Twenty-Seven Bones

9

If St. Luke was to some extent an island out of time, its infrastructure having been badly damaged by Hurricane Eloise in 1975, by Hugo in 1989, and then again by Luis and Marilyn in 1995, and its tourism industry dealt a near-mortal blow by the Blue Valley massacre in 1984, then the former Peace Corps training camp known as the Core was an island within an island.

It wasn’t technically a sixties commune-everybody paid their own rent-but the ethos and the facilities harkened back to that era. Rustic cabins, Quonset huts, and A-frames, no phones, electricity only in the most expensive dwellings, communal shit ’n’ shower. Good people, hippies, neohippies, neo-Luddites, down-islanders from even more impoverished islands. Holly’s idealistic-to-the-point-of-otherworldly sister Laurel and her two mixed-race love children had fit right in.

It wasn’t the worst fit in the world for Holly, either, much as she missed her life in Big Sur. But although the reduction in her earnings had been extreme, the reduction in living expenses had not been. Not only did she have to support a family of three now, but almost all the necessities that appeared magically on the shelves of even the dinkiest groceries in California had to be shipped or flown into St. Luke, oil prices were through the roof, and since the majority of the property on the island was owned by a tiny minority of the population, rents were kept at an artificially high level.

After dropping by Apgard Realty to make her rent payment (of which a larger percentage than usual had come directly from the pocket of the extremely grateful Lewis Apgard himself), Holly took stock of her financial resources and discovered that she had been reduced to a few hundred in the bank and twenty in the pocket. Fortunately, in addition to being rent day, the first of the month was also tempura night at the Core.

Tempura nights were the brainchild of C. B. Dawson, an eccentric (insofar as the word applied at the Core) woman who grew her own vegetables behind her cabin and was given to disappearing into the rain forest for days on end. There she made a slim living from the fruits of the trees, never the trees themselves. Bracelets and necklaces strung from wild tamarindillo seeds, necklaces from the seeds of the elephant’s ear tree, incense holders and paperweights fashioned from sandbox tree fruits, bowls and gourds from calabash and cannonball trees, that sort of thing.

Dawson was the first friend Holly had made on St. Luke, and the closest. At fifty, she was remarkably self-effacing for such a striking-looking woman. Her hair was still naturally dark and her figure impressive enough that last year a man who’d met her on the beach and claimed to own a modeling agency, had given her his card, and told her she could make a six-figure income modeling swimsuits for the mature, full-figured woman-a growing niche, apparently.

But she’d thrown the card away. She told Holly it was out of the question, but wouldn’t say why. Sometimes Holly had the impression Dawson was hiding from someone or something. Why else would a woman who was so broke she could barely afford the rent on the cheapest structure at the Core-a Quonset hut at the very top of the clearing-turn down that kind of money?

But tonight was tempura night, the one night a month that nobody, not even the poorest, green-cardless-est down-islander, went hungry at the Core. Dawson gathered firewood from the forest, set up a wok the size of a microwave antenna in the center of the hillside, established a perimeter of kerosene torches to keep the mosquitos at bay, and spent the next few hours dancing her wok dance in the flickering light of the tiki torches. She peeled, sliced, diced, battered, dropped morsels into the boiling oil and fished them out with a flourish when they floated golden brown to the surface. Young Marley helped by working the bellows with his feet, and the rest of the Corefolk kicked in whatever foodstuffs they had on hand or could afford to buy.

Roger the Dodger, for instance, a gentle-hearted former Vietnam War draft evader, now a sandal maker with a hillbilly beard long enough to hide a family of birds, contributed the cooking oil. Dave and Mary Sample, who had three kids with a fourth on the way, and kept chickens behind their cabin, provided eggs for the batter. Holly provided flour. Molly Blessingdon, a nurse at Missionary Hospital, kicked in a whole chicken, as did Billy Porter, who played guitar for the house band at the King Christian. Everybody else brought veggies, and the Core kids picked mangos, sugar apples, and soursops for dessert.

All contributions were welcome, but the person voted most valuable scrounger at the October tempura party was Ruford Shea, a diminutive down-islander from St. Vincent who’d contributed all the fresh-caught shrimp the capacious pockets of his work pants could hold.

Ruford was also the one who reported seeing Andy Arena’s old yellow Beetle parked across the street from the harbormaster’s shed. It was there when he went to sea in the morning, crewing on a shrimper, Ruford reported, and still there when he returned late this afternoon.

After the last crumb in the Core had been battered, fried, and eaten, Holly and Dawson talked it over. Dawson and Arena had had a brief, passionate affair a few years back-all Dawson’s affairs were brief and passionate.

“It’s not like him,” said Dawson.

“Maybe he’s having a midlife crisis,” Holly suggested.

“Horseshit,” said Dawson. “That’s something men invent when they want to get-Hey, watch it, there!”

A sports car or a teeny-bopper girlfriend, she’d been about to say, but a soccer ball had just whizzed past her head, missing her by inches, and when she caught sight of Holly’s nephew racing after it as if he hadn’t a care in the world, she didn’t feel much like bitching. Which was not an unusual response: Marley had that effect on a lot of people. “Never mind, skip it.”

“You think we should file a missing person’s report?” asked Holly.

“You do it.”

“Why don’t you do it? You know him better than I do, you can give them a lot more-”

Dawson cut her off. “I just don’t like to get messed up with the police. Avoid authority, the Buddhists say.”

“Since when are you a Buddhist?”

Dawson lay back on the blanket, looking up at the stars, which were pretty spectacular at this latitude, this far from city lights. “Us Mysterians say that, too,” she replied.

“What’s a Mysterian?” asked Marley, dribbling his soccer ball over to Holly, stopping it on a dime, plopping himself down into her lap, leaning back.

“It’s a religion Dawson and I made up,” Holly explained, putting her arms around him and pulling him tightly against her. “After that Iris Dement song-you know, the one I’m always playing about let the mystery be? Mysterians aren’t atheists, or even agnostics. They know there’s some big mystery out there, but for the most part-”

“Never mind. I thought it was like some kind of Star Trek thing-Klingons, Mysterions. Can I stay up an hour late tonight? Mr. Bendt says there’s gonna be a meteor shower, and he’s gonna set up the telescope.”

“As long as he keeps it pointed at the sky,” said Holly-they didn’t call their neighbor Peeping Fran for nothing.