Half the Day Is Night (7 page)

The rain stopped. David found he'd been hunching his shoulders.

“What kind of agreement?” her grandfather asked. Like his own father, David thought, this was a man who did not trust gifts. Who had to turn them over and over and who always suspected either a bribe or a catch.

“Marincite Technical Exchange is going independent,” she said. “Marincite is spinning them off. We may do the financing. A lot of money.”

He didn't help her, just waited for her to go on. After a bit of silence she said tentatively, “I offered short-term notes with an automatic rollover. It would have been a better deal for them, but they wanted five-year fixed, something about the way they do business.” The terms meant nothing to David but he listened to the sound of her voice. He could hear things better now, through the strangeness of language and the shrillness. He could hear her nervousness, and hear how she got a little less nervous as she talked. She chattered on about buying some buildings and leasing them back to the company, while the old man sat silent, his eyes on the Indian red tile.

“Short term?” he said suddenly, and coughed, a bark. “Why'd you push short term if they wanted fixed?” He had a hard, flat, American voice, David could hear that, too.

“The U.S. market is falling,” she said, her voice gone sharp and defensive again, “it's got to correct, and then interest rates will drop. We thought with Marincite we'd have to give them short term. The bank will take short term,” she said and shoved her hands in her pockets.

The old man looked up at her. “You didn't do your homework.” The old tyrant looked pointedly at her hands and she took them out. “A client shouldn't have to be sold,” he said.

She didn't say anything, just took her dressing down. Maybe she knew that nothing would make any difference. Better than himself, every time he saw his father they ended up screaming at each other. When was the last time he had seen his father?

Mayla's grandfather looked at him. “You're new,” he said.

Mayla promptly introduced her grandfather, “John Ling,” she said. John Ling leaned forward in his wicker chair and held out his hand and for a moment David thought he was supposed to help the old man stand up. Then he realized the old man wanted to shake hands.

Loose dry skin over fragile bones.

“What happened to the big blond … Tim?” the old man asked.

“He's going back to Australia,” Mayla said.

“Are you American?” John Ling asked.

Nobody had ever thought he was American before. “No sir,” David said. “French.”

“Southeast Asia?”

“Yes sir,” David said, “Indochina.”

“Speak any Chinese?” the old man asked.

“No sir, my grandmother speaks Vietnamese.”

The old man sat back. Nodded. “I went to Chinese school after regular school for a couple of years, but I never learned a bit.” His attention went back to Mayla. “What are you wearing?”

She had on a red silk blouse belted over tights, something simple and bright, David thought. Although what did he know about how people dressed?

“You spend a lot of money on clothes,” he said. “Your grandmother never spent so much on clothes.”

She sighed.

The old man stared out at the plants. Was his vision bad? The silence hung.

“So how are you feeling?” she said, trying to fill the space.

“Old,” he said. “And helpless.”

She looked up at Domingo and then at David, looking for help or for something to say. Her face was pink.

David found he could not meet her gaze, so instead he looked at the bamboo.

*   *   *

“I was thinking,” she said in the parking, “maybe we should go someplace for dinner.” Her voice was bright, working hard at it. She dug in her purse. “I think, I looked up restaurants … but I think the best place … wait,” she found a piece of paper. “I thought maybe a French restaurant, you know, I thought you might like some food from home.”

Food from home. Chicken. Pasta. Something other than fish. “It does not matter,” he said. Homesickness washed over him in waves, all he could think of was bread and butter—not tortillas and not that bland stuff from the U.S., just a decent piece of bread. He wanted to go home. Sixty days, he had promised. At the moment it seemed an immeasurable wait.

“I went away to school,” she said, “I remember what it was like. Besides, after that business in Marincite, I wanted, you know, I mean I can't make you forget that but—”

“It doesn't matter,” he said again.

“It does,” she said. “I don't know what to say about it. It was horrible. It was horrible for me, and I wasn't wearing the telltale.”

Blind. He had thought he was blinded. The memory was bad, he slid away from it and shrugged.

She looked down at her hands.

He meant only to pass it off, but she looked as if he had shrugged her off. She looked the way she had when she was standing in front of her grandfather.

“I would like to go to a restaurant,” he said.

She smiled at him, grateful. How easy to make her happy. “Well,” she said, serious again, consulting her scrap of paper, “there are a couple of places but everybody says that the best place is Botticelli's. It's in Aphrodite, that's a casino.” She looked down at her piece of paper. “Actually, it's not French, it's Continental. But they have some French dishes and some other things, too. Italian, and Spanish.”

“Okay,” he said, and was rewarded again by her smile, so he smiled, too. “Okay,” he said, to make her smile, to feel his own face mirroring hers.

“Okay,” she said.

He nodded, and because he didn't know what else to say, he said it again. “Okay.” And it sounded so inane, this dialogue of “okays” that they started to laugh, grinning at each other like idiots. A couple of emotional cripples, he thought. Grinning at her in her grandfather's parking.

*   *   *

Botticelli's was in the middle of the casino. It was dark and each table sat in a little pool of light. For a centerpiece each table had a stand and a live parrot: blue parrots, green parrots, gray parrots, all with heavy bills and strong ugly feet. He looked and was relieved that at the tables where people had food there were no parrots.

The prices made him still. The chicken, the beef dishes were 45cr and 55cr. He looked up and the blue parrot flipped down to hang upside down. A little sign said that they nipped.

“Poor things,” Mayla said, “they don't do well in the air mixture, the cold gets them. Most of them don't live long.”

He supposed they didn't fly because their wings were clipped, but what kept them from climbing down the stand and onto the table? The parrot turned and twisted its head, snake fashion, then clambered sideways and righted itself, flapping its wings. It opened its beak when a waiter walked by and its tongue was black. It stared at David, flipped upside down again.

A waiter stopped at their table and the parrot righted itself again. The waiter asked if they were ready to order.

He had no idea what he wanted, he hadn't even decided if maybe he should order fish—it was the cheapest thing on the menu.

The waiter said he'd be back and fed the parrot a peanut. The parrot craned its head and fluffed out its feathers. It raised its wings and made a “ding” exactly like the sound of a flash unit signaling “ready.”

Mayla looked up from her menu.

“It was the bird,” David said.

She laughed and the bird stared at her. “They're distracting, aren't they? I think we should get a bottle of wine, but you have to order, I don't have the nerve to order wine in front of a Frenchman. The chicken dishes are famous.”

There wasn't much on the menu he had ever eaten before but he didn't tell her that. He ordered
coq au vin
and she ordered some kind of chicken with garbanzo beans so he got a Chardonnay. White with chicken and he liked Chardonnay. Growing up his family hadn't drank wine often, and when he did buy it he usually just got a
vin de table.
He really didn't know much about wine.

The waiter came and got the parrot, whisking the thing away, stand and all. David was relieved.

The food was good, and even if it tasted a little different, it was not fish. It tasted so good he wolfed it down so it never really had a chance to get cold. The bread wasn't bad, warm crusty rolls wrapped in a big napkin, and he sopped his plate clean. He thought the wine was all right and Mayla seemed to think so.

Coffee after dinner, not-hot-enough Caribbean coffee. Then they walked back through the casino.

“Blue and whites,” Mayla said suddenly.

He looked at her, not understanding.

“There's been a bomb threat,” Mayla said.

David looked around. He saw people at the slot machines, heard the muted whir and chime of gambling, nothing out of place, everything seemed normal. Then he saw, at the door, six in police blue and white.

She sighed. “We could end up standing here for an hour if they've just started a sweep.”

The boy who stopped them looked maybe nineteen, with the smooth skin of a young man. Under his lifted visor he had the look David associated with the military: youth and exercise and steady food. Like the young people at the security check in Marincite, except that this boy wore crisp blue and white fatigues rather than maroon and cream. “Excuse me,” the boy said, “can I see some identification?”

They passed over their smart cards and the boy dropped them in his reader, then used the image to check, im against face, all six points. Like the port, David thought, so thorough. He consciously loosened his shoulders.

“Is it a bomb threat?” Mayla asked.

“No ma'am,” he said. “An arrest. But we don't know if the suspect is here to place a bomb or not, so we are being very careful. Could you stand over there for a moment?”

Mayla seemed to find it normal. This country was crazy, David thought. They stood over at the side of the entrance. How could these people live this way? he wondered. He watched as two men and a woman saw the team and hesitated. It was obviously irritating to have to stand around and wait. He wished they could wait outside, particularly if they thought that someone might be placing a bomb. Then it occurred to him that in a structural sense there really was no outside in Julia. The doors didn't make so much difference. The three people stopped and the woman said something to one of the men. “What can
I
do about it!” the man said. The third man hung back a bit.

They came down and presented their IDs. The woman was tiny and dark, with a triangular face. African, he thought. Maybe she was Haitian, some Haitians were as dark as Africans. Just because he had been in Africa he thought she looked African. She was angry about something, refusing to talk to the man she was with except in clipped monosyllables. “How long will this be?” she asked the boy in blue and white and he shrugged. He thought she sounded African, but he still had problems with the way the air mixture distorted everything.

“You'll have to wait over there,” the boy said, pointing at where Mayla and he were standing.

“I wasn't even supposed to be here tonight,” the woman said.

Northern Africa, he thought. She didn't look like the blacks he'd fought with in Anzania.

“Over there,” the boy said.

She still wanted to argue but the boy shrugged his rifle around and clicked the safety.

He looked at the rifle and then at the woman. The rifle didn't seem to matter to her, but she grimaced and let the man she was with pull her towards the side.

It did not feel dangerous, exactly, surely the boy was just trying to put her in her place, and yet it did. Africa, and rifles in the hands of very young men. After the way things had gone with the telltale, Caribbean Security forces made him nervous.

“Identification,” one of the blue and whites said to the man, who had not really been with the couple. At least, now he did not seem to be with the couple, but before, when David first saw them, he thought that they had been. Not because they were talking, or even walking exactly together, but not walking separately. But now it seemed that they did not know each other.

This country, it made him see plots everywhere. Like Tim's diving lesson.

The man handed the blue and white his smart card and the boy dropped it in the reader. David put his hand on Mayla's arm and pulled her further back. He didn't know why, perhaps it was the sound of the safety on the rifle when the boy had been talking to the woman, perhaps it was thinking about Africa, he didn't know.

The boy grabbed the man's arm and wrenched him around, letting the reader swing on his belt, “DON'T MOVE! NOBODY MOVE!”

The young man said.
“There's been a mistake—”
Always, the same thing they say, he thought, mistake.

“AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHERFUCKER!” the boy shouted, and the other officers were shoving him, too, and the man panicked, swung out. One of them slammed his head against the wall, it made that hollow melon sound, and then they hit him in the kidneys with their rifle stocks.

The young man's nose was bleeding and he was dazed. Blue and whites came running. Blue and whites everywhere. David was backing up, pulling Mayla with him. The young man disappeared in a crowd of blue and whites. At the edge of the blue and whites stood the African woman and her man. They were not backing up, they were watching, their faces blank. The woman had the man's arm, her fingers straining the fabric of his sleeve.

She looked away, looked back at them. She looked at Mayla, who was watching the blue and whites. She looked at Mayla a long moment. David wondered what she was thinking, maybe she did not even realize she was looking at Mayla.

He looked at her, and she glanced at him and looked away.

It was almost an hour later when they finally got their smart cards back. A different officer dropped them each in readers, “Ms. Ling,” he said, and handed her hers.