A Drink Called Paradise Read Online Free Page A

I’ve gone too far. I have to be lost, though lost on this small island can’t be too bad. Maybe lost is good, is just somewhere else. I force myself to smile. I turn as if that’s what I want to do.
    Where the bush thickens most there’s the leftover of a path that veers around it, and I take it more to avoid the plants than for a direction, and at the end of that path is a palm with a wire running up its smooth side, like one plant throttling another. Then I see the house below it.
    It is made with fiberboard nailed crookedly to planks and tarpaper and air, but the rusted bolts and barbed wire all around its bottom give it a look of growth, of a succulent’s succulent with greening thick walls, of something made fast and abandoned slow.
    I look for an opening, a reason for all the bolts and barbed wire, why it’s here and not on the beach. Surely the wire’s an antenna, surely something inside bounces sound around, if not picture. Inside must be a radio, if not a phone.
    I’m free, finding a phone makes me free. The boat is already coming if I can tell it to.
    I keep circling.
    My ex will send a boat. Although he is the man who forgot me, he is someone who shrinks refrigerators and blows up people for a living, one special effect or another, none of them very special to me after he forgot to pick me up post-delivery, and other better-forgotten events, he could send a boat. But I don’t think he thinks of me now.
    I hope he doesn’t, I hope he’s forgotten.
    There has to be some place to get in.
    It is my son whom I’d call. Miss you, I’d say to him if I could, but it would come out, Brush your teeth. Then I’d make the loud sound of a smack that’s supposed to embarrass him, the one that leaves a red butterfly on a cheek.
    I stop to think about that butterfly, that call, and then I find the lock.
    It’s covered with vines and all rusty, a lock I can’t knock off with one blow of a machete the way any islander could. I have no machete. I’m probably the only person on the island who doesn’t carry a machete.
    The shack can’t be empty.
    Maybe the rust fills in instantly where a sweaty palm turns, or the plants surge over the suddenly bared spot in a single afternoon.
    And over what other bared spots on single afternoons? One square mile of island, and how many secrets can such an island harbor?
    My shoulders against the door don’t so much as flake off rust. I give the door a good kick.
    Barclay will open it.

Barclay, I say, let me radio.
    Who would look for him in the cemetery? Ghosts, says Ngarima, you don’t want to go there. But there he is, drinking, his back up against one of the stones that all lean one way, like recliners, that angle, and hard to see if you are walking by at a clip, which I am, short-cutting and wending and feeling my way back. But I do see.
    He gives me his film-star profile, his wet lips settling around a bottle.
    Barclay, I say, I’ve found the shack.
    Barclay drinks. The label’s imported. What’s not imported here?
    I squat to his level. At his level, each plot is fenced to the size of a bed and mounded as if there are covers pulled over. In some places the covers are cracked and open. I thought everyone here was afraid of this place, I say. Talk to me, Barclay.
    Everyone is afraid, he says. Aren’t you? His voice is down deep where darkness sits in a man, where rumble meets those chemicals that make a man or make him weep.
    They’re not my dead, I say.
    No? It doesn’t matter, he says. The spirits have blown away anyway. He purses his lips to show me blow . All of the spirits.
    Quit being so mysterious, I say. It’s bad enough you wouldn’t take me to the radio.
    Radio? says Barclay, sitting up a little. You know, boats used to miss this island even when they started having radar, he says. He drinks again. This is where they always put the inches-to-miles on maps because