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The Devil Is Beating His Wife

Sarah Archer

No one on the island knew how much of the ocean was up in those clouds, waiting to collapse back down.

Bill Polk was more concerned with the woman than the weather. Henrietta Gumbs was impossible for him to ignore. As he stood at the window of his condo, overlooking the deck that abutted the beach, he could hear her shrieks and yelps over the drumbeat of rain on the pool cover and the thwack of palm leaves against each other in the wind. She pranced from the tree in its planter at the lip of the patio, to the meager shelter of the bougainvillea clinging to the wall, and back. The clear plastic slicker she clutched over her head flashed in the fluorescent floodlight, which had lit early in the darkening afternoon. The long skirt that flapped around her legs was unnaturally red against her surroundings. The normally aqua sea was muddy, and the sky was the dull yellow of a bruise from a lingering wound.

Bill sighed and threw the door open and stuck his head out into the spitting rain. “Want to come in?” he bellowed.

Henrietta came over, picking her way past the puddles in the stamped concrete, laughing like a toddler. She took her time entering, exhaling once she reached the doorway—“Whoo!”—then lowering the slicker and shaking it out into the rain. She was letting the water in and the air conditioning out, and Bill saw a mosquito drift past her into the condo. But he smiled and nodded as he held the door. “Some storm,” he said when she finally made it in.

Henrietta knew the outside of this building well, since she cleaned the grounds and pool deck twice a week, but she had never been inside one of the units. She took in the space: a vaulted ceiling, large tiles of marble or something like it on the floor, a generous stainless-steel stove visible in the open kitchen, and on the living room wall, between a dartboard and a framed picture of an orange ocean at sunset, a television that must have been four feet long. She took in Bill too, as he gestured for her to put her dripping slicker on a hook. A coral polo shirt stretched over his beer belly, and sunglasses hung from a strap around his neck despite the clouds. His skin was the brown-pink color white people turned after years of tans.

“Thank you, thank you,” she said, flinging raindrops from her hands. “Good afternoon.”

“Doesn’t look so good to me!” His voice was louder than it needed to be indoors, like so many Americans’. “Couldn’t let you get soaked. You’re welcome to wait in here until your ride comes.”

“Oh, I don’t think my ride is coming in this,” Henrietta said. She moved to the other side of the room to look through the window that faced the road, where cars were back-to-back. Her skirt swished over her stately hips as she walked, and large gold earrings swung on either side of the hair glazed into a neat shiny bun at the nape of her neck, curled inward like a cowrie shell.

Bill followed her over. “That traffic is something.”

“Not even high season,” she said. “Everyone’s trying to beat the storm home. They didn’t expect this, no.”

“This is why you need more than one main road around the island.” Bill’s teeth were more crooked and yellow than Henrietta had expected, with one small incisor set at an angle. Americans—at least the ones who could vacation in St. Martin—usually had good teeth.

“It didn’t use to be so bad, before the cruise ships, and all the tourists.”

Bill wasn’t sure if that was some sort of jab, but he tried not to take it that way. “Well, dry off, make yourself at home. We can watch from here for the bus.” He’d seen the white vans trundling around the ring road plenty of times, hand-lettered signs in their windows, but in his twenty-three years of visits he’d never taken one. “Or I could call you a cab.” That might be more courteous.

But she shook her head with a small, complacent smile. “Oh, no, I’m not going out in that.” She moved to stand in the center of the living room and fanned herself, drying her white flowered blouse. 

“Could be a while. Where are you heading? I could drop you myself if it’s not too far.”

“I live in Orleans, almost on the Dutch side.”

“I know where Orleans is,” he said. Locals always assumed he knew nothing about the island.

As far as Henrietta was concerned, this man was crazy. “You’re going to drive me how? On what road? No, no. We’re not going out in that. The storm has just started.”

“Picked up a little earlier than they were predicting,” Bill said. “It might end earlier too.” How long was this woman planning to stay? She looked utterly comfortable standing in the middle of his condo, wiping rain from her neck with smooth, steady strokes of her gold-tipped fingers.

“They were all wrong. I was worried this was going to be a big one. That sky this morning? They were all wrong.” Henrietta had hoped to be back before the rain and wind accelerated, but at least she had closed all her storm shutters and interior doors before leaving her apartment that morning, bracing the structure.

“Hard to predict the weather out here sometimes, but you’d think for a tropical storm they’d make more effort to get it right.” 

“Tropical storm? This feels like a hurricane.” She tried not to worry about her kids. Dieudonné was in school in Jamaica and Chastity had promised to take the grandbabies and shelter in the basement of St. Martin of Tours, which had ridden out decades of storms. “The island is in nature’s hands now. And nature is in God’s.” She expelled a sigh and moved back to the front window to watch the clouds roiling, their undersides turning a ghastly green. That was what she had to keep telling herself: it was God’s hands mixing the clouds.

Bill joined her, unsure of what else to do. “Never seen it so dark here in the middle of the day. Normally what I like about this view is it’s always the same.” He spread his hands, capturing the panorama of the beach beyond the pool deck. “Blue sky. Blue water. Green leaves. All year.”

“Hmm.” She restrained herself from pointing out to this man how wrong he was. The beach was slimmer or fatter from one hour to the next as the tide rose and fell, leaving laundry detergent caps and ridged chips of brain-shaped coral and blue disembodied lobster claws. Rain gusted in and out in twenty minutes. Glenda’s home at Oyster Bay where Henrietta used to go for coffee and croissants had been a concrete ruin since Hurricane Irma. Marcel had had to shut down the roti cart where everyone had gathered on Saturday afternoons to make way for a Burger King parking lot. A long strip was razed down Sentry Hill for the world’s steepest zipline. Cruise ships deposited passengers by the thousands each morning and swept them away by sundown. When the teenagers peeled off from their parents after church and gathered in the street, stripping their dress shirts, hollering like seagulls, they spoke in the American English of rap stars. Traffic swelled, swelled, swelled. Nothing on the island was constant. Even graves had to be elevated on plinths above the sandy soil.

A mosquito floated past them. Bill snatched at it and missed. Island mosquitoes were stealthier than North American ones, their movements subtle and deliberate. “Little bastard,” he said, mostly to say something. He felt obligated to talk to this woman since she was here, to entertain her. His wife would offer her a drink. But too much hospitality might imply she should put her feet up and stay a while, and he didn’t want that either.

“Oh my goodness, that wind,” she gasped, then patted the plaster around the window. “This had better hold.”

“She’s solid. Built after Irma, so everything’s in top shape.”

“Don’t bring up Irma. Not right now.” She shook her head and crossed herself.

Bill turned and looked out the other window, hoping traffic might have eased, that maybe a bus would even be pulling up. Instead, cars were at a standstill, and blurry red lights blinked through the wet window. The woman turned to look too and strode with purpose to the other side of the room, so he followed.

“Poor man,” she said.

Through the rivulets on the glass, Bill could see a white sedan stopped at the side of the road, hazards on, with a man bent over the raised hood. He whistled. “Hell of a time to have a breakdown.”

Henrietta muttered some exasperated-sounding words he couldn’t understand, then got her slicker from beside the back door, put it on, and crossed again to the front, trailing water on the tile. She opened the front door and stepped out.

A cacophony of wind and rain and humming engines and loud Caribbean-accented voices out car windows blasted Bill. He stuck himself halfway out the door after her, squinting and sheltering his face with his forearm.

“Good afternoon,” Henrietta yelled, clutching her hood forward past her cheeks. The man at the car looked up. She saw that he was Asian, middle-aged, with black hair plastered in tatters over his forehead and a Carib beer T-shirt soaked onto his bony shoulders. “Do you need help?”

“No, thank you,” the man called back. But Henrietta looked back at Bill anyway.

Bill realized she expected him to help fix the car. He was a boat man, not a car man, and damned if he was going to get underneath some stranger’s crappy twenty-year-old sedan in the mud. But her bald expectation felt impossible to resist. He jogged to the car and bent over the open hood. “What seems to be the problem?”

“It stalled out, then I restarted, and it stalled again,” the man said. “All the lights came on.” At least that’s what Bill thought he heard over the flapping of a tarp on a nearby roof. Bill leaned over the engine in a proprietary way, hands on the bottom of the aperture, elbows bent, trying to seem like he knew what he was doing. But he barely recognized what he was looking at, especially with rain blurring his eyes and pelting his back. He tapped and twisted some things. This was ridiculous.

“It’s okay,” the man said, nodding. “It’s okay.”

Bill was about to shake his hand and hurry back, but the woman called from behind them. “Come inside,” she said, gesturing them in with her hand. “Come on.” The man looked between his blinking car and Henrietta, then swiftly lowered the hood, shut off the engine, retrieved a paper grocery bag from the back seat, and dashed toward the condo door.

Bill followed, not thinking until he was inside about the fact that a stranger had just invited another stranger into his house.

Haitao Zhao caught his breath as he entered and the American man closed the door behind them, killing the noise. The air conditioning immediately made his arms prickle and shocked his lungs. He had never understood why some people kept the temperature so low. Maybe it was a mistake to leave his car out there, but it wasn’t going anywhere—no one was going anywhere—and he was grateful to get out of the rain. Now that he was inside, he could appreciate the storm through the windows. The sky so rarely glowered on the island; clouds passed so quickly. The sight stimulated his blood.

 He slid out of his tennis shoes at the door, holding the grocery bag, aware that he was dripping all over the pristine floor. The place smelled like the lavender Fabuloso cleaner he used in his store. He ran a small supermarket in Cupecoy. The sign above the door said “Zhao Supermarket,” but everyone in the neighborhood just called it the Asian mart.

“Here, take a load off,” Bill told him, gesturing to the kitchen counter, and Haitao put down the wet bag. The white American man and Black Caribbean woman in front of him were a strange pairing. Could they be married? The man glanced at Haitao’s bare feet.

Bill noticed the new guy’s eyes roving around the room, probably taking in the size and amenities. Wherever this man lived, Bill doubted it had a vaulted ceiling.

“Thank you for inviting me in,” Haitao said.

“Beats being out in the rain, doesn’t it?” Bill asked.

“And feel that air conditioning.” Henrietta stretched her arms out in front of her and swayed side to side, like some sort of zombie dance, smiling.

“Turning into a regular party in here.” Bill chuckled. That’s what this was, he told himself, a party. A story he could regale friends and corporate clients with later on the deck of the Payday. The sort of adventure he came to the Caribbean for—not something you get in an excursion off a cruise ship, no, this was what happened when you were a real islander. Well, they were all here now, and who knew how long they’d be stuck? He should make the best of it and play host. After all, even though he hadn’t exactly invited either of them to stay, it was his condo.

“Who’s up for a beer?” He went to the fridge and pulled out three Presidentes. He was more of a craft pale ale guy back in North Carolina, but when in Rome… He popped the tops and handed them out.

“Would you mind if I hold some things in your refrigerator? Is there room?” Haitao lifted a carton of milk from his grocery bag.

“Of course, plenty of room. Don’t do much cooking here when the wife is away.” Bill held open the door while the man put in a few perishables. “Thought you could get your groceries and beat the storm, huh?”

“Not my groceries; I was making a delivery.”

Bill whistled through his teeth.

Haitao noticed those teeth were disorderly, not like the ones on most Americans.

“Asking you to go out on a day like this for a delivery—the balls of some people,” Bill said. “Some customers don’t think you’re a human being, right?”

Henrietta thought of the management company of Bill’s condo, asking her to come out today to clean with the storm descending, but didn’t say anything.

Haitao didn’t say anything either, just smiled and pulled out his phone. “Excuse me, I should call the customer to let him know I’m delayed.” But he got a flat tone when he tried to place the call. “The service must be out.”

The woman tutted and shook her head.

“How about that.” Bill whistled again. The three of them stood apart in the living room and the sound of the wind expanded in the silence. He wasn’t sure how to talk to these people, but he knew how to entertain them. He could always figure out a way to do that with big clients. “Might as well get comfortable. Netflix and chill, huh? My daughter says that.” He picked up one of the remotes on the coffee table, started Netflix, and scrolled through their list: a rom-com with a teenage girl clutching a notebook to her chest, a realtor show with a man and a woman back-to-back with their arms crossed, some anime thing. “Don’t judge my viewing preferences by my wife and kids’,” he said, and laughed.

“Are they here on vacation with you?” the woman asked. “They’re not caught out in the storm?”

“No, they’re up in Orlando, should be out of the way of the worst of it. The wife wanted to take the in-laws and kids and I said, ‘Go ahead, honey, I’ll stay here and watch over things.’” He winked and raised his beer. “Aka get some peace and quiet. Views and brews. Disney’s a fort; that’ll be the safest place to be during a tropical storm anyway.”

The woman smiled. “Hurricane.”

A zapping sound seemed to come from nowhere and everywhere. The power went out.

Bill jabbed uselessly at the remote.

Henrietta made a loud “Oooh.”

“I’ll be damned,” Bill said. “Guess I’m not catching up on emails later. Maybe this vacation really will be a vacation for once.”

The rain and distant honks were louder in the absence of electronic sounds. But a second later, something pulsed in the belly of the building and the lights and TV clicked back on.

“You have a generator?” Haitao asked.

“How does anyone survive on the island without one? But I don’t want to run it down.” Bill turned the TV and the lights off. “Better protect the HVAC—no more AC. Sorry, kids.” He went to a panel in the hall just off the living room and flipped some switches.

Haitao, and most people he knew here, did in fact survive on the island without a generator. He had one for the store but not his apartment above it. He wondered if his family was without power now too at home. Their walls were concrete but cracked, and mildew that grew and regrew above the stove, despite his persistent patching, evidenced a leak somewhere. How nice it would be to have a generator and then not even need to use it.

“Not too bad, right?” Bill said. “At least it’s not as hot as usual. Got the daylight. It’s like camp.”

“You should close the storm shutters,” Henrietta cautioned. “Better to lose the daylight than your windows.” She nodded at Haitao and they sealed the shutters in the living room while Bill disappeared down the hall. He came back with some candles that he lit. She could already feel the air settling more heavily on her arms without the AC. The darkness would help, but she thought back to the way it was in the weeks without power after Irma—no AC, no fans, just thick moist heat and sweat that stagnated in her bra line and dripped down her spine.

She noticed a tin box on the TV stand with Poker Night written on the top and pointed. “You have a game! Let’s play.” She drew out the container, sat at the round dining table with a rustle of her skirt, and began shuffling cards and stacking chips. She loved games. She was good at them.

It wasn’t that Bill had any objection to a friendly game of poker. It would help to pass the time. He just couldn’t help feeling it was a little rude of this woman to make herself so comfortable in his home, with his things. He was understanding of cultural differences, of course, even the stupid ones here, like how you had to flag the waiter down to get your check. But still.

“Want me to set that up for you?” he asked her.

“No, no, I have it. But I could have another beer.”

Bill held out his hands. “No problem. You’re my guests. Like I said, make yourselves at home.” He went to the fridge and got fresh beers for each of them. He could hear his wife’s voice saying to be careful not to let all the cold air out.

“Winner takes all,” Henrietta declared as she neatened her pile of cards.

When they were all seated, Bill asked if they knew the rules. “Really? Poker is something you play?” he asked, after Haitao said he did.

Haitao heard the unspoken “something your people play,” or “something you play back there.” Poker was one of the ways he and the other cruise ship workers used to pass time belowdecks—one of the more innocent ways, though he himself had never engaged in much debauchery beyond a cigarette beside the kiddie pool at 3 AM. Haitao had been surprised, though, when Henrietta suggested a match. Poker had always been the men’s game.

“I play.” She laughed, earrings swinging. “We used to cut class and play behind the movie theater. And I dated a bartender at a casino.” She winked. “He was a charmer. His job was to keep the tourists drinking, drinking, and tossing money around. You know how it is!” She looked at Bill with another laugh and started dealing.

Bill raised an eyebrow at her, the pinkish skin wrinkling on his forehead. “What makes you think I’m a tourist?”

Henrietta caught an edge in his voice.

Bill broke into a smile. “Just messing with you. Been coming here for twenty years, though. It’s my home away from home.”

That was a funny expression, Haitao thought. There was home and then there was away.

“In fact, if I were a betting man,” Bill went on, looking at Haitao and putting some chips in the center of the table, “I’d bet I’ve spent more time here than you have.”

“You may have,” Haitao said.

“Where’d you come here from?” Bill asked.

“Working on a cruise ship.” Haitao could tell that wasn’t what Bill was really asking, but he said nothing more.

“Guess that makes you the only local,” Bill said to Henrietta.

“Yes,” she said. “I was born in Curaçao, but I’ve been here since I was six years old.”

“Oh!” Bill crowed. “Not a local either, then.”

“What do you mean? I’ve been here my whole life. My children were born here. I’ve had family here for generations. I am a St. Maartener.”

“Not your whole life,” Bill said.

“We’re all interlopers.” Haitao nodded. “All passing through.” He wouldn’t normally get philosophical with strangers, but the second beer was hitting his system. His cheeks felt warm. “Raise,” he said.

Thunder rattled the legs of their chairs, and the building creaked.

The woman jumped and put a hand to her heart. “Oooh,” she said. “I’m going to need another beer.” She had already finished two, but when she walked to the fridge to help herself, her gait was still steady.

Screw it. Bill stood and got himself another beer too. Heat was building in the motionless air, and it was dark enough, with only the candles and the thin lines of light around the shutters, that it could have been well past 5 o’clock. He sat back down with a grunt. “This day turned out to be a hell of a lot more interesting than I expected,” he said.

Haitao looked between them, eyes glittering. “We could make it more interesting.”

“What do you suggest?” Bill asked.

“Strip poker!” he said.

Both Bill and Henrietta guffawed.

“Oh my goodness,” she said, rocking, hand to her heart again. “You are bad.”

“No way, amigo.” Bill tugged on his polo shirt. “You don’t want to see me out of this. Too many Mai Tais on the beach. Here, you want to make it more interesting?” He pulled out his wallet and put a dollar bill in the center of the table. “There you go.”

Henrietta hooted and clapped her hands. “Now it’s fun!”

Haitao picked up the bill, inspected it, and tossed it back down. “Pfft. That’s it?”

Henrietta clapped again.

“All right, all right. Let’s make this a real game.” Bill took another note from his wallet, this time a twenty, and then threw a tiny silver coin on top. “Plus one cent of a guilder. What the hell else am I supposed to do with it?”

Henrietta slanted her eyes at him. “All right, if that’s all you can afford. I’m sure this vacation is expensive for you.”

“What are you putting up?” Bill asked. “Let’s see it.”

She folded her lips, unbuckled a watch from her wrist, and laid it gently in the middle of the table. It was handsome, masculine in its proportions, with a cognac leather strap, gold fittings, and delicate diamonds that caught the candlelight.

Bill leaned in, surprised. “Hey now. That looks pretty nice.”

“Bulova,” she said. “It’s been in my family for four generations. My mother wore it until the day she died. I took it off her wrist while it was still warm.”

The room went quiet, filled with the moan of the wind. Haitao’s mischievous smile had dropped. “I can’t accept that from you if I win,” he said.

“Yeah, not fair, you know we’re not going to take that,” Bill said. He elbowed Haitao, trying to bring back the light mood. “But don’t worry about winning, I’ll handle that.”

“You’ll have to put up something just as valuable to make it fair,” Henrietta said.

Bill opened his wallet a third time and searched inside. “What do you want? I’ve got… twelve more dollars. You’re bleeding me dry here.” Now the joke was getting stale. He realized how unwise it would be to give over all his cash if the island’s facilities went down.

“You’ve got more than twelve dollars,” Henrietta said. “Look around you. Look at all the things you have.” Her gold fingernails shimmered as she gestured. “This table. Those pretty curtains. Big couch for the whole family. A large television.”

Bill scratched at his arm. That fucking mosquito kept getting him, and he couldn’t even see it. It was one thing to have people over to his condo and let them admire his nice possessions, show off the fruits of his labors a little bit. Nothing wrong with that. It was another for strangers to invite themselves in and peruse his home like a used car lot. “You want my TV?”

“I want all of it.”

“All of it?”

“The whole condo.”

Bill gaped.

Henrietta went on. “But I’ll let you keep the television. I never watch anyway; I’d rather sit down with a good crossword puzzle. It’s not amusing if there’s no challenge,” she said. She rested her hands in her lap and gave him a mild smile.

Bill huffed out a laugh instinctually, then tried to keep his face neutral. Was this a joke? He often felt wrong-footed in interactions with locals, never sure if he was missing some reference or cultural practice or if he would offend just by doing some perfectly normal little thing. He looked to Haitao for cues, but the man didn’t say anything.

Between the storm outside and the alcohol within, Haitao was feeling great, loose-limbed and energized. He went and got his grocery bag off the counter. He pulled out a gallon jug of water, a can of bug repellent, and a four-pack of toilet paper and set them on the table amidst the cash, the watch, and the pile of chips.

“This is my bet,” he said.

Now Bill did laugh. He mimed weighing two things with his hands. “A condo and a roll of toilet paper. Hmm, sounds about right to me.”

Haitao still didn’t smile. “This is what I have with me, so this is what I’ll bet.”

“Let’s just keep playing for chips and forget the damn bet.” Bill scooped his money back into his wallet, adding a wink to neutralize the damn. Maybe it had been tasteless to throw cash around. People could be so sensitive about those things. He noticed the others left their bets on the table.

“Before we resume, would you mind if I use your restroom?” Haitao asked.

“No problem,” he said. “Down the hall, to the left.” Bill did a quick mental inventory of what might be out in the bathroom. His wife’s little nail scissors that he used to trim his eyebrow hairs that were coming in gray and wiry. His swim trunks, drying on the shower curtain rod. He wouldn’t mind either of these people seeing him in those trunks out on the beach, but to see them hanging up in his bathroom somehow felt like an invasion. The living room and kitchen area were where they entertained guests, not the rest of the home.

While Haitao disappeared, Henrietta raised herself from her chair, thumb cupped into the small of her back. She went to the window, sandals slapping, and massaged her spine while she lifted the louvers of the storm shutters to look out. She was never comfortable sitting or standing for too long. Too many years of physical jobs, tilting to scrub floors, bending to pick up her kids and others’, holding trays of ribs overhead when she waitressed at the shack on the beach. That was maybe the only thing she missed about her ex-husband: his back rubs.

Outside there was no sand visible at all, just ocean crashing straight into the pillars that supported the strip of condos and hotels along the beach. The clouds swirled like ink dropped into water. A dog had found its way to the pool deck, a rangy brown thing, squeezing itself against the planter, under the fitful shelter of the palms.

“Ooh, a dog out there,” she said. “Poor creature.”

Bill joined her at the window. It was one of his least favorite things about the island: the stray cats and dogs. Coconut retrievers, people called them. It had taken years to break his kids of begging to feed them and play with them and take one home. The last thing Bill needed on a long flight back to North Carolina with a family and luggage in tow was to worry about getting a rabid mutt through customs. He had told his kids it was the best possible life for a dog here, hanging out on the beach all day. A permanent vacation. He’d never dwelled on how the dogs fared in storms. Animals knew how to fend for themselves.

When Haitao came back and the game resumed, Henrietta had another beer, but Bill thought she seemed entirely unaffected. He resisted the urge for another himself. Already the sweet smell of the candles in the thickening air was turning his stomach. For a second he swore he heard the drone of a mosquito right next to his ear, but when he swatted for it, it was gone. His ankles itched like crazy. He started to reach for the bug spray on the table but drew his hand back. The spray didn’t belong to him.

Haitao’s eyes met Bill’s. “I couldn’t help but notice in the restroom that your bug spray is expired,” Haitao said. “Also, you appear to be nearly out of toilet paper.”

Henrietta giggled, pleased. This man had spirit. A wily streak. She noticed Asian families on the island but never talked much to them. They didn’t really cross her world: her church, her market, the schools where she and her kids had gone. But this man, she was beginning to like.

She tsked. “That’s not good,” she said. “Not good at all. If the island is shut down, those will be the first things gone from the stores.”

“They’ll become very valuable,” Haitao added. “Maybe even more valuable than a watch.”

“Not more valuable than a condo,” Bill said. “But nice try.” He called Henrietta’s bet even though he had a weak hand. After the first round, his stack of chips was shorter than Haitao’s.

“It depends on if that condo survives the storm,” Haitao said. That was rude—he wondered if he had gone too far. But everything felt unshackled with the beer, and he was enjoying this little negotiation. So much of Haitao’s day-to-day was counting inventory, calculating orders, looking over his kids’ math homework. Neat tabulations, not the bends and angles of a loaded conversation. He could never have said this to his wife, wouldn’t want her to think he didn’t care about their safety—but he liked it when a storm hit the island and macrocosmic fears released him from little worries and tasks. This game with strangers was an added treat.

“Survives the storm?” Bill said. “She’s built to handle it. I made sure of that. Metal roof with ring-shank nails. Impact-rated fiberglass doors. Expansion bolts that direct the wind load to the foundation. She’s got the whole package.” It had all ended up costing way more than he expected, but wasn’t that always the way?

“I’ve been through typhoons in Singapore,” Haitao said. “There’s always one that surprises you.”

“Yes, always one,” Henrietta agreed. “I saw that sky this morning and I knew.” She shook her head and placed her cards facedown. “Fold.”

“Yeah, well, I’ve been through hurricanes too,” Bill said. “Last big one cost me six grand when a gutter flew off the mother-in-law suite and right through the window of my F-150.”

Haitao cocked a shoulder. “Then you know.”

The game continued without conversation. Somewhere was the tinny whine of a French ambulance. The room seemed to have gotten even darker.

Bill couldn’t resist. “At least I had the sense to stay in today with the storm coming. You were both caught out in it. Got lucky you wound up near my place.”

“Easy to stay in and relax when you’re on vacation,” Henrietta said. “We were both out working. We didn’t have a choice.”

“I work my ass off eleven months out of the year. How do you think I afford this vacation?” Bill scattered some chips in the pot, so they rattled on the table. He forced his voice lighter, adding a bit more of a jokey twang. “I mean, a man has to let off a little steam so he can run his business the rest of the time. And I can’t just go to the beach in North Carolina; I live not ten miles from there. That ain’t a vacation.”

“What sort of business?” Haitao asked, dealing a turn card.

“HVAC. Got in on the ground floor thirty years ago. And I mean ground. Spent my first six years learning the trade, shimmying around on my belly in crawlspaces. Luckily I’ve got other guys to do that part now.” Bill laughed and patted his paunch. “We’re franchised throughout the state now. Yeah, I came from nothing, out in Appalachia,” he went on, though they hadn’t asked. “We didn’t have two nickels to rub together. Best toys I got were bottle rockets I made with scrap from the side of the road. I qualified for free lunch the whole time I was in school.” Bill had worked hard to own a vacation house in the Caribbean, and he didn’t mind saying it. Worked hard to get away from the boy who didn’t learn to read until fourth grade because his parents didn’t have the money or give-a-shit to get him a tutor. The boy whose family couldn’t afford orthodontia.

“Free lunch,” Henrietta said. “Isn’t that nice! Your whole country has money.”

Bill scowled. That wasn’t how he’d meant it.

“I wish I could go off on vacation every year.” She sighed and shook her head. She’d always had side hustles on top of her jobs. Buying cheap wholesale fabric off a friend who worked at the shipping dock, knotting on a few ropes to make a hammock, and selling the results to resorts as authentic Caribbean handcrafts. Packaging locally made jams for grocery stores and souvenir shops. Working as an attendant at the public restroom in Marigot. She always got good tips there because she put up decorations for every holiday. Now that her kids were out of the house, she still liked some extra cash to give to church or buy herself a good cigar or a lacy piece of lingerie.

“The famous Caribbean work ethic.” Bill perused the community cards, then cast a grin at Haitao.

“What do you mean?” Henrietta asked.

Bill imitated an island accent: “‘It’s low season, we go slow.’ That wouldn’t fly for customer service in America. Or in—Asia.” He nodded to Haitao. He had almost said “China,” but realized the man might not be Chinese, and was pleased he’d made the distinction. He’d learned early on that his South and Central American coworkers at home—his teammates back in the day, now his employees—were not all Mexican. He took pride in getting to know their individual backgrounds, asking after their families. “The Caribbean has many charms, but it’s not known for its industry. I mean the only thing you make on the whole island is that guavaberry rum.”

“We sell that rum to tourists,” Henrietta said, and slid a stack of chips across the glass. “Our industry is you.”

“Exactly.” Bill drained his beer bottle and set it down with a thunk beside the others, the brown glass sparkling in the candlelight like church windows. “We’re your whole economy.”

Henrietta smiled. “I thought you weren’t a tourist.”

Bill wiped his mouth with the back of his arm and smirked.

“The heat and the humidity in low season make it difficult to work,” Haitao said.

Henrietta nodded.

Bill could hear his teenage daughter’s voice, telling him to check his privilege and not punch down. There was no reason for him to get so damn heated over a game. It was the stifling air, getting to him. “Boy, do I get that with our Carolina summers,” he said. “Must be rough being a delivery person.”

“I only do deliveries when we’re short on staff,” Haitao said, as they finished the round. Bill had pulled ahead. Haitao had been doomed with an off-suit two and seven. “I own the store. My wife and I opened it when we moved here.”

“Now there you go.” Bill clapped him hard on the back. “That’s how it’s done. Bringing yourself up from nothing.”

“I didn’t come from nothing,” Haitao said. Even he was beginning to sweat around the temples and under the armpits. His feet stuck to the tile floor. “My family is not nothing.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“My parents were middle class. An administrative assistant in the local government and a podiatrist. I became a journalist. A segment producer for China Central Television.” It was Henrietta’s turn, but she and Bill had stopped playing to watch Haitao, who could feel a fine excited spray of saliva leave his lips with the last word. He loved their dark curiosity. It was so rare that people on the island really looked at him, really listened to him. Most never asked him anything except which aisle the ketchup was on.

“Until I ran afoul of the Propaganda Department’s censorship guidelines,” he continued. “I had to leave my family behind to escape to Singapore. I got work on a cruise ship. Cleaning booster seats that had held soiled diapers, scraping the guts of fish. But I met my wife there. And it was better than prison. Better than having red pepper blown into my eyes to try to force a confession.” He looked at Bill, who was shuffling the discards. “I also earned being here.”

Henrietta crossed herself. She set her cards down and put a hand over Haitao’s wrist. “Sometimes God reminds us to be grateful for what we have.”

 Bill cleared his throat, which had turned tight. He felt claustrophobic inside his own body. “Lot of respect for immigrants,” he said. “That’s one of my proudest accomplishments: giving immigrants a way to feed their families.” Most of his workers were undocumented, and he preferred it that way, since he could pay them less than minimum wage. Still more than they’d make back in Mexico or wherever. He didn’t just pocket the extra money; he passed the savings on to the customer. It was how he’d grown his business to number one in North Carolina. A win-win-win.

The other two didn’t respond.

By now Bill wished this whole stupid storm would die down so he could politely encourage them to leave. He could clear the bottles, say he ought to head out to the marina and check on his boat. But no one was going anywhere with that rain strafing the walls like buckshot. “This has turned into some vacation,” he declared. Nobody laughed. “You’re next,” he said to Henrietta.

As the game went on with only terse announcements of their bets, it was harder to ignore the tropical storm, or hurricane, or whatever this was turning into. Bill’s blood pressure rose with every creak of the building. He had made sure they used hurricane clips in the construction of this place, but maybe he should have sprung for the newer more innovative truss screws and the windows with the design pressure rating of fifty. He saw it all the time in his work: customers who skimped up front paid for it later. He knew better. He’d always been trained to go cheap growing up, and it was hard to break that habit. But he’d paid to do this place right, even if it had stretched what he could afford.

Especially with an island construction company…who knew what kind of corners they’d cut. The property management company at least was American-owned. Though a bunch of the products they used were made in China. Of course, he couldn’t say any of this aloud to these people.

“It’s good that this building is so well-constructed,” Haitao said, as the candle flames danced in a shudder of the building. “We’re all fortunate to be here.”

“Hmm,” Bill grunted. These two were clearly trying to manipulate him into betting the condo. Working together as a team. Maybe they’d been cooperating from the start, and had planned to be conveniently right outside his home as the storm picked up, hoping he would take them in. Ready to take him in. Aiming to pick through a rich American tourist’s things, then swinging big and trying to claim the whole damn condo.

Of course, that was ridiculous, they couldn’t plan a hurricane. And why would these two know each other anyway?

Still, despite their obvious differences, he couldn’t help feeling these people were on one side and he was on another. An outsider here. Always.

A loud whack rocked the building, followed by a distant crash in another unit. Henrietta jumped, then closed her eyes, gripping the edge of the table and muttering a prayer. Bill and Haitao leapt to the window and Bill opened the storm shutters. An entire trunk of the palm tree by the pool had been sheared clean off from its mates, leaving a spiky stump, and blown into the building. Its leaves batted the window like the rubber panels in a car wash. A jagged crack bisected the glass.

“Ho-lee shit,” Bill said.

Three or four other dogs had joined the stray, darting back and forth across the length of the pool deck, swirling around each other like a vortex, tails lashing, teeth bared.

What if everything they were saying about the storm was true, Bill wondered. What if the condo was destroyed and they were all marooned on the island? He was already looking at repairs to the window and who knew what else. He already had that kind of mess to deal with back home, at his real home. What kind of investment property was this if it got the crap blown out of it once a year? Ever since buying the condo, he’d started to feel like vacations here might be more trouble than they were worth. There was that first gust of excitement every time they arrived, and he’d strip the cover from his boat and steer it out of the marina in Simpson Bay, past Steve Jobs’s widow’s yacht, with its severe spear of a nose, and the towering ships of the Saudis, tiered and white like wedding cakes. There was a thrill of pride when he’d pull up to the condo on the first afternoon in his airport rental, a place they owned but hadn’t seen in months, familiar but fresh. But the rest of the year, the boat and condo were just ever-growing bills he had to pay. Items in his inbox.

It would be charitable, even, to give the condo away to one of these needier people. A good way to explain the decision to family and friends. When he bought the condo he’d thought he would bring corporate clients here to entertain them, but the expense of flying them down had never seemed justified. Or he’d thought they could share it with friends vacationing in the Caribbean at the same time, but nobody’s schedules ever lined up. Even his own family had fucked off to Disney World. Actually, he wasn’t sure he’d ever want to come back here after this shitshow. The whole experience of the island was sullied. This was supposed to be his tropical escape, not a place to deal with home repairs and identity politics. There was plenty of all that back in the States.

Henrietta’s heartbeat was starting to level, and she ungripped the edge of the table, where she saw her fingers had made wet prints on the glass. No question, this was a full hurricane. Chastity and the girls were in the church basement; that was all that mattered. Who knew what was becoming of Henrietta’s own apartment. Their landlord never did get around to fixing the wiring, even when she brought him papaya and fresh-baked cinnamon bread. She doubted that Bill ever had to bring gifts to get something done in a place like this. She watched his face as they resumed the game in silence. “Call,” he said. “I mean, check.” He was distracted. The firelight contoured the grooves of his furrowed brow and glinted off his wet, open lip. The game was close. Was he actually thinking about betting the condo?

Henrietta imagined inviting her family to move in here with her. If they were caught in during a storm, they’d be safe. She would have friends over often. She would sun herself out on the pool deck in a purple bathing suit, eating Jaffa cakes from the British aisle at Carrefour, watching the sky and ocean turn as orange as they were in that framed picture on the wall. One day she’d pass the condo to one of her children, and it would stay in the family. Most of the people she knew on the island didn’t own any of it. Thousands of visitors passed through every year, taking thousands of photos of thousands of views. But this view, this particular angle of this particular stretch of sea, would be hers.

Bill watched a vein pulse in Haitao’s neck, wondering if it was a tell about his hand or simply a response to the heat. Bill knew that thinking about betting the condo was silly, but maybe that was the beauty of it. No one could hold him to such a far-fetched idea. If one of the others won, but the storm wasn’t so bad and he decided to keep the place anyway, what could they do? Whining “You promised” wouldn’t hold up in court. As he did the math, he started to like it.

Haitao clapped his hands at the mosquito but missed.

Henrietta let out a low sound. “You’re never going to catch them,” she said. “You just have to put up with the itch.”

“I’d rather not put up with dengue or zika or chikungunya,” he said.

“A man at my church died this year from chikungunya,” she said. “Only forty-five years old! He had a wife and twin boys.”

“You can die from chikungunya?” Bill asked.

“Oh yes. He got the syndrome, the Guillain-Barré syndrome, and it stopped his lungs.”

“I’ve had chikungunya,” Haitao said, and drew from the cards on the table. “It was the most painful time of my life.”

Bill thought back to the red pepper.

“It started with fever and a rash,” Haitao went on. “I was throwing up.” Haitao spread his cards in his hand, curved like a seashell, spacing them evenly so they were just perfect. “Then the aches and pains started. It was like my bones were crumbling. All I could do was stay in bed, but no matter what, I couldn’t get comfortable enough to sleep.”

Henrietta shivered.

“The pains can last for years. I still get them sometimes.”

“I’ve never had it,” Henrietta said. “I am lucky, lucky. Blessed. After Irma, with no fans to blow the mosquitoes away, and no air conditioning, we all had to be outside all the time. The mosquitoes were awful.”

“It’s the extra standing water after a hurricane too,” Haitao said. “It allows them to breed.”

Henrietta swept her head slowly up and down in agreement, her bracelets tinkling against each other as she rolled her stack of chips between her palms. There were two in a row in the community cards. The play was still interesting. Haitao was clearly working the same game as her. All they had to do was get Bill to bet the condo, and they might actually be close. If she won, she would share in some way with Haitao. Maybe she would give him some of the money she saved from moving out of her apartment, or even let him keep her watch. She felt sure he would do the same.

Bill had always thought if he or the family had a medical emergency here on the island, they could be med-evaced to Florida. Would that be possible in the aftermath of a hurricane? The airport was still a construction site, years after Irma. “Don’t they have anything to treat chikungunya at the hospital here?”

Henrietta shrugged. “Perhaps they do, perhaps they don’t. We use bush.”

Bill wasn’t about to put some island herbal bullshit in his body. This was the twenty-first damn century. They had real medicine. When he was eight, he had broken his arm, and because his father didn’t want to pay to take him to the hospital, he had the vet next door come and set it. No anesthesia. Bill had had to bite down on a Bible, the same Bible his father smacked him with if he ever cried. That elbow still creaked if the air went below fifty degrees.

Haitao did a mental inventory of what his family had at home: canned food, toilet paper and paper towels, four or five gallons of water on the floor of a closet. They could raid the store below for supplies if need be, whatever escaped damage. They’d all ridden out Irma together in that apartment. But they would be safer in a place like this, with impact-rated fiberglass doors and a generator, despite the crack in the glass. Owning and not renting, and owning a place like this, would really mean something. In all his time on the island Haitao had felt like both tourists and other locals regarded him as an outsider, part of some amorphous third class. He didn’t even have a position in the island’s stereotypes. Owning a place like this, he would be harder to ignore.

He imagined, too, with a sour delight he couldn’t suppress, Bill moving all his things out, watching as some company he’d paid wrapped the TV with Styrofoam padding and heaved the deep-cushioned couch onto a truck, then, once the place was empty of all traces of him, handing over the keys.

Haitao had perhaps always had a taste for trouble. Productive trouble, at least, against those who deserved it. He was grateful for the safety he and his family had in this corner of the world but sometimes wished it weren’t so easy here to hide. Torture, censorship, discrimination, starvation, injustice—they all raged as ever in other places since he had retreated to this nest where the sound of the waves lulled adults to sleep like babies on the beach, pink toes pointed to the balmy sky. Every few years a hurricane made headlines, but no one really cared what happened in St. Martin, or St. Maarten. France and the Netherlands hadn’t even bothered to continue fighting for ownership of the land, each settling for close enough to half. Haitao missed the cold poached rabbit his mother used to make, scarlet with chili oil; her guttural cough; the hard cracked plastic cover she used to protect the sofa; and the raucous cries and tough intestinal funk of the tight market alleyways where she shopped. He missed a landscape where his opinions mattered. He missed having something to contend with.

Sometimes if he went out on delivery, he’d sneak a pack of strawberries from the market, making sure to deduct them from inventory, and pull into the empty lot of a gutted convenience store to eat the whole pack himself before heading back to work, swamped with guilt. This, now, was the shriveled horizon of his dissidence.

Haitao realized that it was Bill’s turn, and had been for a minute, but Bill was staring at the cards in his own hand. His chest went up and down against the weave of his polo shirt. He set his cards face down.

“Fine,” Bill said. “I’ll bet the condo.”

Haitao put back the sweating beer he had just lifted. Henrietta laughed.

“I’m serious,” Bill said. He pushed his chair out and disappeared down the dim hallway into another room. Henrietta and Haitao looked at each other, then trained their eyes on the dark. Lightning flared through the cracks around the shutters. When Bill returned, he slapped a sheaf of papers onto the table, next to the watch, the water, the bug spray, and the toilet paper. “There’s the deed. This place belongs to whoever earns it fair and square.”

Henrietta’s heart thumped. She shared a glance with Haitao, whose face was spreading into an incredulous grin, the candlelight wicking up the planes of his cheeks. They had done it. They had really done it. Now all one of them needed to do was win.

And winning was within her reach. A three and six of hearts in her hand, and a four, five, and seven on the table. Of course, Bill might only have made the bet because he had a strong hand. He looked flushed and excited now, the same look she’d seen people wear at the casino both right after winning a jackpot and right after losing everything. Could his cards be even stronger than her own?

Haitao folded.

That was okay. Henrietta could still win it for both of them. Bill ran a wet tongue over his lip. The wind shrieked over the roof. Then Bill carefully spread his cards: four threes. She watched him smile and suppress a small burp as he leaned back in his chair, satisfied.

Bill was almost glad this storm had landed in the middle of his vacation. He’d go home with a real tale after all.

But Bill didn’t know what Henrietta did. She rechecked her hand to make sure she wasn’t dreaming. She had this. She could take it all and walk away. The thought was decadent.

 But she felt a certain kinship with Haitao, this strange half-serious man she’d just met. She would think about him as she swished her feet through the water of the pool and wonder if she should have done more, if he would have done the same for her. Would she want her grandchildren to come play in a home that always felt like it couldn’t quite possibly be hers?

Henrietta fanned her straight flush toward the others. She saw Haitao’s eyebrows lift as he took it in.

Before her cards could touch the table, a smack: Bill slapped his own thigh. “I see you, you bastard. I’ve got you!” His hands hovered, then he leaped up, chasing something across the room. “All right, get out, get the fuck out.” He wrenched open a storm shutter and reached to open the window, but just as Henrietta was about to call to him to stop, she saw Haitao’s hand wrap around a candle, something like joy or menace in his eyes—though maybe it was the play of the fire—and he lifted it. For a confused instant she felt he might throw the candle into the wall.

But then everything was lost in a deluge of sound: a boom and crash, shattering glass, animal howls, Henrietta’s own scream ripping from her throat. Cool wind whipped the stifled air of the room and she was somehow wet everywhere at once.

When Bill raised his head enough to register that he was on the floor, and that the long beam lying in front of him was the mast of a boat, for a wild second he gasped at what had become of the Payday. Then he realized that this couldn’t be his boat, which was docked across the island, and that he should be more worried about his condo, half of the back wall of which was rubble, or about the blood splattered across his shirt. He splayed his fingers over his red-stained belly, but before he could say anything the room was full of new motion. He caught a kaleidoscope of sounds and images: barks and snarls and bleats; Henrietta yelling and beating her arm out; the end of the mast cratering the table; a fright-eyed hound zooming in circles over the glass-strewn floor; another jumping onto the remaining half of the couch; the clatter of hooves as a goat scrambled over the wreckage and into the condo; bared teeth; distant shouts; the palm tree wedged against the side of the building snapping as the boat rammed into it; where roof had been, the marbled clouds.

A tail whipped Bill’s leg and he saw a dog yanking at the base of Haitao’s shorts. The man was shouting in some language Bill couldn’t understand. Bill picked himself up, threw himself across the room and the broken table, and pulled at the dog, swatting him away. “Get out! Get out!” he yelled, and in a frenzy of yelps the animals circled each other and ran back out the way they came, the goat’s tuft of a tail bobbing over the capsized boat and out of sight.

In the absence of the chaos, the rain and the wind also seemed to turn down a notch, and Bill became aware of a throbbing pain. A rough rectangle of glass was lodged in his left arm like some surreal sculpture. “My arm,” he said. “My arm!”

“Don’t touch it!” Haitao commanded. He grabbed a towel hanging in the kitchen. Bill held out his arm to him, dumb, and heard Henrietta’s gasp as Haitao gripped the glass and pulled it out. Bill felt warm trickles down his arm just before Haitao wrapped the towel around and around the wound, so tightly the pressure hurt more than the glass had.

“Thank you,” Bill said, and then laughed, without knowing why. The noise of the wind was definitely diminishing. He caught his breath. A fish writhed on the floor. Bill laughed again. It felt good. “A goat took up with those dogs, what about that? Any port in a storm.”

“Is it over?” Henrietta asked. She wiped rain from her cheeks and looked up through the hole in the roof.

The storm was calming, but it couldn’t have ended so abruptly. Bill shook his head, realizing. “The eye.”

In the reprieve, he looked around. A quarter inch of dirty water covered the whole floor now, probably brought in by the boat and the caving roof. One of his kids’ flip-flops from a basket by the door was somehow on the stove, mangled, chewed up and spit out by the storm. Concrete dust grayed the white couch. The ruins of the poker game were strewn through the mess of water, glass, and debris on the floor: cards, chips, a soaked roll of toilet paper, Henrietta’s watch, face-down.

“I won the game,” Henrietta said. The others looked at her.

“No one won,” Haitao said. “The game is over.”

She huffed. “I had the winning hand! You saw it! You saw my cards.”

“I saw nothing,” he said, and that was what his face gave: nothing.

Henrietta’s stomach caved. She and Haitao had never been allies. Even the island was against her. This place of blue and pink and sparkling white could go gray-black and monstrous in an instant and turn everything she had into nothing. Or maybe she had never had anything at all.

Bill laughed. “Congratulations. You won all this.” The paperwork he had laid on the table drifted in the mounting water at his feet, the ink bleeding. If either of the others had bothered to read it, they would have seen that he himself was underwater with payments on the condo, that in fact he barely owned it at all. But he had known that neither of them would look.

He leaned forward and squinted at the exposed livid sky, where a colorless sun stared through the clouds. “Will you look at that,” he said. “The devil is beating his wife.”

“The devil?” Haitao asked.

“It’s what we call that back home, when the sun is out while it’s raining. The sky will always surprise you, won’t it?” He smiled again and shook his head, like he was watching an amusement performed expressly for him, a little dog who rode a bicycle, or a magician’s assistant emerging uneviscerated from a box and throwing him a wink.

Henrietta was surprised that Bill seemed almost jovial. She had thought he would be more distraught at the destruction of his property. Maybe he was less materialistic than she had given him credit for. Or maybe he was okay with losing the condo as long as he didn’t lose it to one of them.

Bill slapped at an invisible mosquito and scratched his ankle, above the rising water. “Son of a bitch got me good,” he said.

Past the chasm of the crushed pool deck were low creeping waves, and past those were meaner waves on the other side of the storm, and past those the thrashing sky.

▪ ▪ ▪

Sarah Archer’s debut novel, The Plus One, was published by Putnam and optioned for television. As a screenwriter, she has developed material for MTV Entertainment, Snapchat, and Comedy Central, and been recognized by the Black List, the Tracking Board, the Motion Picture Academy, and the Austin Film Festival. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous journals and been nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize. She has spoken and taught on writing to groups in several states and countries, and interviewed authors around the world as a co-host of the award-winning Charlotte Readers Podcast. Read the author’s commentary on her story.

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