A Drink Called Paradise Read Online Free PDF Page B

Men die on the island too.
    I choose to stay here, he says. He makes his job of greeting visitors, of saying yes, sound very good, makes his place here under the palms on a chair sound great. He is pleased.
    What’s with the giant sponge? I ask.
    Two men stop throwing dice. Giant sponge? Barclay laughs so that others laugh. I have seen those in the movies.
    All the men eye me now, my short shorts, my braless sheet-wrapped top.
    Which movie? I ask.
    She is asking which movie, he says, as if there’s an interpreter, as if I am a voice he has thrown. The army’s movies, he answers. Let me see, once we saw The Fly . Once King Kong .
    One man pulls his undershirt aside to bare some chest, to beat it.
    Nothing’s giant around here, says Barclay, turning to me. Everything’s small. Small coconuts, small island, small people. Compared to yours.
    The army? When was the army here?
    Barclay shakes his shoulders as if the question bites at his back. Come here, come here, he says. He tows me over to the flagpole next to the wharf—there’s no flag on top, just a bit of metal on the rope hitting the pole—and his audience follows. Did you read our plaque?
    It is fastened to the base, I have to squat. Love makes the world go round , I read out loud. I thought it commemorated a battle or something.
    A battle? An actual smile is what happens across Barclay’s face. When we made these houses out of cement, he says, mixing and hauling and spreading, many nights we came to our women exhausted. We did not like that, he says. You see, there’s only one thing that grows big around here.
    I’m too physical—I step back.
    Don’t worry, he says when his friends stop laughing. Why did you come, anyway, if you didn’t want to be part of our customs? The man who came with you has no problem with our customs. And now it’s the water, it’s what’s in the water. Isn’t what’s in the water why all people want to come to an island?
    I leave Barclay and his dice-throwing friends and find the only shop open among the abandoned and half-built ruins that front the wharf. There I buy a bottle of soy sauce, the condiment of choice for taro, from a young girl who has been sleeping across the counter. The soy-sauce bottle is long-necked and corked—just what I need. But I need it empty, and without thinking to save it for Ngarima or even myself, I pour the contents into pig mash that sits souring in a bucket beside the path. I know it’s mash because two pigs fight over it as soon as I leave.
    The girl who has sold me the bottle tells me the sauce will fatten the pigs well, so well someone will pay too much for them. Although her hand is very hot when she gives me my change, along with the advice, she smiles all the way across her face.
    Children smile with fresh muscles, they don’t know where their smiles stop or start. Even in perfidy, they smile so sweetly. I buy a length of suckers from her belt of them and give them out to her and her friends. Except one of the suckers I crack and then wedge down the bottleneck. Then I find matches in my pocket—the Girl Scout in me yet—and the girl lets me buy her last pen so I can write a note on the inside of the matchbook, the perfect-sized paper and tough weight for such writing. Dear Timmy, I print, I miss you and want to kiss you. Here is where I am.
    The map I make shows me in the middle, any tourist’s rendering. I tear off the cardboard and stuff it into the bottle with the sucker. The children puzzle over the waste of the sweet, licking each other clean of every trace of the suckers’ sugar. Except for the smallest, who tucks his little lump-and-stick behind his ear. Then they all talk about what a crook I am to fatten the pig with soy sauce, and I smile wide the way they do.
    They follow me to the wharf. I am happy to have them. I want witnesses. After all, if I get a reply I want someone to say I am the one who