Supposedly he was studying a biology assignment in his bedroom, the door to which was closed. His source of light was a bare bulb that swung with the slightest breeze by a cord from the center of the ceiling. He lay dressed in a thin, worn merino vest and equally thin and worn cotton short pants on his bed. One leg was propped at the ankle atop the knee of the other, which he had drawn up. His book rested open and facedown on his chest. He was daydreaming. Every few minutes a mosquito buzzed near his head. He would slap the area when he felt the prick of one feeding on his neck or arms, or the frantic wriggling of one trapped in the net of thick and curly hairs that had sprouted on his lower legs. He was thinking about a particular scene from a movie that he and three of his classmates had skipped school several times to see in a nearby cinema.
In the scene he was reliving, a man who has long been in love with a woman who scorns him finds himself alone for the first time with her. They are having a vibrant quarrel where, face-to-face, noses almost touching, he accuses her of being spoiled and childish, while she demands in a high-pitched voice that he not speak to a woman of her standing so insolently. “I shall not stand for this. Stop it at once,” she says, staring at him unflinchingly. He then grips her by both shoulders, so firmly that she gasps, but she makes no attempt to get away from him. He says she has a heart of stone and doesn’t know what it is to be loved or to love. She stares up into his face, and her eyes flicker as she looks at his lips. How tightly the man holds her, one arm around her waist, pulling her hard into him. The boy imagined he was the man on the screen. The woman’s back is arched as she keeps her head away with enough distance to be able to see his eyes and mouth. His other arm, splayed against her upper back, allows her to lean that far back. They are about to kiss. The boy and his friends had gone to see the movie so many times solely for that moment, the moment of their first kiss. The way the man grips her waist tighter, presses her upper back toward him in such a forceful, swift manner that her head whips back and then forward, her mouth perfectly hitting his, hard. With a forefinger, the boy stroked himself.
Suddenly there was a light tap on his door. He jumped up, breathless. His mother. Without entering, she called his name. He turned his back to the door, fixed his shorts, and began to pull on over them the pair of long pants that were thrown on the foot of the bed. She softly called out to him to come, to sit with them awhile. “He” wanted to talk to him, she said. He pulled on a shirt, pressed his hand against his penis, and waited for the blood flooding his brain to subside, his heart to still, before opening the door.
Mr. Persad sat at one end of the verandah on a bentwood and cane rocking chair, she at the other in a vinyl armchair, both shadowed in the soft edges of orange flare extending this far from a street lamp. The boy stood awkwardly in the doorway. The tip of a mosquito-repellent coil glowed in a corner of the verandah. A steady, slim stream of dense white smoke rose and swirled lazily in the air, spiraled in the space between the three of them, then dissipated into the hot, still night. The porch, though open, smelled heavily of it, yet Dolly and Mr. Persad still slapped at their arms, their faces, and waved their hands about their heads.
“You studying?”
“Mammy say you want me.”
“Sit down.” Mr. Persad gestured with an open palm to the only other chair on the verandah. The boy nodded and sat in the slatted folding wood chair, the kind sold by pavement vendors in the town center.
Mr. Persad looked out over the wood railing into the impenetrable blackness beyond the light of the street lamp. As he rocked, there was a rhythmic squeak of dry wood arching against dry wood. When his mother wasn’t swiping at the buzzing sounds about her ears, or brushing her skin, she would rest her arms on the shiny curl of metal and padded-vinyl arm of the chair. Her fingers made no sound as she tapped the metal in time to the beat of Mr. Persad’s rocking chair. The boy perched on the edge of his chair, waiting. The smoke stung his eyes. He leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees, and looked at the dark floor.
Finally Mr. Persad spoke. “So, son, next term you choosing subjects for your finals. Not so?”
The boy nodded.
“You have plans for your future, son?”
Plans? Future? Wasn’t it as simple as choosing whichever subjects he happened to get the highest grades in? Where could this conversation be headed? he wondered.
“Well, you decide to go into science or the classics?” When the boy was not forthcoming with a response, Mr. Persad asked, “Or you thinking about business?” and without waiting carried on, “Because, you know, I hoping you will take up business. Who else will run all of this?” He indicated with one hand the gas station on the other side of the house, but the gesture made “all of this” appear to be a vast empire, which it was not. The boy thought of the word “heir” and suppressed the urge to grin. The boy’s mind skipped to Bihar and Busby, two classmates who were inseparable. This was how the two of them went through their lives, their futures known, mapped out, and secure. They were born with paid passages on ships captained by their surname and headed unequivocally for success.
Perhaps if his own father were alive, he might have assumed that he would become a fisherman, too, or taken up boat building, and seeing that generation after generation moved townward, he might have followed suit and set up a fish market right there in Marion. But the way things had turned out, his mother coming to Marion and marrying this man who had no obligation to him, he had simply supposed he might finish school as best as he was able and get a job as an elementary school teacher, perhaps as a clerk in a store or in a government office, or even as manpower in a construction company.
Reaction from the boy was slow. From the way his mother looked at him, he knew that she was anxious for him to show some interest, to be grateful. Several times over the course of their life in Bhatt Persad’s house, he did get the impression his mother was with this man for his benefit. This was one of them.
Mr. Persad waited as long as he could and then unfurled his plans for his future and the boy’s.
“You know, it’s twenty-one years now I am living here. Twenty-one years, same house, same station. I see this town grow up around me.” He paused and rocked and seemed to be reflecting on this fact. “What brought me here was the motorcar, you know. Not many people had cars in those days, but of course those who had, needed petrol to run the cars. There were no petrol stations then. Well, not like we know them today, you know.” He said this, his eyes wide open, baring a grin as if he himself were responsible for the development of the gas station. “The car came from an American company. They had set up an office in Trinidad that was to serve the whole Caribbean. All that was here in Guanagaspar was a showroom in Gloria, nothing more than a shoe-box-size office with a picture of the car pin up behind the salesman’s desk, and a brochure about it. You signed up, you made your down payment there, and you waited. Then the vehicle arrived via ship three to six months later. But gasoline to run the car was hard to come by. Only one place sold it: you had to go all the way to the docks outside of Gloria. Sometimes the trip to buy gas was enough to cause you to run out of gas! You see, people were afraid that petrol stations right in town were an invitation to hooligans to burn down the entire town in one big”—he made a gesture of an explosion with his hands—“poof!” Dolly pursed her lips and nodded as if in agreement with the people. “And so you can see the problem. If you ran out of gas outside of Gloria, it was headache to find a way to send to the docks for just enough gas so that you could put a little in the tank and make your way back to fill up the rest later. Well, more and more people wanted cars, but it was only the people in the capital who could maintain one. The car company in America and a petrol company over there decided to set up some fellows in business on the outside of the towns. To make a long story short, at that time I was doing manual work in a sugar factory. Well, one day as I was leaving the factory compound, a stranger outside the gate approached me. He asked if he could talk to me a minute. He was a red-skinned man, but he had on nice clean clothes, and he was polite enough. So, I asked myself what harm could there be if I were to spare him a minute or two? He walked with me and we talked a little. He asked how long I worked in the factory, if I was married, and all kinds of other questions. He even asked if I had car. Well, by this time I could tell he was either a real salesman about to try and sell something, or he was a smart man. But I had no money for him to take advantage of me for, so I wasn’t too worried. Eventually he asked if I ever had a dream to be my own boss and to be free of money problems. Well, I burst out laughing, but that didn’t slow him down. He continued walking with me, telling me how easy that dream was to come true. He was, in fact, working for the very company that made dreams come true. The company was looking for people with ambition, and he said that I looked like a man with ambition. He told me that if I was interested and showed potential, the company would teach me everything. For free. Eventually I would have my own business that I could name after myself, and in no time I would be my own man. They would give me a crash course in keeping books and dealing with customers, all for free. He said they weren’t taking any and everybody, ordinarily you had to apply and you had to have certain qualifications. I told the man I had no qualifications, but he told me he had already summed me up and could see I was a very good candidate. So basically he sweet-talked me, and the impressionable young fellow I was, I decided to go to the short-term office that they had set up especially for recruiting, and to apply—without even knowing what exactly I was applying for, except that it was to be my own boss. I found out only then that it was to rent-to-own a gas station. You know, whenever I think back on it, I always realize that all that separates me from this life I living now and continuing on in the sugar factory—maybe one day rising to foreman or driving one of the trucks—was a chance meeting with that fellow outside the factory grounds. Well, I got the job and the station same day. They had to build the station, but in two weeks’ time, I was a businessman with a gas station. This same one. Look at that, eh? One day I was a hand in a factory, and next day I was operating a gas station on the way to owning it. You can never really know who somebody was; by that I mean what position they used to occupy, or who they are currently, or who that somebody may one day become, what clout he might one day have. Best, then, to treat everybody the same, not so? Anyhow, it was the first station this side, you know, and that year Marion had five cars. One year later, it had over two hundred motorcars in Marion.”
Dolly seemed familiar with the story. The boy had had no idea that this man in whose house he lived had once been an estate hand.
Mr. Persad continued, “So I see the town grow up to be what it is today. Now there are more cars in Marion than there are gas stations to supply gas. You see how this place have lineup Friday night and Sunday morning? Anyway, the thing is, businesses—be they gasoline or house construction or lumberyards or clothing stores—here in Marion and in the rest of the country, they getting bigger and broader, and I am wondering what is Bhatt Persad doing? Well, Bhatt Persad has been thinking. I have been thinking I need to begin to grow with the town. Expansion, that is what it is, you know. I am thinking about expanding, buying another gas station. It have need in this place for more. Need, in truth. Well, I want to purchase another two. One on the other side of Marion and the other along the highway.”
Dolly, as surprised as her son, gasped. She said unusually loudly, “Eh?” He looked at her, grinning, and then said that one happened to be for sale right now. She said, “But what you need more than one station for? One is a livelihood, two is headache, and three is … three is …” She wouldn’t finish her thought. She sucked her teeth.
He said right then, very quickly, that he was only thinking about it. She said, “Well, he will choose business, but one station is business enough.” Mr. Persad looked at the boy and nodded as if in agreement. His mother got up and went inside. Mr. Persad said to the boy in an excited but low voice, “Later. We’ll talk later. Man-to-man. You better go and hit those books hard, boy!”
Feeling taller than he was, the boy walked into the house, strangely aligned with his stepfather, dizzy from the ease with which he found he could betray his mother.