Fiction: Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café [10]

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10. Kirk had warned him

[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.]

Kirk had warned him, but he was surprised he actually had to turn around about thirteen times to get to Attley. He asked directions from an old farmer driving a few goats who could not tell him where Attley was, but Ras nevertheless handed him a wad of weed as big as his thumb in a shred of plastic wrap. The fellow was elderly, and Ras was sure that in America the doddering old rag would have been in a wheelchair. He gave the fellow a US dollar, and the half of the fellow’s grin that still held startlingly white teeth lit up the car. He patted Ras on the arm and assured him that although his journey would be long and arduous, the rewards at the end would be great. He proceeded to drive the goats up a slope that Ras could hardly have climbed himself, then followed them into the forest at the top and disappeared. The American gave up on four more mountain tracks that ended at lofty banana shacks or in alpine-jungle logging camps.
    He asked directions from three teenage girls in jeans and jellies with little stringy tops barely hiding adolescent breasts, and one pointed back the way he had come. They all giggled. He knew she was lying; he’d been up and down every single road from the highway in. But he didn’t yell at her. They were black, they looked nothing like his little white daughters. But if they had lived, his girls would have been like this, wouldn’t they? Surely they would have been snotty, giggling teenagers at some point? He shook his head. It had been seventeen years, his children would have been in their twenties by now. He might have been a grandfather.
    Suddenly he wanted to jam the gears, spin the wheels, speed off up the hill, which would say, so clearly, he knew they were steering him wrong. He didn’t. He knew he would just look like an idiot, trying to impress nameless adolescent girls on a mountain road in the precise geographic center of Fucking Nowhere. He pulled slowly away, watching in the rearview as they watched him go. The two who had said nothing both slapped at the one who’d tried to send the fat old white man the wrong way, and they all staggered about the leaf-littered roadway with girlish laughter. He grinned, sharing their humor. He ignored the next four turns and followed the main grade to the end, and sure enough, there at the end was Attley.

    Attley didn’t look like much, less of a place than Bells even, which was saying something. But there were a few concrete block houses, and their chalky walls of pink and yellow added color above the dwindling pavement. The roofs were good. In Dominica they had to be, or a house would be flooded every day. Plywood hovels sported metal roofs fit for a Palm Beach mansion.
    On his visit to Scott’s Head, at the south end of the island, he’d looked down from Fort Cachacrou onto the pitiful collection of tumble-down block-and-concrete they’d just passed through to get there, and he’d been amazed. From atop the fort, high out on the point, the town resembled nothing less than some quaint Italian village with lovely, multi-colored roofs everywhere. It was like a postcard – hell there were postcards of it. The ramshackle buildings, the crime and drugs and prostitution and disease were completely hidden from view. And, he thought bitterly, wasn’t that just how this fucked-up world worked. The truth, like two weightless little coffins, was somehow always concealed from the public at large by some bullshit trick, some sleazy sleight-of-hand. Even worse, there was always a good reason to put the sandbags in there, to make it “look like” his dead daughters still existed, even as corpses; always a plausible rationalization why it was better that the pretty roofs hid the poverty and hopelessness, so no one had to think about the awful reality.
    There was a bamboo restaurant and bar, Bayo’s River Place, next to the turn into the village of Attley. The road was so steep he had to cut the wheels hard into the white rocks on the side of the road to park, like they taught you in Driver’s Ed. In Florida, he’d never had to worry about it. Hell, Cocoa Beach was so flat, you could leave a car in neutral and the only way it would move was if the tide came in.

View of Scott's Head from the
fort on Point Cachacrou

    Out on the street, a few local girls were gathered around a handsome young man right off the cover of a bodice-ripper romance novel who was sitting on a mountain bike that had to have cost at least five hundred dollars US, more than the annual income of five hard-working local men. His clip-on water bottle was filled with the local bush rum, which he offered all around, even to the white guy, who drew sideways looks from everyone but the man on the bike. As Ras took the bottle from him, the young man fell over on the bike, getting tangled in the frame as he tried to rise, and Ras gathered that the young man, who had startlingly green eyes, was totally shit-faced drunk. He took a pull of the fiery liquor, which wasn’t half bad, and helped the kid to his feet. The drunken fellow righted the bicycle and sat on it again, took the bottle back and turned it up, sucking on the plastic nipple. He said he was from the Dominican Republic and was here to visit what his country considered their “little sister,” Dominica.
    This made no sense at all to Ras. The Dominican Republic was the eastern half of a much larger island called Hispaniola, which was often confused with Dominica. Its inhabitants were for the most part of white Hispanic descent, while those of Dominica were either uniformly African or Carib. The western part of Hispaniola was, of course, occupied by some other African folks called Haitians, which the denizens of the Dominican Republic most assuredly did not consider their cousins. In fact, they hated them with a bitter passion. They armed themselves with American-made automatic rifles to guard their common border and refused to even allow roads to be built through the mountains between the two countries. There was a damned good reason; Haitians cut down all the trees they could reach. Americans didn’t know it, but the means to cook food was a huge problem in all the islands. Most of the governments in the Caribbean, no matter how corrupt, had long since bitten the bullet and begun importing natural gas. The Duvalier government of Haiti, the most corrupt of all, had instead told their people to cut down the forests and make charcoal to cook with. Forty years later, there were practically no trees left on the western side of the island, deadly floods and landslides were common, and the people there were once again in dire straits.
    The Dominicans, descendants of the bloody-minded Spanish and themselves a rational and pragmatic nation, were determined the same thing was not going to happen to them. Every few months the Haitians rioted, attempted to break the borders, were killed in the hundreds, then starved for a while until they rioted again. The Dominican Republic kept a low profile, out of the news, watching it happen over the sights of their US-made M16 rifles. Any Haitian caught crossing the border was shot dead on the spot. While Ras stood talking with him, the handsome Dominican youth fell off his bike again. He wasn’t even riding it, just sitting there with his feet down. The islanders had a saying: never underestimate the power of rum.
    Back on his feet again, the boy said with a leer that the locals were very friendly, and with his looks and the way the Attley girls were giggling behind their fingers and elbowing each other, Ras figured the lad had probably gotten laid every few hours since his arrival. The bright green eyes glowing from his dark face, as well as the evidence of more money than they saw in a lifetime, couldn’t have hurt his chances either. As he turned to go into the bamboo bar, the young man once again fell over on the bike and was literally covered by the girls, who pushed and shoved to be the one to help him up.
    Bayo’s seemed deserted. Ras finally found Bayo himself down on the bottom floor, where he lived, picking boogers from his impressive bulb of a nose and punching at his laptop computer. Ras had been astonished to find how many people here had internet, but he was used to it by now. As Kirk had taught him, he offered a hand and a smile, and as usual was rewarded with a grin and a friendly reception. Bayo was a narrow, coffee-colored man with short nappy hair and a sharp face, on which the blob of nose was completely out of place.

Behind Bayo's River Place

    They went up to the bar and Bayo made him a drink, or rather, he provided the cup, the bottle, and Ras’ choice of fruit. Except for the cheap roadside places in town, this was the tradition: If you drank bush rum, for one price you got a six-ounce plastic cup, a bottle in front of you and whatever mixer might be available, or not. You poured as much as you wanted in the cup each time, and each time you paid. Ras asked for grapefruit, and Bayo stepped across to the bamboo window at the back of the bar. The wood shutter for the window was held open from hinges at the top by a rope that ran through a pulley and was tied to the handle of the refrigerator to the right of the window. A grapefruit tree grew from down the slope behind the bar and Bayo snatched a big green fruit right off a branch. He sliced the fat ball into eighths and set the slices on a paper plate beside Ras at the bar. It was sour but good, with the rum. Citrus needed cool weather to ripen and Ras had resigned himself to the fact that he would never get ripe citrus here, because it never got cold, thus the fruit here stayed forever green. He squeezed a finger’s worth of juice into the cup and filled the rest with rum. You paid the same whether you filled the cup or not. Ras wanted to know what was in the refrigerator. No, he admitted, what he really wanted to know was, if Bayo opened the refrigerator, would the window wag up and down? He was sure it would.
    “How much?” Ras asked, and Bayo replied, “US or EC?” “EC.” The skinny black man stuck his right index finger thoughtfully up his left nostril and dug for gold. He looked the white man up and down, as if deciding how much he could charge. “Two-fifty.” That was about seventy-five cents American, and probably twice what he charged the locals. Ras didn’t care, just handed over three of the colorful East Caribbean dollars with pictures of the Queen on them. Bayo dropped two East Caribbean quarters too. Ras left the quarters. “Do you have any ice, my friend?” Bayo grinned. Ice was the one, defining, peculiarly American vice.
    Ras knew he was taking a chance. In spite of the fact that Dominica had the cleanest water on Earth, he was the one man on that Earth, or so he believed, who got the screaming shits from drinking it. He’d stuck to bottled water until Kirk pointed out that it was bottled at a spring right down the road and clearly had not saved him. Ras’ dad had always called diarrhea “Montezuma’s Revenge.” Ice was made from local water, and if Montezuma was going to get you, freezing it wouldn’t help. Fuck it, he thought. He’d had the shits as bad or worse in the war.

Mama Geraldine’s mountaintop

    Besides, he had the cure: Mama Geraldine’s Magical Elixir. He’d called it that since his first conflict with Montezuma, the second day he was there. Rita, who really was a sweet person in spite of her screwy politics and Buddhism, had had him drive her a couple miles upso, the island word for “up the hill.” Upso a ways was the most charming little bit of a mountaintop he had ever seen. It stood above an enchanted forest shrouded in mist and mystery. Geraldine’s little hovel was dirt-floored, cramped, and solid as a rock. She looked like a tiny black Fairy Godmother, he thought, looking at her smiling wrinkles as they were introduced. Her husband, Albert, was a nasty little man who, Kirk said, had a habit of poisoning dogs. Her daughter Sofia was retarded and unable to speak. She would make awful “unhh, unhh” noises when Ras or Kirk was around. Ras thought she was horny. She was thirty but had the body of a teenager. Albert kept a rank fire going out front under an awning, with a joint of meat of some kind always smoking.
    “Do you have a son named Kelvin?” Ras had asked Geraldine, who crowed over the white man from America who knew her rich son. He lived in the capital of America, Austin, Texas! And, he was going to bring her a refrigerator! Ras was pleased beyond all reason at the coincidence. He was, he thought, definitely going soft. Rita explained Ras’ problem, and Geraldine led them out the back to her garden. Albert had built raised boxes for all her herbs, set on top of concrete blocks and piled tires. It was amazing, there had to be five or six thousand square feet of growing space, and every inch was bursting with life. Every sort of flower, bulb, grass, and root flourished in the dirt the ramshackle boxes held so precariously at waist height, so Geraldine wouldn’t have to bend over to pick them. She walked up and down the rows, selecting a leaf here, a root there, a small bunch of grass, put them all in a tattered brown bag and gave them to Ras. She told him to grind and mix it well and make a tea from a few pinches every morning and night. Not too much, she said; it was powerful medicine. If he ever wanted to move his bowels again, she said, he’d better not overdo it. And she slapped his arm and cackled at him. Her gleaming white teeth were nearly perfect, and for one second when she smiled, she was almost pretty.
    Mama Geraldine’s Magic Elixir had stopped Montezuma in his tracks, and Ras had praised her to the locals, but he noticed some of them turned away when he spoke. Something going on there. Geraldine – Mama Geraldine – he corrected himself, wouldn’t take his money, but Rita said she loved floaters. These were salted, smoked fish from the market in Roseau. Crusted with yellow, greasy salt, they were undoubtedly the most rancid, disgusting fish Ras had ever encountered. But he bought them, and brought them upso to Geraldine’s little house, and refused to give them to Albert who, he was sure, would eat them himself. Albert sported dingy white jockey shorts and a massive boner. When Geraldine finally came out, she was overjoyed to get the floaters and gave him a hard-armed hug. Ras had the sure impression he’d interrupted them getting it on.

Copyright © 2020 by Roger Owens