Dav!d Reed

Upon arriving at my funky little lime-green Shackteau in out in Coral Bay, St. John after what had been sixteen hours of grueling car/plane/boat/taxi travel carrying with me a few guitars, a PA and enough clothes to last three months, I crawled out of my tired old Hyundai rental car My arms loaded with luggage and guitars I stumbled down the dark path and kicked open the weather-beaten white louvered door to the shack. It was nearly midnight. I was exhausted. The delicious, old 'home again at last' feeling of relief and joy that I usually experience upon my arrival to my island retreat quickly dissolved when I turned on the light and saw what was standing there to greet me.

There stood “Kelvinator”. The ancient, stained, rusted apartment-sized refrigerator loomed like a miniature Stonehenge pintle, smack dab in the middle of the room. Its door precariously yawned open, revealing a worn out door gasket, presenting like the pale, flaccid lips of an old crone. Inside were two small glass shelves - one cracked and covered with the detritus of age and abandonment. A freezer box way larger than anyone could reasonably expect to reside within the belly of such a diminutive refrigerator dripped moisture. A short, crusty electrical cord trailed behind, like the naked tail of a tree rat. “Well, this is certainly a treat,” I muttered. “What in hell am I supposed to do with this?” I asked no one.

Part of the plastic “Kelvinator” logo name plate on the dented door had been broken off between the letters 'n' and 'a'. The 'ator' section evidently had disappeared, leaving “Kelvin” stuck to the door like an eponymous afterthought.

“Forthwith I shall name thee 'Kelvin'” I decreed, guessing that perhaps I wasn't the first to have done so. Kelvin leaned forward significantly, as if in deference to my arrival. However, further investigation revealed that poor Kelvin's small feet - certainly way more tired than mine - had actually disappeared up through his rusted bottom plate, thus disallowing his door to remain shut. Not a desirable feature for a refrigerator.

“Why are you here?” I mused to Kelvin. That I thought a refrigerator would answer such an existential question is beyond me, but he actually transmitted a response: “I am here to be of service to you. And you are here to be of service to me.”  It really had been an awfully long day of travel.

I needed the floor space in my small room and I'd decided that Kelvin was a bit too tall for an ottoman or night table. He offered nowhere near enough room to be a useful dresser. It was evident that Kelvin's filthy little self would not be welcome anywhere inside the Shackteau, so I pushed and shoved and dragged him from the middle of my small room out onto the porch. “I don't know how you got here, or what I'm supposed to do with you, Kelvin, but I'm too tired to figure this out now. Goodnight!”, and I dragged my own self off to bed.

I was awakened early the next morning by a gentle knocking on my door. It was Percival, the sweet, venerable church deacon from Dominica who owns my shack. “A very good mahnin', to you Mr. David, and welcome back to deh island.”

“Thank you, Percival, and it's also very good to see you again,” I replied, somewhat embarrassed to be wiping sleep from my eyes at 7AM. I knew that Percival had likely been awake since 4:30, tending to his own duties before heading off for his job as groundskeeper at Estate Concordia.

“I suspec' ya see deh 'frigerator dere? Wan' ya know ya use it if ya wan'. Jes' plug he in. But he door nah stay close...hafta use dis tape to keep he door close',” Percival said as he handed me a roll of duct tape.

“Ah, thank you, Percival,” I said, taking the tape from him, imagining chilled food and cold beer spilling out onto the floor each time Kelvin's door was 'untaped'. “I was wondering how it got there and what your plans were for it. I thought it was going to the dump!”

“Nah, no dump for he,” laughed Percival. “He got life in he yet. Ya bes' use 'im! Have a blessed day, Mr. David, and again, welcome back!” And off he went, whistling into his day, having made it quite clear that the dump was not an option for Kelvin. Now my first round of business for the day had been ordained: Figure out how to make Kelvin useful - without making me insane!

I tipped Kelvin back and leaned him against the porch wall. Sure enough, his two front feet had painfully retracted through his rusty floor and were protruding reluctantly less than half an inch. His back two feet, however, looked fine. I went out into my yard and rooted around until I found two small scraps of wood about an inch and half thick. I placed these scraps under Kelvin approximately where his front feet should be. Voila! Kelvin's new prostheses worked like a charm and allowed him to stand straight up again! And the best part? His door remained closed!

“Now we have to do something about your door gasket, Kelvin,” says I as I got a bowl of soapy water and a sponge. “And while I'm at it, you shall receive a thorough, all-over scrubbin'!”

I spent the better part of the next hour removing years of filth and grime from Kelvin, being very careful not to further damage any of his fragile gasket material. I removed his shelves and scrubbed his copious freezer compartment until he positively gleamed, inside and out. Well, sort of. At least as good as an ancient, well-worn apartment-sized Kelvinator of undetermined origin can be capable of gleaming. Bits of duct tape were enlisted to hold Kelvin's door gasket reasonably in place.

And then came the moment of truth: Time to plug Kelvin into the wobbly wall socket! I grabbed his electrical cord (considerably more flexible and less ratty since his tubbin') and plugged it into the wall, fully expecting the primitive, low-amp Shackteau wiring to heat up and blow. But it didn't. Kelvin woke up, rattled a little and then hummed to life. Within an hour, I had a fully functioning 'fridge! And as an added bonus, Kelvin's top was exactly counter-height, so I could use his top as a work surface to prepare food.

“Excelsior!” I shouted. “Hooray and huzzah for Kelvin!”

Days turned to weeks, then to months, and Kelvin kept humming along nicely. I decorated his door with local stickers from “I Got Baked In the Sun” bakery and the notorious “Skinny Legs”. I returned the unused roll of duct tape to Percival who was quite pleased to learn of Kelvin's well-being. Kelvin happily cooled a few gallons of milk, six coconuts, countless vegetables and fruits, chilled more than a few ginger beers and kept a bottle of rum icy cold in his freezer...all with no problems, no issues. Except one.

Recall Kelvin's copious freezer? It may be that Kelvin had a really cold, cold heart, or was simply cold-blooded, but that damn freezer frosted up like a Greenland glacier in rather short order. It got so chock full of snowy, frosty ice that there was no room for the ice cube tray. My rum bottle became ice- locked. 

Adjusting his fully-functioning thermostat did little to remedy his glacier-making abilities, thus requiring Kelvin to be defrosted on a weekly basis. Once, Percival interrupted our weekly defrosting ritual by popping his head around my porch door just in time to see me sweeping some of Kelvin's snow and ice off my porch floor with a broom. “Don' ya use deh shovel to do dis back north?” he queried with a smile. Perhaps Kelvin might simply have been trying to remind me of what I'd been missing back in wintery New England?

Then I absent-mindedly neglected Kelvin's defrosting schedule for over a month. This led to a copious abundance of ice such that there was little room for anything else. I had been in the habit of spending mornings writing my How-to-Play the Fretless Cigar Box Guitar book, but today Kelvin demanded my attention. The morning sun shone strongly on Kelvin's porch space, so I decided I could multi-task: I would write as Kelvin, basking in the tropical sun, defrosted, and I'd still have time to visit the beach before I had to play my gig that evening!

I unplugged Kelvin and opened his door to allow the warm sun to work its magic on the permafrost within. I removed the food and beverages, placing them in the shower stall covered with a towel to preserve whatever cool I could from the Caribbean heat. Then I set to writing and waiting. And waiting.

After about an hour, audible dripping noises informed me that the defrosting process was definitely underway. I took my knife and chipped away at the interior ice cap. Small chunks fell to the floor, but there remained so much frost and ice that I could not yet remove the drain tray; the rum bottle was completely encased. So I went back to my writing.

A little while later I heard a small chunk of ice fall away. A miniature iceberg, calving from its mother glacier, fell not into an arctic sea, but onto my tropical porch floor where it began to flow. I picked up my knife and began chipping away again. This time more ice fell and I swept it into a dustpan and heaved it over my porch railing onto the street below where it sat for a few seconds before evaporating away on the sun-scorched pavement. A large grey thrushee, a garrulous and curious bird who'd been sitting in a nearby genip tree watching me all morning, occasionally chirped his interest - or criticism - in my activity. He would cock his head and let out a loud Ta-WEET? that definitely had a question mark attached to it. I returned to my writing. But not for long.

The solar-thermal defrosting process had been achieved, the tipping point reached. Large chunks of snowy ice began to rapidly fall onto the floor from Kelvin's chest cavity. It was all happening rather quickly now. I enlisted my knife to remove the remaining ice and again retrieved my broom and dust pan. I wondered again 'Why in hell would such a small fridge have such a large freezer?'. There was now way more frozen fallout than I could fit in a single dust pan scoop. I needed a bucket, but didn't have one. Taking my cue from Percival, I shoveled the slushy stuff into my dustpan, quickly flinging the contents off the porch onto the road below.

I don't normally do this sort of thing. I prefer to think things through, devise a plan. But this time, I needed to get rid of the glacial material before it melted, flooding my porch floor. However in my haste to remove it, I neglected one important fact: The road below was directly adjacent to the Shackteau, running just twenty feet below my porch. It was used for vehicular traffic. It was not a snow removal zone. Useful Factoid: 'Snow Removal Zone' is a totally irrelevant and unknown concept in the Caribbean. At least until today.

I hurriedly piled the last of Kelvin's sloughing ice onto the brimming dustpan, quickly raised it up and let it fly. About midway through its icy arc from porch to road, I noticed a shiny, new, red rental Jeep approaching on the road below. “Good lord!” I exclaimed, sucking in my breath. “No! No! Please, God, don't . . .”

Before I could finish my thought, the load of snow and ice landed in a perfect, slushy heap on that scarlet Jeep's hood. The combined velocity of Kelvin's falling frost with the speed of the moving Jeep made for quite an interesting, and certainly alien, sound upon impact – Shhhhplaaaaaatttttttt!!!!

The Jeep's tires screeched. The thrushee squawked and shot off like a missile. Miss Lucy's goats and chickens who had been happily scrounging the adjacent roadside for edibles exploded off into the bush like livestock grenades. I stood dumbstruck as Kelvin's icy avalanche and the Jeep both came to screeching stop about thirty feet from where I stood, immobilized, above them on my porch.

Inside the Jeep a tourist family, obviously from northern climes as evidenced by their pallid, opalescent skin tone, sat stunned. The tattooed, bearded man with shaved head and no visible neck sat macho- style, gripping the steering wheel. Next to him his bejeweled, bottle-blonde wife who sported oversized sunglasses, cosmetic breasts and a goofy oversized sunhat let out a piercing shriek. Plopped miserably in the back seat looking as though they'd rather be having a root canal slumped two sour- looking, gum-chewing adolescent girls, wrapped in gaudy beach towels and serious attitude. Their lacquered hair was crowned by backwards ball caps; one with a “NY” logo, the other with a “Hello, Kitty” graphic. This bunch, no doubt relieved to be away from the absolutely brutal winter conditions back in the northern States, stared wide-eyed and slack-jawed in momentary silence as I stood above them, paralyzed, on my porch. Suddenly like a beehive smashed with a sharp rock, they all erupted! Everyone was hollering their best New York curses, shaking their fists and giving me furious middle finger salutes.

“Yo, crazy man, what the f**k you think yer doin'?” roared Bronx man. Wife shrieked something unintelligible while the two teens glared and each gave me their best double-handed middle finger salute from the Jeep's open windows. “Hello Kitty” stuck out her tongue.

Mortified, I momentarily feared Poppy just might feel the need to demonstrate his machismo by springing out of the Jeep and, leaping up the high walled embankment in an adrenaline-fueled rage, nailing me to the porch wall. I probably deserved it.

“I am so, so sorry,” I sincerely apologized. Trying to lighten things up a little, I smiled, “Bet you thought you could get away from all those blizzards back home, eh? See, I was defrosting my refrigerator and...” but before I could finish my explanation they'd roared off, tires screeching, shiny red fenders dripping cold water, windshield wipers flapping wildly. I thought I could still hear shouting - “You crazy sumbitch” - and I am fairly sure I could make out a couple of middle finger salutes through the Jeep's blacked out rear windows as they tore off towards Salt Pond.

*****

That night I had a dream. It was about Kelvin. Like a kitchen Frankenstein, he had been brought into this world cursed, from some dark, gothic factory hidden somewhere deep in Eastern Europe. Dark forces had installed a demonic component inside of him that made him behave in mysteriously untoward and sometimes evil ways. Kelvin looked normal alright, just like all the other Kelvinators of his vintage: white, boxy, small and rectangular – the perfect size to fit innocuously in an apartment, perhaps under a counter.

But Kelvin was different and odd things had happened to the people with whom Kelvin resided. Things like routinely blown electrical fuses, broken water pipes resulting in ruinous floods, spoiled food and strange nighttime noises. Peculiar, localized meteorological disturbances often accompanied these events. Each successive owner of Kelvin began to wonder whether perhaps it was that weird little 'fridge of theirs that may have had something to do with the disturbingly annoying events that plagued their homes. Each, in turn, got rid of him. And lucky for them, too, because things were steadily going from bad to worse with Kelvin.

Just before Kelvin was sent away for the last time to the Salvation Army where an enthusiastic church pastor from the outback would pick him up to be used in their parish commissary, the poor island family with whom Kelvin had last resided found themselves in a terrible state of inconsolable grief. The family had several small children and their youngest daughter, a sweet little girl of three, had mysteriously disappeared a few days ago without a trace. There were no witnesses, no clues. “One minute she on de floor playin' wit' her toy animals, de nex', BAM! she jus' gone, jus' like dat!” a distraught auntie later told the befuddled detective. The authorities were clearly stumped.

A few days later, the distraught mother went to the village's old wise woman for consolation and sage advice. The old wise woman sat silently in her tiny wooden shack upon what had once been the front seat of a Jeep. She slowly fingered a length of old electrical cord like a string of worry beads. Her long, snowy hair flowed in snake-like braids down around her waist. Deep from within her leathery, wrinkled face, ice blue eyes stared mysteriously from her open door to the high mountain peaks visible in the faraway distance. Despite it being summertime, snow and ice could plainly be seen. After a long while sitting in a transcendent state, the old woman turned slowly to the tearful mother sitting at her gnarled feet, opened her toothless mouth and solemnly uttered, “Kelvin ate her.”

Then I awoke with an urgent desire to get a new refrigerator.