Bad Monkey

“We’re blessed to live in such times,” Yancy said.

“You think Caitlin knows?”

“Nope. Only Eve.”

“And where is the fearless Mr. Stripling?”

“Not sure if he’s dead or alive. He was about to shoot me when my new hero Neville stabbed him with my six-hundred-dollar bonefish rod.”

“It just gets better and better,” Rosa said. “And now we’re in a hurricane!”

“Named Françoise, for Christ’s sake.”

“Don’t spoil it, Andrew. Take off your pants.”

The eye of the storm stayed out in the Tongue of the Ocean, feeding on the warm waters. Still there was substantial damage and disruption across Andros as it passed to the east. The winds on Lizard Cay reached seventy-one miles per hour, gusting to ninety.

Yancy found himself struggling to focus on what would have been, under calm heavens, an act of carefree and delicious reflex. The din from even a small hurricane is nerve-racking, and Yancy was additionally distracted by thoughts of the evening’s frenetic events. Rosa told him to relax; Neville and his girlfriend wouldn’t be able to hear them from the other side of the door, which Yancy had locked in case Neville’s monkey got nosy.

It was during light-spirited foreplay when Rosa confided that she’d been reading a smutty novel in which an inexperienced woman becomes enthralled by a lover who bosses her around the bedroom with the same tone one might hear from the nail-gun operator at a slaughterhouse. The woman sportingly signs an enslavement contract, after which the fellow forces her to put on Day-Glo wetsuits and perform contortions that would daunt Olga Korbut.

Rosa said she was sort of enjoying the book. Yancy tried to act intrigued though he’d never been good at fantasy sex; it was difficult to stay in character and not make smart-ass remarks. One time Bonnie made him play the shiftless hitchhiker while she was the naïve Mary Kay associate who got lost in her imaginary pink Lexus. Yancy couldn’t keep a straight face, or anything else, and Bonnie ended up steaming mad.

Adopting the role of ruthless dominator in Rosa’s daydream would require some stagecraft, and in Yancy’s experience there was a hazy line between daring and disgusting. Usually when making love he strived for a purely sensory, uncomplicated experience. Incorporating a game or a skit seemed too much like a class assignment.

For Rosa, however, he’d try anything—first in a morgue and now in a hurricane, the whole damn house heaving on its foundation. Fine.

“Thad always speaks to Juliette like a Russian,” she was saying, referring to the characters in the novel.

“I can’t do a Russian.”

“Any Eastern bloc nation should work.”

“Bad Irish is all I’ve got,” said Yancy.

Rosa kissed him and said, “All right, let’s hear it.” In the lantern’s light she looked lovely, but this wide-eyed Juliette thing she could never pull off, not with her butterscotch skin and those South Beach bikini stripes.

She said, “Ready? Now call me a mean name and order me to put my feet behind my head.”

“You can actually do that?”

“Come on!”

“Kay, ye wortless bitch, do wutcher told or I’ll spank yer arse with a boogie whip.”

She broke up, giggling and kicking at the air. “It’s like screwing Shrek!”

“Did I not warn you about the accent?”

“Give me some Daniel Craig.”

Yancy slid over and pinned her arms. “Don’t move,” he rumbled.

“Oooh, baby, that’s pretty good!”

It took a little time but Yancy’s mind began to untorque, despite his almost having been shot point-blank and then escaping through a tropical gale to rescue his date from a voodoo den. All the heavy stuff faded as he rolled around with Rosa and finally let go. The storm made the intimacy more exotic—they were trapped but also tucked safe. When the lantern died they found their way by touch, and the knocking from a loose porch plank became their rhythm.

Later, when they had time to think about it, their recollections differed as to exactly when the top of Coquina’s house blew off. Yancy thought it had happened a few moments before they finished, as Rosa’s fingertips began to dig into his arms. But she said no, it was the precise instant she came that the roof had peeled away, the nails popping like firecrackers.

Yancy had known without turning what the loud noise meant. Suddenly he could see Rosa beneath him and she could see the clouds, because even at night a hurricane brings its own particular light. The wind came wailing into the open room yet the rain flew dead sideways over the gap where the boards had been, and not a drop fell upon the bed.

Rosa had laughed deeply, shaking Yancy by the shoulders and saying, “That is what I’m talkin’ about, mister!”

Which is the part they both would remember the same way.

Twenty-four

By dawn the weather had broken and the wind dropped to nine knots. Hurricane Françoise was gone. The landing strip at Lizard Cay was littered with trees, coconuts, plywood, two-by-fours and sheets of brittle plastic roofing from a nearby chicken farm.