A Drink Called Paradise Read Free

does he know she needs her rain hat? No words that I hear pass between them. She hands him her finished Milo cup, the preacher helps her upright, and the porch shudders.
    She stands.
    The small bit of pleated plastic does cover her woolly island hair well enough, but the rest of her, with the bulk of some army vehicle, something large yet still moving, sweeps into the deluge with its shoulders bare, the water sluicing and splashing around her, parting the water for the preacher behind, who has to go on into the rain for some reason, and with her.

Ngarima’s boy invents a dog. At least you don’t have to walk it, I say as he trains the roach to roll over.
    Insects are the future, he tells me. My father says so. He knows.
    What else does he know? When the boat’s coming back?
    The boy nods as if I don’t listen. He says, He doesn’t want me to go on the boat.
    Parents don’t want children to go anywhere.
    The boy rights his cockroach, puts it back inside a shell, and plugs the shell with a rock. This will help it learn.
    Where I live, I say, boys go swimming. Why don’t you swim? I ask. All the time I’ve been on this island I’ve never seen you swim. The only one who swims is there.
    I point to a head in the lagoon, just above the water from this angle. You can finally see the lagoon because the rain has stopped, and what you can see is what you see daily, a head, tiny like a baby’s, over a big board, with long arms like a man’s that go around it. When I go in, the head and arms are always gone, the board against a tree. What about that swimming? I say.
    Water gets in your throat and you cough, he says. He coughs to show me. There’s too much water. You see him? He doesn’t need to breathe so much—look at the size of his head.
    We look.
    Where I live, I begin again, boys play ball or go to school or watch TV.
    Here, all the balls go into the lagoon, then trade winds take them away, he says. And the school here is closed now until we get a new teacher.
    He turns his shell over. You can be the teacher, you can tell us about TV.
    This is how you turn it on, I say, and I twist my wrist, touch a channel. Unless you have a remote, then you just press.
    Ngarima’s son just presses.
    I think you’ve got it, I say.
    He presses and presses.
    A pig squeals, caught on a kitchen can outside. Why doesn’t anybody fish around here? I ask, after he frees it. Even if you don’t eat the fish, it would pass the time.
    He rattles the shell. No boats, he says.
    But why aren’t there any boats? These islands are famous for boats.
    Nobody can buy them here.
    Sure, I say. But can’t you just go and make them like before?
    He laughs. Who knows how? he says. He puts his hands up and out. Do you? he asks, as if I know.
    Back on the porch Ngarima screeches, Come get food for us.
    Ngarima’s son fetches a can of mackerel from which he skinnies out all of the fish without losing its can shape. I am offered a chunk to go with a piece of taro that I still have from an earlier offering. No, no more, I say. I might as well say yes. He disturbs his cylinder with his finger, the chunk is mine no matter what, and the curls of coconut jelly he scrapes from the lid of the nut I drink from come with it.
    I eat one for the other, the jelly surely a drug, so cool and smooth I want to climb back into the coconut with it. Ngarima’s son eats what’s left in the bottom of the can, then beats on its bottom in quick rhythms. Over at the next house, a two-year-old sways with her hips, she sways and falls down on some slick of her porch, then gets up, goes on with his beat.
    How many live on this island all the time? I ask. Even if it isn’t so big, I say.
    Not so many as before, says Ngarima, but she doesn’t say before what.
    There’s a book in my room, I say, that says a hundred and eighty-three. But is this the number made up for the book or the number that once was