Terese Svoboda: A Drink Called Paradise

He makes his noise.

I pick up a fruit and hit him in the face with it. He blinks, sniffs it, then crushes it between his jaws, the juice coming through real animal’s teeth.

Then he makes his noise again.

I run.

Off the path, everything scratches. I rip my shorts, my legs bleed, my hands tear as I lurch away from the boar into the bush, into the real bush. They may as well tack up boards covered with nails as grow all this stiff stuff so ready for sex that scratches, cuts, jabs, lances what is already dish-shard-sliced.

The bush thickens further with its knife-sharp plants, and I stop. I have to. Besides, the pig’s not in pursuit, nor is the windmilling boy. I’ve gone too far. I have to be lost, though lost on this small island can’t be too bad. Maybe lost is good, is just somewhere else. I force myself to smile. I turn as if that’s what I want to do.

Where the bush thickens most there’s the leftover of a path that veers around it, and I take it more to avoid the plants than for a direction, and at the end of that path is a palm with a wire running up its smooth side, like one plant throttling another. Then I see the house below it.

It is made with fiberboard nailed crookedly to planks and tarpaper and air, but the rusted bolts and barbed wire all around its bottom give it a look of growth, of a succulent’s succulent with greening thick walls, of something made fast and abandoned slow.

I look for an opening, a reason for all the bolts and barbed wire, why it’s here and not on the beach. Surely the wire’s an antenna, surely something inside bounces sound around, if not picture. Inside must be a radio, if not a phone.

I’m free, finding a phone makes me free. The boat is already coming if I can tell it to.

I keep circling.

My ex will send a boat. Although he is the man who forgot me, he is someone who shrinks refrigerators and blows up people for a living, one special effect or another, none of them very special to me after he forgot to pick me up post-delivery, and other better-forgotten events, he could send a boat. But I don’t think he thinks of me now.

I hope he doesn’t, I hope he’s forgotten.

There has to be some place to get in.

It is my son whom I’d call. Miss you, I’d say to him if I could, but it would come out, Brush your teeth. Then I’d make the loud sound of a smack that’s supposed to embarrass him, the one that leaves a red butterfly on a cheek.

I stop to think about that butterfly, that call, and then I find the lock.

It’s covered with vines and all rusty, a lock I can’t knock off with one blow of a machete the way any islander could. I have no machete. I’m probably the only person on the island who doesn’t carry a machete.

The shack can’t be empty.

Maybe the rust fills in instantly where a sweaty palm turns, or the plants surge over the suddenly bared spot in a single afternoon.

And over what other bared spots on single afternoons? One square mile of island, and how many secrets can such an island harbor?

My shoulders against the door don’t so much as flake off rust. I give the door a good kick.

Barclay will open it.

Barclay, I say, let me radio.

Who would look for him in the cemetery? Ghosts, says Ngarima, you don’t want to go there. But there he is, drinking, his back up against one of the stones that all lean one way, like recliners, that angle, and hard to see if you are walking by at a clip, which I am, short-cutting and wending and feeling my way back. But I do see.

He gives me his film-star profile, his wet lips settling around a bottle.

Barclay, I say, I’ve found the shack.

Barclay drinks. The label’s imported. What’s not imported here?

I squat to his level. At his level, each plot is fenced to the size of a bed and mounded as if there are covers pulled over. In some places the covers are cracked and open. I thought everyone here was afraid of this place, I say. Talk to me, Barclay.

Everyone is afraid, he says. Aren’t you? His voice is down deep where darkness sits in a man, where rumble meets those chemicals that make a man or make him weep.

They’re not my dead, I say.

No? It doesn’t matter, he says. The spirits have blown away anyway. He purses his lips to show me blow . All of the spirits.

Quit being so mysterious, I say. It’s bad enough you wouldn’t take me to the radio.

Radio? says Barclay, sitting up a little. You know, boats used to miss this island even when they started having radar, he says. He drinks again. This is where they always put the inches-to-miles on maps because there is so much blue here they can’t resist it, it makes the map look good. He says, Watch the sunset tonight and you will see green fire. Or you used to. He takes another drink. I used to meet women here, he says. No one would bother us.

Barclay, I say, let me radio.

Clare, he says. He says Clare perfectly. The radio doesn’t work.

No? I say.

I am a man, and I don’t like to say what doesn’t work, and I don’t like to say it to you, who is not subject to me, but the radio doesn’t work. It has no part, the part is gone, I don’t know.

He drinks.

You could have told me sooner.

You had your hope.

So when is the boat coming?

It comes when it comes, he says. You should not be so sad.

I like order. Here I can’t order up or out, I can’t order a thing.

You are a woman.

The inflection sounds kind at first, a little pitying, then it’s something I should have thought of, a woman alone with a man.

He offers me his bottle.

Thanks, I say, and I go on with my walk.

Don’t mention it, he says after me so that I know it’s the mention of the brokenness of the radio that he doesn’t want anyone else to hear, not that I shouldn’t consider him generous.

I shiver as a mist mists the path in swaths, the way a ghost would, then I run away with an anger that is huge, that cracks.

I wake in a dream about my son, who is falling, who falls fast and hard, and I can hear his breath in surprise suck by the air at my ear, and I run to throw myself to be under him, a pillow, when someone knocks me down. I writhe to sit up, to see if my son’s all right.

Then I rear back and hit hard.

The part plunging into the air I can’t see, this being a pure night, starless and moonless. I’m not seeing anyway, I am trying to find a scream where it’s made, clutched tight or asleep, when he and his big hot part get tangled in my hit and pull down glass, which shatters on the side of the crate I know is there.

What can I see? I can’t see anything.

Get out, you eruption on god’s ass, you problem noise and ghostfucker! That is Barclay, above me. You should think before you creep so.

Barclay’s beating at the curtain that’s the front door, its flowers smoke against the darkness my eyes try to sort. I stand beside it, wound in more curtain, the sheets here, the dress here, surely even the slid-off shorts of the man who stood over me are flowered and red or yellow. I am so sleepy and shocked I think the red is bleeding into the yellow, or is that because the bleeding should be mine?

Oh well, says Ngarima from her mat, he will be back and try better. Or someone not so clumsy. You see, she says, as I hear Barclay lower himself beside her, they can’t break a lamp getting in, they can’t fall over things.

It is a custom we should give up for visitors, says Barclay. Let them have the little girls. Look at her, she’s not one for them.

Rape, it’s called, I say.

It’s her fault the lamp is broken, says Ngarima as if I can’t hear, rolling over on her stomach beside him.

The boat will bring more glass, says Barclay.