Fiction: Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café [8]

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8. It wasn’t until the tenth day

[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.]

It wasn’t until the tenth day he was on the island that Ras finally broached the subject of why he had really come, besides that he needed a break from trying to find a reason to live each successive day. He had spent nine nights in the little concrete house up by the road, listening to the bats come rattling into the rafters before every rain. And those rains! He was a Florida boy, who the hell you think you’re talking to? He had spent eighteen months in-country in Vietnam, which was no stranger to deluvian weather either. He’d thought he knew all about rain, but damned if this wasn’t another thing entirely. The mountains, even thirteen hundred feet above sea level, peaked and ridged all around them, gathering the clouds to themselves and drinking in the deluges that amounted to as much as four hundred inches a year. Away to the northwest, on the ridge called Donkey Back, was a majestic Royal palm tree Kirk had named King Palm. The clouds would sweep in from that direction and by the time King Palm was no longer visible, the crashing of the downpour would be rushing towards them through the jungle, battering the banana leaves and pounding on the tin roofs like an army of pissed-off Scotsmen. It rained more than an inch a day, sometimes so hard you couldn’t hear each other talk for the noise. The air was cleaner than anywhere he had ever experienced. The Nam might have been comparable had it not been at war, but it was always polluted by the stink of diesel fumes, gasoline, and jet exhaust. Stinking, unwashed young men, rotting garbage, fly-blown corpses, and maggot-infested latrines. But here he didn’t need his inhalers for lungs poisoned by tobacco, weed, napalm, and Agent Orange. Soon he didn’t need his nose spray either. His sinuses were clearer than they had been since he had started snorting coke, God, how many years ago now? Whatever dust there was, and certainly the rain of pollen from the burgeoning rainforest, were washed away daily by the short but devastating downpours as surely as the blood of Christ washed away the sins of the world.
    After sunset there were the “meeting-lizards” and the clack-clacks. The meeting-lizards, as Ras named them, sounded just like the guy at meetings who taps his spoon against a glass to call the meeting to order. Ding ding ding! It was like a tiny bell ringing out clearly in the groaning, creaking jungle darkness. Clack-clacks were like giant grasshoppers with eyes that glowed bright florescent green like the headlights on the toy Hess trucks he’d gotten for Christmas as a child. They would hover in through the open windows like tiny helicopters, eventually landing upside-down on the ceiling. Then they would shut off the headlights and turn on an incredible tail-torch of the same Halloween glow-stick green while they wandered around among the rafters. He had at times been able to read by the light, it was that bright.

    That morning he sat with Kirk and Rita on the porch of the bamboo house for coffee, as usual. The bamboo house sat well down from the road, by the river, and was totally unlike most Dominican houses in that it did not face the road. Dominicans seemed bored with the eternal beauty of the forest and river valleys and even the beach. Each house, and even every drinking joint, faced the road, just like at Vena’s. The locals wanted to see what was going on, who was going by. The coffee was exceptionally good. Ras sucked up caffeine like the usual recovering addict and smoked weed like the hollow-eyed attendees of AA meetings smoked cigarettes. He had given up tobacco some time back, and his lungs were too wrecked for him to even consider taking it up again. What breath he had left he had dedicated to smoking pot. Reefer at least left him room to breathe.
    The porch looked out on the little branch of the Layou River, called the Dl’eau Manioc, hovered over by calabash and cacao trees, smooth brown boulders the size of small houses forming pools and little waterfalls here and there. Kirk had painted pictures of white herons on some of the boulders, the kind of bird they were used to seeing in Florida. The hills rose on the other side of the stream, layer upon layer of bananas and jungle, and then layer after layer of hills, fading into the distance and the haze of moisture that softened the outlines of every tree and mountain. Kirk had been eight years old and Erasmus seven, when Kirk had first come down the street on his bicycle and sold him firecrackers. He obtained them on his family’s yearly trips to North Carolina and sold them for a profit when he got home. They had been illegal in Florida since before they were born, and Kirk hid them from the cops in the headlight of his Schwinn. It was a scheme that was to serve them well for the rest of their lives. Seven years later, Ras introduced the young entrepreneur Kirk to marijuana, which he had stolen from his older brother, Kenny. At fifteen and sixteen they sold their first bag of weed to some surfers at a place called the Pines, just north of the boardwalk in Indialantic.

Dl’eau Manioc

    Now passing a morning joint of the usual epic proportions, Ras couldn’t help but reflect on how their lives had diverged. First, he’d been drafted and gone to the war, returning home a year and a half later with lifelong injuries that afforded him some small compensation from the VA, and not much else. He’d gone to college and studied psychology, gotten shit jobs in construction, psych hospitals, and halfway houses, and worked like a dog to get what he had. Kirk had never really worked a day in his life. He had continued to sell pot and was so successful, it had eventually paid for rental houses and commercial buildings. Hell, he had bought the building where their childhood doctor, Doctor Crandall, had maintained his office since they were kids. Now he lived in Dominica and was buying land there, too.
    “Do you remember my Uncle Charlie?” Ras asked. “The one who went to Korea? He came here a few years ago.” Ras couldn’t be sure, but he knew Kirk well, and could have sworn he hesitated for just a heartbeat. “I remember hearing about him, but I wasn’t living here at the time, just visiting. They wouldn’t let you stay more than six weeks, and you couldn’t even get off the plane if you didn’t have a ticket out. Unless you married an island girl.” It was true, and that was just what Charlie had done. Kirk had been instrumental in gaining privileges for foreigners on the island; when he’d first come, you couldn’t own land unless you were married to a local. That had changed. Now you could own two acres per person. Kirk owned two in his own name, two in Rita’s, and two more in his father’s name. He was negotiating for another acre just south toward the village in his sister Eileen’s name. He had never played by the rules, and he wasn’t starting now.
    “Well, Mom and my brothers have been asking about him again, and I thought, you living here and all, I could come and ask around about him. Last I heard he was living in a place called Attley.” And there it was again, that slight hesitation. Kirk wasn’t by nature a dishonest man, quite the opposite, and did not lie or hide anything well, unless it involved the police. Ras had been in the intelligence-gathering business in the war, which had eventually led him into the private-investigation game, the only occupation that had ever made him any real money.

    Kirk rubbed his mouth, as if thinking, a sure “tell” he was hiding his real thoughts. “I’ve never been there, but I know where it is. You go down to Pont Casse, and make sure to go left at the traffic circle, not right.” They all laughed, remembering his first near-disastrous attempt at driving on the left side of the road. He had gone around the circle to the right, and all the locals waiting for buses at the intersection, even the cops at the tiny station, had stood and clapped at the tourist going the wrong way. “Then you head up the last left,” which would have been the first right in the US, “past Brantridge Estate to Point Lolo. Keep going, and directly across from Layou Park Estate, you’ll see the road to Attley.” Kirk sipped his coffee, the excellent Bello brand, which they ground fresh every day, and passed their breakfast joint to Rita. She too was acting strangely; unusually quiet, not at all her normally outspoken and even belligerent self.
    “But I warn ya,” Kirk went on, “you’ll get lost in there. There’s ten or fifteen dead-end roads before you get to the real dead end, at the top of the mountain in Attley. You go through Neiba Estate, Gould Estate, then Crown and Tiperie, all the time zig-zagging around Mourne Couronna. Attley’s at the asshole of Dominica. It backs up on Fond Zomb.” This weirdly-named area, “zombie flats,” was strangely enough the same flats upon which the windowless rear of Vena’s Place looked, or in this case did not look. And that, stoned or not, was downright, you know. Odd. Fucking odd. And for a guy who claimed never to have been to Attley, Kirk seemed to know an awful lot about the area, and that was fucking odd too.
    Ras had learned a little something about Attley himself, through his investigations before he had left the States. There had been a series of messy murders there about the time Charlie had come to the island, and in a place as small as Dominica it had been a huge scandal. This was about twenty-five years ago, just before Hurricane David had devastated the island, and along with a lot of other people, Uncle Charlie and his black wife had disappeared. Letters to Ras’ mother, Zoe, from her wayward older brother had become scanty and incoherent in the months before the storm. After the disaster, answers to her inquiries as to his fate had been slow to come and slim pickings to say the least. The Dominican authorities claimed to have too many of their own people missing and dead to worry about some errant white man and refused to offer any further information.
    Charlie had been one of the very few white people on the island at the time. He’d taken the only route to residence then open to an outsider and married a Dominican girl a third his age. He’d met her in the Fort Lauderdale Airport. The girl was very black and very exotic, and in 1975 in Melbourne, Florida, that had been a huge scandal too. Some of his old informants, people who’d been in the life back then, said they only saw her after dark. They all figured she was just another coke freak who slept until five and only came out after dark. Oh right, like they weren’t. He knew; he’d been one of them too.
    They lived in Melbourne for a while, then they moved to Dominica. Charlie had told Ras’ mother his wife had a house in Attley, and her uncle, who lived in the house, had died. She was afraid that if she didn’t go back and claim it, either someone from the village would squat there or her own family would steal it from her. She brought him to her house, at the top of the remote jungle mountain, and within one year she died of some unknown illness. Charlie had lived in her house on the hill, which looked over the far side of Fond Zomb from Vena’s Place. He spent his next few months drinking rum and writing letters to Zoe in Florida. His fondness for alcohol, for which he was famous and which had undoubtedly gotten him into this situation, had turned into a solid addiction to the local rum. Dominica’s home-made “bush rum” was clean but devastatingly powerful. He wrote that his hair was falling out. His skin was turning blotchy. Reading the actual letters, one got the impression of a guy drinking himself into an early grave who just didn’t get it. Of course his damn hair was falling out. He was in his sixties and easily supported five local families with his rum purchases, and bush rum was cheap! He knew. He’d been one too.
    Mom worried her brother was spending his money unwisely. Ras thought that was the least of his problems. Uncle Charlie had plenty of money. That money, in fact, was part of why Ras was here, and no small part of how. Charlie had regularly sent money to his sister . She had a fair bit of money too, and hadn’t spent it, until she asked him to come to this island and find out what had happened to her brother. She’d seen to it he had all he needed.
    The thing was, Ras’ aunts, Ruby and Flo, had gotten Charlie declared dead, against his mother’s wishes. Charlie’s other sisters wanted the money, but when the will was read it had backfired on them. Ruby and Flo got saddled with Charlie’s junky little 1940s house off Babcock Street in old Eau Gallie. All the money went to Zoe. And all she wanted to do with it was to find her big brother, or find out what had happened to him.

    Enter the loser son who’d snorted a successful private investigation company up his nose, while his family had been turned into char-broiled highway burgers. He’d literally been whiffing cocaine when they were being killed. The bodies were so burned, they had to put sandbags in the girl’s little coffins to make it look like there was something in them. The funeral director, his good friend Ray Hobbes, hadn’t really wanted to tell him about it, but Ras had pressed him. There was no real weight to the remains. The sandbags, he reluctantly revealed, made it believable at all that their roasted little bodies were in there.
    After their deaths Ras had sold his business and drifted, doing the odd cheating-spouse or greedy-business-partner investigation. He lived like a hermit and spent his money sparingly. He rented half a tiny asphalt-shingle duplex in downtown Fort Pierce, the place, it was said, where crack cocaine had been invented. Surrounded by threatening, rundown three-story apartments, part of the city housing project, it had long ago surrendered to anonymity. You had to take two turns of the yellow sand track after you cut through the parking lot of the Nowalk Hotel, or worse, come in through the parking lot of the Project apartments. Either way, you had better wear shoes, against all the needles and used condoms littering the sun-blasted sandspurs and broken glass. Either way could be worth your life, especially for an aging white nobody who used to be bad but was now just a pathetic remnant of brighter days.
    He liked it because his neighbors were no more interested in calling attention to themselves than he was. Even the bikers snorting gak in the other half of the dupe kept it down. It was right downtown, off US 1 and Delaware Avenue, not three blocks from where they parked the black-and-white cruisers. And, biker or not, you did not want to fuck with the Fort Pierce Police Department, no you did not. Occasionally some altercation at the Nowalk would bring the FPD, usually between a hooker and her john. The joke was it was “no walk” from any of the local joints, Frankie and Johnnies’ or The Bourgeois Saloon, if you picked up a working girl; it was right on the corner. No walk at all to get laid. They apparently rented rooms by the half-hour. So of course, these little trysts now and then went south, and there would be screaming, and the black-and-white cars would show up, and it would be just like an episode on COPS. There would be whores crying, suspects hiding their faces, and law enforcement officers being their usual, steady, reasonable, and often humorous selves. But on the bad nights they would have to play rough, and downtown had lots of bad nights in the early days of the twenty-first century.
    This led to some fine late-night entertainment for a guy watching from the dark of his little porch. The heavy metal from next door was so muted and pleasant it sounded like Christmas carols. He would sit watching with a beer in his hand, maybe a joint, but less and less these days did he have a head full of coke. After years of crying and calling himself an asshole, he was thoroughly tired of cocaine and missed sleep. He finally just quit doing it. He woke up one morning relatively sober, having done no blow in weeks and just now realizing how good he felt. He had a day or so to try to figure out what to do next when Zoe called. She wanted him to come visit his mother. She needed him for a job.
    This had never happened before. Ras had done his level best to insulate his mother from the seedier side of his occupation, but she knew. Yet she had perfect faith in his honorable intentions, his innate goodness, even when he was trashing his family and his business in a losing battle. He fought an enemy who forced you to finance her war efforts, to seek her out and do battle at your own expense. When Kirk had quit years ago, he had said cocaine was a whore, and she always stole your wallet. His surprise at Mom engaging him was next to nothing when she revealed what she wanted him to do, where she wanted him to go. An island called Dominica.
    In some inexplicable twist in the fabric of any rational universe, that loser of a son, Ras, his humble self, had a lifelong friend who had chosen Dominica from a map as the place he wanted to live out his life. Kirk had made his decision twenty-five years ago, right after Hurricane David, which he had spent partying with the rest of them in the U-Haul building. He spent the better part of the next ten years trying to establish some right to stay on the island more than six weeks. He was nothing if not determined. He often repeated his mantra when he was back in Melbourne. “Dominica is ninety-five percent jungle and mountains. It has no dangerous animals, no poisonous snakes, and few biting insects. It has no army, no navy, a weak government, and a nearly non-existent police force. Weed is plentiful and cheap. This adds up to paradise, my friend; think about it.” Until that call from his mother, Ras had never considered it. He would what? Run off to some tropical island and live happily ever after? Find out it was some third-world dump and slink back home? But now, he had a job, and he would do anything for his employer, anything. And he had money. The kind of money he’d had when he’d first started moving coke, when he was on top of it, instead of the other way around. He felt really shitty, calling his buddy and feeding him a line of bull about getting an inheritance and just wanting to visit, see the island for himself. Kirk had been overjoyed at the prospect. Come anytime, he said. Stay for free, as long as you like. Ras felt worse.

Copyright © 2020 by Roger Owens