“Twenty E.C.”
“E.C. What’s E.C.?”
She laughed. “Money. Dollars.”
“Can I call collect?”
“Will they accept?” She laughed again, unlocked the gate, and ushered him inside the post office. He wrote the number on a slip of paper; she went behind the desk, spoke into the receiver a moment, and passed it to him. In the line he could hear miles of wires buzzing and snapping, a noise like a thousand switches being thrown. There was a sound like a bolt sliding home, then, miraculously, ringing.
It astonished him that a sequence of wires, or maybe satellite relays, might actually run from that island all the way to Shadow Hill, Ohio—how was that possible? But he was not so far away, not yet. He could imagine the phone on the kitchen wall with ruinous clarity: fingerprints on the receiver, the plastic catching a rhombus of light from the window, the bell’s mechanical jingle. What time would it be there? Would the ringing wake Grace? Would the house still be damp, would he have been fired, would an insurance check have arrived?
He was fairly certain he had been gone eighteen days. He imagined Sandy plodding to the phone in her pajamas. She was flipping on lights, clearing her throat, lifting the receiver from its cradle—she would speak to him now.
The line buzzed on and on: a simulation of ringing he wasn’t used to. His tongue was like a pouch of dust in his mouth. It rang thirty times, thirty-one, thirty-two. He wondered if the house was submerged underwater, at the bottom of some new lake, the phone still clinging dumbly to the wall, the cord brought horizontal and fluttet-ing in the current, minnows nosing in and out of the cupboards.
“Not home,” the operator said. It was not a question. The post office woman looked at him expectantly.
“A few more rings.”
The wall of the post office was white and hot in the sun. The silos of a sugarcane mill, painfully bright, reared above the town. At a kiosk he bartered his suit jacket with a man whose patois was so thick and fast Winkler could not understand any of it. Winkler ended up with a salt cod, a pineapple, and two jam jars filled with what he thought might be Coca-Cola but turned out to be rum.
A pair of women strolling past, carrying baskets, nodded shyly at him. He followed them awhile, down an unpaved street, then turned and descended through thorny groves to a beach. Small green waves sighed in from the reef. He heard what he thought were occasional voices in the trees behind him but even in full sunlight it was dark back there and he could not be sure. From high on the hills came the bells of goats moving slowly about.
That sweet, carrion smell crept under the breeze. The cod was oily and stirred in his gut. He raised the first rum jar and stared at it a long time. Tiny gray clumps of sediment floated through the cylinder.
He had been drunk only once before, at a chemistry department party in college when, in a fit of introversion, he quarantined himself on top of a dryer in the hostess’s laundry room and gulped down four consecutive glasses of punch. The room had begun to spin, slowly and relentlessly, and he had let himself out through the garage and thrown up into a snowbank.
Dim clouds of mosquitoes floated at the edges of the trees. He sipped rum all that morning and afternoon and rose from the sand only to wade into the sea and relieve himself. By evening strange waking dreams possessed him: a dark-haired girl hauled a sack through woods; a row boat capsized beneath him; the woman from the post office prayed over a halved avocado, her crucifix swinging through the light. He dreamed freezing lakes and Grace’s little body trapped beneath ice and the heart of an animal hot and pumping in his fist. Finally he dreamed of blackness, a deep and suffocating absence of light, and pressure like deep water on his temples. He woke with sand on his lips and tongue. The sun was nearly over the shoulder of the island—the sky seemed identical to the previous morning’s. The same cane mill stood brilliant and white in the glare.
Another day. Beside him a tiny snail worked its way around the rim of an empty rum jar. His dream—the asphyxiating blackness—was slow in dwindling. Dark spots skidded across his field of vision. He rose and picked his way through the grove behind the beach.
In an alley behind a series of hovels he pulled lemons from a burl-ridden tree and ate them like apples. An old woman tottered out, shouting, shaking a mop at him. He went on.
In the days to come he telephoned the house on Shadow Hill Lane a dozen times—each time the call went unanswered; each time he begged the operator to wait a few more rings. He wondered again if the freighter had carried him to a new location in time, a future or past that did not coincide with Ohio’s. Here it was a day like any other: a hot, dazzling sky, blackbirds screeching at him from the trees, boats sliding lazily in and out of harbor. There what day was it? Maybe it was years later—maybe, somehow, it was still March, maybe he was still asleep in his bed, upstairs, beside Sandy, Grace sleeping her steadfast sleep down the hail, the first raindrops fattening in the clouds.
But it was April 1977. Back home the yard was coming to life, the flood receding into memory. Were they burying Grace? Maybe the funeral had already happened and now there were only memorial-fund canisters beside checkout registers, a grave, and leftover vigil programs neighbors had kept on their kitchen counters too long and now were guiltily folding into the trash. Grace Pauline Winkler: 1976–1977. We hardly knew you.
The American Express office could not reach his wife, they said, to see if she would wire money. A tall, purple-skinned man at the bank said he could not access Winkler’s checking or savings without a current passport. “Technically, sir,” he stage-whispered, winking, “I make a call and you get locked up at Immigration.”
He pawned his belt; he pawned the laces from his shoes. He ate stale croissants salvaged from bakery seconds, a dozen discarded oranges with white flesh. When he couldn’t bear his thirst he took sips from the second jar of rum: sweet, thick, painful.
In a moment of courage he asked the post office woman to dial Kay Bergesen, Channel 3’s “News at Noon” producer. Kay accepted the charges. “David? Are you there?”
“Kay, have you heard anything?”
“Hello? I can’t hear you, David.”
“Kay?”
“You sound like you’re in Africa or something. Look, you have to get in here. Cadwell is pissed. I think he might have fired you already—”
“Have you heard from Sandy?”
“—you just disappeared. We didn’t hear squat, what were we supposed to think? You have to call Cadwell right now, David—”
“Sandy,” Winkler said, wilting against the post office wall. “And Grace?”
Kay was shouting: “—I’m losing you, David. Call Cadwell! I can’t fend—”
Twenty-one days since leaving Ohio. Twenty-two days. He tried the neighbor, Tim Stevenson, but no one answered; he tried Kay again but the connection broke before it could be completed. The post office woman shrugged.
In the afternoons, storms came over the island and he sheltered on the fringe of his small beach under the low-slung palms. Every few hours more blood seemed to drain from his head, as if his heart was no longer up to the task of circulation, as if this place held him in the grips of a more powerful form of gravity. At night tiny jellyfish washed ashore and lay flexing in the sand like strange, translucent lungs. Sand fleas explored his legs. He took to sleeping in long stints and when he woke his same dream of blackness faded slowly as though reluctant to leave. Somewhere out past the reef lightning seethed and spat and he turned over and slept on.
3
He had been in St. Vincent six days when he went to the post office and passed his wristwatch to the woman behind the counter.
“I need to make another call.”
“You won’t reverse the charges?”
“Not this number.”
“Will these people be home?” She started to laugh.
“Goddamn it.”
Her smile wilted. She raised a hand to her crucifix. “Permiso,” she said. “I am sorry. I should not
make fun.” She held the watch at arm’s length and studied it in a pantomime of interest. She raised the buckle up and down; she squinted at the second hand, which stood motionless over the nine. “What do I do with this?”
“Tell the time. Sell it. They wouldn’t take it at the market.”
She glanced behind her at the thin man who managed the place but he was paging through a newspaper and paying no attention.
“Is it broken?”
“It works. It got a bit waterlogged. It just needs to dry out.”
“I don’t want it.”
“Please.”
She looked over her shoulder again. “Two minutes.”
He told her the number for Herman Sheeler’s house in Anchorage and she dialed and handed over the receiver. After the first ring he thought he might pass the phone back and tell the woman no one was home but then he heard the handset being lifted on the other side and it was Sandy.
There was a satellite delay in the line. Her two syllables—”Hello?”—repeated, tinny and distant, as if she had spoken through a culvert pipe. Somewhere inside the connection an electronic beep reverberated. His throat caught and for a long moment he thought he might not be able to speak. April in Anchorage, he thought. Wind against the garage door, slush sliding off the roof The trout print in the paneled hallway.
“Hello?” she said again.
He supported his head against the wall. “It’s David.”
Silence. He had the sense she had covered the mouthpiece with her palm.
“Sandy? Are you there?”
“Yes.”
He said, “You’re okay.”
“I’m okay?”
“You’re all right, I mean. Alive. I’m glad.”
The line fizzed; the beep sounded. “Alive?”
“I keep trying the house.”
“I’m not there.”
“How long have you been gone? Are you back with him?”
She did not reply.
“Sandy? Is Grace there? Is Grace okay?”
“You left. You just got up and left.”
“Is Grace with you? Is she all right?”
There was the sound of the receiver clattering onto a counter or maybe the floor. A second later Herman’s voice was in his ear. “Don’t call here again. Get some help. You need help. Do you understand?” Then a click, and the static fell off.
He stood a moment. The wall was warm and damp against his forehead. The air smelled like wet paint. He had a sudden image of Sandy in the doorway of that house, toboggan-riding polar bears printed on her pajamas, her bare feet whitening in the cold.
“I was disconnected,” he managed to say.
The woman’s voice was low: “I’ll dial again.” The line rang, and rang. Finally it picked up and then clicked off.
He listened to the dead space in the line for a moment, then passed the receiver back. “Lord,” the woman said. “You sit down for a moment.” She clasped the telephone over the big crucifix on her chest. “I’ll get some tea.”
But he had already turned and was blundering through the doors into the throbbing green light. What was left? His shirt was stiff with sweat and grime; the knees had come out of his trousers. He had a half jar of rum and three Eastern Caribbean dollars in his pocket, enough for nothing: a bag of crackers, maybe, a tin of luncheon meat.
Below the town the ocean gleamed like a huge pewter plate and the sun beat murderously upon it. He stopped in the middle of Bay Street and braced his hands on his knees a long time. The asphalt seemed to tremble, the way an image reflected in water trembles. Inside him a slow vertigo had started. He had the odd sensation that the light in the sky was entering his skin somehow and penetrating the cavities of his body. Any minute now he would not be able to contain it.
He raised a hand to his mouth and retched. A man, passing on a bicycle, gave him a wide berth. Two small boys pointed at him and covered their mouths with the hems of their T-shirts. The faces of the pastel storefronts seemed to leer and pitch. Somewhere in the harbor a ship sounded. He staggered down the thin track south of town. Each cell in my body is disconnecting, he thought. All the neurons have torn loose.
The light was such that he could only keep his eyes open for a few seconds at a time. A bus with PATIENCE AND GOD painted across it, its windows full of sleepy women, churned past and left him dusty. He found the path leading off the road and picked his way through the dense growth. On his little beach he knelt and watched horizontal scraps of clouds inch across the sky. Cumulus humilis fractus, he thought. Everything I know is useless.
He crouched in the sand and shivered. Twice in the hours to come he woke to feel another man’s hands in his pockets and he reached to grab the wrist but it was gone. The first had robbed him of his remaining money and he wondered hazily what the second had found. In half dreams in which he wasn’t sure if he was awake or asleep, he watched regiments of crabs sidle onto the beach, cantering among the tide pools on their needle-tipped feet, pausing, then moving on again.
4
He woke to the smell of meat and the sound of gums smacking. A potbellied man was squatting beside him, eating rice and mutton dedicatedly, hardly pausing to swallow. A bar of yellow light pulled over the back of the island. Among the rocks, tide pools reflected jagged circles of sky. Winkler had not eaten in two days and the wet sounds of the man chewing made him want to gag.
The man said, “Could’ve robbed you.”
Winkler tried to balance his head on his knees but it would not stay. “It’s already stolen,” he said. His voice cracked and sounded to him like the voice of a stranger. The potbellied man shrugged and ate; the sky accumulated light.
“What day is it?”
“Sunday.”
“Sunday what?”
“Sunday Easter. Here.” His accent was Spanish. He handed over rice wrapped in a glossy yellow leaf. Winkler raised it to his nose and passed it back.
“Eat it.”
Winkler raised it again and closed his eyes and bit off a tiny corner. His mouth was entirely void of saliva. The rice felt like tiny bones between his molars.
“My wife,” the man said. “Soma.” He paused, waiting perhaps for Winkler to react. His forehead puckered. “She hasn’t slept all week. She says Easter is forgetting. No, for”—he snapped his fingers in search of the word—“for giving. For forgiving.”
Winkler chewed carefully. His teeth had loosened in their gums and felt as if they could at any moment unmoor altogether. “Eat the leaf too,” the man said. Winkler studied it: thick, glossy, something like a broad and yellow rhododendron leaf. He shook his head.
The man took it and folded it carefully into quarters and ate it. “Good for the bowel,” he said, and smiled. He wiped his fingers on the backs of his calves and stood. “I am Felix. Felix Antonio Orellana.” He seized Winkler’s hand and hauled him to his feet. Streaks of light leaked slowly across Winkler’s vision.
“I am a chef. I cooked in the Moneda in Santiago, Chile. I cooked once for Cuban presidente Fidel Castro. I made callaloo soup and he called me from the kitchen to tell me it was fabulous. That is the word he used. Fabuloso. He said he would like me to send his cooks the recipe.” He nodded a moment. “I sent it, of course.
“Come.” He led Winkler along the beach and over several embankments clotted with seagrape. Winkler’s feet were swollen in his shoes, and his head felt poorly anchored to his neck, as though it might tumble off. Despite his paunch, Felix walked easily and quickly, balancing his torso on agile, chicken-bone legs; several times he had to turn around and wait. They picked their way down to a cove where a barefoot girl, maybe five years old, sat on the bow of a long, wide-hulled canoe, tossing stones into the sea.
Felix said something to the girl that Winkler did not understand and she splashed into the water and stood minding the bowline with one hand on the gunwale.
“Please,” Felix said and waved toward the boat. “We take you home.” He gestured with his chin toward the sea. “N
ot far.”
The planking was loaded with crates of food and charcoal. Winkler flattened himself across the middle bench and Felix folded himself between crates and took the tiller. The girl coaxed the boat off the sand and waded with it until it drifted free and hauled herself aboard. At the stem hung a rusted outboard and Felix gave it two quick pulls and it coughed and smoked and gasped to life.
The bow rose as the boat accumulated speed. Winkler watched the green slopes of St. Vincent recede behind them. Flying fish soared in front of the bow wake, gliding along for long stretches, then knifing back into the water. Felix produced a flask from somewhere in his shin and uncapped it with one hand and drank meditatively. He appeared to be making for an island, a black lump on the horizon.
Winkler’s vision lapsed occasionally in the dazzle of the early sun and the seething water and the jolting of his eyeglasses against the bridge of his nose. The horizon bounced and heeled. A sour taste rose in his throat and he felt his face blanch. He turned and spat. When he looked up he saw the girl staring at him with bright eyes. “¿Mareado?” she shouted. Winkler turned away and swallowed.
The island drew closer; he could make out trees, a cane silo, a few houses dispersed over ridgelines. It looked smaller than St. Vincent and not as steep, three green hills fringed in black, dwarfed by sea and sky.
Just when he felt he could bear the nausea no longer, Felix let off the throttle and backed the motor. “Reef,” he announced. Ahead of the bow the island disappeared and reappeared and disappeared again. The backsides of swells frothed and broke ahead of them. Peering over the side Winkler could see the dark shapes of coral passing below. They passed a battered green channel marker, sucking and nodding in the swells. The boat yawed; the propeller came free for a moment and screamed, then cut back in. The girl shouted, “It is daaangerous!” and beamed at Winkler.
Felix seemed nonplussed. He raced the engine, and they were rushing over the coral, surfing almost, and the loaded canoe lilted sickeningly. For a brief moment Winkler found himself staring past the bow at a wall of foaming water. Then they were through and into a lagoon. The boat settled. Combers broke placidly behind them. The girl looked at Winkler, and he nodded to show he was okay and she laughed. “No?” she asked. “No more?”