AT THE PRINCESS I MET HOLMES, who was sitting with Dorothy at the bar. He had been looking for me, he said, because he thought before I left town I ought to talk with Rocco, the witness. The bar was filled with a cool, light green light, the same clean color as the fields of guinea grass at Castle Comfort. I nodded agreement, and we left the Princess, walking past my van on the street and turning left after a block, then quickly through back yards and pathways that cut behind cabins and sheds, under laundry lines, over board fences, until we were deep within a jungle of tin-and-old-board shanties, wrecked cars, refrigerators, washing machine tubs, pigs rooting in the packed dirt, goats meditating on an orange peel, slender, hairless dogs barking feebly and scratching at their mangy backs, and children, dozens of children, naked and near naked, scattering like clouds of gnats as we walked purposefully through them and moved gradually uphill from the Port, until finally we were over the first ridge and were out of sight of the sea, in a clot of cabins and blood-red mudded ground scraped clean of anything that could be burned or eaten by man or beast.
We stopped before a closed-up cabin with one small window, and Holmes shouted for Rocco. After a few moments, a man appeared at the door, a man who at first seemed to be very old but soon came to look not much more than fifty. He was brittle and stooped, somber and frightened, dressed in rags the color of ash and tobacco.
He knew Holmes, smiled quickly, then stepped out to the yard, where Holmes introduced me and told Rocco that I wanted to hear his story about how he came to be a witness against DeVries. The man looked first at me and then at Holmes with deep, gray-faced suspicion, until Holmes squatted down and started rolling a large cigar-sized ganja spliff, fussing with the brown paper cone, tightening it and twisting the end precisely, then lighting it, bathing his head in the fragrant, silver smoke. Rocco and I squatted down next to him, and Holmes passed the cigar to Rocco. We smoked in silence for a few moments, with the sounds of children playing, dogs barking, a woman yelling shrilly in the distance. Then Rocco began to speak, in a rapid country patois, with a high, thin voice, more like an Oriental’s than an African’s.
He had been a young man when DeVries killed his wife, he said.
So DeVries actually did kill his wife, then? No, no, of course not. Errol Flynn and Dr. Menotti and his son killed her. But first they had tried to kill him, Rocco himself. He explained that his job at the Flynn ranch took him out there early every morning, before sunrise, and about three months before DeVries’ wife was killed, he had been walking along the road on his way to work, and as he passed in front of Dr. Menotti’s hospital on Dolphin Bay, he had noticed the outlines of several figures and the flashes of lanterns at the edge of the cliffs overlooking the water. Then he saw DeVries’ meat wagon and his two mules, Deke and Mitchell, standing a few yards off the road. He knew DeVries well, had even worked for him for a few years when he was a boy learning how to take care of livestock, so he stepped off the road and started walking toward the figures with the lights, to see what DeVries was up to out here this early.
Maybe he needed some help, he thought as he walked through the brush and rough rock toward the edge of the cliff in the darkness, when suddenly he realized the lights were approaching him, three of them, and they had separated so that one light approached him from the front and the others approached him from the sides. He stopped, then called out DeVries’ name. No answer. But the lights kept coming steadily on. Rocco took a step backward and called again. Still no answer. He could see that the three lights were being carried by three men, two of them white and one black, and then he saw that one of the white men was Errol Flynn and the other was Dr. Menotti, and the black man was DeVries, who was carrying his machete.
They were about twenty feet away when he turned and ran, darting back through the brush and rock toward the road, with the three men noisily behind him. He heard Errol Flynn call out, Rocco, wait! We only want to talk to you! But he knew they wanted to kill him and so he ran, terrified, past the mules and wagon to the road and down the road toward the Port, three miles away.
He got safely back to his mother’s house, he said, this house here before us, he explained, pointing back at the cabin he had emerged from moments before, and he never went back to the Flynn ranch or to Dolphin’s Bay, except of course when the police took him out there to the cliffs so he could show them where he saw DeVries hacking at his wife’s body trying to get it through the hole to the sea.
But if you never went out there again, I said, how did you see DeVries hacking up his wife’s body there?
Rocco looked at me as if I were stupid. How could a white man be so stupid? his expression seemed to ask. So he patiently explained that after DeVries had been arrested, he was sitting in his house one day, still afraid to leave even to go down to the Port for a drink or to see his friends, when he heard someone in heavy shoes coming up to the door, and before he had a chance to see who it was, two large black men in suits and ties walked into the house. They were policemen, detectives, from Kingston, and they took him from the house, down the ridge to the Main Street where they had parked their car, a large black Land Rover, and they drove him out to Dolphin’s Bay. And that was the first time, he said, that he saw what you call a tape recorder, a big one in the back seat, between him and one of the policemen. They stopped the car and sat there for a while, asking Rocco questions about what he had seen that morning when he had run away. Nothing, nothing, he kept saying. Just DeVries’ mules and wagon, that’s all. Then the policeman sitting in the back drew out his revolver and placed the tip of the barrel into Rocco’s ear and pressed his head hard against the side of the car. You saw DeVries out there, didn’t you? the man in the front seat said. Yes. And you saw him chopping at something over near the edge, didn’t you? Yes. And you got scared and ran home, didn’t you? Yes. Now, the driver said, as the other one withdrew the barrel of his revolver, now you are going to tell your story from the beginning, how you came out here on your way to work at the Errol Flynn ranch and how you saw DeVries’ wagon and horses and then saw DeVries himself. Because we’re going to hang DeVries, and then you won’t have to be afraid anymore.
After I’d left Holmes off at the Princess, I drove back to the hotel. It was late in the afternoon, and I was exhausted, sweaty, my mind churning. As I walked up to the desk for my room key and passed the manager, who was stretched out on a chaise longue in the lobby with a newspaper spread across his large belly, he cocked one eye open and asked me if I had enjoyed my visit to Navy Island this morning.
What?
Navy Island. Did you and your friend enjoy your visit?
Yes, yes, certainly, I stammered, wondering how he had learned that I had been out there. I asked him if there had been any telephone messages for me.
No, he said, slumping back down beneath his newspaper. Nothing at all.
After showering and changing my clothes, I rested on my narrow bed for an hour, running the links between people through my mind—Mrs. Flynn and Captain Ausley, Errol Flynn and the Miami Mafia, the CIA and the Miami Mafia, Errol Flynn and Menotti’s abortion clinic, the abortion clinic and the Kingston police force, Rocco and DeVries, Flynn and DeVries, Mrs. Flynn and the Frenchman’s Cove Hotel, Mrs. Flynn and the manager of the de Montvin Hotel, the manager of the de Montvin and Captain Ausley’s Windjammer, Errol Flynn and the Princess, Errol Flynn and the Titchfield Hill Hotel—until my links led back to the beginning and new linkups appeared. Everything was significant, everything was tied to everything else.
This was true magic, I thought, this was obeah. The distance between the world of the wealthy and the world of the poor was so great that he who had wealth was truly a magician, was outside the powers that controlled the lives of ordinary men and women. But it wasn’t that distance alone, I decided. It also had to do with knowledge. Wealth and knowledge went together, like Errol Flynn and Dr. Menotti, and the power they created together was frightening to those of us who had no access to it. We could be victimized by it instantly and with no appeal. It was satanic, stolen fire, a Faustian exploitation of a corrupted racial and economic history. Was evil.
To avoid making any new links, I decided to eat dinner at the Bonnie View Hotel, the place at the top of Naylor’s Hill where Evan Smith had met his wife the night the 1938 hurricane struck. A narrow, unlit, winding road that switchbacked up the knob ended in the hotel parking lot. The hotel itself was a flat-roofed, two-story structure that spread formlessly over the top of the hill in terraces, dining room, lounge, and living units in various combinations.
Out on the main terrace a fat Chinese woman was complaining to a black man in a bartender’s uniform about the lack of tourists and the difficulties of meeting her payroll. I took a seat by the railing and looked out at the Port below, the same view as from Smith’s house but from the east instead of from the west. The waiter brought me a drink, called me Doc, which I thought strange, and went back to his conversation with the Chinese woman, who had been joined by a slender young black woman in a waitress’ uniform. She wore glasses and looked more like a middle-class college girl from Kingston than a waitress in a Port Antonio hotel.
Half turning in my chair, I peered through the large window into the dining room beyond and immediately saw that it was empty, except for one table, where sat Captain Ausley, in a white shirt now, and his glassy-eyed girl friend, and a handsome, well-dressed white woman, middle-aged, blond, coldly pale. Mrs. Errol Flynn, I decided.
Swiftly finishing my drink, I signaled for the waiter, who came smiling over. Another one, Doc?
No thanks, I just remembered an appointment, I said, paying him quickly.
You don’t have time to drop that girl off downtown, do you? he asked politely. I couldn’t say no, and left, with the waitress in tow.
Halfway down the hill, she broke the silence and asked if it was true that I was a doctor. She was studying to be a nurse, she added quickly, in Kingston, but she worked at the hotel during holiday. Her father was a Baptist minister in town, she said. I asked her why she thought I was a doctor. The waiter had told her my name was Dr. Ajax, she said, and that I was from the States.
He was only kidding you, I said somberly, and followed her directions to a well-kept old house on Titchfield Hill, a few blocks from my hotel.
She slid out of the car and, closing the door, said through the open window, in patois—as if it were safer that way—that I should come and see her when I got some time and didn’t have any appointments to rush off to.
Thanks, I said, but I’m leaving in the morning for Montego Bay.
Well, another time then, she answered, and strolled into the house.
It was late evening now, around ten, palm trees pronging the moonlit sky and silvered hills, the whores of Port Antonio hissing and kissing from the sidewalks as I cruised past, drifting in my thoughts and fears. A clutch of lights out in the port signified the sleepy, lazy presence of sailing yachts from the States. New arrivals. What kind of brother Americans were aboard those boats? I wondered, as I drew my car over to the curb in front of the Princess. Rock singers, I speculated, and their girl friends and producers. A vice president in charge of marketing for Chemgro Corporation, his bored, alcoholic wife and their eldest female child. A well-known sculptor and his girl friend, twenty-five years younger than he. The dean of academic affairs at a large mid-western university, in company with the managing editor of a fashion magazine, two middle-aged men conducting a secret love affair as if negotiating for a job in each other’s industry.
Inside the Princess I met a blue smoky haze cut by the blat of the juke box, the laughter of the whores, and an old drunk screaming curses at the Prime Minister’s photograph over the bar. The smell of cheap perfume and curried goat and white rum mixed together in a sweet, warm, seductive blend. Over at the bar Dorothy stood nursing a beer with penurious care, wearing a denim cap cocked over one eye, a black T-shirt, tight Levi’s, white, wedge-heeled shoes with ankle straps, jangling metal and colored plastic bracelets on her wrist: a thick, muscular, satiny black woman with a broad, good-natured, intelligent smile as she saw me come through the door. I could see why Holmes was so fond of her. Her humor and intelligence combined with her profession, and she came out looking almost wise, the possessor of an ancient wisdom, not necessarily a woman’s alone. She knew how lovely we are and how utterly insignificant. It made her a skillful gossip, a tender lover probably, a joker, and a hard person to lie to.
I sat down next to her at the bar, and she seemed glad to see me and asked about Holmes. But I’m looking for him too, that’s why I came in, I said quickly, too quickly, for she saw through me with ease and knew that I was merely trying to give her information concerning the degree and complex ways in which I felt myself available to her.
I bought her a drink and she switched from beer to gin and tonic, asked me for money for the juke box, played sexy, slow reggae, and dragged me off my stool to dance with her. She threw her pelvis against mine, shoved her head between my chin and shoulder, pushed her breasts against me, and we danced slowly, grinding into one another, saying nothing to one another, just cranking our tired bodies up, opening sticky gates to let the juices flow, me saying to myself, What the hell, I like this woman, it’s not as if she’s not a friend of mine, this is personal, which somehow freed me from my one last fear at this moment, that I should be confused in anyone’s mind, especially in my own, with any other of the white Americans who come into the Princess to pay for a girl, a black, thick-armed, big-breasted Jamaican girl from the country.
But no business tonight at the Princess, except for mine, and mine was merely that of buying an occasional round of cheap drinks, another couple of bucks for the till, nothing for the girls. Until around midnight, when I discovered that I was hungry and remembered my flight from the Bonnie View Hotel and Captain Ausley and Mrs. Flynn. I’m hungry, I said to Dorothy. Let’s go get something to eat.
She smiled and put her arms around me and stared into my face. Fish and peppers, she said. She knew where we could get the best fish and peppers in Port Antonio.
It was raining outside now, and the streets were empty. No cars blatting by, no pedestrians, no higglers, no beggars, no tourists. No old drunks stumbling in a rum haze through the garbage, no burly cops swaggering from the alleys where they seemed constantly to be urinating, like male dogs. No clever blond co-eds in convertibles looking for ganja and cocaine, no one cashing American Express travelers checks at the Bank of Nova Scotia or Barclay’s. Just me and Dorothy in my blue Japanese van turning right, then left, then right again, down the alley to a closed shop, where we parked the car, stepped out, and rapped on the iron grated door, until someone called from inside that they were closed. Dorothy yelled her name, and then the door was opened slowly and the grate unlatched, and an old man turned away and shuffled back into the darkness again. Dorothy and I followed him, after latching the grate and relocking the door, back into a dimly lit room filled with the smell of fish and peppers and onions cooking on bits of coal and the sweet smell of an open bottle of white rum being passed from one dark figure to another.
These were the night people, shadowy, tired figures smoking, drinking, gnawing on fish, licking fingers, talking peacefully in low, guarded voices—thieves and whores, a couple of cops with holsterless revolvers stuck into their belts, wearing street clothes, slightly drunk, and smiling easily here among their childhood friends and family; and gamblers totaling the night’s take; a Chinese numbers man, fat and sleekly admiring his rings; a couple of teen-aged boys in knit tams who ran errands for the thieves and gamblers while plotting their deaths; and Dorothy, my Dorothy, who knew everyone in the dark room, was probably related to a few, a cousin or maybe she was the niece of the fat old woman behind the counter handing out the fish and peppers and onions on sheets of brown wrapping paper and then two large glasses half-filled with white rum.
We smiled at each other as our faces greased up, lips and teeth pulling the fish apart, chewing, spitting back the bones, chomping into hot peppers, sucking down the circles of onion, gulping rum, dowsing one flame with another. Dorothy introduced me to a couple of the men in the dark, crowded room, called me her friend. Brother to Holmes Musgrave’s brother.
A man who knew Holmes and Terron said he’d been schoolmates with Terron and back then he’d had a stammer that was so bad his mother couldn’t even send Terron to the store for rice, because he’d only be able to say, R-r-r-r-r-rah-rah-rah…, and then would give up and run back home empty-handed. We all used to call him Stammer, the man told me. But I guess the dreadlocks unlocked his tongue, he said, smiling, gold teeth shining glossily in the kerosene lamplight. He was a fat half-Chinese man with a flicker of a mustache and thick, dry lips that he wet constantly with his pink tongue. His chubby brown hands, laden with rings, he kept carefully exposed on the counter, as if he were a gambler with a reputation for cheating at cards.
A second man moved in beside me, one of the cops, a large, muscular man with a white knit tam tightly pulled over his bullet-shaped head. He was very dark, the color of a grand piano, and thick bodied, and his face was watery-eyed and expressionless. His gun in his belt was between us, and I stared down at it, as if it were a snake whose gaze had caught and held me helplessly in my spot. The cop looked over at my empty glass and with a short gesture to the woman behind the counter had it refilled, then closed his eyes and sleepily nodded acceptance of my thanks.
The fat man with the rings went on talking in his thin, relaxed voice, asking me if I played dominoes and could I play like a Jamaican, and if so would I care to sit and play a seven. He’d find me a partner, maybe even Dorothy, he suggested, with a broad golden smile, who ought to be able to control anyone in the place. She once nilled me, he said. Seven-nil. Only woman who ever nilled me, he added with a light nostalgic grimace that made me believe the information but question his reason for offering it. The cop next to me, named Larry, would be his partner. I nodded hello to Larry.
Dorothy had come up behind me, and now she reached around and locked her hands together against my belly and squeezed while she nuzzled her face against the back of my neck.
No, I don’t think I’ll play any dominoes tonight, I said to the fat man, but thanks anyhow.
I turned away from the counter, said good night to everyone in the room and, holding Dorothy’s hand, stepped outside to the hallway where we waited by the locked door for the old man to come and let us out.
Where do you want to go now? Dorothy asked me.
We can go to my room. Fine, she said, smiling contentedly.
The dark rain was still slopping heavily onto the streets, thickly drumming against the top of my blue van, as we headed back through Port Antonio, talking rapidly, cheerfully, the two of us astonished that we could exchange views, as Terron would have called it, when here she was talking in Jamaican patois while I flapped along in my New English dialect, like a Sicilian and a Florentine, discovering that we were repelled and attracted by the same things, excited by the contact, the momentary tangency, two planets suddenly sharing an orbit and a sun, when all along we had thought we were in separate, even if identical, galaxies.
At the hotel I parked the car and the two of us ran beneath the rain for the lobby, which was deserted. I plucked my key from the board above the desk, and we strolled, joking, arm in arm, up the stairs, back down the narrow unlit hallways to my small room with the single bed.
Eventually we slept, wrapped in the narrow bed in one another’s bodies like animals in an underground den, the big bulky country woman with nostrils that stared straight at me and lips as thick as fingers and skin as black as shoes, with the flat-muscled middle-aging man from the cities of Europe and America, wedge-faced and pencil-lipped, with skin the color of rattan.
In the morning we made love again for a while, and afterward, lying in the slats of clean, bright light that fell into the room from the shuttered window, she asked me if I would be her pimp. Then she showed me her knife, a six-inch switchblade with a white bone handle, and told me she would kill any woman who tried to take me from her.
I could only think of cheap jokes and teasing one-liners for an answer. I bet you say that to all the boys. But she seemed serious. And then I knew, because she was desperate in ways I could never be desperate and a survivor of hardships I would never have survived, that she was serious, so I tried to describe myself to her.
She listened with thoughtful care, and the distance between us quickly grew, and soon she was joking again, complaining of hunger, punching me on the shoulder to get me out of bed, then yanking me back to her, as if I were some kind of large but easily handled rag doll. You look like Robert Redford, she said to me.
I bet you say that to all the white men, I answered, and we both laughed, got out of bed, dressed, and headed out for breakfast.
The Princess, empty of customers, was bathed in morning sunshine, and quiet, except for the noises from the street, bicycle bells, greetings, and battered old cars rattling by. The old woman was washing the floor behind the bar when we came in and took a table next to an open window that looked out on a cluttered yard next door. On the far side of the yard two men and a boy were hanging the carcass of a black, just-killed ramgoat from a tree branch.
Ackee and salt fish and coffee was what the woman could offer us. She went back to the kitchen to dish it out, while we turned in our seats and idly watched the butchering of the goat. One of the men, grizzled and gray-haired, expertly removed the head and testicles and set them in a tub on the ground. Returning to the carcass, he split and gutted it, removed the feet, and carefully stripped off the skin, until the goat had been converted into a long sinewy, muscular piece of meat, which the man proceeded to dismember at the joints with his machete. As each limb was lopped off, the second man and the boy carted it away to a bench or table somewhere just out of sight behind the building, until all that hung from the tree was the trunk, which the man untied and lugged back to the bench. Soon we could hear the whacking sound of the machete against the bones, breaking the meat away, delivering up the marrow.
Our breakfast came, and we ate in silence. She asked me if I was going to leave today, and I said yes and offered to drop her wherever she wanted.
That was agreeable, I could take her home, she said, where her sons were waiting. It wasn’t far, just a few miles out of town toward Montego Bay.
We drove out along the port, past the knob where Holmes and Evan Smith lived, and wound along the coast for a few miles, until she instructed me to turn left, and we bumped along a narrow, marl-paved lane for a few hundred yards and stopped in front of a cabin made of cast-off lumber, old doors and stained corrugated iron. Two small, bare-bellied boys wearing pee-smeared underpants peered out from the darkness of the cabin into the glaring sunlight, where we sat inside my car.
Dorothy waved to her sons, who each flicked a wave back but held tightly to the doorjamb with the other hand. You got a pencil and piece of paper? she suddenly asked me. I tore a sheet from my notebook and handed it and a pen to her. Hunched over the paper, she started to write and for several minutes scratched away intensely, while I studied the boys in the doorway and they studied me.
Finally, she handed back my pen, and folding the paper carefully several times, pressed it into the palm of my hand. I looked down at the square and then at her.
Read it, she ordered, so I unfolded the paper and read the large, childish letters. I DON’T WANT YOU TO PAY ME NO MONEY. BUT I BROKE. WILL YOU GIVE ME SOME MONEY. I LOVE YOU.
I gave her twenty dollars, two tens folded twice, the same way her note had been folded, and pressed them into the palm of her hand, as her note had been pressed into mine. Then I kissed her, and said good-bye. She leaped from the car and ran powerfully across the cluttered dirt yard to the boys and grabbed them both up in the air, one in each glossy arm, turned and yelled good-bye to me. I backed my car slowly out to the main road, turned left, and headed back toward Port Antonio. I had one last stop to make before I left the town.
I parked the blue van on the seaside of the road, facing east, with Dolphin’s Bay on my left, the large, rambling, white house that once had belonged to Dr. Menotti on my right. An estate, not a home, with an acre of lawn and meticulously tended flower beds, rows of crotons and poinsettias, thriving clutches of coconut palms and fruit trees planted in cosmetic relations to the buildings—the place signified control, order, awesome confidence and calm; and, of course, great wealth. On the other side of the road, between my car and the open sea, a tangled, rock-strewn field lurched awkwardly for about two hundred yards to a cliff, where, a hundred feet below, the sea plowed beneath the ledge, crashing itself against unseen cavern walls. The day was overcast now, the early morning sun gone and with it the glaring tropical light. Though the air was warm and the offshore breeze bumping across the field before me slight, as I walked through the macca bushes and Jerusalem thorns, stepping around large, pale, limestone boulders and outcroppings, I felt cold, withdrawn to some place deep inside the center of my body.
At the edge, I peered down and watched the water rush beneath me into darkness and heard it shatter against the rocks, saw it surge back again, swirl and return with renewed force, leaving behind dark eddies and whirlpools that drifted in patterns that, though random-seeming, indicated currents running shoreward toward the Port in the west and toward Frenchman’s Cove, the Blue Hole, and Boston Bay in the east. A body or parts of a body thrown from this place could easily end up at any one of those beaches, to be discovered one morning turning over and over in the surf. No one who knew this place and the currents would dispose of a body this way, I thought, as I turned and walked back across the roof of the huge cavern below, staring at the ground a few feet in front of me for the opening, like a chimney, that was supposed to be there.
After a half hour of prowling through the tangle of thorny bushes and low green cacti and pocked limestone rocks, I finally saw it, a hole in the ground large enough to swallow a human body. Standing at the edge, my toes curled over the lip of the hole, I peered down. At first I saw only darkness, as if the hole went straight to the center of the earth where there was nothing but heat and the groans and cries of the damned, and I wanted Errol Flynn to be down there, looking helplessly up at me, my head and body outlined blackly in relief against the silvery gray sky.
Cupping my hands around my eyes to block out the daylight, I brought my face closer to the hole, until I could see into the darkness and could hear the sea thrash itself against the walls of the cave below. About four or five feet down, the hole jaggedly narrowed to the size of a human head and became too small for a woman’s body to squeeze through. Then it opened and widened again, until there was a quick drop to the water, which carried flashes of light from the mouth of the cave on its back and moved rapidly back and forth like a huge slick-bodied beast trapped and insane in a stone cage.
I stood up and turned away. Hurriedly I picked my way back across the field to the road and got into my car. The wind was offshore now, and the sky had darkened, and I knew that in a few moments it would be raining. I started the car, turned it around in a sandy clearing a short way down the road, and headed home.