One midday he saw Mona helping an old disabled man on the corridor. The man had one arm around the girl’s shoulder and the other was clutching a wobbly cane. One leg of the man’s trousers had been folded to the knee, exposing a scarred stump. Orbits got up and rushed out to help the pair. “Don’t worry,” the man said, and Orbits saw it was Doraymay. “I just glad I reach up these stairs before the place close.”
“Sit down, Uncle. Look how heavy you breathing.” Mona steered him to a chair.
“When I had my two good legs, I use to sprint up places like this in no time.”
“So how everything?” Orbits asked awkwardly.
“Good, good, man. Daughter married and move out and son get a big job in the town.” As Doraymay continued talking, it emerged that things weren’t that good after all. His wife spent most of the time at her daughter’s place and he had not seen his son in months. Orbits asked who saw about his meals. “I build a nice little kitchen downstairs,” he said. “Have everything right there. Pro-gas, sink and a toilet in the back. Board up everything. You remember the place? You must drop by sometime. Will cook a nice curry goat for the two of we. You forget I was the seasoning man for Spanish?” He looked down at the folds of his trousers. “I should leave now,” he said abruptly.
Orbits and Mona helped him down the stairs, and Orbits, who initially assumed he had come for help, could not understand the purpose of the visit. Was the request really couched in the description of his situation, the abandonment by his family? Was he too proud to ask directly for assistance? Orbits looked from the doorway at his old co-worker hopping down the street and for a minute felt he should run after him. He actually made a few steps before he hesitated. In no mood to return to his office, he climbed the stairs at the other end of the building.
The pet store owner sitting behind a desk bookended by aquariums glanced up. His wavy hair was neatly parted and he wore thick donnish spectacles. “Just looking around,” Orbits said. “I have an office at the other end.”
“The councillor? I thought you looked familiar.” Now the man got up, and Orbits saw that his merino was rolled up to expose his hairy belly. He recalled a trip when he had remarked to his mother that the picturesque upper half of a scene was tarnished by the dereliction beneath. “Only fishes and a few birds here. Too expensive to import.” He sniffed into his merino, wiped his hand and added, “Had a time when you could get all these birds locally but too much hunting. You know people eating alligator tails now? Eating everything. Damn savages.” For a minute Orbits saw only the upper, refined half of the man. He was obviously educated and sensitive. Then the man said, “You want a puppy?” He walked to the end, reached behind a row of boxes and produced a trembling, skinny little thing. “Father was a hunting dog. Mother got bounced down.” He placed it on the ground and it tottered and almost toppled over. “Does call it Magaboy on account of how it so skinny. But with the right master it will spring up in no time. I wanted to take it home, but these guard dogs I breeding will tear it up.”
“I really don’t have the time—”
“You ever see these movies where a skinny little dog pull somebody out of a fire? Or run for help like Lassie?”
Orbits smiled, his mood momentarily lifted. But once more in his office his mind turned to Doraymay. He was still thinking of the other man during the next meeting of county councillors. He told the chairman, “So far I am completely useless in this position. Why exactly am I drawing a salary if I can’t help anyone?” He saw the chairman’s fingers preparing to twirl and he added quickly, “And I don’t want to hear any da-da-da nonsense.” The chairman, his response pre-empted, reached for a file, flipped through its contents roughly, threw it aside and scratched his forehead, his finger tracing the deepening lines.
The next day Orbits visited the MP for the area. His office was in a town choked with high, narrow shops competing for attention with a multitude of roadside vendors congesting a pavement that dropped suddenly at spots. The concrete barriers placed erratically on the street slowed traffic to a crawl, and there was the constant honking of horns and inventive curses as pedestrians and stray dogs weaved through the vehicles. The MP’s office was on the upper floor of a health food store with a billboard promising to cure cancer, diabetes and menopause. The MP was a small, benign-looking man outfitted in a white shirt and blue tie and a jacket several sizes too big. Orbits sat and described his frustrations. The man listened carefully, blinking sleepily and nodding. When Orbits was finished, the MP adjusted his tie, leaned forward on his desk and locked his fingers. The gesture was gentle, but the minute his fingers locked, his expression changed: his lips turned down and his eyelids narrowed. He seemed to recede into his jacket like a morrocoy retreating into its shell. He began to speak in an exceptionally reedy voice. “We have to move forward one step at a time. We must not look at our destination but at our feet. Where will it take us?” What the hell is he talking about? Orbits wondered. Has he been infected by the store downstairs? Orbits heard him saying, “We are puffs of smoke and the prime minister is holding the cigarette in his hand. He exhales the smoke and the wind blows it here and there. Do you think the PM actually cares? He has done his part.” Unexpectedly Orbits thought of his old friend, Wally. What would he have made of this?
In the weeks that followed, Orbits tried to think of ways he could circumvent the roadblocks placed before him and help those who were genuinely afflicted. He discovered that less than half of the people he saw had legitimate concerns, and to this group he began to suggest alternative routes to solving their problems. He tried to explain that they should not expect everything from the government and that they had been trapped in a cycle of dependency that had cemented their helplessness. “I can’t control the price of rice or dasheen,” he told a group of villagers one afternoon. “I don’t have the power to do that. All I could do is to advise you to plant some more profitable crop. What about pineapples and papaya, for instance?”
“Pine and papaya in a swamp?” The men slammed the door on their way out, scaring Mona. Still, he visited their farms and made promises he knew he could not keep. During these trips he listened to the complainers and mamaguyers on the radio and the lengthy advertisements sponsored by an assortment of quacks and psychics. “We have the cure for anything from A to Z,” ran one while another featuring a man who called himself Doctor Stand promised marital bliss with his concoctions. One evening he heard an immigration consultant boasting of the men and women he had managed to get into Canada and America through some bogus refugee scheme. His mind ran to Wally and he thought: I should really pack up and leave this madhouse.
Instead he got the puppy from My Family and Other Animals. The pet store owner was delighted. He brought the animal from its box and Orbits saw that it had barely grown in the weeks since he had seen it. “Come Magaboy. You get a new owner.” To Orbits he said, “You know the minute you stepped in my place I know this puppy was for you.”
He brought over the animal to Mona and in the evening while he was preparing to leave, he saw her scratching her arms and legs.
Each morning he left Magaboy on his porch with bowls of water and chow, but it always managed to escape, and he would return to find it sniffing around his mother’s backyard garden, now a tangle of lastro. Once it returned with a tiny iguana, and he recalled the pet store owner saying the father was a hunting dog. In the nights he heard Magaboy yapping, and although his sleep was disrupted, he was comforted by the presence of another living thing.
***
Three months after he had purchased Magaboy, a delegation that included Halligator came into his office. Orbits was confused as to what they wanted; then it emerged that an emissary had been sent previously with a proposal. He was still puzzled: which emissary and what proposal? But he listened and he gathered that the man in question was a plainclothes officer who had forwarded requests from Halligator for government contracts to build roads and
repair schools. At the end of the conversation, Orbits explained to the group that there was a bidding process. “We don’t have time for any kiss-me-ass bidding,” Halligator said. “We is busy people. Just coming to you today mean that five business had to close. What else you want from we, man?”
Orbits thought of the question. He opened a drawer in his desk and withdrew a folder. “This is the bidding form.” He slid it across the table.
The plainclothes officer, tall and burly, read the form. “What is this?”
“Could someone read the form for him?” Orbits said tiredly.
“This is a joke. This is a joke,” Halligator sputtered. He snatched the form from the officer and flung it at Orbits. It sailed harmlessly at the side of the table.
Another man said, “You know who you playing with? Allyou fellas does get a little power and feel allyou is Barabbas. I hope you know what happen to him?”
“Making threat in a government office is different from the commess in the rumshop,” he told the group.
“Nobody making threat,” Halligator said, smiling with one side of his mouth. “Threat is only talk.”
Orbits saw Mona looking through the door and told her, “It’s okay. Go back to your work.” And to the men, “Don’t waste my time with this nonsense again.” His voice was even and he was not angry.
Two weeks later, he got a call in his office. He got into his Wingroad and drove hurriedly to his home. The left of the house had been destroyed — the bedrooms that had been occupied by his parents — but the kitchen and living room and two bedrooms had been spared by the fire. Joe the mechanic, who was gathered with a small group, told him, “The fire brigade come a whole hour after I call it.”
“Did you see a dog?” he asked the other man. “Magaboy,” he shouted as he walked through the rubble and the spared rooms.
“That dog gone long time,” Joe reassured him. “Most likely it hiding inside they.” He pointed to the forested area opposite the house. “Must be done eat up two-three snake by now. Ay-ay, where you going?”
“To look for it.” Orbits crossed the road hurriedly. He struggled through the blacksage and the drooping guava trees closed in by vines, calling the dog’s name. He remembered this area, but soon he came to a decline that led to a shallow ravine. On the other side, about five hundred yards away on a hill, was the old community centre. By the time he got to the building, his shoes were soaked and his pants and shirt were covered with burrs. The community centre had been built as a split level to follow the contours of the hill, and from the back it was a jumble of rotting walls and posts. He climbed to the front, which bordered a gravel road now abandoned and overgrown with para grass.
He pushed open the front door and walked inside. There were three men squatting around a box. They got up immediately, and Orbits, if he was not so beset by the fire and the loss of Magaboy, would have noticed that one was holding a knife. They were all shirtless and as they advanced, one of the trio asked, “What you doing here?”
“Looking for a dog.”
“It don’t have no dog here. What is you name?”
“Orbits. I live down the hill. Did you see a dog?”
“I tell you it have no dog here. What you doing here?”
And another, “You come to spy? That is what you doing here?”
Now he smelled the weed and noticed the knife. “I just told you. I live down the hill.”
“We never see you before.” Two of the men were on either side and the one with the knife was directly in front.
“Look, I had a brother who used to come here all the time.”
“Nobody else come here. What is his name?”
“Starboy.”
The men fell silent. Then one of them said, “Don’t talk shit. You is really Starboy brother? You don’t look like him. He was a pretty boy.”
“Yes, yes,” Orbits said impatiently, not catching the change in the man’s tone and the danger that had just passed. “And I looking for a dog.”
“It have no dog here, brother. The only thing here is the three of we and them snakes up in the rafters.” He lit a joint and inhaled. “So you crazy like Starboy?”
“He wasn’t crazy,” Orbits said.
“I don’t mean it that way, brother. He was too bright for this place. Sometimes he used to talk in parables that only he could understand.”
“Like the time he say that people afraid to shut up because the minute they get quiet everybody wondering what scheme they up to.”
“You remember that thing he talk about shame? How every manjack grow up with a ton of shame on his head. I can’t frame it nice like Starboy, but I think that was what he mean.”
“Starboy brother, eh. You know after all this time we does still talk about him.”
“Like when the rain sliding silky-silky down a dasheen leaf we would play this game by guessing how Starboy would frame the scene. Or if the sun peeping through the cloud. He use to talk about the sky a lot.”
“As if he lost something up they.”
The men grew quiet and awkward as they slapped away mosquitoes. Orbits felt the tingle of the burrs on his flesh. He asked the men, “You all know how he died?”
They took their time in answering. Then the man with the knife said, “For we he didn’t die. He still around.”
When he returned to his house, Joe, still there, followed him through the destroyed porch. The rafters in the bedrooms had been burnt and the aluminium sheeting, twisted by the heat, dangled over the floor. The sky, through the holes, looked pitted and broken, the clouds sliced by the angles of the dangling sheets. In his father’s bedroom, the iron filing cabinet had been saved, and when he opened the drawers, he saw clotted parcels and bottles of dental material. Some were even older tonics with the handwritten words “shake well” on their labels.
“You remember when everybody use to think it really had a doctor name Doctor Shakewell because all the bottles from the drug store had this description?” Orbits did not reply. He noticed an old rusted iron box that he assumed contained more dental material. In his mother’s room, the roof had caved into the bed and onto the dressing table, the mirror shattered and lying on its side. But the closet seemed unaffected, and when he pulled open the solid teak door, he saw her clothes, remnants from another time, dresses and gowns and the strange attire she had worn during his former wife’s visit. Pushed to the side were a dozen hangers with clothes he recognized as his brother’s. He walked to the other side of the house, to the rooms that had been spared. He pushed open the door to his brother’s old room and sat on the bed.
Five minutes later Joe shouted from outside, “You find something inside they? Is the dog?” When Orbits emerged, Joe looked at him and said sympathetically, “Don’t take it so hard. These things happen. Thank god the house was empty.” He followed Orbits to the living room. “From the amount of smoke, I thought for sure the house was gone for good. We try to dash some water from the hose on this side and it help a little bit. Nothing permanent damage when you really look at it, so it shouldn’t be hard to rebuild. Maybe you could put some brick walls outside and cedar inside. On the roof, you could put some of these green tiles that so popular nowadays. Sliding door and louvres will look nice. Sometimes these things is just a opportunity, I always say. Labour not so expensive again since the oil money start dripping away. Just a opportunity, as I say.”
He continued with his suggestions, but Orbits had stopped listening. Finally, he told him, “You right. Is an opportunity.” He almost added: I have to move away from this place.
***
The house he had seen more than twenty years earlier, first when he was in a bus with Skullcap, the place transformed by the tourists’ appreciation, and later lowered by his former wife’s more level-headed view, remarkably, was still unoccupied, still abandoned, the fruit trees and flowers now overtaken by lastro but ye
t as appealing as when he had first spotted it. The village, too, had not changed; if anything, it appeared more abandoned, but there was an old grocery beneath a concrete house, the cantilever and the raised blocks and the fretwork and balusters above mocked beneath by the heavy slats, the plain unpainted walls and the yard bruised by knotgrass. Dangling from the fretwork on the upper porch was a sign saying “Soongsoong Japourie. Licensed Grocer.” In the grocery, a smallish man who seemed to be in his sixties with moustache and eyebrows branching in several directions and huge knobbed knuckles that seemed transplanted from a bigger man, told him that the owner of the house had once owned a cocoa estate in the village. The owner had hoped his children would take over the estate, but they had all migrated. “The fella sell out the estate but he hold on to the house. Don’t ask me why. Maybe he was hoping.” He slapped down a fly and Orbits jumped back. “But then it get too late to sell the house,” he said, examining his hand and flicking his finger limply like a dancer. “Nearly everybody leave the village and gone to the town. But I still here. You want to ask me why I never leave?”
“Why?”
He scratched his chin as if he had been caught off guard by the question. Finally, he said, “Go where? And for what? I have the most important thing right here in the shop.” He gazed around his empty shop sadly. “Peace and quiet. You must be confused by the name on the sign, not so?” Orbits was about to tell him that he was not when the grocer said, “Father buy the shop from a old Chinese man who went back to Shanghai. Fella name was Soongsoong, and father wanted to leave the old signboard because everybody in the village was already accustom to the name, but these bitches from the county council office come down hard on him. They say that is fraud to use another man name on your business. So father combine two names. Soongsoong and Japourie. End of text. Case for the crown. You interested?”
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