“Bob Marley is a holy man,” said the guide. “He bring the world together.”
They left. Tom tipped the guide. The Dutch couple also gave money. Maybe they’re not so bad, thought Tom. It was all Seckler’s view of them.
In the van, Debra asked, “Do you think Bob Marley really did bring the world together?”
“Is the world together?” asked her husband.
Rosalie raised her hand with too much bright excitement, annoying Tom. “He did give some poor people hope. That’s worth something,” she said.
“It’s not an illusion?” asked Debra.
“I don’t think so,” said Rosalie.
Nine Mile was at the top of the hill, and from there to the main road taking them to the coast, they listened to music. Debra’s cute leg rolled into Tom’s, and instead of shifting his leg out of courtesy, he pressed back. Her skin was slippery with sweat, and this conducted, so he wanted to believe, a special charge. If this was the closest he might come to cuckolding Barry Seckler, he would take full pleasure and force Debra to pull away or play the game, to be conscious of the touch. What would Rosalie see if she looked at them? She might see nothing, the contact was so slight.
The van bumped across muddy ruts where the rains had sluiced through the pavement. “The road gets worse before it gets better,” said James.
Tom considered James’s simple sentence as the fortune cookie of his day. Do I have to read all of this as a parable of something within me? The road of life? I’m a muddy green island inhabited by the poor descendants of slaves. And the road of my life takes me from hilltop shrines to wherever we are now, let me see how I can conjure this place appropriately, to … to barren fields … to old farms abandoned by their tenants and left to seed?
They drove past farm or plantation fields filled with tall grass and young trees.
Tom thought: Some part of me is just like this? But some part of me is just like some part of every part of the universe.
And if the muddy road was how he felt, ahead was the highway, and from the way the fields rolled downhill to another dense grove, a sense that beyond all of this land the ocean was near, and so the waterfalls were near, and with them finally the place where he would kill Barry Seckler.
Tom stopped trying to think of things to say. The vacation was a ruin already. The children and his wife were having a fine old time. His wife probably thought that the sun and the warm water and the visions released by Jamaica succored Tom’s need for profound revelation.
I was a criminal because I needed a story in my life, thought Tom. My secret crimes made me important. The secret made me arrogant, but that private disdain subsidized my occasional benevolence.
The soft leg against his. Nothing to add to that. Even at the moment, the leg’s pressure belonged to the past, to what he had wanted, not what he felt now. His desire for her was dimming, dimming, gone. Just this touch was wrong, wrong to his wife, wrong to Debra Seckler, wrong for his children in the backseat. How could he make love to another man’s wife with all of their children so close? He pulled his leg away. Their skin had bonded, and the separation, which he advanced slowly, ran between them, the lazy end of a long and funny kiss. For the first time in all their bumping together, he felt her erotic consciousness rising into her skin. This made him even unhappier. He wanted to tell Barry that all that needed mending was the direction of his apology, which belonged not to Tom but to Alma. But how do you apologize to a little girl for an insult when the explanation of the offense would constitute another violation?
If there was no apology, there was only revenge. The road, representing to Tom that part of him which always descended from glorious mountaintop slum to beachside tourism, settled into the final easy grade to the coastal plain. What would this mean as a spiritual paradigm, he wondered. Signs for restaurants and hotels, nothing so awfully polished as the advertising in America; hand-painted and charming for the pitiful hopes squeezed within the crude caricatures of happy tourists and happy Jamaicans. And then everywhere around them something green, a field, a big tree, and then the ocean, always a challenge for purpose. How to read this now? James made a left turn off the coast road and up a hill into the parking lot for Dunn’s River Falls, and into a line of tour buses from the big hotels and cruise ships. Tom understood the scene around him immediately: no entrance to the falls without first navigating the hundred stalls of bad crafts, the carvings of long-necked African queens, the jute handbags, and everywhere T-shirts of Bob Marley. James opened the van’s door, and Tom helped his children out. He was happy to hoist them both from the van to the ground, a feeling of solid merit for giving them a lift into the air above him and bringing their faces close to his.
“You have to get special shoes for climbing the falls,” said James. “The falls are slippery.” Jamaicans in booths offered neoprene felt-soled boots for rent.
Debra put on her boots and said to Barry, “How do you define these? The world gives us so many experiences that are impossible to describe. Was it always this way?”
“Definition?” asked Barry. “You say, ‘A knight in armor on a black horse.’ Everyone gets that. You say, ‘A man in neoprene boots with felt soles for traction on wet rocks.’ Who understands that? So many words to define a thing, the name is a process. Who gets it? I have them on, and I don’t get it. Maybe that’s why we have so much music in our lives now, so many forms and melodies. The man who first said, ‘A knight on a black horse,’ how many songs did he know? How many melodies? How many forms of music? The man who says ‘neoprene boots’ is a prisoner. He is speechless. The only language to contain his experience is music.”
The parking lot was at the top of the falls. From the ticket booth they walked down a winding trail, away from the falls to the beach, where they fell in line with a busload from a hotel in Ocho Rios. A guide introduced himself.
“I am Lyall, and I am your guide today. We are all going to have fun, and we are all going to have a safe trip. I only lose people on Tuesdays, and today is Wednesday.” This brought a laugh to those who thought it was funny. Some of the tourists carried video cameras in waterproof cases.
Lyall explained the rules. Everyone would hold hands going up the falls. Whoever wanted a video record of the trip could pay for it now, and at the top of the falls a copy would be waiting, or you could hire someone to take a movie with the camera you brought. The camera would be safe. Lyall took the hand of the first person in line, an older woman. She in turn held her husband’s hand, and he held the hand of a pretty teenager who held the hand of her brother, who held his father’s hand, and his father led Tom, who led Alma who led Rosalie who led Perri who led Debra who led Adam who led Rita who led Barry and after that Tom didn’t care.
They left the sand and stepped up on the rocks. Fresh cold water filled their boots, but the felt soles gave traction. The climb brought to Tom a feeling of increased competence. The group stopped in a wide pool. Above them, a thousand tourists held hands in a line, up the ladder of falls and pools, on steps carved along the side. Tom looked back. The bottom of the falls was lost around a bend, but through the trees, he saw the blue bay and two rotting fishing boats lying at anchor. The thread of humanity extruding from the beach suggested a hatchery releasing its fry.
Couples posed and mugged for the photographers and the men with the video cameras. Children jumped into a deep hole in the pool. Others brought themselves to the wide curtain of water falling from the ledge above, put their arms into the veil, parting the water on a seam, and then stepped through to a cave behind.
Lyall called for the next ascent.
Tom changed his place in the line and allowed Barry to lead him.
The line began slowly.
Here the falls were steep.
There was none of the bonhomie of the first pitch, none of that hospitality, none of those free-flowing condolences for the little slips along the way, none of the hands extended when the line broke. This part of the climb scared them.
> Mothers complained to Lyall about the danger of the climb. Lyall said it was safe. “Look up, everyone has made it. You don’t see any bodies in the water.”
Tom held Barry’s hand. “I don’t feel well,” said Seckler. “This isn’t fun for me right now.”
His distress alarmed Tom. He wanted to kill Seckler, not watch him drop dead of a heart attack, and he wanted to face him. Tom could have pulled Seckler’s arm and yanked him off the steps, but the fall wouldn’t kill him. Seckler held Tom’s left hand, and Tom switched to his right because the rock he needed for a hold was too slick, and a solid tree root above it offered a better grip. Once he secured a hold on the root, the waterfall and rocks seemed to reverse energy, and where everything until that moment pulled him towards the beach, now the buoyant pleasure of the danger pushed Tom upwards to the next ledge, without effort, as though Barry Seckler found Tom no more trouble than an old suitcase.
The worst of it behind them, the group pulled themselves with triumphant smiles to a broad shallow pool.
Tom looked up. The next section was a long stairway with an iron rail. It will have to be now, thought Tom, at the center of the pool’s edge, looking down a forty-foot drop.
Rosalie splashed water at the girls. Tom picked them up under each arm and carried them squealing around the rocks, where a clump of twenty or so tourists waited their turn to walk into a cave behind another waterfall. The little chamber could hold five people. Tom waited with the girls. Instead of walking around the waterfall, he carried them through it, but this fall was heavier than the one below, and the force of the water knocked them over. Alma went under. Tom held her arm and brought her back to the air. She refused to cry. In the water and the sun, by the love of her father and a contempt for public shame, she willed in herself the rudiments of courage. She would not give to anyone the entertainment of her tender sobbing. He loved her for this.
Rosalie asked them to pose for a picture. The snapshot is on a wall somewhere, even today; Tom between his daughters, leaning over to fit the frame.
Tom then let go of the girls and walked to the ledge. Barry Seckler kicked through the water and stood beside him, certain that the castigation of the night before, in his view justifiable though unnecessary, was over, and that the trip today had brought the men into a friendship that might last. Tom said to him, “What you did to my daughter.”
“What?” asked Seckler, who looked hard into Tom’s eyes, seeing, Tom was sure, how sad and remote they were, and then how dangerous.
Tom mumbled, “What you did to my daughter. You should not have made her dance.”
“I thought we were over this.”
“No.”
“Come on, man, it was a mistake. I told you that. She’s fine. Look at her.”
Tom put a hand on Seckler’s arm. Seckler now saw in his eyes the mournful resolve of an error gone too far for restoration. Tom thought, I can die here. This can kill me, too.
Tom pushed Seckler to the edge. Tom had the advantage; his foot was braced against a rock, and Seckler was slipping in the swift-moving water.
“Don’t do this,” said Barry.
“What?”
“I think you want to kill me.”
“I don’t know what else to do.”
“I can help you.”
“It’s too late.”
Seckler cried out, “Help! He’s killing me! Help me!” He sounded like what he was, a man about to die, a man frightened for his life, a child.
“This is for my daughter,” said Tom.
Later, someone would say that from the next step up the falls, the two men looked like friends having fun; what had been desperate was seen as exuberant pleasure.
Barry Seckler dropped forty feet, breaking open his head. As he fell, everyone watching heard his anguish, the agonal cry of a man knowing that at the end of this, his children would lose their father.
Debra Seckler grabbed her children and pushed them away from the edge. In fractions of seconds, up and down the line of tourists, the word went out that something terrible had happened.
Rosalie, Alma, and Perri saw what happened. They had never seen Tom fight before.
It was understood that this was a murder and not an accident.
There he was, dead in the water. The difficult climb up the rocks from that pool was harder going down. Debra could not find a hold, and kind people lifted her away from the rocks and lowered her, passing her along from hand to hand. Those who touched her would remember their meticulous intention, only to help her, and the reward of a sensation of intense honesty.
Barry was face down. Debra, beside him, asked for help, and from a watchful crowd of young Jamaican men, two stepped forward, and then all, and they turned him over. The cracked side of his head seeped blood. She lifted his head out of the water and cupped a hand and washed the wound with water. She looked up and met Tom’s eyes. Tom was surrounded by Jamaicans and tourists.
She kissed her fat dead husband’s lips, and cried to him, and sang. Tom couldn’t hear the song over the water.
Tom hated everything, the sullen beauty of the falls, the easy way that the tropics delivered clarity. Tom thought: I never understood the world until now. I never understood the danger of evil until now.
I was a good man who did one thing wrong. Then he thought, More than one.
...
Children cried, “Daddy!” The voices of his daughters, the voices of Rita and Adam Seckler, who were in the lower pool. Tom leaned over the edge of the cliff to get a better view, but then the men crowding around him pulled him away, fearing that he would jump.
I won’t jump, he could have told them, but who would have believed him, and why be reasonable now? He could toss them an apology like a chunk of meat, watch the apology rise and fall on a parabola of their anticipation and then disappointment at such a meager offering. Better to stay silent and keep them entertained by their fantasies of what he should or might do now that they had him on the way to prison.
All of this happened at once: James the driver was called by the river guides. James brought a woman from the ticket booth who gently coached the Seckler children away from the body and led them to the side of the river, where others lifted them out of the water. There was a policeman in the water, his pants rolled up, and someone gave him a video camera. The policeman, and others, watched the playback on the camera’s screen, and Tom understood that they were looking at him pushing Barry Seckler to his death. At the same time, Rosalie, with the girls beside her, cried out, “Why, Tom, why?”
This delighted the crowd. A voice from the hill added in mockery, “Why, Tom, why?”
The people around him also wanted to know. “Why did you push that man, sir?”
“I’m sorry,” Tom said again. It was too complicated. He might have said, “He made my daughter dance. He asked my daughter to dance, and who knows when the degradation of what happened to her will work its way into action? Should I wait thirty years, and if she turns into a junkie, should I track him down and kill him then? You don’t know that she wasn’t ruined by what happened last night.” But he couldn’t say this. It wasn’t the knight in armor on the horse. It was neoprene boots with felt soles. It was the video camera with the thing on the side where you look at the picture. The thing, the little screen, and bad sound. The viewing-screen thing. That’s what it was.
The crowd’s sound lost its definition. The men guarding Tom opened a breach in their wall around him to let the police through. The men closest to Tom took his hands and pulled on his arms, as though a white man in a bathing suit could be dangerous.
But I am dangerous, thought Tom. I just killed a man. This thought impressed itself heavily with the advent of the police, dropping Tom to his knees, and the men around him yanked him to his feet. He dropped again, hurting his knees on the rocks in the cold water.
I’m scared, thought Tom. I am now frightened to death. I have never been so scared of anything in my life. And I am making a fool of myself in
front of the policemen. In America, the police would have asked the men holding Tom to let him go. They would have threatened the volunteer guards with nightsticks, but this was not America, Tom knew that, this was a place where a crowd could hold a man and hurt him, pull his arms hard when he falls to his knees, and the police would allow it. Klaxons sounded. Tom liked the two-note call, it reminded him of movies with the French resistance and the alarm made when the gestapo arrives. In movies, the message of the Klaxon is death. In Jamaica, this Klaxon brought an ambulance and a gurney, and the men who rolled Barry Seckler’s enormous body onto a stretcher. They couldn’t expect the stretcher to hold his weight, but it helped. Four men to each side, floating him into deeper water, where they could slip the litter beneath him. Tom would have liked to watch the rest of the effort, but he was taken away to the riverbank.
“What is your name?” a policeman asked him.
“Tom Levy.”
“And where are you from?”
“America.”
“And where are you staying in Jamaica?”
“The Montego House.”
“These people say that you pushed that man over the falls. I saw the videotape. It looks as though you did. Can you tell me what happened?”
“I’d like to speak to a lawyer.”
“Last night at the Montego House, you had a bad word with this man. Why? What happened last night, Mr. Levy?”
“He made advances at my daughter.”
“Could you explain what you mean?”
“He made my daughter dance.”
“Did he touch your daughter?”
“He made her dance like a whore.”
...
Rosalie stood alone in the water with Perri and Alma. No one was helping them. Somewhere, someone gave relief to Debra Seckler and her two children, but no one there even knew that the killer’s wife watched the arrest of her husband.
Under Radar Page 5