Fiction: Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café [1]

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1. Erasmus Taft knew

[This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to any actual person, living, dead, or anywhere in between, is purely a figment of your own sick, twisted imagination. You really ought to seek professional help for that. Except for the cat, of course; that skin on the cover really is  t h e  Dead Cat, if that’s any consolation to you.]

Erasmus Taft knew damned well he was driving too fast, and he giggled like a stoned teenager. But hey, driving too fast? That’s nothing! How about driving too fast down a steep mountain track no fool would dignify by calling it a road, the pavement so old it had long since broken into loose, rattling chunks? On the wrong side of the “road,” in fact, only not really, because that’s the side they drove on down here. On the wrong side of the car even, but not really, because Dominica was like England, and like England, their cars were built like that too. Even the gearshift was on the wrong side, but only of his big white ass, because it was in the middle as always. It was Ras who was on the wrong side in that case, which made him snicker even more. Oh yeah, and don’t forget the rain exploding on the windshield like you were sitting under a waterfall, which he knew about because he had done it several times since he had come to the island, and you couldn’t see for shit sitting under a waterfall either. He looked over at his half-empty bottle of St. John’s Island rum to make sure it was secure in the seat to his left, strapped into the safety belt of his trusty, rented Suzuki Gran Vitarra, in which everything was on the wrong side including him. Except for the bottle of rum, which was, he thought smugly, right where it belonged.

  He strained to understand the heavily accented voice of the man on the scratchy island AM radio over the blasting storm outside the car. Among the fractured English and Kwéyòl – what they called the Creole French patois around here – he distinctly heard the word “hurricane.” Palm trees whipped in the rising wind like manic cheerleaders on meth whose team was winning. Vines and branches flew across the road, slapping at his windows like angry protesters. But he stayed cool; he was in control. He jerked the wheel to miss a refugee goat bounding across the road in front of him and felt a second of pity for its owner; that goat might represent all they had to eat for a week. He came within a palm-frond of the concrete ditch that lined all the roads here, a broken axle waiting to happen. The ditches were everywhere, because, forget hurricanes, on most of this island it rained at least an inch every day. Some places got over four hundred inches of rain a year, more than any place on Earth except the Karst area of Cambodia and Thailand, about which location, thanks to the US government’s involvement in southeast Asia, he knew more than he would have cared to know, given the choice.

    He sucked in a huge toke of Salbado’s new weed, green as grass and tasting like fresh horse manure. With his wet fingers and the damp rolling papers, it would barely burn, but damn it was good. He had to admit, this little day trip was turning out to be just about the craziest thing this old Vietnam hippie had ever done, and that, boys and girls, was saying a lot.
    He couldn’t believe the weed; the little bastard had been telling the truth. When Salbado kept saying his crop would come in soon, Ras had assumed he meant like his “ship” would come in, like some down-and-out Yankee fifty years ago. He was just dreaming. But on this island, a real crop coming in good meant you were rich. You could own new sneakers, buy a television. You could have a car. Maybe even move to America. He laughed, long and hard, and grabbed the rum bottle for a good pull. Fuck, he wanted to move from America to here. The joint had gone out again, and he had to put the bottle down and try to get his cheap Bic knockoff to spark some flame in the damp air without running off the road.
    Salbado had come skipping over the hill just after he’d left Kirk and Rita’s place, where, oddly enough, he had come to get some more weed to hold him over, since it looked like he would be here a few more days. He’d missed his plane out, not due to the storm, but because of 9/11. His friends had obliged him with several of the five-inch joints they smoked here all the time. These were standing to attention in his shirt pocket, minding their own business and perfectly dry. Good regular pot was cheap here, and it was everywhere. There were no rolling papers here shorter than about five inches. These islanders were Rastas, man, what you talkin’ about? It was like every brand of papers he had ever known in the States, each one a close personal friend, had all been busted for steroids, so of course they were hiding here in Dominica in smug if muscular shame, just like him. Well, except for the muscular part. He was still in spectacular shape for a guy his age, people told him so all the time, but compared to what he was like at eighteen, in-country in 1970? He felt like a flabby old man. He was a flabby old man.
    He made a promise to himself to edit which of his pictures he would show his mother when he returned to the States, because all those humongous joints they were all waving around in the photos were pretty unmistakable. And she had always thought of his buddy Kirk as such a nice boy. Although she would never see Ras again, his mother would receive his digital camera two years after he disappeared forever, and she would see the huge reefers, and she wouldn’t care. They were unmistakable. She would know what they were, and she wouldn’t care. She would still think Kirk was a nice boy.

    As Ras started back down the hill toward the collection of shanties called Bells, Salbado had appeared to his right and tripped down the streaming clay slope with that light step the hill people owned and that his own flatlander bulk would never master. Ras swung across the road to the side and slid to a stop on the high-quality tires only the cars the tourists rented would ever have on this dirt-poor island. He rolled the electric window down, something else the islanders never had. By then the steady rain had slowed to a simple downpour, what island folk considered a humid afternoon. His smile huge, Salbado looked from under heavy brows with a tilted head.
    “Salbado, my son, okay okay, how is it with you?” The tall black youth with his startling green eyes threw his head back and laughed, his perfect ivory teeth shining in the gloom. It was a joke between them. Salbado worked for his friend Kirk, cutting the jungle for twenty dollars US per day, which was five dollars more than the going government rate for cutting jungle along the roads. East Caribbean dollars went nearly three to one for US, and US currency carried a certain glamour as well, especially with the Rastas who sold weed. The lad had often said the aging American, whom he often referred to as “Papa Ras Tafari,” the saint of the Rastafarian movement, should adopt him and take him to live in the States, where, he was assured, the streets were paved with gold. His translucent green plastic jacket showered second-hand rain into the car, to which Ras knew the rental car crew would pay no more attention than Salbado did. Rain to these islanders was like air. The worn remnant of a paper bag appeared from under the cheap raincoat, and Salbado held it inside the truck.

    “Did you leave me de boots, Ras Tafari, my American Papa?” Ras lowered his brows in disappointment. In a hurt voice he said, “I told you I would. Did you think I’d lie to you? They’re right on the porch where I said they’d be, and well out of the rain. You should at least start with dry boots, my son, although I have no doubt you will get them wet soon enough.”
    “Aha!” Salbado shouted, doing a little dance, his head thrown back and his brilliant teeth shining, while somehow his hands, with the bag, stayed inside the car window. “I knew you would! Here, dis for you, I tol’ you! My crop, it come in.” He dropped what turned out to be no less than a quarter-pound of incredibly fresh, light-green weed in Ras’ lap. Later, Ras would be glad to have it, but at the time he thought he would leave the island within the next day or two, when the current tropical storm abated, and he tried to give most of it back. “Don’t be foolish, man, take it!” Like most of the islanders, Salbado’s English vowels accelerated until his Scottish consonants slammed on the brakes. “Taak eet!” Erasmus patted his arm. “Thank you, my son. I will not forget you.” Salbado’s face grew serious, and he stared hard into the white man’s eyes.
    “I don’t see you leavin’ here any time soon, Papa. De spirits, dey tell me you will stay here, dat you will be like a king! But I don’ know what dat mean. Hear my words, Papa. Somet’ing big be hap’nin’ in dis place. You look out for eet. I am worried about you. Maybe, you should have kep’ your nice American boots. But you did not!” His smile returned, lighting up the dreary afternoon. “You keep de weed, I keep de boots!” His smiled disappeared again, like the clouds over the sun. “Drive careful, Papa.” With that, he skittered back up the slope and was gone into the rain.
    And there it was. The “young savior,” an old woman on another mountainside had told him about several days ago, in a shithole called Attley, where a disabled girl and her mother had spun him a yarn of literally Biblical proportions, about him being the new king. The young savior would tell him, she had said, on a mountain, in the rain, in a storm. And all that shit about him being Ras Tafari. Salbado meant savior. It was raining. There was a storm coming. He looked up the mountain to where Salbado had disappeared. God damn it, his name was Erasmus Taft. He was suddenly cold, shaking in the moist heat so badly he could barely put the car into gear. Ras stopped just downso, as the locals liked to say, and rolled a big fat doob from Salbado’s gift. He stashed the rest in his purse, along with his passport, ID, and other vital items. He had no way of knowing he would never need them, except for the reefer. He lit up the joint, pulling hard with the flame from the lighter still on to fire the damp weed, and was stunned to cough out a huge cloud of aromatic smoke. His head spun and his eyes lit up. Damn! Not a bad trade for the pair of slightly worn waterproof deerhunters he’d ordered from a sportsman’s catalog. Salbado had lusted after those boots for three weeks, chopping jungle from Kirk’s land in a pair of torn plastic sandals his sister had given him. The locals called these “jellies,” and in fact they looked like they might have been made from gummy bears. They might as well have been toys for children as serious footwear. Ras could hardly stand upright on the muddy, near-vertical slopes upon which Salbado and the other workers labored, cutting back the jungle that seemed to grow faster than men could hack it away, wearing those boots himself. And they were not even really good boots, as far as rich Americans were concerned. He’d left them on Kirk’s porch the morning before. He had expected to land at Miami International by eight that evening, Eastern Standard Time.
    He would wear his sneakers on the plane, Reeboks, which cost twice as much as the boots, only mildly smelly blue Concourse walking shorts, and his last semi-clean Guy Harvey T-shirt. He would get a shower at the hotel, buy some new slacks and a button-down shirt at Walmart, and have sushi at that place on North Beach with his sister, Samantha. Samantha Taft, having recently reclaimed the family name from her high-living, low-life, Palm Beach lawyer ex-husband, was now the chief medical examiner at Miami Metro General Hospital. Samantha would harangue him with her liberal views and chide him for his plodding conservatism. He smoked dope like a fiend, wore his hair long, and sometimes, when he felt especially cocky, was still known to catch a wave or two if the storms drove some real waves over the reefs offshore. What the hell was he thinking, voting for Bush?
    He would remind her that he also flew the flag every day of his life for all the guys who never came home at all, or lay rotting, paralyzed, in some shithole VA hospital like the one he’d worked at in Gainesville, while going to the University of Florida after the war. That he gave half his money from the crappy little private investigation business he ran up in Fort Pierce to the veterans’ organizations, the DAV and the PVA. Then he would laugh, hug her, drinking in the wonderful smell of her blazing red hair, and order another large hot sake with an extra cup to put on top to keep it warm. His friend Chuck, a Navy vet who had introduced Ras and his then-wife Tabitha to both sushi and sake, had taught him that trick.
    Chuck, of course, was dead. He’d died from one of the interminable infections he’d gotten from passing multitudes of razor-sharp kidney stones while the head of urology at the West Palm VA had claimed he was just an old biker who wanted drugs. That was abysmally stupid; Chuck had had more drugs than a hospital pharmacy. He’d finally begun passing undigested food through his ureter, which the asshole urologist claimed Chuck’s wife, Fran, had sneaked into the urine samples so he could get drugs. Ras had freaked out. He’d originally planned to be a doctor and, while in the pre-med program at his first school, FSU in Tallahassee, had honed his general anatomy to a fine edge. The only way that could happen, he told Chuck, was from a bladder fistula, undoubtedly caused by cuts to the interior of his bladder by the damn kidney stones the VA refused to treat him for. The infection must have breached his small intestine, and the only reason Chuck wasn’t dead already was that that infection had also sealed the hole between the bladder and intestine. Otherwise, with fecal matter loose in the body cavity, he’d have been dead from sepsis in no more than three days, and those days would have been filled with shaking, feverish agony to boot. Ras had seen enough guys buy the dirt farm that way, from gut wounds in the jungle, to know. At his urging, Chuck had gone to the doctors in Vero Beach, who had confirmed his diagnosis and put Chuck in the hospital for emergency surgery that day and saved his life-for the time being. Congressman Mark Foley had come to their aid, and later brought a copy of the scathing report written by the head of surgery for the whole VA to Chuck and Fran’s house in Lakewood Park. Among other things, the report had said a first-year surgery student would have correctly diagnosed the fistula, snidely including the fact that, as he understood it, a small-town private investigator had made the proper diagnosis while the head of urology in West Palm had screwed the pooch. But. But. Chuck was still dead.

Copyright © 2020 by Roger Owens