Right after supper that night, my mother telephoned. She always called twice a week, to make sure we were okay, and to check up on things. It may seem odd to you that she didn’t live with her children, but the reason was money, and there was no way round it. My parents had split up when Lou was a baby, and my father just took off to live with another lady, leaving Mam with us two children and no money. He’d never sent her a penny from that day to this. So Mam moved in with Grand and Grammie, and got the only job she could find, checking out groceries in the general store in town.
She always wanted to earn more, to help support us, so for four years she spent all her spare time doing a degree course at our island’s Resource Centre, where teachers from the College of the Bahamas come to teach people who can’t leave home to go to college. When she’d passed her exams she got a much better job in Nassau, and she moved there, to live in a little room in Grand’s brother’s house.
It was a horrible wrench for all of us, but Mam couldn’t find another job on our own island, and we couldn’t go with her; Nassau is a big city and a tough place, and she didn’t want us kids growing up there. We miss her, but I think she was right; I’ve been to Nassau twice and I don’t like it. Too much stuff going on, too much dirt and noise.
So Mam calls us twice a week, and comes home whenever she can.
“You still fooling around in that boat?” she said, distant in my ear.
“Sure, Mam. Lou loves it.”
“You be careful now.”
“I always careful. Ask Grand.”
Then she said in a different, tighter voice, “Trey, baby, you remember you father?”
“No,” I said at once. I felt angry whenever I thought about my father, angry at him for running off with someone else, but I had no real picture of him in my head, and we only had one photograph. It showed him with Mam and me when I was about two. About all you could tell from it was that he was about her same height, and wore a baseball cap, and that his skin was lighter than hers.
I’d always taken care never to wear a baseball cap. I didn’t want to be like my daddy.
She said, “I saw him the other day. He wants to get in touch with you, and I said no.”
I said quickly, “I don’t want to see him, not ever.”
“I just wanted to warn you,” said my mother’s distant voice. It sounded sad, and a bit scared. “You wouldn’t ever go off with him, would you?”
“Mam!” I said, horrified. “Of course not!”
“Just watch out. But don’t worry. Grand knows all about it. I love you, sweetheart. Is my baby there?”
“Here he is. I love you, Mam.” I gave the telephone to Lou, and as he listened he started to smile. They couldn’t have a proper conversation, of course, but somehow Mam managed to have long talks with him, all her words punctuated once in a while with a hoot or a little grunt from Lou.
One day about a year ago, Mam had taken Lou to Nassau to see some famous American doctor who was visiting the hospital there. He examined him, and told her there was no physical reason why Lou shouldn’t talk. He said it was psychological, and so were his seizures; that something was wrong inside his mind, and that he could probably be put right if she sent him away to live in some special school in the United States.
Mam said no, she’d rather have a quiet little boy who lived at home.
I used to think about that doctor sometimes and wonder if he was right. That was before I found out the things that were so strange and special about Lou, things no doctor would ever be able to understand.
Three days later, Lou and I went back to Long Pond Cay. It was our first time together since we’d heard about the developers. You can’t get to the cay except by boat, so I knew Lou couldn’t have gone there without me unless Grand took him—and Grand had gone off to Nassau with Mr. Ferguson, the high school headmaster, to talk to the government’s Lands and Surveys Office about saving the cay from development.
Me, I’d been staying in town for two nights with my friends from school, Lyddie and Kermit Smith. This happened every so often, whenever Grammie decided I needed a change from being way out where we lived—“in the sticks,” she put it—looking after Lou. The sticks seemed just fine to me, but that was Grammie, always thinking about ways to improve life for other people. Mrs. Smith was one of her friends from the bank, who said she was always glad to have me because I kept Lyddie and Kermit from killing each other. They were twins, about my age.
I’d asked the Smiths if they had heard about the Frenchman’s plans, but they hadn’t, and they weren’t really interested. They’d never even been to Long Pond Cay—it was way up our end of the island, too far, too isolated.
“We sure could use some development,” said Mr. Smith heartily. He was a cab driver. “Jobs. Opportunities. Anything to keep you young people on the island when you finished with school.”
“You dreaming, Daddy,” Lyddie said.
“Off to Nassau, me,” said Kermit. “New York. Los Angeles.”
Lyddie grinned at her father. “You’ll still have Trey around,” she said. “Writing some old book.”
I was glad to get back to the sticks, and to Lou.
We went out very early that next time. The tide was going out, but there was still time to get over to the cay before full low. It was a beautiful clear day, and the sky light blue, with a few tiny shreds of cloud that would grow, during the day, into round puffballs drifting in a long row. A pair of whistling ducks flew low over our heads as we puttered up the channel, though they weren’t whistling; you could just hear the faint swish of their wings. I was surprised to see them in daylight; usually you see them when it’s beginning to get dark. But lots of things were unusual, that day.
We landed, and the beach stretched ahead of us broad and gleaming white, as the tide crept out. Terns swooped in low, calling to each other. We went inland, across the storm-carved slabs of sandstone, through the scrub and the trees, to the lagoon in the center of the cay. The sand there felt different underfoot, soft, squishy, half-mud, with the little spiky shoots of new black mangrove poking up everywhere like nails.
Lou stood staring out at the shallow water of the lagoon, looking for the silvery flash of bonefish, as they butted their heads down into the sand hunting for crabs and shellfish. They feed on the ebbing tide, and again when it begins to come back in. Lou’s always loved the bonefish. He can already see a moving school of them quicker than I can. Grand said to me once, “We don’t have to worry about him—for all his problems, he’ll make a wonderful bonefish guide.” And so he will.
But I wasn’t thinking about Lou then, just about the fish; like him, I was looking for that dimpling of the water that their tails make as they go headfirst down at the sand, and the quick glint as their silver backs catch the sun for an instant. There were none to be seen, though. The water was too low; it had retreated into gleaming pools and bays left among huge expanses of shining white sand-mud, and the schools of bonefish and snapper had gone out with the tide. Out into the open sea.
It must have been that hour between tides, when the sea is as low or as high as it will go, and everything is sort of suspended, waiting for the turn of the tide.
And then, as I stood there in the silence, looking out over the flats, I thought I saw the air begin to shimmer, blurring the edges of things, as it had that other day in the cave. My heart sank; I didn’t want this to happen again. I shook my head and I blinked my eyes hard—but still the shimmering was there, the air wavering as if heat were rising through it.
The wet flats became a shining blur, and the line of palmettos and trees on the opposite side of the lagoon seemed to be reflected in it, double, like a mirage.
And gradually I began to hear that sound again, coming from nowhere, the sound like the wind in the casuarina trees. It grew and grew, rising, whining, filling the shivering air, though when I glanced out of the corner of my eye at a casuarina I saw nothing stir, not a branch or needle move.
The noise filled my head; I wanted to put my hands over my ears. I was so scared that I felt sick. I knew I was on the edge of real panic, and I looked over quickly at Lou.
He hadn’t moved. He didn’t look the least bit frightened, this time. As I watched, he began to walk slowly forward, over the mangrove-prickled sand, toward the shining stretches of the lagoon. It was a sort of measured walk, not the way a kid moves, and as he went, he did something even stranger, more adult—ancient, even. He raised both his skinny arms into the air, spread wide, as if he were going out to embrace someone.
He stood very still, just stood there, holding his arms out like that. It looked so weird, it sent a chill through me. I moved nervously up toward him, a few slow steps forward.
Then all the sound stopped, and the air wasn’t shivering, and there was dead silence.
And out there in the lagoon the water seemed to open, and roll back and disappear. We stood there watching, scarce breathing, and a great shining city rose up before us, growing out of the earth.
It sprang up with a noise like a high wind, a forest of tall towers and cliffs and gleaming straight lines: grey, silvery skyscrapers, scraping the sky. Lou dropped his arms and turned to me; his face was a little boy’s face now, frightened, and he grabbed my hand. It was as if he’d become a different person just for a few moments, and now abruptly he was himself again. On all sides the city was springing up, so that the buildings were all around us: we were held in a world of stone and concrete and black brick. Long Pond Cay was gone, and so was the sunlight and the blue sky. The whole world had changed.