seized by the conviction that someone was pounding on my front door. But as I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, the milky air of sunrise, no noise disturbed the stillness except the palaver of birds outside the window.
There was no point in returning to sleep. I crawled from bed and crept down the hall to the parlor, where the radio rested on the sideboard, tuned to the single Nassau station. I switched it on. A plume of baroque music swept into the room, crackling with static, Bach or something. But no news. I checked the lock on the front door and went back down the hall to run a bath.
An hour later, Veryl had not yet arrived. I boiled an egg, toasted bread, started the coffee in the electric percolator. The radio now thrummed with piano. Still no news. I ate breakfast in the kitchen, standing up, because there was no room for a table. I washed and dried the dishes, poured another cup of coffee, and betook myself to my work, such as it was.
For some time, I sat at my typewriter and stared out the window, toward that small sliver of sea visible between the nearby houses, trying to think of some clever angle from which to relate the story of Nancy Oakes and her shocking elopement with Alfred de Marigny, while the radio played tinny, crackling Beethoven and the birds continued their confabulation in the trees and the sun climbed the hazy blue sky. Stay away from politics, advised Lightfoot, and I’d given him what he asked for, hadn’t I, given it to him in spades, in monthly servings of tittle and tattle. He was going to love this scoop about Nancy Oakes and Alfred de Marigny. All I had to do was return to the typewriter and finish it, slip it into its manila envelope, carry it to the post office and collect my two hundred dollars to keep body and soul together.
In the vase next to the typewriter, right in the middle of a pool of sunshine, Veryl had set a spray of pink frangipani from the shrub outside. The scent was enough to drown me. The electric fan tossed my hair across my forehead. I rested my thumb on the rim of the coffee cup and glanced down at the newspaper under my arm, the Nassau Observer, headlines bristling. The labor question raged, the laborers raged, the affairs of the world hurtled along the course of history. Outside my window, the sun climbed over Nassau, hotter by the minute.
Still no sign of Veryl.
I set down the cup and went to collect my bicycle from the lean-to shed. As I pedaled hatless into town, the atmosphere was silent, eerily so, as if an invisible force had sucked away every living creature, leaving behind nothing but sunshine and heat and dread.
They called it Burma Road, the trail newly cut through the scrub and the pine forest to connect the airfield being built at the western end of the island with Oakes Field in Nassau. The name represented some wry reference to that legendary seven-hundred-mile route across the Himalayas, down which the British had recently retreated from the Japanese forces in China. Everyone’s got a sense of humor, I guess. Anyway, the airfield laborers had built Burma Road themselves, and upon Burma Road they traveled to work each day, and on Burma Road they now gathered up a few fragrant pine branches for clubs and marched back into Nassau, right past Government House—the Windsors were visiting Washington, remember—to Bay Street, down Bay Street to Rawson Square where the House of Assembly stood. I knew this because I could hear the shouting ahead, the singsong chanting, something about Conchie Joe. Burma Road declare war on de Conchie Joe.
And that’s when I knew it was trouble, all right, because Conchie Joe was the white man, Conchie Joe was the fifteen percent of the Bahamian population allowed within the walls of high-class joints like the British Colonial and the Emerald Beach Hotel, to say nothing of the front door of Government House. Conchie Joe was the foreman on the airfield project, the merchant on Bay Street, the lawyer, the doctor, the owner of virtually all property. The legislator in Parliament, passing laws on himself and the other eighty-five percent of the population. Until now, I had always understood the word as a term of needling affection. But words, you know, they’re funny things. You wake up one