Texas Pages

At twenty- six, May is a tall version of the girl she used to be. She still keeps her straight brown hair very short, and she has the same valiant curiosity she had at the age of ten. Gold hoop earrings and numerous bangles help to feminize her. She’s become what people¬ call “a handsome woman.”

She’s spent most of her life here on Navy Island, a place so small it’s not on any map, not even maps of the West Indies. It’s an islet really¬, about a mile off the coast of Jamaica (“a piece of Jamaica that drifted away,” she used to tell people).

Every day she sits at the wrought- iron table on this veranda, typing on an old manual Underwood. She’s not sure why. She could say, like the hero of Treasure Island, that someone persuaded her: My dear friend Nigel Fletcher, having asked me to write down the events that occurred here from beginning to end, keeping nothing back but the bearings of the island and that only because there is still trea¬sure not yet lifted, I take up my pen. . . . She knows that she wants to do this now, not wait until things have become memories of things— nutmeg-smelling rooms, the rasping sea, how quiet it is on this veranda after a downpour.

Her father, the man who is said to be her father, bought the island when there was nothing on it but trees. People say he won it in a poker game, but her mother, Ida, remembers him paying cash, the money he made starring in The Adventures of Don Juan (“He had to take that money out of America quick- quick before the first wife found out about it; he wanted a house pink like the sunset,” Ida said). He built the house, pink with white jalousies and white railings, and named it Bella Vista. A good name, she’s always thought. Bella Vista is a ruin now, a desecration; there’s almost nothing that isn’t broken or torn, but she can look out at the sea from every room of the house. From this veranda, she has the best view of all— the sudden descent to the whitewashed boathouse, then the turquoise water fluttering between the two shores.

Jamaica, or “land,” as they say, is ten minutes away by taxi- boat. She can see the harbor town of Port Antonio across the water and, beyond its Anglican steeples and corrugated rooftops, the Blue Mountains. Sometimes she hears music from the town across the water, reggae pounding from the rum shops and passing cars. But it has been quiet of late because of the curfew and the soldiers and the fear: it is 1976, and Jamaica is in a State of Emergency.

Some soldiers paid her a visit.

She was out on the veranda and heard noises inside. There were two of them looking around the ransacked living room. One of them had sunglasses resting on top of his head. He was examining the photographs on the sideboard, picking them up one at a time: one of her mother, Ida, as a young girl on horseback, another of May by the swimming pool with the two dogs. Then something caught his attention. He called the other soldier over to look at it— a publicity photo of her father as Captain Blood. It seemed to amuse them.

The soldiers were surprised to find May there. “We have to search the area,” the one with the sunglasses said. She wondered if they really had any authority to do so or whether, having heard about the place, they were simply curious, drawn to the relics of an extinct glamour.