Antsy Floats (9 page)

I DON'T LIKE BEING A TOURIST. MOST TOURISTS
are loud, rude, clueless, and got no respect for the place they're visiting. The problem is, since I'm mostly loud, rude, and clueless, putting me next to a bunch of tourists makes me look like one of them. It's embarrassing. If I'm gonna visit someplace, I don't want to be clumped with some pasty-thighed retirees in sun hats. Lexie doesn't like being “the blind girl,” and I don't like being “the ugly American.”

Under normal circumstances, though, I would have given in and gone along with the herd, but I already knew there wasn't gonna be anything normal about my day on the island, with Tilde.

•  •  •

“What do you mean you're not going with us?” My dad was up in arms. “Do you have any idea how much we paid for the Deluxe Jamaican Island Tour and Snorkel Extravaganza?”

“So get a refund.” My original plan was to tell them I was spending the day with Lexie, but then she left with Moxie for the spa, announcing that she was getting a three-hour seaweed wrap, which until then I thought was something you ate. It left me with no cover story.

“We made plans as a family,” my mother said, wagging her favorite wagging finger. “The least you could do is follow them.”

“If I have to go, so should he!” complained Christina.

“C'mon, Antsy,” Howie begged. “It's an extravaganza!”

“I got your extravaganza right here,” I said.

My mother threw up her hands and walked away. “I've raised a cultural imbecile.”

I showed them my sunburn, which was still lobster red, and began to whine. “In case you forgot, I'm burned, and it hurts. I don't feel like going, so get off my back already!”

My dad shook his head, looking at me all disappointed. “Fine. Stay here and vegetate. I hope you and Crawley enjoy each other's miserable company.”

“I heard that!” said Crawley from the adjoining suite.

I waited until they had all left, then watched from the balcony until I was sure all the tour buses were gone.

Crawley came up behind me, full of his usual suspicion. “What are you scheming?”

“Who says I'm scheming anything?”

He poked me on my sunburned chest intentionally, and I grimaced. “Don't insult my intelligence. You're always scheming something.”

Which was usually true. But this time it wasn't. “I'm not the schemer,” I told him. “This time I'm just the henchman.”

Crawley nodded, somehow satisfied. “I always knew you'd be a henchman sooner or later.” Then he went back to his suite and closed the adjoining door.

•  •  •

As soon as I got off the ship, I found myself in Fake Jamaica. The pier was full of comfy gazebos in pastel pink and blue, sparkling-clean souvenir shops selling native crafts that all said “made in China,” and an open-air stage, featuring yet another clone reggae band with regulation dreads playing “Red, Red Wine.” It was all so controlled and sterile, it might as well have been Disneyland. I guess that's what some people want: a giant living diorama—because the real thing isn't always so pretty.

But if you don't get on the air-conditioned tour buses and actually have the guts to step out of the pier's security zone, you'll find a world that ain't so pristine but is tons more interesting.

First there's the guy who approaches everyone who looks under forty and asks them if they want to buy some prime
gancha
at discount prices.

“What's gancha?” a little kid asked his parents. “Can I have some?”

The father laughed and said, “Not till you're older.”

The mother was not amused.

There were souvenir shops out here, too, but they were more run down and more packed with stuff. More real. The buildings themselves had a kind of crumbling character to them, like they barely survived the last hurricane but what hadn't killed them made them stronger.

“You scared me, Enzo—I though you changed your mind!”

I turned around to see Tilde. She was looking a little nervous and not at all her usual self. She gave me a hug, which she had never done before.

“Ouch! Careful—my sunburn.”

“We should go now,” she said. “We don't have much time.”

I noticed she was gripping a paper sack a little too tightly. “Are you gonna tell me what we're doing? Does it involve the guy selling gancha?”

“
Idiota.
We're not buying weed or any other drug. What we're buying is much more valuable.”

“Which is?”

Tilde put her hand in the air to hail a taxi. “Today, we buy freedom.”

Kingston's cruise port had no shortage of taxis, and pretty soon a small car, billowing more smoke than my grandma's bridge club, screeched to a halt in front of us. The driver was all smiles. There was no shortage of friendliness in Jamaica.

“Hop on in,” he tells us. “You want de island tour or beach? I know de best beaches.”

Once we had gotten in, Tilde gave him an address scrawled on a piece of paper. “Take us there, please.”

“Yes, yes,” he said, without even looking at the paper, “but don't you want a tour first?” He addressed me instead of Tilde, figuring I was either the one calling the shots or the more likely sucker. “I give you and your cutie my deluxe island experience; how dat sound? Good? Betta believe it!”

“No,” Tilde said sharply, gripping even more tightly to the brown paper bag in her hands. “Take us to the address and no more questions.”

“Hoo hoo hoo!” laughed the cabbie. “Dat one knows where she is going! Betta watch yourself wit dat one, mon!” He actually said “mon.” I wondered whether he really talked that way or just knew what Americans expected. Then he looked at the paper and that island-friendly expression on his face changed. “You kiddin' me?” he said. “You really want to go to dis place here?”

I didn't like the look on his face.

“Is it far?” I asked.

“About an hour. Why you want to go to dis place?”

“Not your business,” I told him. “And if you don't want to take us, we'll find a cabbie who will.”

He turned his eyes to the road and put the car in gear. “You say take you, I take you. Your money, your hides.”

He stepped on the gas, spewed enough smoke from his tailpipe to kill a flock of birds, and we were off.

•  •  •

One thing's for sure, Jamaica is a beautiful island. It's got all these natural bays with clear blue water and white sand beaches—but if you have the guts to take your eyes away from the spectacular views, you see other stuff. Outside of the tourist zones there's so much poverty, it's hard to look at. I saw some kids playing in the street with a peeling, scuffed soccer ball that, in the US, would have been thrown out a long time ago. I had half a dozen balls in better condition in my garage. It made me feel kinda guilty to be complaining about my lost luggage when the stuff that I lost was probably more than these people even had.

The windows were rolled open, but the breeze did little to ease the oppressive heat and humidity. Exhaust from passing cars spilled into the window—it wasn't just this car that had issues. At first, the cabbie whistled pleasantly as we rode through the busy streets of Kingston, but after a while, he stopped.

We turned down a rough road with much less traffic that led us away from the city. The road disappeared beneath the rain forest canopy.

“Everybody got good places and bad places where they live,” the cabbie said as we wound deeper and deeper into the island. “But dis place where you're going, it's where you end up when you drop through de bottom of all de other places. Dis place, they call ‘Hello-Hello.'”

“That doesn't sound too bad,” I said.

“It means ‘Hell of Hells.'”

We hit a pothole and the car took a nasty bounce. We would have lost a hubcap if the taxi had any hubcaps to lose.

“You two sure about dis?” the cabbie asked again.

“Yes,” I told him. Then I looked at Tilde just to make sure she still wanted to go through with this, whatever it was. She nodded at me. I leaned over to her and whispered, “Whatever this is about, is it worth it?”

“Ten times worth it,” she said.

“Okay,” I said. “I believe you.”

After about an hour, with nothing but winding roads and forests, we came to a crumbling village. I turned to Tilde, and I could see fear in her,
real
fear, and I realized that maybe she had told the truth yesterday. Maybe she
did
need me to feel safe, but who was going to make
me
feel safe?

There weren't many buildings. It wasn't much of a town. Most of the structures seemed to be made of parts of other things. A stone wall that was part of the foundation of an earlier building. Corrugated steel roofs covered with rust. Peeling doors that didn't quite fit into their doorframes. There were no children playing soccer here. No children anywhere. What few people I saw on the unpaved street seemed bone thin and ready for the town graveyard—which, by the way, looked a lot like the one we set up on our lawn for Halloween. Welcome to Hello-Hello.

The cabbie stopped the taxi but kept the engine running. “You pay for both ways now.”

Tilde opened her bag, reaching in, and I saw a whole lot of green in there. As I suspected, it was a bag full of cash. I stopped her before she could pull any money out. “No,” I told the driver. “We pay you when we get back to Kingston.”

He wasn't happy about that but accepted it. “Fine, fine. But I see anyting I don't like, I'm gone. I don't need your money dat much.”

The hairs on my neck started to bristle. If this place could scare a Jamaican cabbie, should I be scared, too? What kind of people, I wondered, would choose to live in a place known as the Hell of Hells, and why, in both hells, did Tilde want to go here?

We got out of the taxi, and Tilde looked toward a crumbling cinder-block bar. There were four guys out front who looked so shady, together they could form an eclipse.

“Wait for me here,” Tilde said.

“Don't be dumb—I'm coming with you.”

“No,” she said. “I was told to come alone . . . and besides, you have to make sure the taxi doesn't leave us here.”

“Yeah, that would be bad.” I didn't even want to imagine being stranded here and having to spend quality time with the residents of Hello-Hello.

“But if you hear me scream,” Tilde said, “come after me.” Then she took a deep breath as if she was going underwater and strode toward the bar, ignoring the stares from the eclipsers. She pushed her way through the lopsided swinging door, and it swung shut behind her with an irritated creak.

I moved around to stand in front of the taxi so that the cabbie couldn't leave without running me over. Then I dared to look around.

There was an old, suspicious-looking woman slowly rocking on her porch, and in the next house over, a man peered out of a dark doorway, staring at me.

“You from the ships, then?” he asked, after about a minute of staring.

“Maybe,” I answered.

“You got money?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I answered.

And out of the darkness he gestured with his hand. “Come on in here; I'll show you what I got to sell.”

“Leave da boy alone!” shouted the cabbie, suddenly all protective, like maybe he felt guilty for thinking of abandoning us here.

The man in the dark doorway pointed a bony finger at the cabbie like he was leveling a curse. “Not your business.”

Then the cabbie turned to me. “Don't you go over dere, hear me? He ain't got nothing to sell you but misery.”

“Yeah, I kind of figured.”

For some reason, the old woman on the porch suddenly burst out laughing, and the man pulled back into his dark doorway, swallowed by the shadows of his house.

So now I'm feeling like I'm the first B-movie victim in late night voodoo theater, half expecting some guy with a python around his neck to do a cloudy-eyed dance around me, and I'm wondering if these people even know that they are, by their very existence, perpetuating a cruel stereotype. No wonder the people of Jamaica hate this place.

Now that I had a sense that the cabbie wouldn't ditch us, I marched toward the bar. Tilde had been in there way too long—but as I got close, the cluster of creepy eclipsers lined up like a human wall, blocking my path. They didn't need to speak because the look on their faces said all.

I was trying to decide whether I should batter my way through, thereby losing my miserable life, or try pointlessly to negotiate with them—but before I did either of those things, Tilde came out. I guess the wall of voodoo was like a one-way turnstile, because the creepy dudes allowed her to push through them. Then she grabbed my arm and pulled me back toward the taxi. She was shaking, but I knew better than to ask what had happened. Somehow I could tell she was shaking not because of what happened—but because of all the things that
could
have happened but didn't.

I looked down at the sack she held. It was a plain paper bag but a different shade of brown than the bag she brought in, and it was a little less wrinkled. “Mission accomplished?”

She nodded but didn't utter a word.

“What did we buy?” I asked her.

“It doesn't matter.”

“Hey,” I told her. “I didn't just do the limbo through Jamaican Mordor to be told it doesn't matter!”

“All right, it matters,” she told me. “But it's better if you don't know.”

I could have pushed it but decided that this wasn't the time.

We got back into the taxi, and the driver took off even before I had closed the door, practically leaving my left leg behind—but I wasn't complaining. The dust from our wheels rose like a fog behind us, hiding the town as we left, and in a few moments “Hello-Hello” became “Good-bye, Good Riddance.” Then Tilde reached over and grabbed my hand, holding it.