He introduced Michael to a magazine journalist named Liz McKie.
"What brings you here, Michael?" she asked. "At a time like this. You writing?"
"No, just diving."
McKie assumed an expression of puzzled interest. "Say what?"
"I'm here for the beach."
"No shit?" the reporter said. "The beach, huh?" Van Dreele laughed darkly.
"Well," Michael told them, "I thought I'd look at the native art, too. Buy some pictures."
"Hey, Dirk," she said to Van Dreele, "I know you're avoiding me. Give me a break this time. What is the story on this guy, Dirk?" she asked. "Is he a spook? I mean, he doesn't look like a…" Whatever she had been about to say went unsaid.
"Maybe he's here to buy the hotel," suggested Van Dreele. "It's being sold."
They heard trucks pulling up outside. A party of local soldiery tramped up from the road. Mrs. Robert ran out to meet them.
"Hey, you boys," she shouted at them. "You can't come in here." The three soldiers who had come laughed at her but stopped. A tall striking officer in British-style rig came up behind them; he was laughing too. Liz McKie walked over to him. Their handshake was affectionate. Then the officer and the three soldiers went back into the night. More trucks pulled up.
"They're after me," Van Dreele said. He did not seem to be joking. "Every time they miscount a vote I catch them. They want me out of here."
"I think they're surrounding the hotel."
"But it's being sold right now," Michael said.
"Are you here to buy it?" Liz McKie asked. "Along with the local art?" Still addressing Michael, she turned to perform for Van Dreele. "Gonna run it on the up-and-up? I hope Roger's staying on as manager. Where is old Rog anyhow?"
"He's at the lodge with Lara," Van Dreele said. "I guess they're stamping the papers."
"You wouldn't be down here with Lara?" Liz McKie asked. "Like, are you a friend of hers? One of her tonton macoutes?"
One of the old waiters came to the table to tell Michael that there was a message for him. He excused himself and went to the desk. Mrs. Robert had the message, apparently brought on foot by a little boy who stood expectantly by. The message was from Roger Hyde. Miss Purcell was in conference, and the conference might last the night. Michael gave the boy one of his folded bills, to the great excitement of the child, and said good night to the people at his table and went back to his room.
Lying there, he could hear orders crooned in a mixture of British and American inflections. Running soldiers, the slap of their weapons, laughter. He heard the sea. But louder and louder, from how far away he could not tell, he heard drums. The hills behind the town made them echo and confused their direction.
Concentrating on them, he tried to unravel the rhythms and count the number of drums. There were too many — so many, he thought, that it was impossible to imagine the drummers at their devotions. The voices in the drums were as good as infinite with their turns and shadows, doubling and tripling and repeating and commenting on their own tattoos. Covering each other, featuring the premonition of a beat, the beat itself, its echo. Each pattern sounded of inevitability, so that what had to come next came, obvious only after the fact, surprising. Then repeated, it surprised again. If you followed a line of the beat you would know what you were about to hear and then hear it and have it repeated for you, each rendering ever so slightly different from the last. The drums made patterns that filled the mind's eye to capacity, crowded out the mind of the listener.
It occurred to him that if he opened himself to the drums he might find himself anywhere at all. He might be emptied of himself, turned into a shifting of the sand at the bottom of the sea outside his window. The drums were in nature, he thought, as surely as a bird call and its answer. They came from a place where the human touched everything else in the world, a secret crossing where they could draw spirits out of the dark.
When he dozed, he thought it must be the malaria pills he had taken, that he was hearing the drums in dreams. But when he stood up and drank from his bottled water or from the bottle of duty-free rum he had put beside the bed, he realized that they would always be there, they were incessant. Events he could not conceive were taking place within them, a different kind of time unraveling. They sounded counterpoint with the sea, who kept her own time.
He was in the grip of some peculiar lust, erect and alone, as though he were waiting in vain for a woman he had lost rather than one found, a woman whose features were melting away into forms he put out of his mind. He leaned into the drums, actually felt like dancing, and did dance, a freak dancing a solitary fever dance, aroused and terrified in his ratty hotel room by the city sea, throwing his arms about. He made himself stop, but it was hard to work free of the drums. In their many voices he heard his name.
Lara. Some of his dreams were of her. Some of Kristin. His skin felt tight with fever. The drums took him to the balcony, which overlooked the Carenage and the sea.
No escape in sleep; he kept going back to look at the ocean, the drums took him. Its surface was blank, there was no moon. But, he thought, there had been one the night before. In some other world. The drums never stopped, nor his wrestling with dreams. The ocean outside his window now had a quality he did not care for. Its darkness only concealed. Trying to pick out the reef line in faint starlight, he wondered where along its edge their dive would be. The place had so much ruin and bad history for an ocean to cover. Hateful angry gods one never suspected might command dimensions out there, gods who owed nothing to him or to reason. He felt more lonely than he had ever felt in his life.
15
THERE WERE NO messages for him at the desk the following day and no one seemed to know of a way he could contact Lara. He spent the morning walking along the Carenage, looking through the markets, declining to buy basketry, dispensing pens to the schoolchildren. Fishing boats with tortuously repaired rigging stood moored bow-landward where the Carenage ended, though it was hard, looking at them, to tell what kind of fish they followed. One had the dried carcass of a sea turtle stretched across its open forward hatch. All of them were brightly painted in the Haitian manner, named in Creole and sanctified with the portraits of saints and the designs that he would come to know as vevers, designs that signified the gods of the Haitian pantheon, whom the Christian saints also represented. The ancestors of the people at that end of the island, he had read, had come or been brought from Haiti after the revolution there.
At the edge of town, he walked unaware into an encampment of soldiers. Their uniforms were of a different shade than those of the soldiers he had seen around the hotel and their helmets had an unfamiliar shape. The men stared at him in hostile silence. Their rifles, stacked in the old infantry manner in the center of their bivouac, looked like relics. Some of them he thought might be M-1's of World War II manufacture. Two of the soldiers came toward him but were called back by a noncom in a language that Michael knew must be English but could not understand. As unconcernedly as possible, he reversed direction.
When the sun became too much for him he went back to the hotel. Still there was nothing from Lara. He put a bathing suit on and paddled among the frangipani blossoms in the pool, then lay down in his room for a while. Late in the afternoon he dressed and went outside. There were several soldiers sitting at the patio tables, officers of the island republic's new army, all in fresh camouflage fatigues and wearing sidearms. Soldiers in the same colors stood guard at the steps that led down to the road and on the rise behind the swimming pool that overlooked the bay.