Away with the Fishes Read online

  Ms. Lila had decided the house could do with some brightening up while they were at it, and so she had chosen, to replace the pale yellow of its exterior, a vibrant, cheerful pink. From among the rainbow of offerings at Higgins Hardware, Home, and Garden, she had purchased what the salesman called “Playful Rose,” and had had big tins of it delivered. For the shutters and sills, she bought “Coconut Cloud.”

  Because Ms. Lila generally demanded little, and because Raoul had learned early on what unhappy wives were capable of, he heaved a nostalgic sigh for the pages that would remain unread that day, put the kettle on, and fetched some tattered trousers and a worn-out shirt. In a corner of the yard, under an almond tree, he laid out his implements and paint tins, then he ducked back inside to sip his tea. His stomach would require more sustenance than that, but he would work for two or three hours first, then break for an early lunch.

  As the sun climbed, Raoul scraped and sanded and stirred and got one whole wall completely covered in the bright, playful hue. He stood back to admire his work, guessing by the sun’s position that noon had come and gone, and rubbing his grumbling tummy, told himself he had earned some bread and cheese. He was delighted to discover that Ms. Lila, who really was a good sport, had instead left him breaded fish for lunch, which he put between two slices of her homemade bread, chasing it with warm mango and cold beer.

  His belly full, Raoul went back outside just before two o’clock. The first pink wall dried in the sun as he made his way past it and on to the next one. When he rounded the corner of the cottage, so engrossed was he in evaluating the morning’s work that he failed to see a paintbrush lying in his path and trod on it. It sent him stumbling off balance, and he fell.

  “How the devil did that get there?” he wondered, certain he had not left any brushes lying about, especially not ones still dripping with paint.

  “What in the…?” His train of thought, and the words it dragged behind it, stalled as Raoul caught sight of the yellow wall he was about to attend to. It appeared to be marred by some sort of bright pink graffiti. He looked around, but could see no mischievous youths running off, could hear no taunts and giggles from the bush behind his house. He leaned back and took in the marking on the wall. It was hastily painted and running and drippy. It seemed to say FIND A BAKER. Why would someone tell him to do that? Raoul had plenty of home-baked bread. And why with Playful Rose on a faded yellow wall?

  He got up off the ground and backed away to take in the whole of the words. The spacing between the letters was uneven and sloppy, as were some of the letters themselves, but none of the readings he imposed on them made any more sense than FIND A BAKER.

  “Stupid kids,” Raoul spat, sure that the words must be a reference to some silly teenage joke or some carnival song that eluded him. He would go on with his work and not give it another thought. Then he wondered, Should he paint over it? Might he be destroying evidence? Although he couldn’t answer when he asked himself “Evidence of what?” Raoul decided to skip the second of the cottage’s four sides and to go straight on to the third. Perhaps later his wife would see some sense in the writing on the wall.

  Raoul hummed as he worked, scraping and smoothing the wood before him, but he couldn’t resist the urge to peer around the corner every so often, to see if the strange graffito was still there, and whether viewing it anew might yield any insight. He finally grew so preoccupied that he abandoned his work to search the immediate vicinity for clues.

  He examined more closely the paint tins that stood under the almond tree and discovered behind one of them a small spill, into which someone—the vandal, presumably—had stepped. Not fully, not enough to leave behind proper footprints, but enough to leave a series of pink smears leading away from the yard. Raoul ran inside for his magnifying glass, but it was of no help in determining what sort of shoe or what sort of foot was attached to the guilty party. He followed the smears for as long as he could, but they gradually faded into nothing, the culprit’s heel wiped clean by the woodsy brush surrounding the cottage.

  “Hmm,” Raoul said. He had come to the end of his property and found himself on the edge of the road parallel to his. He looked left, and he looked right, and he looked through his magnifying glass, which he held up to eye level, expecting to see heaven-knew-what sort of clue in thin air, but to no avail. He turned and made his retreat. It was nearly evening, and Ms. Lila would soon be home.

  While Raoul walked, he wondered who could have painted such a silly message on his house. He turned the strange rosy words over and over in his head, dismissing them in one instant, and theorizing about them in the next. Despite his wonderings and theories, when he got back to the cottage, the pink fly that would knock against Raoul’s brain later that night was still nothing more than a niggling gnat. It niggled sufficiently, however, to drive Raoul just a little bit mad. Mad enough that, without waiting to hear what Ms. Lila might make of the day’s events, he had put away his paint and brushes, spruced himself up, and gone to the bakery to look for the baker.

  Alone there with Trevor and Branson (at the end of the night that had witnessed the debate about the love-starved fisherman), Raoul looked on from a few feet away as the two friends, under a bulb that hung bright and naked over the smudged glass counter, snacked on fresh, steamy bread with butter, and ice-cold ginger beer. (Raoul had declined a portion.)

  “This is it, you know, Bran,” Trevor said, flatly tapping the folded newspaper with the lonely hearts ad against the counter’s edge.

  “What is?” Raoul asked anxiously.

  But before Trevor could answer that Oh was waking up, before he could explain to Raoul that the island was stretching and twisting and about to jump out of its bed, the wind, which had for months sat quietly in the yard and listened to their chatter, forced its way through the window with such violence that the lightbulb swung and crashed into the ceiling. In the new and sudden darkness, Raoul heard Trevor move and chuckle, crushing with his trainers the bits of bulb that littered the floor. Raoul couldn’t see him but knew that Trevor was shaking his head, in relief and resignation.

  “This is it,” Trevor’s bodiless voice pronounced again in the darkness. “At last.”

  4

  Perhaps I wasn’t perfectly accurate before when I said that Trevor announced the end of Oh’s tantrum over bread, beer, and a pair of lonely hearts. A pair of lonely hearts was to be involved soon enough, that’s true. On that night, however, the second heart, which would presumably pedal its way into their lives, had yet to come forward and identify itself. Even the first remained a mystery, but at least they were certain of its existence. It wrote messages, and stuffed them with money into envelopes to slip under newspaper-office doors.

  The identity of this mysterious and questing heart was cause for such speculation, it may well be that the frenzy of the islanders’ conjecture is what finally awoke the wind, which in turn stirred the clouds into rain.

  “I’ll bet you this package of plantains in my hand it was Neal from the valley who placed that ad!”

  This pronouncement came from Officer Arnold Tullsey, who, together with Officer Joshua Smart, represented the cream of the island police force and of the law-enforcement football club (striker and goalkeeper, respectively). The pair of them were headed home on Dodger Bent’s bus, which careened around the corners and up the hill to the village of Thyme, where both of them lived.

  “You know Neal from the valley,” Arnold continued, “always alone down there with his chickens and his dogs. How else could he find himself a nice lady?”

  “Neal? Nah,” Dodger disagreed as he drove, glancing at Arnold in the rearview mirror. “It couldn’t be Neal. The man said he had a boat. It has to be a fisherman. Someone who lives by the beach.”

  “What, you never heard of anyone from the valley going fishing?” objected Jarvis Coutrelle, conductor and change-maker on Dodger’s bus. “Could be someone from the country, too. Lots of men move of a morning to fish, and keep a boat anchored at
the shore.”

  “I don’t think Neal owns a fishing boat,” Joshua Smart said matter-of-factly.

  “Whoever he is, why would he want a woman with a bike?” Dodger asked no one in particular.

  “Could be that waiter from Val-de-Trop,” suggested Joshua. “You know the one. With the green and white boat he’s always repainting?”

  “He does more painting than fishing with that boat,” Jarvis remarked as he counted up the coins he and Dodger had collected over the course of the day.

  “In truth, I’ve only ever seen that boat up on the beach. Not once in the water!” Arnold confirmed, and all four of them laughed at the waiter’s expense.

  “I still think it’s Neal from the valley,” Arnold insisted.

  “Nah. No way it’s Neal,” Dodger repeated.

  “I say it’s the waiter,” Joshua said. “What’s his name?”

  Before anyone could advance an answer, without warning, Dodger jerked the minibus to a stop in the middle of the road.

  “Why are you stopping?” Arnold asked.

  “Is it Alain Gilbert?” Joshua wondered aloud.

  “In the road?” Arnold asked.

  “No, his name,” Joshua said, so stuck in their discussion that he hadn’t noticed Dodger stopped-dead. “The name of the waiter from Val-de-Trop, is it Alain Gilbert?”

  “That’s a tree!” Dodger cried.

  “They named a tree Alain Gilbert?” Arnold asked, confused.

  “No! There’s a tree across the road,” Jarvis explained, standing up and peering through the windscreen.

  “Oh.” (Arnold.)

  “Ah.” (Joshua.)

  “Mm.” (Dodger.)

  Dodger and Jarvis found themselves still two miles away from Thyme, with their two police passengers and a good part of the road blocked by a downed breadfruit tree. The battered breadfruit was apparently the work of the violent wind and rain, which had begun to knock against the windows of the bus somewhere between Neal’s chickens and the waiter’s painted boat.

  Dodger put the bus in reverse, intent on winding his way down the hillside until he found an alternate route to climb back up. His first backward maneuvers were met with such frightful squeals from the policemen on board, however, that Jarvis forced him to stop. Officers Arnold and Joshua, in an effort to reclaim some authority, jumped out of the bus then with official urgency, examined the road, and determined that Dodger had just the space he needed to inch the vehicle forward between the tip of the heavy, fallen tree and the two-foot ditch on the road’s edge.

  “Are you mad?” Dodger said to them. “I can’t fit through there.”

  “You can, I tell you!” Joshua insisted.

  “We’ll direct you,” Arnold said.

  They did, and he couldn’t. About thirty seconds later the bus was stuck, its front wheel sunken into the sewage ditch.

  “Well, that’s that,” Arnold announced. Resigned to a rainy walk home, and unable to do anything more for Dodger or Jarvis, he reached inside the bus, collected his package of plantains and covered his head with it. While Joshua did the same, his own improvised raingear a discarded plastic bag that had fluttered through the bus the whole trip, a pair of headlights pulled up on the other side of the fallen tree and shined into the face of Dodger’s vehicle. As luck or the awakening island magic would have it, Randolph Rouge was just then coming down the mountain in his bread truck, having finished his deliveries to the tiny shops scattered atop the hill. Randolph, Trevor’s son, was as small-statured and as big-natured as his father; he offered to carry the officers up to Thyme, and Jarvis into town. Dodger could stay with the minibus until Jarvis returned with a tow truck, which Randolph would help him fetch after the policemen had been sorted out.

  Randolph’s truck was smaller than the minivan-bus, and he moved it agilely, so it took but a few seconds before he was facing in the right direction, Dodger’s minibus at his back. Jarvis got in next to Randolph, and Arnold and Joshua made do inside the truck’s empty and seatless back half. When the flour-dusted officers had been safely deposited in Thyme, Jarvis and Randolph went back down the mountain’s other side, a loud calypso marathon blaring from the radio.

  “Who you think we can find to pull out Dodger’s bus at this hour?” Jarvis asked. It was close to ten o’clock by then.

  “My uncle will do it,” Randolph said, bouncing his shoulders up and down in time to the music. “We’ll go back to the bakery and call him from there.”

  So apart from the mystery of the lonely hearts ad, the night’s problems had worked themselves out. Dodger’s passengers were home and mostly dry. The night’s deliveries were made. The rain was slowing down. Randolph’s uncle would rescue Dodger’s minibus before too much longer.

  Randolph liked it when things fell into place, and if they did so to calypso rhythm, why, then all the better. These were his thoughts as he happily tapped the steering wheel and followed the curves down and into Port-St. Luke.

  But Oh was just waking up, remember. Just stretching and twisting and about to jump out of its bed. The wind had stirred, and stirred up the rain in turn. I’m sure that calypso beat only inspired the island’s antics. Suddenly everything stilled and the moon shone bright on Randolph’s and Jarvis’s path. It shone on the asphalt, where there was any, and on the puddles where the road was rough and torn. On the unmoving leaves, the shiny wet trunks of the trees that had withstood the just-finished storm—and on the bent and mangled remains of a bicycle that Randolph slammed on the brakes to avoid.

  The two men looked at each other, then both jumped out of the bread truck and rushed to survey what they assumed to be the remnants of some terrible accident. The bicycle was nearly crushed, but they found no blood or clothing or shoes or any other piece of evidence to indicate that the rider had been thrown or harmed. They checked the ditches and the woods in the general vicinity, even going so far as to knock on doors and to ask if anyone had seen or heard what happened. No one saw or heard anything, no one seemed to be missing, and no one had ever seen a bicycle like the one that lay in the middle of the road.

  This last part is what’s most unusual, for on Oh it’s impossible to own something without your neighbors knowing. Equally impossible is it to avoid loaning out that very same thing to any neighbor who should ask. A bicycle was a commodity that would not have gone overlooked. Randolph decided to put the bike in the truck and to take it back to the bakery, where his father would surely know what to do about it.

  “Looks like a lady’s bike, doesn’t it?” Jarvis observed, as they picked it up from the road. Randolph didn’t answer, and on the way home he kept the radio off.

  And there, at home, at Trevor’s Bakery in Port-St. Luke, the second bit of the story joins the first. Branson and Trevor were still sipping ginger beer (Trevor had replaced the bulb by then) and Raoul was trying not to think about what he had decided not to think about, when the boys arrived and told their tale in all its particulars: Neal and the waiter from Val-de-Trop, the toppled breadfruit, and the bicycle abandoned in the road. Had Randolph and Jarvis happened upon evidence of the second, bicycle-owning lonely heart? Trevor shook his head again and smiled wide and bright.

  “Ho ho,” he said. “This is it. This is really it.”

  Raoul didn’t answer, but under his breath he cursed the madding gnat that had sent him to find the baker.

  5

  Some little bit of madness is intrinsic to life on Oh. To life on any island—and I’ve visited many—but on Oh especially. For one thing, you can most easily and literally find yourself running in circles on an island. Worse, your circular jog will carry you endlessly past every monument to your troubles: past the ravine where you twisted your ankle, up the hill where you were butted by a goat, down the lane where your wife cheated on you with a man half your size. Of course the monuments to your success will always be there, too, the cricket pitch where you scored a half-century and the mango tree where you tasted true love. While it’s good, even wise, to il
lumine your course with the flashlight of the past, you may find its beam falls too easily on familiar pitfalls, too readily on roads best traveled. You might ignore an unexpected gulley and stumble, or overlook a lush but untried path.

  On Oh, this running in circles and in the subjective rays of your own history, maddening enough on its own, is exacerbated by the island’s capricious terrain. A wink from the moon, and clouds unleash terrific storms, turning ditches into rivers overnight. A sneeze from the sun, and the frangipani’s blooms triple, blocking your view and choking you with their powerful perfume. A loud and angry wind will blow the leaves off of every last tree, and there won’t be a patch of shade for miles. The assaults to your sanity and your senses are quite thorough.

  Which is why, to cope, most of the islanders on Oh choose to see, hear, smell, taste, and feel things not as they are, but as they wish them to be. Flooded river banks? Just a generous Oh throwing its plentiful fish right up on the grassy shores. Vicious sunlight? Why, the better for the islanders’ deep mocha complexion. Believe you me, spend enough time on Oh, and you will convince yourself that the weeds are the sweetest of roses, and a traitor your very best friend. Here denial and delusion are as soothing as tea and fresh scones.

  6

  An abandoned and mangled bicycle was as newsworthy as it got, all the more so in light of the anonymous lonely heart who sought a bicycled mate. Trevor couldn’t possibly have known what complications the island was cooking up just then, nor could he guess that Bruce would be the finishing touch, the cherry on the waking island’s cake.