“Babes. I knew you’d need my support to get over this loss. I included him because I know he loves you and wants to be here for you. Who you think taught him to take such good care of you? I knew you’d need us. I’m sorry about #1, but he was getting greedy about too many things that weren’t his to control.”
Wrong lover again.
I thought back to meeting #1 at an art opening she had dragged me to, and #2 at the club that I slowly realized I’d never actually seen her dance in. My perfect arrangement, all her creation. Denyse Plummer sang it: Woman is boss.
PROPHET
BY LAWRENCE SCOTT
Maraval
This is the dark time, my love . . .
—Martin Carter
I had come back to write about a nineteenth-century painter, an ancestor of the old family, and ended up reporting on something quite different. Sasha called from London a week after I had arrived back. “Patrice, can you do the story?” I could barely hear him through the drifts of snow I had just seen on the news.
“Which story?”
“Come on, man, where are you? I know you. You’re living in your head.”
“No, I’m living on the Saddle Road, Maraval.”
“What!” he screamed down the phone. I didn’t even have to lower the air conditioner or the cable—strictly tennis— both of which I keep at high decibels to block out the roar of traffic: a tropical blizzard.
“Take it easy, Sasha.”
“You know what you just said?” he screamed.
“What?”
“It’s where it’s happening.”
“What? What’s happening?” Then I lost him to the airwaves and the snow.
I e-mailed him. Speaking to Sasha on the phone is like being bludgeoned. This is what I told him, trying out my landscape pieces:
In the morning, I begin my walk in darkness and finish it just as the first light of dawn bleeds into the gray foreday morning. The ridges above me are the first to be lit where I walk among the villas of the rich in the valley of Maraval, an old suburb of Port-of-Spain. I’ve kept this up since my arrival. It’s the one certain thing which I do at the moment. So much else is guessing. What are you telling me?
P
Beautiful, beautiful! And this guy, your artist, he did watercolors? I can see it in your language. But Patrice, read the papers. Look at the news. This is something for you. I know you can write about this. I know you’ll want to write about this.
Sas
Funny, I thought. Why doesn’t Sasha just tell me what he’s talking about?
I read the papers the following day. First day I bought the papers since my arrival; usually, by the time I leave the apartment and the nineteenth century, they are all sold out. I would never buy a paper just before or after my walk, spoil my fraction of the dawn when I can hear myself think.
I read the articles on last year’s missing children and an editorial. There were no leads on the children. I felt I was going to be sick. Then I went down to the main police station. “Who are you? You have a press card?” I overheard the talk: They were busy dealing this morning with the case of two stray police bullets injuring two infants in Carenage last night during a shootout. Nothing to do with the children I was seeking a lead on.
This is a small island, Sas, that last year had a murder each day. The chief justice is on bail and under some kind of house arrest for alleged corruption. The leader of the opposition in the parliament is on bail also for alleged corruption. Everyone says, “He tief man!” There is a connection somewhere, they say. All of this I have just learned.
P
Fascinating. But keep to the story.
Sas
I pass the police each morning on my walk coming up to the chief justice’s villa behind high walls and slavering dogs. They put their lights on bright and catch me in the full beam. They slow down and take a good look. I can’t believe it’s my jogging shorts. I get cold sweats with police, a hangover from the ’60s and ’70s in a homophobic metropole.
I’m beginning to feel at home, but still missing the old, deserted estate house at Versailles in the Montserrat hills. Don’t miss that narrow life though. I try out a next piece on Sasha:
The clouds in the nineteenth century must have been the same over Saut d’Eau and the lit ridges of Paramin, the same gentle hills which welcome the seraphic flight of white egrets, the first birds to bless the valley as I begin my walk along Collens Road. And the nineteenth century, think what happened then!
P
p.s. I went to the police station—no luck.
Keep digging. Keep writing.
Sas
As Sasha had first said, I was lucky with the apartment on Saddle Road—with the position, that is. The block was built in the late ’50s, early ’60s, and the old fella from whom I bought it had changed nothing over the years. So the best which can be said about the interior decor is that it has a distinctly retro look. I won’t ever change the lampshades. “Right at the center of things,” the agent had said. I don’t think she understood her own irony.
I’m definitely doing the story. How can I not?
P
Sasha would know what I meant without asking me to go there.
Opposite the school from which the children have allegedly been abducted. What a coincidence! Now I saw my luck. Somehow I can’t imagine it. Not here, not from Miss Beaubrun’s School. “That won’t do!” I can hear her at prayers in assembly every morning as she shrieks out the national anthem and the children scream it out after her, echoing: “Islands of the blue Caribbean sea . . . where every creed and race find an equal place!” Hmm! “God bless our nation!” Hmm!
Some of those mites, gone? Their voices fade when I shut the door to the veranda. I find myself standing in the middle of the lounge looking through the glass doors with tears in my eyes. I know what I’m crying about, but I’ll write the story. Is why I’m writing the story.
I try to get back from my walk in the mornings before the traffic blocks up Saddle Road, or rather, before the short-cutters start slicing their way off the Saddle Road higher up the valley and come through Fairways and fucking hinder my solitude and disturb the late sleeping chief justice on Golf Course View. Each morning now, I’ve noticed that a black car with tinted windows is parked at the exit to his road. Took no notice the first two times, but now I’ve come to look out for it. Suspicious? They’re an East Indian couple, middle-aged. One day, from the corner of my eye I see that he has his head in her lap. Parking at this hour? Tender: He was like a baby wanting to suckle at her breast the way she held his head and looked down at him. The way he looked up at her. I wondered if they had just lost a child. Just a stray thought. What were they hiding?
T&T to the bone. Hug up me island. Rudder soca so sweet! Hug up me island!
Bear with me, Sas. You know it’s fascinating how the security business has become real big business in such an unsafe place. Or so the talk is—because as I told these friends last night, you know, I’m a slow cruiser through the darkness of the darkest streets and all I can say is they are too fucking empty. Bravado, after two Merlots. Fear and dread eats the soul and everyone is behind their burglar proofing. Not the couple at dawn, easy to display their amorous rendezvous to me and the police, who take no notice of them when they pass as dawn breaks and the white clouds turn to dun.
P
Sasha is online. He replies right away:
What’s dun, Pat?
Sas, it’s pinkish brown. What’s dun is done. Oh gawd! Bad eh?
P
Sas, nothing is like the ’70s, when the boys hung out on the railings of Victoria Square and begged you to pick them up and life was civilized and poor and we weren’t dying, being shot, or kidnapped. Well, just so, say friends whom I can increasingly tell about my nightly sojourns—everyone is home because you can no longer walk the streets at night. And some PC jerk at More Vino, trendy wine bar on Ariapita Avenue, butts in with, “Anyway, you’ll fucking get HIV.” “Wh
at?!” I scream and question. From driving around slowly at night, because that is where I feel most comfortable, rather than being locked up in my cage of an apartment, wondering what those poor kids are going through. Odd, and always interesting, how homophobia manifests itself—often through guilt and self-loathing disguised as social responsibility.
P
Pat, don’t become too moralizing, and watch yourself. I know this stuff is raw for you.
S
The kids are all boys. Another one gone today. And none as yet found. The press keeps telling us the lurid stories of yesteryear because they don’t have fresh blood. It isn’t that I expect to find them out on empty streets playing or abandoned, or walking hand in hand with their abductor. I feel I need to have my finger on the pulse of this city, my beautiful belle d’Antilles. She, the city, is my femme fatale, my la diablesse, luring me into her darkness . . .
I fade out.
Take it easy, Pat. If you use too much of that kind of purple blood, you’ll lose your readers and yourself.
Sas
What? Not too dark, Sas? Well, what can I do with an insufferably romantic turn of mind and a burning anger for the things I love? Cynic, no, can’t do cynic. What, like that fucker in More Vino? What does he understand about my desires?
P
Cool it, Pat. Write your story, sweetheart. I love your romantic side.
Sas
Are you worried about me, love? Condomize, as they say here. No bareback. The latest attack is on bi—big headlines about low-down and stealing a beautiful tender frame from Brokeback Mountain for their bigotry. Do people understand desire?
Luv, P
I get the paper now after my walk from the fella outside Hi-Lo. And it’s the usual thing, looking for the monster in a stranger when the statistics tell us that the monster is probably the big bad wolf in your parent’s bed or your priest in the confessional.
There’re security guards and three policemen at the school gates. I tried to get past them the other morning in an attempt to set up an interview with the headmistress. No dice. “Miss Beaubrun just step out.” Keeping her head down. And the guards? Look what happened again the other day! Who is slipping through and how do they steal these boys?
I feed birds and I watch birds. Binoculars are wonderful! And I must admit that when I’m watching the palm tanagers and my friend the one-legged tropical mockingbird, I’m taking in the arrivals and departures of the little boys in their khaki shorts and blue cotton shirts and their school bags bulging with libraries and sports kits. The national flag unfurls itself in the wind from the schoolyard pole and the children pledge their pledge. Education! Was all part of a dream once in ’62. I feel sick. Independence!
Doorbell. No one visits me. No one knows me. Is it a welcoming party? Callaloo and crab? Trinidad does not do welcoming parties. All of we is one! You know what I mean?
“I just wanted to say if you could mind how you feeding the birds because they does shit the pawpaw on my planter underneath.”
“Oh, sorry. I’m Patrice.” I put out my hand through the burglar proofing to shake the small hand of the delicate Indian lady from downstairs. “I’m sorry. I’ll stop feeding . . .”
“I’m Savi. And the water dripping from your air conditioner onto my louvers.”
“Oh dear, well . . .”
“I go get the fella in the yard to fix it. Run a PVC pipe . . .”
“Yes, anything. I’ll pay.”
“Good. Have a nice day.”
“You too. Excuse me. It’s terrible, isn’t it . . .” But she had slipped down the stairs in the shadow of the palms on the landing. Then she called up, sticking her head around the pillar.
“You like using your binoculars?” Then, like an afterthought as she flew, “You shirt pretty, eh?”
“Yes, you know . . .” But she was gone again, as swift as a hummingbird. I wondered what she thought of the disappearing little boys. I wanted to talk to people in the apartments. Someone must’ve noticed something. She’s been keeping an eye on me.
I’ve forgotten with all the frantic e-mailing to mention Carmella, my neighbor opposite on the same landing who amounted to a welcoming party—Chinese delicacies passed through a crack in my door the first morning. “Thought you would like these.” Steamed wontons! Why not fried? I leave them for my lunch. Never saw her again for days, except I notice that every time I park my car under her window, she parts her curtains and looks out. Always at the window, peeping. I wonder what she’s seen.
It’s this one boy! He disappeared the day after I arrived in the apartment. Odd that the school has not been shut down. That would give me some peace but it might make it more difficult for me to learn anything. I still feel I will discover something as I sit here on mornings like James Stewart in Rear Window with Grace Kelly. Love those oldies with the stars. There’s no Grace Kelly here. I wanted to be Grace Kelly once.
I sit with my binoculars, not lame like James Stewart. I stare into the assembly hall, keeping a watch on the main gate and playground. I train my binoculars on the tiptop flowering of the palmiste where the blue-gray tanagers and keskidees love to feed on the berries of the flowering royal palm.
I had been doing this the morning after my arrival, when I saw him being picked up by a respectable-looking gentleman in a smart Rover. Not the most common car here, I thought, Japanese dominate with a variety of Nissans. The boy was black and also the gentleman, what I called old-fashioned political type, like the first crooks who stole all the oil money in the ’80s. Of course, then I thought nothing of anything. It is only now, piecing together the stories, that I realize that I was probably the last to have seen him.
I phone Sasha: “I think I was the last to see one of the little boys.” Then, I can’t help myself.
“Take it easy, Pat. Come, come . . .”
“I keep going over the moments and wondering what was in the frame which could tell me now that the man was or was not his father and if the little boy was at all anxious, resisting, being forced, some clue. I wish now it was not just the binoculars but the digital which I could have clicked away on and had the whole scene over and over to examine.” Sasha had given me the digital, bless him. “But as you know, not like me to have any of that ready. Not like me at all. I have just bought my first mobile, cell. As I said, I’m stuck in the middle of the nineteenth century.”
Patrice, it’s been days! Where’s my story?
S
Sasha, as soon as I‘ve got something you’ll be the first to know.
P
I lie.
p.s. I’m very close now.
P
He doesn’t reply. He’s getting impatient.
I was entertaining myself with the daily opera, Australian Open over, and checking the gate and the playground when the doorbell went. Wontons? I could do with a Carmella visit. Shitting birds? Leaking air conditioner? Not Savi, please. I turned the lock, slid back the emergency chain, opened the door. “Oh my god!” The man in front of me carried what seemed like an enormous machine gun pointed almost straight at me, but a little down to the ground when I looked again, catching my senses. I quickly wondered how he had gotten into the foyer. Then that thought slipped away.
“Good morning, sir,” he said.
“Morning, officers?” I presumed that was what they were. There were two of them, standing one behind the other outside the padlocked burglar proofing. They looked like commando fighters, not police officers. This could have been a scene in Gaza.
“We would like to come in,” the front one said.
“What’s this about?” I asked, reaching for the keys on the TV table, thinking this is quite extraordinary. And from somewhere, outrage, a feeling for my civil rights entered my head. I stopped reaching for the keys. “Have you got a warrant?”
“We don’t need a warrant, sir. We just want to talk to you. If you refuse we’ll go away and come back with a warrant and then it might be worse, you know.” He was losing
his formality.
“You threatening me?”
“It won’t be threats, sir, if we have to go and get a warrant, but we probably won’t choose to do that. We can get through here quite easily, you know. Obstructing a police investigation does not improve your case.”
“Case? Which case? Is there a case? Talk to me from where you are, you don’t have to come in.”
“Hiding something?” Then this first police officer standing closer to the gate turned to his partner and said, “I wonder what they does have to hide. You have something you don’t want we to see? We not going to interfere with you, you know.” You know, you know, it was like a nervous tic with this one, and the other one was smiling constantly, leveling his gun at me from time to time, till he noticed, and then pointing it at the ground again.
“Maybe he want us to interfere with him.” The one at the back laughed and they both laughed now. “Look, open the focking gate, eh! Sir. Or is it madam?”
I was terrified. The first one rattled the gate with the barrel of his gun.
“Open the focking gate, you buller man!”
I don’t know where I got the strength or the nerve. I slammed the front door shut, bolted it, and ran into my bedroom and shut that door too, imagining that I would have to lunge under the bed to escape the bullets ricocheting around the room. I had left the air conditioner on high and the room was as freezing cold as a morgue. I was terrified. I was sure they would blast themselves in. When that did not happen, I knew they would be back with the warrant. What could I do?
There was a gentle knock at the door after what seemed like an eternity of silence and the muffled passing of traffic on Saddle Road. I thought if I looked outside I would see that it was snowing. I was that dislocated. I felt lonely, realized how isolated I was without any family here now. How had those brutes gotten into the compound and then into the foyer? And why me? And my address? I squinted through the glass peephole and saw a distorted Carmella with a plate of steamed wontons. I opened up.
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