She soon abandoned the rug for the sectional. When the TV began to bore her she switched on the stereo. She put on a gospel station and went back to the couch and tried to relax, rearranging herself diligently, trying to feel comfortable in her own skin.
chapter twelve
Donovan filed a criminal charge, and the following morning, two detectives came to the house in a battered white Corolla. They parked beneath a tamarind tree, and as Fire watched from an upstairs window, the driver, a meager man in a Lakers vest, slung an M16 across his chest, slipped on a pair of wraparound sunshades, and paused to light a cigarette. Soon the car began to pitch and roll, and his partner, a grossly fat man in a red shell suit, gripped the roof and pulled himself to his feet. He reached into the car for an Uzi and then led the way to the door.
Fire felt the wad of bills in his pocket as he went downstairs to meet his guests. The pendulous moral weight of the bribe—a thousand U.S. dollars—made him feel unbalanced. Of all the adjustments he’d been forced to make since moving back to Jamaica, bribery was the one that bothered him most. It was a form of theft. More important, it outraged his sense of social justice, for bribery, in his opinion, was a tax against the poor.
This is shit, he thought, as he opened the door. What does this say about me … the socialist … the one who all his life has railed against class privilege … the one who refused a Rhodes because it was named for an imperialist … the one who spent three glorious years in Cuba? Ian committed a violent crime, and he’s a violent man … has always been that way. And although I will defend myself—I’m a man of peace. Poor people in Jamaica routinely go to jail for things like this. Why should Ian be any different? Because I am his friend? Because I have money? I was raised to defend the innocent. Not the guilty.
This is shit, he told himself as he offered the men some drinks.
They sat on varnished wicker chairs around the breakfast table, an inlaid door from a Cuban church, and talked over Chivas Regal—scotch, they said, was their drink of choice … they drank only the best. The request for the money would not come directly, Fire knew, so he was neither relieved nor misled when the slim one began to bemoan the officer’s life—the low pay, the poor conditions, the rotten public image.
They were misunderstood, the man said. It was not that they were cruel; it was just that Jamaican people cooperated only out of fear.
“You really think so?” Fire asked, trying to get a sense of him.
“Yeah, man. Jamaican people have a warrior heart. They born to hate authority. And American journalists don’t understand this, so they come down here and write a whole heapa things bout how Jamaican police wicked. But what about the people? I deal with them on the road every day. Them wickeder than we.” Then, as his partner followed him in laying his rifle on the table—a warning disguised as goodwill—he asked, “If New York send fifty of their police out here and we send fifty of our police up there, what you think would happen?” Before Fire could answer he said, “Our gunmen would kill their fifty out here because they wouldn’t fraida dem. And our fifty would go to jail up there because they woulda beat and manhandle the people dem and kill anyone they catch with a illegal gun.”
Understanding this for what it was—a threat in thin disguise—Fire responded with a threat of his own. Pretending to lean forward to refill his glass, he snatched his Glock from the small of his back and laid it between the policemen’s guns.
“Just want you to know I’m armed,” he said. “A lot of tragedies arise from confusion.” He leaned back and watched as they placed their weapons across their laps, their eyes blinking busily like lamps flashing an urgent message: Help, this will not be easy. He’s more streetwise than he seems.
“I know y’have a license,” the slim one said. “You really wouldn’t diss we da way deh. You smarter dan dat.”
“You’re the boss,” Fire replied. “If you say I have a license, then I have a license. If you say I don’t have one, then I don’t have one.” Steering the conversation to Ian’s charges, he went on, “What you say carries a lot of weight, which is why it’s important that we”—he turned to the fat one to include him—“agree on what you are going to say when you get back to the station. The stakes are very high … as, I assume, will be the cost.”
“You realize this is a serious thing,” the fat one said. “Your friend could go to jail for a very long time. The court-dem back up bad as you know. It could take a long time before him case get call … months. And ah know him as a farriner not used to the conditions we have down here. I hear up in America where him come from dem have toilet in jail for prisoner. Down here we have shit bucket, and we doan have TV, and prisoners have no rights. Anything could happen to him in there.” He took a sip of the whisky, closed his eyes, and swallowed. “That would be a tragic thing. But”—he glanced at the slim one—“we like how you flex, so we’ll try and work out a ting. And as you know, if you don’t help the police then the police cyaah help you.” He rubbed his hands together. “So where im is, by the way?”
“I don’t know,” Fire said. Ian was upstairs. “I haven’t heard from him since yesterday. So what should I tell him … in case I hear from him … that the police came and didn’t see him and will continue their search elsewhere?”
The answer piqued the fat one’s love of games. He reached into his pocket for a copy of the Gleaner and unrolled it on the table. Beneath the headline AIRING DIRTY LAUNDRY were pictures of Fire and Ian. For Fire there was a publicity shot, for Ian the picture from the cover of Time.
Less patient than his partner, the slim one cleared his throat and placed his hands behind his head. “Tell him to turn in himself,” he bluffed. His teeth were chipped like old dominoes. “If we decide fe look fe him, him mightn’t reach the station.”
“Anything,” the fat one added, “can happen on the road.” His overeagerness suggested desperation.
Fire placed his elbows on the table and cotched his chin on his knuckles. The arrogant casualness of the threat had sparked his indignation, and in a moment of anger he allowed himself to rationalize Ian’s behavior. Fuck the police, he thought. There is only one side, the side of my friend. Fire decided to exercise the power of his family name as he’d never done before. He would call the commissioner’s office and have the charges dropped. These fuckers sitting before him would not get a dime.
“What d’you mean that anything can happen?” he challenged. He heard in his voice the return of an accent he’d worked so hard to unlearn, the near-British cadence of old Jamaica, the vowels forming high in the back of the mouth, the lips barely moving. This was the voice of the legendary barristers and parliamentarians—of more than money. It was the voice of breeding, of people with family names like Manley, Hart, Matalon, Desnoes, Ashenheim, Issa, and Blackwell.
And for a moment the men couldn’t reply … didn’t feel they had the right. Then the fat one spoke, in a timid voice. “He didn’t mean it no way, boss.”
Fire turned his stare on the slim one, demanding without words a prompt explanation.
“I said what I have to say,” he muttered, trying to sound defiant.
“And what is that supposed to mean?”
“That the road is dangerous … that’s all. Nutten more than that.”
“Let me tell you something,” Fire said, rising. “You don’t want the kind of trouble I can bring to your insignificant life. Considering who my family is, you don’t want that at all.” He held his fist in front of his chest and cracked his knuckles one at a time. “This is what you will do. You will go back to your station and say you searched as best as you could but you didn’t find that man. You’ll say you will keep on looking, but you won’t. And you will never mention this conversation to anyone. Also, and I really can’t stress this enough, you will never return to this house again; neither will you call me.” He paused as he heard Ian coming down the stairs. To Ian he said: “Come and have a drink.” As Ian swigged from the bottle, Fire said to the policemen: “Go now.”
As they looked at each other, not knowing what to say, Fire was bubbling with anger. There was no pleasure in bringing this charade to its rightful conclusion.
“Time to go,” the fat one said.
“Thanks for the drinks, boss,” the slim one said.
Fire walked them past Ian to the door. As he watched them drive away, he felt the wad of money in his pocket grow heavier.
When he returned to the kitchen, he washed up the glasses and sat at the table. There, with his legs crossed, a glass of water in his hand, he called the commissioner’s office. He was assured that everything would be fine. How? he asked, and there was silence. He puzzled a moment and then he remembered where he was—in Jamaica, people of privilege do not consider details. Details are for minions and fools.
Fire felt strange when he hung up the phone—oddly weak when he should be feeling potent. Taking a sip of water, he leaned back in the chair and closed his eyes to clear his head, opening them to see the chessboard pattern of the coffered ceiling, a pattern mirrored on a smaller scale in the terra-cotta floor. With his poet’s eye, he saw in this a metaphor: life is a game of luck. Some people are pawns and some are kings.
Who decides which we will become? The answer came quickly—fate.
He took off his shoes and placed his feet up on a chair and reflected on his life. Although his family had some money and he’d been left a small inheritance by his grandfather, he’d made it on his own. He’d worked hard, first as a painter, then later as a writer, and, with the recent sale of the house in London, he was now independently wealthy by Jamaican standards. With few indulgences beyond travel, books, and music he wouldn’t have to work for the rest of his life. So in a material sense, he’d made it on his own. But had he done so in more important ways?
How much of my love of adventure is the result of my class privilege? he began to wonder. Or the ease with which I endured hard living while I pursued my art? How would I be different if I had had Ian’s parents? How much like Ian would I be? In his head he heard a term he’d used at university—lucky sperm. These were kids who were accepted because their parents were alumni. He’d won an academic scholarship. But in many ways, he was admitting now, he was a lucky sperm. His father was a well-regarded painter. His mother’s family owned a large estate. Michael Manley was his godfather. And through I-nelik he’d become friends with Marley.
Fire began to consider now how hard he would have had to work to be a failure. He had always assumed success because he’d been given the tools to succeed, so he’d never worried. Never felt intimidated by life. At Yale he’d been aware of the whiteness of the place, but his blackness and his sense of worth had been so deeply ingrained at home that he felt no sort of pressure to fit in, to stand out, or to prove any points. He realized now that this ability to be himself and love himself was something he’d taken for granted.
As he reexamined himself he thought of Ian, and then Sylvia. And he began to feel, more than comprehend intellectually, her insecurities and fears. Sylvia was not the one who was out of step. It was him, for he was a privileged romantic in a competitive world barely open to black artists. He wanted to see her now, to apologize for his arrogance, for disappearing without saying goodbye. To hold her face and say, Sweet girl, I am sorry.
Should I call her? he began to think. Or should I write? As he considered his options, the phone rang. It was his father.
“Hello, Dada. How are you?”
“Have you seen the Gleaner?”
“Yes.”
“Well, how do you expect me to feel? You and Ian are on the front page looking like two criminals.”
“I don’t want to argue right now, Dada,” Fire said. At times like these, he thought, I wish that I could just hang up or tell him to leave me alone. But for all his flaws the man was an elder, and elders must be respected.
“I have to go,” he said as his father paused to take a breath.
“I’m not finished.”
“I don’t know what else to say.”
“Well, we can finish tomorrow. The Major and I are going up to Newcastle, so we’ll come for tea in the afternoon. And tell Ian I have some words for him—acting like a damn ruffian like that.”
“It shocked me when he struck him too,” Fire said in a low voice, looking over his shoulder for Ian and feeling like a traitor.
“Not me,” Mr. Heath said. “He’s always been like that. I thought he would grow out of it eventually. But breeding is something that you just can’t buy, Fire. Look how I try with that boy. I took time away from you so I could help to raise him and look what happened. Left on his own he fell almost right back where he came from. And on top of everything he hasn’t called or come to see me since he’s been here. Take it from me, ingratitude is worse than witchcraft, and that boy is ungrateful. He’ll take, take, take, but he will never give. Anyway, tell him not to worry. The Major says he’ll call the commissioner and get the charges dropped.”
“I see,” Fire said distantly.
“So we’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
“Yow, pack,” Fire shouted to Ian as soon as he hung up. “We’re going to the Lighthouse first thing in the morning.”
Later that evening, as the sun withdrew so the moon could shine, Fire sat at the kitchen table and wrote a letter to Sylvia.
There are two ways to get to Port Antonio from Kingston. There is the Junction Road, a looping ribbon of asphalt that gift wraps rugged hills, and then there is the East Road, the longer route, which shadows the coast through the parish of St. Thomas like a ruffled hem on a dress. The Junction Road is shorter and more scenic, but also more dangerous. It flirts with the lips of hungry gorges and dashes toward blind curves.
Fire and Ian took the East Road, descending through the city as the sun began to rise. The roads were empty at first, but became busier as they left the newer suburbs and their tile-roofed gentility and picked up Mountain View Avenue, which took them past the national stadium, whose parking lot was cracked and filled with weeds. Soon they fell into a convoy of beachgoers in Monteros and Accords, and looped and swayed and dipped and rose with the narrow, rutted road. Fire, shirtless in denim overalls, kept thinking about the letter in his knapsack as they drove through east Kingston, where his father had lived as a boy, a swath of verandahed bungalows with shingled roofs and wide bay windows. Bourgeois forty years ago, it was a ghetto now. A ghetto with blue-collar dreams. From time to time, Fire and Ian would pull themselves away from their thoughts to talk above the sound of the engine and the onrushing wind.
Fire had spent the night in a chair on the terrace, afraid of falling asleep, knowing that he would dream of Sylvia if he slept, aware that this could send him tumbling into the pool of emotion in which he’d nearly drowned when things had ended badly in New York.
Ian had lain awake in bed, worried about their friendship, afraid that he had damaged it beyond repair. Late in the evening he went downstairs to apologize to Fire for the trouble he had caused him and found him writing at the table. Believing it was a poem, he asked if he could see it and Fire told him no—said it sharply without looking up, as if he were a pest. This had pitched Ian down a briared slope of old hurts and jealousies … prickly anxieties about class, and race, and natural gifts and talents.
They followed the convoy along the edge of the harbor past the silos of the cement factory and the flour mill to the flowered roundabout at Harbour View; there the beachgoers tooted and took the peninsula road that leads to the airport and Port Royal, where hired fishing boats would take them to the cays.
Moving into the countryside with greater speed now, Fire and Ian saw fewer cars but more people, especially in the larger towns like Morant Bay and Yallahs, where small groups waited for buses to take them to church, the women in hats and stockings and the boys and girls in suits and frilly dresses. Beyond Yallahs the land became more mountainous, the vegetation wetter, and the towns—with names like Priestman’s River and Poor Man’s Corner—quainter, smaller,
and more widely spaced. Over the hood of the dusty truck, the country rushed toward them in rippling waves of pastureland and banana groves and hamlets by the sea.
Fifteen miles outside Port Antonio, about two hours after leaving home, they came upon a fork where the main road cut inland for the next five miles to bypass a ragged line of sheltered coves.
“Thirsty?” Fire said. “Want a Guinness?”
Ian wiped his face on his white T-shirt.
“Yeah, man.”
“We have to get some from Buju then, because a dance keep last night and I know Mr. Bartley sell out.”
Fire turned off on the country lane that led to the town of Battery, passing beneath an arbor of tamarind and mango and crossing a Bailey bridge that spanned a little stream; there, naked children splashed in the easy current and women washed their clothes.
“They normally do the washing after church,” Fire explained. “But Mr. Bartley, who owns the bar, is also the pastor of the church. So whenever he has a hangover everybody knows that church gweh late.”
After passing the path to Snapper Bay, the road was straight for a hundred yards, then veered to the left, crawling along a sheer rock face before swishing around a triple bend and fluttering into the town.
Battery was built on an English fort on the lip of a low-rise cliff. It had one street, Battery Square, a narrow brick road around a rectangular park that used to be the parade ground. Around the park was a tall, stone fence.
The church and the school were on one side of the park. On the other side were ice-cream-colored clapboard houses, each with a garden and an overgrown hedge. Behind the houses was the common.
In front of a light blue house with yellow trim Fire pulled up and honked the horn. Soon Buju came down the walkway, a gangly man in a red mesh vest and a blue Knicks cap. He had a wide face with a flat chin and a nose like a lump of clay.
“You remember Ian,” Fire said to him.
“Yeah, man. How you mean?” Buju replied, booming Ian’s fist. “Yeah, man, him use to come by you modda when oonoo did likkle.” To Ian he said, “Respek, rude bwai. Long time, long time. Years without fears.”
Waiting in Vain Page 26