On my side there wasn’t much to see. Chain link between unpainted concrete pillars, backed by a tall, untidy hedge and bisected by a padlocked garden gate, BRC on steel pipe, from which a flagging flagstone path led almost at once to four or five concrete steps with, at their summit, an empty, small verandah and a door through whose half-height panes of glass the morning sun irradiated confusedly. The place had a neglected, impoverished look. The galvanized zinc roof was rusting badly.
From twenty feet away: “Watch dis,” the vagrant said. He might have been speaking to himself.
In the house behind me, the “modernized” house, a glass sliding door opened, then closed, and a big, paunchy, Portugee man in perhaps his late forties came down the steps and out onto the pavement. He was evidently dressed for work: white short-sleeved shirt (pulling tight at the waist) with an undervest showing; dark trousers. Big forearms, the hair on them long and black; the hair on his head, too, suspiciously black. He crossed behind the 626, close enough that a passing nod at its owner would have been natural. But he merely glanced angrily from the car to my face, and went on over. At the padlocked gate he looked up and down the street, then banged the metal saddle three times.
“Um bad!” the vagrant wailed softly (the Michael Jackson song). “Um ba-ad!” And he pinched the stub of the cigarette, inhaled mightily, and blew the smoke up, straight up, to the bright blue morning sky.
In the house across the street the glass-paned door opened, and a woman—a youngish, brown-skinned woman in a housecoat of fading flowers with her hair in curlers—emerged and came down the steps to the garden gate. She might have been in her mid-thirties, or she might have been younger, for her face had the graven, naked-sad look of one not long come from sleep, and her gaze when she glanced across the street (at me, then at the vagrant) was appraising rather than disapproving. She and the Portugee man stood at the gate talking.
How is it that one can unerringly tell from forty feet away when a man and woman are talking about “doing it”?
Maybe it’s just that they stand too close—even when separated by a BRC gate. Or maybe it’s the way they take turns glancing around, though not as if expecting to see anyone. Or the sense you get, though out of earshot, that they are talking softly yet urgently . . .
At any rate, the woman seemed of a mind to demur (perhaps, I thought, because of the presence of two witnesses across the street). But the Portugee man’s broad, white-shirted back gave off the uncompromising “planted” air of someone who was not about to move; and abruptly the woman broke away and went up the steps into the house and returned with a bunch of keys and opened the gate.
Locking it after him, she glanced a last time at the vagrant—and I saw that the vagrant had gone perfectly still. Then she turned and went up and in, closing the door behind her.
“Um baaad,” the vagrant crooned softly, as though to himself. “Um ba-ad!” Abruptly he sang it out, harsh and loud: “Um baad! Um baaaad!”—and I turned, then said angrily: “Hey!”
The vagrant had slipped his hand into his trousers-front, and—staring hard at the house—was vigorously agitating himself there.
“Hey, you!” I shouted enraged, and the vagrant swung away, interposing his shoulder between me and what he was doing, and went on doing it.
I said, “Jesus Christ!” and swung away myself, and started walking—and in this way found myself abreast of the driveway of the “modernized” house from which the Portugee man had come. There was a car parked in it, some way in, near where the back steps would be. It was a silver shining Mercedes 300 SL: PBA something or the other.
And, writing this now, I cannot explain it, but I looked at that car and knew—knew—that what was taking place in the house across the street, the house with the once-more-locked garden gate, was not at all what I’d assumed it to be—not a solitary man’s heat and hunger calling into some stifled night of marital loneliness (though I understood that the wailing, revving car, laboriously leaving from the far side of the house, had been the signal the Portugee man had been listening for); not a free negotiation between loins and heart, impassioned, urgent, yet free; not male want calling to female bewilderment—but the brute operation of money upon moneylessness (those broken flagstones, that neglected verandah, that badly rusting roof!), the adamantine imposition of power upon powerlessness and need.
Behind my back: “Um baad!” bellowed the vagrant suddenly. “Um ba-ad!” And I turned and saw that—hand out of sight, trousers-front shaking violently—he was glaring at the shut, glass-paned door of the shabby old forties Woodbrook house across the street—glaring at it as if he could kill it.
2.
It was minutes past nine, and though the street where the 626, without warning, had crossed over from life into death (and now lay by the curb, embalmed in silence) was a quiet, residential Woodbrook street, cars still came down it, one by one. I stared at each briefly but hungrily—for who wants to stand in the burning sun not fifty feet away from a violently masturbating vagrant?—but none was a white Galante that might be bearing my acquaintance and his “electrics guy.” So, gloomily, I watched each car come, decelerating as it passed, and then of necessity—just as it came abreast of the engrossed vagrant—braking for the major road ahead.
(“Um baaad!” bellowed the vagrant at sporadic intervals, glaring at the glass-paned door across the street, one hand working wildly in his trousers-front.)
Like that, there came down the road:
1) A dark blue Sonata driven by a young Syrian woman who, when she saw what she was pulling up next to, accelerated so desperately that she swung onto the major road barely ahead of a thundering garbage truck, which repaid her by shattering the quiet morning with a three-second blast of its horn.
2) A brown PAY Laser, piloted by a young creole tess who shook his head when he saw what he saw, bending over in such exaggerated disbelief or misapplied mirth that his forehead bumped his horn and made him jump.
3) A pastel Laurel, the padded cell of a well-dressed, middle-aged, red-skinned lady, who must have suffered terribly—or so the back of her head seemed to say—while she waited for a gap to open in the main road traffic, and who was full of hatred by the time it did, judging by the vengefully accelerating swerve with which she put behind her forever (except, perhaps, in her dreams) the lit and dreadful apparition suffusing her peripheral vision for a petrified Eternity.
None of these fazed the vagrant in the least.
(“Um baad!” bellowed the vagrant at the house with the two unseen occupants and the locked garden gate. “Um baaaad!!!”)
On the other hand, not even he could have ignored the battered pickup with three Indian guys wedged in front and a fourth with a power mower in the tray.
“Yuh crazy nigger!”
“Yuh nasty bitch!”
“Stay right dey, we bringin’ de police for yuh mod-ah cont!”
The vagrant’s hand stayed in his trousers but stopped moving. The guy in the tray jumped up and with an oath flung a cardboard box at him. (It missed.) Reflexively the vagrant picked it up, looked inside, then tossed it away into the gutter. With a chorus of obscenities the pickup turned onto the main road and was gone.
The vagrant looked dismayed. He glanced around him (including at me) disappointedly. And I was just judging it safe to return to my pool of shade, two car lengths or so from where he stood, when his gaze fell again on the glass-paned door, and I saw it strengthen there, and grip, and his hand slipped back into his trousers-front; and I said to myself with feeling, “Oh, fuck!” and for the nth time looked up the street in vain for the Galante.
(And if some amateur psychologist wishes to explain to me at this point that my reluctance to stand near the vagrant in that state was due to latent homosexual tendencies on my part, fine. I only know there’s a certain, irrefragable distance from a masturbating man within which I am not prepared to stand; and the only pool of shade on the pavement lay well within it.)
“Um bad,” the v
agrant said pensively; and I saw that with him the trousers-front business was now meditative rather than frenetic.
Here a black PBB Corolla with dark-tinted windows came down the street, pulled up for the major road, and stopped. There was a lull in the main road traffic, but the Corolla didn’t move . . . a stream of cars passed by, then another lull . . . still the Corolla didn’t move. And I had just amazed myself with a surge of fury, which for a moment actually had me looking around for a stone to pelt at it, when the vagrant threw himself upon it, screaming, “Uh go kill you! Uh go kill you!” kicking and banging on the fender and boot, and the black car leapt away like a startled animal, out onto the main road, and was gone.
“Uh go kill him!” the vagrant screamed, and his eyes were terrible. “Uh go kill him!”
Our eyes met. I nodded, and the vagrant saw, and his wildness abated slightly.
“Uh go kill him!” he shouted at me a third time, as if making sure I’d heard him right.
And I said, quite loudly (returning to my patch of shade at last), “Yeah, kill him. Kill his ass!”
“Uh go kill his mo-dah’ss,” the vagrant said with desolate satisfaction. And he leaned on the telegraph pole and folded his arms and resumed watching the glass-paned door across the street, but without frenzy now.
And so we stood there, me and the interrupted vagrant, and watched the silent house across the street (in which, for some reason—though I claim a robust imagination and am no especial prude—I could only imagine what was taking place in there as occurring in the (foully named!) “missionary position,” with the brown-skinned young woman almost out of sight and struggling to breathe beneath a great pale threshing bulk.)
And, sure enough, presently the glass-paned door opened and the Portugee man came out, dressed for work just as before, with behind him the young woman, barefooted now and wearing only an old thigh-length white T-shirt, imprinted with some fading festive scene.
She was in the process of taking the last curler out of her hair. (And that, for some reason, depressed me even more. To think he hadn’t minded her keeping the curlers in!) She deposited it on the verandah sill and came down the steps and unlocked the garden gate and let him out.
“Uh-go-kill-his-mo-dah’ss,” the vagrant said.
But he said it experimentally, in the tone of one rehearsing a phone number; and I knew that nothing was going to happen.
The Portugee man never looked at him. As he had done earlier, he glanced from my car to me (but without anger, now) and went on down his driveway and got straight into the Mercedes and started it and backed out and drove off, stopping for the major road, then going on. And I marvelled at his doing all that as if nothing at all had just happened: as if he were just a normal guy, driving off to work on a normal weekday morning.
The young woman in the T-shirt had stayed at the garden gate: presumably, I thought sourly, to wave goodbye to her gruff ex-smotherer and philanthropic paramour. But now she lingered a moment longer, fingers lightly gripping the BRC at breast-height; and I saw that she was looking at the vagrant . . . looking at him with a sort of tutelary patience . . . and that the vagrant was looking back at her, with an expression I couldn’t quite name.
I glanced from one to the other—from bare feet to bare feet, from matted locks to ex-curlered, untidy curls—and realized, startled, that, across the width of that quiet Woodbrook street, dishevelment was considering dishevelment.
Then the woman locked the gate and went in, picking up the plastic thing from the sill in passing, closing the glass-paned door behind her. And the vagrant turned and walked away without a parting glance at me, walking now not with a vagrant’s swagger but as any man would walk, going unhurriedly about his business, on a normal weekday morning—and that, I suddenly understood, had been the expression on the vagrant’s face which I’d be unable to name.
From behind her garden gate, she had turned to him her unmade-up, naked-sad face: looking at him not as one man’s housewife, nor another man’s whore, but as a woman: just a woman. And from the pitiless glare of a shadeless pavement, he, the vagrant, had looked back at her, not with the bright eyes of his kind, nor with anything even remotely resembling a lecher’s leer, but levelly, steadily, as a man considers a woman who means something to him. As a man. Just a man.
They were sobering, somehow wondrous, realizations. And, left alone on that empty Woodbrook street with the occasional car coming down it, I stood there for a long time, in my shrinking pool of shade (until, as he’d promised, my Good Samaritan returned in the white Galante, with his “electrics guy”), musing over all that I had seen.
PART IV
Losing Control
Songster
by Jennifer Rahim
North Coast
(Originally published in 2002)
Miss Ivy say she hear a singing trail through the church, sounding just like when Michael use to raise a few songs after the fishing done, and he by himself in Queen Penny bailing water in the shallows. His voice walking easy over the water and up the beach to where Mr. Oswald, who own the boat, and Sunil, the other fella that fish with them, checking the lines to see that everything ready for the next trip.
Everybody in Victory Bay know that Michael could sing. The boy have voice oiled and smooth like the Birdie crooning only a fool breaks his own heart. That is how he get the name Songster. So when Miss Ivy swear is Michael spirit that pass through the gathering last Good Friday, during the time that Pastor Williams call the church to silence so memory could swell and speak love for the dead, people didn’t object, and some, like Mother Francis and Mr. David even, nod their heads as a confirmation. Is true, Michael not resting.
Nobody jump just so and believe any word Miss Ivy bring and that is because when she make baptism and Pastor Williams and the appointed believers lay hands and pray down the Spirit, Miss Ivy like she decide, when she raise up from where she get slain, that she is chief anointed prophet and seer of the Calvary Hill Renewal Temple of the Word. She say she see heaven open up like how it open for St. Stephen, and a man in white robes stretch out a long golden rod and touch her tongue.
Since then every time you look sharp is like prophecy dropping from the sky freesheet, and bad spirit following everybody. Then Pastor, who don’t like to cross a soul and believe that everybody have to make their journey, decide to put his foot down when the prophecy come from Miss Ivy that the doc himself send a message that the country in a royal mess since he gone, and because he can’t leave his people in need, he want everybody to pray to him for the party to rise again like in ’56. Well, that is when Pastor put a ban on Miss Ivy prophesying.
Michael coulda sing anything, just call the tune and he gone clear with the lyrics, just like how kingfisher get carried away with their song when morning come, sweet too bad, and even the bed-sick get up and walk. So when Miss Ivy say his spirit still walking and that he singing, the church wasn’t too quick to dismiss her word. Michael was a man who, when the mood take him, use to turn up in the middle of the service on a Sunday morning. He sit down quiet-quiet in the back listening to the lesson, not even joining in the amen-chorus when Pastor speak a truth that call for confirmation. Michael just sit there listening, with his eyes close, like he praying, although he is a man who make it clear to everybody that life have to live and you can’t hide in no church. And is so Naomi plead with him not to talk so. That God don’t sleep and that a man is more than the bread he labour for.
But everybody know Michael heart is gold and that is why he couldn’t resist the church even though he stay by himself in the back. So he stay until Mother Crichlow raise a hymn he know, like “The Lord Is My Shepherd,” that she bring out in a kind of long elastic wail, sounding like pain and victory, conviction and plea, all mix up in one. That is when out of nowhere Michael voice come sailing in, not drowning out nobody, but easing a kind of lightness and sweetness into the mournful stream of the congregation singing as if the hymn is a testimony to a faith they had to carry li
ke a cross through their days. Singing a hope that heavy with the weight of a belief they had to pick up every day and roll away from their living, when poor people have children to feed, work to find, sick that can’t pay for doctor, sons lost to rum and white powder, daughters with belly and no man to take responsibility, house to finish build, and nowhere to turn, and a life that asking every morning for a chance to live, demanding a chance to feel that this Victory Bay that have the taste and smell of salt is a home in truth.
In the middle of that kind of tormented faith, Michael singing break in from the back bench where he sitting by himself, with only old man Toby on the other end, close to the door, only because the bad chest-cold he get so long ago wouldn’t leave him. Michael voice like a firm but sweet seconds-pan teasing out a rhythm that make the tired hymn sound new, pulling the voices together, and carrying their loads with its spirit that fresh like river water and the strong purpose of trees, reminding the church just where it going and what it dreaming. And Naomi so proud, she just sit down on the front bench rocking and softly praying, “Merciful Lord, mercy,” with a kind of gratitude that everybody feeling, and they glad to hear somebody testifying to how their hearts find wings again in the beauty of Michael’s voice.
That his spirit not at rest didn’t come as no surprise. Everybody know Michael never do bad to nobody. In fact, from the day he born, Naomi swear he was a godsend, an angel that come to spend time with her. And everybody know that since he small Michael love to help people out. That is how he live, giving whatever he could give. Whatever you want—a hand to raise a roof, some small change to buy a little kerosene, a chicken coop to fix, fishing line to untangle, walls whitewash for Christmas—Michael there ready to help.
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