JOANNE C. HILLHOUSE

Amelia at Devil’s Bridge

Antigua & Barbuda

On an island nobody ever really, truly disappears without a trace. No, what we have here are bodies: a woman found in the bushes in All Saints, a tourist slain at Darkwood, a girl washed up at Devil’s Bridge . . .

They’re few and far between. That’s why they make the news, because it always kind of shakes us up that there might be someone among us who could do such a thing.

But there are no places to hide bodies, nowhere where they won’t eventually reveal themselves.

 

A thin girl crouches behind the flimsy cover of a cassi tree when she hears cars, more than one, coming up the path. She is naked and old enough now, at thirteen, to be embarrassed by that. Her mind is a fog and she is wet, as if she’s been in the water.

Only that isn’t possible, is it?

Somehow, she’s at Devil’s Bridge where the rocks are sharper than a coconut vendor’s cutlass, and the waters lash with a vengeance. Nobody swims at Devil’s Bridge.

None of that explains why she is wet and why, when she licks her lips, it tastes like salt, and why, when the water trickles down her back, it burns, as if there are cuts there she can’t see. She’d done a little dance earlier, like a dog chasing its tail, trying to see, and aching for the burning to stop.

It was like the burn of a good beating, the kind she got the first time she’d run away. She thought Mammy was trying to strip her skin off her back that time; the way she sweated and screamed, her face ugly, arms flapping, as the belt wailed. Then Mammy had called out to everybody she knew: “You all talk to that gyal dey, you nuh, ca me’ll kill she.”

After the fourth or fifth time, the social worker told Mammy not to hit her anymore; that when she ran away again, Mammy was just to call them and let them handle it. Only they were short-staffed, and the police was “don’ care ah damn”—Mammy’s words—and with everybody looking the other way and her mother’s hands tied, the girl knew she could stay gone for weeks if she set her mind to it.

But she didn’t plan on ending up here at Devil’s Bridge, which she only recognized because of a long-ago school field trip. How could she have remembered the route or hitched a ride, and why? She can’t cut through the fog in her mind to get to the answers, and the cars are closer now, causing her to draw in even tighter behind the spindly cover of the acacia, thankful for the grey of foreday morning.

They pass. Bringing up the rear is a Nissan pickup loaded with things, manned by three boys, boys maybe a little older than she is, sitting on the very edge of the vehicle as it bounces up the path.

She tracks them all the way up to where the path ends and the land flattens out into giant slabs of bleached and jagged rock, and patches of thin grass. She watches as they unpack kites, of all things, and a cooler from the pickup, and turn up the stereo. Reggae blasts to wake up the morning. “Sun is shining,” sings Bob as the sun begins its lazy stretch into daybreak.

She stands near the back of the truck, so close she can see where it’s starting to rust, her nakedness forgotten as she eyes the drinks in the open cooler. She’s suddenly so thirsty. She thinks about asking for a drink, or maybe stealing one; it’s not like they’re paying attention. Thirteen or so of them, men and boys, all ages, and they’re busy getting the kites in the air. No one will notice if she slips a Coke into her pocket.

That’s when she remembers she doesn’t have a pocket, that she’s naked. And shouldn’t the water on her skin have dried by now? She’s shivering against the wind as it hits the droplets still running down her body as though she’s only just stepped from the water.

And that’s the other thing: she can’t swim. Few can from her landlocked, dirt-poor part of the island. So it doesn’t make sense that she would be all the way out at Devil’s Bridge by herself to steal a swim. How did she get here? How is she going to get home? Maybe she could ask one of the men for a ride or, if they refuse, hitch a ride on the back of the pickup when they aren’t looking.

Sure, Mammy’ll be angry, probably beating-angry in spite of what the social worker said, but she’ll be happy to see her too. She’s always happy to see her.

“Why? Why you do these things?” Mammy always asks, and her silence makes her mother angrier. She doesn’t know why she runs away; she doesn’t have it any worse or better than anyone she knows. Life is rough but it’s rough for everyone. She has food, clean clothes, a mother who worries when she doesn’t come home; once she’d even had a father.

Warm feelings flood her as she thinks of that time, when Daddy would let her help as he fiddled around under the hood of his thirdhand Ford every Sunday, before taking her to Thwaites parlour for strawberry ice cream. Folks called her a daddy’s girl, something that would make her smile so wide her cheeks would dimple. But then Daddy left, and Mammy got miserable, and now strawberry ice cream makes her stomach hurt.

When Daddy left she wanted to go with him, but he walked away and didn’t look back. As much as it is possible for a person to disappear on an island as small as Antigua, he disappeared.

When she runs away, she doesn’t go looking for him though; she isn’t a stupid little girl anymore, and if he wants to be gone he can stay gone.

She doesn’t want him.

She wants to go home.

She watches one of the men grab a length of string and run toward her, his eyes shining like stars, his grin splitting his face; it’s the kind of joy she’s only ever seen on the faces of kids too little to know any better.

She is crying outright now but the man doesn’t seem to notice, he keeps coming straight at her. She dodges at the last minute.

“Hey!” she yells.

But he keeps running, and he is laughing now as he finally turns and looks up, slowing, stopping.

She yells again. But he just keeps right on, laughing and glancing up, and one of the other men walks over to him, pats him on the back. Together, like little boys instead of grown men, they look up at the kite. She looks up too. There are several kites in the air now. Some aren’t even kites at all, not the newspaper, coconut bough, turkleberry kind. More like big-big balloons; and they are all kinds of colours and shapes, fish and squids and things. She stands, just staring for a while. It makes for a pretty picture, the too-bright colours against the spreading yellow of sunrise. For a minute it’s weird; she’s up there with them, straddling the big blue fish and riding the wind, and feeling like a cowgirl riding a steed like in those old John Wayne Westerns her dad used to watch late at night on Turner Classic Movies, back when she was a little girl, and he’d defy her mother and let her stay up late, and she’d fall asleep to the sound of hooves pounding, keeping time with her daddy’s heartbeat against her ears.

She finds herself down in the dirt, and wonders if the man had run into her after all. She yells again to get his attention. Then, when he continues to ignore her, she starts jumping up and down, arms flailing like she is playing mas in carnival or something. But none of them look at her. They are flying their kites, drinking their drinks, none noticing the girl whose breasts are only just starting to come in, the girl only now getting hair under her arms and between her legs, the girl with tears running down her face, the girl whose throat hurts from screaming, the girl wet and naked right in front of them.

She screams then sits in the dirt like a two-year-old. But they never look in her direction. As they start to pack up, she grows desperate, doesn’t want to be left alone up here at the eastern edge of the island, alone, not knowing how she is going to get home. So she runs ahead of them and squats down near the cassi tree until she hears the tyres crunching on the loose soil and rocks. At the very last minute she steps out in front of the lead car, a restored red Lada, and is relieved when the driver breaks so abruptly that the truck tailgating it bumps it lightly.

“Wha de hell, man, ah so you jus mash breaks?” the driver of the truck demands, stepping out.

“Me see subben,” whispers the driver of the car, sounding spooked.

“Subben laka wha?” demands the one driving the truck.

“Me na know, like one naked gyal pickney.”

The others step out of their vehicles to witness and weigh in on the melee and laugh. Still none of them are looking at her.

“You ah see t’ings, man,” one scoffs.

“No, me t’ink me see um too,” says the passenger from the first car.

“What would a naked girl be doing up here?” one asks sensibly.

“Well . . .” another begins, but is cut off with, “Man, get you min’ out de gutter, ah wan likkle gyal pickney, not one big woman, and she look scared.”

“You see she now?” one teases in a salesman’s voice.

“Ha ha,” the second driver snaps back sarcastically.

“Let’s jus look roun likkle bit to make sure.”

“Man . . .” more than one of them whines, but they spread out anyway.

 

Caribbean folk know that if the dead want to be found, they’ll let you know where they are, and if they could talk they’d probably tell you who did it too. The dead are purposeful like that. By Devil’s Bridge there’s a hidden spot known as Lovers’ Beach, a shallow cove carved out by the force of the water. It’s the kind of place a girl of thirteen has no business being at any time of the day. Much less with fractured ribs, which investigators say might have been caused by her body banging against the rocks before coming ashore.

But who can tell.

The dead don’t speak.