Fiction: Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café [9]

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9. He slept so well in the island

[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.]

He slept so well on the island it was hard to get up and going early, but the next dawn found him well on his way to Attley. He knew the few actual miles traversed meant nothing here; the mountains and the roads on them were so exquisitely twisted, one might drive an hour or more to reach a spot one could see across the valley from where one started. He needed time on the ground, to do what they had called recon, back in another jungle.
    It was a Wednesday, and the workers were out harvesting bananas. Thursday was “banana day” in town, when all the farmers brought their produce down to the harbor to see if they could sell it, and if there would be a ship that day. If there was, the capital town of Roseau would be like a carnival all day and night, or so he had been told. The previous Thursday they had been in town, and there had been no ship. Not only that, but the local vendors weren’t buying much, and the little “huckster” boats, the tiny, gayly painted inter-island skiffs and schooners, had mostly been diverted by a storm. Many of the farmers had dumped their bananas and dasheen and breadfruit off the docks into the harbor waters in protest, but the only ones to witness it were the beggars and the beach drunks, who got maybe their only bath of the season wading out to drag this floating bounty back in. These intrepid swimmers and a gathering crowd of local folks from the beachside bars proceeded, with early rum-fueled clumsiness, to fight over this free, if salty, treasure from the sea, until beggars and groceries both were thoroughly covered in sand. An occasional streak of blood from a nose or eye accented the struggling mass of staggering, drunken humanity. Had the poor abandoned vegetables been aware, they could hardly have been less outraged, Ras thought, than the slovenly drunks and addicts who swaggered threateningly above them, there on the morning beach. What had they done, excepting to grow and be fruitful as they should, to deserve such shabby treatment?
    The procession of ragged, empty-eyed black men slumped in the back of ragged, empty pickup trucks – what they called “transports” – took on the air of a funeral, winding back up the mountain. On the way out of town Ras got his first glimpse of the man in the cave. North of Roseau, on the beach road, were some cliffs, with a shallow impression of a cave and a tiny waterfall, where and old drunk lived with his continuous little fire and his jug of rum, just on the other side of the only guard rail Ras had seen on the island.
    That guard rail had featured in a magazine he’d picked up in the airport from Africa – Zimbabwe, if he wasn’t mistaken – and he wasn’t. In spite of his drugged abuse of it, Ras’ mind still worked surprisingly well, and the story he’d read was by some fluff-headed government news babe, gushing the party line about how the progressive people of little Dominica were building their very own “fine new roads, completely free of potholes.” The only roads the visitors from Africa had seen, it was clear, was the beach highway south from Roseau to the Governor’s Mansion. This road was a perfect replica of an American four-lane highway, with yellow lines in the middle, white lines on the outsides, and guard rails – just like in the bad old USA – on both sides. This same road extended north from the city limits just five hundred meters past the old man’s cave and then died a sudden and frightening death, from the usual cholesterol of greed and corruption that clog the arteries of all government funding. From there on, the road was the usual potholed, switch-backed horror common to the rest of the island.

    Today he noticed the dozens of “boxing sheds” along the roads, what he thought of as banana shacks. Usually deserted, they were now complicated darknesses filled, brimming, with squirming locals dipping bananas. The stuffy English term “boxing shed” dignified these corrugated tin shelters far beyond their humble reality. They were where a significant portion of the island’s men and women exposed themselves weekly to powerful fungicides into which they dipped the bananas, in the hope this crop would find a buyer. Ras’ first visit to one of these primitive workhouses had horrified him. On its wall was displayed a poster with pictures of a white guy. His bland, Leggo-Man features made it abundantly clear why they thought all white people looked the same. The white guy was wearing a hat, a double-filter breathing mask, goggles, a long-sleeved shirt, rubber gloves, long pants, and rubber boots. He was shown in a variety of poses one might expect a banana worker might assume, if one were a white guy in America who knew nothing about harvesting bananas. He injected the roots of banana trees with fungicide; he sprayed the leaves with pesticide; he carried the resultant toxin-soaked bounty of poisoned yellow submarines over his shoulder in one of the ever-present blue plastic bags seen blowing along the roads and washing down the streambeds.
    None of the real banana workers had ever met that nameless white guy. They didn’t know or care if a tree had fungus to begin with; it either produced bananas within three years or it didn’t. If it didn’t, you cut it down. If it did, you cut it down and took the bananas. It would never make another bunch; only one to a tree. As for fungus, they only cared that it didn’t show when they presented it to the market and the hucksters and the ships. So, wearing ragged particles of shorts and shirts irretrievably stained by the sticky brown sap of banana stems, they stained them more with the reeking bluish blotches of the liquid fungicide, into which they dipped the bananas with their bare hands for shipment to Europe and the USA.
    When they were done dipping them, these dark, serious men and women laid them gently to dry on brown paper draped over what looked to be vinyl-covered exercise machine benches bought from some skanky, defunct New Jersey gymnasium, complete with sweat stains. They then packed them into boxes he found familiar from Florida’s citrus trade, infamous for its exploitation of migrant workers. Sunsweet. Dole. Sunkissed. Sunpicked. Then they hung their scabrous outfits on nails driven into the outsides of the banana shacks, for the rain to wash them as clean as they would ever get, until they returned the next Wednesday for another dose of chemical death. The deference with which they treated the bananas, cradled on those cushioned tables, was better than their own beds, better than they treated their children. The padded benches upon which they sacrificed their own health to avoid bruising the breakfast food of rich Americans was in stunning contrast to the island’s stated philosophy of healthy people who owned little and needed less.
    He negotiated the traffic circle, correctly this time, from left to right, to what should have been the first right but here was the last left. Driving past the tourist-oriented demonstration “boxing shed” up the hill from Point Lolo, he wanted to Sunpuke. He decided there and then that, upon his return to the States, he would never again eat a commercial banana. He needn’t have worried; he was never going back.

Copyright © 2020 by Roger Owens