Joan Groves: The Last Island

Looking up from around a display, I saw a lady. First impressions are very important and I was very impressed.

“Thanks. Been trying,” I said.

She introduced herself. “Hi, I’m Jeanette.”

“I am—”

“I know who you are, you’re Vaughnie.”

What the—, I thought.

She must have seen the ‘what the—’ on my face because she began to laugh aloud.

Damn Manta. Damn ‘ie,’ I thought.

“You have been talking to Manta.”

She answered me. “Manta talks to everybody and everybody talks to Manta.”

I was on my back under the table looking up.

“Jeanette, good name.”

“Thanks,” she said.

“French?” I asked.

“Pennsylvania Dutch,” she replied.

“You look more French than PA Dutch from this angle.”

She laughed.

“My whole name is Joan Jean Juanetta Jeanette Johnson. When I was a kid, they called me Joan.”

“What were your parents smoking, herbal potatoes? You would think Joan ain’t all that hard,” I replied.

She laughed louder.

“That is why I decided to go with Jeanette—just for spite,” she said.

“Well, John Henry is your new name,” I said.

“John Henry was a steel-driving man,” she mocked and then began to sing the ballad—not well—but she continued on.

“You got some good strong hard-working never-say-quit influences, John Henry,” I said, standing up.

“I like John Henry. I think I will go with that, Vaughnie.” She giggled.

We both laughed.

“Need some help? I am a carpenter’s daughter. I can be another set of hands, I run my own dive shop, after all, and it looks like you can use a dozen score of octopi,” she teased.

When it comes to a helper for work, I have no pride and besides, I am no fool. It is nicer to be under a table with a PA Dutchie than alone with a plumber’s wrench.

There are noises and there are silent sounds. I heard one of those silent sounds. It was the sound of a ghost walking on cotton balls. The only sounds were of the miniscule compression of air atoms in my ear. She heard the compression, too.

“The Deacon,” she said with reverence. I peeked. It was the Deacon. He walked directly to a huge old Navy tank as if he was a positive charge and the tank was a negative pole.

The tank was of military grade quality construction. It was made of battleship grade steel. Great ribbons of support metal acted as belts that were anchored to oversized bolts set in a reinforced cement floor. The battleship gray was total except for places on the steel rusted through exposure.

The viewing space was a single face-sized porthole. The porthole consisted of alternating layers of glass and clear plastic secured and reinforced with a rim of plate steel fused to the side of the tank. The only way to view the internal space of the tank was to press one’s face upon the porthole in a most intimate and immodest kiss.

I couldn’t help staring at the Deacon’s back as he stood in front of the tank. Deacon’s back was a V from his waist to his shoulders, and the bottom was an inverted V from his waist to his feet. He was straight, tall, and muscularly defined with the bearing of a top predator. Somehow, the dreads seemed out of place. They gave him a peacefulness that was not in his soul. He stood looking at the tank. I looked at him.

Just as silently he exited.

I got up. She got up.

“Who is he?” I asked, looking at John Henry.

She turned and walked to the tank as if it was a magnet and she was an iron piece.

“You see this tank.” She paused. “This tank is the Deacon. This tank is his body, his soul, and his mind.”

The tank was oversized, immensely sturdy, and—from what I knew about such things—over-designed.

She continued, “The tank is for the Devil.”

“What the—” I stuttered.

“Well, that is what Manta says it is for—and Manta is no fool.” She turned and faced me. The seriousness was upon her face.

There is this thing about fear. I don’t have any. I did not know the genus or species of the devil. I knew that John Henry was out of work for today. Manta must have told her quite a story.

“Hey, man, thanks for your help. I think that I am through for today,” she said.

There was a ton more work to do, but I was through for today too.

She pulled herself from the tank and turned towards me.

“Are you sure?”

It was one of those ‘are you sures’ that are always said in polite society by polite people with the expectation that a polite ‘yes, I am sure,’ will be the reply.

“Yes, I am sure,” was my reply. “Quite sure.”

I sounded like a member of the royal family at a state dinner and for an anti-royalist, I was quite proud of myself, indeed.

“Then I’ll go. I just remembered some work I have to finish,” she said.

This was her less-than-silent exit.

The Deacon gave no announcement of his entrance and even less of his exit and he was not impolite at all. Here we, in order to be polite, do no such thing. Being polite was a royal complication: first, of engagement, and then disengagement.

“Stop by my shop,” she said.

“I will, I sure will,” I answered.

We exchanged a final salutation and standard body language signals; with such, John Henry left the LION.

I was most happy here. Reaching out for a banana leaf to use as a dinner plate was my kind of fine dining, along with the fact that the silverware was always at the ready at the end of my arms, allowing me to live the fine life of unrefined living. At the end of dinner, wrap up the leaf and throw it away—such a fine way to do dishes. Lastly,with a tongue lick, the silverware was clean.

There was a village open-air market. Open tables for food stuffs, an open table for dry goods, and one refrigerator was all that consisted of the business center. For me, a scissors, a pile of winter clothes, a quart of gasoline, and a match had converted Cleveland, Ohio clothes into the latest tropical fashion. The cobbled coral road, the only road on the island, was the super-highway to every island location.

I began to walk. It was not long before along came a family bus—a sawed-off car with an extended back—and I hitched a free ride. More than multicolored on the outside, it was multicolored and multi-smelly on the inside. I stepped over some live chickens, pushed past hanging taro and bananas, ducked under fresh fish, and shared a space with a swine, resting my feet upon a large, very friendly dog.

I made my way to John Henry’s dive shop.

“Hello, John Henry.” I spoke to her with my James Bond cool and looked around.

I’d been an open water diver ever since I took a free certification course in college and qualified in the North Atlantic and, from here to there and back again, dived what felt like a hundred places. I'd been in what felt like a thousand dive shops, and this dive shop was as well-equipped as most. It did not have a volume of stuff, but it had the right stuff, it had the good stuff. You can always tell, and you can always smell quality.

“Nice gig. I’m impressed.” I spoke this time in my non-James Bond manner.

She said hello with her eyes and her smile.

There was a noise coming from the attached work area. I could see Manta working on some gear.

There was silence coming from the open door that I had just entered. It was the Deacon.

The noise from Manta was swallowed up in the vacuum of the Deacon’s presence, and silence ruled.

With a direct and deliberate stride, the Deacon went to the article he wanted, took it from the display, and simply exited. He did not pay for it; John Henry said and did nothing. As he exited, the sounds of the dive shop returned.