Galilee. Part 25

Very few boats come to drop anchor here. Occasionally a fishing vessel, plying its way up and down the coast, takes shelter from a squall, and even more occasionally a pleasure boat, its captain hopelessly lost, will appear, only to disappear again just as soon as its pa.s.sengers get a glimpse of the town. Other than these, the harbor is a hospice for a handful of small boats, none of which look healthy enough to put out to sea again. In the winter, at least one of them will sink there in the harbor, and rot.But there was one vessel that fell into none of these categories: a vessel, called The Samarkand, more practical than any of the fishing boats and yet more beautiful than any of the pleasure boats.

It was a yacht, of sorts, the timbers of its hull not painted but stained and varnished. Its cabin, wheel and two masts were likewise deeply stained, so that in certain lights the grain of the wood was uncannily clear, as though the vessel had been etched by a master draughtsman. As for the sails, they were of course white, but they'd been repaired many times over the years, and the patches were apparent; irregular shapes of canvas that were slightly paler or darker.

Perhaps to most eyes it was not as remarkable a vessel as I'm making it out to be. In one of the fancier marinas of the world, in Florida or San Diego, it would have not looked particularly fine a thing, I suppose. But here in Puerto Bueno, its arrival on a gray, cold day seemed like the visitation of something from a realm of dreams. Even though its captain (who was also its first mate and bosun and sole pa.s.senger) had been bringing the vessel to Puerto Bueno for far longer than any citizen could remember, its appearance on the horizon always brought folks down to the quay to watch its approach. There was a certain right-ness to its coming-like the return of spring birds after a season of ice-that made even these hard hearts a little more pliant.

Once the vessel was safely within the arms of the harbor, however, the spectators would hurry away. They knew better than to watch the actual docking, or worse still spy on the solitary black man who captained this boat as he disembarked. Indeed something very like a superst.i.tion had occurred over the years that anyone watching the captain of The Samarkand set foot on terra firma would die before a year or so had pa.s.sed and the vessel came back again. All eyes were therefore averted when the man known by just one name made his way up the hill to the house he kept high above the harbor. The name, of course, you already know. It was Galilee.

How, you may well ask, did my half brother come to be keeping a residence in a criminal community somewhere in the back of beyond? Chance, is the answer. He had been sailing down the coast when-like one of those fishing boats I made mention of earlier-he was driven to seek refuge from a storm or be drowned. Believe it or not, this was not an easy decision at the time. He had been pa.s.sing through a period of profound depression, and when the storm came he was of half a mind to let The Samarkand be driven before it and turned to timberwood. He had decided against this course not for his own sake but for that of his vessel, which he considered his only true friend. It was no decent fate for a boat as n.o.ble as his to have its entrails washed up on the sh.o.r.es of this coast and picked over by peasants. He had promised The Samarkand that when the time came he'd make certain it died a good death, somewhere far, far from land.

So he took shelter in Puerto Bueno-which at that time was a quarter of its present size, or less, its harbor newly built, and almost entirely unused. The man who'd founded the construction was one Arturo Higgins, a man of English descent who had lost all his money in the endeavor, and had taken his own life the year before. His house stood unoccupied at the top of the hill, and Galilee, out of some perverse desire to see the place of suicide, had gone up the hill and entered. n.o.body had visited the house since the body had been removed: gulls had come to roost in its bedrooms, and there were rats' nests in the fireplace, but its desolation suited the trespa.s.ser mightily. He purchased the house the next day, from Higgins's daughter, and moved a few belongings in. The view, on dear days, was peaceful, and he came to think of it as his second home; his first, of course, being the vessel moored in the harbor.After a couple of weeks he'd departed, locking the house up behind him and making it quietly known that anyone who ventured over the threshold would regret it.

He'd not come back for thirteen months, but come back he did, sometimes three or four times in a single year, sometimes with several years intervening. He became a mystery of some note, and there's force to the argument that the felons and the fugitives who came to the town thereafter did so because they'd heard of him. If this is so, you may ask, then why did the tale of the voyager, a man with divine blood running in his veins, not also attract a few finer spirits? It's a reasonable question. Why didn't saints come to Puerto Bueno, and Galilee's presence turn it into a town where the lame skipped and the dumb sang patter songs?

I have only this answer: he was too crippled. How could his legend inspire healing saints when he was incapable of healing himself?

So there you have the way things were, until a week or so before Rachel departed for Hawaii.

It happened that Galilee was not out at sea at that time, but resident in the house on the hill. He'd brought The Samarkand into Puerto Bueno because it was in need of repairs, and for the last few weeks he'd been back and forth between the harbor and the house daily, laboring from dawn to dusk on repairing the boat, and spending the hours of darkness sitting at the window of the Higgins house looking out over the Pacific. He would not let anybody set foot on The Samarkand to help him. He was a perfectionist: no other hand but his could be put to the tasks of nailing and planing and staining. Occasionally some inquisitive soul would idle along the quayside and watch him at work, but his glare was enough to drive them away after a little while. Only once did he engage in any social activity in the town, and that was one windy night-just a few days before his departure-when he appeared at the little bar on the hill where it seemed half of Puerto Bueno's citizens came to drink on any given evening, and downed enough brandy to have poleaxed any man in the bar. All it did was make Galilee a little merry, and he became quite loquacious-at least by previous standards. Those who talked with him came away with the flattering impression that he'd opened up to them: shared a few intimacies. The following morning, however, when they came to repeat what he'd said, they could recall very little that had pertained to Galilee himself.

His conversation, it seemed, had been a form of listening; and when he had chimed in with something it had invariably been a fragment of somebody else's life he'd been recounting.

Two days later, his work on The Samarkand seemed suddenly to become much more intensive.

He worked the next seventy-two hours without a break, his nightly labors lit by hurricane lamps set all about the boat. It was as though he'd suddenly been given sailing orders, and was obliged to depart sooner than he'd expected.

Sure enough, he was at the general store in the late afternoon of the third day of his labors, ordering supplies. His manner was brusque, his expression thunderous: n.o.body dared ask him where he was headed this time. The supplies were delivered to the boat by Hernandez, the son of the owner of the store; Galilee paid him extravagantly for his efforts, and asked the young man if he'd apologize to Hernandez Sr. on Galilee's behalf; that he knew he'd been less than civil earlier in the day, and he'd meant to cause no offense by it.That was the last conversation anyone in Puerto Bueno had with their fellow citizen during his visit. Galilee weighed anchor as the night fell, and The Samarkand slipped out of the tiny harbor on the evening tide, to destinations much speculated upon, but unknown.

IX.

i Nicodemus, as I've already indicated, was a man of prodigious s.e.xual energies. He loved all things erotic (except books, of course): I doubt more than two consecutive minutes ever pa.s.sed without his thinking some s.e.xual thought. Nor was his interest limited to human, or superhuman, congress. He enjoyed the spectacle of an unleashed libido in whatever skin it showed itself. His horses especially, of course. He loved to watch his horses f.u.c.k. Many times he'd be right there with them, in a fine old sweat himself, whispering now to the stallion, now to the mare, encouraging them in the act. And if things weren't going well, he'd have his hands in the heat of things, helping it all along. Masturbating the stallion if need be, and guiding him home if he was clumsy; touching the mare with such tenderness she'd be calmed and accepting.

I remember one such incident with particular clarity; it happened perhaps two years before his death. He had a horse called Dumuzzi, of which he was particularly proud. And with reason. This was a stallion in the genes of which I'm certain my father had divinely meddled, for I never saw, nor expect to ever see again, so remarkable a horse. Forget all you've heard of Arabian stallions, or of the warrior steeds of the Kazak. Dumuzzi was another order of animal, preternaturally intelligent, exquisitely proportioned and magnificently formed. His bloodline, if it had survived, would have redefined what we understand by the word "horse." I've sometimes wondered if my father hadn't been sculpting this splendor as a kind of inspiration to the human world; a species of such perfection it would make all who witnessed its strength and beauty meditate on the sublimity of creation. (Then again: perhaps it was merely a selfish indulgence and he intended to keep Dumuzzi's son and daughters at L'Enfant; I will probably never know.) The point is: the night of which I speak there was a thunderstorm of majestic scale, which had been moving in since the late afternoon. Darkness had fallen prematurely, as great bruise-and- iron clouds covered the last of the sun. Even at several miles distance the thunder was so deep it made the ground shake.

The horses were panicky, of course; in no mood to be f.u.c.king. Especially Dumuzzi, whose only real frailty was temperamental: he seemed to know he was a special creature and was wont to behave operatically. That night he was feeling particularly difficult: when my father came to the stable to prepare him Dumuzzi stamped and kicked and refused every calming word. I remember suggesting to Nicodemus that we try again the following morning, when the storm had pa.s.sed, but there was a battle of wills here that no suggestion of mine was going to pacify. Nicodemus addressed Dumuzzi as he might have spoken to an inebriated and volatile friend; told him that he was in no mood for this drama, and the sooner Dumuzzi calmed down and began to behave sensibly, the better for all concerned. Dumuzzi ignored the warning; if anything his shenanigans escalated. He kicked his trough to splinters, and then kicked a hole in the stable wall-just punched out a dozen bricks as though they were so much papier-mache'. I wasn't afraid for my father-atthat time I believed him immune from harm-but I was certainly anxious for my own safety. In my various travels on behalf of Nicodemus, in search of great horses, I'd seen what harm they could do. I'd visited the grave of a breeder in Limoges who'd had his brain kicked to mush two days before I arrived (by the very horse I'd come to view); I'd seen another fellow, in the Tian Shan mountains, who'd lost his hands to an irate mare, just had them bitten off: one! two! And I'd seen horses fight among themselves until there was more blood on their flanks and the ground beneath their hooves than in their veins. So there I was, afraid for my limbs and my life, but unable to take my eyes off the spectacle before me. The storm was almost overhead by now, and Dumuzzi was in an eye-rolling frenzy. Sparks of static electricity ran up and down his mane, and leapt between his hooves and the ground; his complaints were so loud they cut through the thunder.

Nicodemus was undismayed. He'd dealt with countless fractious animals in his time; for all Dumuzzi's heroic strength and size, he was just one more. After some struggle, my father bridled the beast and dragged him out of the stable to the open ground where he had the mare tethered.

As I describe this now my heart has quickened, the scene is so vivid in my mind's eye: the lightning erupting in the clouds overhead, the horses shrieking in their hysteria, foamy lips curled back from lethal teeth; Nicodemus yelling at his beauties against the din of the storm, the front of his trousers showing plainly how much this scene aroused him.

I swear he looked half-b.e.s.t.i.a.l himself, by the glare of the lightning; his hair, which hung to his waist when he was standing still, roiling around him, his face cracked in half by a rabid smile, his skin iridescent. If he'd lost all trace of his human form then and there-convulsed and stretched and cracked his spine to become some other thing (a horse, a storm; a little of both)-I wouldn't have been surprised. I was more astonished that his humanity held in the midst of this; that he didn't unleash himself. Perhaps it excited him better to be confined by his anatomy in such circ.u.mstances; to have to sweat and fight.

There he was-divinity made flesh, and that flesh halfway to becoming animal-hauling the protesting Dumuzzi into the presence of the mare. I thought the last thing the stallion would want to do was f.u.c.k, but I was wrong. Nicodemus insinuated himself between the two horses and proceeded to arouse them: rubbing their flanks, their bellies, their heads, and all the while talking to them. Despite his agitation, Dumuzzi became hot for the mare. His ma.s.sive phallus was unsheathed, and he promptly threw himself up on her. Still talking, still patting and rubbing, my father took hold of the stallion's rod and put it at the mare's opening. Dumuzzi needed no help with the rest. He covered the mare with the efficiency of one born to the task.

My father stood back and let them couple. His entire body seemed to be bristling: I swear to have touched him then would have proved fatal to my common heart. He was no longer laughing. His head had drooped, his shoulders were hunched: he seemed like a stalking predator, ready to tear out the throats of these creatures should they fail him.

They didn't. Though the storm continued to rage around-the lightning so frequent it visited a ghastly vivid day upon this midnight, the thunder so loud its reverberations shook down several trees and cracked a dozen windows in the house-the animals f.u.c.ked and f.u.c.ked and f.u.c.ked, their panic subsumed into the frenzy of their mating.The foal that came of this coupling was a male. Nicodemus called him Temujin, the birth name of Genghis Khan. As for Dumuzzi, he seemed to dote on my father thereafter; as though that night they'd become brothers. I say seemed because I suspect the animal's devotion was a sham. Why do I think that? Because the night my father died the panicked charge that trampled him to death was led by Dumuzzi, whose eyes carried in them-I swear-a flicker of revenge.

I've told you all this in part to give you a better picture of my father, whose presence in this story must necessarily be anecdotal, and in part because it serves as a reminder to me of the capacities that lie dormant in my nature.

As I said at the opening of the chapter, my own libido is a pitiful echo of Nicodemus's s.e.xual appet.i.tes. My entire life has never been particularly complex or interesting, except for a short period in j.a.pan, when I was courting, in the most formal fashion, Chiyojo, the woman who would become my wife, while nightly sharing the bed of her brother Takeda, who was a Kabuki actor of some renown (an onagatta, to be precise; that is to say, he only played women). Otherwise, the scandals of my s.e.xual life would not fill a small pamphlet.

And yet-as I prepare to enter the portion of this story dedicated to the act of love, I can't help wondering where my father's fire went to when it flowed into me. Is there a lover in me somewhere, waiting for his moment to show his skills? Or has that energy been turned to less frenetic purpose? Is it what fuels my laying these very words on the page? Have the juices of Nicodemus' desire become the ink in my pen?

I've taken the a.n.a.logy too far. Ah well. It's written, and I'm not going to abort it now, after so much effort.

I have to move on. Leave the memories of my father, and the storm, and the horses. I only hope that if the pa.s.sion which drives me to my desk (obsessively now; every waking moment I'm thinking about what I've written, or about to write) isn't as blind and confused as love can be. I need clarity. Oh Lord, how I need clarity!

You see there are times now, often, when I think to myself: I've lost my way. I've got all these tantalizing pieces laid out, but I don't know how to put them together. They seem so utterly disparate: the fishermen at Atva, the hanged monks, Zelim in Samarkand; a letter from a man facing death on a Civil War battlefield; a silent movie star pursued to Germany, loved by a man too rich to know his true worth; George Geary dead in a car on a Long Island sh.o.r.e, and Loretta's astrologer predicting catastrophe; Rachel Pallenberg, out of love with love, and Galilee Barba- rossa, out of love with life itself. How the h.e.l.l do all these pieces belong in one coherent pattern?

Perhaps (this thought nauseates me, but I have to entertain it) they don't belong together. Perhaps I lost my bearings some while ago, and I've simply been gathering up pieces that for all their individual prettiness can never be made to fit together.

Well, it's too late to do anything about it now. I can't stop writing; I've got too much momentum.I have to forge on, using whatever little part of my father's genius I've inherited to interpret the scenes of human need which are about to come before me, and hope that in their interpreting I'll discover some way to make sense of all that I've described hitherto.

ii One last thing. I can't let another chapter go by without making mention of the conversation I had with Luman.

I don't want you to think I'm a coward; I'm not. I fully realize that at some point I have to address the accusations my half brother flung at me; both face to face with him, and face to face with myself (which is to say: here, in this book). He said my devotion to Nicodemus was in some measure the reason for my wife's death; that if I'd been the loving husband I claimed I would not have turned a blind eye to Chiyojo's seduction. I would have told Nicodemus she was mine, and he was to keep his hands off her. I didn't. I let him work his wiles upon her, and she paid the price.

I'm guilty as charged.

There; I've admitted it. Now what? It's too late to make amends to Chiyojo. At least I can't do so here; if her ghost still walks the mundane realm-which I suspect it does-then she's at home in the hills above Ichinoseki, waiting for the cherry trees to blossom.

The only peace I can make here in L'Enfant is with Luman, who I don't doubt stirred up this trouble between us out of perfectly innocent motives. He's not a man who knows how to conceal his thoughts. He had an opinion and he spat it out. Not only that, but what he said was right, though it agonizes me to admit the fact. I should go down to the Smoke House (with a conciliatory offering of cigars) and tell him that I'm sorry for my outburst; that I want us to start talking again.

But I fear the thought of venturing down that overgrown path to the Smoke House door makes my head ache: I can't do it. At least not yet. The time will come, I'm sure, when I have no excuses left-when I haven't got a character suspended in the air-and I'll go make my apologies. Maybe I'll go tomorrow, or the day after. When I've written about the island, that's when I'll go. Yes, that's it. Once I've cleared my head of all that I have to tell you about the island, and what happened to Rachel there, I'll be in a better state to sit and talk with him. He deserves my full attention, after all, and I can't possibly give it to him when I'm so distracted.

I feel a little better now. I've confessed my guilt, and that's oddly comforting. I won't undermine that confession by attempting to justify what I did. I was weak, and too eager to please. But I can't leave this pa.s.sage without returning to the image of Nicodemus, the night of the storm. He was a rare creature, no question of that; I think many sons would have put their service to such a father before their duties as a husband. The irony is this: that if I hoped to be like him, as I did, and that in letting him have Chiyojo I would gain his approbation, and come closer to him, I worked against my own interests with heroic thorough ness. In one night I lost my idol, I lost my wife, and-let this be said, once and for all-I lost myself. What little there was of me-a selfseparate from my desire to please my father-was trampled under the same hooves that took his life. It's only been in the last few weeks, as I've been writing this history, that my sense of a soul called Maddox, alive in my flesh and worthy of preservation, has appeared. I suppose the moment of my rebirth was the moment I walked out of the skyroom, leaving the wheelchair behind me.

Another irony, of course: the strength to do that was ignited in me by my stepmother; she's the architect of my resurrection. Even if she doesn't want payment for that service-beyond the words I'm writing-I know there's a debt to be paid; and with every sentence, every paragraph, the Maddox who will make that payment comes into clearer focus.

This is what I see: a man who has just confessed his guilt, and will make amends, in time. A man who loves telling stories, and will find a way to understand what he's telling, in time. And a man who is capable of love, and who will find somebody to love again-oh please G.o.d yes; in time, in time.

X.

Rachel's first view of Kaua'i was tantalizingly brief; just enough to glimpse a series of bright scalloped beaches, and lush, rolling hills. Then the plane was making its steep descent into the airport at Lihu'e, and moments later a b.u.mpy landing. The airport was small and quiet. She wandered through to pick up her bags, keeping her eyes open for the manager of the house where she'd be staying. And there he was, dutifully standing by the tiny baggage carousel, with a cart for her luggage. They recognized one another at the same moment.

"Mrs. Geary..." he said, forsaking his cart to come and present himself before her. "I'm Jimmy Hornbeck."

"Yes. I thought it must be you. Margie told me to look out for the best-pressed clothes on Kaua'i."

Jimmy laughed. "So that's my reputation," he said. "Well, I suppose it could be worse."

They exchanged a few pleasantries about the flights until the baggage arrived, then he led the way out into the sunshine.

"If you'd like to wait here," he said, "I'll go and fetch the car and bring it round for you. It saves you the walk to the parking lot."

She didn't protest this; she was perfectly happy to stand on the sidewalk and feel the ocean breeze on her face. It seemed as she stood there she could feel the grime and anxiety of New York ooze out of her pores. Soon, she'd wash it all away.

Hornbeck was back with the vehicle-which looked robust enough for jungle exploration-in two or three minutes. Another minute to load Rachel's bags, and then they were out of the little maze of roads around the airport and onto the closest thing the island had to a highway."I'm sorry about the transport, by the way," he said. "I had intended to pick you up in something a bit more civilized, but the road to the house has deteriorated so badly in the last couple of months-"

"Oh, really?"

"We've had a lot of rain recently, which is why the island looks particularly lush at the moment."

Lush was an understatement. Off to the left of the highway, toward the island's interior, were fields of rich red earth and green sugar cane. Beyond them, velvety hills, rising in ambition as they receded, until they became steep peaks whose heights were draped with sumptuous cloud.

"The problem is that the little backroads just aren't being taken care of the way they should be,"

Hornbeck was saying. "And there's a little tussle going on right now about who's actually responsible for the road to the house. The local council says it's really part of the property, and so I should be getting money from your people to get it fixed. But that's nonsense. It's public property. The council should be filling in the holes, not a private contractor."

Rachel was only half-attending to this. The beauty of the fields and mountains-and on the other side of the highway, the blue, pounding ocean-had claimed her attentions.

"So this argument has been going on for two years," Hornbeck went on. "Two years! And of course nothing's going to be done about the road until it's resolved. Which means it just deteriorates whenever there's rain. It's very frustrating so I apologize-"

"There's really no need..." Rachel said dreamily.

"-for the vehicle."

"Really," she said, "it's fine."

"Well just as long as you understand. I don't want you thinking I'm neglecting my duties."

"Hm?"

"When you see the road."

She glanced at the man, and saw by his fretful demeanor, and the whiteness of his knuckles, that he was genuinely concerned that his job was in jeopardy. As far as he was concerned she was a visiting potentate; he was afraid of making a mistake.

"Don't worry, James. Do people call you James or Jim?"

"Usually Jimmy," he said.

"You're English, yes?""I was born and raised in London. But then I came here. It'll be thirty years ago next November.

And I said to myself: this is perfect. So I never went back."

"And you still think it's perfect?"

"Sometimes I get a little stir-crazy," Jimmy admitted. "But then you get a day like today and you think: where else would I want to be? I mean, look at it."

Rachel looked back toward the mountains. The clouds had parted on the heights, and the sun was breaking through.

"Can you see the waterfalls?" Jimmy said. She could. Silvery threads of water plummeting down from cracks in the mountainside. "Up there's the wettest place on earth," Jimmy informed her.

"Mount Waialeale gets about forty feet of rain a year. It's raining right now."

"Have you been up?"

"I've taken a helicopter trip once or twice. It's spectacular. If you like I'll organize a flight for you.

One of my best friends runs a little operation down in Po'ipu. He and his brother-in-law pilot these little choppers."

"I don't know that I trust helicopters."

"It's really the best way to see the island. And if you ask Tom he'll take you out over the ocean whale-spotting."

"Oh that I'd like to see."

"You like whales?"

"I've never seen any up close."

"I can arrange that too," Jimmy said. "I can have a boat organized for you at a day's notice."

"That's kind, Jimmy. Thank you."

"No problem. That's what I'm here for. If there's anything you need, just ask."

They were coming into a little town-Kapa'a, Jimmy informed her-where there were some regrettable signs of mainland influence. Beside the small stores of well-weathered clapboard stood the ubiquitous hamburger franchise, its gaud somewhat suppressed by island ordinance or corporate shame, but still ugly.

"There's a wonderful restaurant here in Kapa'a which is always booked up, but-"

"Let me guess. You have a friend-"Jimmy laughed. "I do indeed. They always keep a prime table open each night, for special guests.

Actually, I think your husband's stepmother invested some money in the place."

"Loretta?"

"That's right."

"When was she last here?"

"Oh... it must be ten years, maybe more."

"Did she come with Cadmus?"

"No, no. On her own. She's quite a lady."

"She is indeed."

He looked over at Rachel. Clearly he had more to say on the subject, but was afraid to say anything out of place.

"Go on..." Rachel said.

"I was just thinking that... well, you're different from the other ladies I've met. I mean, the other members of the family."

"How so?"