Pynter Bender

by Jacob Ross

  He remembered drifting down Old Hope Road, the houses a brown unsteady blur on either side, and people floating past like smudgy ghosts. Somewhere along the road a woman’s voice said his grandfather’s name and straight after that he wasn’t walking any more. Hands were holding him and he was travelling through air.

  Pynter closed his eyes and tried to recollect the days he’d lost. The morning after Guy Fawkes Night, Old Hope was buzzing with his name. Coxy came down early to the yard, cocked a thumb at him and smiled. And by the time Pynter stepped on the road for school, he learned that he had the fastest feet on earth. He was the young-fella who ran and danced on wind, who slipped between the fingers of a hundred of Victor’s soldiers and left a coupla buttons from his shirt in their murderin-an’-killin hands. All of it, to deliver Muriel last lil boy from their terrible killin ways.

  Miss Muriel was waiting for him by the side of the road with a small paper bag of sugar apples. She gave it to him. This, he knew, would go on for a while until they’d wrung the last little bit of joy from what he had done. Eventually they would have to face up to what really happened the night before at Cross Gap Junction, and what was sure to come. And what was to come would be no Guy Fawkes make-believe.

  Sylus didn’t come. Instead, he’d sent men who were the offspring of friends or relatives further up the foothills. They’d burnt the jeeps. They’d ragged up the ones who’d chased after him and lil Kicker. They’d told these young soldiers it was nothing personal, and sent them walking home.

  Sylus and his men would arrive when he was ready, and Pynter thought he knew how they would come. It would be the way they’d taken Marlis Tillock, the way they did it in the north, in the quietest hours of the night, sometime close to morning. They would not announce themselves. They would enter a house, hold a torch to faces, select the youth they wanted and leave as quietly as they came.

  He’d gone into school that morning and leaned against the wire fence in the courtyard. Sislyn saw him from the staff room and came out to him.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ she said.

  He did not answer her. She followed him to their place above the lagoon.

  ‘I leavin school,’ he said.

  She sat down. She didn’t look at him. ‘That’s what you bring me back here to tell me?’

  ‘Don’ have no choice.’

  ‘Don’ tell me that!’ His words had brought her to her feet. Now she was in his face.

  ‘Listen, young man. Don’ tell me I waste my time with you, y’hear me? Don’t tell me I waste my … my …’ She choked on the words, brought a fist up to her mouth as if she wanted to stuff the words back down her throat. She pulled her shoulders back and sucked in a lungful of air. When she looked at him again her face was calm. ‘Sorry – I have no right. I fool myself. I think I have. I don’t.’

  ‘I know you leavin too,’ he said.

  She looked at him quickly. ‘Where you get that from?’ Her brows came suddenly together. ‘Is that why…’

  ‘No, miss.’

  ‘How did you…’

  ‘I feel it.’

  She was staring out to sea. A stiff breeze was kicking up the water below. It was one of those mornings when the light followed the curve of things and did not leave a shadow.

  ‘I have a doctorate to return to,’ she said. ‘England – I need to.’

  Pynter shook his head. ‘Not Englan’, miss.’

  ‘Follow me,’ she said, striding ahead of him.

  He could barely keep up with her. At the entrance of the small library, Sislyn stopped abruptly and turned around to face him. Now only her lips were moving. ‘I won’t ask you why, Bender. I don’t want to know. But I want my pound of flesh; I’m holding you to something.’ She flicked her fingers quickly before her. ‘Ten months – that’s what you’ve got. In ten months’ time, you come back here and do the exams. It’s all you’ve got to look forward to.’

  She stepped up onto a stool and began pulling books off the shelves. The desk shuddered under the weight of the armful she dropped on it.

  ‘I’ll have those replaced.’ She returned to the shelves. ‘Conway wants you for Economics. Edwina says you’re born for Biology. And God knows who else wants you for whatever else to make them feel that they’ve been teaching.’ She dropped another armful on the table, jumped off the stool and looked him in the eyes. ‘I’m signing you up for these: the history, the language, the literature. That’s you. Read what they say, see if you agree and either way, work out some damn good reasons why, then come back here and sit the exams.’

  She emptied her bag on the floor and chucked it at him.

  He did not take it. Sislyn raised fighting eyes at him.

  ‘Dat’s a woman bag,’ he said. ‘A fella can’t …’

  ‘Walk the public road with it? That’s not my problem. Take it!’

  She walked him to the gate. They stood there a while staring at the little road that led straight down.

  ‘Don’ know what to say,’ he said.

  ‘Don’t say anything, then. Tell me, Bender, and this is purely academic – can a woman love two fellas at the same time?’

  ‘Not only two, miss – a whole heap of them,’ he said.

  She rocked back with laughter.

  ‘Go,’ she said.

  ‘Remember me,’ he said.

  She nodded and turned away.

  ‘What you thinkin?’ Patty said. He didn’t know when she’d stopped talking.

  ‘I lef’ school,’ he said. He felt tired. He wanted to sleep.

  Patty got up and pushed the window wide open. He looked up at the light. Out there, a patch of purple sky, the top of the tres-beau mango tree, a slice of the hill above it – a bright truncated world.

  ‘In ten months I go back,’ he said.

  Patty was silent for a while. And when she spoke she sounded almost frightened. ‘Ten months – s’a long time, not so?’

  His aunt seemed to be reminded suddenly of something. ‘Arilon say a fella come a coupla times askin after you.’ She furrowed her brows at him. ‘An’ de fella look more like you dan Peter. Dey won’ tell ’im where to find you. He say he goin come again.’

  Pynter said nothing; instead, he lifted her hand and rested it on her stomach. He held her gaze. She read the question in his eyes. She looked down at both their hands and nodded.

  ‘Pynto?’ she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. ‘How – how come you know dese tings, Pynto?’

  He winked at her and smiled.

  Later, he emerged from Patty’s house to find Anita standing with her daughter in the yard. A red woman in a sea-blue dress, fuller-fleshed than all her sisters, her brown hair rolling down her thick shoulders in coils. Her back was turned to him but as soon as he reached the doorway, she stiffened.

  Anita did not turn to face him. She looked over her shoulders with eyes that made him think of chicken hawks. A fast bright flash of teeth. Patty prodded him in the back. He nodded at Anita.

  Windy pushed back her hair and lifted her chin at him. Patty’s voice was a breath behind his ear. ‘Girl-cousin never stop askin after you.’

  They’d arrived at a time when the valley was foaming white, as if all the clouds that ought to be above them had left the sky and settled on the canes. The canes were pluming weeks too early. The weather had confused them. They feathered the air in waves, raised no odours on the wind and barely made a sound. But all that beauty was hiding a disaster. For it meant that the sugar had left the stems and made of the flesh a useless watery sponge.

  That evening, Pynter sat slightly apart from them. His mother and Patty had their heads together. Tan Cee leaned against Coxy. Patty was pleased that her place was the one he’d opened his eyes in, and that she was the first to hear him speak with the voice of a man. Daytime was all right, she told him. Nights were dangerous. Oslo and the rest of his scooter-mad friends headed for the hills above the canes where they made leaf caves out of the bamboo. Peter did not go with them. He’d made a
place for himself up Top Hill way, which he was telling no one about.

  Anita would not tell them where she came from, or why she arrived so suddenly with her daughter, whom no one knew she had.

  Been a long-long time, Tan Cee said. Too long p’raps. A pusson no longer knew Anita. They couldn’t pull Anita close if she kept from them the one thing they could close their hands around: a lil bit of her past.

  Anita leaned against the house and looked about her. She talked but made no conversation with them. She tapped her fingers against her legs, nodded at the things they said to her without really hearing them, smiled when they least expected it and reminded them of things she said they told her, months before she came. She wanted her own house, she said. She’d brought enough money for that. Deeka pointed at the plot of land where Columbus used to collect butterflies, a little way from Tan Cee’s. And Coxy, who’d been staring at Anita above the flaming tip of his cigarette, told her he would build her house and that he wouldn’t charge a thing.

  It was then that Peter broke off his jostling with Windy and went into the house. He came out with Birdie’s canvas bag and grumbled goodnight to them. At the edge of the yard, he looked back at Pynter, adjusted the bag on his shoulder and stepped into the dark. For he, Pynter, had started the trouble, not so? With a few words in Coxy’s ear, he’d twisted the arms of the men. And instead of sticking around to see the problems that he left them with, he’d thrown himself on his back and played dead for all of three days.

  When, the next day, Peter returned, he dropped his bag in the yard, waved at Windy, said good morning to the women and walked to the drum of water beside the house. He stripped to the waist and poured water over himself. His mother lifted her head at him, a trace of a smile around her mouth as she watched him scrub his face and arms. He was becoming a man. Brown as an over-baked loaf, the muscles already strained against his skin. There was the darkening smudge of a moustache which every now and then his fingers crept up to and paused over. When Peter raised his head, it struck Pynter for the first time that his brother had their father’s eyes.

  Anita passed all her joy to her bright-eyed daughter. Windy doubled the women over with her jokes, put her fingers in Peter’s plate, fed herself and laughed with him. Peter crushed leaves between his fingers and held them under Windy’s nose. The ant-blighted grapefruit tree was blossoming. Peter pulled the petals off the flowers and threw them in her face. She chased him round the yard. He found a caterpillar somewhere and placed it in Windy’s palm. Something about the wriggling creature seemed to hold her. She grew still, passing her fingers over the white hairs that stood out from the body of the insect, like the prickles of a golden-apple seed. It was as yellow as the ripened fruit, with streaks of black and white along its side.

  Deeka and his mother stopped their conversation, as interested in the girl now as she was in the insect she was holding.

  Pynter heard her slippers on the stones. He lifted his head from his book and looked up at her.

  ‘S’a butterfly,’ he said, taking it from her. ‘A lil bit of sun. A lil bit of waiting. Then de colours break out, get dry, turn wings. If …’

  Peter’s laughter cut across his words. ‘He’s a liar; don’ lissen to ’im, Winny.’

  Pynter handed the insect back to her.

  ‘If what?’ she said.

  ‘If y’all let it live.’

  Windy walked over to Deeka’s rosebush and rested it on a leaf. Peter went to stand beside her. He held the tree and shook it, and the caterpillar tumbled to the ground. Pynter watched her face as Peter trod on it.

  The next morning Pynter left for Glory Cedar Rise. Halfway up, he realised the girl was somewhere behind him, and that she wasn’t alone. She rounded a twisty corner and did not seem surprised to find him standing there.

  ‘What you followin me for?’ He did not hide his irritation.

  ‘I not followin you,’ she said. ‘We walkin same direction, thaaz all.’

  He’d never been this close to her. She was older than Peter and him by one year, Tan Cee said. She didn’t look it. She wore a single earring in her left ear. When she tossed back her hair, it sparkled like a struck match.

  ‘Got a lot more hills round here to walk,’ he said.

  ‘I like this one,’ she said, and pushed past him.

  He watched the slippers slapping against her heels, pale as the skin of the palm of her hands. She climbed carefully, reaching out to balance herself by touching the trunks of trees, stopping only to brush her palms from time to time.

  She came to the high mud bank that stood between them and the top of the hill, and he climbed past her. Glancing over his shoulder, he saw that she was holding up an arm towards him with an expression that was a mixture of expectation and reproach.

  Without a word, he reached down and pulled her up. He could detect the pomade in her hair – the smell of lemons, and something else which came off her skin, almost like the smell of grapefruit blossoms.

  She did not release his hand until they cleared the hill.

  There was always wind up here. It came straight off the ocean, reared itself up, grabbed at their clothing and slapped them in their faces.

  She was looking east, beyond the ridge of hills past which San Andrews lay. Columns of clouds, serrated like old sails, pushed themselves up from the ocean.

  ‘Morning start ’cross dere,’ he told her.

  Windy lifted her face at him. He was distracted for a moment by the fine hairs along the nape of her neck. ‘You laugh a lot,’ he said. ‘You hardly talk and your modder not sayin where y’all come from.’

  She smiled and pointed past his ear. ‘Wozzat?’

  ‘Westerpoint. Rich people and their dogs live there.’

  He named the hills and places just above their valley. Pointed at the spread of trees at the far end, just above the river, which he called Grass Water Bowl. And over there, on the hill that looked down on the ocean, the huddle of trees from which the people who came before them used to launch themselves and fly.

  He took her hand, aimed it past the old stone mill, over the grey cane road and up towards the green rock rise that hoisted the trees above Old Hope.

  ‘It got somefing up there,’ he said. ‘One day I might show you.’

  She sat beside him. ‘You talk pretty,’ she said. She pressed her head against his shoulder.

  He looked at her fingers and thought of cane. ‘We cousins,’ he said.

  She eased her weight off him and nodded. She passed a hand across his chest and stroked his throat, and her pupils were like open doors which he wanted to walk into.

  He returned to Windy during the days, up there on Glory Cedar Rise where the valley slipped away beneath them in a dazzling, giddying heave. But in the nights he took his bag and joined the young men in Grass Water Bowl. His arrival changed their tones and brought out the resentment in Oslo. He walked too quietly, they said, turned up at their gatherings too softly. He never forgot a thing and slept sitting, with his shoes on. And the nights that one of them dared to strike a match, all they saw between him and the darkness beyond his shoulders were his eyes.

  They stretched themselves out in the leaf caves and talked in whispers, dropping off to sleep one by one, until their snoring joined the murmurings of the river and the canes.

  A low mist had settled over the canes one early morning when Pynter stirred and woke them. He told them they had to move higher up the foothills, straight away. They watched as the jeeps rolled up the old cane road, the dim shapes of the soldiers spilling out of them, awkward and stiff-limbed, moving blindly through the fields, their searchlights scrawling crazy arcs against the half-light.

  When, later, the vehicles left, Arilon came and stooped beside him. ‘Dey practising on us,’ he said.

  It was true that as the weeks went by the vehicles came in more quietly. The men killed their engines and pushed them in more cautiously. They arrived at different times and approached from unexpected directions. They ma
de wider circles and crept further up the hillsides. Pynter was worried then, especially when the Land Rovers drove off and his mind turned to the dogs that the soldiers hadn’t brought yet.

  During the days he would prepare Windy for the rumours that would envelope them. He told her how to look behind the soft words and the smiles of the women in the yard and follow the turnings of their minds. Right now, they were putting their heads together over them. They were searching for a way to kill their friendship. They got closer to it every time she left the yard to meet him on top of Glory Cedar Rise. When they struck, he said, it would be all of them together, even though the words would come only from the mouth of the one they’d passed the duty to.

  And if anything, Patty’s condition would be adding to their urgency.

  His young aunt Patty was round as a full moon and the child in her was calling for odd things: the hard white flesh of green mangoes, the salty leaves of cheese plants, young June-plums so sour just the smell of them set the teeth on edge, strips of cinnamon and bitter mauby bark, finger-daubs of salt, Guinea peppers that were amber as the flame they carried in their hearts. Chalk and ash and charcoal. Patty strolled about the yard smiling foolishly to herself, her hands guided to the leaves of plants and the juicy stalks of grass. Deeka, his mother and Tan Cee spent their idle hours staring at her with still-eyed, dreamy fascination. They’d already started arguing over names: ‘Dalene,’ Tan Cee said, ‘Dalene or Anisa or Melissa, or p’raps another Deeka. In fact, why not a second me?’

  ‘Nuh, boys,’ Deeka said. ‘Another coupla fellas.’ She would wave an arm at Peter and Pynter. ‘Twins! In fact, two sets o’ dem goin be perfect. That make four in one go, not so? That was, of course …’ She rested bright, assessing eyes on Patty. ‘That was, if a pusson strong enough to manage it. Cuz this yard want more man. Any kinda man. A yard could never have too much man. Man good, even if dem turn good-for-nothing in the end. Man still good!’

  They’d laughed with Patty throughout the evening meal, and somewhere near the end of it, they went quiet for a while. Leroy had to know, they said, cuz the last thing a pusson wanted was to have him meet her on the road like that and get surprised. Men go crazy over things like that, seeing a woman he convince ’imself belong to ’im, carrying another man child, so soon afterwards. Especially after all those years of nothing happening for him. It kill something in a fella. In these parts here – a fella who learn he got no life inside of him don’t care no more for life. Not even his own. So, they should call him to the yard and Patty could let him know the nice way.