Lights Out

The driver hopped on the jitney, cranked up his boom box, shot away from the dock. “Cotton Town and all points in between,” he said. “Which is nowhere. Va va voom.”

31

Cotton Town was an hour away. In that hour, the road degenerated to a rutted track, and Western civilization, except for flattened beer cans flashing in the sun, disappeared. Eddie caught a glimpse of one house along the route, standing on a bluff over a quiet bay. It was white with closed shutters, a verandah, and a peace sign painted large on the slanted roof.

“Who lives there?” Eddie asked.

“In the old gin house?” said the driver, turning down his boom box. “Nobody now. The hippies they crash in it when there was hippies.”

“Does anyone own it?”

“Everything be owned,” said the driver, “even the mangoes hanging from the trees.” He glanced at Eddie in his mirror. “You in the market for a house?”

Eddie looked down at the bay, sheltered by two curving arms that ended in sandy points about half a mile apart. He could picture himself swimming back and forth between them. “How much would it cost?”

“The old gin house? Thousands and thousands.”

He had thousands and thousands. Why not? Then he thought of Mandy. Would he want to settle in so close to her? There were other islands, with other bays perfect for swimming.

“That be the problem, man,” said the driver. “Where to get those thousands and thousands.”

The road ended in front of a pink church the size of a two-car garage. “Cotton Town Tabernacle Kirk of Redemption,” read big blue letters on the wall.

“End of the line,” said the driver. “Tipping permitted.”

Eddie gave him five dollars-too much? he didn’t know, not having been in many tipping situations-and got off the jitney, carrying the backpack. The jitney backed, turned, departed. That left Eddie alone with a brown chicken, pecking at the dirt outside the open door of the church.

Music came through the doorway, one of those familiar pieces that appear on classical-highlight records not sold in stores. Eddie went inside.

A little girl with a bow in her hair sat at an upright piano, her back to the door, her eyes on the sheet music. She sensed his presence; her hands flew off the yellowed keys and her head snapped around.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt,” Eddie said.

She stared at him.

“I’m looking for a man named JFK.”

“You the doctor?” Her voice was so soft he could barely hear her.

“Just a friend.”

The girl stared at him. It was quiet in the church; he heard something land with a thump outside, a coconut perhaps. Just when he’d decided she wasn’t going to respond, the girl said, “The house after the Fantastic.”

“Where’s that?”

She pointed with her skinny arm.

Eddie went outside, slipped on the backpack, and set off on a path that led beyond the church, in the direction the girl had pointed. He went past an overgrown garden, a half-built cinder-block house with weeds growing through the holes in the blocks, and a lopsided dwelling with an open window through which he saw a woman slumped forward at a table, her head in her arms. He came to an unpainted wooden structure with a sign over the door in big childish letters: “Fantastic Bar and Club.” He heard a man hawking inside, saw a gob of spit fly out a side window.

The path led through a grove of four or five sawtooth-leaved palms to a small house painted in broad vertical stripes of red, green, and black. A curtain hung where the door should have been. Eddie knocked on the doorjamb.

The house was silent. Eddie knocked again. “Hello?” he called. “Anyone here?”

No answer. He brushed the curtain aside and went in.

He was in a small room with a cement floor and unfinished wooden walls. There was nothing in it but an icebox, a card table, two card-table chairs, and a rusty bicycle leaning against the wall. “Hello?” he called again. Silence. He opened the icebox. It was empty except for an oblong yellow-green fruit of a kind he didn’t know.

Eddie crossed the room, entered a short hall with two doors off it, both closed. He opened the first. A bathroom; he shut the door, but not before the smell reached him. A ball of nausea rose up inside him. He stood in the hall, took a few deep breaths, kept it down. Then he opened the second door.

He looked into a darkened room. A strip of tar paper hung over the single window, but there were coin-sized holes in it, and golden rays of sunshine poked through, spotlighting a Bob Marley poster taped to the wall, an L.A. Lakers sweatshirt rumpled on the floor, and a man lying on a bare mattress, eyes closed. A fly buzzed in the shadows.

Eddie had seen AIDS before. There was lots of it inside, although the victims were usually removed by the time they reached the point that the man on the mattress had come to. Eddie went a little closer, gazed down at him.