Left at the Mango Tree (26 page)

Oh was always Jack’s first stop. When he arrived, two men from the Island Post pulled the sacks meant for Oh from the Government Mail Boat, while Jack bought coffee from a bar that was a window in the side of a house. He dribbled two coins into
the palm of the man seated inside and two capfuls of Killig rum into his coffee (Jack never set sail without his flask). Then while he proceeded to his remaining peregrinations, the contents of the sacks began their own. Letters were divided by village, and packages were sent to the office of Customs and Excise, which in turn dispatched notices to the lucky addressees.

With your Customs notice in hand, you could claim your package, open it for inspection, pay what duty was due and carry home your prize. So you see how a bowl of farina was needed to produce your new shortwave radio or pair of shoes.

It was according to some similar faulty logic that Raoul decided to place
again
the advert about my mother’s pregnancy. The ad would remind the islanders of Raoul’s feigned feeble mental state (by virtue of which he could behave as oddly as his investigation required), and, more importantly, he was sure it would produce a pineapple smuggler: his phony madness, he hoped, would stir pity in at least one of his cheating chums, who would be moved to confess his betrayal, to open his guilty heart to the inspection of Customs and Excise Officer Raoul, like a package with shiny new loafers inside.

When, exactly—and how—did Raoul find out that his chums were cheaters? To explain what prompted his logic and his ad (his farina, if you will), we have to get back to the airport and pick up the story from the gritty floor. The morning’s passengers were due at any minute, remember? And Raoul was running late.

He managed to get to work on time and cleaned-up, if barely, and spent the day consumed by the piece of glass in his pocket. It was a tangible tie to Gustave, of this he was sure to have confirmation from Fred Nettles the following day, and he couldn’t get it out of his head. Now perhaps even Stan Kalpi himself, forced to
wait a full 24 hours to determine a variable’s value, would have lost sight of the bigger picture, or at least of the solution’s next logical step. Heaven knows that by the time Raoul went round to see Fred Nettles the next morning on his way to work, his flies had worked themselves up into a terrific frenzy. And when Fred identified the glass! (He held it up to the light and rubbed its facets, but nothing is what it appears to be on the surface, I can assure you.)

“Sure, I know this,” Fred said. “Not too many people around here who can afford it. I just had to order some in for...what’s his name...it’s on the tip of my tongue, you know.” Fred held the broken piece to his forehead as if the information he sought might be transferred from the chunk of glass directly into his brain. “Begins with a G...”

Raoul felt like Mr. Stan Kalpi, spilled at the gates of his village on the morning after a long night’s rain. He shifted his weight from one foot to the other and back, not daring to put any words into Fred’s mouth, and stifled a smug grin.

“The Gentle contract! There you go! That’s who I ordered this for.”

“The Gentle contract?” Raoul said the words without hearing them, so deafening was the silence in his head (in utter bewilderment his flies had come to a sudden and dead halt).

“Yes. Gentle. Nat Gentle. Said he saw it over at Puymute’s and had to have it. He’s been doing some work on that cottage of his, you know. It’s starting to shape up real nice.”

If Fred Nettles said anything else after that, Raoul didn’t notice. He was busy lining up his variables, fitting them into the bigger picture that was getting uglier and uglier. What was Nat doing at Puymute’s? And why hadn’t he mentioned his recent renovations when they talked at the Belly? Raoul had gone to Fred hoping
to learn about some trouble at the plantation, hoping to incriminate Gustave, and instead he had implicated one of his very best friends.

Uglier, indeed.

But then life rarely reads as smoothly as your favorite book. That much, Raoul should have guessed. Though he longed to speak to Nat right then, to confront him with this latest variable and to exact from his friend what duty was due, it was late and there wasn’t time. The airport’s gritty floor again awaited and Raoul hurried off, wondering if he had bothered to tell Fred “thank you” for his time.

Raoul has to make his way to work, but
you
might be interested to know how Nat’s piece of glass came to be lodged in the sand on Sinner’s Cove in the first place. It was the fault of the shifty wind, the same shifty wind that Nat had on the brain last time he was at the Belly. It had kept him twisting and turning and wriggling on the beach the night before to shield his dinner of fishcakes and beer from its gusting sandy glaze, and in the process the rainbow chunk had fallen from his pocket.

Nat had just come from his cottage, where he had capped off a day of taxi-driving with a debate on the merits of frosted glass, Fred Nettles having in surplus something in a stylish and subtle green. But Nat wouldn’t crack, and in the end Fred Nettles agreed that beveled glass better suited the front door’s decoration. That Nat had a sample of Puymute’s glass to show him was sheer and innocent serendipity, of the kind fitted so perfectly into the bigger picture you can’t help but wonder how serendipitous it really is.
There had been no burglary at Puymute’s, and no kerfuffle, only the careless swing of a machete by a hearty and inebriated gardener named Bud.

As luck would have it, when Bud smashed the glass door at the manor house, Nat was there, exacting his due from Gustave, who had paid him heftily for his night’s work on the beach a few days earlier, and paid him now for his promise of more nights’ work to come. Curious Nat. He had picked up a few of the pieces and, admiring their prismatic effects, decided to install the same glass in his own front door. He took one of the chunks with him, to show Fred Nettles what to order, and so with a rainbow in one pocket and rainbow bills in the other, Nat went home. When he and Fred had finished discussing Nat’s new glass, Nat went out to get some dinner.

He ate his takeaway on the beach—with the wind—tilting his body to withstand its breezy affront, ignorant of the clue that the wind’s tricky fingers had fished from his jeans. The islanders tolerated the wind’s assault, as they did that of the tide and the noisy leaves (what choice did they have?), and though the gusts blew the salt from his food and the foam from his beer, Nat resigned himself, and settled in to enjoy the wind’s company. It blew sand in his ears to drown out his conscience and cooled the heat of his remorse.

Like a storm forgotten in the face of a rainbow, Nat’s guilt was drying up a bit more with every colored bill from Gustave that he stashed away. It dried up until all that remained was the slightest puddle, which Nat avoided by driving his cab.

Simple, that.

Things were not so simple for Raoul, who couldn’t simply drive away his troubles. For one thing, like many of the islanders, Raoul didn’t own a car. For another, neither did Mr. Stan Kalpi, whose journey to the past might have taken a different turn entirely had he set out in a noisy vehicle. He mightn’t have heard the songs on the wind, and he certainly wouldn’t have made the leaps and bounds that finally got him home. No, Raoul would have been loath to find escape behind the wheel.

Instead, he found escape at the airport. Not by plane, but by pineapple. While he worked at his typewriter, flanked and backed by wooden cratefuls of the spiny fruit, his hands completed triplicate forms and doled out sticky gifts in a manner so automatic it allowed for flights of fancy to Puymute’s, to Sinner’s Cove, to Nat’s cottage, to the Belly, and back.

If Nat had been at the manor house to collect his piece of glass, Raoul reflected, he must have gone there to see Gustave. (Puymute himself spent all
his
time in the patch. Everyone on Oh knew that.) But why would Nat ever go to see Gustave? Creepy, that’s what Nat called him. So why on earth pay him a call?

Raoul passed a pineapple to a man from Canada, who dropped it on the floor. Of course! Nat must have been dropping off a passenger when he saw Gustave’s broken glass. He must have dawdled to chat with the girl from the foyer, the one who answered the phone and sat in her sandaled feet, and serendipity had put a rainbow in his pocket. A rainbow that he lost to Sinner’s Cove. (Nat often went there to eat his dinner alone. Everyone on Oh knew that, too.) Perhaps the bigger picture wasn’t so ugly after all, Raoul surmised as he sized up a Japanese businessman’s passport. Aaah-huh-huh. And yet.

A muffled buzz hummed in Raoul’s brain, a niggling suspicion. In his mind the bigger picture was a jigsaw puzzle that he did, un-did, re-did. There were pieces missing, but what they depicted Raoul couldn’t know. Why didn’t his theory of Nat’s passenger and the sandal-footed girl, of serendipity and Sinner’s Cove convince him? He was overlooking a variable, a point on the graph, but which one? Raoul checked his watch. He wanted to smoke, but the stream of incoming passengers continued to trickle. So he continued to check and to stamp, while his buzz continued to hum.

He thought about Nat’s front door, about how spiffy the cottage would look with its new beveled glass. ‘He’s been doing some work on that cottage of his, you know,’ Fred Nettles’ words came back to him. ‘It’s starting to shape up real nice.’ Why had Raoul learned this from Fred and not from Nat himself ? Topics of conversation at the Belly weren’t terribly numerous. Surely in between cricket and signature cocktails Nat might have mentioned his refurbishments. Maybe it was meant to be a surprise? Maybe he was planning to invite them all for a little lime once the place was tidied up. Yes, that must be the reason! There could be no other to account for Nat’s secrecy.

But Raoul lacked conviction in this theory, too, and the suspicion in his brain niggled more and more. He saw exactly what was going on. He saw it very clearly. Nat had come into some money. Money for redecorating, money he kept a secret, money that must have something to do with Gustave. Raoul’s mate was in cahoots with the local smuggler.

Wasn’t he? Like the zigs and zags of the visitors arriving on Oh, Raoul’s thoughts shilly-shallied. So Nat had some extra cash. Did that naturally denote a connection to Gustave? Of course not! So Nat had passed out expensive cigars at the Belly. Did that mean
he was up to no good? Not necessarily! Still the buzz in some far niche of Raoul’s head would not be silenced. He was missing something, it said. His geometry was skewed. Raoul checked his watch again, his urge for a cigarette growing, but the watch’s old hands were reluctant to scale the Roman numerals the years had faded. Time seemed to stand still. Raoul sized up the slow-moving line before him, just a few stragglers more, and shook his head in resignation. Perhaps the shake jarred loose a cog or agitated whatever fly buzzed inside his skull, but suddenly Raoul understood. Suddenly he was back at the Belly and it was the night before, and his glass hovered in midair, suspended in time along with those of his very best friends. At the time he hadn’t been able to put his finger on it, but now, now Raoul identified the wrench in the clock’s works, the sand in the gears of his friends’ solidarity. The reason time had seemed to stand still.

Guilt.

Gentle, cautious Nat was in cahoots with the local smuggler, and the others must know something about it, too. What a fool Raoul had been!

His buzz was strong and decisive now. Not that of a fruit fly or a housefly or even a blowfly, but that of a taunted and hairy bee. Raoul had to sting or get stung, it told him. So like Jack on a farina-filled stomach pedaling straight to the Post, Raoul hurried the stragglers and stamped their forms and rushed off to place an ad for a smuggler.