‘Here,’ said a gruff voice. It broke him from his thoughts. ‘This is yours.’
A rifle appeared in front of him. Long black metal nose, a crutch-like piece of polished wood. The guns, he had known about them; they’d been shipped from Miami amongst piles of hollowed-out plywood. Hundreds had arrived some weeks ago and they’d been hidden in a warehouse near Cry-Town in central Sans Amen. Guns, ammunition, explosives, all in planks of hollowed wood. Ashes had never seen a gun before. He held it like he might hold a teapot. He had no idea how to use it; he hadn’t been one of the brothers chosen for training. The gun was heavy and it frightened him. His wrists were thin and weak and he tried to hide this. His stomach was all curdled up. His armpits began to perspire. The gun grew so hot it seemed to scald his hands. His heart felt tight and closed up and he stood like a wooden man with a red-hot gun in his hands. One of the brothers gave him a bandolier of ammunition. With stiff hands, Ashes put the large bracelet over his head and one shoulder so it encircled his body. It was heavy and the bullets felt like sharp teeth. Now he looked like Rambo too. He wanted to call his wife immediately. He wouldn’t tell Jade where he was or exactly what was happening. He would just let her know he wouldn’t be home for dinner. That would be appropriate, that was all she needed to know.
Then everything began to move quickly. A hundred or so men were leaving the prayer room, wearing green army camouflage pants, big black boots, knitted hats, string vests; some, those who’d been trained, wore a version of combat fatigues they’d brought from home; all of them were armed with long metal rifles. The brothers began to file out the back door into the afternoon heat. They were fighters now, soldiers of God.
*
Two trucks were parked by the wall of the compound. More masked brothers stood by them. Ashes thought he recognised them. Most likely these men had also been trained. They looked fierce, almost like professional soldiers. Hal was with them and Ashes could see he meant business. He had on full combat fatigues and a black beret, neat and tilted sideways on his head. Hal was Number 2 to the Leader in the community. He was handsome, like the Leader, an educated man. Sometimes Hal gave talks after prayers, and sometimes he coached the boys because Hal was also good at football; he’d been away from the island to university to study ‘computer science’, something very new. In some ways he was even more qualified to lead than the Leader himself, but it was like Hal didn’t want to. He liked to be Number 2. Seeing brother Hal gave Ashes a surge of confidence. He gave a brief nod and the two men exchanged looks.
‘You, get in with me,’ said Hal. Ashes was glad of this, that he would be with Hal.
One of the trucks had big white letters on the side: W. A. T. E. R. He knew that a brother in the community had a cousin or an uncle who worked for the water authorities; the truck must have been borrowed. The other truck looked like the kind of vehicle used to transport horses or farm animals. It had no windows. It was a metal box on wheels.
‘I’m not going in the horse truck,’ Ashes said to Hal. This assertion surprised him. Maybe it was because he had a gun in his hands. Already he had more strength. Hal nodded as if he had thought the same thing.
‘The trucks are for camouflage,’ said Hal.
Ashes nodded, but he still wasn’t going in the horse truck.
Brothers began to line up, their guns shining in the sun. One of the men, a feller called Arnold, had put on a red Santa hat with a snowy white trim. Arnold was tall and his body was hard looking, hard as Pouis wood. He wore a green net vest and green army pants and black leather boots. He had bucked teeth. He was an ugly man, ugly like a vampire bat, but with the Santa hat on and his bandolier slung round his thin torso he looked dangerous.
Ashes stared at Arnold’s hat. He wished Hal would say something. It was not befitting for a revolutionary soldier to dress like that.
‘What you staring at?’ said Arnold.
‘You gonna make history in that hat, or what?’
‘Yeah, man.’
‘But we are not Christians,’ said Ashes.
‘Maybe I am.’
‘You?’
‘Yeah, maybe.’
‘And you praying with us?’
‘No. I never pray with you.’
‘What you doing here, then?’
‘I was invited, nuh.’
‘As Santa Claus?’
‘Captain Claus,’ said Arnold, and he made a sharp mock-salute and laughed at Ashes like he was the arse.
Ashes steupsed. He didn’t like this at all. More and more this was feeling difficult. He didn’t want to go to a revolution in a horse truck with a brother dressed like Santa Claus. But Hal didn’t seem to mind and no one else seemed to care or notice Arnold’s hat.
Men were getting into the W. A. T. E. R. truck. Ashes realised he needed to move fast to find a space. He made his way towards the truck and put his gun inside and then heaved himself up and onto one of the bench seats lining the sides.
It was dark inside the truck and when he looked around he found he recognised all of the men and boys already sitting there. Most of them he’d seen around the compound for years; all he’d prayed with. They weren’t friends; they weren’t associates or colleagues either; they were brothers. One of the young boys, a street kid called Breeze, seemed to be delighted with his gun; he was alert, ready for action. Breeze was about fourteen, Ashes guessed. He got his nickname because he could run fast. He had dressed himself up in black: black pants, black sports shirt, big black army boots, a knitted hat over his razor sharp hair. The gun he held was thin and sleek and for a split second Ashes could see Breeze running fast with his gun.
Then Hal appeared, and Ashes felt relieved. Hal was like a big bull-terrier dog, strong, loyal, a fighter. He had two gold teeth in the side of his mouth and his eyes were a muddy green. Hal was a man a cut above the men he was leading. That was clear. Hal sat down on the other side of Ashes and switched on his walkie-talkie. He spoke to the Leader, down into the microphone. ‘Yeah, yeah,’ he was saying, listening to the final commands. ‘Yeah, yeah, we going,’ said Hal. Then he switched off the walkie-talkie and leant outside the back of the truck and shouted to the driver.
‘Lehwego,’ he commanded. The truck started to move, rolling out of the compound, straight past the army post stationed next door, the army that was supposed to watch the Leader closely and guard the country from the Leader’s bad men.
*
The streets of St Jared’s on the outskirts of the City of Silk were busy busy busy. It was late on a Wednesday afternoon, late in the month. Month end, payday soon, and people were out drinking beer. The W. A. T. E. R. truck rolled slowly past the people liming and the vendors out on the street. A parlour on the corner was blaring soca, and jerk chicken smoked on the grill at the takeaway next door. Ashes stared out into the world he knew well and it didn’t feel real. Again he was far away. His head had gone soft. His heart had slowed down. He was barely breathing. The other brothers stared out the back too. They watched people walking across the street. They watched the maxi taxi behind them get a bad drive from another maxi, which turned in to the traffic. A vagrant with a big raffia bag on his head began to bawl in the street, for no reason but just to bawl. Cars beeped their horns at him, to get out of the way. Ashes felt like he’d gone deaf, like he’d come down with some kind of confusion of the head. He could feel Hal was nervous too. He was already showing patches of damp through his army suit. He wanted to reassure Hal: I believe in you, he wanted to say. Everything will go okay.
Then they were travelling around the big savannah parkland in the centre of town. The truck stopped halfway round, pulled over by the kerbside, and a few brothers, men he’d never seen before, wearing black robes and aviator sunglasses, were standing there. The men seemed to be expecting them; several boxes of rifles were piled up on the ground and they began to load these boxes inside the W. A. T. E. R. truck in broad daylight! Ashes rubbed his eyes as if he wasn’t seeing right. Boxes of big guns were sailing int
o the back of the truck, right there, next to the savannah. It was like the guns were invisible, like this was some kind of sign or blessing from God. The rifles passed silently through the back of the truck. No one spoke. The boxes of guns piled up on the floor of the tray. Then they were driving again, and Ashes had a sense of leaving the world behind, of watching the world backwards from the truck which now smelled of gun metal and late-afternoon sweat.
The W. A. T. E. R. truck turned left down into the heart of town, travelling past the gaol, past shops, past people walking slowly in the afternoon sun, then right, then left again into Veronica Street. It wasn’t a very long journey from the compound into town. Then Hal was giving them instructions as to what to do when they arrived at the House of Power.
‘We going straight up,’ he said. ‘Up into the chamber. Up the steps to the public gallery. Security will be armed and they will try to stop you. Shoot them. Shoot them dead. They will shoot you if you don’t shoot them. Do not shoot anyone else. We will be taking the Prime Minister and the other cabinet ministers hostage. We will round up as many ministers of the government as we can. Everything is in the first ten minutes. We will be taking them by surprise; people will try to run. The first thing we need to do is secure all the exits.’
And then the W. A. T. E. R. truck stopped. And Ashes could feel the air in his lungs had evaporated. Again he reached for his inhaler and pumped mist into his lungs and waited and counted and he said a brief prayer to his God. Tomorrow, everything will be different, he told himself. The skies were an empty chalk blue, the House of Power a stark and lurid magenta against it. The building was huge. There were striped-canopied windows, high arches and long balconies which made it seem like a palace of some sort. There was even a dragon on the roof, some kind of sea serpent, arched and hissing at them. It was a weather vane and it marked the direction of the wind but Ashes didn’t like the look of it at all. It was like the serpent was vexed and cussing into the air. On the ground floor there was a wide wrought-iron gate which barricaded the street level, and next to it there were steps which led upwards into the balcony and chamber of the House. Five palms stood outside the gate like thin girls, showing their lewd red bunches of berries under their skirt-fronds. Ashes had never been so close to the House. He felt like he was near something very feminine and glamorous, like his wife’s purse.
Hal jumped out and let down the back of the tray of the truck. And then it was like they were a thousand brothers and they were all running and shouting and Hal was yelling, Go!, and all the men and boys were running up the steps to the public gallery to the House of Power. Some of the brothers began firing their guns into the air. Arnold was ahead of him, with his Santa hat, strong and fierce now and he was shouting God is great and only God knew what else. Ashes didn’t fire his gun; he could hardly hold it upright, could barely make his legs move. He could only just breathe and see what he was doing. All he knew was that he was in the pack, running, playing his part, and thinking of his dead brother, remembering those whispered conversations between himself and River, in bed at night, ideas of a New Society, the stacks of Phantom comic books under their beds. Those days came with him as he ran amongst the men who were shouting Praise be to God, storming the House of Power. The revolution was happening.
Then he heard loud screaming and more shots coming from another direction and he saw a security guard fly down the stairs and bam. He saw the guard fall back against the wall, a red spot on his chest. Bam, more shots, then he saw Arnold in his Santa hat. Arnold was still shooting the guard even though the man had slid to the ground and looked dead. Men were running past him, and there was black-red blood on the ground. And there was a sound like a loud woodpecker, rat a tat tat. Shots fired in the air, a woodpecker rapping on the glass as bullets ripped through the panes. Ashes saw a fat woman jump out the stately open window of the House of Power and fall crumpled to the ground, her feet bent beneath her. Her cries sounded like an animal in pain. And then he was up in the chamber and the screaming was so loud he panicked and started to yell out the name of his brother River.
*
Ashes hadn’t expected to see women in the chamber. But they were there, three of them, youngish-looking, attractive women, dressed in jackets and skirts, actually in the chamber. He hadn’t realised there would be women so close up in the politics of the day, so close that they could talk freely to the big men, the ministers and everyone in the House of Power. The women began to cry out in terror and they ducked under their desks. One of the male ministers froze and stood there like a ghost of himself. He was shot instantly and then he fell. Bullets ricocheted like grains of rice pouring into a deep metal pan. They flew everywhere in a hail and up into the air, shooting holes into the thick ornate white plaster which Ashes was also surprised to see, fancy, like a wedding cake. It was like heaven in there, another world to the one he knew. The House of Power looked just like a shrine or a holy place, all white and gold and tall columns, fancy tra la la and bows painted into the ceiling. There were high arched windows inside the chamber and a red velvet carpet. Ashes felt his insides melting. Then he flew upwards, out of his body.
He was on the ceiling then, watching everything: people were cowering under chairs, he could see their ankles, the heels of their shoes, their haunches not quite tucked under them enough. He saw two men dragged out from underneath a desk. One big man seemed to be protecting the other; he was covering this other man with his body; this was some kind of bodyguard and the brothers told him to Step aside or be shot. Hal kicked the man he was protecting hard in the face. Hal cussed at him, saying that Everything is over, Prime Minister, we are removing you. Then Hal struck this man, the Prime Minister, again hard in the face with the butt of his rifle and he groaned and fell unconscious. Hal and two other brothers hogtied the Prime Minister, yanking his arms behind his back, securing his wrists, and then they pulled down his suit pants so his white underwear was visible and his brown buttocks showed. Some of the brothers were shouting out names of ministers of the government: ‘Where is Jayso? Where de IMF man? Where Cranleyson?’ They kicked over chairs, pulling these men out, shouting God is with us, saying they’d caused pain and suffering to the poor man and now they were going to pay for it. Yelling came from down the corridors of power, the sound of gunshots, screams echoing and reverberating so Ashes had to put his hands to his ears. People who’d come to sit in the public gallery cowered. One man dressed up real smart in a suit and tie had urinated on himself. He blubbered and cried for mercy and one of the brothers swore at him and said, ‘Fucking big man like you bawling like a cow,’ and jabbed the man hard in the ribs with his rifle. Ashes didn’t like the way the brothers were behaving at all; it was alarming to see such bad manners and foul language.
Government men and House employees were escaping everywhere, running down the corridors and out onto the balcony; men were jumping down to the ground, out of the windows. Brothers with guns were chasing after them; two or three escaping people were shot in the back and fell down dead. In the tearoom next to the chamber, the tea ladies screamed as bullets zinged past them; there was a man amongst them undressing and pleading with them for help. They said, ‘Yes, yes, quick,’ and hid him in a cupboard. Policemen who’d been standing on guard were escaping from the chamber, running through the corridors away from what was happening; some were also shedding their clothes. The brothers didn’t shoot them. They let them go free. There was a woman under a table in another room across the hall from the tearoom; she’d been shot and lay wounded and groaning and Ashes knew she was calling out the name of her son. Black-red blood was seeping from her stomach. No one but Ashes up on the ceiling had seen her. She’d crawled to a safer spot, but she wasn’t going to live long.
Throughout, brother Arnold was jabbering and wild, shooting upwards and menacing anyone who looked like they might leave the chamber. His Santa hat had slipped sideways on his head. His skin shone and his hard muscles bulged and the whites of his eyes gleamed, and he looked lik
e an escapee from the madhouse not too far way. Maybe, even, he was. That thought occurred to Ashes as he watched the chaos from the ceiling. The young brother called Breeze seemed well conditioned, very active and in step with what was happening. He was keeping close to Hal, going along with everything like he was a natural.
In the chamber Hal began to shout orders. The members of the public would be set free; they could go immediately.
‘Go oooonnn,’ he shouted. The brothers prodded them and these people began to leave very quickly, down the stairs and out into the draining evening light. They ran across the forecourt of the House of Power, out onto Veronica Street. The tea ladies were allowed to go and they fled, three of them in their aprons, muttering prayers. One of the parliamentarian women was allowed to go free too; she was a minister in the opposition party. Another man was told to go, a man Hal knew, a notable man in the labour movement. And then Hal weeded out all the men who were no longer high up in the government, those in a small group who’d split from the Prime Minister. He had them lie flat on the floor behind the speaker’s chair; it was like they were a separate group of prisoners. The Prime Minister, already hogtied, he lashed to another minister, leg to leg, and he laid them flat on the floor in the centre of the chamber like the big prize. And then the other members of his cabinet, including the two women, were also tied with their hands behind their backs with tight plastic bands, face down, in the centre of the chamber; they were trussed up like blue crabs in the market. It was all happening so fast, like the plan was working. Ashes had a fluttering feeling inside, like the feeling of hummingbird wings, the feeling of God being present with them there, in their actions. Something important was happening and God was helping them. Ashes was impressed; Hal had been trained and it showed. Hal knew what he was doing, like he was a man of action.
House of Ashes Page 2
