The gust of air subsided; Ronald McDonald’s handlers reined him in.
Eliza said, “Did that really happen?”
We laughed most of the way to Ninth Avenue.
Chuck was not to be found at the agreed place. Eliza asked me, “So, did you like my albums?” I did, I told her. She’d done a good job. The story of my son, as she put it, was now gathered in a single leather-bound volume inscribed with his initials.
Eliza flexed a bicep triumphantly. “What did I tell you?”
“You’ve got the knack,” I agreed. I didn’t tell her that while her work gave me joy—who can resist images of one’s laughing child?—it also documented my son’s never-ending, never truly acceptable self-cancellations. In the space of a few pages his winter self was crossed out by his summer self which in turn was crossed out by his next self. Told thus, the story of my son is one that begins continuously, until it stops. Is this really the only possible pagination of a life?
Chuck was late, then very late. We called him repeatedly, with no answer.
“OK, now I’m worried,” Eliza said. We’d been waiting almost an hour.
“He just got screwed up by the crowds,” I said, kissing Eliza good-bye. “His phone battery probably died.”
That was Thursday. On Saturday, I called Chuck again; I still hadn’t heard from him. “Hey, it’s me,” I asserted to the voice mail. “I’m on the plane, just getting ready for takeoff. Where are you? What the hell happened to you? Anyhow, take care. Bye.”
The aircraft went into reverse; taxied; rumbled innocently out of New York’s clear sky.
It’s not quite true to say that Chuck out of sight was Chuck out of mind. I did think about him. I concluded that his Thanksgiving no-show was merely the newest manifestation of his whimsicality and didn’t hold it against him, just as I didn’t hold it against him, or me, that in the end all I got out of him was an e-mail:
Good luck with everything! Sorry about
Thanksgiving. I got held up. Speak soon.
Chuck
We never spoke. Every once in a while, in the grip of affectionate curiosity, I’d search the Web for a mention of Chuck Ramkissoon. I found none—which told me that his cricket project was going nowhere. A pity, but there it was. There were other things to think about.
Then I’m told that his body has been found in the Gowanus Canal and that it was put there very soon after I left New York.
Immediately after talking to Abelsky, I ring Anne Ramkissoon’s number. Another woman answers and it’s a while before Anne comes to the phone. I am looking at St. Paul’s Cathedral. The afternoon is another dull one, with white clouds mottled by smaller gray clouds.
Anne accepts my condolences. “Do you need any help with anything?” I say. “Anything you need.”
“It all taken care of,” she says. “I ready for this. The bishop taking care of everything.”
“And the funeral? I’d like to be there.”
She says squarely, “My husband body going back to Trinidad. He going to rest with his people.”
I feel under an obligation to speak up. “But, Anne,” I say, “you heard him. He wanted to be cremated, in Brooklyn. I was there when he said it, remember? I was his witness.”
“You his witness?” Anne says. “Everybody his witness. Everybody witness Chuck. I his wife. I waited for him for two years. Nobody else waiting; not you, not the police. I waiting.”
It has not occurred to me until this moment to think carefully about what it might mean to be the widow Ramkissoon.
“They bring my husband out of the Gowanus Canal,” she goes on. “Who put him there? Not me. His witness put him there. Now I lost him,” she says. “I have to live with this. You go back and live your life. What I do? Where I go?”
“I’m so sorry, Anne,” I say.
Do I need to declare to her, to all whom it may concern, that I am distraught? That, although I may not have missed him for two years, I now miss Chuck terribly? Do I declare that I loved Chuck? Is this what is required?
Or perhaps I should more concretely declare that, having spoken to Anne, I leave the office early, at three-thirty, and walk all the way home, uphill and in light rain, and that in Highbury Fields I stand for twenty minutes in my raincoat, thinking about whether I should fly to Trinidad for the burial. That when I arrive home I touch Jake on the head and tell Paola, our nanny, that I’m going to my bedroom and should be left in peace. Perhaps I should declare that I call the New York Police Department and am put through to a Detective Marinello, who promises to call me back but doesn’t. That when Rachel comes home from work she senses immediately that something is up, and that at nine o’clock we sit down together with a glass of wine. Perhaps I should declare that we proceed to talk about Chuck Ramkissoon and that thoughts of Chuck come to me at all hours in the months thereafter. What is the declaration that is in order here?
It doesn’t take long to tell Rachel about the good times: how Chuck and I met in remarkable circumstances, how we stayed in touch, how we came to collaborate in heat and grass and fantasy. To all of this she listens quietly. It’s when I tell her about the day of the parrots, as I mentally label the worst day, that she interrupts me.
“Go over that one more time,” she says, examining the shadow in the wine bottle and dispensing one half of the shadow into each of our glasses. “Tell me exactly what you saw.”
My wife is a lawyer, I remember. “I don’t know what I saw,” I say. “I just saw that this guy had been roughed up. And his office as well.”
“Why?”
I give her a blink. “I don’t know. They were into something. They had a real estate business, so maybe…” I say, “Chuck liked to diversify. He liked to get into all kinds of things. Things that were not necessarily…” As best and briefly as I can, I explain the weh-weh and, as I see it, my unwitting role in it.
Rachel can’t quite believe what she hears. She shakes her head and purses her lips and leans on an elbow. “It doesn’t look very good, does it?” she decides to say. “You drive him around while he runs his numbers game? What were you thinking?” She says, “Darling, this man was a gangster. No wonder he ended up the way he did.”
Now on top of everything else I’m anxious as hell and running a hand through my hair, and my wife leans over to take this hand and hold it between hers. “Oh, Hans, you silly goose,” she says. “It’ll be all right.” But she also says that she’s calling a New York attorney first thing tomorrow. (Which she does. The attorney opines that as a practical matter I have nothing to fear and charges us two thousand dollars.)
When I go on with my account, Rachel interrupts me once again. She seems aghast. “You continued to see him? After what happened?”
I recognize the accusation on the tip of her tongue: that I have a temperamental disposition to pardon that simplifies things for me and is certainly a symptom of moral laziness or some other important character weakness. And she’d be right, in general, because I’m a man to whom an apology of almost any kind is acceptable.
“Just hear me out,” I say.
In October—two months after what I’d thought had been my last dealings with Chuck—my electronic diary gave me a week’s notice of the personal day I’d set aside, back in the summer, for a driving test in Peekskill, a town upstate (the farther away from Red Hook the better, I reasoned). I confirmed the date. Why try out for an American driver’s license just before you’re leaving the country? This is Rachel’s question, too, and there’s no answer I can give her.
I traveled in a rented car up the Saw Mill and Taconic parkways. My preparatory examination of the road map had turned up such place-names as Yonkers, Cortlandt, Verplanck, and, of course, Peekskill; and set against these Dutch places, in my mind, were the likes of Mohegan, Chappaqua, Ossining, Mohansic, for as I drove north through thickly wooded hills I superimposed on the landscape regressive images of Netherlanders and Indians, images arising not from mature historical reflection but from a child’
s irresponsibly cinematic sense of things, leading me to picture a bonneted girl in an ankle-length dress waiting in a log cabin for Sinterklaas, and redskins pushing through ferns, and little graveyards filled with Dutch names, and wolves and deer and bears in the forest, and skaters on a natural rink, and slaves singing in Dutch. Then out of nowhere came the loud blast of a horn—I’d swerved halfway into the next lane—and this dreaming came to a sudden end as I steered back and gave my attention to tarmac and automobiles and the real-time journey on which I found myself.
My arrival at Peekskill came, as planned, an hour before the appointed time. I familiarized myself with the streets and practiced parking. The town was built on steep hills by the Hudson, and it soon became clear that the principal hazard facing drivers was that of sliding down toward the river—indeed, it was my impression that the fundamental challenge facing the whole community was to resist the immense gravitational force drawing all of its constituents, organic and inorganic, toward the watery abyss that constantly came into view. This struggle appeared to have taken a toll on the townspeople, who hung out in front of unaccountably run-down dwellings and wandered through barren shopping precincts with the lassitude of a population in shock. There seemed to be an abnormal concentration of impoverished black residents and a bizarre absence of the satisfied middle-class whites I associated with outposts of the City, as New York is called by people living in such places, and all in all I was put in mind of a town in East Anglia I’d once visited with my wife: arriving there at night, I was taken aback, in the light of morning, by a scene of exclusively white people, all color and shape drained from their faces, shuffling here and there with an ill-omened, idiotic slowness, so that it seemed to me a species of zombie had established itself in that place. This inexcusable dread did not escape Rachel, who quietly said, after I had passed some comment, “There’s nothing wrong with these people.”
My driving examiner on this occasion was a polite old white guy who asked me in a bizarrely defeated voice if I had foreign driving experience, and I told him that, yes, I had. He beckoned the car forward, made me turn a corner, and asked me to park. I did so clumsily, anxious not to violate the ridiculous rule whereby the slightest contact between tire and curb results in automatic failure.
“Not great,” I suggested.
“Yeah, well,” the old guy said. “I always used to tell my students, take a bogey on the parking. Never screw around with the out-of-bounds.” He directed me back to the starting point, and only after I’d come to a stop did I realize that he was intent on giving me my license.
“Thank you,” I said, a little overcome.
“Drive safely,” he said, and got out of the car.
I was examining my temporary New York license when there was a rap on the window. It was Chuck Ramkissoon.
I watched with astonishment as he opened the door and sat beside me. He removed his India cricket cap—sky blue streaked with the saffron, white, and green tricolor—and paused for effect. “What?” he said. “You think I’d miss my student’s moment of glory?”
Chuck, who’d agreed back in August to supply his car for the test, was not one to forget a date; and a call to my office had told him all he needed to know.
“I took the train,” he said. “You’re going to have to drive me back.”
What was I supposed to do? Throw him out?
“Yes,” Rachel says. “That’s exactly what you should have done.”
Nothing was said as Chuck and I got under way. Then, hard by the river at the outskirts of Peekskill, there appeared two immense semi-spherical roofs escorted by a thin, strikingly tall chimney: from our angle, two mosques and a minaret.
“Indian Point,” Chuck said.
It felt good to swing away into the countryside. Chuck turned off his phone. He said, “You know, I never finished telling you the story of my brother.” He was looking into the hollow of his cap. “My mother was destroyed by my brother’s death,” Chuck said. “She was inconsolable for months. Literally. Nothing my father could say would make things better. One day they had a terrible argument. My father, who had taken some rum, got so angry he ran out into the yard and came back with a chicken in one hand and a cutlass in another. Right there, in front of all of us, he chopped the head off the chicken. Then he threw the chicken head at my mother. ‘Go,’ he said. ‘Take that with you.’”
Was I hearing this? Was he really telling me one of his stories?
Chuck reached for the handkerchief in his back pocket and mopped his mouth. “The fight,” he said, “was because my mother wanted to take part in a Baptist ceremony for my brother. You know who the Baptists are? You know about Shango?” Self-answering as usual, he said, “The Baptist Church is this Trinidad brew of Christian and African traditions—you’ll see them in Brooklyn on a Sunday, wearing white and ringing bells and trumpeting the spirit. They believe spirits take possession of you. Sometimes one of them will catch the power on the street, shaking and trembling and falling to the ground and speaking in tongues. It’s a spectacle,” Chuck said, holding out his arms and wobbling his hands. “The other thing people associate with Baptists is sacrificing chickens. So you can see why my father did what he did. He was angry my mother was falling for this black people’s voodoo.”
“You owe me an apology,” I said. “An apology and an explanation. I don’t want to listen to this.”
Chuck put up assenting hands and said, “There’s a place that the Shango Baptists like to go called the Maracas Waterfall.” Running east–west across Trinidad, he explained, are the mountains of the Northern Range. In those mountains are remote and wild valleys, and one of these, the Maracas Valley, is the site of the famous Maracas Waterfall. Chuck said, “It’s quite something: the stream flows to the edge of the mountainside and drops three hundred feet. If you go there, you’ll see the flags and chicken heads left by Shango Baptists. It’s pretty spooky if you don’t understand what it all means.”
Leaning back in his seat, he told me that the waterfall may be reached only by walking for a few miles along a trail through one of the last virgin forests in Trinidad. It is in this highland forest that you may hear, and if you are lucky even see, he said, one of the most wonderful songbirds of Trinidad, the violaceous euphonia, known to everybody on the island as the semp. The male semp is a golden-yellow bird of four inches or so and for as long as anybody can remember, according to Chuck, the children of Trinidad have trapped and caged it on account of its beautiful call, a practice that has resulted in the species now being close to extinction. Chuck said that it shamed him to admit that a large part of his own boyhood had been spent trying to capture songbirds, usually the seedeaters and finches that were then common in the grassy plains around Las Lomas. “There are many ways to catch birds,” Chuck said. “My own method, with the semp, was to use a caged semp as a lure. I fixed a stick to the cage and spread a gum, laglee, we call it, on the stick.” The semp, attracted by the song of its fellow creature, would land on the stick and become stuck in the gum for a few seconds. “This was my window of opportunity: I’d jump out from my hiding place and grab the bird before it could fly away.”
Chuck, squinting in the sunlight, put his cap back on his head. It was a bright day. Autumnal colors were firing in the woods.
One day, he told me, he traveled to the Maracas Valley to catch a semp. He was thirteen or fourteen. He was slightly familiar with the area, having previously accompanied his father on a hunting trip there. It was a weekday. Young Chuck—or Raj, as he was called—walked in solitude up the path to the waterfall. On both sides of the path grew the immense trees of the forest. About a mile or so into the forest, he came upon a spot that suited his purpose. He deposited the caged semp on the edge of the path and crouched behind a tree at the side of the road. From down below, in the valley, came the sound of water running and falling on rocks.
After a short while, the semp began to sing. Chuck sat still, waiting.
It was about then that he noticed
something unusual: a small dirt track, going into the forest, clumsily covered by branches. Chuck followed the track. It led to a tree. Stowed by the tree were farming implements and materials—rakes, hoes, fertilizer, a cutlass. Chuck noticed something else: seedlings in a cup. He knew straight away what this meant. A friend had only recently shown him: you put the marijuana seeds in a cup, and they germinated.
At exactly that moment, Chuck heard voices coming up the trail, the voices of men. It came to him immediately that these were the marijuana growers. The voices grew louder, and then he saw them through the trees, coming up the main path—two black men, one with long dreadlocks, the other an East Indian with sunglasses covering his eyes. “The fear I felt at that moment,” Chuck said, “is something I’ll never forget. Never. It felt like a kick in the chest. Those sunglasses were terrifying. They were black, black—the kind Aristotle Onassis used to wear.” He shook his head. “I knew I was in danger,” he said. “These men are ruthless. They wouldn’t hesitate to chop me. Some men can kill so easily. I knew the semp would alert them. A semp in a cage, left out in the open like that? Everybody knows what that means. So I began to run—down the mountain, toward the sound of water. It was the only way to go. I heard shouting behind me, this noise of branches and bushes. They were coming after me.”
The moment you stepped inside the forest, according to Chuck, you were under a thick, almost unbroken canopy. Where a tree had fallen down, the sunlight came through; everywhere else was dark. “So you have these brilliant columns of sunlight in between the trees. That’s where you’ll find undergrowth. Otherwise the ground is almost bare. People think of virgin forests as jungles, but they’re nothing like that, not these mountain forests. I could run freely; I had to grab on to saplings to slow me down, stop me from falling down the hill.”
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