Terese Svoboda - A Drink Called Paradise

Barclay is not up to hushing them. After his son does not return, I see Barclay on the beach, even my beach, and he looks out the way I do, but the boat he wants is different. Now Barclay stares at his hands as if the missionary’s quieting is cupped in them and only after that starts to rise.

But Harry says, No, no, he will pay, he does not wish the good people of this island to be scandalized further.

Not in front of your wife, says the preacher.

This is when they all turn to me. I take a step back from the window, their actual turning is such a surprise. Me? I say.

You have slept the night through with him, is this not correct? asks the small man up in the pulpit.

I begin to scratch my head hard. I knew it, I knew it.

Yes, says Harry. She says yes. Just tell me how much.

The missionary pretends to consult Barclay, who is looking out the window again to the sea, who is looking at his wife and then all around, then back to the sea. Who is nodding.

It will be five hundred dollars, says the missionary, but no interest for all the time that has gone by.

This sum shocks even the women leaning forward, this sum changes Harry from a castaway doing his duty to a citizen in outrage. What about prurient interest? asks Harry. What about greed? Harry turns to me where I am rooted. I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you, he says to me. That’s the way the Arabs do it. Will that do? he says to the missionary up in his pulpit. Can’t there just be fornication now? Or is that punishable too?

Barclay? says the missionary.

What? says Barclay.

As long as they are not pregnant you must pay, says the missionary. A kind of tax, he says. Render unto Caesar, he says. When one is pregnant, you can stop. That’s how it is. We require it.

Harry begins laughing. Well, you’ll be sorry to learn that if I had five hundred dollars, I wouldn’t pay it. The ladies will all come to me for free.

But the congregation, especially the ladies’ side of the congregation, the flowered side, makes no noise, no flurry of assent and sighs.

Two days later, I am looking for the coconuts that sometimes fall on a field where they kick balls when they have them, when I see Harry picking up rocks to make a row that stretches around the goal and on around both sides. I sit down to watch him. It’s worth doing: his furred torso all muscled from picking up rocks, his arms and their flexing from putting them down. He’s alone for once.

That’s it, he says after he sets down another ten feet of rock. I’m fried, he says. He stirs the sand beside me to get rid of the beach crabs that swarm here and on me, some kind of crab that is too small to eat, or too successful in the sand’s heat, and he sits.

I shake the hair from my face as a divorcee should, and I say, Is all this in payment?

Penance, not payment. Five hundred dollars is a lot more rocks. He draws a circle in the sand. He draws another circle.

Is this two nothings or two islands? I wonder. Or the beginning of male and female?

They don’t get pregnant easily here, do they? is all I say.

Look, I can’t really talk to you. Somebody checks up on me. One of the girls. They send down the very young ones now, the ones most likely to get pregnant, to try to speed things up.

I suppose my being here will increase the number of rocks you have to haul.

They come at night and put them back. He looks at me. You? You were just an excuse. You don’t count. Anyone can tell you’re not here. You’re not here at all. You’re a ghost. He holds his nose. A stinky ghost but a ghost nonetheless.

I run away, I scuttle two trees over and search for coconuts under fallen palm fronds.

Harry rises and stretches. You’ll get fined too, he shouts in my direction. All those belong to somebody, you know.

I’m smacking a green one against a rock, I’m shaking it.

He repeats, You’ll get fined.

Nobody owns these, I yell. But I drop this one anyway.

Just because the trees don’t look planted by anybody doesn’t mean they aren’t anybody’s property. He comes over to me, he holds me by the shoulders where I shake without the coconut.

Even the coconuts are hot, I say.

Is that what you think? says Harry. He takes his hands off me and goes over to the circles he made and brushes sand over them. You know, you sound sane, he says, just loudly enough.

I sound sane. I giggle and crab-sidle over. The way you say that with just a touch of a question, I say. How sane would you be if just breathing made you sick?

I would be crazy, he says, turning away from me. I would breathe, he says. Have babies.

Jelly babies, I say. You jerk, I say.

He goes back to his rocks. I don’t know, he says, grunting and straining.

I sit in his way, on the next rock, on the next. My boat hasn’t come. That’s all I care about. I dig my toes into the sand so I don’t fall over, so he can’t move the rock, but he does. I’m dizzy, moving from rock to rock, I’m dizzy all the time now. It comes from not eating right and not too much sleep and weeping. Barclay’s probably told the captain not to come back until they’re all pregnant, I say.

Harry stops with the rocks. Barclay’s got to get some more of that copra off his docks, he says. He would jump up and down to see the boat again. Come on, the boat probably sank.

That’s not it, I say.

The sun is so far down our shadows almost touch six yards away. I look away from those shadows so close together. I get up and go to the water. I don’t see it, it’s only wet and then not, a warm shine on the sand. All I have to do is walk in. I’m walking in the way I have tried a few times before, to get rid of walking, to take in all that water, all that big O of an ocean, the naught of nothing, to just swallow it up and be done with it, I walk and I walk, I’m walking in almost to my neck when I walk into a bottle.

It’s not mine, the one I threw, but it’s close enough, some beer bottle. I catch it up and wade out, I smack it against a rock to get at the note that I see is inside.

I know it’s not from him. I know that.

What is it? asks Harry. Stop crying.

He takes the note away from me. I hate this place, he reads. I hate the whole seventh grade. Signed, Sheila.

What’s so sad? he asks.

I tell him.

I stop shaking when I tell him, even though I keep on crying. He holds me and holds me. Then I’m laughing, I’m leaning on his shoulder, with my eyes open and teary I start laughing, and I can’t stop laughing, not even when I point, when I say, There it is, and drop the note.

It? he says. It?

The dot is too far away to be Temu, even the way dots here mean nothing with the sky just more sea the neck bends to. Besides, Temu always floats in the lagoon. Ngarima hauls him back whenever he floats too close to the reef that his brother shot.

The dot is so far away it’s like an eye test.

I don’t see anything, says Harry.

Okay, so you don’t. There it is, I cry. This time I point with both hands. Isn’t it there?

Calm down, he says.

Big bullets of tears drop off my face and hit the sand. I turn away from the water. Sometimes, I say, I expect the sand to hiss back when I wet it.

Right. It’s not that kind of hot. He looks at me a long time, and then he goes over to another big rock right where a rock would block a ball if you were kicking it that way, and he digs at it with a stick.