The Bone Readers

by Jacob Ross

  ‘Your salary, they still…’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘But they might…’

  ‘It won’t get that bad, leas’ways I don think so.’ Suddenly I wasn’t so sure.

  ‘I have money,’ she said.

  ‘I don want your money.’ The words left me more brusquely than I intended. I saw the recoil in her eyes. I reached out and placed my hand on hers. ‘I don’t mean it the way you take it. I upset, that’s all. Money not going to be a problem.’ I hoped I sounded more certain than I felt.

  ‘Digger, I want a baby.’

  I dropped my spoon. ‘You…?’

  ‘I want to have a child wiv, wiv you. You don’t have to mind it, I…’

  ‘Lonnie, hold on. How come we jump from talking about my trouble at work to making baby? Last night you wouldn’t even lemme breathe near you.’

  She wouldn’t look at me. She was making agitated circles on the table with her fingers.

  ‘Lonnie, what’s the problem?’

  ‘I just…’ She wiped her eyes and looked away.

  ‘It make more sense to hold on, not so?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Why not? I keep asking you what’s behind all this.’ I reached for her hand. Lonnie prised herself from me, rose to her feet and headed for the door.

  I got to the main road in time to glimpse the flare of her brake lights as she took the bend and disappeared.

  28

  I retrieved the letter Malan had handed me, signed the attached receipt and slotted it into the supplied envelope. I would drop it off at the post office, then head for Lonnie’s place in Marais. I needed to sit with her, find out what the trouble was and settle her mind. Things would work out because they had to. Malan’s war was not against me.

  Okay, the fella behaving vex-and-ignorant right now, but a man could unnerstan that. He wanted Chilman out of his Department and that made a lotta sense. The island needed my services. So the worse that could happen was a few marks on my record.

  I-man would keep my head down, ride out the restricted duties, and chill out till tings cool-off-an-sekkle. Miss Stanislaus was Chilman’s problem. Not mine. Definitely.

  I felt better as I drove into the choke and heat of San Andrews. The woman at the post office took the envelope and stamped it. She raised her head as if to speak and something in her manner changed.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘What, what?’ she threw back. Wary now. Sullen-faced. ‘Tash,’ she called, with a casual turning of the head. ‘Bring the other stamp for me!’

  I walked out of the post office and looked over my shoulder. There were two of them now, side by side, staring at me through the glass door.

  I headed for the usual places where I bought my fruits and vegetables. I felt eyes on me; told myself it was just them wimmen in the post office playin the arse. Man just imagining all them bad-eye from people on the street.

  But then there were the nudging elbows, the quick turn of heads in my direction. At the entrance of the market, a man – short and rough as a dehydrated yam – placed himself in front of me and looked me in the face. I felt a tightening in my guts.

  Miss Mark told me she didn’t have the coconut oil she usually kept for me. I pointed at the bottle against the box on which she sat. That was for a macmere, she said. I looked about me: market women all gone silent, leaning against their stalls, arms making handles on their hips. Staring at me.

  ‘Why y’all lookin at me like that,’ I said.

  The one with the dark-blue headwrap, dense as a boulder, in front of a giant cocoa-basket of yams and sweet potatoes answered.

  ‘You de police fella that shoot de Reverend, not so? Her voice – resonant like a kata drum – turned heads in my direction.

  ‘Where you get that from?’ I said.

  The woman pushed a hand behind her back, rummaged a while, then lifted a newspaper above her head.

  ‘Is here! Right here.’

  A full length snapshot of me leaning on my car with my phone against my ear.

  ISLAND VOICE EXCLUSIVE!

  Uncovered: Suspended Officer, Michael Digson.

  The way the woman held the paper, I could not read the strap-line.

  ‘You want to lie an tell me is not you that murder the Reverend?’ She’d raised her voice, in the manner of the preacher that she surely was.

  In all my time of bantering and buying from these market women, I had no reason to interpret the meanings in the colours of their wraps and the way they’d tied them on their heads. Now I realised I was in the middle of a flock of outraged Sisters from various parts of the island.

  ‘Is the seed of retribution you goin suck today. Amen.’ I thought it was a curse – a Bible-driven condemnation – until I saw the man several heads in front of me.

  I can spot a Watchman anywhere: something in his eyes and an aloofness that cannot be explained by the poor-arse job he did to make a living. I also knew him by the fouet he carried in his hand – a whip the exact length of his striking arm; thick as a thumb with protrusions the size and shape of knuckles all along the length of it. A good Watchman understood the human body as well as any doctor; knew all the sites of disablement and pain. A blow – quick and secretive – to a bone, a nerve in the leg, or spine could maim for life. I watched him approach, the long body riding easily on the jostle of the crowd, being carried forward by it, his eyes everywhere but on me.

  I shambled through the market crowd until my feet hit the pavement, then sprinted to my car.

  Once out of San Andrews, I pulled into a cul-de-sac that overlooked the yacht marina in Canteen. I pressed my neck against the headrest and considered how just two days ago, I would have called for backup. Now I did not have that option.

  So! Pet was right. The newspapers had no problems identifying and naming me. I thought of calling her to tell her she was right. I phoned Lonnie instead. She did not pick up. I called a second time, left a message, started my car and drove home.

  I spent the day in a stupor, my thoughts swimming with the image of the Watchman in the market bearing down on me, the fouet like the rod of reckoning it was, in his right hand. The scene replayed in my mind unbidden.

  This was Malan’s punishment, not the MJ’s. Chilman had given Restricted Duties a whole new meaning when he took over San Andrews CID. It was no longer a matter of leaving an officer desk-bound for a couple of weeks, or ‘lending’ him at short notice to a policing outpost in some remote part of the island. Restricted Duties became Chilman’s version of purgatory.

  An officer sent home was meant to be on call every second of his working hours. Calls rarely came, but if one did it was to demand rapid response to something trivial like coming to the office to locate a misplaced file or wash and polish the Governor General’s car. The punishment was in the waiting.

  I must have been sitting there for hours, because when I looked up, the light in the valley had thickened and the sounds were those of late evening.

  I followed the rise of a chicken hawk on the wind above Mont Airy heights – its wings bright in the last of the evening sun.

  …Fire in their arse…

  Pet’s words

  Also my grandmother’s. I was twelve when I last heard her say them.

  A great war had started between certain Sisters of the congregation over a brown-skinned deacon from the north. Full of himself, and thundering words, he disputed my grandmother’s position as a Prover.

  The day he challenged her, she took down my grandfather’s belt. It hung from a fat brass buckle on a nail above her bed-head – a heavy thing of leather slightly darker than the wood against which it rested. It was almost as thick as it was wide, apart from the tail of the strap where the leather flared out. The buckle was an odd thing – a metal that did not dull. Not smoothly curved at the top, it tapered into a pointed tip. My grandmother wore it every day for a month; rehung it on its nail the night after she drove out the Deacon with the curly hair.

 
I went into my bedroom, took down the strap, returned to my seat and laid it across my lap.

  I called Pet.

  ‘What’s happenin, Digger?’

  ‘I managing. Sorry about the late call, Pet. You could do me a favour?’

  ‘Uh-huh?’

  ‘Tomorrow, you think you could get to the office before everybody else?’

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Tell Malan I phone in sick, and I sound really sick. When you find the time, go to Doctor Garth on Market Hill. His surgery opens till seven in the evening. Ask him to write out a sick note for me, Michael Digson. It got to be for two weeks, minimum. No less than that, y’unnerstan? I want you to give it to Malan day after tomorrow – that’s Wednesday. You got all that?

  ‘Uh-huh.’

  ‘Pet, in a coupla days, I’ll text you a number. Keep it in your head. Don’t give it to Lisa.’

  ‘Yeh,’ she said, her voice alert now. ‘What you plan to do?’

  ‘I working on it right now,’ I said, tossing the rest of my drink over the wall of the veranda.

  29

  The passenger ferry I’d taken – Fish Eagle – approached Kara Isle under a doomsday sky that turned the rough waters of the harbour copper. Shaped like a prancing dog with oversized ears, Chilman’s and Miss Stanislaus’s birthplace sat north of Camaho.

  These were the people at the root of my troubles. For all her directness, Miss Stanislaus felt as elusive as smoke. She was all flesh and warmth with me, but ill-tempered steel with Malan, and I could not help noticing her resentment towards her father. I wanted to understand why, during all the time I knew him, Chilman had never talked about his place of birth and this woman who he’d confessed, only under pressure, was his daughter.

  I gave myself twelve hours to find out.

  Crosscurrents threw up waves as high as hills at the northwestern approach, but it was the only way to get to the harbour. Past the boiling waters, the sea opened up to a curving necklace of islets, coves, hidden beaches and sheltering mangroves that allowed a vessel to travel undetected all the way to the Florida Everglades. In The Force, we knew it as a trafficking backdoor and a getaway gateway for inter-island rum-runners. Chilman had shown no interest in them until the necktie killing.

  Like he told us, ‘Them pirates was heroes in Francis Drake and Captain Morgan time. But now them Youropeans not profiting from the proceeds, they call it trafficking. They done suck we dry and abandon we arse to fight up on we own, so how them expect West-Indies-man to survive?’

  I walked to the guest house named Guest House, situated at a junction called Cross Roads. Eyes in the doorways of tiny fried-fish bars and eateries followed my progress up the curving street. One of the bars was called The Matchbox and it struck me that folks on Kara Isle named things for what they were. No wonder Miss Stanislaus didn’t know how to lie.

  When night fell I stepped out of the guest house into a seawind that was clearing the streets of everything that could be shifted or lifted.

  I headed for a drinking hole that faced the wooden jetty. I expected it to be named Drinking Hole, but somebody had called it Delna’s. I walked into a storm of crashing dominoes and chesty guffaws. A drunken argument between four men was raging at a table near the entrance. I raised my voice, ordered fried fish and breadfruit chips, sat a couple of paces behind them and kept my eyes on my food.

  No other place I knew made me more aware of the ocean than Kara Isle – its thundering, blustering vastness – and my insignificance in a world where water ruled.

  From somewhere out there, a voice, raised above the wind, jerked me out of my thoughts. The drunks had taken what remained of their argument outside. It was now an incoherent rumble.

  I left the half-finished food and stepped outside. The street was empty. The fluorescent spill from food stalls and shop fronts barely gave shape to things. The beach was a dim white curve directly ahead of me.

  A weak quarter-moon hung over the heaving water. I narrowed my eyes at the dark outline of boats on the foreshore. I strolled towards the jetty. The catamaran I had taken from San Andrews was rocking ponderously against it. The wooden pier shuddered with the suck and surge of the tide.

  I walked out on the jetty towards a wall of sound and spray, with the wind pummelling my face. About two thirds of the way out, I turned around to scan the beach. Stood there until my eyes adjusted to the dark. Then I began to walk back.

  I smelt the presence before I saw the man – a mixture of engine oil and rancid fish. He was directly in my path, backlit by the lights from Delna’s cafe.

  ‘You lookin fuh someting?’ The voice seemed to trundle out of a tunnel.

  I felt my nostrils flare, aware now of the size of the man ahead of me. My armpit itched where I would have worn my special issue, and I felt a heavy thump of regret for giving it up so easily to Malan.

  I pulled up myself full height and deepened my voice. ‘What make you think I want something?’

  Still I was no match for him. I could have identified myself as a policeman, but in my shorts, a pair of rubber slippers and an old t-shirt I could barely convince myself that I was an officer.

  ‘You find I look like if I jokin?’ He took a couple of steps toward me. It was then that I saw the outline of the gaff against his leg – the dull wink of the big steel hook.

  I filled my lungs and raised my voice. ‘I dunno what you want from me, fella. I want to know why you standing in my way and threatening me!’

  I heard the tumble and shift of bodies on the boat, then a voice from the deck. ‘What happenin deh?’

  A round head dimly silhouetted against the sky popped over the edge of the jetty.

  ‘Juba? Is you? That’s you, Juba?’

  A brief silence, followed by the deeper irritated tones of another man. He’d pushed most of his upper body over the railing of the boat. ‘Juba, why you don’t leave de fella alone. You not tired giving people grief!’

  Juba didn’t move.

  I heard the men consulting. ‘That not the fella who come up with us this evening?’

  A couple more men leaned over. The same voice, stronger now, more indignant. ‘Juba, I goin call de captain – Captain!’

  Juba stepped aside. I took my time walking past him, or tried to; felt the brush of something hard and cold against my thigh.

  ‘I watchin you,’ he rumbled.

  ‘I watching you watch me,’ I threw back – and lengthened my stride.

  I hurried back to the guest house, irritable and jumpy. I showered and stretched out on the bed. The scent of the man still clung to my nostrils and I was tempted to shower again. For the first time in my job, I’d been truly spooked by another person. I resented it. I resented Chilman and Miss Stanislaus for dragging me into this shit; for exposing me to enemies who did not know I existed until some Fire Baptist women killed the preacherman who’d made a harem of his church. And I felt betrayed by Malan.

  I berated myself for not walking with my belt, which I’d only used once against another person.

  That belt! For years I wanted to know what my grandmother did with it to chase away the Deacon who had threatened to remove her from the church. She always sidestepped the question or ignored me, until one day she ordered me to get out of her frikkin face and never ask about no blaasted belt again.

  I gave up.

  My last year at primary school, I returned home one Friday with a busted lip. She wanted to know what happened. I refused to tell her. The Wednesday of the following week I came back with a limp.

  She saw to my injuries, said nothing; went inside the house and brought out a large enamel bowl of soapy water. She unrolled her red headscarf and dropped it in.

  After a while, she lifted the cloth and began to wring the water from it. She beckoned me with a finger. I was a couple of feet from her when something struck me so hard in the chest I fell backward. I scrambled to my feet. Another flash of red and I doubled over gasping.

  ‘Get up!’ she ordered. She flic
ked the dripping coil of cloth at me again. It unfolded from her hand in a heavy writhing curve, struck me on the ear and threw me over.

  She left me there sobbing, went inside, returned with the belt and dropped it at my feet.

  ‘Leave his face alone,’ she said.

  After that, Dalo never laid his hands on me again. Eight years later, I saw him in the market square – a sack of charcoal on his shoulder. He was still walking with a limp. From then I wore that belt – double-looped around my waist – whenever my grandmother let me, and the more I used it, the more its nature changed in my hand, until it became like a living thing.

  My mind returned to the big man on the jetty and the voice I’d heard that brought me out of Delna’s eatery. It was Lazar Wilkinson’s – the young man I’d met in Beau Sejour on my way to Chilman’s place.

  In different circumstances I would have called Malan and have him come here before daybreak with a unit from Special Forces. I had no doubt that a go-fast boat with twin engines was among the twenty footers out there in the shallows, laden with Vincen Island ganja, or something which, based on Juba’s reaction to my presence on the jetty, was worth killing an intruder for.

  30

  The next morning I strolled inland in my shorts, a pair of sandals and a Boston Celtics T-shirt. No need pretending to be native, Kara-islanders knew the names and faces of their own – all six thousand of them.

  People ambled past, each giving me a quick once-over without breaking stride, even the children. I smiled at a boy dangling a string of red snappers in his hand. ‘Nice catch. You selling?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘I’m just passing through. Looking for family. Been away a long time.’

  That halted him. ‘Who you lookin for?’

  ‘Chilman – they my people.’

  The boy cocked his head, accessing no doubt his very own built-in database of family names, their history and connections to each other. I’d never met a person from Kara Isle who could not do that.

  ‘We don’t have no more Chilman here. The rest of dem gone ’way. Same like you.’ I thought I saw something like reproach in his eyes.