February Heat. Wilson Roberts

on the road we continued along the sea wall, wind blasting our faces. I picked up my habit of driving rental Jeeps with the windshield down from riding in Chance’s Land Rover. The only time he raises it is during a storm. It’s his sole protection from the rain. I keep telling him to carry an umbrella, cardboard boxes, anything his passengers could use to shield themselves from rainstorms. He refuses. He enjoys stopping, putting up the windshield, and continuing his drive, pretending the rain doesn’t bother him while his passengers get drenched, complaining at the same time they marvel at his seeming indifference to both their discomfort and his own drenching.

      “She really turned you on,” he said.

      “She’s an attractive woman.” I dropped it there. I don’t talk about women with other men, even a good a friend like Chance. Besides, I didn’t want to think about Liz Ford. From the time she approached me by the ladder on the upper deck of The Yellow Bird, to the firmness of her handshake as she said goodnight, I had been hoping for something other than spending the evening with Chance. Sighing again, I stretched my legs, resting my hands behind my head.

      Chance broke the silence. “I’ll go to dinner with you.”

      “Sounds good to me.”

      Day or night, the road from Smugglers Bay to St. Ursula’s main town of Chaucer is one of the loveliest drives in the world. To the south is the Caribbean, its blue/green expanse broken only by the three small rises of Queen Anne Island, Jacobs Cay and Pirates Nemesis, a barren thrust of stone surrounded by coral reefs, accessible only by rowboat. Local legend says plundered gold is buried on Pirate’s Nemesis. If there ever was it has long since been found and secreted somewhere else. Not an inch of ground remains that hasn’t been dug up and turned over repeatedly by treasure seekers. In spite of that, it’s a favorite haunt of middle-aged tourists with metal detectors, who, after hours of prospecting, end up finding nothing more than one another’s lost dimes and quarters.

      The sea is separated from the road by a wall of rock, chunks of coral and brick mortared together in the fashion of the old sugar mills, once the core of St. Ursula’s plantation economy. Waves broke against the stone, their spray covering the road, the Land Rover and us. In heavy storms the sea will eat sections of the road as it breaks through the wall, sending chunks of rock and asphalt crashing against the foot of the mountains which run the length of the island, separating the north from the south side. Roads twist and wind over those mountains, past huge century plants, hibiscus and oleander, banana plantations, grazed fields, and occasional houses. Cars have to compete for space with cows, donkeys, goats, chickens, as well as with people walking, bicycling and riding donkeys.

       This particular night the moon, nearly full, caught the breaking waves, lighting the foam as it swirled around the rocks. Lights twinkled from the Paradise Isle Hotel and Yacht Harbor on Queen Anne Island.

      I reached into the ice chest Chance keeps in the back of the Land Rover and grabbed us each a Heineken. I pulled the tabs and passed him one.

      “Bad stuff,” I said as he took the can.

      “I love beer,” he said.

      “Not the beer, the cans. You ought to buy bottled beer. I’ve heard that cans are made with aluminum might do more damage to your brain than the alcohol.”

      “Then here’s to beer, in cans and bottles.” He raised the can to his lips. “I don’t think much of my brain anyway. It gets me in more trouble than my pecker does.”

      Halfway between Smugglers Bay and the Great Harbor of Chaucer, the road curves sharply around Pelican Cove. There, in a small valley at the base of Wise Mountain, sits a small cluster of West Indian homes, the road separated from the sea by thick mangroves, the nesting place of the pelicans for which Pelican Cove is named.

      A dozen or so men, all dressed in dungarees and tee shirts, lounged around the common well, leaning against the fence, sitting on benches as they smoked cigarettes and drank from a rum bottle they passed around. Chance pulled over and stopped.

      “Good evening. How are you tonight?” He spoke in the formal Ursuline manner.

      “Chance, mon, and Frank,” several of them said at once. “We are just fine you know, and you?”

      “Absolutely wonderful, thank you,” he said as I made the okay sign with my thumb and forefinger.

      We got out of the car. Chance hunkered down by the benches. I sat on the edge of the well. We all talked a bit, passing time, Chance and I drinking from the rum bottle as it made the rounds. There was the general light unease often present as Statesiders and West Indians grope for common ground, the void between us filled with talk of the weather, local politics and some lengthy discussion of politics in the States, all of us wondering how they would affect the winter’s tourist crop.

      “It will be a little better than last year.” Moses Riley, whose family owned most of the land around Pelican Cove, took the rum bottle with one hand, gesturing with the other as he spoke. “Your presidential election is over. I have noticed over the years, whenever there is a presidential election in the States tourism is down a bit here. People in the United States do not care about what happens in the Caribbean as long as events here do not affect them directly. But the people with money to travel are also those who are most involved in political affairs. They go away less during important election years.”

      Moses smiled as he delivered his lecture. The rest of us nodded, making noncommittal grunts in response, or simple comments such as ‘oh,’ or ‘interesting,’ and ‘I didn’t know that.’

      “None of it matters anyway,” said another man, a lanky West Indian named Robert Brady, who chain-smoked unfiltered cigarettes and refused the bottle each time it came to him. “Nobody in American politics gives a damn about what happens in these islands. Someday maybe it will be different, but now they do not care.” Several of the others nodded in agreement. “And it is all right they do not give a damn,” he continued. “We do not want them to give a damn. They give a damn and we lose our land, we lose our control of the island. Look at the American islands. They give a damn and somebody pays them twenty-four dollars worth of Hong Kong beads and the island is lost.”

      “Yeah, that is the true thing,” another man said. “My brother in St. Thomas, he lives in a housing project which does not have running water six days out of seven, and his children get beat up at school all the time and the crime is out of control. Kid with guns, man. And the drugs, and I do not mean Ganga, man, I mean real drugs. It is very bad there. Very bad.” He shook his head and made a sucking noise through his teeth.

      From there the conversation turned to local politics and which of the two major parties on the island would be most likely to side with American authorities should they ever want anything from St. Ursula.

      “Up on the top of the mountain, there is our problem now.” Robert’s voice was angry as he spoke, his face in a stiff frown as he pointed at the side of Wise Mountain. “That antenna will change us, man, and it will change our children even more. After a few years of watching the programs and advertisements from the States they will want the States. They will want us to be like the States. They will want cruise ships in our harbors. Trinkets in our gift shops. Television will bring us down just as surely as American troops brought Grenada down.”

      After an awkward silent moment, someone raised the topic of poker. Politics were forgotten as he took a worn deck of cards from his pocket and began shuffling them. Someone else broke out a fresh bottle of rum. I reminded Chance of dinner.

      We said good night, shook a few hands and got back into the Land Rover.

      As we started to pull away, our stomachs growling, Willis Penn, a man of sixty, known through the British and American islands as a particularly wise obeah man and canny politician, put his hand on my arm. “Weird night, Frank.” His voice was as natural and even, as if he had just commented on the coldness of the beer.

      Willis Penn wasn’t given to playing a role with his reputation of being wise in the ways of sorcery, hidden truth and ritual. He was a practical man, one of the most politically astute people