“You smell like whiskey.”
“Mmm.”
What on earth was she now, what trend or fad was she fastening on? She never made mention of her constant realignment of interests in any of her occasional letters, periodic updates of the trivial. Weather’s splendid out here, I’m doing fantastic, met a guy, moved to Montana, met another guy, I’m learning how to sail, moved to Honolulu, moved to the North Shore, moved to Maui, here’s the new address, come visit.
“Don’t you smile now that you work for somebody’s government?”
“I can smile.”
“Let’s see you.”
Mitchell bared his teeth.
She did write that her mother drank herself to death a year ago. Her father was a child psychiatrist, now in Chicago. Was that right, Chicago? Minneapolis? Johnnie had nicknamed him Doctor Lick, the man who gave tongue to all hurt, all the hurt little boys and girls.
He felt bad, making her jittery like this, but he couldn’t locate what it was he should be doing. All the lost days, like a stream vanishing underground, but resurfacing (to borrow from the current political rhetoric in fashion on St. Catherine) in this place, in this time. Unforgivable?—no, not quite that. Forgiveness might be efficacious, but it wouldn’t make a dent in the mystery of the deprivation, those irrecoverable days. They were terrifying, they were ours minus us, he said to himself.
“You really haven’t said anything,” she moaned, and though he couldn’t see he could hear the incipient tears. “I thought you’d be glad to see me.”
Mitchell had to clear his throat to speak. “Yes, I am,” he rasped.
She had a pack of cigarettes in her hands, fumbling with the wrapper, and she stooped to rake through one of the bags for a book of matches. He gazed down at the two hemispheres of her hair framed by the band of her sun visor, the brown undertones and wisps of blond, trying to recall the duties of each side of the brain. As much as one half of her favored him, the other half always had a way, an argument, a design, to undo it.
“I’m sorry.” Her words strained through the constriction of her throat. She had stopped searching for a light but stayed down in her penitent’s crouch. “I didn’t think it would be this hard. Stupid me.”
His head wagged no no no. “I’m a little drunk,” he blurted out.
“You’re being a shit.”
When she said that, Mitchell knew he could afford to smile. He recovered enough sense to open the door and bail out, let the masochism of his memory plunge ahead without him, without hope. He now had the headache he had labored to earn but smiled through its stabbing pulse at Johnnie, who had stood up and taken the unlit cigarette from her mouth. It disappeared in her hand and both hands dived into pockets sewn near the waist of her skirt, her arms compressing her breasts, the nipples perked the shape of limpet shells under the cotton, rocking on her flat heels looking pleased and there. Mitchell had nothing to say, again, to this pleasure of hers. It was all so easy, yet he couldn’t stop himself from feeling inflamed and clogged.
She nudged up against him, took his wrist, let her hand glide into his and grabbed when he wouldn’t. Her breath smelled of tobacco and peppermint. “Are you all right? You’re shaking.”
“Let’s just go.”
He hoisted the inciteful backpack by its straps and carried it that way. Walking through the terminal by his side she rotated her attention this way and that, perplexed by the unusual aspects of the Brandon Vale International Airport, a facility decorated in calamity and breakdown.
“What happened here? We saw the smoke from the air and thought you were all murdering each other.” She surveyed the black pools, the stone-faced locals, filth tracked all over the tiles, the soot on the walls, the chopped-up LIAT station wetly smoldering.
“This is how we do things here,” Mitchell said. “Welcome to the muddle.”
* * *
In the taxi she took her sandals off, the skin on her ankles branded with red stripes, her toes puffy from the heat. She gave him little room on the seat, hogging the middle. Mitchell leaned forward both to feel less confined and to ask the driver if he had seen Isaac.
“Yeah, I see him. He mek a quick skip up Zion Hill. Look like he chasin a fella.”
“Drive up that way, would you.”
Johnnie coaxed Mitchell back next to her and held his arm as though she thought he might run away. “Don’t get mad,” she said. “I actually thought you were trying to punish me there for a while.”
“I don’t know,” he answered wearily. “Maybe I was.”
She brought her knees up flat onto the seat and turned at the waist, facing him with her body, using its confident language. Her anxiety was no longer there, she had made a decision to be calm. “I thought you had forgiven me,” she said, and although it was a dramatic line to say she said it quietly, plainly.
He watched the roadside, the vendors caged in their booths with a stock of beer and weird West Indian soda. “I thought I had too,” he said, and wondered if he would have to do it again, or could, now that it must be true.
Up Zion Hill and at the crest, Isaac was nowhere to be seen. The driver doubled back and headed for Howard Bay. The escapade had come to an end; Isaac would be home in Scuffletown by now, crawling in his bed like a refugee to be saved by sleep, hurrying to lose consciousness.
They motored back down the hill across the cane-green meadows of Brandon Vale. Mitchell didn’t care to look in the direction of Miss Defy foundered and lamed forever in the fields that would be harvested to sweeten wealthier parts of the world. The driver shifted into a lower gear as they began to climb Ooah Mountain, the engine a wounded wheeze. Johnnie stared thoughtfully out the window, the sun visor on her lap, the scented breeze fragmenting the strands of hair that had loosened from her ponytail. A gangly man pedaled up the grade on a thirdhand bicycle, a load of cassava root netted to his back, his heaving grunts briefly audible to them over the grind of the car.
Johnnie sat away from the window, retaking the center of the seat. Mitchell reached up and put her sunglasses on the crown of her head. Here she was then, complete, more of her than he ever had the chance to know. The unhealthiness of her eyes was another shock, the token repair of eyeliner and mascara, the red mist of exhaustion that travel alone could not account for. Her eyes didn’t look young anymore, they were years ahead of her, waiting for the rest to catch up. There was still a power in their green and hazel depths though, its source not so much a feminine quality as it once was, the innocence or freshness they had once expressed, but something else, something greater that had been severely challenged without breaking, and something fractured and sadly resigned, an inner life in which Mitchell did not want to be enrolled. She had rubbed blush on her cheekbones but it was wearing thin in the heat. Underneath, her color was faintly jaundiced, not right for a woman just arrived from the beaches of Hawaii. Her eyes darted back and forth trying to interpret what he saw in them.
“You’ve stayed beautiful,” he said. And she had, even if it was a beauty under transition, perhaps a beauty about to rupture. She rested her forehead against his shoulder. He thought by now she had been granted ample time to practice an answer, and he needed to hear it, shrugging so she was forced to raise her head, look at him. She knew what was coming.
“Yesterday you were thousands of miles away, in another life. Why are you here?”
Johnnie didn’t falter or drop her eyes. “Will you believe what I say?”
“Okay ... why not.”
She had a two-minute presentation worked out, an overview. She talked about people coming into each others’ lives, and people hopping out of each others’ lives, and good timing, and bad timing, and off timing. Mitchell didn’t know what she meant and said so.
“I want to be with you again—if you’ll let me.”
He was slow to react to her revelation, the only possibility he had dismissed outright. He heard himself chuckling, but the sound was rich with contempt and menace. She observed the change
s in his face with alarm. All these festering urges—to push her out of the car, to bury himself in the curve of her neck and weep, to fling her into bed in a rage of domination and then order her back in the air. Mitchell squirmed; blades of fever took short looping slices at his nervous system. He stared out the window, sighed, looked back steadily into her road-worn eyes.
“You know, I don’t find this stuff funny anymore.”
“Now I don’t know what you mean,” Johnnie answered softly.
His voice rose. “You experienced a moment of overwhelming affection for me, right?, like a mystical vision, is that right?, and you had to drop everything and run to my side. Do I have it straight?”
His words ended in a harsh whisper. The taxi banked into a hairpin turn that squeezed them together, the pressure from her increasing by her own will. He pushed her off with his elbow.
“Johnnie, I’ve got a headache, a brain-buster, and I think, on top of that, I broke my nose this morning. I’m going to lie down here. I’m going to close my eyes for a minute. Don’t say anything, all right.”
Mitchell started to slump down, falling away in the opposite direction from her but Johnnie caught both of his arms and bent him around, cradling his head into her lap, flipping the visor onto the floor. She stroked his hair tenuously, as if afraid of being told not to. Mitchell inhaled the laundered fragrance of her skirt, felt the pack of muscles on her thighs beneath the denim. He was no longer incited or unsound, and hadn’t the energy or the zeal left for further righteousness. As she massaged his temples, he discovered himself wondering if she were wearing panties. She used to disdain the habit and the implication of underclothes. What had she thought, that their purpose led to another hopeless middle-class trap. No, of course not, it was just a feeling she liked, a tiny, private freedom. He felt ridiculous thinking about it now, in complicity with the customs agent, the wonderful shades of her lingerie shaken out on the examination table.
One thing Mitchell had not forgotten about Johnnie though. Like a candidate for higher office, amassing loyalties, Johnnie had always overpromised her love.
Chapter 4
Isaac was talking to the dead but couldn’t get their attention: his father Crissy Knowles; his father’s father, Samson Knowles; that one’s father, Cedric Knowles; and that one’s father, Alfonzo Knowles; and the next in line, Parnell Forbes; and the next, Etson Bynoe, and his father Aubrey Bynoe; and the Creole filibustier, Gireaux; and then the half-breed Maroon named Biabou; back and back through a clan of patriarchs to the one they called Anselm, the name lacerated on the eggplant skin of his shoulder by an English slave trader, down through the blood of the centuries to this one who had crossed the waters from Guinea and mixed his seed with the wild Indians. Behind this father there were no others, only a mythical homeland, a vast incorporeal voice unintelligible to Isaac though he addressed it as Yah-weh, and understood it as an ancient ended world once ruled with the strict cruel wisdom of the warrior-princes who were the sons of Cain.
Isaac was muttering to them about pollution, the bad luck that was somehow draining into the stream of his tolerable life, muttering that he, their good son, should have been forewarned, but the dead were playing a raucous game of dominoes under the shade of a bwa homme, a man tree, puffing away on their clay pipes and tossing back pitties of strong rum. They didn’t want to be distracted—never did, it seemed. Isaac converted his conversation to the living, then—Fitzroy Roberts, Basil Trent, Noel Charles, Stuffy Paine, and the rest of the fellows who drove the taxis parked along the circle drive servicing the air terminal—but they weren’t listening either. Plane juss reach, they shrugged, and since it was not possible for him to pay a fare or for them to accept his payment, he couldn’t buy or beg their time away from chauffeuring tourists.
Then one of the dead lifted his lacy white head from the action of the domino board and said, Look alive, bwoy. This was one of their jokes, and they cackled hilariously when they used it. Stop lookin dead like we, look alive now. You missin sometin up de road, nuh? Shoo. Hurry.
Isaac scanned beyond the airport compound, along the road that led toward Zion Hill and down into Queenstown. The thoroughfare was populated as always with its flanks of cyclists and foot traffic, its opposing currents of jitneys and lorries, vans and passenger cars trailing plumes of raw exhaust. Look close, he advised himself, and soon he saw what he thought he was supposed to see, a monkey of a boy scampering onto the hill a step faster than everybody else, dodging the slower walkers. Swinging in the boy’s grip, unmistakably, was a flat, square boxy object—the radio from Miss Defy. Readin you loud and clear, Isaac thanked his tribe of domino-slapping ancestors, and took off across the parking zones and the untended lawn, in pursuit of the boy before this day of losing things got any further out of his control. General runaway. General blowup.
Anselm: it was his arms, in a cane roller.
Parnell Forbes: one eye pricked out, with an acacia thorn.
Cedric: died of the everything-drop-off disease.
Samson Knowles: beaten back into infancy with a brass trumpet, having offended its Scottish owner, a member of the Fort George Queen’s Regimental Band.
A knee was stiff and an ankle swollen but Isaac paid no mind to their steady broadcast of pain, the pain was nothing compared to the satisfaction of getting back what was yours. Yours was yours—simple, simple, and people had no right to lift it. He was halfway there, and then halfway through the remaining distance, when he began to get signals that something was wrong. To ease his anxiety, he forced himself to go a little faster, his lope bouncy from his hobbling knee. The boy slowed to a shamble and joined a queue of other boys and girls, and Isaac approached near enough to see his mistake. Here was no thief but a schoolboy late for the bus stop, carrying his noon meal along in a rusty tin lunchbox. He watched the bus come, the boy climb aboard.
Missin sometin up de road, sonny.
Hush, he answered back. You prankin me now. Fulla prank.
A car swerved in behind the bus, hit its brakes, then began to reverse along the shoulder, scattering pedestrians to one side or the other. Isaac hadn’t really thought about what the car was doing until it halted just short of him, and only then did he recognize its mangled posterior. The horn beeped once to summon him, an arm with a gold watchband snaked out the driver’s window and motioned Isaac to come around to the front. He wasn’t in any shape to win a footrace down through the yards so there was nothing he could do about it. He limped up to the window and bent over, down level with the driver. Archibol glanced over at his frown-faced wife and she sucked her teeth, like a backward kiss, in confirmation, turning to look straight ahead, presumably at Isaac’s own sorrowfully finite future. Isaac, his eyes on the dried-out disk of an old squashed crapaud in the gravel and grass tufts under the car, tried to behave himself and not make things worse by being cheeky or undignified.
“I know you, eh?” Archibol asked in a voice that had traveled off the island, north, and been influenced. “You Crissy Knowles’ boy?”
Isaac scuffed the dirt with his good foot. “Me brakes give out, sah. I ain have no control. Me very own auto and livelihood mash up, come to a pile of junk.”
“Get in,” Archibol directed. “Come.” The minister reached behind him to unlock the rear door of the sedan. Full of resignation, Isaac obeyed. There was some comfort to sitting down in the air conditioning, getting the weight off his legs. Before they could even return to the roadway, the woman furiously cranked her window open.
“Smell daht bwoy, Archie,” she complained. “Him ahll drunk-up.”
They drove up and over the crown of Zion Hill and down fast into town, through the blackened stone arch of the gate of the central police station, and parked on its cobbled parade ground. Archibol was committed to relieving himself of the distraction of Isaac as quickly as possible. A man arrives home from overseas where he has been conducting the serious business of his nation and is in no time at all ensnared by the trivial business bogging d
own the lives of common citizens. A fellow bang into the car and race off, his wife tells him. What does he care, he has more important things on his mind, but still he is only a man and his wife is upset. He’s tired from his long journey, he’s fretting about the maneuvering between his comrades since he’s been gone. He doesn’t want to think about such a small thing as an automobile, he wants to forget the whole business, the damage is only superficial and now the automobile looks like any other automobile on the potholed roads and dirt tracks of St. Catherine, so quit making this damn big fuss, woman, fah Cyrise sake! There were more compelling and fateful matters to concern himself with—he’d been summoned back from New York by the PM but not for reasons as yet explained. Quit making such a stupid fuss, eh?—but this was part of coming home, pretending sympathy and partnership in the meaningless obsessions of his spoiled wife, entering within the walls of her domestic kingdom where he was willing to let her reign with only occasional ritual challenges to her petty rule. It was nothing to him, except for such frivolous moments as this, their annoyance a mere tithe, a tax he must of necessity pay for sex, a home, a family. She insisted he stop on the road away from the airport and so he stopped, and now all he wished was for Crissy Knowles’ oldest boy Isaac to come along to the police station and file an accident report so that his wife could be assured her vengeance—submitting a proper damage claim to the insurers, an act which would eventually bring about purpose and pleasure for her, given the plodding mishandling of such claims. He felt exactly as though he were providing her with a privileged position of employment—an opportunity to engage in long and fruitful harassment, bullying a chain of clerks and agents who would have no recourse but to listen to her caterwauls, and strive to please her.
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