AT VICTORIA PARK in the center of downtown Kingston, Johnny stepped from the bus and joined the throng—higglers and musicians, gray-bearded Rastas haranguing passers-by, nuns cruising in silent, quick pairs, gangs of huge laborers and hard-hats munching meat patties and watching the office girls strut past, cops, beggars, cripples, slit-eyed Natty Dreads nodding stoned in the midday heat to the beat of transistorized reggae, goats, dogs, wandering pigs, Chinese bankers, Indian women in saris, white businessmen in their drip-dry suits, back-packing American teen-agers looking extraterrestrial, people screaming at one another in the sweltering heat, people weeping, people shouting the names of angels and lost children, people yelling out the price of what they’ve got to sell—hot meat patties, mangoes, kalaloo, roast corn, ganja, shoes, radios, cocaine, hats, transportation, ideas, salvation, everything—because if you can’t sell it then you have to buy it, and into this throng Johnny pushed his way, stopping only to buy a red, green and gold Rasta tam to protect his head from the sun, a man as human and peculiar as any other man, bearded, long-haired, skinny and becoming scrawny, thirty-six years old but looking ten years older now that his brown hair and beard had grayed away, dressed in jeans and a green T-shirt that had the words Seit Ya, meaning “Legalize it now,” printed on it, as he lugged his heavy, battered suitcase with machete and cookpot tied to it and his portable typewriter case through the whirling traffic of North Parade to the Orange Street side of the square, where he got onto a bus headed north out of town to Constant Spring, which is where the suburbs begin and the buses loop back downtown again.
Hitchhiking now, with rides from several people—a Rasta on a Honda who tried to sell him cocaine and took him as far as Stony Hill, a cab driver on his way to the Playboy Club in Oracabessa on the north shore where he hoped tonight to pick up a rich American drunk who wanted a black woman in Kingston and was willing to pay to be driven fifty miles for it, and a third ride from a kid in a new Ford pickup truck, a soul boy with an American-style Afro and wraparound sunglasses and a billowing rayon shirt. This ride was from Castleton, where the cab driver had dropped him, all the way in to Gordon Hall. The kid explained that he worked for the M.P., Doc Semmell, a man Johnny met briefly in the back room of a shop in Castleton last January, and the Doc, as the kid called him, was in Gordon Hall today, campaigning for reelection. As the kid tooled the truck skillfully through narrow passes and around hairpin turns, double-clutching and sliding the pickup as if it were a Formula One racecar, they talked politics, until it came out that the kid was PNP, Michael Manley’s party, not JLP, his boss’ party, the leader of which—a man named Edward Seaga, a Harvard-educated economist of Syrian extraction—had promised to halt the leftward drift toward communism and restore Jamaica’s faith in Jamaica. Those Communists ain’t the ones who made Jamaicans poor, the kid said to Johnny, whipping the truck up the sides of mountains. The only people in Jamaica who want to bring back the good old days are the ones who were rich in the good old days! he yelled, as the truck leaned out over the Flint River a thousand feet below.
In less than an hour they were in Gordon Hall, bumping along the lane toward Bowra’s yard. On both sides of the lane, half in ditches and half out, cars and small trucks and Hondas had been parked, and the kid had to thread his way through them with care, as people, most of them with rum and beer bottles in their hands, staggered in small, straggling groups down the lane toward the Colonel’s place.
Doc does this every election, the kid explained. He brings in a couple cases of Red Stripe, a couple of Dragon, and a couple cases of overproof, and the chief up here gets out his dancers and drums and has a big party for him. Doc’s a big man up here with these Maroons. And the chief loves it. Makes him a big man with his people. All Doc cares is that the old guy delivers the vote, and he does deliver the vote, let me tell you. They’ll be voting Labour up here for the next hundred years! the kid laughed. And all it costs Doc is a few cases of rum and beer. A hell of a lot less than it costs the Labour guys over in Beverly Hills or Montego Bay. In Jamaica, the kid said, when you’re out you got to pay to get in, and when you’re in you got to pay to stay in. He laughed and drew the truck directly into Bowra’s yard, parting the crowd and coming to a halt before a knot of about twenty-five people, mostly old people, dancing in a thick circle.
From the cab of the truck, Johnny could see Pie and Steve on the ground in front of the porch banging frantically on gombay drums, another man beating on the bamboo stick next to them. In the crowd of dancers he could see the Captain tootling on the abeng and stamping along in time, and there were Charles and Aunt Celia and Bowra’s wife Regine, and, near the center, Gondo, leaping like a dervish, while on the outer edge of the circle, Harris, with a rum bottle in one hand and a batch of green herbs in the other, swooped and staggered, moving counter to the slowly clock-wise spin of the dancers. At the center of the circle, like a hub, was Bowra, not dancing but turning slowly in place, glowering into the faces of the people moving before him. He brandished a stick over his head and every few seconds extended it and touched on the chest or top of the head of first this dancer, then that, causing the dancer to go suddenly rigid and fall and thrash blindly at the ground, when Harris, immediately alert, would shove his way through to the fallen one and apply his handful of greenery to the person’s black face and then spray a mouthful of rum onto the person’s lips, which would bring the fallen dancer back to life, would raise him or her, dazed and wobbly, and slowly move the dancer back into time with the drums, back into the circle. Then Harris would stalk the edges of the circle again, until another dancer, touched by Bowra’s stick, would fall.
The kid stayed in the truck, smoking a cigarette and watching, a superior smile on his lips, but Johnny got out, grabbed his suitcase and typewriter from the back, and made his way toward the porch. As he passed the drummers, Pie looked up and, after a few seconds of not recognizing him, probably because of the wool tam and beard, suddenly realized who he was and nodded sweetly and went back to his drumming. The porch was crowded with people watching the dance, one of whom, taller than the others, was Doc, the politician, a bottle of warm beer in one hand, a chunk of jerked pork in the other. He was surrounded by women, mostly girls in their teens who were standing as close to the politician as they could get without quite touching him and without losing their place to the girls next to or behind them, and when Johnny tried to step onto the porch with his suitcase and typewriter, he disrupted the precise positioning of the crowd there, forcing people to nudge and bump and squeeze against each other in ways that confused them and in seconds brought them all, even Doc, to stare at him, this peculiar-looking stranger pushing his way onto the Colonel’s porch, saying, S’cuse me, sorry, sorry, as he shoved people off their carefully chosen and tightly held pivot points, making chaos of a structure he hadn’t perceived until after he had disrupted it and it was too late. A heavy hand grabbed his shoulder from behind, and Johnny turned to face a large, muscular youth—a stranger to him—with the size and physical force of Big Ron, shirtless, and angry, extremely angry, who yanked Johnny backward off the porch and tossed him, as if he were old clothes, against the side of the building. His suitcase and typewriter clattered to the ground, and the cookpot and machete broke loose, the pot rolling downhill toward the dance ground and the machete falling flatly between Johnny and the other man, who went for it, reaching down with his right hand as if to snare a bird. Johnny kicked at the man’s hand, knocking it away, and grabbed for the machete himself, reaching it first, closing around the wood handle, lifting it in a swooping arc that hit the man’s right hand at the wrist, severing it cleanly and continuing the arc to a point high above Johnny’s head, where it stopped.
It was Harris who took the machete away from Johnny. He appeared out of nowhere, while people screamed and the cut man moaned and fell bleeding backward into the bushes where three or four men grabbed him and one of the men ripped off his shirt and tied a sleeve around the cut man’s elbow, wrenching it to stop the jets of blood spurting from the stump, slowing it immediately to a bubbling that another man staunched by wrapping his shirt around the stump. By now the cut man was limp and dazed, in shock; someone hollered for a car, and the group of men administering to him led him away.
Meanwhile, Harris had simply walked through the screaming tangle of people surrounding and pointing and yelling at Johnny, and when he saw Johnny and recognized him, hollered his name and bellowed a chain of words in Ashanti, which caused the crowd to back away a few steps. Then the man walked up to Johnny, who still stood with his back to the building, the machete raised above his head as if he were hanging from it by one hand, and took the machete out of his hand. Then Bowra was there, holding the man’s severed hand as if it were a dead lizard. He held it out to Johnny a few inches from his face.
Spit on it! he ordered.
Johnny looked at the thing and shook his head no.
Spit on it, Johnny! If you don’t, the other hand will kill you!
Johnny spat on it, and swiftly, as if rushing to save the hand, Bowra wrapped it in a batch of herbs and hurried onto the porch, pushing past Doc and the others there, and disappeared into the house.
Grabbing Johnny by the arm, Harris brought him into the house behind Bowra. Inside the dark room and hunched in a corner, Bowra was mumbling and dousing the severed hand in rum and carefully wrapping it, after which he deposited it inside a wooden Royal Jamaican cigar box. Johnny sat down on the double bed. On a table across from him perched the brass statuette of the bird.
I have a message to give you, and then I have to leave, Johnny said in a high, thin voice. Outside, the drums had started up again, the screaming and shouting had stopped, and people were starting to sing the African songs again, Aunt Celia’s keening voice taking the lead, as usual, and the others falling in behind with growing volume and enthusiasm.
Bowra came and sat next to Johnny. Harris stood at the open door, as if keeping guard. That’s right, Johnny. You have to leave here.
Colonel Phelps is dead.
I know that, the old man said.
Yes, and Mr. Mann is the Colonel now.
I know that.
And he won’t be able to come down here on August first to join you in your celebration.
I know that too.
And he is having a copy of the sacred Maroon treaty sent to you.
Yes, that has already arrived and Harris has read it to the people.
All right, then. I’ve delivered my messages, Johnny said.
And now you have to leave.
Yes. I’ve seen everything I wanted to see.
No man can see more, Bowra said tenderly. Then he shouted at Harris to find Doc and ask him to come forward for a moment.
Harris ducked out and returned instantly with the tall politician in tow.
What is it, Colonel? he said, staring hard at Johnny, as if trying to remember when he had met him before.
The Colonel asked Doc if he was going back to town soon, and Doc said yes. Now, in fact.
Will you take this white man out of here with you in your truck?
How far you going? Doc asked Johnny.
The airport.
I’ll take him, Colonel. For you. But he’ll have to ride in the back. And I want your people to know that this man does not work for me and he is not my friend.
Oh sure, Doc, don’t worry about that, I’ll tell them, the Colonel assured him.
Let’s go, the politician said. Then, in a cruel voice, he said to Johnny, I want you out of the country. That’s why I’m taking you to the airport.
Johnny nodded and followed him out of the room, with Harris and Bowra coming along behind. The crowd parted for the politician and called out to him, Doc! Hey, Doc! Don’t forget us, Doc! We’re voting for you, Doc!
At the side of the truck, Johnny turned, as if to say good-bye to Harris and the Colonel, but they weren’t there. The Colonel had returned to the dance, and Harris was again stalking around the circle of dancers, guzzling rum and sucking at the handful of herbs.
Get in back, Doc said and got in on the passenger’s side and slammed the door. Johnny flung his suitcase and typewriter in ahead of him and climbed over the tailgate. The kid in the wraparound sunglasses peered through the rear window at him and grinned. Then he backed the truck slowly out of Bowra’s yard to the lane, dropped it into first, and headed out.
They left him at the Air Jamaica terminal, where he bought a one-way ticket for the six-fifteen flight to Miami. It was then five-forty-five, and he had to run. He passed through the gates quickly, routinely, despite his appearance, and went aboard a few minutes before departure time.