Quién Sabe?

I cleaned shrimp as fast as can be, piled them up in a bucket of water.  Solomon washed the dishes, singing under his breath.  He didn't say too much to anyone but me, cause we were pals, and I didn't say too much to anyone cause I could hardly speak in Spanish.  I just minded my own business, cleaned the shrimp, cut the carrots, made the garlic bread, grilled the lobster, and heated up the soup.  But as I worked in the kitchen, cleaning the shrimp a bucketful at a time, slicing through the gray meat in the water, he was there, washing dishes.  From time to time he reached over and snagged a freshly cleaned shrimp and popped it into his mouth with a grin.

Years before, Solomon came to St. Thomas in a boat at night with forty others.  Upon beaching the boat in a secluded spot, they all jumped out and scattered in the hills.  The police didn't find a single one.  All forty to this day lived happily on the island.  Solomon found a wife for two thousand dollars and became an American citizen.  It was a good deal.  He lived with his sister, who ran a beauty parlor in the Dominican and Rasta part of town.

Across the street from where Solomon lived was a little bar with a billiard table inside.  There was no music in this bar and the cash register was left unattended.  You had to be an insider to frequent this particular bar.  In the corner sat a man who could not walk or enunciate his words.  He often he spoke to himself.  He laughed and hugged himself when a player missed a shot, grinning with his eyes squinted shut.  He lacked several of his front teeth and when he grinned, hugging himself with his eyes squinted shut, he stuck his tongue through the gap in his toothless mouth and said, "Lucky!" over and over again.  He sat in the corner and watched the men play billiards.  He was an insider.

There was a Rasta man with golden teeth and his own private billiard stick who waited for his turn out on the door step, smoking a joint.

There was a Mexican man, slight of build, with lines in his face and a swagger to his step.  He was glad to meet the friend of a friend and offered to buy me a beer.  His six year old son, Louis, sat watching him play billiards.

These people were all insiders.

One Saturday afternoon, I was playing a game of billiards against Solomon and losing miserably.

"La esquina," Solomon said, calling the shot, and sank the eight ball.  I went to shake his hand, when a woman began to growl from across the room.

"I know dem boots," she said menacingly, gesturing with a crooked finger at my big black boots.  "I knoooow dem boots," she crooned.  "Dem's traceable boots.  Dem's POLICE boots!"  At that she began to shriek, speaking curses in Patois that I did not understand.  I was speechless and it did not occur to me to try to persuade her that I was not an undercover cop.  I just stood there dumbfounded as she hissed and spat.  Solomon grinned at me and knocked on his finger with his temple as Miguel showed her to the door.

At two forty-five every afternoon, Solomon stopped at my apartment and yelled for me at my window. Then the two of us moseyed down Main Street past all the jewelry shops and cruise ship tourists and then past the bakery and then the primary school building spilling out small children dressed in blue and laughing.  Solomon always recognized a lot of people sitting in their cars with the windows down diving slowly by in the traffic jam, or standing on a street corner or walking arm in arm. He shouted his greetings as he passed.  They shouted to him and waved.  As he walked, he touched the walls of buildings, trailing his fingers against the rebounding texture of the bricks and of the light poles and trees and fences.  He stopped to pick up sticks and bits of trash and he tossed them for a time until he noticed something new.  Somberly, he paused to look at women from behind as they walked by and honored them with whispered words of praise.

As we walked to work at two forty-five every afternoon, Solomon and I asked one another many questions.  Thoughts occurred to Solomon suddenly and he quickly turned his head, grabbed my elbow and he said, "Did you play billiards yesterday?" or "Are there really two hundred distinct languages in the country of Cameroon?" or "How do you say 'fork' in English?" or really anything that came to mind.  He spoke machine gun Spanish, biting off the 'Ss.'  He loved to talk about basketball and baseball.  He knew the names and stats of all the teams.  But he often got confused about which was the city and which was the state.  Sometimes Solomon told me that he did not want me to leave the island.

I asked many questions about the Spanish language, which is the language that we spoke together because Solomon could not speak English or hardly.  But he spoke slowly and he pantomimed what he said expressively to help me understand with greater ease.

"What is it called, that animal, like a bird with hair?" I asked.

"The birds do not have hair.  They have feathers."

"Yes, but there is an animal like a rat that flies in the air."

"Oh!  A bat."

"A bat?"

"Yes, that animal that smokes," Solomon said matter-of-factly.

That confused me.  I said, "That smokes?  Like a dragon?"

"No, if you give a bat a cigarette, it will smoke," Solomon laughed.

"That small animal like a bird with hair that flies about at night?"

"Yes, it smokes."

"It smokes?"

"Yes."

"What barbarism."

These were the sorts of conversations Solomon and I had.  Every day as Solomon walked to work at two forty-five he stopped by my apartment and yelled out my name at the window.  And then I ran downstairs and the two of us slowly made our way down through the town and up that long steep hill to A Room With A View.

One afternoon I was not at home at two forty-five.  So when Solomon saw me at work, he said, "Where were you?  I went to you house and called 'Nate!  Nate!' but you were not there."

"No, I was not there.  I thought you were at the gym."

"I was playing billiards."

And then, after a long day of work, we sat outside.  I smoked a cigarette and drank a Presidente, Solomon urinating in a bush, staring at the sky, the Caribbean stars above, thousands of stars, thousands of stars.  "I wish for you not to go away," Solomon said. 

"What?"

So he repeated it in belabored English.  "St. Thomas is a good place.  It is small, but good."

"I like St. Thomas very much."

"Yes!" Solomon grabbed my elbow excitedly.  "And in May we can get a better job!  I know the one.  I used to work for Governor Schneider, cleaning the streets for ten dollars an hour.  Every day at seven thirty in the morning to four o'clock in the afternoon.  We will have the afternoons off to go to the beach or play billiards and also weekends!"

"Really?" said I, but I knew that I was leaving.  I always knew that I was leaving.

"Yes!"

"That sounds great."  Then:  "Vamos a ver."

"Quizás."

"Quién sabe?"

"Nadie sabe."

"Es posible."

"Tal vez."

We thought that talking like a thesaurus was funny.  It was a script that we went through and expanded upon every couple of days.