West Shore

The weather had gone through in the night and left the island wet to the bone.

Water stood in the ruts of the ranch road. It hung off the gutters and the fence wire and the long blades of the cane, and the air was so heavy with it that breathing felt like drinking.

Harvest was on. The crews had been through the near fields before first light, pulling the pineapple plants up roots and all and stacking them in windrows, and behind the machines the ground lay open and red-brown and ran away west until it flattened into haze.

The old-timers said you could plant a broom handle in that dirt and it would come up green. They gave the credit to the warm current that slid up the coast every spring, or to the fog, or to generations of the same families hauling compost out to the same rows. Whatever it was, the cane stood above a man's head by September, the coffee came in heavy, and the pineapple went out on the boats by the ton.

The island had been at cane and pineapple and coffee for as long as anybody had kept records, and it was still at it in the same red dirt, and the water and the sand and the weather brought the tourists in by the planeload and took them home again.

A young man drove the ranch road toward town with his sleeves rolled to his elbows.

He was thin and quick, with wide hands and a face that was pleasant and not much else. His shirt was cream-colored linen, washed soft. What the wind hadn't dried lay flat on his forehead. The sun came out from under the last of the weather, and the light came down through the wet air in sheets, and some of it landed on the hood of the truck and some on the backs of his hands on the wheel.

The harbor was already working. Charter boats were going out with their rails lined with people in orange life jackets, and the fish market had its doors up, and the whole waterfront smelled of diesel and ice.

The town was three streets and a harbor and that smell. Under the eaves of the corner place a man with a ukulele had set up to play for the tourists and the gulls, and the air along the water carried coffee and pineapple wine.

The young man parked in front of the diner and went in. The bell over the door rang.

"Jay!" Gila Reyes came up the bar with both hands already full. "I knew you'd be by. It's all packed. And I put one of the new sandwiches in there, so you tell me what you think before I put it on the board."

He leaned on the bar and gave her the smile he kept for her, the wide one, the one that started in the shoulders. "Gila, you are the best-looking woman on this island. I've said it before and I'll say it under oath. When are you going to leave Mr. Reyes for me?"

"Oh, listen to him." Gila was short and broad and brown from a long time standing in a hot doorway, and she laughed with her whole chest. She threw him a wink, poured the coffee, and pushed it across the bar. "Every week, the same speech. I told my husband. I said, that boy is going to talk me into something one of these days."

"You could do worse. I've got forty acres and a truck that runs."

"I've got a husband who cooks. Sit down. Tell me about the harvest. Everybody on this street says you're going to come out ahead this year."

He drank some of the coffee. "Better than I told you it would be. The coffee surprised me most. Rod walked the north block with me on Tuesday and didn't say one word the whole way around, which from Rod is applause."

"I knew it." Gila wiped the bar with a rag and kept talking, because Gila talked while she worked and the diner talked back. "When you bought the Ferris place, I want you to know, this whole town had opinions. City man, city job, and nobody ever heard of him. They said you'd be off the island by the end of your first summer. But I look at a man's hands, Jay. Those aren't city hands."

"Well." He turned his palm up and looked at it, creased and hard and crosshatched with old calluses, and closed it again. "The pig's going to market in six weeks. The kitchen's three weeks behind that. When it's done I'm bringing you a rack of ribs that will cost you the sandwich business."

"So you keep saying. I'll believe it when I smell it." She took his cup to refill it and stopped halfway. "How's the dog?"

"Old. He's decided running isn't dignified, so he shambles. Iggy does the running for both of them."

"That little gray mop." She set the cup back down. "You want the sandwich heated or cold?"

"Cold's fine."

He drank the coffee standing, with his hip against the bar, and answered the men at the end who wanted to know whether the cane was going to come in before the rain. The coast was due for something, they said; the water had been too warm all month and the birds had gone quiet. He told them what he thought—sugar off before the fourteenth if the crews kept moving—and left money on the bar and picked up the bag.

"May the fog stay off your rows, Gila." He raised the empty cup, tipped it, and set it down.

"Get out of here."

He said goodbye to the woman at the end of the bar who had taught school on the island longer than he had been alive. She told him he looked thin. He told her he was eating.

Three women in bikinis came in off the beach as he reached the door, sun-flushed and loud, and he stepped back and held it for them. They watched him walk out to the truck, and then they laughed at something all together, and it was probably him, and he didn't mind.

At the far end of the bar a man in a fishing cap put his glass down. "That's the one bought the Ferris place?"

"Paid real money for it," Gila said. "Ferris died owing the bank twice what the land was worth, and the check cleared it all."

"Where's he from?"

"New York. Says he was an accountant. Says his girl walked out on him, and he sold the house, and he came out here to grow something." She shrugged. "Some men take up golf."

"Mainlander."

"Harry, everybody's a mainlander. Where were you before this?" She wiped the bar again. "I'm going to introduce him to my niece. He's shy and she's not."

He kept his head down on the street the way he always did. Half the year-round population out here had come from somewhere else inside the last ten years, and a young man in a wet shirt buying screws was not a thing anybody looked at twice.

Down the block, at the feed-and-hardware, he bought two-by-fours, a sheet of drywall, a coil of wire, and a box of screws, and paid for all of it in cash.

The kitchen had burned nine days earlier. It had started behind the stove, in a splice that had been dying in the wall since long before he owned the house, and it had gone up fast enough that he had stood in the yard with the dogs and watched the window light up orange and waited for the fire truck from the harbor station. The adjuster had walked the damage twice and been sorry about the check. He was going to frame and hang the drywall himself, and run the wire himself, and it was going to cost him a month of evenings and a third of what a contractor wanted. He had the month. There was nothing else in it.

He loaded the lumber flat in the bed and set the drywall on top and strapped it down, and he had his hand on the tailgate when he stopped.

He turned his head and looked up the street.

This was the busiest corner on the island. Two lanes of trucks and tourist rentals, a sidewalk packed solid with people buying shaved ice and T-shirts and sunglasses off folding tables, doors banging, somebody's radio going. Looking for one pair of eyes in that was like looking for a coin in the surf. There was nothing to see. There was never anything to see.

A car parked too long. A man standing too still at the end of his own driveway at dusk. He had been through it more times in the last year than he could count, and every one of them had come to nothing, and nine days ago he had walked out of a burned kitchen and caught himself checking the neighbors' windows. He had stopped keeping a list. The list was one more thing to carry.

He got in the truck and drove home.

The road home took a little over an hour. His place was the last one on the west shore: a one-story wooden house built under the shelter of the cliff, with palms and banana plants crowded up against the porch and a footpath behind it climbing to the lighthouse on the point. The truck had barely turned off the pavement before the dogs came off the porch.

Mack got there first—yellow Lab, thirteen or fourteen, gray gone deep around the muzzle, tail going hard and low. Iggy came behind him in a rush of gray curls, overshot the truck entirely, circled it twice, and put his front paws up on the tailgate to see if anything in the load was for him.

Dizzy was on the steps. The cat was long in the body and enormous in the face, orange all over with one white sock, and he stretched one leg at a time, slowly, taking his time about it, and flicked his tail like a question.

"All right. All right. Get down." He carried the groceries in with a dog on either side of him and a cat cutting across his feet at every step.

The house was bigger than one man needed. The furniture didn't match—half of it had come with the property, and the other half was stuff he had found at three estate sales and one garage on the other side of the island. On the dresser and along the wall he had tacked up photographs: a coastline at first light, a boat hauled up on gravel, a snowfield with one line of tracks going across it, a street market with the sun coming in sideways between the stalls. Fishing rods stood in the corner by the front door, and boots, and a hat that had never sat right on him.

Anybody who came in would have said the owner had settled in and intended to be here a while.

He fed the dogs and the cat and let them out onto the grass, and made himself a bowl of yogurt on the back porch and spooned rose preserves over it, and then took one more spoonful straight out of the jar, standing there in the dark, and would say one spoonful if anybody ever asked.

The boats were coming in.

There were four of them, and they came up the channel slowly, one behind another, and the lighthouse swung over them as it swung, white, gone, white. The oil lamps along the pier were already on, and the lights of the boats and the lights of the pier and the beam out at the point all sat out on the water together like something spilled.

The broadleaf trees down the slope were moving in the wind, and they were making the sound they made every night, a long steady rush like rain on a roof. He closed his eyes for a while and let it come over him. It had been going his first night in the house. It had not stopped since.

Inside, the television was going, and it had been going for a while.

"—President Lewis again called on Marovia and Deltra to accept the ceasefire framework—"

"—the Bellhaven International Financial Forum opens Monday, with finance ministers from across the region expected—"

"—the Cairn Pass case goes back before Bellhaven Superior Court on September seventeenth, the defendants facing the maximum sentence available, and yesterday, one year on, a memorial at the site was led by Colonel Jason Vance, who commands the First Regiment—"

Mack lifted his head and barked once, hard, down the yard.

He opened his eyes.

Something small and black came out of the grass by the fence and crossed it fast, low to the ground, and went into the brush at the bottom of the slope. A raccoon, probably, or one of the big rats that lived in the banana plants. Working the compost again.

"Easy," he said. "Easy. It's a rat."

Mack barked twice more, unconvinced, and then lay down with his chin on his paws and grumbled about it for a minute.

He was still holding the bowl.

The news had moved on to weather. He caught the back half of it through the screen door: the storm they'd been tracking out past the shipping lanes had a name now. Tropical Storm Rose, expected to make landfall on the fourteenth, sustained winds up to forty-five miles an hour and higher gusts, small craft to stay in port, residents along the west shore to secure anything loose before Wednesday night.

He stood up off the step and stretched, both arms overhead. His shirt came untucked and rode up, and the air off the water moved against the small of his back, cold where the day had been hot. He let his arms down and looked at the brush at the bottom of the yard for a moment. Nothing in it. There hadn't been anything in it.

Tomorrow he would ride the north block and look at the trees and see how much of the coffee was ready to come off, and meet the buyer from Bellhaven at eleven, and after that he could start framing the kitchen wall. It was going to take him most of the week. Wednesday the storm came in and no work would get done on anything.

He whistled the dogs in off the grass. Dizzy came in last, with a moth in his mouth, and dropped it inside the door as a gift.

He turned off the television, checked the latch, put out the porch light, and went to bed early.

He slept in the room at the back with the windows open. The beam came over the roof and went across the ceiling, paler than the moon, on its way down the coast, and came back around seven seconds later, and went. The dogs arranged themselves in the hall and stopped moving. Out on the water somebody's engine ran down and quit, and the tree sound went on and on.