From Book Untitled...

Pete has the type of physique that every woman loves and every guy deems overrated. That is if they don’t have it. Since I happened to fall into that category myself I would know. I stand three inches over six feet and prefer to refer to myself as lean rather than skinny. I try to use the blond hair and blue eyes to my advantage anyways, always sure to throw in a touch of charm to boot. I also went through a brief and ill-advised period of saying my name in that James Bond sort of way.
“Haynes. Trigger Haynes,” I would proclaim.
I think everyone was better off when that phase was over.
Standing five feet, eight inches with shaggy sandy-colored hair, a protruding nose and those stained hole-ridden clothes he wore ad nauseam all Pete really had to rely on was his chiseled features and Mr. America bulk. He was rather successful financially as a general contractor, but he would never use that to his advantage. His shy, nice-guy demeanor did the trick more often than not with the ladies, even if it was unintentional. I admired Peter. We had been friends for more years than I cared to count and he always had a self-assured confidence to the way he handled situations. He was an extremely hard worker who bordered on stubborn, but he was a loyal friend. Sometimes painfully responsible, he was always on for an adventure if I pushed the right buttons. Peter’s right buttons were the great outdoors, healthy eating, physical activity, and competition. Peter Marking could not handle being anything shy of the best, at everything. All the time. He got mad when I managed to tie my shoes faster than him.
We sat on the pier at Salt Pond Square just off Calypso Bay, which was surrounded by gently swaying palm trees. The sea air was thick.
I mused again, “Seriously Petey. What is so great about this sunset? I don’t get what all the fuss…”
The brilliant emerald surface of the calm gulf water exploded. Salt water stung my eyes as I lurched back awkwardly from where I was sitting with my legs hanging over the wide expanse of cement dock. With my feet flailing spindly over my head I heard the distinctive plopping sound of an object falling into the water four feet below.
“Those were my boaties weren’t they,” I asked referring to my boat shoes that were comfortably on my feet only moments before. I layed on my back looking up at the sky shielding my eyes from the fading July sun with one hand while still clutching my beer, unharmed in the other.
“Did you see how I heroically managed to grip my bottled amber draught?”
“Shut up,” muttered Peter.
I always liked to sensationalize things a bit. Jazz my encounters up a little. Peter, having known me since high school could always sense when I was about to embellish and if the tale didn’t involve him, was quick to put an end to it.
“You’re not some character in a book Trigger. ‘Heroically gripped my bottle of amber ale…’” he mocked.
“Draught,” I corrected.
“Whatever the hell you said. You were holding your beer. You fell backward like an idiot when that fish jumped out of the water. And now you’re still holding it. Big deal.”
I smirked. “An impossible saga of triumph against all odds!” I roared. “Pulling glory from the desperate depths of certain gloom. My beer prevails against overwhelming odds due to my sheer strength of character! Refusing…no…willing myself to capture the strife-ridden beer that the heavens tried to snatch away from my very being with a puerile attempt at thievery and discord sending a large fish torpedoing out of it’s watery denizen at our very feet! Clearly attempting to startle me into an ill-fated beer spillage of never before seen proportions.”
Peter couldn’t help but laugh.
“I thought it was heroic,” giggled Alexis.
I wore a mischievous grin as I looked at Peter. I had almost forgotten the flight attendants were still with us. “Why thank you Lex.”
Looking over the dock’s edge I saw one of my brand new deck shoes that I had bought hours earlier sinking sadly below the undulating water. I had paid three times what they were worth at a shop cleverly dubbed Captain Runagrounds on Little Palm Way, the island’s main street. The storeowner had talked me into them, as I am sure he did to all the tourists milling about the cobbled road. He also talked me into two new shirts at fifty bucks a pop. He had told me they were made of a special microfiber. Barb and Peter had looked skeptical.
“Well,” Peter pointed out, “at least you still have one of your boaties.”
When I asked the group what kind of fish it was that had jumped out of the water Peter informed me that he had no idea. He also boasted that it was easily the biggest fish he had ever seen in his life and couldn’t believe I had missed it. I had to believe him when I heard a local next to me tell a young awe-stricken child that what they had just seen was a rare treat and that that particular fish showed itself at the dock on the square but once or twice a year. Peter felt great joy rubbing in the fact that they saw it and I didn’t.
We ordered another round of beers as we watched the sun slide down quietly and out of site. The party going on around us was just getting started. Street performers of every sort scattered around the square entertained tourists with everything from fire eating and tight wire walking to juggling and dirty jokes for fifty cents. Others simply smiled behind their tiki-stands of homemade jewelry, paintings, shark teeth, and tie-dyed shirts. One fellow seemed to be having quite a go of it trying to get his pet monkey to sit and speak at his command. When he announced to the crowd that this was only his second official day as a street performer sympathetic heads nodded throughout the crowd of onlookers and more singles were thrown into his hat of money. I wondered how many times he had told people that.
Maurice continued to gently strum his old wooden guitar and hum songs about the sea to anybody who cared to listen. He had already gotten a couple of bills from Peter and I after we had met him earlier setting up his microphone stand for the impending Sunset Celebration as they called it here on the island. Maurice had a calming voice and keen ability to get the audience to join in during his songs. He appeared to be in his late fifties with an unshorn salt and peppered beard. He wore a hand-knitted cap on his head with an old T-shirt bearing the logo of a boat company from the sixties boasting it’s motto: Compromise Nothing. His brown leather sandals matched the color of his skin and from his warm smile beamed a healthiness that only comes from spending every day of your life in magnificent weather. His eyes reflected a keen demeanor and he held himself with sage ease. When Maurice started on Beyond the Sea Peter and I clinked our bottles with the ladies and we all started singing along.
Barb and Lex offered to go get us a round of frozen rum drinks from the open-aired bar behind us. More than a dozen pairs of eyes looked longingly at the two ladies ordering boat drinks in their pressed navy skirts, black pumps and pinstriped blouses.
“Isn’t this great Petey?” I had to yell for him to hear me over the growing noise around us. There were now no less than three bands playing within a ninety-foot radius of one and other. Couples and families milled about wasting money on trinkets from different carts and tables that seemed of the utmost importance at the time but would seem nothing short of ridiculous in a week when they were back in their suburban homes on the mainland. Singles were flirting merrily at The Oyster Farm bar behind us while members of a bachelorette party took incriminating pictures of the bride-to-be getting one of a hundred Life Savers that were attached to her sundress bitten off by eager young men looking to have some fun on their vacation. Gliding along in the distance was a sailboat filled to capacity with reveling vacationers. No less than half the people aboard and all of the crew and deckhands were bent over at the waist with bathing suits and shorts at half-mast facing away from the pier. It was not hard to tell which bronzed rumps were local and which pasty whites were merely on a cold-climate hiatus. Music thumped from the aft deck of the Heaven on Surf.
“You made the right decision Pete,” I said for the thousandth time.
“Easy for you to say. You quit your, er, job and dragged your unemployed butt down here to find adventure or excitement or something. I still can’t believe you sold vacuum cleaners for two years…”
“It was a marketing position. I worked with other clients too.”
The truth was that I had reached a point in my life where I was craving change. I needed something to disrupt the mundane day to day. I was in search of a new career, new surrounding -- new people. My mind brought me to the islands, a place I had never been before. I just wanted to get back to the basics. Enjoy life for what it was all about. Not worry about deadlines and appointments, but concentrate instead on dinner dates and strolls along the coast. I was a walking ad for all that seize-the-day-live-your-life propaganda. I wanted to trade in my pinstriped suit for a bathing suit and see if I could make it work.
“…The problem is that I let you convince me to come with you.” Peter was still talking. “I left a job that I liked. It took me years and countless attempts after college to find my niche. I had finally gotten business cards Trigger. It was cool to see my name printed on all those little cards.”
The convincing really wasn’t that hard. It took four days, a small pepperoni pizza and three beers at a bar on a miserably rainy night in Providence. Successfully imploring someone to move indefinitely with you to a tropical paradise when you’re looking out the window to a cold, wet, depressing gray horizon in Rhode Island isn’t all that impressive. Or challenging. Not to mention Pete had to pay for those business cards himself even if it was out of the seven thousand dollar bonus he received from the general contracting firm. He ended up spelling his own name wrong. Instead of “Peter Marking” two thousand cards had been printed that said “Meter Parking” before he frantically noticed. I helped him pack his suitcase the next day.
The girls were back with our drinks. With a cheer I kicked my other boat shoe into the gulf and watched the trail of bubbles it left as it sank. The four of us danced to steel drums and maracas as the moon’s reflection shimmered off the gentle roll of the ocean. Somewhere around three we hazily ambled into the Raintree Court just off Salt Pond Square.


With a splash I jumped out of bed and onto our icy wet pool of a floor. We had put the air-conditioning unit on high freeze when we had gone to bed. Apparently the condensation from the unit dripped enough in our sleep so that the entire hotel room rivaled an Alaskan ice-fishing hole by daybreak.
“Wake up Meter!” Days later I still couldn’t let go of his business card disaster.
“Roooo-roo-roo-ro-roooooooooo!” I imitated the roosters right outside our room. “Rise and shine ladies and gentlemen.”
I rung out the saturated comforter on the floor next to the bed Alexis and I had shared. Even in the harsh early morning daylight with no make-up and one eye glued shut with eye gunk she looked stunning.
“What time is it?”
“Almost seven Lex.” I noticed Barbara fighting Peter for her share of the covers in the other bed. “You guys had better get your acts together. Somebody find a phone book and figure out a place where we can get some breakfast. I’m hopping in the shower. If anybody other than Marking wants to join me consider yourselves cordially invited.” My skin had a gelatinous film to it. A combination of humidity, salt, and sweat. I started the shower and poked my head out the door to check on the beleaguered group.
“Today Meter,” I paused for dramatic effect. Peter was now sitting up in bed with his arm pinned below Barb’s midsection with a helpless look on his face, “we become locals.”
After showers and an unsuccessful attempt to squeegee the floor with the local phone book we had walked a half-mile past shops and markets to The Lazy Mongoose. It’s marquee touted: Great Food and Service. Sometimes. We apparently lucked out and picked one of the times where they had not just one, but both. The majority of seating was outside on plastic lawn chairs in the dirt. We sat next to a makeshift bowling alley lane that consisted of nine actual bowling pins, one makeshift empty rum-bottle pin and a coconut for a bowling ball. Barb got frustrated when the coconut repeatedly spun off course after hitting the tree root that ran across the lane. Alexis managed a spare when she used a diaper-toss to throw the coconut at the pins on her first try and toppled over the defiant few that hadn’t gone down yet with her sandal on the second attempt. She managed to accidentally squish a little gecko lizard along the way. The tire swing to the other side of us was unattended. Wild roosters roamed frantically looking for the scrapped remnants of greasy food and buttered toast.
After breakfast and a brief funeral service for Gary the gecko we said our goodbyes. The girls were in danger of missing their next flight, which ended up setting them down in St. Louis for nine hours before going to Milwaukee and Chicago after that. As we watched the two of them hurry away Peter smiled at me and confided that this move just might have been a great idea. We walked along under the soothing shade from the palm fronds on the trees. One sign we passed noted the Seven Sisters Festival kicking off in three months time. The festival was named after a small cluster of seven stars that could be seen nightly amongst the other constellations. Distracted by merchants we began hunting for a place to live.


By noon my new short-sleeve microfiber button-down was soaked through. A button had already popped off as it clung to my perspiring back. The scorching sun left Peter and I desperately searching for shade. Peter had already sweated through his T-shirt hours earlier. We were both on our eighth bottled water of the morning. Endless droplets formed on my brow and without fail made their way to my already stinging eyes. My tube of chap stick had melted into an oily liquid in my pocket.
“There’s not a single room, house, cabin or lodge vacant on this whole island Trigger. We have looked everywhere.”
“What about that one ad we read in the paper?”
“The one that said room available a.s.a.p?”
“Yeah.”
“I called an hour ago. The guy said it must have been a type-o.”
“Oh.” The heat was burning my brain.
“But he did notify me that if we find a place soon he does have a very nice broom available that he’s looking to get off his hands.”
We both laughed. With all the campsites booked through the summer our options appeared to be waning. When we checked out of the Raintree Court the bellboy had told us the only reason we got a room at all the night before was because the scheduled occupants had called and reported they would be a day late. Their flight was delayed due to foul weather in the Northwest. I guessed that us having two cute women doing most of the talking to the concierge hadn’t hurt either.
We spent the remainder of the afternoon fading in and out of consciousness under a couple of mangrove trees at a local beach called Sugar Hole. We mustered the energy to participate in three and a half games of beach volleyball after a vociferous guy with an intimidating mustache and a head too small for his pudgy body challenged us to two on two with his volley-partner-buddy. Pete and I had been calling the loud mouth Diaper Man all day under our breath on account of his unfortunate affinity to tuck the legs of his dirty white shorts inside themselves until they formed a snug fit around his upper thighs and crotch. It was unsightly.
The games were to twenty-one, win by two. Team Diaper managed to take the first game easily. For a victory dance both men stood on their hands and pedaled an imaginary upside-down bicycle. There was a gasp as one unlucky female caught site of Diaper Man flailing around with all the blood rushing to his puny head. With admittedly surprising agility Peter and I managed to win the following two games 24-22 and 22-20 respectively. When our lead in the fourth game reached 11-2 Diaper Man punted the volleyball in the ocean and stormed off kicking sand with every step.
“I told you we wouldn’t lose!”
We were in the water now trying for some kind of relief from the incessant sun.
“I know Meter. You never do. I don’t know how I ever doubted you.”
There was some excited commotion going on from a snorkeling family fifty yards out from Peter and I.
“What is the temperature of this water anyways?” I asked as we swam our way towards the family. We were anxious to see what was going on. “It feels like we are doggie-paddling through a perpetual kiddy pool surrounded by incessantly peeing toddlers. It’s so warm.”