How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

by Cherie Jones

  But Lala had rejected him that day on the steps. She had not wanted to hear him when he told her to come away with him. She had returned his kisses, his hugs, and then she had said that she was already married to Adan, that trying to visit her like that would just get them both into even more trouble. They were no longer little children, Lala had told him, they needed to grow up, move on. Adan would eventually settle down, Lala had explained to him, and stop beating her. All marriages have these rough patches, Tone shouldn’t think that he needed to save her.

  When she said that, Tone almost did not recognize her, as if some impostor had clothed itself in her body and forced her lips to say things that Lala never would. He had been given cause to wonder whether Lala was even the same person he had met on the beach all those years ago. Whether this was some little fantasy he had carried in his head in prison, something to keep him warm at night, not something that should be bothering him now.

  In the few days since they met on the steps of Adan’s house, he has watched from his Jet Ski while Lala spends hours on the beach, plaiting heads for US dollars. Word has reached Tone about how she jumps from behind the hair of her clients and goes chasing crabs on the sand, about how she howls for Baby when people pass her with children, leaving heads half-done. Any time they see each other on the beach since that evening on the steps, Lala and Tone do not speak. It is as if their entire meaning, one for the other now, is the keeping of secrets. It is as if they both know their friendship is now doomed. What are secrets but things we want to forget? Why then would we keep the acquaintance of others who remember them?

  * * *

  22 August 1984

  The Thing stays silent two days later, when Adan meets him in the tunnel with the announcement that he intends to go back home. It has been long enough, determines Adan; if the police had wanted him about the white man’s murder, they would have come looking for him already. He is tired of visiting his wife in secret and then retiring to the hard floor of some facking cave at night. He is tired of lying low during the day. Bad man no ’fraid police, says Adan. Bad man no ’fraid nobody, as man.

  They need to sort out the next job, says Adan, them need to talk about it.

  This is how Tone comes to be sitting in the wrought-iron chair beside Lala and Adan’s bed, smoking a joint with the man he has served faithfully since boyhood, watching the same big hands that bruise Lala stretch toward him with a spliff.

  Adan still jumps at the sound of feet ascending the steps to his house. He still nods to Tone to tell him to be ready in case it is somebody they cannot welcome, he is still palpably relieved when he sees that it is only Jehovah’s Witnesses, not Sergeant Beckles and the soldiers of Babylon, come to take him in for questioning.

  The Witnesses want to talk about the parable of the bread and fish, the miracles marked in the bible. Bitches on Baxter’s Beach was making bread out of big rock for years, is what Adan tells the Witnesses, what make you feel they need a bible to tell them how all of a sudden? Tone watches one of the Witnesses step forward and smile. This Witness has not heard what Adan has said, he has heard how Adan has said it and has therefore concluded that what Adan needs, more than anything, is the love of the Jehovah he serves. This Witness is a frail old man in a stained fedora who walks with a stick. When he extends a small thin magazine, it shakes so much that Tone can hardly make out the image on the cover until he takes it in his own steady hands. The image is of two lions, a male and a female, resting their heads in the laps of the stupidest black people Tone has ever seen.

  Adan chupses long and hard, takes the tract from Tone, says thank you to the Witness, closes the door without checking to be sure the old man makes it back down the stairs unharmed, throws the tract in the trash, and gets back to rolling another spliff. Adan doesn’t have any problems with people who believe in the bible, he says, but he doesn’t have time for Witnesses, for reasons he considers so obvious he doesn’t bother to articulate them.

  “I got to get this thing sort out so we can bury Baby. I know you know the tunnels good-good,” says Adan, “nobody ain’t going think to look in them tunnels for nothing so.”

  Tone had not intended to be there, talking to Adan about his latest master plan, but Adan had insisted and he didn’t have anything better to do right then, so here he was.

  What happen to him that he getting on sketchy so, all of a sudden, Adan wants to know, and Tone is washed by a guilt he has not felt up to this point. He repeatedly denies that there is anything unsaid between him and Adan, he forces his eyes to stay on Adan’s until Adan looks away first.

  In his head, Tone admits that it is a good plan. The garrison tunnels stretch from the historical fort like the legs of an octopus. They have been mostly unused for the 300-plus years since the fort was abandoned by the British. Only a few people in his neighborhood know about them, mostly older people, and they have chosen to use them only as the homes of the fictional monsters who inhabit the nightmares of children. Children are therefore kept safely away from their depths, but Tone has long become unafraid of nightmares and he knows the tunnels like the fingers of his right hand. One of these tunnels ends in a cave on the beach, into which a boatload of marijuana can easily be deposited, and there are several caverns that converge into underground rooms big enough to hide a few hundred pounds until it can be sold.

  Tone understands that in Adan’s head, these few hundred pounds are the key to his future. Before Baby died, the weed was the means to a new house – a proper one that wasn’t so weather-beaten and decayed, a warm, dry place where you could raise a girl baby and keep a wife. Now the cargo is the means to a decent funeral for that same baby girl, repairs to the house where he keeps the wife who killed her.

  “We could even go in and move them once or twice, just to make sure.”

  “Uh-huh,” says Tone, inhaling the lit spliff. He is beginning to regret taking Adan to the tunnels to hide after the robbery.

  “As man, is just the money now for the boatman and the consignment,” Adan reasons. “Is just that little money I gotta fix up.”

  Tone is thinking about Lala.

  What he remembers most about the Lala he first met was that she was always humming. Even when she was listening, in the quiet spaces between whispered conversations in the tunnels, in the yard of his mother’s half-house and on Baxter’s Beach, she would deliver little melodies under her breath. It was as if a happy little child lay beneath that bullish build – a child whose belly was full, whose clothes were dry, and who was therefore free to sing while she explored the world. He spent months looking for that child, trying to coax it out of her, but up to the time they ended he’d never found it. She managed to keep it away from him, singing deep inside her.

  Even when he met her, the outward Lala was big – bigger than he was – with shoulders like the ones on the swimmers at the Olympics. Lala was not a fat girl. She was not the soft, pillowy sweet of Pammy at the convenience store, whose touch felt like grace when she handed Tone his change. She was not the tall, thin, and willowy of his friend Rocky, who worked the beach behind the Holborn Hotel. Lala was a big body on a big frame. A frame that said solid. A frame that said it did not need anyone to carry bags on its behalf. As it happens, Tone would have carried them anyway. Lala was quiet, he used to watch how she kept her eyes in the books her granny bought her, hardly looking up when he passed her on the beach. Tone had been intrigued by all that solidness surrounding a voice that barely squeaked when she spoke, a spirit that preferred to sing. Tone has fallen in love with her silence and the promise of liberating that hum beneath her breath. The man who could release that hum, Tone had thought, the man who could turn it into a song, elevate it to a shout, that man was a man indeed.

  Lala had been the reason he turned up in the early hours of that morning after they had dropped the baby. He had been making his way home after a night with one of his regulars – a middle-aged German woman who never seemed to style her gray hair, clip her toenails, or shave her
pussy. She was one of the clients with whom he could never spend a whole night – could never allow himself to wake up the next morning and look at those toenails, that face, and admit what he had become – but she was also one of the ones who paid him handsomely, one of the few who took her holidays in the summer because it was not the height of tourist season. Tone has fewer clients in summer and therefore more time to spend with her.

  Tone had been thinking as he walked. About maybe going home and getting a board and catching a wave. About Lala. About whether he should work the Jet Skis that day. About Lala. About whether Adan had hurt her after he left with Jacinthe. About Lala. And of their own volition, his feet had taken him to the sandy soil at the bottom of the little board house. And then he had become transfixed by a screaming he recognized as the anguish of the humming child.

  When Tone had run up the steps that morning, Adan and Lala were howling so hard that neither of them heard the door open or saw him come in. By then they had passed the stage of trying to shake Baby awake, of gently tapping her cheeks, of lifting her eyelids and blowing into them. They had passed the initial winded sobbing of surprise, of scrambling to find wallet and bag and a hat for a baby who, though still warm, was clearly already dead. They had passed the stage of wrapping her in a blanket against a cold she would never feel and almost bumping into themselves on the way to the door. They had passed the stage of coming back in when they realized they could not walk to Baxter’s General and there was no bus at 4 a.m., passed the panic of rummaging for change to use the pay phone at the top of the hill and then – remembering that emergency calls were free – racing with Baby to the pay-phone kiosk to call the ambulance. They had passed the despair of finding that the kiosk had been robbed of the receiver and cursing the murderer who had taken it, all the while running back to the house, patting Baby, cooing to her, assuring her that she would be fine. They had passed the point of putting Baby on the bed, lifting her neck and blowing into her mouth the way they had seen on TV, taking turns between blowing and screaming and crying and bawling and blowing and calling a baby who would now never answer them.

  They had passed these points and were simply draped over a dead baby on a bed, sobbing.

  Who knows now why the first thought that came to Tone on rushing through the door was hiding what had happened, trying to make sure Lala was free of blame by faking a kidnapping? Who knows how he managed to convince them that it was best to let people think that someone else had taken Baby, and that that someone had probably killed her? Who now can question the logic of enlisting a man who had spent so many nights under arrest to help them to avoid arrest themselves? In what had seemed like minutes, Adan had returned to the tunnels and Tone was racing to Baxter’s Beach, placing the little body by the rocks a short while before Lala ran up and down screaming for help, saying her baby was gone.

  “You hearing me?” repeats Adan, when Tone does not answer the first time and it becomes evident that he is not.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “If I get de man to bring it in from Vincy, bring it to the boulders, we can move it into the tunnels, store it, and sell it off. Send back and pay the Vincy people, everybody happy. Nobody gonna think to look down there,” says Adan, “no police gonna figure out to look down there.”

  Adan stares at Tone with the wide-eyed amazement of discovery, a facial expression that has stayed with him since he was a mere child, since they were nothing more than little snotty-nosed boys running barefoot on the rab-land behind Ma Tone’s house. Tone was one of the few children allowed to play with Adan, for no reason other than that Ma Tone spent too much time seated inside with her rags to know what Adan was really like.

  As a matter of fact, it was Ma Tone’s house that had scarred Adan. It had been the early days of Ma Tone’s bid to make their wooden chattel house into something permanent and immovable. The concrete bathroom had just been built and the wall that was, in Ma Tone’s mind, the first wall of a kitchen which she’d seen in a book extended proudly along one side of the wooden house. This wall had a window already fitted and rolled out each morning and then closed each evening like all the other windows in the house, but the wall had nothing else – it did not support part of a roof, or meet perpendicularly to other walls to make a room. Adan, unaccustomed then to the new spatial dynamics, had rounded a corner in hot pursuit of another neighborhood boy and collided with a corner of the rollout window in the wall that enclosed nothing.

  Tone remembers how this very same Adan had fallen to the ground as a boy with a forehead gushing blood. He had been taken to Baxter’s General but had been kept waiting too long; the cut could no longer be stitched by the time they were permitted to see the doctor. It was Tone who held Adan’s hand as the man-boy screamed while the cut was cleaned and examined by a student doctor, it was Tone who had earned Adan’s trust by keeping that secret forever after – that Adan, the man-boy, the big bad bully of Baxter’s, had cried like a motherless child to have his cut washed and a tetanus shot administered. Adan and Tone had become even closer friends after that.

  The cut had scarred – a curvy correction mark that now reminded Tone of a curled-up centipede – and had swelled and stretched as Adan grew.

  “Is a good plan,” Tone admits now, absently. Adan smiles a wide smile that exposes two even rows of bright white teeth.

  “As man,” says Adan, “just gotta get the money to pay de boatman now.”

  Tone feels the muscles in his neck contract, despite the weed. Once Adan starts to talk this way, he knows it means a job is coming – hot jewelry to sell on the black market, perhaps, or a forged check to take somewhere to be cashed. Tone has tried to steer clear of talk about jobs since his last stint in prison. He’s found far better ways to make money, he has no need of these types of jobs anymore. Still, it is summer, the season for tourist families and budget travelers. The beach will not be rich with the older visitors, the women who pay him, until it starts to really get cold in the climes they are from. In November the lights in the big villas blaze every night and Tone is harder to find, less available for Adan’s hustles.

  “If Lala didn’t come and get me that night Baby born, I woulda had that money already,” Adan complains. “I know it had some good money in dey.”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “One o’ dem rich white men,” Adan explains, “dem ones always got a safe somewhere. Had to left before I get anything.”

  Tone checks a Tissot watch gifted to him by one of his customers and makes as if to stand. He doesn’t want to hear about this job. Adan understands.

  “If I could get the money, you could meet the boat? Help me get dat thing through the tunnels?”

  Tone nods.

  “Nobody ain’t gonna think to look in them tunnels,” repeats Adan, “as man.”

  * * *

  Tone has never told Adan about Lala, about how he knows her. Somehow it did not ever seem like something he should say, so Adan still thinks that Tone first met Lala when he introduced her to him as his wife. Tone remembers himself, newly released from prison and still shocked to shivers by the idea of walking the length of the road without feeling as if he was doing something wrong. He had walked out of Ma Tone’s half-house and down the street that day of his release, checking off the landmarks against the memories he had returned to, every day, when his mind needed to escape his cell and the three other men in it. He remembers the tentative smiles of children who might have been warned not to turn out like him, the encouraging words of neighbors who had watched Ma Tone suffer and wished him a life on the straight and narrow for no reason other than that they wished her a life free of further sorrow. He remembers the wary eyes of the bad boys warned not to test him, the quiet defiance of those who thought him overrated, convinced one fist from them would knock him flat, but still not particularly inclined to try. His feet had led him past their stares to Adan’s little shack on the beach, and that was where he had found Adan and Lala, newly pregnant, cleaning and dusting his partner’s hous
e.

  He could not tell her then that he had dreamed of her and her solid, good-natured silence on the many nights when he had been kept awake by the discomfiting proximity of snoring men. He had supposed then that he could not really call it love, that thing they had had when they were young. It couldn’t compare to what she had with Adan. On the day he had found her again he had offered his congratulations, observed the little thin gold band around Lala’s wedding finger that bore Chinky’s trademark gaudy style, took in the gentle swell of Lala’s stomach. When Adan had introduced her as his wife he’d said Nice to meet you like he didn’t remember who she was, and she, following his lead, had returned the greeting. Later, after he had returned home to Ma Tone’s and gone to bed, he allowed his mother to think that prison had so broken her son as to make him, a grown man, bawl into his pillow like some inconsolable little boy.

  Chapter 24

  Lala

  27 August 1984

  In the end Lala pays for the funeral with money she has begged off of Wilma. Lala does this after she visits the funeral home early one morning and the attendant tells her that there is another option if they are finding it hard to pay for a funeral. The government can bury Baby, says the attendant, there wouldn’t be a service and everything, but it would be free. Or the body can be cremated at the mortuary, since it is just a tiny little baby.

  Lala is so distraught by these suggestions that she has to be given a glass of water and time to collect her wits before she can leave the funeral parlor. When she comes back she approaches the beach with a vengeance with her mayonnaise jar of plastic combs and her little packs of beads, but no one comes to have their hair braided. She makes herself brave and she asks, but the women she approaches do not want to convert their bobs to braids, and the women who might have chosen the beauty of braided hair no longer trust Lala with their heads.