Pat Boone Fan Club Read Online Free

mountain, I stare out paneless windows. I don’t hear Miss Duvall conjugate French verbs. I don’t watch Mr. Waggoner chalk sums on the blackboard. My mates’ voices, chanting answers, seem remote. Far below, white sails gust the U-shaped harbor, the tessellated azure, aqua, viridian sea. Pastel houses dot green volcanic mountains. Daydreaming, I re-create the scene when the tramp turnedthe corner . . . see him again before he turned the corner. I want to know who he is, where he lives, where he goes, where he is now. As if he offers a secret message, I want to hear his triangle, follow his bare feet, know what he sees in his distant gaze. Yesterday afternoon, while watching a film about Martians landing on Earth, I couldn’t even pretend to be scared. Rather, his image continuously reels.
    A week later, again in front of the theater, I finally hear the ping of metal. I look toward Emancipation Park. The sound sharpens. I slip the coins meant for the purchase of a movie ticket into my pocket. I step back under the canopy of the marquee. I don’t yet want him aware of me. When he passes, it’s as if his presence deepens the shade in which I stand. Not as a bad omen, as in movies, foreshadowing a car crash or the arrival of a monster. Rather, his shadowed scent is of mangrove swamps, is the core of a calabash, rain-rubbed earth after a tropical storm. As I take my first step after him, this scent is what I seem to follow.
    He pays no attention to me. We continue along the main street past duty-free shops, tourists giving him a wide berth, and now me, as well. Again he turns toward Market Square. Here in the crowded market, I assume no one will notice me, even though I am a white girl trailing after him. I dawdle past booths of sugarcane, myrtle, Bombay mangoes, squawking guinea fowl. Men sit outside snackettes drinking small glasses of white rum. I pause beside a donkey to stroke his mangy fur, still aware of the man’s burlap-sack back. Even above shouts of women in headties selling guava ices, I hear the strokes of his triangle.
    He leaves the market, continuing along the marl alleys of shantytown. Here I will be noticed, in this place my parents forbid me to enter. I follow anyway, past shacks with corrugated tin roofs, walls constructed of newspapers, egg cartons, rusty biscuit tins. A woman watches me as she cups rainwater from a kerosene drum. Another woman, sweeping her dirt yard with apalm frond, pauses. I don’t know if I should smile, explain my presence. I do nothing. It’s not as if I’m scared to be here, not at all, and I don’t understand my parents’ warning. Rather, I worry that, because of my skin color, I am the one to cause concern even though I’m young. I hunch my shoulders as if this can make me seem even smaller, as if to say, I’m only a little girl who won’t cause trouble . I shuffle as quietly as possible in my buffalo-hide sandals, my toes now dusty with limestone soil. The man never slows his gait.
    Once we leave shantytown, we are in solitude. We are at the point on the island where streets lead to alleys, alleys lead to fields of fever grass, fields flow up volcanic mountains or meander into donkey trails and goat paths, here, where streets aren’t streets at all but muddy footprints leading into mangrove swamps, into forests of mimosa, mampoo, coconut palm.
    He enters the woods. Reluctantly I pause just inside the entrance. If I don’t meet my father at the appointed time, he’ll be angry. Grasses sway as the tramp follows the trail, soon disappearing. Now, the ring of his triangle is the chirp of bananaquits and scarlet tanagers. Even though the island is small, finite, this place seems like an unearthly, overgrown, magical garden where cool trade winds sough flame trees, where sphagnum moss thrives, where phalaropes sleep. I clink my movie coins together, to mimic his sound.
    Around this same time, I first hear the story of the Pied Piper, probably at school, told as a