Black Coral The bearded young man who didn’t give a damn about anyone (or so he’d just shouted—whereupon the bartender had grabbed his scaling knife and said, “Dat bein’ de way of it, you can do your drinkin’ elsewhere!”) came staggering out of the bar and shielded his eyes against the afternoon glare. Violet afterimages flared and fizzled under his lids. He eased down the rickety stair, holding onto the rail, and stepped into the street, still blinking. And then, as he adjusted to the brightness, a ragged man with freckled cocoa-colored skin and a prophet’s beard swung into view, blocking out the sun. “Hot enough de sun duppy be writhin’ in de street, ain’t it, Mr. Prince?” Prince choked. Christ! That damned St. Cecilia rum was eating holes in his stomach! He reeled. The rum backed up into his throat and the sun blinded him again, but he squinted and made out old Spurgeon James, grinning, rotten teeth angled like untended tombstones, holding an empty Coke bottle whose mouth was crusted with flies. “Gotta go,” said Prince, lurching off. “You got work for me, Mr. Prince?” Prince kept walking. Old Spurgeon would lean on his shovel all day, reminisce about “de back time,” and offer advice (“Dat might go easier with de barrow, now”) while Prince sweated like a donkey and lifted concrete blocks. Work! Still, for entertainment’s sake alone he’d be worth more than most of the black trash on the island. And the ladinos! (“De dommed Sponnish!”) They’d work until they had enough to get drunk, play sick, then vanish with your best tools. Prince spotted a rooster pecking at a mango rind by the roadside, elected him representative of the island’s work force, and kicked; but the rooster flapped up, squabbling, lit on an overturned dinghy, and gave an assertive cluck. “Wait dere a moment, Mr. Prince!” Prince quickened his pace. If Spurgeon latched on, he’d never let loose. And today, January 18, marked the tenth anniversary of his departure from Vietnam. He didn’t want any company. The yellow dirt road rippled in a heat haze that made the houses—rows of weathered shanties set on pilings against the storm tides—appear to be dancing on thin rubbery legs. Their tin roofs were buckled, pitched at every angle, showing patches of rustlike scabs. That one—teetering on splayed pilings over a dirt front yard, the shutter hung by a single hinge, gray flour-sack curtain belling inward—it always reminded him of a cranky old hen on her roost trying grimly to hatch a nonexistent egg. He’d seen a photograph of it taken seventy years before, and it had looked equally dejected and bedraggled then. Well, almost. There had been a sapodilla tree overspreading the roof. “Givin’ out a warnin’, Mr. Prince! Best you listen!” Spurgeon, rags tattering in the breeze, stumbled toward him and nearly fell. He waved his arms to regain his balance, like a drunken ant, toppled sideways, and fetched up against a palm trunk, hugging it for support. Prince, in dizzy sympathy with the sight, tottered backward and caught himself on some shanty steps, for a second going eye-to-eye with Spurgeon. The old man’s mouth worked, and a strand of spittle eeled out onto his beard. Prince pushed off from the steps. Stupidity! That was why nothing changed for the better on Guanoja Menor (derived from the Spanish guano and hoja , a fair translation being Lesser Leaf-shaped Piece of Bird Shit), why unemployable drunks hounded you in the street, why the rum poisoned you, why the shanties crashed from their perches in the least of storms. Unwavering stupidity! The islanders built outhouses on piers over the shallows where they bathed and fished the banks with no thought for conservation, then wondered why they stank and went hungry. They cut off their fingers to win bets that they wouldn’t; they smoked black coral and inhaled gasoline fumes for escape; they fought with conch shells, wrapping their hands around the inner volute of the shell so it fit like a spiky boxing glove. And when the nearly-as-stupid ladinos had come from the Honduran mainland, they’d been able to steal and swindle half the land on the island. Prince had learned from their example. “Mr. Prince!” Spurgeon again, weaving after him, his palm outstretched. Angrily, Prince dug out a coin and threw it at his feet. “Dass so nice, dass so kind of you!” Spurgeon spat on the coin. But he stooped for it and, in stooping, lost his balance and fell, smashing his Coke bottle on a stone. There went fifty centavos. There went two glasses of rum. The old man rolled in the street, too drunk to stand, smearing himself with yellow dirt. “Even de sick dog gots teeth,” he croaked. “Just you remember dat, Mr. Prince!” Prince couldn’t keep from laughing. * * * Meachem’s Landing, the town (“a quaint seaport, steeped in pirate legend,” prattled the guidebook), lay along the curve of a bay inset between two scrub-thatched hills and served as the island capital. At midpoint of the bay stood the government office, a low white stucco building with sliding glass doors like a cheap motel. Three prosperous-looking Spanish men were sitting on oil drums in its shade, talking to a soldier wearing blue fatigues. As Prince passed, an offshore breeze kicked up and blew scents of rotted coconut, papaya, and creosote in from the customs dock, a concrete strip stretching one hundred yards or so into the glittering cobalt reach of the water. There was a vacancy about the scene, a lethargy uniformly affecting its every element. Cocals twitched the ends of their fronds, leaning in over the tin roofs; a pariah dog sniffed at a dried lobster claw in the dust; ghost crabs scuttered under the shanties. It seemed to Prince that the tide of events had withdrawn, leaving the bottom dwellers exposed, creating a lull before some culminative action. And he remembered how it had been the same on bright afternoons in Saigon when passersby stopped and listened to the whine of an incoming rocket, how the plastic flags on the Hondas parked in front of the bars snapped in the wind, how a prostitute’s monkey had screamed in its cage on hearing the distant crump and everyone had laughed with relief. He felt less irritable, remembering, more at rights with the commemorative nature of the day. Beyond the government office, past the tiny public square and its dusty-leaved acacia, propped against the cement wall of the general store, clinging to it like a gaudy barnacle, was a shanty whose walls and trim had been painted crimson and bright blue and pink and quarantine yellow. Itchy-sounding reggae leaked from the closed shutter. Ghetto Liquors. He tramped heavily on the stair, letting them know within that the drunkest mother on the island, Neal His Bloody Majesty Prince, was about to integrate their little rainbow paradise, and pushed into the hot, dark room. “Service!” he said, kicking the counter. “What you want?” Rudy Welcomes stirred behind the bar. A slash of light from a split seam in the roof jiggled on his shaved skull. “Saint Cecilia!” Prince leaned on the bar, reconnoitering. Two men sat at a rear table, their hair in spiky dreadlocks, wraiths materializing from the dark. The darkness was picked out by the purplish glow of black lights illuminating four Jimi Hendrix posters. Though of island stock, Rudy was American-born and, like Prince, a child of the sixties and a veteran. He said that the lights and posters put him in mind of a brothel on Tu Do Street, where he had won the money with which to establish Ghetto Liquors; and Prince, recalling similar brothels, found that the lights provided an excellent frame of reference for the thoughtful, reminiscent stages of his drunk. The eerie purple radiance escaping the slender black canisters seemed the crystallized expression of war, and he fancied the color emblematic of evil energies and sluggish tropical demons. “So this your big day for drinkin’.” Rudy slid a pint bottle along the bar and resettled on his stool. “Don’t you be startin’ that war-buddy crap with me, now. I ain’t in the mood.” “Shucks, Rudy!” Prince adopted a Southern accent. “You know I ain’t war buddies with no nigger.” Rudy stiffened but let it pass; he gave a disaffected grunt. “Don’t know why not, man. You could pass yourself. Way your hair’s gotten all crispy and your skin’s gone dark. See here?” He laid his hand on Prince’s to compare the color, but Prince knocked it aside and stared, challenging. “Damn! Seem like Clint Eastwood done wandered into town!” Rudy shook his head in disgust and moved off along the bar to change the record. The two men at the rear drifted across the room and whispered with him, casting sly looks at Prince. Prince basked in the tension. It further fleshed out his frame of reference. Confident that he’d established dominance, he took a table beside the shutter, relaxed, and sipped his rum. Through a gap in the boards he saw a girl stringing up colored lights on the shanty opposite the bar. His private holiday had this year coincided with Independence Day, always celebrated upon the third Friday in January. Stalls would sprout in the public square, offering strips of roast turtle and games of chance. Contending music would blare from the bars—reggae and salsa. Prince enjoyed watching street dancers lose their way in the mishmash of rhythms. It emphasized the fact that neither the Spanish nor the islanders could cope with the other’s presence and further emphasized that they were celebrating two different events—on the day that Queen Victoria had granted the islands their freedom, the Honduran military had sailed in and established governance. More stupidity. The rum was sitting easier on his stomach. Prince mellowed and went with the purple lights, seeing twisted black branches in them, seeing the twilit jungle in Lang Biang, and he heard the hiss of the walkie-talkie and Leon’s stagy whisper, “Hey, Prince! I got a funny shadow in that bombax tree . . .” He had turned his scope on the tree, following the course of the serpentine limbs through the grainy empurpling air. And then the stutter of automatic fire, and he could hear Leon’s screams in the airand carrying over the radio . . . “Got somethin’ for help you celebrate, Mr. Prince.” A thin hawk-faced man wearing frayed shorts dropped into the chair next to him, his dreadlocks wriggling. George Ebanks. Prince gripped the rum bottle, angry, ready to strike, but George thrust out a bristling something—a branch of black coral. “Dis de upful stuff, Mr. Prince,” he said. “Rife with de island’s secret.” He pulled out a knife and whittled at the branch. Curly black shavings fell onto the table. “You just scrapes de color off and dass what you smokes.” The branch intrigued Prince; it was dead black, unshining, hard to tell where each stalk ended and the room’s darkness began. He’d heard the stories. Old Spurgeon said it drove you crazy. And even older John Anderson McCrae had said, “De coral so black dat when you smokes it de color will rush into your eyes and allow you vision of de spirit world. And will allow dem sight of you.” “What’s it do?” he asked, tempted. “It make you more a part of things. Dass all, Mr. Prince. Don’t fret. We goin’ to smoke it with you.” Rudy and the third man—wiry, short Jubert Cox—sidled up behind George’s shoulder, and Rudy winked at Prince. George loaded the knife blade with black shavings and tamped them into a hash pipe, then lit it, drawing hard until the hollows of his cheeks reflected the violet-red coal. He handed the pipe across, a wisp of smoke curling from his tight-lipped smile, and watched Prince toke it down. The smoke tasted vile. It had a mustiness he associated with the thousands of dead polyps (was it thousands per lungful or merely hundreds?) he’d just inhaled, but it was so cool that he did not concern himself with taste and noticed only the coolness. Cold black stone lined his throat. The coolness spread to his arms and legs, weighting them down, and he imagined it questing with black tendrils through veins and arteries, finding out secret passages unknown even to his blood. Drifty stuff . . . a little nauseous. And he didn’t seem to be inhaling anymore. Not really. The smoke seemed to be issuing of its own volition from the pipestem, a silken rope, a cold strangler’s cord tying a labyrinthine knot throughout his body . . . “Take but a trifle, don’t it, Mr. Prince?” Jubert giggled. Rudy lifted the pipe from his numbed fingers. . . . and involving the fissures of his brain in an intricate design, binding his thoughts into a coralline structure. The bright gaps in the shutter planking dwindled, receded, until they were golden straws adrift in the blackness, then golden pinpricks, then gone. And though he was initially fascinated by this production of the drug, as it progressed Prince became worried that he was going blind. “Wuh . . .” His tongue wouldn’t work. His flesh was choked with black dust, distant from him, and the coolness had deepened to a penetrating chill. And as a faint radiance suffused the dark, he imagined that the process of the drug had been reversed, that now he was flowing up the pipestem into the heart of the violet-red coal. “Oh, dis de upful stuff all right, Mr. Prince,” said George, from afar. “Dat what grows down to de root of de island.” ~~~~~~~~~~ Rippling kelp beds faded in from the blackness, illuminated by a violet glow, and Prince saw that he was passing above them toward a dim wall (the reef?) at whose base thousands upon thousands of witchy fires burned, flickering, ranging in color from indigo to violet-white, all clinging (he saw, drawing near) to the stalks and branches of black coral—a bristling jungle of coral, stalks twenty and thirty feet high, and more. The fires were smaller than candle flames and did not seem as much presences as they did peepholes into a cold furnace behind the reef. Maybe they were some sort of copepod, bioluminescent and half-alive. He descended among the stalks, moving along the channels between them. Barracuda, sleek triggerfish . . . There! A grouper—four hundred pounds if it was an ounce—angelfish and rays . . . bones showed in negative through their luminous flesh. Schools of smaller fish darted as one, stopped, darted again, into and out of the black branches. The place had a strange kinetic geometry, as if it were the innards of an organic machine whose creatures performed its functions by maneuvering in precise patterns through its interstices, and in which the violet fires served as the insane, empowering thoughts within an inky skull. Beautiful! Thomas De Quincey Land. A jeweled shade, an occulted paradise. Then, rising into the murk above him, animmense stalk—a shadowy, sinister Christmas tree poxed with flickering decorations. Sharks circled its upper reaches, cast in silhouette by the glow. Several of the fires detached from a branch and drifted toward him, eddying like slow moths. “Dey just markin’ you, Mr. Prince. Don’t be troubled.” Where was George’s voice coming from? It sounded right inside his ear. Oh, well . . . He wasn’t troubled. The fires were weird, lovely. One drifted to within a foot of his eyes, hovering there, its violet-tipped edges shifting, not with the randomness of flame but with a flowing, patterned movement, a complex pulse; its center was an iridescent white. Must not be copepods. It drifted closer. Very lovely. A wash of violet spread from its edges in and was absorbed by the whiteness. It brushed against his left eye. Prince’s vision went haywire, spinning. He had a glimpse of the sentinel sharks, a blurred impression of the latticework of shadow on the reef wall, then darkness. The cold touch, brief as it had been, a split second, had burned him, chilled him, as if a hypodermic had ever so slightly pricked the humor and flooded him with an icy serum, leaving him shuddering. “Dey bound him!” George? “Be watchful down dere, Mr. Prince.” Jubert. The shutter banged open, and bright, sweet, warming sunlight poured in. He realized he had fallen. His legs were entangled in an unyielding something that must be the chair. “You just had a little fit, man. Happens sometimes the first time. You gonna be fine.” They pulled him up and helped him out onto the landing and down the stair. He tripped and fell the last three steps, weak and drunk, still shivering, fuddled by the sunlight. Rudy pressed the rum bottle into his hands. “Keep in the sun for a while, man. Get your strength back.” “Oh, Mr. Prince!” A skinny black arm waved from the window of the gaudy box on stilts, and he heard smothered giggles. “You got work for me, Mr. Prince?” * * * Severe physical punishment was called for! Nobody was going to get away with bad-tripping him! Prince drank, warmed himself, and plotted his revenge on the steps of the dilapidated Hotel Captain Henry. (The hotel was named for Henry Meachem, the pirate whose crews had interbred with Carib and Jamaican women, thereby populating the island, and whose treasure was the focal point of many tall tales.) A scrawny, just-delivered bitch growled at him from the doorway. Between growls she worried her inflamed teats, a nasty sucking that turned Prince’s saliva thick and ropy. He gave old Mike, the hotel flunky, twenty-five centavos to chase her off, but afterward old Mike wanted more. “I be a bitch, mon! I strip de shadow from your back!” He danced around Prince, flicking puny left jabs. Filthy, wearing colorless rags and a grease-stained baseball cap, flecks of egg yolk clotting his iron-gray whiskers. Prince flipped him another coin and watched as he ran off to bury it. The stories said that Mike had been a miser, had gone mad when he’d discovered all his money eaten by mice and insects. But Roblie Meachem, owner of the hotel, said, “He just come home to us one mornin’. Didn’t have no recollection of his name, so we call him Mike after my cousin in Miami.” Still, the stories persisted. It was the island way. (“Say de thing long enough and it be so.”) And perhaps the stories had done some good for old Mike, effecting a primitive psychotherapy and giving him a legend to inhabit. Mike returned from his hiding place and sat beside the steps, drawing circles in the dust with his finger and rubbing them out, mumbling, as if he couldn’t get them right. Prince flung his empty bottle over a shanty roof, caring not where it fell. The clarity of his thoughts annoyed him; the coral had sobered him somewhat, and he needed to regain his lost momentum. If Rita Steedly wasn’t home, well, he’d be within a half mile of his own bar, the Sea Breeze; but if she was . . . Her husband, an ecologist working for the government, would be off island until evening, and Prince felt certain that a go-round with Rita would reorient him and reinstitute the mean drunken process which the coral had interrupted. * * * Vultures perched on the pilings of Rita Steedly’s dock, making them look like carved ebony posts. Not an uncommon sight on the island, but one Prince considered appropriate as to the owner’s nature, more so when the largest of them flapped up and landed with a crunch in a palm top overlooking the sun deck where she lay. The house was blue stucco on concrete pilings standing in a palm grove. Between the trunks, the enclosed waters of the reef glittered in bands and swirls of aquamarine, lavender, and green according to the varying depth and bottom. Sea grape grew close by the house, and the point of land beyond it gave out into mangrove radicle. As he topped the stairs, Rita propped herself on her elbows, pushed back her sunglasses, and weakly murmured, “Neal,” as if summoning her lover to a deathbed embrace. Then she collapsed again upon the blanket, the exhausted motion of a pale dead frond. Her body glistened with oils and sweat, and her bikini top was unhooked and had slipped partway off. Prince mixed a rum and papaya juice from the serving cart by the stair. “Just smoked some black coral with the boys down at Ghetto Liquors.” He looked back at her over his shoulder and grinned. “De spirits tol’ me dat I must purify myself wit’ de body of a woman ’fore de moon is high.” “Ithought your eyes were very yellow today. You should know better.” She sat up; the bikini top dropped down onto her arms. She lifted a coil of hair which had stuck to her breast, patting it into place behind her ear. “There ain’t anything on this island that’s healthy anymore. Even the fruit’s poisoned! Did I tell you about the fruit?” She had. Her little girl’s voice grated on Prince, but he found her earnestness amusing, attractive for its perversity. Her obsession with health seemed no less a product of trauma than did his own violent disposition. “It was just purple lights and mild discomfort,” he said, sitting beside her. “But a headache and a drowsy sensation would be a good buzz to those black hicks. They tried to mess with my mind, but . . .” He leaned over and kissed her. “I made good my escape and came straightaway.” “Jerry said he saw purple lights, too.” A grackle holding a cigarette butt in its beak hopped up on the railing, and Rita shooed it off. “Hesmoked it?” “He smokes it all the time. He wanted me to try it, but I’m not poisoning myself any more than I have to with this . . . this garbage heap.” She checked his eyes. “They’re getting as bad as everyone else’s. Still, they aren’t as bad as the people’s in Arkansas. They were so yellow they almost glowed in the dark. Like phosphorescent urine!” She shuddered dramatically, sighed, and stared glumly up into the palms. “God! I hate this place!” Prince dragged her down to face him. “You’re a twitch,” he said. “I’m not!” she said angrily, but fingered loose the buttons of his shirt as she talked. “Everything’s polluted down here. Dying. And it’s worse in the States. You can see the wasting in people’s faces if you know how to look for it. I’ve tried to talk Jerry into leaving, but he says he’s committed. Maybe I’ll leave him. Maybe I’ll go to Peru. I’ve heard good things about Peru.” “You’ll see the wasting intheir faces,” said Prince. Her arms slid around his back, and her eyes opened and closed, opened and closed, the eyes of a doll whose head you manipulated. Barely seeing him, seeing something else in his place, some bad sign or ugly rumor. As his own eyes closed, as he stopped thinking, he gazed out past her head to the glowing, many-colored sea and saw in the pale sky along the horizon a flash of the way it had been after a burn-off: the full-bore immensity and silence of the light; the clear, innocent air over paddies and palms blackened like matchsticks; and how they’d moved through the dead land, crunching the scorched, brittle stalks underfoot, unafraid, because every snake within miles was now just a shadow in the cinders. * * * Drunk, blind, old John Anderson McCrae was telling stories at the Sea Breeze, and Prince wandered out onto the beach for some peace and quiet. The wind brought fragments of the creaky voice. “ . . . Dat cross were studded with emeralds . . . and sapphires . . .” The story about Meachem’s gold cross (supposedly buried off the west end of the island) was John’s masterpiece, told only at great expense to the listener. He told how Meachem’s ghost appeared each time his treasure was threatened, huge, a constellation made of the island stars. “. . . and de round end of his peg leg were de moon shine down . . .” Of course, Meachem had had two sound legs, but the knowledge didn’t trouble John. “A mon’s ghost may suffer injury every bit as de mon,” he’d say; and then, to any further challenge, “Well, de truth may be lackin’ in it, but it capture de spirit of de truth.” And he’d laugh, spray his rummy breath in the tourists’ faces, and repeat his commonplace pun. And they would pay him more because they thought he was cute, colorful, and beneath them. White cumulus swelled from the horizon, and the stars blazed overhead so bright and jittery they seemed to have a pulse in common with the rattle of the Sea Breeze’s generator. The reef crashed and hissed. Prince screwed his glass into the sand and settled back against a palm trunk, angled so he could see the deck of the bar. Benches and tables were built around coconut palms that grew up through the deck; orange lights in the form of plastic palms were mounted on the trunks. Not an unpleasant place to sit and watch the sea. But the interior of the Sea Breeze bordered on the monstrous: lamps made of transparent-skinned blowfish with bulbs in their stomachs; treasure maps and T-shirts for sale; a giant jukebox glowing red and purple like the crown jewels in a protective cage of two-by-fours; garish pirate murals on the walls; and skull-and-crossbones pennants hanging from the thatched roof. The bar had been built and painted to simulate a treasure chest with its lid ajar. Three Carib skulls sat on shelves over the bottles, with red bulbs in their jaws that winked on and off for birthdays and other celebrations. It was his temple to the stupidity of Guanoja Menor; and, being his first acquisition, memorialized a commitment he had made to the grotesque heart of acquisition itself. A burst of laughter, shouts of “Watch out!” and “Good luck!” and old John appeared at the railing, groping his way along until he found the stair and stumbled down onto the beach. He weaved back and forth, poking the air with his cane, and sprawled in the sand at Prince’s feet. A withered brown dummy stuffed into rags and flung overboard. He sat up, cocking his head. “Who’s dere?” The lights from the Sea Breeze reflected off his cataracts; they looked like raw silver nuggets embedded in his skull. “Me, John.” “Is dat you, Mr. Prince? Well, God bless you!” John patted the sand, feeling for his cane, then clutched it and pointed out to sea. “Look, Mr. Prince. Dere where deMiss Faye go turtlin’ off to de Chinchorro Bank.” Prince saw the riding lights moving toward the horizon, the indigo light rocking on the masthead, then wondered how in the Hell water in an instant, into his eyes. His vision went purple, normalized, purpled again, as if the thing were a police flasher going around and around in his head. And it was cold. Searing, immobilizing cold. “Ain’t dis a fine night, Mr. Prince? No matter how blind a mon gets, he can recognize a fine night!” With a tremendous effort Prince clawed at the sand, but old John continued talking. “Dey say de island take hold of a mon. Now dat hold be gentle ’cause de island bear no ill against dem dat dwell upon it in de lawful way. But dose dat lords it over de island, comes a night dere rule is done.” Prince wanted badly to scream because that might release the cold trapped inside him; but he could not even strain. The cold possessed him. He yearned after John’s words, not listening but stretching out toward them with his wish. They issued from the soft tropic air like the ends of warm brown ropes dangling just beyond his frozen grasp. “Dis island poor! And de people fools! But I know you hear de sayin’ dat even de sick dog gots teeth. Well, dis island gots teeth dat grows down to de center of things. De Carib say dat dere’s a spirit from before de back time locked into de island’s root, and de Baptist say dat de island be a fountainhead of de Holy Spirit. But no matter what de truth, de people have each been granted a portion of dat spirit. And dat spirit legion now!” The light behind Prince’s eyes whirled so fast he could no longer distinguish periods of normal vision, and everything he saw had a purplish cast. He heard his entire agony as a tiny, scratchy sound deep in his throat. He toppled on his side and saw out over the bumpy sand, out to a point of land where wild palms, in silhouette against a vivid purple sky, shook their fronds like plumed African dancers, writhing up, ecstatic. “Dat spirit have drove off de English! And one day it will drive de Sponnish home! It slow, but it certain. And dat is why we celebrate dis night . . . ’Cause on dis very night all dose not of de spirit and de law must come to judgment.” John’s shoes scraped on the sand. “Well, I’ll be along now, Mr. Prince. God bless you.” Even when his head had cleared and the cold dissipated, Prince couldn’t work it out. If Jerry Steedly smoked this stuff all the time, thenhe must be having an abnormal reaction. A flashback. The thing to do would be to overpower the drug with depressants. But how could old John have seen the turtling boat? Maybe it never happened? Maybe the coral simply twitched reality a bit, and everything since Ghetto Liquors had been a real-life fantasy of amazing exactitude. He finished his drink, had another, steadied himself, and then hailed the jitney when it passed on its way to town, onhis way to see Rudy and Jubert and George. Vengeance would be the best antidote of all for this black sediment within him. * * * Independence Day. The shanties dripped with colored lights, and the dirt road glowed orange, crisscrossed by dancers and drunks who collided and fell. Skinny black casualties lay underneath the shanties, striped by light shining down through the floorboards. Young women danced in the bar windows; older, fatter women, their hair in turbans, glowering, stood beside tubs of lobster salad and tables laden with coconut bread and pastries. The night was raucous, blaring, hooting, shouting. All the dogs were in hiding. Prince stuffed himself on the rich food, drank, and then went from bar to bar asking questions of men who pawed his shirt, rolled their eyes, and passed out for an answer. He could find no trace of Rudy or George, but he tracked Jubert down in a shanty bar whose sole designation as a bar was a cardboard sign, tacked on a palm tree beside it, which read FRENLY CLUB NO RIOT. Prince lured him outside with the promise of marijuana, and Jubert, stupidly drunk, followed to a clearing behind the bar where dirt trails crossed, a patch of ground bounded by two other shanties and banana trees. Prince smiled a smile of good fellowship, kicked him in the groin and the stomach, and broke Jubert’s jaw with the heel of his hand. “Short cut draw blood,” said Prince. “Ain’t dat right. You don’t trick with de mighty.” He nudged Jubert’s jaw with his toe. Jubert groaned; blood welled from his mouth, puddling black in the moonlight. “Come back at me and I’ll kill you,” said Prince. He sat cross-legged beside Jubert. Moonlight saturated the clearing, and the tattered banana leaves seemed made of gray-green silk. Their trunks showed bone white. A plastic curtain in a shanty window glowed with mystic roses, lit by the oil lamp inside. Jukebox reggae chip-chipped at the soft night, distant laughter . . . He let the clearing come together around him. The moon brightened as though a film had washed from its face; the light tingled his shoulders. Everything—shanties, palms, banana trees, and bushes—sharpened, loomed, grew more encircling. He felt a measure of hilarity on seeing himself as he’d been in the jungle of Lang Biang, freakishly alert. It conjured up clichéd movie images. Prince, the veteran maddened by memory and distanced by trauma, compelled to relive his nightmares and hunt down these measly offenders in the derelict town. The violent American legend. The war-torn Prince of the cinema. He chuckled. His life, he knew, was devoid of such thematic material. He was free of compulsion. Thousands of tiny shake-hands lizards were slithering under the banana trees, running over the sandy soil on their hind legs. He could see the disturbance in the weeds. A hibiscus blossom nodded from behind a shanty, an exotic lure dangling out of the darkness, and the shadows beneath the palms were deep and restless . . . not like the shadows in Lang Biang, still and green, high in the vaulted trees. Spirits had lived in those trees, so the stories said, demon-things with iron beaks who’d chew your soul into rags. Once he had shot one. It had been (they told him) only a large fruit bat, deranged, probably by some chemical poison, driven to fly at him in broad daylight. Buthe had seen a demon with an iron beak sail from a green shadow and fired. Nearly every round must have hit, because all they’d found had been scraps of bloody, leathery wing. Afterward they called him Deadeye and described how he’d bounced the bat along through the air with bursts of unbelievable accuracy. He wasn’t afraid of spirits. “How you doin’, Jube?” Prince asked. Jubert was staring at him, wide-eyed. Clouds swept across the moon, and the clearing went dark, then brightened. “Dere’s big vultures up dere, Jubert, flyin’ ’cross de moon and screamin’ your name.” Prince was a little afraid of the drug, but less afraid of the islanders—nowhere near as afraid as Jubert was of him right now. Prince had been much more afraid, had cried and soiled himself; but he’d always emptied his gun into the shadows and stayed stoned and alert for eleven months. Fear, he’d learned, had its own continuum of right actions. He could handle it. Jubert made a gurgling noise. “Got a question, Jube?” Prince leaned over, solicitous. A sudden gust of wind sent a dead frond crashing down, and the sound scared Jubert. He tried to lift his head and passed out from the pain. Somebody shouted, “Listen to dat boy sing! Oh, he slick, mon!” and turned up the jukebox. The tinny music broke Prince’s mood. Everything looked scattered. The moonlight showed the grime and slovenliness of the place, the sprinkles of chicken droppings and the empty crab shells. He’d lost most of his enthusiasm for hunting down Rudy and George, and he decided to head for Maud Price’s place, the Golden Dream. Sooner or later everyone stopped in at the Dream. It was the island’s gambling center, and because it was an anomaly among the shanties, with their two stucco rooms lit by naked light bulbs, drinking there conferred a certain prestige. He thought about telling them in the bar about Jubert, but decided no and left him for someone else to rob. * * * Rudy and George hadn’t been in, said Maud, smacking down a bottle on the counter. Bar flies buzzed up from the spills and orbited her like haywire electrons. Then she went back to chopping fish heads, scaling and filleting them. Monstrously fat and jet black, bloody smears on her white dress. The record player at her elbow ground out warped Freddy Fender tunes. Prince spotted Jerry Steedly (who didn’t seem glad to see Prince) sitting at a table along the wall, joined him, and told him about the black coral. “Everybody sees the same things,” said Steedly, uninterested. “The reef, the fires . . .” “What about flashbacks? Is that typical?” “It happens. I wouldn’t worry about it.” Steedly checked his watch. He was in his forties, fifteen years older than Rita, a gangly Arkansas hick whose brush-cut red hair was going gray. “I’m not worried,” said Prince. “It was fine except for the fires or whatever they were. I thought they were copepods at first, but I guess they were just part of the trip.” “The islanders think they’re spirits.” Steedly glanced toward the door, nervous, then looked at Prince, dead serious, as if he were considering a deep question. He kicked back in his chair and leaned against the wall, decided, half-smiling. “Know what I think they are? Aliens.” Prince made a show of staring goggle-eyed, gave a dumb laugh, and drank. “No kiddin’, Neal. Parasites. Actually, copepods might not be so far off. They’re not intelligent. They’re reef dwellers from the next continuum over. The coral opens the perceptual gates or lets them see the gates that are already there, and . . . Wham! They latch right on. They induce a low-grade telepathy in human hosts. Among other things.” Steedly scraped back his chair and pointed at the adjoining room where people thronged, waving cards and money, shouting, losers threatening winners. “I gotta go lose some money, Neal. You take it easy.” “Are you trying to mess me around?” Prince asked with mild incredulity. “Nope. It’s just a theory of mine. They exhibit colonial behavior like a lot of small crustaceans. But theymay be spirits. Maybe spirits aren’t anything more than vague animal things slopping over from another world and setting their hooks in your soul, infecting you, dwelling in you. Who knows? I wouldn’t worry about it, though.” He walked away. “Say Hi to Rita for me,” Prince called. Steedly turned, struggling with himself, but he smiled. “Hey, Neal.” he said. “It’s not over.” * * * Prince nursed his rum, cocked an eye toward the door whenever anyone entered (the place was rapidly filling), and watched Maud gutting fish. A light-bulb sun dangled inches over her head, and he imagined her with a necklace of skeletons, reaching down into a bucketful of little silver-scaled men. Thethunk of her knife punctuated the babble around him. He drowsed. Idly, he began listening to the conversation of three men at the next table, resting his head against the wall. If he nodded out, Maud would wake him. “De mon ain’t got good sense, always spittin’ and fumin’!” “He harsh, mon! Dere’s no denyin’.” “Harsh? De mon worse den dat. Now de way Arlie tell it . . .” Arlie? He wondered if they meant Arlie Brooks, who tended bar at the Sea Breeze. “. . . dat Mary Ebanks bled to death . . .” “Dey say dat de stain where she bled still shine at night on de floor of de Sea Breeze!” Maybe it was Arlie. “Dat be fool duppy talk, mon!” “Well, never mind dat! He never shot her. Dat was Eusebio Conejo from over at Sandy Bar. But de mon might have saved her with his knowledge of wounds if he had not run off at de gunshot!” “Ain’t he de one dat stole dat gold cross from old Byrum Waters?” “Correct! Told him dat de gold have gone bad and dass why it so black. And Byrum, not mindful of de ways of gold, didn’t know dat was only tarnish!” “Dat was de treasure lost by old Meachem? Am I right?” “Correct! De Carib watched him bury it, and when he gone dey move it to de hills. And den when Byrum found it he told his American friend. Hah! And dat friend become a wealthy mon and old Byrum go to de ground wrapped in a blanket!” That washis cross! That washim they were talking about! Outraged, Prince came up out of his stupor and opened his eyes. Then he sat very still. The music, the shouts from the back room, the conversations had died, been sheared away without the least whisper or cough remaining, and the room had gone black . . . except the ceiling. And it brimmed, seethed with purple fire: swirls of indigo and royal purple and violet-white, a pattern similar to the enclosed waters of the reef, as if it, too, signaled varying depths and bottoms; incandescent looking, though, a rectangle of violent, shifting light, like a corpse’s first glimpse of sky when his coffin is opened up in Hell . . . and cold. Prince ducked, expecting they would swoop at him, pin him against the freezing darkness. But they did not. One by one the fires separated from the blazing ceiling and flowed down over the walls, settling on the creases and edges of things, outlining them in points of flickering radiance. Their procession seemed almost ordered, stately, and Prince thought of a congregation filing into their allotted pews preparatory to some great function. They illuminated the rumples in ragged shirts (and the ragged ends, as well) and the wrinkles in faces. They traced the shapes of glasses, bottles, tables, spiderwebs, the electric fan, light bulbs and their cords. They glowed nebular in the liquor, they became the smoldering ends of cigarettes, they mapped the spills on the counter and turned them into miniature phosphorescent seas. And when they had all taken their places, their design complete, Prince sat dumbstruck in the midst of an incredibly detailed constellation, one composed of ghostly purple stars against an ebony sky—the constellation of a tropic barroom, of Maud Price’s Golden Dream. He laughed, a venturing laugh; it sounded forced even to his own ears. There was no door, he noticed, no window outlined in purple fire. He touched the wall behind him for reassurance and jerked his hand away: It was freezing. Nothing moved other than the flickering, no sound. The blackness held him fast to his chair as though it were a swamp sucking him under. “I hurt bad, mon! It hurt inside my head!” A bleary and distressed voice. Jubert’s voice! “Mon, I hurt you bad myself and you slip me de black coral!” “Dass de truth!” “De mon had de right to take action!” Other voices tumbled forth in argument, most of them drunken, sodden, and seeming to issue from starry brooms and chairs and glassware. Many of them took his side in the matter of Jubert’s beating—that, he realized, was the topic under discussion. And he was winning! But still other voices blurted out, accusing him. “He took dat fat Yankee tourist down to print old Mrs. Ebanks with her camera, and Mrs. Ebanks shamed by it!” “No, mon! I not dat shamed! Let not dat be against him!” “He pay me for de three barracuda and take de five!” “He knock me down when I tell him how he favor dat cousin of mine dat live in Ceiba!” “He beat me . . .” “He cheat me . . .” “He curse me . . .” The voices argued points of accuracy, mitigating circumstances, and accused each other of exaggeration. Their logic was faulty and stupidly conceived. It had the feel of malicious, drunken gossip, as if a group of islanders were loitering on some dusty street and disputing the truth of a tall tale. But in this case it washis tale they disputed; for though Prince did not recognize all the voices, he did recognize his crimes, his prideful excesses, his slurs and petty slights. Had it not been so cold, he might have been amused, because the general consensus appeared to be that he was no worse or better than any of his accusers and therefore merited no outrageous judgment. But then a wheezy voice, the expression of a dulled, ancient sensibility, said, “I found dat gold cross in a cave up on Hermit’s Ridge . . .” Prince panicked, sprang for the door, forgetting there was none, scrabbled at the stony surface, fell, and crawled along, probing for an exit. Byrum’s voice harrowed him. “And I come to him and say, ‘Mr. Prince, I got dis terrible pain in de chest. Can’t you give me money? I know dat your money come from meltin’ down de gold cross.’ And he say, ‘Byrum, I don’t give jack shit about your chest!’ And den he show me de door!” Prince collapsed in a corner, eyes fixed on the starry record player from which the old man’s voice came. No one argued against Byrum. When he had finished there was a silence. “The bastard’s been sleeping with my wife,” said a twangy American voice. “Jerry!” Prince yelled. “Where are you?” A constellate bottle of rum was the source of the voice. “Right here, you son . . .” “Dere’s to be no talkin’ with de mon before judgment!” “Dass right! De spirits make dat clear!” “These damn things aren’t spirits . . .” “If dey ain’t, den why Byrum Waters in de Dream tonight?” “De mon can’t hear de voices of de spirits ’cause he notof de island hisself!” “Byrum’s not here! I’ve told you people so many times I’m sick of it! These things induce telepathy in humans. That means you can hear each others’ minds, that your thoughts resonate and amplify each others’, maybe even tap into some kind of collective unconscious. That’s how . . .” “I believe somebody done pelt a rock at de mon’s head! He crazy!” The matter of the purple fires was tabled, and the voices discussed Prince’s affair with Rita Steedly (“Dere’s no proof de mon been messin’ with your wife!”), reaching a majority opinion of guilty on what seemed to Prince shaky evidence indeed. The chill in the room had begun to affect him, and though he noticed that unfamiliar voices had joined the dialogue—British voices whose speech was laden with archaisms, guttural Carib voices—he did not wonder at them. He was far more concerned by the trembling of his muscles and the slow, flabby rhythm of his heart; he hugged his knees and buried his head in them for warmth. And so he hardly registered the verdict announced in Byrum Waters’s cracked whisper (“De island never cast you out, Mr. Prince”) nor did he even hear the resultant argument (“Dat all you goin’ to tell him?” “De mon have a right to hear his fate!”) except as a stupid hypnotic round that dazed him further and increased the chill, then turned into ghostly laughter. And he did not notice for quite a while that the chill had lessened, that the light filtering through his lids was yellow, and that the laughter was not voiced by spectral fires but by ragged drunks packed closely around him, sweating, howling, and slopping their drinks on his feet. Their gap-toothed mouths opened wider and wider in his dimming sight, as if he were falling into the jaws of ancient animals who had waited in their jungle centuries for such as he. Fat moths danced around them in the air. Prince pushed feebly at the floor, trying to stand. They laughed louder, and he felt his own lips twitch in a smile, an involuntary reaction to all the good humor in the room. “Oh, damn!” Maud slammed the flat of her hand down on the counter, starting up the bar flies and hiccuping Freddy Fender’s wail. Her smile was fierce and malefic. “How you like dat, Mr. Prince? You one of us now!” * * * He must’ve passed out. They must’ve dumped him in the street like a sack of manure! His head swam as he pulled himself up by the window ledge; his hip pocket clinked on the stucco wall . . . rum bottle. He fumbled it out, swallowed, gagged, but felt it strengthen him. The town was dead, lightless, and winded. He reeled against the doorway of the Dream and saw the moldering shanties swing down beneath running banks of moonlit cloud. Peaked and eerie, witches’ hats, the sharp jut of folded black wings. He couldn’t think. Dizzy, he staggered between the shanties and fell on all fours in the shallows, then soaked his head in the wavelets lapping the shingle. There were slippery things under his hands. No telling what . . . hog guts, kelp. He sat on a piling and let the wind shiver him and straighten him out. Home. Better than fighting off the rabid dog at the Hotel Captain Henry, better than passing out again right here. Two and a half miles across island, no more than an hour even in his condition. But watch out for the purple fires! He laughed. The silence gulped it up. If this were just the drug doing tricks . . . God! You could make a fortune selling it in the States. “You scrapes off de color and dass what you smokes,” he sang, calypso style. “De black coral takes, boom-boom, just one toke.” He giggled. But what the Hellwere those purple fires? Duppies? Aliens? How ’bout the purple souls of the niggers? The niggers’ stinging purple souls! He took another drink. “Better ration it, pilgrim,” he said to the dark road in his best John Wayne. “Or you’ll never reach the fort alive!” And like John Wayne, he’d be back, he’d chew out the bullet with his teeth and brand himself clean with a red-hot knife and blow holes in the bad guys. Oh, yeah! But suppose they were spirits? Aliens? Not hallucinations? So what! “I one of dem, now!” he shouted. He breezed the first two miles. The road wound through the brush-covered hills at an easy grade. Stars shone in the west, but the moon had gone behind the clouds and the darkness was as thick as mud. He wished he’d brought his flashlight. . . . That had been the first thing that had attracted him to the island: how the people carried flashlights to show their paths in the hills, along the beaches, in the towns after the generators had been shut down. And when an ignorant, flashlightless stranger came by, they’d shine a path from your feet to theirs and ask, “How de night?” “Beautiful,” he’d replied; or, “Fine, just fine.” And ithad been. He’d loved everything about the island—the stories, the musical cadences of island speech, the sea-grape trees with their funny round leathery leaves, and the glowing, many-colored sea. He’d seen that the island operated along an ingenious and flexible principle, one capable of accommodating any contrary and eventually absorbing it through a process of calm acceptance. He’d envied the islanders their peaceful, unhurried lives. But that had been before Vietnam. During the war something inside him had gone irreversibly stone-cold sober, screwed up his natural high, and when he returned their idyllic lives had seemed despicable, listless, a bacterial culture shifting on its slide. Every now and then he saw the peak of a thatched roof in silhouette against the stars, strands of barbed wire hemming in a few acres of scrub and bananas. He stayed dead center in the road, away from the deepest shadow, sang old Stones and Dylan, and fueled himself with hits of rum. It had been a good decision to head back, because a norther was definitely brewing. The wind rushed cold in his face, spitting rain. Storms blew up quickly at this time of year, but he could make it home and secure his house before the worst of the rains. Something crashed in the brush. Prince jumped away from the sound, looking wildly about for the danger. The tufted hillock on his right suddenly sprouted horns against the starlight and charged at him, bellowing, passing so raw and close that he could hear the breath articulated in the huge red throat. Christ! It had sounded more like a demon’s bellow than a cow’s, which it was. Prince lost his balance and sprawled in the dirt, shaking. The damned thing lowed again, crunching off through a thicket. He started to get up. But the rum, the adrenaline, all the poisons of his day-long exertions roiled around in him, and his stomach emptied, spewing out liquor and lobster salad and coconut bread. Afterward he felt better—weaker, yet not on the verge of as great a weakness as before. He tore off his fouled shirt and slung it into a bush. The bush was a blaze of purple fires. They hung on twig ends and leaf tips and marked the twisting course of branches, outlining them as they had done at Maud’s. But at the center of this tracery the fires clustered together in a globe—a wicked violet-white sun extruding spidery filaments and generating forked, leafy electricities. Prince backed away. The fires flickered in the bush, unmoving. Maybe the drug had finished its run, maybe now that he’d burned most of it out the fires could no longer affect him as they had previously. But then a cold, cold prickle shifted along his spine and he knew—oh, God!—he knew for a certainty there were fires on his back, playing hide-and-seek where he could never find them. He beat at his shoulderblades, like a man putting out flames, and the cold stuck to his fingertips. He held them up before his eyes. They flickered, pulsing from indigo to violet-white. He shook them so hard that his joints cracked, but the fires spread over his hands, encasing his forearms in a lurid glare. In blind panic Prince staggered off the road, fell, scrambled up, and ran, holding his glowing arms stiff out in front of him. He tumbled down an embankment and came to his feet, running. He saw that the fires had spread above his elbows and felt the chill margin inching upward. His arms lit the brush around him, as if they were the wavering beams of tinted flashlights. Vines whipped out of the dark, the lengths of a black serpent coiled everywhere, lashed into a frenzy by the purple light. Dead fronds clawed his face with sharp papery fingers. He was so afraid, so empty of everything but fear, that when a palm trunk loomed ahead he ran straight into it, embracing it with his shining arms. * * * There were hard fragments in his mouth, blood, more blood flowing into his eyes. He spat and probed his mouth, wincing as he touched the torn gums. Three teeth missing, maybe four. He hugged the palm trunk and hauled himself up. This was the grove near his house! He could see the lights of St. Mark’s Key between the trunks, white seas driving in over the reef. Leaning on the palms as he went, he made his way to the water’s edge. The wind-driven rain slashed at his split forehead. Christ! It was swollen big as an onion! The wet sand sucked off one of his tennis shoes, but he left it. He washed his mouth and forehead in the stinging saltwater, then slogged toward the house, fumbling for his key. Damn! It had been in his shirt. But it was all right. He’d built the house Hawaiian style, with wooden slats on every side to admit the breeze; it would be easy to break in. He could barely see the roof peak against the toiling darkness of the palms and the hills behind, and he banged his shins on the porch. Distant lightning flashed, and he found the stair and spotted the conch shell lying on the top step. He wrapped his hand inside it, punched a head-sized hole in the door slats, and leaned on the door, exhausted by the effort. He was just about to reach in for the latch when the darkness within—visible against the lesser darkness of night as a coil of dead, unshining emptiness—squeezed from the hole like black toothpaste and tried to encircle him. Prince tottered backward off the porch and landed on his side; he dragged himself away a few feet, stopped, and looked up at the house. The blackness was growing out into the night, encysting him in a thicket of coral branches so dense that he could see between them only glints of the lightning bolts striking down beyond the reef. “Please,” he said, lifting his hand in supplication. And something broke in him, some grimly held thing whose residue was tears. The wind’s howl and the booming reef came as a single ominous vowel, roaring, rising in pitch. The house seemed to inhale the blackness, to suck it slithering back inside, and for a moment Prince thought it was over. But then violet beams lanced from the open slats, as if the fuming heart of a reactor had been uncovered within. The beach bloomed in livid daylight—a no-man’s-land littered with dead fish, half-buried conchs, rusted cans, and driftwood logs like the broken, corroded limbs of iron statues. Inky palms thrashed and shivered. Rotting coconuts cast shadows on the sand. And then the light swarmed up from the house, scattering into a myriad fiery splinters and settling on palm tops, on the prows of dinghies, on the reef, on tin roofs set among the palms, and on sea grape and cashew trees, where they burned. The ghosts of candles illuminating a sacred shore, haunting the dark interior of a church whose anthem was wind, whose litany was thunder, and upon whose walls feathered shadows leapt and lightnings crawled. Prince got to his knees, watching, waiting, not really afraid any longer, but gone into fear. Like a sparrow in a serpent’s gaze, he saw everything of his devourer, knew with great clarity that thesewere the island people, all of them who had ever lived, and that theywere possessed of some otherworldly vitality—though whether spirit or alien or both, he could not determine—and that they had taken their accustomed places, their ritual stands. Byrum Waters hovering in the cashew tree he had planted as a boy; John Anderson McCrae flitting above the reef where he and his father had swung lanterns to lure ships in onto the rocks; Maud Price ghosting over the grave of her infant child hidden in the weeds behind a shanty. But then he doubted his knowledge and wondered if they were not telling him this, advising him of the island’s consensus, for he heard the mutter of a vast conversation becoming distinct, outvoicing the wind. He stood, searching for an avenue of escape, not in the least hopeful of finding one, but choosing to exercise a final option. Everywhere he turned the world pitched and tossed as if troubled by his sight, and only the flickering purple fires held constant. “Oh, my God!” he screamed, almost singing it in an ecstasy of fear, realizing that the precise moment for which they’d gathered had arrived. As one, from every corner of the shore, they darted into his eyes. Before the cold overcame him, Prince heard island voices in his head. They ranted (“Lessee how you rank with de spirit, now! Boog man!”). They instructed (“Best you not struggle against de spirit. Be more merciful dat way.”). They insulted, rambled, and construed illogics. For a few seconds he tried to follow the thread of their discourse, thinking if he could understand and comply, then they might stop. But when he could not understand he clawed his face in frustration. The voices rose to a chorus, to a mob howling separately for his attention, then swelled into a roar greater than the wind’s but equally single-minded and bent on his annihilation. He dropped onto his hands and knees, sensing the beginning of a terrifying dissolution, as if he were being poured out into a shimmering violet-red bowl. And he saw the film of fire coating his chest and arms, saw his own horrid glare reflected on the broken seashells and mucky sand, shifting from violet-red into violet-white and brightening, growing whiter and whiter until it became a white darkness in which he lost all track of being. * * * The bearded old man wandered into Meachem’s Landing early Sunday morning after the storm. He stopped for a while beside the stone bench in the public square where the sentry, a man even older than himself, was leaning on his deer rifle, asleep. When the voices bubbled up in his thoughts—he pictured his thoughts as a soup with bubbles boiling up and popping, and the voices coming from the pops—and yammered at him (“No, no! Dat ain’t de mon!” “Keep walkin’, old fool!”) it was a chorus, a clamor that caused his head to throb; he continued on. The street was littered with palm husks and fronds and broken bottles buried in the mud that showed only their glittering edges. The voices warned him these were sharp and would cut him (“Make it hurtful like dem gashes on your face”), and he stepped around them. He wanted to do what they told him because . . . it just seemed the way of things. The glint of a rain-filled pothole caught his eye, and he knelt by it, looking at his reflection. Bits of seaweed clung to his crispy gray hair, and he picked them out, laying them carefully in the mud. The pattern in which they lay seemed familiar. He drew a rectangle around them with his finger and it seemed even more familiar, but the voices told him to forget about it and keep going. One voice advised him to wash his cuts in the pothole. The water smelled bad, however, and other voices warned him away. They grew in number and volume, driving him along the street until he followed their instructions and sat down on the steps of a shanty painted all the colors of the rainbow. Footsteps sounded inside the shanty, and a black bald-headed man wearing shorts came out and stretched himself on the landing. “Damn!” he said. “Just look what come home to us this mornin’. Hey, Lizabeth!” A pretty woman joined him, yawning, and stopped mid-yawn when she saw the old man. “Oh, Lord! Dat poor creature!” She went back inside and reappeared shortly carrying a towel and a basin, squatted beside him, and began dabbing at his wounds. It seemed such a kind, a human thing to be so treated, and the old man kissed her soapy fingers. “De mon a caution!” Lizabeth gave him a playful smack. “I know dass why he in such a state. See de way de skin’s all tore on his forehead dere? Must be he been fightin’ with de conchs over some other mon’s woman.” “Could be,” said the bald man. “How ’bout that? You a fool for the ladies?” The old man nodded. He heard a chorus of affirming voices. (“Oh, dass it!” “De mon cootin’ and cootin’ until he half-crazy, den he coot with dewrong woman!” “Must have been grazed with de conch and left for dead.”) “Lord, yes!” said Lizabeth. “Dis mon goin’ to trouble all de ladies, goin’ to be kissin’ after dem and huggin’ dem. . . .” “Can’t you talk?” asked the bald man. He thought he could, but there were so many voices, so many words to choose from . . . maybe later. No. “Well, I guess we’d better get you a name. How ’bout Bill? I got a good friend up in Boston’s named Bill.” That suited the old man fine. He liked being associated with the bald man’s good friend. “Tell you what, Bill.” The bald man reached inside the door and handed him a broom. “You sweep off the steps and pick up what you see needs pickin’, and we’ll pass you out some beans and bread after a while. How’s that sound?” It soundedgood , and Bill began sweeping at once, taking meticulous care with each step. The voices died to a murmurous purr in his thoughts. He beat the broom against the pilings, and dust fell onto it from the floorboards; he beat it until no more would fall. He was happy to be among people again because . . . (“Don’t be thinkin ’bout the back time, mon! Dat all gone.” “You just get on with your clean dere, Bill. Everything goin’ to work out in de end.” “Dass it, mon! You goin’ to clean dis whole town before you through!” “Don’t vex with de mon! He doin’ his work!”) And he was! He picked up everything within fifty feet of the shanty and chased off a ghost crab, smoothing over the delicate slashes its legs made in the sand. By the time Bill had cleaned for a half hour he felt so at home, so content and enwrapped in his place and purpose, that when the old woman next door came out to toss her slops into the street, he scampered up her stairs, threw his arms around her, and kissed her full on the mouth. Then he stood grinning, at attention with his broom. Startled at first, the woman put her hands on her hips and looked him up and down, shaking her head in dismay. “My God,” she said sorrowfully. “Dis de best we can do for dis poor mon? Dis de best thing de island can make of itself?” Bill didn’t understand. The voices chattered, irritated; they didn’t seem angry at him, though, and he kept on smiling. Once again the woman shook her head and sighed, but after a few seconds Bill’s smile encouraged her to smile in return. “I guess if dis de worst of it,” she said, “den better must come.” She patted Bill on the shoulder and turned to the door. “Everybody!” she called. “Quickly now! Come see dis lovin’ soul dat de storm have let fall on Rudy Welcomes’s door!”