He stood up. “You know, you don’t make it so easy for a person to speak plain.” He headed round the side of the house towards the front yard. I followed him.
“You’re sick!” I snarled at him. “Can’t even make up your mind. Going back and forth from women to men, spreading diseases!”
He stopped so suddenly I almost ran into him. He turned to face me. “Actually,” he said in a low, dangerous voice, “I know I’m not sick. Get tested every year, use barrier protection. I bet you money you don’t do the same.”
The memory of Gene’s naked cock sliding into me betrayed me. Words stuck in my throat.
Hector saw my face fall. He kissed his teeth. “I thought so,” he said. “So it seem to me that you’re the one who stand a chance of putting your lovers at risk, not me. It’s people like you why I make sure to use latex. You tell you last lover yet that he should get tested?”
And he slung his bag over his shoulder, turned on his heel, and walked away.
I found my voice. “Faggot!” I cried. He kept on walking. I followed. “Anti-man! Dirty, stinking, lying hen!” My voice cracked on the last word. I was crying so hard that I had trouble getting my breath. Everywhere I turn, another one of those nasty men, thiefing away any joy in my life. It’s like somebody curse me.
What right he had to be angry? I was the injured party! Me!
On the big ship one of the sailors who brought them the thin pap that was their only food was an Igbo man. He joked that the whites were cannibals who were going to eat them. It could be true. Why else truss people up like chickens for the market?
Every few days the sailors would open the hatch, cursing and holding their noses against the smell. It was the only time when the people got a glimpse of sky, a sip of fresh air. The sailors would remove the dead and dying. The more that died, the more space for those remaining. The dada-hair lady was heartsick at the relief she felt when another body was removed. The Igbo sailor described how they threw the dead bodies over the side, how large fish with sharp teeth were following the ship now, waiting for their next meal.
After a lifetime of a misery she could never have imagined before this, the sailors came down one day and took them out of the hold, those who could stand. So long the dada-hair lady’s eyes had been yearning for the sight of the sky, but now the light pierced them like knives. Fresh, cool air to breathe made the dada-hair lady feel almost drunk.
The men had been brought out of their section of the hold, too. So thin they were, and weak-looking! The dada-hair looked at her own arm. Yes, the flesh had wasted.
The sailors sluiced them down with buckets of salted water. The water made her shiver. The salt stung the chafed skin on her wrists and ankles where the shackles rubbed.
There was a child near her, maybe eight years old. She hadn’t seen him before. It’d been too dark in the hold. He dragged two empty shackles where his fellows should have been. He shook and blubbered with his fear, and wailed softly in his language. The dada-hair lady didn’t know what he said, but “Mamma” would be a likely bet. She knelt. Her two shackle-mates had to kneel with her. She took the boy in her arms. He came, wriggling his way in among the chains binding her wrists, hungry for loving touch, his tiny body like chicken bones wrapped in skin. He had weeping yaws on his legs.
The sailors doused everyone with oil, signalled for them to rub themselves down. The dada-hair lady rubbed oil into her skin, and into the little boy’s. It made them gleam, as though they were healthy. “Maybe they’ll throw perfume on us next?” joked Belite, who had lain beside her in the hold. She was a young Arada woman. They were Igbos and Ewes and Aradas in that place. Different languages, different ways, but they had been learning each other’s speech in the long dark misery of their days.
The scrawny boy fell asleep in the dada-hair lady’s arms.
There were tree branches floating in the water, birds perched on the sails. There was a shadow on the horizon. The white man who looked like the boss man was conferring with another, looking at a sheet of paper. They pointed at the shadow and babbled their nonsense talk. They frowned, and the sailors near them looked nervous. Was that land? She had to do something soon.
Truth was, she hadn’t reckoned what she was going to do. All she could think was poison. For them all to take poison to shunt them into the world beneath the waters.
If she were at home, and free, she could easily have found the ingredients to make a strong dose. But she had nothing here, only the chancy power of the blood in her, and starving on the ship, she hadn’t been bleeding. But some few days ago, their rations had been increased. Now she was only constantly a little hungry, not half-fainting her days through from starvation.
A flurry in the water beside the ship caught the dada-hair lady’s eye. Efiok—the Efiok whose place in the hold was two souls over from hers—she saw it, too. She looked to the dada-hair lady, jerked her chin in the direction of the disturbance in the water. The dada-hair lady moved a little closer to the edge.
At first the dada-hair lady could see nothing. Then her soul leapt in her breast; a head, grey-brown with curious black eyes, staring after the ship! Had one of their band jumped, then?
Then the person dove down into the water. The dada-hair lady had only a brief glimpse of its body slipping bent as a sickle forward into the sea. It was cylindrical, curved, and fat with good food. Sea cow? Seal? At home, the older people sometimes talked about sea cows who lived in the coastal waters, how you shouldn’t look directly at them, lest they drag you down to the depths with them for your presumption. The dada-hair lady had never seen one up close, but the fishermen described them: they stole fish from their nets. Momi Wata, thought the dada-hair lady respectfully to the thing she’d seen, beg you please take a message to Uhamiri for me. Tell her we need her help here. Tell her I am hers. I pledge to always faithfully be hers, but please would she help us now, before we land and the white people eat us. The dada-hair lady peered at the water, but she couldn’t see any sign of the sea cow, or whatever it had been. Her heart ached for what she’d promised: the women who were called to serve Uhamiri remained barren.
But she’d made her plea, and her pledge. The dada-hair lady held the boy’s small shivering body and whispered in his shell of an ear, “Soon. Something will happen.” It must.
Agway tried to go on tippy toes to reach for the kitchen sink, but the cast was cramping his style.
“I know what you want,” I told him. “Let’s set you up first, all right?”
I carried him into the bathroom and got the fancy neoprene cast protector out of the cupboard under the sink. The hospital had given it to me, and it was a wonderful thing. Back in the kitchen, I sat him on the floor. He watched gravely as I covered his cast with the cast protector, attached the air bulb, and pumped all the air out.
“Now you ready to go.” I took all the breakable dishes out of the sink and lifted him up onto the counter so he could sit with his feet in the sink. “Here.” I gave him the soap and a cloth. With a serious look, he turned on the tap, dabbled his feet in the water, and set about washing the dishes. He loved doing it. He’d make some woman a wonderful husband.
Not like certain men, playing Mr. Sensitive but all the time having it both ways.
I peeled and grated raw Irish potato into a small pot for porridge for Agway’s breakfast. I tossed in a cinnamon stick, filled the pot with water and put it to boil.
Stringing people along until they make fools of themselves.
I put two eggs on to boil for me, and started frying up bacon for me and Agway. It was the one kind of meat he would tolerate cooked.
Getting vexed at people when they go off on you. I turned the bacon over and over in the pan, trying to scrub the image out of my mind of me sweet-talking Hector when all the while…but it kept popping up to shame me.
Foul-smelling smoke was rising from the frying pan. I was turning burnt bacon with my spatula. “Shit!” I twisted the heat dial to off. It came away in my hand. I scr
eamed and threw it out the open window. “He can just go and take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut!” I sobbed.
“Flying fuck,” repeated Agway with perfect diction as he poured water from a bowl over his lower legs. He even got the L right. He’d been having trouble with the letter L.
“Oh, great. Just don’t say that in front of Evelyn tonight, all right?”
Screw the bacon. I boiled another egg. I could persuade Agway to eat an egg if I mashed it and put enough butter in it. I puréed the porridge in the blender, added milk and a dab of butter. Threw my eggs onto a plate with a mound of salt and black pepper beside them, and buttered couple-three slices of harddough bread for the two of us.
I was scraping his mashed egg into his bowl when I heard a rustle behind me. Agway had climbed down off the counter. Even with the cast, the damned boy was agile as a mongoose. He had fished the eggshells out of the garbage and was holding them wadded in his fist, except for the one he was chewing.
“Agway! Bad!” I flicked the broken eggshell out of his mouth. “You mustn’t do that! You understand me? No playing in the garbage!”
He already knew when I was telling him he had done wrong, but I could see that the poor soul couldn’t understand what I was scolding him for. I sighed. “I can’t wait for you to learn more than seven words of English.” I washed his mouth out and found a way to close the garbage can that he couldn’t figure out; not yet, anyway. I sat him at the table and persuaded him to eat his egg, spoonful by spoonful, out of the spoon, not with his hands. That battle came to a draw.
What did Hector looked like when he…> I got a mental flash of Hector and another man (who looked a bit like Michael) touching, hugging, their lips meeting. I shut the image down quickly. It mocked me. It looked too much like my secret, voyeur fantasies.
I needed some distraction from this black mood. I took us out into the living room and put on an old DVD: A Shark’s Tale. As each movie finished, I fed another one into the player: Sukey and the Mermaid, Lilo & Stitch VII, In the Time of the Drums.
Eventually I got up and began tucking books away. I cleaned up a bit. Place needed to look good for Evelyn’s visit this evening.
While Agway was preoccupied with a movie and his toys, I set up a card table on the porch with one of the stacks of Dadda’s papers on it. He had more documents stashed everywhere in the house. Sorting his life was going to be a job and a half.
Then I hauled Agway out to the front yard and showed him how to use the tricycle. He got the trick of it, and pretty soon he was zooming around the yard, hunting down the tiny green lizards and yelling as he did. I just prayed he wouldn’t actually catch any of the lizards; with his love of raw food, I didn’t want to see what he would do with it. I flipped through Dadda’s papers. Old water bill receipts: toss. Credit card information: keep, so I could cancel them.
“Child, come away from my tomato plants!” Blasted boy hadn’t learned yet that the green ones gave him a bellyache. His nappy needed changing, too. I plucked him off the tricycle he’d just deliberately crashed into my tomato plants. I took him up onto the porch and stood him on his feet in front of me. He had a saggy diaper, dirt on his hands and knees, more smeared across his face, and little tomato seeds drying around his mouth. “What I going to do with you, enh?”
He tried to go back down the porch stairs. “Wait, hang on!” I grabbed him up by his middle and took him, kicking, into the bathroom.
Using the toilet as a bench, I sat with him in my lap, stripped off his diaper and wiped him clean. He was beginning to get the hang of toilet-training. He didn’t like having a dirty nappy.
I tossed the soiled toilet paper into the bowl. “You want to flush?” I asked him.
He grabbed the handle on the toilet and yanked on it with all his weight. Then he leaned over the bowl to watch the magic. He was fascinated by the toilet, where you could make water run on command. Twice now I’d caught him trying to climb into the bowl. When he wasn’t doing that, he was flushing it, over and over.
Good thing I’d been too lazy to take the cast protector off. One less step to do. I changed into my bath suit, grabbed two towels, and ran after Agway, who had scampered out of the bathroom, clonk-slap on his one bare foot and the one with the cast on. I caught up with him in the living room. “Tuck!” he protested as I took him back out to the yard.
“You can play with your truck later. I have something else for you right now.” I set the sprinkler on Dadda’s miserable excuse for a lawn, and made sure I could see it from the porch. I turned it on to “oscillate.” Agway’s eyes got round as the moon when he saw the water come out. Soon he was dashing back and forth through the water, naked as any egg, screeching with glee. He used his all-fours wolf lope. That leg must be healing, if he could do that. I played catch with him in the sprinkler for a while, then I left him sitting under the sprinkler shower, trying to pull up lawn grass by its roots. I was exhausted. Not even lunch time, and a whole day ahead of me of Agway being rambunctious. I returned to the porch, dried off, and kept going through Dadda’s things.
Mortgage papers for the house on Blessée: keep, for nostalgia’s sake; the insurance money done spend long time ago. Card Chastity had given Dadda for his thirtieth birthday: toss; and stop sniffling. Then a legal-size document. The paper had aged to yellow.
I leafed through the dog-eared sheets. There was a section that described a business plan. Apparently, Dadda had wanted to grow cashews and sell and distribute cashew products. Train local workers, expand the production to other islands. Big ideas. Clearly didn’t go nowhere, though.
I turned to the final page. Lender’s line signed on behalf of the FFWD by Messrs. Gray and Gray. The borrowers’ line was signed by Dadda and someone else. I peered at the signature. To rass. Mr. Kite! So they had known each other from before, then. Maybe that’s why he’d been so ready to take Dadda in? Best I call Gene and tell him, nuh true? Could be important.
Chuh. I wasn’t fooling myself. I just wanted an excuse to call him. I reached for my phone and dialled his cell.
He answered the phone with a gruff “Yeah?”
My heart gave a little leap when I heard his voice. “It’s Calamity. I’m not interrupting anything?” I asked, straining to figure out what the noises in the background were.
“Hold on; too much static.” After a few seconds, I heard generic street noises. “Okay,” he said. “I’m outside. Who’s this?”
“Calamity.”
“Wow. You calling me. Usually I have to do the calling.”
I flushed. “I just found something.”
“What?”
“Dadda and Mr. Kite knew each other from before I was born. I just found papers for a loan they took out to start cashew farming and processing in Cayaba.”
“Awoah.”
“I thought they only met when he rescued Dadda from the docks here right after the hurricane. I wonder what happened to the business?”
“Businesses fail.”
“I’m going through all Dadda’s papers now. Maybe I’ll find something that will tell me.”
“Maybe.” He sounded preoccupied.
“You busy? I can call another time.”
“Nah, man, no need for that! Okay. You have my full attention now.”
But he still didn’t volunteer any information. I recognised what he was doing; had done it myself sometimes. Keep somebody at a distance by telling them as little about yourself as you could get away with. Paper over it by being friendly, but play your cards close to your chest. “Gene, what you and I really doing any at all?”
“How you mean?”
“We seeing each other? We not seeing each other? We friends, we booty-calling, what?”
His laugh was relaxed and open. “That’s all? Well, tell me what you want us to be doing here.”
“And you will go along with whatever I want, is that it?”
“No, you not getting off that easy. Because after you tell me what you want, you have to ask me wha
t I want.”
“You strike a hard bargain, Mr. Meeks.”
“You gotta play to play.”
“Okay,” I replied. I was all nerves. Suppose I was misreading him same way I’d misread Hector? “I not sure what I want,” I told him. “I been thinking maybe I should keep things simple for a while. We were supposed to be doing anonymous funeral sex, remember?”
“That? We did that already. I crossed it off my list long time. You still keeping it on yours?”
I laughed. “Maybe. It had a certain appeal.”
“You can’t be anonymous twice in a row, you know.”
“Not with the same person, anyway.”
“Oh.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I just like to tease. Truth is, I not sure I have any business dating anybody right now. The heart kind of tender, you know?” I pushed Hector out of my mind.
“Good,” he said, and my spirits sank down even deeper into the crab barrel. “Because I learned long ago not to get involved with anybody who in a big life transition. You have grieving to do, and your life to start over.”
Relief made me giggly. “And a new child to look after. Don’t forget that.”
“You can handle that one,” he said. “I have every confidence.”
“And once I’m done…transitioning, then what?”
“Then we’ll have to see, nuh true? You going to be a whole different person. Maybe you won’t find me interesting any more.”
“And we can still keep company till then?”
“If you want to.”
“I want to.” I was smiling so broadly it was hard to talk.
“Tell me,” he said, “why you call me about Mr. Lambkin and Mr. Kite? I thought you didn’t want any poking around in your parents’ past?”
“It’s your fault, you know. You got me interested, and now it look like I can’t leave it alone.”
“You free Monday night?”
My heart made a little leap. “Pretty sure, yes. Why?”
The New Moon's Arms Page 23
