The Lunatic

by Anthony C. Winkler

Sarah bolted upright in bed.

  “Hubert! Hubert, is dat you?”

  “Me one.”

  “What you doing by de window? Why you bawling out on top o’ your voice for?”

  “I have pain in me chest.”

  Sarah jumped out of bed with alarm and to his side.

  “You think you having a heart attack?”

  “I don’t know what I having. I just feel bad.”

  “Oh my God, Hubert! I should drive you to de hospital!”

  She dressed hurriedly and helped Busha into his field clothes. Then they set out in the dark night for the hospital, which lay some thirty miles away on the seacoast down a narrow road that wound over mountains, slumbering villages, and darkened fields.

  “Whatever happen to me, Sarah,” Busha pleaded as the car’s headlights splashed on the tombstones of the village graveyard, “don’t bury me in dat place. I beg you don’t put me where donkey and cow and goat goin’ trample on me grave!”

  “Hubert, don’t say dat!” Sarah scolded. “You goin’ make me have an accident.”

  Every event, every incident in Busha’s life, had occurred in this parish, near this same road over which the car now careened. Landmarks flashed past in the darkness, evoking memory and gloomy commentary out of him.

  “To think I might dead in Walker’s Wood,” Busha moaned as they drove through the shuttered village of that name. “Lawd God, don’t make me dead in Walker’s Wood! Anywhere else but this place. We supposed to play dem cricket next month.”

  “Don’t talk like dat!” Sarah snapped, nearly ramming a roadside wall.

  “Right in dis spot I used to shoot bird with me daddy,” Busha mumbled later on, “now I come to dead in it.”

  “Hubert!”

  Then later: “Remember de night we catch crab here, Sarah? You catch crab in a place one night and de next thing you know you dead in dat same place. Just like a crab.”

  “For God’s sake, Hubert!” Sarah screeched.

  They also passed those places where Busha silently remembered begging a quick nighttime grind from some slack village woman, and he said a quick prayer that he would not die on the spot where he’d committed mortal sin.

  Eventually the car headed down the dark throat of Fern Gully where Busha had done nothing of significance except drive through and witness tourists gawking at the clutter of ferns, and he lapsed into gloomily massaging his chest.

  Alarmed by his sudden silence, Sarah asked, “Hubert, how you feel?”

  Which frightened Busha so much that he snapped, “You testing me to see if I dead? Dat’s how to finish off a sick man!”

  They screeched into the driveway of the hospital, a scattering of old wooden buildings behind a thick grove of trees with light leaking feebly through an open window, and they tramped down a long, dimly lit breezeway with Busha leaning on Sarah’s arm and coughing to attract attention. They hurried past rows and rows of dishevelled beds where patients slept in open wards, and the sweet smell of antiseptic, sickness, and nighttime death assailed Busha’s nose and made him wish with all his heart that he had lived a better life.

  The matron on duty was catching a doze in a stuffed chair at the end of the dim ward when they found her. Recognizing Busha, she helped him into an examination room where she poked and thumped his chest, looked at his tongue, listened to his heart and pinched his left arm, and asked what he’d had for supper.

  Busha mumbled that in his present condition it was difficult to remember, but he thought he’d had stew peas and green bananas.

  “Busha,” the matron said, “I think you eat too much dumpling for you dinner.”

  “What you talking about?” Busha scowled, feeling acutely like he was being taken for a fool. “Dis is Jamaica for you! A man come to de hospital complaining about a pain in him chest and dem tell him him eat too much dumpling. Sarah, carry me outta dis damn place! If I goin’ dead tonight make me at least dead in me own bed.”

  “Dead, Busha?” the matron scoffed. “You can’t dead. Who say you can come here and dead on my shift? Come, I going put you inna bed and send for de doctor.”

  “You think I come all dis way for a joke?” Busha growled. “You think we drive all dese miles because we love night air? Me tell you me chest killing me with pain.”

  “Busha, I don’t hear nothing in de stethoscope. You not flushed. You draw breath freely. You not sweaty.”

  “How can a man sweat on dis cool night? What’s de matter wid you? You a nurse or a obeah woman?”

  “Sarah,” the matron sighed, “why you don’t hush him up for me, eh? Busha, you under my rule now. You goin’ do as I say or I goin’ bring out de rod o’ correction. Now, you stay here, I goin’ get a smock for you and find you a bed.”

  “Find me a private room,” Busha grumbled after her as she disappeared down the hall.

  Half an hour later and Busha was tucked into a bed in the far corner of the ward because there were no private rooms available. Sarah stood by his bedside and held his hand comfortingly while the matron was rummaging through the supply room for a screen to give him privacy and medicine to help him sleep.

  “You damn woman love to stick man wid needle, eh?” Busha quarrelled when the matron returned to give him an injection. “Because God make man to stick woman, you make up you mind you goin’ stick him back, eh? No so?”

  “What am I goin’ do wid him, eh, Sarah?” the matron chuckled, shoving the needle deep into his arm.

  A few minutes later Busha said a bad word and fell asleep.

  Busha woke to hear a sound of death chomping a path toward his bed. Occasionally death would stop and give a weary snort from all the chomping, then it would resume its grim labor. In his drugged state, Busha was having a nightmare about a sermon he had heard a long time ago where the parson had compared death to a goat that eats everything. Death, bellowed the parson, ate man, woman, and child just like goat eat guinea grass, tin can, and old shoe. And when it was your time for death to eat you, nothing you did could stop him. Death would chew through a wall to reach you.

  So now as Busha awoke from his drugged sleep he heard the sound of death grinding a path to where he slept. He could barely open his eyes because of the influence of the injected medicine, but his heart was racing with the delirious conviction that he had to get up and run before the death goat got near enough to bite.

  He moaned, sat up, opened his eyes, and looked into the malevolently slanted eyes of a living goat staring at him from four feet away on the veranda.

  “RASS!” Busha screamed.

  He sprang out of bed, got tangled up in the bedsheets, and toppled against the screen.

  The screen clattered to the floor and Busha fell on a fat woman asleep in the next bed.

  With a screech of horror, the woman flung him off her bosom. Busha toppled on the floor, rolled under the woman’s bed, and upset her chamber pot.

  A trainee nurse sprinted over to where Busha had fallen and was pinned on all fours under the bed. He kept trying to groggily stand up, each time hoisting the bedspread and mattress and the woman on it violently into the air, drawing horrified shrieks out of her.

  “Busha!” the trainee said, getting down on her knees and trying to pull him out from under the bed. “You goin’ turn over de bed wid de woman ’pon it.”

  “De death goat!” Busha raved deliriously.

  “Is de watchman goat dat, Busha! Is all right, you know! Is only de watchman goat dat!”

  “Him land ’pon top of me and frighten de living daylights outta me!” the fat woman was wailing. “Me think is earthquake and de ceiling drop ’pon me, de weight so sudden and heavy! Lawd God Almighty, de man nearly killed me with fright!”

  Busha was led unsteadily back to his bed.

  “Out of order!” he mumbled. “Dem have de damn goat dem roaming right up to where people sleeping in de hospital. Why you don’t have cow too and mule and donkey? You might as well, if you goin’ have goat.”

  Busha fell back
into a drugged sleep. When he awoke again the bed next to him was empty and the floor stank of urine.

  An hour later the doctor arrived.

  The doctor was a Kingstonian who knew Busha from a long time back. Talking all the while about this year’s poor bird season, he listened to Busha’s heart thumping through his stethoscope.

  “De baldpate flying high, Busha,” the doctor complained. “I went out into de bush dis morning and couldn’t hit a one. You’d need a rocket to bring one of dem down.”

  “Why you listening to me back?” Busha asked. “My heart is in de front.”

  “Draw a breath, Busha,” the doctor said. “De whole morning and I see one lapwing.”

  “Tell me de truth. You think I had a heart attack?”

  The doctor said he didn’t think so but to be sure he’d do an EKG. He ordered the nurse to bring the EKG machine and she disappeared down the hall and returned rolling a machine to Busha’s bedside.

  The doctor wired the machine to Busha’s chest and turned it on, but it wouldn’t work. He fiddled with the knobs on the machine and it still wouldn’t come on, so he asked the nurse to send for Hector, who the doctor said was the only one who knew how to get this blasted machine to work right.

  From rows and rows of beds in the open ward patients were waking up and peering silently at Busha, who felt stupid and ill-used as though he were the center of an uncouth scene.

  A few minutes later a toothless old black man dressed in ragged khaki pants and a white T-shirt was standing beside Busha’s bed peering at the machine.

  “It want a good thump, sah,” he told the doctor solemnly. “But is a special spot must thump.”

  He wriggled between Busha’s bed and the machine, studied it for a few seconds, then gave the special spot a solid thump with his right fist. The machine sprang to life and the needles began scrawling across the paper.

  “Good God!” Busha muttered. “Is dat what a man heart beat look like? Like chicken scratch a paper?”

  The doctor chuckled and studied the paper as the machine whirred.

  Then he declared in a pompous voice that Busha had definitely not had a heart attack. As bad luck would have it, the matron happened to be passing by Busha’s bed just in time to overhear the doctor’s diagnosis.

  “Is too much dumpling him eat,” she gloated. “I tell him so last night, doctor, but him never believe me.”

  A patient across the hall heard the matron’s remark and broke into a chuckle. He muttered something to another patient in the bed beside his and the two of them grinned impertinently at Busha and seemed to be openly gossiping about him.

  Feeling profoundly stupid and ridiculed, Busha got out of bed, huddled behind the privacy screen, and pulled on his pants.

  He was dressed and ready to go when a trainee nurse began stripping the sheets off the bed on which he had fallen in his earlier delirium.

  “What happened to de woman who was sleeping dere?” Busha asked.

  The trainee looked all around her as though she feared eavesdroppers.

  “She gone to meet her Maker, Busha,” she whispered, tucking the sheet under the mattress.

  “Good God! She dead?”

  “This morning. But no because you drop on her, you know, Busha. Her time was overdue. She was supposed to dead from last year.”

  “Just dead like dat!” Busha marvelled in an awed voice.

  “Dese people, Busha, never dead when dem supposed to. Dem dead when dem good and ready, at deir own sweet time.”

  At the front door the doctor gave Busha a parting shot.

  “Busha, is a good thing you leaving us. You killing off all me patients right and left. I don’t know what I’m to put on dat poor woman death certificate. ‘Falling weight’? ‘Heavy load’? ‘Sudden burden’?”

  The doctor laughed heartily at his own humor.

  None of this struck Busha as at all funny. Feeling wounded and humiliated, he left the hospital and drove grimly back up into the mountains with Sarah dozing wearily at his side.

  The freshness of morning had not yet burned off the fields as Busha drove upland, and the air still tanged with the coolness of dew. He passed hordes of uniformed schoolchildren on their way to school, workers trekking slowly down to the fields, cattle browsing in cool pastures, and he felt glad to be alive. The road where he had trapped the thief, bought the hog, or even stolen the grind didn’t seemed fearful in daylight. It even struck Busha that he would be better dropping dead among the fresh air and lovely scenery of such a stretch of road than dying in the dingy mustiness of a hospital ward. So by the time his car nosed out of Fern Gully, Busha was whistling, occasionally waving to a familiar face he passed on the road, and feeling sorry that this was not Christmas time when he could bawl out greetings of merriness through the car window without seeming peculiar.

  Nothing made a man appreciate his life more than a stay in the hospital, Busha was thinking with a shudder. If he had his way he would force all the ungrateful brutes of the world—and God knew that there were millions of them—to overnight in a hospital at least once a month. He would compel whiners to visit a morgue. Chronic complainers he would force to witness an autopsy. (That would shut them up once and for all.)

  He was happily scheming up fiendish hospital punishments for malingerers when Sarah stirred, sat up, and looked blearily around at the passing fields.

  “Good morning, darling!” Busha said happily.

  She raked him with a scowl.

  “Dat’s all very good for you to say,” she grumbled. “You sleep de whole night. I had to sit up in a hard chair. And all because you eat too much blessed dumpling.”

  She squirmed down in the seat against the door and closed her eyes. Busha lapsed once again into a savage mood.

  He was still in this bitter mood when he drove into Montague, turned down the narrow road that snaked through his property, and immediately hallucinated the vision of a stout white woman climbing gingerly into the crown of one of his pear trees.

  It took several seconds before his unbelieving brain could register what his eyes had seen. But once the true situation had dawned on him, Busha slammed on the brakes of his Land Rover, nearly pitching his sleeping wife into the dashboard, and threw the vehicle into violent reverse.

  Then he was out of the Land Rover and yelling at the top of his lungs, “What dat woman doing in me tree? Get out of dat tree!”

  Aloysius hurried across the pasture to soothe the wrathful Busha.

  “Me tell her not to climb de tree, Busha,” he babbled. “But she no listen, sah!”

  “Get out of my tree before I call de police and lock you up!” Busha bellowed.

  The tree’s limbs creaked and bent as Inga began a slow descent.

  “You can’t come here from Germany and climb people’s tree and thief deir fruit!” Busha hollered indignantly. “Dere’re laws in dis country. If I catch you on me property again I goin’ lock you up! I don’t care if you whiter dan Snow White herself! Damn out of order!”

  “Imagine,” Busha was puffing with rage when he climbed back into the Land Rover, “it’s not enough dat dis damn woman seducing half de mad people on de island, now she must come thief from me!”

  Nevertheless, catching a praedial thief redhanded in a pear tree was one of the joys of owning property and just what Busha needed to help him forget his humiliations at the hospital. For all his raging, he was feeling better than he had since he’d woken up last night with the pain in his chest.

  “But how on earth did dat heavy woman climb way up in dat tree?” Sarah wondered. Craning to look back as Busha roared away, she glimpsed the German standing beside Aloysius and making an obscene gesture after the Land Rover.

  From that day on there was open hatred between Busha and Inga.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Inga was vexed with the world even before Busha had bawled at her for thiefing his pears. Her father had stopped sending money. She’d ignored his order to come home so he’d spite
fully cut her purse strings. Everything about Jamaica now struck her as lean and bony: The children looked underfed, the adults hardened and quarrelsome, the scenery a smear of blurry green littered with ramshackle dwellings.

  In the days when the money used to flow Inga would get a letter from her father at least every other week. She would read the German handwritten script aloud in a gruff male voice that sounded to Aloysius like the snarling of a cross dog. But even if the letter was cross there would still be big green bills rolled up in its belly.

  Then the latest letter came. When she read it aloud the German words exploded juicily inside her mouth; bubbles of spit flew through the air and popped on the grass.

  She threw the letter on the ground and lit up her last joint of Sinsemilla.

  “What you daddy say?” Aloysius asked.

  “He say come home. No more money.”

  She picked up the letter and read it again.

  “Come home, he says,” she repeated.

  There was no money in this letter.

  * * *

  One dark country night Inga, Aloysius, and Service sat around a fire talking. The fire had gnawed a ragged hole out of the darkness and the three of them were huddled inside it, their faces tinted red from the glare of the flames. They were ruminating about moonlight foolishness, swapping thoughts about everything from why Japanese men loved to eat so much mushroom to why woman had a fatter batty than man. Everything that Inga said Service would contradict. She would tell him to shut up and he would either growl and snarl or whimper about how she was cruel to him. But when the conversation moved off to another topic, he would enrage her again with more contradicting opinion.

  Just the week before he had annoyed Inga so much that she had stopped giving him pum-pum altogether, reducing him to endless whining about how it was wicked for a white woman to treat a negar man so. Whenever he was vexed with Inga he called her a white woman. This name would goad her into a nasty temper and make her scream bad words and send the blood rushing to her head until her face was puffy and flushed. Nothing enraged her more than to be called white. One day Inga got so provoked over this name that she stripped off her clothes and flashed the pum-pum spitefully at Service, chasing after him when he refused to look at it and be roused into a tormenting craving that she would not satisfy. Aloysius pleaded with Inga not to goad Service with the naked pum-pum unless she intended to dose him, but she snarled at him to mind his own business.