Islands Read online

  “Enough is enough,” Lewis said. “I don’t want to spend my Sundays scooping setter shit.”

  So Sneezy, Dopey, and Sleepy stayed home, where Robert spoiled them with duck breast and lamb and hunted them in the woods and marshes of Edisto. It was as good a dog’s life as I could imagine.

  That was the first year I ever saw Sullivan’s Island’s celebrated Fourth of July parade. It was a ragtag, joyous, seat-of-the-pants affair, with decorated golf carts and a motorcycle or two from the Isle of Palms, and the island fire trucks and ambulance, sirens wailing, and many children. All with dogs. The island dogs, most of whom knew each other from their nocturnal garbage-can scoutings, pranced along beside their young owners, decked out in flowers and tiny flags and ribbons. There was every kind of dog imaginable, and they were all unified by the pride of the day and the joy of belonging to Sullivan’s Island. Our dogs did not march, but when the fireworks display arced and spat into the blue night sky, they howled in uniform accompaniment, their anthem to our country’s birthday. Some of them lived in Charleston homes older by years than that.

  So, the summer of the dogs. And the summer of the light.

  The island light that year was simply magical, at least to me, who had never seen it so before. It was honey gold and soft, and so clear that everything—Charleston in the distance, Fort Sumter nearer by, the great tankers and freighters that passed, the navy’s eerie, death-silent black nuclear submarines that occasionally broke the water off the beach—seemed to be outlined in crisp, deep blue. I remember no heat shimmering from the beach, no mist, no fog at night. At least when Lewis and I were there, the moon and stars were as distinct as a night-sky chart in a child’s classroom, and the black, white-creamed water often danced with phosphorus. Lewis and I went into it late one night, naked and shivering a little, and felt the silken water alive with the soft hiss of sea fire. Afterward, we made love behind the first dune line. There was nothing else for it.

  “This is pure heaven,” I said on the porch, after a long August lunch. “I’ve never seen such weather, not that lasted so long. No wonder everybody comes to Sullivan’s.”

  “It’s not like this often, not by a long shot,” Henry said. “August is usually just as miserable out here as it is in Charleston. You can just get wet quicker. This is unusual. I don’t remember a summer just like it, do you, Lewis? Camilla?”

  “I mainly remember mosquitoes and sandburs,” Lewis said.

  “I remember Daddy saying that the old-timers said a summer like this was a weather breeder,” Camilla said, not looking up from her knitting. “But I never saw much weather bred out here except thunderstorms and heat waves.”

  “You’ll know something’s coming if you see the Gray Man,” Simms said, grinning.

  “What’s that?” I said. Somehow I did not like the sound of the words.

  “Nobody quite knows,” Simms said. “A man in a long gray cloak is supposed to appear on the beach if there’s a bad storm coming. When they see him, people know to prepare.”

  “If I saw him, I’d prepare to get out of here,” I said, shivering.

  “Simms, you know that’s only on Pawley’s Island,” Lila chided. “Nobody’s ever seen him anywhere else.”

  I looked at her. I had expected her to dismiss the Gray Man as a child’s ghost story, but her face was serious.

  “Do you believe in him, Lila?” I said.

  “Well, I don’t not believe in him,” she said slowly. “Daddy has a friend on Pawley’s who claims to have seen him, and two days later there was a tornado there. Lots of people have seen him. I don’t know if there have always been storms, though.”

  Driving home that night, with the silver pepper of the stars fading out as the lights of Charleston rolled up over the bridge, I said to Lewis, “Do you believe in him? The Gray Man?”

  “Not really, but I don’t want to give him up, either. I can’t think of anywhere else but the Low Country that has a Gray Man.”

  We were all at the beach house that Labor Day, and while we were there, Henry finally persuaded me to go with him on one of his missions of mercy, this time to the mountains of central Mexico.

  “It’s not close to anywhere,” he said. “It’s a terribly poor and backward region, and for years the only health care has been a bankrupt government clinic in a town fifty miles away, with only a burro path connecting the two, and that covered by rock slides and cave-ins half the year. But there’s a new road now, just opened, and it puts the village within range of a bigger national highway that leads to several larger towns. A Dr. Mendoza has established a little hospital there, or hopes to, and found a couple of nurses and some funding for equipment. He got in touch with our folks in Washington, and asked for help from whoever could come. I was up, so said I’d be there. Now that there’s some access to other, more populated areas, a setup on the order of Outreach—not nearly so sophisticated, of course, but a start—would be salvation for the village. Anny, please come. I can’t pay you, but I can guarantee you a clean bed and three squares a day, and all the backup I can give you. There’ll be some other docs there; I don’t know who, or what their specialties are. But we’ll have company, and you might enjoy the native people. I always have. There’s an interpreter along, too. How about it? You like burritos?”

  I thought of my last board meeting, which had been consumed entirely by a discussion of our PR effort to acquire gifts and services. I had nearly drifted into sleep during the excruciating minutiae of our current fund-raising confection, a dinner dance at the Kiawah Island home of a board member who had just redecorated and built a large pavilion out over the dunes, facing the sea. The gala’s working title was the “Outreach Beach Ball.”

  “I have some vacation time coming,” I said to Henry. “I think I’ll go. I’m being Kiawahed to death right now.”

  Only then did I look at Lewis, questioningly.

  “I love burritos,” he said. “You got space for an old bone man?”

  Henry laughed and hugged me and pounded Lewis on the bicep.

  “Did you know that the mountains of Mexico have more poisonous scorpions than any other region in the world?” Fairlie said, swirling wine around in her glass. She was smiling, though. Through some alchemy, she and I had become friends, to the point where we could tease each other without wondering if there was a barb embedded.

  “No wonder they need doctors,” I said. “Why don’t you come, Fairlie? I could use somebody to go to the ladies’ room with.”

  “They got no ladies’ rooms,” Fairlie said, grinning. “Besides, what would I do? Teach them to dance?”

  We all laughed, and Camilla smiled at me.

  “Good for you, Anny,” she said. “I’ve always worried about Henry on these little sorties. I keep thinking he might run off with a fiery señorita or something, and we’ll never see him again. You can keep watch.”

  “He’s already got a fiery señorita,” Fairlie said, baring her teeth ferociously at Camilla, who laughed outright.

  “So he does,” she said.

  That evening, just after sunset, I walked down the beach with only Gladys for company. The day had been blisteringly hot, but there was fog coming in over the dunes from the waterway, which meant, I knew, a change of weather. All of a sudden the empty beach and the warm water swirling around my ankles felt poignant, elegiac. This summer was ending. It made me sad.

  I turned to go back. The fog had reached the top dune line and blurred the beach house. Its lit windows burned cheerful holes in the mist. All at once I could not wait to get off the empty beach and into the house. I started across to the steps to the wooden walkway, whistling to Gladys. She came larruping happily behind me. Both our feet slipped in the dry, shifting sand.

  I looked up to see Camilla on the top of the dune line, a little way from the house. She wore her old raincoat, and it blew about her. I wondered what she was doing out in the fog. She always said that it made her bones hurt.

  “Hey!” I called. “What a
re you doing up there?”

  She did not answer, and I cupped my hands to throw my voice farther.

  “Camilla?”

  Again, there was no answer. I turned to make sure Gladys was with me, and when I turned back, Camilla had gone inside. Gladys and I bounded up the steps and into the house as if pursued.

  They were all sitting around the unnecessary but beautiful fire, drinking wine. I loved them suddenly. Loved them all with a weight that hurt my heart.

  “You’ve got wet hair,” Lewis said.

  “There’s a big fog bank out there, in case you haven’t noticed,” I said. “Camilla, what were you doing out there on the dunes? I yelled, but I guess you didn’t hear me.”

  She looked at me.

  “I haven’t been outside,” she said. “Not this whole afternoon.”

  “I was sure it was you. It looked like that old raincoat of yours, the one with the hood.”

  “I gave that to the Salvation Army last spring,” she said.

  There was a silence.

  “You saw the Gray Man,” Simms said, leering. “Gonna be a storm sure as gun’s iron.”

  “Oh, I did not,” I said peevishly. “It was probably somebody up there looking for a dog or something.”

  “Nope. The Gray Man,” Charlie jumped in. “Come all the way down from Pawley’s just to see you. We better batten down.”

  On the way home, the fog thick and white by now, I said to Lewis, “I did see somebody on the dunes. Somebody real. Why does everybody have to carry on about the damned Gray Man?”

  “Teasing you,” he said briefly. He did not say any more.

  “Lewis, you can’t possibly think…”

  “I guess not,” he said.

  We did not speak again until we got home.

  “Want cocoa?” he said.

  “I think I’d just like to go to bed. I’ve got to get up early if I’m going to arrange to take two weeks off.”

  “Well, I think I’ll read awhile,” he said, and kissed me on the forehead. “Be up later.”

  I lay awake for a long time, even after he came up, even after I heard his breathing deepen into sleep. I had wanted amused denial, fond ridicule, and, I realized, reassurance. Their absence felt like hunger.

  Ciudad Real means “royal city,” and it is difficult to imagine that any one of its 355 inhabitants gives much thought to the irony of that. It lies in the north-central state of Chihuahua, huddled in a gap in the Sierra Madre Occidental range, approximately halfway between the small city of Madera and the sea. Until very recently, it was connected by road only to the slightly larger village of Oteros, whose own road led to the spectacular Barranco del Cobre, or Copper Canyon, and stopped. There were footpaths over the mountain to small towns on the Sonoran coast, but it was not possible to get goods and crops for trading and selling over them, and the great Copper Canyon Railway that connects the arid mountainous interior of northern Mexico to the Pacific was beyond the means of most of the villagers. Few of them harvested crops or fabricated goods anyway. It was a desperately poor little hamlet set among stunted oaks and stubby cacti. A cloud of dust hung over it perpetually. There was a small, crumbling adobe church, a cantina with rooms above it for the thin teenage prostitutes and their guests, a sort of store/gas station affair that sold fly-specked canned goods and American snacks and sodas and the occasional gallon of elderly gas. There was a telephone in the cantina and store, but none of the horrendously dirty and dilapidated houses seemed to have one, and the only TV aerial I saw was on the roof of the cantina. In its sun-smitten little central square, the fountain was dry and the market stalls all but empty. A few merchants sold thin, dispirited chickens and a skinny, cold-eyed goat or two, and bits of lumpish pottery, and baskets of wilting vegetables and fruit that grew in the gardens behind the homes. English, we found, was spoken only by the unkempt priest, the doctor who had summoned us, and the bar mistress of the cantina, who was also its madam. To get there from Charleston, you flew to Atlanta and from there to Mexico City and from there to Chihuahua, took a battered bus from Chihuahua to Madera, and depended for the remainder of the journey to Ciudad Real on the kindness of strangers.

  We came into Madera at three in the afternoon on September the eighth, dirtier and more tired than I, at least, had ever been in my life, and were met by the aforementioned Dr. Lorenzo Mendoza, in a Land Rover that made Lewis’s Range Rover look like a Rolls-Royce limousine. He was a short, stocky, swarthy man with the darting energy of a Tasmanian devil and a gold-starred smile as wide as his entire face.

  “My Americans are here!” he shouted, and hugged us all in turn. He hesitated when he came to me, said, “You are a nurse, perhaps? Wonderful!” and continued his hugging without listening for an answer. He smelled powerfully of stale sweat, but so did we. I so badly wanted a bath and a nap that I would have gotten into the Land Rover with the world’s gamiest Sasquatch. Wedged in between Henry and a gastroenterologist from Houston, I found myself trembling with insane, suppressed laughter. I felt Henry’s shoulder shaking and knew he was desperately trying to contain laughter, too. I did not look at him; that would have been death for both of us. In the seat ahead of me, Lewis slept. He could sleep anywhere. I hated him momentarily. The gastroenterologist stared straight ahead. Two general surgeons from Fort Worth cowered in the front seat with Dr. Mendoza, being bombarded with shotgunned information.

  The new road, the good doctor said, connected Ciudad Real to Madera, from there to Chihuahua, and then on to Highway 40, which wound its way across the waistline of the country and entered Texas at McAllen.

  “Now we are in reach of many health care facilities, and we can receive supplies,” he cried gaily. “I put up my little hospital and some temporary housing for the staff even before the bulldozers rolled out. It is small, but it will grow, and it is not uncomfortable, I don’t think. With my new friends to teach new techniques to me and one or two new associates coming in, and even a nurse to instruct my nursing staff, we will soon be a distinguished regional facility.”

  And he laughed, a trifle hysterically. The two surgeons grinned desperately. Lewis snored. Henry snorted.

  “Don’t you dare,” I hissed furiously at him. The gastroenterologist did not move his eyes from the road ahead.

  We caromed through deserted little Ciudad Real, scattering dust and chickens and a few skinny black dogs. A fat woman with impossibly lush, lacquered black hair waved from a window over the cantina—the madam, I learned later, Señora Diaz. In the entire two weeks we were there, I never saw hair nor hide of Señor Diaz. He was very much alive, Dr. Mendoza assured us, though he was seldom seen.

  “It is just that he is shy,” he said.

  We careened around a curve overhung by a huge boulder, and there was the hospital of Dr. Mendoza. The distinguished regional medical facility. It consisted of three brand-new double-wide trailers placed side by side in a meager grove of scrub oaks and connected by a wooden walkway. A low wooden barracks affair sat a little behind the trailers, with a few folding plastic chairs set about it in the dirt and an outside shower affixed to one end. I wondered, crazily, how he had gotten the trailers and the material for the barracks over the new road.

  In front of me, Lewis woke up.

  “Holy shit,” he said.

  “Yes!” Dr. Mendoza shouted in ecstatic agreement. “It is truly holy shit, is it not?”

  It was a shell-shocked and surreal sort of evening. The American doctors would be housed in the barracks—“brand new, still smelling of sweet new wood!”—but no one had told him I would be coming. The nurses had lodging with a couple of villagers, but he did not think there was any more available. We would go and have our dinner at the cantina, and give thought to the matter of where I was to sleep.

  “A clean bed and three squares, huh?” I glared at Henry. “Maybe there’s a goat shed around somewhere I could share.”

  “I’m sorry, Anny,” he mumbled. “I’ve never been on one of these things that didn’t h
ave some kind of hotel or motel or something.”

  “You damned well ought to be sorry, Henry, my man,” Lewis said ominously. But I could see his lips twitching. It was clear to all three of us, even before the arrangements were made, that I would be sleeping upstairs over the cantina with the three adolescent prostitutes.

  “But by far the best room,” Dr. Mendoza assured me earnestly. “It is for the ones who stay three or four hours. There is a television set and flowered sheets.”

  “You could come out of this a wealthy woman,” Lewis said. And we all burst into laughter. It was clear that the surgeons and the gastroenterologist did not get the joke.

  Looking back, I can picture those two weeks in Ciudad Real as if I were watching them on a screen. They have the surreal vividness of a fever dream: details stand out as if limned in light. I can remember the sights, sounds, smells, tastes so clearly that I become lost in them. Almost anything can call them back: the brassy wail of cantina music, the taste of dust, the smell of new wood in the barracks and old sweat and perfume in my seraglio bedroom, the taste of warm beef and tacos. I do not wish to summon that time; in many ways it was ghastly in the extreme, and pales utterly beside some of the beautiful places Lewis took me in the years after that. Nevertheless, there it is, lodged in my subconscious like a bone in a dog’s throat. I think it’s because those weeks were so absolutely self-contained, so totally without context. Nothing—not time, not the world—seemed to intrude upon them. That hyperreality is still a source of both pleasure and pain to me.

  Nothing, absolutely nothing, went as we had supposed it would. The first morning we went into the hospital’s minimal little waiting room and found it boiling with the miserable humanity of Ciudad Real. Patient old men and women; wailing children; vastly pregnant women; stoic, sullen men with racking coughs or bloody rags wrapped around an arm or a leg; even a black dog, tail thumping under the receptionist’s desk. If there had been a receptionist. The two promised doctors did not appear.