Left at the Mango Tree (7 page)

Magic.

Raoul’s atypical Tuesday (the second in as many weeks) had started off badly. Seeing as how it
was
Tuesday, he should have
slept in until 10:25, awoken to his breakfast of coffee-milk-and-oatmeal, donned his favorite blue shirt with the stripes, and gone to the library. But duty called, and the recent hullabaloo at Puymute’s, namely the mysterious disappearance of two acres’ worth of ripe pineapple, required the attention of the Excise Office, day of the week notwithstanding. So Raoul awoke at 9, rushed through a breakfast of espresso and bread that he didn’t fancy at all, and forwent his favorite blue shirt for a less worn and less comfortable yellow one. Then muttering under his breath about “that damn Vilder” and the newly-arrived
New Modern History of the Silent Stage
that he wouldn’t get to read at the library that morning, Raoul set off on the two-mile walk to the plantation.

It was a warm day, as they all are on Oh, but the cotton of his shirt kept him cool. The porous fabric, a bit tighter than he’d have liked, was dampened slightly with his sweat and felt cold against his skin as the wind blew on it. It was a windy day, too, as they almost all are on Oh, and Raoul wore sunglasses to shield his eyes from both the blowing sand and the scrutiny of Puymute’s neighbors, should he run into any on the way. He had decided to take the tight path that led up Dante’s Mountain (it’s really a big hill at best), from the top of which he’d be able to survey all of Puymute’s property and possibly find some clue. It mightn’t be a bad idea, after all, to get a view of the whole situation before he took himself wading around in the muck of it.

Halfway up, Raoul stopped to smoke a cigarette and to catch his breath. He wouldn’t be able to see Puymute’s place until he got to the top, but from the side of the mountain on which he stood he could see the island’s far end. Buildings of pink and yellow and beige dotted the landscape, themselves dotted with roofs of red and brown and orange. Here the bushy green head of a
palm, there the humble gray spire of a church. All of it wrapped in a white-sand ribbon tugged at by the sea, whose water looked more silver than blue in the early sun. It was a mosaic fashioned by man and god, as perfectly imperfect as any Raoul had seen in photograph at the library. A trompe l’oeil in which the sharp edges of the rainbow buildings cut out the dirt and the dust from which they sprang. The air was filled with salt and sand and the two mingled with the sweet taste of the tobacco Raoul drew into his lungs, as if his very cigarettes were made of the tide.

Sometimes at the airport he couldn’t help but wonder about all the visitors to Oh, what it was they could possibly wish to see here. But on this Tuesday morning when he should have been reading about shaded actresses and newsreels and was instead climbing a makeshift mountain for clues that might lead him to a pineapple smuggler, Oh’s beauty fell upon him like one of the island’s weighty fruits. How easy not to see the air you breathe! He wondered if it was a blindness that struck everywhere, or only there, where the constant sun played tricks on the eyes. On the faraway shore the tide slithered inland. Raoul listened to its marvelous silence and watched as he exhaled and blew it back to sea in white smoky wisps.

His reveries, alas, were short-lived.

“Oy! Mr. Orlean! Oy there!”

Along with sun and sea and tide and trees, Oh is full of pests. Mosquitoes, mice, gnats, fleas. And Pedros. Or, rather, one Pedro Bunch, though his company is as exhausting as if you were caught in a whole swarm of him. Pedro Bunch means well enough. The trouble is that he lives on his own, and off the beaten path, and suffers from an incurable desire to be heard, a condition exacerbated by his encounter with any creature who can hear. Even the
goats hide when they know Pedro is coming, for fear of some long and futile conversation that it would be impolite to run away from.

Panting, Pedro rushed toward Raoul, as much as a man of a certain age on a mountainside and carrying walking-stick and sack of cassava can do. “Oy there, I say. This is a treat to find yourself here.”

“Yes, well, felt like a day for a walk.”

“Didn’t look to me like you were walking.”

“Just taking a breather.” Raoul crushed his cigarette out against a rock and dusted his hands against each other elaborately, hoping that to Pedro the gesture would indicate some sort of business awaited. “Forgot about the view from up here.”

“Ah, yes. Finer, they don’t come.” Pedro had positioned himself in Raoul’s path. “So where’s this walk of yours headed, then, Mr. Orlean?”

“Oh, I don’t know. Thought maybe I’d finish the climb and go down the other side. I see you’ve got your hands full. Don’t let me keep you.” With that, Raoul patted the man on the back and squeezed past him.

“Don’t mind a climb up top myself, now you mention it. Mind you, I’m not as quick as you are, I expect, but you can hardly hurry past a view fine as this one, then, can you?”

Certainly not today, Raoul thought, annoyed that his sentimental musings may now well cost him a good half-hour. There was little use in protesting. The quicker he got Pedro moving, the quicker he’d get where he wanted to be. So he took up the old man’s plastic sack and nudged him on. To the rhythm, as sure and regular as a military cadence, of Pedro’s observations on subjects as diverse as trout with lemon, telephone listings, and eyebrow tweezers, they made their way up. Pedro was nothing if not indefatigable.

When they got to the top, three-quarters of an hour later, Raoul’s patience was wearing thin. Puymute’s plantation stretched out before him, as much a sea as the one made of water on the mountain’s other side. Its waves of tall stalks rippled their long, thin leaves into pointy crests of green and gold that stretched off into the horizon, peppered with the bobbing heads of sweaty, black-haired pickers. At intervals the sun-baked sea was divided into smaller bodies by pathways cut into its thickness to ease navigation. Raoul let his view relax and fall over the undulating activity of the scene below him, hoping some irregularity might catch his eye.

“Ah, yes. Finer, they don’t come.” Pedro moved close to Raoul, helping himself to a portion of the panorama and warming Raoul’s neck with his hot-pepper breath. Clearly, it would be impossible to concentrate with Pedro’s chatter—Heavens, he’s worse than Bang! Raoul thought to himself—so he thanked Pedro for his company, pointed out that Pedro’s house was on the opposite side of the mountain from that on which Raoul planned to descend, gave back the old man’s plastic sack of cassava and nudged him on again.

“Well, if that’s that, I’ll just be on my way, then, won’t I?” With the help of his walking-stick Pedro straightened his curved back into a stretch and turned to go back down the mountain. “Now don’t linger, Mr. Orlean. No telling what might befall a fellow finds himself hanging round here. No telling.”

Raoul, intent on surveying the plantation below, took a moment to register the words and detect something of a threat therein. He looked behind him, from where the words had come, but Pedro was gone. “Pedro!” Raoul shouted. “Pedro!”

Odd, this.

Raoul looked all around him, but there was nothing to see. He strained to hear his companion’s receding steps and for a moment
was sure Pedro’s voice rang out it’s warning again. “No telling, Mr. Orlean. No telling.”

Perhaps it was just the clever wind.

Bothered by the echo of Pedro’s words, Raoul finished the climb down Dante’s Mountain. He decided finally that the misgiving he sensed in the old man’s tone was on account of the rumors that some supernatural swindler was responsible for Puymute’s missing crops. It was neighborly concern and nothing more.

Pedro needn’t have troubled himself. Raoul didn’t believe in anything he couldn’t explain, so a supernatural solution was out of the question. And even had he been inclined to consider such a hypothesis, it didn’t make sense to him that whatever cosmic prankster had punished the island with all those pineapples would someday simply up and steal them back. Even a phantom must submit to some fundamental logic, surely.

“Listen to me!” Raoul said to himself and shook his head. “Phantom talk!” Another reason, along with his rushed breakfast, too-tight shirt, and climb with Pedro, that he hated this particular day so far.

And he expected it would only get worse.

Raoul was cranky and thirsty when he reached the manor house from which Puymute managed his estate. His long walk had been useless. Nothing on the plantation looked amiss from on high, and on the ground it would be easy enough for Puymute or Gustave Vilder to camouflage the truth. Raoul was hoping to speak to Puymute himself, but he had a nagging suspicion, based
on the tenor of the day and on Gustave’s General Manager title, that Gustave would be the one waiting to see him.

Imagine. It would be their first meeting since Raoul placed the ad about my mother’s pregnancy. They had glanced at each other the night before during Bang’s show at the Belly, but they hadn’t spoken. They had only
ever
spoken once, in fact, just a week or so earlier, right after I was born—which is what led to the ad in the first place. I’ll tell you about that time, too, but right now let’s finish our trip to Puymute’s, and get Raoul back to the library and to his research.

The manor house was a welcoming shade of salmon that set off the green-gold sea below it and the light blue sky above, disappearing entirely at dusk and at dawn, like a chameleon on the branch of a tree. Tall potted plants dressed the portico, where in lieu of a visible door, sheer white curtains billowed from an opening eight feet high and eight feet wide. Raoul pushed them aside and entered a lavish foyer, lavish by Oh standards, with white tile flooring and a garish chandelier of gold leaf that had only just begun to flake. To the left of the entrance a young woman, legs crossed, sat at a table with pad, pencil, and telephone, its dangling cord gripped between the first two toes of her sandaled foot. “Are you looking for someone, sir?”

“Raoul Orlean. Customs and Excise. I’m here to see Mr. Puymute.”

“Mr. Puymute’s in the patch, but the General Manager’s here. Should I get him for you?”

“Fine.”

The girl dialed a number on the phone, mumbled something Raoul couldn’t make out, then hung up and escorted him to an office one flight up. Gustave wasn’t there yet, but he would be
momentarily, and in the meantime would Mr. Orlean like some tea? Raoul didn’t fancy the idea of sharing tea with any Vilder, and with Gustave least of all, but the climb up and down Dante’s Mountain had made him too thirsty to refuse. “Yes, thank you. With milk.”

Gustave arrived a few minutes later, the sandaled secretary trailing behind him with a tray of tea accoutrements. She put the tray on the desk that separated the two men and left.

“Mr. Orlean,” Gustave nodded. He had just come from outside, his face still damp with perspiration. His shirt was tucked and buttoned and his manner polite and official. If he didn’t extend his hand to Raoul for a shake, it was only because he wondered what he would do with it, should Raoul leave it hovering there, unmet. (His last meeting with Raoul, the one right after I was born, did not end well at all.)

“It’s
Officer
Orlean today. May I?” Raoul poured himself a cup of tea, barely watching or waiting for Gustave’s consent. He swallowed a whole cupful and felt refreshed and almost cheerful, until, setting his cup on the tray again, he remembered where he was and why.

“Let’s get this over with, Vilder. State your name for the record please.” Raoul pulled a notepad and ballpoint from the pocket of his shirt. He could barely look Gustave in the face.

“Gustave Vilder, General Manager.”

“Mr. Vilder, I am here in the name of the Office of Customs and Excise to investigate the matter of two acres’ worth of pineapple that seems to have gone missing from the estate of Mr. Cyrus Puymute. As you are aware, any such merchandise leaving the island is subject to excise, and I am here to collect.”

“That’s true, any such merchandise leaving the island is certainly subject to excise. But if I’m not mistaken, the tax should be paid by the one who sent the merchandise away. That was
not myself, nor was it Mr. Puymute.” Gustave sipped his tea and replaced the cup on the saucer in a tremolo of ceramic that belied his complacent demeanor.