“So hummuch dat?” Fire asked as he got up to leave.

In his mind Buju counted the bottles at their feet. There were four stouts remaining.

“Just pay for the four,” he said, hoping for a chance to pay back Fire for all his help. Fire had helped him in so many ways, from listening to his ideas to encouraging him to create an education trust for his son.

“Just cool, Buju man,” Fire replied, punching him playfully. “We haffe pay for what drink off, man.”

Buju jabbed him in the chest and they began to shadowbox.

“You cool,” Buju said as Fire slipped a cross and touched a hooking pat on his cheek. “You cyaah siddown wid a man and reason wid him in fronta you house then charge him for de juice. Wha kinda Yankee ting you comin wid? Just cool, man.”

“But this is your business,” Fire replied. “Everybody know you have a little shop in your house. If we did go out to a bar that’s a different thing.”

As he said this Buju feinted with an overhand and palmed his face.

“Okay,” Fire said as he flopped on the sidewalk. “That was the knockout punch.”

As they laughed he reached into his pocket and thumbed through the money he’d taken out of the bank for the bribe, and as Buju jerked him to his feet he palmed him a couple of bills.

“This is not for the stout,” he said under his breath. “This is for my godson’s trust fund.”

Buju shook his head and accepted the money, then watched them drive away.

Back on the main road, sweetened by the bitter stout, Fire sent the Land Rover charging up the hill. On the left, from a thousand feet, the jungle fell toward them in a stream of palms and shrubs and trees hung with furry vines. Breaking across the road, the greenery resumed its cascade on their right, roiling and frothing down the steep incline and splashing into the sea, where forest green and ocean blue became a minty teal.

At a dip in the road by a jackfruit tree, Fire turned off on a rutted track and the Land Rover bucked and grunted as it burrowed into the heart of the forest; there, the trees grew tall and light drained through the canopy in amber streams like drafts of beer. As they came out of a fording, the track became a wide dirt road that curled around the mountain, switching back through bamboo groves and stands of wild bananas.

Picking up a grassy trail, they rode on the edge of a deep ravine to the top of a high plateau; there at the end of a gravel road was the Lighthouse, the writing retreat that Fire had bought and renovated two years before his return—a nineteenth-century windmill that had lost its blades to vandals and the weather. From a ring of white hibiscus it rose up forty feet, a column of stone with six-foot yellow shutters that opened from the top like wings.