The new beginning lasted about a year.
I sanded and painted and varnished until Joyleg was in tiptop shape. Took her out more or less regularly, once on a long sail to Puerto Rico. Adapted well enough to living on her and to Red Hook. I even became the nominal drinking buddy of the ex-navy, ex-charter fisherman who'd once given me sailing lessons; it amused me that he didn't remember me from Adam's off ox and treated me as if I'd never been anything but his equal. I told myself the scars were starting to heal a little, that I'd found a measure of peace again, but of course it wasn't true. The pleasure and the illusion of peace faded along with the newness; I began to lose interest, the way I had with Windrunner and Sub Base harbor.
Thirteen months after I bought Joyleg and moved to Red Hook, I was again spending more time in waterfront bars than I was on the schooner in port or at sea.
In September of '89 the Virgins and Puerto Rico suffered one of the most devastating hurricanes ever to slam through the region. Maybe you remember reading about it. Hurricane Hugo. A howling, snarling, Category 4 monster—torrential rain, 130-mile-an-hour winds, widespread devastation everywhere it ripped across land. More than twenty people died, and tens of thousands were left homeless. The worst carnage was on St. Croix, but St. Thomas took a heavy hit as well. The blow knocked out electrical power and phone service, and caused severe road and marine damage. There was major flooding in low-lying areas; countless trees and plants were uprooted, some beaches badly eroded, some coral reefs ruined.
There was enough advance warning for frightened residents and tourists to flee in droves before the storm battered the island. That left rooms available at high-ground hotels like the Inn at Blackbeard's Castle. I booked one there, and rode out Hugo in flickering candlelight and relative safety behind the inn's storm-shuttered stone walls. At the height of the hurricane, the noise was deafening—thunderous bellows, banshee shrieks, savage wailing glists that literally shook the building. Annalise would have freaked out before it was over. I considered it something of an adventure—until I went down to the Red Hook marina afterward.
Some boats survived relatively unscathed; others were battered beyond recognition. It didn't matter how well they'd been secured by their owners—the effects were a matter of pure random luck either way, good or bad. Joy leg was one of the casualties. Her spars were gone, one side of the deckhouse had been caved in, holes had been torn in her hull in two places above the waterline. She was salvageable, but just barely.
I could have filed an insurance claim, as so many other owners did—insurance is mandatory when you buy and register a boat in the Virgins—but it would have taken months for payment to come through and I was afraid that a claim might trigger a background check on Richard Laidlaw. I could have paid for the repairs out of my own pocket, but it would've cost thousands and I didn't have enough emotional attachment to the schooner to make it worthwhile. Boat living had pretty much lost its appeal for me by then, anyway.
I sold what was left of Joyleg to Dick Marsten, cheap, and moved back onto dry land for good.
The island wasn't the same after Hurricane Hugo. It had been changing before the Big Blow, as Bone and I had lamented often enough; the massive damage, the millions it cost for cleanup and rebuilding, hastened the process and turned St. Thomas from an island paradise into a large-scale commercial enterprise. Fancy mega-resorts to lure more and more tourists. Expensive new villas and condominiums, and new and expanded marinas, to lure more wealthy full-time and part-time residents and yacht owners. Gentrification of districts like Red Hook, Frenchtown, Sub Base harbor. Out with the old, in with the new—the glitzy, gaudy, expensive, hypermodern, bullshit new.
But all this took time, and while it was going on I lived in French-town and avoided the commercialization as much as possible. I rented an old-fashioned three-room cottage down a lane off Rue de Gregoire.
It was quiet, it had everything I needed, and it was within easy walking distance of everything else I needed. The Bar had been condemned and torn down before the hurricane, but there were other watering holes and cafes, and the waterfront wasn't far away. I was known in some of the places, and accepted, because of my association with Bone.
Not a week went by my first six months in Frenchtown that somebody didn't ask me about him. What happened to Bone, why did he leave St. Thomas, where did he go, would he ever come back? I don't know where he went, I said, I don't know why he left. Maybe he'll come back, I said, maybe he won't. You know Bone, I said, he's his own man, he goes where he likes and does what he pleases. Good old Bone, I said, he was my best friend. And then we lifted our glasses and we drank to good old Bone.
One night, in one of the watering holes, a slumming Frenchwoman fresh from Martinique decided I would make a worthwhile conquest. My blue eyes, maybe. I'd given up wearing the brown-tinted contacts; enough time had passed, and the aging Richard Laidlaw looked nothing at all like Jordan Wise, so that the risk was negligible. Enough time had passed since Annalise, too, to make me boozily curious if what she'd broken had healed of its own volition. Until that night, I just hadn't cared enough to find out.
So I let the Frenchwoman pick me up, and took her back to my cottage. And the answer to the broken question was no. Nothing the woman did—and she was as much a sexual animal as Annalise had been—produced so much as a quiver. She said something that sounded like "Bah!" and got out of bed and threw her clothes on. Before she went away into the night, she reached down and picked up my cock between her thumb and forefinger and shook it as if it had been a bad Utde boy.
"Quequette mort," she said disglistedly.
Little dead weenie.
I haven't been to bed with a woman since.
Royce Verriker died of a sudden massive coronary in the spring of '91. I read about it in the Virgin Islands Daily News. He'd been playing racquetball at the Royal Bay Club, he'd just made a winning shot and turned to shake hands with his partner, and he fell over dead.
I thought about going to the funeral home where he was laid out for viewing. Not to pay my respects: to spit in his dead face. But of course I didn't do it. I settled for the knowledge that the bastard wouldn't be giving any more men's wives the best fuck they'd ever had.
The new St. Thomas palled on me enough by the early nineties to force me off the island. Frenchtown was turning into a "historic" district filled with trendy restaurants designed to attract the snowbirds and cruise ship passengers. Many of the Cha-Chas had assimilated or moved away, and mainlanders were buying up the old frame buildings and renovating them in what they considered to be quaint Caribbean styles. It was all sham and window dressing, and I couldn't stand to be a part of it.
I thought I might like living on Tortola, so I packed up my meager belongings and moved over there. It wasn't as tourist-ridden; I liked what I'd seen of Kingstown and Cane Garden Bay, and there was the lure of the Arundel distillery. But I didn't feel comfortable there, didn't fit in with the British residents and the island lifestyle. I stayed only about a year.
From there I went to St. Croix—the west end, Frederiksted, a town that had the look and feel of an old-fashioned Caribbean outpost on the five days a week it wasn't being invaded by the cruise ship armada. I rented a cottage near LaGrange Beach, one of a series of beaches perfect for long morning and evening walks. I might still be there if I hadn't come home late one night and walked in on two strangers ransacking the cottage. They beat me up, left me in a bloody heap, and ran off. As far as I know, the local law never cought them. I wouldn't have pressed charges if they had. I considered myself lucky, as it was, that the police didn't think of me as anything more than an unfortunate victim.