AFTER THEY FOUND THE GIRL, Clive became untouchable. When he was released from prison he tried to return to his life, but Don and Des closed ranks. Even Arthur wouldn’t touch him. He couldn’t find work, not cutting grass, not even scrubbing toilets at Papa Mango’s. He and Edwin kept their distance from one another. As far as he knew, Edwin had also been shut out of polite society, but it was different for him. He hadn’t been to prison, for one thing. He didn’t have a family to support, for another.
For weeks after his release, Clive went to Sara’s house and begged to see his son. But Agatha wouldn’t let him past the front door. Finally, one day, he waited down the road until he saw Agatha go out. Then he went up the front walkway. “Please, Sara! Let me talk to you!” he shouted as he pounded on the door. He didn’t care who saw.
The door swung open. “Hush,” Sara scolded. “You’ll wake him.”
He told her everything he had planned during his time in Her Majesty’s Prison. He was sorry. He would do whatever it took to make it up to her. He would quit drinking and smoking. He had messed up and he knew it, but he would fix it.
“And what kind of mum would I be if I let you into my boy’s life after this mess?”
“But I’m innocent! I swear it! Don’t you believe me, Sara?”
“It doesn’t matter what you are,” she snapped. “Innocent, guilty, can’t you see? It’s all spoiled.”
“I know it must seem that way right now. But with time, maybe—”
She shook her head. She had her hand on the door, ready to close it.
“Please,” he begged.
She paused. She smiled a small, sad smile. “You know, I think you’re the only person who was ever really sweet to me,” she said. Then she closed the door.
GROWING UP, Clive had known more than a few people who had returned to the island from abroad, and it was from them, long before he ever thought their stories would be relevant to his own life, that he learned what it meant to leave home. Almost all of these people had gone either to New York or London, though he knew a few who’d gone elsewhere—to Glasgow, Birmingham, Toronto, Miami. A few years before he left, a boy who’d been three forms above him at Everett Lyle Secondary flew off to Houston, but last Clive heard he, too, had washed up in New York.
For most of his childhood, New York and London were roughly interchangeable to Clive, big, gleaming cities, more Dominicans and Haitians in New York, more Jamaicans in London. But when Keithley returned from London with his wife and the baby boy who was destined to die on the soccer pitch behind Horatio Byrd, he began to understand that the people who returned from New York and those who returned from London had changed in distinct ways. Though Keithley had left home determined never to return, he appeared relieved to be back, and this seemed the case for many people returned from London. It was true they had failed to do what they had set out to do, to build a big life away. But in London it had become plain that this plan was naïve and misguided. The city had taught them that the big life was nothing but the delusion of a person from nowhere who didn’t know any better. They rarely spoke of their time away.
The New Yorkers, too, appeared relieved to be home. New York, like London, had been drab and crowded and unforgiving, and the winters were colder and the summers hotter and more humid than in London. But their relief was thin, a skin covering the flesh of longing. They spoke of New York constantly, as one turns over a riddle one has not managed to solve. They seemed convinced they had missed the big life by inches. It had been there, set plainly before them, but some narrowness of vision had prevented them from grasping it. Now New York was over. They had not grasped it and they could not figure out why.
Clive knew he was not like these men. He did not want to leave home. New York had been Edwin’s dream, never his. He arrived with no grand plans, no conviction that in New York the world would finally recognize his special deservingness. He hoped only that his time away might make it possible, someday, to go home and reclaim the only life he’d ever wanted, a quiet existence with Sara and his son. Mates and a drink after work. Picnics and cricket in the sand at Little Beach on the weekends. Perhaps another child eventually, a daughter, chubby like him. People did not forget, but they might decide, eventually, that they no longer cared.
Most of the people he knew who had gone to New York had settled in the Bronx, but he did not want to run into people from home. He chose Flatbush because it was the largest Caribbean neighborhood in the city; a place, he hoped, he could get lost in. He found a room in an apartment on Farragut Road, in a building whose dim hallways smelled of mice. The apartment had four small bedrooms, each shared by two men, and a common space with a kitchenette against one wall. When he moved in, a bunch of rotting bananas atop the fridge cast off a sickly sweet smell. In the bathroom, toothbrushes balanced precariously on the rim of the sink, which was lacquered with a pale blue chalk of hardened toothpaste; the floor around the toilet was littered with cardboard tubes. He could hardly believe this filthy apartment was New York, and he was thankful that it was he, not Edwin, who was here to see it.
The unwritten rule of the apartment was that the men pretended not to see one another. In such close quarters, it was the only way to keep the peace. They took wordless turns in the bathroom, slept and woke and pretended not to overhear one another’s phone calls home.
Only two of them disrupted this dreary concord. The first was Ousseini, Ouss for short, the youngest among them at twenty-two and the only one not from the Caribbean. He was short and sprightly, with the simultaneously curious and sleepy countenance of a child. On Clive’s first night in the apartment, as he unpacked his suitcase in his bedroom, Ouss stood in the doorway in his mesh shorts and undershirt, elbow against the doorjamb, and confessed he’d been socially and sexually deprived ever since he arrived in Brooklyn from Burkina Faso three years before.
“I desire a wife with such ardor I can think of nothing else.”
Clive was hot and tired and wanted only to lie down on his thin mattress and sleep. On the opposite side of the room his roommate Charles was flipping through a sports magazine, diligently ignoring Ouss and eyeing Clive every so often with a glint of warning.
“You’re young,” Clive said succinctly.
Ouss shook his head sadly. “This is what I thought, but it was an error. I have five brothers in Ouaga, and all have children. When they were marrying I thought they were foolish to start families. I thought I was so smart to remain free to pursue my dreams. Now I fear I am too late. I want a woman who will be my partner. I want to start a business. But what woman in New York will love me? We need women. All of us here. You, too, Charles!” Charles kept his eyes on his magazine. “You see! You see! We are becoming dysfunctional. To live in this world of solitary men is not natural.”
Ouss talked on and on and Clive, not wanting to be rude, nodded politely and offered small words of comfort. Later, he understood that this had been his critical mistake. The other men ignored Ouss absolutely. This was how Clive became the recipient of Ouss’s laments, a position he found somewhat irritating, though ultimately not as disagreeable as he supposed he should, because, as Ouss had said, theirs was a solitary existence, and it was nice to have company.
Then there was Sachin, as surly as Ouss was talkative and romantic. Sachin left his briefs on the bathroom floor, his old food in the fridge, was often drunk and prone to picking arguments. (Those were his bananas rotting atop the fridge when Clive moved in.) He took an immediate dislike to Clive, who found himself on the receiving end of much of the man’s vitriol. “It’s not personal,” Ouss assured him. “He possesses a lot of anger. He had a wife and daughter back in Trinidad who died in an accident after he left. I think he should go home and begin again, but he’s afraid. Jean-François says he speaks to them in his sleep.”
In New York, with these men, he became Clive again, as he hadn’t been since Edwin christened him in the schoolyard at Horatio Byrd Primary. Gogo. That name, that world, that life. At times it seemed to him like one of the stories his mother used to tell him, vivid and vaporous as a dream.
NEW YORK surprised him. He expected a rough, gritty place, and while this vision was not exactly inaccurate, there were things it failed to capture. The pleasure of a nine P.M. summer sunset. In spring, in the parks, the quiet grace of what seemed like all the people in the world spread across the lawns. He had expected a place where there were a million things to see, but also where what you saw was what you got. Instead, New York seemed to tremble with the unseen. Subway tunnels whooshed people through the earth, the warm steam rising from street grates the only sign of this subterranean world. He had heard that the layers of the city went down ten meters, that below the city of today were buried houses, streets, and cemeteries, and he could sense this past beneath his feet. Walking at night, he sometimes feared someone would grab his elbow, and he would whip around to find himself staring into the eyes of his dead father.
IT TOOK him three months to get his hack license. He submitted the dozens of pages of paperwork for the application. He got a medical exam from a Dr. Khutsishvili in Midwood. He took defensive driving at Safe Taxi Academy and sat for the six-hour exam: What landmark is located at the intersection of 33rd Street and 5th Avenue? Which of the following streets runs parallel to Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Boulevard? How many roads cross Central Park, and where are the transverses located? When he found out he had passed, the first thing he did was call Sara.
“I’ll be making decent money,” he told her happily. “I’ll be wiring some home to you and my gran as soon as I can.”
“My mum needs new tires for her car,” she said bluntly.
“Your mum?”
“Yes, she needs new tires for the car I use to take your son to the doctor and to do the shopping. Although you cannot see us, Clive, we are living every day down here, and every day has its expenses.”
He took a deep breath in. “Can I speak to him?”
She sighed. “It would only confuse him.”
For a moment neither of them spoke.
“Clive?”
“Yes?”
“Be careful on those roads.”
HE LEASED a night shift because he heard it was more profitable.
“Last chance to change your mind,” said the manager at the fleet garage, a middle-aged man named Larry in an old, beat-up Mets cap calcified by sweat and grime, before he took the money for Clive’s first night’s lease.
“You’ll never see him without that filthy thing,” the driver behind Clive in line said, gesturing at the hat.
“Don’t even take it off to screw my wife,” Larry said proudly.
Clive handed him the money.
“Don’t say I didn’t warn you,” Larry said with a smile. “I’ve got hacks getting mugged on the regular. Half these guys have diabetes, and you can say sayonara to your kidneys unless you want to piss in a bottle all night.”
In the months that followed, Clive found that the things Larry said were true. It was the most punishing work he’d ever done. Customers ran off without paying. He was regularly accused of taking a slow route on purpose. (How was it that these people, these New Yorkers, didn’t know he made less, not more, the longer each fare took?) Some nights, his first fare found him stuck in gridlock on the FDR bound for JFK, where he waited another hour in the holding area for his next fare, and when this happened he knew the best he would be able to do on his shift was to break even, and he would spend the next ten hours laboring simply not to lose money, after which, bone-tired on the bus home, he might see a white woman seated next to him clutch her handbag and smile kindly at him; at first he was perplexed by this sequence of behaviors, but he came to understand that these women did not trust him, but they also did not want to appear distrustful.
In spite of all this, the work also had its pleasures. The drivers inhabited a secret shared world. He liked to linger after his shift in the garage, where men played checkers and polished off takeaway containers of curry and jollof rice in the break room, retreated into the prayer room with its three threadbare rugs, groused about the new weekly lease rates in Punjabi and Urdu and Haitian Creole. He found comfort in the ritual details of the garage—its smell of motor oil, the rainbow slicks on the concrete floor, the clouds of yellow dust cast off as the mechanics touched up paint. He learned a hidden archipelago within the archipelago of New York: the Pakistani curry-and-chai cafeterias on Lexington, the Haitian spots in Harlem, the dwindling gas stations, the bodegas that carried meter paper. He learned to feed himself in New York from the examples of his fellow drivers. Deals: two plain slices and a can of soda; egg roll and sesame chicken combo. Egg and cheese on a roll from a bodega, scarfed down on the sidewalk, gone before he tasted it. Foods from home, too, peas and rice and pumpkin soup and fish stew with dumplings, though none of it satisfied him; the scent of island food carried on cold air delivered a sense not of nostalgia, but of error. So much of New York was like that, not-quite-memories and almost-evocations that slapped him with his distance from home … the sonorous coos of the turtledoves of his youth emanating from the filthy iridescent throats of pigeons in the streets.
There was something about the night shift. He discovered that his favorite New York was the one you could only know at four A.M.: The darkness, which was never true black but a trembling blue, as if the city exhaled the residual light of day all night long, and against which the vivid green of traffic lights on the avenues—block after block of them to the edge of sight—was that rarest thing, beauty as pedestrian as it was exquisite. New York was the city that never sleeps, but it did, and as he drove its empty, witching-hour streets and sailed across its starry bridges, he sometimes felt that the city had been abandoned to him, that every other living soul had vanished into the air.
He left the garage around six in the morning. On his walk to the bus he watched the sun come up behind the buildings. The oystershell light of dawn. How it tugged at him, reminding him of his old bike ride to work at Indigo Bay. Even this daily sadness he did not mind, exactly. The ache of it was its own pleasure.
Be careful on those roads. He heard Sara’s voice all the time. Be careful, when a car cut him off on the BQE at sixty miles an hour. Be careful, in the pouring rain and when his eyes yearned for sleep. Her words were the most meager of gifts, a small seed of hope that he had not been completely forsaken, and he held fast to them.
ON A night in December of his first year in New York, he picked up a man in a suit outside of an office building in midtown. Once the man had hefted his briefcase onto the seat beside him and closed the taxi door, he declared, “We’re going to Westchester.” The man told Clive the name of a town at the northernmost edge of where he was required to take passengers, and proceeded to spend the ride alternately reading documents and directing Clive. Up the Henry Hudson, the river a black abyss, the cliffs of Jersey twinkling across the water. On to the winding ribbon of the Saw Mill. After nearly an hour, the man directed him off the highway. A few minutes later, Clive found himself on a narrow road driving through what could only be described as the country. It was his first time this far out of the city. He drove up steep hills from the crests of which the villages below glittered like something from an old movie. In a moment of wonder and terror, a silvery deer leapt out from the woods into the road; Clive slammed on the brakes and narrowly missed hitting it. “Jesus,” the man in the backseat muttered without lifting his head from his papers.
Clive wondered if this man had ever vacationed on the island that had once been his home, or if he would be going soon, this Christmas, even, or to celebrate a promotion or anniversary.
“Sorry for dragging you up here,” the man said when they arrived at his house, which was huge and had a turret on one side. In the illuminated square of a window Clive saw a pretty wife in jeans and a sweater. The man handed him a generous tip. “Right, right, left will get you back to the highway,” he said. As Clive watched the man walk up his front steps, and his pretty wife open the door and push onto her tiptoes to kiss him, he felt himself fill with anger he didn’t like and didn’t want.
Right, right, left did not get him back to the highway, and soon he was hopelessly lost. He passed a silo beside a barn, a hillside where pine trees hugged the curve of the earth. Then the sky filled with white. His first snow. In the beginning, the flakes melted as soon as they hit the windshield, so he hardly saw them. He pulled off the road at a park to piss and pull out a map. The parking lot was beside a pond surrounded by trees and hills. He urinated into the gravel of the parking lot, studied a map for a few minutes before giving up. (Half an hour later he would stumble, mercifully, upon an elderly woman walking a dog, and she would direct him back to the highway.) The snow picked up. He was shocked by the lightness of it; it fell faster than it seemed a weightless thing should be able to fall. He stood and watched the snow melt into the pond. As he looked at the snow on the water, the blue hills beyond, he saw his own sadness stretching out in tandem with the landscape, as if the land knew his affliction, as if it were weary with the burden of human secrets. Suddenly the colors of home struck him as flat and cheap, a prettiness like white sugar. (And it was really only the water that was pretty at all. The land was dry and covered in gray scrub. The towns were overcrowded with concrete houses.)
The girl was from here, or a place like it. Any one of these big houses might have been hers. Standing in the snow in the middle of who knows where, he tasted the berry of her lips. He saw her dancing; she raised her arms in the air and her shirt lifted to reveal that touchable, touchable scar. He heard her say again all the disparaging things she’d said about the place she was from. She had lied to him. They all had. All the vacationers who went on and on about how beautiful his island was, how lucky he was to live there, how jealous they were. What bullshit. They had this.
EVERY SEASON in New York had its indignities. The stink of urine on pavement in summer. Trash cans stuffed with the corpses of umbrellas during the rainy, blustery days of early spring. By his second winter in New York, Clive saw the season as yet another thing to be gotten through, the clang of the radiator at night, the black snowbanks that uglied the city (or rather, that revealed the ugliness that was always there). Their landlord kept the building like an icebox. This was illegal, but so was everything about their situation, so what could they do? The shower did not get truly hot; the water came so close to warming him without actually doing so that he came to dread bathing, the almostness of it, comfort held just out of reach.
Roommates had come and gone by then, Ouss and Sachin and Charles the only ones who remained. Sachin was as volatile and Ouss as earnest as ever; he’d recently been promoted to assistant manager at the hardware store where he worked, and was convinced this would turn out to be his “big break.” The others had been replaced once, twice, three times over, the men different in their particulars, though these differences hardly mattered to Clive. Jean-François kept a laminated picture of his father back in Dessalines in his jeans pocket. His father was ill, and Jean-François would be stuck in New York until he died, paying his medical bills. After four months he was replaced by Dennis, a bachelor who had sent home enough money over a decade in New York for his sisters’ weddings and houses and schooling for his nieces and nephews. He went home once a year, for a week.
Clive had begun to wonder by then if Ouss hadn’t been correct on that first night—maybe this temporary existence was changing them in ways more permanent than they could fully comprehend. He thought of Hamid, another night-shift driver, who loved to brag about the accomplishments of his four children back in Pakistan, but whose plans to bring them over to join him always seemed to get pushed back to the next year, and the next. He thought of Neer, a baby-faced driver who had returned to Gujarat for the month of December for years. When December arrived that year and Neer was still at work, Clive asked if he would be going home at another time, and Neer told him he would not be going at all. Had something happened, Clive asked, was something wrong? Neer shrugged evasively, and Clive was frightened to find that Neer didn’t need to explain. He understood. The family Neer had longed for, eked out this lonely existence for … it had been too long. The noise and chaos of children early in the morning, a wife’s hopes and desires and disappointments—these things were too much now. He had grown too accustomed to a life he’d never wanted in the first place to give it up. That December, the sight of Neer—gazing impassively at the television in the break room, smoking a cigarette on the curb in front of the garage after his shift as the sun tried uselessly to break through the clouds—was enough to bring tears to Clive’s eyes. He missed Sara and his grandmother, missed being in the company of and under the care and brusque direction of women. He was determined not to let what had happened to Neer happen to him. He would not become one of those men for whom family became too difficult, a thing better surrendered than reclaimed. Yet he could feel it happening to him, bit by bit, as seawater erodes rock. He wired money to Sara monthly, but he called less frequently now. Sometimes he asked if he could speak to Bryan, but sometimes he didn’t try, even when he could hear cartoons in the background, punctuated by his son’s airy giggles.
Sometimes, he could never predict when it would happen, he would be plunged into Bryan’s life. He was stuck in traffic on the Major Deegan. He was trudging through the snow on an unshoveled stretch of Forty-seventh Street. Then he was in the yard at Horatio Byrd, invisible and watching, as a pack of boys (all much bigger than Bryan—in his imaginings his son was a small and delicate child) shoved him and called him bastard. He watched his son curl into himself and cry. Then Bryan turned and looked at him. He was not invisible anymore. His boy ran to him, and he gathered him in his arms, taking Bryan’s small, heaving body into his large one, absorbing the tears and the runny nose and the brave trembling lip into himself, and in that moment he understood, finally, what his too-big body was for. There had been a reason for it all along: to take into himself the suffering of his child.
Then he was back—the taxi inching along the asphalt, the snow soaking into his shoes. And he felt emptier than it had been possible to feel before he’d had a child to be absent from his life. He should never have left. He should have found a way to stay. If he had not been able to regain Sara’s trust he should simply have demanded it, so that he could remain on the island and in his son’s life. No, he had done the right thing. Sara needed space and time. Eventually she would soften. It might all work out in the end. He felt better, except sometimes he didn’t. Could you ever undo it when a father and son became nothing to one another but voices? He could never decide—he would wonder for the rest of his life—whether his departure was his single most courageous act or just one more example of his cowardice.
IN BED at night, he closed his eyes and sent himself home. His grandmother’s house, white curtains in the kitchen and the oleander tree in the yard. The potholed streets, Mayfair and Gould and Princess Margaret and Underhill. The three-legged goat in Daphne Nelsen’s yard. The secret, nameless cliffs from their nights joyriding with Keithley. Conch fritters and limeade at Perry’s Snackette. The gas station on George Street and the salt ponds with their pleasant stink and clotheslines on which school uniforms crisped in the sun. The spots where the buildings, the hillocks, the scrub parted to reveal flickering glimpses of the sea. The sea itself. He sat on the sand at Little Beach and looked out at the water. He was not alone. On the beach were all the people he had ever known, the old and the young, the living and the dead. They, like he, sat still and solemn with their eyes on the sea, waiting.
For what?
Then it began to snow.
IT WAS January of his third year in New York when Clive stopped for gas at the Shell on Hudson Street and the man at the next pump said, “Clive Richardson? Is that really you?”
He looked up and saw a man standing beside a Range Rover, and after a moment he realized it was Ron Rawlins, who had been in his form at school and who had gone on to attend university in the States. In school Ron had been a square, mercilessly teased for his eczema and acne. He looked good now. His skin had cleared and he wore a gray suit with a lavender tie.
“I heard you left for here, and here you are!” Ron said.
He could feel the weight of what Ron hadn’t said. Surely Ron had heard about everything that had happened to him in the years since they had last seen each other.
“What are you up to these days?” he asked Ron, who happily accepted this shift of focus to himself.
“Real estate. The market’s hot right now, my man.”
How he and Edwin and their friends would have laughed and mocked Ron if he had dared to call any of them “my man” back home.
“You know Berline’s up here, too,” Ron said.
“Bery?”
“I set her up working in the same optometry office as my girl. She’s saving for art school.”
Clive forced a smile.
“Hey, man, good on you for making an honest living here,” Ron said, gesturing at the taxi. “Keep it up, you hear?” He pulled out his wallet and flicked a business card at Clive. “You need anything, call me.”
Early the next morning, when Clive got back to the apartment and flipped on the light, Sachin leapt off the couch.
“The fuck, man? I’m sleeping here,” Sachin shouted, his eyes crazed. Drunk.
“Sorry. I didn’t know you were out here.”
Sachin spread his arms before him. “Well, here I am. Trev’s driving me mad. I can’t stand to sleep where I can hear that joker breathing.”
“Sorry,” Clive muttered again, and fled to his bedroom. He had to piss, but he didn’t want to go out and face Sachin again, so he relieved himself into a Big Gulp cup from the day before, his urine swirling with the inch of flat cola at the bottom. He lay down, but though he was tired he couldn’t sleep. He imagined Ron Rawlins and his girl and Bery sitting together in a diner. Ron had his arm around his girlfriend, who was small and pretty and American. “You’ll never believe who I ran into,” he would say to Bery, swiping a fry through ketchup and tossing it in his mouth. After he said Clive’s name, Ron and Bery would tell Ron’s girlfriend about him: an illegitimate child, drugs, jail, the girl. Then Bery would snort at a thought in her head. “You know, he punched me in the face once,” she’d say, without bothering to explain the circumstances.
IN FEBRUARY, his roommate Charles returned to Saint Thomas. Three days later their landlord came to the apartment with his replacement. Fazil was a diminutive man with mantis-like limbs and a tidy beard dyed with henna. He was much older than the rest of them, in his fifties at least, and he kept nearly silent. He prayed five times a day, and Clive liked this about his new roommate, though he had no interest in religion himself. It seemed to him that Fazil had released himself to the universe in a way that made him, not happy exactly, but reconciled to his life. He had a habit of picking his nose and flicking his excavations into the corners of their small bedroom, but other than this he was unobtrusive (in his sleep he was completely soundless, so that Clive sometimes worried he was dead) and fastidiously neat, and Clive accepted his one vice as the cost of a roommate who was much better than he might have been.
Not long after Fazil arrived, Clive was working on a Monday night when, barely an hour into his shift, he pulled over on Amsterdam and vomited a salmon-colored froth onto a hardened gray snowbank. He was so suddenly and intensely ill it was all he could do to drive the taxi back to the garage, stopping periodically to be sick again, and then struggle home. He thought he’d eaten something bad and figured he’d be back on his feet the next night; instead, he awoke drenched in sweat and delirious with fever. The illness lasted for days. Fazil moved his mattress against the wall to create as much distance between them as possible. Ouss cared for him to the extent possible when he wasn’t at work, bringing him soup and medicine and washing Clive’s sheets at the Laundromat.
Just an hour before he fell ill, Clive had paid his weekly lease, six hundred dollars he now had no chance of recouping. When he was finally well enough to return to work, he showed up at the garage only to have Larry tell him he’d found another driver for his shift. He would have to wait until a spot opened up. Two weeks passed.
Sara called. “I expected you to wire us something last week.”
“Things are hard up here at present.”
“Well, down here at present your son is growing like a weed and needs new polos and trousers and shoes.”
“You think I don’t know your extensive list of demands, what with how you do remind me?” he snapped.
For a moment Sara didn’t speak. He could hear her breathing into the phone slowly and deliberately.
“This is not about me and you. It is about your son.”
He hated when she called Bryan your son—as if Clive didn’t know, as if he needed reminding.
Rent was due but he couldn’t pay it. Their landlord came to the apartment and told him in front of Fazil and Trev and Sachin that he had a week to pay. That night he took Ron Rawlins’s business card from his wallet and turned it over in his hands. He walked to a pay phone. He dialed the first digits. Then he heard Ron’s voice, Good on you, in his head. He hung up. He tore the card in pieces and tossed them in the rubbish bin on the street corner. He did not trust himself with it.
Two days later, he returned to the apartment after a day spent fruitlessly walking the city looking for HELP WANTED signs, his feet aching, and found Sachin sitting on the couch. Sachin looked up at Clive, his green eyes sparking. “Where is it?”
“Where is what?”
“You know very well.”
“Please, Sachin. I’m too tired for this today. If you’re vex with me, say so and be done with it.”
“You bet your dick I’m vex. This morning I had four hundred dollars in an envelope under my mattress. Tonight, I don’t.”
“You think I took it?”
“I know you owe rent.”
“But I’ve been gone. I’ve been out since this morning.”
“Says you,” Sachin spat.
Clive heard the sound of a key in the lock. Fazil stepped inside. When the small old man saw the two of them, frozen and glaring at each other, he hunched his shoulders and disappeared quickly into the bedroom.
“I’m giving you a chance to make it right, Clive. You give me what you did take and we’ll be cool.”
“I didn’t take your money, Sachin. How would I even know where you hide it?”
Sachin clapped his hands and released a dark, amused laugh. “How would you know?” He was wired; he spoke with a red-hot smoothness. “Clive, even you could find a stack of cash in a room that’s nearly empty.”
“I don’t know what else to say,” Clive whispered. “We’ve lived together a long time. You know me. You know I would never—” He heard the floorboards creak in his bedroom beneath the light weight of Fazil’s body settling onto his mattress and he knew. Small, silent Fazil who never bothered anyone. He also knew there was no point in accusing him to Sachin, who would never believe him, blinded as he was by his anger. “I wouldn’t,” Clive said finally, uselessly.
“You have until tomorrow night.” Sachin stalked off to his bedroom and closed the door behind him.
He should not have thrown away Ron Rawlins’s card. It had been exactly the wrong thing to do. What else was new? The next evening, he went to the Little Sweet. He planned to stay there until closing, then remain out until two or three A.M., by which point, he hoped, Sachin would have blown through his anger and turned in for the night. He ordered his pepper pot and Carib, then another beer and another. Vincia pursed her lips but did not comment. The radio was on; the local Caribbean station was broadcasting a cricket match, Barbados Pride versus Leeward Island Hurricanes. By his sixth beer, he could feel the grass on the pitch like velvet beneath his fingertips. He closed his eyes and said a silent prayer that when he opened them he would be sitting in his grandmother’s kitchen. She would be rinsing dishes in the sink. She would swat a mosquito and scowl, and how happy he would be.
When he opened his eyes, he was in the Little Sweet, his empty plate before him. He looked through the storefront at the street. Sachin was standing on the sidewalk, staring at him through the glass.
ONE AFTERNOON when he was fourteen, during the boys of Everett Lyle Secondary’s brief love affair with boxing, Clive took a punch to the gut so powerful it knocked the wind out of him. His mouth opened and closed like a fish’s on land as he waited what felt like an eternity until the air rushed back in. It was Thomas Hinton who had walloped him that time, a shy, handsome boy, well liked by the girls, who would go on to become the landscaping foreman at one of the resorts on the south coast. Clive remembered the intensity of the punch, but he did not recall feeling any pain at the moment of impact. This must have been partly because of the adrenaline of the fight, his body thrumming with it as he tried to get off his best shot to a chorus of cheers and jeers. But mostly it didn’t hurt because Thomas was his friend. So were Damien and Des and Don, and because they were his friends, his body seemed not to believe the physical seriousness of their blows. Those matches in Don’s yard never hurt. It was the great irony of their contests. They administered injury to one another in order to teach themselves something of the violence of manhood, yet each blow was carried on the wings of fraternal love; you could feel it as plainly as you tasted the tang of blood seeping from your split lip. Because of this, those afternoon sessions were no preparation at all for what finally did come, on a frigid February night in New York. As he understood very quickly after he left the Little Sweet and followed Sachin around a chain-link fence to a vacant lot (broken glass glistening like jelly in the moonlight), it was not the physical power of a blow but the contempt which fuels it that makes it so terrible.
Why did he go with Sachin? That’s what he would ask himself after, leaning against the fence and spitting blood onto the sidewalk, his face mangled and swollen. He could not explain it. Sachin had stood on the sidewalk outside the Little Sweet, staring at Clive through the glass with such coldness. He curled his index finger, gesturing for Clive to come out as if offering an invitation. Clive felt his body rise from his chair. He had the feeling that he was walking toward something he’d been trying to avoid for a long time, that Sachin had something to show him about himself, and that it would be the truth.
When they entered the vacant lot, Sachin stumbled on the uneven ground, then swung his arms wildly to steady himself. He was very drunk. “This is your final chance,” he slurred. His voice was brittle and ironic, as if this were a poorly acted performance they were both in on, as if his own anger were hilarious to him.
“I didn’t take your bloody money,” Clive grunted through clenched teeth. He was suddenly furious, because he understood now that Sachin didn’t even really believe he’d taken it, but it didn’t matter. He was hated.
The first sloppy blow glanced off Clive’s jaw. Sachin spun on his own momentum, regaining his footing just in time for his chin to meet Clive’s fist. Clive heard the gnash of Sachin’s bottom teeth smashing into his top teeth, saw his head snap back.
Well, Clive thought, he’d given Sachin his chance. It wasn’t his fault if Sachin had shown up too drunk to put it to use. He turned and walked over the uneven ground toward the sidewalk. He was almost at the fence when he heard the pounding of feet behind him. Then Sachin was on him. An arm hooked around Clive’s neck, the crook of an elbow crammed against his windpipe. He fell to the ground and Sachin sprang on him. Clive felt every blow—on the rim of his eye socket, his throat, his chin. Finally, he was able to grab hold of Sachin’s shirt and shove him off. Sachin flew backward. Clive heard a crack. Skull hitting concrete.
The night filled with a terrible stillness. Sachin lay on the ground, motionless. “No,” Clive whispered. “No, no, no.”
Then Sachin raised his arm. Clive had never felt such relief in his life. Sachin brushed his hand against the back of his head, held it up to the moonlight to confirm a gummy swipe of blood. He pushed himself off of the ground and rushed at Clive. Clive let Sachin pummel him, too terrified of what he’d almost done to retaliate.
Sachin began to laugh. “Is the big man scared?”
He punched Clive in the gut. Clive did not respond.
“Does that make you angry? Does that get you going, big man?”
Sachin’s pale eyes never wavered from Clive. He was a father whose child had been taken from him; his loss was black magic, allowing him to see through Clive and know the things that he had taken. When Sachin delivered a swift, fierce kick to his groin, Clive fell to his knees, spat into the dirt. The world began to swirl. Sachin kicked at his ribs like he was trying to dislodge a stubborn flat tire. He kicked and kicked—he was moaning, Clive realized. The sound had been going on for some time. It filtered down from far above his body like the voice of God.
Then footsteps, stumbling away. He caught a fleeting whiff of berries. Tinkling laughter. A final howl: Sachin’s? His? Hers? Clive sailed away on it.
HE COULD not stay in the apartment. It wasn’t just Sachin. After that night, he could find within himself only pity for Sachin, whose family was gone and always would be, no matter how he tried to batter the truth of his life out of existence. But he hated Fazil. (Where would the money he’d stolen end up? Clive wondered. He imagined grandkids in Guyana opening a package of Nikes and CDs. Or maybe Fazil had no one back home and would spend the money in small morsels on himself; he saw him hunched over a large slice of red velvet cake in a café, scraping every last bit of frosting from the plate.)
Ouss loaned him the money for his back rent and the deposit on a new place. He found an open bed in an apartment shared by five roommates just a few blocks away. Not long after that, a shift opened up at the garage, and Clive returned to work. His first night back, in early March, was the first warm night of the year, a promise of spring. When he got off in the morning, he decided to walk. He crossed Manhattan on Forty-second Street, Times Square so early in the morning empty, his. When he reached First Avenue he turned south. He walked past the United Nations, its sweep of flags snapping in the wind, past the brick projects of the Lower East Side, quiet and softly lit at this hour. At Delancey, he turned onto the pedestrian ramp for the Williamsburg Bridge. He crossed the bridge, pushed forward by westward winds and fanned, at intervals, by ephemeral breezes from bikes whizzing past. When he reached the bridge’s apex, he stopped. At the edges of the panorama, the silver tip of Manhattan and the brown façades of Brooklyn aproned the river; the water was a rich, indeterminate color, as if the essence of the city had been condensed into a dark, sparkling broth, and here he was above it, catching its cool upward breezes.
Things would get better now. He would be able to wire money to Sara and his grandmother soon. His cuts from the fight with Sachin had scabbed over. His whole body felt tight and new as a bud. At the foot of the bridge, he got on the B44 and rode Nostrand all the way down to Snyder. When he got home, the phone was ringing. He picked it up just in time. It was Sara.
“I was just thinking about you,” he said.
“Oh?”
“I’m back at work. It’s all sorted out. I’ll be wiring money in a few days.”
She said nothing.
“Sara?”
“That’s wonderful.” She paused. “I want you to know I’m proud of you, Clive. I know it hasn’t been easy there.” Years later, the memory of it was enough to pull tears to his eyes. “I’m calling because I have something to tell you.” Her voice sounded neither happy nor sad.
“What is it, Sara?”
“I’m married.”
For a moment he couldn’t speak. “You’re—Sara, did you say y-y-y—”
“Yes,” she snapped. “I said I’m married. I got married. Last week.”
“No.”
“I’m sorry, Clive.”
“You should have told me. You should have given me a chance to—”
“To what? To try to stop me? I’m sorry, Clive, but I couldn’t do it anymore. I’ve been here, all this time, raising our son alone.”
“While I’m up here slaving away for that boy.”
“And how do you think it’s been for me? You don’t have to take the stares when all you want is to buy groceries.”
“Please, Sara. Listen to me. I love you. I—”
“It’s Edwin,” she said. “Do you hear me? It’s Edwin.” Her voice seemed to study the words, as if she only half believed them. “I married Edwin.”