Bay of Souls

19

MICHAEL MANAGED to get to bed before dawn. He was almost asleep when morning lit the slats of his room, a breeze stirred the netting around his bed. The birds of day were chattering, a rattle of bad pennies that gathered force in the space where the drums had been. When he listened closely enough he found the drums still there, faded into sounds of dawn but relentless. Out on the ocean, a great mass of cloud was approaching, armored and crenelated, triumphally white. Before its fortress front, if you looked with the right eyes, with Lara's eyes, it was possible to see the powers of the island withdraw into dark green groves, into their own reflection under the surface of Guinee below.

He had waited for morning; now he was jittery in the light of day, the barred half-light of his room. While he sat naked on the bed with his head in his hands, a knock came. Certainly expected, he thought. He put on his pants and opened the door to a tall, bony boy in white jeans, Dolphins cap reversed. The boy handed him a table chip, number 00, two ovals of leaf green, the action chip from the Caribe Hilton… the night before? The night before that? Before that? What have I won?

With the island sense of drama the boy waited, not so much for a reward, Michael thought, as to watch his reaction. In any case, his errand was not over.

"Lady says come on back."

"What have I won?" Michael asked.

"Says you be comin' on back. Come on back. Everybody says. They be angry wit you."

The 36 chip was in his trousers pocket and it occurred to him to hand it to the boy to take to Lara. The holy number trumps. Emeralds out of luck.

He put the second chip in his pocket and asked the boy to wait for him and closed the door. When he finished dressing and went out he found the reporter McKie at his door. The boy Lara sent had moved off. There were strangers about. There were white men, and more government soldiers.

"You were diving last night," McKie said softly. As though she affected to admire him and as though that were a trick.

He shook his head.

"Did you get the goods?"

"C'mon," he said as he might in grade school to a girl teasing him. This riled her. She looked around to see who heard. Michael wondered where the boy with the chip had gone.

"Let me tell you something, diver. This is Iran Contra Junior. This is senatorial aides, huge right-wing connections, the whole Argentina colonels' lobby, and it's linked to the death of Allende and it's linked to coke. And your girlfriend — she is your girlfriend, is she not? — your girlfriend's family's activities in this island? Got it?"

"My word!" Michael said mockingly. "Goodness me! Holy shit!"

"You're a fucking fool," she said. "Fucking fool you are. You're involved in contraband and conspiracy. You'll sit in an island jail — you want to talk blood on the walls? Want to see the ants eat it? And then you'll do federal time — if the milicianos don't feed you to their spider monkeys."

"Was there an accident?"

"My dear shithead! Pretty shithead! I have the story. I will set you the fuck free if you talk to me. I have the story and we will walk away together with it. The feds will not let you walk. The island will not let you walk. The milicianos will most certainly not let you walk."

Two white men, Americans, approached, one of them walking much more rapidly than was customary here, in the heat of the day.

"OK," said Miss McKie, "one is the Drug Enforcement dude from the capital. The other is the consul up here. You don't have to talk to the DEA guy if you talk to me."

"What about your boyfriend?" Michael asked.

"Who?" Shocked! "Who, Junot?"

The American consul acted scornful and grossly overqualified, a savant of many climes, wasted here. Too wasted even to put out a hand. His name was Scofield. He was waspish toward McKie and never addressed the DEA man, whose name was Wallace. Michael deduced that they had not met before the preceding few hours.

"Tell them what you do, Michael," Miss McKie said.

Michael told the Americans he taught English at Fort Salines. They had never heard of it. Wallace treated him like an apprehended criminal and they walked down toward the water.

"So who's in the plane?" Wallace asked. "An American citizen?"

"I really don't know," Michael said.

His tone seemed offensive to Wallace. For a moment Michael thought he would get some kind of epicene mimicry for his impertinence. I really don't know. Cop sarcasm to show him his place.

"No? Maybe you know what's in it."

Michael waited for someone to mention the dive shop but no one did. Turning onto the Carenage toward the harbor, they passed the youth who had brought Michael the roulette chip. He stood at the edge of a gathering crowd and knitted his brows. Jeeps full of island soldiery passed.

Consul Scofield led them to a waiting boat of the island Coast Patrol. Beside it, he drew himself up in a political manner and introduced himself formally.

"On the advice of Vice Consul Wallace, I've asked the American citizens to come down to the harbor. Obviously there's been a tragedy — a plane is missing and we have some eyewitness reports of an explosion occurring the night before last. On such short notice we haven't been able to do much, although we have located what we think is the scene of an accident. Vice Consul Wallace would like a few of you to come out while we try to raise the remains."

"I'll go!" Liz McKie said, raising her hand to volunteer. Wallace and Scofield looked at each other. Scofield shrugged.

"We'd like Mr. Ahearn to come with us," Wallace said. "Especially we'd like Mr. Ahearn. We think he might be able to help us."

Michael tried to understand what the DEA man might mean by this. As far as he could remember, he had not damaged the plane in getting the doors open or left any particular evidence. No one had raised any question of a dive except McKie, who was keeping her own confidence.

"I don't understand why I should have to go out there," Michael said.

"Don't you?" Wallace asked. "We think it would be helpful if you were there. Maybe as a witness when we bring up the body. We think it would be really helpful."

"Actually," Consul Scofield said, "it would be real cooperation. We'd be grateful. Bureaucratic reasons."

"It's psywar," Liz McKie said quietly to Michael. "He wants you out there because he wants you scared."

"Should I go?" Michael asked.

"He might give you local problems if you don't."

"You might help me with those."

"It's possible. It's also possible he might get smart and go have a look at the dive shop. "You were down there last night, no?"

Michael looked away without answering and they set out, beyond the small pretty harbor to the edge of the reef, or at least to an arm of it, one that stretched from the base of the Morne that towered over them to the Puerto Rico Trench, eight miles of descending terraces that bottomed out in the deepest spot in the Atlantic, pole to pole. It was toward that spot that the plane's third case was little by little making its inexorable way. At least Michael hoped it was.

On the way out Consul Scofield remonstrated with the hot-rodding Coast Patrol helmsman.

"Doucement," he called over the engine noise. "Doucement, mon ami."

The man at the wheel laughed agreeably and did slow down a bit. Wallace kept his eyes on Michael, who was balanced on a small partition in the stern beside Liz McKie. He was holding the green roulette chip in his hand.

"Where'd you get that?" asked the insatiable McKie. "Souvenir or something?"

Michael shrugged.

At the edge of the reef, where the plane had gone down, a single barge with a rusted A-frame crane was riding the rising surf. Steersmen held their boats against the incoming tide.

Coast Patrol divers had lowered and secured the crane's light tackle. As the Americans' boat came up, a young man on the barge, an islander, supervised the operation. There were two divers in the water, who looked to be blancs. The man in charge signaled to the crane operator.

"He's done this sort of thing before," McKie said to Michael. "He's got a pretty good idea what's down there."

Michael, who knew, took a deep breath. The crane started up. Everyone waited for the surfacing.

After a minute or so, the pale blue water swirled and clouded. A lubricant can hit the surface. One of the hands on the barge began to shout in Creole. Michael thought he could make out a shadow on the deeper side of the reef line. He shielded his eyes from the declining sun.

Then some kind of creature raced to the surface only a few feet from his boat. It was a huge unwieldy thing, crazily shaped but certainly, Michael thought, alive. It had antennae, claws, spines, a tail. And it was surrounded by fish, fish of such variety and in such uncountable numbers that anyone arguing that the fish were gone, that the reef was barren and lifeless, would stand refuted. Tangs and butterfly fish and wrasses. And there were shrimp adhering to the main body of the creature, hanging on.

Then it hit the surface, and Michael thought that the size of it was the strangest thing. Nothing that lived on the bottom, nothing he could think of, was of such a size. Nothing went surrounded by fish in such a way, in the mandibles of shrimp, wrapped in some kind of rainbow jelly.

The surface did not at first hold it down. Whatever it was showed most of its length to the breathing world, then spun. In their boats, the barge hands and the blancs and the others watched it spin across the top of the water. The thing bounced along the surface as though it were trying to escape a predator, zigzagging, darting this way and that. It made a noise that was like the farting of a hundred exhausted penny balloons.

On the barge, one of the deck hands called out in Creole and everyone turned to him. He called a second time, repeating the same word. The man at the wheel of Michael's boat took off his gold-braided cap.

"What is it?" the diplomat asked.

"It's a floater," said Mr. Wallace.

Then Michael realized that the rainbow jelly was oil slick, that the fish and other creatures were eating the creature. He caught a fraction of a second's whiff of foul breeze. It had a kind of face, Michael saw, a head and body. Both were beyond imagining. They bounced like enormous corks in the sandy water over the reef. They were the remains of the pilot, of whose posthumous existence Michael thought he had seen enough. He turned away. Then he noticed that even hardboiled Mr. Wallace had found another quarter on which to cast his cop's gaze. The islanders crossed themselves — and Michael too — in recognition that Guinée awaited plenty of those who served the trade. Fishermen and emigrants, smugglers and divers, pilots and contrabandists and policemen, all might find their way to Guinee one day, at the bottom of the trench at the bottom of the world. Even for Miss McKie, who was just passing through for the world's information, especially for Miss McKie, Guinee yawned. Even Miss McKie uttered a prayer.