The mayor of Fun Royale

Colin saw the boy’s fingers slip, and thought I knew this would happen. It was a small Nissan van, five flimsy rows of seats. The boy looked about 12, deep black skin and one eye that stared off to the side. He hung out the open sliding door of the van, hammering on the roof to tell the driver to stop to let someone off, arguing and pushing to find a way to get two dozen passengers into the tiny space, collecting the fares.
Colin’s knee hurt, and one foot had fallen asleep, his ankle pressed against the boney shin of the man with the shovel. He had watched the boy’s hands, one reaching in pressed flat against the van’s ceiling, the other with a thick pile of bills wrapped through his fingers. Colin’s shoulders were pulled tight, giving room to an older Dominican woman, being the polite Canadian. Then he saw the boy’s right hand slide a little against the light brown ceiling, and he was gone, waving once with the hand with the bills. Colin and Marie were facing each other, and Colin saw the boy out the back, bouncing sideways on the road, ungraceful cartwheels, a sandal flying high in the air.
The passengers shouted, the driver stopped and backed up, the gears whining, and they all jumped out.
Three men on a moped had stopped, and helped the boy to sit up. He was bleeding, from his forehead and his knees and the back of his left hand, and he held his back. His eyes were cloudy, rolled high in his head, and he shivered. He still held the bills, but they were covered in blood, several torn. Colin watched, as Marie turned and stared across the alaming green sugar cane fields to the sea, blue and grey and stretching on and on. The sun was already low in the sky behind them, and the fields were mixed dark shadows and lurid highlights. He hair was reddish in the sun, and her face, burned, was turned darker. He looked up from the boy, and saw her, and for a second didn’t know who she was.
A taxi driver stopped to join the crowd. They paid him 150 pesos for a ride back to the resort.
They ate too much in Lin Tran’s, the Chinese restaurant that was part of the resort, with two couples from Calgary and a large bullet-headed young British man and the sunburned, toothy woman who had married him on the beach the day before, all of them drinking rum punch with the egg foo young and curried pork fried rice and sweet and sour something.
“How the hell could he fall?” Jeff was a stockbroker in Calgary, polite and curious and neat. “He must have done the drive a thousand times.”
Marie had told them the story, describing the over-crowded bus, the bruises on the boy’s forehead and the blood. “You didn’t get any blood on you, did you?” That from Cal, who struggled to focus on them. “I mean, you know, AIDS and all.”
Marie took a large drink of the pinkish rum drink, clean after the food. She ignored Cal, considered Jeff’s question, smelling the greasy food and the light scent of some sort of mosquito repellent the British woman. She pushed a piece of slippery pepper around the plate with chopsticks, put them down, and looked at her husband.
“Actually.” And she took another drink. “Actually I may have nudged him, a little.”
The British woman - Cecily, her name was - laughed, a sharp, high shriek, so Colin did too, then before anyone could speak he asked if anyone had signed up for scuba lessons and the talk moved away from the boy.
In bed, he felt the room move just a little from the rum, lay looking at the ceiling fan as Marie switched around the channels, watching a game show in Spanish.
“What makes you think you pushed the boy out of the van.”
“I didn’t say that.” She looked at Colin, but he was staring at the fan, steadying himself with the round blur of the blades. “I said I may have nudged him.”
Colin had brought a large glass of rum up from the bar, now reached for it and took a drink, felt the rough warmth on the back of his tongue.
“What makes you think that?”
“It doesn’t matter, does it? I don’t even know, really. It was something to say.”
“But why would you say that, if it wasn’t true?”
She got up from the bed and pulled the drapes open about a foot, looked out at the palm trees and the road and the lights of the hotel rooms in the next building. He could only see her back, and her head was resting on the window glass so he could hardly hear her.
“It doesn’t really matter, does it?”
The next day all eight of them met at the beach. Cal was bulky in a large orange T-shirt that said Galvin Klein, and bargained angrily with the skinny vendors selling carvings and suntan oil,. They all drank from the beach bar and ate hot dogs and watched a Dominican dog, thin brown hair with a sore on a back leg, limp slowly from group to group. Cal threw sand at the dog, who looked at him and then lay down about 15 feet away, in the shade of a small palm tree.
By 2 they were all a little drunk, except for the large British newlywed and Cal, who were a lot drunk and turning red as they lay on the beach chairs with their eyes closed, plastic glasses scattered around them like washed up jellyfish.
Colin lay on his stomach, and turned his head toward Marie. The sun actually touched his back. His eyes were almost closed; he could see her silhouette, against the sun, her neck stretched out as she lay on her back, one hand over her head.
“You didn’t push him,” he said.
Marie lay still, didn’t open her eyes. She may have been asleep.
“I stretched just a little,” Colin whispered to the sun, “tried to find space for my foot so my leg would stop hurting, and he stepped on my shoe and fell.”
He waited, but she didn’t speak.
“I’m going for a swim,” Colin said, and he got up so quickly wobbled a little from the heat, but was down six steps over the hot sand and into the water before anyone could come along. He liked the coolness, the way the waves pushed him around, and he swam steadily without looking back until he was past the sailboats moored offshore, out to where waves were breaking over the reef. He felt the water moving around him as if it were deep. Ahead the reef came near the surface, and waves broke crazily, sideways and backwards, water sucked in to fill the void over the coral. He swam there, slowly, buoyant in the salt water, waited for the water to flow over the reef and tried to swim across, made it halfway before the wave was past and he was rolling across the dark, dead coral, trying to use his hands to keep his body from touching it, bouncing off palms and shoulder and hip and knees as the wave rolled sideways over the coral, then pushed him back into deep water. His skin stung from the salt in the scrapes, and when he held his hand out of the water thin, watery lines of blood ran down his wrists.
He floated on his back in the water, and waitied for the next wave to break on the reef.

A bruise

He had to lean through the branches of the bush to kiss her goodbye. She was tight against the house, in the corner formed where the rust red clapboards came together, watching the swirl of children and men and women on the dirt-patched lawn from the shadows.
They’d met in the town, and he almost hadn’t recognized her after so many years. The faded red dress, stains like bruises, the grey, thin hair rising in beauty parlor curls. But there was something about the way she stood that caught him, her arms crossed tightly, shoulders up a little, wrinkling the brown skin at the base of her neck. He realized who when it was too late. She came over, asked where he’d been, admired the son, touched the daughter’s hair until she shyed away, bought them candies and insisted they come see her.
“You grandmother,” he’d told them in the car, bumping along the gravel road following her as it grew dark. “She wants us to visit.”
The house was strange. He remembered it, the dark, faded wood, the leaning porch, windows like dark eyes, patchy yard, overgrown roses, swing set. But he could never remember being inside - just the outside.
She was waiting, on the step, paper bag in each hand, pushing at the unlocked door. Small dark rooms illuminated only by the fading light coming in from the windows, crowded with furniture and layers of things - clothes, pictures in small frames, china, the odd half-empty glass.
Everywhere things, and he thought he could hear his father breathing heavily - up the stairs, in the next room - but couldn't be sure, thought he could even smell something of him in the air, but it may have been the dust.
She showed him photos, clothes, school papers, china, a chest with clippings, offered tea, moved too quickly, banged her hand sharply on the table. But she hardly noticed, although he could see a small white spot where the blood was driven from her skin. She asked questions, did he want tea, a drink, were the children all right outside, did he remember this picture, and he answered, yeses and nos and maybes until he felt out of breath, like the air in the house had long since been used up. He looked at a last crowded table, a last picture of people he didn t recognize in dark coats beside a big black Ford, and said he had to go.
And she followed him out, into the twilight, then slid along the wall, so he had to lean through the branches, the skin on his hand lightly torn, scratched flesh and few dots of blood, and he brushed his cheek against hers, felt the dry skin.
He and the children met his wife again in a park not far from the house, two huge, overhanging trees soaking up the light, smaller tress and brush crowding around the chearing, battered slides and swings and teeter totters and a round-about all scattered around the dirt and grass, looking tossed like forgotten toys.
The children played, quieter than usual, dragging their feet in the dirt as they twirled on the equipment, running, stopping, visible then invisible in the early night. He watched them dance with danger, smelled the cool of the evening moving in, shivered just a little, saw them swing too high, jump from the top of the slide to land on the gravel and dirt, spin too fast, his daughter's hair flying out as she hung straight out from the little merry-go-round, head dancing just above the dirt and glass and rocks, pink fingers locked around the chipped railing, no sound from her as she went faster and faster.
He sat off to the side, watching the children, telling her of the house and the things he'd seen.
Seeing only the flashes of the children's skin in the near-dark now, seeing only her eyes through the night, and then only when she looked towards him, which wasn't often.
Then he saw movement. A figure, on the path, moving towards the children, then past, crossing toward them.
"Your father, he's dead."
"Oh."
"It just happened now. It seemed very strange, and we all thought it was just a little bruise, but he's dead."
A woman brought the news, not one he recognized, a friend of his mother's probably, a little younger, but with the same kind of clothes - plain, colors faded to grey, though dark this time, hands held in front of her wrapped in some kind of sweater.
"Just a small bruise, almost a smudge, a thin blue line, just here," and she pointed to the soft skin just above the cheekbone and under the eye, close to the eye and the brain. "We thought he was just lying down, then we saw he was too still."
"It was a swing, just came up and touched him ever so lightly, and laid down the bruise, and killed him. No one was on it - it was just a swing."
He thought about the house and the small yard, could see his father lying in it, jeans too large, on his back, black leather shoes still shiny, his face still except for the thin blue bruise, less than two inches long.
The children still playing, now the boy pushing the girl higher and higher in the swing, his hands flashing, her hair stretched out in the sky, dancing with the swing as it swooped up and down in the night.