Clive wondered if this man had ever vacationed on the island that had once been his home, or if he would be going soon, this Christmas, even, or to celebrate a promotion or anniversary.
“Sorry for dragging you up here,” the man said when they arrived at his house, which was huge and had a turret on one side. In the illuminated square of a window Clive saw a pretty wife in jeans and a sweater. The man handed him a generous tip. “Right, right, left will get you back to the highway,” he said. As Clive watched the man walk up his front steps, and his pretty wife open the door and push onto her tiptoes to kiss him, he felt himself fill with anger he didn’t like and didn’t want.
Right, right, left did not get him back to the highway, and soon he was hopelessly lost. He passed a silo beside a barn, a hillside where pine trees hugged the curve of the earth. Then the sky filled with white. His first snow. In the beginning, the flakes melted as soon as they hit the windshield, so he hardly saw them. He pulled off the road at a park to piss and pull out a map. The parking lot was beside a pond surrounded by trees and hills. He urinated into the gravel of the parking lot, studied a map for a few minutes before giving up. (Half an hour later he would stumble, mercifully, upon an elderly woman walking a dog, and she would direct him back to the highway.) The snow picked up. He was shocked by the lightness of it; it fell faster than it seemed a weightless thing should be able to fall. He stood and watched the snow melt into the pond. As he looked at the snow on the water, the blue hills beyond, he saw his own sadness stretching out in tandem with the landscape, as if the land knew his affliction, as if it were weary with the burden of human secrets. Suddenly the colors of home struck him as flat and cheap, a prettiness like white sugar. (And it was really only the water that was pretty at all. The land was dry and covered in gray scrub. The towns were overcrowded with ugly concrete houses.)
The girl was from here, or a place like it. Any one of these big houses might have been hers. Standing in the snow in the middle of who knows where, he tasted the berry of her lips. He saw her dancing; she raised her arms in the air and her shirt lifted to reveal that touchable, touchable scar. He heard her say again all the disparaging things she’d said about the place she was from. She had lied to him. They all had. All the vacationers who went on and on about how beautiful his island was, how lucky he was to live there, how jealous they were. What bullshit. They had this.
EVERY SEASON in New York had its indignities. The stink of urine on pavement in summer. Trash cans stuffed with the corpses of umbrellas during the rainy, blustery days of early spring. By his second winter in New York, Clive saw the season as yet another thing to be gotten through, the clang of the radiator at night, the black snowbanks that uglied the city (or rather, that revealed the ugliness that was always there). Their landlord kept the building like an icebox. This was illegal, but so was everything about their situation, so what could they do? The shower did not get truly hot; the water came so close to warming him without actually doing so that he came to dread bathing, the almostness of it, comfort held just out of reach.
Roommates had come and gone by then, Ouss and Sachin and Charles the only ones who remained. Sachin was as volatile and Ouss as earnest as ever; he’d recently been promoted to assistant manager at the hardware store where he worked, and was convinced this would turn out to be his “big break.” The others had been replaced once, twice, three times over, the men different in their particulars, though these differences hardly mattered to Clive. Jean-François kept a laminated picture of his father back in Dessalines in his jeans pocket. His father was ill, and Jean-François would be stuck in New York until he died, paying his medical bills. After four months he was replaced by Dennis, a bachelor who had sent home enough money over a decade in New York for his sisters’ weddings and houses and schooling for his nieces and nephews. He went home once a year, for a week.
Clive had begun to wonder by then if Ouss hadn’t been correct on that first night—maybe this temporary existence was changing them in ways more permanent than they could fully comprehend. He thought of Hamid, another night-shift driver, who loved to brag about the accomplishments of his four children back in Pakistan, but whose plans to bring them over to join him always seemed to get pushed back to the next year, and the next. He thought of Neer, a baby-faced driver who had returned to Gujarat for the month of December for years. When December arrived that year and Neer was still at work, Clive asked if he would be going home at another time, and Neer told him he would not be going at all. Had something happened, Clive asked, was something wrong? Neer shrugged evasively, and Clive was frightened to find that Neer didn’t need to explain. He understood. The family Neer had longed for, eked out this lonely existence for … it had been too long. The noise and chaos of children early in the morning, a wife’s hopes and desires and disappointments—these things were too much now. He had grown too accustomed to a life he’d never wanted in the first place to give it up. That December, the sight of Neer—gazing impassively at the television in the break room, smoking a cigarette on the curb in front of the garage after his shift as the sun tried uselessly to break through the clouds—was enough to bring tears to Clive’s eyes. He missed Sara and his grandmother, missed being in the company of and under the care and brusque direction of women. He was determined not to let what had happened to Neer happen to him. He would not become one of those men for whom family became too difficult, a thing better surrendered than reclaimed. Yet he could feel it happening to him, bit by bit, as seawater erodes rock. He wired money to Sara monthly, but he called less frequently now. Sometimes he asked if he could speak to Bryan, but sometimes he didn’t try, even when he could hear cartoons in the background, punctuated by his son’s airy giggles.
Sometimes, he could never predict when it would happen, he would be plunged into Bryan’s life. He was stuck in traffic on the Major Deegan. He was trudging through the snow on an unshoveled stretch of Forty-seventh Street. Then he was in the yard at Horatio Byrd, invisible and watching, as a pack of boys (all much bigger than Bryan—in his imaginings his son was a small and delicate child) shoved him and called him bastard. He watched his son curl into himself and cry. Then Bryan turned and looked at him. He was not invisible anymore. His boy ran to him, and he gathered him in his arms, taking Bryan’s small, heaving body into his large one, absorbing the tears and the runny nose and the brave trembling lip into himself, and in that moment he understood, finally, what his too-big body was for. There had been a reason for it all along: to take into himself the suffering of his child.
Then he was back—the taxi inching along the asphalt, the snow soaking into his shoes. And he felt emptier than it had been possible to feel before he’d had a child to be absent from his life. He should never have left. He should have found a way to stay. If he had not been able to regain Sara’s trust he should simply have demanded it, so that he could remain on the island and in his son’s life. No, he had done the right thing. Sara needed space and time. Eventually she would soften. It might all work out in the end. He felt better, except sometimes he didn’t. Could you ever undo it when a father and son became nothing to one another but voices? He could never decide—he would wonder for the rest of his life—whether his departure was his single most courageous act or just one more example of his cowardice.
IN BED at night, he closed his eyes and sent himself home. His grandmother’s house, white curtains in the kitchen and the oleander tree in the yard. The potholed streets, Mayfair and Gould and Princess Margaret and Underhill. The three-legged goat in Daphne Nelsen’s yard. The secret, nameless cliffs from their nights joyriding with Keithley. Conch fritters and limeade at Perry’s Snackette. The gas station on George Street and the salt ponds with their pleasant stink and clotheslines on which school uniforms crisped in the sun. The spots where the buildings, the hillocks, the scrub parted to reveal flickering glimpses of the sea. The sea itself. He sat on the sand at Little Beach and looked out at the water. He was not alone. On the beach were all the pe
ople he had ever known, the old and the young, the living and the dead. They, like he, sat still and solemn with their eyes on the sea, waiting.
For what?
Then it began to snow.
IT WAS January of his third year in New York when Clive stopped for gas at the Shell on Hudson Street and the man at the next pump said, “Clive Richardson? Is that really you?”
He looked up and saw a man standing beside a Range Rover, and after a moment he realized it was Ron Rawlins, who had been in his form at school and who had gone on to attend university in the States. In school Ron had been a square, mercilessly teased for his eczema and acne. He looked good now. His skin had cleared and he wore a gray suit with a lavender tie.
“I heard you left for here, and here you are!” Ron said.
He could feel the weight of what Ron hadn’t said. Surely Ron had heard about everything that had happened to him in the years since they had last seen each other.
“What are you up to these days?” he asked Ron, who happily accepted this shift of focus to himself.
“Real estate. The market’s hot right now, my man.”
How he and Edwin and their friends would have laughed and mocked Ron if he had dared to call any of them “my man” back home.
“You know Berline’s up here, too,” Ron said.
“Bery?”
“I set her up working in the same optometry office as my girl. She’s saving for art school.”
Clive forced a smile.
“Hey, man, good on you for making an honest living here,” Ron said, gesturing at the taxi. “Keep it up, you hear?” He pulled out his wallet and flicked a business card at Clive. “You need anything, call me.”
Early the next morning, when Clive got back to the apartment and flipped on the light, Sachin leapt off the couch.
“The fuck, man? I’m sleeping here,” Sachin shouted, his eyes crazed. Drunk.
“Sorry. I didn’t know you were out here.”
Sachin spread his arms before him. “Well, here I am. Trev’s driving me mad. I can’t stand to sleep where I can hear that joker breathing.”
“Sorry,” Clive muttered again, and fled to his bedroom. He had to piss, but he didn’t want to go out and face Sachin again, so he relieved himself into a Big Gulp cup from the day before, his urine swirling with the inch of flat cola at the bottom. He lay down, but though he was tired he couldn’t sleep. He imagined Ron Rawlins and his girl and Bery sitting together in a diner. Ron had his arm around his girlfriend, who was small and pretty and American. “You’ll never believe who I ran into,” he would say to Bery, swiping a fry through ketchup and tossing it in his mouth. After he said Clive’s name, Ron and Bery would tell Ron’s girlfriend about him: an illegitimate child, drugs, jail, the girl. Then Bery would snort at a thought in her head. “You know, he punched me in the face once,” she’d say, without bothering to explain the circumstances.
IN FEBRUARY, his roommate Charles returned to Saint Thomas. Three days later their landlord came to the apartment with his replacement. Fazil was a diminutive man with mantis-like limbs and a tidy beard dyed with henna. He was much older than the rest of them, in his fifties at least, and he kept nearly silent. He prayed five times a day, and Clive liked this about his new roommate, though he had no interest in religion himself. It seemed to him that Fazil had released himself to the universe in a way that made him, not happy exactly, but reconciled to his life. He had a habit of picking his nose and flicking his excavations into the corners of their small bedroom, but other than this he was unobtrusive (in his sleep he was completely soundless, so that Clive sometimes worried he was dead) and fastidiously neat, and Clive accepted his one vice as the cost of a roommate who was much better than he might have been.
Not long after Fazil arrived, Clive was working on a Monday night when, barely an hour into his shift, he pulled over on Amsterdam and vomited a salmon-colored froth onto a hardened gray snowbank. He was so suddenly and intensely ill it was all he could do to drive the taxi back to the garage, stopping periodically to be sick again, and then struggle home. He thought he’d eaten something bad and figured he’d be back on his feet the next night; instead, he awoke drenched in sweat and delirious with fever. The illness lasted for days. Fazil moved his mattress against the wall to create as much distance between them as possible. Ouss cared for him to the extent possible when he wasn’t at work, bringing him soup and medicine and washing Clive’s sheets at the Laundromat.
Just an hour before he fell ill, Clive had paid his weekly lease, six hundred dollars he now had no chance of recouping. When he was finally well enough to return to work, he showed up at the garage only to have Larry tell him he’d found another driver for his shift. He would have to wait until a spot opened up. Two weeks passed.
Sara called. “I expected you to wire us something last week.”
“Things are hard up here at present.”
“Well, down here at present your son is growing like a weed and needs new polos and trousers and shoes.”
“You think I don’t know your extensive list of demands, what with how you do remind me?” he snapped.
For a moment Sara didn’t speak. He could hear her breathing into the phone slowly and deliberately.
“This is not about me and you. It is about your son.”
He hated when she called Bryan your son—as if Clive didn’t know, as if he needed reminding.
Rent was due but he couldn’t pay it. Their landlord came to the apartment and told him in front of Fazil and Trev and Sachin that he had a week to pay. That night he took Ron Rawlins’s business card from his wallet and turned it over in his hands. He walked to a pay phone. He dialed the first digits. Then he heard Ron’s voice, Good on you, in his head. He hung up. He tore the card in pieces and tossed them in the rubbish bin on the street corner. He did not trust himself with it.
Two days later, he returned to the apartment after a day spent fruitlessly walking the city looking for HELP WANTED signs, his feet aching, and found Sachin sitting on the couch. Sachin looked up at Clive, his green eyes sparking. “Where is it?”
“Where is what?”
“You know very well.”
“Please, Sachin. I’m too tired for this today. If you’re vex with me, say so and be done with it.”
“You bet your dick I’m vex. This morning I had four hundred dollars in an envelope under my mattress. Tonight, I don’t.”
“You think I took it?”
“I know you owe rent.”
“But I’ve been gone. I’ve been out since this morning.”
“Says you,” Sachin spat.
Clive heard the sound of a key in the lock. Fazil stepped inside. When the small old man saw the two of them, frozen and glaring at each other, he hunched his shoulders and disappeared quickly into the bedroom.
“I’m giving you a chance to make it right, Clive. You give me what you did take and we’ll be cool.”
“I didn’t take your money, Sachin. How would I even know where you hide it?”
Sachin clapped his hands and released a dark, amused laugh. “How would you know?” He was wired; he spoke with a red-hot smoothness. “Clive, even you could find a stack of cash in a room that’s nearly empty.”
“I don’t know what else to say,” Clive whispered. “We’ve lived together a long time. You know me. You know I would never—” He heard the floorboards creak in his bedroom beneath the light weight of Fazil’s body settling onto his mattress and he knew. Small, silent Fazil who never bothered anyone. He also knew there was no point in accusing him to Sachin, who would never believe him, blinded as he was by his anger. “I wouldn’t,” Clive said finally, uselessly.
“You have until tomorrow night.” Sachin stalked off to his bedroom and closed the door behind him.
He should not have thrown away Ron Rawlins’s card. It had been exactly the wrong thing to do. What else was new? The next evening, he went to the Little Sweet. He planned to stay there until closing, then re
main out until two or three A.M., by which point, he hoped, Sachin would have blown through his anger and turned in for the night. He ordered his pepper pot and Carib, then another beer and another. Vincia pursed her lips but did not comment. The radio was on; the local Caribbean station was broadcasting a cricket match, Barbados Pride versus Leeward Island Hurricanes. By his sixth beer, he could feel the grass on the pitch like velvet beneath his fingertips. He closed his eyes and said a silent prayer that when he opened them he would be sitting in his grandmother’s kitchen. She would be rinsing dishes in the sink. She would swat a mosquito and scowl, and how happy he would be.
When he opened his eyes, he was in the Little Sweet, his empty plate before him. He looked through the storefront at the street. Sachin was standing on the sidewalk, staring at him through the glass.
ONE AFTERNOON when he was fourteen, during the boys of Everett Lyle Secondary’s brief love affair with boxing, Clive took a punch to the gut so powerful it knocked the wind out of him. His mouth opened and closed like a fish’s on land as he waited what felt like an eternity until the air rushed back in. It was Thomas Hinton who had walloped him that time, a shy, handsome boy, well liked by the girls, who would go on to become the landscaping foreman at one of the resorts on the south coast. Clive remembered the intensity of the punch, but he did not recall feeling any pain at the moment of impact. This must have been partly because of the adrenaline of the fight, his body thrumming with it as he tried to get off his best shot to a chorus of cheers and jeers. But mostly it didn’t hurt because Thomas was his friend. So were Damien and Des and Don, and because they were his friends, his body seemed not to believe the physical seriousness of their blows. Those matches in Don’s yard never hurt. It was the great irony of their contests. They administered injury to one another in order to teach themselves something of the violence of manhood, yet each blow was carried on the wings of fraternal love; you could feel it as plainly as you tasted the tang of blood seeping from your split lip. Because of this, those afternoon sessions were no preparation at all for what finally did come, on a frigid February night in New York. As he understood very quickly after he left the Little Sweet and followed Sachin around a chain-link fence to a vacant lot (broken glass glistening like jelly in the moonlight), it was not the physical power of a blow but the contempt which fuels it that makes it so terrible.
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