Trinidad Noir_The Classics

by Earl Lovelace

  In the town below, Mr. Ali lets her out into a river of heated bodies—people swimming like guabines on the pavement. On the main boulevard, Guyanese and various small-island immigrants hock their wares. Cheap panties and pirated DVDs, strung side by side on collapsible display racks, hover above dirty drain water. At the police station, she looks for Corporal Beaubrun, a distant cousin.

  He’s in the middle of breakfast, smoked herring and bake on his desk. Wiping his hands on the seat of his pants, he comes toward her. He’s a good-looking boy. Tall and dark with a square head and a nose carved like an answer to his heavy brow. At the counter he takes his time pulling his pen out of his pocket.

  “I hear you having some trouble with your last one,” he says.

  “He misses a father’s hand.”

  “How long has he been gone?”

  “Since Wednesday morning. He said he was coming down here to do some business.”

  “He wasn’t in school?”

  She shakes her head.

  “He has a woman?”

  “No.” Oh God, she thinks to herself, is this man so dense that he does not understand what I am asking of him? “It might be too late when you all finally decide to look for him,” she says carefully.

  “You know something you not telling me?”

  “No, just worried.”

  He shuffles a few papers on his desk. “How long we know each other?”

  “Since primary school, you know that. What’s that got to do with this?”

  “Sit tight and he will come home. The more trouble you make—”

  “To look for a missing child is to make trouble?”

  He places the cap back on his pen and glances at his breakfast. “Come,” he says. “Come and talk outside. I’ll walk you out.”

  They leave the station, his hand lightly on her elbow.

  “Has he ever told you who he works for?” He explains that the boys are recruited from villages all over the island. They are well paid to do what they consider easy work. These rural boys know the terrain, the trails through the hills, and are handy with their homemade pipe-guns. They are routinely moved around the island to fill gaps in an army of small-time criminals. If Daniel is ambitious and bright, could he be involved in this?

  Carmelita hesitates before answering. What can she say without implicating her son in wrongdoing? Can she believe her youngest son knows right from wrong? Has she been too indulgent with him? She shrugs her shoulders. “Maybe. I can’t say for sure.”

  Beaubrun sighs and pulls a handkerchief out of his back pocket to wipe his brow. “I’ll call you if I hear anything. I’ll make some enquiries.”

  * * *

  All day she walks. She passes the old cathedral, cavernous and violet, which stands next to De Freitas Dry Goods with its bags of coffee, cocoa and nutmeg, pigtail buckets, and piles of blue soap. At the end of the street, Chan’s Laundry puffs little blasts of starchy steam onto the pavement. In this part of town, blue-bitch stone faces the fronts of the buildings, the corners laid with old ships’ ballast. Her father laid blue-bitch all his life—that hard beautiful stone pulled from the earth below the village—a solid, honest life, he always told his children. Work from the land.

  She has a picture of Daniel in her hand, holding it up toward the faces of strangers who sidestep her. When the sun begins throwing long shadows, Carmelita veers off the main street, crossing the river that leads to the other side of town. On this side, drinking men spill out from shanty bars with their nasty, stale urine and rum-sweat smells. Alleys dribble off the main road, wildness taking over. Behind the derelict government housing, the grid-order of the town disappears into indeterminate ends, twisted mazes of collapsing galvanized sheets and open latrines. Here and there golden marigolds grow in discarded truck tires. Farther on are the monstrous yards of the scrap-iron vendors, rumoured to be the front offices of bustling rent-a-gun operations. Surely someone here must know him. Recognize his face. Tell her something that the police could not.

  Down an alley, in the dim light between the buildings, two women sit on an overturned Coca-Cola case with a makeshift table between them. One, a coarse-skinned Indian woman, is picking out seeds and leaves from a pile of weed, separating it into neat heaps. The second one looks up as Carmelita approaches, her hand motionless over the line of weed on the cigarillo paper. Both women shift at the same time, perfectly synchronised, blocking her view of the table.

  “How do you do business?” she whispers. Is it like chicken, she wonders, that you buy by the pound?

  The older woman holds up a finger to Carmelita. Wait, she is clearly saying. Don’t come any closer. She rises heavily, wearily, rubbing her back as she comes toward Carmelita.

  “Do you know him?” Carmelita shows her the picture.

  “How much you want?”

  “Ahhm, one.”

  “Just give me a twenty.” The woman takes the photograph from Carmelita. “Why you looking for this boy?”

  “I’m his mother. He’s missing.”

  “Everybody down here know Daniel.” The woman makes the sign of the cross before bagging the joint.

  “When last you saw him?”

  Before the end of the street, she’s thrown the joint into a clump of bushes.

  * * *

  When the sun cools she walks home. She stays off the pitch, still radiating the day’s heat, walking in the grass at the side of the road, her breath loud in her ears as she climbs and climbs up to her village. Halfway up, her feet stinging from the tiny pebbles on the road, she stops. The plateau overlooks the Gulf of Paria, a big, broody expanse of water. People say that this is where the cocaine crosses, coming from Venezuela. Across the bay, South America is just visible in the dying light. The scarlet ibis are flying home. They fly across the indigo water heading inland toward the swamp. Years before she’d taken Daniel to see the pink birds roost. The birds had landed in rosy blurs, whole ibis families staining the mangroves red.

  “Mama, how do they know to come here every night?” he’d asked.

  “They come,” she’d told him, “because this is where they sleep. Even the littlest bird knows he must come home to his mama.”

  When she catches her breath, she begins walking again.

  * * *

  “Don’t cry,” says Myrtle the next morning when she brings Carmelita the newspapers and a ball of cocoa. “Daniel too beautiful to die. He’ll be alright. Don’t cry, Carmelita.”

  A lagniappe child, the villagers said when her stomach began to rise like bread with Daniel. She was forty-four then. A change-of-life baby will break your heart, the old midwife told her. Two months before his due date, Daniel was born in a tropical storm. He was her smallest baby but she’d had the worst time with him. She had all the others at the hospital but Daniel was born in her bed, bloody and breathless. Against her thigh, his skull was no larger than a monkey’s, his skin translucent under the hurricane lanterns. The midwife wrapped him in a blanket and placed him in the drawer of a dresser. Carmelita had softened the edges of the drawer with cotton padding laid over sweet-smelling vetiver sprigs. For the first month of his life he wore a bracelet of black beads on his tiny wrist to ward off maljeaux while she prayed to keep the breath in his body. The baby had nothing of her flat, wide face and hairless sapodilla skin, or his father’s smooth cocoa complexion. He was thin-faced with marmalade eyes, a beautiful changeling child.

  * * *

  Father Duncan comes right behind Myrtle early on Saturday morning. Daniel has been gone three mornings. Four nights her son has slept somewhere else and she has no idea where. The night before, she’d not slept well, her feet aching from the long walk up the hill, and she rose twice to the sound of a baby’s cry. But each time it was only the big jumbie bird, roosting in the mango vert tree up behind the house. By the time she waves Myrtle out the gate and turns to go back inside, Father Duncan is already striding up her path, as if tragedy has made him lose his manners, his crucifix glinting in the sun, h
is great head bobbing above the scarlet flowers of the hibiscus hedge. She has to hide Ganesh, snatching him from beside Jesus, pushing his elephant head deep in the compost heap. But in the end, she is happy the priest has come and they say the rosary together, pausing after each decade to allow the words to drift up to Mary’s ears.

  * * *

  Beaubrun telephones on Monday morning.

  “A body of a young boy was picked up by the Caura River. They’ve sent him to the mortuary in town. That’s all I know.”

  Her heart beats a galloping staccato that rushes in her ears and brings black spots before her eyes. The telephone falls from her hand and hits the statue of Mary, knocking the mother of God off her pedestal and narrowly missing the Sacred Heart with the bloody heart of Jesus popping out of his chest. Carmelita opens her mouth and bawls.

  Afterward she remembers that the village poured through her door like red ants, laying their hands on her, but even the softest touch bit and stung her skin and made her scream. It was only when old Dr. Chin arrived in his Honda CR-V to stick a needle into her arm that Carmelita stopped screaming.

  * * *

  On Tuesday morning she packs a small bag to go to the mortuary. In it is a rosary, a bottle of holy water, a clean shirt, and an ironed pair of pants for Daniel. Mr. Ali comes when she calls, holding her elbow as she walks to the car as if she is an old woman.

  “You don’t have to go with Mr. Ali, Ma,” Johnny had said, “I’ll take you.”

  But she had told him no. This was about her and Daniel.

  * * *

  The old colonial-built hospital is filled with airy rooms that filter the trade winds; the view through the jalousies looks down on vendors selling colas and fruit drinks at the entrance. At the back of the hospital, the mortuary stares at Carmelita, its closed windows giving it a stupid, blind appearance. Inside, a small Indian woman listens to Carmelita’s story before picking up the telephone. As she speaks, a small extra finger swings gently from the side of her left hand. This infant finger with its own half-moon nail causes a somersaulting in Carmelita’s stomach, a clenching in her womb. Across the room a wooden door bears a nameplate: Dr. Andrew Olivierre, Chief Pathologist. She takes a seat on a wooden bench across from this door.

  “You can go in now,” the secretary eventually says.

  Dr. Olivierre comes to meet her as she walks through the door, holding out his hand and smiling pleasantly. “I’m sorry,” he says. “There has been a mistake. I’m so sorry, Mrs. Nunes.”

  “Excuse me? The police sent me.”

  “We’ve seen this happen. People come in thinking they will find missing people here. But your son is not here.”

  They sit in silence for a moment or two. There is a picture of a pretty woman with three children on his desk. The woman looks like her daughter Oriana, same dark hair and wide mouth. The doctor has two daughters and a son. The oldest girl looks a little younger than Daniel and there is a baby in the woman’s arms. The doctor flips his pen between his fingers and snaps it open and shut with sharp clicking noises.

  “How you lose someone?” she asks the room. “A boy is not a handbag. Or a scrap of paper that fly off a table and disappear in the breeze; a boy is not something you could lose so.”

  “I’m so sorry for your loss, Mrs. Nunes,” the doctor says, his hand resting lightly between her shoulders as she leaves the room.

  She waits on the bench outside the hospital for Johnny to come and get her. She still has the bag of Daniel’s clothes and the small bottle of holy water.

  * * *

  That night she dreams that Father Duncan caught a scarlet ibis and asked her to stew it for him to eat. The next morning, Wednesday, she draws a black line through the whole week on her almanac. She chooses a picture of Daniel sitting with the two dogs on her front porch. She will go back and give the doctor a picture. If Daniel does come in, at least he will recognize him.

  When the car pulls into the mortuary the next morning, Carmelita is waiting. The doctor is in the passenger seat. The dark-haired woman from the picture kisses him goodbye, waving as he walks away.

  “Goodbye,” she calls.

  The morning sun backlights the doctor’s hair, but his face turns mulish and cruel as he approaches Carmelita. Still, she reaches out to touch him. When he clamps her wrist, she remembers how a dog bit her like this once, with a sudden snap.

  “Your son is not here,” he says, his big body, with its womanish bottom, stiff and hostile.

  Behind him, the car stops, its engine idling, in the middle of the road. “Drew!” the woman calls.

  Carmelita pulls her hand back, shaking her wrist, the photograph falling on the ground. When she looks up, he has walked away and the big car has driven off.

  Drew

  Drew carefully examined the body of the young boy. He had been brought in after midnight early Sunday morning. Blue and black discolourations of settling blood were just starting along the boy’s back, his skin grey under the buzzing fluorescent lights. Tall, but still a child. No more than sixteen or seventeen. Could be a country boy, a cocoa panyol mixed with some Indian. There was a birthmark on his left cheek. Maybe a local white, but Drew doubted this because he’d know this child. Venezuelan? His mouth had collapsed into the spaces left by the missing front teeth, making the boy’s face appear babyish. Drew turned up the top lip. The gums were bruised, puckering around little bloody pockets left by the extracted teeth. Drew ran his tongue over his own front teeth, a quick reflexive move. The ends of the boy’s fingers had bled until death and now the hands curled lightly, peculiar and birdlike without their nails. Even with closed eyes, his face still had the startled expression of a panicked child as if the bullet had caught him negotiating to the end. A drug hit? But Drew knew that if Ralph had called him out, it meant the police were involved.

  After he’d examined the body, Drew peeled his surgical gloves off, discarding them in the bin. The yellow death certificates came in triplicate, untidy with their bulging carbon copies. On the top copy, Drew carefully wrote the cause of death as vehicular accident. Underneath, he signed his name: Dr. Andrew Olivierre, Chief Pathologist, St. Mary’s General Hospital.

  The first bodies had begun arriving within weeks of the election. Last week there’d been a prostitute, a pretty girl who had tried to blackmail the wrong person. Was Ralph so powerful that he could arbitrarily order someone to be killed? Drew pulled the sheet up, covering the child’s face. Where were this boy’s parents? They were the ones to blame for this. He could put his head on a block that none of his three would ever end up like this. Irresponsible people having children had spawned a generation of feral teenagers. This is what the ruling party had said during the election campaign and the population had agreed so much that the party had swept into government on a landslide vote.

  At his weekly confession, Drew had struggled with his conscience. What was he to say to the priest? That part of his job as the government pathologist was to make the victims of police brutality disappear? It was not as if he were associated with a death squad or anything like the Tonton Macoute in Haiti. This was simply some housecleaning to tidy up the streets. He turned off the lights, locked the door and left. It was 3:15 on Sunday morning. The boy had been dead for a little over twenty-four hours.

  Ralph and Drew still met every Wednesday at the Cricket Club, even though Ralph was now a government minister. When they had turned up for lunch that first Wednesday after the election, the whole room had stood and clapped when Ralph entered. He looked like a minister of national security, as if everything in his life had been leading up to playing this part. Drew had held his briefcase while Ralph stopped to shake hands with people on the way to their table.

  But today, no one looked up when they entered the room.

  Drew cut his chicken carefully as he spoke. “The mother tried to stop me in the car park this morning. I told her we didn’t have him. We should have buried him on Monday.”

  “Does anyone else know he
was brought in?” asked Ralph.

  “I should ask you that. This was a child. Shit, man. This is not what we’re supposed to be doing.”

  “What a fuck-up. We didn’t know he was so young.” Ralph sipped his drink. “We think he double-crossed Jamiah.”

  “I still don’t understand. Who killed the boy?”

  “Our men did. He knew everything about Jamiah but he couldn’t go back. We offered him protection to talk, but he refused.”

  “We can’t be killing children.”

  “You know, the little shit never cracked. He never talked.”

  “They were very rough with him,” said Drew. This is where I should say something, he thought, this is where I should get up and walk out.

  “This boy doesn’t exist anymore, so whoever they are could not have been rough with him. Do you understand? This boy must disappear completely. This was a fucking nightmare and now you giving me some crap to hold about this boy’s mother? Make him disappear, Drew. It’s your job.”

  No, Drew wanted to say, it’s not my job. This was not supposed to be part of it.

  “How long we go back, Drew? Come nah, man. How long we friends?”

  I’d like you to be part of my team, Ralph had said. How many months ago? Was it six already? If we want to clean up this country, we have to bend the rules a bit.

  He’d presented a convincing argument, but Drew had always known that he didn’t have a choice.

  In their final year at university, Drew had listened most nights to Ralph’s low voice cajoling and stroking, the murmurs travelling through the walls. He couldn’t believe the girls fell for it. But they did, every time. With a fleshy mouth that glistened pink and healthy when he laughed, a booming ha-ha-ha mouth that opened to show big, white teeth and a small, pointed tongue, Ralph was beautiful.