Pleasantview

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by Celeste Mohammed


  But, before the wedding could take place, Sunil’s father came running in one day, and ordered her to pack. All the plastic bags she’d brought from Venezuela were scattered about; she didn’t even know what they’d done with her little rolling suitcase.

  “Now! Now!” he said to Sunil. “Get she ready. Police coming.”

  Sunil threw her stuff into his own duffel bag. Then he and his father bundled her into their van and drove to a Chinese man in a nearby village. Sunil’s father asked for two thousand. “No. Fit-teen handrey,” the man countered. Sunil’s father said, “Sold,” and collected, in a back room behind the Chinese restaurant, his fifteen hundred greasy American dollars.

  The memory makes Consuela pitch herself backward onto the bed. She plucks, from between the pillows, her virgin white teddy bear—a Valentine’s gift from Mr. Jagroop. With both hands, she holds it above her and stares into its dead-fish eyes. She wonders, for the millionth time, if any police had been coming at all, that day in Icacos. Or had Sunil’s father made up the whole story? Had he been planning to sell her all along but couldn’t bear to tell Sunil? Or had Sunil known? Back then, she believed Sunil was innocent. And she’d even believed when he tearfully said he was “coming back soon” to redeem her from the Chinese man.

  But he hadn’t come back. The chino locked her in a room with a Colombiana, and every few days or so, they were tied and raped side by side (“Yes, fellas,” chino would say, “break them in good.”) And yes, they had broken her insides with their machetes, chopped her up real good inside, severed whichever artery carried feeling and pain and faith and hope and love. And when she and the Colombiana weren’t being raped, they would pray and tell each other, “Hermana, tienes que ser fuerte, piense en tu familia allá.” For five weeks they repeated that. Out loud and in their heads too, under the black and brown bodies of these strange men who dripped cologne-water but smelled of fish, rancid coconut oil and engine grease. Consuela proved the more popular of the two, and one day chino came in wagging his finger and said, “Like how you more white-looking than she, and your hair more yellow, you go be a big, big hit and make good money up north.”

  Consuela was transferred to his sister, Boss Lady, in Pleasantview. To this pussy-pink house on Panco Lane. Still small-bodied, still seventeen, but she’d hardened to forty inside—yet Boss Lady told the customers, “Consuela is fifteen.”

  Sunil came one day. He spent a long time talking with her, cursing as he told her how chino had refused to let him see her, and then crying as she told him what chino had made her do. Then, he spent a long time talking with Boss Lady. Afterwards, he looked happy. His face beaming and his shoulders high when he said, “She say I could buy you back. Just hold on, babes, I coming for you.”

  That was a fifteen months ago, and still, she must say she’s fifteen. Customers still call her “whitey” and “blondie”, but what she sees of herself in the closet mirror as she works is negra como el carbón. Sure, Boss Lady pays her well, lets her send cash back home using the Chinese money-line, lets her have a cellphone so she can lie to Mama every week about how the money is made (“Sí, Mama, soy profesora de inglés”), lets her shop in the Junction, lets her have everything—except her passport and freedom.

  But Consuela never complains, because she isn’t sure what she would do differently, anyway, if she had those things. Mama sent her here to earn money and find Marisol—it was never in the plan that she should seek a life and dreams and happiness of her own. She is careful not to reach too high, donde sus manos no pueden alcanzar.

  She rolls onto her side, draws teddy into her bosom and curls up on the bed, her place of work. She makes a hurried Sign of the Cross … en el nombre del Padre, del Hijo … but it doesn’t make her feel any more blessed or protected or any less alone. She remains dried out and brittle inside. She is terrified to risk even a tiny spark of belief.

  By the time we reach the jetty in Carenage, I catch back my breath and my senses and all the li’l pieces of myself that the sea was threatening to drown. We move through the night like some cat looking for fish and I stand up in the darkest dark, under a hog plum tree, to change my clothes. I put on the dry ones Stench bring.

  “Come, let we move,” I say, talking like the boss of the operation again—I ain’t hear myself sound so in a whole year.

  Stench bump fist with the two other fellas—I don’t know them, them don’t know me, and it better so—they jump in a next car and drive off. Them head west, we head east to Pleasantview.

  Stench secondhand Toyota patchy with flashband and moving slow, but my blood fuel-injected. I hype up, I nervous, I happy, I could lift up this damn car and run with it—you would swear I sniff coke or something. Daddy did bring in some blocks one time, and I did watch the customer dip-in a finger, taste the powder, then bawl, “Shiiit! That’s the damn thing self. Pure, pure. Thing to blow man brain out they head.”

  “Thanks, eh,” I tell Stench, clapping him on the back over and over, like he choking and need help. “You’s a damn good friend. You been a brother to me,” I keep saying. Is true: Stench was there with me, on Daddy boat, when we did bring across Consuela. And is he-self used to go with me, by Lee Loy Restaurant every week to look for she. And then, when the Chinee Mafia send she north, to Pleasantview, is Stench used to drive me up the road every week, in this same old Toyota, to check on she. He do me plenty favors, but he know, just like I know: he owing me more than I owing he. Is me did take the rap with the police, I never turn informer, I never call he name. I did make one single request from him before I walk myself in the police station: “Every month, go by Daddy, he go give you a li’l change; take it for Consuela.”

  “How she looking?” I ask Stench—I does ask that every time he visit me in prison.

  “Good, good,” he say. “She taking care of sheself.”

  He does always say that, and it does always make me feel good to hear it. I did promise to handle she, as a man does handle he woman. The five hundred I sending every month, through Stench, it ain’t much but it making a point: no matter who she fuck, she still my woman. Any man could climb on top of she, but I’s the onliest man making jail for she.

  Watch, nah: when Boss Lady did say I coulda buy Consuela and she passport back for fifty thousand, I nearly fall down and kiss she old, stinking toe—fuss I was glad—it had a hope for we. I went straight home and tell Daddy that I done with that petty smuggling life on the boat. He did cuss me and call me neemakharam, but I didn’t care. I went and get a good contract-work with the oil company—driving truck and boat, digging hole, fixing engine, anything they tell me do—and I did start to save, save, save. But the funds wasn’t piling up fast enough, and Consuela keep crying every time I went to see she, so I had was to think fast. I team up with Stench and some other fellas to make a li’l lagniappe on the side. But the oil company catch on and tell police “industrial tools worth more than US$10,000 have gone missing.” I did give Daddy my cut to hold, and I plead guilty, thinking My Honor woulda give me a small jail, but the fucker hit me with seven years—big jail, on the prison island, far far far from Consuela.

  I did cry like a snatty-nose baby in the courtroom.

  “So, bai, let we go through the plan one last time,” I tell Stench. “Everything hadda move like clockwork tonight.”

  He say after we get Consuela we heading down Icacos to collect my money and all the groceries my father done stockpile—garlic, baby milk, pampers, toilet paper, tin juice—things that scarce in Venezuela. Then, Stench go take we out in the pirogue to a condemn oil platform in the Gulf. Then, a man Daddy does do business with go pick we up and take we the rest of the way, upriver, to Tucupita. Consuela go be home with she mother and nephew-them again. And we go have enough to set up a nice li’l shop and have a quiet life.

  I like the plan. No, I love it. I stick my head out the car window and search till I find the moon. It there behind me, like I leave it hanging up over the prison island. What they doing now with Richards,
I wonder. I sorry for the man, but better he than me, oui. I know they looking for me, I know they coming, but all I need to do is keep moving and stay ahead of this blasted, deceitful moon.

  The moment Consuela dozes off, Marisol’s face floats up. Not the Marisol she’d always been—red-painted lips, black-lined eyes, blonde hair wild—but the Marisol she’d stripped down to, the last time Consuela saw her, twenty-four months ago, back in Venezuela. She’d worn no makeup and her hair was pulled back and braided into one long, golden rope—if only it could have saved her! She wore a simple T-shirt, jeans, sneakers. She wanted to enter her new life, she said, on the other side of the Gulf, looking respectable. She’d believed and trusted the man from the Christian group when he said they would resettle her in Trinidad.

  Consuela sees it all again in her dream, how she pleaded with her older sister, “Hermana, no! No le creas,” but Marisol wouldn’t listen. Manuelito—only five years old—was dead, the hospital in their village had run out of medicine for the infection he’d gotten from a broken beer bottle. “Me quedan dos hijos,” Marisol said to Consuela, “los voy a salvar.” Then she walked off with Manuelito’s old superhero backpack—Los Increíbles—and disappeared. Consuela has asked and asked, but nobody in Trinidad has ever heard of Marisol Romero Silva … de Tucupita.

  Consuela startles from her sleep. She looks at the clock; it has only been a ten-minute doze but the night has deepened, it seems. She opens the casement windows wide, craving fresh cool air, but no breeze blows her way; craving the lick of sea spray on her cheek, but she is too far from the Gulf. She walks to the door, wishing there was someone she could talk to about Sunil and his offer of freedom, but she cannot trust the other girls; they are all locals.

  In the middle of the room she stands, like one of the many little islas, emerald shards scattered in the Bocas waters between Trinidad and Venezuela. Not one of them, no matter how hard they yearn, can reattach what time and tide has carved off—it would be a useless effort: aquí estoy, aquí me quedo.

  She calls Mr. Jagroop, who always speaks kindly to her and is always gentle—almost apologetic and fatherly—after he’s finished with her. He answers right away. She tells him Sunil is coming and she’s not sure what to do. She hopes Jagroop will beg her to stay, offer her something more than a life in Icacos baking roti on a tawa, pretending to be normal, pretending to feel things she can no longer feel.

  “You talk to the man?” Jagroop asks.

  “No.”

  “So how you know he really coming tonight?” She hears submerged laughter in the ripples of Jagroop’s voice.

  “His friend … he call me, he say—”

  “Girl, don’t worry your head,” Jagroop cuts her off. “I don’t think he coming, nah. But, if he show up, don’t answer, don’t come out your room. Just call me. I go handle it.”

  “Okay, okay, yes. I sleep now,” she says, eager to get off the phone. He has made her feel childish and naive, when she’s been trying oh so hard to be the opposite. She decides that whatever happens, she will not call Mr. Jagroop back. She will handle this on her own.

  “Wait,” he says, before she hangs up. “I real like how you comport yuhself tonight. You didn’t have to tell me nuttin’. It show you have more class than that guesthouse. You’s a real nice girl, and I been thinking ’bout something lately, and now you help me make up my mind. Tomorrow, when I come across, I going and have a chat with Boss Lady: is high time I take you outta there. You deserve better than that, babes.”

  “Oh, yes, yes, Mr. Jagroop,” Consuela says, her heart thumping. “Gracias, Mr. Jagroop.”

  She switches the phone off so Sunil and his friend cannot reach her, so they will get tired of calling and just drive off—if they do show up tonight.

  She tries, in vain, to accept her own decision and to rest. Sleep is like something she’s lost under the bed and can’t find no matter how much she twists and turns or how hard she squints. After a while, she lies flat on her back, staring at the pink, cotton-candy knot of mosquito netting. She kicks it, begins counting its swings but ends up counting how much more she’ll be able to send to her mother, if Mr. Jagroop sets her up as his mistress. It would make sense of everything: her journey and the death of who she was before Icacos, Marisol’s journey and death in the Gulf, Manuelito’s gangrene, the worries of Mama raising Marisol’s two other boys.

  But Mr. Jagroop might change his mind—it’s his right.

  He might change tomorrow and never ask Boss Lady, or he might change after a week … two weeks … a month: take her, then get bored or get mad and bring her back.

  Milagros, Señor! Consuela prays. Hadn’t she witnessed a miracle happen last year, for Luz, the Dominicana who used to be in the back bedroom: a businessman from Port of Spain bought her, como un perrito en la ventana, set her up in a cute apartment—she’d come back to visit and shown pictures. Luz had even given Consuela her old, dog-eared New Testament, because she didn’t need it anymore. She’d bought a whole Bible now, she’d said, a big fancy one with gold on the edges.

  Consuela flicks on the bedside lamp and stares at the half-empty duffel on the floor. The half-Bible is in there. She kneels and feels around in the bag until she finds the book she hasn’t opened in months. A blue rectangle no bigger than her palm. Nuevo Testamento, its cover declares; below those words a little golden diamond, then Salmos y Proverbios, and below those words a golden jar in a golden circle, then: Este Libro No Sera Vendido. Consuela’s soul flinches at the reminder: some things should not be for sale. She flips the pages with her thumb, wondering what to read. What chapter, what verse? What wisdom did the Lord leave behind para una putita perdida? She sandwiches the book, page edges facing her, and digs both thumbs into its flesh as if peeling a tangerine. The book opens and her eyes fall on 1 Corintios 13:13:

  Y ahora permanecen la fe, la esperanza y el amor, estos tres;

  pero el mayor de ellos es el amor.

  Consuela spreads the book wide on the bed, reads the verse again and again to teddy, then clutches the page against her chest as if staunching a mortal wound. She doesn’t have much faith left in Sunil, she barely has any hope at all, in anything. But it’s possible she does have love—Sunil’s love. If he’s broken out of jail to come get her, if he actually shows up, that will be the sign she needs. It doesn’t matter that she’s still angry at him, or that she doesn’t know if she could love him or anyone anymore. If he loves her, she will go with him. She will follow this half-Bible—it worked for Luz, she reminds herself—she will not flip and flop como una merluza gasping on the floor of a fishing boat.

  When we pull up outside, the place dark, dark like everybody sleeping.

  “Bai, me eh know ho-house does close on a Thursday night?” Stench say, killing the engine.

  “Me neither,” I say. “But this one different to them places we know. This place is for big-shot fellas and thing.”

  Stench start to mumble ’bout how he money and he prick as good as any man, but I shush him. “Call she, nah?” I say.

  The phone ring off while I sitting down here jiggling my leg like it catch malaria. She not answering. He call again but same thing.

  “You want me blow the horn?” he say.

  “Don’t be a ass,” I say, as I crack open the car door.

  With his black skin and red jersey, he look like a vex coral-snake when he hiss, “Watch yourself. Somebody go see you and call police.”

  I walk to the gate, then back to the fence—half wall, half chain link with a hedge poking through. I studying the house. If I remember correct, Consuela room is the front one, right there. But suppose they move she to a next one? A year is a long fuckin’ time.

  The dark curtain in the front room get split by a shank of orangish light, like from a low-watt bulb or a lamp. Some fellas mighta take it as a sign, a caution light, but my brain take it as: on your marks, get set … and then I gone. Close my eyes, brace one foot on the wall and fling myself against the chain link fence, as
if I flinging a net off a boat. The bougainvillea have fingernail and teeth; it grabbing and pulling and ripping into me. I fighting it, not knowing if I going over or through, and then suddenly I land on the other side, in the grass, skin burning like I get rub down with Congo pepper.

  A voice say, “Su-neel,” and when I look up, Consuela in the same front window, watching down on me with she hand over she mouth like she shock.

  “Baby,” I say, the word come through my nose like a breath. I start to run before I even stand up good, so I moving across the grass like a zandolee on all fours, catching the ground then raising my body, becoming a man again by the time I reach the window.

  “Shhh,” she say.

  I lift up my two hand as if I back in church with my mother, praising the Lord, and I say, “Jump. I go catch you. Is only a small drop. Don’t frighten.” But I trembling, my whole body hot and shaking like a outboard engine. Suppose she say no? Suppose she don’t love me again? Suppose she have a new big-shot man? But when she throw she leg over the sill, I get my answer. Then she say, “Wait,” and pull back, making my heart sputter, until she reappear and throw down a bag—the same duffel I did give she so long ago. I catch it, then I catch she, overbalance and we fall in the grass, roll and separate like one big, ripe breadfruit that fall and buss in two.

  Consuela climbs Sunil’s body like a ladder, then eases herself down the other side, hops onto the pavement. He follows, lands in a squat then springs up and claims her in a bear hug. He smells as he always did, as the rapists in Icacos did, of the Gulf—saltwater, fuel and fish. Her arms flop and she pulls away in a panic. She cannot go through with this: she cannot live with Sunil’s father who sold her, Sunil’s mother who worked her like a slave. This freedom is not free, and she is a pauper who cannot repay Sunil’s love. Her body twitches with readiness to run to the gate, to shake, shake, shake till they let her back in. Then she looks up at Sunil and, in a streetlamp’s ray, sees his eyes, watery, red and pleading. No other man has ever looked at her in this naked way. Some delicate strand of emotion moves, brushing against her heart then floating away, only to return and entwine itself when he says, “Girl, I so sorry. Come, nah? I taking you back home, we going and stay, back by your mother-them.”

 

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