The Angels' Share

by Garfield Ellis

  “But you look good.”

  “But you don’ see how some o’ them look hungry.” She laughs breezily.

  We are just beyond the bonfire now and most of the crowd is behind us. Here the groups are smaller, the smell of weed stronger, and the water is just ahead of us down the gentle sloping black sand.

  “You like the beach?” I ask her.

  She shrugs and looks up haughtily at me. It seems the mood is getting to her, for there are lovers here too, couples strewn everywhere. A moment is being thrust upon me that I did not anticipate.

  “What kinda work you do?” she asks.

  “Why?”

  She shrugs. “What kinda work? You look like them manager.”

  “I am. I’m into marketing.”

  “Marketing, and you look so serious?” It is not the answer I am expecting, but it is a mistake that people usually make, confusing marketing with public relations.

  “Well, marketing is a serious thing, but why you say I’m serious?” I try to lighten my voice.

  “You know, I never see you laugh yet. You just serious. You come like them whiskey man.”

  “Whiskey man?”

  “Yes, you can tell a man by what kinda drink him drink. You know, a whiskey man—mature and kinda boring, English always proper, whiskey man who like long conversation. On the rocks or neat? You know, a whiskey man.” She smothers the smile playing on her lips by placing the tip of the bottle there.

  “Oh, so I am an old man.”

  “Not old, just a whiskey man.”

  “What kind of work you do?” I make to redirect the discomfort.

  “Me? Guess.”

  “I must guess?”

  “Yes, what you think?”

  “A bartender?” She could be a poker player the way the smugness covers her face, as if she has lured me into a trap and I have walked right into it.

  “Why, because I call you a whiskey man?”

  “No, I wasn’t trying to insult you or anything, I was just saying, I mean . . .”

  There is a moment of silence. She finishes the drink and drops the bottle right there on the ground. I watch our footsteps as the sand closes over them. It could be a picture for an ad of one of those hotels. A beer bottle, lying on the beach with two sets of footprints moving away from it . . . with sexy lettering that says: FOOTPRINTS. I wonder if there is a hotel called Footprints on the coast. Now that is an idea to sell.

  “I study it in school, yes.”

  “What?”

  “Bartending, I study it in school, yes.”

  I smile to myself. “Where?”

  “At the HEART School, it was part of my course. I was very good. I mix any drink—it’s like I did have a way with mixing drinks . . .” Her voice trails off, and the sadness is creeping in. And it tells me that I must now be careful in my tone. But I cannot find an appropriate thing to say just now. So we walk silently along the beach for a while. My beer too is finished. I hold the bottle for a few minutes hoping to find a bin, and then I shrug and drop it in a footprint as I make it.

  “Your father really love you though,” she says, as if we had been having a conversation all along and she is responding to something I just said.

  I am tempted to tell her that what passes between my father and me is not her business. But I guess my mood is changing a bit, and I do not want to be accused of being a whiskey man again.

  “My father never love me. Him say me feisty. But I not feisty. I never liked how him treated my mother. So I tell him. Some man just think a woman is something to use.”

  Usually, walking down a beach on a night like this with a woman, my hand would already be around her waist, and I would be steering the conversation in a particular direction. But this woman does not provide a manner in which to shift the focus of the discussion. It is very difficult to tell what she is thinking at any one moment, or to gauge her emotions. This is not the type of woman I am accustomed to.

  Suddenly we are alone.

  There is no sound from the party we just left. No one is walking on either side of us. I know the cottage is about fifteen minutes in the direction we are heading, but here there is no one but us, and nothing but the water breaking on some distant reef to spend itself foaming on the black sand beach.

  “We are alone.” I should not have said it, I know. But with this woman it is hard to know what to say or how to say it.

  “You want sit down little?”

  “If you want,” I tell her.

  “All right.” She waits and waves me down as if to indicate that there is some arrangement to the sitting. So I just drop right there in the middle of the beach.

  She pushes my knee. “Fix yourself.”

  So I let it fall and give her space so she may sit between my legs and rest her head upon my stomach. She is soft against me, but I am not sure if I should hold her, or how to if I do. Should I caress her hair, or play my hand against her skin? Should I press my palm against her hard flat stomach and sweep it up the plane of her torso to her breasts or stroke down to the curve of her and play with the elasticity of her stretch jeans? Instead, I press my elbow into the sand to steady myself and place my other hand upon my own knee.

  “You know you don’t set good,” she says. “You lean back too much, you elbow soon start hurt you.” She eases up. “Sit forward little.”

  I reposition and sit so that my legs are spread but not fully down and my back isn’t quite erect. This is more comfortable.

  “All right, come,” I tell her. As she makes to sit, she holds my hand to steady herself. Now she is deep into me, I would call it a hug or something like that, and I find that she has not let go of my left hand and my right has found a place across her waist. Her skin is like the silk of the apple blossom. I am quickly aroused with the ache of my teenage days. It bores into her back.

  There are several reasons why I should ease away from this moment. Reasons about her and reasons of earlier about my woman, about love, about decisions I must make and things I must do. I should act, grab hold of this erection forcing against her, pull away from the firm sensuous back, untangle myself. But I feel lost now, at sea by the turmoil she is causing, unable to handle all the emotions inside of me.

  I lean against her and she receives me. I let my lips roam the back of her neck. As she tilts her neck toward the kiss, I know her eyes are closed, and I feel her head move in a sensuous arc as she responds. I press my lips to her ear and I whisper, “I want to make love to you.”

  “Make love?” she whispers back huskily. “Make love . . . I don’t make love. I fuck.”

  My erection wilts. I do not know now what to do. But she doesn’t move except to rub her head back and forth against mine and pat my knee as if to comfort me.

  SIXTEEN

  Father reaches down into the soil where the grass is dry. He drags a handful and rubs it between his fingers so I may see it turn to dust in his hands.

  “Ah, the land, this land, this is the be-all and end-all of everything. It is this land that started it, this land that finished it, this land. You see this, this is the challenge. This! To make the crop grow on this—that is the challenge, the same way T.P. Lecky made a cow to survive our climate and be totally Jamaican. I wanted to make a way to grow crop on this land.”

  “And how is that?”

  “This,” he says. “This grass is the most important thing. You put the grass to cover the crop, to trap and hold the moisture. As the crop grows, the same grass deteriorates and becomes fertilizer . . . and you cover the root with more. Till rain comes . . . if it does, but even if it does not . . . the grass is hope.”

  It is a hot afternoon. Hot and dry. And the shadows of the thin leaves of the mango tree do not extend far beyond its root. But they shift in a hesitant breeze to play on my father as he sits and speaks. There is a dreamlike quality to his speech now, and there is lowness to it as if he is going back to days long before me when he was but a youth whose head was filled with dreams . . . and hi
s path a sad one.

  There is love in his voice; there are sixty-seven years of dreams in there. And emerging is a father I have never seen.

  “But why this land?”

  “Because it is mine.”

  “But you could have bought land anywhere in the country.”

  “Because it is mine, because it is yours. This is our land—given from generations, through manumission, from slavery. Your great-great-grandmother was the first woman to own land of this size here. This land cost her her life and many other things. This land has struggle, this land has history.”

  “Yes? This land?”

  “This land. You see all of that side? The river use to run through it from where you are right up here. But when your great-great-grandmother got the land they diverted the river to dry her out. Poor woman never knew anything. But now we know. Now I know how to fix it.”

  “I don’t understand. Where is all of this coming from, old man?”

  “All right, you see this tree I am sitting under right now? One of your ancestors was hanged right here in this tree. Use to have a man called Vassel—all this land from the mountain here right back to the sea was called Vassel Pen. Cruel old man, that Vassel, came from England during slavery to work as overseer on a large plantation in Savanna-la-Mar. Was a poor white man who never know much about farming, buy the land because he felt he could make Alligator Pond into a thriving port, and plus of course in those days everybody wanted to own land and slaves and get Esquire on their name. The river ran right there where you standing and all this hillside was green with peppers and small crops and even rice used to be planted up here.

  “Wasn’t a wealthy man but him had about twenty slaves or so, cattle too. It is all there in the archives in Spanish Town in his will, what and what he left to who and who. Never brought a woman with him come down here from England. Loved black women gone to bed. So he was one of those who never married, had about ten or so woman slaves and treated them just like his own personal harem. And the head of that harem was your great-great-grandmother, Carla. Lived like man and wife with her for years, and when he died he willed it to her right here. Maybe out of conscience or what. Or maybe this was the piece she asked for—we will never know. But he willed to her the same piece of land where him hanged her husband after him beat him for two days in the sun and made half a dozen slaves defecate in his mouth. Right here, killed your great-great-grandfather, right here, hanged him like dead meat on this very tree, then willed it to your great-great-grandmother, first woman slave in these parts ever to own any kind of land.

  “And one year later, they chopped away the river from one mile up the road so that the new path was half a mile beneath her land. Dry her out, they said, dry her out.

  “And I always told myself that this place, this land, was a place that could grow things. Even without the river. Now we know how.”

  “How long since you come to this land?” I ask him gently.

  “Ten years,” he says longingly. “Maybe ten years, and before that maybe another ten years more.”

  “So long?”

  He does not answer but stands and walks away from me. He looks out as if trying hard to find something in the distance. His eyes linger for a while in the direction of the ganja field that Willy had so expertly skirted as he brought us back here. And it is an odd place, a sort of craggy lump of limestone rocks surrounded by clusters of mango and lignum vitae trees. It would be an oasis if there were water, and now that he has mentioned that the river ran here once, I can understand that it may have been a waterfall of sorts. And where we sit in the shadow of the small hill is almost a lap of the old fall, and the trees are green here though the grass at our feet is dried to dust. It is a good place to be, to sit, if you like that kind of thing.

  I ease down on the smooth side of a jagged hunk of limestone and watch him as he stands a yard or so away from me. “If you love it, why you took so long to come back? Why you never did anything about it?”

  “It is a long story,” he tells me. “Sometimes things get in the way. Sometimes you wait and time passes like so. And you realize you sitting down in the same place. But there was a time I use to come here every week. Every weekend I would be down here. And the land hasn’t changed much, just the places round it. You see how many houses round the place—schools, small villages? When we use to come here, it wasn’t like that, we use to walk through the same trail and come up here and have picnics, same place there where you are sitting down.”

  “We?”

  “Yes, me and Hope. We use to come up here.”

  “Hope, that is the woman you have come to see after all these years?”

  He nods, then sits across from me at the root of the tree. We are facing each other, man to man.

  “Left Kingston, come down here, walked through bush to come up here. Why?” I ask.

  He looks at me now with an air of superiority. “It’s because you never love a woman yet. You need to open yourself to more adventures, more excitement.”

  “Me?”

  “You climbed the mountain last night?”

  “What, what mountain?”

  He laughs. “My big son, I bet you never climb it.”

  “Climb what mountain! Are you asking me what I think you are asking me, old man? You think I would tell you? That is not your business.”

  “That is a serious girl. That is one experience I bet you would never forget. You would never want that model again.”

  My laugh is a light one. “Well, maybe I am not as sharp as you. But let me ask you something, Father. Let me ask you something now: do you plan to climb the mountain tonight?”

  “Well . . .” He picks a blade of grass that has survived the sun. “Nobody say you have to be as good as me.”

  “You not answering the question.”

  He is still silent.

  “How much women you use to have, Daddy, in those days when you traveled the country as, what you call it, field officer for the Ministry of Agriculture? How many women you use to have in those days? Women in every parish or something like that?”

  “It wasn’t field officer, I was an extension officer. And it wasn’t how many woman you have, the thing is to get the woman you want. There is a difference.”

  “Really.”

  “Well, you see, I grew handsome. When I was your age, I was too good looking for my own good. Women never told me no. If I asked a woman ‘the question’ and she said no, it was perhaps because she never heard me properly. That is how I moved in those days.” We have never talked like this before and now he is telling me things that I would blush to tell my son—if I ever have one. He pats my shoulder. “Now, if you weren’t so proud, I would give you a few tips. But you are going make a whole heap of mistakes.”

  “Don’t you see the kind of women I talk to?”

  “Cho.” He turns from me and looks down the land toward the river and his features darken.

  “You loved her, don’t it? You really loved Hope.”

  “Boy,” he says, “love is not the only word.” His face is softening now. And he is not looking at me. He is speaking almost to himself. “You see, when you love a woman, it is as if she is not made of flesh and blood. She doesn’t have skin—silk, velvet, food, but not skin. Everything different: as if she is not human . . . not flesh. Even her sweat is sweet when you smell it and there is no scent to her. And her voice . . . don’t even talk ’bout that . . . especially when she whisper to you. When you love a woman, you would move hell or high water to get to her . . . be with her. And you never ask yourself the question, you know, never wonder why, in the moment, you making a fool of yourself, risking your life, risking everything that brought you to that moment. Like a devil is in you and you must get to her, be with her or do what she wants . . . when you love a woman.

  “And you know the worst thing about it? You don’t know when it goin’ happen; whether it is the first time you see her or the second time, whether it is her picture on the televisio
n or her back walking down the street or her figure in a bathing suit on the beach, you can never tell, when you love a woman. Not flesh and blood, something else, but not flesh and blood.”

  I could tell him that all memories are like that; we all remember things in the same way, not as they truly were, but magnified. But he would have an answer for that and I do not wish to dilute what he sees as love, right now.

  “May I ask you something, old man?”

  “You can ask, I not sure I’ll answer.”

  “How does she fit in? What about Una? Where does she fit? I mean, who was first, who was second? Where do I fit? My mother, how does she fit? What is the sequence?”

  “Sequence? This is not a story or a novel, son, there is no sequence to things like this. Is life. Things roll into one another, things mixed up and confusing. Everything does not have explanation. And time is not enough to just lay it before you with the kind of logic you may expect.”

  “But everything seemed to have happened around the same time. And you must imagine I would want to understand the logic. So what is the problem here? Why bring me here, show me this land, and now say there is no logic? You know me, I want explanations, Daddy.”

  So he eases back as if to meet the evening as it comes and looks across the hills toward the sea, where the multicolored clouds are strewn across the skies as if by the hand of a careless painter.

  “You know, I don’t even remember who win the Miss Jamaica that night. But I remember every detail of the dress Hope was wearing—a yellow all-in-one, taffeta mini with the hem one inch above where ladies like to wear it then, but not so far up you would say that she was loose, you understand . . . a yellow taffeta dress, so tight on her that not even ants could pass between it and her skin.

  “The crowning was at the Pegasus and it was the biggest event of the year. I went to the bar to order drinks and left with the most beautiful woman in the room on my hands. She was standing there, leaning casually against the counter, bored, and every man at that bar wanted to say something but did not have the nerve.”