A Drink Called Paradise by Terese Svoboda

Author:Terese Svoboda
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: A Drink Called Paradise
ISBN: 9781941088654
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 1991-03-21T16:00:00+00:00

It is the next day. The next day I have my hangover, and it is one you want to climb out of and leave the head behind, the head so not your own it is surely borrowed and overdue, thank you very much, but what I see in my head is three perfectly can-shaped cylinders of corned beef and a side of immaculately white rice—Barclay’s party food from yesterday. That’s what sticks in my mind. He did not eat the chicken and pork and banana and boiled blood squeezed onto the banana leaf, he did not drink from a single coconut.

I have never seen him drink from a coconut. From none of the coconuts he opens for me, three a day, not from any of those has he taken even a single sip.

I sit on the porch wearing a taro-leaf poultice and between throbs I think. Barclay sits on the porch too, for once here, and without a poultice. But he is slow today, very slow, and as soon as he sits he falls asleep and soon begins to snore his thunder snores. Someone else will have to tell me, someone else will say why they don’t object or make fun of him and his corned beef and rice and no coconuts. I hold my poultice to my forehead and use the fingertips of my free hand to ease myself up to standing without disturbing too much of the pounding. I make for the two steps off the porch to ask Ngarima, who is rooting in the bush.

But there, just over the edge, under the flowering plant that a stick I dropped turned into, lies a small overturned box. It kills me to bend over to pick it up, my poultice slips, blood rushes into my heavy temples, but the glimpse I have is of photos inside. Beside it lies the ripped spine of an album that looks like just a curl of bark if you are sitting on the porch.

A boy I’ve never seen on the bow of a ship with Barclay. That’s the first picture.

The others show less, the boy at the bottom of a set of steps, the same boy in a bed looking bad, pink flesh under brown, Barclay beside a gravestone with what looks like Minnesota behind it, grass and trees whose leaves fall and a power line and a station wagon.

My hands begin to shake.

Bravo, says Barclay behind me.

Bravo? I repeat. He doesn’t say it like congratulations.

He takes the photos from me. Temu, he shouts.

The army’s Bravo, it was their big test here, he says. He is speaking without looking at the photos, he speaks with his eyes shut, he speaks from an old pain in his head. Or really the test was over there, he says. He points one hand into the wind without looking at it. But then the trades blew and brought the test here, and after a while my son is taken away with me on this boat to your country, and I go home later alone.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.