The Coriolis Effect

DEDICATION
I dedicate this novel to the reader’s father

CHAPTER 1: A TROPICAL DISTURBANCE
The two tourists spent more time sightseeing than steering and didn’t see the yellow school bus barreling down on them as they rounded the crest overlooking Montego Bay.
After somersaulting off the cliff, their scooters sailed into the bay while their bodies plunged to earth and exploded in a burst that painted red blossoms on the plaza. Many of the onlookers got their first look at human organs, while children rushed into the waves to fish out two new motorbikes.
Locals said the gods selected their sacrifice by spinning the wheel of misfortune; but in the moon-shadows of the palm trees, they whispered another story: that someone needed two large shipping crates in a hurry.
Later that day the bodies were brought to the island mortician and his assistant, Astride. They worked in a small mortuary on a narrow dirt road that sliced through a canyon that was carved by the floods that follow the hurricanes.
“M’Lord, they were fat as whales,” Astride whispered, as she stuffed seaweed into the voodoo doll in her left hand.
“They’re just shells now,” the mortician replied, just before taking a bite of his tuna-fish sandwich.
“We are all to be forever,” Astride added. A second, finished, doll lay on the table by the rear door.
A lung and liver lay on a surgical table. On the bookshelf—a bag of potato chips, a Diet Pepsi, and a kidney. An eye floated in a dish atop a plywood crate kept as a spare for the next stray family that couldn’t afford a coffin.
“Please set that down, come here, and take this,” the mortician snapped, holding out a bloodied surgical rag.
“That eye be watching me,” Astride answered, pointing at the ownerless eye, while she shielded herself its gaze with the voodoo doll.
“Stop looking at it. And finish your project later. I don’t pay you to be a witch doctor. Put down the doll and come here and help me,” he snapped as he turned back to the table.
Astride took the bloody rag and tossed it to the table by the back door. She wiped her hands on the yellow and green stripes that zig-zagged across her black dress; but she only managed to smear the red blood into orange streaks.
The mortician was a large man. His belly folded over itself and new layers protruded each year. “My grandchildren use my belly as a staircase,” he often would joke, as if laughter and food could camouflage his work’s reality.
Astride avoided the eye and searched the distant hill beyond the window. When the bodies were delivered, they were told to prepare for a visitor.
“When will they get here?” she asked as she wrapped chaparral vines around the doll. She set down the doll near the first one on the table and took a step closer to the window.
“When they get here,” the mortician replied.
“Can’t think so good with this anxiety,” she continued as she fanned herself with her hands. Her crimson painted fingernails flailed around her head.
“You sound like you’re excited to see them,” the mortician said, and added, “I’d rather you focus on this work.”
“Hard to work with an eye on the coffin,” Astride whispered.
They heard a van drive up, a door slam, and the sound of approaching footsteps crunching the gravel in the driveway.
Astride looked into the mirror that hung near the rear door to the back garden and studied her face. She pulled down her dress, tightened her hair bun, smacked her lips and turned to face the front door.
The front door opened.
The mortician set down his instruments and he and Astride stepped back, partly to make room for the big man who entered, and partly for his cigar smoke, but mostly for the rumors that circulated around him.
El Cigarro was over six feet tall. A thin white moustache slid across his upper lip one morning and stayed. Few had enough courage to get close enough to find out if the lines on his face were scars or wrinkles from too much sun; those that did soon swam with fishes.
“The impact did the work for you,” El Cigarro laughed as he pushed his fedora back over his head. As he pressed the cigar between his lips, he slipped on a blue surgical glove and picked up a brain, rubbing his thumb on it the way natives press the coconuts that lie on the beach after a tropical storm.
“We’ll pay you the same. Tonight you’ll receive the delivery,” he added as he flipped the brain into the air, caught it, and tossed it toward the trashcan. “Won’t need this no more.”
The brain bounced against the wall, leaving a trail of slime as it found a resting place beside an empty can of tuna fish.
“Remove the bones. It’s a large shipment.”
“Whom do I see next?” El Cigarro continued, now addressing the police chief who had slipped in quietly behind him and had remained nearly unnoticed until now.
“Can’t always see him but I can see the puppet strings,” people would say as they watched the police chief following El Cigarro on the street like a lap dog. The chief was a thin stick of a man—a walking tree with two branches for arms.
“They arrived. On a yacht. In the bay,” the Chief stammered. “There’s a navigator. Mr. Walker,” he continued. “No one else. They have one child. A daughter. In Manhattan,” he added, as if speaking in shorter sentences would get him noticed less.
“Take me to Walker,” El Cigarro ordered, thrusting his arm and snapping his fingers at the officer. The thrust of his arm deformed the helix of cigar smoke into a turbulent cloud that followed him out the door.
Astride and the mortician were alone with the stench of the cigar and the rumors of an imminent drug war. They decided to go home for a late afternoon rest before the work began.
CHAPTER 28: AND THE WOMEN WHO LOVE THEM
(Final thoughts of the narrator and main character)
With her, I will share this man I will forever become. I love being a man, and she invigorates my respect for masculinity; helps me see the common thread all us men share. When my respect for the beauty of men flows spontaneously and without reservation, I feel connected to masculinity and its goodness. While I accept the gender fluid, I embrace the gender solid. For women are beautiful; and my way of transcending the binary and accepting my own femininity is by love for all women through one woman. My masculinity that I share with Cyrise, in fusion greater than its parts, is not a performance, and it is not one of many; it exists without an audience—it is the sound of a tree growing in the forest.