MY WORK AMONG THE MAROONS was soon completed, and again I had to return to the States to resume my usual activities. I turned in the by then nearly useless yellow Toyota at the Montego Bay airport, gravely said good-bye to Terron and his brother Holmes, who had decided to travel with us from Port Antonio to Montego Bay, and moved regretfully into the line of returning American tourists, all of them sunburnt, straw-hatted, and grinning. I had no sunburn to show for my month in the tropics, no straw hat decorated with an impossibly contorted limbo dancer, and no anticipating grin for what the girls in the office would say on Monday when I strolled, luxuriously colored, into work.
Instead, my mind was jammed with images that in their darkness and conflict with one another made me uncomfortable—images of Errol Flynn as Terron saw him—Captain Blood, obeah man, a proud, laughing prince of darkness—and images of Errol Flynn as Smith saw him—an elegant mafioso don, a wealthy and famous land baron, a possible CIA agent—and images of Errol Flynn as I saw him—a sybaritic debauchee, an aging and decadent movie star. But it was the conflict between the images, rather than their number, that troubled me, for while I saw the man mainly in psychological terms, Smith saw him in social terms, and Terron saw him in mythic terms. This raised in me an irritated grasping after certainty, an insecurity that was distinctly unsettling.
One couldn’t resolve the conflict simply by saying that Flynn was all these things at once, that an image, like a text, functioned on all three levels simultaneously and equally. One wished instead to establish a priority among them, a hierarchy, and for a long time now in his investigations one had organized his perceptions under the assumption that the psychological led to the social and historical, which in turn led to the mythic. This was the assumption of the age, the convention of rational analysis, that one had been trained to trust. Simply put, one could not know Errol Flynn as mafioso don until one had come to understand him as debauchee, and one could not know him as Captain Blood until one had probed his role as land baron. Cause and effect. It was presumed that his psychology caused his social identity which then caused his mythic function. Each stage was impossible without the previous stage as underpinning. Certainly Flynn could be perceived separately at any one of these three levels by different individuals who by their conditioning and circumstance were more or less better equipped to perceive him at one level than at another, and it did not depress one that Terron, Smith and oneself happened to perceive Flynn at different levels. What depressed was that, for Smith and Terron, the social and mythic levels, respectively, seemed sufficient, as if they were self-determined. For Smith and Terron, there was no irritated grasping after certainty. The perception alone was both adequate and certain. They had peered out from the house of their own perceptual apparatuses, and they had each seen an image, Errol Flynn, and for them the view had the clarity and certitude of a vision. For me, however, from my house the view caused anxiety, mistrust, depression.
But I saw no necessity for that anxiety, mistrust and depression. They were not expressions of the nature of the world; they were expressions of the nature of my training. I determined to neutralize the effects of my training somewhat. As soon as I had put my affairs in the States into an order that would permit me to be absent from them for a long period of time, I would return to Jamaica. I would come back and live there for at least a full year, and my purpose this time would be to establish, in place of a point of view, a vision. And I knew, as I boarded the plane for New York, that to do so I first might have to destroy my point of view, all my points of view.
A grant from a large private foundation afforded me the luxury of returning to Jamaica that September. Once again I took up residence in the house on the hillside in Anchovy and proceeded to throw myself into researching the Maroons. I had already familiarized myself with their history, through a set of written documents, all lodged in the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C., and the West Indies Institute in Kingston. What I was after now, what I thought I was after, was an understanding of how the Maroons today experienced their world. At this time of my life I, like most Americans, believed more in the essential sameness among people than in their difference. I thought I could learn to know what it was like to be a Maroon. I could not then see any conflict between that belief and my ambition to replace a point of view with a vision.
Shortly after my arrival in Anchovy, Terron appeared, literally as if by magic, strolling delicately from the dense undergrowth and ledge one dark night, peering over the wall of the terrace and with his bassoon of a voice singing, “Yass, Rasta!” I hadn’t told him when I would be arriving or where I would be staying; I had merely written him in the early summer to say that I would be returning to Jamaica sometime in September and that I hoped he would once again “move with me in the country,” which was how he described his activity apropos my activity. So here he was, ready to move with me in the country again, after having come forty-five miles across nearly impassable Cockpit Country, jungle-covered limestone pits and craters that from the air resemble nothing so much as the surface of the moon. There were a few narrow roads curling around the edges of the region, along which great, lumbering, top-heavy buses carried passengers and market goods back and forth between Montego Bay and the interior villages. But travel to and from the interior, for the impoverished Maroons especially, was expensive, difficult and never casual. Terron’s sudden appearance, therefore, was all the more surprising to me. He could not have known I would be here in this same house on the hill, sitting out on my terrace smoking a Royal Jamaican cigar and watching the sky over the Caribbean shift from blue to rose to purple and finally, as clouds streamed in from the northwest and blocked out the stars and moon, to black. I asked him how he had known I would be here, and he smiled and in rapid country patois said something about a dream, and I concluded that he probably spent a lot more time testing the prophetic powers of his dreams than I did.
I won’t go into the details now of how I spent the next six months because my purpose here is to describe the encounter between Errol Flynn and DeVries, an almost forgotten murder case that, by my attempts to get straight what really happened, led me into understandings I did not expect or particularly desire. Let the six months pass, then, and assume certain changes in the narrator. Assume an increased ability to understand and speak Jamaican patois, an increased tolerance for the crisp fire of white rum, a growing respect for the difficulties of understanding what it was like to be a person from a different culture, race, landscape, economy and language, even as I was daily growing more familiar with the intricacies of that culture, race, landscape, economy and language. I learned the names of the trees and the flowers and the foods that surrounded me, learned how to play dominoes as ferociously as a Jamaican, and even learned how to talk with Jamaican women sufficiently for them to forget for whole long moments the tremendous advantage to their economic position I represented, so that they would now and then briefly cease trying to tell me only what they thought I wanted to hear. This does not mean that I then understood what they said to me.
At the end of March I went alone to Port Antonio, one hundred miles away at the opposite end of the island. Terron stayed in Nyamkopong to deliver his fifth child, but I had planned to make this trek alone anyhow. I had bought a car, a used Mazda van, in September on my arrival, and by this time had coaxed, pushed, and jammed some ten thousand miles of backcountry crushed limestone road onto it and had given up my earlier capitalist fantasy of selling the car when I left the island for the same four thousand dollars I had paid for it.
I parked the blue van in front of the Hotel de Montvin at George and Musgrave Streets on Titchfield Hill, a high-rising neck of land that swung around the Port on the western end of town where there were a dozen narrow streets and weather-beaten, unpainted, old houses from the last century, the remains of a hotel that seemed to have been partially constructed and then deserted. The de Montvin was like the houses, dilapidated, but fallen from a considerable height, so that enough remained from its original tropical opulence and excess and the colonial love of detail to make it still comfortable and interesting to the eye. I was given the key to room number thirteen by a rotund, bald, brown-skinned man at the desk and was directed to a small but airy and clean room at the back on the second floor.
The hotel had the feel of a rooming house. The guests I saw seemed to be residents, not tourists—a white man, who turned out to be Scottish, in his sixties and crippled so that he moved in tiny steps with the aid of two canes, his newspaper in a tight roll stuffed between his arm and tense, bent body; a pair of thick-faced black men in short-sleeved, double-knit tropical suits, apparently salesmen from Kingston; and an elderly woman, very black, with her hair wrapped in a lavender gauze scarf. Everyone in the hotel—the fat desk clerk, the chambermaids, the long-armed youth setting the tables in the dining room, and the guests—seemed to be locked inside his own thoughts, totally uninterested in what was going on around him, even the fact that a white man, obviously a foreigner, was registering at the desk. This pleased me. It was as if I were watching a meticulously detailed movie in which I was a minor character, a movie set in a Caribbean country in the 1930s designed to demonstrate a socialist view of history by killing off all the characters one by one until only the innocent working-class young are left alive. I knew that I would be among the last to go, not because I was most nearly innocent but because I was most representative of capitalist evil. To kill me off early would destroy any possibilities for dramatic action, and even ideology must allow for drama.
At the hotel bar, a small anteroom off the dining room, I drank a Dragon stout and asked the barmaid, a lanky girl with a lovely wide gap between her two front teeth, how to get to the famous Blue Hole. I noticed, behind me and almost out of sight, that the desk clerk (who now seemed to be a manager, for I saw that he was wearing a necktie) was attempting to watch me without my noticing it. When I had registered, in the space marked “Occupation” I had written “writer,” and, though I was obviously American, I had put down my Jamaica address. This may have confused him, aroused his suspicions slightly. To be a “writer” in an anxious, politically intense society is to be under suspicion, and to contradict nationality with place of residence is worse. From now on, I decided, I would put “teacher” for my occupation, and I would only provide my U.S. address. Better to be a tourist and allowed to settle into a trusted generality than to make myself unique. I wanted information; I wanted to see, to make a vision for myself; I did not want to become someone else’s information, to be seen, to be inside a vision. So I would lie. Let the truth take care of itself, I decided. It’s done all right on its own so far.
I parked my car in the rutted lot next to the wharf, facing Navy Island, the United Fruit pier on my left, and walked carefully into the clubhouse of the Eastern Jamaica Anglers Association, which passes for the Port Antonio yacht club. The bar was open to the water on three sides, so that boats-men could tie up on the low dock and step directly into the clubhouse for a drink. There were three or four small, unkempt sailing vessels and a noticeable absence of customers at the bar, but it was still early—not quite ten in the morning. This kind of sailor likes to sleep late, I thought.
The bartender, a swollen black man in his fifties with purplish lips and rings around his eyes like a racoon’s, was slinging beer into the lockers below the bar when I sat down and ordered a cold Red Stripe. He yanked it open, set it in front of me, and went back to stocking his lockers. Where did Flynn used to dock his boat? I asked him.
Flynn? Flynn? What the hell was this guy talking about? Ah, Errol Flynn, the movie star. Right out there, he pointed. In the stream, actually in an eddy in the stream between Navy Island and the mainland just below Titchfield Hill. He liked to keep his boat a little ways off the Jamaica Reef Hotel that used to be there on the cliff, where Titchfield Hill juts out against the sky and then drops several hundred feet to a sudden beach. That was the concrete wreckage, the pilings and empty pool I had seen this morning before I checked in at the de Montvin.
The Jamaica Reef, eh?
Well, actually, when Flynn was alive it was the old Titchfield, owned by a friend of Flynn’s, Captain Ausley, now manages Navy Island.
Navy Island? The whole island?
Well, actually it’s called the Windjammer Hotel, still under construction. You can’t get out there, though.
Why not? I asked him.
They’re not ready yet.
On my way back through town to the wreckage of the Jamaica Reef Hotel, I turned left at the square and passed the Delmar Theater and observed that a karate film made in Hong Kong and starring Bruce Lee was the current feature. This seemed significant to me—but practically everything seemed significant to me then. That was how I wanted it. I was losing momentum in my quest, and I was consequently falling backward into myself, so that the only way I could continue to justify my continuing the quest was to attribute significance to everything that passed before me. I was becoming unhappy.
The Jamaica Reef was no more than a carcass now. This morning I had thought it was a project that hadn’t been completed. Now I saw that it was the picked-over remains of what had once been a lavish and elaborate installation. Holes in the ground, like foundations for bunkers, were empty swimming pools littered with broken beer bottles and flakes of aqua paint piled like dead leaves. Columns that had looked grecian turned out to be the trunks of concrete palm trees supporting long-gone thatched roofs above terraces that had overlooked the stream flowing between the Port and the open sea. Across the stream, no more than a quarter of a mile away, was Navy Island. And halfway across were three red markers, where Smith had said they found the bodies of the boys who had tried to swim over, or maybe the boys had been caught trying to swim back with their precious knowledge to the safety of the mainland. Who knew? Who, besides their families, cared any longer? Between the markers and the narrow strip of sandy beach below the hotel the water was slower, and here Errol Flynn must have anchored his boat, coming over by launch in the evenings to drink and eat with his friend Captain Ausley at the hotel.
The story about DeVries was beginning to look like just that, a story. Under the placid intensity of the late morning sun, surrounded by the remains of a hotel that had burned down years ago, I stood on the beach staring out at the rippling current that ran between Titchfield Hill and Navy Island where a new hotel complex was erupting from the jungle, and slowly the several stories of Errol Flynn and Dr. Menotti and his son and the murder of the wife of the butcher DeVries faded into local gossip and superstition, a shapeless batch of unrelated details. In place of all those details a new set was appearing to me, bringing with it a new story, the tale of an idle American trying to make his ordinary life seem more mysterious and interesting to himself.
I was disappointed in what was appearing to me to be true, and I was disappointed in myself, for it meant that I was disappointed in reality. I walked sullenly to the edge of the sand, took off my shoes and rolled up my trousers, and slogged a few yards into the water, and I let the depression come over me.
Later, deciding to go out to the Blue Hole anyhow, I scrambled back to the road and got into my car. The Blue Hole was where Terron had been heading in his canoe when he saw the leg from the body of DeVries’ wife, and it was where they had discovered the second leg. And it was a tourist attraction, I reminded myself, and I was a tourist. So I drove the half dozen miles along the coast road, past sprawling, slumbering estates surrounded by palms and carefully tended lawns and hibiscus and poinsettia beds, following hand-lettered signs and arrows, until I pulled left off the main road and passed into a large, grottolike opening in the cliffs, a lagoon with a narrow opening to the sea where there was a beach with a half dozen dugout fishing canoes drawn up on the sand and, between the beach and the lagoon, a bamboo-walled and thatch-roofed restaurant. Parking my van in the shade of a cashew tree, I strolled into the restaurant, which was deserted, except for three young men in white waiters’ coats talking at one of the tables.
None of the waiters had ever heard of DeVries. But after I had ordered a plate of curried goat and rice and we had chatted in a casual way about the lagoon, one of the waiters yelled for the cook, who turned out to be a man in his fifties, dark-faced and scowling, short and slightly bent. He came out of the kitchen wiping his hands on a spotted apron, disliking the waiters, who were boys to him, fresh kids who teased him about his relations, or lack of them, with women. He’ll know that man DeVries, the waiters assured me, and he did, happy for the chance to show these fresh kids that age has its uses.
DeVries was wicked. That’s what the cook insisted. A wicked man. And no, Errol Flynn had no involvement with the case. There was a Dr. Menotti involved, but only because he owned the property where DeVries had tried to dispose of the body, which was not in pieces, but merely headless, and DeVries had got caught trying to stuff the body down a hole that dropped through the limestone ledge at Dolphin’s Bay to the sea below. The waves slammed against the cliffs below and carved huge caverns there, and along the top one could now and then find holes that dropped twenty or thirty feet through the ledge all the way to the cavern below. DeVries had been trying to drop his wife’s body down one of these holes one morning, so that it would get swept into the sea with no chance of its turning up on a sandy beach someday. It would have worked too, the cook assured me, if he hadn’t been seen by a man from town who was on his way to work at Flynn’s estate. So Errol Flynn was involved! I declared. Yes, one could say that, the cook supposed. But the Doctor was also involved slightly because at that time he owned all the land along Dolphin’s Bay, and for a long time people thought that he had killed the woman for DeVries, because he was a Doctor, you see, and they can do that. Do what? Kill people. That’s what people say, he meant. That’s what people in those days believed.
The waiters had stopped stepping with the reggae on the radio and had suddenly become serious. They were watching me. I quickly told them I wasn’t so much interested in DeVries and the Doctor as in Errol Flynn, and, as if relieved, they all started talking rapidly in patois, pointing and gesturing and moving with the music again, that pretty dance with the upper body swaying and the feet making tiny shuffling steps forward and backward. They were telling me about Mrs. Flynn, the widow, and the Flynn estate, a few miles east from here.
I walked to the edge of the lagoon, where there was a dock and a glass-bottomed boat tied to it. One of the waiters offered to take me out in the boat so I could look at the coral and schools of fish. Shaking my head no, I asked him how far down you could see from a boat. Maybe thirty feet. And how deep is the lagoon? One hundred eighty feet. And what’s the bottom like? Muddy. What’s down there? Stolen cars, he said, and all three waiters and the cook laughed and slapped hands and kept on stepping to the reggae, even the cook now, dancing back into the kitchen, pleased with himself.
A professionally painted sign on a post set in a field beside the road seven miles from Port Antonio, two miles beyond the Blue Hole:
ERROL FLYNN ESTATE
MEMBER
JAMAICA RED POLL BREEDERS SOCIETY
FOUNDED 1952
Clumps of cattle the color of dried blood spotted the rolling, pale green fields of guinea grass for the next mile or so on both sides of the road, and then, at Comfort—a settlement with a half dozen stucco cabins and police station—I saw on the right another, smaller sign: CASTLE COMFORT ERROL FLYNN ESTATES. The land drifted up to a ridge, and at the top of the ridge, facing the sea, sprawled a low glass-and-stone ranch house and several large outbuildings. Behind the ridge loomed the blue, quick-sloping mountains. The sky had clouded over, and the air seemed heavily expectant, still, humid, as if I were suddenly located at the center of a storm.
Turning off the main road I drove my van along a rutted lane lined on both sides by a carefully made, head-high stone wall, what Terron called “slavery walls,” not because they had been used to pen slaves but because they had been built by slaves. In his mind, anything constructed by slaves served as effectively as manacles to bind them to slavery. Barns, churches, houses, office buildings, counting houses, docks and walls, it didn’t matter what the stated purpose; to Terron they essentially served to bind the Africans, and that was why they existed. Their first cause was enslavement.
At the top of the ridge I turned into a smooth parking area next to the house, which would have looked right in southern California, and parked my car. I had no idea what I would say to anyone who answered the door—a maid, I assumed. Mrs. Errol Flynn herself would not answer the door for a stranger arriving in a battered, old, blue van. I supposed I would ask to see Mrs. Flynn. Simple. But then what would I say to the widow Flynn? That I wanted to ask her some questions about a murder case she may never have heard of before? Was Errol capable of a ritual killing? Did he dabble in obeah? What about Dr. Menotti? Would you say that your late husband was pathological, or would you simply call him decadent, or how about evil, wicked? Was he sybaritic? Was he real? I wanted to be like that old Maroon chieftain, I wanted to tell her a story with questions.
Suddenly a pair of enormous German shepherds came racing around the far corner of the house, their mouths roaring at me, hurling their beefy bodies against the tin sides of my van. Quickly I cranked the windows up and stared out at the beasts as they circled the van and now and then walloped it with their huge heads. For several minutes I waited, expecting the maid to appear from around the same corner, to calm the dogs and send them away. But no maid appeared, and I grew more and more uncomfortable inside the closed, sweltering van. All right, then. Good-bye, Widow Flynn. Now you will not have the chance to hear my story. Instead, you and your dogs have become details in the story I will tell to someone else.
I drove back down the lane and turned onto the road headed back toward Port Antonio. Still sweating, I pulled over at the first shop I saw, a small tavern open to the road and surrounded by the Flynn property. Across the road hundreds of pale green acres bellied down to the sea. I bought a cold Red Stripe from the large, smooth-faced woman behind the bar and guzzled it noisily. She smiled at me and told me I was hot, and soon we were talking about Mrs. Flynn.
She runs this whole place alone?
So she says, the woman told me, emphasizing the says. The woman didn’t like Mrs. Flynn, but she liked her daughter Arnella, a “hippie girl,” which probably meant that she had long, straight hair and went barefoot most of the time. She sunbathes down at Boston Beach, the woman informed me, suggesting with a helpful wink that I might catch her there now if I hurried.
Ah, I said, and remembered that Boston Beach was where Terron had said the head of DeVries’ wife had come tumbling in on the morning surf.
I stood at the bar and stared out at the sea, drank my beer, and wondered what I was looking for. The truth? I knew how to find the legal, official truth of what had happened to DeVries’ wife. That was easy. The mayor of Port Antonio was an old friend of Evan Smith, and the previous April Smith had been proud enough of that fact to want me to meet the man. That would have given me quick access to the records kept at the large, garishly red City Hall. And I could obtain newspaper accounts from the Daily Gleaner files in Kingston. Then I would own the official truth. But I already knew what that would give me—a story about some small-town butcher who’d slain his wife and been seen trying to dispose of the body and been convicted and then hung for his crime. I wanted more, though. That story, the official one, only frustrated me.
The thought swept through me, the thought of my likely eventual frustration, and at the same instant it began to rain, as if to wash away the webs of ambition that had kept me from satisfying myself up to now, and, resigned, I settled down to watch and listen. Gray sheets of rain moved up the sloped fields from the sea and crashed against the tin roof of the shop, drumming wildly, making it impossible for me and the woman to talk any further, so we just smiled at each other, while she opened a bottle of Red Stripe for herself and, at my signal, another for me. I placed my arm on the counter and peered out at the torrent, while she stroked my arm slowly and evenly. I put down my bottle of beer and held her hand for a long time and, when the rain began to lighten, I said good-bye and ducked out.
The rain was still falling when I reached Port Antonio. As I drove through puddles toward the hotel, I saw Evan Smith hurrying along Main Street between the higglers market on Musgrave Square and the public works department, as if he were late for work. He waved when he saw my car, got in next to me when I stopped, and agreed eagerly to sit out the rainstorm and renew our friendship in the Princess, a combination bar and whorehouse that at that time of day would be pleasantly quiet. Smith hated rain, he explained, saying that he was like a cat. I remembered his story about the night he met his wife and how he spent his first three days and nights with her, and I wondered if there was a link, other than the one in my mind.
The Princess was a light, airy barroom with a dozen small tables, swinging doors that opened directly onto the street and, next to the bar, swinging doors that led back to the cribs where the whores worked. An old, bent woman was tending bar and between serving us and washing down the tables kept shouting at a pair of skinny kids who were supposed to be helping her but persisted in studying the juke box selections. After a few moments of the woman’s shouting, I got up and put some coins into the box and told the boys to play some music and go help the old lady.
Smith told me that since he last saw me he’d learned that Errol Flynn didn’t win Navy Island in a poker game; he bought it for three thousand pounds from a friend of his who was an attorney handling the estate of a rich widow from the States. And after a few years he sold half the island for thirty-three thousand pounds, Smith said with evident admiration. As far as he knew, Mrs. Flynn had continued to own the other half, until recently, when, he had heard, she had become a partner with the people who for the last ten years had been building the Windjammer Hotel and villas out there. It was the property at Comfort that Flynn had won in a card game, Smith informed me, a game played right here at the Princess. He’d won sixteen hundred pounds that night, and the man he won it from had no money and had to sign over the deed to a thousand acres to pay off his losses. That’s how the old Englishmen used to do it, Smith said with wonder in his face and voice, gambling away estates and slaves and horses and women, as if they meant nothing to them.
I asked him about Menotti again, if the Doctor still lived in the area.
No, of course not, Smith said. He left Port Antonio and the island right after DeVries was convicted, didn’t even wait around for him to get hung, because of the scandal. The scandal? What scandal? Oh, you know, all that superstition and rumor.
That evening, after dinner at the hotel, I drove out to the western end of town where the United Fruit pier and warehouses were located and watched the loading of a banana boat, the Northern Isle, a rusting, wheezing, dripping freighter bound for Liverpool. Work gangs strung along broad tables were packing bunches of green bananas into cartons while a counter with a bell in his lap tallied the cartons from his high stool. Conical lights hung down from the high, tin roof, and yellow forklift trucks zipped around the wide space of the dock snatching up pallets of the stacked cartons of bananas, stashing them into the refrigerated hold of the ship. Up high, along the deck, leaning over the rail and watching the activity below, was a small group of white sailors and an officer or two, here and there a male passenger in shorts and T-shirt, all of them looking passively at the scene below as if they were watching a movie. A character in the movie, I strolled forward from the counting table and, standing a few feet from the side of the ship, stared up at the white men—my brothers. For a second our eyes met, and I felt myself about to step out of the movie and join the viewers, when suddenly a man walked out of the darkness on my right and stood beside me. It was Holmes, Terron’s younger brother. He had seen my car parked outside and had come onto the pier to find me.
His big horse face grinned handsomely, and we shook hands. Unlike his brother, Holmes was tall and shyly quiet, spoke slowly and precisely in terms that he felt I would be comfortable with, terms of measure, of exact quantity, terms that defined by setting limits. I knew that he spoke this way out of a desire not only to make himself understood, but also to make me comfortable, for I had heard him talking with his brother and friends, and with them he flew through limits and spoke always in grand Rastafarian metaphor. Like his brother, he was a Rastafarian and wore the locks and beard. In certain ways, however, he was more political and orthodox than Terron, who, even in the context of Rastafarian alienation from the world of Babylon, remained poetically alone, as if he were seeing and saying everything he saw and said for the first time in his or anyone else’s life, as if he personally had discovered the Rastafarian perspective.
We left the pier and got into my car and drove slowly down the street, the prostitutes hissing good-naturedly at us as we passed. Once again, I was asking questions about Errol Flynn and DeVries and Dr. Menotti and his son. Holmes’ version of the story was the same as his brother’s. Evan Smith, he told me, was frightened of obeah because he was an old man and a Christian, and that was why he didn’t think Flynn and Menotti were guilty. He didn’t want to make himself vulnerable to Menotti’s power or Flynn’s who, even though the one was out of the country and the other dead, could still make Smith suffer.
We stopped at the Princess, which was crowded with whores and local workingmen and loafers. Holmes indicated to the old lady I had seen that afternoon with Smith that we were only interested in drinking, and we took a table in a corner and ordered beers. What should I do with this story? I asked Holmes. You should go out to Navy Island, he answered, and talk to Captain Ausley. And you should see Mrs. Flynn, if you can. And you should talk to the man who saw DeVries that morning out at Dolphin’s Bay chopping up his wife’s body, and you should go out there yourself and see the hole where he tried to drop her into the sea.
And you should talk to this woman! he said, turning suddenly in his chair and grabbing the hand of a chunky young whore standing at the bar not far from our table. He pulled her over to the table and said that this was Dorothy. She grinned broadly and punched Holmes on the arm, and they wrestled for a few moments, grabbing each other’s arms and shoulders and jamming their faces into each other’s necks. Then he pulled her into his lap and told her my name and said that I was the brother of his brother.
She was a young woman, probably not more than twenty, large-breasted and dark-skinned, wearing tight jeans and a T-shirt decorated with a sequined palm tree that undulated across her breasts. She wore her hair cropped close to the skull, had large, expressive, joking eyes, thick, unpainted lips and a flat, broad nose with large nostrils that flared like wings. Her shoulders and arms were as broad and thick as Holmes’, and every few seconds she would whack him on the thigh or chest.
The evening wore on. I grew tired, bored and slightly drunk. Holmes and Dorothy talked more and more exclusively to each other and in patois uttered so rapidly that I could no longer follow what they were saying. Once in a while one of the women would come over to our table, Holmes would look at me to see if I was interested, and as soon as he saw that I wasn’t, he’d say so to the woman and she’d leave for another table. I was grateful for his willingness and ability to play this intermediary’s role, because, though I had moved very close to his world, had come right up to the line where his world and mine met, I still had not stepped off the landing there and onto dry land. I remembered the white faces of the sailors staring down from the deck of the Northern Isle, how familiar they had seemed to me, and how easy it had been for me to start sliding upward into their eyes. Errol Flynn, you may have been a madman, I thought, but you knew this line well. There must have been a night here in Port Antonio when you too stepped over it, when you walked off the pier between the sea and the shore, strolled down these shadowy streets, and ceased being who you were. What did you become then? I wondered.