Used Stories

by Poppy Z. Brite

  This time, Kat didn’t argue.

  “Kingston’s gonna blow sky-high one of these days,” said Gideon.

  They were sitting in a rum shop near Kat’s hotel, and Gideon, as the young man had introduced himself, seemed to be baring his soul to her. Kat didn’t know why; he wasn’t drunk, and she’d never thought of herself as a particularly good listener, but somehow in the midst of the crowd and the chaos they had hit it off. He’d told her about his two years at the University of the West Indies, his attempts to work as a journalist. Now he was describing the street politics of the city, the rival parties JLP and PNP and their devolution in Kingston to a pack of rival gangs who controlled the slums, killing each other for the sake of party loyalty. Loyalty, it seemed, could be as important as a free election or as petty as drinking the wrong brand of beer. Gideon was drinking Red Stripe.

  Kat thought he was very attractive, but was trying not to show it. With Tedd so recently in her past, a vacation fling was the last thing she needed.

  “That guy who grabbed you? He used to be a big man in the Concrete Jungle, where I live. He’d throw street carnivals, have food and beer for everybody. He only started drinking so much after a JLP posse shot his son.”

  “That’s terrible, but it doesn’t give him the right to grab a woman and curse her on the street.”

  “No, ‘course not.” Gideon stared into his beer bottle. “That comes from the drinking. Different people grieve in different ways.”

  “What about you?” She willed him to meet her eyes, and he did. “Are you grieving for somebody?”

  That got a rueful smile out of him. “You see a lot, Katherine.”

  “I already told you everybody calls me Kat.”

  “I don’t like cats. Katherine is much more beautiful.”

  “And you’re trying to change the subject. I’m sorry, I don’t mean to be a nosy American.”

  “It’s okay. It’s just something I haven’t talked about for years, ‘cause everybody I know already knows about it. Ever heard of Orange Street?”

  “I think I was on it today.”

  “Yeah, it’s not so bad near the market. But down toward the harbor it gets pretty rough. Bunch of yards—tenements, and the people who live there are all PNP. So? Son in 1976, a posse came and blew up one of those yards with Molotov cocktails, then shot the firemen who came to put it out. Five hundred people homeless, eleven dead.

  “One of those dead was my twin brother Thomas. We were eight. We were identical twins, but he was always runty, and I took care of him. But nor that night. I couldn’t get to him, and he burned.

  “Nobody ever proved it, and the newspaper wouldn’t write about it. But everybody knew it was Seaga, Seaga the goddam fascist and his JPL.” Gideon shrugged. “Everybody’s lost somebody, everybody in Kingston, anyway. But I don’t like to see innocent folk get hurt, and I especially don’t like to see them get hurt by JLP. That’s why I talked to you tonight. There’s Shower Posse at that party, and it isn’t their territory.”

  “Look.” Kat held up her hands in a placating gesture. “That’s horrible about your brother. I’m so sorry. But I think I’m in way over my head here.”

  “I understand. You come to Jamaica and buy up our treasures, but you don’t want to see the dirty side.”

  “I—” Kat wasn’t sure what to say; he had spoken in a pleasant enough tone, but his words were damningly true. “I live in New York, okay? I spend plenty of time worrying about getting shot. But yeah, basically I’m here to buy stuff from the nice lady in the market, and probably pay her a whole lot more than most people would. It’s how I make my living.”

  “Living.” Gideon looked faintly amused. “Americans always talk about their living. Jamaicans just spend their time trying not to die.”

  “So can I see you again?” he asked in front of her hotel, in the flower-scented night, and Kat surprised herself by saying yes.

  “I’m taking the bus to Spanish Town tomorrow. I want to check out the market there. Come with me?”

  “I can’t tomorrow.” Gideon rubbed a hand over his short dreadlocks. “Something to do. How long will you be here?”

  “Until next week, but I have to travel. I could be back in Kingston by Tuesday.”

  “Then I’ll see you on Tuesday, Katherine.”

  Her dreams ran hot and cold, smooth and sharp. A man was inside her, not Tedd, but a lithe black man who moved like Heaven. A prick in her womb, a thousand pricks out of her skin. She woke with the taste of iron in her mouth.

  She parked up the little man, swathing him in layers of bubble wrap so the nails would not poke through, and sent him to New York. She took the bus to Spanish Town, then up through the crystalline Blue Mountains to Port Antonio. She flew to Ocho Rios on a perfectly terrifying small plane. And all the time she could not stop to thinking about Gideon.

  In Ocho Rios, she called home; or called the gallery, rather, as her home was locked and empty. Rob answered the phone sounding uncharacteristically subdued.

  “Yes, the packages got here fine. The nail fetish is particularly nice. It’s not an antique—the lady you bought it from probably cranks ‘em out at home; you ought to see if she has any more—but it’s a beautiful piece. Worth several hundred dollars, I think.”

  “It’s worth that much, or you think you can get that much for it?”

  “In New York, what’s the difference?” Rob laughed, and so did Kat. But he still didn’t sound quite right.

  “Anything wrong?” she asked. “Is Axel okay?”

  “Well, he’s having trouble sticking to his pill schedule. I made a big chart for the refrigerator, with gold stars like they used to have in nursery school. I think the drugs are really helping, thought, Kat. I think he’s going to beat this thing.”

  “I’m so glad,” she told him, and meant it. She’d not been close to her parents; knowing Axel and Rob had been like getting a second chance. “But you still sound kind of down.”

  “Sweetheart, I didn’t want to say. I wanted you to have a nice tropical vacation. But Axel made me promise that I’d tell you if you asked. The police came to the shop this morning. Apparently your ex-boyfriend was murdered.”

  “Tedd?” she said, absurdly; she’d been with no one else for three years. “What? What happened? Why did the police have to talk to you? What—”

  “Shh, shh, let me tell you. Tedd came to the shop a few days ago wanting to know why you weren’t answering your phone. I said I wanted to know why he was calling you, but he said he just wanted to make sure you were okay—”

  Wanted to make sure I hadn’t slit my wrists with grief over the loss of him, Kat thought, and then a wave of nausea washed over her as she realized just what she was thinking.

  “So I told him you were away on a buying trip. He wanted to know when you’d be back, and when I told him it was none of his business, he started pulling out the testosterone stops. “You fuckin’ supercilious queens, I love that girl’ and such. I always thought it was cute how he tried to use those big words.”

  “Robbie.”

  “Sorry. Anyway, I’d just put the nail fetish out on the floor, and when I asked him to leave, he kicked it—just kicked it right over! That’s when Axel came out from behind the counter, picked him up, and carried his skinny ass out to the sidewalk. I told you those drugs were working!

  “That was the last we heard from him, and that’s what we told the police.”

  “But what happened? Why—how was he murdered?”

  “He was bludgeoned, sweetheart. One of the band found him in his apartment. Heavy object to the skull, not found at the scene. As coked up as he appeared to be at the shop, I’d imagine it was a debt gone bad.”

  “Probably,” Kat murmured. She’d given Tedd money to cover cocaine debts more than a few times.

  “There was one funny thing. Probably some kind of gang ritual, but I thought it was an odd coincidence seeing as you’d just sent the fetish. I didn’t mention that to the police
, of course—they’d probably seize the piece as quote-unquote evidence and it’d end up in some cop’s rec room.”

  “Rob. What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Tedd’s guitar,” Rob told her. “It was hammered full of nails.”

  It was strange arriving back in Kingston so numb; she had felt so lush when she left it. She’d meant it when she told Tedd she never wanted to see him again. But there was a world of difference between not seeing him again and imagining him alone in his nasty apartment, face bloody and skull stove in, his thin body curled upon itself in final agony. His guitar. The lingering taste of iron.

  She told Gideon all this when they met in the rum shop. “I was attracted to you when we met,” she said, unable to make herself shut up no matter how much she wanted to. “But after this, I just don’t think I can handle it. I hope you understand…”

  Kat let her voice trail off. Gideon was nodding, a sympathetic look on his handsome face, but she suspected his mind was elsewhere.

  “Where did you get the fetish?” he asked.

  “At the Jubilee Market, like I said.”

  “Yes, yes. But from which vendors? A woman? What did she look like?”

  Kat described the woman as well as she could, ending with the purple turban. “She said he was an obeah man. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Oh, yeah, I know about obeah.” His eyes narrowed. “Comes from Africa. Ashanti. Nanny, one of our PNP heroines, she was an Ashanti slave. Obeah is black magic. Good for getting revenge on your enemies.”

  “You’re PNP?”

  “Katherine…” He sighed, gazed up at the twinkling Christmas tree lights strung from the tin ceiling. “I should have told you before. I’m the leader of a posse.”

  “A posse.”

  “Yes.”

  “Bombs and guns.”

  “Oh yes, lots of guns. He actually smiled.

  “Gideon, ‘posse’ sounds like a word from an old cowboy movie.”

  “Yeah, some of the brothers love those old Westerns. They think that’s how life would be if they were free—whatever free means to them.”

  “What does free mean to you, Gideon?”

  “Paying them back for Thomas.”

  “Killing other people that somebody loves. That doesn’t bother you?”

  “Not if they’re JLP,” he said, and his eyes were as cold as iron.

  She knew she would not see him again, but it was still awkward saying goodnight. There were ghosts of things between them, things that could have happened, though now Kat was very glad they hadn’t.

  As it turned out, she was wrong about not seeing him again. She saw him again the very next morning. It was her last full day in Kingston, and remembering that Rob had asked her to look for more nail fetishes, she returned to the Jubilee Market. The crowd pressed in as she searched for the stall of the woman who had sold her the little man. She smelled garbage and goat shit, and realized that she could hardly wait to leave this city.

  As she approached the stall, she saw Gideon talking to the woman. She wondered whether to walk on by, but before she could decide, he finished his business, turned away, and saw her. His smile was broad and chilling.

  “Remember, obeah is good for getting revenge on your enemies,” he said, and disappeared into the crowd.

  The nail fetish had been sold by the time Kat got back to New York. Rob was disappointed that she hadn’t been able to find any others, but she told him to get over it, and he was so surprised by her fit of temper that he let the matter drop.

  She called Tedd’s parents, who told her he had been cremated and that there were no leads in the case. Thought they intimated no such thing. Kat could not help but wonder if they blamed her.

  She began noticing news stories that she had skimmed over before, stories about Jamaican gangs that controlled the sale of cocaine in the boroughs of New York. They had a reputation for being more dangerous than the mob, perhaps even more ruthless than the Chinese triads. There was one story in the Post that she cut out and stuck on her refrigerator with a magnet. Though it hurt her to look at it every day, she could not make herself take it down.

  NEW FORM OF TORTURE?

  A slaying in Queens has been linked to the John Wayne Posse, a Jamaican gang associated with the PNP, or People’s National Party. The PNP was founded in Jamaica in 1938 as a democratic party for workers, but was later tarnished by relations with Castro’s Cuba and more recently by associations with the crack cocaine trade.

  Orlando Washington, 23, formerly of Kingston, was found dead in an abandoned warehouse in Queens. Washington, an alleged crack dealer for a rival posse, appeared to have been bludgeoned to death after being tortured with a nail gun.

  THE GOOSE GIRL

  Seely woke with the conviction that she had dreamed of something terribly important, something she’d forgotten and needed to remember. But there was no chance to lie lazily in bed and let it wash over her, no chance at all to remember with the alarm bleeping and Laurel knocking on the door. “Drusilla? That’s been going off for half an hour. If you hit the snooze button again you’ll be late.”

  “Don’t call me that,” Seely mumbled into her pillow, as she did most mornings.

  “All right, Seely, then. Thought why you want to use that ugly nickname I can’t understand. Your parents named you after your great-aunt to show respect, not so you could mutilate it—”

  “Truncate,” said Seely.

  “What?”

  “Truncate is the word you want. More accurate than mutilate in that context.”

  Seely’s stepmother slammed the door and went away, which was precisely the effect Seely had intended.

  Seely extricated herself from the comforting wreck of her bedclothes, wavered on cold bare feet for a moment, then sat down at her vanity table. The antique mirror was surrounded with black netting and dried roses. Photographs of her friends back in San Francisco were tucked into its edges, smiling faces outlined in dark makeup and pierced with shiny bits of metal: the friends she’d had before her father married Laurel and they dragged her here to what they called “the heartland.” It wasn’t the heartland in Seely’s opinion; if anything, it was the fucking cloaca.

  She’d shaved most of her hair just before they left San Francisco. Now it hung nearly to her shoulders, bleached to a brittle white with a single violet strand near her face. Daddy and Laurel hated it, which made Seely cherish it all the more.

  She put the Cure’s Bloodflowers into her CD player and began her morning routine. She colored her eyelids and her lips inky black, slipped twelve silver rings into the holes that traced the delicate curves of her ears, pulled on a well-worn pair of black jeans and a fishnet top and a Crüxshadows T-shirt on top of that. She showed her feet into a pair of Doc Martens that looked as if she might have walked here from San Francisco in them. Just before she went downstairs, she opened the bottom drawer of her vanity, reached underneath the tangle of underwear, and took out a handkerchief. Marring its snowy surface were three small spots of red. Bloodflowers.

  Seely tucked the handkerchief into the pocket of her jeans and went downstairs, hoping against hope that her father and not Laurel had made the coffee this morning. To say that Laurel’s coffee tasted like horse piss would, in Seely opinion, do horse piss a grave injustice.

  One of the things she remembered best was how her mother had taken her riding. The smell of horses, their long delicate noses questing for an apple or a carrot in her hand, the liquid muscle feel of their bodies between her legs: all of these things were intertwined with Seely’s memories of her mother.

  The stable nags had boring horsey names like Brownie and Jumper, so Seely and Mama would always rename the horses they hired. Even if the new names only lasted for a few hours, they seemed to suit the animals better than the names given them by the stable. One day when Seely was seven, she couldn’t think of a good name for the whitish mare she was riding, so Mama called it Falada.

  “Falada?” Seel
y echoed doubtfully.

  “It’s from a a very old story,” Mama explained. “Most people would call it a fairy tale, but there are no fairies in it. There is a princess, thought, and Falada is her horse.”

  “So, I’m the princess now,” Seely said, delighted.

  Mama threw back her head and shook her hair, a thick dark shock that looked a little like the mane of the horse she was riding. “And I’m the queen.”

  Seely rode Falada in her dreams that night. They left the stable path and skimmed across the hills, barely seeming to touch the ground. The horse, now pure white with a silver mane, spoke to Seely. “Alas, young queen, how ill you fare. If this your mother knew, her heart would break in two.”

  “But—but, Falada, I’m only the princess. Mama’s the queen.”

  She felt the horse’s sadness touch her mind. “You shall be the queen sooner than you would wish.”

  Seely woke crying, unable to remember what she had dreamed, only that it had started out happily and ended horribly.

  The week before Seely turned eight, Mama fell down in the shower and never got up again. Daddy said a blood vessel had burst in her brain. An aneurysm, he called it. Her mother had been stolen from her by something she couldn’t even spell.

  Daddy left Seely with a babysitter while he went to make the funeral arrangements. Intimidated by the magnitude of the little girl’s loss, the sitter sat numbly in front of the TV and allowed Seely free run of the house. She rummaged through Mama’s dresser drawers, looking for some clue that would tell her she knew not what. Half-used tubes of lipstick, gossamer underthings, an empty velvet jewelry box told her nothing. Just as she was about to give up, she found the handkerchief. It was tucked like an afterthought into a drawer full of cashmere sweaters, as white as Falada’s coat, its center stained with three drops of red as small and vivid as pomegranate seeds. Mama’s blood; it had to be.