Max Collins - Carnal Hours

Then a land crab scuttled across my path, and I jumped back, and shivered. Closed my eyes. Breathed slowly.

The little bastard had made it real for me again.

Through Marjorie’s open windows the smells of cooking drew me toward her cottage like I was Hansel and she was a wickedly delicious witch and as for Gretel, well, to hell with Gretel.

I knocked once and waited, to give my hostess a chance to put lids on the steaming pots I pictured her tending. When the door opened, she looked a little harried, her brow pearled with sweat under a white bandanna; she grinned, though, and motioned me in. She wore a white blouse with an inadequately aproned wide blue-and-white-checked skirt that swirled over petticoats as she moved back to the stove.

“Smells wonderful,” I said, and it did, the spicy fragrances a virtual culinary aphrodisiac. I sat at the round table, where two woven sisal place mats waited, along with the usual bowl of cut flowers.

“I hope you like this,” she said. “I been workin’ on it all afternoon. The main course isn’t so hard, but dessert is gonna be real special.”

Watching her slim graceful form, as she moved from this pot to that, I could think of something that would make a real special dessert, myself.

That lecherous thought aside-and despite the lingering memory of last night’s sweet kiss-I was determined to be a gentleman this evening. Marjorie Bristol was as intelligent as she was lovely, and as vulnerable as she was ladylike; hurdling the racial barrier between us, not to mention the cultural one, was a peril I didn’t wish to subject her to.

Or me either, for that matter. Friendship, possibly mild flirtation, was the limit, here.

“You said you weren’t sick of conch,” she said, serving me a small bowl of chowder, “and I took you at your word.”

“Out of this world,” I said, savoring a spoonful. The spicy soup was thick and the chunks of conch mingled with diced potatoes, tomatoes and various other vegetables. I didn’t even dip into the oyster crackers she provided.

She seemed to spend more time watching me eat than eating herself, and her childlike smile at my enjoyment was infectious. Halfway through the soup, she added an appetizer to the table, crunch-battered, mild-tasting fish fingers.

“Grouper,” she said.

They didn’t serve this at Billy Ireland’s back in Chicago; but they should have.

The main course was a plate of well-spiced rice with onions and tomatoes and big white tender chunks of meat.

“Crab?” I said, and smiled a little.

“Your enemy,” she said. “I thought you might like to triumph over him.”

I had a bite and said, “He tastes a hell of a lot better than he looks.”

She ate a bite herself, then studied me, those huge long-lashed brown eyes turning soulful. “You don’t look like a man who’s much afraid of anythin’. Why does a little animal give a big man like you such a start?”

I shrugged; sipped my iced tea. “Not while we’re eating, Marjorie. I’ll tell you later.”

She nodded solemnly, looked down at her food; she had a chastised expression, and I didn’t want her to.

“Hey-Marjorie. It’s no big deal. It’s just not polite supper conversation…okay?”

She smiled again, a little. “Okay.”

I asked her about herself, her family. Both her mother and her father had for many years worked for various wealthy white households in domestic positions.

“My father…really isn’t my father,” she said. “He is my father to me, and I love him, but…he married my mother when she was expectin’ me. Some rich man was my blood daddy. I don’t know who he is, and I never look into it. But that’s why I look like this. Mama’s kind of light-skinned, too. Papa, too, a little. That’s why we live on the other side of the wall.”

“Other side of the wall?”

“In Grant’s Town, a concrete wall separates us light brown ones from the darker.”

“And you folks are higher up the social ladder, I take it?”

She nodded. “We have a nice house. Two stories. No electricity, no indoor plumbin’…not as nice as livin’ here by Westbourne. But nice enough.”

“You mentioned you had a brother you want to put through college….”

“I have two sisters, one older, one younger. Mabel’s married and works at the straw market; Millie’s a maid at the B.C.”

“I’d like to meet them.”

She smiled and ate her food. Somehow, despite her openness, I knew that me meeting her kin wasn’t high on her list.

I was finished with my main course; my stomach glowed with it. I looked at her as she nibbled at her food, and thought about how she’d leveled with me about who she was; how personal she’d been with me.

“Last year about this time,” I told her, “I was on an island called Guadalcanal.”

Her head tilted. “I read about that place in the papers. You were a soldier?”

“A Marine. I was on a patrol that got cut off from the rest of our company. We fought back the Japanese for a day and a night, out of a hole in the sandy ground a shell made. Some of us died. Some of us lived. All the ones who lived were…wounded. Not necessarily physically. Do you understand?”

She nodded gravely. “It was a place like this, Guadalcanal. A tropical island.”

“Yes.”

She smiled ever so gently. “And the land crabs were there.”

I laughed, tapped my empty plate with a fork. “Skittering around like ugly baseball gloves with legs. Lots of legs.”

“Well, you ate you him, now. Your enemy.”

I touched her hand. “Thanks to you.”

Her hand was warm; so was her smile. “Now, dessert.”

She went to the oven and put on a kitchen mitt to pull out a cookie sheet on which were two steaming, oversize custard cups. Soon the cup with its orangeish-white, crusted-brown contents sat before me, its rising, swaying steam beckoning me like an Arab dancing girl.

When I broke the skin with my spoon, a rich orange-white liquid ran through the custard.

“Coconut souffle,” she said, beaming, obviously proud of herself. “Be careful…it’s hot….”

It was, but goddamn it was good; I can taste that stuff this minute: sweet with shreds of coconut and hints of banana and orange and rum….

“I make it with Yellow Bird,” she said, taking a little taste herself.

“There’s a bird in this?”

She laughed musically. “No! Yellow Bird is a drink that mixes banana liqueur, orange juice, Triple Sec, and rum. I put the same things in my souffle.”

“Are you sure you’re not the cook up at Westbourne?”

“I’m sure. She’s so much better than me-but not as good as my mama.”

After supper, we sat out on her front stoop and watched the tide roll in; both the look and sound were shimmering. We sat close, but didn’t touch. The moon in the dark clear blue sky looked unreal, like a poker chip you could reach out and pluck. There were very few stars to wink at us tonight. The horizon was endless, though I knew the countless islands of the Bahamas were scattered out there; that hundreds of beaches, just this lovely, were ivory under the moonlight, just like this one. But somehow this was the only one. Anywhere.

“You know, Nathan…there’s something that’s been botherin’ me….”

“Oh? Something I’ve done or said?”

“No! No. Something about Sir Harry.”

She looked into her lap; she must’ve slipped out of the petticoats when she went into the bathroom after supper, because the blue-and-white dress was spread out before her now, flat, like a tablecloth.

“Sir Harry seemed kinda…funny, a month or so before he died.”

“Funny? How?”

“He was always takin’ precautions. Like he was scared about somethin’.”