BJ pulled a cheap Persian rug from under his bed, unrolled it, and placed it in front of the table on which were the Absolut Vodka, and the Holy Qur’an. He placed the Qur’an on the floor in front of him, and he placed his hands before his heart in the demeanor of prayer and concentration.
All this time, Marco was looking into the pages of Plutarch’s Lives, which he had taken from the bottom shelf of the narrow, unpainted bookcase that contained only classical literature. And he sucked on the vodka, straining it through his teeth and the melting pieces of ice cubes, as his friend ommmmmmmed and ommmmmmed and intoned “alla hack-bar” which is how Marco understood the pronunciation of the Muslim prayers. Fuck, he said to himself, this motherfucker is real serious. If I didn’t know he was serious, fuck! It was nine o’clock. The morning was crisp and cold and clean.
The boy flung the newspaper, aiming for a different spot, and it banged against the window where she was with her hands in the thick, white dishwater, foaming like the waves that banged against the rocks near the Esplanade, and then retreated back into the calm, blue sea. She was thinking of home. She had seen him. “You little bastard!” And the boy jumped back on his bicycle and sped out of the circular driveway over the crunching snow. It was ten o’clock. The morning was cold. When she had got off the subway and was walking to this mansion, the wind ripped into her body, and made her think of going back home the moment she made herself into a woman, meaning when she had money; and it made her feel as if she was naked. The wind had the same brutal touch as his fingers on her backside that day when she was bending over the vacuum cleaner. He had not touched her. She imagined it was his intention. And imagining it, it made it real. The wind swept up her legs, right between her thighs, clawing at her pantyhose with such force that she thought she had left home without putting on her underwear. “I should have been born a man,” she said, to the boy disappearing over the smashed snow, but really not for his ears. Men didn’t know how lucky they are, she said, continuing her thoughts; they don’t know how damn lucky they are to be wearing pants to get more greater protection from this damn cold. “And in other things, too!” Her thoughts went back to her son. For she had seen the photograph of the Jamaican family on the front page of the Star newspaper many weeks ago, and now this morning, when that damn boy pelted the paper that almost broke the window where she was, here was another one. She wiped her hands in her apron, and studied the newspaper. It said that the young man was seventeen, and it said that he was living with his mother in a big house in the suburbs, and it said he was in the car with another young man about his same age, and it said that he was not going very fast and that the traffic policeman didn’t have to follow him with the sirens on, and it said he was shot in the back of his head. She felt sad. And wanted to cry. She was leaving her own son at home so often, by himself, before the dawn broke, in bed, and she wondered if he was safe. “But praise God, he doesn’t have a car. A car is the surest thing to make a police shoot a black man dead. Praise God for that!” And she wanted to take up a cause, and hold a piece of stick with cardboard stapled on to it, and a message written on the cardboard, in thick black letters: THIS COUNTRY RACIST. THE POLICE TOO! “Yes! And put an exclamation mark after it, too!” She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. But who would listen to her? A simple woman like her? That’s why, she said to herself, a man has it better, for “I am the least amongst the apostles.”
The young man’s face, and the face of his mother, wringing her body in tears, filled the space of the double sinks as she returned to her work. Her employers were having a party at five. And when the image of the mother and the son evaporated like the foam of soap from the two sinks, in their place were the faces of her own son, and his no-good father. She pulled the plug in the second sink out with force, and the face of that bastard disappeared. She began to hum, “Sometimes I feel like a motherless . . .”
BJ got out casually and with self-assurance from the taxi, at the front of the tall apartment building somewhere in Scarborough; and as he walked across the lawn, he passed a blue car in which two men were sitting. The men were watching the same entrance BJ took. They had been there for the past three hours; and they had started watching the door since last Sunday. BJ paid no attention to the blue car. He walked straight to the panel of names, and pressed one of the buzzers. It was a buzzer beside the name G. Harewood. He did not know G. Harewood. He could have pressed any buzzer. It was only two o’clock, and his school friend, who allowed him to use the underground parking, without her mother’s approval and knowledge, was still in school. This was the only way to retrieve the car.
“Who’s it?” a woman’s voice, mangled by the malfunction in the speaker system, cried out. The voice came through louder than he expected, and he made a start. It stirred him more than that. “Who’s it?” The voice was not irritable. “Is it George?”
“Yeah!” BJ said, trying to change his voice to George’s voice without knowing George’s voice.
“Come on up!” the woman’s voice screamed. It was less irritable. “Come on up!”
And when BJ entered the lobby, he could still hear the voice saying, “Come on up!” and the buzzer on the door to let him in was still being pressed.
He pressed the button in the elevator to P2, and went down into the bowels of the building. Three women were in the elevator with him. The three women stared at him. When the three women were tired staring at him, they stared at the floor. Pools of water from melted ice were on the floor. When the three women were tired of staring at the floor, they stared at the illuminated numbers on the panel in the elevator. When it came to P2, the three women stood where they were. It seemed to BJ that they were standing in such a way to suggest that they had taken the wrong elevator. BJ got out. He walked straight to a corner of the large dimly lit underground parking area. Glimmering in the bad light of the dull fluorescent bulbs was the white BMW. He stood beside it. He looked at the front tires. He looked at the hood. He looked at the windshield. The elevator door was still open. The three women were watching him. He went round to the front of the BMW and looked at the bumper. He looked at the cap which covered the hole to the gas tank. He screwed it tight. It was already tight. It was locked. One of the three women got off the elevator when it reached the main floor and walked straight to a door marked “Superintendent.”
BJ looked at the licence plate. He passed his hand over it. He was about to brush the dust from the plate onto his trousers, but he remembered in time. He was wearing expensive clothes. His trousers were black. They were full in the leg, and narrow at the ankle. His socks were white. And the shirt and jacket fitted him as if they were three or four sizes larger than his weight and size. He took a handkerchief from his pocket. The handkerchief was white, and folded into quarters. He wiped his hand, and then he passed the handkerchief slowly over each letter of the car licence. When he was done, the licence plate was glimmering almost as much as the BMW itself. The licence plate was BLUE. His beeper was beeping. So, he got into the car, with the doors locked, and the engine still turned off, and he checked the beeper. It was Marco.
He turned the engine on. Gradually, the interior of the black leather got warmer and warmer until he felt he was as comfortable sitting in it as he was in his room surrounded by all his solid-state stereo and CD equipment and books. In this car he had installed an equally expensive system. John Coltrane was playing. He had left the cassette in the tape. “A Love Supreme.”
The car was warm. BJ’s two large eyes filled up the rear-view mirror, and he could barely see, in periphery, the elevator door open and a man and three women; and the women were pointing in his direction as they talked to the man; but the BMW was warmed up, and it moved without noise over the caked ice in some parts of the underground parking; and he manoeuvred it through spaces left by bad and careless drivers, past large concrete pillars, and mounted the incline to the exit door, in no hurry, and all the time speaking to Marco on the telephone, and he had to repeat himself two times, for the aerial stru
ck the top of the last exit door, and finally he emerged into the brilliance of the winter afternoon, bright in the sun but still cold. The women had just told the superintendent, “I’m sure he looks like one of those drug dealers, and I feel he is, not because he’s . . .”
The two men in the blue car saw the white BMW. And the two men made a note of it. And they registered BLUE in a notebook. And they made a check on their computer. And they began to talk on the telephone. BJ was heading for Victoria Park and Kingston Road to pick up Marco at the subway station. He was in a good mood. The last racing day was something else, “Fuck!” as Marco put it. They had won and won and won . . .
Facing her now were the most magnificent slender white sculptures of branches on the trees in the backyard. She had seen these trees change their form for three years now, and she still did not know the name of one of them. But this afternoon, around three, with the clear light and the brilliance of the sun which gave no heat, she marvelled at the beauty of thought of men travelling in olden times, over this kind of landscape, walking in shoes made from skins; and following in the tracks of wild animals they had to kill to stay alive. It was as if an artist had applied pearls and other kinds of jewels, with precision, on the branches of the trees. But she was not happy inside herself. Something was bothering her. And she picked up the telephone and called her landlord.
“Did you really see him?”
“Yes, I tell you, Mrs. J.”
“Go out, dressed? In his school clothes? In time for school?”
“Everything.”
“You sure it was my son? You didn’t mistake somebody else for him?”
“Sure.”
“Well, thank you then.” And to herself, she said, “I don’t know why I am in this mood.”
She had selected the crystals and the silvers and the plates, and all she had now to do was choose the serving dishes, and put the place mats on the shining mahogany table. She checked the roast beef in the oven, and shook her head at the amount of food she cooked, with most of it being thrown away the next morning, since neither husband nor wife liked to eat leftover food; and with all this damn food wasting day in and day out, and so many people on the streets of this city starving with nothing to warm their stomachs, and that blasted boy I gave birth to, refusing this good rich food, saying he is a Muslim. What a Muslim is? Is a good Muslim a person who doesn’t have common sense inside his head, that he would refuse all this richness? And she laughed to herself. It was a joyous laugh. A hearty laugh. A laugh from the bottom of her belly. She looked round to see if anyone was close by, to mistake her for a fool, that she was going out of her head, laughing and talking to herself like this. “And come telling me that he is fasting. Fasting? And all this food, all this food going to waste. I wish I knew somebody on my street, without foolish pride that I could leave a plastic container full of this food!” And she began to hum. “Some-times, I feel like . . .”
As BJ pulled off from the curb in front of the subway station in the east end, with Marco strapped in beside him, and laughing and turning up the volume of the saxophone solo, the BMW was so loud with the music contained within it that Marco himself felt his head was about to explode; and BJ himself was becoming nervous that perhaps the BMW would become conspicuous with the two of them in it with so much noise. The windows were rolled up. The BMW took the first entrance on the 401 West doing 80. BJ settled behind the wheel, with a Gaulois unfiltered cigarette at the corner of his mouth, one eye closed against the smoke, and he put the car into fourth gear, and the car still had some more power, and moved like a jungle animal measuring its prey, and receiving additional power because of the certainty of devouring its prey. The prey in this case was their destination. But they did not have any anxiety of time and distance to reach that destination. It was simply that BJ liked to drive fast. That was why he convinced Marco to buy the BMW instead of the Thunderbird. And that was why he got it with standard transmission. They had won the money at the racetrack one afternoon when Marco made the mistake of buying the three horses in a triactor race for ten dollars, instead of five, which was the custom. The name of the horse that won, that went off at 50 to 1 odds, was Blue. BJ knew he could not keep all that money in his room; and he knew that he could not open an account without questions asked. He knew he could not give it to his mother, even with the explanation that he had won it at the track. What would he be doing at the track? Why was he at the track on a school day? So, he bought a white BMW. He paid a friend of his, a real estate salesman, three hundred dollars to cover for him. Real estate was at rock bottom at that time, and the salesman was more than happy to keep his mouth shut, and to pocket this unearned commission. But BJ knew all the time that he had to be careful, and that a time might come when the real estate salesman, still at the bottom of the unsold houses on the market, would need more help in keeping his mouth closed. He had to be careful.
He turned the music down a little more, and he reduced his speed to 80. As these thoughts entered his head, he had been doing 150. He had just spotted a marked police cruiser with 52 painted on its white side, parked alongside the 401. But he did not know that as soon as he had pulled off from the subway station in the east end that at that precise moment a blue sedan with two men in it had pulled off too, and had followed him until he entered the 401 going west. The marked cruiser was expecting him. And as he had swooshed by, the traffic policeman was on the radio to another one, somewhere farther west along the 401. Conversation passed between the policemen in their cars. “Drug dealers for sure!” And through another system came “Question of being armed and dangerous.” And the two policemen in the parked blue car up in the suburbs of Scarborough added their contribution, “We were hoping for a red Camaro, but you never know with these drug dealers. They have the money to change cars . . .” And Coltrane was playing his ass off, as Marco would say, still fond of the way he thought BJ talked, and should talk. “’Trane’s playing his ass off!” he said eventually. He said it three more times. BJ grunted something. In his rear-view mirror he saw the police cruiser pull into the same lane as his, tailing him. He knew this stretch of the 401 like the palm of his hand. He was west of the Allen Road, approaching on the highway a little north, the area in the city known as the habitat of drugs and guns and gangs and called by two names, one the name of a woman, a whore: the other name of a bird, which may also be a woman and a whore. Jane-Finch. He knew this stretch of road well. He knew he could get into the express lane within twenty kilometres. The cruiser was gaining on him. Marco was oblivious to this, as he listened to Coltrane. The cruiser’s red light was still not on. But BJ surmised that any time now, it would be. And the siren would start. The lanes ahead of him were crowded with slow drivers who had themselves seen the cruiser. All four lanes heading west were crowded. But that was what he wanted. He put the BMW into third. He was gearing down to stop; and the car was not so noisy with the music, and that was when Marco had commented about Coltrane’s mastery of “Love Supreme,” when BJ changed his mind about stopping, to face the consequences. For how would he know the cruiser was following him? Of the thousands of cars on the highway, why should a police cruiser pick him out because he was driving an expensive car and was a young black man? He told himself he must not be fooled by the logic of a man, or of a woman, or of a time, a better time than was taking place in this city; he remembered that logic had absolutely nothing to do with it. He was intelligent in the ways of the hunter, and in this case, the hunted. He was relying upon his instincts. Somewhere in his vast reading he had come across something about this. He was not quite sure, nor could he remember the exact quotation; but it had something to do with instinct and emotion and gut feeling. His mother lived by her emotion. So, he geared up to third, and the BMWEZ lurched forward. Marco said, “Fuck!” and tightened his seat belt. “Let her ride, let her ride!” It was already in fourth. And in and out of traffic, from the slow lane to the middle, to the fast lane, and when the fast lane was not fast enough, and the enti
re width of the four-lane highway seemed to be creeping, the white BMW swerved like a top spinning near the end of its revolutions. “Fuck!” Marco said when they were safe, for the time being, in a secondary road somewhere near Dufferin. “What the fuck was that all about?”
BJ smiled. He turned Coltrane up. The car was filled once more with the beauty of the music, with the pulse of emotion and the feeling of the time; and they remained quiet in the waves of the melodious tune they both liked so much, and argued about. BJ insisted, because of his new religion, that it was a religious chant. Marco, equally insistent said it was a love song.
“A love supreme,” he began chanting. “A love supreme. Nineteen times the brother says a love supreme! Nineteen times, BJ!” He never lacked enthusiasm about this aspect of the song. “Fuck!”
“Nineteen times,” BJ said. And he turned the music up even louder. They were cruising along Eglinton Avenue, passing record stores from which reggae and dancehall blared out upon them, past barber shops and restaurants and shops which sold curry goat and fish and oxtail and peas and rice, and they felt they could smell and taste the food even in this breathless afternoon so cold, and so uncertain. Young men, some younger than either of them, walked with a patience that came close to loitering along the lively street, stopping now and then to place their hands on the parking meters, as if reassuring themselves and the ugly pieces of metal that life was still going on, even in this cold afternoon when it was difficult to breathe; in this heart of West Indian life, when there was no attention paid to the depth of the fall in the coldness and where life remained constant: the laughter and the lightness of dress and manner. “What about lunch?”
“Yeah.”
“Curry goat? Or oxtail?”
“Fuck! Goat and oxtail.”
In this City Page 20