We Don't Mention Him

For the sake of privacy I have changed all the names in this experience.

My little brother Corey lived for a time on a private bay in the Caribbean Sea. His landlady, MariAnne, had built her home and the adjoining batch of porches and apartments with her husband. She put up with Corey on account of his size and territorial manners, in a neighborhood crawling with disrespectful tourists and drug-addled thieves alike. She was his upstairs neighbor, with her two giant dogs. I loved his little apartment with the gekko lizards and outside the khoki frogs yelling all night. Defying the tropical bugs and spiders, I claimed the couch as mine.

In addition, this sort of neighborhood junkie/ handyman, Joey, came around to do odd jobs or pass out on the property. Anyone who lives in a small town is familiar with this character and the kind well-meaning folks what keep them high/employed. My brother was not his biggest fan. He was a very wiry, short individual with waist length light brown hair and a surfer's wasted swagger. I only ever saw him barefoot and naked chested in khaki cargo shorts, but I was visiting. He was nothing but polite, to me, with a mainland accent.

One night we stayed up very late smoking and watching TeeVee. We had turned off the AC to crack open the door and let in the breeze from the distant storm. Corey had passed out on the couch, so with nowhere to properly sleep, I was sitting in his desk chair, pushing myself back and forth in a very lazy way with my feet, between watching the gekko lit blue by teevee on the ceiling, and looking out the screen door into the distant fluorescence of the patio light, full of island sounds.

Following no pattern at all, I swung myself to look out the front door and saw a beer-bellied figure in a brown terry cloth bathrobe, who turned, and walked toward the stairs to the upper deck.

I cried out, "who's there?" I was irritated at the spying, sure it must be Joey or some lousy trespasser.

Rising, hazed by my shriek, my brother loomed out the screen door and up the stairs. I could hear him on the deck above, then coming back down. He was still shuffling, part sleepy bear.

He asked me what I saw, and when I told him he woke straight the hell up. "Do not open the door or go outside again tonight" he said, very seriously, and clumped, grouchy, off to bed. Having grown up in a rural area with meth heads aplenty, I complied, and locked the door shut.

The next day I mentioned the incident to our other brother, on a different island. I said how it was weird that Corey would be scared of one scrawny tweaker in a ratty bathrobe. He laughed. "Wait, what did you see?"

I told him of the beer-bellied figure in the brown bathrobe moving away from the door. He laughed some more and asked if I had told Corey.

"Well, yeah."

He laughed some more and then actually said to me with a straight face, "Well, if you see it again, don't tell Corey, because we don't talk about the ghost at his house anymore-since we figured out it was MariAnne's husband."

Needless to say, I kept my eyes averted from the screen door or front windows, and avoided the porch as best I could, for the rest of my stay. Jimminy Christmas, but living in the islands changes folks.