Iron Balloons

by Channer, Colin

  “I said if you want something to eat?” she shouted from the hollow corridor.

  “Is you goin cook it?” Maximilian replied.

  “Then who else, Mr. Minister?”

  “Me no know. I was considering starvation, with all the tripe you giving me lately.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said.

  She did it again. Spoiling for a fight, he had not realized her masterstroke until too late. She had left him hanging on the cusp of cussing, shot him with apathy while he stood waiting for a fuse so that his mouth could explode. He had to swallow his own malice back down. Maybe she was getting smarter in her old age, a sort of sage foolishness that was better than sense. He had underestimated her again.

  Maximilian was bored. His neighbors, men missing hair and mind, and women who now wore stockings rolled up to the knee, all seemed to be at peace, with boredom being the last rung before heaven. Not Maximilian. He felt cursed for having an alert mind but a lost body.

  On the table were beetles and butterflies, all dead, but whose wings sparkled with a luminescence. He thought to collect them; he had the pins ready, but never really started.

  Evening was threatening to come. The two men had said three days hence. Maximilian told himself he was ready for the visit. And should they come to take him to hell, they would just have to fucking wait. Not even the devil was going to have him before he became a National Hero. This was what balanced his life’s great imbalance, something that made a life of no children worth something. Not that he ever wanted children. But the two men in a dream, or a vision, warned him of a visit today. Maybe not a warning, he thought, but a promise.

  Maximilian did not tell his wife of the dream. Sleep was always a shifty thing, even when he was younger. In dreams he would travel to new lands and dark women, but would hear the bark of a dog in the next yard, or the hum of distant trucks, or the hushed call of a woman asking if he was awake.

  So when Aloysius Dawkins and Teddy James told him to expect a visit, he couldn’t remember if he was asleep or awake. There was a blur of words and he was lost as to whether he had heard or felt them, but there was also his wife’s snore right beside him, though he did not look at her to make sure. Maximilian remembered the men’s shapes but could not recall seeing their faces in the dark. Nor could he remember who spoke first or what he sounded like. They had been dead so long that he had forgotten their voices, what their breaths smelled like after four beers. Coming back on Wednesday, one or both said. Today.

  Maximilian watched evening dye the green grass silver. Soon it would be night, then midnight, then day, and his fear would pass in a haze. He had thought that a man would age beyond fear, but that had not happened.

  “What you say?” he asked his wife. She did not answer.

  He looked at the newspaper again, at Ché laughing at him. Was it really Ché or was it an imposter, an unlucky son of a bitch in the wrong place at the wrong time, with nothing left to show but a bloody cavity? Did he escape, as he had several times before? Wasn’t he dead already? Was he still there? Here? Did he finally betray the cause and flee to America, where he was busy fucking the bourgeoisie’s finest white women with his liberator?

  The article quoted Fidel Castro himself, demanding Ché’s body. Maximilian had wanted to meet him. He had met Fidel, of course, and no amount of facial hair and green uniforms could erase the Catholic schoolboy in Commandante. General Elections a Surety in 1970, read a headline beneath the fold of the newspaper.

  He had won a few elections but lost more. His cousin became his rival and won the last. The leadership of Jamaica was up for grabs; all she needed was a man with a strong enough grip. Maximilian wrapped his fingers around the country and made a fist. How she had slipped out, he didn’t know. Slippery thoughts made him think of milk and the way he always kept the carton up to a week after the expiration date. It still good, he would say, cussing his wife when she went to throw it out. Now it rested on the table beside Ché.

  Maximilian wondered how long Ché had been dead when they took that photo. Smiling to the last. The photo could not have been more than two weeks old. Things moved much faster these days. Faster than even telex. Maximilian remembered his first horse and last, his first automobile and last, totaled in a collision with a steel suspension bridge. Maximilian had such promise then, he and Ché. And now Ché was dead. 1967 would move on without him.

  Was he not a liberator as well? In his own way? A truck passed by but refused to answer. Instead, from the windows pulsed a sound that the poor people called reggae, with a man riding the rhythm and wailing that The gal Caroline say she live cross the line/The gal Caroline say she live cross the line/Some of them say she a thirty-nine/Some of them say she a forty-nine/She just a walk from Pegasus to Skyline.

  He wondered if Ché ’s body would be sent back to Cuba for an official funeral. People had to be called, ministers rounded up. The Cubans would expect if not the Prime Minister then certainly the Deputy Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs. Fidel would insist, even though the Jamaican government did not officially recognize any Communist republic. He wondered who would be there. Perhaps a Beatle or a Rolling Stone or Michael Caine, such a rascal in Alfie.

  He tried to get up but his legs would not allow it. He wondered why old age had snuck up like a whispered promise. Or warning. Night waited outside. Surely they would not be coming again. He was relieved. No entertaining the company of dead men tonight. Maximilian could not have his wife thinking he was senile. Cantankerous bitch was probably arranging for him to live at the old folks home, where rats chewed off people’s toes at night.

  “Are you okay, Excellency?”

  “What? Is mock you mocking me, woman?”

  “Just want to know if you’re alright, sir.”

  “Leave me alone,” he said. He thought to add, I’m expecting company, but left that sentence on his tongue. The room had the sweet stink of antiseptic. He wondered why he hadn’t noticed before. He noticed other things as well: how the smell seemed to come from both the floor and his clothes, how the floor even in the coming dark bounced gray light from outside, and how his wife had taken to wearing white all the time as if she planned on getting married again. There were rumors about her and Teddy James, the one who sleepwalked off the balcony despite no history of sleepwalking. That was in January 1960.

  1960? Maximilian looked at the date on the newspaper and it said 1967. A song came back to him. Engine, engine number nine/Engine, engine number nine, it said. Damn this chair, he was going to stand. Like Franklin Roosevelt in 1945. Like Nelson. He gripped the chair and pushed himself up. His mind made the first step long before he did. But then the left foot moved, then the right, then left again, and he thought of perhaps running away from the house and the wife with her white dresses, as if she was a cute nurse, and the antiseptic. His left leg strayed and struck a chair.

  “Fuckin bomboclaat!” he said.

  “What goin on in there?”

  “Nothing!”

  “Your nothing always sound like you up to something.”

  “A chair turn over.”

  “Don’t make me come in there.”

  Maximilian was furious. Who did she think she was, talking to him as if he still shat his drawers? Did she remember that not long ago he was famous for sitting down with the baddest of people, spreading his arms wide behind him so that everybody could see two holsters peaking from his jacket, one for each shoulder, stuffed with ivory-handled revolvers given from the Prime Minister of the Congo himself? Did she remember that certain men were ready to unleash hell in the ghetto on just his say so? Did she remember that after Teddy James sleepwalked over the balcony, no fucking motherfucker had dared to fuck with him since then? Did she want him to get all country in this raasclaat? Did she, bitch?

  Power felt like an itch. He made another step and caught someone fleeing, just a blip, and grabbed for the holster that was not there. He cursed again and stepped back. There was a person off in the
deep dark of the left corner of the room, white as he was and shifting in some sort of mockery. A mirror.

  Engine, engine number nine/Engine, engine number nine/Going cross Chicago line, the song said. Maximilian lumbered over to the mirror. A white man looked back at him. With white hair and sideburns that exploded in fright, as if running away from his face. His face seemed gray but that could have been the evening moon. His hair looked like a mane and he thought of growling but that would raise his wife. National Hero indeed. When did his eyebrows go white? He knew it was 1967, he knew that the election was three years away. He thought of the idle girl he’d had sex with only four weeks before, a juicy black girl with honeydew breasts from the Back o’ Wall ghetto. Honeydew was a word his cousin used. They only shared a girl once, five years ago—or was it five girls one year ago? Ché could have told him, but the newspaper was on the table along with dead bugs and spoiled milk.

  He sniffed ash and sour flesh and jumped, thinking the room was on fire. There behind him in the mirror was Aloysius Dawkins, blacker than usual, dark as night, with smoke twirling from his head. His eye a glowing white to his skin’s burnt black. Aloysius raised a hand but a finger fell off. Never a man for words, that Aloysius, said another voice, in perfect Oxford-degreed English.

  “Teddy,” Maximilian said.

  Cousin.

  Teddy stood behind as well; beside Aloysius, his white skin seemed to pop. His smile was as bright as ever, yet as his grin grew wider, teeth appeared missing. Suddenly half of his face went crimson from a flush of blood flow.

  Heavens, I think I’ve popped my top, Teddy said.

  “What you want, eh? What the bloodclaat you want?”

  Maxy, Maxy, is that any way to treat your cous—

  “What you want? Is pound of flesh you come for?”

  The Merchant of Venice? And they said I was the wellread one.

  “Why you coming here? Why the raas you come now, don’t they make you National Hero already? What about me? Why you come now?”

  “Who you talking to in there?” Her voice came from another room.

  “Bloodclaat! Can’t a man think out loud in peace?” Maximilian stepped away from the mirror.

  Why do we come now? Old chap, we never left.

  “In the course, in the necessary … in the course of, of events, sometimes the practical becomes the necessary for the greater good of—”

  Good, good. I remember when I wrote that. Powerful stuff, all that sturm and drang nonsense. Have to say, though, you delivered it way better than I ever could. You had just that, that … uncouthness? Is that the word? Let’s use that, uncouthness. Yes, you had the uncouthness that it needed. I left it out for you, you know.

  “No, you didn’t, I take the thing from your, from your room, when you …” Maximilian covered his mouth.

  Cock mouth catch cock, said ashen Aloysius. But it cost him a lip, which fell.

  Who’d guess that it would take just one fire and one push to turn number three into number one? Teddy added.

  Maximilian left the mirror. He hopped and dragged himself back to the chair. The room smelled of ash and old blood.

  “Everything in this life me want, me have to snatch it like greedy baby. Nobody give me a fuckin thing.”

  True, true.

  “What the fuck God think him was making? Joke? Give me white man skin but black man poverty? But I show him, though, I show the fucker.”

  You show everybody, Maxy.

  “Bloodclaat right. Show you too.”

  Well … technically, you know what that word means, don’t you? Well, technically, you didn’t ‘show’ me anything. See, you were behind me, so I couldn’t see you.

  “Shut up! You always talk too fuckin pretty and too fuckin much!”

  Aloysius seemed to hiss, but it was just the sizzle of his burned flesh.

  “The two of you get out and don’t come back.”

  The hero can’t talk to we no more, said Aloysius.

  “Leave!”

  But we never left, Maxy. What do you think has been tickling the back of your head since 1960?

  “What? We in 1967 now. Ché Guevara just dead. It in the paper. Damn fool you is to—”

  Aloysius giggled in a high pitch that sounded like a wheeze. Teddy James’s laugh barreled through the room like thunder. They sounded like a harmonized, mocking chorus. Maximilian grabbed a plate and flung it into the dark corner where the mirror was. The crash woke up the room to light.

  “What the hell is going on here?” she demanded, her hand still at the light switch.

  “Nothing. Nothing at all. Go back to spoiling dinner.”

  She sighed. “Why don’t you sit down and behave yourself?”

  “Why don’t you sit down and behave your self. I look like pickney to you? Me is a National Hero.”

  “Yes, Mr. Minister. Is me push you in you wheelchair to collect you medal two year ago, remember?”

  “And another thing. I don’t like when you talk to me like that. I don’t like it at all.”

  “How you want me to talk to you?”

  “I don’t … I don’t know … Not like that is all me saying.”

  “You hiding your pills again?”

  “I don’t know what fart you chatting now, and—hold on, what you just say?”

  “Me say if you hiding your pills.”

  “No, before that.”

  “Me not cassette tape, you know, Mr. Minister. You can’t press rewind.”

  “Don’t get fresh.”

  “Mr. Minister, you promised me you would take them. I trusted you. You want them to come force it down you throat again?”

  Maximilian shook. He sat down. The woman moved over to the table and took up his newspaper. She rolled it up to squash a beetle on the chair.

  “Him dead already,” Maximilian said. He bowed his head.

  “Every day you take out this newspaper. Is what so special ’bout it so?”

  “I … I need to remind myself of the funeral. Ché’s funeral. Goin be big.”

  “Well, if it in this newspaper then it gone already.”

  Engine, engine number nine, a song went.

  Damn wife. Taking revenge now in her little wifely ways. “You just don’t want me to go,” he said.

  “Then go. Me look like me care?”

  “Why you stay so, Clemencia? What me do that make you cantankerous so?”

  “Who name Clemencia?”

  Maximilian Morrison looked at the woman and closed his eyes. His jaw fell open as if the breath was too much to hold. There was no ash, no sulfur, no flesh, and no blood. Only antiseptic, and it came from the woman. He looked at her as she scratched her temple. Her cap jerked up and down.

  “Don’t think that because night coming you not still getting a sponge bath.”

  Maximilian looked in her face but saw nothing.

  “I just want to know one thing. One thing. How much more month leave in 1967?” he said.

  The nurse peered at him and laughed. As she left the room, promising to come back with the basin and sponge, she was still laughing. Maximilian picked up the newspaper and it fell limp in his hands. The paper was brown, not white. 1967 was a year of promise. 1967 gave him Jamaica in the palm of his hands, and he was about to make a fist. 1976? The paper fell to the floor. Evening was leaving and night made his eyes clearer. For a minute.

  Engine, engine number nine/Engine, engine number nine/Running cross Chicago line/Next year a 1979/Next year a 1979/Hey!

  PARTING

  by Alwin Bully

  I’ve always known this, but I know it better now—parties are a place to meet interesting people. Even when it ain’t carnival, parties are a kind of masquerade.

  A few months ago, in Trinidad, a man from Dominica went to stay with friends who took him to a party on a hill because they thought he needed cheering up. He was a tall man, with short hair along his graying temples, and his white shirt, which was open at the collar, had pajama cuffs, which st
ated softly that perhaps he was an artist who’d known some success.

  The drive was long, and on the way he smoked in silence in the back of the dark car, compulsively adjusting rimless glasses, which were tucked high on his nose. Every now and then he’d hunch with his elbows on his knees, remain so for a while, then fall back into a slouch with his arms stretched out along the leather top of the wide backseat, a Newport twitching in a corner of his mouth.

  He was new to smoking and he didn’t quite know how to hold a cigarette, and with unmoving brows he tried to recollect how he’d directed actors to puff with confidence on stage, trying different grips as he thought.

  Every grip was followed by a drag and every drag was followed by a cough. Every now and then he’d nod toward the eyes that watched him in the rearview mirror. Sometimes he’d hold them in a stare, sometimes he’d drop his head in his hands or raise it up and keep it there like he could see right through the roof.

  The smoke had caused the coughing, he was willing to accept. But not the smoke just by itself. The air-conditioning. Pelham’s sport cologne. The musk oil streaked on Tina’s neck. The showroom odor of the new Accord.

  At the sprawling house, which was perched on a ridge near the foot of Fort George, he quickly took the owner’s invitation for a tour. The owner was a middle-aged Indian who’d made his fortune selling textbooks, and he gestured broadly as he spoke above the volume of the music, which vibrated through the walls.

  “So how you know Pelham and Tina?” the owner asked, while the coughing smoker gazed blankly at the front of the house, which was three stories tall and made of concrete and cut stone. They were standing on the lawn, and the owner was again relating that the stained-glass trim on the windows and doors had come from an old train station in Leeds. When the station was razed, his son who worked there as an architect had bought the precious glass “cheap, cheap, cheap” and shipped it to him in a thirty-foot container, each piece carefully wrapped and tucked in among the various household things.