Joey Cloudy online

Title: Isaiah Jones vs. the Sea: A Sermon: On the Bow***

The African Atlantic Church of Bone and Ghost pt 1 of 3

14° 45′ 15.2″ N 32° 55′ 16.8″ W

‘Stuck in the Middle with You’

“Well, I don’t know why I came here tonight.

I’ve got the feeling that something ain’t right.

I’m so scared in case I fall off my chair.

And I’m wondering how I’ll get down the stairs.

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right.

Here I am stuck in the middle with you.”

— Stealers Wheel

On March 1, 2022, I found myself in the closest thing you could get to an upscale dive bar on the southwestern side of the 5-mile-wide by 10-mile-long island of Barbados. If he had bothered to look at the sign before he came inside, he would have known the name of the establishment: “The Careenage Rum Stop!”

To Isaiah, it was just another bar on another Caribbean island, filled with human driftwood, lost souls, and lonely drunkards spinning toward oblivion.

There he was, lost again swirling through the journey, after drifting too close to the great maws of the ever spiraling gyre.

An aged hand reached out and gently touched the cover of a deeply tanned leather-bound novel—the first he had ever written, quite by accident, of course.

As he opened the book and began to read, he found a novel cobbled together from a collection of letters he had typed on his antique crimson Olivetti Valentino typewriter while at sea, along with those sent to him during his voyage from America to Africa. In those days, most of his correspondence was directed to his parents, Helena and Kennedy Jones, while some were written to his best friend and future wife, Aeon Gabriella Zavala.

The book included reproductions of the NOAA maps his family had kept, marking his daily progress and recording the coordinates he sent each evening and each morning in his daily text messages. It featured reproductions of the watercolor drawings he had made of the people he met in port cities around the world: seabirds, dolphins, orcas, cloud formations over the sea, and the ports, towns, and villages he visited. His boat—a Monarch Ti-44 ft Solent-rigged sloop, the SS Exodus—was one of a handful of sailboats with a marine-grade titanium hull.

There were even reproductions of the sketches of his dog, Starbuck, napping on the bowsprit. He loved capturing those moments with quick plein air paintings and pen-and-ink drawings whenever time allowed. Had it really been one hundred years—an entire century—since he set sail from the port of Galveston after spending that last night with Aeon? He had initially planned to leave on New Year’s Day, but Aeon had other plans.

So much had happened in the last few months since he first cast off and set sail from the port of Galveston in January: the out-of-control celebration of the shakedown run with Mara and Beatrix when he arrived in Key West; the meeting with the albino Dead Eye Polly after returning his lost soldier to him in Cuba; the night with Naomi; waking up on a different beach, hotel room, or tin shack on a jungle hillside with open sewage running parallel to a road that was little more than the compacted earth from centuries of human foot traffic.

Even in the palm tree shaded cement blockhouse ghettos of the Caribbean Commonwealths, many islands, he found his people living their humble lives quietly on the multitude of tiny tropical islands. When he awoke in the mornings in beautiful strangers’ arms, he noticed as he made his way back to the harbor the sameness of their black lives on the islands—it was just the same as back home or in any village in Africa. Always he saw the ebon-hued old women in brightly colored scarves sitting on overturned plastic crates, braiding their grandchildren’s hair.

Their burnt umber skin was wrinkled with age. They sat on the stoops just outside their brightly colored corrugated steel shacks. They all sat with their muscular thighs spread wide beneath the voluminous fabrics of their long cotton skirts, while a skinny little brown boy or girl sat on the ground in front of their granny, getting their hair twisted, braided, plaited, and their scalps oiled. The leftover Vaseline on her hands was rubbed onto their faces and bodies to keep the child’s deep, dark bronzed skin from becoming ashy.

They kept tea kettles nearby on tiny electric hot plates powered by the same pirated electric line that illuminated the metal huts, block, and chattel houses’ single light bulb. The old woman warmed water for coffee, and he joined the elder women whose daughters’ and granddaughters’ arms he had awakened in on the cot in the back corner of their tiny home.

“Mamma Torres’s smile shone beneath her silvered Afro, the front half covered with a teal and taxi yellow colored scarf, as Isaiah stepped out into the morning, squinting in the bright light as the old woman insisted he sit down with her just outside of the corrugated metal hut that she and her family called home. The old woman stopped him as he exited the shack this morning.

“Sit daw, leh muh do something wid yuh head, boy.” She would make a clicking sound three times with her tongue popping off the roof of her mouth as a sign of disapproval, a old world holdover like the Twi words in their Pidgin English he recognized. He sat down, as the honored elder commanded. Being an introvert, he hated most human contact; but he loved having his hair braided; it comforted him and made him feel safe, less homesick, less alone.

Momma Torres sent the grandkids in to retrieve her barstool for her to sit on as she did his hair. “Yuh in a tall drink on water, little griot. I’m Gine do got do sit pun me high seat do sih de top on yuh head while yuh sit pun de ground here,” she laughed, mussed his hair, then served him his drink in her best dish: a chipped porcelain China cup, an heirloom of a forgotten plantation, the perfect white big house relic now filled with her thick black coffee, condensed milk, and lots of sugar, along side a slice of buttered toast covered with honey squeezed from a plastic bear. Isaiah drank his coffee and ate as she took his braids down, combed out his hair, oiled his scalp, and then re-braided the lanky black boy from Texas’s hair.

The old arokin (griot of the Yoruba) laughed when she saw him sneak Starbuck a bite of his breakfast as she talked about the life she had lived on the tiny island, working in the same café where he had met her granddaughter when she was her age.

“Yuh know she de first boy she ben wid in five yehs now,” the old woman shared her story with the green-eyed American black boy. “I know me baby really cut fuh yuh because she never leh Nuh body sit as dat table back on de bar except she babies here. An she never brought Dem daddy home before he run off do California. Me sweet Mackenzie, she got a good heart” -the old woman shook her head slowly from side to side as she clicked her tongue three times -just had de bad luck wid dese island boys.” He left one of the sketches he drew of her braiding one of the grandchildren’s hair, along with a few one hundred-dollar bills tucked neatly beneath the empty, chipped teacup before he left to find the forgotten plantation houses she told him about in her stories.

It was only a mile due north, so he walked with Starbuck down the long black tar road to the 300-year-old buildings of the usual white-painted stone. The island here, like the rest of the Caribbean, was not as busy this year because of the COVID pandemic. They took no chances on the tiny island; anyone not vaccinated was turned away.

The buildings were nearly completely overgrown with vegetation from the last 2 centuries covering them. It was barely visible even when you knew where to look. There were only a few of the old stone seventeenth-century Georgian architecture buildings left standing; the majority of the old plantation land that had been fields of sugar cane was now going back to the tropical jungle. The rest of the houses on the island were the usual wood-framed, ornately steepled portable chattel houses like Mackenzie’s mother’s lime green and Chinese white striped home on the northern tip of the island.

Isaiah had met Momma Torres’ granddaughter, Makenzie Fitzgerald, at the seaside café where she worked as a cook, waitress, cashier, bartender, and occasionally even the bouncer. Makenzie was 23, dark-skinned, and had a perfect natural afro, just like her grandmother’s. The 5-foot-4-inch, slender, cocoa-colored woman let him hide in a cubby in the back of her cantina, where he could still see the patrons from his chair and tiny table for two. There he sat, clandestinely drawing and painting the people while he and Starbuck hid in the corner, nursing their drinks—his long-neck amber bottles of Banks, the local beer, and the dog’s bowl of water. Isaiah had been drunk every night since he left Cuba in mid-January; it was now March.

It hadn’t registered to him that he was changing, how he had gone from being terrified of even having too much to drink to taking whatever drug anyone handed him at a club or party without giving it a second thought.

Izzy was all smiles as he walked into the tavern the next day after exploring the island all afternoon. He was happy to see Mackenzie was at work; he was looking forward to sketching her again. As soon as she saw him, she rushed to him, then slapped his face so hard that the sound rang out like a shot. Everyone in the tavern, eating lunch or drinking at the bar, stopped to see where the noise was coming from as the tall, gangly black teen stood there, stunned as she spat in his face. Enraged, Mackenzie screamed a volatile stream of indecipherable Bajan curses at him. Her face contorted with anger and shame as she cried, trembling with rage.

“I’ma no cock-rat!” Mackenzie screamed. She threw the hundred-dollar bills he had left with Mamma Torres at him.

He stood there, shocked, his face stinging and the taste of blood pooling in his mouth, motionless for a moment before he could speak. Isaiah hugged her as he apologized.

“I’m sorry! I didn’t mean it like that. I don’t think of you like that,” he stammered. “I just left the cash for her to buy the kids some lunch or something before I took off to go explore the old plantation ruins she talked about while she braided my hair. It had nothing to do with us. I like you, because I like you,” he said as he held her face tenderly in his hands, “and because you make me laugh. I think one day your afro is going to grow taller than you,” he grinned.

Mackenzie looked up at him, her eyes red from crying. She shook her head slowly as she reached out and wiped the spittle from his cheek with a red-and-white striped dishtowel she kept tucked into the waist of her bright red apron to wipe the bar and tabletops.

“I never foop wid one on yuh sailors before,” she sobbed. “I’m not a whore!”

I don’t serve anything to the customers but food and drink. But because we in nah rich, nuff men dat come in here got propositioning muh since I was too young do even bleed! Dem got nuh shame,” Mackenzie sighed.

“Forgive muh, I don’t know wuh I was thinking. I know yuh in nah like dat, but I just got so mad wen I woke ah and Mamma Torres shawed muh dat money. Is made muh feel like yuh just used muh like dat. I in know wuh I thought. I just lost it.”

“I’m really sorry.” Izzy grinned as he picked up the wadded-up hundred-dollar bills from the floor near his feet, where she hurled them. He handed them back to her, grinning. “Let me make it up to you. You’ve been letting me hide out here and feeding me all week; how about you come over for dinner tonight and let me serve you?” He grinned, and she reached out and hugged him.

“I’m an idiot, okay? But yuh shoulda known better than do do such a ting. Wuh do yuh think I would think?” she asked.

“I didn’t think. I’m black; I could never see you like that. You are a real person. I told you I’m just a nerd that sails; I go to the barbershop in the hood just like everybody else. Just because I got a high IQ don’t mean I stopped being black. I was raised to respect black women above all others by my white mother and my black father. My momma would get a belt to my backside if I ever talked to any woman that way,” he confessed.

“Yuh so smart sometimes yuh’re stupid.” Mackenzie sighed, relieved he wasn’t a complete piece of shit like all the rest she met here.

They both laughed. She kissed him agian.

“I duh sih yuh after work.” She looked up at his face. “You know, sometimes I think yuh like do just do things to mess wid muh. I forget yuh in autistic most on de time. Intellectually, yuh may be some sort on a prodigy,” she grinned, “but emotionally, yuh in a fucking moron.”

“I know that too,” he concurred. “I gotta admit I do love the way you cuss,” he drawled, exaggerating his Texas twang. “It gets me all riled up every time; I don’t know why, but it does. I pinch you on the ass whenever you walk by just to hear a bit of it,” he grinned mischievously.

“Ya cheeky bastard,” she looked into his eyes filled with laughter as she hugged him and pinched him on his rear end.

He and Starbuck spent the rest of the afternoon belly-up to the bar drinking until it was time to close up. He didn’t feel out of control. He got up every day before sunrise, walked the dog, and worked every day on his dissertation.

After the tavern closed, Izzy and Starbuck waited outside until Mackenzie finished locking up for the night. He bored her as he talked excitedly about the ruins he explored after talking to Momma Torres.

“I got do go home do change out on me work clothes.” As she tried to leave, he held her hand.

“No, come with me to the marina. I have clothes there that will fit, and I can start dinner while you shower.” He let her hand fall free of his grip as he tilted his head to the left almost reptile-like as he waited for her response.

“All week you have been letting me hide out at your place, feeding me while I hid in the back of the tavern,” he said, suddenly serious. “It’s my turn to do something nice for you. Did you know the shower on the boat never, ever, ever runs out of hot water?” He grinned, enticing her, “It’s heated by being filtered through a heater core, and the batteries are solar recharged. Doesn’t that sound irresistible? A nice hour-long steaming hot shower.”

“Yuh in a devil.” Mackenzie laughed.

“And when you get out of the shower, all scrubbed clean, you will sit down to a gourmet meal on a cute little boat and dine under the stars with the nerdiest boy in school.” She was walking towards the marina the moment he said Hot shower. He pinched her bottom as they headed to the Exodus.

“Why do yuh got women’s clothes pun yuh boat?” Mackenzie asked as they held hands, walking behind Starbuck, who seemed to know where they were going as she trotted confidently ahead down the dark road several yards in front of the couple. “Last summer, my best friend Aeon and her girlfriend Penny lived with me on the Exodus, helping to get ready for the shakedown run. You and my girlfriend are about the same size.” He observed, leaning back to glance at her posterior as they walked. Mackenzie slapped his backside as they strolled.

“Yuh in so bad fuh muh. Yuh in Gine do sail away farm here soon an never think about muh again. Is’s nah fair fuh muh do bi de my one having dese kind on feelings. I hate dat yuh got muh feeling like dis about yuh. I in even know if dis it real or if is’s just de sex.”

“It can be both,” he retorted. “I feel the same way about you, and the sex is great.

Yuh’re de first man do ever Gih muh en orgasm wid yuh mout,” she confessed, embarrassed. “I came so hard so mash times I got scared I was Gine do actually die.”

“I heard that there were places where the guys didn’t go down on women, but I never gave it much thought. Honestly, Izzy shrugged, I kind of thought it was bullshit; it sounded so ridiculous. My brain doesn’t comprehend not doing something that’s fun to do and gives your partner pleasure.”

“I grew up around a lot of Catholic girls, and they had a ‘virginity is only what goes inside my vagina’ philosophy of sex.”

“God lord boy, Haw long got yuh ben doing dis sort on ting?” Mackenzie said in mock shock.

“Long enough to know not to talk about it on the internet. He grinned. We learned by experimenting, and we all reached puberty with triple XXX porn on our phones. We grew up with the Kamasutra in our pockets, so nothing is unknown or mysterious. We pretty much all know the mechanics and had willing partners forever, always just an app away.”

“De children—they in growing ah too fast everywhere,” she said sagely.

“Yuh in de worst on de nuff,” Mackenzie teased.

“You should meet my friends; he counseled, I’m the sweet boy compared to them.”

“If yuh de new sweet boy, I fear fuh we future generations.” She kissed him for a long time, standing in the narrow galley.

Mackenzie showered, then dressed in the white halter top and white miniskirt. She used a strip of lace ribbon to tie the front of her hair back into a curly afro bun on the back of her head. Mackenzie had to admit Izzy was right; she felt great after she got out of the shower. She wept for a moment, knowing that he would be gone in a few days. She pulled herself together; there was no point to pre-emptive misery. There would be plenty of time for regrets and sorrows later.

The two women had left everything from clothes to makeup and toiletries; it looked as if they expected to return the next day. They had left these things here last summer. Mackenzie used everything from anti-perspirant to body spray and hair conditioners. It felt good to use his girlfriend’s stuff; it was petty. She knew who his girlfriend was; she just kept pretending not to remember that she existed or what her name was. “Bitch even had great taste in shoes; fuck my life,” she loved the strappy white sandals.

Izzy stopped cooking to stare at her as she walked into the stateroom to spin slowly around the middle of the cabin, as he applauded. “I’m not going to tell you how beautiful you look tonight because I don’t want you to get a big head.”

She smiled and curtsied. “Thank yuh, sir.”

“Do you know what I do for a living?” He asked as he pulled out a seat for her at the table.

Odd now that she thought about it, with all of the chin wagging they were doing about his antics, out-of-control partying, and the decolonization 101; other than he was some sort of a math god, she had no idea what he actually did for a living.

“Math?” Mackenzie shrugged with a grin as she took her seat.

“I work as a consultant part-time for Tartarus Aerospace, an aerospace corporation that designs and manufactures next-generation hazardous environment equipment for deep-sea divers, firefighters, and astronauts. We have contracts with NASA, SpaceX, and the European Space Agency.”

“Day it Nuh ned do brag; she grinned, I was impressed wid dat big brain on yours long before we met.”

“No, this is not a brag,” he corrected. “You are the only reason anyone goes into that tavern; you do know that, right?”

“Yeah, I know dat day it a place pun every other corner pun de island doing exactly wuh I do day,” Mackenzie agreed. “Most on dem folks dat come in in okay so long as yuh kpee dem in line. I in care Haw rich yuh in; I in tek Nuh shit off on anyone.”

“I grew up in a military family; my parents are both 20-year veterans. They saved every penny they earned during those two decades and invested in a diversified portfolio. We shopped for clothes at the Goodwill and Salvation Army after they retired from the military and moved to Dallas, and started teaching at SMU. Those twenty years of savings and investing, and not going out or buying cars or stereos and coupon clipping, all got them their first million with luck and sacrifice for two decades. My sister’s death paid off a handsome settlement from the manufacturers of the yacht that overturned the night she drowned. So, before they were even 40, they had over 3 million dollars in assets.

The year after they retired from the armed forces and moved to Dallas to begin teaching, I took over their investment portfolio; my autism manifested itself as a fascination with numbers, mathematics, and counting. I will be the first to tell you I am not a people person. I suck at small talk; this is the most social I have been in my entire life in the last few months, and it is clear I may be going a bit overboard. My parents still shop at discount stores; they are not cheap; they are frugal. They spend wisely, and they had a plan to live on a catamaran, and now they do. But make no mistake, I knew growing up so close to the rich in our area that we were not them; we were worker bees.”

“Almost all of the money I have now, I have earned in the last year since my parents signed the emancipation papers. I earn an annual salary of $225,000, which includes an additional $25,000 negotiated by my parents. Initially, I was offered $200,000 per year, but after negotiations, it was increased by $25,000. In addition to this annual salary, I receive a signing bonus of $150,000, which was also negotiated up from an initial offer of $100,000. So, this first year, including the signing bonus, I earn a total of $375,000 just from that one company working part-time.

All of that money is sitting in the bank because everything I do on this expedition is paid for by my grant sponsors. The book I am writing about this for school is about to be picked up by Knopf (Alfred A. Knopf) – An imprint of Penguin Random House. They are negotiating a multi-million dollar deal for the rights to publish it and the novelization of the expedition.”

“Is still sounds like yuh in bragging from here,” she grinned.

He opened the bottle of sparkling wine and filled her glass as he continued. “I have worked on my parents’ stock portfolio, which was respectable for two US military veterans by any standard. They had earned their first million by the time I was 6, but that is when I took over, and now they are worth tens of millions, maybe 100 by now. I just wrote the software that manages their investments for them.”

“That is a long way to say that my family has only recently, in these last few months, acquired this kind of wealth. I do not think I will ever have to worry about money. Even if I lose it all, I will win a Nobel in the next decade, and that’s another 20 million plus endorsements if I get desperate for cash,” he grinned.

“This is for you. It’s from one of my side hustles,” Izzy grinned. “Don’t worry; it is not drug money, but I did not declare it when I got here, and the person who paid me is not going to report it.” He reached out, took her hands in his, and looked into her eyes as he spoke.

“I want you to work for me, which is the same as working for yourself. I bought a chattel house and a piece of land for you to open your own place. You get to keep what the place earns for yourself instead of making some asshole rich. The customers will go wherever you go on this island.”

“So yuh do do bi de asshole?” Mackenzie said, laughing. “Wait a minute, yuh’re serious!?”

Izzy slid the envelope filled with cash across the table to Mackenzie: “My shy friend is the kind of guy who gives you this as a bonus, or as he says, a stipend for a job well done.” She needed another drink. He didn’t want to think about Cuba again tonight. He focused on Mackenzie; she looked as if she had just stepped out of the 1970s soul train line.

“Yes, I am serious; you will have the contracts emailed to you by morning.”

“The man I worked for in Cuba told me something about his philosophy of economics. He is a very wealthy man, but he refuses to hoard his wealth. He invests in the local community rather than letting most of it gather interest in a bank. He creates jobs for his people, and it makes complete sense. The market going up is meaningless if the people are not the ones moving the economy with commerce rather than bean counters with interest.”

“Yuh know dat it de most logical ting i got ever heard anyone seh about Haw things work,” she said with a wry smile. “You are full of surprises tonight, Mister Jones. I think I may be in shock right now, Izzy. What do you have stronger than champagne? So this is not a way to launder money or have anything to do with any crime? I just work and get to run the business same as before, but now I keep the profits for myself? I cannot accept your money, Izzy,” Mackenzie said resolutely.

“I never thought you were a whore; this is a good investment, and yes, I like you too,” he tried to explain.

“I am only seven years older than you, but everyone who lives in these islands knows there is only one way to get that sort of cash. You want me to go into business with you, and you don’t trust me enough to tell me the name of this cartel boss you do business with,” she sighed. “No, I cannot work like that; you think not knowing his name is going to protect me somehow. I’m not some dumb little island pussy you can just rain money on and I lose IQ points. No, either you trust me or we go our separate ways now.”

Izzy chuckled. “I see your point; of course, you can never utter this name again after this. He does not exist. I am doing a favor for the Albino.”

Mackenzie began to giggle, snort, and chortle as she tried but failed to suppress her laughter. “The Albino,” she said between guffaws, “he is not real, that is just a legend we tell bad kids to scare them, the one-eyed albino and the cannibal-witch lover, his mother.”

“Well, he is quite real, and Ceecee is his maternal aunt; they never were sexually involved; he is a pederast,” Izzy corrected. “I spent the night at the chateau overlooking the harbor when he gave me that economic lesson while I beat him at chess.” Mackenzie looked on and gasped as she realized he was not lying. “You are not joking?! No, my jokes are obvious dad jokes. What purpose would be served by my lying to you?”

“I hear this mahn name me whole life thinking it was made up, and you tell me it’s true,” she exclaimed. “You need to explain who the boss of bosses is, your friend. You are not a bad boy; how did you get mixed up with the devil?”

“I found one of his soldiers adrift and wounded. I took her back to him after I bandaged her bullet wound instead of turning her into the police in the Bahamas.”

“You were mixed up in that boat fire!” Mackenzie shouted. “How pretty is she?”

“She is not as pretty as you,” he grinned. “Naomi didn’t kill those men, but one of them was the only son of Dead Eye Polly.”

“Please do not say his name,” she warned; he is like the Candyman.

“So, now that I have told you the one thing I was never to tell anyone, do you trust me? My business with him concerns his legal businesses and investments. He is a monster, but he is also very charming and intelligent. Sort of an old-fashioned Southern gentleman air about the man. He reads great literature, loves the opera, loves to sail, and is very philosophical. As long as you are not involved in illegal activities, you will never know that he exists. He only collects from other mobs.”

“Oh my god,” she exclaimed, “You are in a bromance with him!”

“I just want you to understand that you will not be in any danger.”

“You are obviously insane,” Mackenzie grinned, “but yes, I will work with you.”

“Here, this is my credit card; there is nearly 400k in there. Use that to do everything you need to do to get your business set up, and then just hang onto it for me until you see me on my return voyage. I’ll send you a copy of my itinerary.”

“So, yeah, that is how business works. The bar has been fully stocked at some point this week. There have been so many people in and out of here, they filled up my liquor cabinet; you gotta love boat people. The drunken SOBs know how to live life. The never-show-up-at-a-boat empty-handed rule has kept the liquor cabinet full since Key West. I keep meeting new people, and they keep bringing booze to my boat.”

“What do you get out of all of this?” she asked, eyeing the teen suspiciously.

“I get to see the woman who let me hide out in the back of her café while everyone has gone crazy over an internet fad just because I talked about the state of black America, and now it’s riding the algorithm monster. I don’t care about that stuff; you run this place like it’s an art. I come from nothing; I’m still the same little kid that loves to make stuff go fast with magnets. I never changed. The world around me just got weird.

I’m 16 and a half, and I’ve been living on my own pretty much since I started college when I was 13; I finished in two years. All I do is math in my head; it’s therapeutic, meditative, almost religious for me. I never said I was an atheist; I said I don’t believe in your specific God, not the idea of an intelligence so vastly superior to ours that it possesses technology and has evolved to be as human as we are to insects. The universe is vast; that is something I can never know, and neither can anyone else, so stick to the science. “But what do ya want, boy?” All I want for my investment is a salary as vice president of your company, one US Dollar annually,” Izzy replied with a big goofy kid grin. “That will be my pay each year from our tavern. Does that sound fair to you?”

“You certainly believe in paying it forward,” she said. “I know that you are an atheist, but I want you to know that what you are doing is God’s work.” They finished dinner, and he led her to the captain’s cabin. “I saw this in a movie once; I think we should have sex on a pile of money tonight.”

“The money in the envelope?” she giggled.

“No, your money in that footlocker.” He lifted the lid; it looked like it was all 100s half filling the footlocker. By his estimate, it was about 5 million dollars in there. The envelope is what he called a stipend for my troubles; this is the actual payment for doing the job. You know how tax havens work; you take that case to the bank in the morning, no questions asked here.”

Mackenzie stared at the footlocker’s contents in disbelief. “Are you sure you are not in the CIA or something? Because even for crazy-rich people’s shit, this is getting weird. You have to be smuggling dope to make this kind of money.”

“He is an investor, a very private man. I don’t think he’s left Cuba in decades now.”

“Think about it: even if you are rich, how often are you going to have 5 million in cash just lying around?” he smiled at her mischievously. “The way I see it, this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Even if it’s not on your bucket list, when you get a chance like this…”

“I think you’re right; a night like this demands more than the clinking of champagne glasses and firm handshakes to seal a deal such as this… custom demands that we spread all of that cash out all over the bed and make a real mess of things. It’s like making snow angels or leaving your name in the wet cement for once in your life.”

“Exactly, the software will manage your investments for you, the same as it does for my family,” Izzy grinned. “The name of the app is MOTHER. Think of her as your virtual personal assistant from now on. I have a friend with a degree in contract law if you feel like you need to talk to an attorney.”

“No, I trust you, I do not need an attorney,” she grinned. “I need another drink. You get busy spreading out all of that filthy money, and I will make us something to drink. Izzy, I don’t know what kind of a girl you think I am, but before you cum here, I was not the girl you go out drinking all night and carrying on the way we have been doing all week. I’m dah boring girl who go to church on the holidays and occasionally on a Sunday. I got 2 kids…”

“Tracy and Stacy. I met them at Momma Torres’s. They both have your eyes,” he smiled. “Trust me; let MOTHER handle your investments, and you and your family will be fine.”

“Are all mathematicians so cavalier with their money as you?” Mackenzie asked sarcastically.

“There is a chance I will die out there doing this solo sail,” Izzy looked her in the eyes as he spoke. “No matter how well the ship is made and how good your skills are as a sailor, there is a chance I will end up on the bottom of the Atlantic with the ancestors. What good is that money to me when I am dead? I’m alive; I’m doing some good with it by giving it to you.”

“I know you will do good work in the community; that’s a start. Taking care of your own backyard is only logical. You’re a good person; if we can’t trust that and invest in that, then we are doomed as a species. My folks have their own money now; they don’t need this; my work is funded by private corporations, by the university, and the individuals who are patrons of my grant, so everything I do is considered research so long as I take notes and make a few sketches.”

“Enough talk now; I’m going to give you something to write about,” she said, lying back, pulling his head down between her thighs. “I want to see how filthy we can get this dirty money.”

The next morning, they explored the sites of former plantations, visited the oldest African graves on the island, where the old woman said they would be, unmarked behind the remnants of a foundation and remains of coral plastered walls of the abandoned sugarcane factory and abandoned slave quarters. Using notes from centuries-old captain’s logs to find slave ship ports of call, where the old slave markets had once been the main feature of the location.

They talked with people related to the various indigenous tribes shipped to the islands as slaves by the Spaniards, French, Portuguese, Dutch, and English. He made notes on how the languages of each island evolved differently over the centuries—the great genetic variety of the peoples from dark to light skin, from skinny to broad noses, thin to full lips, straight to kinky hair—all on islands only a few miles long in many cases.

The isolation of the islands, even when only a few miles apart, was enough to allow radically different variations of people’s languages and cultures to evolve. Yet, the one thing they all had in common was that they were almost all descendants of someone brought to the islands in chains after being kidnapped in their own land. He wrote his log entries and drew the areas of interest for his research on this subject.

But he was also drawing a lot of different people, half-nude and fully naked, in flagrante delicto. It was all there in his journals, as well as his sketchbooks, which began to fill with more sketches in cantinas and taverns. Pictures of hotel rooms littered with empty wine bottles, rum and coke cans bent with punctures, scorched after being used to smoke dope of every kind. Clothes were strewn about carelessly, while sleeping naked bodies snored softly like kittens in the morning light.

The morning of March 1, he woke up between the skinny blonde boy whose suite it was, Sascha, and Mackenzie, who slept with her head resting on his belly. He could feel the warmth of her breath on his cock, the morning erection resting lightly beneath her lips while Sascha played with his cornrows—gently nibbling on his right earlobe before he leaned over Izzy’s face to kiss him, then wrinkled his nose.

“You have puppy breath this morning.” He reached over to the end table and handed Isaiah a glass half-filled with rum punch. Isaiah took a drink, then looked around the room, yawning as he regained consciousness. It was almost sunrise. Sascha left and returned a moment later with a new toothbrush in a plastic cup and a bottle of water. He brushed his teeth, then grabbed the tall, skinny platinum blonde boy from behind.

Makenzie tossed a pillow at the two from her futon in the suite’s corner.

“Watch yuh rashole!” she shouted. “Shut ah, I got de worst hangover, yuh noisy cunts.”

“We didn’t say anything,” Sascha said as he threw the pillow back at the curly-haired, brown-eyed girl. Starbuck looked up from her spot near the futon behind Makenzie, then lay back down, seeing no one was leaving yet.

“You leaving so soon?” Sascha asked.

Isaiah smiled. “After breakfast, I have a lot of work to do before I take off this afternoon at high tide, so while you call room service, I am going to walk Starbuck.”

Sascha kissed him again before he headed back into the master bedroom filled with nude girls and boys from the last party to retrieve his phone. Izzy stood naked, still stretching and yawning, his dark black skin in high contrast to the ivory drapes he stood in front of, covering the bay window.

Standing there naked, illuminated by the shaft of incandescent light streaming in from the kitchen, he felt clear-headed; for the first time in months, he didn’t have to drag himself out of bed still half drunk and drugged out. He had a lot of work to do before he set sail this afternoon. He had just begun to look around the room for his clothes when a bundle of clothing came flying at his head out of the shadows. It was Makenzie again, tossing his clothes and shoes to him.

“A heads up would be nice,” he grinned. He didn’t have to see her impish face to know she was smiling. God, he really wanted to fuck her again the way he had been every morning for the last week. It could wait until he returned; he hurriedly dressed and walked over to where Makenzie lay nude on her belly, slapping her perfectly shaped, fat brown ass before he stepped out of the bungalow’s front door onto the beach. She cursed at him in her Bajan-accented Creole English; he adored the way they used the same words, but they had completely different meanings here. They even still had a few words of Twi.

This was one of the strange things about the islands: the foreigners owned all of the beachfront and seaside property since the colonial sugar cane plantation times, while the locals were forced to live in the interior, with few, if any, services or amenities you take for granted in the States or even at the hotels here.

Yesterday, over a breakfast of French toast, thick slices of canned ham, and poached eggs, Makenzie confessed that she had never had a hot shower or hot running water in her life before the one she took on his ship. This, he later learned, was not unusual for someone growing up poor on tropical islands. They used hand-pumped wells to fill buckets to get their water most of the time. You were lucky if you had running water at all, let alone hot running water.

They reminded him of his mother’s family in Kentucky when they visited his maternal great-grandmother for Christmas when he was seven. They were the descendants of Asa Harmon McCoy, living in the hills and having wells on their property. They had their own generators for power, but his other cousins from further up in the hills, who were there, lived in trailers with busted toilets, so they used a porta-potty they stole from a construction site.

They were all nice to him; most had the same green eyes as Isaiah. His white cousins confessed that he and his father, Kennedy, were the first black people they had ever seen in real life.

He walked along the beach as the dog trotted ahead, the sun still a few minutes away from rising and warming the eastern edge of the sky. He sat down in the sand, waiting for the sky to do something amazing. It never disappointed. Sascha reminded him of Aeon; he was a social butterfly, exceptionally good at reading people.

He took one look at Izzy at the hotel bar last night, turned his schtick off, put his phone away, and took him to his bungalow down the beach. His entourage followed along behind them, only quieting down after he shushed them and gave them the evil eye. He knew who Isaiah was on sight, but it was obvious he was burning out and needed to take the night off.

He was so deep in thought as they approached him, sitting at the bar drinking bourbon straight up. Sascha saw that he was about to spiral. Whatever was going on in his head didn’t matter; he just saw someone in trouble who needed help, not someone to keep drinking and partying with him until he imploded.

Sascha put his hand on Isaiah’s wrist gently as he tried to take another drink.

“I have what you need at my place. Come.”

Isaiah got up as if he were a zombie and walked out of the bar with the group of strangers.

His place was nice despite the mess—the remnants of last night or this afternoon’s party still everywhere. He called and ordered pizza. When he returned from the kitchen, he handed Izzy a bottle of berry smoothie.

“Thank you. You know I been sitting here thinking I’ve been drunk for three weeks now. I’m fucking this up.” His eyes filled with tears. Sascha sat with his arm around him.

“You are just walking through the valley of darkness. I’ve been there before; it’s easy to lose your way.” Sascha grinned. “But nah, if you were fucking this up, you would not be here right now thinking you are fucking this up. That is just how it works, man. Ya see, it is just like being crazy. If you are actually crazy, you never think you are crazy. But the real brain buster is that if you only think you might be crazy, then you are perfectly sane.” Izzy looked into the blue eyes of the stranger.

“Who are you?”

“I am Sascha. You are a guest in my home; you are amongst friends now. You are going to be fine. Food is on the way, and I sent everyone who was awake home. Now, get undressed; I am going to give you a bath. I have these amazing bath salts that will help while you soak in the bubbles. I promise, you will feel reborn afterward; it is almost magical. Come, phew,” he grinned, “I swear you are sweating alcohol out of every pore of your body. I could smell the reek of the booze from across the bar.”

The tub was huge, wide, and curved up at the ends. The polished brass faucets were in the center rather than at the end. It looked as if it were a great bird carved out of Thalo-green marble with golden veins. Sascha undressed him as he stood, drunkenly staring at the tub filled with bubbles. The smell was like a garden in the spring, with the soft scent of fresh flowers, sunlight, and the cool shade of an oak tree.

“Whoa, climb in, relax, listen to some music while we wait for our food.” He returned from the medicine cabinet with a flat black leather case. “Now I need you to relax,” he said as he unzipped the bag holding the syringe. “I am going to give you an injection; it will instantly sober you up and flush all of the party out of your body, but it is pretty intense. I promise this is not a drug, but it is very hard to come by and probably illegal. They extract it from the adrenal glands of fresh corpses. Do not ask how I get it; let us just say I know a guy that knows a guy. It is the best thing invented since heroin.”

Izzy gave the stranger wearing the scarlet sarong and gold mesh tank his arm as he stared at Sascha’s platinum blonde haircut, cut short and spiky. He smiled as he injected the substance into Izzy’s left arm.

“The only side effects,” he grinned, “are extreme focus, divine clarity, and the most unimaginably intense sexual arousal.”

The soundtrack to Pulp Fiction, specifically “Stuck in the Middle with You,” began to play as Sascha stripped and joined him in the tub.

“Now we are going to Netflix and chill, watching a classic old movie because that is what people do.”

Starbuck sat down next to the tub, and the flat-screen on the far wall of the bathroom displayed the start of the movie, which was the original black and white Romero film, Night of the Living Dead.

“I’ve never seen this movie before,” Izzy said as the film began.

Sascha smiled. “I promise you this is an educational film.”

As he approached Puerto Rico, the first strangers began to come to the docks to meet him. As he pulled into port, there were just a handful of curious locals and three reporters—two were bloggers, but Bianca was the most widely read, well-known reporter in Puerto Rico.

As he made his way through the Bahamas and the Caribbean islands, more people gathered at the docks each time he moored the ship. Even when there were no crowds when he arrived, large numbers of people were at the pier by the time he returned to the boat a few hours later with provisions. Most just smiled and waved, as many recorded his return to his vessel with their phone cameras.

None of this made any sense to him; he was just a scientist who loved to sail and happened to be black. Big deal, he thought. This was a scientific expedition to retrace the route of the slave ships from Galveston to Ghana. It was important to document these sorts of journeys, so he chose to use pen and paper to document his expedition, with Galveston being the place where the last people had heard that the slaves were freed years earlier.

He took notes in the margins as he sketched and painted anything that caught his eyes’ attention: an overbearing seagull, a dozen barefoot brown boys playing football shirts vs. skins on a hard-packed dirt field with pairs of discarded 50-gallon steel barrels for the goals.

On the occasions when he was docked overnight, it became an unofficial tradition for him to invite a few people and a local reporter aboard for supper. He was a high-functioning autistic and an introvert by nature, but he was also coming to understand that he was viewed as an ambassador for his tribe. Most had never met an African American sailor; all the skippers of the cruisers they met were mostly white guys, sometimes Arabs or Asians, and occasionally, a white girl would sail through.

He noticed that more and more people were wearing their hair in cornrows and dressing in white muslin linen ensembles, which he favored for the informal affairs and dinner parties aboard the Exodus. His long white cornrows were still black in those days before the third great war or the two civil wars that followed, nearly destroying the newly formed AUA (African United Alliance) union. He looked down at the titanium cybernetic prosthetic grafted to his right leg just below the knee. He felt an itch where his shine used to be.

By the time he reached Barbados, the last stop on the Caribbean island-hopping before he crossed the Atlantic, the crowds had grown to hundreds of spectators hanging around the pier, hoping to get a glimpse of the guy from the Key West video. Most came to gawk at the high-functioning autistic black boy with the sailboat.

The video Mara and Beatrix posted the night they celebrated his shakedown run in Key West was still getting millions of views on YouTube; it had been two months since he left Key West. Aeon, Penny, Trenton, Adira, and Raphaël had all messaged him to let him know that their favorite NPR writer, Sara Vowel, was flying in to interview them for an article about their old punk CD, Death Pixel. After the article was published, the album of 17 songs was put on Amazon and Spotify for sale, and so many people tried to get it that the servers crashed. It was a punk album that was being highly praised by music critics for its intellectual depth and emotional range; it was a punk album with a blues song and a blank verse poem set to bebop jazz.

Homecoming: After the grueling six weeks fighting the current and the prevailing winds, he spent the last month and two weeks tacking across the Atlantic heading east toward the west coast of the African continent. He enjoyed the solitude; the long days and nights alone at sea suited his disposition. Without the distractions of the outside world, he found it easier to think, with no other concerns pressing than the routine of sailing the ship. He dried out while crossing, having no booze on the ship or illegal drugs; his head was as straight as could be expected.

It was in the depths of night, in the darkness amid the great blue nothing that he came to understand the terror of the Middle Passage in all its horror—in a way he could not grasp before. After weeks at sea, he could feel the lost souls crying out to him from their unmarked tombs beneath the azure waters.

He let the weight of their agony rest on him in a way that he had always avoided. He moved from merely encountering history academically to feeling the soul of the story. Our story is unique; there is no ancestor of ours welcomed at Ellis Island. The Statue of Liberty’s lie is evident on her face, whitewashed after the French sculptor used his African lover as the model for the original design of the monument.

Where are we now? In the middle of the great nothing, shackled by fear and propaganda from your nearly transparent master. There are no Hebrews in Egypt attempting to parley with Pharaoh’s descendants about their civil rights.

He had been distracted by all of the attention from the press, and the people dressing in all white and wearing their hair in cornrows seemed more than a little odd. The Atlantic crossing would take nearly twice as long, having to tack the entire passage and beat into the wind. The extra distance of tacking made Isaiah and Starbuck both glad to finally see land as they approached the small cluster of islands, Cape Verde, about 100 miles off the coast of Senegal.

The crowds that gathered when he made landfall in Cape Verde were modest compared to the masses that congregated in the Caribbean. But that was a trick of the island’s location, being 100 miles west of the mainland. He stayed overnight, then rose early to gather provisions, enjoying the day with the dog off the boat while Starbuck stretched her legs, running along the edge of the surf on the quiet island beach.

About the author

JD Cloudy’s poetry has disappeared in the literary journals: Fatfizz, Mad Swirl, Texas Beat Anthology, Danse Macabre, Du Jour, and Death List Five. He has won no literary awards, entered no slam competitions, and never completed college. He lives to write in Dallas, TX.