Pynter Bender

by Jacob Ross

  They could barely hear the feet of his men on the floorboards. They were conversing in whispers. When they finally came out they said nothing to Chilway. Or if they did it was not with words. Chilway simply looked at them and smiled.

  ‘I tell y’all something else,’ he said. He eased himself forward, slipped his hand into the back of his trousers and brought out a radio. ‘I figure I could stop him. I figure I know exactly where Birdie going. The way I work it out, Miss Dee, I still got time – two hours for the most.’ Chilway rested the radio on the steps. ‘Lemme tell you how I work it out.’

  The man patted the walkie-talkie and then turned his face upwards and away from them. The firelight didn’t seem to settle on his face so much as slide off it.

  ‘Ain’t no way Birdie goin be runnin up dat freezin mountain up there. Birdie like comfort. You won’t find him ’mongst those cane-an’-bush down there either. He remember the dogs; he remember how patch-up and piecemeal those felons, that those dogs retrieve, look when they come back. He take the river. He wouldn leave the water till he get to the end of it. Now when Birdie reach the end of that river, he got just two ways to go: through the swamp or round it.

  ‘But,’ Chilway looked into their faces and smiled, ‘he won’t go through that swamp, he know what’s inside there. Is worse than you can imagine, Miss Dee – what Birdie see inside that swamp. You won’ believe ’twas just his father he see in there when he start bad-dreaming and bawling. So I rule that out. I rule that out completely. He heading for the biggest, widest door in all God world. He heading there.’

  The man pointed at a cleft in the hills. It was too early to see the white, glittering heave that was the sea between it. ‘Kalivini Bay,’ he said. He sipped from the cup and rubbed his chest. ‘It still dark, Miss Dee. A coupla fellas down there waiting for him. A few more come to see him off. Is not a big boat. What people round here know is cane, not sea. Is the kinda boat you play around the bay with. Is a little boat. Is a fly in the mouth of the sea. But they like Birdie, everybody like Birdie, even them dogs we got like Birdie. In fact, Sylus try to send them dogs after him and they got confuse. He put Birdie clothes in front of them and they start to wag their tail. Sylus’s order didn’t make no sense to them. Yuh see, Miss Dee – is a very stupid dog that bite the man that feed it.’

  Chilway pushed back his head and laughed, carefully, tentatively, as if he were tiptoeing his way around the fit of coughing that was just behind it.

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We reach the bay, not so? Somebody will take him out, but one thing they won’t do – they won’t go south. That boat too small for all that bad water down there. They heading north. North, Miss Dee. North because Birdie want a bigger boat. Birdie need a boat that know tall water. A boat that understand the sea. Now, fellas, I know only three places on this island where he could find a boat like that. On the top of the island, where Miss Dee come from. That make sense. He got family up there, and family is blood. But that place too far. It too far, fellas. Birdie know that. Miss Dee here know that. I know that. Besides, Mister Boatman tired. San Andrews is the second place. But San Andrews fisherman don’t have no heart. All he think about is his family and himself. If he see a man running, he want to know what that man running from before he even look at him. Now if Birdie tell him that he beat up some soldiers real bad. If he say is eight of them that he mash up. He don’t even need to add that one of them is critical in hospital and chances is he never goin walk an’ talk again. That fisherman not going nowhere. S’matter o’ fact, he running to call the police. So that leave just one place.’

  Chilway rested the cup on the step. ‘How I doin, Miss Dee?’

  ‘You talkin, sir; I lissenin.’

  During all this time they’d hardly changed position. Tan Cee was still there, with a hand resting on her hip like the handle of a cup. Patty looked as if she were about to cry. Pynter’s mother had become like Deeka, even in the way she stood. The plum tree was taking all of Peter’s weight. He didn’t appear to be listening to Chilway. His eyes were on the radio.

  ‘That leave Kanvi. They got everything that Birdie want there. They got twenty-footer boat that know the ocean the way you fellas ought to know your bed. Kanvi people have a different law. They judge a man by what they think they see inside him. It don’t matter what he done, once it wasn’ done to them. If they like him, they’ll take him anywhere for nothing; if they don’t, it don’t matter if he offer them ten new boat and a coupla aeroplanes, they’ll turn their back and, excuse me, ladies, they’ll leave him in his shite. Now, this is the interesting part.’

  Deeka moved to fill Chilway’s cup, but the man raised a staying hand. His eyes were slightly redder but his voice remained steady.

  ‘You see, it don’t matter what time Birdie left here. He could’ve gone to his woman house and spend a coupla hours tryin to make up for all the times he never had with her, and all the times he never going to have with her. Or he could’ve left straight away. It don’t matter. It don’t make a single difference to the time Birdie goin hop off this island. Yuh see, man is a beast of habit. And that is why,’ Chilway looked at his watch and slid a finger across the glass, ‘for the next hour or so, Birdie still belong to us. Yuh see, somebody will take him, but they’ll take him in their own time. They’ll get up in the morning, just after four, like they always do. They’ll eat the fish an’ provisions their woman fry or cook for them. They’ll go down to the beach and prepare their boat. They’ll boil a lil coffee there. They’ll check the water and the weather and what kinda fish God make available today. After that, they’ll double-check with one another and agree who goin be fishing which patch of sea today. Then just after the sun come up and hit the water, they’ll prepare to leave. Right, Miss Dee?’

  Chilway handed her the cup. He leaned forward and reached for the walkie-talkie. He unclipped the leather flap that kept it in the holster and slipped it out. It settled in his hand much as a pistol would.

  ‘I had a choice between the gun they offer me and this, Miss Dee. I take this. Is new. Englishman invention. Scotland Yard.’ He turned it over in his hand. ‘That van down there is like a lil radio station. I switch this on …’ His thumb slid across the silver button. The thing came alive and began hissing like a little metal hive. He studied the object for a while and then looked up.

  ‘Now, Miss Dee – I’z cognizant of the fact that I been procrastinatin here. I been giving y’all my prognosis when duty behooves me to … ’

  ‘What he say?’ Deeka’s face could have been cut out of the stones that packed the yard.

  Pynter looked at the man and a quiver ran through him. For despite the rum-reddened eyes, the dry white lips, the tired, ash-grey face that seemed to have been charred to the bone by illness, the brain that lived under the cotton-white head of hair was as active as live coals.

  ‘He say he wastin time wiv all dis ole-talk,’ Pynter said.

  Chilway’s head jerked sideways at him. He rested the radio on his lap and grinned.

  ‘Ah! A lil epistemologist. Secondary?’

  Deeka nodded, her eyes on the man’s hand.

  The pleats on Chilway’s forehead deepened. He was leaning forward now, his hand adjusting his glasses. ‘Birdie never tell me ’bout this one. He yours?’

  ‘He ours. He was here last time you come. He grow. We call ’im Pynto. He got Birdie second name. He de first in de family. First in Ole Hope.’ She opened her palms at Chilway. ‘And the way he goin, yunno … ’

  ‘I know,’ Chilway cut in. ‘The rest round here will follow after him. He show them that is possible. Now, Miss Dee.’ The man’s eyes were holding Deeka’s and the expression on his face was strange. A hardness resided in his eyes now. His voice had also changed. ‘Gimme one good reason why I shouldn keep my finger on dis switch an’ put my mouth to it. Make me unnerstan why me – big man like me – who been doin this job fo’ thirty years, who never lose a man, why I should spoil my name for Birdie.’

  The words
had issued from the corners of his mouth – flat, emptied of the humour he had greeted them with when he arrived.

  Deeka cleared her throat. Her hand drifted in the direction of her daughters. ‘We, we the cane, Missa Chilway. We take the heat. Y’unnerstan? Dey,’ she gestured at Pynter, ‘de children, dey what come out of it. Of us. They the rum, the sugar, the …’ Deeka shook her head, as if to clear it of some pain. ‘We bring dem in de worl’; we not s’posed to see them go before we go. Else, what sense it make in livin – in livin like we live? Tell me, Missa Chilway, then what’s de use o’ cane?’

  A tear slipped down her face. She turned her back and cleared it.

  Chilway rose to his feet, the little machine still in his hand, still turned on, the crackly voices coming from it. He flicked the switch. The machine died. Peter eased his back off the plum tree and began humming to himself.

  Morning had just begun to streak the peaks of the Mardi Gras. It hadn’t reached them yet. Wouldn’t for another half-hour or so.

  Deeka fed them fried fish and bread and cups of scalding cocoa. Pynter went off and returned with a shirtful of water lemons, and guavas whose flesh the five men sniffed and marvelled at.

  And Patty, only for that morning, became the dream she knew that Chilway always wished for: she brought his plate to him, she poured his cup of cocoa, brushed the breadcrumbs off his shirt, and when he finished eating she brought him the water to wash his hands, and poured. The man looked up at her, his face gone soft and vulnerable as a boy’s, and said in a low, unsteady voice, ‘What’s the opposite of death, Miss Pretty?’

  ‘Life,’ she told him, smiling.

  He shook his head. ‘Everybody get it wrong,’ he said. ‘The whole world get it wrong. The opposite of death is beauty.’

  Then, as if he’d just been reminded of something, he looked across at Pynter. ‘And you, Missa Secondary? What you say?’

  Pynter had been allowing his mind to drift along the top of the island, the high inscrutable places of wind and silence that looked down on the villages. He’d been thinking about a name that had been said to him which was supposed to mean something. He blinked at the man and shrugged. ‘Ain’t got no opposite,’ he said, ‘jus’ … ’

  ‘Just?’

  ‘Difference.’

  The man rested his elbows on his knees and leaned forward. The frown lines deepened on his forehead. ‘And how you work that out, young fella?’

  Pynter lifted his shoulders again. He felt his mother’s eyes on him, glanced at her and caught her quick cautioning gaze. He sensed the sudden wariness in the women too. He felt his mouth go dry.

  ‘Talk to me, young fella,’ Chilway said, his voice gone whispery and impatient.

  Pynter was suddenly afraid too – that whatever he might say now, this man who was looking at him so steadily, so strangely, might find something in his words that would send his hand reaching for his radio.

  Pynter licked his lips. ‘Stone blunt; knife sharp. You – you kill somefing wiv a stone, or you kill it wiv a knife – same – same intention, same result. Ain’t – ain’t got no opposite.’

  Chilway nodded. ‘Just difference.’ He split a guava and scooped out the soft flesh with a thumb. He held it up before him then placed it in his mouth. ‘How old you say you was?’

  ‘I didn say how old I was.’

  ‘He twelve,’ Elena said, her voice strident with a warning for him and an apology for the man.

  Chilway smiled at her. ‘They teach you that in Secondary?’

  Pynter shook his head. ‘S’what I think, Missa Chilway. And – and if it got a opposite to death, is not no life.’

  ‘Is?’

  ‘Knowin.’

  ‘Knowing?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Don’ know what wrong wiv ’im,’ Elena cut in, her voice pitched even higher. ‘Dis – dis boooy!’

  ‘Yuh miss the point,’ Chilway told her sharply, irritably. ‘And that mean,’ he held a rigid finger up at her, ‘you miss the problem. Cuz Missa Secondary here jus’ show you whaaz frightening this whole country right now, and why they want all of ’em in jail.’ The man jabbed a finger at his head. ‘The mind they got belong to them, and they don’ give a damn who know it.’

  He was breathing heavily. The rum had loosened his jaw and from time to time he lifted his shoulders and dropped them as if he were trying to shake off the drunkenness.

  ‘Times change, Miss Dee. The job turning into something different. Things gone upside down. Everything.’ He looked at the radio in his hand. ‘I wish everybody had one o’ these so I could talk in it just once and make them understand that. Used to be a time when they send me for a fella like Birdie. I’ll take two or three of my men with me. If I know him well, if he is a regular, I’ll go alone. I remind him that if he take a farmer goat and cook oil-down with it, without that farmer consent, is tantamount to theft, no matter how much his children starving. So he should expect me to come for him. He unnerstan that. His woman might start bawlin becuz life just got a lil harder for her and the children that he leave her with. I bring him in whole. A coupla years later he come back out in one piece. Okay, not all the time. I not a perfect man and some o’ them does try me patience so I have to bus’ dem arse. A coupla blows with this,’ he pointed at his baton, ‘is enough to turn them into angels. Is not the same as picking up a coupla schoolchilren and telling them they guilty of dissent and dissatisfaction. It don’t have no – no,’ he looked angrily about him, ‘no elegance in that. I can’t hold that up in front of a magistrate and say, “Your Honour, take a look at the quantity and the size of dissatisfaction this young fella here commit and see for yourself what a criminal he is.”’

  For a moment Patty’s fingering of her earrings arrested him.

  ‘You give a man a gun, is not just a weapon that you hand him. You give him permission to find out how it work. One day he goin to use it on somebody, if only to make it do what it s’posed to do. Is the only way he know that is really what they say it is. Is the only way he know that is for real, y’unnerstan? The trouble is it got a kind of man who never satisfy with one time. He do it over and over again. He don’t need no provocation. S’like he need reminding all the time what killing really feel like. That’s Sylus, Miss Dee. That’s the fella you shame yesterday. He’ll come again, when y’all not even looking. He done it before.’

  He wagged a chin at Peter first and then at Pynter. ‘Watch out for y’all children. Is the children that they after.’

  One of his men reached down and helped him to his feet.

  Chilway stood at the edge of the yard looking about him as if he’d forgotten what he’d come for. He cocked a finger at Deeka.

  ‘I hope you never have to ask yuhself if saving Birdie was worth all the trouble he left y’all with.’

  They watched the fellas help him down the path.

  22

  SIX MONTHS AFTER Birdie left, they climbed the foothills to watch the tractors leave – a slow, juddering procession of dirty steel, trundling eastwards towards the cleft between the hills that marked the beginning of the Drylands. They did not return home until evening, not until the thundering far off in the distance died completely and the smell of trees and the river replaced the fetor of machine oil.

  The tractors had left a sloping expanse of wasted straw behind them and the smell of exposed soil. They’d taken what remained of the dry season with them also, for the furnace of the valley cooled soon after, and now Old Hopers were turning up their heads to the softer skies of another halfway season.

  This was their time, Tan Cee said, these days of quiet air, and light as brittle and pure as glass, when the moisture that the hills released was cool on the skin, when bananas bloomed momentously – the curved head of their single, elongated flower straining to lick the earth like giant scarlet tongues. And silk-cotton trees buried deep inside the climbing forests floated fertility messages on the wind – tiny seeds wrapped in bolls of cotton that were so thin and light
it was like catching bits of solid air.

  If Deeka noticed this change, she did not show it. From the night that Birdie left them, she’d been searching for signs of his arrival somewhere. She studied the spiralling fall of leaves, the flutterings of the perishing moths inside the lampshade, the unsteady flight of seagulls – as if there ought to be some meaning in the rapid scribblings of their wings on the winds that drove them inland.

  She hardly ate. She hoped aloud that Birdie had escaped to a country where he at least understood the language, which o’ course meant Englan’ o’ America.

  Just when Pynter thought there would be no end to this grumbling, sour-faced vigil, the evening came when he watched his grandmother follow the flight of a single cattle egret that lifted itself from the gloom of the valley floor. It rose fast and steady, in a dazzling arc, like a streak of light against the smoke green of the hillside. It looped high and hard, seemed to hit a sudden wind up there above their heads, then it began descending in a dizzying whorl towards them. Deeka brought the palms of her hands together. She held them before her, her body pushed forward in a nervous, aching prayer. The bird settled like a fluttering fragment of tissue on the tres-beau mango tree above the house.

  His grandmother spread her arms and smiled. ‘Birdie awright,’ she said. ‘Leasways, I feel so now.’

  Pynter turned towards his scooter, smiling, because his mother and his aunts had already begun to remember Birdie differently.

  Evenings, Patty became Chilway, while Tan Cee and Elena took turns pretending to be Deeka. And because it sweetened the jokes a lot more, Peter walked and talked like Birdie. And it did not matter what his grandmother said or did to kill the fun, they made a fool of Birdie over dinner and laughed about his chupidness.

  Now, with Deeka’s mind at ease, Patty remembered aloud the time when Birdie stole a whiteman’s dog and Chilway came for him. Patty high-stepped to the middle of the yard, her bowl of soup cradled under one arm. She pulled down the sides of her mouth, half-closed one eye, dropped her shoulders and leaned her head like Chilway.