Second Skin

Vile, in the Sunshine Crawling

Yes, I have always believed in gentle thoughts. Despite everything, including the long-past calumnious efforts of a few cranks in the Navy Department, I have always remained my mother’s son. And how satisfying it is that virtue — tender guardian, sweet victor, white phantom of the boxing ring, which makes me think of the days before the mutiny when Tremlow vainly attempted to give me boxing lessons every late afternoon in a space cleared among the young bronze cheering sailors on the fantail — how satisfying that virtue always wins. I have only to consider Sonny and Catalina Kate and Sister Josie and myself to know that virtue is everywhere and that we, at least, are four particles of its golden dust.

Yes, everywhere. In getting down to business with one of the cows, in blowing the conch that calls the cows across the field to me, in noticing from time to time the remarkably rapid growth of the child, another fleck of golden dust inside Catalina Kate, in splitting a pawpaw with Sonny or spending an hour or two over the year-old newspaper Catalina Kate had wrapped the hot dogs in, or calling out “No beat the puppy!” to the small black bowlegged boy who wallops the little pink squealing bitch every afternoon between the overgrown water wheel and our collapsing barn, in all this, then, the virtue of life itself.

In the very act of living I see myself, picture myself, as if memory had already done its work and flowered, subjected even myself to the golden glass. Broad white window frame, white shutter with all but a few slanting lattices knocked out, long mahogany table, cane chairs, rusted hurricane lamp suspended by a chain from the ceiling that rises to a peak, pagoda style, and houses the bats; gray clay-colored wooden floor, hemp hammock filled with red petals, odor of slaves and curry and wine and hibiscus soft and luxurious on the dark air. Cup of the warm south. Beaded bubbles. And myself: drawn up to the table, studious, smiling at the thought of the little dark faces pressed into the enormous green and yellow leaves curling in at the window, frowning and smiling both with my upper body leaning on the table and my feet bare and my toes playing in the rich dust under the table, eyes and mouth burning slightly with the fever of our constant and deceptive temperature. Myself. Lunged quietly against my long table — bottle of French wine, bottle of local rum, handful of long thin unbanded black cigars stuck like pencils in a jam jar, swarms of little living fleas in the grooves of my note-taking paper — lunged at the table and seeing myself and smiling at the thought of yesterday, yesterday when I sat in the swamp with Sister Josie and Catalina Kate, and ruminating over the latest development of Kate’s precious pregnancy — Kate has only about three more months to go, it occurs to me — and teasing the fleas.

And so I have already stepped once more from behind the scenes of my naked history and having come this far I expect that I will never really be able to conceal myself completely in all those scenes which are even now on the tip of my tongue and crowding my eye. The fact of the matter is that Miranda will have to wait while I turn to a still more distant past, turn back to a few of my long days at sea and to several other high lights of my more distant past. Mere victory over Miranda is nothing, while virtue is everything. So now for my past, for the virtue of my far-distant past.

But first my afternoon in the swamp.

God knows what time it was, but we had finished eating our noon meal of the sea creatures Big Bertha somehow digs out of the conchs, and Sonny was sleeping out in the barn and I was sitting at my table and toying with — yes, even after seven years I still wear it around my neck on its thin chain — toying with Uncle Billy’s crucifix and thinking about certain problems of my profession. I was noticing that the insides of my hands were the color of golden straw, and was listening to the doves when suddenly a face appeared among the flat green and yellow leaves and spotted shadows outside my window, a tiny face as smooth as a wet kidney and the color of the black keys on a piano. Tiny little face without a line, with eyes like great timid pearls and a little nut-brown mouth and masses of artificial gold teeth— young as she was she had had all her teeth extracted and nice gold teeth installed for beauty’s sake — and around the little black head the truly gigantic mauve headpiece of her official habit and the white thing that looked like a priest’s collar shoved vertically over her tiny face. Serene, serious, silent.

“Sister Josie,” I said, “is it really you? How nice. But Sister Josie, what do you want?”

Somber child. Dark wonderfully cowled little head in the comer of the window. Little black cheekbones. Pearls beginning to dissolve and more luminous and gentle than ever. Ready to open her mouth, this child, this black girl, thin devoted example of missionary madness. Sweating. Hot as the devil. Long time to answer. And then she smiled and in a murmur she asked me to come with her because Catalina Kate was asking for me and had sent her, Sister Josie, up to Plantation House to persuade me, if she could, to join her in a little walk down to the swamp.

“Well, of course, Josie,” I said, and reached for my old yellowing cap and cocked it on my head, “I was wondering about Kate since you usually dog her tracks, don’t you, Josie?”

Vigorous nodding in the corner of the window. Trembling of the little dark features. Master coming. Gift of God. Ecstasy. As usual I was pleased with her happiness and smiled and told her to wait for me by the water wheel. I extended my hand slowly, gently, and let it come to rest on the broad white sill so that it was directly in the path of a little black newborn lizard which I had noticed while listening to Sister Josie’s soft interminable plea. And for a moment we watched the baby lizard together. It was black, fuzzy, about an inch and a half in length. It was covered with frills and tendrils, wore leggings, had absurdly large feet for its size and an absurdly large blind head. Ugly. And while we watched — did Josie make the sign of the cross? — the baby lizard crawled onto the back of my hand and stopped, little tail twitching at a wonderful rate, and stood still as I lifted him slowly into the warm sweet air that hovered between Sister Josie and myself. Lifted him up to my nose.

“Do you see, Josie? He hasn’t any eyes. And look at that tail, will you? Excruciating!”

We laughed. Then I took a deep breath, puckered my lips and blew so that he sailed off in an orgy of somersaults and plopped onto a bright golden spot next to Josie’s cheeks.

“I’ll have to improve my aim, Josie,” I said, and, laughing, shooed her off to the water wheel. No doubt the little lizard would turn into a dandy big fellow when he grew older. But I have always favored the birds, especially the hummingbirds, over the lizards and butterflies. Give me the mystery of birds or the strength and sweetness of honest-to-God animals like cows any time. What better than the little honeysuckers or the leather hides and masticated grass and purple eyes of my favorite cows? As for a blackbird sitting on a cow’s rump, there surely is the perfect union, the meeting of the fabulous herald and the life source. And there are always the ground doves to give voice to my vision, soul to my love.

Since I was up and about I looked in on Big Bertha — mass of black fat, calico rags, old brazen face and dusty hands and fat breasts decorated with the fingerprints of the babies she had nursed, all of her crouched over the mortar and pestle and fast asleep — and I grinned at her, raised my finger to the visor of my cap in salute to her. I strolled around to feed a few fistfuls of green grass to the ducks, squatting, pulling up the grass, enjoying the greed of the ducks and the way they wagged their white tails. Then to my feet again and on through the shadows of the lime trees — perfect little pale yellow globules dangling amidst the riffling green leaves and shadows and nearly invisible thorns — until I came out into the sun and approached the barn.

I stood in the doorway, crossed my legs, leaned against the hot porous upright — remarkable labor of the wood ants — thrust my hands into my pockets and stared up at the star-shaped hole in the roof. Interesting star-shaped hole with a shaft of sunlight driven through it like a stake. Dry and sagging timbers, roof that would soon collapse and be no more. Sonny — my ingenious Sonny — wanted to remove some of the planks from the walls to repair the roof. But I preferred the barn as it was, or as it would be. We would just have to get along, I told Sonny, with a roofless barn, and I was pleased when he slapped his thigh and said, “Oh, you means a roofless barn. I understands you, Skipper. That’s good!” I knew I could always count on Sonny.

I walked into the barn then and stood at the foot of Sonny’s hammock and smiled down on him. Poor Sonny. Sleeping in the heat of the afternoon. Hands clasped behind his head, light streaming in the little rivers between his ribs, hammock swaying, one long black shrunken leg dangling out of the hammock, hanging down. He was naked except for a pair of combat boots — no laces, leather turned to white fungus — and a pair of my castoff white jockey shorts and a sailor hat with the brim reversed and airslits, diamonds, cut around the crown. And he had changed in seven years-thinner, a few white kinks in the hair, some of the rich oily luster gone from his black skin, incurable case of boils on one of his thighs — but was Sonny, still Sonny with every black bone showing and a smile sleeping on those living lips which looked as if they had been split open in a fight. The nearby shaft of sunlight cast a glow on the patched hemp of the hammock and sent little shadows dancing and shivering up and down this black length of Sonny in his stretched and swaying bed. I left him in peace, walked softly to the other end of the barn where Oscar the bull was watching us.

“What’s the matter, Oscar,” I said, “jealous of my attentions?”

Confusion and hatred in the crossed bloodshot eyes. Dust swirling out of the shaggy white head of hair when I rumpled it. Flies in the ears. Mean old bull begrudging every invisible drop of his scattered seed. Flies, lice, mud. But marvelous shaggy machinery for my purposes.

“Don’t be jealous, Oscar,” I said softly, “your time will come.” And I laughed and gave the brass ring in his nose a little tug and turned my back on him, walked out to the hot radiance beyond the doorway. I paused for a moment, squinted, fanned myself briefly with my cap, then made for the water wheel.

She was nearly invisible against the water wheel, my little blessed chameleon with bowed head and folded hands. But she was there and waiting. Patient and perspiring in the shade of the wheel. Each time I saw the water wheel, and I saw it a good many times each day, I stopped, always perplexed and startled to see its life-giving gloom. Because it was about twenty feet tall, this fusion of iron wheel and fragment of stone wall, and useless, absolutely useless, and inexplicable, statuary of unknown historic significance now drenched with green growth, robbed of its power. The wheel that could never turn, the wall that had ceased its crumbling. No water. And yet in every cracked iron cup, in every dark green furry ribbon of the climbing plants, in every black hanging leaf and every swaddling vine — there was even a little crooked gray tree growing out of the side of it — it appeared to be spongy and dense and saturated, seemed to drip with all the waters of the past and all the bright cold waters that would never flow. Monolith of forgotten industry, what on earth had it crushed? What sweetness extracted? The birds were singing and chirping among the red berries and in secret crevices in the moss. I listened until I could disregard no longer the little nun standing there meekly under the towering wheel.

“Well, Josie,” I said, and stepped forward briskly, “Let’s go and see what this is all about. OK, Josie?”

She told me that she was ready to go, though her little silk voice was so soft I could hardly hear it above the sound of the birds, and she told me that Miss Catalina Kate was hoping I would go to her. I smiled.

“Lead on, Sister Josie,” I said, and sauntered along behind her as she picked her way down the hot path trying to avoid the thorns in the high grass. The wind was rolling about in that high grass — stretching out to sleep? getting ready to spring? — and there were trees growing out of trees, smooth gray trunks and bushy heads of hair, flowers like painted fingernails and occasionally underfoot a sudden webbing of little roots tied in knots. But Sister Josie had nimble feet and knew where she was going.

“Do I smell guavas, Josie?”

Vigorous nodding.

“Why don’t you pick a load on our way back, Josie? I’m very fond of guavas.”

More nodding, long soft statement of acquiescence.

When we passed the pile of dried conchs and stepped out onto the beach the bush was on our right and the sea on our left and the bush was impenetrable and the beach was a quarter-mile strip of snowy pink sand and the tide was sliding in, frothing, jumping up in little round waves. So there was much wetting of shoes and trouser bottoms and swaying skirts during that last quarter mile of our walk. Above us through the dead coconut leaves the sun was an old bloody bone low in the sky. I whistled, hummed, blinked, licked salt. Paused to help Sister Josie climb over the windfalls or crawl through the sea grape trees.

“Lovely spot, Josie,” I said. “Good for the soul.”

“Oh yes, sir.” Furnace of gold teeth, habit soaked to the knees. “That why she here, sir.”

“But surely she doesn’t mean to have the child out here, Josie? Does she?”

“Oh, yes, sir. She want the baby in the swamp, sir.”

“Well, there’s courage for you, Josie.”

“Yes, sir.”

And then the bush fell away on our right and the beach swept wide into the sea on our left and rose, straight ahead, into a long white sandy shelf, and Sister Josie and I were in the open and pulling each other to the top of the broad sandy shelf. A fisherman’s hut, a white stump, the green transparent tint of the endless sea on one side and on the other, where the shelf dipped down into a little rank stagnant crescent, the swamp. The beginning of the swamp. Dark green tepid sludge of silent waters drifting inland among the ferns and roots and fuzzy pockets and pools of the infested swamp. Harem of veiled orchids, cells of death.

“You see, Josie,” smiling, raising my hand, gesturing, feeling the ocean breeze on my neck and smelling the lively activity of the fields of sunken offal in the swamp, breathing deeply and seeing how the pale blue-green light of the ocean met the dark greens and heavy yellows of the swamp, “you see, Josie, a true freak of nature. Wonderful, isn’t it? And that fisherman’s hut, who knows what’s been going on in that fisherman’s hut, eh, Josie? How about it now, a few small sacrifices to the gods?”

And head lowered, eyes lowered, voice soft and serious: “Sometimes she sleep there, sir.”

The ants were racing through the holes in my tennis shoes and the tide was a rhythmic darkening of the sand and something was beating great frightened wings in the swamp. There were bright yellow turds hanging from a soft gray bough over the hut, and I began to scratch. But then I looked down and saw what I had somehow failed to see in my first sweeping glance at the warmer side of the sand shelf and beginning of the swamp. And I took slow incredulous footsteps down that sandy incline, leaned forward, held out my hands.

“Kate. Are you all right, Kate?”

She was lying there and watching me. Must have been watching me all the time. Lying there on her stomach. Chin in her hands. Naked. Legs immersed halfway up the calves in the warm yellowish pea soup of that disgusting water. And stuck to her back, spread eagle on her broad soft naked back, an iguana with his claws dug in.

“Kate, what is it, Kate. …

But she only smiled. I stopped, hand thrust out, and kneeled on one knee in front of Catalina Kate who had the terrible reptile clinging to her back. His head reached her shoulders, his tail dropped over her buttocks, and he might have been twenty or thirty pounds of sprawling bright green putty. Boneless. Eyes like shots in the dark. Gorgeous bright green feathery ruff running down the whole length of him. Thick and limp and weak, except for the oversized claws which were grips of steel. Kate was looking at me and smiling and the iguana was looking at me, and I heard the noise of locust or cricket or giant swamp fly strangling behind a nearby bush.

“Hold on, Kate,” I whispered, “don’t move. Just leave him to me.

So then I rose carefully from my position on one knee and tried to think of what to do, of how to go about it. There at my feet was Kate, and she was stretched out flat on the sand, had dug a nice deep oval hole for her belly, and her naked skin was soft and broad, mauve and tan, and the shadows all over her arms and calves and flanks were like innumerable little bright pointed leaves. At one end of her the scum from the swamp water lay in fluffy white piles against her calves; at the other her black hair was heaped up in a crown, shaped in oil, and the long thick braid hung down over one shoulder into the sand. A child with real pink sea shells for ears, child with a disappointing nose but with lips as thin as my own and bowed, moist, faintly violet and smiling. A dark mole — beauty mole — on one cheek. Body as big as Big Bertha’s. A garden, but shaped by her youth. There at my feet. Kate.

And on her back the monster.

So I straddled her — colossus over the reptile, colossus above the shores of woman — and hearing the lap and shifting of the sea, and wiping my palms on my thighs and leaning forward, I prepared to grapple with the monster. My eyes were already shut and my hands already feeling downwards, groping, when Josie, little Sister Josie, took courage — for her it must have been courage — and called out to me.

“Oh, no, sir. No, sir. Don’t touch iguana, sir. Him stuck for so!”

She had risen from her seat on the stump in front of the fisherman’s hut, wringing her hands, squeezing her ankles together beneath her skirts, doll in the sunshine, straight and small, but sat down again quickly as soon as I glanced at her. Little black face, pained eyes, ankles and knees and hands all rigid and pinched together, unbearable hot weight of cowl and little buttoned shoes and God knows how many skirts. I was in no mood to take advice from Sister Josie and told her so.

“That’s all right, Josie,” I said. “I’ll handle this.”

From inside the rich brown layers of drapery or from one of her sleeves she produced a tiny Bible and licked a finger, began to read. She looked like a little black beetle hunched up and reading the Bible in the sunlight. The forked tongues were crying out in the swamp. I shook my head. And lunged down for the iguana.

I got him with the first grab. Held him. Waited. And with my feet buried deep in the sand, my legs spread wide and locked, my rump in the air, tattered shirt stuck to my skin like a plaster, nostrils stoppered up with the scum of the swamp, heart thumping, I made myself hold on to him — in either hand I gripped one of the forelegs — and fought to subdue the repellent touch of him, fought not to tear away my hands and run. Cool rubber ready to sting. Feeling of being glued to the iguana, of skin growing fast to reptilian skin.

“Now,” I said through clenched teeth, and opened my eyes, “now we’ll see if you’re any match for Papa Cue Ball.” And slowly I pulled up on him, gently began to wrestle with him. He yielded his putty, stretched himself, displayed a terrible elasticity, and everything rose up to my grasp except the claws.

“It’s just like being in the dentist’s chair, Kate,” I muttered, and grinned through my own agony, “it’ll be over soon.” But Catalina Kate gave no sign of pain, though now her head was resting on her folded arms and her eyes were closed. So I kept pulling up on the iguana, tugged at him with irritation now. With every tug I seemed to dig the claws in deeper, to drag them down deeper into the flesh of poor Kate’s back in some terrible inverse proportion to all the upward force I exerted on the flaccid wrinkled substance of the jointless legs or whatever it was I hung on to so desperately. And he wouldn’t budge. Because of those claws I was unable to pull him loose, unable to move him an inch, was only standing there bent double and sweating, pulling, muttering to myself, drawing blood.

“Well, Kate,” I said, and let go, stood up, wiped my brow, “it looks as if he’s there for good. Got us licked, hasn’t he, Kate? Licked from the start. He means to stay right where he is until he changes his mind and crawls off under his own power. So the round goes to the dragon, Kate. I’m sorry.”

I climbed off, dipped my hands in the scummy water — even scummy water was preferable to the iguana — rubbed them, wiped them on my trousers, mounted the slope, flung myself down in the sand beside Sister Josie. And grimacing, pulling the visor down fiercely over my eyes, “There’s nothing to do but wait,” I said. “We’ll have to be patient.”

“She plenty patient already, sir. She already waiting.”

“That’s right, Josie,” I said, “you young ladies better stick together.”

Sister Josie read her Bible, I twirled Uncle Billy’s crucifix on its gold chain until the sun came down. And we waited. Coconuts knocking together, sun drenching the sand, dry bones scraping in the middle of the swamp, peacock tails of ugly plants fanning and blazing around the edge of the swamp, a little pall of late afternoon heat settling over us. Like Sonny and Big Bertha and the rest of them I must have dozed. Because suddenly I was leaning forward to the stillness of the warm south and trembling, giving the nun a signal on her little knee. “Do you see, Josie? Do you see? The iguana moved!”

It was true. He had unhooked his claws and slid down onto Kate’s right hand and deep rosy shoulder and upper arm, and now his ruff was humming, his tongue flexing in swordplay, swishing in all the tiny hues of the rainbow, and the eyes were dashing together like little sparks.

“He’s hungry! Do you see that, Josie? He’s hungry now, he’s going off to hunt flies! Thank God for Kate. …”

So he plopped from her shoulder and waddled down to the scum, this bright aged thing livid in the last thick rays of the sun, and inch by steady inch pushed himself under the lip of a broad low-hanging yellow leaf and into the scum, and lashing his tail, kicking suddenly with his stubby rear legs, he disappeared. Succubus. I would have gone after him with a stone had it not been for the failing light and for Catalina Kate who had raised herself up on her arms and was smiling and beckoning and opening to me like some downy swamp orchid.

I ran to her and sank down next to her, panting, brushing the sand from her breasts.

“Well done, Kate!” I whispered, “well done, my brown Joan of Arc. You know about Joan of Arc, don’t you, Kate? The lady burned up in the fire?”

Smiling. But a gentle smile and only faintly visible. A color in the face. Touch of serenity about the eyes and at the corners of the mouth. Nothing but the radiance of the fifteen or sixteen years of her life on this our distant shore, our wandering island.

I took her hand. I covered her back with the remnants of my own dissolving shirt and I reached down into the enormous egg-shaped hole in the sand and helped Kate to feel with her soft young fingers what I could feel with mine: the warmth of the recent flesh and the little humped hieroglyphic in the warm sand.

“Feel the baby, Kate? Unborn baby down there in the sand, eh, Kate? But no more iguanas, you must promise me that. We don’t want to let the iguana get the baby, you know.”

She nodded. Kate understood. And that’s all there was to it. I helped her to her feet and arm in arm we climbed the little velvet slope of sand together and walked up to Sister Josie — another sign of the cross, big gold flash of teeth — who rose, held out her arms and embraced my own nude Catalina Kate. That’s all there was to it. Except walking back alone to Plantation House in our moment of darkness, brushing aside the leaves and thorns and stumbling knee-deep in the salty foam, I saw the few lights and long black silhouette of a ship at sea and smiled to myself since apparently our wandering island has become quite invisible. Only a mirage of shimmering water to all the ships at sea, only the thick black spice of night and the irregular whispering of an invisible shore.

So now I sit staring at the long black cigars and at the bottle of French wine. Perhaps I will open the French wine when the child is born, drink off the French wine when the child is born on the Night of All Saints. And now I goad myself with the distant past.

So hold your horses, Miranda! Father and Gertrude and Fernandez, sleep! Now take warning, Tremlow!