Fiction: Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café [2]

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2. That wasn’t so unusual though

[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.]

That wasn’t so unusual though; Tabitha was dead too. Their two daughters were also dead, all killed by the same meth-head truck driver in a fiery crash on Interstate 95. A lot of people were dead these days. In that vein, ha ha, over sliced sashimi Samantha would tell him about the most interesting corpses she had chopped up lately with those wicked little air saws they used, and all the fascinating things she had discovered about their previous owners. Her partners in crime were Dr. Sawat al-Shibh and Dr. Tian Ngu Nguyen. Collectively she called them the “foreigners at the coroners” and assured him they were at least as callous and brutal as herself, if not more. He had long since determined not to die in Miami.
    His problem now was, with the new restrictions after 9/11, he had missed a plane for the first time in his life. There would be no sushi with Samantha at the little place on North Beach where the upscale lesbian couples liked to meet for lunch, which looked like a Steak and Shake that had won the lottery, with the big windows looking out on A1A and the chrome appointments. Not any more, as it turned out; never again in fact, but he had no way of knowing that. Tabitha had always scheduled his infrequent flights, had packed for him, taken care of everything. Told him what to bring, what to leave behind. She was good at it. She had been good at everything. After she and the children died, whenever he traveled in America his travel agent had always told him when to go to the airport. What desk to check in at, what time to be there, what flight number.

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“Che be sa’w” is Kwéyòl for
“a wandering, wild woman.”

    Dominica was not America. Even if he’d had the money, Salbado could not have bought those boots in this island. They weren’t here to buy, not for sale, not anywhere. There was no Walmart. There were no travel agents. No one had told him when to go to the airport. He was sitting with his friends, Kirk and Rita, drinking ice-cold Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café, just across the Melville Hall River bridge from the airport, until about an hour before his flight. That had always been enough time before. Before a bunch of asshole towel-heads had driven a couple Boeings into the Twin Towers, and one into the Pentagon for good measure.

    The Dead Cat wasn’t really named that, it didn’t have a name, and it wasn’t really a café, except that they served food and the little green-bottled Kubuli beers from a plywood shack a little more substantial than most of the plywood shacks on the island. A white cat skin with a few tan patches, a face, ears and all, was stretched on a crude frame of branches over the bar like something from a psychotic post-apocalyptic fantasy-western novel by Stephen King. It was where Erasmus had first tasted the flavor of the island, on his arrival three weeks earlier.
    You flew a Boeing or maybe an Airbus out of Miami or Fort Lauderdale and landed in San Juan, Puerto Rico, which looked so much like Miami that he had resolved never to visit. One Miami was more than enough for any sane person. From there you took an American Eagle ATR south for four more hours, a turboprop with room for sixty-six passengers and not a lot of luggage. It was his first experience with weight restrictions since his all-expenses-paid junket to Southeast Asia courtesy of Uncle Sam in 1970. The seats barely escaped classification as medieval torture devices, and he thought Bush should have used them instead of waterboarding; after a few hours he would have admitted to child porn to get out of the god-damned thing. By the time the pilot told them they were approaching Melville Hall International Airport, he was battered by the head-drilling prop blast. Over the intercom the pilot was saying they were passing over the Northern Forest Reserve and Morne Diablotins. His limited French made that out to be “mountain of the little she-devils.” Could that be right? He thought at the time that Dominica might have some interesting history. He forgot all that when he saw the airport.
    Kirk had warned him not to freak out when the mountains and palm trees came up past the windows. He’d seen the like in-country, but, after all, he was a Florida boy too, and Kirk knew him for the flatlander he was. He’d said not one fucking thing about Melville Hall International god-damned Airport looking like a run-down YMCA with a patched roof and an aging, elongated parking lot. He’d seen better landing strips at forward fire bases where the gooks and chinks shelled them with mortars every other day. It looked like it was closed, too. Closed or not, the pilot was betting his life on it, which gave Ras some modicum of hope. Kirk had warned him about this too: they had to make a steep turn and descent just over the mountains to land. Not to worry, he said, he’d done it a whole six times now and was still sucking good air.
    The youthful jock at the stick must have been an Air Force vet from the Bosnia campaign with PTSD: maybe he thought he was on a strafing run. Did they even do strafing runs anymore? He didn’t know. The engines roared as they dove straight down at the crappy parking lot, checkered with tar lines where cracks had been repaired. The passengers, almost all black, had almost all screamed in fear as well. Ras clenched his teeth. Screaming, he knew, wouldn’t save you. The only other white guy, a long-haired French body-builder with his hot, long-haired French girlfriend, had his face buried in his massive hands, crying like a lost child. The girl looked bored. The mountains and palm trees and banana plantations came up past the windows, the plane levelled off, and they touched down lightly, only bouncing a little. The tar lines went bip-bip, bip-bip under the tires. The passengers took up a cheer, and almost in jest Erasmus joined in. The French girl rolled her eyes. She didn’t cheer.
    He stood in line at Customs in his dorky blue shorts and fish-printed Guy Harvey T-shirt, sweating with the rest of the passengers. The heat didn’t faze him; Saigon had been way worse than this. The interior of the airport looked exactly like an airport in a movie about Africa. He expected that any minute Brad Pitt, or maybe Leonardo DiCaprio, might walk by, mirrored sunglasses reflecting the scene, in fashionably rolled khaki sleeves with fashionably sweat-stained armpits and too many pockets. They didn’t. It was all black islanders, many looking as flush as rich Americans. They were from other, less mountainous and jungled islands, here in the Caribbean Jungle Paradise for vacation, which proved they most certainly were as flush as any rich American. The snorkeling at Champaign Reef was world-class, as was the hiking to such destinations as the Boiling Lake, Emerald Pool, or Trafalgar Falls.

    He knew all this, not only from Kirk’s twenty-year travelogue, but also because the posters on the walls said so. Some of the passengers he’d spoken with on the flight, like Kelvin, were native Dominicans returning to visit. Kelvin lived in Austin, Texas, and was coming home to see his mother, Geraldine. Ras had described his buddy Kirk’s place as being “out in the sticks,” or so he’d heard. Kelvin informed him politely that the locals, who pronounced the name of the country Dominica, and called themselves Dominicans, preferred to refer to that as “living in the country.”
    He cleared Customs, after hearing a bag of shit from some American clown who’d asked him why he was here and where he was staying. He said he would be staying in Bells and wanted to do some fishing. “Bells!” the guy laughed. “Won’t be doing no fishing in Bells!” He told the loudmouth prick he assumed there were charter boats, which brought another guffaw. “Ha! Charter boats!” He considered stabbing a stiff-finger jab into the guy’s throat but figured killing someone before he even left the airport would probably put a damper on his real mission, and spending his life in some shithole island prison didn’t exactly appeal. Instead, he savored the thought of the look on the jerk’s face when he realized his larynx was crushed and he was choking on blood, and it calmed him somewhat.

    He walked through the sweating crowd to the open side of the terminal to pick up his luggage. The narrow hall was high and hot, and on the right were a few shops selling fried chicken, sodas, and beers. He bought a beer, his first experience with the excellent little Kubulis in their green bottles with the map of the island on the label. He would learn later that the locals considered the shapely outline of their island like the body of a woman and described her in Kwéyòl as “Wa’itu Kubuli,” “How beautiful is her body.” It was cold and went down as smooth as spring water. He put a dollar on the bar and the smiling black woman with the enormous breasts gave him back two East Caribbean dollars and some coins, all with the picture of the Queen on the front. Elizabeth’s grim visage stared at him from sometime in the 1950’s, he was sure. Her hair was still dark then, her bearing still erect, while today she was a stooped figure hazed in white curls. The chatter of the crowd and the announcements over the intercom blended into an almost-normal airport soundtrack, if you could ignore the island-accented British delivery. The usual luggage conveyors were replicated here in stained plywood, immobile tilted racks where the suitcases were carried out and placed for pickup by muscular, sweating young men in unaccountably crisp blue uniforms. It turned out they had tiny window air conditioners in their back offices running off the government’s electricity, which was probably illegal. Unofficial porters, who were apparently not illegal, swarmed around the luggage like jackals around a dead wildebeest. Erasmus saw his bags and went for them, but too late. A skinny yellow man with sunken eyes snatched his battered possessions and had them on a hand cart in a heartbeat. In keeping with the money, he asked in perfect Queen’s English where the big American would like to go.
    “I’m meeting a friend here, and I don’t need any help with my bags,” he said, dragging them from the cart as he spoke. The man stood up next to him as if he wanted to fight. Ras didn’t back down; he stood to his full six feet three inches and looked down, hard, on the skimpy little high-yellow bastard. No bigger than the usual VC fuck. His eyes told the islander he took no shit. The punk stayed in his face, stayed cocky. “Lunch here costs seven dollars,” he said, defiant. “I need to make a living.” Ras gathered his bags. “You ain’t gonna make it off of me.” Just to the right of the doors to the brilliant sunshine outside, he spied a tiny counter labeled Island Car Rentals, and steered for it through the rippling black crowd like a lucky sailor escaping the Sargasso Sea.

    Kirk had tried to talk him out of it, but he insisted on renting a car. “Roger and Cindy use Island Rentals when they visit, and they’re happy,” Rita had told him on the phone. She liked it when visitors rented cars. Then she didn’t have to ride the bus into town to go shopping, which, she said, was a major pain in the ass. He had detected a bit of irritation in her voice, which surprised him; he had thought all was well with his friends in the Island Paradise. Roger and Cindy were some folks in Melbourne, Florida, his and Kirk’s home town, whom he had never met. Undoubtedly, they bought their weed from Kirk too, like half the population of Melbourne had for decades. As far as Erasmus knew, except for a few weeks at a tomato-canning factory in his teens, Kirk had never done anything for a living except sell grass. Police Chief of West Melbourne? Every Saturday night, like clockwork. Mayor of Melbourne Beach? When he wasn’t hitting on the teeny chicks sunning in bikinis on the dunes, ohhh yeah. Due to Rita’s warnings concerning that unknown couples’ visits and their troubles with the regular car they first rented, he wound up with the Gran Vitarra four-wheel instead of some pussy-assed sedan, which in the end turned out to be a very good choice indeed.

Copyright © 2020 by Roger Owens