to have fun, and we are all going to have a safe trip. I only lose people on Tuesdays, and today is Wednesday.” This brought a laugh to those who thought it was funny. Some of the tourists carried video cameras in waterproof cases.

Lyall explained the rules. Everyone would hold hands going up the falls. Whoever wanted a video record of the trip could pay for it now, and at the top of the falls a copy would be waiting, or you could hire someone
to take a movie with the camera you brought. The camera would be safe. Lyall took the hand of the first person in line, an older woman. She in turn held her husband's hand, and he held the hand of a pretty teenager who held the hand of her brother, who held his father's hand, and his father led Tom, who led Alma who led Rosalie who led Perri who led Debra who led Adam who led Rita who led Barry and after that Tom didn't care.

They left the sand and stepped up on the rocks. Fresh cold water filled their boots, but the felt soles gave traction. The climb brought to Tom a feeling of increased competence. The group stopped in a wide pool. Above them, a thousand tourists held hands in a line, up the ladder of falls and pools, on steps carved along the side. Tom looked back. The bottom of the falls was lost around a bend, but through the trees, he saw the blue bay and two rotting fishing boats lying at anchor. The thread of humanity extruding from the beach suggested a hatchery releasing its fry.

Couples posed and mugged for the photographers and the men with the video cameras. Children jumped into a deep hole in the pool. Others brought themselves to the wide curtain of water falling from the ledge above, put their arms into the veil, parting the water on a seam, and then stepped through to a cave behind.

Lyall called for the next ascent.

Tom changed his place in the line and allowed Barry to lead him.

The line began slowly.

Here the falls were steep.

There was none of the bonhomie of the first pitch, none of that hospitality, none of those free-flowing condolences for the little slips along the way, none of the hands extended when the line broke. This part of the climb scared them.

Mothers complained to Lyall about the danger of the climb. Lyall said it was safe. “Look up, everyone has made it. You don't see any bodies in the water.”

Tom held Barry's hand. “I don't feel well,” said Seckler. “This isn't fun for me right now.”

His distress alarmed Tom. He wanted to kill Seckler, not watch him drop dead of a heart attack, and he wanted to face him. Tom could have pulled Seckler's arm and yanked him off the steps, but the fall wouldn't kill him. Seckler held Tom's left hand, and Tom switched to his right because the rock he needed for a hold was too slick, and a solid tree root above it offered a better grip. Once he secured a hold on the root, the waterfall and rocks seemed to reverse energy, and where everything until that moment pulled him towards the beach, now the buoyant pleasure of the danger pushed Tom upwards to the next ledge, without effort, as though Barry Seckler found Tom no more trouble than an old suitcase.

The worst of it behind them, the group pulled themselves with triumphant smiles to a broad shallow pool.

Tom looked up. The next section was a long stairway with an iron rail. It will have to be now, thought
Tom, at the center of the pool's edge, looking down a forty-foot drop.

Rosalie splashed water at the girls. Tom picked them up under each arm and carried them squealing around the rocks, where a clump of twenty or so tourists waited their turn to walk into a cave behind another waterfall. The little chamber could hold five people. Tom waited with the girls. Instead of walking around the waterfall, he carried them through it, but this fall was heavier than the one below, and the force of the water knocked them over. Alma went under. Tom held her arm and brought her back to the air. She refused to cry. In the water and the sun, by the love of her father and a contempt for public shame, she willed in herself the rudiments of courage. She would not give to anyone the entertainment of her tender sobbing. He loved her for this.