“The man you cut with a bottle?” Professor Cleave said. “Was he too dirty for your business? So diseased you couldn’t take his money?”
“I don’t know the man you’re talking about.”
“If no one takes a picture, it didn’t happen? Is that what you think? Did you take pictures at the terminal? Where your friends left a man dead?”
Tremor’s expression shifted in alternating currents of hatred and fear. “I wasn’t at the terminal.”
The edges of Professor Cleave’s vision went black. Only when his knees met the sidewalk did Professor Cleave realize he’d pushed aside the barricade and fallen to the ground with his fingers pressed into Tremor’s neck. He felt damp skin and corded muscle, a wild pulse against his thumb and the edge of a baton beneath his ribs. He felt weightless, and then breathless and bruised, as two policemen dragged him to his feet, pressed the paper slip into his hand, and pushed him down the sidewalk. He stumbled forward, disoriented by the sun’s glare, leaving Tremor on the ground, gasping for air.
Inside, he slumped on a couch, rubbing his hands to control their shaking and trying to obliterate the lingering sensation of Tremor’s pulse. We watched him from the air ducts, for it would have been sheer madness to show ourselves in the headquarters of the Hospitality Service Workers’ Union. We’d ventured into the very bastion of sanitation crews, the command center of countless insecticidal regimens and “hygiene” campaigns. Overwhelmed by the static filling Professor Cleave’s mind, we welcomed the gradual return of his attentions to the room, finding unlikely relief in the renewed workings of his intellect.
“‘The Future is Here.’” He squinted at a poster featuring a wall of high-rise hotels along a Jamaican beach. “‘Prosperity and Pride through Progress.’”
He leaned over a polished glass table and considered a pamphlet bearing a glossy photo of Graham Douglas. Studying a composite of unremarkable features, he realized that weary voters would welcome a sexless antidote to the philandering Little Butts and a prosaic counter to the mythical extremes of Patsy Williams. Then he felt a cold breath on the back of his neck.
“Air conditioning,” he whispered.
He twisted around and looked at a vent above his head. For the first time, he heard the hum of a water cooler and a phone ringing behind a closed door. He was struggling from the couch when Douglas’s deputy emerged from a back room.
The deputy extended his hand. “Wynston Cleave.”
“You have phones. Electricity. Air conditioning,” Professor Cleave said. “This can’t all be from a generator.”
The deputy lowered his empty hand. “Lyndon Buttskell disabled cell towers to keep the disturbances from the news. One of his better decisions. As for electricity, certain lines have been repaired and not others. You understand these things take time.”
“I understand all too well.”
“There needs to be a center of government during a state of emergency.”
“People with something to gain have prolonged this state of emergency,” Professor Cleave said.
“You, too, have gained from our efforts to establish order.”
“And that boy outside? It’s inconceivable.”
“If he went to jail, people would say Graham Douglas con demned a hero. Many people believe that boy defended this island against an epidemic.”
“He’s done nothing of the sort.”
“Then let people believe in nothing. This isn’t the time for ideological battles.”
Professor Cleave placed his hand on a wall to steady himself. “He was throwing bricks only two nights ago.”
“Like so many others.”
“One man at the terminal was doing anything but throwing bricks.”
“I was sorry to hear about that. About your loss,” the deputy said. “But there’s no evidence that anyone on our security detail was involved.”
“He’s not fit to carry a gun.”
The deputy narrowed his eyes. “Do you think his gun is loaded? It’s as empty as the gesture of putting him on the force. A gesture that will ease tensions and cost nothing.”
“In the short term. In the long term, it will cost everyone. And it’s a hollow gesture, with Bowden still in jail.”
“The Americans see Bowden as a murderer.”
Professor Cleave scrutinized the deputy’s expression. “Is that what you see?”
“I see a man who’s been favored with a job in lean times and still criticizes political gestures. Who talks about the long term when he needs to eat now.”
A moment later, Professor Cleave stood beside a Land Rover parked on a fenced gravel lot. “This is Lyndon Buttskell’s car.”
“This is the prime minister’s car. Lyndon Buttskell is no longer prime minister.” The deputy picked a dead leaf from its hood. “You’ll wipe down the interior between every trip. You’ll clean the exterior at the end of every day. Once a week, you’ll spray the car to prevent infestations.”
“They find their way in,” Professor Cleave said. “Always.”
“They’ll find their way out, now. Tomorrow, you’ll drive Prime Minister Douglas to the Plantations to meet the U.S. cultural attaché. You’ll need to purchase new shoes.”
“When the shops open.”
“In the meantime, someone in your acquaintance must own shoe polish.” The deputy turned away and left Professor Cleave beside the car.
Alone, Professor Cleave wet the car’s dashboard with a disinfectant wipe, massaged scented oil into its leather seats, and cleaned the gearshift with a felt rag. Kneeling to vacuum sand from its floor mats, he experienced a sickening sense that he was indulging the perverse obsessions of an impotent and dangerously incompetent man.
When he returned to the street, Tremor was nowhere to be seen. With a pressed uniform draped over his arm, ammonia stinging his hands, and keys to a battered car in his pocket, he felt like the last of a dying species driven from its shrinking refuge. Those of us gathered in the gutters drew away from trampled images of Mary and lurched behind him, through litter and rubble, back to our classroom, desperately longing for the radio and sensing, no less than Professor Cleave, the imminence of extinction.
The places of refuge open to Tremor were shrinking, too. Everywhere, shock was fading and anger taking its place, spreading like a foul weed. If Professor Cleave had taken a different route home, he might have passed Tremor sidling along defaced walls and pausing to look over his shoulder at every corner. Dismissed early, Tremor had been sent into the empty streets at evening’s onset with nothing but the uniform on his back. He gave no thought to direction, taking random turns in his desperation.
Near the center of town, he paused in a doorway. He saw six letters painted on a twisted fence and imagined the shopkeepers who now hated his name—people with so little to lose that his uniform would mean nothing to them, just as retreating police had meant nothing to him. There were those in Tindertown, too, who hated the police more than they hated anyone else. His uniform, salvation hours before, had already become a curse. With a downturned face, he slipped from the doorway, carrying the dead weight of a gun with no bullets.
On the street where he’d lit his first fire, he was stunned to find EZ’s apartment still intact above a ransacked shop. He paused at the base of its stairwell, considered the door above him and decided he’d break its lock, if he had to, just to sleep on a familiar floor. He ascended the stairs, encouraged by predictable creaks and the sight of a rolling paper beside a baseboard. Near the top, he placed his hand on his holster and called EZ’s name. The door opened, and EZ peered into the stairwell, as if trying to discern the elusive shape of a ghost in the dusty light.
“We thought you’d be dead. What the fuck you doing in that uniform?”
“I got to get off the street. People are looking for me.”
“Looks like you’re the one looking for someone. You alone?”
Tremor nodded, and EZ backed against the doorframe. Inside, Tremor found people he�
�d once called friends sitting on the floor, staring at his uniform with confusion and contempt. He felt relieved, if only for the absence of the woman he’d last seen curled in on herself in the sweep of headlights.
EZ closed the door and circled Tremor. “I asked what the fuck you doing.”
Tremor shifted his weight from one foot to the other. “I got a job.”
“You’re messed in the mind,” EZ said.
Sweat ran down Tremor’s neck, and he felt himself dissolving within the confines of his jacket. He looked around at foreheads coated with perspiration and discarded clothes lying in corners. Taking a deep breath, he unbuckled his holster and slipped out of his jacket and shirt. He sat down on a crate and pointed to the welts and blisters covering his shoulders.
“Crazy shit’s happened.” Averting his eyes from EZ, he recounted his day, distorting and omitting scenes ill suited to his needs. He stumbled only once or twice over quickly conjured details.
“Burning the white man. That’s all they asked about.”
“They ask about us?”
“Just once. Didn’t want to hear about how they ran and hid themselves.”
EZ leaned against a wall. “So after you put your name all over town, they gave you a uniform and a gun?”
“They’re afraid.” Tremor dug his fingernails into the crate. “They think people will leave them alone if I’m with them.”
“That what you think?” EZ studied Tremor’s face.
“You got someone with them now. Watching what they do. Making sure nobody bothers us.”
“They. Us. You. Them. You sound confused.”
“I’m saying things just got easier. For us.”
EZ cocked his head. “So they had you with Bowden? Haven’t hung him with a sheet?”
Tremor looked at the floor. “Beat him so bad he lost himself. Was lying there staring at the ceiling, talking crazy. Seeing things. He don’t even know what happened to him. Don’t think he’ll be right again.”
Gripping the sides of the crate, he closed his eyes and saw a shrinking passage, a concrete cell, and a twisted sheet strained by the weight of a dead man. As John Bowden opened his swollen eyes, he opened his own to find EZ staring at the burn marks on his shoulder.
“What they did to Bowden, they can do to anyone.” EZ pushed himself from the wall and drew Tremor’s gun from its holster. He ejected its empty magazine and placed it beside Tremor. “When they say they’re behind you, that’s when you need to watch your back. An empty gun’s asking for a bad end.”
EZ reached beneath his shirt and pulled a gun from his belt. He scrutinized Tremor’s face and spilled six rounds into his own palm.
“You’re not ready,” he said when Tremor held out his hand.
For the next half hour, EZ showed Tremor how to chamber rounds and hold himself when he pulled a trigger. “First time, no one expects the weight. They shoot dirt. And check the safety,” EZ said, fingering a small lever. “This is the EZ lesson. Aim high, not low. A red dot means blood’s ready to flow. Lucky you found me.”
“Didn’t think I’d find anyone here.”
“Serious, thought this was a bust when we heard you.”
“Maybe it is.” Tremor raised the loaded gun and swiped a pipe from the top of a speaker. “Confiscating shit. Get used to it.”
Everyone but EZ lifted their hands to their faces.
“You think I’m serious?” Tremor said. “You should see yourselves.”
Staring into Tremor’s eyes, EZ wrapped his hand around the gun and pointed it toward the floor.
“I’m asking again. Why’d you come here? Acting this way.”
“Nowhere else to go.”
“Keep that in mind when you start waving shit around.”
Tremor let the gun slip into EZ’s hand. He sat down on the crate and looked at his wrinkled uniform jacket, a shed snakeskin lying limp on the floor. Haunted by visions of twisted sheets, he sat half-naked before strangers, consumed by fear and shame and wondering how much time would pass before everyone turned against him. When he got high, he felt as though he were running along the edge of a sheer cliff giving way beneath his feet, breaking apart in increments and forcing him into endless and exhausting flight.
PARADISE
THE PLANTATIONS OF ST. Anne was a dreadful place, but you’d never have guessed from the rubbish published in magazines like Resort Life and Luxury Traveler. Only months before various fires ravaged St. Anne, Jacqueline Whitford of Sophisticate described the Plantations’ estate house as a “testament, par excellence, to haute culture at its most eclectic and experimental, a celebration of Britain’s imperial aesthetic in a bold pastiche of hallmark colonial styles and modern design elements.” The most omnivorous among us should hardly be expected to digest such thoroughgoing nonsense. “History aficionados and golf enthusiasts alike,” Whitford wrote, “will delight in tea trolleys laid with eggshell china and teak chests that provide unique glimpses into the island’s charmed past.”
There is pulp (much of it admirably written), and then there is rot. This was rot of the lowest order, barely fit for compost. The trolley so beloved by Whitford had been diverted from a discount outlet in Biloxi. The brass pots hanging in the Sugar Mill, “the Plantations’ premier restaurant,” had acquired their patinas in a chemical bath north of Bantangas. Honduran sweatshop workers in Miami had distressed the teak chests with industrial sanders. Whitford understood her audience, if nothing else. Whatever their need for modern conveniences, many of the Plantations’ guests (especially those who paid a handsome sum to rent the master’s chamber, a high-ceilinged suite overlooking the golf course) wanted something of an “authentic plantation experience.” This we found more than a bit odd, but then, so much depends on perspective.
We witnessed the Plantations’ violent birth. We witnessed slaves arriving in wagons, chained at the ankles and bleeding from fresh brands. At harvest time, we watched them toiling in the sugar mill, day and night, extracting juice from stalks of cut cane. We saw grinders and rollers crushing hands and stripping muscle from mangled arms. We saw slaves scalded by spilled molasses in the boiling house. We witnessed more suffering than we can recount.
Of the original Plantations, little remained by 1990, when a developer from Cincinnati bought the derelict property and sent us “lurching” again, this time from the path of bulldozers. Contractors demolished the boiling house, mulched disintegrating beams at the site of a long-abandoned slave village, sodded over cemeteries, and buried rusted manacles beneath the sand traps of a new golf course. They razed banana trees and rows of feral cane to build gingerbread cottages and condominiums, duty-free shops and a tanning spa. They built pools with swim-up bars where guests could sip cocktails called Clipper Ships. They built the Molasses Shack and Pizza Paradise, where guests could order pork sandwiches called Hogsheads and pepperoni slices imported from Idaho. Where they didn’t lay cement, they planted alien species of flowers and ersatz forests. They erected walls ringed with concertina wire. They imported vast quantities of insecticides. These they used liberally, with wild abandon we might say, if they’d been anything but obsessive in their efforts to exterminate us.
We found our way to the Plantations by accident, at first, and then lured against our better judgment. The first among us to explore its grounds slipped from the gaskets of Little Butts’s car, dazed by Roach Out! and delirious from champagne. We thought we’d discovered Paradise. Ah, to recall the perfume of strange flowers glistening in the silver mist of sprinklers and oozing sweet nectars—honey-colored meads and dusky opiates that served, for some time, as panaceas for all our woes, drew the veil from our antennae and revealed earthly delights never before imagined. Awakened, we floated on silken wings over shimmering pools, mirrors of infinity beneath the endless sky. We nestled in emerald grass and napped on the leaves of resplendent trees. We discovered baskets of exotic fruits, trays of liquefied fat, stacks of pancakes, and mountains of whipped cream. We bathed in streams of
cool air spilling from magnificent vents and nearly drowned in pleasure.
Had we only known of the venom tainting each bloom! The corruption at the core of each fruit! Over days and weeks, we languished, consumed by a sickness never before known to us. Strange spots appeared on our legs and fever overcame us. Perfume once heavenly stung our eyes and perverted our senses. We lost ourselves in a labyrinth of air ducts, trailing mucous and suffering unimaginable torments of the soul. We wandered through gardens, afflicted by monstrous scenes and the unnatural colors of sickly, overfed blooms. We tread in horror over the bones of ancestors, Professor Cleave’s and our own, pursued by nightmarish visions of verdant graves. Heaven became Hell, and we languished within its walls, confined by razor wire and stung by phosphates. Most of us eventually escaped, seizing and shaking beneath the seats of departing airport shuttles and Butts’ car. A few of us returned, helplessly drawn by the siren call of incomparable air conditioning. Sophisticate’s columnists described the Plantations’ gardens as tranquil. That isn’t the word we would have chosen, but again, so much depends on perspective.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
THOSE OF US AT the Plantations when Helen and Dave arrived had spent the week muddling through mazes of golf courses and condominiums and restaurants nearly indistinguishable from other golf courses and condominiums and restaurants at other all-inclusive resorts lodged in our collective memory. (You’d think humans had all joined in a perfect harmony of opinions, only to bring forth a utopia for the fatuous and feeble-minded.) We had just enough clarity to recognize how degraded everything and everyone had become. Sure, we were messed up six ways from Sunday. Still, observations made under the influence aren’t, by definition, fucked up or wrong. Logic 101 (ad hominem fallacies)!
When Helen and Dave appeared, dragging their feet on their way to (Pizza) Paradise, we hadn’t yet succumbed to the tremors and narcoleptic fits that attend excess of the worst kind. We were mourning the murdered monkeys dumped beside the road to the Plantations, even regretting the times we’d called them “chest-beating, knuckle-dragging bipeds.” It was the right thing to do. And appearances aside, monkeys and cockroaches were in the same miserable stew.
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