A Traveler’s Tale

A ll this happened several years ago on the island of Guanoja Menor, most of it to a young American named Ray Milliken. I doubt you will have heard of him, not unless you have been blessed with an exceptional memory and chanced to read the sketchy article about his colony printed by one of the national tabloids; but in these parts his name remains something to conjure with.
“Who were dat Yankee,” a drunkard will say (the average Guanojan conversation incorporates at least one), “de one who lease de Buryin’ Ground and say he goin’ to bring down de space duppies?”

“Dat were Ray Milliken,” will be the reply, and this invariably will initiate a round of stories revolving about the theme of Yankee foolishness, as if Ray’s experiences were the central expression of such a history—which they well may be.

Most Americans one meets abroad seem to fall into types. I ascribe this to the fact that when we encounter a fellow countryman, we tend to exaggerate ourselves, to adopt categorizable modes of behavior, to advertise our classifiable eccentricities and political views, anything that may later prove a bone of contention, all so we may be more readily recognizable to the other. This tendency, I believe, bears upon our reputation for being people to whom time is a precious commodity; we do not want to waste a moment of our vacations or, as in the case of expatriates like myself, our retirements, by pursuing relationships based on a mistaken affinity. My type is of a grand tradition. Fifty-eight years old, with a paunch and a salt-and-pepper beard; retired from a government accounting job to this island off the coast of Honduras; once-divorced; now sharing my days with a daughter of the island, a twenty-year-old black girl named Elizabeth, whose cooking is indifferent but whose amatory performance never lacks enthusiasm. When I tally up these truths, I feel that my life has been triangulated by the works of Maugham, Greene, and Conrad. The Ex-Civil Servant Gone To Seed In A Squalid Tropic. And I look forward to evolving into a further type, a gray eminence, the sort of degenerate emeritus figure called upon to settle disputes over some trifling point of island lore.

“Better now you ask of Franklin Winship ’bout dat,” they’ll say. “De mon been here since de big storm in ’seventy-eight.”

Ray’s type, however, was of a more contemporary variety; he was one of those child-men who are to be found wandering the sunstruck ends of the earth, always seeming to be headed toward some rumored paradise, a beach said to be unspoiled, where they hope to achieve . . . something, the realization of a half-formed ambition whose criteria of peace and purity are so high as to guarantee failure. Travelers, they call themselves, and in truth, travel is their only area of expertise. They know the cheapest restaurant in Belize City, how to sleep for free on Buttermilk Key, the best sandalmaker in Panajachel; they have languished in Mexican jails, contracted dysentery while hiking through the wilds of Olancho, and been run out of various towns for drug abuse or lack of funds. But despite their knowledge and experience, they are curiously empty young men, methodical and unexcitable, possessing personalities that have been carefully edited to give the least effrontery to the widest spectrum of the populace. As they enter their thirties—and this was Ray’s age when I met him—they will often settle for long periods in a favorite spot, and societies of even younger travelers will accrete around them. During these periods a subtype may emerge—crypto-Charles Mansons who use their self-assurance to wield influence over the currencies of sex and drugs. But Ray was not of this mold. It seemed to me that his wanderings had robbed him of guile, of all predilection for power-tripping, and had left him a worldly innocent. He was of medium stature, tanned, with ragged sun-streaked hair and brown eyes set in a handsome but unremarkable face; he had the look of a castaway frat boy. Faint, fine lines radiated from the corners of his eyes, like scratches in sandstone. He usually dressed in shorts and a flour-sack shirt, one of several he owned that were decorated with a line drawing of a polar bear above the name of the mill and the words HARINA BLANCA .

“That’s me,” he would say, pointing to the words and smiling. “White bread.”

I first saw him in the town square of Meachem’s Landing, sitting on a stone bench beneath the square’s single tree—a blighted acacia—and tying trick knots for the amusement of a clutch of spidery black children. He grinned at me as I passed, and, surprised, being used to the hostile stares with which many young Americans generally favor their elders, I grinned back and stopped to watch. I had just arrived on the island and was snarled in red tape over the leasing of land, aggravated by dealing with a lawyer who insisted on practicing his broken English when explaining things, driven to distraction by the incompetent drunks who were building my house, transforming my neat blueprints into the reality of a Cubist nightmare. I welcomed Ray’s companionship as a respite. Over a span of four months we met two or three times a week for drinks at the Salón de Carmín—a ramshackle bar collapsing on its pilings above the polluted shallows of the harbor. To avoid the noise and frequent brawls, we would sit out back on the walkway from which the proprietress tossed her slops.

We did not dig into each other’s souls, Ray and I; we told stories. Mine described the vicissitudes of Washington life, while his were exotic accounts ofchicleros and cursed Mayan jade; how he had sailed to Guayaquil on a rock star’s yacht or paddled alone up the Río de la Pasión to the unexcavated ruin of Yaxchilán; a meeting with guerrillas in Salvador. Quite simply, he was the finest storyteller I have ever known. A real spellbinder. Each of his stories had obviously been worked and reworked until the emotional valence of their events had been woven into clear, colorful prose; yet they maintained a casual edge, and when listening to him it was easy to believe that they had sprung full-blown from his imagination. They were, he told me, his stock-in-trade. Whenever times were lean, he would find a rich American and manage to weasel a few dollars by sharing his past.

Knowing he considered me rich, I glanced at him suspiciously; but he laughed and reminded me that he had bought the last two rounds.

Though he was always the protagonist of his stories, I realized that some of them must have been secondhand, otherwise he would have been a much older, much unhealthier man; but despite this I came to understand that secondhand or not, theywere his, that they had become part of his substance in the way a poster glued to a wall eventually merges with the surface beneath through a process of the weather. In between the stories I learned that he had grown up in Sacramento and had briefly attended Cal Tech, majoring in astronomy; but thereafter the thread of his life story unraveled into a welter of anecdote. From various sources I heard that he had rented a shanty near Punta Palmetto, sharing it with a Danish girl named Rigmor and several others, and that the police had been nosing around in response to reports of nudity and drugs; yet I never impinged on this area of his life. We were drinking companions, nothing more, and only once did I catch a glimpse of the soul buried beneath his placid exterior.

We were sitting as usual with our feet propped on the walkway railing, taking shelter in the night from the discordant reggae band inside and gazing out at the heat lightning that flashed orange above the Honduran coast. Moths batted at the necklace of light bulbs strung over the door, and the black water was lacquered with reflection. On either side, rows of yellow-lit windows marked the shanties that followed the sweep of the harbor. We had been discussing women—in particular a local woman whose husband appeared to be more concerned with holding on to her than curbing her infidelities.

“Being cuckolded seems the official penalty for marriage down here,” I said. “It’s as if they’re paying the man back for being fool enough to marry them.”

“Women are funny,” said Ray; he laughed, realizing the inadequacy of the cliché. “They’re into sacrifice,” he said. “They’ll break your heart and mean well by it.” He made a gesture of frustration, unable to express what he intended, and stared gloomily down at his hands.

I had never before seen such an intense expression on his face; it was clear that he was not talking about women in the abstract. “Having trouble with Rigmor?” I asked.

“Rigmor?” He looked confused, then laughed again. “No, that’s just fun and games.” He went back to staring at his hands.

I was curious; I had a feeling that I had glimpsed beneath his surface, that the puzzle he presented—a bright young man wasting himself in endless wandering—might have a simple solution. I phrased my next words carefully, hoping to draw him out.

“I suppose most men have a woman in their past,” I said, “one who failed to recognize the mutuality of a relationship.”

Ray glanced at me sharply, but made no comment.

“Sometimes,” I continued, “we use those women as justifications for our success or failure, and I guess they do deserve partial credit or blame. After all, they do sink their claws in us . . . but we let them.”

He opened his mouth, and I believe he was about to tell me a story, the one story of real moment in his life; but just then old Spurgeon James, drunk, clad in tattered shirt and shorts, the tangle of his once-white beard stained a motley color by nicotine and rum, staggered out of the bar and began to urinate into the shallows. “Oh, mon!” he said. “Dis night wild!” He reeled against the wall, half-turning, the arc of his urine glistening in the yellow light and splashing near Ray’s feet. When he had finished, he tried to extort money from us by relating the story that had gained him notoriety the week before—he claimed to have seen flying saucers hanging over Flowers’s Bay. Anxious to hear Ray’s story, I thrust alempira note at Spurgeon to get rid of him; but by the time he had gone back in, Ray had lost the impulse to talk about his past and was off instead on the subject of Spurgeon’s UFOs.

“You don’t believe him, do you?” I said. “Once Spurgeon gets a load on, he’s liable to see the Pope driving a dune buggy.”

“No,” said Ray. “But I wish I could believe him. Back at Cal Tech I’d planned on joining one of the projects that were searching for extraterrestrial life.”

“Well then,” I said, fumbling out my wallet, “you’d probably be interested to know that there’s been a more reliable sighting on the island. That is, if you consider a pirate reliable. Henry Meachem saw a UFO back in the 1700s—1793, I think.” I pulled out a folded square of paper and handed it to Ray. “It’s an excerpt from the old boy’s journal. I had the clerk at the Historical Society run me off a Xerox. My youngest girl reads science fiction and I thought she might get a laugh out of it.”

Ray unfolded the paper and read the excerpt, which I reproduce below.

May 7th, 1793. I had just gone below to my Cabin after negotiating the Reef, when I heard divers Cries of astonishment and panic echoing down the Companion-way. I return’d to the Fore-Deck and there found most of the Crew gather’d along the Port-Rail, many of them pointing to the Heavens. Almost directly overhead and at an unguessable Distance, I espi’d an Object of supernal red brilliance, round, no larger than a Ha’penny. The brightness of the Object was most curious, and perhaps brightness is not the proper Term to describe its Effect. While it was, indeed, bright, it was not sufficiently so to cause me to shield my Eyes; and yet whenever I attempt’d to direct my Gaze upon it, I experienc’d a sensation of Vertigo and so was forc’d to view it obliquely. I call’d for my Glass, but before it could be bro’t there was a Windy Noise—yet not a whit more Wind—and the Object began to expand, all the while maintaining its circular Forme. Initially, I thought it to be falling towards us, as did the Crew, and several Men flung themselves into the Sea to escape immolation. However, I soon realis’d that it was merely growing larger, as tho’ a Hole were being burned thro’ the Sky to reveal the flame-lash’d Sky of Hell behind. Suddenly a Beam of Light, so distinct as to appear a reddish-gold Wire strung between Sky and Sea, lanc’d down from the Thing and struck the Waters inside the Reef. There was no Splash, but a great hissing and venting of Steam, and after this had subsided, the Windy Noise also began to subside, and the fiery Circle above dwindled to a point and vanish’d. I consider’d putting forth a Long-Boat to discover what had fall’n, but I was loathe to waste the Southerly Wind. I mark’d the position of the Fall—a scant 3 miles from our Camp at Sandy Bay—and upon our Return there will be ample Opportunity to explore the Phenomenon. . . .
As I recall, Ray was impressed by the excerpt, saying that he had never read of a sighting quite like this one. Our conversation meandered over the topics of space colonies, quasars, and UFO nuts—whom he deprecated as having given extraterrestrial research a bad name—and though I tried to resurrect the topic of women, I never succeeded.

At the time I was frantically busy with supervising the building of my house, maneuvering along the path of bribery and collusion that would lead to my obtaining final residence papers, and I took for granted these meetings at the Salón de Carmín. If I had been asked my opinion of Ray in those days, I would have said that he was a pleasant-enough sort but rather shallow. I never considered him my friend; in fact, I looked on our relationship as being free from the responsibilities of friendship, as a safe harbor from the storms of social convention—new friends, new neighbors, new woman—that were blowing around me. And so, when he finally left the island after four months of such conversations, I was surprised to find that I missed him.


* * *
Islands are places of mystery. Washed by the greater mysteries of wind and sea, swept over by tides of human event, they accumulate eerie magnetisms that attract the lawless, the eccentric, and—it is said—the supernatural; they shelter oddments of civilization that evolve into involute societies, and their histories are less likely to reflect orderly patterns of culture than mosaics of bizarre circumstance. Guanoja’s embodiment of the mystery had fascinated me from the beginning. It had originally been home to Carib Indians, who had moved on when Henry Meachem’s crews and their slaves established their colonies—their black descendants still spoke an English dotted with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colloquialisms. Rum-running, gun-smuggling, and revolution had all had their moment in the island’s tradition; but the largest part of this tradition involved the spirit world. Duppies (a word used to cover a variety of unusual manifestations, but generally referring to ghosts, both human and animal); the mystical rumors associated with the smoking of black coral; and then there was the idea that some of the spirits dwelling there were not the shades of dead men and women, but ancient and magical creatures, demigods left over from the days of the Carib. John Anderson McCrae, the patriarch of the island’s storytellers, once put it to me this way:
“Dis island may look like a chewed-up bone some dog have dropped in a puddle, and de soil may be no good for plantains, no good for corn. But when it come to de breedin’ of spirits, dere ain’t no soil better.”

It was, as John Anderson McCrae pointed out, no tropic paradise. Though the barrier reef was lovely and nourished a half-dozen diving resorts, the interior consisted of low scrub-thatched hills, and much of the coast was given over to mangrove. A dirt road ran partway around the island, connecting the shantytowns of Meachem’s Landing, Spanish Harbor, and West End, and a second road crossed from Meachem’s Landing to Sandy Bay on the northern coast—a curving stretch of beach that at one moment seemed beautiful, and the next abysmally ugly. That was the charm of the island, that you could be walking along a filthy beach, slapping at flies, stepping carefully to avoid dead fish and pig droppings; and then, as if a different filter had slid across the sun, you suddenly noticed the hummingbirds flitting in the sea grape, the hammocks of coco palms, the reef water glowing in bands of jade and turquoise and aquamarine. Sprinkled among the palms at Sandy Bay were a few dozen shanties set on pilings, their tin roofs scabbed by rust; jetties with gap-boarded outhouses at their seaward ends extended out over the shallows, looking like charcoal sketches by Picasso. It had no special point of attraction, but because Elizabeth’s family lived nearby, I had built my house—three rooms of concrete block and a wooden porch—about a hundred yards from the terminus of the cross-island road.

A half-mile down the beach stood The Chicken Shack, and its presence had been a further inducement to build in Sandy Bay. Not that the food or decor was in the least appealing; the sole item on the menu was fried chicken, mostly bone and gristle, and the shanty was hardly larger than a chicken coop itself, containing three picnic tables and a kitchen. Mounted opposite each other on the walls was a pair of plates upon which a transient artist had painted crude likenesses of the proprietor, John James, and his wife; and these two black faces, their smiles so poorly rendered as to appear ferocious, always seemed to me to be locked in a magical duel, one whose stray energies caused the food to be overdone. If your taste was for a good meal, you would have done better elsewhere; but if you had an appetite for gossip, The Chicken Shack was unsurpassed in this regard; and it was there one night, after a hiatus of almost two years, that I next had word of Ray Milliken.


* * *
I had been out of circulation for a couple of weeks, repairing damage done to my house by the last norther, and since Elizabeth was grouchy with her monthlies, I decided to waste a few hours watching Hatfield Brooks tell fortunes at the Shack. He did so each Wednesday without fail. On arriving, I found him sitting at the table nearest the door—a thin young man who affected natty dreads but none of the hostility usually attendant to the hairstyle. Compared to most of the islanders, he was a saintly sort. Hardworking; charitable; a nondrinker; faithful to his wife. In front of him was what looked to be a bowling ball of marbled red plastic, but was actually a Zodiac Ball—a child’s toy containing a second ball inside, and between the inner and outer shells, a film of water. There was a small window at the top, and if you shook the ball, either the wordYes orNo would appear in the window, answering your question. Sitting beside Hatfield, scrunched into the corner, was his cousin Jimmy Mullins, a diminutive wiry man of thirty-five. He had fierce black eyes that glittered under the harsh light; the skin around them was puckered as if they had been surgically removed and later reembedded. He was shirtless, his genitals partly exposed by a hole in his shorts. John James, portly and white-haired, waved to me from behind the counter, and Hatfield asked, “How de night goin’, Mr. Winship?”
“So-so,” I replied, and ordered a bottle of Superior from John. “Not much business,” I remarked to Hatfield, pressing the cold bottle against my forehead.

“Oh, dere’s a trickle now and den,” he said.

All this time Mullins had said not a word. He was apparently angry at something, glowering at Hatfield, shifting uncomfortably on the bench, the tip of his tongue darting in and out.

“Been hunting lately?” I asked him, taking a seat at the table by the counter.

I could tell he did not want to answer, to shift his focus from whatever had upset him; but he was a wheedler, a borrower, and he did not want to offend a potential source of small loans. In any case, hunting was his passion. He did his hunting by night, hypnotizing the island deer with beams from his flashlight; nonetheless he considered himself a great sportsman, and not even his bad mood could prevent him from boasting.

“Shot me a nice little buck Friday mornin’,” he mumbled; and then, becoming animated, he said, “De minute I see he eye, podner, I know he got to crumble.”

There was a clatter on the stairs, and a teenage girl wearing a man’s undershirt and a print skirt pushed in through the door. Junie Elkins. She had been causing the gossip mills to run overtime due to a romance she was having with a boy from Spanish Harbor, something of which her parents disapproved. She exchanged greetings, handed a coin to Hatfield, and sat across from him. Then she looked back at me, embarrassed. I pretended to be reading the label of my beer bottle.

“What you after knowin’, darlin’?” asked Hatfield.

Junie leaned over the table and whispered. Hatfield nodded, made a series of mystic passes, shook the ball, and Junie peered intently at the window in its top.

“Dere,” said Hatfield. “Everything goin’ to work out in de end.”

Other Americans have used Hatfield’s method of fortune-telling to exemplify the islanders’ gullibility and ignorance, and even Hatfield would admit to an element of hoax. He did not think he had power over the ball; he had worked off-island on the steamship lines and had gained a measure of sophistication. Still he credited the ball with having some magical potential. “De thing made to tell fortunes even if it just a toy,” he said to me once. He did not deny that it gave wrong answers, but suggested these might be blamed on changing conditions and imperfect manufacture. The way he explained it was so sweetly reasonable that I almost believed him; and I did believe that if the ball was going to work anywhere, it would be on this island, a place where the rudimentary underpinnings of culture there were still in evidence, where simpler laws obtained.

After Junie had gone, Mullins’s hostility again dominated the room and we sat in silence. John set about cleaning the kitchen, and the clatter of dishes accentuated the tension. Suddenly Mullins brought his fist down on the table.

“Damn it, mon!” he said to Hatfield. “Gimme my money!”

“Ain’t your money,” said Hatfield gently.

“De mon has got to payme formy land!”

“Ain’t your land.”

“I got testimony dat it’s mine!” Again Mullins pounded the table.

John moved up to the counter. “Dere’s goin’ to be no riot in dis place tonight,” he said sternly.

Land disputes—as this appeared to be—were common on the island and often led to duels with conch shells or machetes. The pirates had not troubled with legal documents, and after taking over the island, the Hondurans had managed to swindle the best of the land from the blacks; though the old families had retained much of the acreage in the vicinity of Sandy Bay. But, since most of the blacks were at least marginally related, matters of ownership proved cloudy.

“What’s the problem?” I asked.

Hatfield shrugged, and Mullins refused to answer; anger seemed visible above his head like heat ripples rising from a tin roof.

“Some damn fool have leased de Buryin’ Ground,” said John. “Now dese two feudin’.”

“Who’d want that pesthole?”

“A true damn fool, dat’s who,” said John. “Ray Milliken.”

I was startled to hear Ray’s name—I had not expected to hear it again—and also by the fact that he or anyone would spend good money on the Burying Ground. It was a large acreage three miles west of Sandy Bar near Punta Palmetto, mostly mangrove swamp, and notable for its population of snakes and insects.

“It ain’t de Garden of Eden, dat’s true,” said Hatfield. “I been over de other day watchin’ dem clear stumps, and every time de blade dig down it churn up three or four snakes.Coralitos , yellowjaws.”

“Snakes don’t bother dis negro,” said Mullins pompously.

His referral to himself as “dis negro” was a sure sign that he was drunk, and I realized now that he had scrunched into the corner to preserve his balance. His gestures were sluggish, and his eyes were bloodshot and rolling.

“Dat’s right,” he went on. “Everybody know dat if de yellowjaw bite, den you just bites de pizen back in de neck.”

John made a noise of disgust.

“What’s Milliken want the place for?” I asked.

“He goin’ to start up a town,” said Hatfield. “Least dat’s what he hopin’. De lawyer say we best hold up de paperwork ’til we find out what de government think ’bout de idea.”

“De fools dat goin’ to live in de town already on de island,” said John. “Dey stayin’ over in Meachem’s Landin’. Must be forty or fifty of dem. Dey go ’round smilin’ all de time, sayin’, ‘Ain’t dis nice,’ and ‘Ain’t dat pretty.’ Dey of a cult or somethin’.”

“All I know,” said Hatfield, “is dat de mon come to me and say, ‘Hatfield, I got three thousandlemps , fifteen hundred dollars gold, if you give me ninety-nine years on de Buryin’ Ground.’ And I say, ‘What for you want dat piece of perdition? My cousin Arlie he lease you a nice section of beachfront.’ And den he tell me ’bout how de Carib live dere ’cause dat’s where dey get together with de space duppies . . .”

“Aliens,” said John disparagingly.

“Correct! Aliens.” Hatfield stroked the Zodiac Ball. “He say de aliens talk to de Carib ’cause de Carib’s lives is upful and just naturally ’tracts de aliens. I tell him, ‘Mon, de Carib fierce! Dey warriors!’ And he say, ‘Maybe so, but dey must have been doin’ somethin’ right or de aliens won’t be comin’ ’round.’ And den he tell me dat dey plan to live like de Carib and bring de aliens back to Guanoja.”

“Gimme a Superior, John,” said Mullins bossily.

“You got de money?” asked John, his arms folded, knowing the answer.

“No, I ain’t got de money!” shouted Mullins. “Dis boog clot got my money!” He threw himself at Hatfield and tried to wrestle him to the floor; but Hatfield, being younger, stronger, and sober, caught his wrists and shoved him back into the corner. Mullins’s head struck the wall with athwack , and he grabbed the injured area with both hands.

“Look,” I said. “Even if the government permits the town, which isn’t likely, do you really believe a town can survive on the Burying Ground? Hell, they’ll be straggling back to Meachem’s Landing before the end of the first night.”

“Dat’s de gospel,” said John, who had come out from back of the counter to prevent further riot.

“Has any money changed hands?” I asked.

“He give me two hundredlemps as security,” said Hatfield. “But I ’spect he want dat back if de government disallow de town.”

“Well,” I said, “if there’s no town, there’s no argument. Why not ask the ball if there’s going to be a town on the Burying Ground?”

“Sound reasonable to me,” said John; he gave the ball no credence, but was willing to suspend disbelief in order to make peace.

“Lemme do it!” Mullins snatched the ball up, staring cross-eyed into the red plastic. “Is dere goin’ to be a town on de Buryin’ Ground?” he asked solemnly; then he turned it over twice and set it down. I stood and leaned forward to see the little window.

No, it read.

“Let’s have beers all around,” I said to John. “And a soda for Hatfield. We’ll toast the solution of a problem.”

But the problem was not solved—it was only in the first stages of inception—and though the Zodiac Ball’s answer eventually proved accurate, we had not asked it the right question.


* * *
This was in October, a time for every sort of inclement weather, and it rained steadily over the next few days. Fog banks moved in, transforming the sea into a mystic gray dimension, muffling the crash of waves on the reef so they sounded like bones being crunched in an enormous mouth. Not good weather for visiting the Burying Ground. But finally a sunny day dawned, and I set out to find Ray Milliken. I must admit I had been hurt by his lack of interest in renewing our acquaintance, but I had too many questions to let this stop me from hunting him up. Something about a colony built to attract aliens struck me as sinister rather than foolhardy—this being how it struck most people. I could not conceive of a person like Ray falling prey to such a crackpot notion; nor could I support the idea, one broached by Elizabeth, that he was involved in a swindle. She had heard that he had sold memberships in the colony and raised upwards of a hundred thousand dollars. The report was correct, but I doubt that Ray’s original motives have much importance.
There was no road inland, only a snake-infested track, and so I borrowed a neighbor’s dory and rowed along inside the reef. The tide was low, and iron-black coral heads lifted from the sea like the crenellated parapets of a drowned castle; beyond, the water was banded with sun-spattered streaks of slate and lavender. I could not help being nervous. People steered clear of the Burying Ground—it was rumored to harbor duppies . . . but then so was every other part of the island, and I suspect the actual reason for its desertion was that it had no worth to anyone, except perhaps to a herpetologist. The name of the place had come down from the Carib; this was a puzzling fact, since all their grave sites were located high in the hills. Pottery and tools had been found in the area, but no solid evidence of burials. Two graves did exist, those belonging to Ezekiel Brooks, the son of William, a mate on Henry Meachem’s privateer, and to Ezekiel’s son Carl. They had lived most of their lives on the land as hermits, and it was their solitary endurance that had ratified the Brooks family’s claim to ownership.

On arriving, I tied the dory to a mangrove root and immediately became lost in a stand of scrub palmetto. I had sweated off my repellent, and mosquitoes swarmed over me; I stepped cautiously, probing the weeds with my machete to stir up any lurking snakes. After a short walk I came to a clearing about fifty yards square; it had been scraped down to the raw dirt. On the far side stood a bulldozer, and next to it was a thatched shelter beneath which a group of men were sitting. The primary colors and simple shapes—yellow bulldozer, red dirt, dark green walls of brush—made the clearing look like a test for motor skills that might be given to a gigantic child. As I crossed to the shelter, one of the men jumped up and walked toward me. It was Ray. He was shirtless, wearing boots and faded jeans, and a rosy sheen of new sunburn overlaid his tan.

“Frank,” he said, pumping my hand.

I was taken aback by the religious affirmation in his voice—it was as if my name were something he had long treasured.

“I was planning to drop around in a few days,” he said. “After we got set up. How are you?”

“Old and tormented,” I said, slapping at a mosquito.

“Here.” He gestured at the shelter. “Let’s get into the shade.”

“How areyou ?” I asked as we walked.

“Great, Frank,” he replied. “Really great.” His smile seemed the product of an absolute knowledge that things, indeed, were really great.

He introduced me to the others; I cannot recall their names, a typical sampling of Jims and Daves and Toms. They all had Ray’s Krishna-conscious smile, his ultrasincerity, and they delighted in sharing with me their lunch of banana fritters and coconut. “Isn’t this food beautiful?” said one. There was so much beatitude around me that I, grumpy from the heat and mosquitoes, felt like a heathen among them. Ray kept staring at me, smiling, and this was the main cause of my discomfort. I had the impression that something was shining too brightly behind his eyes, a kind of manic brilliance flaring in him the way an old light bulb flares just before it goes dark for good. He began to tell me of the improvements they were planning—wells, electronic mosquito traps, generators, schools with computers, a medical clinic for the islanders, on and on. His friends chimed in with additions to the list, and I had the feeling that I was listening to a well-rehearsed litany.

“I thought you were going to live off the land like the Carib,” I said.

“Oh, no,” said Ray. “There are some things they did that we’re going to do, but we’ll do them better.”

“Suppose the government denies your permits?”

I was targeted by a congregation of imperturbable smiles. “They came through two days ago,” said Ray. “We’re going to call the colony Port Ezekiel.”


* * *
After lunch, Ray led me through the brush to a smaller clearing where half-a-dozen shelters were erected; hammocks were strung beneath each one. His had a fringe of snakeskins tacked to the roofpoles, at least thirty of them; they were crusted with flies, shifting horribly in the breeze. They were mostly yellowjaws—the local name for the fer-de-lance—and he said they killed ten or twelve a day. He sat cross-legged on the ground and invited me to take the hammock.
“Want to hear what I’ve been up to?” he asked.

“I’ve heard some of it.”

“I bet you have.” He laughed. “They think we’re loony.” He started as the bulldozer roared to life in the clearing behind us. “Do you remember showing me old Meachem’s journal?”

“Yes.”

“In a way you’re responsible for all this.” He waved at the dirt and the shelters. “That was my first real clue.” He clasped his hands between his legs. “When I left here, I went back to the States. To school. I guess I was tired of traveling, or maybe I realized what a waste of space I’d been. I took up astronomy again. I wasn’t very interested in it, but I wasn’t more interested in anything else. Then one day I was going over a star chart, and I noticed something amazing. You see, while I was here I’d gotten into the Carib culture. I used to wander around the Burying Ground looking for pottery. Found some pretty good pieces. And I’d hike up into the hills and make maps of the villages, where they’d stationed their lookouts and set their signal fires. I still had those maps, and what I’d noticed was that the pattern of the Carib signal fires corresponded exactly to the constellation Cassiopeia. It was incredible! The size of the fires even corresponded to the magnitudes of the specific stars. I dropped out of school and headed back to the island.” He gave me an apologetic look. “I tried to see you, but you were on the mainland.”

“That must have been when Elizabeth’s old boyfriend was giving us some trouble,” I said. “We had to lie low for a while.”

“I guess so.” Ray reached for a pack that was propped against the wall and extracted a sheaf of 8" by 11" photographs; they appeared to consist chiefly of smudges and crooked lines. “I began digging through the old sites, especially here—this is the only place I found pottery with these particular designs . . .”

From this point on I had difficulty keeping a straight face. Have you ever had a friend tell you something unbelievable, something they believed in so strongly that for you to discredit it would cause them pain? Perhaps it was a story about a transcendent drug experience or their conversion to Christianity. And did they stare at you earnestly as they spoke, watching your reactions? I mumbled affirmatively and nodded and avoided Ray’s eyes. Compared to Ray’s thesis, Erich von Däniken’s ravings were a model of academic discipline. From the coincidental pattern of the signal fires, the incident of Meachem’s UFO and some drunken tales he had solicited, from these smudges and lines that—if you exerted your imagination—bore a vague resemblance to bipeds wearing fishbowls on their heads, Ray had concocted an intricate scenario of alien visitation. It was essentially the same story as von Däniken’s—the ancient star-seeding race. But where Ray’s account differed was in his insistence that the aliens had had a special relationship with the Carib, that the Carib could call them down by lighting their fires. The landing Meachem had witnessed had been one of the last, because with the arrival of the English the Carib had gradually retreated from the island, and the aliens no longer had a reason for visiting. Ray meant to lure them back by means of a laser display that would cast a brighter image of Cassiopeia than the Carib could have managed; and when the aliens returned, he would entreat them to save our foundering civilization.

He had sold the idea of the colony by organizing a society to study the possibility of extraterrestrial life; he had presented slides and lectured on the Guanojan Outer Space Connection. I did not doubt his ability to make such a presentation, but I was amazed that educated people had swallowed it. He told me that his group included a doctor, an engineer, and sundry Ph.D.s, and that they all had some college background. And yet perhaps it was not so amazing. Even today there must be in America, as there were when I left it, a great many aimless and exhausted people like Ray and his friends, people damaged by some powerful trouble in their past and searching for an acceptable madness.

When Ray had finished, he looked at me soberly and said, “You think we’re nuts, don’t you?”

“No,” I said; but I did not meet his eyes.

“We’re not,” he said.

“It’s not important.” I tried to pass it off as a joke. “Not down here, anyway.”

“It’s not just the evidence that convinced me,” he said. “I knew it the first time I came to the Burying Ground. I could feel it.”

“Do you remember what else we talked about the night I showed you Meachem’s journal?” I am not sure why I wanted to challenge him; perhaps it was simply curiosity, a desire to know how fragile his calm mask really was.

“No,” he said, and smiled. “We talked about a lot of things.”

“We were talking about women, and then Spurgeon James interrupted us. But I think you were on the verge of telling me about a woman who had hurt you. Badly. Is all that behind you now?”

His smile dissolved, and the expression that flared briefly in its place was terrible to see—grieving, and baffled by the grief. This time it washis eyes that drifted away from mine. “You’re wrong about me, Frank,” he said. “Port Ezekiel is going to be something very special.”

Shortly thereafter I made my excuses, and he walked me down to the dory. I invited him to visit me and have a meal, but I knew he would not come. I had threatened his beliefs, the beliefs he thought would shore him up, save him, and there was now a tangible barrier between us.

“Come back anytime,” he called as I rowed away.

He stood watching me, not moving at all, an insignificant figure being merged by distance into the dark green gnarl of the mangrove; even when I could barely see him, he continued to stand there, as ritually attendant as his mythical Carib hosts might have been while watching the departure of their alien guests.


* * *
Over five weeks passed before I again gave much thought to Ray and Port Ezekiel. (Port Ezekiel! That name as much as anything had persuaded me of Ray’s insanity, smacking as it did of Biblical smugness, a common shelter for the deluded.) This was a studied lack of concern on my part. I felt he was lost and wanted no involvement with his tragedy. And besides, though the colony remained newsworthy, other events came to supersede it. The shrimp fleet struck against its parent American company, and riots broke out in the streets of Spanish Harbor. The old talk of independence was revived in the bars—idle talk, but it stirred the coals of anti-Americanism. Normally smiling faces frowned at me, the prices went up when I shopped in town, and once a child yelled at me, “Get off de island!” Small things, but they shook me. And since the establishment of Port Ezekiel had been prelude to these events, I could not help feeling that Ray was somehow to blame for this peculiarly American darkness now shadowing my home.
Despite my attempt to ignore Ray’s presence, I did have news of him. I heard that he had paid Hatfield in full and that Jimmy Mullins was on the warpath. Three thousandlempira must have seemed a king’s ransom to him; he lived in a tiny shanty with his wife Hettie and two underfed children, and he had not worked for over a year. I also heard that the shipments of modern conveniences intended for Port Ezekiel had been waylaid by customs—someone overlooked in the chain of bribery, no doubt—and that the colonists had moved into the Burying Ground and were living in brushwood shacks. And then, over a span of a couple of weeks, I learned that they were deserting the colony. Groups of them turned up daily in Meachem’s Landing, complaining that Ray had misled them. Two came to our door one evening, a young man and woman, both delirious, sick with dysentery and covered with infected mosquito bites. They were too wasted to tell us much, but after we had bedded them down I asked the woman what was happening at the colony.

“It was awful,” she said, twisting her hand in the blanket and shivering. “Bugs and snakes . . . and . . .” Her eyes squeezed shut. “He just sits there with the snakes.”

“You mean Ray?”

“I don’t know,” she said, her voice cracking into hysteria. “I don’t know.”

Then, one night as Elizabeth and I were sitting on the porch, I saw a flashlight beam weaving toward us along the beach. By the way the light wavered, swooping up to illuminate the palm crowns, down to shine upon a stoved-in dory, I could tell the bearer was very drunk. Elizabeth leaned forward, peering into the dark. “Oh, Lord,” she said, holding her bathrobe closed. “It dat damn Jimmy Mullins.” She rose and went into the house, pausing at the door to add, “If he after foolin’ with me, you tell him I’m goin’ to speak with my uncle ’bout him.”

Mullins stopped at the margin of the porch light to urinate, then he staggered up onto the steps; he dropped his flashlight, and it rolled over beside my machete, which was propped by the door. He was wearing his town clothes—a white rayon shirt with the silk-screened photo of a soccer star on the back, and brown slacks spattered with urine. Threads of saliva hung from his chin.

“Mr. Frank, sir,” he said with great effort. His eyes rolled up, and for a moment I thought he was going to pass out; but he pulled himself together, shook his head to clear the fog, and said, “De mon have got to pay me.”

I wanted no part of his feud with Hatfield. “Why don’t I give you a ride home?” I said. “Hettie’ll be worried.”

Blearily, he focused on me, clinging to a support post. “Dat boog Yankee clot have cheated me,” he said. “You talk to him, Mr. Frank. You tell him he got to pay.”

“Ray Milliken? He doesn’t owe you anything.”

“Somebody owe me!” Mullins flailed his arm at the night. “And I ain’t got de force to war with Hatfield.” He adopted a clownish expression of sadness. “I born in de summer and never get no bigger den what you seein’ now.”

So, sucked along by the feeble tide of anti-Americanism, Mullins had given up on Hatfield and shifted his aim to a more vulnerable target. I told him that Ray was crazy and would likely not respond to either threats or logic; but Mullins insisted that Ray should have checked Hatfield’s claim before paying him. Finally I agreed to speak to Ray on his behalf and—somewhat mollified—he grew silent. He clung to the post, pouting; I settled back in my chair. It was a beautiful night, the phosphorescent manes of the breakers tossing high above the reef, and I wished he would leave us alone to the view.

“Damn boog Yankee!” He reeled away from the post and careened against the doorframe; his hand fell upon my machete. Before I could react, he picked it up and slashed at the air. “I cut dat bastard down to de deck!” he shouted, glaring at me.

The moment seemed endless, as if the flow of time had snagged on the point of the machete. Drunk, he might do anything. I felt weak and helpless, my stomach knotted by a chill. The blade looked to have the same drunken glitter as his eyes. God knows what might have happened, but at that moment Elizabeth—her robe belling open, eyes gleaming crazily—sneaked up behind him and smacked him on the neck with an ax handle. Her first blow sent him tottering forward, the machete still raised in a parody of attack; and the second drove him off the porch to sprawl facedown in the sand.

Later, after John James and Hettie had dragged Mullins home, as Elizabeth and I lay in bed, I confessed that I had been too afraid to move during the confrontation. “Don’t vex yourself, Frank,” she said. “Dere’s enough trouble on de island dat sooner or later you be takin’ care of some of mine.” And after we had made love, she curled against me, tucked under my arm, and told me of a dream that had frightened her the previous night. I knew what she was doing—nothing about her was mysterious—and yet, as with every woman I have known, I could not escape the feeling that a stranger lay beside me, someone whose soul had been molded by a stronger gravity and under a hotter star.


* * *
I spent the next morning patching things up with Mullins, making him a gift of vegetable seeds and listening to his complaints, and I did not leave for the Burying Ground until midafternoon. It had rained earlier, and gray clouds were still passing overhead, hazy fans of sunlight breaking through now and again. The chop of the water pulled against me, and it was getting on toward sunset by the time I arrived—out on the horizon the sea and sky were blending in lines of blackish squalls. I hurried through the brush, intending to convey my warning as quickly as possible and be home before the winds; but when I reached the first clearing, I stopped short.
The thatch and poles of the brushwood huts were strewn over the dirt, torn apart, mixed in with charred tin cans, food wrappers, the craters of old cooking fires, broken tools, mildewed paperbacks, and dozens of conch shells, each with their whorled tops sliced off—that must have been a staple of their diet. I called Ray’s name, and the only answer was an intensification in the buzzing of the flies. It was like the aftermath of a measly war, stinking and silent. I picked my way across the litter to the second clearing and again was brought up short. An identical mess carpeted the dirt, and Ray’s shelter remained intact, the fringe of rotting snakeskins still hanging from the roofpoles—but that was not what had drawn my attention.

A trench had been dug in front of the shelter and covered with a sheet of wire mesh; large rocks held the wire in place. Within the trench were forty or fifty snakes.Coralitos , yellowjaws, Tom Goffs, cottonmouths. Their slithering, their noses scraping against the wire as they tried to escape, created a sibilance that tuned my nerves a notch higher. As I stepped over the trench and into the shelter, several of them struck at me; patches of the mesh glistened with their venom. Ray’s hammock was balled up in a corner, and the ground over which it had swung had been excavated; the hole was nearly full of murky water—groundwater by the briny smell. I poked a stick into it and encountered something hard at a depth of about three feet. A boulder, probably. Aside from Ray’s pack, the only other sign of habitation was a circular area of dirt that had been patted smooth; dozens of bits of oyster shell were scattered across it, all worked into geometric shapes—stars, hexagons, squares, and so forth. A primitive gameboard. I did not know what exactly to make of these things, but I knew they were the trappings of madness. There was an air of savagery about them, of a mind as tattered as its surroundings, shriveled to the simplest of considerations; and I did not believe that the man who lived here would understand any warning I might convey. Suddenly afraid, I turned to leave and was given such a shock that I nearly fell back into the water-filled pit.

Ray was standing an arm’s length away, watching me. His hair was ragged, shoulder-length, and bound by a cottonmouth-skin band; his shorts were holed and filth-encrusted. The dirt smeared on his cheeks and forehead made his eyes appear round and staring. Mosquito bites speckled his chest—though not as many as had afflicted the colonists I had treated. In his right hand he carried a long stick with a twine noose at one end, and in his left hand was a burlap sack whose bottom humped and writhed.

“Ray,” I said, sidling away from him.

I expected a croak or a scream of rage for an answer, but when he spoke it was in his usual voice. “I’m glad you’re here,” he said. He dropped the sack—it was tied at the top—beside the trench and leaned his stick against the wall of the shelter.

Still afraid, but encouraged by the normalcy of his actions, I said, “What’s going on here?”

He gave me an appraising stare. “You better see her for yourself, Frank. You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” He sat cross-legged beside the patch of smoothed dirt and began picking up the shell-bits. The way he picked them up fascinated me—so rapidly, pinching them up between thumb and forefinger, and funneling them back into his palm with the other three fingers, displaying an expert facility. And, I noticed, he was only picking up the hexagons.

“Sit down,” he said. “We’ve got an hour or so to kill.”

I squatted on the opposite side of the gameboard. “You can’t stay here, Ray.”

He finished with the hexagons, set them aside, and started on the squares. “Why not?”

I told him about Mullins, but as I had presumed he was unconcerned. All his money, he said, was tied up in investment funds; he would find a way to deal with Mullins. He was calm in the face of my arguments, and though this calm seemed to reflect a more deep-seated confidence than had been evident on my first visit, I did not trust it. To my mind the barrier between us had hardened, become as tricky to navigate as the reef around the island. I gave up arguing and sat quietly, watching him play with the shells. Night was falling, banks of dark clouds were rushing overhead, and gusts of wind shredded the thatch. Heavy seas would soon be washing over the reef, and it would be beyond my strength to row against them. But I did not want to abandon him. Under the dreary stormlight, the wreckage of Port Ezekiel looked leached of color and vitality, and I had an image of the two of us being survivors of a great disaster, stalemated in debate over the worth of restarting civilization.

“It’s almost time,” he said, breaking the silence. He gazed out to the swaying tops of the bushes that bounded the clearing. “This is so wild, Frank. Sometimes I can’t believe it myself.”

The soft astonishment in his voice brought the pathos of his situation home to me. “Jesus, Ray,” I said. “Come back with me. There’s nothing here.”

“Tell me that when you’ve seen her.” He stood and walked over to the water-filled pit. “You were right, Frank. I was crazy, and maybe I still am. But I was right, too. Just not in the way I expected.”

“Right about what?”

He smiled. “Cassiopeia.” He hunkered down by the pit. “I’ve got to get in the water. There has to be physical contact or else the exchange can’t occur. I’ll be unconscious for a while, but don’t worry about it. All right?”

Without waiting for my approval, he lowered himself into the water. He seemed to be groping for something, and he shifted about until he had found a suitable position. His shoulders just cleared the surface. Then he bowed his head so that I could no longer see his face.

My thoughts were in turmoil. His references to “her,” his self-baptism, and now the sight of his disembodied head and tendrils of hair floating on the water, all this had rekindled my fear. I decided that the best thing I could do for him, for both of us, would be to knock him out, to haul him back to Sandy Bay for treatment. But as I looked around for a club, I noticed something that rooted me in my tracks. The snakes had grown frantic in their efforts to escape; they were massed at the far side of the trench, pushing at the mesh with such desperation that the rocks holding it down were wobbling. And then, an instant later, I began to sense another presence in the clearing.

How did I sense this? It was similar to the feeling you have when you are alone for the first time with a woman to whom you are attracted, how it seems you could close your eyes and stopper your ears and still be aware of her every shift in position, registering these changes as thrills running along your nerves and muscles. And I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that this presence was female. I whirled around, certain that someone was behind me. Nothing. I turned back to Ray. Tremors were passing through his shoulders, and his breath came in hoarse shudders as if he had been removed from his natural element and were having trouble with the air. Scenes from old horror movies flashed through my brain. The stranger lured to an open grave by an odd noise; the ghoul rising from the swamp, black water dripping from his talons; the maniac with the split personality, smiling, hiding a bloody knife under his coat. And then I saw, or imagined I saw, movement on the surface of the water; it was bulging—not bubbling, but the entire surface bulging upward as if some force below were building to an explosion. Terrified, I took a backward step, and as my foot nudged the wire screen over the trench, as the snakes struck madly at the mesh, terrified themselves, I broke and ran.

I went crashing through the brush, certain that Ray was after me, possessed by some demon dredged up from his psyche . . . or by worse. I did not stop to untie the dory but grabbed the machete from beneath the seat, hacked the rope in two, and pulled hard out into the water. Waves slopped over the bow, the dory bucked and plunged, and the noise from the reef was deafening. But even had a hurricane been raging, I would not have put back into the Burying Ground. I strained at the oars, gulping down breaths that were half salt spray, and I did not feel secure until I had passed beyond Punta Palmetto and was hidden from the view of whatever was now wandering that malarial shore.


* * *
After a night’s sleep, after dosing my fears with the comforts of home, all my rational structures were re-erected. I was ashamed at having run, at having left Ray to endure his solitary Hell, and I assigned everything I had seen and felt to a case of nerves or—and I did not think this impossible—to poltergeistlike powers brought on by his madness. Something had to be done for him. As soon as I had finished breakfast, I drove over to Meachem’s Landing and asked the militia for their help. I explained the situation to one Sergeant Colmenares, who thanked me for my good citizenship but said he could do nothing unless the poor man had committed a crime. If I had been clearheaded, I would have invented a crime, anything to return Ray to civilization; instead, I railed at the sergeant, stumped out of the office, and drove back to Sandy Bay.
Elizabeth had asked me to buy some cooking oil, and so I stopped off at Sarah’s Store, a green-painted shanty the size of a horse stall not far from The Chicken Shack. Inside, there was room for three people to stand at the counter, and behind it Sarah was enthroned on her stool. An old woman, almost ninety, with a frizzy crown of white hair and coal-black skin that took on bluish highlights under the sun. It was impossible to do business with her and not hear the latest gossip, and during our conversation she mentioned that Ray had stopped in the night before.

“He after havin’ a strife wit dat Jimmy Mullins,” she said. “Now Jimmy he have followed dis tourist fella down from de Sea Breeze where dey been drinkin’, and he settin’ up to beg de mon fah somet’ing. You know how he gets wit his lies.” She did her Jimmy Mullins imitation, puffing out her chest and frowning. “ ‘I been in Vietnam,’ he say, and show de mon dat scar from when he shot himself in de leg. ‘I bleed fah Oncle Sam, and now Oncle Sam goin’ to take care of dis negro.’ Den in walk Ray Milliken. He did not look left or right but jus’ stare at de cans of fruit juice and ax how much dey was. Talkin’ wit dat duppy voice. Lord! De duppy force crawlin’ all over him. Now dis tourist fella have gone ’cause de sight of Ray wit his wild look and his scrapes have made de fella leery. But Jimmy jus’ stand dere, watchful. And when Ray pay fah de juice, Jimmy say, ‘Gimme dat money.’ Ray make no reply. He drink de juice down and den he amble out de door. Jimmy follow him and he screamin’. ‘You scorn me like dat!’ he say. ‘You scorn me like dat!’ It take no wisdom to know dere’s blood in de air, so I set a Superior on de counter and call out, ‘Jimmy, you come here ’fore yo’ beer lose de chill.’ And dat lure him back.”

I asked Sarah what she meant by “duppy voice,” but she would only say, “Dat’s what it were—de duppy voice.” I paid for my oil, and as I went out the door, she called, “God bless America!” She always said it as a farewell to her American customers; most thought she was putting them on, but knowing Sarah’s compassion for waifs and strays, her conviction that material wealth was the greatest curse one could have, I believe it was heartfelt.


* * *
Sarah’s story had convinced me of the need for action, and that afternoon I returned to the Burying Ground. I did not confront Ray; I stationed myself behind some bushes twenty feet to the right of the shelter. I planned to do as I should have done before—hit him and drag him back to Sandy Bay. I had with me Elizabeth’s ax handle and an ample supply of bug repellent.
Ray was not at the clearing when I arrived, and he did not put in an appearance until after five o’clock. This time he was carrying a guitar, probably gleaned from the debris. He sat beside the trench and began chording, singing in a sour, puny voice that sent a chill through me despite the heat; it seemed he was giving tongue to the stink of the rotting snakeskins, amplifying the whine of the insects. The sun reflected an orange fire on the panels of the guitar.

“Cas-si-o-pee-ee-ya,” he sang, country-western style, “I’ll be yours tonight.” He laughed—cracked, high-pitched laughter—and rocked back and forth on his haunches. “Cas-si-o-pee-ee-ya, why don’t you treat me right.”

Either he was bored or else that was the whole song. He set down the guitar and for the next hour he hardly moved, scratching, looking up to the sun as if checking its decline. Sunset faded, and the evening star climbed above Alps of purple cumulus. Finally, stretching and shaking out the kinks, he stood and walked to the pit and lowered himself into the water. It was at this point that I had intended to hit him, but my curiosity got the best of me and I decided to observe him instead; I told myself that I would be better able to debunk his fantasies if I had some personal experience of them. I would hit him after he had fallen asleep.

It was over an hour before he emerged from the water, and when he did I was very glad to be hidden. Icy stars outlined the massed clouds, and the moon had risen three-quarters full, transforming the clearing into a landscape of black and silvery gray. Everything had a shadow, even the tattered fronds lying on the ground. There was just enough wind to make the shadows tremble, and the only noise apart from the wind was the pattering of lizards across the desiccated leaves. From my vantage I could not see if the water was bulging upward, but soon the snakes began their hissing, their pushing at the mesh, and I felt again that female presence.

Then Ray leaped from the pit.

It was the most fluid entrance I have ever seen—like a dancer mounting onto stage from a sunken level. He came straight up in a shower of silver droplets and landed with his legs straddling the pit, snapping his head from side to side. He stepped out of the shelter, pacing back and forth along the trench, and as the light struck him full, I stopped thinking of him ashe , thinking of Ray as a man; the impression of femininity was so powerful that it obliterated all my previous impressions of him. Though not in the least dainty or swishy, every one of his movements had a casual female sensuality, and his walk was potently feminine in the way of a lioness. His face was leaner, sleeker of line. Aside from these changes was the force of that presence pouring over me. I had the feeling that I was involved in a scene out of prehistory—the hominid warrior with his club spying on an unknown female, scenting her, knowing her sex along the circuits of his nerves. When he . . . when she had done pacing, she squatted beside the trench, removed one of the rocks, and lifted the edge of the screen. With incredible speed, she reached in and snatched out a wriggling yellowjaw. I heard a sickening mushy crack as she crushed its head between her thumb and forefinger. She skinned it with her teeth, worrying a rip, tearing loose long peels until the blood-rilled meat gleamed in the moonlight. All this in a matter of seconds. Watching her eat, I found I was gripping the ax handle so tightly that my hand ached. She tossed the remains of the snake into the bushes, then she stood—again, that marvelous fluidity—and turned toward the spot where I was hiding.

“Frank,” she said; she barely pronounced thea and trilled ther , so that the word came out as “Frrenn-kuh.”

It was like hearing one’s name spoken by an idol. The ax handle slipped from my hand. I stood, weak-kneed. If her speed afoot was equal to her speed of hand, I had no chance of escape.

“I won’t kill you,” she said, her accent slurring the words into the rhythm of a musical phrase. She went back under the shelter and sat beside the patch of smoothed dirt.

The phrasing of her assurance did nothing to ease my fears, yet I came forward. I told myself that this was Ray, that he had created this demoness from his sick needs and imaginings; but I could not believe it. With each step I became more immersed in her, as if her soul were too large for the body and I was passing through its outer fringes. She motioned me to sit, and as I did, her strangeness lapped over me like heat from an open fire.

My throat was constricted, but I managed to say, “Cassiopeia?”

Her lips thinned and drew back from her teeth in a feral smile. “That’s what Ray calls me. He can’t pronounce my name. My home . . .” She glanced at the sky. “The clouds obscure it.”

I gawped at her; I had so many questions, I could not frame even one. Finally I said, “Meachem’s UFO. Was that your ship?”

“The ship was destroyed far from here. What Meachem saw was a ghost, or rather the opening and closing of a road traveled by one.” She gestured at the pit. “It lies there, beneath the water.”

I remembered the hard something I had poked with a stick; it had not felt in the least ectoplasmic, and I pointed this out.

“ ‘Ghost’ is a translation of the word for it in my language,” she said. “You touched the energy fields of a . . . a machine. It was equipped with a homing capacity, but its fields were disrupted by the accident that befell my ship. It can no longer open the roads between the worlds.”

“Roads?” I said.

“I don’t understand the roads, and if I could explain them it would translate as metaphysics. The islanders would probably accept the explanation, but I doubt you would.” She traced a line in the dirt with her forefinger. “To enter the superluminal universe the body must die and be reanimated at journey’s end. The other components of the life travel with the machine. All I know of the roads is that though journeys often last for years, they appear to be direct. When Meachem saw flame in the sky, it was because I came from flame, from the destruction of my ship.”

“The machine . . .” I began.

“It’s an engineered life form,” she said. “You see, any life consists of a system of energy fields unified in the flesh. The machine is a partial simulation of that system, a kind of phantom life that’s designed to sustain the most crucial of those fields—what you’d call theanima , the soul—until the body can be reanimated . . . or, if the body has been destroyed, until an artificial host has been supplied. Of course there was no such host here. So the machine attracted those whose souls were impaired, those with whom a temporary exchange could be made. Without embodiment I would have gone mad.” She scooped up a handful of shell-bits. “I suppose I’ve gone mad in spite of it. I’ve rubbed souls with too many madmen.”

She tossed out the shell-bits. A haphazard toss, I thought; but then I noticed that they had fallen into neat rows.

“The differences between us are too great for the exchange to be other than temporary,” she went on. “If I didn’t reenter the machine each morning, both I and my host—and the machine—would die.”

Despite the evidence of my senses, this talk of souls and energy fields—reminding me of the occult claptrap of the sixties—had renewed my doubts. “People have been digging up the Burying Ground for years,” I said. “Why hasn’t someone found this machine?”

“It’s a very clever machine,” she said, smiling again. “It hides from those who aren’t meant to find it.”

“Why would it choose only impaired hosts?”

“To choose an unimpaired one would run contrary to the machine’s morality. And to mine.”

“How does it attract them?”

“My understanding of the machine is limited, but I assume there’s a process of conditioning involved. Each time I wake in a new host, it’s always the same. A clearing, a shelter, the snakes.”

I started to ask another question, but she waved me off.

“You act as though I must prove something,” she said. “I have no wish to prove anything. Even if I did, I’m not sure I could. Most of my memories were stripped from me at the death of my body, and those that remain are those that have stained the soul. In a sense I’m as much Ray as I am myself. Each night I inherit his memories, his abilities. It’s like living in a closet filled with someone else’s belongings.”

I continued to ask questions, with part of my mind playing the psychiatrist, eliciting answers in order to catalog Ray’s insanity; yet my doubts were fading. She could not recall the purpose of her journey or even of her life, but she said that her original body had been similar to the human form—her people, too, had a myth of an ancient star-seeding race—though it had been larger, stronger, with superior organs of perception. Her world was a place of thick jungles, and her remote ancestors had been nocturnal predators. An old Carib man had been her first host on the island; he had wandered onto the Burying Ground six months after her arrival, maddened by pain from a cancer that riddled his stomach. His wife had been convinced that a goddess had possessed him, and she had brought the tribal elders to bear witness.

“They were afraid of me,” she said. “And I was equally afraid of them. Little devil-men with ruddy skins and necklaces of jaguar teeth. They built fires around me, hemming me in, and they’d dance and screech and thrust their spears at me through the flames. It was nightmarish. I knew they might lose control of their fear at any second and try to kill me. I might have defended myself, but life was sacred to me then. They were whole, vital beings. To harm them would have been to mock what remained of me.”

She had cultivated them, and they had responded by providing her with new hosts, by arranging their fires to depict the constellation Cassiopeia, hoping to call down other gods to keep her company. It had been a fruitless hope, and there were other signals that would have been more recognizable to her people, but she had been touched by their concern and had not told them.

I will not pretend that I recall exactly everything she said, yet I believe what follows captures the gist of her tale. At first I was disconcerted by its fluency and humanity; but I soon realized that not only had she had two centuries in which to practice her humanity, not only was she taking advantage of Ray’s gift for storytelling, but also that she had told much of it before.


* * *
For twenty-two years [she said] I inhabited Carib bodies, most of them terribly damaged. Cripples, people with degenerative diseases, and once a young girl with a huge dent in her skull, an injury gotten during a raid. Though my energies increased the efficiency of their muscles, I endured all their agonies. But as the Carib retreated from the island in face of the English, even this tortured existence was denied to me. I spent four years within the machine, despairing of ever leaving it again. Then, in 1819, Ezekiel Brooks stumbled onto the Burying Ground. He was a retarded boy of seventeen and had become lost in the mangrove. When his father, William, came in search of him, he found me instead. He remembered the fiery object that had fallen from the sky and was delighted to have solved a puzzle that had baffled his captain for so many years. Thereafter he visited every week and dragged old Henry Meachem along.
Meachem was in his seventies then, fat, with a doughy, wrinkled face and long gray hair done up into ringlets; he affected foppish clothes and a lordly manner. He had the gout and had to be carried through the mangrove by his slaves. They brought with them a teakwood chair, its grips carved into lions’ heads, and there he’d sit, wheezing, bellowing at the slaves to keep busy with their fly whisks, plying me with questions. He did not believe my story, and on his second visit, a night much like this one, moonstruck and lightly winded, he was accompanied by a Spanish woman, a scrawny old hag enveloped in a black shawl and skirt, who he told me was a witch.

“Sit you down with Tía Claudia,” he said, prodding her forward with his cane, “and she’ll have the truth of you. She’ll unravel your thoughts like a ball of twine.”

The old woman sat cross-legged beside the pit, pulled a lump of clouded crystal from her skirt, and set it on the ground before her. Beneath the shawl her shadowed wrinkles had the look of a pattern in tree bark, and despite her apparent frailty I could feel her presence as a chill pressure on my skin. Uneasy, I sat down on the opposite side of the pit. Her eyelids drooped, her breath grew shallow and irregular, and the force of her life flooded me, intensifying in the exercise of her power. The fracture planes inside the crystal appeared to be gleaming with more than refracted moonlight, and as I stared at them, a drowsy sensation stole over me . . . but then I was distracted by a faint rushing noise from the pit.

Hatchings of fine lines were etching the surface of the water, sending up sprays of mist. The patterns they formed resembled the fracture planes of the crystal. I glanced up at Tía Claudia. She was trembling, a horror-stricken expression on her face, and the rushing noise was issuing from her parted lips as though she had been invaded by a ghostly wind. The ligature of her neck was cabled, her hands were clawed. I looked back to the pit. Beneath the surface, shrinking and expanding in a faltering rhythm, was a point of crimson light. Tía Claudia’s power, I realized, was somehow akin to that of the machine. She was healing it, restoring its homing capacity, and it was opening a road! Hope blazed in me. I eased into the pit, and the fields gripped me, stronger than ever. But as the old woman let out a shriek and slumped to the ground, they weakened; the point of light shrank to nothing, gone glimmering like my hope. It had only been a momentary restoration, a product of her mind joined to the machine’s.

Two of Meachem’s slaves helped Tía Claudia to her feet, but she shook them off and backed out of the shelter, her eyes fixed on the pit. She leaned against Meachem’s chair for support.

“Well?” he said.

“Kill him!” she said. “He’s too dangerous, too powerful.”

“Him?” Meachem laughed.

Tía Claudia said that I was who I claimed to be and argued that I was a threat to him. I understood that she was really concerned with my threat to her influence over Meachem, but I was so distressed by the lapsing of the machine’s power that I didn’t care what they did to me. Bathed in the silvery light, stars shining around their heads, they seemed emblematic of something—perhaps of all humanity—this ludicrous old pirate in his ruffled shirt, and, shaking her knobbly finger at him, the manipulative witch who wanted to be his master.

After that night, Meachem took me under his wing. I learned that he was an exile, outlawed by the English and obsessed with the idea of returning home, and I think he was happy to have met someone even more displaced than he. Occasionally he’d invite me to his house, a gabled building of pitch-coated boards that clung to a strip of iron shore east of Sandy Bay. He’d sit me down in his study and read to me for hours from his journals; he thought that—being a member of an advanced civilization—I’d have the wit to appreciate his intellect. The study was a room that reflected his obsession with England, its walls covered with Union Jacks, a riot of scarlet and blue. Sometimes, watching the flies crusting the lip of his pewter mug, his sagging face looming above them, the colors on the wall appearing to drip in the unsteady glare of the oil lamp . . . sometimes it seemed a more nightmarish environment than the Carib’s circle of fires. He’d pore over the pages, now and again saying, “Ah, here’s one you’ll like,” and would quote the passage.

“ ‘Wars,’ ” he read to me once, “ ‘are the solstices of the human spirit, ushering in winter to a young man’s thought and rekindling the spring of an old man’s anger.’ ”

Every page was filled with aphorisms like that—high-sounding, yet empty of meaning except as regarded his own nature. He was the cruelest man I’ve ever known. A wife-beater, a tyrant to his slaves and children. Some nights he would have himself borne down to the beach, order torches lit, and watch as those who had offended him were flogged—often to the death—with stalks of withe. After witnessing one of the floggings, I considered killing him, even though such an act would have been in violation of everything I believed.

Then one night he brought another woman to the Burying Ground, a young mulatto girl named Nora Mullins.

“She be weak-minded like Ezekiel,” said Meachem. “She’ll make you a perfect wife.”

She would have run, but his slaves herded her forward. Her eyes darted left and right, her hands fidgeted with the folds of her skirt.

“I don’t need a wife,” I said.

“Don’t you now? Here’s a chance to create your own lineage, to escape that infernal contraption of yours. Nora’ll bear you a child, and if blood holds true, it’ll be as witless as its parents. After Ezekiel’s gone, you can take up residence in your heir.” His laugh disintegrated into a hacking cough.

The idea had logic behind it, but the thought of being intimate with a member of another species, especially one whose sex might be said to approximate my own, repelled me. Further, I didn’t trust his motives. “Why are you doing this?” I asked.

“I’m dyin’.” The old monster worked up a tear over the prospect. “Nora’s my legacy to you. I’ve always thought it a vast irony that a high-flyin’ soul such as yourself should have been brought so low. It’ll please me to think of you marooned among generations of idiots while I’m wingin’ off to my reward.”

“This island is your reward,” I said. “Even the soul dies.”

“You know that for a fact?” He was worried.

“No,” I said, relenting. “No one knows that.”

“Well, then I’ll come back to haunt you.”

But he never did.

I had intended to send Nora away after he left, but Ezekiel—though too timid to approach her sexually—found her attractive, and I didn’t want to deprive him of her companionship. In addition, I began to realize how lonely I had been myself. The idea of keeping her with me and fathering a child seemed more and more appealing, and a week later, using Ezekiel’s memories to rouse lust, I set out to become a family man.

What a strange union that was! The moon sailing overhead, chased by ragged blue clouds; the wind and insects and frogs combining into a primitive music. Nora was terrified. She whimpered and rolled her eyes and halfheartedly tried to fight me off. I don’t believe she was clear as to what was happening, but eventually her instincts took control. It would be hard to imagine two more inept virgins. I had a logical understanding of the act, at least one superior to Nora’s; but this was counterbalanced by her sluggish coordination and my revulsion. Somehow we managed. I think it was mainly due to the fact that she sensed I was like her, female in a way that transcended anatomy, and this helped us to employ tenderness with one another. Over the succeeding nights an honest affection developed between us; though her speech was limited to strangled cries, we learned to communicate after a fashion, and our lovemaking grew more expert, more genuine.

Fourteen years we were together. She bore me three children, two stillborn, but the third a slow-witted boy whom we named Carl—it was a name that Nora could almost pronounce. By day she and Ezekiel were brother and sister, and by night she and I were husband and wife. Carl needed things the land couldn’t provide, milk, vegetables, and these were given us by William Brooks; but when he died several years after Carl’s birth, taking with him the secret of my identity, Nora began going into Sandy Bay to beg—or so I thought until I was visited by her brother Robert. I knew something must be wrong. We were the shame of the family; they had never acknowledged us in any way.

“Nora she dead,” he told me. “Murdered.”

He explained that two of her customers had been fighting over her, and that when she had tried to leave, one—a man named Halsey Brooks—had slit her throat. I didn’t understand. Customers? Nothing Mullins said made sense.

“Don’t you know she been whorin’?” he said. “Mon, you a worse fool dan I think. She been whorin’ dese six, seven years.”

“Carl,” I said. “Where is he?”

“My woman takin’ charge of him,” he said. “I come for to bring you to dis Brooks. If you ain’t mon enough, den I handle it myself. Family’s family, no matter how crooked de tie.”

What I felt then was purely human—loss, rage, guilt over the fact that Nora had been driven to such straits. “Show him to me,” I said.

Hearing the murderousness in my voice, Robert Mullins smiled.

Halsey Brooks was drinking in a shanty bar, a single room lit by oil lamps whose glass tops were so sooty that the light penetrated them as baleful orange gleams. The rickety tables looked like black spiders standing at attention. Brooks was sitting against the rear wall, a big slack-bellied man with skin the color of sunbaked mud, wearing a shirt and trousers of sailcloth. Mullins stationed himself out of sight at the door, his machete at the ready in case I failed, and I went inside.

Catching sight of me, Brooks grinned and drew a knife from his boot. “Dat little squirt of yours be missin’ you down in Hell,” he said, and threw the knife.

I twisted aside, and the knife struck the wall. Brooks’s eyes widened. He got to his feet, wary; the other customers headed for the door, knocking over chairs in their haste.

“You a quick little nigger,” said Brooks, advancing on me. “But quick won’t help you now.”

He would have been no match for me; but confronted by the actual task of shedding blood, I found that I couldn’t go through with it. I was nauseated by the thought that I had even considered it. I backed away, tripped over a chair, and went sprawling in the corner.

“Dat de best you got to offer?” said Brooks, chuckling.

As he reached for me, Mullins slipped up behind and slashed him across the neck and back. Brooks screamed—an incredibly girlish sound for a man so large—and sank to his knees beside me, trying to pinch together the lips of his wounds. He held a hand to his face, seemingly amazed by the redness. Then he pitched forward on top of me. The reek of his blood and sweat, just the feel of him in my hands as I started to push him away, all that drove me into a fury. One of his eyes was an inch from mine, half-closed and clouding over.

He was dying, but I wanted to dig the last flicker of life out of him. I tore at his cheek with my teeth. The eye snapped open, I heard the beginning of his scream, and I remember nothing more until I threw him aside. His face was flayed to the muscle-strings, his nose was pulped, and there were brimming dark-red craters where his eyes had been.

“My God!” said Mullins, staring at the ruin of Brooks’s head; he turned to me. “Go home! De thing more dan settled.”

All my rage had drained and been replaced by self-loathing. Home! Iwas home. The island had eroded my spirit, transformed me into one of its violent creatures.

“Don’t come ’round no more,” said Mullins, wiping his blade on Brooks’s trousers; he gave me a final look of disgust. “Get back to de damn Buryin’ Ground where you belong.”


* * *
Cassiopeia sprang to her feet and stepped out into the clearing. Her expression was grim, and I was worried that she might have worked herself into a rage by rehashing the killing. But she only walked a few paces away. Silvered by the moonlight, she looked unnaturally slim, and it seemed more than ever that I was seeing an approximation of her original form. The snakes had grown dead still in the trench.
“You didn’t really kill him,” I said.

“I would have,” she said. “But never again.” She kicked at a pile of conch shells and sent them clattering down.

“What happened then?”

She did not answer for a moment, gazing out toward the sound of the reef. “I was sickened by the changes I’d undergone,” she said. “I became a hermit, and after Ezekiel died I continued my hermitage in Carl’s body. That poor soul!” She walked a little farther away. “I taught him to hide whenever men visited the Burying Ground. He lived like a wild animal, grubbing for roots, fishing with his bare hands. At the time it seemed the kindest thing I could do. I wanted to cleanse him of the taint of humanity. Of course that proved impossible . . . for both of us.”

“You know,” I said, “with all the technological advances these days, you might be able to contact . . .”

“Don’t you think I’ve considered my prospects!” she said angrily; and then, in a quieter tone, “I used to hope that human science would permit me to return home someday, but I’m not sure I want to anymore. I’ve been perverted by this culture. I’d be as repulsive to my people as Ezekiel was to Robert Mullins, and I doubt that I’d be comfortable among them myself.”

I should have understood the finality of her loneliness—she had been detailing it in her story. But I understood now. She was a mixture of human and alien, spiritually a half-breed, gone native over a span of two centuries. She had no people, no place except this patch of sand and mangrove, no tradition except the clearing and the snakes and a game made of broken shells. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s not your fault, Frank,” she said, and smiled. “It’s your American heritage that makes you tend to enshrine the obvious.”

“Ray and I aren’t a fair sample,” I said defensively.

“I’ve known other Americans,” she said. “They’ve all had that tendency. Everyone down here thought they were fools when they first came. They seemed totally unaware of the way things worked, and no one understood that their tremendous energy and capacity for deceit would compensate. But they were worse than either the pirates or the Spanish.”

Without another word, she turned and walked toward the brush.

“Wait!” I said. I was eager to hear about her experiences with Americans.

“You can come back tomorrow, Frank,” she said. “Though maybe you shouldn’t.”

“Why not?” Then, thinking that she might have some personal reason for distrusting Americans, I said, “I won’t hurt you. I don’t believe I’m physically capable of it.”

“What a misleading way to measure security,” she said. “In terms of hurt. You avoid using the word ‘kill,’ and yet you kill so readily. It’s as though you’re all pretending it’s a secret.”

She slipped into the brush, moving soundlessly, somehow avoiding the dry branches, the papery fronds.


* * *
I drove all over the island the next day, trying to find a tape recorder, eventually borrowing one from a tourist in Meachem’s Landing. Half-baked delusions of grandeur had been roused in me. I would be the Schliemann of extraterrestrial research, uncovering the ruin of an alien beneath the waste of a human being. There would be bestsellers, talk shows, exclamations of academic awe. Of course there was no real proof. A psychiatrist would point out how conveniently pat the story was—the machine that hid itself, the loss of memory, the alien woman conjured up by a man whose disorder stemmed from a disappointment in love. He would say it was the masterwork of a gifted talespinner, complete with special effects. Yet I thought that whoever heard it would hear—as I had—the commonplace perfection of truth underlying its exotic detail.
I had forgotten my original purpose for visiting the Burying Ground, but that afternoon Jimmy Mullins turned up at my door, eager to learn if I had news for him. He was only moderately drunk and had his wife Hettie in tow—a slender, mahogany-skinned woman wearing a dirty blue dress. She was careworn but still prettier than Mullins deserved. I was busy and put him off, telling him that I was exploring something with Ray that could lead to money. And, I realized, I was. Knowing his character, I had assumed Mullins was attempting to swindle Hatfield; but Nora Mullins’s common-law marriage to Ezekiel Brooks gave credence to his claim. I should have explained it to him. As it was, he knew I was just getting rid of him, and Hettie had to pull him down from the porch to cut short his arguments. My news must have given him some heart, though, because a few minutes later Hatfield knocked at the door.

“What you tellin’ Jimmy?” he asked. “He braggin’ dat you got proof de Buryin’ Ground his.”

I denied the charge and told him what I had learned, but not how I had learned it.

“I never mean to cheat Jimmy,” he said, scratching his head. “I just want to make sure he not cheatin’ me. If he got a case . . . well, miserable as he is, he blood.”

After he left, I had problems. I found I needed new batteries for the recorder and had to drive into Meachem’s Landing; and when I returned home I had an argument with Elizabeth that lasted well past sunset. As a result, I did not start out for the Burying Ground until almost ten o’clock, and while I was stowing my pack in the dory, I saw Cassiopeia walking toward me along the beach.

It was a clear night, the shadows of the palms sharp on the sand, and each time she passed through a shadow, it seemed I was seeing Ray; but then, as she emerged into the light, I would undergo a peculiar dislocation and realize that it was not Ray at all.

“I was on my way out to you,” I said. “You didn’t have to come into town.”

“I gave up being a hermit long ago, Frank,” she said. “I like coming here. Sometimes it jogs my memory to be around so many others, though there’s nothing really familiar about them.”

“What do you remember?”

“Not much. Flashes of scenery, conversations. But once I did remember something concrete. I think it had to do with my work, my profession. I’ll show you.”

She squatted, smoothed a patch of sand, and began tracing a design. As with all her actions, this one was quick and complicated; she used three fingers of each hand, moving them in contrary directions, adding a squiggle here, a straight line there, until the design looked like a cross between a mandala and a printed circuit. Watching it evolve, I was overcome by a feeling of peace, not the drowsiness of hypnotism, but a powerful, enlivening sensation that alerted me to the peacefulness around me. The soughing of the palms, the lapping of the water, the stillness of the reef—it was low tide. This feeling was as potent as the effect of a strong drug, and yet it had none of the fuzziness that I associate with drugs. By the time she had finished, I was so wrapped in contentment that all my curiosity had abated—I was not even curious about the design—and I put aside for the moment the idea of recording her. We strolled eastward along the beach without talking, past Sarah’s Store and The Chicken Shack, taking in the sights. The tin roofs of the shanties gleamed under the moonlight, and, their imperfections hidden by the darkness, the shanties themselves looked quaint and cozy. Shadows were dancing behind the curtains, soft reggae drifted on the breeze. Peace. When I finally broke the silence, it was not out of curiosity but in the spirit of that peace, of friendship.

“What about Ray?” I asked. “He was in pretty rough shape when I visited him the other afternoon.”

“He’s better off than he would be elsewhere,” she said. “Calmer, steadier.”

“But he can’t be happy.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “But in a way I’m what he was always seeking, even before he began to deteriorate. He actually thinks of me in romantic terms.” She laughed—a trilling note. “I’m very happy with him myself. I’ve never had a host with so few defects.”

We were drawing near the New Byzantine Church of the Archangel, a small white-frame building set back from the shore. This being Friday, it had been turned into a movie theater. The light above the door illuminated a gaudy poster that had been inserted into the glass case normally displaying the subject of the sermon; the poster showed two bloodstained Chinese men fighting with curved knives. Several teenagers were silhouetted by the light, practicing martial-art kicks beside the steps—like stick figures come to life—and a group of men was watching them, passing a bottle. One of the men detached himself from the group and headed toward us. Jimmy Mullins.

“Mr. Milliken!” he shouted. “Dis de owner of de Buryin’ Ground wantin’ to speak with you!”

Cassiopeia spun on her heel and went wading out into the water. Infuriated, Mullins ran after her, and—myself infuriated at the interruption, this breach of peace—I stuck out a foot and tripped him. I threw myself on top of him, trying for a pin, but he was stronger than I had supposed. He wrenched an arm loose, stunned me with a blow to the head, and wriggled free. I clamped my arms around his leg, and he dragged me along, yelling at Cassiopeia.

“Pay me my money, bastard!”

“I’llpay you!” I said out of desperation.

It might have been a magic spell that I had pronounced. He quit dragging me; I clung to his leg with one hand, and with the other I wiped a crust of mucky sand from my mouth.

“You goin’ to pay me three thousandlemps ?” he said in a tone of disbelief.

It occurred to me that he had not expected the entire amount, that he had only been hoping for a nuisance payment. But I was committed. Fifteen hundred dollars was no trifle to me, but I might be able to recoup it from Ray, and if not, well, I could make it up by forgoing my Christmas trip to the States. I pulled out my wallet and handed Mullins all the bills, about fifty or sixtylempira .

“That’s all I’ve got now,” I said, “but I’ll get the rest in the morning. Just leave Milliken alone.”

Mullins stared at the money in his hand, his little snappish eyes blinking rapidly, speechless. I stared out to sea, searching for a sign of Cassiopeia, but found none. Not at first. Then I spotted her, a slim, pale figure standing atop a coral head about fifteen yards from shore. Without taking a running start, she leaped—at that distance she looked like a white splinter being blown through the night—and landed upon another coral head some twenty, twenty-five feet away. Before I could absorb the improbability of the leap, she dived and vanished into the water beyond the reef.

“I be at your house nine o’clock sharp,” said Mullins joyfully. “And we go to de bank together. You not goin’ to be havin’ no more strife with dis negro!”


* * *
But Mullins did not show up the next morning, not at nine o’clock or ten or eleven. I asked around and heard that he had been drinking in Spanish Harbor; he had probably forgotten the appointment and passed out beneath some shanty. I drove to the bank, withdrew the money, and returned home. Still no Mullins. I wandered the beach, hoping to find him, and around three o’clock I ran into Hettie at Sarah’s Store.
“Jimmy he never home of a Saturday,” she told me ruefully.

I considered giving her the money, but I suspected that she would not tell Mullins, would use it for the children, and though this would be an admirable use, I doubted that it would please Mullins. Twilight fell, and my patience was exhausted. I left a message for Mullins with Elizabeth, stashed the money in a trunk, and headed for the Burying Ground.

After mooring the dory, I switched on the recorder and secreted it in my pack. My investigative zeal of the previous day had been reborn, and not even the desolation of Port Ezekiel could dim my spirits. I had solved the ultimate problem of the retiree; I had come up with a project that was not only time-consuming but perhaps had some importance. And now that Mullins had been taken care of, nothing would interfere.

Cassiopeia was sitting beneath the shelter when I reached the clearing, a silvery star of moonlight shifting across her face from a ragged hole in the thatch. She pointed to my pack and asked, “What’s that?”

“The pack?” I said innocently.

“Inside it.”

I knew she meant the recorder. I showed it to her and said, “I want to document your story.”

She snatched it from me and slung it into the bushes.

“You’re a stupid man, Frank,” she said. “What do you suppose would happen if you played a recording of me for someone? They’d say it was an interesting form of insanity, and if they could profit, or if they were driven by misguided compassion, they’d send me away for treatment. And that would be that.”

For a long while afterward she would not talk to me. Clouds were passing across the moon, gradually thinning, so that each time the light brightened it was brighter than the time before, as if the clearing were being dipped repeatedly into a stream and washed free of a grimy film. Cassiopeia sat brooding over her gameboard. Having grown somewhat accustomed to her, to that strong female presence, I was beginning to be able to detect her changes in mood. And they were rapid changes, fluctuating every few seconds between hostility and sadness. I recalled her telling me that she was probably mad; I had taken the statement to be an expression of gloom, but now I wondered if any creature whose moods shifted with such rapidity could be judged sane. Nonetheless, I was about to ask her to continue her story when I heard an outboard motor, and, moments after it had been shut off, a man’s voice shouting, “Mr. Milliken!”

It was Jimmy Mullins.

A woman’s voice shrilled, unintelligible, and there was a crash as if someone had fallen; a second later Mullins pushed into the clearing. Hettie was clinging to his arm, restraining him; but on seeing us, he cuffed her to the ground and staggered forward. His town clothes were matted with filth and damp. Two other men crowded up behind Hettie. They were both younger than Mullins, slouching, dressed in rags and sporting natty dreads. One held a rum bottle, and the second, the taller, carried a machete.

“You owe me three thousandlemps !” said Mullins to Cassiopeia; his head lolled back, and silver dots of moonlight flared in his eyes.

“Sick of dis Yankee domination,” said the taller men; he giggled. “Ain’t dat right, Jimmy?”

“Jimmy,” I said. “We had a bargain.”

Mullins said nothing, his face a mask of sodden fury; he teetered on the edge of the trench, unaware of the snakes.

“Tired of dis exploitation,” said the man, and his friend, who had been taking a pull from the bottle, elbowed him gleefully and said, “Dat pretty slick, mon! Listen up.” He snapped his fingers in a reggae tempo and sang in a sweet, tremulous voice:

“Sick of dis Yankee domination,
Oh yea—aa-ay,
Tired of dis exploitation . . .”
The scenario was clear—these two had encountered the drunken Mullins in a bar, listened to the story of his windfall, and, thinking that he was being had, hoping to gain by it, they had egged him into this confrontation.

“Dis my land, and you ain’t legal on it,” said Mullins.

“What about our bargain, Jimmy?” I asked. “The money’s back at the house.”

He was tempted, but drunkenness and politics had infected his pride. “I ain’t no beggar,” he said. “I wants what’s mine, anddis mon’s money mine.” He bent down and picked up one of the conch shells that were lying about; he curled his fingers around the inner curve of the shell—it fit over his hand like the spiked glove of a gladiator. He took a vicious swipe in our direction, and itwhooshed through the air.

Cassiopeia let out a hissing breath.

It was very tense in the clearing. The two men were watching Mullins with new respect, new alertness, no longer joking. Even in the hands of a fool, conch shells were serious business; they had a ritual potency. Cassiopeia was deadpan, measuring Mullins. Her anger washed over me—I gauged it to be less anger than a cold disapproval, the caliber of emotion one experiences in reaction to a nasty child. But I was ready to intervene if her mood should escalate. Mullins was a coward at heart, and I thought that he would go to the brink but no further. I edged forward, halfway between them. My mouth was dry.

“I goin’ to bash you simple, and you not pay me,” said Mullins, crossing over the trench.

“Listen, Jimmy . . .” I said, raising the voice of reason.

Cassiopeia lunged for him. I threw my arms around her, and Mullins, panicked, seeing her disadvantage, swung the shell. She heaved me aside with a shrug and tried to slip the punch. But I had hampered her just enough. The shell glanced off her shoulder. She gave a cawing guttural screech that scraped a nail down the slate of my spine, and clutched at the wound.

“See dere,” said Mullins to his friends, triumphant. “Dis negro take care of he own.” He went reeling back over the trench, nearly tripping, and in righting himself, he caught sight of the snakes. It would have been impossible not to see them—they were thrusting frenziedly at the wire. Mullins’s jaw fell, and he backed away. One of the rocks was dislodged from the screen. The snakes began to slither out, writing rippling black figures on the dirt and vanishing into the litter, rustling the dead fronds.

“Oh, Jimmy!” Hettie held out a hand to him. “Have a care!”

Cassiopeia gave another of those chilling screeches and lowered into a crouch. Her torso swaying, her hands hooked. The flesh of her left shoulder was torn, and blood webbed her arm, dripping from her fingertips, giving them the look of claws. She stepped across the trench after Mullins. Without warning, the taller of the two men sprinted toward her, his machete raised. Cassiopeia caught his wrist and flipped him one-handed into the trench as easily as she might have tossed away an empty bottle.

There were still snakes in the trench.

They struck at his arms, his legs, and he thrashed about wildly, crying out; but one must have hit a vein, for the cry was sheared off. His limbs beat a tattoo against the dirt, his eyes rolled up. Slivers of iris peeped beneath the lids. A tinycoralito hung like a tassel from his cheek, and a yellowjaw was coiling around his throat; its flat head poked from the spikes of his hair. I heard a squawk, a sharp crack, and looked to the center of the clearing. The second man was crumpled at Cassiopeia’s feet, his neck broken. Dark blood poured from his mouth, puddling under his jaw.

“Mr. Milliken,” said Mullins, backing, his bravado gone. “I goin’ to make things right. Hettie she fix dat little scrape . . . Cassiopeia leaped toward him, going impossibly high. It was a gorgeous movement, as smooth as the arc of a diver but more complex. She maintained a crouch in midair, and passing close to Mullins, she plucked the conch shell from his waving hand, fitted it to her own, and spun round to face him—all before she had landed.

Hettie began to scream. Short, piercing shrieks, as if she were being stabbed over and over.

Mullins ran for the brush, but Cassiopeia darted ahead of him and blocked his path. She was smiling. Again Mullins ran, and again she cut him off, keeping low, flowing across the ground. Again and again she let him run, offering him hope and dashing it, harrying him this way and that. The wind had increased, and clouds were racing overhead, strobing the moonlight; the clearing seemed to be spinning, a carousel of glare and shadow, and Hettie’s screams were keeping time with the spin. Mullins’s legs grew rubbery, he weaved back and forth, his arms windmilling, and at last he collapsed in a heap of fronds. Almost instantly he scrambled to his knees, yelling and tearing loose a snake that had been hanging from his wrist.

Acoralito , I think.

“Ah!” he said. “Ah . . . ah!”

His stare lanced into my eyes, freezing me with its hopelessness; a slant of light grazed his forehead, shining his sweat to silver beads.

Cassiopeia walked over and grabbed a handful of his shirtfront, hoisting him up until his feet were dangling. He kicked feebly and made a piteous bubbling noise. Then she drove the conch shell into his face. Once. Twice. Three times. Each blow splintered bone and sent a spray of blood flying. Hettie’s scream became a wail. After the final blow, a spasm passed through Mullins’s body—it looked too inconsequential to be death.

I was dimly aware that Hettie had stopped screaming, that the outboard motor had been started, but I was transfixed. Cassiopeia was still holding Mullins aloft, as if admiring her handiwork. His head glistened black in the moonlight, featureless and oddly misshapen. At least a minute went by before she dropped him. The thump of the body broke the spell that the scene had cast. I eased toward the brush.

“You can leave, Frank,” she said. “I won’t kill you.”

I was giddy with fear, and I almost laughed. She did not turn but cocked an eye at me over her shoulder—a menacing posture. I was afraid that if I tried to leave she would hunt me through the brush.

“I won’t kill you,” she said again. She lowered her head, and I could feel her despair, her shame; it acted to lessen my fear.

“The soldiers will be coming,” I said.

She was silent, motionless.

“You should make the exchange with Ray.”

I was horrified by what she had done, but I wanted her to live. Insane or not, she was too rare to lose—a voice of mystery in all this ordinary matter.

“No more.” She said it in a grim whisper. “I know it’s much to ask, Frank, but will you keep me company?”

“What are you going to do?”

“Nothing. Wait for the soldiers.” She inspected her wound; the blood had quit flowing. “And if they don’t come before dawn, I’ll watch the sunrise. I’ve always been curious about it.”


* * *
She scarcely said a word the rest of the night. We went down to the shore and sat beside a tangle of mangrove. I tried to convince her to survive, but she warded off every argument with a slashing gesture. Toward dawn, as the first gray appeared in the east, she had a convulsion, a brief flailing of the limbs that stretched her out flat. Dawn comes swiftly on the water, and by the time she had regained consciousness, pink streaks were infiltrating the gray.
“Make the exchange,” I urged her. “It’s not too late, is it?”

She ignored me. Her eyes were fixed on the horizon, where the rim of the solar disc was edging up; the sea reflected a rippling path of crimson and purple leading away from it, and the bottoms of the clouds were dyed these same colors.

Ten minutes later she had a more severe convulsion. This one left a froth of bloody bubbles rimming her nostrils. She groped for my hand, and as she squeezed it, I felt my bones grinding together. My emotions were grinding together as well; my situation—like Henry Meachem’s—was so similar to hers. Aliens and strangers, all of us, unable to come to grips with this melancholy island.

Shortly after her third convulsion, I heard an outboard motor. A dory was cutting toward us from the reef wall; it was not a large enough craft to be the militia, and as it drew near, I recognized Hatfield Brooks by his silhouette hunched over the tiller, his natty dreads. He switched off the motor and let the dory drift until he was about fifty feet away; then he dropped the anchor and picked up a rifle that had been leaning against the front seat. He set the stock to his shoulder.

“Keep clear of dere, Mr. Winship!” he called. “I can’t vouch for de steadiness of my aim.”

Behind him, shafts of light were spearing up through balconies of cloud—a cathedral of a sky.

“Don’t, Hatfield!” I stepped in front of Cassiopeia, waving my arms. “She’s . . . he’s dying! There’s no need for it!”

“Keep clear!” he shouted. “De mon have killed Jimmy, and I come for him!”

“Just let him die!”

“He don’t just let Jimmy die! Hettie been sayin’ how dat crazy mon batter him!” He braced himself in the stern and took aim.

With a hoarse sigh, Cassiopeia climbed to her feet. I caught her wrist. Her skin was burning hot, her pulse drummed. Nerves twitched at the corners of her eyes, and one of the pupils was twice the size of the other. It was Ray’s face I was seeing in that dawn light—hollow-cheeked, dirt-smeared, haggard; but even then I saw a sleeker shape beneath. She peeled my fingers off her wrist.

“Goodbye, Frank,” she said; she pushed me away and ran toward Hatfield.

Ran!

The water was waist-deep all the way to the reef, yet she knifed through it as if it were nothing, plowing a wake like the hull of a speedboat. It was a more disturbing sight than her destruction of Mullins had been. Thoroughly inhuman. Hatfield’s first shot struck her in the chest and barely slowed her. She was twenty feet from the dory when the second shot hit, and that knocked her sideways, clawing at her stomach. The third drilled a jet of blood from her shoulder, driving her back; but she came forward again. One plodding step after another, shaking her head with pain. Four, five, six. Hatfield kept squeezing off the rounds, and I was screaming for him to finish her—each shot was a hammerblow that shivered loose a new scream. An arm’s length from the dory, she sank to her knees and grabbed the keel, rocking it violently. Hatfield bounced side to side, unable to bring the rifle to bear. It discharged twice. Wild misses aimed at the sky, the trees.

And then, her head thrown back, arms upflung, Cassiopeia leaped out of the water.

Out of the world.

I am not sure whether she meant to kill Hatfield or if this was just a last expression of physicality—whatever her intent, she went so high that it was more a flight than a leap. Surrounded by a halo of fiery drops, twisting above the dory, her chest striped with blood, she seemed a creation of some visionary’s imagination, bursting from a jeweled egg and being drawn gracefully into the heavens. But at the peak of the leap, she came all disjointed and fell, disappearing in a splash. Moments later, she floated up—face downward—and began to drift away. The sound of the reef faded in a steady, soothing hiss. The body spun slowly on the tide; the patch of water around it was stained gold and purple, as if the wounds were leaking the colors of sunrise.

Hatfield and I stared at each other across the distance. He did not lower the rifle. Strangely enough, I was not afraid. I had come to the same conclusion as Cassiopeia, the knowledge that the years could only decline from this point onward. I felt ready to die. The soft crush of waves building louder and louder on the reef, the body drifting leisurely toward shore, the black snaky-haired figure bobbing in his little boat against the enormous flag of the sunburst—it was a perfect medium for death. The whole world was steeped in it. But Hatfield laid the rifle down. He half-raised his hand to me—an aborted salute or farewell—and held the pose a second or two; he must have recognized the futility of any gesture, for he ducked his head then and fired up the motor, leaving me to take charge of the dead.


* * *
The authorities were unable to contact Ray’s family. It may be that he had none; he had never spoken of them. The local cemetery refused his remains—too many Brookses and Mullinses under the soil; and so, as was appropriate, he was laid to rest beside Ezekiel and Carl on the Burying Ground. Hatfield fled off-island and worked his passage to Miami; though he is still considered something of a hero, the tide of anti-Americanism ebbed—it was as if Ray had been a surrogate for the mercenaries and development bankers who had raped the island over the years. Once more there were friendly greetings, smiling faces, and contented shrimp-workers. As for me, I married Elizabeth. I have no illusions about the relationship; in retrospect, it seems a self-destructive move. But I was shaken, haunted. If I had not committed my stupidity with the recorder, if I had not thrown my arms around Cassiopeia, would she have been able to control her anger? Would she merely have disarmed Mullins? I needed the bitter enchantment of a marriage to ground myself in the world again, to obscure the answers to these questions, to blur the meaning of these events.
And what was their meaning?

Was this a traveler’s tale like none other, a weaving together of starships and pirates, madmen and ghosts, into the history of an alien being and a sorry plot of mangrove? Or was it simply an extraordinary instance of psychosis, a labyrinthine justification for a young man’s lack of inner strength?

I have no proof that would be measurable by any scientific rule, though I can offer one that is purely Guanojan and therefore open to interpretation—what was seen might have been an actual event or the shade of such an event, or it might have been the relic of a wish powerful enough to outlast the brain that conceived it. Witness the testimony of Donald Ebanks, a fisherman, who put in at night to the Burying Ground for repairs several months after Cassiopeia’s death. I heard him tell the story at The Chicken Shack, and since it was only the third retelling, since he had only downed two rums, it had not changed character much from the original.

“I tinkerin’ wit de fuel line,” he said, “when of a sudden dere’s de sound of wind, and yet dere ain’t no wind to feel. I ’ware dat dis de duppy sign, but I ain’t fearful ’cause my mother she take me to Escuilpas as a child and have de Black Virgin bless me. After dat no duppy can do me harm. Still, I wary. I turn and dere dey is. Two of dem, bot’ shinin’ pale white wit dat duppy glow dat don’t ’low you to see dere trut’ful colors. One were Ray Milliken, and de other . . . God! I fall back in de boat to see it. De face ain’t not’ing but teeth and eyes, and dere’s a fringe ’round de head like de fringe of de anemone—snappin’ and twistin’. And tall! Dis duppy mus’ be two foot taller dan Ray. Skinny-tall. Wearin’ somet’ing dat fit tight to it frame neck-to-toe, and shine even brighter dan de glow ’round dere bodies. Now Ray he smile and come a step to me, but dis other cotch he arm and ’pear to be scoldin’ him. It point behind dem, and dere, right where it pointin’, some of de glow clear a spot, and de spot growin’ wider and wider to a circle, and t’rough de circle I’m seein’ creepers, trees . . . solid jungle like dey gots in Miskitia. Ray have a fretful look on he face, but he shrug and dey walks off into de circle. Not walkin’ proper, you understand. Dey dwindlin’, and de wind dwindlin’ wit dem. See, dey not travelin’ over de Buryin’ Ground but ’pon duppy roads dat draws dem quick from de world, and dey jus’ dwindlin’ and dwindlin’ ’til dey’s not’ing but a speck of gleam and a whisper of wind. Den dey gone. Gone for good was de feelin’ I got. But where, I cannot tell you.”