The Lunatic

by Anthony C. Winkler

  The remark was bitterly denied by a spokesperson who declared that come what may, the government intended to apply to the Republic of West Germany for the extradition of the fugitive Inga Schmidt.

  But that was very plainly that.

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Barrister Linstrom put Aloysius on the stand to give testimony. It was expected to be the final day of the case. Busha and Sarah were in court to witness its outcome, and Aloysius glanced nervously at them during his testimony.

  The barrister began by saying that he just wanted the jury to hear for themselves his client’s side of the story. He also wanted the jury to get to know his client a little better and to appreciate the part he’d played in this sad business.

  By now the jury was thoroughly disgusted and was longing to go away from the cramped and stuffy courtroom where the overhead fan didn’t work and the windows were left half-closed to shut out the noise of the street and everything was so airless and drab that even drawing breath was hard work.

  Sensing the jury’s impatience, the barrister got down quickly to brass tacks. He asked Aloysius a few questions about life with Inga and then led him quickly to matters that struck every observer as stupidly irrelevant.

  “Lemme ask you dis, Aloysius,” the barrister said, standing right beside the jury. “If I ask you for a character reference, whose name would you give me?”

  Aloysius shuffled his feet and looked pained.

  “I don’t know, sah.”

  “Who is you best friend in de whole world? Who know you as man better dan anybody else in de world?”

  Aloysius fidgeted.

  “De tree, sah,” he said faintly.

  “What’s dat, Aloysius?” the barrister prompted.

  Aloysius took a deep breath.

  “De tree, sah. De flame heart tree. Him know me best of everybody.”

  The jury sniggered at this idiotic reply, causing Aloysius to shuffle and look embarrassed.

  “Now, Aloysius,” the barrister said gently, “you know what people going to say to dat. Dey goin’ say dat a tree can’t talk.”

  “So dey say, sah,” Aloysius mumbled, looking mystified.

  “So what did de tree say ’bout dis German woman, now?”

  “Him didn’t like her, sah. Him was jealous.”

  “Speak up, man,” Linstrom prompted. “Dey can’t hear you.”

  “Him didn’t like her, sah. Him was jealous.”

  “Him didn’t like her, eh? Why him didn’t like her?”

  Aloysius shot an apprehensive glance at the jury.

  “Because before she come, it was just him and me. But then when she come de three of us was dere, and him get jealous.”

  “Him tell you dis himself?”

  Aloysius squirmed.

  “Yes, sah.”

  “So if I ask you for somebody to give me a reference about you in writing, you’d pick dis tree?”

  “Yes, sah. Except dat him can’t write.”

  The jury guffawed.

  “But me can’t write neither, sah,” Aloysius added in a soft voice. “Odderwise everybody used to say dat me’d be a barrister.”

  “Oh, yes? Well, lemme ask you now, Aloysius. How did you feel about dis woman?”

  Aloysius hung his head.

  “Me love Inga, sah.”

  “Love!” the barrister said, nodding his head. “Everybody in dis room understand love. But I goin’ tell you what nobody here understand. Nobody understand why you jump in and spare Mr. McIntosh’s life. Why did you do dat, Aloysius?”

  Aloysius rubbed his face and sighed.

  “Me feel sorry for him, sah,” he said softly.

  In the back of the courtroom Busha jumped angrily to his feet.

  “Feel sorry for me? You feel sorry for me, you mad rass you! You broke into me house and nearly make a man kill me and you have de nerve to say dat you feel sorry for me?”

  “Out of order, Busha!” the judge bellowed, banging his gavel.

  “Him is out of order saying dat him feel sorry for me! Damn nerve!” Bush fumed, sitting back down. Sarah patted his arm and whispered in his ear.

  Linstrom looked from Busha to Aloysius and then to the jury.

  “So de tree is you best friend, eh? You love de tree?”

  “Yes, sah,” Aloysius mumbled, looking ashamed to admit it.

  “And you love Inga?”

  “Yes, sah. Inga is me true love.”

  “And you feel sorry for Mr. McIntosh?”

  “Yes, sah. When me see him get de chop.”

  “So in a way, you could say dat you love Busha McIntosh, too?”

  “LOVE ME!” Busha roared, leaping again to his feet. “LOVE YOU, RASS! LOVE WHO?”

  “Busha!” the judge shouted.

  Sarah grabbed Busha by the elbow and propelled him firmly out the back door.

  “What kind of madhouse is dis dat turn thiefing into loving?” Busha yelled over his shoulder as he whisked through the doorway.

  When everyone had quieted down, the barrister strolled slowly over to his table.

  “One final question,” he said. “Aloysius, what is your name?”

  Aloysius looked startled.

  “Name, sah? What me name?”

  “Yes. Tell me your full name.”

  “Me name, sah? Me full, full name?”

  “Yes. What is your name?”

  Aloysius struggled visibly with himself in the witness stand. Then he straightened up briskly.

  “Aloysius Gossamer Longshoreman Technocracy Predominate Involuted Enraptured Parliamentarian Patriarch Verdure Emulative . . .”

  The jury looked stunned. The judge repeatedly banged his gavel. Linstrom began putting away his papers in a briefcase.

  “Perihelion Dichotomy Intellectual Chaste Iron-Curtain Linkage Colonialistic Dilapidated . . .”

  “Order!” the judge banged. “Order in the court!”

  “Impracticable Loquacious Predilection . . .”

  Two constables led Aloysius bodily away. He continued his rapid-fire recital as he was manhandled out the door.

  “Abomination Vichyssoise Pyrrhic Mountebank Unconscionable Altercation Lookalike . . .”

  “Go ’way, you mad rass you!” Busha was heard bellowing at him from behind the courthouse.

  * * *

  Bumpkin loved a show as much as bumpkin loved money, and the barrister gave them a show with his summation and closing argument. It was dreadfully hot in the courtroom and the two rows of black and brown faces before the pacing barrister were gleaming with sweat. Handkerchiefs fluttered in the room mopping brows and wiping sweaty nosebridges, and every now and again one of the jurors, an old man who said he was a retired teacher, would gulp for breath like a fish out of water.

  Busha sat fuming in the back of the room listening to the barrister’s speech and getting redder and redder in the face. Once or twice Busha even snorted with contempt and drew a glare of reproof from the judge, who was his personal friend and did not want to be too hard on him.

  The barrister began his summation by telling the jury that he wanted them to understand why he did not live in America. To give them this understanding, he rolled up his sleeves, leaned his arms on the railing of the jury box, and begged the jurors to look closely at the color of his skin.

  Carrying on like a schoolteacher, he asked each one of them what color his skin was. The answers, given after careful study and hesitation, ranged from light brown to khaki to chestnut. The barrister then paced around the room, lowered his voice, and said he would tell everyone present his secret about why he didn’t live in America even though a man like himself in America would live in a mansion, drive big car, earn bands of money, and go through his whole life without ever laying eyes on a madman.

  “But I don’t live in America,” the barrister said, “because in America dey would say I am a black man.”

  He paused for this sad state of affairs to sink into the twin tiers of bumpkin stacked attentively bef
ore him.

  “Now everyone here see dat I am a brown man, except de American. To him, I am a black man. To de American a brown man, a red man, a sepia man, a chestnut man, a khaki man, is one and de same: Him is a black man. But notice dis about Americans. Dey don’t call brown horse black. Dey don’t call brown dog black. Dey don’t call brown house black. Is only brown man dey call black. Because over dere dey have more color for horse and house and dog dan dey have for man. For a man dey have only two color: white and black.”

  The barrister did a little spin around the room and wound up face to face with bumpkin row.

  “But here in Jamaica we have our brown man, our dark brown man, our yellow man, our red man, our pink man—dat is you Chiny man—our Indian man, and our blueblack man! Because we don’t see a man only in two color in Jamaica, because God don’t make man in only two color. God make man in at least thirty, forty color, and here in Jamaica we see dem all.”

  Busha snorted like a horse blowing its nose.

  “So now,” continued the barrister, “it’s like dis man, Aloysius Hobson, who say him have a thousand names. You are Jamaicans and you can look at him and see dat him is not just a thief.”

  “Him is a damn thief, of course!” Busha snapped, drawing a rap of the gavel.

  “You can see him did a little thiefing and him is a little mad, and him is a little fool-fool. But you also see dat dis heart have some good in it too. Dat dis is de same heart dat show mercy to Busha McIntosh, dat when push come to shove would not let dis damn wretch here who say him is born again Christian kill Busha—born again me backfoot! Him born again like monkey born again when monkey want something from you! You can see dat love live in dis poor heart beside thiefing and foolishness and madness, love and mercy also live dere side by side.”

  “Love for who?” Busha snorted.

  “Love for you, sah!” the barrister trumpeted, turning to face Busha, who glowered in the back of the room. “Dis is a man who love you! Who show mercy to you! Every breath of life you draw from now on until you day of judgment you going owe to dis madman here!”

  “Owe what?” Busha raged, jumping to his feet. “So what, him is God over me now? Him make me?”

  “Make you, sah?” Linstrom declared. “Yes, sah. Look on dis poor madman before you. Because now on until you dead, dis man is you maker!”

  Busha’s face turned purple and full like an overripe grape.

  “My God not black!” Busha screamed. “Maybe your God black, but my God not black! My God in heaven, him don’t talk to tree and him don’t thief from people house!”

  “Busha!” the judge yelled, rapping the gavel.

  Still shouting about his God, Busha was escorted out of the room by two bemused constables.

  Linstrom watched him go with a sly grin on his face.

  Then he turned to the bumpkins who were fanning themselves and mopping their faces before him.

  “If you convict dis man today,” he said to them in a hushed voice, “it mean one thing. You turn American on me. It mean you overlook de mercy and love dat’s in dis man’s heart. It mean you call brown man, sepia man, red man, and yellow man black. It mean you see more in dog and horse and rat and cat dan you see in a man. It mean all you see in dis heart is thiefing and wickedness, but you don’t see de kindness and mercy and love dat live dere, too.”

  The barrister sat down, signalling that his speech was done.

  “Is all right, sah,” Service mumbled in a pitiful voice. “Me forgive you for saying wicked thing ’bout me. De Lord say to forgive, and me forgive you.”

  “I don’t hold discourse with born thief and bogus Christian,” Linstrom said sternly.

  “Me forgive you for dat, too,” Service cringed, pawing the Bible with moist fingers.

  The jury was out for a matter of only minutes and came back with a decision. It was so insufferably hot in the deliberation room that debate was nearly impossible. But none was really necessary because the jurors were all of the same opinion on the principles in the case. They found Service guilty, Aloysius innocent.

  The barrister smiled when the verdict was read. Aloysius, standing to hear it, shuffled his feet and looked confused.

  “Me guilty and him innocent!” Service bawled loudly. “How dat? Him no broke de house wid me, too? Is me alone broke it? How me de only one going to workhouse for it, when is three of us broke de house?

  His counsel nudged him in the ribs.

  “Is all right,” Service mumbled in a suddenly subdued voice. “Dey crucified de Lord and Savior, so I suppose dem must crucify me, too.”

  On being informed of the verdict, Busha gave a roar of outrage so loud that it blew from the parking lot into the courtroom, scaring a woman in the front row out of her wits and causing her to jump as if she’d sat on a pin.

  “Mercy must be shown where mercy is shown,” the old juror was explaining in a pedantic voice as he shuffled out of the courtroom with the other members.

  “Rass, boy,” said one the jurors, “lemme outta dis damn madhouse. It hotter dan hellfire in dere.”

  The judge sentenced Service to fifteen years at hard labor. Then he said that in good conscience he would not allow a madman who had participated in a burglary to get away scotfree, so he was sending Aloysius back to the lunatic asylum for further treatment.

  Aloysius was sent to Kingston, spent a month in the asylum, was subjected to an experimental American treatment based on a diet rich in protein, administered a few pills, beaten once with a switch, and released as harmless.

  The building guard who walked Aloysius to the gate, and who had become rather fond of him, remarked to the gatepost guard as they watched him walk away to the bus stop: “Any man in Jamaica who can chat to a bush and tree will never be lonely. Sometimes, to rass, me wish me could chat wid bush, too.”

  “Man who chat wid bush can’t become civil servant,” the gatepost guard said scornfully, turning the pages of his book.

  He was studying to become a clerk in a government ministry and rightly suspected that talking to bushes and trees was not the kind of madness appreciated in such high places.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  The widow Dawkins, the same who had nearly asphyxiated Busha with her beastly farting in church, did not like nastiness to touch her lips. She did not like bad words to cross her tongue or filthy expressions to brush against her teeth, whether real or false (she had both kinds in her mouth).

  So when Aloysius asked her to read his foreign letter—the one he had lately gotten from the slack German who had talked him into breaking Busha’s house and nearly made him party to murder—she made it plain that if there were any bad words in it she would not utter them but would simply signify their omission by saying “nastiness” or “filthiness.”

  Aloysius agreed. They were sitting on the small wooden veranda of the widow’s house, which was half encircled by a grove of trees on a mountain slope overlooking the endless stretches of Busha’s land. It was dusk and the sky bled the soft pastel colors of a tropical sunset.

  The widow was perched on her rocking chair, the same she had been sitting in when her faithful departed husband had dropped dead of a heart attack four years ago. She had on her thick glasses and clutched the letter Aloysius had been told was waiting for him at the post office and had now brought to her for reading.

  She steeled herself with a deep breath and began: “Dear Aloysius, I am writing from Rome, where I have enlisted in a cell of the Red Brigade. You might not have heard of the Red Brigade in Jamaica, but we are a political group fighting for the rights of poor people here and everywhere else in the world. At the moment I am living in the basement of a house in a suburb of Rome. I do not go out very much because the police are everywhere looking for us.

  “I think of you often. Most often of all, I think of . . . nastiness, filthiness . . . Do you remember the days when we used to . . . more nastiness, more filthiness.”

  The widow turned the page, glanced at Aloysius and mut
tered grimly, “A whole page of filthiness.”

  She dismissed a paragraph on the next page with, “A paragraph of nastiness.”

  Finally she found a clean passage and began reading again.

  “My father tried to have me committed to an institution in Berne, which is in Switzerland. I pretended that I would go and accept his decision. But I managed to escape the two men he had hired to take me there. Since then I have been living in Italy with friends.

  “I am sorry that everything turned so bad for you. I am also sorry that Service was such . . . nastiness and filthiness. I do not know even to this day why I let him come and live with us because he was . . . nastiness and filthiness.”

  The widow paused and drew a cleansing breath.

  Aloysius fidgeted and peered over her shoulder at the words scrawled on the page and wished with all his heart that he himself could read them and see what lay under the “nastiness and filthiness” that gave the widow such discomfort.

  “I do not know if I will ever again come to Jamaica,” the widow read.

  “I sincerely hope not,” she sniffed.

  “In fact, I do not know how my life will turn out and how it might end. That stupid old man who controls us all . . .”

  “What old man does she mean?” the widow wondered.

  Aloysius squirmed. “God.”

  “God? She calling God Almighty a stupid old man? You sure is God she mean?”

  “Yes, ma’am. Dat what she call God.”

  “But what a nerve of dis dirty woman,” the widow declared angrily, “to write dat way about God!”

  “Beg you finish de letter for me, ma’am.”

  “You not going catch me talking about God in dat way. No sirreehheee. Not dis woman.”

  “Just pass over dat part, please.”

  “I only doing dis because is you, Aloysius,” the widow said piously. “No man going make dis woman commit sin.”

  “Me not making you commit sin, ma’am.”

  “In fact, I do not know how my life will turn out and how it might end. Nastiness . . . who controls us all will no doubt have some tricks in store for this sheep. But I still show him my teeth in the pasture.”