Читать книгу February Heat - Wilson Roberts - Страница 6

CHANCE AND RUMBLE waited in his rusted blue Land Rover as we came out of Customs and Immigration. A large man, six five and a half and weighing over two hundred and fifty pounds, his thick black hair fell nearly to his eyes, shaggy over his neck, with a well-trimmed van dyke on his chin. Barefoot, with rings on each toe, he wore a brown cotton vest and a worn, weathered yellow bathing suit. Rumble sat wriggling on his lap, tongue out, watching as I approached them.

“Thanks.” The woman smiled, offering me her hand as we stood on the side of the road, beyond hearing range of Ursuline officials, her single small duffle bag sitting on the pavement. “I hope I didn’t inconvenience you, I just thought I’d have an easier time getting through immigration if I was with someone who looked as though he knew his way around.”

“Don’t say goodbye yet.” I took her arm, leading her to the Land Rover. “The immigration officials can still see us and they might think it’s a bit peculiar if we come in like friends and part like strangers. Come on, Chance will give us both a ride. I’m Frank James, this is Chance.” I pointed to the mountain seated behind the wheel.

“And where’s Jessie,” she asked, then rolled her eyes with embarrassment. “I guess you hear that kind of joke a lot, don’t you?”

“So often that it’s not a joke. It’s a pain in the butt, okay?” My voice had The Edge to it, a phenomenon Chance named three years earlier when I nearly decked a drunken preppie charter boat captain who kept hassling me about trying to pull off a bank robbery on St. John, insisting we would make a great pair of desperados, sailing around the islands in his boat. He wouldn’t let it go, regaling everyone in the bar with tales of our future exploits, pounding me on the back, rubbing my head and shouting as he told the other drunks that I was, after all, Frank James.

“I’m sorry.” She extended her hand again. “Let’s try again. My name’s Elizabeth. Ford. I go by Liz.”

We shook and I opened the Land Rover’s door. Liz climbed into the seat next to Chance. I threw her purse, duffle bag and my stuff in the back and got in next to her. Rumble jumped into my arms, licking my face, wiggling, wagging his stumpy docked tail. For a change the Rover started at first crank. We drove down Ocean Road, water from the uncovered foam rubber cushions soaking into our clothes.

“What kind of a place is Smugglers Inn?” Liz spoke, grabbing my arm as Chance swerved to avoid a large pothole in the road. “I’ve got reservations there, but I don’t know anything about it.”

“There are three good hotels and eleven lousy ones on the island,” Chance said. “They all cost between a hundred and three hundred bucks a night. Smugglers is the nicest, it’s only two and a quarter and it has Ron Martin, the best manager on the island. Delano’s, over on Little Coconut Bay is filled with cockroaches, bedbugs, has hot, small rooms, contaminated water, and costs two hundred.”

“Sounds like I’ve got one piece of luck anyway.” She did not sound happy.

“There’s an added major advantage to Smugglers.” I grinned at her.

“What’s that?”

“The hotel sits on a bluff on the east side of Smugglers Bay. My place is on the west bluff. If you’re sitting on the hotel verandah you can see me sitting on mine.”

“How grand.” Her voice hung between sarcasm and disinterest, but there was a glint her eyes that allowed me to convince myself that she was hiding a spark of curiosity.

“I’ve got a better idea, though,” I said. “Why don’t I meet you at your hotel in about an hour? I’ll take you to dinner at the Tabard Inn.”

Saying nothing, she rested her head against the back of the seat and groaning softly, closed her eyes. Chance wove the Land Rover around a series of potholes along a section where the pavement was eroded by waves crashing constantly over the sea wall. When she did reply it was in a tired defensive tone, edgy.

“Look, you’ve been a help, Frank, and I don’t mean to be rude, but I need time alone. That’s why I’m here. I’ve got a lot to sort through, plans to make, letters to write. I don’t have time to look at your etchings.”

I shook my head. “Poems. I don’t etch. I write poems. But I don’t show them to people. Ask Chance. And you were rude. Sometimes dinner really means dinner.”

Chance nodded. “It’s true. I haven’t read more than five of his poems in four years.”

She smiled, the tension in her face easing slightly. “Sorry. I’ve had a bad few days. I have to rest a while and have time alone.”

I grunted, and we rode in silence. Time alone I understood after seeing her throw her ring into the Caribbean from the sun deck of The Yellow Bird. I’d been single-minded in my pursuit of solitude after my divorce.

There was no other traffic on the road for the first few miles. At the junction of North Road and Ocean Road on the west side of Salvation Hill, a bunch of kids in three Mini Mokes ran the stop sign and nearly forced us off the road. They were singing and hooting, waving beers as they pushed on by us at a curve, nearly crashing into an empty dump truck passing us going the other direction, probably headed to a beach where, under the cover of darkness, the driver could steal a load of sand for a construction job.

Chance drove slowly, giving me time to talk to Liz Ford. Waves crashing against the sea wall and we were damp from the spray, but he kept a deliberately slow pace. At one point he stopped by a roadside hibiscus hedge and picked two blossoms.

“For your hair.” He handed two of them to Liz. “Put one over each ear.”

She did, laughing. “You do that with practiced grace.”

I patted Chance on the shoulder. “According to the usual reliable sources, it has been said if you see a woman with a hibiscus in her hair in the morning you can make book she’s spent the night before with Chance.”

“These islands are full of mythmakers.” He popped one of the remaining flowers in his mouth. “They make good eating too.”

She laughed again. We rode the last three miles trying to describe Smugglers Inn’s Ron Martin to her.

“He’s tiny,” Chance said. “Less than four feet, eight inches tall. He claims to be eighty-six and says he was a gag writer for Milton Berle.”

“No one’s ever been cruel enough to check his story,” I said.

“I choose to believe him,” said Chance.

“We all do,” I said.

If Ron Martin wanted to be a former gag writer for Milton Berle, then he was. The islands are filled with people who reinvented their pasts. Whatever he once was, and maybe that included writing gags for Berle, now he ran a damn good inn, and he had built it himself brick by brick. The lobby was filled with huge framed black and white posters of Milton Berle in every kind of imaginable costume. Milton Berle as Queen Victoria. Milton Berle as Harpo Marx. Milton Berle as a giant chicken. Milton Berle as George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, George Armstrong Custer with a hundred phony arrows sticking out of the costume. There were shots of Milton Berle as anything but Milton Berle. Ron Martin claimed he was the mastermind behind Berle’s costume gags. Now he ran a weekly comedy night during high season in the inn’s lounge, known from Puerto Rico to Trinidad as an excellent training ground for aspiring stand up comics.

Chance pulled the Land Rover into the circular drive in front of Smugglers Inn. Yellow lights lined the way, throwing soft shadows of century plants, palms and lime trees over the closely cropped lawn. The night sky was clear; the stars bright, the moonlight a shimmering silver glaze over the landscape.

Ron met the car by the front door. He opened the passenger’s side door as we moved slowly and I jumped to the ground the moment we came to a stop. He helped Liz from the seat as I grabbed her bag from the back. I walked with them to the front of the inn.

“Maybe I’ll see you again.” I touched her shoulder as she stood in the doorway. “Here’s my card. Give me a ring if you feel like a good dinner some evening while you’re on island, or if you feel like having a good talk you can call me for that too, or both. A good meal and excellent conversation can be very therapeutic, you know.”

“Thanks.” Standing outlined by the lights in the lobby, she read the card aloud. “Frank James, poet/private investigator. You’re a private detective?”

I shrugged. “I do some investigations. It’s mostly little stuff, looking for kids who’ve been kidnapped by one parent and brought down to the Caribbean so the other parent can’t find them, things like that. Sometimes it gets a little heavier, but I don’t get much work down here. It’s a hobby as much as it is a job. Besides, it’s all under the table. The Ursuline authorities would never give a non-islander a permit to work as a private eye.”

“Who knows, maybe I’ll hire you,” she laughed. Then, giving us each a final handshake, she said goodnight and disappeared into Smugglers Inn, followed by Ron and her bag.

“Class act,” Chance said.

“Yeah.” I stretched my legs under the glove compartment, pushing the full weight of my body against the seat. Sliding my hand along the cushion, I could feel the warmth of the spot where Liz had been sitting. I pulled it back, lightly slapping my knees. I saw the signs and wasn’t about to get caught up in one of my self-pitying loneliness jags.

Back on the road we continued along the sea wall, wind blasting our faces. I picked up my habit of driving rental Jeeps with the windshield down from riding in Chance’s Land Rover. The only time he raises it is during a storm. It’s his sole protection from the rain. I keep telling him to carry an umbrella, cardboard boxes, anything his passengers could use to shield themselves from rainstorms. He refuses. He enjoys stopping, putting up the windshield, and continuing his drive, pretending the rain doesn’t bother him while his passengers get drenched, complaining at the same time they marvel at his seeming indifference to both their discomfort and his own drenching.

“She really turned you on,” he said.

“She’s an attractive woman.” I dropped it there. I don’t talk about women with other men, even a good a friend like Chance. Besides, I didn’t want to think about Liz Ford. From the time she approached me by the ladder on the upper deck of The Yellow Bird, to the firmness of her handshake as she said goodnight, I had been hoping for something other than spending the evening with Chance. Sighing again, I stretched my legs, resting my hands behind my head.

Chance broke the silence. “I’ll go to dinner with you.”

“Sounds good to me.”

Day or night, the road from Smugglers Bay to St. Ursula’s main town of Chaucer is one of the loveliest drives in the world. To the south is the Caribbean, its blue/green expanse broken only by the three small rises of Queen Anne Island, Jacobs Cay and Pirates Nemesis, a barren thrust of stone surrounded by coral reefs, accessible only by rowboat. Local legend says plundered gold is buried on Pirate’s Nemesis. If there ever was it has long since been found and secreted somewhere else. Not an inch of ground remains that hasn’t been dug up and turned over repeatedly by treasure seekers. In spite of that, it’s a favorite haunt of middle-aged tourists with metal detectors, who, after hours of prospecting, end up finding nothing more than one another’s lost dimes and quarters.

The sea is separated from the road by a wall of rock, chunks of coral and brick mortared together in the fashion of the old sugar mills, once the core of St. Ursula’s plantation economy. Waves broke against the stone, their spray covering the road, the Land Rover and us. In heavy storms the sea will eat sections of the road as it breaks through the wall, sending chunks of rock and asphalt crashing against the foot of the mountains which run the length of the island, separating the north from the south side. Roads twist and wind over those mountains, past huge century plants, hibiscus and oleander, banana plantations, grazed fields, and occasional houses. Cars have to compete for space with cows, donkeys, goats, chickens, as well as with people walking, bicycling and riding donkeys.

This particular night the moon, nearly full, caught the breaking waves, lighting the foam as it swirled around the rocks. Lights twinkled from the Paradise Isle Hotel and Yacht Harbor on Queen Anne Island.

I reached into the ice chest Chance keeps in the back of the Land Rover and grabbed us each a Heineken. I pulled the tabs and passed him one.

“Bad stuff,” I said as he took the can.

“I love beer,” he said.

“Not the beer, the cans. You ought to buy bottled beer. I’ve heard that cans are made with aluminum might do more damage to your brain than the alcohol.”

“Then here’s to beer, in cans and bottles.” He raised the can to his lips. “I don’t think much of my brain anyway. It gets me in more trouble than my pecker does.”

Halfway between Smugglers Bay and the Great Harbor of Chaucer, the road curves sharply around Pelican Cove. There, in a small valley at the base of Wise Mountain, sits a small cluster of West Indian homes, the road separated from the sea by thick mangroves, the nesting place of the pelicans for which Pelican Cove is named.

A dozen or so men, all dressed in dungarees and tee shirts, lounged around the common well, leaning against the fence, sitting on benches as they smoked cigarettes and drank from a rum bottle they passed around. Chance pulled over and stopped.

“Good evening. How are you tonight?” He spoke in the formal Ursuline manner.

“Chance, mon, and Frank,” several of them said at once. “We are just fine you know, and you?”

“Absolutely wonderful, thank you,” he said as I made the okay sign with my thumb and forefinger.

We got out of the car. Chance hunkered down by the benches. I sat on the edge of the well. We all talked a bit, passing time, Chance and I drinking from the rum bottle as it made the rounds. There was the general light unease often present as Statesiders and West Indians grope for common ground, the void between us filled with talk of the weather, local politics and some lengthy discussion of politics in the States, all of us wondering how they would affect the winter’s tourist crop.

“It will be a little better than last year.” Moses Riley, whose family owned most of the land around Pelican Cove, took the rum bottle with one hand, gesturing with the other as he spoke. “Your presidential election is over. I have noticed over the years, whenever there is a presidential election in the States tourism is down a bit here. People in the United States do not care about what happens in the Caribbean as long as events here do not affect them directly. But the people with money to travel are also those who are most involved in political affairs. They go away less during important election years.”

Moses smiled as he delivered his lecture. The rest of us nodded, making noncommittal grunts in response, or simple comments such as ‘oh,’ or ‘interesting,’ and ‘I didn’t know that.’

“None of it matters anyway,” said another man, a lanky West Indian named Robert Brady, who chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes and refused the bottle each time it came to him. “Nobody in American politics gives a damn about what happens in these islands. Someday maybe it will be different, but now they do not care.” Several of the others nodded in agreement. “And it is all right they do not give a damn,” he continued. “We do not want them to give a damn. They give a damn and we lose our land, we lose our control of the island. Look at the American islands. They give a damn and somebody pays them twenty-four dollars worth of Hong Kong beads and the island is lost.”

“Yeah, that is the true thing,” another man said. “My brother in St. Thomas, he lives in a housing project which does not have running water six days out of seven, and his children get beat up at school all the time and the crime is out of control. Kid with guns, man. And the drugs, and I do not mean Ganga, man, I mean real drugs. It is very bad there. Very bad.” He shook his head and made a sucking noise through his teeth.

From there the conversation turned to local politics and which of the two major parties on the island would be most likely to side with American authorities should they ever want anything from St. Ursula.

“Up on the top of the mountain, there is our problem now.” Robert’s voice was angry as he spoke, his face in a stiff frown as he pointed at the side of Wise Mountain. “That antenna will change us, man, and it will change our children even more. After a few years of watching the programs and advertisements from the States they will want the States. They will want us to be like the States. They will want cruise ships in our harbors. Trinkets in our gift shops. Television will bring us down just as surely as American troops brought Grenada down.”

After an awkward silent moment, someone raised the topic of poker. Politics were forgotten as he took a worn deck of cards from his pocket and began shuffling them. Someone else broke out a fresh bottle of rum. I reminded Chance of dinner.

We said good night, shook a few hands and got back into the Land Rover.

As we started to pull away, our stomachs growling, Willis Penn, a man of sixty, known through the British and American islands as a particularly wise obeah man and canny politician, put his hand on my arm. “Weird night, Frank.” His voice was as natural and even, as if he had just commented on the coldness of the beer.

Willis Penn wasn’t given to playing a role with his reputation of being wise in the ways of sorcery, hidden truth and ritual. He was a practical man, one of the most politically astute people on St. Ursula, and the founder of the Ursuline Progressive Alliance, a political party built on the principle of strong local control of the island. The urgency of his voice and the intensity of his stare held me for several long seconds after he removed his hand. Then, falling back in with the other men, he joined again the talk about the day’s fishing as they tried convincing one another of the strength of their poker hands. “What was that all about?” Chance asked when we were back on the road.

“Damned if I know.” I shivered slightly in the warm February evening.

“Willis Penn’s no idle chatterer. When he talks it’s almost always about something he considers important.”

“Weird was his word. ‘Weird night, Frank.’ He didn’t say anything else.”

“He chooses his words carefully.” Chance pulled at his beard and looked over at me. “Strange. Really strange.”

It was after nine when we pulled into town. Chaucer got its name when the British took the island over from the Dutch. One of the first governors suffered from a literary streak. It’s a failing English speaking people rarely tolerate in their public officials.

We parked in front of the Tabard Inn, a white concrete and stucco building, its windows large shuttered archways shaded by lush vegetation. Red, blue and yellow spots lit the palm fronds around the Inn. Passing a small kidney shaped pool, we walked around a group of tourists listening to Ken Tindall, a local dock hanger on, giving a slide talk on humpback whales.

I knew Ken casually. He lived in a rundown hut in the valley between Salvation Hill and Wise Mountain, earning his living doing odd jobs and cooking on charter boats. Most of the time he was a knee-walking drunk who wore ragged denim shorts, a tee shirt and a wool hat, like those that Rastas pull over their dreadlocks. Ken’s hair was graying blonde and flowed down around his shoulders. When he wasn’t hustling a few bucks from tourists with his slide talks on nature in the Caribbean he could often be found at the Quarterdeck, the favorite bar of expatriates, where he would hold forth with endless boring stories in one of the thickest West Indian dialects on St. Ursula.

Nodding to him as we passed, we passed through a large interior courtyard to the verandah dining room where we found an empty table and sat down. Tobias Gaines, owner-manager of the Tabard Inn, came over.

“I say, you chaps dining with us tonight?” Tobias was less than five and a half feet tall, stringy black hair looking as though it had never been washed falling over the collar of his black polo shirt.

“Only if you spring for a pre-dinner drink,” Chance said.

“It’s on the house, chaps,” he said.

Chance ordered a Sambuca. I wanted a screwdriver with Stoly.

Tobias wrote the orders down in a yellow newsprint pad.

“Jolly good.” He bowed slightly at the waist, then spinning around half ran, half hopped toward the bar.

Tobias was an Australian who had learned to be British from watching American B-movies. He was a repository of Jolly Goods, Rightos, Bloody Blokes and Good Shows. The only classic phrase I had never heard him say was Tally-Ho, and it was missing only because Monica Whistley-Gore’s attempts at starting a local hunt club faltered when Government had refused her permission to import foxes. Wild sheep, goats, donkeys and mongooses running over the hills and through the island bush were trouble enough. Over the last three years, the goats have gotten so bad, so out of control, that people have had to fence their properties if they want any kind of garden or shrubbery.

He returned with our drinks and we sipped them, our legs stretched out, feet resting on the extra chairs at the table. Boat lights bobbed on the waters of Great Harbor, halyards clinking against aluminum masts. The evening air was sweet, filled with odors of flowers and cooking.

At the far end of the verandah two young women, obviously college students on vacation, were playing guitars and singing “Judy Drownded.” They wore identical hand printed blue cotton caftans and leaned over their guitars, fiberglass Ovations designed to look like medieval lutes. Hair fell over their faces and brushed the backs of their hands as they played and sang in thin reedy voices, just on the edge of being off key.

The song ended, they looked up, smiling at the scattering of applause. I caught the eye of one, and smiled half in encouragement, half hoping I might pick her up. Her eyes fell quickly to the guitar neck and she started strumming. Her partner picked up the beat and they went into a bland version of “Island in the Sun.”

“It’s Bellefonte night at the Tabard Inn,” Chance said.

“They’re not bad.”

“They’re terrible, Frank. Their guitar playing makes you sound like Doc Watson and their singing is enough to make Rumble howl, which takes a hell of a lot after living with you.”

“I don’t think they’re all so bad,” I persisted.

“You’re horny.” He put down his drink and turned to me. “You whiffed with Liz Ford earlier and your gonads are driving you crazy. For chrissakes, Frank, both those girls are younger than your sons.”

“Maybe I’m lonely.” I felt like an idiot. There is nothing more pathetic, more despicable than a man in his fifties who thinks a woman in her early twenties might be interested in him.

Chance turned back to the table and attacked his drink. “I don’t want to hear about lonely. Being horny I can deal with. Loneliness I can’t even think about.”

The dining area was half full, vacationing couples in varying shades of tan, drinking pina colladas and strawberry daiquiris with little paper umbrellas for stirrers. They spoke in hushed tones, looking intensely at one another. Waiters and waitress moved around and between them, delivering food, removing plates, replenishing drinks, careful not to intrude on their intimacy.

“Must be nice,” I said.

“What’s that?” Chance dropped a small handful of coffee beans in his Sambuca.

“Being in love on a Caribbean island.”

He popped a bean in his mouth, chewing on it as he answered. “It’s just like being in love anywhere. You are in love for a while, it feels wonderful and then you’re not in love and you feel like hell because it’s over.”

“You’re such an asshole cynic.”

“I’m an asshole realist. I understand how hunger rises, makes its demands, gets glutted, falls off, and rises up somewhere else. And that’s all love is, hunger.”

I smiled at him, dropping the subject. Chance approaches life much differently than I do. Harder. It reflects his ups and downs, things he’s seen and had to do. I’ll always be a romantic. I try to hide it. I pretend to have Chance’s hardness, but I can’t feel it. The best I can do is hide my romantic streak from people who might try to use it against me.

Tobias took our dinner orders himself, returning in a few minutes with curried banana soup for our appetizers.

“My own recipe,” he said. “Do enjoy it, chaps.”

The soup was excellent. Tobias’ food always is.

Chance looked at me across the table, stirring the ice and coffee beans in his third Sambuca. He pulled out the swizzle stick, one without an umbrella on it, licking off traces of the drink, and leaned back in his chair, distorting the silk screened images of Groucho Marx and John Lennon on the front of his tee shirt.

“What would you say if I told you I was thinking of selling the plumbing business and investing in a television station?”

I was surprised. He doesn’t talk much about his own affairs. When he does, it’s often to hit the listener with something big he’s been sitting on for days.

“Here? On St. Ursula?” I thought he was joking, but when I smiled at him he nodded.

Several years earlier Chance had started a plumbing supply business in partnership with Rodney Creque, an Ursuline plumber. I knew he had been getting bored with it, but he’d never mentioned getting out.

“The new relay tower is going to open up incredible market potential here.” He played with the swizzle stick, folding one end and tucking it in the other, making a small plastic circle.

Finishing my drink, I shook my head. “There are less than twelve thousand people on the whole island. How can you support an operation as expensive as a television station with such a small population base? And you’ll have to compete with cable.”

“It’s plenty big enough if Government will guarantee I’m going to have the only station they’ll license here and they’ll also guarantee me ownership and control of the cable system. It’ll be a goldmine, Frank. Everything picked up by the relay tower will have to broadcast through my station or my cable, and the station will be beamed to the BVI and the American islands. Maybe even down island.”

“Government has given you complete assurance?” I was surprised. It’s not easy for an off islander to get such cooperation from the Ursuline government.

“The Minister of Communications has already given it to my potential partners.” He hooked his thumbs under the sleeve seams of his tee shirt, tycoon style. “Besides, I’ve got to do something. The supply business is in trouble.”

“I thought you were doing well.” I was surprised. Chance’s three delivery trucks always seemed to be out on the roads.

“We were. Hell, we’re moving supplies like crazy, but goddamn Rodney’s a piss poor businessman and it’s time for me to get out before he drives us into bankruptcy by giving credit to everybody, regardless of the risk. He’s still giving credit to people who haven’t paid us for six months.”

“Then get out. But television? What good is television going to bring to St. Ursula?”

He dropped the swizzle stick into his empty glass and looked directly at me. “Your problem, Frank, is that you’re just like everybody who comes to the islands. You want progress and change to stop when you get here so things will remain the way they were when you were attracted to the place.”

“Wrong. I’m an idealist. The only thing a television station will do is undermine the culture.”

“Horseshit.” He crashed his chair to the floor. “It’s going to come. Besides we’ve already got television over the air from the US islands and Puerto Rico. You’ve got a set yourself.”

“But the reception’s too lousy for it to be a major force, and it doesn’t directly involve St. Ursula.”

He smiled, shaking his head. “Better me being involved with it than someone with no respect for this place. I’ve got the money to make it work for the island instead of just for making more bucks.” He paused, looking off at the lights in the harbor. “Of course, I want it to make more money for me, not lose it. I’m not just an altruist.”

We ate our main courses in silence. I had grouper with a light sauce of butter and Parmesan cheese. Chance had a thick rare filet of beef.

Following the meal we had three stingers apiece. Rumble lay on his side sleeping under the table, sated on our scraps, snorting, whining softly as he dreamed, his stumpy legs fanning the air as he chased imaginary beasts. We sat quietly, Chance staring at lights on the pool’s surface, me feeling sorry for poor old Frank James, sleeping alone again. Finally we paid our bill, said our good nights to Tobias, who pressed a last beer into each of our hands. Stumbling and weaving, we made our way back to the Land Rover.

“You’re wrong about television,” I said. It’s a mistake to bring it in.”

“Don’t be an asshole, Frank.” He fell into his seat and turned to face me.

Chance is a gentle man, but no one to mess around with, his muscles built over years spent lugging heavy boxes of pipe fittings, hoisting bathtubs onto trucks and rowing his dinghy out to his home aboard The Maybelline, a decaying wooden Chris Craft he anchored in the middle of Great Harbor, thus avoiding having to pay dock fees. He had been on St. Ursula for twenty-five years; sometimes making a lot of money, sometimes going broke in one business or another. He’s been in a number of businesses. He owned a small hotel on the north side for couple of years, but once it was a going concern he lost interest and sold it. When I first met him he was running a successful landscaping business, which he sold to raise the capital for his half of the plumbing supply operation.

Maybe he was right about the potential for television on the island. Chance is a talented and energetic person from a talented and energetic family. His father is the author of sixteen one thousand plus page topical novels, the first of which was made into a successful Broadway musical, later into a movie. Three or four others had also been made into movies. The mere mention of a new book by Chance’s father is enough to have publishers and book club executives running around with the intensity of Spock in heat.

By the time Chance was eight, his father, raking in proceeds from the musical, was pushing him to be the exemplary son of a rich man. Chance played the game until his junior year at Swarthmore. He dropped out to knock around the dens of the Beat Generation for a couple of months, got disgusted with nihilists jockeying for literary fame by embracing nothingness, and finally took a job as a crew member on a yacht belonging to a friend of his father’s. He jumped ship in St. Ursula after the owner discovered Chance was having an affair with his young wife.

Chance has his father’s ability to muster his energy to profitable ends. He does it in different ways, but he is always successful, at least for a while. He’s been rich, he’s been poor, he’ll be rich again, and his father always is ready to finance his plans.

“It’s the wrong business for St. Ursula,” I said.

“And I say you still haven’t gotten over your romantic crush on the island.”

“Like I said, I’m an idealist.”

“Idealist, romantic. It’s the same thing.”

We knew each pretty well and, aware of the pointlessness of arguing, dropped the discussion. He started the Land Rover, ground it into gear and drove weaving along Waterfront to Ocean Road. Resting my head against the back of the seat I stared into the star-broken vastness of the tropical night.

“What are you going to do?” I asked.

“Go to bed.”

“I mean about the television business.”

“Who knows? Tonight I’ll go to bed. I do my best thinking when I’m asleep. Tomorrow I’ll have a better idea what I’m going to do about the television thing.”

We turned off Ocean Road, down the rocky, rutted, twisting, muddy drive to my place.

“You can sleep here tonight,” I said, getting out of the Land Rover.

He shook his head.

“You’ve been drinking as much as I have.”

“Not to worry. Look, I can still stand up and touch my nose.”

Shutting his eyes and keeping one hand on the steering wheel, he stood and brought his thumb rapidly toward his face, poking himself in the corner of the left eye. The car swung into a pothole, lurched through a growth of century plants and came to a stop in a hedge after lightly brushing a small coconut palm. He was thrown back on the seat, laughing as the engine sputtered twice and stalled.

“I didn’t do so well, did I?” He restarted the engine, backed out of the bushes and drove up to my front door.

“You should stay here.” I got out and walked around to the driver’s side. Stretching, I put my hand on his forearm.

“I’ll drive carefully and I promise not to stand up and touch my nose on the way home. I have things to do and miles to go before I sleep. Take care.”

Spinning his wheels, he turned the Rover around and drove rumbling and squeaking toward the main road.

THE CEILING FAN turning above us, Rumble and I lay on my bed watching the 11 o’clock news from St. Thomas. The picture jumped, fading in and out as the signal bounced off clouds and mountainsides. A tourist had been shot in the head outside a nightclub. A teacher had been mugged at the University of the Virgin Islands. A citizen’s group was accusing the Legislature of misappropriating funds for a housing project, and a senator from St. Croix had just admitted raping his nine-year-old daughter. Speculation was that he would be re-elected in a landslide. The weather was going to be mostly sunny with a high of eighty-one the next day, sea swells expected to be one and a half to two feet high, and the garbage collectors were entering the tenth day of a strike.

They showed a commercial three times with a single repeating line:

“One third of all jobs in the U.S. Virgin Islands come from tourists. Think about it!” There was a background picture of tourists descending from a cruise ship. “One third of all jobs in the U.S. Virgin Islands come from tourists. Think about it! One third of all jobs in the U.S. Virgin Islands come from tourists. Think about it! One third of all jobs in the U.S. Virgin Islands come from tourists. Think about it! Be nice to tourists!”

I turned the television off and fell asleep as waves broke against the foot of the bluff, wind rustling palm fronds, and tree frogs whistling from the bush in the damp earth behind my home.

I was jolted awake by the phone and Liz Ford telling me somebody had just tried to kill her.