BLOOD WARM
BLOOD WARM
novel by
Robert Burdette Sweet
GLB Publishers ® San Francisco
Second Edition
Copyright © 2005 Robert Burdette Sweet
All rights reserved. Printed in the U.S.A.
No part of this book may be reproduced by any mechanical, photographic, or electronic process, or in the form of an electronic recording, nor may it be stored in a retrieval system, transmitted, translated into another language, or otherwise copied for public or private use, excepting brief passages quoted for purposes of review, without the written permission of the publisher.
Published in the United States by
GLB Publishers
P.O. Box 78212, San Francisco, CA 94107
www.GLBpubs.com
Cover art by the author
Cover Design by the author and
GLB Publishers
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental
Library of Congress Cataloguing Control Number
2005924904
1-879194-56-2
First printing June 2005
DEDICATION
In Gratitude to
Susan Eastwood, Will Patterson, and
members of Arts Anonymous:
Paul Christensen
Tess Crescini
David George
Mike Newman
Pat Perrone
Sheila Rowan
D. Lester
Part I
THE TOWN: ST. GEORGE'S
1
Blood Warm
I tried shoving my suitcase and typewriter through the torn mosquito net draping the bed, but couldn't figure out where the netting attached. Growing up in Chicago had not prepared me for my first skirmish with the tropics. It was already late afternoon and the sweltering heat made the simplest undertaking arduous. Yet I was in a hurry. Better to end my life today than draw out the inevitable.
At twenty-five I had traveled to the island with the goal of plunging myself into the sea to drown. Death as in a Joan Crawford movie—where she flails away in a flapping white nightgown striking out toward the center of the Atlantic—struck me as a clean and vigorous exit. Cold water, however, seemed unnecessary. Suicide in the Caribbean might be less noble than Joan's immersion in the frigid Atlantic, but it would be more womb-like, soothing. I unbuckled my bag to feel around for a notebook and pencil. I had no intention of dying without taking notes.
Managing to wrap the mosquito net over the rectangle of wire suspended from the bedposts, I leaned back against the two hard oblongs I took to be pillows. "October 10, 1955," I scribbled. And then underneath, "Grenada, British West Indies." I gnawed the eraser. It tasted as vapid and sullen as I had felt for a long time.
Extremely agoraphobic, I've never traveled beyond my front door expecting to return alive. So in a private sense I had already passed beyond. Checking into the St. James Hotel and beginning my suicide note were mere formalities. "Dear Mom and Dad, colleagues, friends, acquaintances and all lovers I will never meet." I smiled at my expansiveness. "Should you be informed that my (corpse) (body) (remains)…" Well, which would it be when finally I washed ashore? It depended on how long I had been submerged. And that would depend on how far out I paddled before I sank from exhaustion. My parents would wonder why I hadn't just jumped into Lake Michigan. Not to mention the expense of flying to a tiny island in order to finalize my existence, which might necessitate the return of my (corpse) (body) (remains). This would be an additional fiscal burden for them, who already had postponed paying off the house loan due to their sacrifices for my college education.
Behind me, outside the open window, I heard the waves smacking over rocks and the yawp of gulls before the next crash. I had never smelled sea salt before. It smelled sharp as the scent of blood. Bluntly, I decided upon ‘corpse', crossed out the less accurate possibilities and proceeded:"Should you be informed that my corpse has washed ashore, please accept that my drowning was no accident. Not a murder," I dramatically added hoping to salvage the reputation of any islander who might come under suspicion. "Nor is it anyone's fault," thinking as I wrote that it sure was. "I have simply decided that my life is untenable." I yawned, stretched my arms and inadvertently snagged dangling portions of the net which abruptly unraveled with a muffled thud, shrouding me like a winding sheet. I felt stunned, as though with the descent of this curtain I had already finalized my plan. "Chin to the wind!" With a flourish I signed my first, middle and last name.
Feeling much better, I fell asleep.
* * *
"Is there a piano on the island?" I inquired a week later of the woman behind the reception counter at the hotel. She was attractive, big black eyes staring out of mocha skin. Other than the governor, myself and a few others, I discovered that on the island there existed two other colors: mocha and black, neither of which had much to say to the other. The mocha, much to my chagrin, called me ‘Boob.' The West Indian dialect, sounding more Scottish than anything else, had accents tending to fall on surprising syllables.
"Why for a piano? But, of course, Mr. Boob, you must seek to play one yourself?"
"It's Bob with one O," I corrected.
She went on, "I might know of where one is. Tomorrow, Mr. Boob. Tomorrow I will fetch one out." Her lips trembled so flirtatiously, I guessed wrongly that she had something in mind for me for herself. Well, I was lonely. I kept my suicide note tucked in my back pocket for security.
Grenada was off the beaten track then. Tourist boats were yet to dock. I would learn that drums throbbed the forest while tasseled, voodoo nuns groaned in tongues and fell in cataleptic seizures upon the earth floors of bamboo huts. The blacks called me "Sir," and no plea, no matter how desperate on my part, would stop them. So to them I had no name. I was simply a perpetually sunburned, sweating "Sir."
The following morning the receptionist hailed me with a note—tiny blue forget-me-nots twining the margins—announcing that a Mrs. Jessamine Hempstead would expect me for tea that afternoon at four.
"She's the piano," the receptionist confided, grinning and slapping at the metallic bell for no apparent reason other than to appear busy. "You follow Green Street up, up and up. You'll know the house. It looks like a steamship."
Stumbling along the cobblestone street that wound steeply away from the harbor—the afternoon heat made progress difficult—I hummed a tune while licking sweat off my lips. Being invited somewhere, anywhere, improved my disposition. Though I seemed to have put off my suicide, as I did most things, I still couldn't accept who I was, much less where I was.
Identity is a slippery concept. The gorgeousness and ease of island life, the unfamiliarity of every sound, odor and sight had quickly eroded whatever sense of self I'd originally sought to annihilate. Chicago, with its rows of gray apartment buildings, gray streets and sidewalks, the bare black branches of ice-locked elms scraping the brooding sky, seemed a distant memory.
My suicide plan now appeared to be unnecessary, not merely due to Mrs. Hempstead's invitation, which gave me an immediate purpose, but because the first day I had strolled across the street from the hotel through a heavy, warm rain smack into paradise.
Beyond an iron fence on a hill rose the twin spires of an Episcopal Church. Surrounding the Gothic facade and its high, stained-glass windows, frangipani trees glowed in cascades of white and yellow flowers, their leaves shining from the shower that by then had ceased. Inside the church a choir rehearsed, the sound of the voices rising into a rainbow, neon and brilliant, arcing across the steamy island. In front, upraised, white boxes appeared to drift down the hill in a scrim of haze. An occasional high cross flashed gold in the fitful sun. The air, thick with the heady pungency of flowers, was the temperature of blood. I wanted to fall to my knees.
I seemed to be challenged by beauty itself—swallowed by it like Jonah inside the whale. To celebrate my survival, that day I had decided on the spot to play at being Gauguin and paint in order to implant the tombstones in my memory. But nowhere on the island was anything but house paint to be obtained. So I opted for toothpaste. On a cardboard sheet, with a toothbrush and paste—fortunately for my purpose streaked with red—I quickly approximated marble: sarcophagi, crosses and all, and tacked the finished product to my hotel room wall. A maid and the janitor to whom I eagerly showed my painting found it tolerable, even interesting. Their kindly condescension, however, changed to intrigue and even awed alarm when I called them in to view the painting hours later after the heat of midday had melted each toothpaste tomb, cross and conch into gradual shifts and slides so that the graves appeared to erupt into frothy spirits, a kind of otherworldly emanation that thrilled what I guessed to be their basic Voodoo orientation.
That had been only yesterday, and as I pushed on toward Mrs. Hempstead's I congratulated myself again and again on my artistic attempt. Walking alone makes my mind spin and twist, repeating itself over and over. The street to Mrs. Hempstead's, still spiraling upward, was deserted. Long shadows cast by broad-leafed breadfruit trees offered some relief from the heat. I stopped to breathe and mop my forehead. I looked back down at the town of St. George's, its white, blue and ochre-colored buildings clambering up the hill to terminate in green clouds of gum trees. The distant ocean, streaked by long waving lines of improbably ponderous pelicans, flashed yellow and silver.
Stucco houses had given way to shacks. Since there were no house numbers I had to assume I was on course. Too much effort had already been expended to turn back. I plodded upward. Two bends in the road further I recognized my hostess' house. It did resemble a steamship. Despite its peeling white paint, the house was the largest I'd seen on the island, girded as it was by square pillared porches rounding both the first and second floors. Huge dogs hurled themselves at me from behind a fence. The animals' fury bent the fence dangerously in my direction.
Not only do I become witless when any dog takes notice of me, but particularly I had already learned to fear the tropic dog, a scurvy beast incapable of affection. I am willing to speculate that, for a thousand miles on each side of the equator, dogs increase in viciousness just as their numbers become startling. They stand in the streets, lie on the doorsteps, poke their heads from open windows, even recline upon the low flat roofs with their tongues lolling and their eyes running like sores. "Hi there, Cerberus," I attempted to calm myself and the monsters with my deepest voice whose quavering timbre eased neither of us. Dogs indigenous to the area are not easy to distinguish from each other. They're large, always tan or clay-colored, with several inch-long black whiskers circling their stubby muzzles. As they strutted toward me with a wily, audacious carriage, I shouted, "Mrs. Hempstead? Mrs. Hempstead?"
Expecting a matron of sorts to appear on the porch ineffectually brandishing a cane as a gesture of welcome amid the cacophonous snarls, yips and barks that surrounded me, I was not prepared for the sudden emergence of a lovely girl, her mocha skin and flashing black eyes set off by the whirl of a short lace dress as she bounded down the steps to intercept the dogs and swing wide the gate. "You must be Boob." She extended her ringed fingers.
I naturally assumed this diaphanous charmer to be a daughter or a surprisingly friendly servant on her way to a christening. "Mrs. Hempstead should be expecting me."
"If you're Boob, I greet you. Call me just Jessamine." She turned to rush ahead of me, shooing the dogs under the house with a stick. "Come. Come. It's safe now. Oh, I apologize for the mess this garden is."
Actually, I was stunned by the bananas, palms, hibiscus and especially by a tall flamboyant tree tonguing red flames over the tiled roof. No one consciously gardens in the tropics. Her apology was a reference to what she assumed I was used to in the States. On the island gardens simply are, an unappreciated given. There's something very mundane about the rules of gardening I'd been accustomed to, because she proceeded to lop off the yellow head of a hibiscus with her stick.
"Since Janet, everything has been crazy." She kicked the flower under a bush.
A year before my arrival, the island had been devastated and subsequently demoralized by the hurricane called Janet. Most boats had been destroyed and no one thought to build more, so the fishermen no longer fished. Children were sprouting bloated bellies from a diet of plantains, dasheen and bananas. Gnawing too much sugarcane rotted their teeth. Yet no one did anything about it except talk and even obsess about Janet.
So Jessamine and I drank our initial tea with cookies among a flurry of her stories about the horrors of the hurricane. The wind did this and then it did that. This blew here. That blew there. They hid. They trembled. Nothing would ever be the same. The British sent care packages of sweaters. Even I laughed, dabbing, as I continually did, my dripping forehead with the back of my hand.
To my wonder, Jessamine seemed sophisticated and naive in equal proportions. And she was vivacious and broody by fits and starts. After tea, she took both my hands and held them. Caressed them with her long fingers while staring into my eyes. Why are women's eyes usually so much wider than men's, so much rounder, as though they can see right through you?
Like Lara's eyes, I thought while forcing a smile and glancing out the window. Lara in Chicago.
"What are you thinking?" Jessamine placed my hand on her knee, arranging the fingers wide so that they cupped the knobby bone.
"What?"
She stroked the hair on my arm. "Thinking of the States? Lonely for home, are you?"
She could see through me. Though not accurately. Free from home would be more like it. Free from the mess I'd already made of my life. And Lara's. "Can I trouble you for a glass of water, please? I'm thirsty. The hike up here in the heat…"
She brushed aside my hand and rose. "And I'll bring a wet towel for your drippy forehead. I should have invited you later, toward evening. I've heard Americans have trouble adjusting to the tropics." Jessamine stood over me smiling. "I hate it here, too," I thought she muttered, padding on her bare feet toward the kitchen. Lara, also, had preferred to scuff off her shoes at the least provocation. Though Lara was educated and white and Jessamine uneducated and black, I wondered if I wasn't going to use and be used by them similarly. I stretched out my legs and tried to get comfortable in the stiff cane chair. We take our needs with us wherever we go. Jessamine made me feel welcome. Just as Lara had.
Initially, Lara had seemed wonderful. Hysterical, but in her way divine. I ignorantly assumed she might be the agent to straighten my bent and make me acceptable to my parents, the high school that employed me as teacher, and the world in general. I had pled in my heart, if not my groin, for reprieve from Chicago's fairy-faggot underground with its commingling of lust and fear, the Liebestod of strangers. Lara, a potential divorcee with two children, was as genuine as I would like to be. Curly-haired and frisky, Lara was not only pretty but proved to be sexually aggressive as an unspayed mouser.
Gay guys screw women in more ways than one. I'd never have junked all of that and escaped to the island had I not still been, in the evenings I did not spend with Lara, a lurker in the bushes for trade. Winter, fall, or summer, it made no difference. The happier I was with Lara, the more I felt free to unleash the forbidden me. To my credit, I imparted not all, but many, of my peccadilloes to her. She replied, "But that's not how you act with me!"
I responded, "The love you think you feel is not what you're getting." Males tend to stick it anywhere it can be stuck. At nature's command. They are under the aegis of that great god, the Future-Forever. Youth is that god's slave, his gonadal hireling.
"I'm pregnant," she whispered.
I heard my father, the school principal, and the head of the English department all laughing, but their laughter was cold, derisive, ironic. Blinking rapidly, her lashes beating hard, like a spasm or tick, Lara insisted, "Of course, I'll have an abortion. My divorce isn't final. I'll lose my children if I enter that courtroom with a distended belly. And you, look at you, what a waste!"
Chicago's seamy underpinnings being familiar to me, I ferreted out that most dedicated teacher of human despair: the illicit, usually incompetent abortionist, who for an exorbitant price would kill nearly anything you had enough money to requisition. In a room under the roar of the elevated train, there Lara screamed and screamed and bled and bled. My, our, child wrapped in rags and tossed into a slop bucket had never had the honor or horror of one breath.
If memory is who one is, I shuddered at my recollections. I was relieved when Jessamine returned, bearing a glass of water cubed with ice. Ice! A house on the island with a refrigerator! I sighed as she wrapped a cool towel around my forehead. "You're a saint." I drank greedily. The previous tea had done nothing to quench my thirst.
"I'm a woman."
I wondered what that was supposed to mean.
"There's the piano," she invited. "Play. Play for me, Boob."
Near the far wall of the ample living room away from the windows stood a baby grand, the ivory missing from many keys. I feared for its tune. My fear proved justified. But I tried some Schubert, some Chopin and Bach. Keys stuck, I kept forgetting where I was in most pieces, the wires twanged and clinked. The towel slipped from my head and got tangled about my feet. It was a rout, but Jessamine seemed to love it all. "More, more," she giggled, at me or with me, I was not sure.
Though I've never performed on the piano with finesse or even with particular concern, from the age of six playing the instrument has been a satisfying habit, like brushing one's teeth. Hence my desire to find a piano on the island. Most of what I've ever learned about anything came from attempting to come to terms with playing music. But what you know and can maneuver yourself through one week, without constant renewal and continual effort you won't be able to manage the next week. All performance artists are Buddhists whether they acknowledge it or not. They must accept impermanence.
Which is a wisdom I've never been able to accommodate. Knowing is not believing. I still want permanence. Which is another way of admitting that too much of what is real has always gotten in the way of my presumptions.
Just as I pretended to misconstrue what was to become of my relationship with Jessamine. I at first assumed that this island beauty wanted me for me. And for a time the affair did appear to be how I thought it was. We became lovers the evening of our first meeting, after the tea, the ice water, after my pianistic fiasco, on her upper porch, as night rolled in on the thousand, thousand flashes of fireflies igniting the arching flamboyant tree above our heads.
Possibly it's a gay thing, but I've always suspected that if strangers don't have sex right away, later familiarity will bore them into not wanting it. With acquaintance arises, all subliminally, a kind of incest taboo. Besides, initial sex is rather tentative anyway, the yowling and clawing a month or so up the road. Also, a young man has no basic function other than to try out whatever is around. I hadn't had sex since the dwarf I'd encountered in New York's Everard Baths, the first stop on my way to the island. I enjoyed other guys, too, while at the baths, but specifically I recall the dwarf, cute and hairy as a furball, cuddled on my lap, lapping my cod like a starved kitten. His dong was longer than his chest, his tiny legs twitching upward toward an air vent that dripped with steam. I had deplaned in Trinidad dripping with clap, a green scum leaking unremittingly like snot from a runny nose. I searched out a doctor to stab penicillin into my behind, concluding that if it was hell I wanted and hell I deserved, I had arrived at its approximation.
But Jessamine's eagerness annulled my sense of desperation and, as had Lara's, made me question my natural proclivity. The affair, what was to become my constant welcome in her house, her friends, the gossip I became privy to, all put my fatal fear of rejection and estrangement momentarily to rest.
Jessamine was very open and told me most of what I wanted to know about her, sometimes by intention, sometimes by accident. People follow patterns. We grow to become programmed as any machine. Her program, I eventually realized, was to screw white. It wasn't my penis she desired, but my pinkness.
(And then later...)
...The falls gushed through a cleft of black rock a hundred feet or so above my head. The stream tumbled directly down, the white cascade widening until it roared into the pool in sparkling clouds. Embedded in the dripping rock on both sides of the spilling water clung tendriled plants, ferny and thick-lobed, and one yellow-blooming acacia bush dripping and waving from the booming spray. The noise was tremendous, obliterating rather than alarming, lulling my senses, tempting me toward the ego loss requisite for attaining solitude. I was well aware that had I not been by myself, and had I not felt rejected by all I had ever known, I would have experienced my immersion into the waters under Concord Falls as a mere pleasure and not this luxurious baptism in the font of wholeness.
Then I saw him. Standing stock-still, the bare foot of his left leg lodged against the knee of his right, the leggy triangle outlining the path I also had found to approach the river, the whiteness of the two giant boulders outlining his dark shoulders. He looked to be near my age with a bristly head of hair so thick and black it coated his head like a helmet of ink-dyed isinglass. He wore only short dark pants of a very thin material. Around his neck circled a bulbous, black car inner tube, its color and texture so resembling his skin that it looked to be a yoke supplied him by his own body.
How long he'd been there I couldn't be certain. Surely he had witnessed my abandon, my cavortings, my nakedness. I had to assume he resented my presence as had the toothless sibyl. I politely buried all but my head in the water and paddled just enough to keep afloat while warily eyeing him fearful of racial antagonism. Were he a color-bigot, I was mince meat. Well, that's what I get for blundering into what might well be forbidden territory. And me exposed as a pellucid grub adrift in a puddle.
The more alarmed I am, the more strident my voice gets. "Come on in," I splashed water in his direction attempting to appear relaxed and playful. "The water's fine." Platitudes have been known to rescue many a desperate man, I hypothesized on the spot.
I think he was staring at me, but I could not be sure. The sun was almost behind him and the rocks had begun to cast shadows. Either his eyes were closed or an umbra of darkness obscured them. His body looked to be squat rather than tall as was usual on the island, yet solid with more beef than fat. His right leg remained implanted in his left as though he were a swamp bird or an African hunter stalking prey. I clawed my hands up onto a dry rock and kicked demurely, proceeding with my charade of nonchalance. My bare butt must be protruding beyond the water and I felt woefully vulnerable. The constant crash of the water was so terrific that if he had responded to my invitation I probably would not have heard. I peered down the river into the valley.
"Hey, youse," I finally descried him calling out, "youse Hamerican?"
I kicked on while responding with a forceful burst of voice, "And are you Grenadian?"
From a side glance I noticed him shuck off his shorts and wade rapidly into the pool while adjusting the inner tube around his waist. He collided with the water amidst a splash and then floated inside the confines of the inner tube, his head propped near the protrusive nozzle. His wet muscled chest with its spatterings of kinked hair reflected the sun and glimmered like a metal shield.
Believing that gestures rather than words define human interaction, our shared nakedness and his obvious unconcern regarding my presence encouraged me to relax my guard. I dog-paddled over to where he floated and sputtered, "This your swimming hole? What I mean is, do you live near here? My name is Bob but I'd rather you called me Robert."
"Boobert?" he mis-echoed.
I decided it would do no good to correct him and so proceeded to inquire, "What's your name?"
"Name?" he questioned as though thinking. He had a very African face, wide nose, thick lips and a very round chin. "Youse calls me Junior?" he suggested as though his identity were in question. He smiled, his very white and perfect teeth aglitter. His smile, should memory prove me correct, was poignant. Not especially welcoming, nor sarcastic, but poignant. With a wisp of spittle riding one corner of his lip.
Since I had to keep paddling in place while addressing him, I began to exhale frothy spouts of water until he suggested I cling to the tube, which I did. I let my legs drift alongside his. I felt the current push our thighs together. He shut his eyes, his heavy lips settling into a grin, blissful as the Buddha. I could not even guess how he might have come by the name of just Junior. In my mind I named him Celestine even though I did not realize yet how Catholic the island really was, how the Anglican Church centering my favorite cemetery was more for show than worship. As the Catholic Church well knows, he who gets there first masters imaginations. And the French colonized the island long before the British. The further back country one meandered the further into the island's past one journeyed.
"Hang tight," Junior warned as he began to backstroke us toward the falls, the thick hair of his armpits shaggy from moisture. The stream whirled in circles the closer to the roar we got. Speech became impossible. A cold wind off the falls made me shiver. I glared at him in alarm. My lips must have drained to a wormy pink. But because his poignant smile remained fixed, I didn't let go and swim back to shore. Our thighs were still enmeshed and so when he reached for my hand I let him grab hold and fed my fingers through his while squeezing my eyes tight against the stinging whips of water.
The tube plunged and spun—with me screaming—somehow through the roaring spray and beyond. Eventually I dared open my eyes and there the watery veil poured, heady with exuberance, screening us from the valley. Behind the falls where we bobbed the water lapped serenely. I saw that it leaked in rivulets through cracks in the rocky wall. All felt calm, safe, strangely comforting. Junior indicated where I should stand on a submerged boulder where he was to balance next to me while pushing the inner tube onto a jutting, dripping shelf. With his arms he pulled himself up onto the shelf beside it, his dangling sex swinging like an animal's under his crack. After he had turned to yank me upwards with him, I had no trouble walking the shelf behind the falls to the far corner where he led me.
I crouched with him in the twilight of our cave where, yes Throckmorton, some sort of god must abide within the leaking slags, because Junior and I leaned back against the rock so close our shoulders touched and I felt engulfed by the aura of where we were, as though in a temple, sacred and profound. We began to touch each other. Our fingers lingered, stroked and pulled until the sheets of tumbling water grew whiter and shook as with the spasms of a ghost. When I finally returned to inhabit my body, the valley that lay beyond the falls seemed to have slid into the sudden violet dusk of evening.
Was Junior now Boobert's friend? I had not a guess. Such is the closeness that occurs within the confines of a tremulous thundering where speech is useless.