The room she lived in was bare and small, but not unpleasant, especially in the mornings, when sunlight streamed through the window and splashed across the painted gray floor and over the bed. She made up a bed for the baby in one of the dresser drawers and placed it in the corner of the room farthest from the window. Generally, when the men who visited her saw the baby asleep in the corner of the room, they lowered their voices and tried not to wake him, but sometimes they were drunk and noisy and even angry at the sight of the child in the room and complained of it afterwards downstairs to Grabow, so he took the dresser drawer out of the room and put it in a windowless storage room next door and made it clear to Vanise that she would have to keep the child there at night from now on.
The men who came to her, rarely more than one or two a night, were mostly seamen. They were fishermen and turtlers from the small open boats in Coral Harbour and sometimes Bahamian crewmen from the big charter boats, sometimes a Cuban or a Jamaican, and sometimes even a white man, an American, who came up the narrow stairs from the bar and spent an hour with her, fucking her and then trying to talk with her, which of course always failed, so they would often simply ramble on as if she understood.
A few of the men she liked, a short, round, chocolate-brown man who affected huge, winglike sideburns and operated the only taxi in town other than Grabow’s, and a Cuban, tall, skinny and black, who always brought Vanise a cold Heineken and seemed disappointed when the baby Charles got moved out to the storage room, and she liked a young Jamaican man who wore a carefully trimmed, very thick beard and finger-length dreadlocks, a man named Tyrone, who spoke some Creole and always rolled and smoked a cigarlike spliff of ganja before making love to her. She liked the smell of the ganja, perfumy and dry, and when he offered it to her, she accepted. It seemed to make the time with Tyrone a respite from the painful silence of her mind. For her mind, an utterly silent, burned-out charnel house by now, was filled with images of les Morts from the dark side, Ghede and Baron Cimitière, whose evil presence no longer frightened her, whose presence, in fact, she had begun to encourage and make welcome. She lay back in the dimly lit room over the shop and opened herself to these dark, malevolent spirits the same way she opened herself to the men she did not like, men who were dirty and quick and stunk of fish and rum and sweat, men who were drunk and half impotent, which made them irritable, men who fucked her in unusual ways, and now and then the man who slapped her until she wept and only then would he fuck her.
This last was Jimmy Grabow himself. It would be three or four in the morning, and the domino game downstairs would have broken up, the metal screen pulled down on the front of the shop, the lights turned off, and he would come trudging upstairs half-drunk and bumping against the sides of the walls in a way she recognized immediately. Then he’d come into her room and light the kerosene lantern on the small table next to the bed and stand over her, while she pretended to sleep.
Afterwards, in silence, he left the room, and she heard him lunging back down the stairs to the room next to the kitchen, where he slept. The next morning, he whistled cheerfully downstairs and throughout the day was kindly toward her, smiling that horse-toothed smile, chucking the baby under the chin with approval as she passed through the kitchen to the privy in the backyard.
