He walked the entire field until his feet were sore and covered in mud. There wasn’t a soul in sight. He picked his way back to the galvanized shed and peered through the holes in the gate. It was dark inside and he couldn’t see much, just large hanging shapes. The smell, however, was unmistakable— it was exactly the same weed he had just been cleaning. Trey turned and ran for the road, leaving his surfboard behind as a bright orange marker to light his way back to paradise.
Jimmy the maxi-taxi driver was cagey, driving extra slowly on the winding country road. Though a large banner on the back windscreen proclaimed it Jah Bus, the real owner was a Christian who wanted no part of Rastafari. A keen businessman, he recognized that popular culture glorified all that was Rasta, from dreadlocks to Bob Marley and marijuana use, so he latched onto the trend to make his business popular. He warned his drivers, the men he hired to work the vehicle on a twenty-four-hour rotation, that he wasn’t going to allow weed smoking on the job. What they did in their own time was their affair, but behind the wheel of Jah Bus they were to be clean and sober.
It was close to 10 and Jimmy, an occasional Rasta, had finished his last trip with only $100 in pocket after oil, gas, and the $300 child maintenance he had to pay his ex-girlfriend every two weeks for their three sons. When Trey and Danny flagged him down and put their unusual proposition to him, Jimmy had been of two minds, thinking about the maxi’s owner and the prospect of being out of a job. But the offer of a bonus payment was irresistible. It wasn’t every day that someone offered to rent your maxi for five pounds of weed. Though he doubted the resurrection of Haile Selassie I, the late Ethiopian emperor whom Rastas acknowledge as the descendant of Christ, he certainly agreed that smoking weed was an ideal part of livity. Five pounds of it—a whole black bin liner full of the stuff—would keep him high for quite some time.
Trey and Danny directed the driver to a small house on a hill off the main road. It was where Danny lived and where Trey had been hiding out from the world for two months. The house was like most of the others around it, a humble concrete dwelling with a small front porch, a neat garden behind a chain-link fence, and three pot hounds skulking around the yard. “Rambo!” Danny shouted affectionately at the first brown mongrel to reach his feet as he pushed open the rusty gate. Hiding behind a lush ixora was a black bitch, marked like a Doberman pinscher but with none of the grace of the breed, and lounging on the front steps, just below the porch, was a dog that resembled both its parents, half-brown and half-black. Trey shot a warning look at the one behind the bush. Sarah was prone to snapping at strangers and Jimmy was already nervous enough. “Come nah, Princess,” Danny was urging the dog on the step, nudging her aside with his foot. “Move and let people pass. You feel this is your house, eh, girl?” Trey stayed in the yard between Jimmy and the growling bitch.
“That is you, Danny?” a woman’s voice called from the house. Aunty Zora leaned over the bottom half of the Dutch door leading to the kitchen. Her arms were covered in flour up to the elbows. Jimmy eyed her long salt-and-pepper dreadlocks with admiration. “Full some water and bring it for me, nah. This pipe giving trouble again.” Trey’s maternal aunt glanced at Jimmy with little curiosity. The boys were always bringing friends home. “Good evening,” she said mildly before disappearing back into the kitchen.
Danny changed direction, going around the house instead of through the front door. “Give me a minute, man,” he tossed over his shoulder as he headed to the kitchen, reemerging in a moment with a plastic pail in each hand. As he filled the buckets at the standpipe outside the kitchen, Jimmy edged closer to Trey.
“So, where the thing?” Jimmy asked, lighting a cigarette and peering around the yard.
“Cool yourself, nah,” Trey muttered. “We go handle it. Let the man see about he queen first.”
“Scene,” Jimmy agreed, swiping his brow with one finger and flicking the stream of sweat off to the side. “What she making?” he asked Trey, sniffing the fragrant air that smelled of vanilla.
“Sweetbread.”
“So much’a sweetbread? Is all up by she elbow I see flour. Allyuh have a bakery or what?”
Trey was growing testy. “She does make and sell. Sweetbread, cake, drops. All of that.”
“Which part she does sell it?” Jimmy was a talker. Trey was tired of it already.
“In the village there. In the shop.”
“Scene,” Jimmy nodded. The loaves of sweet coconut bread, full of raisins and cherries, were very popular. Aunty Zora was quite the businesswoman and had placed her products on shelves all up the Toco Road, a string of communities that curved in a rough semicircle around the northeastern tip of Trinidad from Valencia to Matelot. Danny, when he wasn’t surfing, delivered the goods in their old beat-up Land Rover.
After their visit to Aunty Zora’s, they stopped by the fisherman’s hut on the beach to load the maxi to the roof with stuffed black garbage bags. Then they drove off to town in Jah Bus.
Trey lay on his back in his dusty bedroom surrounded by bulging black garbage bags. His bloodshot eyes and slack expression told his mother the story when she opened the door. That, plus the unique aroma of twenty pounds of fresh weed.
“So, is so you come home and ent offer nobody nothing?” His mother sized him up. “Didn’t see your mother two months and you haven’t said a word. Smoking inside here by yourself.” She crossed her arms over her slender chest, tossing aside long dreadlocks with an angry flick.
Wordlessly, Trey reached into an open bag and grabbed a handful of weed. “Here, Mammy. Smoke. Have a time.” When she saw the quality of the herb, she smiled.
“Where allyuh get this? Danny farming now?”
Trey shook his head. “The less you know about this ganja, the better. Trust me.”
His mother hesitated, her smile slipping slightly. “Is tief you tief the weed, Tracy?” Trey took a pinch of herb from the same bag and started building a spliff. He didn’t answer. “So when they come looking for you, what we go do?” Her voice grew shrill.
“Let me study that. Besides,” he flicked aside a seed, “that ent go happen. The place was deserted and we didn’t tell nobody nothing. Is one man know and he ent go say nothing. That is the maxi man. And we pay he off good.” She looked skeptical.
“I hope you know what you doing.” She paused, watching him lick the spliff and light it. “And what you going to do with all this weed?” There were five or six bags, each two feet high and two feet wide.
“Don’t you worry about that,” Trey said through a cloud of smoke.
From the time Trey let it be known, through a hint dropped at the corner shop, that he had product to sell, the calls started coming. Man, hook me up with some of that was what he heard every ten minutes on the phone. Then there were the customers, mostly men, who drove or walked up to the house at all hours asking for a ten-piece or a five-piece, conveniently measured buds rolled into tinfoil fingers, just enough for a spliff or two. His neighbors were smokers themselves, so there was little chance they would turn him in to the police. As long as he kept things quiet, he would be fine.
The talk of Trey’s new hustle had to come back to Garvin, a man whose appetite for weed was exceeded only by his appetite for luxury. Lying in bed next to Tasha, Garvin inhaled the smoke from his fat, short joint. He passed her the channa pack, a marijuana cigarette resembling the paper cones vendors used to wrap channa in years before, when boiled chickpeas were a popular snack. Tasha took the cone and drew deep. The room was silent. The fifty-two-inch plasma TV was muted, showing images of gyrating bodies, rappers, and singers. Silk sheets slid noiselessly from her naked body as Tasha rose and padded across the plush white carpeting to the bathroom.
She surveyed herself in the mirror as she washed her hands after using the toilet. Same full breasts Trey loved. Same high, round butt. Same long, jet-black legs. Better makeup, definitely a better weave. Garvin wasn’t pretty but he was generous to a fault. And that fault was stupidity.
Sli
ding back into bed next to him, she asked, “So what now?” Garvin frowned, shrugged. He smoked some more. “Antonio coming back in five days,” she said pointedly. “He going to want to know where the weed is.” Again, Garvin shrugged. “What you going to tell him?” She didn’t wait for him to shrug again. “You going to tell him you lost five pounds of weed? Just so? Like magic?” Garvin looked genuinely troubled. His pale brow wrinkled, his thin lips folded into a scowl, even his nearly transparent ears looked upset, blushing bright red. “You forget how he get on the last time—”
“How I go forget?” Garvin snapped. “Is my ass he shoot!” Reflexively he grabbed for his flat behind, finger dipping into the round scar of the bullet wound. It was still pink and raw, a fresh reminder that he shouldn’t tamper with his big brother’s stock. But was it enough to stop him from “redistributing” over two Ks of compressed, high-grade Vincy weed while Antonio was on a buying trip to St. Vincent? Nope. Garvin frowned again, wiggling yellowish toes until their joints popped, a habit Tasha loathed.
She thought of Garvin’s pale body against hers and shuddered. No doubt Trey, that honey-dipped lover of her past, was twice the man in all respects. Trey was smarter and more complex too. But he was also poor. He lived with his mother, he worked in a factory, and his only ambition was to surf, smoke, and “reason” with the other Rastas on the corner, talking religion and livity late into the night and leaving her home alone. Flicking a glance at her $200 pedicure as she kicked off the covers impatiently, she knew that Trey’s was the wrong family for her.
Garvin’s, on the other hand, was perfect. Behind the modest façade of their house was an upscale, even posh home, equipped with every modern convenience and luxury, all paid for by Antonio’s job as a marijuana agent. He imported and wholesaled the stuff, keeping a relatively small amount for recreation, bribes, and retail sales. The boys lived on the proceeds of Antonio’s part in the lucrative marijuana trade, sharing everything except women.
Living around the corner from them, and buying weed from Garvin, who handled the retail trade for Antonio, she had gotten to know the brothers well. It wasn’t hard to see that they liked the chase, both of them, so she teased them into wanting to steal her away from her undeserving man. Though it was Garvin who took the bait first, it was Antonio she really wanted. As rich as he was, he would be able to afford a lifetime supply of the Baby Phat jeans, Timberland boots, and Gucci bags that Tasha craved. If she never wore another knockoff it would be too soon.
Sitting at the edge of the bed, she sucked her teeth in disgust. Antonio had balls. He was no Trey, who had too much damned integrity, but Antonio was a strong man who knew his responsibilities. Antonio would never have grabbed and sold his brother’s weed to take her on a shopping spree. Idiot, she thought, tossing an annoyed look at Garvin.
“You think I want him to shoot me again? I can’t take that pain. Besides, he might kill me this time.” He wasn’t joking. Antonio had a wicked temper, hence the bullet wound, an emblem earned a few weeks before when Garvin had accidentally-on-purpose forgotten to give him a bag of cash. Antonio had come looking for him with a grim look and a gun. When Garvin lied, Antonio hit him in the buttocks to remind him who was in charge. Although the wound was still healing, the lesson had already been lost. Garvin imagined he could take Antonio in a fight. The poor fool.
“So what you going to do about it?” she repeated. Garvin thought for a minute, sucking on the joint.
“I go have to replace it.”
“With what? You feel weed does grow on trees?”
Garvin grinned. “Well, yes. Besides, you ent hear your ex-man have a new sideline?”
She was slow to respond. When it hit her, she did a double take. “Trey selling now?”
Garvin nodded. “And I hear is some real high-grade.” Tasha’s eyes lit up.
Danny called Trey with bad news. “The man come back. He asking questions.”
Trey wasn’t sweating. “Jimmy irie, right? We ent have nothing to worry about, brethren. Is cool. Nobody ent see we and nobody don’t know nothing.”
“They don’t have to know nothing to lick we up,” Danny said cagily. “He only have to suspect is me and my ass is grass.”
Trey laughed at the unwitting pun. “Don’t fret yourself, cousin. We safe like Selassie I briefcase, man.”
On the other end, Danny was biting his lip. “Man . . .”
Trey, blowing out a thick cloud of smoke, repeated his assurances.
Danny wasn’t appeased. “I coming down. We have to deal with this man or he go find we and mess we up bad bad, brother. I coming down tonight.”
Trey hung up the phone just as a voice called, “Good afternoon,” from outside the house. Ambling to the door in shorts and a plain white undershirt, he jumped visibly when he saw his visitors—Garvin and Tasha. He walked to the gate.
“What going on?” Trey greeted Garvin. “Tasha.” He couldn’t help his eyes, which drank her in. She smiled lightly and held Garvin’s arm tighter.
“Trey, my brother!” Garvin was all fake good cheer but his eyes were flint. His grip around Tasha’s waist contracted. “I hear you have some excellent smoke. I was wondering if you could make a deal with us. I need two kees. Will you give it to me?”
“I don’t know about give,” Trey said coolly. “But I could certainly sell it to you if you want.” Garvin was half-listening. His eyes were busily roaming the façade of the house, trying to bend around the corner to see what lay on the other side. In time, his brain churned the information around. “How much?” he asked. Trey called his price. Garvin whistled. “Even with the employee discount that sounding high,” the drug pusher said with a small, cold laugh. Tasha stood up taller, bristling.
Trey was casually taking out a sample for them. “Smoke that and tell me it not worth it.”
Garvin rubbed the thick, fragrant leaves between his fingers, pulling them apart to feel the stickiness of the plant. It was perfectly dried, and full of illegal goodness. He didn’t have to smoke it to know it would be a sweet, potent ride.
They were standing at the gate in the fence surrounding the yard, Trey on one side and Garvin and Tasha on the other. Garvin jerked his head in farewell and pulled Tasha down the road after him into a black Lexus SUV.
Tasha was livid. “What the hell was that? You don’t have to pay he for that weed! Just take it!”
Garvin sucked his teeth and drove faster. “Hush your stupid mouth, nah,” he mumbled threateningly. “What you think I planning to do?” They reached his house, drove through the electronic gate past the half-dozen dozing Rottweilers, parked, and walked through the triple-locked front door with its alarm system. “But I had to find out if he had the weed. No sense robbing he for a ounce. And look, he have it. Nice grade too.” Tasha waited in silence for him to get to the point. “So while you bulling him to distract him, I go find the weed and take it.”
She recoiled instantly. “What you mean?” She pushed a finger into his face. “What you take me for? Some kinda ho?”
“Aye, take it easy. What, you can’t bull the man one more time? I sure when you was living there allyuh wasn’t playing patty-cake when the night come. What is one more, for this? For me?” He paused, giving her a canny look. “Or I know what it is. You want me to get lick up. You want Antonio to shoot me.”
Tasha’s face grew hot. She slapped him hard. “Don’t be an ass, Garvin. I done tell you already, me ent no ho.”
Rubbing his face, he cut her a sideways look and lifted his hand to hit her but stopped. “Why you always have to slap me, Tasha? I tell you don’t do it. One of these days I will slap you down.”
Instantly contrite, Tasha snuggled a hand on the reddened cheek. “Sorry, darling.”
He sucked his teeth in disgust. “Anyway, you go have to distract him somehow. Whether you sex him or not is your choice. Me ent business with that. Just make sure he don’t come out. I go handle it from this end.”
But she doubted Garvin could. �
�Why you don’t distract him and let me tief it?” Garvin shook his head, but before he could speak, she interjected, “I know the house better than you. I know where he does like to hide things. It make more sense this way, Garvin.” She pressed her round breasts into his chest and thrust her hips forward until their pelvic regions touched. By the time she kissed him, Garvin had changed his mind.
“No scene.” He couldn’t maintain a blood flow to both his brain and his penis, so he aimed low.
The knock was soft. It was close to midnight. This time Trey wasn’t surprised to see Garvin outside his window. “What’s the scene, man?” Trey asked.
Garvin grinned. “I come to do the deal, partner.” Trey rubbed his eyes. He had been napping before the visit. He yawned and stretched as he closed the window and went to open the front door. His nemesis was still grinning. “Two kilos, man. Look, the money there,” Garvin said, gesturing at a small package on the steps of the front porch.
Trey didn’t move from the doorway. Something felt wrong. “Look, man, I change my mind. I not selling you again.” As he moved to close the door, Garvin sprang forward with surprising grace and speed.
“How you mean you ent selling me? Man, don’t talk foolishness now. Two kilos. Go and bring it.”
Trey shook his head. “Nah, partner. I done. You go have to get that someplace else—”
The report of the gunshot silenced them both. Blood drained from Garvin’s face and he was as white as the wall he had to lean against to keep from falling.
Trinidad Noir Page 2
