“Pope believe dat we can win a trophy fah Pennyfield,” Albino Ricky is saying. “We can give we community a good name. Plus, we need di money.”
“Money?” Tru asks. “How much?”
“Twenty-five thousand in cash,” Albino Ricky says. “American dollahs. Not no so-suh Jamaican money.”
Tru glances at Sore-Foot Marlon, who doesn’t seem troubled by what Albino Ricky is saying. “Pope’s money, or ours?” she asks.
“Ours!” Albino Ricky says. “All twenty-five thousand of it!”
“So, yuh in or what?” Asafa, the squat, soft-spoken goalie, who has been watching and listening the whole time, asks Tru. Asafa is not one to make small talk, so when he speaks, people pay attention. Tru never liked him. Sore-Foot Marlon and Albino Ricky invited him one day to play soccer since he goes to Roman Phillips with them, and he stuck around. Tru only speaks to him when she has to, like to tell him to pass the ball. She can’t answer his question now. She knows that her father would kill her if he finds out that she’s playing for Pope.
Pope is a constant but unobtrusive presence in Pennyfield, as quiet as he is dangerous. Although people in Pennyfield know he’s capable of doing crazy things, they’re mostly grateful that he does good by them and that he only uses his power to bend the laws in their favor. Because of him, little children go to school and eat regular meals. Pope hands out rice, flour, cornmeal, and canned food every Tuesday. No one knows for sure where he gets it from and how he gets it. There are many rumors about the trinity brothers and how they run their business. Rumor has it that Pope owns cargo at the wharf, and that his brothers Bishop and Cardinal are big drug lords in America. But that’s all it seems to be, rumor. Tru is almost certain that Pennyfield residents like Miss Richardson and Miss Belnavis—Mama G’s church sisters—wouldn’t line up on Tuesdays at the modest seaweed-green house on Cherry Lane to receive their loaves of bread and staple goods if the man was a deadly crook. On those days, Pope’s posse take breaks from playing dominoes, smoking ganja, or tilting their heads back to throw rum over their tongues at Pete’s Bar, to help out with the distribution of food. Meanwhile, behind those lighted windows inside the green house, Pope sits hidden, watchful, maybe even pleased.
So what exactly does Roy have a problem with? Tru wonders now. It’s the police who give Pope the final label—badman. They are the ones who say he’s guilty of some unforgivable thing. But what? Illegally exporting marijuana, which happens to be the country’s natural and most lucrative resource? Wouldn’t that make the poor farmers wealthy? And wouldn’t that help pay off the country’s massive debt? Tru tried asking Roy once and he just told her: “Mek sure yuh stay far away from dat man.”
When Tru doesn’t respond right away to her teammate, Asafa gives the final verdict. “Ah know she was g’wan be a wuss ’bout it.”
“Wait,” Tru says. “Yuh didn’t give me any time to think. You know my father wouldn’t—”
“Maybe she can sit dis one out, Ricky,” Sore-Foot Marlon says in Tru’s defense. “I know Chief. Him won’t agree wid dis. Maybe it was a bad idea . . .”
“Suh is now yuh t’ink to say dat, my yute?” Albino Ricky asks, his voice sparked by anger. He drops the remaining cigarette butt on the ground and crushes it with one foot. “Why yuh neva bring dat up when Pope was here?”
“Yo!” Asafa shouts, jumping in. “We can always get s’maddy else who can play forward.”
“But Tru is di best forward we ’ave! She play bettah than all ah oonuh combine,” Albino Ricky says. He turns to Tru. “Tru, we need you. Yuh acting like yuh don’t want people like Pope to tek notice ah yuh skills. Or like yuh don’t want di money. Is not everybody ’ave ah mother who can sen’ dem money from foreign.”
“You know dat’s not true,” she says in a low hiss.
“Maybe yuh jus’ telling us dat,” Albino Ricky says.
The other boys look Tru up and down with steady eyes. Tru knows that they’re thinking the same thing; they don’t have to say anything. She glances at Sore-Foot Marlon, who is also unable to meet her gaze. Albino Ricky continues, “Do it fah all ah we,” he says.
“Oonuh pussy-whip to rhaatid.” Asafa sucks his teeth and whispers this under his breath as he toys with one of the dreadlock twists on his head. “Is a whole heap ah money we playing fah. Yuh t’ink ah g’wan mek har ruin it fah us? Why we need har? She’s jus’ a girl anyway.”
“Say dat again an’ yuh see who pussy-whip!” Tru says, her fists clenched.
“Cool it,” Sore-Foot Marlon says to her, touching her lightly on the arm. “Him nuh worth yuh energy.”
“Fine,” Tru says, pulling away from Sore-Foot Marlon’s touch. She walks away from the group and Sore-Foot Marlon follows behind her. “Tru . . .”
“Leave me alone.”
“Jus’ wait a likkle!” He catches up with her and she increases her pace, walking farther into Pennyfield toward her grandmother’s house as opposed to home in Rochester. She’s not in the mood to deal with Marva and Kenny’s silent malice.
“Ricky mean no harm. Yuh know dat.”
“Dat’s your best friend, not mine. Not anymore.”
“Tru.” Sore-Foot Marlon holds on to her hand and slows her down until she stops. His face confesses his mild annoyance, though his light brown eyes appear to be where the last of the sunlight went. “Jus’ calm down,” he says. “It’ll be all right.”
“You talkin’ like yuh don’t know who my father is,” she says.
“Look, yuh don’t have to do what yuh don’t want to do,” he says.
“You also didn’t correct dem,” Tru says.
“Correct dem ’bout what?”
“My mother sending me t’ings.”
“Because it’s not my place.”
Sore-Foot Marlon drops his head and digs into his faded blue Jansport book bag slung over his shoulder and fishes out a box. “Before I forget . . .” He slips something poorly wrapped in brown paper into Tru’s hand. Tru takes it. “What’s dis?”
“Happy belated birthday,” he says.
She opens the box and pulls out a mix CD with various dancehall artists. She tries to hide her surprise. “You didn’t have to . . .”
“I wanted to.” He’s massaging the back of his neck and looking over his shoulder. “I know how much yuh like these.”
“Ah don’t know what else to say.”
“Thought ah could be original,” he says, showing a flash of white teeth.
“Does Genevieve Sinclair fall fah dat?” she asks him with a smirk.
Sore-Foot Marlon tugs at his left earlobe. “Jus’ accept di gift.”
Sore-Foot Marlon and Genevieve aren’t really an item, but he likes to woo her with gifts. They met when he was at Wilhampton Boys’—before he had to drop out when his scholarship ran out and his mother, a street haggler, could no longer afford it. But he acknowledges that a girl like Genevieve Sinclair, with her own driver, is out of his league. He’d need way more than the little lunch money he gets, which can only buy a beef patty and a cocoa-bread at Tastees.
“Ah coulda bought myself a CD,” Tru jokes.
“Really, Tru Juice? Yuh know how much trouble Uncle Charles had to guh through fi burn it?”
“Dis is tacky.” She laughs, though flattered. His Uncle Charles is the most popular deejay in Pennyfield. He goes by the name Sir Charles and wears a patch over one eye like a pirate. He barely looks up as he mutely spins old and new hits every Saturday night after Miss Maxine’s cockfights. Albino Ricky told Tru that he heard the patch might be a disguise since it is rumored that Sir Charles once killed a man in his hometown in Montego Bay in a dispute over a woman, and is still a fugitive, now protected by Pope. Every youth in Pennyfield who dreams of becoming dancehall artists begs him to play their demos at dances.
She looks down at her palm and closes it, Saskia Rawlins’s number, still hot, in her fist. “Thank you,” Tru says to Sore-Foot Marlon.
She puts the CD into her frayed b
ook bag with its spoiled zipper, still agitated.
“It still doesn’t make sense.”
“What?”
“Why after all these years Ricky would attack me like dat about my mother.”
“Does it mattah?” Sore-Foot Marlon asks with a shrug. “If yuh know it’s not true, then don’t let it bother you.”
“I guess,” Tru says, lowering her head.
She thinks of her father; how he too seems frustrated, yet oddly protective of her mother. Even in his arguments with Marva over the cost of sending Tru to Wilhampton, which was her mother’s dream for her. A fierce surge of purpose wells in her. She knows suddenly that she is responsible for carrying half the financial responsibility. Twenty-five thousand U.S. dollars seems attractive now. The fear that gripped Tru earlier releases her into the optimism of her burgeoning plan. “I’m in,” she says.
“What’s dat?” Sore-Foot Marlon asks, giving her a quizzical look, his eyebrows arched.
“I said I’m in,” she repeats.
A slow smile spreads across Sore-Foot Marlon’s face. This sudden transformation, revealing some kind of relief (or disbelief), makes his face terribly affecting in this moment.
“Now, dat’s tacky,” Tru says.
“What?”
“Dat smile.”
He waves her off. She jogs a little to catch up with him and pushes him lightly. “You know yuh heard me.” In response, he puts an arm around her shoulder and they continue their walk like that across the dusty gully toward St. George Furnace.
A group of men by Pete’s bar pause their drinking and chatting as Tru and Sore-Foot Marlon pass them by. They see two teenagers—boys—walking with their arms around each other. Callused hands clasp around rum bottles, knuckles cracking, appearing to press through blackened skin. The quiet that falls over the men stirs like a malicious wind. “Wha dem batty bwoy a do ’bout yah?” When the boys draw closer, the men’s shoulders go up. But realization brings the shoulders back down like the Walls of Jericho when the men see that one of the boys is really Mama G’s granddaughter and the other one is Miss Olive’s eldest boy from Garrick’s Lane. The men nod their greetings to the teenagers, swiftly hiding blades of wrath under their tongues to mumble pleasantries. But the hum of their questioning resumes, about the girl—her manner, her clothes. They rub their flies, the taste of salt at the back of their throats. Every one of the faces of the men turns to look at her.
Tru and Sore-Foot Marlon walk on, unbothered. They laugh out loud, the laughter following them on their walk home together, passing Ras Norbert smiling up at the final bow of the setting sun, thick and red-orange at the bottom of the sky, which casts their shadows stretched to infinity.
36
THE FOUR-FOOT-TALL CYLINDRICAL BLUE BARRELS LINE THE Church Avenue sidewalk in front of a place called Little Jamaica—not too far from where Patsy lives. It’s a small place that is crowded with Jamaicans, waiting to send things home to relatives. They wait impatiently in the long lines. More urgent than the need to get to their American jobs on time or run errands is their one opportunity for the month, maybe for a whole year, to stuff all their love into barrels. Patsy decides to go with a barrel because of its size—it’s more efficient and economical to ship a vast number of items. She remembers watching people back home receive barrels from relatives abroad, lanced with envy since it looked like they could open up their own store.
Despite the fact that the space is small and stuffy and smells like cheese, Patsy has gone in there a few times and waited in line before getting cold feet and leaving. Truth be told, nothing she sends for Tru will ever be enough. However, after she heard Barrington’s voice speak to her inside her room, she stood up frightened, afraid that she had let too much time pass by. She decided she cannot go on forever feeling sorry for herself and making Tru pay for it.
She also stands in line for selfish reasons, mostly for the interaction with other Jamaicans—Jamaicans who remind her of the ones she knew back home. She feeds off this experience, feels refreshed by it. Most times she goes for weeks, sometimes months without it, feeling alone, displaced among the crowded streets and tall buildings. Since Fionna moved away, she hasn’t had much opportunity outside of work to talk to people, so she actively searches for these interactions—park benches where she sees the women pushing white babies, Golden Krust restaurants where the men in hard hats, orange vests, and Timberland boots stuff their faces with boiled yams, callaloo, and cornmeal porridge for a long day’s work constructing buildings they can never afford to live in. She also seeks these interactions in the Chinney grocery stores along Flatbush Avenue where she buys goods she misses from home; or at the market on Caton where she buys creams. And here, now, in Little Jamaica, where Patsy stands and waits in line, willing herself once more to buy a barrel.
“Good morning,” Patsy says to the voluptuous woman behind the counter, who has a deep bronze color and reddish brown dreadlocks that touch her shoulders. Over the last few weeks that Patsy has been coming, she’s never made it to the front of the line.
“Did you jus’ say morning?” the woman asks Patsy, putting her hands on her wide hips. There’s a twinkle of mischief in her large expressive eyes as she waits on Patsy to acknowledge her error. “Oh!” she says, slightly embarrassed. “I mean aftah-noon.”
“Late aftah-noon,” the woman corrects, pursing her lips together. “Somebody’s been partying all night long, ah see.”
Patsy has always noticed this clerk’s jovial personality and suspects that people like coming to Little Jamaica during her shift, because not only does she make pleasant small talk, but she also makes every customer feel special—women walk away feeling like they had just met up with a longtime friend, and men walk away feeling they could conquer the world. She makes no demands for people to form neat lines. Neither does she hurry them along or let anyone feel small for not having the right change or being short a penny or two. This is probably why Little Jamaica gets the largest crowd during her shift.
She smiles at Patsy as if she’s already familiar with her. Her name tag says CLAUDETTE. Patsy notices the can of Red Bull next to Claudette and says, “You might be talking ’bout yuhself wid dat drink. Yuh know how much caffeine in dat t’ing?”
“It’s di only way ah know how to function,” Claudette says, shaking her head.
“You know bettah than dat,” Patsy says, smiling, surprising herself with the easy familiarity she already feels with Claudette.
“Why yuh assume dat?” Claudette asks with a smirk.
Patsy shrugs. “You strike me as one of those naturalist sistrens. A Rasta woman.”
Claudette laughs. “Don’t let di dreadlocks fool you.”
“They’re nice,” Patsy says, admiring Claudette’s long, neatly twisted dreadlocks, and suddenly feeling old and tired at thirty-eight with a bad wig.
“Thank you. By the way, I was jus’ joking with you earlier.” Claudette smiles, her dimples pronounced like Patsy’s. That’s what they have in common so far, dimples, Patsy thinks. She remembers the boys she used to allow to lift her skirt behind the church or school building as a girl. How it was their individual idiosyncrasies that she found endearing—a scar, a mold, a birthmark, an extra finger, a pimple. None except a boy named Paul had dimples. She sneaks a glance at Claudette’s deepening ones, wondering what else they have in common.
“It happens all di time,” Claudette is saying, shaking her head of locs. Patsy’s gaze moves to her lips. “People tell me all sorta t’ings—mawnin’, evening, night. Some ah dem all seh happy Monday! Dat’s when me panic. T’ink seh is me wake up ’pon di wrong side ah time. You know how much trouble I would be in if it was really Monday mawnin’ an’ I’m not at dat godforsaken job of mine at dat nursery home? Dog woulda nyam me supper.”
Patsy throws her head back and laughs. She hasn’t laughed like this in a good while.
“So, what can I do for you today?” Claudette asks.
“I’d like to buy one a
h those.” Patsy points outside to the large seventy-seven-gallon cylindrical barrels on the sidewalk. She wonders how she’d bring one home without a ride, and where it would fit inside her small room.
“Dat will be fifty dollars,” Claudette says.
Patsy hesitates.
“What is it?” Claudette asks.
“Do you know when it would get there? To Jamaica, I mean . . .”
Claudette shrugs. “It depends on how fast you can fill it wid items an’ get it back to us. Normally it takes ’bout two weeks. But Christmas is di worse. Have you started buying t’ings to put in di barrel?”
“No. I’ve been saving up.”
“Yuh might want to start buying t’ings. Dat’s what a lot of people do. Dey buy stuff likkle by likkle to fill up the barrel ovah a period of . . .” She pauses. “A year?”
“A year?”
“Well, at least six months.”
“I—I don’t know . . .”
“Don’t worry. Tek yuh time. Yuh don’t have to rush,” Claudette says as if she read Patsy’s mind. There’s something sweet and soft in Claudette’s eyes.
“It’s my first time . . ,” Patsy confesses.
“There’s always a first time fah everyt’ing.”
Before Patsy hands over the money for the barrel—it can’t hurt to get one—the FedEx man arrives. Claudette waves a handful of cash at him. “Wh’appen, Dexter? Sadiq in di back,” she says, then yells for Sadiq to assist the man as she takes care of Patsy and her change. When Sadiq doesn’t respond, she cusses him under her breath and tells Patsy to wait a minute. Dexter makes no move to help her while she bends to lift a crate of packages to give to him. He simply stands there, rubbing the dark hairs under his chin as he checks out her backside bent over in her tight jeans. Her shirt lifts a little, revealing the chains of colorful glass beads that snake around the brown flesh of her waist.
Dexter gives her a toothy, lopsided grin as he takes the crate. Claudette sees the look and gives him a talking eye. “Yuh don’t got no time to stand dere grinning like a jackass,” she says. “Yuh got deliveries to make.”
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