It was not supposed to be. Never supposed to be. But yes, you’ll be back late, nuh? he had asked his sister. Yeah man, she had replied—murmured, actually, momentarily distracted with pulling some loose thread out of her skirt—and had mentioned something about maybe staying late at her friend Jessica’s, in Allerdyce. She and Peter had known each other even then, and Peter, soon to be her fiancé, had arrived not long after that to drive her over to their friends’, though she had always preferred to do her own driving whenever possible … that was Leigh Anne, that was her very independent streak. And she had, not long after that, departed … leaving him alone on the grounds with the nasty-dutty black bwoy walking around, swinging his hips and machete—for by that time the gardener-uncle also had gone, had in fact taken off early that afternoon and left his nephew behind to do the rest of the cutting and chopping and cleaning up. Cutting and chopping … and thinking about those words, and seeing the machete gleaming on the black bwoy’s hip had given him some pause … for hadn’t there been so many stories in recent years about men being “chopped up” by gardeners? Something gone wrong one day? A bit of temper in one, a slip of cruelty in the other? A demeaning word tossed just once too often from brown to black? The final comprehension, by the black, that the brown’s lowered gaze barely concealed an abiding contempt? The black perhaps finally understanding, perhaps after fifteen or twenty years of service chopping back their damned trees and cutting back their blasted bougainvilleas, that the words “dutty” and “nasty,” if never uttered directly to him, were most certainly thought by several (if not all) members of the household about him? Yes, maybe a definite Yes to all, and the possible Yes had, for at least a few moments, given him considerable pause … yet that evening, at last, impossibly, they had met. Brown, black. After dark, well after twilight. Met in the washing room with its washing machine, heavy sink, and constant smell of chlorine, amidst which the helper—Carlene, a young black woman from Trelawny whose only enemies on earth were dirt and Satan—in daylight hours scrubbed and wrung stains from clothing, curtains, bed linens soiled by brown people’s sweat.
Just a glance and a very slight smile that could not truly be a smile but was—that was all it took, it seemed, as he found himself there, in the washing room where he never went, when the gardener’s nephew was at last there, with grave concentration washing his hands and forearms before leaving for the evening. Yes sah, de bus mi a tek a T’ree Mile, the bwoy had said (beautiful teeth, he had noticed again; black skin, gorgeous teeth): full patois, not one English sentence in there. Bus a T’ree Mile, den mi haffi walk. Although he did not think of it at the time, he would remember later that the bwoy had not mentioned that, upon leaving the house, he was also required to walk all the way down the long stretch of Norbrook Road to Olivier Road, then past the golf course to Constant Spring Road, then take the Constant Spring bus to Half Way Tree where he would change for a bus that would take him closer to Three Mile. For some reason the bwoy—machete still shining on his hip—had not mentioned any of that.
But really, there had not been much else. They had not had to make uneasy talk about football, or the weather; they had not had to talk about how wonderful Henry, the bwoy’s uncle, had been all those years, working such long hours and so reliably for the family; they had not had to say anything about the amount of traffic on Norbrook Road these days, nor about the number of doctor birds that had dived into the garden one afternoon, spun in ever-widening circles, and then departed almost as suddenly as they had appeared, never reappearing in the family garden in that number. It had seemed as if all at once, their faces had come together. Hands. Arms. Crotches, and hands in crotches. Without the saddling or comfort of language, except for a few very soft words the bwoy had whispered in his ear—“You can suck m’hood?” and “Gwan, hold it tight fi mek i’ ’tand up”—words like that, which he was sure he had returned with similar requests—little had been said. Suddenly he was smelling, tasting that black bwoy in him, within him, on him, and, impossibly, himself on the black bwoy, the bwoy who did not speak or chose not to speak English, and that fast, yes, that fast, he remembers, everything was black: night, skin, and the space in the throat that aims to grip the tightest. Although it was not possible, the black bwoy’s tongue was in his mouth, his in the black bwoy’s, and—
(Smells. Sweat. Armpit stink, mansmell, crotch. Sweat, crotch, hoodsmell. Lift up the hood and sniff the tip. Sniff it before you suck it. Before you put your mouth on it, smell it. Breathe it. Taste. Unwashed hood after a full day, rass, and rank crotch. He was smelling it. I am smelling it, he had thought. Smelling you. I am smelling your fleshsmell ranksweatfleshsmell and
Yes. Yes. Tasting it. Tasting you. Michael. Nasty-dutty black bwoy. Sucking me sucking you. Here.)
“Michael,” the bwoy had said while somehow managing to keep his tongue pressing against the other’s—lowering a hand to his machete for only a moment, to in fact release it as he released the button that clipped his trousers closed—saying the name again, “Michael”: his name, simply his name.
There are times, even if you are standing in shock at your sister’s funeral, gripping the pew railing in front of you as the organ, in all its sorrow and wail, begins to call your name, when you can hate her with every inch of your blood and bone, and wish her dead yet again for having done certain things: for having once called you that name,“Chunkybatty,” when you were all children and you’d had, in truth, a chunky batty, though you gradually outgrew it in adolescence, in fact grew by all accounts into a slender young man: but that name and its humiliation, Chunkybatty, remained and scalded the scorn of childhood awkwardness and shame that three of your favorite cousins never forgot, and laughed over every chance they got—laughed over for years as you, small boy at the time, had stood there, Chunkybatty, stood there and looked at them. Or you could hate her, deadsister, for telling your parents, although you had sworn her to confidence, that one of your teachers had severely scolded you for looking “unkempt” in your uniform in an afternoon class; or hate her for snapping at you, “No, stupid,” when you as her older caring brother had merely asked a question about one of her friends who had been ill, and had later, most unexpectedly, at a tender age, died; or hate her and very much wish her dead, again and again, for returning home early from a party when she had told you several times only hours before, No, she would definitely be home late, of course, with Peter, with Andrea, maybe with Karen too: with all of them, she would be home late. But no, not late that evening, because she and Peter had had a rare disagreement early on that had escalated into a bitter fight, and “Home,” she had angrily said, “Enough already, man. I’m leaving. Home,” she had said—and home she had come, in someone else’s car—in Andrea’s car, or Deirdre’s; in the car of one of those friends who were now somewhere behind you in the organ-wailing church. There are times when you should know that these things might happen. But when you cannot take your tongue out of a nasty-dutty black bwoy’s mouth and cannot stop inhaling the smell of his sweat and tasting it too, the sweat and smell and kisses and cock pressing against you, inside you, and then deeper inside still, of a black bwoy gardener who is in fact not at all either nasty or dutty; when you cannot, will not, give up the feeling of his warm warm strong black, so black, arms about you holding, holding, like that, and the feeling of his mouth upon your neck, warm, soft, moist, whispering into your most receptive ear his name, his most holy beautiful two-syllabled name; when you have sucked and kissed and even, oh my God, swallowed his rank hood and everything that makes his flesh, that flesh, possible, and he has kissed your belly and then so easily, so calmly and gently, eased his thick black hood into your backside hole, your battyhole, and fucked you, fucked you standing up with his gleaming machete on the concrete floor of your parents’ washing room, his trousers on the floor tangled up in yours and his hood pushing, pushing inside you as you gasp and shudder and reach behind you for his neck, his arms, for something to grab onto because the pain and pleasure and
sheer raw burn of his flesh are too much, beyond all things, beyond imagining, beyond even “Michael!” you had actually called out, calling his name in spite of yourself, “Michael—”
There are times like these when you simply cannot be as aware of things, of sounds and vibrations and suddenly approaching lights, as you ought to be, as you must be. As you must be, by God, especially inna Jamaica, bomborassclaat. Receiving him, receiving his warm rush inside yourself with no thought in those moments of danger or disease or even his black skin so far up inside you, against you, on you, you cannot completely be in your “right mind”: you are in fact deluded, diverted, disoriented unto joy, freedom, release: release from the black bwoy, the brown boy, the black bwoy and the brown boy kissing and sucking, and if only, oh my God, you thought, if only we could—
But then. Then. Then she was there. Standing there, the person who drove her home mercifully having left her by the front veranda because she had wanted to be “alone,” as she had said as the car pulled up the driveway. “Just leave me at the house, I’ll be fine. Anyway, Leighton is home.”
“But are you sure?” the other person had asked as she had prepared to get out of the car—the driver had in fact been Andrea, dear Andrea Harvey now sobbing quietly in the third row on the right, clasping her hands beneath her chin and rocking back and forth as her parents, beside her, hold her, or at least her father does. “Are you sure? You seemed really upset when Peter said—”
But she had almost snapped at Andrea as she occasionally snapped at him: “I’ll call you tomorrow, man. Thanks for the ride, Andrea, but really, man, I’ll be fine. Good night.” And had walked away from the departing car and—perhaps more rapidly because she had indeed been on the verge of tears, or, in fact, had actually been crying, thinking of some of the things that Peter had, so unexpectedly, said during their foolish argument—she had walked faster, faster, and that quickly, without of course at all expecting to, had come upon—Them.
Them,
there and—there.
Black, brown. No, not a woman and a man, but—the gardener’s—the gardener’s nephew? And her (but No. No. No no no)—her brother?
There. In the concrete washroom smelling as always of chlorine and—and what else? Flesh? Sweat? And something else, the smell of—
Oh yes. My God. The smell of—
Unmistakable. That smell, and men. Two men. Flesh. Sweat.
In the concrete washroom, the first and only time she had seen her brother’s … her brother’s … yes, bending; yes, engorged; yes, and the black bwoy, the gardener’s nephew, holding it in his hand, in his hand, as he had moved and rocked and pushed behind, behind, behind her brother. Behind Leighton Andrew Shepherd. Her brother.
She had looked at him. She had not looked at him.
He had looked at her. He had—
(But then she had been so upset upon leaving the party that she had not even thought to call, and would he have heard his phone ringing anyway if she had called? Would he have heeded the ringing? Would he have stopped? Where was his phone anyway, just then? And would he have cared?)
And Michael—
Not again. No. After that evening, none of them had ever seen him again. Never seen again the nasty-dutty black bwoy who somehow in one of those smell-and-suck moments, one of those oh-my-God-he-is-inside-me moments, had become to him, finally, “Michael.” Not the nasty-dutty black bwoy, but … “Michael,” he had thought and thinks now in the church, his parents bent beside him. Yes.
She had looked at him that way every day she had seen him for the couple of years she’d had left to live. She had looked and not looked at him that way especially in his dreams: dreams of broken twisting stairs, dreams of drowning … dreams of reaching hands cut off at the wrists. Dreams of black bwoy kisses, thrusts, embraces. Dreams of that one. Michael. And dreams of faces. Hers. His.
There are times when you know that you should not be standing—somehow managing to stand—during your sister’s funeral, feeling glad, as you do now, and happy—oh, rass, tell the truth, relieved—as you feel now, that she is dead. Though you are sad, devastated (well, no, actually, much much more than devastated), that she died as she did and that, oh God, you never had a chance to say goodbye or I love you, or a chance to tell her how much how much how much … and only you can know what the rest of that sentence would say—you know that you should not feel this most secret feeling of deliverance, yes God, and safety, God, that she who knew about that and him and all of it, though it was only one evening and little more in fact than an hour, if that, is now dead. Though you may hate the roses that surround her corpse and wonder why the bomborassclaat your parents chose all these outdated Anglican songs for the organist to play as the minister proceeds onward and onward still, you know that, though this secret mixture of hatred and relief just may kill you one day, if you are fortunate, it will not. It may not kill you, this enormous hatred and relief, if you … if you what? Yes, what? But you do not know the answer to that question right now. Do not know it, and will not, until—yes, you think, closing your eyes briefly, exactly: until. Until that day, whichever day that will be. And then, dear Lord. Oh, then, Jesus. Fury. Fury like fucking. Glory.
But for now, perhaps, for him—for all of them—what follows will be enough: the moment when the organ begins once again to wail and soar as the minister’s voice carries over all of their heads its long and incantatory litany of woe; the ancient keening of On this day, dearly beloved, and We ask this of our Lord, Heavenly Father, toward climax unto crescendo unto the deeper breath that is no breath at all—that is in truth scarcely a sigh, the gasp and gape of loss: the loss that unleashes all manner of good sense from the hands, that undoes the reliably quiet dignity of the wrists, and rips open the chest for the returning raven’s descending glide in and in.
His mother has begun to shudder and give way even more beside him, he feels it; his father has at last slackened and surrendered his shoulders to the raven’s claws and the dip of its narrow beak over the exposed neck so pathetic and vulnerable before the soundless glide: this he knows also. Knows it as he feels the hand that cannot possibly be his hand, but is, rise not to his face (to his shock now wet, then wetter, then warmer still), but to his mother’s shaking arm; his hand that speaks to her the words that his mouth, so dry, unlike his face, cannot.
She would not have wanted those roses.
And what would … what would the nasty-dutty … what would Michael have thought of—what would Michael have felt about the—
It is only then that he notices that Michael’s uncle is not anywhere in the church.
But now—is it in fact now that he becomes aware of that great dark bird—the raven, perhaps, or some other creature—descending over his head, as if to enclose his wet, warm face between its wings? And then what will happen next? he thinks. But never mind: for, as he already knows, there are times when, even though you are secretly glad someone is dead, and even though the brief grip of a beautiful nasty-dutty black bwoy Michael’s arms about your straining body reached deeper into your cunt, yes, say it!—deeper into your brown male cunt than you could possibly have imagined, to the point even of bringing you dreams of hood smell and the incipient taste of piss as you bend once again to suck and kiss it, you know that somehow, even with the great dark bird descending over you and your mother and father giving way next to you, you will somehow continue standing. And, at the dreadful service’s end, you will walk with everyone else out of the church, away from the awful flowers. Away from that thing dressed up to be her—the thing that is not her, no, and that will never speak. At least, so he hopes. He hopes it will never speak. Let him believe so, at any rate: believe in the possibilities of the spreading day outside and all the silences and accompanying noise, as the dark bird’s wings now almost completely cover his face and its beak poises as if to take aim where his skull is thinnest, as it now wraps itself entirely, ever so gently, in the way of a shroud, about his head.
PART III
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br /> PRESSURE DROP
“54-46 (THAT’S MY NUMBER)”
BY CHRISTOPHER JOHN FARLEY
Trench Town
There have been so many lies told about my late brother in the Jamaican press that I feel compelled to send this e-mail to the Gleaner, especially since many of the falsehoods originated with me.
I don’t expect you to publish all of this, or even most of it, but rest assured that I will post the entirety of it on my new website: TheRealProofWatson.com. Unfortunately, ProofWatson.com had already been taken and is selling unauthorized paraphernalia—hash pipes, roach clips, rolling paper, etc.—bearing my brother’s image. My lawyers are looking into it.
In the wake of my recent early retirement—something that the Gleaner issued not a tweet about—I have finally been able to speak freely about some of the cases that I worked on with the assistance of my brother Proof. I had always wanted to be a writer of some sort—buy me a few Red Stripes and I’ll recite most of the Claude McKay canon—but I was derailed from that track by a family tragedy early in my life, and any poems I might have had in my heart I covered with my badge. Surprisingly, in the wake of the media frenzy brought about when tales of some of his exploits surfaced, many of my colleagues on the Jamaican Constabulary Force, some of whom I served with for a decade, were stunned to hear that Proof and I were related. I would have thought our shared surname would have been a clue, but following up on evidence was never a strong suit of members of the department. Which is precisely why my brother’s mysterious gifts were so extraordinarily useful during our collaborations …
On my first morning as assistant commissioner, I decided to enter the Kingston Central Police Station through the back door. The rainy season had begun, and it seemed the showers would never stop, and the wet had soaked my uniform to my skin in just the brief time it took me to dash from the front door of my apartment building to the front seat of my secondhand Fiat 500. I was particularly perturbed by the drenching because I had gone to great difficulty to iron my clothes the night before, hoping, almost certainly in vain, that creased pants and a pressed collar would boost my standing with veterans of the force who had been dismayed about having a thirty-year-old as the second-in-command, and someone largely raised in America, besides.
Kingston Noir Page 18
