One push changed everything. With one push, the police sent Mary to the ground. Stunned, Mary sat in the middle of the road with her legs splayed across warm pavement. Slowly, she began to hum and rock from side to side, and then pulled her skirt up over her thighs to expose the indignity of scraped knees.
There was much debate, later, about who threw the first rock. It didn’t matter in the end. Dozens of rocks followed the first, raining down on a young policeman foolish enough to stoop for a dropped baton. Women spilled into the road, cut into his face with jagged nails and punched his shoulders, tore at his clothes and smothered him with filthy dresses and decades of unadulterated hatred. At the sound of gunshots, the women fell back, tripping over one another and crawling from the road. By the time they stopped screaming, the police had fled. Mary was lying in a pool of blood.
Tremor tore himself from the dirt and retreated into the cover of trees, scraping himself on branches and gasping for air. Near the bypass, he abandoned caution and followed the fresh imprints of tire treads leading from Rocky Point. He stopped only once, to retch in some weeds with the violent contractions that attend birth. We understood his shame and misery. During Mary’s last moments, we’d been mired in garbage. All we’d ever wanted was gone, leaving in its place a terrible silence and sorrow.
At any other time, Mary’s death would have attracted little notice beyond Rocky Point. It would have inspired, at most, momentary head-shaking and muted comments about the latest tragedy, or worse, offhand remarks about barbarity. That afternoon, though, with nerves frayed by talk of contagion, the people of St. Anne closed ranks as Tremor’s image made its way to New York, London, and Atlanta and reports of tropical savagery began to dominate international news. In the burning of the body, they saw the grim dictates of survival. They saw something they would have done to protect their own children. When they encountered police in the streets, they saw the traitors who’d killed Mary. Unknown to most and a cipher to all, Mary was the perfect martyr for uncertain times.
Within hours of her death, Crazy Mary regained her nearly forgotten name, Mary Clay, a rallying cry for the motley members of a discontented chorus. Stolid ministers of every stripe, ignorant of Mary’s divinations and nocturnal raptures, praised Rocky Point’s dearly departed soul and called upon their congregants to contribute to the cost of a simple coffin. Politicians railed against Little Butts’ delinquency and demanded accountability for Mary’s death. Shopkeepers and the leaders of splintered unions called for a public funeral procession to honor Mary and a one-day general strike to protest the ineptitude of Little Butts.
We might have taken some comfort in the remembrance of Mary, but so many people singing her praises had distorted her voice. Professor Cleave presented an odd specimen. He seemed genuinely disturbed by Mary’s death, and more consumed than most with John Bowden’s fate. That afternoon, he nearly swerved from the road several times while driving to the taxi stand. There, in the absence of their ostensible leader, members of the General Transport Workers Union had assembled to vote on a motion of support for the self-indicting strike.
Professor Cleave met James Brooks Brother on the curb. They stood in silence at first, leaning against Professor Cleave’s taxi and listening to the radio. As an English newscaster reported on the mutilation and possible murder of an American on an isolated beach, Professor Cleave recalled Tremor batting a flame with his fingers and talking about disease. He pulled out his phone and considered the image of Tremor standing over a charred body, struck by the disconnect between Tremor’s triumphant pose and fragile expression.
“Maiden Cruises needed a distraction. Thanks to the boy, they found one.” He slipped his phone into his pocket. “I suspect he had nothing to do with the burning. But his stupidity got a woman killed and a man thrown in jail.”
“If Bowden’s the man I think, he’s the roughest of the lot in Rocky Point,” James said. “The perfect man to charge with murder.”
Professor Cleave rubbed the hem of his shirt between his fingertips. “No one’s saying much about him. It’s easier to pray for the dead than redress injuries to the living.”
“He likely doesn’t have a lawyer.”
“He likely doesn’t have any teeth after this morning.” Professor Cleave scraped a callus with his thumbnail. “That boy has caused so much damage.”
“The police would have gone into Rocky Point anyway. News of the body would have gotten out.”
“But that picture. It turned conversation away from things that matter. That woman’s death. John Bowden.” As an ambulance and a convoy of jeeps passed, Professor Cleave turned his back on the street. “They’re fools to go into Rocky Point now. They’ll be stirring a very hot pot. And they’ll stir it again tomorrow.”
“They’ll know not to provoke a crowd during a funeral procession.”
The convoy rounded a corner, and Professor Cleave faced the street again. “At this point, we’re the only union that hasn’t come out behind the strike.”
“We’ll be striking against one of our own.”
“Butts is hardly our man now, if he ever was. If we lay down with him, we’ll get up with fleas.”
“The police belong to Butts. Because of that, they don’t bother us,” James said.
“But they’ll bother us in time. Butts will be out of office someday, and they’ll be in the pay of someone else. And there’s a time to criticize one’s own. They have a woman’s blood on their hands.”
“But this is no time to fill the streets. Tempers are high.”
“Then we should give the anger a focus,” Professor Cleave said.
“We’ll be putting our necks in the noose for this stupid boy.”
“The boy doesn’t represent Rocky Point. He doesn’t represent anything.”
James tapped his phone and held it up. Professor Cleave squinted at an image of a wall spray-painted with Tremor’s name.
“You must have come by the ring road,” James said. “Drive through town and you’ll see his name everywhere. The little man from Rocky Point is the man of the hour among the worst sorts. Because of him, they’ll be out on the streets. Thinking he’s a hero. The issues that matter to us don’t matter to most people.”
Professor Cleave placed his hand on the hood to steady himself. “Any one of us could end up on the wrong side of a gun. Any one of us could have been that woman.” He paused to listen to the radio. The Minister of Defense was providing assurances of the government’s unwavering commitment to law and order. Professor Cleave dragged his thumbnail across his palm. “And this is about John Bowden, who will get a monkey trial if he gets a trial at all.”
“And after tomorrow? Some won’t be taken back to their jobs.”
Professor Cleave looked up and down the street, at lowered awnings and darkened storefronts. “Between the ship and that photo, we won’t have jobs to lose.”
James stroked his chin and nodded slowly. “If I follow your lead, the motion will pass. If we support the strike, it would be best to avoid political slogans. Big ideas have no place in this. Only grief and anger are holding people together right now.”
“Grief and anger are an unstable foundation for things to come,” Professor Cleave said.
“Without them, the streets would be empty. I’ll vote with you so the anger doesn’t come to our doorstep. That’s the best we can expect.”
“So, we’ll vote together. For different reasons.” Professor Cleave studied the clean lines of James’s face. “You were an idealist the day you introduced me to Patrice Williams.”
“I had a beard. But I wasn’t an idealist. I couldn’t afford it. It can drive a person mad.”
Professor Cleave leaned through the cab’s window and turned off the radio. Scapegoats, though never scabs, we dropped from the gaskets and followed him into the taxi stand, where he called for justice as if he wanted to storm every plastic castle crowding his tiny fishbowl. Had we been less consumed by sadness, those of us who witnessed his extend
ed oration would have been proud to call him our professor.
The afternoon was waning by the time he left the cabstand, feeling relieved by an outcome won with far too much difficulty. His conversation with James and the sight of Tremor’s spray-painted name had unsettled him, but the vehemence of his own arguments had given him the clarity he needed to face Desmond, smoking in the shadows behind the terminal’s padlocked gates.
Professor Cleave nodded at two soldiers standing on a street corner. “I see they expect the worst. If they act like they expect it, they’ll get it.”
“They’re preparing for the worst, whatever they get,” Desmond said.
“Those soldiers were policemen just hours ago. They’ve put on different uniforms, but they don’t have a bit more sense.”
“They’re nervous. Their fingers have been twitching on triggers all day.”
“You look nervous, too,” Professor Cleave said.
Desmond lowered his voice. “We’ve been told not to speak of the incident in Rocky Point.”
“The incident. Is that what they’re calling it? What else are they asking?”
“To keep out of this. To stay off the streets.”
“What will you do tomorrow?”
“I’m thinking only about tonight. My family. Whether they’re safe,” Desmond said. “It’s not just the sickness. It’s this uniform. I mixed with visitors more than most, and now I’m protecting foreigners’ shops. There’s bad feeling all around.”
“You can’t believe everyone telling stories. They’re just talking loud.”
“This morning, a man spit on my feet as I was crossing the street.”
“People are always spitting on the street.”
“On my shoes. That’s what I’m saying.”
Professor Cleave rubbed his forehead. “There’s always been too much rum and foolishness among certain elements.”
“Melvin Jones turned his back on me when I entered his shop. Didn’t have a single word when he took my money. He let me drop it on the counter. That’s not his character.”
“Will anyone from Port Authority be on strike tomorrow? On the streets?”
“I wouldn’t be able to say,” Desmond said.
“Because you won’t, or because you don’t know?”
Desmond ground his cigarette into the sidewalk. “The police. They won’t forget tomorrow.”
“And Rocky Point won’t forget today. There needs to be a public reckoning.”
“There won’t be the kind of reckoning you hope for. Too many people just want a headline. You’ve seen that picture.”
“We can’t think about him.” Professor Cleave gripped the gate to steady his hand. “He’s a distraction.”
“We have to think about him, because everyone else is thinking about him.”
“We need to think about the woman who was shot.”
“She must have been crazy to be called Crazy Mary in Rocky Point.”
“She’s fast becoming Saint Mary.”
“Nobody will care about her by next week,” Desmond said. “Or about Rocky Point. Those people live in their own world.”
Professor Cleave thought of Tremor sitting on the rooftop, staring out to sea. “This morning, they didn’t. The world washed up on their shore.”
Desmond pulled a small bottle from his jacket. “Did you come here to see if I was safe, or to find out what everyone at the Port Authority will do tomorrow?”
Professor Cleave took a deep breath. “Both.”
Desmond uncapped the bottle and considered its label. “I took this from duty-free. It’s overtime pay you won’t see on my stub. I hope you’ll spare me the lecture.” He took a drink and passed the bottle between two bars. “So, you support this foolishness.”
Professor Cleave took a long swig of rum, much to our surprise. “Whatever that boy did, this is bigger than him.”
He handed the bottle back to Desmond and felt himself growing angry. So few people, he realized, could imagine facing a loaded gun. If there’d been some way to communicate with him, we could have told him that the imagination required for empathy was in drastically short supply. Alas, Professor Cleave, however odd a human specimen, had no antennae.
Humans say we’re insensate, too primitive to feel grief. They’d hardly understand how we felt huddled in Mary’s reliquary at sunset, when soldiers and medics in hazmat suits entered Rocky Point to collect the burned body. At the sound of the convoy, women stepped from Mary’s house to cast silent maledictions at the strangers making their way down to the beach. When the jeeps and ambulance passed again, and their taillights disappeared in the trees, the women withdrew into the house that had, in a matter of hours, become Rocky Point’s only church. They tended to Mary’s body, fulfilling sacred tasks hurried by the heat. They drew Mary’s eyes shut, dressed wounds that would never heal and bathed Mary’s body with the tenderness of devoted lovers. They wiped dirt from Mary’s face and picked bits of gravel from her hair, mended her dress and softened her cracked lips with red gloss offered up by one of Tremor’s girlfriends. They anointed her feet with oil.
Before a hearse arrived, the people of Rocky Point gathered at Mary’s house to pay their respects, delivering cane liquor toasts and half-remembered prayers to their beloved saint. Emboldened by alcohol, they spirited away rags, amulets on broken chains, and yellowed pages torn from a Bible and covered in scrawl. They took cracked dishes, tarnished spoons, shell fragments, and bits of glass. No one spoke of stealing from the dead. Love alone guided grasping hands over lopsided shelves and the stony ground of Mary’s ransacked reliquary. Love provided dispensation to almost everyone brought into fragile communion by shock and grief. Tremor was the sole excommunicated exception.
Huddled in a field above the bypass, he’d watched the ambulance leave Rocky Point, knowing he would never again set foot in his father’s house. He retreated into the hills when night fell, tripping over the uneven ruts between stalks of feral cane and slipping deeper and deeper into his mind. In his garden, he collapsed on the only ground he’d ever called his own and sobbed, tormented by the sensation of insects crawling up his arms and the weight of a dead phone resting on his chest. He heard a siren in the distance and imagined unspeakable cruelties in basement jail cells. When the moon rose, he grew unnerved by the play of light and shadow and clawed his way through a labyrinth of stalks. A sudden breeze rustled brittle leaves, a cold breath brushed his neck, and then the air grew still again. For the first time, he imagined Crazy Mary liberated from her body to haunt him. He started running as if he were trying to outrun death, as if he were trying to outrun himself.
By the time he reached EZ’s house, the world was listing. He caught his breath and stepped into EZ’s yard, surrendering his fate to the acquaintances and strangers drinking on the porch.
“EZ,” he called.
EZ twisted around on a railing. “Man, you’re the talk of the town.” He stepped down from the porch and slapped Tremor on the back. “Get yourself inside.”
Tremor looked over his shoulder and then followed EZ into a crowded room smudged with fragrant smoke.
“Looks like Bowden started early on the bottle,” EZ said, opening a beer for Tremor. “Crazy fucker to do what he did.”
A woman sitting on the floor recognized Tremor and struggled to her feet. “Got rid of the American disease. Nothing crazy about that.”
“They’ll be beating him all night.” EZ sat down on the arm of a ripped couch and passed a joint to Tremor. “And you were right there when the shit happened.”
“On the beach,” Tremor stated, realizing he had no way of knowing how he fit into stories that had been evolving all day. Fidgeting, he parsed out details, modifying his voice and choosing words in response to shifting expressions. “Stood right next to the body.”
“What did it look like when it burned?” the woman asked, fingering her braids.
“Nothing like in movies.”
“Fool had it coming, coming here,
” EZ said.
“Had to do something,” Tremor continued, letting names and pronouns slip from his speech. “Stood right beside Bowden. Knew what had to be done.”
By the time Tremor finished telling the story for the third time, anyone could reasonably have assumed he’d discovered the body, and through his own resolve convinced John Bowden to burn it.
“One whole can for one man,” EZ said. “That’s bad.”
“Stood right there. Made sure it burned.”
Visions of spiraling ash and John Bowden pressing a cigarette between blistered lips flooded Tremor’s mind. He thought that, if there were such things as souls, his was dying with every incremental revision of the day’s events. Then something like feathers brushed his arm. He met the woman’s soft brown eyes and felt himself melting into her.
“I gave him my lighter,” he said, lying outright for the first time.
Flushed, he rehearsed the burning again, dwelling on sulfurous sparks and flames rising from a diabolical pyre. As he grew more intoxicated and new questions prompted new fabrications, he changed up phrases and details, subtly and then wildly embellishing his imagined role in the burning.
“You never gonna get into hospitality management school now.” EZ jabbed Tremor’s shoulder. “You and Bowden can open your own school on the beach.”
“Burn every last one,” Tremor said, accepting another beer from another stranger. Hours later, he passed out on a stained mattress in the back room of EZ’s house. EZ woke him before dawn.
“Time to take you to town.”
“Why you talking about town?”
“They’ll be looking for you, asking questions. Been enough trouble here.”
The Wonder That Was Ours Page 15