“I thought you was looking for a green card.”
“Pshaw, man, that take too long. I call them to find out. You have to get marry first and wait five years. Who have that kind of time?” To Shad’s upraised eyebrows, she smiled, sweet moon eyes all innocence. “If I get a visa I can pay him a little visit in New York, give him some loving-up. Every man need a woman to keep him warm, like how it cold up there. You know what I mean?”
Shad’s forehead deepened into a frown. “Is your idea, this visit you going to make?”
“Of course is my idea,” Janet said, tossing her new locks. “You ever hear a man have an idea that a woman don’t put in his head?”
“Don’t get me vex, you hear?” Shad started toward the bar, keys in hand.
“Don’t forget,” she said, sandals clattering on the gravel behind him, “he want you to come for him at the airport. Wednesday at three o’clock, he say.” Shad kept walking, and she touched his arm.
“You hear me, Shad?” The bartender shook off her hand, raising one impatient finger with the keys, and the clattering stopped.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
* * *
Eric threw the rest of his sandwich into the garbage can, guilty of having broken his own rule of not eating behind the bar. There was usually no one around to notice on Mondays, when he worked alone at the counter, few customers to impress.
In the parking lot, Shad was being detained by the dressmaker woman, who was stroking her wig as she talked. She’d come into the bar earlier asking for the bartender and Eric had told her he’d be back soon and she could wait there. Instead, she’d chosen to stand in the parking lot, slapping her thick, shiny legs for mosquitoes every now and again, and Eric had imagined Danny Caines riding the woman, and he’d thought that it must have been a pleasant ride because she was a round little thing with no bony hips to contend with. The thought had been followed by a trip to the kitchen, where he’d slathered mayonnaise onto a slice of hard dough bread, topped it with onion and two slices of ham, and started devouring it behind the bar.
“Boss,” Shad greeted him, a hard look on his face as he strode across the dusty concrete floor. “Business good?”
“Same as usual.” Eric dried his hands on the kitchen towel and perched on Shad’s stool.
“You remember to sweep today, though?”
“The wind is doing it for me.”
“I returning the keys,” Shad said, placing them on the counter and putting his hands in his pockets. “But I going to need the Jeep on Wednesday. Danny Caines is coming back. I have to meet him at the airport.”
“Caines is coming back? Well, Janey Mac!” Eric beamed, delighted with his rhyme and his mother’s favorite expression. “That must mean he’s serious about the hotel, don’t you think?”
Shad turned away, wiping his scalp. “I don’t know—”
Eric slid off the bartender’s stool. “You told him that we’re free and clear to start construction, right? The permits are signed and we came to an agreement with Horace. You told him that, right?”
“I tell him long time.” The bartender was hovering, not rushing away like he always did on his day off. He was shuffling from one leg to the other, putting his hands in his pockets and taking them out.
“So, what’s up, bud?” Eric said, still glowing with delight.
“I want to borrow the Jeep again. I want to go into Port Maria, since it’s my day off—”
“I’ll come with you. I’ll even drive.”
“You working the bar.”
Eric spread his arms to the emptiness. “What work?”
With the liquor stored under the sink, the refrigerator and kitchen locked, the men were on their way in half an hour. It was the perfect afternoon to get out from under, low clouds scudding across the edges of a blue sky, sunshine everywhere.
“Not much traffic, eh?” Eric commented, changing down to fourth. “Why we going to Port Maria?”
Shad rubbed his hands on his jeans. “I think the artist lady, Sarah, still on the island, and I want to start looking for her.”
“It was her passport you were inquiring about, wasn’t it?”
“Same thing.”
“I had a feeling, I just had a feeling.” Eric leaned toward the passenger seat, ready to wink if Shad had been looking at him. “Who found the passport?”
“Boss, some things you don’t need to know.”
Guided by his companion, Eric drove toward the upper end of Port Maria and away from the ocean. The first lane they turned into was narrow and crowded with small cement houses, dusty yards separated by chicken-wire fences.
“Stop here,” Shad said, pointing to a house with high windows.
“Who lives here?”
“A man called Boxer. I know him long time—from Pen days. He know everything going on in Port Maria.”
“You know you’re being melodramatic. She’s probably somewhere—”
Before he could finish, Shad was knocking at the wire gate. A solid-looking man wearing boxer shorts came onto the tiny verandah. He greeted Shad and gestured for him to come inside. Beside the driver’s side of the Jeep, a small boy in a stained T-shirt stared up at Eric, two fingers hanging on to the wire fence between them and two fingers in his mouth.
“You seen any Englishwomen hanging around?” Eric asked the child, who turned and ran into the house.
Five minutes later, Shad jumped into the vehicle. “Up the road,” he declared. He slammed the door twice until it caught. “Drive to the end and turn left.”
Eric slipped the gear into first. “Where we going?”
“We looking for a big yellow house up the hill.”
“Whose house?” Eric asked, turning left around a small bar with an umbrella table and three chairs out front.
“Janet’s brother live there. They call him Lizard.”
Eric chuckled. “Sounds like a drug don or something.”
“Boxer tell me he in the business.”
“What kind of business?”
“Is three of them in town, Boxer say, three dons in Port Maria.” Shad slung his arm out of the window, his face expressionless. “Lizard is one of them.”
“Jesus Christ!” Eric exclaimed, hitting the steering wheel. The Jeep chugged to a stop. “Janet’s brother is a don? How’d you make the connection?”
“I know she from Port Maria and, since Boxer know everybody around here, I thought we should start with him. He know her family, yes, just like I thought.”
“Does Danny know this?” Eric opened his eyes wider. “Oh, God, maybe he’s—do you think Danny’s—tell me it’s not so, because I’m not going into business with a drug dealer!”
“We don’t know anything yet, boss.” Shad was as cool as he’d ever been, wouldn’t even look at him.
“What do you think we’re going to do, knock on some don’s door and ask about a missing woman who may not even be missing?”
“They can’t do us nothing, we just inquiring.” Shad nodded. A smile played along his lips as he turned away. “And, besides, you safe. You disappear and embassy people coming around asking plenty questions.” A remark that did little to curb Eric’s jitters.
The mustard-colored mausoleum was visible from the main road. It stood alone at the end of a long uphill road, dominating the banana trees on either side of the road leading up to it. The cantilevered verandahs on the upper floor made it look like a dusty bomb above the wall surrounding it.
Eric stopped the car a hundred yards in front of the elaborate wrought-iron gate. “This is crazy—you know that, right? We shouldn’t even be here.”
“We just looking, boss, just looking.”
“I’m not driving any closer, I’m telling you right now. Just because we can’t see anybody, doesn’t mean they’re not watching us. I bet they have a camera on us.” He
gestured with his chin, not daring to point. “And if you hadn’t noticed, there’s an eight-foot wall around the place. They’re going to have dogs.”
Shad shook his head and grinned, the gap between his teeth none too comforting this time. “Boss, you never going to make a private investigator.”
“You damn straight.”
“You saying, you not coming inside with me?”
“Shit, I wouldn’t go inside with my own mother.” Eric pulled his head back. “You know what those people do for a living? They don’t only export and import drugs, you know. They wouldn’t think twice about killing you if you asked too many questions. Hell, they don’t even have to have a reason to shoot.”
“Don’t worry, I seen enough,” Shad said, patting the air. He settled back in his seat. “I just wanted to check it out.”
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
* * *
A craving for Danny had come on that morning after she’d forced herself awake from yet another in the series of terrifying dreams. In this one, the strong fingers of brickies had been holding her, dragging her up the stairs in front of a Gothic church, probing under her blue coat, all the while calling her name.
Think yer too good for us, don’t yer, Sarah Louise?
Think we’re dirty jobbies, don’t yer?
We’re going to fuck yer brains out, Sarah Louise, and I bet yer a bloody virgin.
She’d awakened, heart pounding, and the rest had appeared like the gradual lifting of fog from warm earth. Memories, fresh in their rawness, blocked for two decades, had emerged. She remembered first the smell of greasy hair and beer, felt the press of the metal fence against her spine, saw the leering brown face inches from hers.
She remembered the shock of his rough hands and fingers making her breath catch and freezing her tongue, and how they’d cursed her, all of them, throwing out her name, laughing as she struggled in dumb silence. And then it came suddenly, the memory of one of them, the one who had thumped her, trying to have sex with her against the fence, holding up her coat, pulling down her pants, and pushing into her pubic area with his limp penis, and how the others had laughed at him. And she remembered him cursing her again and shoving her to the ground and the damp coldness of the earth under her fingers after they’d left. And she remembered standing up and pulling up her panties. She’d brushed herself off, watching the boys walking down the road, two of them still guffawing, and she’d felt bruised, her privates throbbing and huge. Then her mother’s car had come from the other direction even before the boys had turned the corner. She’d run to the car and jumped in, looking straight ahead.
“You’re late,” she’d said, still shaking, wanting her mother to know.
“I’m sorry, darling. I forgot, to tell the truth, but when Aunt Phyllis asked about you I suddenly remembered. Terrible of me, I know.”
She’d hugged herself, lips shut tight.
“You’re all right, are you, Sarah Louise?” her mother had inquired when they rounded the corner, the boys nowhere in sight. “You’re looking a little—”
“I’m fine, Mum, I’m fine,” she’d said, knowing that her cheeks were red and the car was dark. Her mother had started talking about Aunt Phyllis’s latest boyfriend and how he’d popped in while they were having tea. Nothing more had been said, nothing, nothing to anyone, although she’d asked her parents never to call her Sarah Louise ever again and they hadn’t. She’d stopped taking ballet and buried herself in the quiet of art classes.
When she was fully awake and the dream-reality of probing fingers and her mother’s indifference had been pushed aside, she’d lain quiet for a few minutes, hugging her ribs, staring at the white ceiling with its stupid spackling, and it came to her that this position, this familiar hugging of herself, she’d been doing for a long, long time. And it all started to make sense. The dreams were her history, rejected and blocked. She could now understand the hollowness inside, the walls thickening each year, keeping everyone out, keeping them away from her soft insides, an awareness followed by a yearning for the one person who’d refused to be kept at a distance.
“Danny,” she’d whispered. “Come for me, please, please, please.” It wasn’t about sex, every sexual impulse having died since Batsman held on to her beside the road. It was instead a yearning to be found, to matter to someone.
Half an hour later she was sitting on the floor, her upper body extended over her straight legs, stretching her body, trying to escape the mental jumble. She’d felt a compulsion to stretch and made a couple forward bends. The memories uncaged by the last dream had left her in turmoil and called for pacifying. Outside her window, the unseen dog started scratching, whining with pleasure as he scratched. She was about to stand up and attempt a headstand, when the memories started forming themselves into an organized procession. Pausing with her hands on her knees, she allowed the images to fully materialize, allowed the feelings to emerge along with them.
After the assault, she remembered, she’d only felt shame, embarrassment that these crude young men with their accents and rough hands had found her attractive, had touched her. She’d smothered the memory into obliteration, blaming herself. Thirteen years old, and she’d never mentioned the incident to any living being, not even to Penny. Her silence had been meant as a punishment to her mother for being late. It was deeper even. It was anger with her mother for being self-centered, a woman who had to have the floor, whose turn it always was to make a fuss.
She stared at the blue sky outside the bars. Yet again, she had Man-Up to thank for bringing back the worst of the memories. He’d come into her bedroom the evening before, talking as he entered.
“Where you passport?” he’d demanded, no mention of the painting.
Her mouth was full of toothpaste and she’d stood with the brush in one hand, pulling her nightgown close with the other. “I don’t know.”
“What you mean?”
She’d spat out the toothpaste into the bathroom sink. “I’m telling you. I don’t have it. Whoever packed the bags didn’t put it in.”
Man-Up had walked to her suitcase and looked down at it. “Where it is then?”
“I have no idea.”
“Don’t lie to me.”
“It was with all my stuff, and it’s not here.”
He hadn’t taken her word for it, knelt down and plowed through her clothes, threw some papers and a map of Jamaica on the floor, went through her pads and papers one by one. He looked up at her, still on one knee, his face suddenly like a spurned lover’s.
“Look how we treating you good and you lying to me. You hiding the passport.”
“I’m not.”
Sauntering over to her, his eyebrows hanging like thunderclouds over his eyes, Man-Up balled up his fists. “Give me the passport!” he shouted, and slapped her, shocking her, snapping her head back. “This is your one chance to get out! You better take it.”
She held her cheek. “I—I told you—I don’t have it.”
He’d held on to her upper arms and shaken her, his calluses scratching her skin. “Like you don’t understand. If you want to leave Jamaica alive, you have to tell me where the blood claat passport is and you have to do it now.”
“It wa—was—on a sh—shelf—in Roper’s house,” she’d stammered as he shook her again.
“What shelf?”
“In the closet—in my room.”
Man-Up had stalked out, slamming the bolts back into place behind him. He was vexed, Danny would have said, proven by the loud discussion in the living room afterward—three men’s voices shouting, interrupting, contradicting. She’d made out bits and pieces, an a
rgument about the passport, and she’d sat on the floor beside the door, crying with dry eyes, holding on to her ribs.
“Two shots and everything over,” Man-Up had declared, his vicious voice stabbing through the gap, uncaring if she was listening.
“—the woman named Holloway, the one in Aruba?” the thin man had responded.
“No, man,” Batsman interjected, his voice lower than the other two. “The woman don’t do nutten.”
When the argument had died down and there was silence again, she’d crawled to the bed and lain under the sheet, whimpering, praying, eventually drifting off to the dream and the memories, the imprint of sandpaper hands still on her arms and swollen face.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
* * *
Shad stopped the Jeep on the weed-packed road leading up to the house, well away from the gate. “This is it.”
“Janet’s brother lives here?” Danny slid both hands over his head, his fingers interlocked. His hands came to rest behind his head. “That’s a big fucking house, man.”
“So the dons like they houses big-big. I wanted you to see for yourself.”
The American sighed and shook his head. “She never mentioned it. She don’t seem like the kind of person—”
“I tell you, nothing in Jamaica seem like what it is, star.”
“You think the brother is involved?”
“It seem like too much coincidence that Janet hate Sarah, Janet’s brother is a don, then Sarah disappear. I seeing a pattern here, you get me? You never can tell, maybe he kidnap her for money.”
“Or she just took off on her own, moved into a hotel or something.”
“She didn’t have no money, plus she left her passport.”
“Okay, if it’s a kidnapping, maybe it’s somebody else.”
“Is only a couple of people. Carthena, the maid who work for Mistah Roper. She don’t seem to like Sarah either.”
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