How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House

by Cherie Jones

  Inside the house Auntie Preta heads to the kitchen to make dinner and takes the saucepan out of the cupboard and something takes over her. Perhaps it is the thought of Ms. Nancy firmly ushering her children back inside their house the moment she sees Adan get out of the car and wringing the ear of the one Adan’s age, who persists in turning around. Something happens, because Auntie Preta is not one for beating, not her beloved Adan who came to her when her sister died, looking like an angel from heaven, like God himself sent Adan to be a barren woman’s joy. But Auntie Preta beats Adan until the saucepan is dented and no longer able to sit steadily on the stove, until her head tie is undone and her hair is flying around her and there are little beads of sweat above her eyebrows, until Adan is curled in a ball on the floor begging her to stop, although he surely knows that he is man-boy enough to stand up and make Auntie Preta regret ever picking up that saucepan. The fact that he does not, and not the beating, is what makes Adan angry.

  “No. Means. No!” Auntie Preta is beating into Adan, like the lesson consists of the beats to a song she is teaching him, “Did. I. Raise. You. Up. To. Thief?” over and over until her lover comes through the door and tries to restrain her. John yanks the saucepan away and throws it through the back door.

  And then Auntie Preta comes out of her madness and starts to make dinner. And she doesn’t want to talk to John about what happened because the telling will have to end with why she beat Adan for this and Auntie Preta is not sure of why she beat him, it is the first time she has beaten her Adan, or anybody’s child, in her life. But she doesn’t have to say why to John, who does not look at her this evening when he puts a brown envelope on the table with a few big banknotes that Auntie Preta knows belong to somebody else. John knows that the beating is less about Adan’s theft than it is about Auntie Preta’s guilt for having a professional thief like John around Adan. John puts the money down and Auntie Preta picks it up and puts it in her pocket because she wants it but she does not want to have to look at it. Not this evening, not with Adan howling on the floor and the saucepan on its side in the dirt still visible through the doorway.

  On this particular Friday Auntie Preta makes Adan’s favorite – long, soft cylinders of macaroni with butter and floury dumplings with just the right amount of gravy. But Adan cannot eat it and when Ms. Nancy wanders over to prove with her own eyes that Preta finally put some licks in her demon of a nephew, Auntie Preta says that Adan no longer likes macaroni, that she will buy some chicken necks and make pelau, that she must find something else to feed her sweet boy. Ms. Nancy gives a snort because cooking to please a ten-year-old child is just the kind of nonsense that demonstrates that Preta has not really become a disciplinarian after all and she returns to her house where she will feed her five with a huge pot of white rice and corned-beef gravy whether they like it or not. No wonder, confirms Ms. Nancy, that Adan is the way he is.

  The story of the snack-box is what Auntie Preta thinks of, in her later years, when people ask her when she started to realize that something was wrong with Adan. By these times, Auntie Preta has started to tell herself that Adan has not been sent by angels to be a crown on her head, after all, but by the Devil to shame her face. Try as she will, Auntie Preta cannot give a good answer when asked, she cannot articulate why her Adan has turned out the way he has. Despite her shame, Auntie Preta cannot think of anything she could have done better in raising him. On these occasions, to this day, Auntie Preta thinks of the snack-box, although she cannot think to tell you what about the snack-box incident was an omen. Although she cannot articulate what about that story is the explanation for everything.

  * * *

  After the beating, when Adan is bruised and some parts of his belly are strange shades of blue, and Adan does not eat the dinner Auntie Preta has made for him, John offers to take Adan for a walk, to buy him something to eat. They walk through Baxter’s Village and into Hawks Hall and Adan tells John what happened while they walk toward the Burger Bee. Adan notices how people stare at John when he passes, how they take in his bright windbreaker over a button-up shirt he has not buttoned, his peg-legged khakis with the cuff just high enough to show the world his leather, stitched-sole shoes. John wears the kind of shoes that have soles that clip-clop, as if this will convince those who know him that he is not really a robber because he loves shoes that announce his arrival and a robber never would. John is a short man, but not when he wears these shoes. When he wears these shoes John is six feet tall, a thin whip of a man who does not sweat or swear, whose jheri curl does not dare drip down his neck, who wears only socks imported from England, whose clothes always have the appearance of having just been purchased from the department store in town – brand-new, sharply colored, and professionally pressed.

  When Adan finishes the story of the snack-box, John just nods, and though Adan never says how badly he wanted one at the moment Janey Thompson came out to the car and planted her mouth firmly around the heel of a drumstick, John understands. John takes Adan into the Burger Bee and orders him a snack-box and a milkshake, just like Janey’s, and then John sits quietly in one of the little kiosks inside and watches him eat it.

  “It good, right?” says John. “Is just what you need, ent it, big man?”

  Adan just eats.

  “Tongue long-out for a little snack-box, cuddear.”

  John licks his lips, rearranges the little piece of grass stalk he plucks and places between his front teeth on a daily basis. His gold bracelet rattles with enough bass to let everyone in the Burger Bee know it is real.

  “Cuddear,” he says again, “a man should never have to depend on another man for a snack-box, ent it?”

  Adan is eating his snack-box, turning the fried chicken flesh over and over on his tongue so he can savor its eventual swallowing.

  “What you wanna be when you done school?” asks John.

  It is exactly the type of question that Adan does not know how to answer. Finishing school is too far away to deserve much thought. Adan shrugs, breaks the wishbone of the chicken, chews one side into fine gray-brown grounds.

  “A man need to be able to take care of heself,” says John, “feed heself, clothe heself, sleep at he own house.”

  Adan watches John press the lapels of his shirt with his fingertips as if to demonstrate the type of man he speaks of. The shirt is unbuttoned to the middle of John’s chest and dark chest hair peeps through, some of it is turning gray. John has been seeing Auntie Preta for several months by now. Some mornings Adan wakes up to the sound of his Auntie Preta giggling in a way Adan hasn’t heard before and later John comes out of her bedroom and goes into the backyard to pee out in the open and pluck the day’s stalk of grass. He puts this stalk between his teeth and John says, “What’s up, lil man?” as he passes Adan looking out the window near the back door. Adan glowers and says nothing. John is not there every night – something Adan is grateful for, because he enjoys the nights he can crawl into Auntie Preta’s bed and sleep with her smell all around him. Adan can sleep in Auntie Preta’s bed only when John does not come over; when John comes he must sleep alone, which means he can hardly sleep and he wakes up early in the mornings to stare out the back window. In the beginning he hated this about John visiting – this separation from his Auntie Preta – but he is starting to reconsider his feelings about John now that he is chewing the bones of some fantastic fried chicken in a snack-box that John bought him.

  “You stick close to me,” John tells him, “I will learn you how to buy your own snack-boxes, big man.”

  So Adan does. At the age of ten, Adan is taught how to make a lockpick from a broken windshield wiper swiped from a mechanic’s shop, how to use a tension wrench, how to scrub this pick back and forth until a lock clicks and opens as if by magic. He is taught to use plastic gloves and to carry a rag soaked in vinegar to clean his fingerprints off handles and doorjambs and loot that must sometimes be left behind. He is shown the weaknesses of the alarm systems to be found in businesses and big h
ouses, and he is taught how to shroud a security camera so it cannot see who is blinding it. For eight years Adan works with John. Even after Auntie Preta and John are no longer lovers, Adan works with John, until the day that John is caught and jailed while on a job and Adan begins to work alone.

  His first solo job, at eighteen years old, is Dr. Thompson – of course it is. It is nothing personal, this decision to rob Dr. Thompson, it is simply that by then the goodly doctor has become so accustomed to the good grace and favor of the community that he serves that he leaves his doors unlocked and his windows unlatched, and this makes him a perfect match for Adan’s intentions. By this time Auntie Preta no longer works for the goodly doctor; Auntie Preta works sewing smocked dresses for one of the factories near the harbor and has forced Adan to leave her home, exasperated with his repeated deviance and urged on by Ms. Nancy. She gives him the little house near the beach she had inherited from an uncle and washes her hands clean of him, even if she does so with a heaviness in her heart that she takes to her grave.

  Dr. Thompson does not seem to recognize the gruff growl behind the President Reagan mask when he is awoken from his bed in the early morning. He does not remember the ten-year-old version of the hand that holds the gun. Adan robs Dr. Thompson, and his willingness to hand over the contents of his wallet and his safe angers Adan immensely. It is not, as Dr. Thompson thinks, the fact that there is little money in the wallet and even less in the safe that incenses the robber. Adan takes it all, using a gloved hand to shove the bills into his pocket, and he is still not satisfied. But then he remembers Janey, who is sleeping upstairs. She has grown even more beautiful, has Janey, she is taller, her hair is silkier, her eyes even more dewy.

  Adan believes he should delight in feeding yampy-eye Janey the length of his cock while he holds a gun to her temple to stop her biting him. He should, but he doesn’t. It gives him no satisfaction that he is making her eat him the way she did that drumstick so many years ago. And Adan finds this point worthy of pondering, the fact that he doesn’t feel any pleasure. Or even any pain. And when he finally takes the gun and beats her with it, until that silky hair is caked with blood, those dewy eyes are pinpoints of terror, and he is holding several of her teeth in the palm of his hand, Adan confirms, with some frustration, that what he still feels is nothing.

  Chapter 16

  Beckles

  17 August 1984

  The black policeman lives by his belly. This is how he knows, while walking away from the house on stilts after questioning Lala, that something is not right – his belly rumbles. It is not the type of rumble that warns of hunger or foreshadows a string of mild intestinal protests against a meager meal. Rather, this rumble forebodes the type of gastric revolt that sends him scampering to the nearest toilet. Of course, at Baxter’s Beach, there aren’t any. This is how the black policeman comes to spread his generous buttocks six inches above the sand in the center of a dense circle of sea-grape trees, praying that his spit-shined shoes are spared. The revolt sheds the best of the last week’s work by his wife – bakes fried flat and fair with just the right measure of cinnamon, fried plantains served with little peppery fishcakes, cassava boiled and slit and basted while still steaming, and tart salt fish pickle he ate with Crix crackers.

  Having signaled to him that there is more to this mystery than meets the eye, his tummy settles into a writhing reminder that, like his ruminations on the evidence, produces nothing of substance.

  So a baby is dead. It has been found on the sand by a gigolo who is a friend of the father. This father is away fishing. The baby is found before the mother has reported it missing to the police. The baby was new, the parents are poor, there are no bruises or signs of abuse. Babies die, he tells himself. He knows this well. They die because they change their minds about facing the world, because accidents happen, because God has his own logic that man need not understand. Sometimes, he knows, babies are killed before they are even born because their mothers do not want them. Occasionally, they are killed after they are born for the same reason.

  A dead baby, without more, does not mean a crime. But babies are not often kidnapped. Not in Baxter’s Beach. Not from dirt-poor people like Adan Primus and his wife, who cannot pay a ransom. When babies are kidnapped from people like these it is because there is someone who wants a baby and reasons that they can take better care of one. But babies kidnapped for this reason do not then turn up dead. And a baby who is killed is not left out in the open on a beach where it can be found, unless this baby was killed by an amateur.

  But why?

  Although Beckles cannot admit it to himself, he has come to take solving this murder personally – very personally indeed. He is still smarting that the Whalen murder, the one he was sure he would have been able to solve almost single-handedly, has been handed over to Scotland Yard, and the death of a small baby whose face does not haunt the daily newspapers has been left with him. This is why he is careful with this investigation, why he is determined to solve it himself, and as soon as possible.

  His belly falls silent, but it is a sanctimonious kind of silence, one that refuses to elaborate after it has spoken. He cleans himself with some sea-grape leaves and considers the evidence afresh, thinking himself into ever-deepening perplexities as he walks back toward his car. But when he is seated and the car has chug-chugged into readiness, he finds that he cannot bring himself to release the brake pedal and drive back to the police station. Instead he sits and stares at the wide expanse of powdery pink sand, he stares at the roof of the Primus house barely visible above a clump of coconut trees. He thinks of the mother of this baby, how she jumped every time he made a sudden movement, as if she had something to hide, how careful she seemed to be about answering him, as if she were trying to ensure that the words she said matched the ones she had rehearsed. The black policeman thinks he knows this kind of woman, a woman whose word cannot be trusted. He thinks he is in love with one. Her name is the Queen of Sheba.

  * * *

  Beckles first met the Queen of Sheba while he was on duty. It was 1980 and he was still a constable, assigned to the drudgery of the “Paradise patrol,” walking up and down Baxter’s Beach and its environs, escorting drunk tourists back to their hotels, taking statements about lost credit cards and cameras, helping out with the occasional investigations of the drowning of visitors who had had too many rum punches too close to their swim.

  Beckles had been patrolling the beach on foot with Constable Napoleon one Friday night in tourist season when Napoleon was almost knocked over by a black American man, to judge from his accent, running like the wind down the beach, hotly pursued by a woman in a pink Hunza jumpsuit, her waist-length ponytail and enormous yellow hoop earrings swinging as wildly as the curses that spewed from her brilliant orange lips. Napoleon had pursued and restrained the man just because he had knocked him down without stopping to apologize but, as it turned out, the Queen of Sheba had wanted them to arrest him anyway – for failing to pay her for her services.

  Even now Beckles chuckles when he remembers it – her insistence that she be paid in the face of the American’s protests that he hadn’t thought he was supposed to be paying for anything. He thought that he’d met an attractive woman on the beach, said the American, a woman who was willing to sleep with him then and there because she was attracted to him too.

  “Oh, so you ‘meet’ me, then?” challenged the Queen of Sheba. “Well if you meet me, tell them my name.”

  And the American couldn’t.

  Beckles had admired her spunk much more than the protuberant breasts and behind that seemed to bedazzle her clients. Napoleon, still irked by the visitor’s rudeness but not particularly inclined to write up an assault, had decided to have fun with it, and said he would let the assault of a police constable pass – but only if the American paid the woman her money. So the Queen of Sheba got her money, though Beckles insisted that she leave the beach under threat of a charge for soliciting. He told her that they would take h
er home but would not hear any of her many objections. He would take her, he said, just to be sure that she reached her destination safely. And so Beckles and Napoleon took the Queen of Sheba home in the patrol car, watched her go inside a little pink two-story apartment in a block of broken-down government housing, and close her door behind her.

  The relationship was purely symbiotic at first: Beckles made sure the Queen of Sheba was safe when she sold her services on the beach, hustling off any clients who seemed too boisterous, too dark, too dangerous for her comfort or his. In turn, she was a source of leads when crimes happened on the sand or in the sea. The Queen of Sheba seemed somehow to always know the real story behind the crimes the police were trying to crack; she was always in tune with the whats and hows of the crimes committed in and around Baxter’s Beach.

  Beckles eventually got promoted for his good sleuthing, and the Queen of Sheba stayed safe and out of jail. And neither of them said a word to each other to suggest that theirs was anything more than a casual acquaintance; neither of them said a word about the other to anyone else. Everything was fine, thinks Sergeant Beckles, until he started to make use of her services himself, until she started switching her usual work spots without telling him, protesting that she wasn’t trying to avoid him, she just went where the work took her. Sometimes he wouldn’t see her for days and when he tried to find out where she had been, the Queen of Sheba showed the same spunk she had with the American.

  “I don’t have to tell you nothing!” the Queen of Sheba had shouted just the week before, when he caught up with her for the first time in a fortnight and asked her where she had been, whom she had been selling her sex to. She had wrenched away from him trying to hold onto her, threatened to report him to the authorities if he didn’t leave her alone. He had told her that he was “the authorities.” He had dropped her hand then, but something had burned in his gut against her ever since.