How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

by Cherie Jones

  Adan is enraged. That she told Sergeant Beckles that he’d left her alone that morning that she delivered the baby. What kind of husband she trying to make people feel he is? That Sergeant Beckles had the nerve to come to his house – his house – and try to make him feel like he had to answer his kiss-me-ass questions. That Baby is dead. It must have been something she said. Thwack. Thwack. Bitch! What did she tell the police? Thwack. Stop screaming and answer. Does she know what they do to people who talk to police where he come from? Bang. Crash. Whir. Fucking. Rasshole. Bitch. What did she tell the sergeant? What? She want him now? She want the sergeant? Whiz. Sing. Slap. Fucking. Rass. Hole. Whore. What did she tell him? He ought to kill her. Did she ever see him gut a fish? He ought to slit her belly like a blasted fish. If she keep it up he will. Like a fucking fish. Blasted. Ungrateful. Murdering. Bitch. Ain’t she know she is the one that kill Baby? As good as if she take her two hands and stop her wind. Slap. Gurgle. Choke. See how it feel? See how, Bitch? If she think he going to jail because she is a fucking murderous bitch murdering her own baby, she lie. Why she had to pull the baby? Why she didn’t just let him show her to Jacinthe? Everybody want to see him go to jail. Everybody. Fucking Sergeant Beckles must be looking to ask him about the robbery by the old white man place. Not Baby. Sergeant Beckles don’t really care about Baby. Poor Baby. Baby didn’t deserve to die. Why she kill her? The fucking young bitch by the white man probably give Sergeant Beckles his description. He should have killed her one time. Fucking bitch. Choke. Choke. Wheeze. And why she had to ring the bell in the middle of everything? Blasted fucking own-way bitch. He gonna go back and see that bitch in the big house want to send him to jail. He ain’t done with her yet. He gonna go back and finish the job properly and he ain’t doing a fucking day for it either. Not a day for that white woman and not a day for her. Fucking. Rass. Hole. Baby-killing. Bitch.

  Chapter 28

  Sheba

  4 September 1984

  The whores who work behind the Holborn Hotel are aware, for the most part, of its many pretenses. They know, for example, that the verdant green that stretches across the tiny Walled Garden in which guests are invited to have “high tea” is in fact a carpet bought secondhand from the entity that managed the National Stadium and is made of a plastic bristle that itches without mercy if you happen to drop a cookie and drag your hand across the turf to look for it.

  The whores know, similarly, that the Grand Foyer, which the advertising booklet suggests is supported by magnificent columns made of indigenous limestone, is nothing more than a large room with a mirrored wall, and that the columns have been covered by the owners in a textured plastic troweling manufactured on the island. The whores know as well that the nightly rates advertised in the letters of introduction that Ganesh Hanu painstakingly types and sends to each member of the Travel Agents Association of Britain each month are fluid, and that, when the desires of a new client cannot be sated by a few quick moments on the beach, Mr. Hanu can be persuaded to rent a room for an hour or two if you speak to him directly and do not burden Mrs. Hanu or sour-faced Hiram, their acne-riddled teenager, with these seedier aspects of humanity.

  This knowledge is why the Queen of Sheba had laughed, at first, when she saw a man walking the rocks on the rough side of Baxter’s Beach at 3:30 a.m. on the morning that Baby was discovered. At the time, the Queen of Sheba had sat astride an Israeli endomorph called Ru in a ground-floor room of the Holborn Hotel, trying to mask her disinterest in his tentative efforts to talk dirty. She remembered that one time that Mr. Hanu, in an attempt to attract the membership of The Ghost Club of London, had typed up a letter that said the hotel was haunted.

  So in the wee hours of 17 August 1984, when the Queen of Sheba had looked out the tiny barred window of the ground-floor back bedroom Mr. Hanu tended to use for rentals by the hour and had watched the half-moon glow on a Rasta man with a baby in his arms, the first thought she had was therefore that she was not in fact seeing a sun-bleached surfer in baggy shorts holding a tiny baby that flopped when he sought to tuck it more carefully into the crook of his arm. And this was why she had laughed, wondering whether Mr. Hanu might have staged such a scene to please the members of The Ghost Club of London, who must eventually have answered his many invitations. But, to the soundtrack of Ru’s ribald talk of peaches and prunes, the Queen of Sheba had watched the Rasta put the baby down among the rocks. At that moment, the Queen of Sheba stretched herself upward, leaving Ru perplexed, to put her face right up to the bars of the little window. The Rasta had reached down and seemed to tuck a blanket around the baby and then, changing his mind, had picked the infant back up to wrap it in the blanket instead. The Queen of Sheba had noted that the baby was motionless in the way of those already dead. When the Rasta put the infant back down on the rocks and started to walk away, Sheba had started to shake with the realization of what she was observing. She had remained oblivious to Ru’s mounting desire, his fast and feverish movements beneath her as she watched the Rasta walk away. When this Rasta had paused to gaze around the beach and confirm that he was not being watched, the Queen of Sheba had ducked down into Ru’s underarm hair with a small exclamation, which worked surprisingly better than dirty talk to get Ru the relief he had been after.

  Later, when the underside of her left breast had been warmed by the stack of US bills Ru had paid her, the Queen of Sheba had joined the search party on the beach for the baby. She had watched the Rasta run back and forth, shepherding volunteers forward to the very rocks he had tucked the baby under. She had watched him, although she knew that he knew it would lead to the baby. She had puzzled over the possible reasons for this and ultimately had decided it was not her business. The Queen of Sheba had therefore walked away from the throng when the search was over, dissolving into the beach crowd with the acquired skill of someone accustomed to living in shadows.

  She had observed Sergeant Beckles start to ask people questions about the discovery of the baby. The Queen of Sheba had not been able to stand the sight of Sergeant Beckles. This fucking two-bit kiss-me-ass policeman had been threatening to arrest her ever since she had started avoiding servicing him – and she had started avoiding servicing him when it became clear that, for Sergeant Beckles, what she gave him was more than a mere servicing. The thing is, the Queen of Sheba had thought then, she wouldn’t have minded servicing the foolish man every once in a while, but something about the things he made her do just turned her stomach too much more than the promise of his money excited her, and the way he took a simple exchange to mean they were meant for each other made her doubt his sanity. As a matter of fact, it made her skin crawl.

  The Queen of Sheba will tell you that Sergeant Beckles catches her at a weak moment when he turns up in the early hours of the morning at the tiny apartment for which she pays the government twenty dollars a week. It bothers her, she will say, that he finds himself at her house, in uniform, in full view of her two children just leaving on their way to school on the first day of the new school year. The Queen of Sheba would not say intimidation, but should she be questioned – should the meaning of the word be explained to her – she might be hard-pressed to deny that’s exactly what she feels when she hears him banging on her door, shouting her name at the top of his lungs.

  Sergeant Beckles says he is on his way home from a “stake out.” That is how he says it – “stake . . . out” – in a way that makes the Queen of Sheba think of livestock being put out to graze, not of TV episodes of Simon & Simon. The case of the dead baby, he says, and he looks at her like he expects her to be impressed. The Queen of Sheba is not impressed. She knows that he is lying, that the little exaggerations of his investigation are meant to dazzle her in a way that the shining metal stripes on his sergeant’s uniform do not. She fidgets in her furry bedroom slippers, keeps wiping the sweat off her palms and into the fabric of her red nightshirt, made to look like the jerseys worn by baseball pitchers in the United States of America.

  “Open the door,
Sheba,” says Sergeant Beckles when she remains looking at him above the taut security chain that keeps the door open just a sliver.

  “How come you here?” wonders Sheba. “How come you here at my door?”

  Sergeant Beckles’s voice assumes the high-pitched whine Sheba mimics with the other whores when he is not within earshot.

  “I could come in, Sheba?”

  He smiles, and the look on his face allows her to understand that he truly intends to make her work in her own house, the one place in which she has, up to this point, refused to be anything other than a mother and a daughter and a friend.

  “I ain’t feeling so good today,” the Queen of Sheba pleads with Sergeant Beckles. “I ain’t feeling so good at all.”

  “We could just talk,” Sergeant Beckles cajoles her, while the hair flares out of his nostrils in a way that tells her that talking is the least of the things he has in mind.

  “I don’t know . . .”

  The Queen of Sheba holds onto her side of the doorknob and looks back toward the inside of her house when the knob starts to rattle with the force Sergeant Beckles begins to apply from the other side. She has turned to stare at the poster of a pastel-pink poodle on the door to the single bedroom where she sleeps with her children when she allows herself the luxury of actually sleeping at night. The Queen of Sheba loves poodles, raising and breeding them is what she dreams of doing once she has retired.

  “Open the door, girl,” insists Sergeant Beckles. “Open it!”

  “I tell you I ain’t feeling good,” the Queen of Sheba protests. “I ain’t taking no clients today.”

  “Oh-ho!” Sergeant Beckles grouses, and the doorknob starts to give way in Sheba’s hands, to come away from the cavity in which it is situated. “So I is just a client now, eh?”

  “That ain’t what I meaning,” explains Sheba. She looks at her son’s new Walkman on the bed, noticing that he has taken off the earphones in a huff because she said he could not take it with him to school. She sees that the cassette is still playing, that the earphones still vibrate with the bass of the Jamaican dance-hall music her son had dressed himself to. The Queen of Sheba would tell you that she watches the tape whir in the Walkman and wishes the sergeant away.

  “So what you really meaning, then?” And when she does not answer: “What you really meaning, girl?”

  The Queen of Sheba will tell you that Sergeant Beckles pushes the door open so roughly that the imprint of the knob is stamped on the upper part of her right thigh for a week afterward, and that the chain preventing the door from swinging wide open comes away from the spongy wood of the doorjamb with one shove of his shoulder. She will tell you that when he comes inside he stands so close to her that she feels she cannot move and that she has already resigned herself to the feel of the hot air being blasted from his nose on her face as he speaks, to the nausea she will suffer through what will come after.

  “We ain’t friends no more, girl?” Sergeant Beckles wants to know, as he lifts the red nightshirt and pins her against the plywood partition. “You and me ain’t friends?”

  The Queen of Sheba will tell you that, though she is scared, she doesn’t understand why. After all, Sergeant Beckles was once a client, it isn’t like she does not know him, it isn’t like he hasn’t positioned her against a tree behind the Holborn Hotel in just this way at least ten times before, it isn’t like he does not already know the precise number of palm-lengths from the middle of her thighs to the perimeter of her panties, the specific angle at which her legs need to be parted for him to fit himself between them. The Queen of Sheba would readily admit that she has no reason to be scared, it isn’t like Sergeant Beckles has ever harmed her, not really, it isn’t like he hasn’t turned a blind eye to her and her clients on one or another occasion, it isn’t like he hasn’t done her favors before – like releasing her when a rookie policeman who didn’t know any better arrested her and brought her into the station.

  As she cannot explain her distress, the Queen of Sheba concludes that she isn’t distressed, not really, that for some reason she isn’t being her sensible, practical self. This is why, when the Queen of Sheba ends up sitting on her bed after the deed is done, feeling the Sergeant’s slime seep out of her and onto the bed on which her children have left their damp towels and the tumble of clothing they searched through to find the twin of a single school sock or a washed and unpressed T-shirt for games, her one thought is to get Sergeant Beckles out of her house as soon as possible. Because somehow, the Queen of Sheba cannot rationalize for herself that Sergeant Beckles has done her anything wrong and if he hasn’t truly wronged her, then she knows she is foolish for feeling as she does. She does not wish to continue to see his face to be reminded of precisely how foolish she is.

  Sergeant Beckles, however, is in no hurry to leave. Instead he strips off the rest of his clothing save his socks and stretches out on her bed, shoving aside her children’s clothes, to doze. Even after he wakes himself a few minutes later by his own snoring, he remains seated at the foot of her bed, naked as he had been born, watching the poster of the poodle on the open bedroom door and theorizing about the case of the murdered baby. The CID in the city hasn’t cracked the Whalen case as yet, even with the help of the mighty Scotland Yard, but Sergeant Beckles knows that it is coming. He feels like he is racing against time, like he must solve Baby’s murder before he can be blindsided by news of the arrest of Peter Whalen’s murderer.

  The Queen of Sheba will tell you that what she really wants at that moment, what she truly intends to do from her heart, is to get Sergeant Beckles out of her house, away from the big pink dolly-house she had bought for her daughter, which stands in the corner of the bedroom with majestic purple spires and its family of perfect little dolly people, like a portal to another world. She wants to get his eyes away from the pictures of the children on her dresser, the picture of her mom, the picture of her from a few years before in baggy jeans and an LA Gear T-shirt and a face free of the shadow of the knowledge of just how evil men can be. She wants to wash the smell of him out of her sheets and shirt. That is all she wants, the Queen of Sheba would say, that is her only aim – what she does has nothing to do with Tone. She has nothing against Tone, she will emphasize, nothing at all to hold him in mind for. As a matter of fact, she and Tone could even be called friends, at least coworkers. She would tell you that he used to shout her when he passed her on the beach and she used to shout him back. Tone never give her no problems, the Queen of Sheba would say. Matter of fact, Tone is one of the few that made her feel that good men still existed. Never brought her any nasty talk, never acted like he knew what she sold on the beach at night, never gave her a Good morning that sounded like it differed in any respect from the one he might give to his mother.

  Nevertheless, good man or no, the Queen of Sheba admits that when she realizes that the one thing preoccupying the sergeant’s mind this morning is the solving of the baby’s murder, she understands at once what she has that will cause him to get dressed, to scurry back to the station and strategize and leave her alone.

  She ain’t no informer, the Queen of Sheba would say, her mother ain’t raise no snitch. It is innocent the way she tells Sergeant Beckles what she saw on the night the baby died. She ain’t mean to point a finger at Tone, the Queen of Sheba would explain, she don’t want him locked up or nothing. That ain’t how ghetto people does live.

  Chapter 29

  Mrs. Whalen

  4 September 1984

  I wondered if you’d like to come by for a drink,” is how it starts, the day after Mira has Peter cremated. She is flying out two afternoons hence with Peter’s ashes; she is taking them home to Wimbledon, where his sisters have arranged a memorial service. She is relieved to be leaving the island behind, unsolved murder case or not.

  The cremation was a small ceremony, in the chapel attached to the crematorium, for Rosa and Mr. Watson and the neighbors on the beach. Mira remembers that Grayson, who has turned up at her fr
ont door to invite her over, was there.

  She hopes it will end with her No, but he persists.

  “Look, it’s nothing but a drink.”

  Mira looks hard at him, in his customary black sports shorts with his chest uncovered. She notes his gingersnap curls of chest and back hair, netting swarthy, sun-damaged skin. His body is not muscular, he rather looks like a wrinkled barrel in black swimming trunks. He rather looks like Peter.

  “Thanks, but I don’t drink.”

  Mira tries to close the door but Grayson stops her. Her eyes sting under the onslaught of sunlight. Mira has not slept. She’d been to the convenience store around 2 a.m. but Jack hadn’t been at work, and all night she had, absurdly, worried about him. The store attendant who was there did not fold the bag the proper way to protect her box of raisins. She had been afraid to ask whether Jack had been fired, whether something terrible had happened to him. She looks past Grayson’s sloping shoulders to the FOR SALE sign that faces the sea. She is selling the house, there is no question of her keeping it, no thought of ever coming back here, far less to sleep in the villa in which her husband was murdered.

  “Who drinks at this time of morning anyway?” she asks him. She is still in her pajamas, the same ones she’s worn for the past week, layered with a silk robe Peter had brought her from Hong Kong, hand-painted water lilies or something similar. Rosa has not tried to force it off her and scold her into a tub of hot water. Rosa is concerned with a reference now that Mira will be leaving.

  Grayson shrugs and mumbles something grumpy. The six o’clock woman runs past, making little explosions with the balls of her feet as she jogs, ponytail bobbing. Mira hugs her robe close, closes her eyes, and tries to imagine that the backs of her eyelids do not burn – from the sun, from the lack of sleep, from the images that are stuck there whenever she drifts off. This man will not move from the step.