Left at the Mango Tree (24 page)

A golden tree by a silvery sea.”

Cougar looked and saw the truth mirrored in Nat’s eyes. Well, what of it, if he had reinstated the competition? He could hardly donate the money to some orphanage or church school now, could he? That would have been far too conspicuous. Cougar Zanne didn’t typically commit such acts of kindness. He only went along with the plan in the first place to protect the others. If any of us ever got caught, my pull would save us all, Cougar had reasoned. But his reasoning, he knew, fell short.

We went to a beach that was still and serene,

Raoul smoked one of Nat’s cigars and sang along under his breath. This was one of Bang’s old songs and Raoul knew it well. He would have preferred to have his nose in a book, Mr. Stan’s book to be exact, but he was enjoying the show and feeling almost lighthearted for the first time in a number of days. He resisted the urge to join Bang on stage and shake a tambourine; for now the urge alone, which he hadn’t felt since I was born, was enough to buoy his sinking resolve and shoo his flies.

The strangest beach I’ve ever seen.

What an idea Wilbur had had the night before to send Raoul for a walk on the beach! Edda’s beach. The beach where she ran in her school clothes before returning home to pineapple tartlets and grammar drills; the beach that saw her first steps on the sandy shore, her tiny body shored up by the tired hands of Emma Patrice; the beach where Edda began, in the light of a near-full moon, when the hands of Emma Patrice were still in love and fresh. To the song of the sleepy leaves and doused in moonlight, Raoul had dozed there, and in the shine of the morning he had looked and found it. Finally, a variable. A clue!

A tree of gold for you and me.

Poor Raoul. Mr. Stan’s treatise had failed to address the inverse proportion of size to weight in the consideration of variables, and the implications of Raoul’s small success on Edda’s beach that morning—once discovered—would send his flies into a real tizzy.

But not until tomorrow. He’s earned an evening’s respite.

A golden tree by a silvery sea.

And so at least for the duration of the show, while Cougar and Nat engaged in silent ping-pong and the shifty wind scattered Raoul’s temporarily-homeless flies, Bang reasoned, and Raoul sang.

15

F
red Nettles was a foreman. Oh’s best. Time
was
when you’d be considered a right fool to try and build a house without him. He knew the best plumber to lay your pipes, the best gardener to plant your frangipani, and the best mason to fashion you a porch. He knew about sockets and window frames and knobs for your doors, and could pour cement and choose patterned curtains with equal ease. He had proved his varied talents time and again, the length and breadth of all the island. As a result, in addition to a heap of rainbow bills at the Savings Bank in town, Fred had firsthand knowledge of every islander’s bathroom tiles and kitchen door.

On the morning that found Raoul variable-hunting on Edda’s beach, after his night’s rest in the soft, green brush a stone’s throw from the edge of the sea, Fred Nettles was at the height of his career. Not a cabinet was hinged without his approval, not a crocus positioned without his say. He knew who had indoor plumbing and who had electric lights, which islanders could afford expensive window-glass, and which ones managed with no window-glass at all. So when Raoul found the clue that he did, it was to Fred that he would turn for help.

Under the full moon, Raoul had passed that night on Edda’s beach trekking barefoot from dream to dream in search of answers to the riddles riddling his life. There seemed to be more of them every day, one wrapped around the one before, like the icy flakes he layered into snowballs once so long ago with Emma Patrice. His riddles had grown too big to manage, and the core of the matter had gotten lost in the slush. The core, of course, was me, though my story had become packed in pineapples and variables and binoculars that banged against the buttons on Raoul’s favorite shirt.

In his dreams Raoul revisited the riddles. He moved from one to the next as if swimming through the cruel, thick snow that had smothered and stolen his missing wife. He saw my mother holding me, my mouth suckling her breast, my skin new and white against the dark of Edda’s, new and white but for the halfhearted mark on one cheek. He saw the blood in my eyes, blood that should have been his own but wasn’t. How could it possibly be? Was I testament perhaps to some secret in Raoul’s own far genealogical past? Or was I a lie, testament to some far more recent treachery?

Raoul wondered and wandered and by night he came upon the puzzling faces that plagued his mind by day: Wilbur’s, blank and unquestioning, full of love and devoid of suspicion, his eyes blind to the appearance of a daughter no one would ever believe belonged to him, his ears deaf to the whispered gossip that swelled into a merciless roar and made Raoul cry out in his sleep; and Gustave’s, complacent and resolute, marred by the same scar as mine, while he denied any hand in my creation. It was as if the two men were in cahoots, Wilbur and Gustave, feigning a common ignorance, a common indifference, the sole purpose of which was to drive Raoul raving mad.

As Raoul slept, the wind seduced and twisted the leaves. They shuddered into a cold breath that blew on Raoul’s naked forearms and on his feet. He shivered and in his dreams the blinding flakes of snow enveloped him. Visions succeeded one another with rapidity, the rapidity, Raoul thought, of imminent death, the proverbial flashing of life before one’s dying eyes. Before he could focus on any single vision it was wiped away, obliterated into whiteness and then replaced by another equally elusive reminder of the troubles he was leaving behind.

If only he really
could
leave them behind! Raoul wasn’t dying and even in his nightmarish state he knew as much. Though he lay unable to muster the strength of body and will to shake himself awake and crack the dream’s cocoon, he recognized somehow its wrappings around his mind. It wasn’t death that lurked imminent on Edda’s beach, not the end of Raoul’s life, but maybe the end of his sanity, a prospect he feared far more.

Raoul swam and thrashed and through chattering teeth he struggled to call out to the silhouette of Mr. Stan Kalpi, black against the colorless snow, his darkness wrapped in white until only the white was visible. The Mr. Stan Kalpi whose variables had fallen into place, whose mandolin-guitar strummed the music of his once-unknown birth. Raoul looked to Mr. Stan for guidance, grabbed at his heels that he might rescue Raoul from the cold heavy water that froze around him. But Mr. Stan was gone.

In his place, Raoul saw green-gold patches of pineapple and then Gustave’s face once more, still unwilling to reveal what magic, if any, it hid. In Raoul’s dreams the crops vanished and like them his plans, too, seemed to disappear, useless and vain, his plans to find variables that would implicate Gustave, plans to blackmail him, plans to get the truth from Gustave about little Almondine.

Almondine! Raoul had scraped away the frozen layers and found himself at the core of the matter once more, but how muddled and cold!

Then Gustave was there again, denying Almondine, denying the magic that made her, touting the magic that swept away the fruits of the green-gold acres, more acres every day and Raoul less and less poised to discover the truth, to ever unblur the mingling of magic and mundane.

The moon watched over Raoul’s fitful repose, splashing her light on his curled body and following him on his journey that not even sleep could still. She was worried, the moon was. If Raoul’s wits slipped away from him and into the still, dark night, then who would be left to unearth the truth? Who would discover the seed she had planted, or unfurl the leaf she had sewn of stolen sides? No other islander would be as anxious as Raoul to make sure certain mysteries were solved. What pleasure in trickery if trickery is never unveiled? To what end the moon’s magic, if not to relish the islanders’ defeat? To revel in their realization that they’ve realized nothing at all?

So for now the moon retired, relinquishing Raoul to the charge of the new sun. The leaves stopped their shuddering and withdrew their cold breath. Raoul’s body stopped its shivering. As the sun warmed his skin, the snow of his dreams melted and pooled, and then it was gone, evaporated.

Raoul woke and despite the restless night he had passed in the moon’s care, he felt calm and pleased, a marathoner who at the finish is worn but proud. He stood and dusted the grass from the front of his trousers and stretched his arms high in the air to call to attention the tightened muscles of his back. He rubbed his eyes, and looked out at the sea, calm and brilliant in the early sun. Raoul saw what promised to be a perfect day.

The morning was quiet and soothing, the beach deserted but for a sniffing stray dog and a clump of three enormous spindly palms, the scene spectacular in its barrenness and geometric in its beauty. The sand was a flat white plane that bordered another of wet turquoise, both ending in triangle points where Raoul’s line of vision ended. Triangles of climbing green hillside and light blue sky intervened at the same distant point toward which the dog’s lolloping rhomboid body made its way. Nearer to Raoul, the palms bent at angles of 65, maybe 70, degrees, adjusted by the gentle wind, their bushy heads points on a vast, invisible graph. “So simple,” Raoul breathed.

Raoul knew something of geometry. He had devoted more than one Tuesday to it some years ago, back when in his mind I was not yet even a fantasy and Stan Kalpi was little more than a well-crafted one. The purity of the shapes had always fascinated Raoul, their naked simplicity and the basic tenets that governed their existence, their variation, their cohabitation. He stared at the rippling plane before him and looked at his feet in the sand. Sunk down into it up to his ankles he was nothing but a line, half a right angle on the plane that was Oh itself, which in turn was but a dot on the circumference of the earth.

“So simple,” Raoul breathed again, looking at his feet and observing his position amidst the immensities of the universe: light, air, water, life. Suddenly the mathematics of Mr. Stan Kalpi were clear. Why, it was all a question of perspective! Of knowing when and how to fit the variables into the bigger picture. Raoul had been going about it all wrong, focusing on the minutia. He paced up and down the sandy beach, tapping his index finger against his chin, elaborating aloud a mathematical proof that would have made even Mr. Stan proud. The minutia still mattered, of course (
don’t let’s forget that Raoul was a philosopher of the plain-as noses-on-faces school), but perspective mattered, too. The perspective that turned a plane into a triangle, that reduced the world to simple, mathematical absolutes. Standing on Edda’s beach that day, Raoul felt as if he were an absolute himself, in tune with the other absolutes of the island, in perfect harmony with the songs on the wind.

Even as he formulated his thoughts, Raoul wasn’t quite certain that he understood them all. The variables would fall in line, this he now realized, for they were governed by rules that were timeless and pure. But they implied a philosophical adjustment on his part, an element of the abstract, of faith, that he decided he would have to allow. Raoul was heartened by this new discovery, the details of which he’d have been hard-pressed to put into words (had you asked him), and ran from the sandy shore to the mango tree in the soft, green brush to gather up his belongings and go home. A new reading of Mr. Stan’s story was in order, in light of Raoul’s new realization about the mathematical-musical order of things.

Illuminated in the sun, their lenses starbursts and mirrors, Raoul’s oversized camera, his binoculars, and his magnifying glass struck him as artifacts from an earlier time, though only the night before he had been unable to part with them at Wilbur’s. In a fit of giddiness he grabbed them up and dashed to the sea, prepared to hurl them into the rippling waves in a grand, symbolic gesture. But at the last Raoul changed his mind. Faith was one thing, foolhardiness another. Not only had the costly equipment been requisitioned from the Office of Customs and Excise, which would have demanded reimbursement, but—more importantly—it might be wiser to keep the gossiping islanders thinking him mad. Yes, definitely wiser. Which is why later that same day at the Belly, though
he was feeling almost lighthearted and though he yearned to join Bang on tambourine, Raoul had hidden his hopes from his friends. And rightly so. For though things had taken a turn for the better, they were still far from sorted out.

In full regalia then (barefoot with camera and binoculars around his neck), Raoul hiked up his trousers and stepped from the sea’s edge, about to turn away from it, and stopped. Something in the sand just below the water’s surface caught his eye. An arithmetic error? The solution’s next logical step? Raoul moved closer. He bent to meet the sand, nearly dunking his paraphernalia into the tide. Just in time he clasped the lanyards in his left hand, and with his right he fished around in the shallow water. The tide ebbed and flowed, invading and retreating, its foamy edges distorting Raoul’s view and drowning his boon. His fingers dug deeper. When they finally closed themselves around the object Raoul hoped he was seeking, he pulled his hand from the water. The rising sun played tricks on his eyes. His fingers appeared to hold a rainbow tinged in blood.

Raoul closed his right eye and looked with his left, then he tried it the other way round. Finally he turned his back on the morning rays and in the shade of his body the vision was clearer. Not a rainbow, exactly, but a prism of sorts. Had Raoul happened upon a crystal washed up from the bottom of the sea, or carried to Oh from some distant land, a gift of splendor and light from a mermaid or a muse? As Raoul examined his hand more closely, he realized he was cut. His blood drizzled over the sharp edge of what was in fact nothing more than a broken chunk of glass whose bevels split the sun into a painter’s palette. He saw that now. He saw it very clearly.

“Bloody...!” Raoul cursed. Still holding the glass, he rinsed his hand quickly in the stinging water and held the dripping piece up to the sun. With every tilt it spilled another rainbow into the sea.
“Fantastic,” he whispered, dazed that an object of such beauty could cause him so much pain. Raoul stuffed the wet prism into his pocket, delighting in his ache, and squeezed his fingers into his palm to stop the bleeding.