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it mean?” he asked finally.
    “Your visa will finished in five days. You wished me to tell you.”
    He felt his stomach tighten at the thought of exposing himself again, so soon, to the authorities. But it would have to be done, unless Edith returned before that. “Okay, hand me my pants.”
    He watched her walk across the room, her slip taut across the rich coffee sheen of her buttocks. She moved in a languid West Indian manner, neck and spine rigid as though an invisible burden rested on top of her head, hips and pelvis swinging forward, then backward, as though the rhythm of love had spilled over into her walk. She stooped to pick up his knee-length cut-down Levis, then straightened with a movement that threw the hair back from her face and settled it on her bare shoulders. In a land where color meant status, Leta had been lucky in her forebears. Her father had been a French-Bengalese refinery worker from Aruba, and her mother had been a mulatto clerk in one of Barrington’s sugar-cane settlements.
    Drew had met her for the first time on the beach at Petty-lay. She’d been watching the other girls swim, wearing her bright red dress and high-heeled white shoes. She’d explained carefully to him that she did not swim naked like a girl from the bush. This snobbery had amused him, and her hair had caught his eye. It was alive, it glowed, it trembled, it leaped with excitement when she laughed and sagged in a lifeless despair when she was sad. He’d been surprised to learn her profession, for she had none of the prostitute’s hardness. She was seventeen, at the peak of that roman-candle flight which is youth in the Indies, followed by the long dying fall.
    Next day she’d come over with the fishing fleet. Drew had bought a red snapper, and Leta had taken it from him, sliced open its belly with a cutlass, and raked out its innards with a flick of her fingers. Then she’d peeled off her old gray dress and stepped into the surf to wash off the blood. Drew had not had a woman in ten years, and he had felt like an adolescent discovering a female body for the first time. He noticed how her skin darkened at the base of her neck, at the bend of her elbows, and the juncture of her thighs. A dime-sized black spot marked the base of her spine; he learned later that she was proud of it, for it showed she had East Indian blood. She turned to face him, naked in the sun, all golden highlights and dark shadows. She smiled the slow serene smile of an athlete about to enter a contest he was sure to win.
    There had been none of those soft opening moves which a man makes with a white woman. Leta was paced sexually like a male; she had stepped from the sea and flowed like liquid to the hard-packed sand, spreading her limbs like a golden flower opening to the sun. He had joined her there amid the soldier crabs and questing ants, and the beaver-tail slap-slap-slap of flesh had blended with the clatter of crab-claws, and the heavy musk of Leta had mingled with the smell of the sea.
    Since then she had come every day. She never spent the night, and that suited Drew. The lock-step existence of prison had left him with a passion for privacy.
    Now Leta handed him his pants and pressed her palms against her stomach. Her face assumed an inward, thoughtful expression.
    “My mind tells me I am making a baby for you,
Dudu.
”
    Drew smiled to himself; it amused him the way her wishes gestated inside her mind, then burst to the surface as though they’d already come true.
    “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
    “Truly. He will be white, grow up to rule everybody.”
    Drew laughed. He pulled on his Levis and took the crutch Leta held out to him. He slid off the bed and let his weight rest gently on the leg. Something grated; there was a vibrating, oscillating pain, as though a nerve were caught in a pair of pliers. For a second his heart stopped beating and a greasy sweat burst out on his face. He felt Leta’s hand on his arm.
    “You have pain