Читать книгу February Heat - Wilson Roberts - Страница 5

I WAS ASLEEP when the phone rang. Fumbling for the receiver I heard the night sounds of the Caribbean, waves softly breaking on the rocks at the bottom of the bluff below the house, trade winds rustling the surrounding fan palms, the whistling of coquis rising above the songs of the other tree frogs in the damp jungle a few feet from my window. Half awake, I forced myself into a sitting position. Reaching for the phone I knocked over the beer I had set on the nightstand before falling asleep. It shattered on the tile floor, warm beer splashing around my feet and ankles. I was hung over after celebrating the West Indies 2-0-1 victory over Australia in the cricket World Series Cup competition with a few friends at the Quarterdeck. St. Ursula, after all, is a British territory.

Squinting at the clock, I grunted into the phone. “It’s two-thirty-five.”

The woman’s voice on the line was thin, frightened. “Frank? Frank James?”

I grunted again.

“This is Liz Ford. From the St. Thomas ferry.”

“It’s two thirty-six now.”

“Someone just tried to kill me.”

The sounds of the waves and the coquis’ whistles faded, drowned in the sound of my breathing and the constant hiss of St. Ursula’s telephone lines. Staring at the rumpled sheet draped over my legs, I took a deep breath and rubbed my eyes.

Had I more awake I would have told her to call the police and gone back to sleep. Now, with all that has happened, I’m glad that I didn’t.

“Tell me about it.”

“Somebody tried to kill me.

“Who?”

“I don’t know anyone else on this island, and I barely know you, but I need help.”

“This isn’t a joke.” It wasn’t a question.

“I’ve got bullet holes in my bed.”

“Any in you?”

“Will you come over here?”

“I’m on my way.”

I hung up. Forcing myself out of bed, careful to avoid stepping in glass shards from the shattered bottle, I put on my shorts and a tee shirt, slid into my flip-flops, grabbed a fresh beer and headed for the door. Rumble, my Jack Russell Terrier, snorted from his sleep on the couch, moving his legs as though running. Stopping at the doorway, I looked at him, then walked over and patted his belly. The dog responded with a few more snorts, ran his sleeping legs, then turned, burying his snout between the cushions.

Outside, the air was warm, damp, the coquis still whistling from the bush, the waves slapping against the rocks far below my house.

I breathed deeply. Looking up at the stars I walked to my ‘73 Gurgle Xavante. It was the first car the Brazilian company built using the Plasteel system, a combination of plastic and steel, its body resistant to the corrosive island environment and equally resistant to the many collisions it had borne on St. Ursula’s narrow roads and blind curves, the Plasteel body deforming temporarily but not smashing under pressure or shocks. It started with the first turn of the key. I lit a cigarette and headed out the drive, turning right onto Ocean Road. I don’t smoke often. In fact, I’ve managed to limit myself to three a week, five when I get stressed. This looked as though it could be a two-cigarette night. Juggling the beer and the cigarette, I drove toward Liz’s hotel, the Caribbean a few feet away on the right side of the road, wondering about Liz Ford and what I was getting into.

I HAD MET HER less than ten hours earlier aboard the ferry, The Yellow Bird, as it churned its way back to St. Ursula from St. Thomas. I go to St. Thomas every month or six weeks, to shop and check the post office box I keep there. Although life in the British Caribbean is quieter and less cluttered than on St. Thomas, untroubled by the heavy development and crime they have on the U.S. island, our mail delivery is terrible. A letter mailed from Boston will reach me on St. Ursula in six to eight weeks. Chances are it will get to St. Thomas in less than four. Not that it really matters. I get less than five letters a year. Everything else is junk mail or rejections from poetry editors.

It had been an uneventful day on St. Thomas. I rode around the island in a rented Jeep with the windshield down, enjoying the sun and the tropical air on my face, exchanging verbal abuses with taxi drivers and tourists from the cruise ships in the harbor, all of them fighting for space in the gridlock along Veteran’s Drive.

I was cut off by a two-tone blue Dodge taxi van, headed in the direction of the airport, filled with people and luggage. Jarred halfway into the Jeep’s passenger seat by the sudden stop, I was crawling back behind the wheel when the van’s driver rolled down his window cursing and gesturing with closed fists. He slammed the taxi into gear and spun out, leaving smoking tracks of rubber on the pavement. Frightened tourists stared from the van’s side windows.

“Hey asshole,” a kid watching from the sidewalk yelled, giving me the finger, never moving from the shade of the coconut palm he leaned against, one foot flat against the trunk. He looked about sixteen and wore a brightly colored wool hat and a tee shirt with the slogan:

I SLEPT ON A VIRGIN

(Island)

Across the distance between us I could see the anger in his face as he stood, probably waiting for a ride to take him home to one of the shoddy and decaying housing projects packed into the hot upper valleys of the island where the land is poorly suited for vacation homes and resort hotels. He didn’t care about the van driver cutting me off, or my innocence of any moving violation. What surely mattered was the apparent wealth my shiny rented Jeep meant to him. The van driver had been a West Indian working to make ends meet. For all the kid knew, I was just another tourist, doing nothing but spending lots of money on trinkets, booze and more food than I can eat. I wasn’t, but the kid had no way of knowing that. All he knew was how vast the discrepancies were between rich and poor in the Caribbean. That knowledge was written in the tight lines of his face.

On St. Thomas it’s always open season on tourists. The main business in the American islands is separating them from their bucks, selling West Indian trinkets made in the sweatshops of Taiwan, Hong Kong, Mexico, anywhere but the Virgin Islands. The kids who attack tourists outside restaurants and bars, or on the island’s narrow, twisting back streets, stealing their wallets and purses, sometimes injuring them in the process, are responding to the prevailing economic conditions of the islands just as accurately as the merchants. The real difference lies in their use of methods the Chamber of Commerce doesn’t sanction.

St. Thomas is beautiful and it’s filled with fine people, but spending a day fighting with its traffic, its crowded pedestrian alleys and its simmering disharmonies always makes me feel clever for having settled on the independent British island of St. Ursula when I left the long winters of Massachusetts behind me.

I parked the Jeep in front of the rental agency next to the Bank of Nova Scotia. Trash overflowed the rubbish containers along the side of the street, cans, bags, bottles and paper collecting in small piles in the gutter.

“Hey, Frank, nice day to cruise around with the windshield down.” Eddie the rental guy came out of his office, hand reaching for my papers.

He’s one of the few people on St. Thomas who knows me by name. A former high school band director from a small town in the Adirondacks, he came to the islands in the mid-Seventies for a winter vacation and never left. Deeply tanned, he was tall and thin, almost gaunt, with sun streaked blonde hair pulled back in a ponytail, a silver dolphin on a chain resting among the chest hairs visible through his half buttoned lime green guayaberra shirt. I followed him indoors and we leaned on our respective sides of the counter yakking as we always do about how little we like the ways in which the island has changed over the years we’ve known it.

He took my credit card and filled out a charge slip. “It ain’t like it used to be. Now it’s all cement and tourists, which is just fine for my bank account. You get any interesting mail, Frank?”

He grabbed a couple of beers from a cooler behind the counter, passing one to me. Taking it, I shook my head, giving him a sour grin.

“Nothing, Eddie. A Hustler, a six month old issue of Poetry, couple of Times and Newsweeks, half a dozen rejection slips from obscure poetry journals published by obscure English professors at obscure little colleges scattered around the States, and an invitation to subscribe to a collectors’ edition of silver coins with pictures of the Presidents on them.”

He didn’t say anything as he shook his head, returning my grin. We never talked about it, but from his unspoken sympathy whenever I mention my poetry, I figure Eddie must have at one time considered himself a professional musician and dreamed of a career blowing his horn. He’s not bad with it. He and a couple of other guys have a little jazz band and play at some of the local clubs on St. Thomas and St. John on Friday and Saturday nights during the tourist season. With tips they don’t make more than fifty to a hundred bucks a night. They’ll never make much more, and Eddie doesn’t seem to care. I love to see Eddie’s eyes closed, his skinny body swaying like beach grass as he plays “My Funny Valentine,” or “Send in the Clowns,” or even a really dumb tourist pleaser like “Cherry Pink and Apple Blossom White.” Sometimes, late at night, after enough vodka and with a good audience, he’ll rip out his own piece, “Eddie’s Blues.” People everywhere should hear it.

I scrawled my signature at the bottom of the credit slip, finishing the beer as Eddie and I discussed the details of the latest mugging spread over the front page of the Virgin Island Daily News. He leaned on the counter, rubbing his hand along the side of the cash register.

“It’s a mess here.” He took two more beers from the cooler, popped the tabs and slid one over to me. “Downtown gets hotter the more asphalt they lay down. The traffic gets more intolerable. People get more frustrated and ticked off. The garbage piles up. I tell you, Frank, this place is going to explode one of these days. It’s reaching critical mass.”

I chugged the beer. It tasted good, the cold carbonated liquid tickling my throat.

“It’s no worse than the rest of the world.” I said between chugs. “There’s too damn many people and they all want what they think is a fair share of the pie.”

I didn’t want to push the discussion any further. I keep my mouth shut whenever someone in the American islands starts complaining about the deteriorating quality of life there. Life on St. Ursula is so much more pleasant, I’m afraid if I told my acquaintances on St. Thomas about its cleanliness, its quiet and safety, they would be flocking there and things there would begin deteriorating more quickly than they will once the inevitable tourists and developers finally do arrive. Besides, St. Thomas no worse than any other city and it has the advantage of being surrounded by lovely beaches and a climate that has earned the U. S. Virgin Islands the sobriquet of America’s Paradise.

The second beer gone, I chucked the empty into a trash barrel and said good-by to Eddie. Leaving the rental agency I walked along the waterfront to the ferry dock. Traffic on Veterans Drive was heavy and slow. Angry drivers sweating, honking, cursing one another, their radios blasting reggae, country music, rap, rock and roll, and 101 Strings into the competing dissonance of racing engines and horns. I could see them ripping off ties, wriggling out of suit jackets, and drinking cold beer behind the wheels of their cars as heat waves rose from the sheet metal surrounding them, the pavement beneath them.

The sidewalk between the road and the sea was filled with tourists wearing straw hats, sunglasses and brightly colored shirts. They pushed by one another, shiny new binoculars and cameras swaying from straps around their necks, arms filled with packages of whiskey, gin and vodka or chic liqueurs such as Kailua or Irish Cream from Sparky’s, bags from the A.H. Riise gift shop, the Down Island Traders and other shops along Main Street and the Waterfront, or those crammed into what the travel brochures describe as “the planted and picturesque passages and walkways between.”

An elderly couple stopped me, asking if I would take their photograph as they posed in front of The Pride of Tortola, a rusting barge filled with building supplies for the British Virgin Islands.

“Sure,” I said, taking the camera as he put his arm around her sunburned shoulder.

I studied them through the viewfinder. She wore a white sundress, sandals, and gold. Lots of gold. Gold rings, gold bracelets on both arms, gold necklaces. She was a mugging waiting to happen. He was wearing a blue cotton shirt with white palm trees silk screened on it, white trousers rolled at the ankles, boat shoes with no socks, several gold necklaces and rings. His white hair, parted at the back of his head, was swept forward to cover a balding forehead. He was next in line for the mugging.

I snapped the picture.

“Better take another one,” he said. “Just in case.”

After I took the second picture the woman said to him,

“Give him a dollar, Wendell.”

“He’s not a native, Ellen,” Wendell said, turning to me. “You’re not a native, are you?”

“We’re all natives, Bub.” I spoke out of the side of my mouth as I handed him the camera and walked away, pleased with my poetic archness, leaving them to wonder if they had been insulted.

THE BLUE-GREEN water of Charlotte Amalie harbor was filled with cellophane, pieces of cardboard, orange peels, trash dropped from boats and tossed from the roadside by tourists and locals alike. The clutter of garbage and trash overflowing the municipal containers, uncollected for days, was far worse along the sea wall surrounding the harbor area than around the banks and stores further back.

Travel ads proclaim St. Thomas a pristine Caribbean paradise. People I know who lived there years ago say it was, and will talk for hours, telling stories of wild times around the submarine base, of Frenchtown parties with frogmen and beatniks whooping it up together. They describe the harbor and beaches when the island was clean and free of the crowds that have come with the tourist boom. Many of those storytellers now live on St. John, or in the British Virgins. A few have come to independent British islands such as St. Ursula or migrated a few miles west to the Puerto Rican islands of Culebra and Vieques.

For years I’ve kept Vieques in mind as a backup if St. Ursula gets too crowded, or ever follows through on its occasional threats to kick non-natives off the island. The Puerto Rican island is not as spectacularly beautiful as St. Ursula, or St. John in the American Virgins, but it is lovely and filled with real life villages and businesses, instead of being built around a tourist economy. Of course, it has the Navy, shelling, bombing and polluting a large part of its landmass. I can sometimes hear the shells exploding from St. Ursula. The military presence has kept the island a backwater, a stay against the development, big hotels, condos, golf courses, strip malls and shopping centers that would surely come should the government pull out. One thing Americans know how to do is ruin an island.

I wandered along the waterfront, watching people, envying young couples walking hand in hand and chuckling at the poor saps in cars, wrestling with their work clothes, impatient to get home. A motor launch snarled in from a huge cruise ship moored at the mouth of the harbor. As I watched, it tied up next to me. Thirty or forty people climbed out, the men wearing slacks and tropical shirts, the women in brightly colored dresses, many of them with their hair in beads and corn rows, all tanned, many already slightly tipsy. They climbed into one of three open sided buses marked with the logo of a prominent real estate developer.

They laughed and joked with one another about the free cocktail party and dinner they were going to get. I wondered how many of them would wake up in the morning wondering just how in the hell they had been talked into becoming timeshare owners of a mountainside condo twenty minutes up a winding road from any beach.

At the ferry dock two hustlers urged me to take The Yellow Bird, while others pushed The Bomba Charger and The Native Son, jostling one another good naturedly, each insulting the seaworthiness of the others boats and the sobriety of their captains. The competition for full boats and tips was part of a loud and carefully staged drama they put on each day for tourists’ entertainment.

Before deciding which boat I was going to take I walked around the dock to check them out. The Yellow Bird was nearly loaded with packages and baggage, passengers already lining up by the gangplank. I was glad it was closer to leaving than the other two. Tired of hanging around St. Thomas, anxious to get home, I would have taken the first boat out, but The Yellow Bird’s topside open air deck is far more comfortable than the enclosed passenger sections of the other ferries, where diesel fumes and cigarette smoke, combined with the pounding of the engines below deck, give me a splitting headache.

The ride from St. Thomas to St. Ursula takes about forty-five minutes to an hour, depending on the sea. My trip over in the morning had been unusually rough, swells knocking passengers into one another, throwing several off their seats scattering their belongings through the cabin. Judging by the relative calm of waves in the harbor, the ride home would be smoother.

The large green and white ferry was half filled with uniformed school children and people returning to St. John, the British Virgins and St. Ursula after a day of working or shopping. The kids laughed and joked with one another, happy school was over for the day. The older local people, tired and cranky from a day’s work or shopping talked among themselves about their jobs, wages and prices, like commuters everywhere. They took seats in the enclosed deck, stretching out to nap on their way home, using as pillows their handbags, sneakers, shopping bags, anything they could find.

Once we were underway, I leaned my elbows on the rail on the sundeck. The day was still warm, the air filled with salt spray. Below me waves crashed and slapped against the green bow as it broke through the water, the engines pounding, the rhythm of their deep thrum rumbling in my chest and gut. I wandered to the stern and watched the white foam of the boat’s wake spreading out and fading into the blue water of the channel. I watched St. Thomas slip into the distance.

The only other person on the upper deck was a woman with auburn hair, curled, wild around her head. In her late thirties or early forties, she wore a white batik sun suit with a red frangipani flowered design, a white headband tied around her hair in an attempt at keeping it under control. It didn’t work. The wind ripped the curls out, cracking them around her face like ginger lightning. From the looks of her skin it was clear she hadn’t been in the islands very long. It was freckled and white, the kind of white you usually see in the islands around Christmas time when the first of the snow birds start coming in for their winter vacations.

I watched her for a while, thinking if I could get a smile or even momentarily attract her attention, I would walk over and start a conversation. Life in the islands breaks down the barriers we normally throw up around ourselves. It’s easy to talk, trade histories, discover common interests and, often, common acquaintances. However, it’s never easy for me to start. I don’t move in and just start blabbing. I need a brief unspoken meeting of eyes first, something to assure me that I won’t be intruding, or at least appear to be.

The woman on the sundeck stared down at the water, oblivious to me, absorbed by the Caribbean’s shifting patterns, dark blues broken by sudden bursts of turquoise above masses of coral. She was there, on the boat, yet as distant from The Yellow Bird as I was from my winter lifetimes in western Massachusetts. Suddenly she took what appeared to be a wedding ring from her finger and dropped it overboard. Rubbing her eyes, she tapped her foot and leaned heavily against the rail, eyes still fixed on the waters below.

I struggled against the wind to light a cigarette and settled into a seat to read a month-old issue of Time. We pulled into the harbor at St. John where the school kids got off and ran down the dock toward the park at the center of Cruz Bay. Moments later we were again underway, past Caneel Bay, Cinnamon Bay, through Drakes Passage. We stopped at West End, Tortola to drop off more passengers and a number of crates of food and dry goods for the shops there before heading south to St. Ursula. The islands were beautiful green mountains, rising from the Caribbean, the late afternoon light yellowing their lush green vegetation. Pelicans swooped and dove around us and frigate birds soared high above, graceful primitive creatures riding the thermals to heights where they were nothing but black streaks against the sky.

I looked back. Far off, St. Thomas was lovely in the dying afternoon. Overcrowded, often crass, an ecological and political disaster, the island looks like an enchanted fairyland as lights flicker on its hillsides and brightly colored sails move in the surrounding waters. My friend Chance keeps telling me my feelings about St. Thomas are the result of my attempts at escaping the complications of life. St. Thomas is just a place, he keeps reminding me. Like Massachusetts, he says, just a place with all the problems of places where we human critters dwell, too many people, not enough money, politicians with sticky fingers, tongues full of lies and no real answers, nor any desire to find any. He should know. He came to St. Ursula from St. Thomas.

Ahead, near St. John and British Virgin Islands, St. Ursula rose from the sea, the outline of a nearly completed microwave relay station at the peak of Wise Mountain looking like a stark giant spider against the sky. Soon it will collect television broadcasts from the American islands and Puerto Rico, as well as from stations in Chicago, Raleigh, Atlanta and New York, bringing the events and fears, the ever coarser visions and attitudes of the States to the homes of St. Ursula. Some people are pleased by the prospect.

Sitting on the open deck, halfway between St. Thomas and home, I stared at St. Ursula, my thoughts quick random flashes of images and vague desires. That’s why I’m a poet instead of the heavy-duty insurance executive my ex-wife thought I should have been. Worse, I’m not a precious academic poet, writing poems for other poets to read and snap their fingers over. She could have dealt with that. I struggle for poems people will enjoy reading. I believe poetry should make people laugh and recognize the ugly and beautiful truths of their daily lives. It doesn’t have to be self consciously clever and obscure. I’ve always been partial to Bob Dylan’s line about Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot fighting in the captain’s tower. My poems struggle below deck where I’m cleaning up the muck while Charles Bukowski stokes the engines.

JUST A FEW YEARS before I’d been making a good living selling business insurance policies in the western Massachusetts, southern Vermont/New Hampshire area. My commissions along with my wife’s substantial salary as a Smith College administrator provided us with a comfortable life.

Melinda and I lived on a three hundred acre farm in Ashfield. Our two hundred year old house, a drafty slate shingled fifteen-room monster, was constantly in need of paint, impossible to heat, and haunted. Fortunately we had our own well-managed woodlot and the ghost was friendly. Even so, the place demanded constant painting, carpentry, pointing, landscaping.

One Thursday in May I was out in the woods with the chainsaw felling the next winter’s cordwood supply. Covered with sweat, bar and chain oil, sawdust and woodchips, I sat on the stump of a freshly felled oak, swatting black flies and sharpening saw teeth. I heard the winding of gears, the roar of an engine and looked up to see Lin driving her Land Rover across the fields and up the logging road where I was working.

She stopped four feet away, turned off the motor, leaned out the window and spoke without smiling. “Thought you were closing a big policy deal.” She was clipping sentences like her old Yankee father.

A bad sign.

“Fell through. Found out this morning.” I out-clipped her.

Shaking her head she switched from Yankee to the condescending psycho-talk common in nearby Northampton with its plethora of shrinks, social workers, academics and their clients, students and hangers-on. “On one level I can really appreciate how hard you work around here, but it seems to me you should be out working another deal instead of wearing bib overalls and playing in the woods.”

“It relaxes me.” I smiled.

She didn’t return it. “That’s your trouble. You relax too much. You didn’t relax so much you’d be a vice-president of the company with a suite of offices in Hartford. Not just a field rep.” Yankee again. In spades.

Melinda had just been offered the presidency of a small, very exclusive woman’s college in Upstate New York. She saw it as a stepping-stone to the headwaters of Smith, Vassar, Mt. Holyoke or Radcliff. She didn’t need a husband who wasn’t a boardroom hot shot, suave and well connected.

Hell, she didn’t need any kind of husband for a trek toward stardom among the Seven Sister Colleges, as evidenced by her setting up housekeeping within weeks of our divorce with a lovely and wealthy blonde Smith senior. With a little work and a lot of drinking, I convinced myself that it was an easier situation to deal with than if she’d run off with another man.

We got divorced. Sold the farm. Fought over custody of the dog, Rumble. I got Rumble. She got rid of me.

Our sons were grown and no problem. Tim, the youngest, was a third year law student at Penn. The older two, Frank and Chris, were partners in a successful New Orleans real estate firm. They inherited Lin’s drive, but got just about as far from her Yankee ways as the country allows.

Financially, after the divorce, I was all set, with my half of the proceeds on the farm, plus our savings and stock portfolio. But I was at loose ends. With no idea of what to do, I rented an apartment in Springfield and played around at selling insurance for another six months, hating every minute of it. Then Tim quit law school to play with a Red Sox farm team.

That was the final straw for me. My marriage was over. Frank and Chris were doing well, making lots of money and enjoying their lives. Tim had become a boy of summer. And I was living in an apartment in Springfield, Massachusetts, not exactly one of the world’s garden spots, selling insurance, writing poetry that no one wanted to publish, and occasionally playing my guitar at open mikes and folk clubs. My life was on hold.

One November Wednesday, more than usually disgruntled, I looked at my life in Springfield. Everything was out of control. I was lonely, depressed and overwhelmed by world and personal events, when I remembered what a friend had told me about his vacation on St. Ursula.

“It’s the most manageable place I’ve ever been,” he said. “It’s got a government pattered after the British system, but it’s only thirty-two square miles and there are less than twelve thousand people in the whole country.”

After a week of thinking about his descriptions of the small island nation, I decided to change my life. Packing a few clothes and my 1950 Martin guitar, I flew from Bradley International Airport to San Juan where I caught an Ursula Air hop to St. Ursula. After three weeks of looking around I bought an old stone West Indian house on an acre and a half plot of ground and spent the next year fixing it up. Buying the house and its repairs took a big bite out of my savings, but with care and a little work on the side, the interest on the balance keeps me in beer and food.

Paradise. At least it might look that way to most outsiders, but the island isn’t an easy place for an American expatriate to live. Aside from the economic opportunities they present, Ursulines don’t care much for people who were not born there. Statesiders and Brits are especially suspect; the Brits because of the legacy of colonialism, statesiders because of how we have despoiled the American islands. As a result I have to watch myself, being careful to keep my place, which requires a maintaining very low profile. For me it’s worth such care to live in a micro world. One where there are a lot of givens and few unknowns.

And here I am. In my fifties, bald, in good health, both physically, mentally and sexually, I’m retired and living alone on an island in a corner of the Caribbean where drunks, drifters, and assorted losers exist on the periphery of an economy geared to providing several weeks of rest and recreation to affluent Canadians, Americans and Brits.

IT WAS DARK when The Yellow Bird pulled into the West End of St. Ursula. The dock was empty, with the exception of a few taxi drivers, the kids who handle the boat’s lines, and my friend Chance, parked outside the customs building, waving as I gathered my bags of mail, the few purchases I had made in St. Thomas, and headed for the ladder to the lower deck.

The woman in the batik sundress was there first. She didn’t have any luggage, just a large cotton purse slung over her shoulder and a small duffle bag.

“Do me a favor,” she said.

It wasn’t a question. Some people can say ‘do me a favor’ making it sound like they’re doing you one by asking. She made it look like a favor too.

Too many of the men I know go nuts over young women and girls. Most single men my age on St. Ursula act like hopeless jerks, grinning at bikinis as they run around wearing earrings with gold medallions or vasectomy symbols hanging from gold chains nestling in the graying hair on their chests, their arms and calves adorned with tattoos.

Me, I like women. I enjoy their company. I like sitting for long hours swapping life stories. If it leads to sexual comfort that’s just dandy with me, but if it doesn’t there’s no big deal. The talking, laughing, and exchanging opinions are what are important. For those exchanges to mean much I need a partner a good distance from her twenties.

She was nearly five nine, as tall as I am, green eyes slightly crinkled at the corners with sun born good humored crow’s feet. Tanned, muscular, she looked as though she could swim five or six miles without pause. I liked the way she looked, her voice, the forthrightness of her “Do me a favor.”

“Sure. What is it?” I said, surprised at her approaching me. Women rarely do. I don’t appear to be the hero type. I look like the man in the Panama hat; the one who should be dressed in a white linen suit, sitting on a rattan chair drinking foul concoctions, fanning my sweat, plotting the hero’s destruction, cigar ash falling on my tie, burning little holes in my shirt. I’m not like that, of course. I am the hero type. An aging Clark Kent without the silly underwear, as one woman called me after I rescued her daughter and son from pirates who had taken their sailboat and held them for ransom on a small island not far from St. Ursula.

“When we go through customs, let me carry one of your bags. And tell them I’m with you. Please.”