Ahead of them, advancing from the edge of the crowd, whose members were singing and holding hands, Fire saw Mr. Heath and Major Daley.
“Well, look who’s here,” said I-nelik in a sarcastic voice. “The First Couple. I’ll check you later. They might start holding hands too.”
“This is not the time for that,” Fire said, grabbing his arm. “We’re family, man. Blood.”
Searching Fire’s eyes I-nelik said, “Stop pretending. You’ve never liked having a battyman father. Don’t get sentimental now.”
“That has never been my issue with him—and you know that.”
“Well it should be.”
The dread sucked his teeth, pushed his way between the men, and burrowed into the crowd. Fire began to feel queasy, as if he’d eaten sour bananas. There was a part of him that often wondered if his relationship with his father would’ve been different if the man were straight. Or if it would’ve been any easier if they didn’t live in Jamaica—a stubbornly homophobic country. He thought about this awhile and reassured himself that this had nothing to do with it. They’d been distant from the beginning.
“Come,” Mr. Heath said from a few paces. The neck of his black shirt-jacket was open, revealing a red silk ascot. “Come and hug your father.”
Fire tried to feel the closeness, told himself it would feel natural if he tried. They’d hugged like this maybe three times, he thought. He couldn’t remember the first time. The last time had been at his mother’s bedside.
“We are family,” Mr. Heath whispered. “No matter what, son, we are family.”
“Yes, Dada.”
“You are my only child, Fire. We can’t keep living like this. Jesus Christ, man. I know that I’m not a perfect man and that I might have done things to alienate you … but come on, man … gimme a chance. Life is too short, man. Look at Ian and Miss Gita. Let that be an example to us. Things aren’t right, so let’s try and fix it. You are my only child, Fire. My only son.”
“I understand that,” Fire replied. “I understand that.”
“Are you sure you understand?”
“Yes … I’m sure I understand … so we can let go now.”
Fire stepped back and turned to the sun. The light would be gone soon. Did Buju and Teego remember to line the gravel road with flambeaus? The procession needed light to go down to the beach for the nine-night. Shit, did he order enough Portosans and tables?
“How much did all this cost you?” Mr. Heath asked, puffing on his cigar. Major Daley was standing to the side.
“Money is not the object, Dada,” Fire replied, as he thought of what I-nelik had told him.
Mr. Heath wagged his head.
“You let that boy use you to the grave, eeh man?”
“Let it rest,” Fire said.
“I keep forgetting that I can’t tell you anything.”
“That’s not true.”
“Of course it’s true.”
“You know it’s not true.”
“Name one piece of advice you’ve ever taken from me …”
“I’m not in the mood for challenges now.”
Mr. Heath dabbed eyes.
“That hurt, you know …”
“I understand that.”
“No you don’t. You won’t know what I’m talking about until you have children.”
“Fire, Fire.”
Over his father’s shoulder Fire saw two of Ian’s sisters approaching.
“Dada,” he said, taking their hands, “remember Pearl and Junie? You know them—”
“Oh … yes,” Mr. Heath replied, finding quick use for his hands—stroking his beard and holding his cigar. “How are you girls really doing?”
“So weh the children?” Fire asked brightly. He wanted to see them in their new Sunday outfits.
Junie, the older one, a fat-bottomed girl with droopy eyes, rubbed her hands down her green minidress and squirmed in her go-go boots, which were yellow like her back-length wig. Her sister, in a vinyl midriff to match her black battyrider, scratched her bouffant weave and giggled. She had a face like a truck—like a truck had hit it.
“So where are the little ones?” Mr. Heath asked.
“At home,” Junie said.
Fuck, Fire thought. So these are your church clothes.
“How many you have?” Mr. Heath asked.
“Junie has six and Pearl has four,” Fire said, speaking on their behalf. “They are really nice children and—”
“So why they didn’t bring them?” Mr. Heath insisted.
“We goin to a dance down Oracabessa later and we doan know when we a-go reach home,” Junie said.
Pearl slipped a hand around Fire’s waist and snuggled up against his chest. “Y’ave any money? We want fe take a taxi.”
“No!” Mr. Heath said, slapping Fire’s hand.
“Dada!” Fire said as Junie picked up the billfold.
“You’re just like your mother,” Mr. Heath exclaimed. The veins in his neck were thick like high-voltage wires. “You just give, give, give, give, give …”
“I can’t help you,” Fire said as the women walked away. “I really can’t help you right now.”
The music ended and the crowd began to separate slowly. Fire felt his limbs trembling. So what if the old man is right? he thought. He doesn’t have the right to treat me this way. And look at them … their brother is dead and they don’t even care.
“See what I mean,” Mr. Heath said, as he pulled on his cigar. “Coolie-dem just disgusting. I tried with Ian but—”
“What is wrong with you?” Fire shouted. “Who do you think you are?”
“Adrian!” Mr. Heath snapped.
“What?” Fire asked, shoving his fists in his pockets.
“Don’t forget yourself.”
“I didn’t mean to do that,” Fire said while looking at his pebble grain shoes. He wasn’t bowing to his father, he told himself. The shoes were really interesting.
“You don’t think sometimes,” Mr. Heath said, clasping his hands behind him, afraid that he might reach out and be denied. “That’s always been your problem.”
“Just leave me alone,” Fire said.
He plunged into the crowd, twisting and pushing against the mass. The rastamen had started to play again, and the crosscurrents of their polyglot rhythms echoed off the buildings and smashed against each other, creating a kind of sonic dust that hung over the murmuring conversations of the slow-moving crowd. Darkness was falling like a mist of rain, blowing like a purple haze.
Fire shook hands without looking and blindly returned hellos as he fought his way around the edge of the park, pressed against the stout stone fence, reaching for handholds and pulling himself along like a climber on a horizontal cliff. A woman fainted and he was crushed against the fence in the rush to pick her up, and an elbow gored his side. This is madness, he thought as the taste of bile rose to the back of his throat. He had to eat, he told himself as he watched the woman being passed overhead like a log. He had to eat … and reach the stage … and get the urn … take it down to the beach and out to sea.
According to his plan, as soon as the service was over, the choir and the rastamen should have set off up the hill to the gravel road with Miss Gita and the guests in tow for the nine-night and the spreading of the ashes. Because he’d been arguing with his father, he’d not been at his post when the ceremony was over, and, left to themselves, the choir members had drifted off to socialize with friends, and the rastamen had formed a groundation circle and begun to smoke weed and chant down Babylon.
Now he was trapped across the street from Buju’s house. To get to the stage he needed to work his way along the fence in the direction of the seawall, then slip around the short end of the rectangular park. Accepting the fact that the recession would never occur, he cotched against a ledge in the fence and waited for the crowd to pass. A breeze brought the smell of fried fish from Snapper Bay on the other side of the hill … the garlic … the pimento … the Scotch
bonnet pepper … the heavy perfume of coconut oil. He trawled the conversations as the crowd swam by. No one was talking about Ian. They were talking about the fish, though—how good it smelled—and describing how they’d like to have theirs. Some wanted hard dough bread, some wanted festival, one or two were hoping for rice or steamed vegetables. Could I-nelik be right? Could they all have come for the food? He began to wonder now. It didn’t make sense, but he still gave it thought, to keep himself from thinking about the quarrel with his father … and the argument with his uncle … and the way the service had ended in disarray. Maybe the old man was right.
He plucked a program from the sidewalk; but he lost his idea by the time he’d reached for his pen; and he sat there for a while with the Uniball suspended over the paper, waiting for a thought.
“Fire, ah just want to tell you that you shouldn’t feel bad about what happen,” a voice interrupted.
“Is awright, Zachy,” Fire said without looking up. “But we can talk bout this later.”
The crusty voice became a whisper. A bony hand fell on his shoulder. He imagined the toothless mouth. “I am really de one to be blame fe dis what happen here, because I get de dream and never tell nobody. Cause de day Ian dead me did dream mushroom … and anytime me dream mushroom dat mean death. Ah doan know what to do with meself now, Fire. Ah doan know where to go.”
“Never mind,” Fire said, as he tried to turn his mind in on itself like a Roman villa. He lowered his lids and listened to his breathing, and judged the saltiness of his mouth by running his tongue over his palate. Soon Zachy’s voice was beaten into the droning world outside his head—from which another voice was calling.
“Hello,” the voice said in a tone both timid and insistent. “Hello, can you hear me?”
And he opened his eyes to see Sylvia standing there in a black cotton dress with a flouncy hem, holding a pocketbook against her breasts like a schoolgirl clasping a three-ring binder. For a moment he wasn’t sure if he knew her. Her hair was longer now, tumbling to her shoulders in waves and curls from a part in the middle of her head. Unsure of how he felt, he made a simple declaration. “I didn’t know you were here.”
chapter eighteen
She didn’t answer immediately. She just stood there, leaning back on one leg, using her body weight to keep it from shaking. The melancholy in his voice was making her want to hold him, but he seemed to her so different now. Mischief no longer danced across his brows.
“How are you?” she asked.
He raised his palms and shrugged. Through the neck of his open shirt his collarbone dipped and rose, and she noticed that he was thinner. His skin was tighter around his mouth and his cheekbones seemed higher, making his face appear impregnable. Tears, she thought, could never breach those high embankments.
“It’s so sad about Ian, isn’t it?”
He nodded.
She had been standing at the edge of the crowd when he arrived, and had watched him from a distance as he talked first with I-nelik and then his father, both of whom she knew by instinct. Twice when he stood on the edge of the common it seemed as if he’d looked at her, but fearful that she wouldn’t know what to say, she’d merged into the shifting crowd. She had arrived on the island the day before, using a provision in her airline ticket to stop over en route to St. Lucia, where Diego had arranged for her to stay in a villa with a view of Les Pitons, the twin volcanic plugs that overlook the languid village of Soufrière. There she planned to rest and regroup and write for a month. She’d landed in Montego Bay and taken a commuter plane a hundred and twenty miles across the island’s hilly spine, landing at an airfield that was obviously a pasture till the pilot told her different. As they came in low across the turquoise water she half-expected the plane to sprout pontoons and skim to a halt on the rippling waves, through which she made out schools of fish. Panicking as the nose went down, she closed her eyes and squeezed her knees, and in a moment of suspended weight and expectations she found herself imagining that she wasn’t going to a funeral, but rather to spend a month with her lover, who’d be waiting for her in that shed with the funky turret—the terminal, she soon realized—with one arm outstretched to take her bags, the other to pull her close, and his warm lips wet and slightly ajar to taste her tongue with decorum, delaying the release until they were alone. So when she didn’t see him, she cried, and she kept on crying during the forty-minute drive along the coast to her hotel. In her room she thought of him as she lay beneath the netting in the four-poster bed, wondering as she gazed at the redwood rafters if he, her lover, loved her still—believing no, but hoping yes, regretting now the choices that she’d made.
But she was refusing to live with those choices, because this man in front of her now, looking at her with downcast eyes, was too special to lose. He was not just the one she wanted to sleep with every night. He was the one she wanted to wake up with every morning.
“How are you, Fire?” she asked.
He shrugged again.
“Is it going to be like this?” she ventured, looking at his locks and wondering if he’d changed inside as well. “Me talking and you not saying anything in return? I hope not … because I think there’s a lot for us to talk about … I know that you and Ian were very close. Maybe this isn’t a good time.”
Fire rubbed his palms together and looked away from Sylvia toward the sea. She followed his gaze through the thinning crowd, past the street lamp and the rubbish bin at the corner where the street curved around the park, over the top of the low seawall, through the gaps in the line of silhouettes. In his disengagement she saw a bit of herself at their first meeting, when he wore her down, charming her into his trust. Turning his strategy against him, she pointed to the program that was idling on his lap and paraphrased something he’d said to her in the kitchen at Claire’s gallery: “Okay, before I go, I’d like to leave you an address and phone number so you can get in touch with me … so we can be in touch only at your convenience. Can I use that paper there?”
He handed her the program and she asked for his pen. In the exchange, their fingers touched, and, ignoring for a second the restraint of the arms to which they belonged, curled around each other in a brief embrace. Fire, who had been feeling disconnected from Sylvia until this moment, felt her life force race through him—the hydraulic pressure of her blood, the electric pulse of her thoughts, the heat from the chemical reactions that fueled her emotions. And as he felt her filling him up, he found the room within his heart to temporarily displace his guilt over how their affair had contributed to Ian’s demise. It was in this new mood that he received her note, which she creased like a greeting card and placed on his shoulder like an epaulet, holding his gaze as he removed it.
Fire had been too deep in his own thoughts to see the moment when Sylvia wiped the paper against her neck to infuse it with the scent she had dabbed there. She had bought the almond oil from Winston’s Roots Apothecary when she stopped to get a remedy for the headache that had worsened as the time drew nearer to meet him.
Reining in the smile that played across his lips, Fire unfolded the paper and found there a drawing of a cookie and an aroma that evoked in him the memory of the night in New York when he’d sought refuge in her house and arms after spending thirteen hours at the hospital with Phil, and she indulged him with almond cookies. As he sat there flashing through the memories—their lunch under the cherry tree, their walk along the Promenade, the reading at the warehouse—he felt something leap in his throat, a roar shaking his ribs, claws raking his stomach. It was hunger, he knew—the kind that could not be quelled by food. Shrugging to loosen the tension in his bones, he stood up, and stretched his neck, and rolled his head in languid circles. He settled his gaze on her, demanding through his posture that she show him a sign. Anxious that he might not see it, he looked toward the sea again, his face serene with contemplation. She saw something new in him now, a maturity accented by his meditative gaze. And there was power in the muscle that pulsed at his temple th
at reminded her that his was a mind unafraid to embrace serious issues. No, he wasn’t just Fire. He was A. J. Heath.
He inhaled deeply and rested his palms against his temples, trying to fight the thoughts that were attacking him. It would be dark soon and he had to take Ian’s ashes out to sea. But spending time with Sylvia was important—even if all he achieved was closure. In his head he heard his uncle’s voice: Everybody has free will. Everybody has to make choices—choices they must live with, sometimes die with. Ian made his and you’ve made yours. He’s died with his. Now what are you going to do?
What was he going to do? He allowed his hands to free-fall to his thighs, felt the sting through the light wool fabric.
In the process a button on his shirt became undone, and Sylvia remembered the night when he held her in the back of the cab on the way from the concert … his nipples small and raisin sweet.
“I wanted to call you so badly,” she said, as her skin began to gooseflesh. “So many times … but I was afraid of you. In some ways I still am. You’re too easy to love. You changed my life, Fire. I see myself differently because of you. You helped me find the me that I wasn’t sure existed … I know now that my writing is more than just an advanced hobby. Writing is my destiny, and I’m ready to struggle and fight for it—because of you. There was a time when I couldn’t relate to Jamaica. I didn’t even want to relate to love. Now I do—again because of you. And with you at my side I slew a dragon that had me terrorized for most of my life. How can I not love you? Oh, Fire, I was so scared, so, so scared of you. Because I hardly knew you, and I was ready to run away with you if you asked me. And that kind of passion is frightening. I love you, sweet boy. That’s all I can say. And I hope you love me too.”
Waiting in Vain Page 37