About Grace (9 page)

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.

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. “Not 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?”

They landed at a wharf, one rotting jetty leaning into a calm bay and a few scattered pirogues painted in pastels. Beneath the trees on the far side stood a clump of fishermen's cottages. “Everyone is at the harbor,” Felix said. “For the regatta.”

He cut the motor and the girl leapt onto the seawall and tied up. Without a word they began ferrying their purchases ashore, and soon the three of them set off, carrying boxes and jugs up a dirt track, a meter wide with tall, heavy grass on either side. Occasional white houses stood back from the trail, small and ragged, with corrugated roofs. A few goats trailed them and dark children watched them pass from doorways and called to the girl, who called back. The sun followed them above the treetops. Red dust rose in small clouds around their feet. Winkler carried a box of eggplant and followed behind potbellied Felix and his daughter, both of them toting bigger loads than his.

They stopped eventually in front of a tiny light blue house with a thin crack running through it, corner to corner, as if a gigantic hand had reached through the sky and broken off the top half and then replaced it. Felix set down his crates. “Home,” he said.

In front of the door they paused and Felix bent over the girl to say something and she produced a clean white dress from a box and pulled it on over her T-shirt. An assortment of stringy-looking hens flapped across the yard and seethed around their feet. Felix produced his flask once more and emptied it into his mouth. Then he ran a comb through his hair and passed the comb to the girl, who tugged it once through her hair and passed it to Winkler.

Inside, three boys, maybe eight or nine years old, in identical white shirts, played jacks on the dirt floor. Behind them a thin woman in a yellow dress and scarf sat in a chair reading. She was, Winkler saw, the woman from the post office on St. Vincent. She set down her book, stood, and held out the back of her hand. “I am Soma. Happy Easter.”

Winkler stood blinking a moment. She laughed. He took her hand. She lined up the children one by one and introduced them and each in turn shook his hand shyly and would not meet his eyes.

Then Soma moved in front of them and made a sort of half curtsy. “I am sorry,” she said, “for my joke at the post office. You must forgive me.”

Felix cleared the boys out to the yard and unpacked the crates of food. “You,” he said, waving a knife at Winkler. “Chop these.” He handed Winkler a sack of small yellow onions and Winkler stood at the counter peeling and slicing. Twice he had to lean over the counter, eyes watering, swallowing bile. The little girl, a miniature of her mother, watched him from the other side of the window, her fingers looped through the wire of the screen.

The walls of the house were unpainted. In places hung photos: a city backed by steep, blue mountains; a rolling grassland dotted with tents; a laminated image of the Virgin in a blue cloak with a snake beneath her sandal. In the corners of the central room were stacks of books, most of them in Spanish:
La Igiesia Rebelde, Armas de la Libertad, Regional Socialism in Latin America.
And on the sills were tiny, clumsily made boats: models of sloops and yawls, longboats, a scow—some with tiny brass halyards, balsa tillers, tigging made from thread.

Felix cooked in a state of near frenzy, banging pans, inhaling steam, occasionally bursting into song. He wiped away sweat with a forearm; he stole drinks from an unlabeled bottle hidden behind the charcoal box. He ordered Winkler to slice the eggplant in long, fine sheets and supervised each slice. “Thin now. Thinner.” Felix took them up, like strange, wet slips of paper, and fried them crisp in a skillet and tucked them between sheets of newspaper. He made an elaborate mango chutney. He scalded and plucked small hens, slathered them in pepper, and set them in the charcoal stove. From far away, beyond the trees, came the sounds of fireworks, and the boys returned an hour later flushed and sweaty and Felix lifted the sizzling hens from their pans. “Okay,” he said.

They ate at a picnic table at the other end of the room. Felix had covered the slivers of eggplant with chutney and arranged the roasted birds on top. Soma bowed her head and the children bowed with her and she thanked the Lord for the food before them and for the bounty of the island and for preventing one of the boys from failing his mathematics exam the previous week. Then she raised a glass and, holding a hand over her heart, said: “To the health and fortitude of our guest.” The children raised cups of milk and knocked them against one another.

They fell to the food. Winkler faced a window and through the screen he watched swifts hunt insects over the yard. The chickens had gone quiet; a gecko breathed silently on the ceiling. It seemed impossible that he was there, listening to this family eat roasted birds. Felix asked several questions about American cattle raising, sizes and calving rates, and seemed disappointed to learn Winkler knew nothing about it. The boys finished first and sat restlessly over their plates. The girl poked at her meat. Finally Felix wiped his mouth and belched and pushed his plate forward and released presents from under his bench: three small wooden sloops, simple hulls with a dowel glued to their decks as masts and tiny captain's wheels just fore of the stern. The boys clamored and fought over colors and settled in with their respective selections. For the girl he handed down a glass jar with wire mesh stretched over the top and she beamed and reached for him and hung her arms around his neck.

Soma smiled and said, “Nothing for me?”

“For you,” Felix said and gestured at the children, “is later.” She laughed.

The three boys pretended to crash their sloops into the walls. The girl crawled beneath the table trying to trap a beetle in her jar.

Soma ordered the boys to wash the dishes and they collected buckets from beneath a shelf and went out. He could hear them in the yard sloshing water and clanging plates together.

The light began to fade. Out in the yard the swifts had been replaced by bats. Soma lit an oil lamp and set it at the center of the table, where it hissed and sputtered. Felix leaned back in his seat smiling with a kind of thoughtless beatitude. As though everything was going as planned. As though his small kingdom resounded with harmony.

He lifted the little girl off the floor and onto his lap. She raised her eyes from her jar to Winkler and smiled and blinked rapidly.

“This is Naaliyah,” Felix said. “Our daughter.” A mosquito landed on the girl's forearm and she watched with astute attention as it pulled blood from her. It swelled, withdrew its proboscis, and disappeared. Naaliyah rubbed her wrist absentmindedly. In her jar a black ant touched at the glass walls with its antennae.

“She is beautiful,” Winkler said. He wanted to ask about her, how old she was, if she went to school, but tears were flooding his eyes and he had to get up from the bench and go out into the night.

The room they gave him was the boys', in the back of the house, a sun-faded poster of some Chilean soccer player tacked to the wall, two bunk beds built into the wall with a single crosspiece for a ladder. Stacks of their little clothes were arrayed on a shelf in the corner. The boys lay down wordlessly on the kitchen floor, side by side, their heads on a single pillow. The girl lay on one of the picnic table's benches, beneath the window, still in her white dress, watching Winkler with big, slow-blinking eyes.

Winkler climbed into the lower berth. A scattering of glow-in-the-dark stars shone dully along the underside of the top bunk. The smell was sweet: laundry, and boys' sweat.

Leaves riding the wind like commuters; filaments of air trapped within the arms of a snow crystal; his mother tamping soil into a terracotta pot. Dreams creeping like shadows from the edges of the yard. When he'd asked about Grace, Sandy had dropped the phone.

Soma tiptoed in, a book in her hand, reading glasses pushed up over her hair. “David.”

He sat up. “I can't…” he began, but she held up a palm.

“Felix does his best cooking in the morning. You will stay?”

He shook his head.

“Sshh…” She pulled the hem of the sheet to his neck. “For me.”

A beetle crashed into the wall and dropped to the floor and sat whirring there as if shaking off the impact. He watched Soma sweep away through the doorway and kiss the girl good night and then disappear behind a curtain into the other room in the house. Soon the place was silent, and he could hear the steady, shallow breathing of the boys as they slept, and the clamor of the insects out in the tamarinds along the path.

He felt himself tilt toward sleep. A memory, unbidden, rose: in the evenings, as a boy, he used to crouch beneath his mother's ironing
board as she pressed her uniforms, and the cotton would cascade around him, fragrant and white and warm, and through the folds he'd watch his father in his undershirt smoking his pipe, snapping the newspaper taut as he turned its pages.