The Lunatic

by Anthony C. Winkler

  Mr. Shubert turned and looked into the homely brown face of a scrawny village woman whose husband operated a bus. He smiled wanly and mumbled that he would do his best.

  $98.67, thought Mr. Shubert, as he settled down again in his chair. And come to think of it, the wretch had missed her payment last week.

  The crowd thundered as Busha hit another towering six.

  But Busha’s heroics earned him no glory. For in cricket it is written that the properly stylish batsman should drive the ball low and humming over the turf where it can’t be caught, should do so while striking iconic poses for the benefit of spectators, and wearing a mien of effortless imperturbability like a Colonial English governess making doo-doo on the potty.

  None of this is possible if one is hitting sixes. It requires such a wrenching effort of brute strength that the batsman invariably looks rude and clumsy. It is all too American and vulgar. A roar from the partisan crowd, no doubt, but no appreciation whatsoever from the connoisseurs.

  So Busha was applauded but not valued. He appeared to some sideline critics to be wielding his bat like it was a machete and he was a garden boy chopping grass.

  Busha swung viciously at a yorker and sent it flying for another six.

  “All dis rass white man can do is hit six,” a spectator grumbled.

  “Him think him butchering cow,” another remarked.

  “Dem soon bowl him,” scoffed a third.

  “Him swinging blind, dat’s all,” muttered another.

  Moneague wickets began falling steadily all around Busha. Dr. Fox was stumped for one run and had to shamble off the field looking like he’d been caught thiefing a chicken. Mr. Shubert came in and was immediately clean bowled for a duck. As he was walking off doing his best to look dignified, Mr. Shubert paused to remind the bowler about the balance he owed the shop. The bowler got vexed and answered with a bad word.

  Mr. Shubert muttered uglily that sooner or later the bowler would want credit again, at which time his goose would most certainly be cooked. The bowler sneered that it was duck that was cooked, not goose, a taunt which goaded Mr. Shubert into such an abusive tirade that the umpire had to walk over and order him off the field of play.

  The spectators from Walker’s Wood jeered the shopkeeper with a loud quacking as he took the long humiliating walk to the sidelines.

  “Better luck next time, Mr. Shubert,” $98.67 muttered to the shopkeeper as he sat down and began tearing off his pads.

  Mr. Shubert turned on her savagely.

  “How come you miss you payment last week?” he bellowed.

  The woman blushed with shame.

  “Lawd, Missah Shubert, sah,” she whispered, “is not me bowl you, you know, sah.”

  * * *

  By noon the Moneague side was in collapse. Busha was grimly hanging onto his wicket with a score of forty-six. He had belted five sixes over the parked cars. One had landed in the bush of the church graveyard and the ball nearly lost. But it was found under a mass of tendrils smothering a weathered graveslab and returned to play.

  Aloysius, the last batsman on the side, came to bat barefoot and clad in a crushed pair of white pants that Busha had lent him. Busha’s belly was so much bigger than Aloysius’s that the waist of the pants had had to be fastened with an old necktie, which drooped down the seams like an ill-fitting cummerbund.

  The captain of the Walker’s Wood side flew at the umpire and protested a madman being used by the other team.

  “Damn out of order, man!” the captain raged, “We have madman in our village too, you know, sah! I could fill me side wid a whole lunatic asylum if I had a mind to. But dis is supposed to be a friendly game! You don’t use you madman in a friendly game!”

  “Play de game, man,” the umpire snapped. “Nothing in de rule book ’bout madman.”

  The captain retreated to his fielding position, muttering threats about next year filling his team with eleven raving lunatics.

  Aloysius stroked a long four through cover point on the next ball. The next delivery he lofted toward the long-on boundary where it was gingerly caught by a fielder.

  Just like that the side was all out for ninety-five runs.

  There was a break for a curry goat lunch served under a Poinciana tree. Everyone on the Moneague side admitted that things were looking grim. The players tried to cheer each other up, but in spite of all the heartening words mumbled through mouthfuls of chewed goat, a thick gloom had settled upon them. Across the field, where the Walker’s Wood side ate its lunch, there was a constant sound of lighthearted banter and laughter. Jokes were being told in boisterous voices and greeted with squeals and backslapping.

  The same contrasting moods had settled over supporters of the two teams. On the Moneague sidelines a fight broke out during which a woman held down her husband and flogged him with a switch. Three special constables had to drag them both away to the police station accompanied by a frightful hissing from the unruly crowd. Children were cuffed, scolded, and occasionally gave vent to an animal shrieking. Men were drinking themselves into a stupor. Women squabbled over old grievances.

  But on the Walker’s Wood side there were no shrieking children, no fighting women, no drunken men, the crowd was in a jovial and happy mood. Laughter occasionally floated over the background jabber of voices. So many people scaled a lignum vitae tree, jostling for a place on an overhanging limb, that it broke with a loud snap and sent a mass of bodies tumbling headlong into the thick of the crowd. But even this accident was greeted with good-natured laughter as the fallen spectators picked themselves up from the ground, dusted off, and began anew a scramble up the tree trunk.

  A drunken woman, her eyes afire with rum, her voice thick and slurred, elbowed her way to where the dispirited Moneague team sat.

  “You say you name cricket players?” she shrieked at the subdued men. “Is so you name? Cricket players? Well, listen me now, if you don’t win dis game, we goin’ ration pum-pum on you like de Socialists used to ration butter. You hear me! No pum-pum for you if you don’t win!”

  A few of the bystanders sniggered at her antics, some scowled and muttered under their breaths. But most of them just looked away and shuffled their feet with painful embarrassment.

  The players sat under the tree toying with blades of grass, twirling their shoelaces, or staring idly at the lines of spectators that twined thick and colorful across the hillside, draped off the branches of the surrounding trees, and curled over the eaves of neighboring rooftops.

  After lunch the Walker’s Wood side stepped to the crease and began hammering the Moneague fast bowlers. The batsmen immediately drove the new ball to the boundaries for two fours. By the time the pacemen had worn a scuff into the new ball, the score was thirty-one runs for no wickets.

  A water boy came on the field and the players took a short break for belly-wash and bullah cake.

  “No pum-pum for de whole o’ you!” the nasty drunken woman bellowed from the sidelines.

  “I goin’ get a constable to lock up her rass,” the inspector glowered.

  “Leave de damn drunk woman, man,” Busha mumbled. “She just telling de truth.”

  “Let’s just do our best and lose honorably,” the parson counselled.

  “Honorably, you bumbo?” Dr. Fox snapped. “We goin’ be de laughing stock of de parish.”

  Busha inspected the ball to see whether it was sufficiently worn to bring on the spin bowlers. Then he tossed it to his best spin bowler, who was Aloysius.

  The strategy in cricket is dictated by the condition of the ball. A new ball is hard and shiny like a marble, slippery to the grip, and cannot be delivered with any appreciable spin. But the fast bowler can bowl it with tremendous speed, get it to carom wickedly off the pitch, and take wickets by scaring the daylights out of the batsman.

  After the fast bowlers have had their innings, the ball becomes scuffed and worn, its seams raised and rigid like an old man’s veins. Then the spin bowlers come on, for now they can grip t
he ball and spin it with a flick of the wrist, making it arc through the air with tantalizing slowness and jink erratically at the stumps.

  The pace of the game slows. The fielders draw perilously close to the batsman. The wicket keeper’s gloved hands hover inches over the wicket. Deceit and swindle hang heavily in the air. Sudden death lurks for the unwary batsman.

  “How you do today?” Aloysius murmured to the ball as he paced off his two-step length.

  “Ahh, me son!” the ball replied. “Times hard ’pon me. Me back nearly broke wid all de licking dem give me.”

  “De bat hard, eh?” Aloysius asked sympathetically.

  “Hard?” the ball became indignant. “Hard, you rass! You don’t know ‘hard’ yet? You should be born in a world where people batter you up wid a piece of wood, den you’d know ’bout ‘hard.’”

  “Is true, you know,” Aloysius muttered.

  “Where dat white man? Him not batting now?” the ball asked anxiously.

  “No, man. Him ’pon we team.”

  “Him nearly kill me puppa wid all dem six. Hard knock to rass!”

  The captain of the opposing team, who was at bat, strode angrily over to the umpire.

  “De man is talking to de ball!” he bellowed. “Dey bring a madman to bowl us! What kind a thing is dis? Out of order to bring a madman to bowl us!”

  On the sidelines the indignation was echoed by the supporters of Walker’s Wood.

  For the sake of peace, the umpire strolled over to Aloysius and asked him to please refrain from talking to the ball while he was bowling since it distracted the batsmen.

  Aloysius took his mark.

  His face wreathed in a ferocious scowl, the captain of the opposing team assumed his batting stance, slapping the tip of his bat angrily against the crease.

  The crowd quietened down expectantly.

  Aloysius took two steps and let the ball go. It floated high in the air, landed three feet outside the wicket, then darted like a snake at the stumps. Fooled by the sharp break, the captain mistimed his swing and nicked the ball into the hands of the fielder crouching at first slips.

  “Howzzeee he?” the team roared.

  The umpire’s finger stabbed the air, signalling an out.

  The fury of the captain was uncontrollable. He ranted and raved at the umpire.

  Moneague had emptied its lunatic asylum to come and bowl against their team, the captain bawled, and here they had been decent enough to leave their own demented citizens behind. The umpire took a dim view of the clamor and ordered the irate captain to leave the field and bring on the next batsman.

  Scowling ferociously, the captain stormed off to a hail of applause from his own crowd and a chorus of boos from the Moneague supporters.

  The next batsman marched bravely to the wicket. He tidied up the crease, got the umpire to give him mid-stump, sniffed suspiciously at crouching fielders, and turned to face Aloysius with a threatening glare.

  The first ball uprooted his leg stump.

  The Moneague crowd exploded in a wild thundering of joy.

  With the help of obeah, the Devil, and lunacy (according to the captain of the other side), Aloysius took all wickets like they had never been taken before. He got a hat trick by clean bowling three. He got one for leg before wicket. Two others were caught.

  The solid center of the Walker’s Wood batting order, where were planted three big-belly batsmen of enormous size and a gluttonous appetite for scoring, fell meekly for fewer than twenty runs. Every falling wicket brought the captain of the Walker’s Wood team raving onto the field. Bad words flew out of his mouth like bats from a cave. He stormed up and down at his own players, screaming at them for being fooled and frightened by a madman. He protested to the umpire, the heavens, the spectators. He popped oaths and blasphemies and named some private parts that old women on the sidelines had not seen in years.

  But nothing he did or said made any difference. It still rained wickets. And when Aloysius was not bowling Parson Mordecai was wreaking havoc with his googly ball—one that bounced trickily and lured two batsmen out of their creases to a merciless stumping.

  The final two wickets fell in quick succession. One batsman was running out as he tried to scratch two runs from a ball driven weakly past the mid-on fielder. The last man at bat, the beefy cultivator who was the Walker’s Wood fast bowler, hit a mighty six on his first swing, and popped up the ball to the long-on fielder on his second.

  A tremendous roar erupted from the Moneague supporters, who surged onto the field, engulfing the players in an ocean of flailing limbs.

  Moneague had won the game by twenty runs.

  Late that night Aloysius straggled past the glare of the last street light on the edge of the village and tramped his way slowly up the empty and unlighted country road with crickets hissing in his ear and croaking lizards groaning at the darkness.

  He had been overwhelmed by the crowd, carted off bodily to the nearest bar, and drenched with glass after glass of free white rum. The sound system had been turned up to its loudest volume and the vibrations of the reggae rhythms had pounded all evening through his body, giving him a splitting headache. He had been hailed and slapped on his back and celebrated and told jokes like never before in his life.

  The drunken woman had caught up with him and hauled him into a backyard where she dropped her panties and attempted to reward him with pum-pum on the roof of a rickety chicken coop. But even while Aloysius was groggily trying to make her understand that he could hardly stand up straight because of his great weariness, she passed out and fell on the ground, causing the penned chickens to explode in a noisy cackling.

  Now, as Aloysius slowly scraped his way up the dark road, his eyes picking out the familiar shapes of trees and the low outline of the wall, he was aware that a sinister silence had descended on the darkened woods and fields. No bushes, no trees called out his name as he passed. The only sound he heard were the shrieking of the insects, the cries of frogs, and the hawking of the lizards.

  He climbed over the wall and by starlight followed the narrow path that wound into the thick bushland where he had lived for many months alone with only the flame heart tree for company.

  Inga and Service had not come to the cricket match. Inga said she did not understand cricket. Service said he had no use for watching grown men play a child’s game.

  Sitting on the stoop of the house, they would be waiting for him in the faint glow of the kerosene lamp.

  On the night wind he could hear the sound of a file whetting a blade. It made the noise of an old man grinding his teeth during a bad dream.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  So now it was Sunday. The day dawned bleak and overcast, and the gray light leaching through the clouds was watery and thin like weak porridge.

  On Sundays the bushland always echoes with sounds of singing, chanting, and hand-clapping mingled with distant preaching. Now these sounds wafted over green hills on a morning breeze and drifted down to the small house where Inga, Aloysius, and Service waited, lost in thoughts.

  Service sharpened and resharpened his machete. Aloysius stared gloomily at the dirt watching ants come and go. Inga wrote feverishly in her notebook.

  They did not speak.

  Busha and Sarah went to Sunday service and, as bad luck would have it, ended up sitting right behind the widow Dawkins who had sickly bowels and broke wind like Satan himself when she was in church. Once before Busha had sat beside the widow and she had very nearly blasted him to the rafters with her incessant farting. Since then he always made it a point to sit as far away from her as he could.

  But this morning the widow was late. Only after Busha and Sarah were firmly wedged between a solid mass of portly matrons did she wriggle into a pew and settle down directly in front of them.

  “Good God!” Busha moaned.

  “Shhhh!” Sarah hissed between clenched teeth.

  “Make we move, beg you!”

  “We can’t move. Service beginning.
”

  “Lawd God. I dead today.”

  Sarah jammed him hard in the ribs with her elbow.

  Busha remembered where he was and began trumpeting “Rock of Ages.”

  The bellowing of a distant preacher drifted down to the small house. Inga, Service, and Aloysius could not make out the words, but the sound of the voice was harsh and angry.

  “Me know what him saying,” Service muttered, rasping the file against the silver grin of the machete. “He say pum-pum cause famine, stunt growth, make bridge collapse, make bus run late, give flour weevil, bring mosquito, cause drought and toothache. Pum-pum shrivel up toe, dry up eyeball, make barefoot man step on rusty nail and get lockjaw. No matter what war and trouble in dis world, parson say pum-pum cause it.”

  “How you know that’s vhat he’s saying? You can’t hear his vords.”

  “Me know,” Service muttered. “Me daddy was a parson. When I chop him, he says, ‘Is pum-pum make you chop me.’ Dat’s how parson mind work. Everything is pum-pum fault.”

  Inga got vexed, wriggled out of her pants, stripped off her panties, and sat naked on the stoop of the small house with her bare knees gaping wide at the gray sky.

  “I vish my pum-pum vas a flag,” she growled. “I vould hoist it on a flagpole for every parson in the vorld to see.”

  Aloysius got up and paced moodily around the house, settling down with a sigh in the same place he had just been sitting.

  * * *

  It is a slow day in Jamaica, this Sunday. It drags like ground lizard through tall grass. The shops and bars are shuttered tight, the radio filled with sermonizing and hymn singing, the roads empty of people and buses, the fields stripped of workers. This dreariest of all days tightens like a hangman’s noose around joy and laughter, reminds the old of dark nights, and sends children scurrying nervously into the laps of clucking aunts.

  A Jamaican Sunday sticks in the throat like fish bone. By noon even a pious heart hungers for the grim normalcy of Monday.

  For the last time Inga went over fingerprints and footprints. Still naked, she crouched on the grass, her pum-pum gaping wide like fish mouth. Aloysius and Service sat nearby listening as she explained what they had to do.