Wisdom

TWENTY-ONE DAYS Severin roared up out of the sea, his hair a thatched mass of bleached ringlets, his skin broiling as salt met parched flesh. Seagulls screamed overhead, drowning out the voice ripped raw from decades of nicotine and rum. Stretching, reaching desperately toward some lost pocket of lung, he found himself bending double to retch out the last vestiges of meaning in his life, knowing now with absolute certainty that the only thing left to face was his death. Turning his back to the noon, his craggy face, furrowed with drink and sun and salty wind, looked like that of a long-forgotten hermit. Purple bags of swollen flesh made it impossible to guess the color of his eyes, and his crud-thickened hair, bleached by repeated bathings in the salty sea, had lost any semblance of its natural texture and color. "Ah, shit," he muttered. "Shit, shit shit shit." His puckered, lardy brown flesh exuded the ripe undertone of caramel-sweetened alcohol, and when he tried to wade through the surf a knifing pain tore more deeply than ever before into his aching bowels. It would have been difficult for anyone to believe that he was barely thirty-five. That he had once been young, and handsome, and considered intelligent. Even brilliant. Now it seemed clear that his doctor was right. He was going to die. Far up on a powdery dune lay Tina, watching lazily from beneath a wind-bowed palm tree. Her onyx eyes reflected nothing of the equatorial sun; her left hand brought an overripe star fruit to her unsmiling lips. Shifting heavily, she pressed her hips more deeply into the sand and exhaled in slow impatience. Her gaze fell to her feet, once fine and rosy despite a childhood spent in barefoot abandon, but now swollen white with her own alcoholic dissipation. "Come, Seven!" she called out, her voice slicing through the battering surf. Severin turned at her bidding, even as his thoughts swept seaward with the undertow. His eyes searched the horizon, momentarily blinded by the searing meridian light, then finally settled on the figure swathed in a billowing robe. "Seven," she shrilled, "come now!" He took a step forward and felt the wet sand suck eagerly at his soles as the waves again claimed his thighs. Tina began chanting in a soft voice; the atonal notes wafted toward Severin between the swells of the surf. Sweet John him cook the one-legged turkey, John him eat the one-legged turkey, Massa ask why the one-legged turkey, John say so it be . . . "Hey, you!" he rasped. "You, Tina you hear me?" Her chanting voice swelled louder: John him say the one-legged turkey He born that way the one-legged turkey Massa say no one-legged turkey, but "Tina, Tina! You! Singing up there! Come help me, woman!" She ignored him, her voice lilting defiantly above the sting of the surf. "I calling you, Theresa!" he shouted, using the baptism name that few on the island knew and no one had called her since her father, witnessing a fist-fight she'd had with her brother Carlson, had affectionately begun calling her his "Tiny Tiger." Instantly she had become "Tina," and no one had since dared to use her Christian name. The song stopped abruptly. He heard a long, sullen whistle as she sucked her teeth. Then her voice began again. Slowly, painfully, Severin waded out of the water. His torn jeans wedded to his hips, he pulled his hands up along the ballooning flesh of his belly and sloughed the water from his matted chest. Tina looked away in disgust. "Woman come help me get me up that hill!" Severin waited, panting heavily while Tina hoisted hNeff, Heather is the author of 'Wisdom', published 2003 under ISBN 9780345447449 and ISBN 0345447441.