A Drink Called Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page A

Ngarima’s son who sleeps there of an age that slips into houses? Twelve? What do I know? Could it be Harry? I step back behind my curtain.
    No guidebook says not to sleep because men make a sport of tupping the tourists. Now only the broken glass protects me. Thank you, Temu, for sparing the one lamp that could break. It certainly wasn’t you, you who can’t even aim pee without wildness.
    I keep my eyes open to the broken glass. No one else, clumsy or not, will tiptoe over it tonight without me hearing his cut cries. Tomorrow I will find the man who did tiptoe by his bloodied feet, the one who fled the room over the lamp pieces, the one who is probably still running over the sharp coral that faces the beach.
    Unless he has calluses like all the rest.
    Not the sex I expected. I review the few men I’ve seen here: all smooth-chested adolescents except Barclay and the old men who gamble next to the flagpole at the wharf. Do more men hide in the crevices of this island, lazy ones who don’t come down to move copra, who howl with the roosters before dawn and sneak onto women’s beds of rice? Men happy about the boat’s delay?
    I can always use my made-up karate again, and besides, for tonight, the glass will have to do. I keep my eyes wide against the darkness until I have to blink, and blinking, they have to close.
    The glass is gone when I wake up. So are the two mountains who sleep but do not guard me just beyond my bed.
    Barclay and Ngarima stand under the papaw tree outside, and their voices carry. They are talking about the sex of the tree, whether it will bear anymore, whether by cutting it short it will have better sex. The chicken under the tree pecking at coconut shreds swivels its head between them and their talk, surveying the ground really, moving its lizardy way forward, neck, then ruff, then the machete Barclay carries shakes at the point he is making about tree sex, but he is really aiming, and that is that for the chicken. Suddenly headless, it takes flight, as much as its bush wings allow, it dances and dies, dances and dies, pumping its blood into the sand while the two of them go on arguing.
    I don’t interrupt.
    I break my strong-tourist vow, the one to never complain or whine to another tourist, which would reveal expectation, and all I really want is to be without that, knowing from the ad business how much of that is made up for you anyway, and I break my vow and leave for the guesthouse. Who is surprised about the path I choose? As I choose it, Ngarima waves at me, chicken feathers rising in a white corona around her hand, and Barclay tips his head the way he does when I say, What about a boat wreck?
    When Harry comes to his door, he is wearing just a wrap of the flowered sheet around his middle, and what shows above it is where the Harry is most appropriate. Since all I have seen him in is what can only be described as planter’s wear, I take the wrap as a state of undress and step back in shock. I didn’t knock, I say. You’re busy, I see, I say.
    Knock, he says. But come in. Veelu is about to go.
    The woman inside is twisting two coconuts together by their husk-hair. Two heads is what they look like to me, bound in her Valkyrie grasp. I’m all ugly angles next to her, where fat is altogether fine, thin is grim.
    She tilts her machete in greeting. Then she lifts her two coconuts and cracks them together so they break open in a single blow.
    I smile, and she leaves to skin and dress the coconuts, whatever you do after such a display.
    Harry, I say, turning back to him slowly. I give him a sorted-out version of my nocturnal visitor. I end with: I just wanted to know how you were getting along. I try not to say that with female inflection at the end, a question.
    I must say the sex is fine, if that’s what you’re after. He stretches his arms over his head so I see more of his navel. I have at least four women fighting over me.
    Oh, good, I say. In