Lights Out

“Stalking another one.”

Her gaze slid down to his chest, moved back up. “You made me lose the ball.”

“It’s the pig’s fault.”

“You could help me find it. It’s my last one.”

Eddie hefted the animal off his shoulders and laid it on the side of the court. They walked around the backboard, into a thicket of sea grapes and low bushes. No ball in sight. Eddie raised a branch to search the undergrowth, pricking his hand on a thorn. The bugs, the thorns, the heat-Muskets and Doubloons had left all that out.

“Forget it,” said Mandy. “There might be balls in the shed.”

The shed stood at the end of a short path that began on the far side of the court. It had a window glazed with cobwebs and a doorway with hinges but no door. Mandy walked ahead, her sweaty T-shirt and shorts clinging to her body. Her calves, like JFK’s, bunched and lengthened with every step, but Eddie couldn’t watch them in the same detached way. He felt a tightness in his chest that had nothing to do with the heat.

They went inside, out of the sun now, but Eddie felt no cooler. At first he couldn’t see anything. He could hear Mandy breathing close by, and smell her too: fresh sweat, in no way repellent. His eyes adjusted to the darkness. The shed had an earthen floor; there was a heavy steel roller in one corner, a wheelbarrow and a mound of red clay in the other. On the walls hung wide brushes and wooden tennis rackets, warped in a way that reminded him of a bent pocket-watch in a painting he had seen somewhere.

“Don’t see any,” he said.

“No?”

There was a silence. Then her hand was between his legs, soft and gentle, but there. Eddie had had a few girlfriends, but none of them had ever reached for him quite like that, not even after they’d been going together for months.

No one said a word. Their mouths came together. They began to make a little world for themselves where the elements-their bodies, their sweat, pig blood-were hot and wet. It was a world dominated by rhythm but quiet, where sounds were moist and speech was monosyllabic and unrehearsed; a world full of irresistible animal smells. Eddie didn’t resist. He sank down with Mandy on the mound of red clay.

After, they just lay there, bodies together but minds drifting apart. Their minds had to be drifting apart, because Eddie was thinking about Muskets and Doubloons, and how could she have read it? Today was a day for learning how much it had omitted about tropic isles. Then Mandy said, “I knew it would be like this,” and Eddie thought that maybe their minds hadn’t diverged very much after all: they were both thinking about what had happened and that it was good. He was trying to think of a way to convey this to her, to tell her about Muskets and Doubloons and maybe even other things from his childhood, when there was a tremendous boom in the sky, followed by the screaming of a low-flying jet.

“Jets can’t land here, can they?” Eddie said.

“They’d better, nature boy,” said Mandy. “That’s the money man.”

8

The wild boar, now minus its coarse hair and internal organs, turned on a battery- powered spit over a driftwood beach fire. JFK basted it with a paintbrush he dipped into a kettle of lava-colored liquid. His hands were long and delicate. Eddie stood beside him, tossing wood on the fire whenever JFK gave the signal. JFK was singing under his breath.

Gonna get some goombay goombay lovin’

Gonna find a goombay goombay girl.

Over the flames and across the beach, Eddie could see the dinner party, sitting in the thatch-roofed bar. They looked good, all fresh tans and white cotton, linen, silk. The dinner party: Packer, Evelyn, Jack; and Mr. and Mrs. Trimble, moneyman and wife. Their voices carried in the still air.

Packer said: “You’ve never seen it?”

Mrs. Trimble said: “No, but I’m looking forward to it, aren’t you, Perry?”

Mr. Trimble replied inaudibly.

Packer said: “You’ve come to the right place, Mrs. T.” He refilled their glasses from a chilled pitcher of planter’s punch.

“They be talking about the green flash,” JFK said to Eddie. “Biggest lie in the islands. Bigger than we gonna have jobs for everybody or I won’t come in your mouth, baby.”

“There’s no green flash?”

“I be raised in this country, man. Seen so many sunsets to make me sick. But never not one time the notorious green flash.”

The sun set. Colors appeared and disappeared, but there was no flash, green or otherwise, not that Eddie saw. He heard Packer.

“There! Right then! Did you see it?” He was on the steps of the bar, gesturing with his cocktail glass. Planter’s punch slopped over the side, staining his white trousers; he didn’t seem to notice.

“I–I think I did,” said Mrs. Trimble, standing beside him. “I certainly saw something.” She turned to her husband, watching behind them. Mr. Trimble: tall, beaky nose, concave chest, crewcut. “Did you, Perry?”

Mr. Trimble shook his head.

“Oh, come on now, Mr. T,” said Packer. “Right there-” He pointed and slopped again. “As plain as the …”

Evelyn appeared. “I don’t think so, Brad.” Her voice was cold. “Not tonight.”

“Jesus Christ, Ev, what do you-”

She cut him off. “Why don’t you freshen our drinks, Brad.”

“No more for me, thank you,” said Mr. Trimble. He came down off the steps, over to the fire.

“Hello, gentlemen,” he said. “Perry Trimble.”

They shook hands with him, identified themselves.

“JFK,” Trimble said. “An interesting name.”

“That be my first name only,” said JFK.

“And your last name?” asked Trimble.

“Never be usin’ it,” said JFK, and turned to baste the pig.

Trimble gazed at it. Overhead the sky was darkening quickly; the reflection of the fire danced in the lenses of Trimble’s thick glasses. “Pig, I believe.”

“Wild boar,” said JFK. “Last of the big-game animals found in these islands. Ceptin’ for in the water, of course. Down there we got more creatures than my wife got excuses.”

“You’re married?” said Eddie.

“Formerly,” JFK replied, his eyes blank. “In the distant long long time ago.”

Trimble was still examining the pig. “You don’t mean to tell me someone shot it, do you?”

“Sure I do,” said JFK. “Ernesto Hemingway himself the great white hunter came to this very Galleon Beach fish camp to hunt the wild boar.”

“But this particular pig. Did someone shoot it?”

“The boss. He did shoot it. Mr. Packer he a sportsman, and a dead shot with the three-oh-three.”

“I don’t call that sport.”

“No?” said JFK. “What you be callin’ it then?”

“Butchery.”

JFK laughed. “Butchery be my job, man. Don’t need no three-oh-three for that. Just a cutlass and a dog to lick up all the lickins.” Still laughing, he dipped the brush in the kettle and swabbed lava-colored baste on the glistening carcass. The baste smelled of onions, garlic, pineapple, and something sweet and smokey that Eddie couldn’t identify. He was going to ask what it was when he noticed that Trimble was staring at him; at least, the twin reflections of the fire were angled his way.