“Damned if I know.” I shivered slightly in the warm February evening.
“Willis Penn’s no idle chatterer. When he talks it’s almost always about something he considers important.”
“Weird was his word. ‘Weird night, Frank.’ He didn’t say anything else.”
“He chooses his words carefully.” Chance pulled at his beard and looked over at me. “Strange. Really strange.”
It was after nine when we pulled into town. Chaucer got its name when the British took the island over from the Dutch. One of the first governors suffered from a literary streak. It’s a failing English speaking people rarely tolerate in their public officials.
We parked in front of the Tabard Inn, a white concrete and stucco building, its windows large shuttered archways shaded by lush vegetation. Red, blue and yellow spots lit the palm fronds around the Inn. Passing a small kidney shaped pool, we walked around a group of tourists listening to Ken Tindall, a local dock hanger on, giving a slide talk on humpback whales.
I knew Ken casually. He lived in a rundown hut in the valley between Salvation Hill and Wise Mountain, earning his living doing odd jobs and cooking on charter boats. Most of the time he was a knee-walking drunk who wore ragged denim shorts, a tee shirt and a wool hat, like those that Rastas pull over their dreadlocks. Ken’s hair was graying blonde and flowed down around his shoulders. When he wasn’t hustling a few bucks from tourists with his slide talks on nature in the Caribbean he could often be found at the Quarterdeck, the favorite bar of expatriates, where he would hold forth with endless boring stories in one of the thickest West Indian dialects on St. Ursula.
Nodding to him as we passed, we passed through a large interior courtyard to the verandah dining room where we found an empty table and sat down. Tobias Gaines, owner-manager of the Tabard Inn, came over.
“I say, you chaps dining with us tonight?” Tobias was less than five and a half feet tall, stringy black hair looking as though it had never been washed falling over the collar of his black polo shirt.
“Only if you spring for a pre-dinner drink,” Chance said.
“It’s on the house, chaps,” he said.
Chance ordered a Sambuca. I wanted a screwdriver with Stoly.
Tobias wrote the orders down in a yellow newsprint pad.
“Jolly good.” He bowed slightly at the waist, then spinning around half ran, half hopped toward the bar.
Tobias was an Australian who had learned to be British from watching American B-movies. He was a repository of Jolly Goods, Rightos, Bloody Blokes and Good Shows. The only classic phrase I had never heard him say was Tally-Ho, and it was missing only because Monica Whistley-Gore’s attempts at starting a local hunt club faltered when Government had refused her permission to import foxes. Wild sheep, goats, donkeys and mongooses running over the hills and through the island bush were trouble enough. Over the last three years, the goats have gotten so bad, so out of control, that people have had to fence their properties if they want any kind of garden or shrubbery.
He returned with our drinks and we sipped them, our legs stretched out, feet resting on the extra chairs at the table. Boat lights bobbed on the waters of Great Harbor, halyards clinking against aluminum masts. The evening air was sweet, filled with odors of flowers and cooking.
At the far end of the verandah two young women, obviously college students on vacation, were playing guitars and singing “Judy Drownded.” They wore identical hand printed blue cotton caftans and leaned over their guitars, fiberglass Ovations designed to look like medieval lutes. Hair fell over their faces and brushed the backs of their hands as they played and sang in thin reedy voices, just on the edge of being off key.
The song ended, they looked up, smiling at the scattering of applause. I caught the eye of one, and smiled half in encouragement, half hoping I might pick her up. Her eyes fell quickly to the guitar neck and she started strumming. Her partner picked up the beat and they went into a bland version of “Island in the Sun.”
“It’s Bellefonte night at the Tabard Inn,” Chance said.
“They’re not bad.”
“They’re terrible, Frank. Their guitar playing makes you sound like Doc Watson and their singing is enough to make Rumble howl, which takes a hell of a lot after living with you.”
“I don’t think they’re all so bad,” I persisted.
“You’re horny.” He put down his drink and turned to me. “You whiffed with Liz Ford earlier and your gonads are driving you crazy. For chrissakes, Frank, both those girls are younger than your sons.”
“Maybe I’m lonely.” I felt like an idiot. There is nothing more pathetic, more despicable than a man in his fifties who thinks a woman in her early twenties might be interested in him.
Chance turned back to the table and attacked his drink. “I don’t want to hear about lonely. Being horny I can deal with. Loneliness I can’t even think about.”
The dining area was half full, vacationing couples in varying shades of tan, drinking pina colladas and strawberry daiquiris with little paper umbrellas for stirrers. They spoke in hushed tones, looking intensely at one another. Waiters and waitress moved around and between them, delivering food, removing plates, replenishing drinks, careful not to intrude on their intimacy.
“Must be nice,” I said.
“What’s that?” Chance dropped a small handful of coffee beans in his Sambuca.
“Being in love on a Caribbean island.”
He popped a bean in his mouth, chewing on it as he answered. “It’s just like being in love anywhere. You are in love for a while, it feels wonderful and then you’re not in love and you feel like hell because it’s over.”
“You’re such an asshole cynic.”
“I’m an asshole realist. I understand how hunger rises, makes its demands, gets glutted, falls off, and rises up somewhere else. And that’s all love is, hunger.”
I smiled at him, dropping the subject. Chance approaches life much differently than I do. Harder. It reflects his ups and downs, things he’s seen and had to do. I’ll always be a romantic. I try to hide it. I pretend to have Chance’s hardness, but I can’t feel it. The best I can do is hide my romantic streak from people who might try to use it against me.
Tobias took our dinner orders himself, returning in a few minutes with curried banana soup for our appetizers.
“My own recipe,” he said. “Do enjoy it, chaps.”
The soup was excellent. Tobias’ food always is.
Chance looked at me across the table, stirring the ice and coffee beans in his third Sambuca. He pulled out the swizzle stick, one without an umbrella on it, licking off traces of the drink, and leaned back in his chair, distorting the silk screened images of Groucho Marx and John Lennon on the front of his tee shirt.
“What would you say if I told you I was thinking of selling the plumbing business and investing in a television station?”
I was surprised. He doesn’t talk much about his own affairs. When he does, it’s often to hit the listener with something big he’s been sitting on for days.
“Here? On St. Ursula?” I thought he was joking, but when I smiled at him he nodded.
Several years earlier Chance had started a plumbing supply business in partnership with Rodney Creque, an Ursuline plumber. I knew he had been getting bored with it, but he’d never mentioned getting out.
“The