The Bone Readers

by Jacob Ross

  ‘You didn hear what I say?’ Malan began bearing down on the youth. ‘I tell you to clean your shoes and get inside the fuckin vehicle.’

  By the time I caught up with him, he’d pulled open the door, wrapped a hand around the young man’s collar and body-slammed him against the jeep. I heard the oof as the breath escaped the youth. Malan dragged him back, was about to slam him face-down on the bonnet when I threw myself between them. I broke most of the momentum with my shoulders. I closed my hand around Malan’s wrist.

  ‘Lemme go,’ he hissed.

  The raised tendons of his arm were switching. I locked eyes with him, and held on.

  I angled my head at the people on the road. ‘They get your point. Let’s go.’

  The tension slackened in his arm and he stepped back. I bundled Switch into the vehicle and we drove off.

  Malan rubbed his wrist and sidled a glance at me. ‘I thought y’was a waster, soft, yunno, but…’ he swung the vehicle around the corner, its tyres yelping as it came out of the turn, ‘You got some moves. Don’t cross me though.’

  ‘I don’t like your method.’

  ‘You know a better way?’

  ‘Yeh.’

  ‘Keep it to yourself, then.’ A series of hiccups followed. ‘Okay, Digger, you learn the book by heart. So what! All that say is that you learn the book by heart. The real world different from a coupla pages in a book. Law book say man not s’pose to murder man. They still go ahead and do it, not so? Fuck the book. I living in the real world. Anyway…’ He nudged my shoulder with a fist. ‘Me and you goin get on.’

  ‘Who decide?’ I said.

  ‘Me.’

  When we got back, San Andrews was simmering in the noonday heat, the air brazen with horns. Office workers weaved neatly between the heavy lunchtime traffic.

  We were on Church Street. Along the edge of the road ahead of us a busy array of shifting bodies. Almost a head above them, a tall cane-stalk of a woman.

  ‘Digger, yuh see that?’ Malan was pointing ahead. He’d pressed his chest against the steering wheel, his chin pushed forward.

  ‘That’s Dessie,’ I said. ‘My account manager.’

  ‘Jeez!’ He’d dropped his voice. ‘We got woman like that on Camaho?’

  Malan tapped his horn. Two enormous eyes turned in our direction, high cheekbones, skin brown as a beer bottle and just as smooth. The easy strut of a gaulin.

  Dessie caught sight of me, and suddenly her face radiated.

  ‘Jeez!’ Malan said.

  ‘One minute,’ I said. He braked so abruptly I almost hit my face against the windshield.

  I stretched an arm through the window. Dessie reached out and slipped her fingers between mine.

  ‘When you coming in,’ she said, ‘to check your mortgage?’

  ‘How’s my mortgage?’ I said.

  ‘Doing alright,’ she laughed, flashed me a beach-white smile and carried on. We sat in the jeep with a raucous line of traffic behind us, watching Dessie step all the way to the bank. As the big glass door slid open, she lifted a hand at me before stepping into the cool.

  ‘Jeez! Digson she yours?’

  ‘She married,’ I said.

  ‘That make it more interesting, not so?’

  ‘Not so,’ I said. ‘You wouldn’t understand.’

  Malan wouldn’t take his eyes off me, not even when he pulled into the court yard, opened the door and let out Switch.

  ‘You goin tell me how you meet she?’

  ‘Nuh.’

  7

  I’d been eight months in the job, made routine arrests when requested, wrote reports that, more and more, Chilman passed over to me. I had a mortgage and was rebuilding my house. I supposed I was doing alright, but sitting in the office, eyeing the old DS, his sleeves rolled up, hands propping up his chin, muttering over the yellow folder that I now knew was the Nathan file, I needed to convince myself I was.

  I knew that later Chilman would re-slot the file amongst his ‘live’ cases, drive down to the Lagoon Road, which bordered the yacht service and drink until he could barely stand. He’d never been thrown by a case except this one. He kept saying this, and even I – after the little time I’d spent in San Andrews CID – could see that he’d not made an inch of progress, and he probably could not.

  But what made me any different from the ole fella? I remembered what he said to me in the corridor of the archives. To free myself of my mother, I too had to kill her – commit a kind of matricide. But how do you kill an absence? How do you rid yourself of something you knew you loved and had never had enough of? How do you empty yourself of all that?

  Perhaps the old DS drank to drown out Nathan; and me – I read. I read a lot to distract me from myself. In school, I’d learned the word for every type of killing there was so that I could name what happened to the protesting women of 1999. The word I found was democide – the wilful murder of a person, or persons by a power greater than themselves. And the hand that wielded that power was the Commissioner, my father.

  I couldn’t say I knew him. He was the man my grandmother sent me to see in my Sunday best when her kitchen garden did not earn enough to buy my things for school. Every couple of months or so I would walk to his gate in Morne Bijoux, shout a greeting to his Dominican wife who was always in the veranda combing her hair. She never answered me. ‘That boy here,’ she would say, her hand not missing a stroke.

  The maid came out, dropped a few dollars in my hand and returned to the house. I would look at the maid with special interest because my mother used to be their maidservant too.

  My anger came later.

  I stayed in the office until Chilman left his desk, replaced the Nathan folder and left without a word. He probably didn’t see me.

  Look where your mother was looking… I’d chewed on that sentence, rolled it over in my mind until, the night before, I rose from bed, switched on the light and wrote a single word: guns. Of course! My mother would have been looking at the guns, or at the men who held them, which in this case amounted to the same thing.

  The guns would have come from the armoury. Somebody would have handed them out. If there was one thing an armourer did it was to keep an inventory of the officers to whom weapons were given, as well as a record of their return.

  Now I felt a hesitancy – a reluctance to proceed. When I cleared it all up, what would I do? Take it to my father? Throw it in his face? Then what?

  But was it about this at all? I already knew who had done it. All my life I had visualised what happened to my mother. What remained to know – to fill the emptiness that DS Chilman seemed to know so much about – was to find out what they had done with her. To locate where she was.

  I locked the office door behind me, got into the car I’d just bought and headed for the part of San Andrews we called The Dims.

  I relished the fact that I could drive now. After four weeks of wrestling with Chilman’s Datsun – a wilful, spiteful chunk of rusting metal – I had little doubt that I could drive anything on earth with wheels – even on the wrecked roads of the island.

  At the end of the fourth week, the DS just said. ‘You could drive, Digson; go pick up your license tomorrow.’

  I got myself a little Toyota that went in whichever direction I turned the steering wheel, and that was good enough for me.

  I tapped on the door of the old stone building , turned my face up to the camera and raised my ID to it. I heard the thwack of bolts on the steel door in front of me. When it swung open, a square face, yellowed by the tungsten light, pushed out itself at me. The man’s head looked as if it were cut from granite

  ‘Yeh?’

  I felt a quiver of uneasiness run down my spine.

  ‘DC Digson here.’ I passed him my ID. He stared at it, then at my face, held it in his hand as if it were a useless bit of plastic.

  ‘I have to call for clearance,’ he said, with a voice that seemed to rise out of his belly.

  ‘Call who?’ I said.

>   He didn’t answer me, was about to turn back, when I planted my foot in the crack of the door. ‘Hold on,’ I said.

  He looked down at my foot, then at my face as if to say it was the stupidest thing I could have done. It was. He could have thrown his weight against it and crushed my foot.

  ‘Hold on,’ I insisted.

  I dialled Chilman. His cell phone rang a couple of times, then the DS’s voice came at me through a clatter of background noises.

  ‘What’s happenin, Digson?’

  ‘I’m at the armoury, Sir. The fella don’t want to let me in.’

  ‘That make a lotta sense to me. What you want ’cross there?’

  ‘You know,’ I said.

  He cleared his throat and in the pause I heard someone call out his name. ‘Pass the fella over.’

  I held out the handset to the man. ‘Detective Superintendent Chilman want a word with you.’

  The man took the phone, glanced at it, then placed it a few millimetres from his ear.

  ‘Uh-huh?’ he said.

  Chilman rattled something. The man lifted the handset from his ear, squinted at the screen, then pressed it against his head.

  ‘How I know is you I speaking to, Sir?’

  Chilman’s voice came through again – a string of squawks.

  ‘Yessir,’ the man said. ‘Nuh Sir – is my job I doing, Sir.’

  The man handed me the phone, looked me up and down. ‘What this about?

  ‘The Superintendent just told you, not so?’

  ‘Nuh.’

  ‘Where y’all keep the paperwork?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘The files, yunno – the shelves with all the files.’

  His face relaxed. He made a movement with his hand and let me in.

  I followed him up some stairs. He lifted his chin at a room without a door directly facing us.

  ‘I might be all night,’ I said to his retreating back.

  ‘Not my problem,’ he said, and clomped down the stairs. A door banged shut and the building settled into silence.

  It took me four hours. The whole history of conflict of the island was here in the records of the handguns and rifles passed over to policemen over the years: the bolt action 303 Ross rifles of the 1950s replaced a decade later by Lee Enfields, followed by the AK47s of the early 1980s, then the Ruger Mini-14s. Now in our time, the American patrol shooters – M4s and F2000s.

  I found what I was looking for in a folder which I thought was empty because it felt so flimsy in my hands: a single scribbled sheet of paper, dated May 3rd, 1999. Even the time was noted: 10.47am. The paper was sectioned into three rough columns: date and time of issue, date and time returned. In a narrower column on the right were the initials of the receiving officer.

  Twenty eight Ruger Mini-14 rifles and twelve Smith & Wesson Model 10 revolvers.

  At the bottom of the list there was an initial and a signature, BH. I photographed the paper with my cell phone and slotted back the file.

  I went downstairs and knocked the door marked OFFICE.

  The man came out, his shoulders so broad they almost filled the corridor.

  ‘Where’s the armoury?’ I said.

  ‘You in it.’

  ‘I mean the guns.’

  ‘What you want to go there for?’

  ‘You come with me. No sweat.’

  ‘I have to come with you.’

  I followed him to the end of the corridor, turned left and stopped behind him at an iron door; his square head cast an inflated shadow on the wall. It took him a while to unlock it, and I sensed his reluctance in every movement of his hands and shoulders. The big steel door swung open. The sweetish smell of gun oil wrapped itself around my head. The man slid a hand along the wall and a weak yellowish glow lightened the darkness of the room.

  There was a crypt-like quality to the space. A palpable quiet. I ignored the reluctance that came over me and walked in.

  Rifles were queued on racks against each wall. I’d done my homework and knew most of them by sight and shape. I walked toward the rack of Mini-14s. I counted eighteen.

  ‘Where’s the rest?’ I said.

  The heavy shoulders heaved. ‘Them is all.’

  ‘Used to be more,’ I said, staring at the dark-brown weapons. I stepped forward, ran a hand along the wooden stocks and closed my eyes – as if by some kind of necromancy they would rouse themselves and speak to me.

  ‘How long you been working here?’

  I heard his breathing, heavy and prolonged. ‘One year and a coupla months.’

  ‘You from the army, right?’

  He said nothing.

  ‘What’s the name of the fella who worked here before you?

  ‘Selo.’

  ‘You know his full name?’

  ‘Selo. He done something?’

  ‘How long Selo work here for?’

  ‘How you know I been in the army?’

  ‘I wrong?’

  ‘Nuh. How you know?’

  ‘You wearing army boots and you got a 9mm Browning under your shirt – army issue. How long Selo work here for?’

  ‘Coupla years.’

  ‘And before him?’

  ‘Dunno.’

  I asked him to let me out.

  Outside, I glanced at my phone. There was a missed call from Chilman, and a text message from Dessie. 1-2-c-u.

  I checked my watch. 11.30pm. Dessie only messaged me when her husband, the manager of her bank, was off the island.

  I typed a question mark.

  Grinder, she replied.

  I headed for the old cane mill buried in a wilderness of acacia and dandakayo trees in the depths of Morne Delice valley.

  Dessie was the teller at the counter when I opened my bank account – the long-limbed girl I used to watch after school as she walked across the Carenage, a full head above her laughing friends.

  She was even more striking than I remembered her, as tall and slim as a river-reed.

  ‘Dessie Manille,’ I said, because I couldn’t help myself. ‘I used to adore you once.’

  Her shoulders stiffened; she stopped filling in the form and looked me in the eye.

  ‘Why you telling me that now, Flighty?’

  ‘You know my nickname?’

  She continued to scribble on the form.

  ‘Who don’t know Flighty Mikey? Inter-college sport. Winning all the time, but never staying round to collect the prize. They calling the boy to give him his trophy – next thing you know, he gone.’ The chuckles shook her shoulders.

  ‘My Cinderella years,’ I said. ‘I had somebody to look after.’

  She X-ed the bottom of the paper, pushed it forward for me to sign. ‘Had lots of girls crazy-sick about you in my school, but…’ She dropped the bank book on the counter, nodded stiffly. ‘Thank you for choosing to bank with us, Mister Digson. Next, please!’

  ‘Let’s talk,’ I said.

  ‘I’m married,’ she said, lifting her eyes at the queue behind me. ‘Next please!’

  When I got home, I saw that she’d scribbled her cell phone number on the back of the receipt.

  I arrived half an hour before her. Dessie parked behind the crumbling wall, got out and picked her way on high heels to my car. She slid into my seat, took my hands and folded them in hers.

  She nuzzled into me. I closed my eyes and took in the smell of her. We didn’t talk much. We were not lovers. We’d been doing this for months.

  We would get to the point where the closeness became almost unbearable and I would promise myself I wouldn’t do it again – this tempting of temptation. Dessie was a Presbyterian, her husband a junior leader or something in their church. I sensed no love between them, but something else that I couldn’t put my finger on. What I knew for sure was that she was terrified of him.

  ‘Digger, we have to stop this.’

  ‘You say that all the time, Dessie.’

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘You say that all the time too.
’

  I felt her breath against my shoulder. ‘I want to wake up with a man who look at me like you look at me.’ She eased her weight off me. ‘You got somebody yet? I mean, serious.’

  ‘Not yet, nuh. Why?’

  ‘You have to?’

  ‘Of course – what you take me for?’

  The beautiful eyes were glowing. Dessie didn’t look maltreated. There was a quick bright smile for whoever she chose to bless with it. I only saw the fear when she said her husband’s name. Luther Caine.

  He would kill her if he found out, she told me, with a certainty that chilled me.

  I’d seen him with her a couple of times. Like her, Luther Caine was from an old Camaho bloodline that called itself good family. Red-skin people, Caucasian eyes with a blackman’s arse and lips – the part of himself he would be hating most, I thought. And no amount of servants, surround lawns, and a massive wedding cake of a house could change that. There would be tennis on Sunday mornings, dinner and cocktails in an expensive restaurant in the tourist south on evenings. In short, my father’s kinda people.

  ‘What make you stay with him?’ I said.

  Dessie would not answer me.

  ‘Y’ever hear about the Thanatos urge, Dessie?’

  ‘The?’

  ‘Thanatos urge. Sigmund Freud. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. 1920, I think. You must look it up. You right, we have to stop.’

  We watched a late moon rise and fill the valley with cold light.

  ‘After here, I don’t want to go back there,’ she said.

  ‘Is what prisoners say, when they come outta jail.’

  She looked at me, interested. ‘Serious?’

  ‘Serious.’

  ‘Digger, you mean it – not meeting up to, y’know… talk?’

  I did not answer her. A couple of weeks would pass and we would find ourselves here again in this grey zone of nebulous transgression, a little frightened of ourselves.

  For me it was a kind of brinkmanship – a pleasurable defiance; and fear, perhaps, that one day Dessie and I might tip over, fall into each other and spoil it.

  8

  It took me a week of sifting through the Civil Service employment records to find the name of the armourer whose initials were at the bottom of the list I retrieved from the armoury. Buckman Hurd. People knew him as Boko. I took the slip of paper with his name to the office at the farthest end of the building that we called The Staple Unit. I figured that the officer there named Cornwall, who collected reports and sorted them, would remember Boko Hurd, and perhaps tell me where to find him.