Decline of the Lawrence Welk Empire by Poe Ballantine

Author:Poe Ballantine
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
Published: 2011-03-07T00:00:00+00:00

29.

THE LOCUST TREE THAT CONTAINED CHOLLIE IS NOW unoccupied. I stare through its scaly branches pendent with pods and look up and down the road. “Maybe you imagined him,” says Kate.

“Possible.”

We stroll together up the empty road amid the grinding of flies and the shriek of the cicadas. Out in the cove a few thickkneed plover are wading in the shallows for brunch. Kate has decorated her delectable form with surah hot pants and a pink halter that gapes, disproportionately revealing her hitchhiking secrets. She walks slightly ahead of me. I don’t know if this is because she is a born leader, we are following island custom, or she just wants me to enjoy the view.

We step aside at the sound of a motorcycle approaching. Fanny goes whizzing past, raising a hand without lifting her head.

Kate waves back. We watch Fanny rise up a hill, then bank left and disappear into the forest. Kate says, “Mountain tells me you were in a rock band together.”

“Betty Estrogen and the Marching Hormones. It was a gin band with tennis rackets. We only did songs by transgressionist French poets.”

She wiggles her behind. “O saisons, o chateaux!” she says, looking back at me. “I did a paper once on Rimbaud, but that’s all I remember.”

“We were mainly Verlaine,” I say, as I continue to admire her thin legs and narrow shoulders, her ripped-off bikini top still vibrating across my corpus callosum and the atrial valves of my heart. “We were primarily interested in poets who shot their boyfriends. Fanny doesn’t like me, does she?”

“Well, if you’re thinking about converting her you might want to dunk your head in a bucket of ice water. How’s your Creole coming along?”

“I’m a dolt.”

“You’ll get over it,” she says, shaking her drying hair, although nothing ever completely dries on this island. “In the third world they just accent every syllable differently.Apart-MENT, instead of a-PART-ment. Your ear gets used to it after a while.”

“Where is Cinnamon Jim from?” I ask.

“Grande-Terre, Guadeloupe,” she says, skipping once and then hopping twice, as if negotiating an invisible hopscotch square.

“That’s French?”

“Most islands around here are,” she says, passing through a ray of sunlight and lifting her hands as a leering, blank-eyed silver rodent lumbers across the road in front of us.

“Sure are a lot of mongoose,” I remark.

“Yes,” she says, stopping with hands on hips as if waiting for mongoose number two to pass. “They’re a nuisance. They brought them here to eat the snakes. Now the snakes are all gone and they eat the songbirds and the chickens.”

“And nothing eats the mongoose.”

“Nothing except us,” she says with a disdainful swat at the air. “Of course, I’ve never been a huge admirer of animals boiled in rum.”

“So Chollie’s father was white?”

“Yes. Wait a minute. I got a rock in my sandal.” She hops and digs for a minute, her breasts bouncing. “Bob Marley’s father was white too, did you know that?”

“No.”

“They tried to assassinate him a couple of years ago.” The source of

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