Fiction: Drinking Kubulis at the Dead Cat Café [13]

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13. “Charlie Dayton, he come to Dominica

[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.]

“Charlie Dayton, he come to Dominica in oh, nineteen sebenty-five or six. Not many white folk in the island den, I can tell you dat. De ones be here long time, everybody knows, but you don’ see dem much. Astaphans be here a long time. Bryzees, dey been here longer. Dey own, you know,” and her withered arm waved the glass in an encompassing gesture. “Everyt’ing.” It was true. Astaphans owned general stores and building supply houses all over the island. Bryzees owned most of the grocery and liquor stores. He thought the Astaphans might be Portuguese, but the only one he’d ever met looked Greek. The Bryzees looked like the same Indians or Pakistanis who dominated the convenience trade in the States. A tiny minority, whose families had been here so long they had bypassed America entirely, yet still controlled much of the commerce in this tiny country.
    “Anyway, Charlie come wit’ his cheap little black island girl and his money and his demons, and in no time, de demons, dey eat de girl.” Ras’ eyebrows were pulling his sagging cheeks up, headed for his hairline, and he coughed raw rum fumes into the tumbler, which was half empty now. His head swam as Georgia Cyrus once again let out a long, grinding snore. She seemed to go from waking to sleep and back like a ping-pong ball. “Oh yes,” Marfa went on, slurring her words a bit now, “de demons be wit’ Charlie from right away. Don’ know if it be him or her first, but one or de odder, dey got de sickness alright. Him an’ de girl never be seen in daytime, but always out drinkin’ at night. Dogs begin to go missing, den a goat here an’ dere. Agoutis lay around dead, bellies open, flies all over.” Kirk had told Ras agoutis were like a giant hamster, and they were really good to eat.
    “Next people find a cow, guts tore open and t’roat ripped out. Now everybody really angry, ’specially de owner. Not too many cows in de island, and dey wort’ a lot of money you know. Men get drunk and run around at night wit’ de guns and flashlights, actin’ like childrens. A wonder, t’ank God, dey don’t shoot dey own feet. Women cry and hug babies, call to each de odder from de doorways, but not’ing happen. Den we find a girl downso in de forest, she is killed, horrible. Like she fights whatever is killin’ her.” Ras roused from his slightly tipsy fascination to ask, “Her arms had wounds, like she tried to defend herself?” Marfa nodded grimly. “Oh yes, she defend herself all right, true dat. She a big, mean banana girl, she carry a cutlass like any man.” This was the island name for a machete, betraying the nation’s schizophrenic heritage. It had been ruled at different times by the English, Spanish, French, and Portuguese. During the time England had held sway, machete had been strictly a Spanish word. Marfa motioned with her glass, and he got the bottle and poured her another slash.

The mountains of Attley,
across Fond Zomb

    She slugged half of it down and pointed at him with her other hand, her head weaving just a bit with the rum. “After dat, t’ings get worse. Animals get found two, t’ree a week. Den a man dead. Den anodder woman. Two little childrens. Oh, de policemans come, dey ask questions, look at de dead people, but dey don’t stay after dark. Dey don’ wan’ be dead too come daytime, what you t’ink?” Ras nodded, his own head a little loose on his shoulders. He poured himself another half tumbler of the caustic bush rum, took a solid slurp, Marfa watching him with a knowing grin. A moonless night in Dominica was blacker than the asshole of Hell, and streetlights were nonexistent. No one went out at night in the country, and Attley, at the back end of nowhere, was no different. Ras didn’t blame “de policemans” one fucking bit. You could take a single wrong step, drunk or not, and wind up with a broken neck right there in the concrete ditch, forget some psycho murderer. But there was something he was missing here, and it wasn’t just because of the rum. What had she said? Something about a sickness. He focused his wandering eyes and started to ask about it when Marfa continued her tale.
    “Finally, de girl, she up and die. Nobody know just when, ’cause by de time dey find her, she be all rotten. Like he one dem crazy people, keep her a long time, you know? But dey don’ know what,” and she leaned close, “she be dead all de time. She one like dat, you know? ’Cause let me tell you, baby, all de animals, all de people, only t’ing de same about dem is almost no blood. Dey all be dead, torn apart even, and every one, most’ dey blood be gone.” Ras felt like his eyebrows must surely have struck his slightly receding hairline by now, and he remembered how Bayo had raised his own so high before he had made his escape. What the fuck did that mean?
    “‘Like dat’?” he asked and took another gulp of the bush rum. It was starting to taste pretty good. “That’s the sickness you talked about? Something about the blood? It, what, it dried up their blood?” Marfa was shaking her head hard, almost laughing. Her face seemed to swing way too far to either side. “You don’ be listening, Mr. Ras Tafari from America! De dead don’ got de sickness, de ones who kill dem do! Dey be zombies!” That stopped him. He drew his head back, sure his eyebrows were lost forever. This was getting out of control. First all the crazy Bible shit, now they were into horror-flick territory. He decided it was time to wrap this up. He’d thought he was getting somewhere, but now it looked like Marfa was batshit, and getting drunker than a sailor on shore leave. He polished off his own rum and set it down on the little table. He tried to gather his thoughts.

View of Fond Zomb from Attley

    “So, mama, please, tell me, whatever happened to Charlie Dayton?” She creaked to her feet and shuffled to the table, pouring off another shot and tossing it back. The rum in the bottle was getting low. After a big sigh redolent of fumes, she turned to him. “Charlie take to stayin’ at a house over in de Carib Reserve, right on de coast. Here in Attley, de killin’s stop. In de Reserve, killin’s begin. When David’s Hurricane come, dat house be blown away. Not’ing lef’ but de foundation.” She looked hard at him, because there were tears in his eyes now. He remembered partying in the Eau Gallie U-Haul with Kirk and all his friends while David blew at a hundred miles an hour outside, and they smoked dope and snorted coke and Tabitha was there, she was alive, she was alive.
    He turned red eyes on Marfa and asked the question. “And did the killings stop in the Reserve?” Marfa just nodded, her eyes distant. She had her own memories of “David’s Hurricane,” and it wasn’t a paltry hundred-mile wind in this island, but a disaster the nation had yet to completely recover from, with hundreds of deaths and the destruction of half the buildings on the island. Many were still nothing but remnants, never rebuilt, and many were the bodies of loved ones who had never been found. The smell of feces filled the tiny house despite the breeze, and the sound of Georgia’s snoring stuttered and stopped. Marfa looked up from the floor, her face a misery now.
    “Please let us be alone now, Mr. Ras Tafari from America,” she said softly, and he left her to clean up the twisted prophet who was her daughter, as she had these thirty-eight years gone. He stumbled down the hill towards Bayo’s River Place, and he saw the drunken cyclist from the Dominican Republic, fallen once again, snoring as loud as Georgia now, his fancy bike stolen. His yellow polyester team shirt, with the thousands of tiny little holes to wick sweat, was bunched around his head, as if the locals had failed to quite pull it off him. His red Spandex shorts were gone, and one of the Attley girls had tied a little green ribbon around his flaccid if impressive black cock. He still grasped the water bottle of bush rum, and Ras plucked it from his silly-assed little fingerless gloves, which the American had never been able to figure out. The bottle sloshed with a bit of the rum still left, and he tipped it up. It was better than the rotgut he’d been swilling at Marfa’s shack, but not nearly as good as the St. John’s Island brand he’d been buying in town. At that point, Ras really didn’t give a shit.
    The bush rum was just white lightning, like he’d had all his life, growing up in Florida in the fifties and sixties. People mistook it for “moonshine,” which was in fact made from corn, as any country boy knew. “White lightnin’” was made from sugar cane, as was all rum. Since the time the first Europeans set foot in the New World, the Demon Rum had been their comfort and often their downfall. The searing liquid was gone, and his head rang a little as he tossed the water bottle on the ground.
    Speeding back down the mountain at thirty miles an hour, Ras shook his head over the meaning of all he’d been told. If he was the new king, who was the old one? And what the hell was he king of? What would the “young savior” tell him on the mountainside, in the storm. It sounded like a folk song from the sixties. Go tell it on the mountain, over the hills, and what the fuck? He racked his brain to remember who was king of Persia after that particular Darius, as if there was a clue there that would explain some of this madness. He sparked up a long piece of the joint that had been stinking up his shirt pocket with ashes. Yeah, that would help.
    What bothered him the most was the implication that God meant for all this to happen, as if the Temple was once again being built, and once again the King needed to preserve it. Herod the Great had rebuilt the Temple, only to have the Romans tear it down again. The twelfth verse of Ezra, chapter six, ran through his mind. “And may the God that hath caused His name to dwell there, destroy all Kings and people, that shall put their hand to alter and destroy this house of God which is at Jerusalem.”

Copyright © 2020 by Roger Owens