“A little fridge out here wouldn’t be a bad idea,” he said. “Just one of them little ones, like he got out in the greenhouse. Plug it up right there…”
“Talk, man. Stop going on about a fridge.”
“Wouldn’t you like a little cold beer or chilled wine from time to time?”
“Cold beer?” She looked at him in amazement. “That country ruined you, man. Stop fooling with me. Where did you see him?”
“In the window. Her window.” He took the chicken head and feet from his shirt and wrapped them in newspaper.
“Doing what?”
“Looking. Just looking. A sheet or something wrapped around him, but bare naked on top.”
“Did he see you see him?”
“No. Don’t think so. I pretended I was taking off my cap to scratch my head and looking off up in the trees.”
“He didn’t do anything? Move?”
“Nope. Just looked around. Then I turned and walked back away.”
“Alone? Was she with him?”
“Can’t say. But it was in her room. Get what I mean? And I saw her up there before naked as a worm when I was fixing to put up the tree. She jumped back, but didn’t do no good. She don’t know I got eyes in the top of my head. Then next, about a hour or so later, there he was. Naked too, almost. Just a piece of white stuff around his waist. You reckon they got it on?” He had stopped trying to appear uninterested and was openly enjoying the possibilities.
“I told you!” said Thérèse. “He’s a horseman come down here to get her. He was just skulking around waiting for his chance.”
“Maybe. Maybe.” Gideon looked at her milky eyes. “You damn near blind, but I have to hand it to you. Some things you see better than me. Otherwise why would a big strong-looking man be hiding round here like that? Why this house all the time? Why not over the other side, or up the road where those Filipinos are? He must have been looking for somebody specific.”
“The chippy. The fast-ass,” said Thérèse. “That’s why he went straight up to her room. Because he knew she was here, he saw her from the hills. Maybe he’ll run her out of here.”
“Back to the States, eh?”
“Or France even. Where that big box came from. Maybe he’s not a rider. Maybe he’s an old boyfriend and he the one sent her the box, Gideon.”
“Hold on. You going wild.”
“And machete-hair she don’t like it. Tried to keep them apart. But it didn’t work. He find her, swim the whole ocean big, till he find her, eh? Make machete-hair too mad. Now she tell her bow-tie husband…” Thérèse sat on the wooden chair and rocked in the telling, pressing her fingers into Gideon’s shoulder as each new sequence presented itself to her. “Bow-tie get mad very. ’Cause he lives near machete-hair’s thumb…” The more she invented the more she rocked and the more she rocked the more her English crumbled till finally it became dust in her mouth stopping the flow of her imagination and she spat it out altogether and let the story shimmer through the clear cascade of the French of Dominique.
Gideon couldn’t stop her, so he tried to gulp coffee while warding off the jabs to his shoulder. When she abandoned English he stopped listening for it was in French that she had tricked him into leaving the States after twenty years and coming back to Dominique to handle family property. So he shut his ears and tried to finish his coffee submitting to the shoulder jabs out of deference to her because she was his mother’s baby sister and because of a grudging respect for her magic breasts and because she had been able to trick him (of all people) with thirty-four letters in fifteen years, begging him to come home and take care of the property by which she must have meant herself because when he got there that’s all there was left: no land, no hills of coffee bush. Just Thérèse, two years his senior, and a cement house whose roof had to be put back on after every hurricane which meant four times a year. When he looked at the house—one of a dozen scattered over the emerald hill—and discovered that the 130 arpents he’d remembered from his childhood belonged, like the emerald hills, to the Frenchman who lived in Guadeloupe and that except for the kitchen garden and the village garden on the riverbank there was no land to care for, only this laughing, lying crone with a craving for apples, he wasn’t even angry. Just amazed that he had believed those thirty-four letters written in perfect French by the priest at first and then by an acolyte describing the burden of managing so much property, too much for an old lady who nevertheless always thought of a way to get a ten-dollar money order out of him, and asking over and over again to make sure he brought apples when he came or to send them, and if he would let her know when that would be she would alert a friend at customs because apples were contraband and could not be imported into Dominique which was true because only French-grown fruit and vegetables could arrive at that port or be sold in the stores. And ships unloaded wilted lettuce, thin rusty beans and pithy carrots every month. A hardship for the rich and the middle class, neither of whom would consider working a kitchen garden (except, of course, the American, who made it a hobby) and were dependent on the market but it was of no consequence to the poor who ate splendidly from their gardens, from the sea and from the avocado trees that grew by the side of the road. Only Thérèse had tasted apples once when she was seven and again when she was thirty-five and had a craving for them akin to hysteria. When Gideon appeared in 1973 with twelve apples hidden in the lining of his electric blue leisure suit which Thérèse’s friends at customs noticed—but for two dollars U.S. ignored—her gratitude was so complete he didn’t get on the next plane back as he threatened. After all he hadn’t left much: just U.S. citizenship, the advantage of which was the ability to send an occasional ten-dollar money order, buy a leisure suit and watch TV. Most of the friends of his youth had emigrated to France, but the stories of their lives there were so heartbreaking, he’d chosen Quebec instead although he had to wait until he was twenty-two for a visa and then he arrived in the coat pocket so to speak of a Canadian farmer. And two years later, by much subterfuge (including marriage to an American Negro) got into the States where money orders, leisure suits and TV abounded. Now that he’d come back what was there to do but build a new roof after each hurricane, find a little work, and wait for carnival? At first he was ashamed before his family and friends. Just as Thérèse had lied to him, so had he lied to her about the wealth he had accumulated in the States. Now there he was for all the world to see building another temporary roof, looking for tourist tips, eying women at the bars—just like before. With no suitcase of American dollars. Just twelve apples and a leisure suit. Humiliating. Who but an ass would go back to Dominique with no more than what he had when he left? Those who wished desperately to come back (from France, Quebec, New York City or wherever) could not, would not, unless they were accompanied by the college certificates or money they had gone to find. He spoke English very well, however, and that could have been something of an asset on the island, but at his age with no certificate and out of touch with friends who could make a way for him he could not carry luggage at the airlines, or wait tables at the Old Queen. So he drifted to the docks for a few days’ work or got a lucky day collecting fares for a taxi man until, finally, all of his forty years of immigrant labor paid off when an American who owned a house on Isle des Chevaliers came to stay and needed a regular handyman/gardener with boat skills, English and a manner less haughty than that of the local Blacks. For in spite of the fact that they built their houses four times a year the natives of Dominique did not hide the contempt they felt in their hearts for everybody but themselves.