chapter fifteen
“Four!”
The crowd under the bamboo pavilion applauded Fire’s cover drive. The next ball, though, was a bouncer, and he scuttled to the pitch.
“Don’t hurt me, nephew, y’know,” I-nelik yelled jokingly as the bowler returned to his mark. “Cricket is supposed to be a gentleman’s game—I don’t know what a cruff like you doing here.”
The crowd tittered, then settled down. Fire brushed off his white flannels and tapped his bat slowly, watching and waiting. The bowler dropped the next one short as well and he shuffled down the pitch to meet the ball and lost his offstump in the process.
He took a seat in the pavilion after his beautiful eight and watched the innings collapse. Buju, the only batsman to reach double figures, was soon caught in the slips. After that the Battery Eleven flowed in a steady stream to and from the crease, and they lost the match by six wickets.
Everyone went to Mr. Bartley’s bar after the match to drink and eat a just-killed-and-curried goat and sip hot mannish water.
Fire and I-nelik sat on the hood of the Land Rover and ate and talked. Buju kept his distance. He and Fire still were not completely cool since the fight with Ian. They’d talked things over, though, and agreed to let things slide.
Fire was taking lots of ribbing for his elegant eight. He was a good batsman, but impatient, and had been slipping steadily in the batting order. He used to be an opener, but was now batting five.
“Dat eight is a prophecy, y’know,” Zacky said, interrupting the conversation. “Last match you did make five. And you bat five today. Make twelve next time nuh, so me can get a game. I was a boss opener in me time y’know. Ask you father. I wasn’t pretty like you though … but I used to score more runs.”
The three of them had a good laugh.
“Everybody say is the prettiest eight dem see in years, man,” Zachy continued. “Only Lawrence Rowe coulda make eight runs look so good.”
Zachy went to shark down a domino game inside.
“That Zachy is something else,” I-nelik remarked. Darkness was rolling in off the sea.
“Someone told me he used to be a class bats one time,” Fire said.
“I’m sure it was him,” the dread quipped. “Him brag about it, but is true. Zachy was a class bats when him was young. But unfortunately for him, he was an opening bats when Allen Rae and Jeffrey Stollmeyer were opening for the West Indies. That was a team … Worrell … Weekes … and Walcott … Ramadhin and Valentine as spin bowlers. Remember when Ian was young we used to call him Ramadhin?”
“He was a good spinner,” Fire said blankly.
“He went back to the States, right?” I-nelik asked. “Y’ever heard from him?”
“Well the last I heard from him was when he was out here,” Fire replied. “I presume he’s back in the States.”
“I want to talk to him, y’know,” I-nelik said.
Fire was staring out to sea.
“Something is wrong,” I-nelik went on. “The way Ian beat up that Mackenzie bredda … was not a normal kind of anger. I know that anger. You know that anger. We’re all artists. That is frustration … and a special kind. Artists tend to be very controlling—you can’t create without control. You can only imagine, but you can’t create. And they carry this need for control into everyday life. Ian is losing control over something, Fire. And it’s making him lose his mind.”
Fire steeled himself against feeling sorry. He wasn’t guilty anymore. As time had passed and he’d thought about things, he’d realized how paternalistic he’d been toward Ian, and how little all his efforts had done to make him change. And he had his own damn troubles. He’d almost slept with Blanche that night. He would’ve if there’d been a condom. She was seeing someone now. No one he knew. And to his surprise this didn’t bother him. This was good. It meant he was over her. Being able to just fuck her, he realized, was its own twisted kind of triumph.
“Honestly, I-nelik,” he said, still looking out to sea, “I can’t be Ian’s conscience forever. When you get to a certain age, it’s your duty to search out the meaning of right and wrong.”
“So what really go down with the two of oonoo?” I-nelik asked. “I-man hear a whole heapa things.”
Fire told him about the fight without revealing the letter’s exact contents. I-nelik listened quietly.
“Ian was reaching for help,” he said. “Ian didn’t want to kill himself. He wanted you to think that and ask him about it, then he would talk to you. When people want to kill themselves, Fire, they don’t want people to stop them, so they don’t tell anybody. When they’re getting close to the point where they think they might kill themselves, though, then they cry out for help … maybe they botch the attempt or have people ‘discover’ their plan and talk them out of it. But in any event, a person is far gone when they get to that point. It means they considering it seriously.”
“How you know so much about suicide, I-nelik?”
I-nelik pulled him closer and whispered, “Every artist thinks about suicide at some point in his life.”
“So what we should do, dread?” Fire asked.
“Let’s go up to the Lighthouse and call him.”
Fire was consumed with anxiety as they drove up the hill. He imagined Ian dying … hanging himself … and he heard his own words urging him to do it during the fight. All self-interest left his body when he reached the door, and in his mind he began to see Ian with a noose around his neck, preparing to take the step.
Fire dialed Ian’s number in New York. The phone rang without an answer.
“If he’s not at home, call Claire and find out,” I-nelik said.
Fire dialed again. “Claire, it’s Fire,” he began urgently. “Have you seen or heard from Ian?”
“Let me tell you about your fucking friend,” she said. “Ian has stabbed me in the fucking back and his ass is mine. Ian and Lewis have defrauded me of hundreds of thousands of dollars, okay? Ian has sold pieces to Lewis behind my back … cutting me out … after all I’ve done for him … after how close we used to be. Well, I’m suing them both!”
He pretended he didn’t know. She would be angry with him as well.
“And you know what pissed me off even more?” she continued. “He was calling me to comfort him because Margaret told him she doesn’t want him anymore. Me! Me who he’s fucked over … he was calling me!”
She’d spoken to him, Fire thought. Which was good. He was alive.
“Where’d he call from?” Fire asked.
“So what about me?” Claire snapped. “Don’t you care about how I feel, Fire?”
“Yes, Claire … but …”
“But he’s more important?”
“Does it really matter?”
She hung up.
He threw the phone on the bed, but it bounced off and hit the floor. He put it to his ear. It was dead. He tried to dial anyway.
I-nelik was annoyed now. How could the boy lose his cool at a moment like this? The dread reached out and grabbed the phone. Fire grabbed it back.
“Listen, I-nelik, I’m a big man, okay?”
The dread waved him away and began to use a penknife to pull the phone apart. Fire stormed through the door, jumped into the Land Rover, and drove to Mr. Bartley’s to call and apologize to Claire, his best bet for finding out where Ian was. He thought of what he’d say to her as he gunned the engine.
“Claire,” he said, as soon as she picked up. “I was wrong and I apologize. I shouldn’t have said what I said. You know I love you best … I’m just under a lot of pressure, that’s all.”
He spoke to her softly, counting every minute on the Air Jamaica clock over the door. She eventually warmed up, but he was forced to listen as she poured out her emotions. This took fifteen minutes, during which time Mr. Bartley kept hinting to him to get off the line. This was a business, he kept saying. And his daughter was supposed to be calling from Canada. Finally, after about twenty minutes, Fire felt safe to ask about Ian
.
“I want to give him a piece o’ my mind about what he’s done to you,” he said. “Where’d the fucker call from?”
“It’s okay, Fire,” she replied. “Don’t get involved.”
He thought quickly. “If it concerns you then it concerns me, Claire. I need to know where he is. He wasn’t at his house when I called him.”
“Of course not,” she replied. “He’s in Jamaica … at a hotel in Negril.”
“Which one?”
“Sea something. I can’t remember—”
“Sea Cliffs, maybe?” he asked. Fuck, so many of them began with “Sea.”
“Aaah … that could be it.”
“How did he sound?”
“Weak … and hoarse.”
“This might sound strange … but … did he mention suicide?”
“Not at all. He just sounded very depressed … and rightfully so … he should be ashamed of what he did. Can you blame me for how I feel, Fire?”
He didn’t answer. He was too busy thinking about I-nelik’s words: When people want to kill themselves, Fire, they don’t want people to stop them …
He apologized to Mr. Bartley and dialed the hotel. There was no Ian Gore there, the woman said. He described him. No, they hadn’t seen anyone fitting that description. Maybe it wasn’t the Sea-something, he began to think. Maybe Claire was mistaken. And again, Ian could’ve registered under an alias. Fuck, he had to find him. Miss Gita was back and didn’t know her son had been there.
“Call the police,” Mr. Bartley said, when Fire told him what had happened. “Have them check all de hotels. Dat bwai wasn’t looking good at all when I did take him go town. Call all the hotels and see if him is elsewhere. We can’t let him kill himself. If you kill yourself you go to hell because you don’t have any time to ask forgiveness.”
“Ian needs no introduction to hell, Mr. Bartley. He lives there.”
He took Mr. Bartley’s suggestion, picked up I-nelik, and headed for Negril, which was more than five hours away.
Kill Phil. Kill Margaret. Kill me. The first time that Ian had heard this, it was clearly the voice of someone else. It had an accent he couldn’t place … the kind of British accent you’d hear in a Peter Cushing film. The voice he began to hear after Claire hung up on him was also from a film—his film. He was the star of this film, as well as the scriptwriter, producer, and director. The voice in this film was his own.
In his film, he was good and Margaret and Phil were evil, so he had to kill them. Then, to show how powerful he was, he would kill himself … then … then … he hadn’t finished the script yet … but … he knew that he would come back to life … or … maybe he wouldn’t kill himself … aaahh … he would have a fake bullet for himself and wouldn’t die at all … he would survive … somehow … because star cyaah dead.
As fate would have it, Ian was scheduled to leave Jamaica on the night he spoke to Margaret and Claire. The voice told him what to do: Leave but don’t check out. Be strong. Go to New York. Don’t tell anyone about your plans. Kill Phil. Kill Margaret. Kill me.
He slept during most of the flight. About a half hour outside JFK, though, turbulence shook the plane and he awoke. His first impulse was to machine-gun the passengers with his cock, but the scene wouldn’t have worked with his script. So he thought of opening an emergency door and flying the rest of the way on his own power. That could fit the script, he thought, but with a bit of a rewrite. But by the time he’d figured out how to open the door he fell asleep again.
He worked on his storyboard as he rode home in the cab. He would go home and get his gun from beneath the bed, wait for Phil to come. He would force him at gunpoint to invite Margaret over, then kill him while she was on the way. When Margaret came, he would force her to suck Phil’s dead cock while he fucked her with his gun. Then he would fuck her to death with the real thing. When she was dead, he would put the gun in his mouth and pull the trigger and the bullet would ricochet off his hard palate.
About an hour after Ian had reached New York, Margaret and Phil were having an argument.
“Phil,” she pleaded, “why can’t you see what I’m saying?”
“Because you’re overreacting, luv,” Phil replied, reaching across the bed to stroke her hair. “Ian was just high. He’s not going to kill us.”
“He threatened us and that’s enough. All I want you to do is go over there and get the rest of your stuff before he gets back.”
Phil put his arm around her and pulled her to his side. He kissed her on the forehead and wiped a tear from her face.
“Babe,” he said reassuringly, “in any case he’s in Jamaica. It’s not like he can fly over here in a flash.”
“Please, Phil … please … for my sake … pleeease.”
“Okay, don’t answer the phone,” he told her as he got up to leave. “Let the machine pick up, in case he decides to call again.”
Phil pondered his future as he rode in the back of the gypsy cab. He’d been gigging around a lot, and Margaret had been saying that the A&R people were interested. But these things took time, he knew; in the meantime his money was running out. He didn’t want to depend on her. And fuck, man, he’d had no idea until now that Ian had been feeling this way all this time. Then he began to think about something that had been simmering in his mind.
There was no life in the Navy Yard that night. Even the wind was still. As he stepped onto the curb, a streetlight coughed and fizzled.
“You will wait, right?” he asked the driver as he fumbled in his pockets for his keys. Something about the blown bulb made him afraid of going inside.
“Pay first,” the driver said.
Phil gave him the fare plus extra. “Funny how the light just popped … weird, wasn’t it?”
“I was saying the same thing. It had me kinda spooked there for a sec … but being in New York and all, you got other things to be scared of, like ignant motherfuckers with guns.”
The driver cracked a smile. Phil felt okay to crack one too.
“Where you from?” the man asked, sliding over to the passenger seat. “You sound kinda different.”
Phil squatted so that their faces were aligned.
“The U.K.,” he replied.
“Where’s that? Canada?”
“No. Britain.”
“And where’s that?”
“Like England.”
“Okay, I gotcha now. So the U.K. and England are like Queens and Jersey then.”
Phil didn’t understand the comparison, but he said yes. “Where are you from?” he asked.
“Me? Originally? Georgia … Columbus. Little Richard’s from there.”
“Are Georgia and Columbus like Queens and Jersey too?”
“Well … not exactly … but kinda. You vacationing over here? … aah … scuse me but I didn’t catch your name.”
“Phil.”
“Doug.”
“I came to try out for an orchestra … I’m a trumpeter … but I ended up meeting a girl and we fell in love … but”—Phil paused a bit and searched the driver’s eye for sympathy and experience. He didn’t find them to the degree he wanted, but he needed to clear his mind—“she’s black. I’m not … being a racialist or anything,” he continued, “but it scares me. See, her boyfriend before me was black … and he’s going crazy because he wants her back. And it’s affecting her so deeply. She’s in tears, hysterical. She says it’s over his threats … but I don’t believe her completely. I think a lot of her tears are for him … for the sadness that he’s feeling. And that’s making me feel insecure, and I can’t help feeling that it’s a color thing. I mean he treats her like shit … always has … and I treat her like a queen … and he still can touch her in this way that I don’t feel I can. I can’t help feeling that it’s a color thing, Doug. Maybe I can’t connect with her in the same way a black man can … I don’t know … maybe a white man has to be twice as good.”
He told Doug about the threats and explained why he had come
to this address in his cab.
“Get on back to the U.S. of K., man, and leave this shit behind. You said this nigger got a gun and he threatening her on the phone and he saying he think you out to kill him? I know people like that … I done been shot by one jealous nigger. No woman’s worth a bullet, Phil. Leave her ass and go back home. And if I was you I’d quit all this talking and get my shit together. Cause you never know when he’ll appear.”
Doug made sense but Phil was still confused. It took him a while to open the lock—his fingers were trembling and he couldn’t get the key to fit.
The lights were off inside, which made him even edgier, claustrophobic, as if he were trapped in a coal mine. He felt for the switch as his heart swelled to fill his chest. The feel of the stubby plastic relieved him. Smiling to himself, he flicked it. But nothing happened and he panicked. Shit. He flicked it again. Nothing. And again. Blackness. More fear. And silence. At the base of his skull, a hammer began to bang a tattoo that almost drowned the sound of his heavy breathing. He reached out again. And then he felt it—this cold sensation that he was not alone. He listened keenly. But he didn’t hear anything. Fuck, he thought he saw something move. “Who’s there?” he called out timidly. Sweat soaked his shirt. He didn’t see any movement or hear any sound, which rather than reassuring him led him to question his senses, and this made him feel even more vulnerable. As his vision adjusted to the dimness and he still wasn’t able to see anything unusual, he began to relax and suddenly, out of nowhere, the reason for the darkness hit him. He’d forgotten to pay the electric bill.
Laughing at himself a bit, though still uneasy, he felt his way to the kitchen and got a candle. As he walked under the basketball net, he mapped out the most efficient route for gathering his things and devised an emergency plan—grab spare horn and scores first, everything else after. Then he saw what looked like a figure in the bed. He stopped. Then crept closer. Then stopped again when his breath blew out the light. Crouching slowly, he placed the candleholder on the floor. Could it be Ian? He didn’t want to go any closer if it was. Maybe he’s asleep. But don’t be daft, Phil, he’s in Jamaica. Now you’re overreacting. Just get your things. He felt his way to the dresser, felt for his scores, then stooped to pick up the trumpet. He felt the handle of the case and grabbed it. But it was empty. The trumpet must be in the room. All he would need to find it was light. As he scoured his memory he focused in on the form in the bed. If it was Ian he would have answered, he thought. It may be just a bundle of pillows and sheets, for heaven’s sake. Why am I getting so hyper? “Ian?” He jumped at the sound of his own voice. But he calmed down when there was no reply. Feeling bolder now, he called out again, a little louder. “Ian? … It’s me, Phil … Are you sleeping? Ian … Ian … Oh fuck, there’s no one there!”
Waiting in Vain Page 35