Alligator - Lisa Moore [37]
David had taken the family on three trips to the Caribbean during those wealthy years.
Colleen would remember for the rest of her life a sugar plantation in Barbados she had visited when she was seven; a plantation mistress had poisoned a series of husbands with voodoo.
Colleen had fed wild monkeys from her hand, and later heard they’d torn a Rottweiler limb from limb. She remembered crouching indefinitely on a floor of dried palm leaves, the ground full of flashing spears of light and shadow, waiting with the banana held before her. The monkeys blinked quickly and rushed forward and held still and fled to a safe distance. With each brave, wily scramble toward the banana the numbers of monkeys grew until there were perhaps thirty.
They screamed to each other and bared their teeth and a small monkey snatched the whole banana from Colleen’s hand. Then the gardener came out waving a machete and telling her to back away slowly.
As quickly as David had got rich, he’d lost everything. He returned to his job at a computer imaging company, specializing in hospital software; three-dimensional graphics that allowed surgeons to watch a laser operation three provinces away, then pick up the phone and tell the guys who were gouging away at someone’s tumour that they’d missed a spot.
He had handed in his resignation two years before with some flourish.
I’m getting a fat ass from all the airplane food, he’d said. He was an engineer and liked the clank of one steel girder lowered by crane onto another steel girder; he liked the smell of outdoor work. He hated the rinky-dink hospitals he’d had to visit and their earnest staffs. He wanted to work with men who had tattoos on their forearms, who could swing a sledgehammer without throwing out their backs.
Although David had not exactly told them to stuff their job, as Colleen had heard him rehearse in the bathroom mirror, his chin raised to the ceiling while he dragged viciously on the knot of his tie, speaking through gritted teeth and looking as though he might strangle himself, he had returned to the position bitter and flinty.
The company rehired him for almost double what he had been paid two years before. He had to travel for work and was gone once a month.
Beverly got calls from Provo, Utah, where David said the women were athletic and blond and dazed.
Impossible to get a drink, he said. He was doing pushups as he spoke, grunting after each sentence. He called from Texas to say they were having a windstorm. He had opened the patio windows because it was exhilarating.
Long white curtains are billowing into the room, he said. She heard a smash.
My God, he said. Now there’s porridge all over the floor.
He called from Ireland and when she hung up she heard a racket in the living room and her heart beat jaggedly; a bird had flown in through the chimney, an unmistakable omen of death.
The next time she spoke to David he was in Berlin and he said that he’d stood at the edge of a cliff in Ireland, in a small village full of ancient Druid dwellings of stone, and the wind through the crevices had sounded like voices and he’d suffered from vertigo and nearly given in.
Given in? she asked.
I could have jumped, he said.
Something had been compelling in Ireland, that’s what she remembered. Something had almost drawn him away. She could hear techno music bleating in the background like cash registers or air conditioners or hundreds of women panting toward orgasm.
I’m in an underground bar, he said.
What do you mean underground? she asked. She was imagining catacombs and rats.
Illegal, he said. It moves location, it doesn’t exist.
Do you still feel like giving in? she said.
That was Ireland, he said. Berlin is all broken glass and BMWs.
She was feeling around on the nightstand for her glasses. She hadn’t said anything about the bird. She’d had to ask eighty-six-year-old