Waiting in Vain

by Colin Channer

  “Y’have any stout?” Fire asked.

  “Yeah, man. How much you want?”

  “You drinking too, right?”

  Buju nodded.

  “Bring bout a dozen, then,” Fire said.

  “Before I forget,” Buju said as he went inside, “Stereotone a-play down yah tonight, y’know. Oonoo must come, cause me hear a talk seh some big deejay suppose to come from Kingston. Plus me a-go run my usual chicken ting.”

  “Buju make the wickedest jerk sauce,” Fire said to Ian as Buju disappeared inside. “We selling it to some hotels now. But we really trying to get it into supermarkets.”

  “Who is we?”

  “Me and him. Well, him, really. I’m just helping him out with a couple of things … some seed money and thing. Is a trying yute. When you see a yute like that, y’haffe help him out. Plus I’m his son’s godfather, so I haffe look out for him.”

  “Oh,” Ian said, feeling jealous now. “That’s nice.”

  Buju returned with a six-pack and they sat on the curb and talked about sports and politics. When the six-pack was done another one appeared and they began to joke about the absurdity of life in Jamaica. In a sense, Buju said, Ian was a hero, for he’d stood up for his rights. A man shouldn’t tek certain disrespek. Fire laughed with them, but he didn’t agree.

  “So hummuch dat?” Fire asked as he got up to leave.

  In his mind Buju counted the bottles at their feet. There were four stouts remaining.

  “Just pay for the four,” he said, hoping for a chance to pay back Fire for all his help. Fire had helped him in so many ways, from listening to his ideas to encouraging him to create an education trust for his son.

  “Just cool, Buju man,” Fire replied, punching him playfully. “We haffe pay for what drink off, man.”

  Buju jabbed him in the chest and they began to shadowbox.

  “You cool,” Buju said as Fire slipped a cross and touched a hooking pat on his cheek. “You cyaah siddown wid a man and reason wid him in fronta you house then charge him for de juice. Wha kinda Yankee ting you comin wid? Just cool, man.”

  “But this is your business,” Fire replied. “Everybody know you have a little shop in your house. If we did go out to a bar that’s a different thing.”

  As he said this Buju feinted with an overhand and palmed his face.

  “Okay,” Fire said as he flopped on the sidewalk. “That was the knockout punch.”

  As they laughed he reached into his pocket and thumbed through the money he’d taken out of the bank for the bribe, and as Buju jerked him to his feet he palmed him a couple of bills.

  “This is not for the stout,” he said under his breath. “This is for my godson’s trust fund.”

  Buju shook his head and accepted the money, then watched them drive away.

  Back on the main road, sweetened by the bitter stout, Fire sent the Land Rover charging up the hill. On the left, from a thousand feet, the jungle fell toward them in a stream of palms and shrubs and trees hung with furry vines. Breaking across the road, the greenery resumed its cascade on their right, roiling and frothing down the steep incline and splashing into the sea, where forest green and ocean blue became a minty teal.

  At a dip in the road by a jackfruit tree, Fire turned off on a rutted track and the Land Rover bucked and grunted as it burrowed into the heart of the forest; there, the trees grew tall and light drained through the canopy in amber streams like drafts of beer. As they came out of a fording, the track became a wide dirt road that curled around the mountain, switching back through bamboo groves and stands of wild bananas.

  Picking up a grassy trail, they rode on the edge of a deep ravine to the top of a high plateau; there at the end of a gravel road was the Lighthouse, the writing retreat that Fire had bought and renovated two years before his return—a nineteenth-century windmill that had lost its blades to vandals and the weather. From a ring of white hibiscus it rose up forty feet, a column of stone with six-foot yellow shutters that opened from the top like wings.

  Zachy, the caretaker, was playing cards with his cronies beneath a poui tree aflame with scarlet flowers. The wind blew the fallen blooms across the crabgrass … sifted them across the slatted table where the old men sat with mugs of rum and milk. Zachy waved and flashed a toothless grin when Fire and Ian arrived and returned to his game. His dentures, which he only wore to church, were stuffed in a pocket of his blue Sunday suit.

  As he passed inside through a tall, arched door, Ian began to compare himself with Fire. On one level he felt superior, because Fire had not achieved as much as he—had not earned as much money or enjoyed as much fame. On another level he was embarrassed because he had so little now and Fire seemed to have everything. As Fire went outside to cut some roses and birds-of-paradise for his vases, Ian stood in the doorway and looked around. A wooden staircase with scrolled iron banisters curled along the book-lined walls to the bedroom, a cantilevered loft that extended three-quarters of the way to the door. In front of him on a raised platform were a sofa upholstered in saffron chenille and a pair of honey-colored club chairs in braided rattan with arms like the fenders of a forties sedan. The chairs were arranged around a bowlegged table, which sat low on a caramel-colored rug that Fire had purchased years ago while cycling through Morocco. Ian had never owned a space like this, one that was a part of him, an extension of himself. When he could afford it, he had always paid the best designers to beautify his homes. But Fire had worked with Sarge to renovate his home, had built the loft, had helped to lay the floorboards.

  “I need to bathe,” Ian said, as his jealousy revealed itself in the form of an itch.

  “The bathroom is outside,” Fire told him as he slipped some stems in a stoneware urn, “between the kitchen and Zachy’s cabin. Anything you want is in the cabinet.”

  Upstairs, Fire put his knapsack on his writing desk, a drafting table from the twenties, and removed the linen from the tall trunk bed. Glancing at the hamper, he saw that Zachy, old and forgetful now, had not remembered to have the washing done. Luckily, he’d brought a few things from Kingston.

  From the mirrored armoire he dressed the bed in tangerine sheets, then leaned out the window and gazed at the sky, preparing to discuss the sketch pad with Ian. Am I reading too much into things? Fire wondered. Still, his instincts told him that the sketch pad and the Donovan incident were related. It would be good to talk with I-nelik now, but he was on the road with Ziggy.

  He stood there thinking till Ian returned.

  “What you have to eat?” Ian asked as he came up the stairs.

  “What you feel like?”

  “Like I woulda eat some fish.”

  “Look in the armoire you see a walkie-talkie,” Fire said as he dug through his knapsack for underwear. “Call Teego down by Snapper Bay and find out what him catch.”

  When Fire left the room, Ian went to his desk, sat in his chair, and swiveled in front of his typewriter, continuing the quiet sobbing he’d begun in the shower. He imagined himself having Fire’s life—being confident, and kind, and forgiving, to naturally love himself and others. Ian felt the room begin to spin. He hadn’t slept all night and he’d had six stouts on an empty stomach. As he closed his eyes to regain his balance, he began to feel that he was shrinking, that his skin was tightening on his bones. He stumbled toward the bed. Lying there on his back in the hard stone tower, naked except for off-white boxers, feeling small and useless, Ian began to imagine himself as a denatured sperm, a dot being carried in another man’s stream. Fire was taking care of his mother. Fire had taken care of the police. Fire. Fire. Fire. What the fuck would he do without him? Apparently nothing. He’d depended on him for something or other all his life, it seemed.

  If it hadn’t been for Fire’s father he would’ve never been an artist. But Humphrey Heath saw in him the talent he had hoped to see in his son and nurtured it … took him away from his mother and moved him from the ghetto to a Jack’s Hill villa with a tennis court and a pool, and p
ulled strings to get him transferred from a trade school to Wolmers Boys, the most prestigious school on the island. There he worked twice as hard to prove himself worthy; there he lied, saying that Humphrey was his father to gain respect and acceptance; there he battered a curious boy who began to whisper that he wasn’t Humphrey’s son, and that Humphrey had left his wife because he was a beeps. Ian knew this was true but forced himself to disbelieve it, for he didn’t want fear and pride to make him lose his focus. He could never go back to where he came from.

  The voice in his head, the same one that kept urging him to murder Phil and Margaret and kill himself, grew more demanding. What kind of man needs so many people to prop him up? it challenged. A man who isn’t a man, said his demon.

  Across the room, on a scullery table, was an electric kettle, and utensils for making coffee and tea. From the fridge he got a piece of ginger, peeled it, mashed it with the back of a spoon, and steeped it in hot water to make some tea. Retracing his steps on shaky legs, the voice aglow in his head, he tripped over Fire’s knapsack, which, the voice explained, had been placed there for that purpose. Sucking his teeth, he threw a T-shirt on the spreading spill and as he replaced the things that had fallen out of the bag he saw a folded sheet of lilac paper—which he recognized from the night before.

  His first response was to put it away, but the voice in his head was insistent. Don’t be a fool, it said. Didn’t you hear him whispering to his father last night? Who do you think they were talking about? What do you think he was saying? Read the letter and you’ll know. They’re hatching a plot against you, man. Don’t know why or for what but Fire was acting too strange last night … too secretive. How does he really feel about you? You’ll know if you read this. He’s always been jealous of you … of your talent … because his father spent more time with you.

  He’ll never know if I read it, Ian thought as he glanced outside. Guilty but vengeful, he squatted next to the desk, aware that this was more than Fire’s room. This was his most private place, his refuge, his sanctuary. His desk was the altar where he summoned his muse by drumming on the keys of his Underwood manual, a 1930 No. 5 that had once belonged to Claude McKay. Eyes darting furtively, Ian unfolded the letter and began to read.

  December—, 19—

  Dearest Sylvia,

  You are writing this letter. Every word is yours. For as I sit here miles away from you, you occupy my soul. The spirit that used to live in me is a wanderer now, a thin dull shadow that haunts the places where we met and loved and laughed like careless children. Do you remember our kisses, our tongues full and strong like Spanish wine? The warmth that would invade our bones? The weakness in our legs? Then, I did not think a letter to you would be this way—a plea for forgiveness. Writing should be a sweet indulgence, the letters arriving damp with musk and longing. This is not right, Sylvia. This letter should be amusing, a reminder of how often we forget the things we say … because we talk so much. Perhaps you don’t remember, but we met and fell in love by chance. When did you first love me, Sylvia? And do you love me still? If you do then you should be here, writing poems in the shade and drinking tea with condensed milk. Come and spend some time with me, bathe with me in a secret river, and wine me in the shallows where the mullets lay their eggs, the current moving slowly, the deep mud sucking us down. Come feed me your sweet fig nipples, wet my lips with red wine kisses, dip my head in the healing stream that flows between your legs. This is the end of this letter, my love, this letter that you have written. But I won’t say goodbye, because I’m afraid of what that means, so I will say I’m sorry. I am sorry, Sylvia Lucas, for walking away from you, causing you pain. Now, I’m going to think of you, your crooked smile, your slender waist, and touch myself, dreaming you will be here when I wake.

  After reading the letter, Ian began to feel another self rise within him, an old self really, one that was deaf to reason and blindly male, that drew its power and sense of worth from the weakness of others. Fire’s vulnerability produced a perverted sense of safety in him—the kind of cunning self-pity that breeds unchecked in prisons and hospitals, infecting healthy brains and causing people to say to themselves, “I’m all right because he’s worse off than me.” Ian read the letter again, warmed for the moment by the knowledge that he was not the only one confounded by love and its often contrary demands. As he sifted the words for clues—the whens, the wheres, the whys, and the hows—he felt a chill. He’d been left out of this love affair, which he was sure now must have begun in June.

  Through the window he heard Fire singing as he came along the walkway. So you doan have nutten over me, Ian thought as he replaced the letter quickly. Fuck wha’ever you make of yourself. When it come down to it, you worse than me because you get fraid and apologize, and me still a-stand firm.

  When Fire returned from the shower he found a new mood in the room, as if old grudges has been scrubbed away—loofahed off like dead skin. Ian was extraordinarily talkative and the light had returned to his eyes, which for days had been in shadow.

  Looking around the loft, which was lined with books to the twenty-foot ceiling, Ian said, “How many books you have up here?”

  Fire was sitting on the edge of the bed, massaging his skin with almond oil. Ian was leaning against the record changer, an old Grundig which resembled a casket on legs with its wooden cabinet and lidded top.

  “About one thousand,” Fire replied, pausing to consider if by books Ian meant just novels.

  “And downstairs?”

  “Another thousand.”

  “And you read off alla dem?”

  “Most. As Oscar Wilde said, ‘There is no such thing as a bad book … only bad writers.’ ”

  Shaking his head and laughing, Ian tapped the Grundig and asked if it worked.

  “Yeah, man,” Fire replied. “Them old tube ting-deh doan break down. I swap a guy in Port Antonio for a boom box. When I throw it in the back and bring it up here I couldn’t believe it, man. Only the speaker did need a little work and ah get that fix for little and nutten.”

  “Good. So let’s lick some music, then.”

  On the front of the Grundig, on the left-hand side, was a corrugated sliding door. Ian opened it and found a trove of old LPs. As he stacked the record changer with his favorite Charlie Parkers, Fire made some lemonade. Soon it began to rain, and for the next three hours they leaned against a windowsill drinking out of jelly jars, talking about music and history and writing and art, voices swooping and swerving like kites.

  When the sun came out they went to get the fish from Teego. The trails were wet and slippery, and in some places covered with mud. As they talked and laughed in this landscape of fragrant earth and lustrous leaves and burbling streams, each began to feel the presence of the woman he loved. The knot on a branch was her navel, a bunch of bananas her toes. Papayas and cacao pods were her breasts, and an overripe mango, split from falling, brought to mind the sweetness of the fruit between her legs. And their conversation, which had been about cricket, turned suddenly to reflection on their lives and loves.

  “You know what the big difference is between me and you?” Ian asked as they stopped to descend into the fording. “I am a pussy man and you are a woman man. See … a pussy man wi fuck any kinda pussy … ugly pussy, pretty pussy, lean pussy, straight pussy … cause him jus love pussy. Him nuh business bout nutten else. Him doan care how the woman look. Or her personality. Or wha she want outta life. Cause is about pussy and pussy doan laugh, pussy doan cry, pussy barely even crack a smile. And pussy doan have no great ambition. Pussy just waah get fuck. So my life simpler. A woman man like you now have too much distraction. Yeah, you love pussy to an extent, but you really into women first. You waah understand them and get to like them and get emotional with them. Y’see like how you can stop fuck a woman and be her friend—me cyaah do that. But I see you do it with Claire, and I see you do it with Nan. Me couldn’t do that. I doan have the time fe be a woman friend after we done fuck.”

  It w
as true, Fire thought, as he laughed with Ian. He had lost his virginity at fourteen, while Ian had slept with thirteen girls at the age of twelve—and by sixteen, thirty-four. In high school Ian developed a brooding disposition that girls used to think was cool, but which was in fact a form of shyness: he didn’t like the way he spoke. In high school, Fire wasn’t cool. No one wanted to sleep with him. They thought he was funny, and nice to talk to, and wicked with words—which they didn’t find sexy till their college years, when these same traits were recognized as the base ingredients of charm.

  “I was such a loser,” Fire said jokingly, as they reached the jackfruit tree that marked the entrance to the main road. The muddy tires slipped before they gripped the blacktop. “When I look back now, there were so many girls I coulda clap.”

  As Fire went down the list of failures, Ian laughed along while mocking him inside. You was always one big pussy, he thought. Always Mr. Nice … telling gyal you sorry and all that kinda fart. Before I bow to a gyal again ah mash up her bloodclaat first.

  From the country lane to Battery they turned off on the narrow path that led to Snapper Bay. From the top of the hill, the beach was a wedge of white between lush green points that stretched into the sea, spreading then hooking like crab claws. Away from the shore, at the foot of a hill, was a cluster of huts within a rusty fence whose flapping sheets resembled strips of mudcloth.

  “Yow sah!” Fire shouted as he parked at the edge of the sand.

  As Teego looked up from his soccer game, a gaggle of laughing children scrambled over the beached canoes.

  “Is Ian dat?” Teego asked, champing on his spliff. He was thin but muscled and his locks had been bleached by the sun and the sea. “Rope een man. Long time nuh see. Come lick a chalice wid me.”

  They took off their shoes, boomed fists with the bredren, and took their place in the circle, talking and laughing as they juggled the ball like seals, diving and twisting and jumping to keep it from touching the ground. As he caught the ball in the nape of his neck, Teego asked Ian about the fight: “So you really do dat or is lie?”