He stood there, silent; long, thin hand on long, thin hip, between long, thin leg and long, thin belly. His hair had molded itself into some sort of bush Mohawk. Perhaps the Bri-Bri, in their wooden shacks built snug against the jungle hills above the town, this town wedged carelessly between jungle and sea. Perhaps they wore their hair so. At any rate the hair seemed shaped to ward off evil spirits, which were, no doubt, more visible to him. I saw only madness, and something in the eye, it seemed, a pain, or human empathy, an open window, unguarded, of a soul in hiding. Traipsing up and down the dusty town square, sometimes with machete, more often carrying a long, thin walking stick that bowed as he leaned against it. At night, in the town square, resting dolefully at the windows and open doors, as close as he was allowed, later, when most tourists found their beds, he would slide in the back with a few others and dance in the late evening darkness. At that late hour, in that brightly painted wooden room, in that town so seemingly “beyond”, there was nothing to do but to move, and nothing, indeed, to stop you.

Like from a trance, the night would emerge once more into day, and whenever I fell out of bed to return there, under beating sun of noon, or later, he would be there, somewhere along the road, scuffling off to fish, or rather sit beneath the trees, upon the dead reefs, gazing out at the sea in crack-eyed contentment; or if not, perhaps in hunger, longing for a mother long since gone, a past that never was, and some forgotten future lost to time.