The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  Too young to know what he had done; not knowing what he had done; not knowing what the policeman in the cruiser had done; not knowing the exact shape of his fate this time, but wise enough to know that he was going to have some fate, BJ paced and paced. And then, perhaps because of his Black Muslim sense of destiny, he stopped walking up and down. He decided not to worry. “Let the motherfuckers come!” he said, but within his heart. He was calmed by the small square space, and by his history. And then he worked it out, in detail, and with a logic he was capable of, but which in the circumstances of the steel surrounding him in the four smells of impatience and of no restraint, of vomit and old urine, in the circumstances of an unclear head, he had permitted to elude and overwhelm him. But when he had worked out his plan, he lit a cigarette, all that they had left him, and in his mind, for his mind was clean and not touched by his circumstances, he selected the long-playing record, could see his fingers ease it out of its jacket, and put it on his stereo, and remained standing, listening to the words of Malcolm X’s speech, “The Ballot or the Bullet.” He was asleep, standing, before the introduction of Malcolm X had finished. And he was stirred from his reverie by the opening of the door, and walked out into the dark cold parking lot, to his car now buried and made invisible by the falling snow. Marco was somewhere else: in another cell, held until his parents could come down from North York, to sign him out. Two men walked beside him. They were not in uniform. He recognized his car, for the snow had not touched the letters B-L-U-E on the licence plate. And he made the gesture to go to it, even though he did not have the keys. And he was corrected. “We’re going for a little drive . . .” And he was put into the back of the cruiser. Left alone, to himself, behind the plastic protector thick as brick, strong as steel, and with his two hands free. The blue unmarked cruiser drove off in the white pouring quiet.

  From the top of Wells Avenue, a street that ran west from Bathurst, she could see the red lights. They were whirring. They scared her so much each time, just to see them, that they gave her the impression they were making great noise, and that the red lights were silencers of that noise. She could see the four police cruisers parked in the middle of the road, and one at the side. She could see the large red, ugly vehicle of the fire department. She could see a smaller, but equally ugly, white-painted ambulance. And from the distance where she was on Bathurst, turning into the smaller street, Wells Avenue, where she lived, she could see the road filled with people. People were leaving doors open and running and passing her as she walked, heading in the direction of the spinning red lights on top of the police cruisers and the fire department truck and the ambulance. She had never witnessed a fire of this bigness in this city before, and so she walked as fast as she could, in the deep sliding snow, to reach the scene.

  The road became more crowded when another police vehicle, a small panel-type truck marked TACTICAL SQUAD, forced itself into the road, from the other end of the street. She was sure now that someone was holding someone hostage. She had watched many of these scenes every day on the soap opera shows in the mansion down in the ravine where she worked. And tickled by the transformation of a movie into a slice of her real life, she tried to hasten her stride, but without success, for the snow was too deep. She felt the excitement the spinning red lights gave off, the curiosity of staring at these kinds of lights on a highway ahead of you, and she passed each house from one end of Wells to the next, now as long as a block, her blood quickening, and not once through her mind passed the thought “Who’s sick?”; and she did not once consider her neighbours nor the landlord in this absent thought of compassion. It was the excitement she was heading to. People—she could see them now—people were being kept back behind a ribbon of yellow plastic, and one policeman stood guarding the yellow plastic ribbon, which measured the area round one house, and disappeared out of sight, perhaps down a lane, or the thin unwalkable space between two houses, and this ribbon reminded her of birthday parties back home, and on Christmas morning, and once when she was no longer a child, taken by her mother to an opening of something where they had a long ribbon like this before the entrance. On that occasion, the vicar of her church had cut the ribbon with scissors. Her excitement was now in her blood, and with her blood hot, she was no longer recognizing things: landmarks and the shape of the uneven concrete steps the landlord had built incorrectly to save money, and that caused her to slip even in the summer. She was forcing herself against these strangers to reach the entrance. And she could see the splotches and the drying small pools, the spots, taking some time to be registered in her excitement as blood. She could see the blood on the steps and blood along the narrow lane, and the lane became difficult to see, as it went beside the house on the left. A dog walked out as if it was drunk. And when it vomited, what came out was like grape juice.

  She could see policemen inside the room, collecting things, some of which they were already bringing out. And she could see the attendants from the ambulance arranging something heavy onto a stretcher. She could see the clothes being brought out. She could see the stereo equipment, speakers, CD player, amplifier. And the books. And the small bible. She wondered who lived here. She could see the books. Books always interested him. And then she realized she was thinking of her son. He always had his head inside a book. And one book she saw him read, again and again, was the Bible, covered in brown wrapping paper. “Thank God!” she said.

  She wondered if this was the wrong address.

  She could see the policemen inside the room, at the back near the door to her kitchen, walking round the small space, nervous and silent. The street outside was silent too. No one was talking. But she could hear their anger and their resentment and their hatred. She was beginning to learn how to listen to this kind of silence.

  And then, there was a sound. A sound very similar to surprise, or to shock, or even to the satisfaction that what you are about to see is the shock, but that you are not prepared for it.

  They were bringing a body out.

  Two ambulance attendants were carrying the stretcher, which had wheels like a bier of a coffin, but which had to be lifted for part of the journey, the short journey covered in deep snow, from the back of the house, down the two short cement steps which the landlord had not got around to fixing properly, a little way to the right of the rear door, and to the ambulance, after going through the thin lane, down two more steps, and up the last three steps of the basement apartment’s front door. As they lifted it up the steps, the wind, which was cold and strong, blew the cloth off the body of the corpse. A cry went through the people. It was a young man. A boy, still with his mother’s features. No more than sixteen or seventeen or eighteen. A black youth, with a close-trimmed haircut, with Zs for patterns and an X for style, dressed in a black woollen sweater, black slacks, white socks, and black shoes that could, if he were alive, help him to jump against gravity, like a basketball star. A Michael Jordan.

  And when the wind had taken the blanket on its short wild curtsy to the night, the people made that sound again, like a gigantic taking in of wind.

  She could see it too. And she saw the head, and it was out of shape from something that had hit it. Disfigured. And the blood was covering the face. And the stretcher was covered in thick blood. And the black clothes the youth was dressed in were red now, more than black. The blood seemed to have its own unkind and disfiguring disposition, and it seemed to drip and mark the journey from the room at the back of the basement apartment through the apartment itself, through the small backyard, through the lane, over the deep snow, and out into the cold wind. It looked as if a cannon had struck the head, and the head had exploded and had been cut into pieces, like a watermelon that had slipped out of the hand. To her, it seemed as if the brains of the young man were coming through his mouth, as if his eyes were lost against the impact of the bullet. To her, it looked like a watermelon that had been smashed by the wheels of a car.

  It was too much. It was too cold. It was too brutal. It was too cruel. A
nd there was too much blood. Worse than the American soap opera she had watched earlier the afternoon of this Friday night, down in the ravine.

  “BJ! BJ! Fuck!”

  It was somebody screaming. She did not know the voice. She looked around, in this crowd of people, and recognized only one of them, her landlord. And then she saw the owner of the voice. It was a young man. There were tears in his eyes. He was dressed in a black jogging suit, black Adidas, and white athletic socks, and he seemed to have something wrong with his right hand or his right side, for he was doing something with his body which made it shake, as if he had a nervous habit, like a tic: hitting his right hand against his right thigh. He looked Portuguese to her. She did not know him.

  “BJ! BJ! Fuck!”

  CHOOSING

  HIS COFFIN

  He is still breathing. The room is hot. His face looks like the polished ebony I had looked upon for so many years, in another place, where it is as hot as here, but where there is always a breeze blowing off the sea. Here, in Willingboro in New Jersey, the breeze comes off the melting black tarred face of the parking lot.

  “This hotness!” my mother says.

  She wipes her face with a gentleman’s handkerchief. She uses this same handkerchief afterwards, to wipe his face, her husband’s face.

  “This hotness could kill a man,” she says.

  But he is still breathing. He is lying on his back. Dead to the world. Majestic in his coma.

  She would remain silent beside him, standing over him, and just as majestic; and she would abuse the rights and privileges that wives whose husbands are dying have, that are given by the hospital; and she would give instructions to the nurses and doctors without deference to their status and to their knowledge of comas and intensive care.

  Slow, and uncertain, we set out, my mother and I, and we come to the first intersection. My mother is not sure if we should turn left, or if we should turn right. And I cannot help her, because I do not live in New Jersey; I do not live in America. I am here, on her insistence, from Toronto, Canada, to “see the Old Man before he dead, boy! He in a coma, now three days going ’pon four.”

  But slowly, the brand new New Yorker car, which she had bought for his birthday, moves over the cleaned, empty streets, and we pass trees and hedges and telephone poles and signs advertising churches of all denominations, and signs for daycare centres, and my mother is still debating with herself the wisdom that “if you are ever loss, it is always more better, in the circumstances, to take the left-hand turn. If possible.”

  She falls silent for a moment; and then she says, with a declarative confidence, “If there is ever a left to take, take the left, boy.”

  She turns the radio on, and the voice of a radio evangelist shouts through the speakers at us, “. . . for the whirl is becoming more sinful. Oh Lord! Mankind is become more vilent. He is burned in a mire—oh my God!—in a mire of ungodliness, and sin . . .”

  “Praise God, boy!” my mother says, talking to the evangelist and to me. The preacher’s sermon is a judgement against all mortal men, spoken in a smooth, thick, syrupy Southern seductiveness. A voice pleasant as molasses.

  Cars pass us in the left and in the right lanes, and some come towards us. We drive as if it is yesterday, Sunday, and we are sightseeing in the afternoon after church. In this Monday morning sun, people going to work honk their horns at our indolence. I am following the cadences of the preacher’s voice chastising us. We are all lost, he says. I feel I am lost. In this Monday morning traffic, I know I am lost. My mother accepts being lost, and covered in sin, in irredeemable sin from head to foot.

  “We’re loss, boy,” she says.

  “And when the day of judgement come, oh my Jesus-God-in-heaven . . .” the preacher screams through the radio.

  “First,” my mother says, ignoring the preacher, “I want to choose a nice, quiet spot for him.”

  “. . . and on that judgement day, brothers and sisters, I hope there is atonement for some of y’all . . .”

  “These Amurcan preachers could turn you into the worst sinner by the words o’ their sermons!”

  In the slowness of our wandering drive, the morning seems to be no longer morning. Night seems to fall miraculously out of the skies, which a few moments ago were blue and bright. But now, it feels as if we are travelling along streets that are in the South. And it is night.

  But immediately, we come out of this dusk and fallen black ashes, and we see women and men walking the streets, the same streets we are now driving on.

  “Turn here! Here, boy!” my mother screams.

  I slam on the brakes. And she sits in silence, shaken and sullen.

  “Jesus Christ, boy! You intend to kill your mother? You don’t know your left hand from your right?”

  We come to a large, unpainted wooden arch. It spans the entrance.

  “Oh my God!” she shouts, “Turn here! Turn! Turn here! Here, boy! This is the place!”

  RANCOCAS BURIAL GROUND AND CREMATORIUM is printed in large white letters on the arch, which is now turning brown from the sun and the New Jersey rain.

  I drive the New Yorker slowly through the arch. And I stop just outside a small wooden building, painted white. The white paint takes up the sun, and shines it back into my eyes. A very small sign says OFFICE.

  It is quiet here. The speeding cars on the street, a few yards behind where we are stopped, seem miles away. A man on my right walks with a long green hose which he pulls along the grass as if he is extracting a worm of interminable length from the bowels of the ground. A second man wearing coveralls walks behind him, carrying a garden tool, a spade.

  There is a large map on one wall of the office. The map says “You are standing here.” And with difficulty, I find myself, the position I am standing in, among the plots of graves and the numbers given to the plots, marked in red on the directing map. There are no names. There is a fan overhead, like the fan in my mother’s kitchen. There is also the sound of laboured breathing, my mother’s and the office man’s. Inside this office, it is as hot as it is outside on the street. Not like being inside the air-conditioned, loquacious New Yorker car, which had reminded us, just a moment earlier, “Your door is ajar!” And my mother had answered the mechanism, and had told the car, “Why the hell you don’t stop talking to we? You don’t have no damn manners, yuh know!”

  She is standing outside the car now, fanning herself with the makeshift Chinese fan which she has buckled back and shaped from the supermarket advertisement announcing bargains in fruits.

  “This hotness! This Amurcan hotness, boy!”

  We walk behind the man, from his office, in single file, through the manicured paths lined with graves. I look at the clusters of grass and flowers, some growing in the ground, some in plastic vases, some in soda pop bottles. There are diminutive American flags on many of the graves. The flags do not move. There is no wind. The flags look as if they are washed in starch. But it is quiet here.

  “Be prepared, boy,” my mother says. And I wonder why she says this to me.

  We walk on in the same file, through the avenues of the dead, each spot, each grave, each plot marked by a stiff Stars and Stripes, until we come to the end of the grounds.

  The three of us stand under a tree. It spreads its leaves and branches over the three of us. The green leaves do not shake, do not move, and they hover over us like green-painted sculptured figures.

  “This is my big-son,” my mother tells the man.

  “Yeah,” the man says, and looks into the lifeless leaves.

  “Lives up in Canada,” my mother says.

  “Yeah,” the man says. He is still looking up at the dead leaves.

  “A big professor. At Yale. In the Ivy Leagues, boy!” she tells the man. The man is older than my mother by many years. When he looks at her, I feel as if he is looking at a piece of plate glass that has no object in its transparency. “You ever hear about Yale University?”

  “Is that right?”

  �
�In the Ivy Leagues, boy!”

  “Is that so?” the man says. He stops looking at the unmoving leaves in the tree, and he looks down at the thick reddish soil, checking where we are standing against the grounds plan in his hand, and says, “Here we are!”

  My mother looks down at the ground, following the man’s indication of it, the ground covered by this thick, strange, healthy grass, smirched in spots by the footprints of the two men nearby, gravediggers, whom I had seen earlier with the green hose and the spade. My mother is intrigued by the strange reddish colour of this earth and ground, in this country of Amurca, that is so different from the dark brown, almost black soil of her own island back there in the West Indies, and she places the makeshift Chinese fan, painted with pictures of fresh fruits shown in detail, with drops of water on those fruits—peaches, pears, plums, apricots, and red grapes—and she raises the fan to her face. And then, without warning, she gives out a cry. A moan. A noise from the bottom of her belly, as if she has been stuck by a deadly blow, delivered at lightning speed, and . . .