2. A New Home

The spa fad of the early twentieth century died off by the twenties, but by then Joel Hope had made friends with the picture people in Hollywood, and his hotel in the mountain woods became the scene of glamorous, scandalous parties, where champagne bubbled and flowed alongside the healing water. These newer guests, who arrived in long roadsters, with their expensive cigars and beautiful bodies, had no need for doctors and cures, and certainly no need for private bath houses. Joel Hope dismissed the doctors and tore down the bath houses. He hired an architect to design an elegant Craftsman style bathhouse to shelter the cooling tanks and invited his guests of all sexes and persuasions to bathe together. He let his guests make their own rules, and there were no rules. Nor were there bathing suits. Swashbucklers chased naked nymphs through the forest, and executives made afternoon deals while the sun baked their bare bottoms. In the bathhouse boys became men, girls became starlets, women became stars, men became boys. One can only imagine what went on in the hotel, upstairs.

By this time Joel Hope was well into his fifties. He had never married. He had been so busy buying orchards and selling fruit, building his bathhouse and hosting people even wealthier than he, that he had never found the time to fall in love. But one perfect summer night, he saw the star that he knew his heart must own. Clara Bianca, “America’s Sweetiepie,” the world’s most famous blonde, shed her satin robe and covered her perky breasts with crossed arms as she pointed one foot and dipped five perfect, painted toes into one of the long, tiled tanks to test the temperature of the water, then pouted, then sighed, then smiled, then laughed merrily. She dropped her arms to her side to let her nipples shimmer in the light of the Japanese lanterns. She gently scratched the platinum curls of her pubis as she stepped down into the tank. When her body was submerged and only her face was above water, she squealed with happiness and everyone waited to hear what this flapper darling would say next. She said, “Mr. Hope, thank you for giving my body the most delicious moment of its life. What can I do to repay you?”

Joel heard himself reply: “You can marry me.”

He heard the motion picture community applaud with wet hands.

Clara Bianca Hope quit the movies and devoted herself to making her husband proud and happy and her former colleagues welcome and comfortable in the mountain retreat. The parties became grander and grander, with the most elegant meals, the best French wines, the hottest jazz.

———

So it was that when Professor Pomeroy arrived at Hope Spring late one fall afternoon, with his daughter Libby, the child Nqong, and a second taxicab filled with scientific supplies and samples, he found a far different place from the one he had visited some years earlier. He asked the drivers of the first and second taxis to wait while he announced himself to whoever was managing the front desk. The taxi drivers barely listened to him; they were gawking at the naked starlets on the other side of the road, who were lounging on the lawn, sipping martinis in the warm Indian summer sunshine, and feeding the olives to the peacocks.

Nqong shut his eyes and opened his nostrils as wide as they would go. The air smelled like home!

When the professor ushered his children nervously into the lobby of the old hotel, he saw that the Victorian furniture had been replaced by Deco furnishings. A lovely young thing traipsed across the lobby and gave the odd company a quizzical smile. She wore a long string of pearls and a short skirt with swishing fringe. “May I help you people?” she asked, wrinkling her nose—either to stop herself from laughing or to reveal an outright disgust, Libby guessed. Libby had very little hope for most white people.

“Please inform Mister Joel Hope that Professor Pomeroy has arrived from Australia,” the old man requested.

“Okey dokey,” the young thing said with a shrug. “He’s terribly, terribly busy, of course.” She turned and walked away with a little twitch in her rear, the fringe swaying with her gait.

Only moments later, Joel Hope, the proprietor, burst into the lobby and raced across the carpet to shake the old man’s hand. “By golly!” he said. “By golly! Welcome back, sir. Welcome back to my home. Where is your lovely wife?”

“I regret to say my dear Mathilda died,” Professor Pomeroy answered.

“I’m so sorry,” Mr. Hope said. “But she was expecting a child—?”

Livingston Pomeroy grinned and nodded. He turned to his daughter and said, “Libby, I’d like you to meet my friend, Mister Hope.”

Libby looked up into the portly man’s red face. He was staring down at her with a look she had never seen before.

———

Pomeroy and the children were given the carriage house to live in. “Nobody uses carriages anymore anyway,” Clara Hope said. “It’s going to waste. Please. I want you to be happy so you’ll stay forever. Do whatever you want with it. Fix it up. You know: have fun. Put in some bright colors. Sofas and things.”

“You’re too kind,” Bugs told her.

“Not at all,” Joel Hope said. “We want you to stay. I plan to do all I can for this young lady,” he said, his hand on Libby’s head.

“And I,” said Mrs. Hope, bending down and speaking straight to Nqong, “want you to be my special friend.” She took hold of his yellow dress and said, “I’m going to dress you like a boy, and give you a boy’s haircut, so you can be my boyfriend. You can call me Auntie Clara, and I’m going to teach you to garden. Can you understand me?”

Nqong smiled and said, “Ontie Clara.”

———

Livingston Pomeroy converted the carriage house into a laboratory, of course. He made sleeping quarters for the children in the loft, and he himself slept on a sofa in an area downstairs that served as a parlor. But most of the carriage house was given over to sinks and counters and shelves and drawers. There he taught the children about insects in general and beetles in particular. He also gave them lessons in reading and writing and playing games with numbers.

He took them for long walks in the woods, and sometimes, when the bathhouse was free of movie stars, the three of them would sit in the hot bath and tell each other stories in the Wanqong tongue.

———

“You must never tell them that we brought these larvae here,” Livingston Pomeroy told young Nqong, in the Wanqong tongue. “That will be our secret. Let the world believe the sulfur beetle has lived here, unnoticed, forever. You see? Hmm?”

The boy was happy with the idea. He was in favor of whatever made the old man happy, and especially whatever made the old man take Nqong along on his walks up the creek and into the forest. He delighted in knowing that Bugs needed him now, needed him to scamper up the trees and put the cocoons in place. Nqong was proud, too. Here he was barely six years old (or so he’d been told), and he was entrusted with handling the cocoons. Back home, only the men were allowed to touch the cocoons.

They had been putting the cocoons to bed in the trees for three days. It was chilly and wet in the forest, but Bugs said they’d be happy here. “It’s the sulfur in the air, you see? It’ll give them sweet dreams.”

Nqong climbed down from the oak tree and showed Bugs the empty burlap sack. “All gone,” he said, in English. “Finish.”

The old man beamed. “Jolly good,” he whispered.

Nqong whispered back, “Jolly good.”

They scrambled their way out of the forest until they came to the trail leading downhill to the hotel. As they walked, with Nqong leading the way, the old man chattered away in English. Nqong realized that Bugs Pomeroy did not know that he, Nqong, knew English. For all Bugs knew, he was talking to himself.

Hope Springs had changed in the years since he had last visited, the old man said. He remembered the place as elegant but sleepy, a quiet, relaxing spot where one could spend all day enclosed in a private bath house, soaking in sulfur water and breathing its fumes and talking to nobody. Or one could spend a rainy afternoon in the library and write in one’s journal or read a book and talk to nobody. One could sit on the veranda in the late afternoon and watch the sunset and drink gin and quinine and talk, again, with nobody. Or one could walk in the woods or along the stream or through the fields, poking about with a net, talking to oneself. The host, Mr. Hope, sometimes came along with him, but he was very good about eschewing conversation. Livingston Pomeroy wasn’t all that fond of conversation. That’s one of the many things he’d appreciated so much about the Wanqong: they didn’t talk much, and they didn’t care if old Bugs had nothing to say to them.

But the new Hope Springs, the place to which he had returned with the children and the precious cocoons, was neither quiet nor relaxing. Chatter, chatter, chatter. They’d put a pianoforte in the lounge, and someone was always banging on it. There was a Victrola in the library now, which made reading altogether impossible. And one didn’t just have a quiet gin and quinine by oneself on the veranda anymore. Oh, no, that would never do. Now, since alcohol was forbidden by law, one didn’t drink a quiet anything. Now one drank loudly, proudly, in large laughing groups. “Whatcha drinkin’ there, sport?”

Chatter, chatter, chatter. And not one of them had the slightest interest in insects.

To top it off, Mr. Hope had torn down all the private cabanas for bathing and had erected the Craftsman-style bathhouse above the holding tanks, where people cavorted together, men and women alike, naked as the Wanqong, without the decency of actually being Wanqong.

“They miss the point entirely, you see,” Bugs said.

He had to admit, though, that the host’s new wife was a charmer.

That she was. Nqong was already in love with her.

———

In the spring, the first few yellow bugs appeared.

Pomeroy and the children were sitting on the veranda with Joel and Clara Hope, having coffee after breakfast, when three lustrous yellow beetles landed on the table where they sat. Mr. Hope folded his napkin into a weapon and was about to swat one of the bugs when Pomeroy stayed his hand.

“Sulfur beetle!” he exclaimed. “Sulfur beetle! Look children, look!”

Nqong held out his hand and a beetle crawled onto it. Auntie Clara clapped her hands in delight, and Nqong and Libby grinned at each other. The old man wept openly, and Mr. Hope, their host, shrugged and stirred his coffee.

———

That same spring Nqong learned to garden. Side by side in dungarees, he and America’s Sweetiepie knelt in the dirt planting petunias and pansies. He whooped and shooed the peacocks away from his flowers and laughed when the yellow bugs circled his head. Auntie Clara and he took a rest and drank lemonade, and when they were finished with that she held his hand and looked into his eyes. She smiled like a soft sunrise, laughed like a gentle rain.

———

Summer came, with dry hot days and nights. Fall with fog and winter with mud, then spring again with sunshine and flowers and beetles, beetles, beetles. Auntie Clara loved the yellow bugs.

The seasons changed again and again. Mr. Hope was kind to them all. He made certain that Pomeroy was comfortable in the carriage house, and he bought Libby sundresses and skirts and sweaters and shoes. She was becoming a little grown-up, eleven years old. He took her to Los Angeles and Santa Barbara and introduced her to restaurants and beauty parlors. She always returned from these outings in a bit of a snit, snapping at Professor Pomeroy, snubbing Nqong, sulking about in the latest fashions.

One day Mr. Hope took Nqong high into the hills and back into the forest and showed him the water house and taught him how all of the machinery worked. “I’m too old to climb this hill every week,” he told the boy. “I think it’s time a young man learned to govern the temperature of our water for the comfort of our guests, and how to keep the valves in working order. I never had a son. You’ll do.”

“I’ll do,” Nqong agreed.

In the garden, Auntie Clara said to Nqong, “I want you to promise to stay here forever, and always take care of this place that I love so much.”

Nqong bowed and said, “I’ll do.”

———

Old Bugs Pomeroy spent more and more time out of doors, in all kinds of weather, looking under rocks and logs, poking around in streams and fields. Libby and Nqong followed after him. Libby was learning everything he knew, and could now supply the names of insects that he was beginning to forget.

Libby did not go with Nqong and Bugs to the water house. It was there that the old man told Nqong how to readjust the temperature and the chemistry of the water daily, keeping it constantly perfect for Coleoptera hydrophilidae mathilda. “This is for men to know,” Bugs said. “You understand that, son?”

“Am I a son?” Nqong asked.

“What on earth do you mean?”

“Are you my father?” Nqong asked.

Old Livingston Pomeroy frowned and shook his head. “No,” he said. “The Wanqong do not have fathers.”

———

One night at dinner, Mr. Hope stopped by their table and sat for a moment. He put his arm about the back of Libby’s chair and cleared his throat. “Mrs. Hope and I have been talking,” he said, “and we’ve decided that the children should stop using the bathhouse. I’m sorry, children, but those are the new rules. Libby, you’re beginning to become a young lady now, and I don’t think it’s proper for you to mix with all these….” He waved his hand at the dining room of chattering tipsy movie stars.

“Why?” Libby asked.

“Because they don’t wear bathing suits,” Mr. Hope explained. “I don’t want you looking at them, and I don’t want them looking at you.”

“Why?”

“Libby, here in America young girls do as they’re told,” Mr. Hope said. “You’ll understand this when you’re older.”

“You’re not my father,” Libby reminded him.

Mr. Hope nodded, his lips pursed. He said, “Perhaps not, but I own the bathhouse, and I make the rules.”

Libby scowled at the host and said, “What about Nqong?”

“Him either, of course. Well, that’s another matter, you see. We all love Nqong, but he’s being trained as a gardener. And he takes care of the water house and so on. The bathhouse is for the guests, not for colored servants. You understand, don’t you, Nqong?”

Nqong understood. He did not much care for the noisy bathhouse anyway. He had already discovered a pool of delicious hot mud high on the mountain, deep in the forest, and he would show that to Libby the next day.

———

In the spring of 1928, Clara Bianca Hope, America’s Sweetiepie and Nqong’s Auntie Clara, announced that she was going to have a baby. Reporters came from all over the country to photograph and interview her. She declared that her film career was finished. She wanted to be a model wife and a perfect mother. She hoped her fans would understand.

With this announcement, other changes began to happen around Hope Springs. Fewer and fewer guests came to stay at the hotel, and they behaved themselves more politely, quietly. Then, as summer turned to fall and Clara Hope turned round and dowdy, Joel Hope announced that the hotel would be open only on weekends. Auntie Clara spent most of her time indoors, in parts of the hotel where Nqong was not allowed.

———

When Joel Hope, Junior, was born in early December, 1928, the hotel was closed for the winter, so that Clara could get a running start on motherhood before returning to the role of hostess. Then, when the hotel reopened, on weekends only, in April, it was open only to invited guests, a few at a time, who never had to pay.

Much of the staff was dismissed. Livingston Pomeroy and the children, now twelve and nine years old, were invited to stay on in the carriage house forever, free of charge.

The old man was delighted. The loud movie stars were gone, and he had the sinecure of his dreams: life in a green, smelly valley populated by yellow bugs. He wrote and published a pamphlet about the discovery of a lifetime, Organism of My Delight.

Libby did not say how she liked life at Hope Springs. She was a quiet, thoughtful child who laughed only with Nqong, and less and less of that. She was changing.

Nqong felt himself changing too. He missed his playmate, and he missed his Auntie Clara. He spent more and more time outdoors, in the wooded hills. He no longer thought in the Wanqong language. But he did not think in the English language either, he realized. He thought like the mud, like the streams, like the steam, like the trees. Like rain and wind and sunlight and shadow. His mind hummed and bubbled, and something inside him yearned.

———

Auntie Clara spent all her time with that little baby. Not at all like the babies Nqong remembered from his boyhood. This one was pale and whiny, needy and angry. The little grub had Auntie Clara to himself all day long. How could he want for more?

“Not now, Nqong, darling. I’m nursing little Joley.”

Even at his mother’s breast, the child was uncontrollable, bucking and bubbling with ungrateful thrusts and cries.

Joel Hope, Senior, was proud and fat. He filled the hotel library with toys for his son. He seldom spoke with Nqong now. Even Libby seemed low on his list.

———

Two years later, on New Year’s Eve, as the Hollywood community was welcoming 1930 in gay parties elsewhere, Joel and Clara Hope had their home to themselves. They finished a fine dinner, saw little Joley off to bed in the care of his nurse, thanked the servants, then donned sweaters and strolled down the chilly path, carrying crystal goblets and a bottle of their best champagne to the warm, steamy bath house. They lit the Japanese lanterns and popped the cork and stripped off their warm clothes. Joel Hope delighted again in the perfection of his wife’s body, her grace as she slipped into the warm water, the angelic sound of her laughter and the love in her widening eyes as she watched his erection grow. His confident, dependable vector of love, pointed only to America’s Sweetiepie, who was still less than half his age. Midnight came, and Joel and Clara Hope celebrated on the slippery tiles by conceiving twins, thus beginning Clara Bianca Hope’s last adventure.

Auntie Clara got big and round again. This time she was cross with everyone, even the demanding little Joley. Nqong knew enough to keep out of her way. There were never any guests. Joel Hope, Senior, was away on business most of the time. Bugs Pomeroy puttered and mumbled, ignoring everyone. Libby, now thirteen, talked to no one; she spent her mornings at her studies and her afternoons in solitary walks.

Nqong was lonely, a ten-year-old with no playmates. He gardened, but nobody looked at the flowers. He maintained the water house, even though no one used the baths anymore. His only passion was the beetles. He took care of them, monitoring the sulfur content and temperature of the stream. There was his purpose, the thing he was meant to do. The beetles were his friends, the only friends he had.

The summer was dry and hot, sleepy and quiet. Dust puffed from his naked black feet when he strolled familiar trails.

In late September, when the yellow bugs had left the sky, Clara Hope went into labor, a labor that lasted two days. Her husband was summoned, and then a doctor, and then two more doctors. People in white scurried up and down the halls of the hotel. Nqong waited on the steps of the veranda for news. No one stopped to tell him anything, but snatches overheard grew worse and worse, until there were tears all around. Clara had given birth to twin girls, Karen and Nellie. In the process, she had lost her life, and Joel Hope had lost his reason to live.

———

America’s Sweetiepie was borne up the mountain the following Sunday and buried in a clearing deep in the forest, on the mountainside above the source of the spring, beneath a shrine that housed a life-sized marble statue of her in a flirty toga. The shrine and the statue had been commissioned by Joel Hope as a wedding present and placed in this spot which Clara herself had selected. Her marble face wore the wide-eyed smile that had made her famous and made her husband fall in love. The smile was now frozen forever, and her sparkling laugh had floated up to join the stars in heaven.

Only a handful of friends and staff attended the burial. Livingston Pomeroy and Libby were there. Nqong was not. He had not been invited by Mr. Hope, and although Libby urged him to come along anyway, he did not choose to join them. Instead, he snuck through the forest and hid in the branches of a tree in the woods on the side of the meadow. He could see them and hear them perfectly and could weep without shame when his Auntie Clara was entrusted to the earth, where in time she would join the healing water of Hope Springs and visit the tiled baths one last time before rushing downhill to the sea.

———

Joel Hope, Senior, shut his hotel for good. He dismissed some of his remaining staff and moved some of them, along with himself and his toddler son and twin infant daughters, to Santa Barbara. Moving vans came and carted things away. The furniture throughout the hotel was draped, including the piano in the lounge.

Mr. Hope dropped by the carriage house while Libby and Nqong were having their lessons. He told Livingston Pomeroy, “I plan to sell this property eventually, but for now you should stay. I’d like you and Libby to move into the Hotel. You’ll be more comfortable there. You can keep the carriage house as your laboratory, but you should take whatever rooms you need in the hotel, except for the master suite on the third floor. I’m leaving you a cook and a maid. I hope you’ll keep an eye on things. I’ll be up now and then, when the children are old enough to enjoy the place, for weekends and holidays. Take care of our little girl, Mr. Pomeroy. She’s getting to be quite the beauty. We should be enrolling her in private boarding school.”

“I won’t go to boarding school,” Libby said. “I already told you that.”

Then what was left of the Hope family—tycoon and toddler, infant twins and a nanny—rolled out the driveway and away downhill in their big black Packard.

———

Over the next two years Nqong endured loneliness as he had never known it before. Born into a tribe of close and social people, he had learned early to do everything surrounded by others: the Wanqong did it all together: they played and slept and ate and shat and told stories and bathed and breathed as a group. Sometimes the men did things only the men did, and they did them all together. Or the women, same way. Or the children, same way, with Nqong right in the middle of them, part of them although always the tallest by far. Nqong’s early years were steeped in society, until that society was blown apart.

After that, all he had left was his playmate and the old man who took care of them both. Three was a smaller group than he had been born into, but it was a group, and Nqong was a part of it. They bathed and ate together, and studied together and took walks and laughed and talked about beetles together.

But now old Bugs Pomeroy was batty. He spent all his days alone in the laboratory. He spent all his evenings in the hotel library, reading and sipping gin.

Libby was not batty, but she was distant and moody. She wanted nothing to do with the old man or with Nqong. She studied and exercised and took long walks to the village, where she learned to be a girl among girls. She had no use for the gangly black boy who had once been her laughing companion.

It was a painful puberty. Nqong never went to the village and he had no friends. He had no family. His Auntie Clara was either in the ground or up in heaven or both, but she was nowhere to be seen. Nqong gardened and cared for the bugs and grew and yearned for friendship and for something to ease the strange urges he felt climbing up his thighs. His legs grew long, his armpits grew hair, his wrists became gnarled, his genitals bloomed, he sweated all the time, and he stank. His voice cracked until he stopped talking for a month and nobody noticed or cared. When he spoke again, he spoke deeply, and so he spoke softly, that no one might notice. No one noticed. He learned to play with his penis and wondered if he should. Season after season, the persistent pressure of newfound pleasures grew stronger and stronger. Sometimes he went to the water house and spent all day discovering horizons of desire and spurting semen into the hot, sulfurous water. Alone in the woods, he howled and listened to the echoes from across the canyon. Whenever he felt the need to weep, he climbed the mountainside to Auntie Clara’s shrine, and weeping by her effigy gave him temporary peace and relief from sorrow.

———

In the spring of 1933, the Hope family started returning to Hope Springs on occasional weekends. The big Packard would roll in on Friday mornings, and out would pile Mr. Hope, Joley Junior, the twin toddlers, and their nursemaid who gave orders to the whole family. Little Joley was four years old, imperious and loud. He began each visit with a screech: “This place smells! I want to go home!”

The little girls were pretty and peppy, leading their nursemaid on chases up and down the halls of the hotel and about the gardens. Having mastered walking and running, they were now learning to talk and shout. They squabbled constantly.

During their visits Nqong spent most of his time in the forest. He was a lonely boy, but he felt even lonelier in company. However, much to his discomfort, he was required to eat dinner with the Hope family on Saturday nights. Joel Hope, Senior, insisted that Libby join the family for dinner, and she in turn insisted that if she should have to be there, so should her father and Nqong. Libby was now fifteen years old, and capable of being civil for two hours at a time. Nqong had just turned thirteen, barely capable of doing anything social without dropping something and making a mess. Old Bugs was silent, smiling, and smashed. Saturday dinners were excruciating.

“Tell me, Libby,” the rich man would ask, “are we keeping up with our studies?”

“Mmmm.”

“Professor Pomeroy, I think it’s time we start looking into private schools for our young lady here.”

“No!”

“Libby….”

“No.”

Mr. Hope sighed and turned to Nqong. “So. How is the water house? Everything in order? Working properly and so on?”

Nqong nodded. Mr. Hope said, “Speak up, boy.”

Joel Hope, Jr. added, “The pollywog stinks.”

———

One Saturday night in late spring, after an especially long, drawn-out dinner during which the twins threw mashed potatoes at each other and Joley whined continually until he found happiness by overturning a bowl of tapioca pudding, Nqong stepped out of the hotel, onto the verandah and gulped the evening air with relief. His shirt was sweaty and he knew he stank, and he was glad to be alone.

“Nqong.”

He was not alone. He turned and saw his lifelong playmate sitting on one of the veranda chairs, her legs crossed, her foot swaying furiously. She stood. She was fully grown now, though not as tall as Nqong. She said, “Let’s take a walk.”

It had been so long since Libby had spoken to him that he did not know how to answer. He shrugged. The two of them went down the steps side by side and walked down the gravel driveway to the gates of Hope Springs, then out along the road toward Tecolote.

The last light of day faded. Blackness rose from the valley on their right, and above them stars brightened in the darkening blue. When night was all around them they stopped. Without speaking they turned together and began walking back uphill, toward their home.

Libby spoke. “They’re planning to send me away,” she said. “In September.”

Nqong ached. She smelled beautiful.

“I won’t go,” she continued, and Nqong felt better. “I’ll run away.”

He ached. She smelled beautiful, and his heart raced.

“Talk to me, Nqong.”

He tried, but all he could say was, “Don’t go.”

The old hotel was dark when they returned. They stopped in front of the steps, and his body shivered.

“Are you cold?” she asked.

“No.” He could not catch his breath.

“Let’s go take a bath. Come on.” She took his hand and led him across the driveway and up the steps of the bathhouse. Inside, in the dark, they shed their clothes.

“I smell bad,” he confessed.

“You smell delicious.” She took his hand and they quietly slipped into the first bath.

He tried to relax. He quit trying to relax. He relaxed. He quit pretending. She touched him.

She said. “Mmm. Let me help you with that.”

———

Nqong’s childhood ended that spring. Libby taught him what their bodies were for, and together they explored the strong secret of ecstasy and orgasm. Warm in the bathhouse when nobody was near, they made the universe yip like a choir of happy dingos. They made love in the mountains, by the mud pool and in the water house. They made love in the carriage house and in abandoned rooms of the hotel. They turned the bathhouse into their pleasure palace. They fucked with the greedy speed of youth, then with the soft, long-lasting rhythm of wise, happy lovers. All night long, night after night, searching each other’s faces in the lamplight, full of new joy that couldn’t be stopped.

———

Until little Joley found them there on a Friday night in June. Caught them. Joley Hope, who had spent the afternoon tearing the yellow wings off beetles, his motherless whine echoing in the valley like a sour wind.

“I’m going to tell.”

“Joley,” Libby scolded, “what are you doing up at this hour? Go back to bed.”

“I’m going to tell.”

“Bugger off, Joley,” Libby told him. “And don’t you say a word, mind.”

But he did say a word, and more than a word, at dinner the following night, in front of them all: “Guess who I saw in the bathhouse, and guess what they were doing. Libby Pomeroy and the polliwog. Guess what they were doing! He had his….”

Joel Hope, Senior exploded and demanded a denial, but Libby defiantly confessed, which was fine for Libby perhaps, but it yanked the joy from Nqong’s heart and threw it out on the tablecloth for both Joel Hopes, Senior and Junior, to take turns stabbing it to death.

“Don’t you know what might have happened?” Senior shouted at the girl.

“I hope it has.”

“Well, we’ll take care of such matters right away, you can be sure of that.” Then he turned to the old man and said, “Professor Pomeroy, that settles it. You are an unfit father, and I won’t have it any longer. Libby is leaving with me tomorrow afternoon, and she’ll stay with me in Santa Barbara until I can make arrangements for her to be enrolled in an East Coast finishing school. It’s high time she became civilized.”

“I am civilized,” Libby said.

“Civilized does not mean keeping company with savages.” He turned to Nqong and said, “I’m going to have you deported.”

“No!” This from the old man, Bugs. “Nqong must stay here. No one else knows what to do!” He stuck the ends of his mustache into his mouth and began to chew furiously.

“You’re an absolute loon,” Joel Hope replied.

Nqong’s eyes met little Joley’s across the dinner table. The little blond child proffered a sweet, dangerous smile and lowered his eyelids. He slid his forefinger deep into his mouth and then withdrew it slowly, his lips caressing it as it came out, his tongue following it out his mouth and flickering like a snake’s.

———

“Nqong?” It was the middle of the night. Nqong sat up in his bed in the carriage house loft. A lamp was lit down in the parlor area. “Nqong, wake up.” It was Libby’s voice.

Nqong got out of bed and climbed down the ladder. When his feet found the floor, he turned around and was surprised to find both Livingston Pomeroys, father and daughter there, fully dressed. Nqong realized how naked he was and scampered back up the ladder to find a pair of shorts. He came back down the ladder and held Libby’s hand.

Suitcases.

Old Bugs was wandering about the laboratory, lighting lamps.

“Father, stop that,” Libby said. She said to Nqong, “We’re leaving. Tonight, Right now. Father and I. I’ve called for a taxi.”

“I’ll come with you,” Nqong said.

The old man shouted, “No!”

“Father, be quiet!”

Bugs Pomeroy strode over to Nqong and stared him in the eye. “You stay here, Nqong. You must take care of our beetles. You must. That is what you must do. You must take care of them, or it will be all over. Finish. Savvy?” The old man’s eyes were watery, his mustache quivering.

Libby said, “Father, keep your voice down.” She squeezed Nqong’s hand, then drew him into a frantic hug. “I’ll come back for you,” she told him. “As soon as I can. But right now I have to get away. Do you understand?”

An automobile growled on the driveway outside. Old Bugs shook Nqong by the shoulder, saying, “Take good care of them, boy.” Libby’s back was turned, her shoulders shaking. Nqong turned away from the both and climbed the ladder. He sat on his bed. The lamps went out. The door downstairs opened and then closed. The automobile purred away.

———

Joel Hope, Senior stormed into the carriage house in the morning and ordered Nqong down from the loft.

“They’re gone,” he said. “Fine. I never want to see them again. I had decided to give Hope Springs to her one day, but she can rot in hell. I never want to see her again. I’m taking my children and the cook and the maid, and I’m leaving this place. I never want to see this place again. I could have you arrested, you know. Thrown in jail. Thrown out. Thrown away. You’re trash. Look at you.”

Little Joley Junior came in the door and stood by his father’s side, holding his father’s hand, grinning.

Nqong finished buttoning his shirt.

“But I’m going to let you stay,” Mr. Hope said. “You’re going to live alone here and guard this place and keep it looking presentable until I sell it. I don’t know how long that will take, but you’d better do a good job. I have charge accounts in Tecolote with the grocer, the hardware store, and the garage. Do you know how to drive the truck?”

Nqong nodded.

“Okay. I’ll tell the local merchants that you can sign on my accounts. Do you know how to sign your name?”

Nqong nodded.

“They’ll send the bills to me, and they’ll also let me know if they think you’re cheating. You listening to me? The only reason I’m letting you stay on is because you know how to take care of the water. The water is the key to this place. Without the water, it’s worthless. So keep the water working well. If anything goes wrong with the water, you’ll be out on your black ass. Do you understand me?”

For the second time in only a few hours, Nqong had been asked to understand something that made no sense, first by someone he loved, and now by someone he hated. He understood nothing.

He nodded. To the Wanqong, a nod means “Wipe my arse.”

———

The last Nqong saw of the Hope family for seventeen years was little Joley’s sneer as the Packard pulled out: the child leaned from the window and grinned at Nqong, fluttered his eyelids, drew his forefinger out of his mouth, and wiggled his tongue.

———

Nqong was alone. Really alone this time. With plenty to do: he had to figure out how to work the truck. He had to take care of the garden for his Auntie Clara, who was gone forever. He had to take care of the water for Joel Hope, Senior, who was gone for good. He had to safeguard the yellow bugs for the old man who had saved his life. Who was also gone. And he had to wait like a widowed great auk for his mate to return, knowing that she never would.