Like every other collar, a tourniquet proved too unsettling to consider. I chose to stanch the blood leaking from my nose with a tissue while my sleeping six-year-old clung to Helga. A big girl, the snub-nosed, palomino-colored mutt weighed half again as much as my towheaded boy. The dog belonged to neither of us. Years of coaxing pushed our friend Mary to release her grip on Helga’s leash, conceding that the dog preferred to hang out with us and roam the bush instead of being incarcerated on Mary’s sloop, Sappho.
A boy and his dog endured as one emblem of Norman Rockwell’s vision of a utopian childhood, yet a shadow separated Rockwell’s America from Flamingo Bay. Hawkins, still in a crouch, had barely spurted from the starting blocks for his life’s sprint. Helga, with as much dignity as she could muster, hobbled toward her finish.
After I roused him and fed her, I opened the door to allow Helga—shamed she no longer possessed the agility to hop into the back of my pickup—a head start to beat us to Hawk’s school at the head of the bay. Aware of her loss of face, I felt it my duty to create for her the illusion she was still in her prime, the same deception I perpetrated to mask my own infirmities.
Once I checked that Hawk hadn’t fallen back asleep, I whipped up breakfast. No Wheaties today. The island of St. Judas had run out of milk, a consequence of logistics and product shelf life, also a telling reminder of the inherent fragility of paradise.
As I scrambled up four eggs for us and toasted half an English muffin for Hawk, a tired trader chugged down the Sir Francis Drake Channel, chasing the smudge of blue-black smoke erupting from its stack. Beyond the decrepit boat, emerald islands, lush from yesterday’s squalls, dotted a sapphire Caribbean.
Working a dollop of grape jelly on the muffin slathered in peanut butter, Hawk asked, “When’s Mama coming home?”
“I don’t know.” I looked at him, but saw his mother’s green eyes, even her nose and mouth—Billie’s son for sure. Still, he’d inherited my temper and temperament.
“Mama missed Thanksgiving.”
And Halloween. And Columbus Day. Billie’s brief and sporadic visits to Nebraska grew in duration over the summer until she became an aunt to her child and a serial one-night stand to her husband. Equally vile, the drama Billie fabricated remained present even when she wasn’t.
“Your mother’s sorry, but don’t forget our big turkey day at the Congo Club.”
“We made the chunky gravy. Gimlets.”
“Giblets. About the best, right?”
“Except the bitter ones.”
I allowed a teachable moment to pass, but reminded him we had fun. “How about the regatta and the T-shirts we printed?"
“Will Mama miss my birthday?”
“No. She’ll be home to bake you a chocolate cake smothered in fudge frosting. Okay?”
“Pretty okay.”
He scarfed down his breakfast. We were running late because I hadn’t wanted to wake him. I’d do anything to prolong his childhood, more precious to me than to him. I needed all the time I could muster to get him launched. Absent his mother, the coming years didn’t look ho-hum for either of us, even if I could commandeer them.
“Is the old Pirate gonna die?”
“We’re all gonna die, Hawk. We talked about that.”
“I know, but soon?”
“I think so.”
“Is that why you work at the Congo Club?”
“Dan is getting too weak to climb into and out of his boat. His friends are donating time to put a roof over his head for his last days.”
“Is he your best friend?”
It’s not like Hawk was old enough to understand a loner like Pirate Dan. A tad more influential than some others, I was, like everyone in Flamingo Bay, just his sexual advisor. “When I want your fucking advice, I’ll ask for it” is how Dan put it. I admired he was upfront. I admired, too, that the man who spent decades perfecting the persona of a pirate did not turn his back on himself as his meet-up with Davy Jones neared.
“Papa, your nose is bleeding again.”
I pulled a wad of bloody tissues from my pocket and held it against my nostrils.
“Ah, sorry. You are my best friend, but he is a friend, a good friend.” A good enough friend to suggest a tourniquet to cure whatever ailed me. “Clean up your face and hands. Helga ate her breakfast. She doesn’t need to lick hers off you. Then let’s get you to school.”
He washed his hands in the kitchen sink, dried them on a paper towel, and wiped his mouth. He presented himself for inspection. I gave him a thumbs up.
“When the old Pirate dies, will everyone stop calling me ‘Sparrow’?”
“No.” I stood and carried the dishes to the sink, tossing the wad of tissues in the trash. “Your nickname will likely stick. Bigger isn’t always better if that’s what bothers you. My favorite is the smallest, the sparrow hawk. On some islands, they call it the ‘gri-gri.’”
“You don’t have a nickname.”
“Sure I do. Everyone calls me ‘Captain Brian.’ Years ago, Pirate Dan started calling me that. I will always be ‘Captain’ unless we leave here.”
“I don’t wanna leave, Papa.”
“Don’t worry,” I answered, aware leaving paradise offered too many opportunities to chase after and catch up to misfortune. “Neither do I.”
“I don’t wanna live up north with Grandma and Grandpa. I hate them.”
“I know it’s hard to understand, but sometimes when people get older, like your grandparents, they get goofy. It doesn’t mean they don’t love you. It means they’re becoming children again themselves and want to be the center of attention.”
“What’s ‘center of attention’?”
“Like at school when someone shows off or makes a joke in class.”
We buckled up and set off for the six-mile drive to the head of the bay.
A hundred yards into the trip, Hawk pointed. “Why can’t I play in the old stone hut?”
The hut, as he called it, looked almost identical to what our cottage once did, a one-room building constructed of native stone. It had been Miss Lucinda’s home her adult life. Abandoned after she died, the derelict building fast devolved into a ruin. Across the road from us and situated in a depression on the hillside to protect it from hurricanes, a tree grew through its roof, and vines covered enough of it to hide it from anybody unaware of its existence.
“It‘s dangerous and doesn’t belong to us. You could be killed if it collapsed on you.”
My explanation seemed to satisfy him, but the questions continued.After admitting Pirate Dan was as goofy as Hawk’s grandparents, but in ways that didn’t hurt anyone, I tried and failed to explain concepts like the Spanish Main and how the imaginative and mundane can merge in a person’s mind and how a lie can attain such a pedigree it becomes indistinguishable from truth. I figured to hear about those things and more the next time we played twenty questions, which would likely be at lunch.
I didn’t mention his mother’s deception in her professed desire to be with her husband and child. I had no wish to badmouth the woman to her son. My aim was to promote to my boy the idea that we live in our heads more than we live in nature—internal and external, delusion and illusion—and while how we live in one affects how we live in the other, we are judged and measured by our deeds and misdeeds. My effort proved I wasn’t much of a promoter. I knew Hawk was too young to understand, but I hoped to plant seeds of concepts that would make the world more intelligible to him in case I wasn’t around when his time to grasp them arrived. I do believe children are perceptive enough to peer through any door you crack open for them.
I often found it easier to communicate with Helga than with Hawk. A decade of shared history with Helga—glory days for us both—counted for part of it, but the greater part I attributed to the years that separated Hawk and me. He would turn six next week. I’d reached the half-century mark, but was running on empty. The biblical threescore years and ten looked unobtainable.
I didn’t remember much good about my childhood except for winning independence. Any cheer waned as I neared my unhappy house and vanished when I stepped across the threshold. Taking that lesson to heart, I committed to making Hawk’s journey as joyous as possible for as long as I could. Whether or not you find joy in the struggle, the journey is the thing—the only thing. You must continue marching, create your own cadence, or maybe fall back on “Colonel Bogey” when your legs rebel against another step.
About halfway to our destination, just past where the road finishes a downhill run to skirt the bay at sea level, Elroy, heading in our direction, waved me down. He tramped the roads and trails most of his waking hours, a real test for a man missing a lobe on his camshaft. On good days, he was almost stealthy in his rambles. On bad days, he violently voiced internal arguments. A perpetual bystander and eyewitness, Elroy served as my Flamingo Bay irregular. I compensated him with cigarettes, sodas, and T-shirts.
Elroy’s extra-large T-shirt wrapped the torso of his squat and muscular body, its hem reaching almost to his knees. Billie’s design, a snapshot of a psychedelic Joshua Light Show caught mid-strobe, featured the message:
TWO MILES WIDE
FOUR MILES LONG
EIGHT MILES HIGH
TOUCH DOWN IN FLAMINGO BAY
After a head-jerk hello—a reverse nod executed with attitude—he rubbed the patchy whiskers on his chin, pulled open my door, and signaled me to lower my head. The better part of a foot shorter than me, Elroy was further disadvantaged because his bare feet were planted on the road’s shoulder that dropped hard to the drainage ditch. He stood next to the driver’s door because, thanks to Danes, wedrive on the left side of the road and, thanks to Americans, we pilot left-hand-drive vehicles.
When we were head to head, Elroy whispered in my ear. I pulled myself upright and lit a cigarette. Smoke was all I had to swallow to keep my breakfast down after hearing Elroy’s news, so I took a long drag before handing him the cigarette. My head buzzed. He jerked his head in thanks before he climbed into the bed of my blue pickup, tiptoeing around Hawk’s watersport saucer, and parked his butt on the wood bench that ran the width of the cab. I pulled the door closed. Getting back up to speed, I flicked on the windshield washers. The wipers smeared dead insects and tree sap. A second shot of washer fluid didn’t stop me from seeing red.
“Papa, you don’t smoke.”
“No, I just carry cigarettes for Elroy.”
A mile farther, the roadside carnage Elroy warned me about drew lookers-on.
“What is it, Papa?”
“No time to stop.” I gave him a light cuff to the shoulder. “Aren’t you forgetting something, First Mate Hawkins?”
“Aye, Captain.” He turned away from me toward the bay, where the bows of six-dozen sailboats—home to some, pleasure craft to others, all a bit faded—faced the fresh onshore breeze. A keen eye could pick out several of the names inscribed on distant transoms. “Sir, Argo rides easy to her mooring.”
I slowed enough to weave through the human and vehicular traffic and still avoid eye contact with the dozen people milling around what Elroy reported was Helga’s body.
“Aye, good news that, Mate. Stand down.”
“Aye, aye, Sir.”
After passing Brendan’s, I slowed to allow Lieutenant March of the Virgin Islands Police Department, cruising down the mountain, to merge onto the road that skirted the bay. We exchanged salutes. Just past the Moravian church, planted in a grove of purple-red bougainvillea, I pulled up at the modest two-year-old building that housed the private school, sited at the edge of the playground my friend Aubrey donated to the community. The swings, jungle gym, and monkey bars were constructed from mahogany I hauled up from Venezuela a decade before.
“Looks like we beat Helga this morning, Hawk. Don’t wait for her today. I’ll go find her. After class, meet me at the Congo Club for lunch. Okay?”
“Okay, Papa.”
Elroy climbed into the front seat. I whipped a U-turn. In my rearview mirror, I spotted Hawk searching for his dog. My eyes began to leak.
“Captain Brian, mon,” Elroy said, “bastard Quincy take she out with machete.”
Once I passed the yellow stucco hulk of the church, and Brendan’s, where six wire-spool satellite tables kept his simple pop stand company, I ignored the twenty-mile-per-hour speed limit, hitting fifty. At our destination, I hammered the brakes and came to a skidding stop at the side of the road, alarming a few of the two-dozen onlookers, half Continental, half West Indian, all whom I knew, the same ones who stepped aside to let me at Quincy.
Bathed in sweat and belligerence, Quincy strived to act brave, his bloody machete still in hand, his dreadlocks hanging limp to the middle of his bare back. The repulsive scene, the antithesis of a Saturday Evening Post cover, pushed me to cleave Quincy to the brisket.
I strode to meet him, skirting Helga’s lifeless and bloody body. I brought both hands to my chest, left over right. Before my legs even slowed, I curled my fingers and unleashed both fists in unison. My left slammed into his sternum. My right sank into his groin. The machete slipped from his hand as he collapsed.
I had no plan, no conscious thought when I dropped to my knees, but the instant I landed, I grabbed Quincy’s long blade by its handle, and severed each of his dreads, itching for his scalp. The shorn lion of Judah looked like a lamb when I finished. As Quincy lay half disoriented, I gathered what blood I could get on my hands from Helga’s gaping neck wound and smeared it on his face and chest before bending my head to his ear, inhaling the blood’s metallic tang and Quincy’s fear.
“You will apologize. It will be heartfelt.”
“Fuck you, Yankeemuddahscunt.”
His whispered curse never reached the volume of a threat, yet I wanted to mark him for life. Knowing it would mark me more, I resisted. Down payment received, Quincy was obliged to collect installments on a promissory note for the full Hobbes. Solitary, poor, nasty, and brutish perfectly described the destination of his life’s new path.
I stood and turned to find the always-smiling Zeke—a barefoot, round-faced bear of a man and former bling king who resembled a shiny black 1958 Buick stripped of its chrome. He chatted with three slim Rastafarians, all about six feet, a couple of inches shorter than me. They sported identical knitted gray dread caps, headgear that, from a distance, could be mistaken for giant parasitic slugs.
The pissed-off trio, flaunting disparate facial hair that if combined would equal a full beard, acted like members of a paramilitary, lacking insignia and rank. Musketeers or stooges—I hadn’t decided. From their reputations in Sugar Harbor, taunting and hassling folk, I did figure them for fifth columnists, aiding and abetting the enemy in the ongoing conquest of Eden, an endeavor launched back in the fifteenth century by the Admiral of the Ocean Sea.
“Our bro, mon,” the soft lazy voice of the presumed leader intoned.
“You should consider taking my side in this dispute. Your buddy isn’t much of a man, hacking a tired old dog to death.” I nodded in the direction of Quincy, still on his butt but propped on his elbows, a stunned adult looking like a scared teen. “His actions say everything about him. Loyalty to him going forward will say a lot about you. We can settle differences now or later. Your choice. But we will settle them. Me, I’m in favor of us getting along.”
“You should maybe listen to Captain Brian,” Zeke butted in. “They never does find the body of that poor narc who blue vex he.”
Though his death resulted from a collision at sea, I’d made sure the narc’s body was never found. Zeke saw it his duty to promote my reputation as a tough guy. I objected, but not strenuously. Street-cred is good, and it amused me to be feared by the community’s lowlifes. While I could maybe pass for a dangerous alpha—you can rest on laurels until they visibly wither—my recent infirmity relegated me to a beta or gamma, resolute more than tough.
Despite his profession as a purveyor of fairy dust, Zeke made an excellent friend and could get me laughing like no one else could. It wouldn’t have bothered me if he directed his mirth-making talent at the Rastas, but I doubted he could squeeze a smirk out of them. Three unwavering Rastafarian scowls, directed at me, summed up the communication between us. I offered, after wiping it on my shirt, my sticky-fingered hand. Angry enough to take all three on single-handed, I pushed for their decision.
My hand hung as if suspended on a puppeteer’s string. As my fingers curled, the trio’s spokesman took it. The others followed. I wished them a good day. They didn’t smile or speak.
A glance down the road alerted me the Reverend Anal Richards, outfitted in bed sheet and sandals, stumbled in our direction. Pretty much crippled up after catching four slugs many years past, he relied on a single crutch to get along. So far there had been no divine intervention, nor had he been able to heal himself, dramatically discarding and walking away from his crutch to the applause of his disciples like TV-healers do. Before his late brother, the cop, shot him over a land dispute, impersonating a prophet had been his avocation. Now that it was his career, he looked committed to performing last rites. In his favor, the not-so-distant kin to Oral Roberts never solicited payment for his services.
Helga earned the honor of having an eagle tear apart her flesh, not a swarm of flies unable to distinguish sugar from shit. No words either from a self-proclaimed evangelist.
I was hoisting her body into the bed of my pickup when the most enlightened cop in the territory pulled up. March’s recent promotion from sergeant to lieutenant resulted in good news for him, but not for us. Patrolling Flamingo Bay would soon be a memory. Policing us was below his new pay grade. Starched and polished and handsome, he wore his uniform as if it were his dress blues from his days in the Marine Corps. Instead of a red stripe on the sky-blue trouser legs, the VIPD opted for gold. By the time March worked his way through the growing crowd, he’d nailed the scenario.
“Captain Brian, you be pressing charges?”
I shook my head and slammed the rusty tailgate into the locked position.March glared at Quincy, spitting in his direction, before going to work to unjam the traffic. I collected Quincy’s machete and a foot-and-a-half-long lock of his hair, contemplating kinship with Crazy Horse, at least until I pulled away from the scene. I couldn’t be sure if the tears were for me or for Hawk. Pressed, I would allow they were for us both. We’d each lost a lot more than a dog.
