Ian paused at the top of the ramp and loosened the neck of his shirt. The sky was a steaming iron, and the hills that back-dropped the terminal buildings were wrinkles in a piece of cloth. Kingston hot nuh rass.
As he walked across the tarmac to the gate, and shuffled through the long airless corridor past wilting palms, he reminded himself that this was his country, the place where he was born. But, God, he felt so alien here. How long had it been? Ten years maybe? Fifteen? Did it matter?
He tied his shirt around his head. Sweat ran down his withering frame, stained the waist of his khaki shorts as he tried to adjust to the heat. There was the sense of an air force barracks about the place. As if they designed the place for people who didn’t associate flying with comfort. Fuck, if they asked he would volunteer to beautify the place. At least some healthy plants, man. Wasn’t this supposed to be paradise? A yucca plant was dying in a planter, slowly turning to ash like a piece of coal. This is what this place can do to you, he thought. Sap your strength and dry you out. That’s why the best of us had to run away. Even Bob. They don’t appreciate artists here. A voice from behind said, “Move.” Without looking, he told it to fuck off.
If I returned, he said to himself, it would be to die. But then, the very act of living here would kill me. He thought about this even more after he went to the bathroom and there was no paper. He had to wipe his ass with his boxers. And when he tried to flush it, the toilet began to grunt and spit and bubble up toward him. Why would a government have people living with such indignity? he thought. Why?
But the indignities weren’t over. The immigration officer wouldn’t let him in until he spoke some French to prove his passport was valid. He’d never seen a coolie with a French passport, he said. This must be some kinda racket. Look what I have to go through—in my own country, Ian thought. This would never happen in Paris.
Neither would this. He’d walked into baggage claim, which looked like a huge hangar with a carousel. Three flights had come in, and the frustrated passengers were shoving and shouting as if they were ringed around fighting cocks, as if two bloodied birds were spurring each other for the kingship of that mountain of vinyl grips and cardboard boxes.
He circled the crowd cautiously, poised on his toes, ready to pounce at the first opportunity. He saw a crack but before he could move the crowd spat out an old man in a three-piece suit who backpedaled with a carry-on bag in his hand. Ian shook his head and opened a pack of cigarettes. Fuck, he needed a hit. Crack. Heroin. Speed. Something.
Outside, he sat on the curb of the shaded walkway and waited for Fire, assailed by heat and sweat and noise. Taxi? No. Taxi? No, star. Taxi? There was a feel about the place of a bus stop at a market or the waiting room at a country clinic. He looked around. The waiting area for arrivals was over his shoulder—a few plastic chairs in front of a TV set that was hung from the ceiling and encased in iron bars. There weren’t enough seats for everyone, but no one complained. Maybe standing gave them the feeling of hanging out.
Fuck, where was Fire? He must’ve been waiting over an hour now. He wasn’t sure. He’d sold his watch. Maybe he should give in to one of the cab drivers. And go where though? He needed a place to stay. Somewhere safe. He had money in his bag for his mother. What did she look like now? He closed his eyes and tried to form her face.
Through the rumble of voices and the grunts of cars he heard his name. He opened his eyes and Fire was standing in front of him, in sandals and cut-off jeans. His gauzy yellow shirt was rolled up over his forearms and open at the neck. And his hair, which was in dreads now, was knotted on top with a leather thong.
“Pussy, where you was?”
The ruffneck greeting made Fire smile. And in the sureness with which he took his hand and pulled him to his feet, Ian knew him again as a brother.
With Fire at the wheel, they set off for home, leaving the flowered parking lot to join the speeding convoy that raced along the single-lane highway down the center of the beach-trimmed peninsula, an overgrown sand spit really, that stuck out from the rest of Kingston like a thumb.
Ian had forgotten about the beauty of the drive. And as the salt spray tickled the hair on his arms, and the sea breeze licked his sun-warmed skin, he was overwhelmed by the sense of space and freedom, and felt the urge to cry. On his left was Kingston harbor, gray water brushed into waves by doting breezes. On his right, undulating sand dunes shimmered against each other like sea-wet nudes arranged for the lens of a dirty magazine.
At Harbour View they shunted left at the roundabout and picked up the Rockfort Road, which slithered between the bay and the scrub-covered hills, a two-lane highway with a grassy median littered with gay pink flowers.
“You know what I like about this drive?” Ian said. “Although Kingston is so near … well, technically we are in Kingston … you don’t feel Kingston. I can’t explain it.”
They had just passed the cement factory and the flour mills.
“I know what you mean,” Fire replied. “I felt the same way when I returned. And after thinking about it I realized I wasn’t feeling Kingston, because it’s no longer a seaside town. It has evolved, y’know, like fish into amphibians, then reptiles, then mammals. Over the years it’s grown away from the docks to the hinterland, to the plains up into the hills.”
Ian didn’t quite understand what Fire meant. But as they discussed the city’s history, Fire pointed the wheels through the deep curve after the oil refinery, and it all became clear. The sea dived away from the land and the hills ran away from the road and the road collapsed its width, and suddenly the expansive Rockfort Road was the rowdy, crowded Windward Road, where goats loitered between overcrowded minibuses, and unemployed youths sat on broken fences, and old women sat on stools in shop piazzas hawking bad fruit and loose cigarettes, and men pushed homemade carts with stuff nobody wanted to buy, and reggae thundered from the speaker boxes set up outside record shops, and people crossed the street against the traffic lights, and the pungent smell of jerk chicken wafted from smoky pans set up in front of the kind of bars where the only mixed drink was rum and water, and the beautiful homes with their shingled roofs and hardwood floors had become ugly tenements, and the memory of the heady days of the sixties when a zoot-suited guy named Bob Marley used to croon at La Parisienne and the Bournemouth Baths, and Desmond Dekker and the Skatalites used to rule up de town had faded along with the hope for better days.
They pulled up to the curb and bought some chicken and a round of stout, then headed north, ascending in a steady incline toward prosperity past the stadium, a small bowl overlooked by grand villas on Beverly Hills, along Old Hope Road, past the old mansions converted to administrative use, up, up past the Sovereign Center, a Miami-style shopping mall where local kids ogle Benetton gear while fine-tuning the mores of the Jamdown mall rat, through the commercial bustle of Liguanea, where it seemed all vehicles were Mitsubishi Monteros or Honda Accords, past the botanical gardens and the two universities, up into the fern-draped foothills of the tall Blue Mountains, along a narrow road that wound along a river valley before forking off through hamlets and switching back across steep, green hillsides dotted with brightly painted houses that from a distance looked like plastic thumbtacks.
At an altitude where the air was crisp like seltzer, and cows outnumbered cars and people, they entered a dirt road and continued uphill through a stand of eucalyptus trees that led them to the house, which was modest in size but well restored.
“Where’s Miss Gita?” Ian asked, as he thought about his own living situation.
“Somewhere in the Mediterranean. She and Sarge gone on a cruise for her birthday. She said she wanted to see Jerusalem.”
“Sarge is her boyfriend?”
“No, man. Sarge is the foreman. He runs the farm … a nice bredda from the area … has his own little coffee farm and all that. Nothing going on between them or nothing like that. I just sent him to keep her company and look after her.”
“Oh … okay … when they coming back?”
“About two weeks.”
They stepped off the verandah into the empty living room, which felt like a gallery. There was art on the walls but no furniture.
“Is so the whole house stay?” Ian asked.
“No, man. Upstairs set up awright. Everything in the fullness of time, nuh. This place was really a mess when I got it, y’know. Me and Sarge rebuilt a whole lot of it by weself.”
Ian looked outside, down the hill.
“You supposed to get a good amounta pussy with a base like this. If these walls could talk, eh?”
“Pussy,” Fire replied. “I don’t know if I coulda recognize one right now. I’m not really in the head space for that right now, anyway.”
“What, you thinking of getting married or something?”
They sat next to each other with their backs against the wall.
“Not now,” Fire told him, “or soon. But I’m at the stage now where I could do that. Have a couple of children and all that. Yeah, man.”
“How old are we now, Fire?”
“Thirty-three and thirty-seven.”
“And we have neither chick nor child.”
“Believe it or not.”
“I’da love get married, y’know, Fire. I want children and all that … but … I guess y’haffe meet the person first, right?”
“But … in the fullness of time, nuh.”
“Y’ever feel like kill somebody yet?”
“What?”
“Okay, lemme put it to you this way. What it woulda take for you to kill somebody?”
“For me to kill somebody right now? Means, motive, and opportunity. I wouldn’t need more than that.”
“You take everything for joke, eeh man.”
Fire punched him playfully. “Y’hungry? Y’want some food? I steamed some snapper.”
“I need to sleep first.”
Fire led him to one of the guest rooms, where he was lulled to sleep by the sound of the voice he’d begun to hear in New York. Kill Margaret. Kill Phil. Kill me.
They had dinner on the upstairs terrace that evening. Kingston’s lights were gems on satin.
“So how you know about this place?” Ian asked.
“I just buck it up one day while I was hiking, and it just stuck in my mind. What it was, I think, was seeing eucalyptus in Jamaica. There’s a guy named Butch who owns some cottages over the hill deh”—he pointed with his fork—“and I was staying in one o’dem. When I told him I’d run into the place he told me it was for sale. Later, when I decided to move back, I found out it never sold yet, and I took it. I bought the farm separately. Y’ever think bout coming home, Ian?”
“To live?” Ian buttoned his shirt against the cold … tucked his legs beneath him.
“Yeah,” Fire said. “To live.”
“No way, sah.”
“Why not?”
He began to shift around. “Bwai, Jamaica just too … I don’t know”—he didn’t want to bring up the Indian thing; he wasn’t sure he’d be understood—“inefficient, everything just so … nothing works … too much crime … everything expensive … food, clothes. And the price of a car is fucking ridiculous. And the people, man, don’t respect artists. As a culture, we don’t respect our own.”
“I hear you,” Fire began slowly. “But if you want to see inefficiency just go to any government office in the States … not even that … go to a bank. Crime? Come on, Ian, you live in New York. I hear what you saying about food, but if you eat local and earn money in U.S. dollars it’s cheap. The pint of freshly squeezed orange juice you pay three dollars for in New York is fifty cents here. Talk about expensive, if you married right now in New York, could you pay a live-in helper to help with the child at home? You can do that here. I can hear you on the car thing. But I don’t have a new car. I have the same old one. And when I want a new one I know who to bribe so that I don’t pay more than a quarter of the duty. And in any case the duty-dem not high like one time. One time it was a hundred percent of the price of the vehicle. So you had to buy the car twice.
“But I won’t lie to you. It took some adjustment. It was hard to leave a place where things work for one where they don’t work. I had to put in a water tank because up here water get lock off at least once a day. Then I had to get a generator because y’know how electricity go down here. Then I had to get a cellular phone because it took longer to get a regular phone. Then I had to get a satellite dish because local TV is trash. Even news. You can’t believe the news. But the thing that bothered me most, though, was getting a gun. But I’d be stupid not to have one in an isolated area.
“And doing business is another story. For example, y’know why I reach so late for you today? I was waiting for a meeting that didn’t happen. There is this bredda named Donovan Mackenzie who works for one of the airlines, and him do some little bandooloo on the side. Basically, him use the airline plane-dem to import goods from Miami for resale. I paid him for a washer and dryer about nine months ago and I still don’t have them yet. Why? Every day is another excuse. But that is just life on this rock.
“I can’t tell you what to do, Ian, but for me Jamaica is the place. I mean I miss London y’know, but when I was there I missed Jamaica. And when the urge take me now, I jump on a plane and go where I feel like go. But this is my base, Ian. This is where I’m rooted. I’m a Jamaican, Ian. Yardie to de bloodclaat core. I love stout more than wine. I love cricket more than baseball. I love rice more than pasta. And I love Bob Marley more than Beethoven or Count Basie. I call women I don’t know ‘darling.’ When a fight start I look to throw a stone quicker than a punch. And I think that the fat on a woman batty and hips is a sexy thing that they shouldn’t try to lose at the gym.”
“Drink to dat one,” Ian said, clinking stout bottles with Fire.
Ian and Fire laughed. They sat on the verandah and listened to music, chatting and drinking until sunrise.
Fire set aside a few hours each day to listen to Ian, who had pulled together his doubts about living in Jamaica into a somewhat incoherent political theory, which he labeled Gore-Tech, the central idea of which was that he, Ian Gore, should be benevolent dictator of the island, ably assisted by a cadre of Caribbean technocrats recruited from overseas. To Fire, the point of engaging him was not to indulge his political vision, but rather to steer him into discussions of his youth, their youth, in the hope of locating the exact time and place when he’d begun to resent Miss Gita. He’d given Fire the money that first night, had simply placed the envelope on his lap while they talked. There were no thank-yous or you’re-welcomes, yet there was an understanding, as subtle as salt on a strip of beach, that one was sorry and the other forgiving.
By the end of the third day, Fire could get him to talk about adolescence, and for the first time he began to really understand the weight of Ian’s class baggage, for none of his reminiscences about the pranks they used to pull, and the girls they used to like, and the parties they used to crash were centered in his own environment. Downtown. The ghetto. Which was strange, because they’d spent a lot of time there, playing soccer on dustbowl fields, and learning to flash ratchet knives, and going to dances at the primary school to dub against the chain-link fence to the heavyweight sounds of Jammy’s and Arrow’s and Ray Symbolic.
And the stories themselves, of concerts at the Police Officers Club and disco nights at Toppsi, in their lack of detail, sounded like adaptations from the secondhand account of someone else’s life, someone distant, a stranger, about whom he didn’t care. They didn’t have the vividness of adolescent memory. Which was like a stage play. Alive. Expressive. And emotionally engaging.
Had he chosen to forget? Fire would ask himself. Or is he talking about things he thinks I’d remember—the things he thinks I’d value? And what does that say of his impression of me? That I’m a bourgeois? And what does all this say about his impression of himself?
Most of their time was spent apart though. Fire would rise with the light and go running, then make breakfast when he returned; he would eat alone. Ian would come down usually after noon and sketch in the shade of a magnolia tree at the side of the house, while Fire read or listened to music or worked on refining some ideas for a novel. His mind was always active. It had to be. His emotions were safer in a crowd.
One morning, as he was about to do some laundry by hand, Fire went up to Ian’s room to look for dirty clothes. He heard him singing in the back and leaned out the window and asked if he had any washing. He said no. On the way down, Fire noticed a sketch pad on the bed. Ian was a master draftsman, so out of a sense of admiration Fire picked up the pad to glance through it, expecting to see landscapes, still lifes, and a few figure studies. The first page took him by surprise. He studied it for a couple of seconds and flipped to the next. To his disquiet it was worse. The entire pad, he discovered, was a meditation on the same idea. He flipped through from end to end again.
Ian was coming. He replaced the pad quickly.
They left the house that afternoon to meet with Donovan at his office in New Kingston, the commercial and cultural hub of the city. A cluster of low-rise buildings in the international style.
Like a lot of local professionals, Fire confided in a whisper as they waited in the reception area, Donovan was not just a professional. He was also an ICI, an informal commercial trader—in short, a higgler. He traded in home appliances. Some traded in car parts. Some stationery. Some clothes. Some jewelry. But something. They would fly to Miami on weekend buying trips with written orders, do business, bribe their way through customs, and get their wares to the buyer at a markup plus a service charge. And after all this the dealers’ prices were lower than the prices in the stores. He liked working with Donovan because he had an excellent hookup through the airline. His goods were cleared easily, the turnaround time was short, and he could travel at short notice. Donovan was a prick though, Fire added. Sometimes he tried to fuck you around.
Short and tubby, with a pea-shaped head, Donovan was cruising porn sites when they went in.
“So,” he began slowly, after a bit of small talk, “the washer and dryer. There’s a slight problem.”
Fire tightened his jaw and began to hum. It had been the better part of a year now, and Donovan had already been paid.
“I see the look on your face,” Donovan said, toying with his pinkie ring. “I can understand if you’re upset. But just sit tight. Everything soon work out.”
“What’s the problem, exactly?” Fire asked. “Why you fucking me around?”
“Look, there’s no need to be out of order. Don’t act like you don’t know how things are here, man. A million and one things can happen.”
He began to lament. If he could get just one tenth of the Jamaicans in the States to return home, he sighed, he could make the country into Singapore or South Korea. All this he said while gesturing grandly. His graduation ring from Miami-Dade Community College glinted.
“Okay, fine, Donovan,” Fire said. “A million things can happen, but what did happen? I’ve heard so many different stories from you: It’s at the warehouse. It’s still in Miami. It’s at the warehouse in Miami. You have it here now, but customs is giving you a hard time. Something broke in transit and you have to send it back. C’mon, Donovan, tell me the truth. I’ll work it out with you. Just level with me.”
Donovan leaned forward in his chair and placed his hands on his desk in his best imitation of earnestness. Fire and Ian leaned forward as well, expecting to hear an apology.
“You’re calling me a liar?” Donovan asked, wagging his head slowly. “I can’t believe my ears. I go to the Ark of God Pentecostal Church with my wife and three kids every Sunday. When was the last time either of you set foot in a sanctuary?” They didn’t answer. “And you have the temerity—in fact the corruptness—to call me a liar? Gentlemen, I am very disappointed, not to mention hurt.”
He leaned back in his chair, stared up at the ceiling, and made the sign of the cross while whispering in tongues—“shala-pala-shala-mala”—then leaned forward again.
Fire and Ian looked at each other in disbelief.
Fire threw up his hands in frustration, but Ian continued to argue, jousted with Donovan, wore him down until he confessed.
“Okay, okay, okay,” he said. “Somebody else bought them, so I have to bring down another set when I go up again.”
“Who?” Fire asked.
“Can’t tell you that. Confidential. Just like how I don’t discuss your business with other people, I can’t discuss other people’s business with you.”
“Don’t give me no confidential fuckery, Donovan. I want to know who has my fucking washer and dryer!”
“Listen, man, get a hold of yourself. Don’t raise your voice at me. And is not your washer and dryer, is theirs. They paid for it!”
“But I gave you the fucking money,” Fire shot back.
“But they gave me more.” He covered his mouth quickly. He’d said more than he’d meant to.
“Look,” he said, “it’s fucked up and I’m sorry. Listen, Fire … don’t let that come between us though y’know, man. Two more weeks and you get it.”
Fire narrowed his eyes. Ian got up to go to the bathroom.
“We have to call this meeting over,” Donovan said as Ian left. “I have a function to attend at the Pegasus, and I have to leave here now. Call me tomorrow morning and we’ll straighten things out. Come on, let’s deal with this intelligently. Call me Monday. And Fire, tell you friend to cool it. The man is acting like I’m a tief—like anybody tief like coolie.”
Coolie. Fire wanted to break his jaw for that … crack his teeth … bust his lip … spill his blood. The Glock was heavy on his waist. Shoulda gunbutt de fucker fe dat, he thought. Fe diss de man like dat. You cyaah call a man a coolie. No man. Dat nuh right.
Ian returned. “Tell you what,” he said. “Just give us back de money then and call it quits.”
“What you talking about?” Donovan replied. “A deal is a deal.”
“Gi wi back de money now.” Ian hammered the desk.
Donovan sucked his teeth.
“Okay, then,” Ian said. “We’ll come for it next week.”
“Can’t do that either,” Donovan said nervously.
“Why?”
“It’s kinda tied up.”
“In what?”
“Well … I had to give some money to this chick I have.”
“So wha appen to de money you get from whoever buy de washer and dryer from you?”
“I gave her that as well.”
“Suppose I just kick you in you face right now, Donovan?” Ian asked. His voice was calm but purposeful, as if he were asking the time.
“Are you threatening me?”
“No. I’m just asking a question. Suppose I just kick you as an individual in your particular face right now? Would you cry? Would you run? Would you try to fight me and get kicked some more? Or would you just go into a drawer somewhere and get the money and hand it over? Tell me, because I don’t want to waste a good kick. I mean, instead of kicking you I could kick my nicotine habit.” He paused to light up a Craven “A.” “So tell me, what will it be? Money or kick-up? Kick-up or money? How many kicks you think de money worth? I think about seventy-nine. What do you think, Fire?”
“Just cool, Ian,” Fire said. He was thinking of the sketch pad now.
“You think ah fraid for him?” Donovan said to Fire. “Let him try nuh. I have my connections.”
“Donovan, shut you ass before de man mash you down.”
Donovan began to mutter to himself while shuffling some papers to show that he wasn’t concerned with whatever was on their minds. “Dis likkle coolie bwai feel say … cho—”
“Weh you say?” Ian asked. “Is me you calling coolie?”
And Ian sprang on top of the desk and kicked Donovan in the face.
“Gimme de fucking money, Donovan,” Ian whispered as cocked his boot again.
“I don’t have it,” Donovan said, clutching his broken nose.
“So who have the fucking washer and dryer?” Ian asked, pulling the smoke in deeply.
“Dr. Lewis at the children’s hospital,” Donovan replied. Blood was splattered on his light blue shirt.
“Good. Make him fix you up.”
Fuck, Fire was thinking now. How did it get to this?
At the same time that Ian and Fire were hustling out of Donovan’s office, Humphrey Heath was finishing his figure drawing class at the Edna Manley School of Visual Arts. Puffing on his Hoyo de Monterrey Double Corona, he spared some time for the students’ questions, then went to have his lunch.
Although he was approaching his seventy-fifth birthday, Mr. Heath was still a handsome man—tall and willowy. His salt-and-pepper hair was swept away from his face in an exuberance of curls, and his white beard clung to his face like ivy on a parish church.
He walked slowly—but lazily rather than feebly—with rounded shoulders and the slight limp that he’d been carrying since the Libyan campaign of 1942. He liked to tell students that he’d been hit by a Mauser slug at El Alamein, but in truth his patella was damaged during a pickup game of cricket in a rearguard supply station.
He sat in the outdoor amphitheater at the drama school and broke off bits of bread with his gnarled hands. A class was rehearsing a play onstage, and when they had a break, the students came to sit with him on the limestone tier. He had been teaching at the school for some twenty-five years and was immensely popular. Budget cuts and arthritis had forced him to reduce his hours, but he could always be found at the school, usually in the center of a group of young artists.
Mr. Heath left the amphitheater after about a half hour, and walked across the campus to the gate, stopping every few yards to talk with the groups of students who called out to him.
He crossed the street and walked on the shady side of Arthur Wint Drive down to Tom Redcam Avenue and sat on a bench in front of the library and smoked another cigar, relaxing in the shade of a poinciana tree as traffic crawled by. He resumed his walk over to the military headquarters at Up Park Camp where he was due for his afternoon scotch with Major Daley. The corporals on duty gave him a mock salute and admitted him without question. He returned their salute jokingly and hitched a ride in a jeep to the major’s house, a cream-colored clapboard bungalow with sky blue trim that had been built by the British army in the 1940s.
Damian, the major’s six-year-old grandnephew, leaped off the verandah and ran to meet Mr. Heath, who couldn’t help smiling on seeing his vigor.
The major admonished Mr. Heath for being late. But being casual about time, like his son, Mr. Heath shrugged his shoulders and asked for his tonic. Soon the maid brought out a decanter of Johnny Walker Black and left the two men to chat and bicker and watch the boy play.
“I saw your Fire the other day,” the major remarked. “I was going up to Newcastle and I glimpsed him flying off Mammee River Road. I blew him but I don’t think he knew it was me.”
“When I look at Damian,” Mr. Heath said, “I see Fire. He was such a strong boy. Full of life.”
“He’s so much like you,” the major said. “Loves to talk to people and always late.”
Mr. Heath sucked his teeth.
“But it’s true. Both of you have no concept of time.”
Mr. Heath sucked his teeth again and poured another drink. “You know Ian is here too?” he said ominously.
“No,” the major replied.
“I haven’t seen him yet, but I spoke to him on the telephone. Maybe he’s too embarrassed to come and see me, since he ruined his life in America. I don’t know why that boy doesn’t come home. What is holding him in America?”
“I don’t know,” Major Daley replied. “But who cares? Why do you even bother with him? You took in that boy like your son and tried to point him in the right direction. But he’s just born to be bad. Listen, some people just come from bad seed.”
Mr. Heath shook his head. “Sometimes I’m inclined to believe that bad seed thing,” he began. “If Ian is from bad seed, though, is from the mother, not the father. The father was a good man. I don’t know …”
“Don’t even bother,” the major said. “You’re old now, and Fire and Ian are grown up. Rest.”
Mr. Heath took a sip and shook his head.