The Rhythm of the August Rain (28 page)

“He live next to Mammee's Bakery, about ten chains up the road.”

After thanking her for his clipping of the kiss-me-over-the-garden-gate, Shad took his leave and started driving up the road, remembering the chant in school: a chain is a hundred feet, ten chains are a thousand. Before long, the smell of baking bread started making him hungry, and he stopped outside a small shop.

“Unity live around here?” he asked the teenage girl who handed him two patties and a plantain tart.

“Next door.” The girl lowered her face and suppressed a smile. “The house have a orange door.”

“Like you know what behind the orange door.” Shad winked.

Sure enough, Unity, dreadlocks concealed under a skullcap, opened the door. Shad reminded him of their earlier meeting. “You can come with me to find the Rasta farm you was telling me about? My mind just tell me to visit them.”

“I was going to wash my—”

“I pay you ten US.”

“Deal,” the youth replied, a next-generation Rasta.

By the time they'd climbed the road to Gordon Gap, the sun was going down, and after they passed through the town, Shad turned on the Jeep's crooked lights.

“Right here,” Unity directed when they approached a dirt road. It was the same road that Carlton had tried to drive down, but the surging water of the night before was now only a trickle and the Jeep lurched down the gully bank and up the other side with little difficulty. The road ahead was heavily overgrown, and tall bushes started beating against the windshield.

“You see anything?” the young man said, peering into the darkness. His question was answered in a few minutes when Shad jerked the Jeep to a halt beside two houses, both brightly lit within. Shad knocked on the door of the larger house.

“Good night,” he said to the Rastafarian woman who opened the door. He introduced himself. The short, erect woman, Sister Aziza, she told him, looked up at him with glowing skin and wise eyes. She was wary at first, but softened when she heard the story about Katlyn's demise.

“We trying to find out what happened to her,” Shad said.

“I remember reading something in the paper about it long ago.” Sister Aziza invited him to come in. “It's a story that's stuck in my mind ever since.” Candles shimmered from every table in the room, and the scent of something minty drifted through the house, coming from either the candles or the pot on the stove in the corner. “And her parents never found her body? That's a real shame.”

Aziza was a middle-class woman by her accent and furnishings. The candlelight made her look younger than her age, Shad was sure. She wasn't from Gordon Gap originally. Aziza and her husband, formerly lawyers in Kingston's Twelve Tribes community, had retired to the area fifteen years before to start an organic farm. Her husband had died six years ago, but she'd stayed on.

“People eating so much garbage, fast food and all kinds of thing, nowadays.” She touched the scarf covering her gray locks. “We wanted to learn how to farm and pass on good growing and eating habits, you know. We never had any children, so I'm going to leave this farm to the young people here.”

“I know the life not easy, but is a valuable thing to do,” Shad agreed. “Good for the country.”

“Yes, like our legacy.” She had something trustworthy about her, good in a lawyer and a farmer.

“How did you end up here? It's a long way from Kingston.”

Aziza rose to check the pot on the stove. “We were driving around looking for land,” she said over her shoulder. “We wanted to buy something in this area because it was fertile and—and Rasta friendly, you know. There's a long history of Rastas farming up here. It's not everywhere you can find that. Somebody told us there was an abandoned farm further up the hill, so I went to look at it. And we found this man living in a shack up there, all by himself—a hermit—looked like he didn't have two sticks to rub together. My husband asked him if the land was for sale, and he said no, but he had some down here. Just like that.” Aziza sat down, waving Shad to do the same.

“We found out he was from Kingston, and he'd been a Rasta from the time when police used to beat up Rastamen and throw them in prison, back in the 1950s. That was when it was illegal to be Rasta. He was one of the men who started the Pinnacle camp—you ever hear of Pinnacle?” Shad shook his head. “Back then, everybody was afraid of Rastas. People used to call them
madmen
, you know. They had all this angry talk and wild hair, refusing to do what the English people wanted. The old Rasta had been part of an early group in the Kingston ghettos, but the police were always harassing them. They moved to the mountains nearby in Sligoville and set up a camp they called Pinnacle.

“Up to five hundred, a thousand, brethren came together in Sligoville. Then police raided the place and burned it down and locked up the leaders. When this man got out of jail, he and his followers set up a camp here. They were the first on this mountain.”

Shad's nostrils flared, scenting something other than mint. “Where he was living when you last seen him?”

“Up at the top of the road, you can't go any further than that. They were trying to hide from the police, you know. I think the old hermit had inherited the land from his parents.”

“He still alive?”

“He must be dead by now.”

“And his name was . . . ?”

“People called him Dread. His birth name was on the deed, Adolphus MacMillan. We bought the land with cash, and he marked his name with an
X
on the sale agreement. It was all legal, you know.” She laughed, slapping her robe. “We were lawyers, after all, and we didn't want anybody to accuse us of—anything illegal.”

Shad thanked the woman and returned to the car. “We going up the road,” he told Unity.

Past I-Verse's gate and five miles on, Unity said he wanted to wash his hair before it got too late. “Soon come,” the bartender replied, knowing well that soon wasn't coming for a while.

The narrow, twisting road ended a few hundred yards farther on at a small, dark shack surrounded by thick bushes. “This must be it, star.”

“I have to come with you?”

“What you think I paying you for?” Shad creaked the car door open. “I don't like to come to these kind of places alone. Time to big up like a man.”

The moon was three-quarters full, enough to help Shad find his way around the undergrowth behind the shack, Unity breathing heavily behind him. A ghostly building, its shuttered window covered by vines, suddenly appeared to their left.

“Raas claat!”
the youth whispered loudly.

“Look like it empty.” Rounding the structure, they saw a circle of abandoned houses, a dozen or more. “Plenty people was living here one time,” Shad commented.

They moved slowly, hunkered down, stepping over and around the tall grass between the houses. At the back of the yard, hiding behind the empty buildings, was a cottage from which a weak light emerged.

“I good, boy,” Shad muttered. “Somebody still there.”

The yellow light of a kerosene lantern glowed behind a tattered curtain, more holes than cloth. Gesturing to his companion to go around the back of the house, Shad tiptoed to the front door. The smell of thyme poured out of the shack's window.

“Anyone home?” He knocked, knocked again on the thin wooden door.

The only sound was the tinkle of a spoon being placed in a pot.

Taking his handkerchief out of his pants pocket, Shad wiped his forehead. “I looking for a gentleman name Dread,” he called.

The door opened an inch. “Who you?” a voice croaked.

“Excuse me, please. My name Shadrack Myers. I had a friend . . .” He trailed off as the door opened slowly, allowing the odors of seasoning and sweat to pour through. The large, dark shape of a man humped with age stood before him. He was leaning on a stick as tall as he, the lamplight behind him, and lumpy, dangling dreadlocks fell to his knees.

“I asking about a woman—”

“I don't know no woman,” the man growled, and slammed the door.

“A Canadian woman,” Shad called.

The door opened a little, stopped. “What you say?” The rumbling voice could have come from a tomb.

“I asking about a woman who disappear—”

The door was yanked open. “I look like a murderer?” The man raised the stick.

Shad stumbled backward and fell to the ground. “Wait!” Shad yelled. “I just asking—”

“Who send you?” Over the Rasta's shoulder, something glinted above the torn curtain. “You is police, right?” He raised the stick again, but this time someone held it and pushed the old man and his stick back into the house.

“Leave him, brethren!” Unity shouted. “The man don't do you nothing. Is so you think Jah want you to act?” After the fellow slammed the door, Unity held out his hand to Shad. “I man enough for you now?”

E
ric stood on the edge of the low dune and waved his arms. “Don't go out so far,” he called.

Eve waved before bodysurfing with Casey back to the beach. As soon as their feet touched sand, they headed back to meet the next wave.

It had been a long morning for her father, and he was already looking forward to the lunch Jennifer had promised. The day had started early because snorkeling was best done before nine, he'd assured Eve.

“You ready?” he'd asked her when she came out of the Delgados' door that morning.

“You forgot to wish me happy birthday,” she'd chided him when she reached his car window, and he'd started singing the birthday song.

“It's okay, Dad. You can skip that part.”

“I thought you wanted me to—”

“Is that my birthday present on the seat?” She'd torn open the gift, trying on the mask of the snorkeling set inside. “Can Casey come with us?” she gurgled through the mask.

“Of course.”

Eve had run into the house, and her father had waited in the Jeep until he could wait no longer.

In the kitchen he'd found Miss Bertha cooking what looked like an elaborate omelet, Sheba at her feet. “Mistah Eric, you want a johnnycake? I just cook some.”

He'd munched away at the fried bread and inquired about her son Isaac, who'd worked at the hotel as a gardener.

“He too frisky, I telling you. His sister is the steady one, but he have one woman after another. He already have three children by three different woman, and he only twenty-seven. What you think about that?”

“I hope he can support them.”

“Pshaw, is the cock crowing all you men.” The woman had sucked her teeth.

Eric had blushed a deep crimson, glad she'd turned her back. The phrase
erectile dysfunction
—the poetic words hiding the terrible meaning—had haunted Eric since Shannon's hasty departure on Monday morning. It had been weighing down his forehead as if he were carrying a metal sign tacked to it with the initials
ED.
He was now officially impotent, he kept telling himself, something he'd heard his mother calling his alcoholic father through the thin bedroom walls. He'd never had a problem before, and he'd always smirked at the ads in magazines touting cures. Just the year before, sex had come easily with Simone, and there'd been no need to think about it in the chaste months since. But here it was at last: he couldn't get it up.

The only person he could share his dilemma with was Lambert, but Eric was too ashamed to bring it up. His best friend had a lusty sex life himself. Cringing already at the cost of seeing his urologist, Eric had spent Monday afternoon fiddling with the computer, determined to get answers. That night he'd discovered Google. On Tuesday, when Shad wasn't looking, he'd visited websites that gave him the information he was seeking.

Impotence, according to one site, was caused by alcohol, medications, or chronic illness; none of these applied to him. Eric had read on, one finger on the screen, that impotence could be a signal of heart disease. Another website said he should protect his erection by eating healthy produce (all those mentioned unavailable in Jamaica), avoiding fatty foods (the core of his diet), and controlling obesity, high blood pressure, and high cholesterol (all of which he probably had, he was sure). By the time he got to warnings to curb smoking and get regular exercise, a feeling of doom had descended and he'd gone to bed depressed.

“Isaac too randy,” Miss Bertha had continued, spooning more fried bread into the basket. “He must be taking Spanish fly or something.”

“Spanish fly?”

“Is a thing that make men—you know—give them plenty juice. Make them get it up and stay up. So they say, anyway.”

Eric had just gotten up the nerve to ask where one would buy this miracle medicine when Eve and Casey rushed into the kitchen with their gear, Jennifer right behind.

“We're having a little birthday party for Eve this afternoon,” Jennifer had pretend-whispered. “You should come.”

“I'd love to.”

“And, of course, we'll have lunch waiting for you when you get back from the beach.”

The snorkeling at Sugar Bay had been more fun than he'd thought it would be. He and Casey had helped Eve put on her mask and fins, and the three of them had paddled around the cove's coral outcroppings, signaling each other underwater when they spotted a colorful parrot fish, or once a stingray lying on the sand. When the waves picked up, they'd stopped snorkeling and the girls had opted to bodysurf. He'd sat on his towel under the same coconut tree where he and Shannon had made out long ago, and he'd been reminded, yet again, of their disastrous night in bed. Only after he'd bought three lobster patties from a man walking on the beach did Eric realize that, if he went to the birthday party, he'd have to meet up with Shannon.

On the drive back home, with Eve and Casey squeezed into the passenger seat, Eric decided that he'd have to go to the birthday party and face his shame. He wasn't sick, he had no pressing appointments, and he'd look like a moron if he didn't go to his daughter's birthday party. Plus Shannon would think him a coward. When they got back to the Delgados', he ambled into the kitchen behind the girls. The first person they ran into was Shannon, lifting cookies off a baking sheet.