sticky with sweat, my mouth is dry and crusty from hanging open. I look over at Mike, sleeping like a big broken doll under a worn white sheet, sweat beaded on his forehead and upper lip. I have slept in a black hole void of dreams, as if drugged for surgery. Usually, I slumber like an animal, unconscious but aware of my surroundings, alert to any sound or movement, twitching to layers of colorful dream-images rife with anomalous meaning.
I stretch, walk out onto the deck, sit looking out across the indigo ocean at the failing sun. I have recently figured out what this overwhelming feeling of nostalgic loneliness means, when the light falters at the end of a day. I have lived three lives already in my twenty-six years. Dusk is the point of crossing over into the past, into my former skin, all the physical cells replaced now, but the memories still etched onto their DNA. I cannot escape what I am becoming. Yet somehow I am the same person that I was at age nine, at sixteen, and right now. Darkness tumbles down luxuriously late tonight, as it did every August when I was a child.
**********
Sadie is waiting for us with bottles of Haitian rum, fresh limes, colas and even precious ice. Butch feeds some quarters into the old juke box, cranks up some scratchy blues. Butch and Thiona dance suggestively while Mike, Quinn and Carlton drink rum at a corner table.
I go back to watch Sadie in the kitchen, though I don't intend to eat any cracked conch. There's not much to the recipe. You just knock off the end of the shell with a mallet, wrestle out the rubbery white carcass and pound it flat. Then you dip the milky body in seasoned flour and fry it in hot oil.
The Turks and Caicos are one of the few places in the world where conch fishing is still allowed, and the only Caribbean islands that actually export it. I had once visited the "conch farm" on Providenciales, marveling at the tedious process of raising the animals from microscopic eggs clinging to kelp in cultured beds, to giant roving shells. I wince as Sadie expertly cracks open a precious pink house, yanks out the occupant and pounds it viciously, without remorse.
“Tuggy tells me he’s your grandson,” I say. “I didn’t know that until a couple weeks ago.”
Sadie chuckles softly, continues pounding. “Yep, dat correct. He’s a good boy.”
“Yes, he is. He’s become a really close friend of mine. And my mother’s, apparently.”
“I heard your mama moved to Turk, started a little café over dere. How dat doing?”
“It’s really busy. Even though she only officially serves kava drinks, coffee and tea.”
“What dat, kava? I never had dat.”
“It’s a traditional drink from the native people of the south Pacific, you know like Hawaii, Fiji, Vanuatu, Bora Bora, those kinds of places. They grind up the leaves and roots of this plant into a powder, then mix it with water, and they have a kind of ceremony to drink it.”
“Make dem see tings?”
“What? Oh, no, it’s not like a hallucinogenic drug, it just relaxes you. It’s pretty mild stuff.”
“I see,” she says, loudly knocks open another beautiful shell, I wince. Instinctually, I know I can trust this woman as I do her grandson, so I decide to see whether she has more knowledge about Bibi Atabey.
“Did Tuggy tell you about the statue we found, over at Highpoint Cave?”
“What cave?”
“We just call it Highpoint, because that’s where they’re going to build that gigantic new resort. But Butch and I recently found an intriguing little statue stuck way back in the cave, and showed it to D. L. Raushe, you know the historian?”
“Yes, I know of him.”
“Well he was in the process of identifying it, when he was killed. Probably murdered. Some people think it was because of what he knew about this statue. Nobody can find it now.”
Sadie stops cracking and pounding and looks up at me with wise, slightly cloudy eyes. “But you know where it is,” she says simply.
I’m taken aback, cannot answer right away. Finally, I stammer, “I – I might.”
She smiles a cryptic smile, turns back to her work and we are silent for a couple of minutes. She sings an enigmatic song, softly, with words I don’t recognize.
“That’s a pretty song,” I say, attempting to re-direct the conversation. “What language is that?”
“Lucayan,” she says. “A lost song about Yucahu, the provider of sustenance. You know what this