I don’t have to leave. This. Any of it. All.
Did he mind?—she was going to cheer.
Within the hour the image had its counterweight, as if she must be rebuked for wanting too much, and getting it. That she wasn’t in the habit of thinking this way seemed moot. There was a woman in the garbage when they returned to the enclave, still early enough for everyone to be asleep but this person on her hands and knees, pawing through a mound of trash the early-rising caretaker had raked to the side of a row of guest cottages. In the grayish, misted light, Sally mistook her at first glance for a dog, and in fact there were three to model herself after, competing with her, scrapping for goat bones. Saconi swerved across the lawn and parked nearby but she didn’t look up from her rooting. Her flaxen hair hid her face; she wore a strap tee shirt and silk panties. Sally got out of the mini-moke, mute with horror, to see what could be done to help her. The woman raised herself into a kneeling position. She was young, green-eyed; pretty—but not this morning—and she covered her mouth to hide it, speaking into the cup of her hand to answer Sally’s questions. She was semihysterical, speeding, maybe, the words spewing with a mush of consonants into her hand. What happened, she said in a rush, was this: A year ago, more than a year ago, a man raped her, this was in California, and she bit him so hard on the arm she broke her own jaw, then a few months later her teeth began to fall out on the upper left side of her mouth, she had to have a dental plate made but the dentist at the clinic never got the fit right, and her boyfriend still had shrapnel in his back from a land mine in Vietnam and was crazy, and so last night before going to bed she had removed the plate because it hurt, and she put it in an empty cigarette pack on the table, and when her boyfriend came in later he wanted a cigarette, but when he found the empty pack he got mad and threw it outside, at least that’s what he thought he did, and somebody had raked up all the trash from the goat roast and fete into this pile and she was praying her teeth were in it.
It began to drizzle. She let her hand fall, sick with embarrassment. One side of her mouth was sunken with damage, withered like a hag’s mouth. She was young, but not this morning, and maybe, Sally thought, never again.
She wanted her teeth back. She wanted painkillers. Sally wished she had never seen her, and afterward she told Saconi they couldn’t get off Cotton Island fast enough to suit her. She stooped down and tried to help the woman find her teeth in the garbage, already beginning to smell. She picked gingerly through the beer cans and paper plates, the festering fruit skins and greasy remains of goat, thinking this lost and burnt-out child had most likely misplaced the teeth somewhere in her cottage, but then there were the three 5s on the logo of the cigarette pack, and the miracle was, when the woman in the trash had her teeth back in she was beautiful, she was the princess that none of them had believed in, restored to the island of interlopers.
The life was the imagery was the life.
Chapter 24
Perhaps it would not have occurred to Emma Quashie that the boy had paid her such absolute attention, listening and watching, that he would absorb his pair of mothers’ sinking universe intact, and drag it behind him into adulthood on a strangulating leash of memory, so that the first time he set foot on Cotton Island, after his resurrection from purgatory by Selwyn Walker, he would come face to face with Erzulie’s latest incarnation—Erzulie, the patron saint of the mutilation of his boyhood. Perhaps she would have found it possible to explain her son’s bizarre and lethal association with this white woman he saw swimming in the waves at Sandy Bay, when the connection came to light, to destroy him as it had destroyed his mother. But Cotton Island had lost its Emma Quashies and Miss Diedras and even its ability to identify one set of gods from another.
There was no one left to explain such intervention. A place that had not changed in three hundred years had changed overnight.
There was no one left to explain, but Cassius Collymore saw the change and dismissed it for what it was. What could be new in the loa-infested, angel-swarmed, beast-haunted world, of which he had firsthand knowledge? Pure forces and ancient patterns are what they are, eternal, no matter what shape they fancied, year to year. What could be new to a boy chained to the oars of the past, rowing a bloody sea of fables and false hopes and commonplace terrors. What could be new in a life where, regardless of its clumsy trips and stumbles and blank strips of yearning, justice was a measured pace, but so was injustice.
Friday evening, past suppertime, Ibrahim found himself on the Queenstown quay, scuffing his feet along the oil-stained cement, carrying his change of clothes in a canvas handbag, searching for a boat going over. The police launch had been in dry dock for months, busted up, someone had driven it top speed into a reef, so he couldn’t just go to them and say, Tek me down Cotton fah Selwyn, but had to beg his own way. It was late, but time wasn’t bad wind or high seas, and didn’t matter to a captain, who sailed when his ship was ready, middle of the night or not.
Who going down? he saluted the men aboard the tied-up boats, and they waved him farther along the quay to the Lady Luck, a rusty World War II LST, its open hold stacked with paper bags of cement like neatly packaged troops, its engines hammering the stillness of the lower harbor. The captain was a Vincentian and said, We ain tek passenger, bwoy, but shrugged contemptuously and told him, Come, the only word he would speak to him, when Ibrahim dug into the pocket of his pants to show the captain his badge, declaring, NPF business, nuh?—what you goin do now?
When they arrived at Cotton Island minutes before midnight, Ibrahim felt sluggish, unseeing, slothful—the water could do that to him with its swirling blackness, its dragon’s hiss. Underfoot, the pier was funny, not solid, as if it had a sleeping life hidden inside it, causing a gentle shift and roll as he walked down it, half-afraid, to the shore of his hatred. The Green Turtle was closing up for the night but he walked like a man unsure of his step and stopped, there among the tables and the milling, laughing customers, the white people who formed the vaguest, most inarticulate part of his pain. He stood, swaying, as though he were drunk and invisible and where he stood was no place in particular. He closed his eyes and listened to the hum of voices, gnawing at the trance that was his homecoming. He opened his eyes again and no one was looking at him because he was invisible and they were invisible and now he was in control of the situation, and all he must do was pass through. He heard this and heard that but he stopped listening because he knew what to do, where to go, and found himself walking in the center of the blue-white coral road behind the bar, up the rise of the hill, a car crawling by, steering around him: a small boy sucking on a mango pip, on his way to school with his sisters.
The night contained a strong current, an incoming tide of purpose, carrying him along. There is a plan—it is just a plan, has nothing to do with anything else, except he is in it, and he is not powerless. He must see a woman and he must see a man: a two-part plan, one part quiet and one part loud. He could do that. He saw the aura of lights above where the hill flattened, heard streaks of music, like birds let out of cages, and told himself, I am in it. Make a story with the woman, to help with a next plan. Come out of nowhere and fuck Marcus. Like so: Bam!
At the Norton compound, there was a glossy, painted wall, roaming with flares of light, that hadn’t been there before, and a gate with lampposts, and some guys standing by importantly. Ibrahim knew them but he had forgotten their names; he had forgotten everybody’s name, he realized, but not their look, which was always both fear and warning. Their eyes sharpened on him and flickered as he approached the gate in a seemingly random, self-absorbed drift, like a stray.
He stepped absently forward, as if to continue on through the stuccoed arch, its flange of wrought-iron doors swept back, but a bony arm swung out in front of him to bar his entry, and, as if he had just become aware of his surroundings, he looked at the guy who challenged him, so the fellow would understand that if he touched Ibrahim, it would be a serious violation. The NPF badge in his pocket burned aga
inst his leg, useless under these conditions. The guy squinted at Ibrahim, trying to place him.
“Ain you go away?” he said, turning for confirmation to his two companions. “Ain you disappear, bwoy?”
“Is Collymore, eh?” said another, and they stared at him like an idea they had never cared for, something they would want to wipe off themselves once he had left, the bottom of existence. Ibrahim’s eyes flashed, darting between the arrogant cast of their expressions—they were the same, he and they, he had run with them, scuffled with them, schooled with them, obeyed with them, but then one day he wasn’t there, and while they ran headlong through the sunny everydayness of their simple boyhoods, he had been sold to the devil for a piece of fish, then indentured to the dull misery of a freedom with no center or meaning, as if vultures had torn the heart from its living flesh, and this was how they knew him, dismissing the dreamworld of their earliest years, as one among them born to badness, as the end of fellowship, a disease to which they could not afford prolonged exposure, a disaster through which they could measure—and applaud—their own secure place in the world as they were given it.
They knew him well enough not to push him, but this was another Collymore, one they had not seen before, a variation on the original.
“You get a new style of rag, eh? Collymore.”
“What’s up, bwoy? You sellin weed?”
“You ain find cock to suck in St. Cee?”
They tensed and then swelled up, their legs planted in a defensive stance, their chins cocked and their hands instinctively curling into fists, seeing what they had stirred up, the flare of unpredictable intensity in Collymore, the physical contraction—the same as a type of dog—the split-second of withdrawal which was really preparation for an attack. They had known they could not joke with Collymore—now they had a renewed appreciation of how dangerous it could be. There the four of them remained, paralyzed and bristling, in the shell of light from the gate.
But he had discipline now, and kept a list—a list of wrong-thinkers and wrongdoers—to refer back to when everything changed. He thought to himself, Wait, though behind the thought he had picked up a rock and cracked it into the head of the fellow who had said what Ibrahim could allow no one to say to him. Wait, he advised himself again—waiting was a very important thing. Selwyn didn’t have to worry that he could not stay cool.
He was incapable of an ingratiating expression or tone—his manner of speaking was always pressurized, halting, elliptical, or abruptly spilling, as though speech were an accident—but they breathed again and relaxed, exchanging dubious looks, when he told them he had business inside the compound. The one who had blocked him with his arm sniggered at such a notion, but Ibrahim, steady and obstinate, not to be dissuaded from his mission, explained himself—he had a message to deliver to a white woman who had arrived late today on a plane—straining the words stiffly through his clenched jaw.
“Big Sally?”
“No,” Ibrahim answered, snapping the sound. “A next one by she.”
“Give it to me, I will pass it.”
No, he explained further, it was a private message from the woman’s husband, a ministry fellow living in Howard Bay, he was instructed to deliver it personally, he must go through the gate.
“She ain reach as yet,” said the most easygoing of the three, the one who had asked if he had come to sell marijuana. “She down by Coddy,” he revealed disingenuously, earning identical sour looks for this stupidness from his companions, for giving away information so freely to one so strange and untrustworthy as Collymore.
Ibrahim stood at the gate a while longer, disengaged from their presence, staring blindly through the arch at the modern cottages and landscaped walks, in a reverie inspired by the fete, somewhere off behind the cluster of buildings, which he could hear but not see. He remembered the ruins of a small stone church on this land. He remembered goats and thorns, remembered being thirsty. He understood this too had become a place that opposed him, defined him as what was undesirable, what was to be kept out, to be watched carefully, and this understanding seemed to resolve for him an unspoken question he harbored about his own intelligence, about the meaning he put on things and the consistency of the force he found himself against. His right eye twitched. There was a wary, uncertain silence—he knew they were waiting to see what he would do; the confrontation was perpetual, as long as he remained nearby, and for this reason alone he would not deign to move, preferring to rankle them with the fact of his existence, these fellows, who once were meant to be his lifelong friends, and not until a drunken group of white people stumbled out of the dark did they finally ignore him, and then he moved on, then he disappeared, having made himself clear.
He knew the rock track down through the bush to the beach, knew it well, where it dropped steeply and where it turned and branched, but he had not gone twenty paces down its dark channel before he tripped, propelled forward to his hands and knees as though he had been pushed from behind, and, there on the ground, the night suddenly lowered its full weight upon the hump of his back, making a noisy vibration, like an electrical charge. The nerves in his stomach knotted up and Ibrahim prayed. He experienced the same minute heave and sloshing—as if it came from deep within the earth, fading at the surface—that he had felt on the pier. There were things, things to be listened for in the muted clamor of nighttime’s unlocking in the bush—things, evils, commands—and if he tried he could name them, he knew them as well as he knew this path, and he prayed to all the spirits that surrounded him not to show themselves, to forgive this trespass, he knew better than to come into the bush after nightfall with an impure mind but citylife had blunted this knowledge, and now he was too afraid to move, to attract the thing that was horror that was the thing always, always stalking him.
He prayed. Angels covered his eyes, lifted him, placed him down noiselessly among the manchineel trees behind Coddy’s place, inhaling the thick, stale air at the back of the beach through his open mouth. Here were the white women, the one in the plan and another one, without their clothes, their flesh shiny with oil, their private parts glowing with white radiance in the shape of their bathing suits. It fascinated him, these ghost suits highlighting their womanness. He stepped closer toward the screen and watched them in the dim watery light of a candle, then another step closer in the sand when the candle was extinguished, watching them without thinking, without any sensation or awareness of their reality, as if he were viewing a film, until they climbed into bed together and he pressed his face against the screen, his nervous excitement like a drug that stuns.
He did not know two women could do this with one another, or would, and seeing them with each other, linked up, was like a collision of dreams and nightmares, releasing the fumes of his own filth and shame. His sexual desires had died early—he didn’t know when, it was a black spot in his memory—but here they were again, reattached, his own sex rearing up, its aching head burst through the waistband of his trousers.
It was then the other woman, her back arching, her head forced back into a pillow and slinging from side to side, saying no no no, saying uh uh uh, looked at him, her eyes rolling out of nowhere and stopping, stuck, on the beam of profound discovery that fused him to her. She screamed, but all he did was step backward, not far, just another piece of the night shifting and resettling.
The other woman—his—reared up on her hands and knees, alert and vicious, eyes turned to diamonds, hair thick and scattered, and there was something there in her feral poise that Ibrahim felt he recognized, something he knew from his imagination, something specific from his past, and he could feel his mind slide toward it, traveling toward sanctuary. He thought, Wait, she is someone ... nobody he actually knew, but not a stranger.
Didn’t she rise from the bed? Didn’t she come to the screen in her nakedness, bewitching? Didn’t he smell the cunt on her breath, suddenly, like the smell of a dark, shuttered bedroom? Didn’t she look straight at him and whisper, so only he could hear, G
o away, not vexed, like you might expect, but like this: This is not the time?
Didn’t he swim away from her through a gyration of fireflies, dragging his balls after him like two bleeding turtles, detached and struggling and exploding with pain?
Didn’t the cocks crow, didn’t he spiral forward through the night, didn’t Marcus answer the door with a gun in his plump hand, saying, Cashy? Wha de hell, bwoy, how you mekkin it?, didn’t Sergeant’s pomaded hair sear his nostrils with the reek of bottomless revulsion, didn’t the thump of his weight echo across the floorboards, didn’t the cockroaches spin in glinting wheels on the whitewashed walls, didn’t Marcus say, Come ... you do it ... come, and didn’t he—Ibrahim—remove the iron bar of his sex from between his aching legs and bring it smashing into the emergent forms of energy, all the grasping demons that life had set upon him, like a red-eyed pack of wolves, until the air became sealed with his many terrible strokes, in a luminescent mist of blood?
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