How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

by Cherie Jones

  It is true that he has a wife, thinks Sergeant Beckles now, true that he is unlikely to leave her, but Sheba is the type of woman he would build a house for. He would ensure she would always be comfortable, that she would never have to walk the length of Baxter’s Beach again, never have to give her body to anybody but him. He knows, thinks Sergeant Beckles, that this is a prospect most women would kill for. Sheba’s disinterest can only mean she has found these prospects somewhere else.

  A man could have the best of intentions, sighs Sergeant Beckles, it don’t matter to some of these women. Some women just don’t want to settle down.

  Lala, he thinks, is possibly one of these types of women, and therefore capable of anything, including the death of her own child.

  The sergeant stays in his car until evening, sleeping, thinking, watching, waiting until the sun goes to sleep and he is parked in a soft darkness and he must go home.

  The following morning, when his belly tells him to go back to the circle of sea-grape trees, still steaming with his stink, to watch and wait, he obeys it. And when he sees a sun-bleached gigolo concealing himself behind trees and bushes as he approaches Adan’s little house, he is not surprised that his belly starts screaming.

  Chapter 17

  Tone

  17 August 1984

  The beach stinks of stewing moss, sargassum seaweed and the putrefying guts of beached fishes, rotting in the warming air. It is one of those mornings when the water remains hungover after a night of reckless abandon and has vomited on the sand before seeking to sleep it off. The tourists find that a walk along the shore is less about a stroll on the stretch of pink powder reproduced in the magazines and more the halting stop-and-start necessary to avoid the hidden jellyfish in the seaweed and the spines of sea urchins washed ashore and submerged in the sand and the glass-bottle pieces that have not yet been in the sea long enough to be smoothened and dulled by sun and salt and made into something worthy of the treasure-hunting of children.

  Tone walks along Baxter’s Beach and his feet rely on their own eyes to avoid the stings and sticks and slicings waiting in the detritus. Tone is watching Adan’s house as he comes up the beach, acting like he isn’t watching it, like he is merely strolling along the sand at this early hour of the morning. In truth, no one would think anything amiss if they saw him there. Everyone knows that men of Tone’s genus are fixtures of the beach, an accepted part of the ecosystem that thrives there. But Tone is not a gigolo this morning, Tone is a worried lover and this is why he thinks he might arouse suspicion.

  Adan’s house is at the very end of the stretch of beach, without a calm, clear bay for bathing. There are no tourist women here for Tone to offer handmade jewelry or a night in bed or a joint or a ride on a Jet Ski, but the view here is beautiful and luxury villas still open onto this stretch. Several of his clients tend to rent these houses, or to own them. It isn’t unusual for people to find him walking this beach at any given time of day or night. But it isn’t tourists that Tone is watching for; Tone is watching for Adan, and Adan is the reason he bobs and weaves behind coconut trees and vegetation every time he hears a sound he is not accustomed to, instead of continuing to walk out in the open.

  Eventually he comes to sit in the ruins of a small fish market, where the fishermen used to beach their boats and blow a conch shell and announce to a bygone village that there was fresh fish to be had on the sand. This village died in the birthing of the big houses, because rich tourists who visit for a few months in a year do not wish to suffer the stink of a market in order to purchase food each day. Only Adan’s little old house, rising unsteadily from behind the coconut trees, and the ruins of the market are left. A few tiled stone structures like tall tables are spread across a paved square with a stopcocked pipe at one corner. Tone crouches beneath one of the tall tables, from which he can see the foot of the cement stairs to Adan’s house, and looks for Lala. She is sure to come down soon, he reasons. There are clothes to pick off the line and she’ll come down and he’ll talk to her, tell her that he’s sorry about Baby, offer her an out.

  The ruins of a nearby public bath have long since been overrun by a colony of sea-grape bushes that have flourished and become colossal in proportion, with wide flat leaves that remind Tone of the upturned palms of the beggars in town. Tone considers making a break for the sea-grape trees and waiting there a few minutes to be sure that Adan will not return, but ultimately decides against it. What could Adan find amiss about him visiting the house to see after Lala, especially when her husband is in hiding, especially after what happened to Baby? His reasoning makes him bold and he is about to step out of the ruins when he sees Adan come back and approach the stairs.

  Tone eases back into the ruins, backs away from the little wooden house. He settles a little farther away, near two fishing boats beached for repairs. He will wait there a while, Tone resolves; he will wait there until Adan leaves, and then he will visit her when it is safe.

  Chapter 18

  Lala

  17 August 1984

  Lala is pretending to have fallen asleep. After he had nearly crushed her hand, Adan had stomped outside to gather the coconuts the tree had discarded and others he had set aside for Coyote. He was tired of hiding, Adan had decided – better to get rid of the white woman so he could tie up that loose end and return to his house as a man, live his life in the open. He had grabbed the cutlass as he left the room and from their bed Lala hears it whistling through the coconut fronds and fiber.

  At times like this Lala does not know what to do. She is unsure whether she should go outside, near Adan and that whistling cutlass, to dredge the coir fiber in sand and scrub the dirty pots in the salty surf. She is unsure whether she should stay in bed, curled up as she is, with a throbbing hand and a stinging breast and try to rest until Adan has left with a load for Coyote. Lala decides that he may leave more quickly if he thinks that she is sleeping, that she is doing nothing that can further offend him, and so she tries her best to return to the land of dreams, where Baby is alive.

  But Lala cannot sleep. And when the cutlass stops its whistling and she hears the dull thud of his feet on the steps, Lala turns to face the wall and closes her eyes.

  In the foggy darkness of their bedroom she feels rather than sees Adan looking at her, senses rather than hears that he is still angry. It is the type of anger in search of a release, and Lala is therefore unsure about her decision to pretend to be asleep. While she thinks about this she considers the possible infractions: being asleep in bed instead of up doing chores like the good women of the world, her turned back instead of a willing smile, any number of household chores left undone, a dead baby she cannot bring back.

  She is facing the wall beside their bed with her hand set carefully on the pillow beside her to cool and her eyes tightly closed and she is breathing quietly, the way she imagines she does when she is asleep. The problem is that the only person who knows what she truly breathes like when asleep is Adan, and the curiosity of whether her breathing is a convincing approximation keeps her shoulders tense.

  “I know you ain’t fucking sleeping, Lala.”

  She cannot turn around. In that moment the weight of all her injuries falls upon her, those existing and those remembered, and the sheer bulk of them renders her immobile. There is the left nipple that, despite a poultice of aloe gel and breadfruit leaves, still seeps through the toilet paper she folds and positions inside of the cup of her bra each morning. There is the knee that has ached her for several months now, that she bandages each night before bed and unwraps on any occasion when she has to leave the house or do something for Adan that will require enough proximity for him to be angered by this evidence of her injury. There is the leaden weight at the bottom of her spine beneath a peeling burn in the shape of the clothes iron.

  But in that moment Lala also suffers the remembered horrors – the time when, with Baby still in her belly, she was held by her face at the edge of the cement steps and made to scream why he shou
ld not let her go, not let her fall enough feet to split her head like a watermelon; the time when he held the cutlass to her throat so closely that when he at last released her there was the thinnest line of beaded blood across her windpipe; the time he dragged her by her hair up those twenty-five steps, and the clumps of hair that bore witness to her struggle had littered the steps the following day.

  Even if she wants to move, she cannot, so firmly do these memories hold her still, so that when a stinging lash falls across her back and her eyes fly open with her mouth in the surprise of pain without origin, Lala considers that the true source of her pain is not the current cruelty, but the fact that she cannot do anything to avoid it, even if she wanted to.

  “Get up, Lala! Get to fuck up! Who you think you fooling?”

  “Why you does be doing me so?”

  “Get. To. Rass. Hole. Up!”

  * * *

  People lie about the first slap. Lala knows you can never trust a woman who can tell you the direction from which the fist first came, because if you are genuinely shocked that first time you are beaten, the only thing you remember is the sting. You cannot remember the direction because you were not expecting it. It is like the stories men like Adan tell about getting shot and not even realizing it and your senses have to process the evidence of the aftermath of something your brain still cannot comprehend. Your eyes see blood, your ears recall the report of gunfire, your nose smells gunpowder, you taste bile, you feel a wet red spot. Meaning you are shot. With that first slap you never know you have been slapped until your senses recover enough to tell you. Any woman who says otherwise is a witch who expected the slap anyway and very likely provoked it. Such a woman is therefore possessed of eyes too wide open to suggest genuine love in the first place.

  Lala cannot now remember where that first slap came from, she cannot remember the finer details of what it was about, but Lala knows that, in the dim light of morning after that first slap, she became Wilma without even thinking about it. Wilma’s response to chaos was always to seek order in the things around her.

  Lala had started with the bed that first morning she was boxed in their bed – she had removed the fitted sheet, the flat sheet and the two pillow cases and washed them, taken down the curtains from the window behind the bed and washed them too. Swept the wooden floor, mopped it, beaten the rug, taken Adan’s rusting yellow unicycle from the corner of the room and scraped and polished it until it shone, replaced it and fretted that it would not stand upright, propped it with a rock and tried not to worry that it would roll away on its own as if ridden by a ghost, scrubbed the rotting cupboards without thought to splinters, scraped the mildew and dried scraps of food from the garbage can beneath the sink, washed the dishes until her hands were gray from prolonged exposure to blue soap. She startled herself when she caught a glimpse of a woman with a black eye in the pockmarked shard of mirror that Adan had tacked to the wooden partition in the kitchen to help him with his shaving. She had stared at this woman, at the purple right cheek and bloodshot eye, and tried to remember whether this woman was someone she knew, someone whose name she should recall.

  (Why you so fucking own-way, Lala?)

  In the early nights of their marriage, after that first beating, Lala had made deals with God while her new husband snored. If He would only make this the marriage of her dreams, she had offered, if He would only grant them a happy life full of children and laughter around tables at dinnertime and matching outfits at the races or the fairs, if God would do that for her, she would forgive him taking her mother before she got the chance to really know her, she would forgive him for subjecting her to growing up with Carson and Wilma, she would go to church, she would forget about Tone, she would not hold these beatings against Adan.

  (“Rass. Hole. Own-Way!”)

  Of course she did not leave him. What woman leaves a man for something she is likely to suffer at the hands of any other? Didn’t Wilma’s neighbor run out of her home and into Wilma’s almost every Friday evening once her husband came home? Hadn’t she seen the evidence on one or another woman she had known of worse beatings than these? Had her own mother not tolerated such beatings?

  Lala had instead focused on the good days – bus rides into town with the setting sun behind them, window-shopping outside Harrison’s and marveling at the clothes on the mannequins, the big Kawasaki that flew past them that Adan said he’d buy himself one day, with an extra helmet so she could ride on the back of the bike with the wind making those long, long braids whip against her bum. Any outfit she wanted, said Adan, once he had the money – any outfit at all.

  When the ability to move returns to her, it returns so forcefully, so decisively, that she is out of the bed and behind the chair before her thoughts have asked her feet to stand. But movement alone does not bring memory with it, and as often happens at times like this, she cannot remember his name to call him, to make him stop.

  “What happen? What happen?”

  “Why you couldn’t just leave Baby? What kind of woman you is, Lala, to let go Baby so?”

  “I didn’t let go Baby on purpose! I sorry, I didn’t mean to let she go!”

  She pleads from the corner of their room for his forgiveness, she tells him she is sorry.

  “Please,” she says. “I did not mean for our Baby to die – please.”

  But she cannot say that name, the last thing his mother gave him before dying, the one appeal that might stop him. And when she is sobbing on the floor at his feet, and she has resigned herself to the strike that will finally kill her, when she has already welcomed the peace that death will bring – the possibility, perhaps, of seeing Baby again in one or other of the places where dead people go – he sucks his teeth like she is not even deserving of his beatings and retreats to his chair and his bible, and she sees a path straight to the door and she escapes, running down the cement steps without thought to the risk of breaking her neck, so free she feels she is flying.

  * * *

  Down the beach the pink man with the big gruff dog is crying. He is bent almost double over the green wrought-iron railing that delineates his piece of Paradise, and he makes deep sobs that somehow still sound as if he is making it up. What can a man such as this have to cry about? Lala slows down, wipes her own tears. Betsy is on her side, shuddering and frothing by his feet on the patio. The pink man is wearing the same black shorts he wears every day to take Betsy for her walk and his toes are covered in the sand that dusts his patio like pastry flour scattered on a flat surface in the work-up to a pie. Lala has previously wondered whether these tourists do not mind how this powdery sand must stick to everything, making it impossible to houseclean, how it must make everything slippery, how it surely infects with the memory of wetness and salty skin and swimming a space meant to be dry and clean and stationary.

  He does not seem to see Lala running, nor does he startle when she stops. He is oblivious to everything but Betsy suffering beside him, trying to drag herself upright every few minutes, struggling to lift her head to nudge his thigh, pawing the railings and whining, wondering why he does not save her.

  A woman Lala has never seen before comes off the beach in a sarong that shrouds her and a large straw hat that might be the reason for the shadows that cover her eyes. She pats the back of the pink man, letting her hand linger until it hardly leaves the surface of his skin and sort of squirms there, flopping about in a series of useless shivers. With her other hand she holds the hat firmly on her head and she shouts at no one in particular to call a vet, for Christ’s sake, even as she grimaces at the slimy green froth that trails perilously close to her slippered feet.

  When Lala reaches them she notices that the woman’s slippers have jeweled straps that glimmer, even in the pinky gray before the full spill of sunshine. She notices how the woman looks at her and Lala is suddenly conscious of the warm trickle of blood on her cheek, the seaweed cloak on hands and hair, the throbbing in her teeth that mimics her heartbeat.

  The woman sa
ys, “My God,” but she is no longer looking at Betsy; she is looking at Lala. Betsy breathes her last and the woman removes her shades to have a proper look and the pink man sobs harder. The woman removes her hand from his back and only then does he raise his head, wipe his eyes, and look at Lala.

  “My God,” the woman says again, “what happened to you?” She starts to walk toward Lala. “Were you robbed?”

  She keeps coming closer even though Lala is shaking her head, looking back down the beach, warning her to stay away. The pink man wipes his eyes, he is coming too. Lala looks around, trying to decide what to do, where to go. This is when she notices that the patio on which Betsy has died is attached to a big pale-blue villa, and that this villa shares a guard wall with the one adjacent to it. This other villa is not blue, it is white, and the wooden fence that tops the guard wall is familiar to her. It is one she has seen just recently.

  “I can help you,” says the woman. “I can go inside and get Rosa, she will know what else to do.”

  “No,” says Lala, “no. I am okay, it is okay.”

  “Hey!” the woman is saying when Lala starts to run, “come here! Let us help you!”

  Lala is running, fast, but not so fast that the pink man cannot catch her and eventually she finds herself sitting on his patio near the stiff shadow of his dead dog. Up close he is nothing like she expected, although it is difficult to say how. Up close, the pink man’s hand is burned brown, with little blond hairs like brush bristles sticking straight up and out of his skin. When the bristles come near Lala’s face she jumps and when she makes to run away, he says: