Fiction: Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café [3]

Click image for more posts

3. Shifting from first to second

[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.]

Shifting from first to second and back again, he worked his way down the mountain in the blasting rain. Here the road wasn’t steep, but it was a joke, only wide enough for a car and a half on the best day, and quickly washing out in the deluge. Emergent rivers poured from the mountainside to his left, filling the concrete gutters and fanning over the pebbled pavement. The jungle writhed in an ecstasy of water and wind. He passed the mission church, where some American denomination like Quakers or something maintained a few white families, who really, no shit, wore Little House on the Prairie clothes, boys in pants and sleeves and round hats, and girls in gingham dresses with long, braided hair. No white children from the nineteenth century played with the little black kids in Bells today. The majestic traveler’s palm, which stood ten yards high in front of the church, waved its arms in distress, their six-foot leaves shredding in the howling tropical wind. On down by Geoffrey the local reefer man’s house the right-hand half of the road had collapsed down the mountain three months earlier, Geoffrey had told him. There wasn’t much slope here but Bells was so remote, they hadn’t yet been able to get anyone from the government out to fix it. Jungle was growing up in the crumbled area and Erasmus would have figured it had been that way at least a year, but then, he was from Florida. People thought Florida was tropical until they went somewhere that really was.
    He now rattled over this mile of ropy green single-lane hell with the rain like dump-trucks full of broken windshield glass emptying on his head. The wind jerked his little four-wheel around like a pissed-off big brother with two hands full of your shirt. Directly in front of Geoffrey’s quite decent little clapboard house, the road opened up to a generous lane-and-a-quarter but had more potholes than a bombed-out airstrip in Da Nang. He entered this wet minefield in second gear with the rum bottle to his mouth, whipping the wheel back and forth one-handed to narrowly avoid only the most obvious of the myriad watery graves. He bounced over craters he sincerely hoped were not deeper than the distance from his tire treads to his axles. Only the safety harness prevented his head from hammering dents in the roof of the car. He found himself grinning stupidly again, and finally he laughed out loud. He was absolutely determined to make the best of his vacation experience.

    He came to the bus stop where the road into Bells met the Marigot highway. He turned right at the stop sign and thought, there was actually a sign, will wonders never cease? He rumbled across the sagging metal bridge over the D’leau Manioc, a tributary of the Layou River. The Layou ran by Bells and past Kirk and Rita’s house. Down the mountain another mile or two, where the road was good and the screaming wind was blocked by the slopes to the east, he came to the sharp, right-left, right-left zig zag that led under a giant banyan tree, whose massive roots were like an integral part of the mountainside. Just past the second left zag, in a clearing on the east side, was a set of buildings called Vena’s Place. Everything about Vena’s was downright fucking odd. To begin with, the sign read:
                    VENA’S PLACE
                    A GOOD PLACE
                    TO SLEEP
                    DRINK
                    AND EAT
And that, you had to admit, was downright fucking odd. Sleep, drink, and eat? Shouldn’t it be eat, drink, and sleep? Added to that, it was probably the best sign on the whole damn island, the hell-and-gone-out-in-the-sticks – sorry, the country –and given all that, you’d think they’d have got it right. The place was three wings of three stories each, the long wing facing the road and the two short ones sticking out sideways towards the road so they all faced a central courtyard with a circle driveway and a white marble fountain in the center. It overlooked, from both the front across the road and dropping steeply from the back, a valley known as Fond Zomb. What was really strange was that, when you went past and around it, you could see there were no windows out the backs of any of the wings.
    Now, that could be explained away, if you wanted to, by the penchant of the islanders to ignore the wonders of nature to be seen on every side and, for some reason, to focus on the road. From the lowliest tin-roofed shack to the newer, American-style concrete block homes, Dominicans, rich or poor, seemed to be more interested in the sparse traffic on their pitiful roads than the jungle paradise they never got their fill of praising to the few tourists. The first time Ras had been driven by with Kirk at the wheel in the rental and Rita chattering to him from the left front seat, he’d been subjected to what he thought was just their time-honored, stoned, cosmic humor.
    Kirk, his best friend since they were eight years old, had met him outside the airport after he’d escaped the little prick who had wanted to hit him up for carting his one suitcase, duffel, and backpack the few yards to the rental car counter. Kirk had held out a bouquet of giant lilies and antheriums he’d cut at his place at Zen Gardens, their name for the bed-and-breakfast he and Rita were building in Bells. After hugging like lost lovers, Erasmus threw his bags in the car and told Kirk to drive, he’d watch and learn. They were on the northeast corner of the island in the town of Melville Hall. Kirk stopped at the first tin-roofed shack past the crappy little bridge over the Melville Hall River out from the so-called “airport.” This turned out to be the loosely-termed non-café café that Ras, seeing the hide of a white cat rather crudely stretched between two driftwood branches over the bar and sensing a lack of leadership in this department, immediately dubbed the Dead Cat. What the fuck would you call it? There was nothing else there.

    Fading puke-green paint peeled from warped plywood walls, which were punctured here and there with glassless windows. Stout hatches of some thick type of cane, topped with hinges, rose like awnings, held by ropes, which could be let down at night and latched from the inside. It looked like the locals trusted each other no more than the denizens of Fort Pierce, Florida, did; his adopted hometown was a shithole of crime and gangs as bad as any in America. Walking in behind Kirk, Ras entered a dark room full of loud, dark men who went silent at their approach, as sullen as black men can be when you are the only white guys around. He wasn’t afraid of them; he just wasn’t sure of his position. A dozen bad-ass black guys in Fort Pierce could be real trouble. He could probably have laid them all out in the bad old days, but even a few minor casualties, he was positive, would ruin his first vacation in years – and worse, would defeat his real reason for being here in the first place. Kirk paid them not the least mind, stepping up to the bar and ordering two Kubulis and two plates of “provision.” He chose goat for their meat and the provision, he said, was whatever vegetables they had that day. The Kubulis, as at the airport, came from the cooler smoking cold in little green bottles like diminutive Heinekens. He had been prepared to be disappointed with another German-tasting beer, but the one he’d had at the airport had convinced him otherwise. Kubulis were truly awesome beers, clean and smooth and not bitter at all.
    The sea breeze blew in from the beach, while the river tumbled to the ocean over rocks where naked black children splashed and shrieked like kids anywhere. Not one of the locals spoke a word. All eyes were on the two white men, the slim, athletic Kirk in his loose shirt and Crocs, and Erasmus, the beefy tourist in the fancy flowered Hawaiian. All he lacked was white socks with his sandals and a camera on a strap. Their plates came up and even the heavy black woman behind the bar eyed the two Americans with suspicion as Kirk picked them up and set them on the table. Ras was almost sure he was in for a boxing match, and maybe a visit to the local jail. Then Kirk leaned over to the three men at the nearest table and, with a big grin, said in a loud voice, “So, how you doin’?”
    The entire room was instantly transformed. The nearest man at the table replied heartily that he was doin’ fine, and how about their own selves? Wide smiles all around revealed massive fence-lines of perfect white teeth at every table. Even the bar lady nodded, satisfied. From that point on they had a lively conversation about where they were from, and were they enjoying the beautiful jungle paradise? It seemed like a catchphrase, jungle island, jungle paradise, heaven on Earth. Ras tucked into tasty, tender curried goat, not too hot. It tasted somewhat like the monkey he’d had in Vietnam, only a little darker. The provision was rice, fresh little beets in a bit of salad, and boiled dasheen, a nasty, starchy local root like a giant, hairy potato. The locals loved it, encouraged him to “eat, eet up, mon!” They actually cheered when he choked some down, grinning so he wouldn’t spit it on the floor. He never managed to like dasheen, but from then on, the people of Dominica owned his heart.

    They left after several more rounds of Kubulis, paid for by the locals, with many a handshake and slap on the back. Some of the islanders claimed to have heard of Kirk and his wife, the “white people in the bamboo house” in Bells. Whites were rare – rare enough, it seemed, to be the subject of gossip. When they were back on the Marigot Road, headed south to Bells, Ras asked Kirk what the fuck all that had been about.

    “The people here went directly from being slaves to being free men in their own country,” he explained. The August after Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the islanders finally heard about it, and revolted. It didn’t happen all at once, but through revolution and politics they were finally their own masters and running their own country. “These are the friendliest people you will ever meet, anywhere in the world, but they have plenty of good reasons never to kiss any white man’s ass. But all you have to do is speak first, and they will give you the shirt off their backs. And it may be the only shirt they own.” In time Ras found this to be true. Speak first in a friendly way and Dominicans treated you like gold.

Copyright © 2020 by Roger Owens