One Hit Wonders Read online

  It was after 2:00 am and raining lightly when our flight landed in the bustling provincial airport. Pallid Canadians in floral shirts thronged the arrivals area. I found a porter, and he led me to the coach bearing the sign for Breezes, my resort destination. I boarded the air-conditioned bus and took a seat about halfway down. A young woman of about Lila’s age and build sat next to me. She was wearing a sweet body spray, the kind of scent Lila would never have worn. Her presence unsettled me. I would have preferred to sit next to one of the already drunk construction workers who had colonized the back of the bus. I closed my eyes whenever I felt her turn to look out the window. I did not want to see her, nor to see what had taken her fancy. It was enough that her bare arm touched mine and that her hip jostled against my thigh when we hit a bump or made a turn. It was enough that I could detect under her blanketing perfume a distinctly animal smell.

  After checking in at the hotel, I decided to get a drink. Everything was just as I remembered. I took my single piece of luggage and followed the thump of island drums to the nightclub in the basement. The cavernous space was blue with cigarette smoke, though largely empty of people: a single conga line of sunburned and extremely drunk college kids staggered and swayed across the dance floor. I joined the line, cutting loose when it swung by the bar. I ordered glass after glass of the local lager from the surly bartender, tipping him a peso for each beer until he finally smiled, by which time I was drunk enough to sleep.

  Lila’s presence was nowhere to be found on the resort. I searched for her in all the places that had been our favourites by virtue of being farthest away from the noisy bars, from the drunk Europeans and their topless girlfriends. I even climbed a balcony and peered through sliding doors into the room we had shared. I became dissatisfied, admitting to myself—perhaps prematurely—that my reasons for coming back to this island were delusional. It was only the second day and I was already tired of looking for her. I sat and waited by the figure-eight pool. I still had five days to kill.

  By day four, I’d had enough. Packing a small knapsack with water bottles, sun screen and granola bars, I set off along the waterfront. Reaching the tip of the peninsula, I looked back down along the arc of coastline. There was no one in sight, just one or two boat-drawn parasails above the reef. Ahead were miles of white sandy beach, hemmed in on one side by a blue-green Atlantic and on the other by palm trees and jungle scrub. I walked east. Yellow-eyed blackbirds flitted close. Sandpipers played rewind and fast-forward with the advancing and retreating surf. There were crabs everywhere, many of them the colour of orange lichen. Sand gave way to pocked coral outcrops, some pieces sharp enough to puncture the soles of my sandals. Soon I came to a headland. Beyond that point the coastline changed, the beach disappearing under boulders, the jungle coming right down to the waterline—mangroves, I decided. In the distance were cloud-scraping cliffs.

  I turned and looked toward the aquamarine ocean. Flying fish zipped across the surface. I pictured filling my knapsack with rocks before locking the front straps together with the combination padlock I’d bought at the resort shop. The trick, I guessed, would be to fill my knapsack with enough rocks to sink me, but not so many as to prevent me from swimming out past the reef into deep water. But my heart wasn’t in it. I shook off the image.

  Blocked by the sea and the rough coastline ahead, and not wanting to return the way I came, I marched inland.

  A sense of boyish adventure took hold. I had learned the night before from a French couple at the resort’s Italian-style restaurant that the island had one of the largest populations of American crocodiles anywhere, some of them up to four metres long. I didn’t see any crocodiles. Still, when dusk began to fall, I climbed a tree. Using skills I had acquired from Scouts Canada, I made myself a rough sleeping platform from sticks and broad palm leaves. It wasn’t comfortable but it kept me from harm’s way, assuming harm was out there.

  I slept for a while, dreamed a helicopter ride. Felt the revolving blades above me slit the air, dice into fragments the sound of a nearby conversation. I turned to see who was speaking. Royal palm trees bowed before the machine-generated wind. Still later in the dream, I awoke in the public ward of a colonial hospital, swaddled in starched white sheets. Dark-skinned nurses glided between rows of beds, handing out glasses of juice and copies of The English Patient. Lila was by my side.

  I awoke from the dream with a fearful thump—I had fallen out of the tree. The earth underneath me was damp and smelled of wet cigars. I sat in the dark and laughed quietly, riding a surge of adrenaline. There was some light from the stars and also—I guessed—from the moon, though I could not see it. Large leaves loomed above me and the air hummed with insects. I was thirsty. My heart stuttered when I heard a crackle in the branches overhead. I imagined a rogue sloth falling on me with its mossy weight, its teeth and claws sinking into the back of my neck. I laughed again. My heart was beating wildly. It occurred to me that Lila’s heart must have faltered in exactly that way in the moments before it stopped. How mechanically the doctors had explained the impact of the overdose on her body.

  Distant now was the thought that I had failed her, that I had failed to love her as I loved myself. I stood outside that dark room and listened.

  Dawn came a short time later. A single hibiscus took on colour, then another and another. I found myself in a clearing filled with flowers and glossy yellow frogs.

  I walked west, away from the rising sun. Six hours later I stumbled across a well-worn path. A few hundred yards further on, I found a crushed cigarette box. I heard men’s voices. I crouched low and crawled through the undergrowth to take a closer look.

  My reverie is interrupted when the driver starts talking excitedly. The man on the passenger side claps his hands and whistles. The truck is labouring up a steep incline. The air is suddenly much cooler. Cresting the hill, the truck cuts a wide arc and comes to a stop on loose stones.

  “Out,” says the man on the passenger side, opening the door.

  I slide across the seat and step outside, glad to be away from the driver’s cigarette smoke. The man grabs my arms and pushes me forward a few feet. The air is cooler and smells different: the jungle funk is still there, but it is masked by smells of crushed gravel, diesel, exhaust fumes, and chemicals. The man slams the door and says something in Spanish to the driver. The pick up truck reverses. I listen to it complete the turn and drive away. The man holding me lets go of my arms and unties my blindfold.

  “Don’t turn around. If you fucking turn around I kill you. OK?”

  “I’m not going to turn around.”

  It takes me a few seconds to get used to the light. From my vantage point on the high plateau, I look across a valley at opposing hills. On their upper reaches are small houses on tiny plots of land cleared from scrub jungle. On their lower slopes is a mine: terrace after terrace of crushed red and grey rock over which enormous yellow dump trucks crawl. At one end of the valley is a jumble of wooden shacks and concrete boxes, one of which has a flashing neon Labatt sign. Between the town and the mine stands a smoke-belching confabulation of tubular steel towers and chimneys. At the other end of the valley is a tailings pond, slag heaps. Streams of red mud run from the rock piles into a wide river, turning its brown water pinkish. People wade through the sludge or sit next to it on the discoloured earth. The sounds of hammers can be heard when the breeze blows.

  “Welcome to Canada,” says the man.

  “What do you mean?” I ask, even though I am pretty sure I know what he means.

  “This is the Green Gold Mine. It’s owned by a Canadian company, headquarters in Toronto, home of the Blue Yays. Go Yays, go!”

  I don’t say anything.

  “See those people down there? Those people are illegal miners. Every day they search for rocks that still have some ore or they pan for ore in the runoff from that lake.”

  “Why don’t they work at the mine?”

  “They don’t hire old men, women, and children. They don’t
even want them poking around in the slag. What they are doing is illegal. They are trespassing, even though the land they are standing on was theirs only a few years ago.”

  I suddenly don’t like where this conversation is going.

  “The land was bought up by this big Canadian mining company but my people didn’t see no money. You know what happens if they get caught mining illegally?”

  I shrug.

  “They get fined, a very big fine. And if they can’t pay, they go to jail. The women are sometimes given a choice, they can be taken to the police or they can be raped. The rapes are never reported.”

  “What about the police?”

  The man laughs cynically. “The local police work security at the mine on weekends. I used to be in a gang that broke into the mine and stole the rich ore. We used to shoot it out with the security guards. They were afraid of us. But there are too many of them now. My new line of business makes me good money. But it’s also payback. Rich Canadians love the coca.”

  I hear the sound of a vehicle coming up the road behind us. I make as if to turn around but am stopped by a kick in the lower back that knocks me to my knees. “I said don’t turn around.” The man blindfolds me again, walks me to the vehicle, and pushes me inside. He climbs in next to me and slams the door. We begin to move again.

  “What did the police say?”

  “They have no report of a missing Canadian.”

  “Hear that, gringo, no one misses you.”

  “I think we should kill him.”

  “No reward. No ransom. You got any money, Canadian?”

  “I’ve got no money. I’m a writer.”

  “A writer. You must be a big-time writer to be staying at the Breezes. The people who work up there make almost as much as we do. They say the Canadian tourists tip more in one night than a miner makes in a month. You should write about that, gringo. And maybe you should write about how these poor people use mercury to get the gold from the rock. They burn off the mercury in pans in their own homes. The vapours are poison. The town is full of sick people. We call them zombies. They sit and stare all day. They don’t even know how to speak anymore. You should write about that.”

  “I will if you let me go.”

  They find this humorous. The man on the passenger side slaps my knee.

  “Writers in this country are all poor.”

  “My wife died,” I tell them. “I’m here on the insurance money.”

  The two men laugh again, though half-heartedly this time. All three of us then fall into an uneasy silence. I suddenly feel less stressed. The driver continues to smoke, sometimes whistling through his teeth. The road on the way back seems to be rougher and is perhaps a different road. The truck often jostles violently to one side, hurling me against one or the other of my captors.

  “I’m sorry about your wife,” says the driver.

  “Thank you.”

  “How did she die?”

  “Heart attack.”

  “Bad luck.”

  Nothing more is said. We drive, downhill for the most part. I can smell dust and diesel and the peculiar body odour of the man to my left, like pencil shavings and feces, a smell that takes me back to the corridors of my elementary school. Once, on what feels like a wide bend, the driver gears down so suddenly that he elbows me in the stomach.

  “Lo siento.”

  A while later I hear the bleating of sheep or goats. The driver honks the horn, shouts something in Spanish. Whatever he says is met with a burst of laughter. Another time the cab of the truck is flooded with floral smells, we must be driving along an avenue of flowering shrubs.

  When the truck finally comes to a stop, the man on the passenger side opens his door and drags me out. “Make him walk on a bit,” shouts the driver. “Make him lie down. I’m going to run him over. Say he came out of the woods—like some kind of crazy animal—no time to stop.”

  “No,” says the man closest to me. “The writer’s not going to say anything to anyone. Are you, writer?”

  I try to think of something clever to say but all I can do is nod.

  The man removes my blindfold and points ahead, down a long straight dirt road. You stay on this road. You walk a few miles and you will come to the beach. When you get there take a left and keep walking. Sooner or later you will see the first hotel. And remember, gringo, I know everybody at the Breezes. You say one word and you will never make it back on the plane. You got lost, OK?”

  “OK.”

  “Hey, you write poetry, writer?” shouts the driver from inside the truck, “In my country the best writers are poets.”

  “Canadians hate poetry.”

  The two men laugh again.

  “Get out of here. Wait. Take this.” The man hands me a bottle of water. He has a swallow tattoo in blue ink at the base of his thumb.

  I thank him and begin to walk.

  “You better walk faster than that.”

  I hear the truck engine catch and whine as it begins to move in reverse. I take a quick look back. I know they are not going to kill me. I never really believed they would. Even so, the skin between my shoulder blades gets tense, tender almost, as though my body anticipates the sudden impact and burn of a high-calibre rifle bullet.

  The sound of the reversing truck fades. When I can no longer hear the engine I begin to run, my momentum giving me lift, turning fear into jubilation. I run so fast I get tangled up in my legs and almost fall over. After a few hundred yards I stop and open the bottle of water they had given me. I take a few sips, spit them out. It tastes different from the water they gave me in the truck, tastes metallic. Probably contaminated, I decide, and throw the bottle into the bushes.

  I begin to run again. I should be exhausted, but instead I have an unlimited store of energy. Adrenaline, I think, and yet it is not a surging, focussed energy. I feel light, as though I were running on a cushion of moving air. I pick up my pace; imagine a weaker and heavier version of myself lagging behind. I think about Lila. Her attempts to fight her addiction resulted in manic bursts of energy, as excessive exercising. She would speed-walk twice around the lake before coming home and pitting herself against Wii Fitness for hours. Exercise made her bright-eyed and giddy. Exercise made her high.

  I run even faster, my flickering shadow keeping pace in the bushes to my right. For the first time since coming to the island I feel Lila’s presence, as a rhythm, as a rise and fall of breath, a smooth working of muscle against muscle.

  I sprint until my mind becomes blank.

  Clear images of St. John’s on a snowy winter day: looking down from Harvey Road on the black tar roofs downtown, red brick chimneys puffing out white wood smoke. I look across the harbour, follow the line of snow-covered hills to the grey Atlantic. I stop, lean over with my hands on my knees and take a deep breath, almost expecting my lungs to fill with icy air. The northern hemisphere has invaded the tropics. A slight breeze picks up and I recognize what has awakened this sensory memory. Looking behind me, I see a tall funnel of smoke. The forest is on fire.

  I run again, though now my body seems to drag against me. My breathing is laboured. I know from my years in Scouts Canada that a wildfire can move faster than a racehorse, fuelling itself on dry grass, dead leaves, brush and small trees. Its speed depends on the terrain and environmental conditions. I feel a prick of fear when the breeze at my back suddenly increases. The fire is already intense enough to generate its own wind. I am in a valley, with steep hills on either side. If this wind picks up enough, there could be a chimney effect, the flames flattening and drying whatever fuel lies in their path.

  I hear an accelerating roar. My first thought is that the two men are coming back to rescue me, but when I glance over my shoulder, flames are climbing above the tallest trees. Perhaps the men have set the fire to wipe out all evidence of their operation. Was that what they meant when they said I had better walk faster?

  I picture their compound: blue plastic drums and white oil barrels, some of them stamped
with a skull and crossbones. Others bearing the triangular hazard symbol. I picture the tin-roofed huts and the two men working at the trestle table with the Kalashnikov on it. One man scooped white powder from a drum into plastic bags. His companion sealed each filled bag and placed it inside a second plastic bag, into which he also inserted a green feather.

  Cinders fly over my head. I panic. Flames begin to spurt up in the undergrowth on either side of me. The heat is becoming unbearable. The fire is spreading faster along the terrain to my right, as though exercising the first part of a pincer movement. I have the irrational thought that wildfire is an intelligent and malevolent force.

  Timber splits and falls immediately behind. Sticks scatter. I imagine fire-hardened spears flung at me. My breath comes fast. A bush to my right ignites, the whole of it explodes into flame. I veer away, the heat scorching my arm and face. Shapes seem to run beside me in the undergrowth, squealing and crying out. Some kind of wild animal—pigs?

  I imagine the glitter-sparkle of water up ahead, but at that moment my foot snags on a root and I tumble forward, rolling like a gymnast, my momentum carrying me back into an upright position. I keep running.

  I float out of this body and see myself from above. The forest all around me is green tigers fighting orange tigers.

  With shocking abruptness—sea air plunging to the bottom of my lungs—I cross out of the tree line and onto the beach. The sand saps my muscles of all strength, my energy collapsing like I’ve been shot with a tranquilizer dart. I fall to my knees and roll over on my back. I watch the smoke drift over my head, listen to the surf boom. The beach is at least a quarter of a mile wide. I am safe. I lie still for some time, waiting for my breathing to slow, for my heartbeat to stop lifting the skin on my chest.

  Slowly I become aware of another presence. I have the unmistakable feeling that I am being observed. When I tilt my head and look up I see a peaked cap. It is a Tilley hat, and above the peak is an embroidered blue maple leaf. Kinky grey hair pokes from underneath the hat brim. The face that looks down on me is chubby and sunburned, slightly boozy; its archipelago of freckles threatens to fuse into one continent of tan. The man wears a tropical shirt, denim shorts, white knee socks, brown sandals. He looks down at me—a bit doubtfully, I think, from my upside-down perspective. The man smiles.