A Brief History of Seven Killings (10 page)

My taxi driver is just trying to win enough money so that he can fly out. He thinks that if the People’s National Party wins again, Jamaica might become the next communist republic. I don’t know about that, but I do know that just about everybody has eyes on the Singer, as if a lot of stuff is riding on what he does next. Poor brother probably just wants to release an album of love songs and call it a day. Maybe he feels it too—everybody is feeling it—that Kingston is on boil. Two nights in a row now, the concierge has slept behind the reception desk. He didn’t have to tell me, I could see it in the bags under his eyes. He’d probably say he was dedicated, but I’m betting he’s just too scared to go home when it gets late.

In May some guy named William Adler said on local TV that there were eleven CIA operatives working here in the U.S. Embassy. By June seven had left the country. Come on. Meanwhile, the Singer, never one to pull punches, sings Rasta don’t work for no CIA. In Jamaica 2 + 2 = 5, but now it’s adding up to 7. And all these loose strands knotting around the Singer like a noose. You should have seen his house today, security like Fort Knox, nobody
being let in or out. Not the police guarding him either, just a posse of goons I found out are called the Echo Squad. Everybody is squad, posse or guard lately. Some poor chick was waiting out there all day, probably claiming she had his kid or something. Does Lansing have a way in? He said he was filming the concert for the label, he must be doing some behind-the-scenes shit. The only problem is to get any info would mean actually being nice to the fucker, and one can’t have that.

I’m trying to not seem so hungry. Twenty-seven years old and six years out of college my mother keeps asking when I’m going to stop being a pinko on the hustle and get a real job. I’m impressed that she’s heard of pinkos but I think she got “on the hustle” from my little sister. She also thinks I need the love of a good woman, preferably not black. Maybe she’s looking at me and smelling wannabe. I think I’m trying to convince myself that I’m not one of those white boys drifting around trying to find something to belong to, something to fucking mean something because after Nixon and Ford and the Pentagon papers and fucking Carpenters and Tony Orlando and Dawn there’s nothing to believe in anymore, God knows not rock and roll. Rolling into West Kingston, the rudies left me alone because they knew I had nothing to lose. Maybe I’m just a stupid kid bitching about the world. I think I got problems but I ain’t got no problems.

The first time I came to Jamaica we flew into Montego Bay and drove to Negril, me and a girl whose dad was ex-army. I loved that she had no idea who The Who were, but listened to The Velvet Underground because she grew up with German kids on the army base. After a few days, it wasn’t as if I felt I belonged, nothing as cheesy as that, but I did get the feeling, this sensation or maybe it was just a belief that said, You can stop running now. No, that did not make me want to live here. But I remember waking up early one morning, right at the point where the temperature finally dips, and saying, What is your story? Maybe I meant the country, or maybe I meant me.

I’m being obvious. I’m better thinking about what’s ticking in this country, right about to boom.

The general election is in two weeks. The CIA is squatting on the city, its lumpy ass leaving the sweat print of the Cold War. The magazine is
expecting nothing much from me but some paragraph on whatever the Stones are recording, complete with a stupid pic of Mick or Keef with headphones half on with a Jamaican in the shot for some color. But fuck that. What kind of game is Mark Lansing running? Cocksucker isn’t smart enough to pull a total scam all by himself. I should head back to Marley’s house tomorrow. I mean, I had an appointment. Like that means anything in Jamaica. Who is this William Adler anyway?

Josey Wales

W
eeper is a man
with a whole heap of stories. All of them start with a laugh, because Weeper is a man who love to joke. And that is how he play fisherman on you because the joke is the hook. But once he hook you the man drag you down the blackest, reddest, hottest pit of hell you could ever imagine. Then he laugh and just hold back to watch you try to climb your way back out. Just don’t ask him about the Electric Boogie.

Make sense that I would be in a bar seeing woman dancing, and man watching, and music playing and what I doing? Thinking about Weeper. Jungle never produce a rudie like Weeper before, and not going to again. He is not like any other man who live in Balaclava before the fall of 1966. Weeper’s mother send him to school all the way to secondary. Not many people know that Weeper pass three GCE subject, in English, mathematics and technical drawing, and was reading big book even before Babylon send him to prison. Weeper read so hard that he had to start stealing glasses until he find one that work. Now the rudie in glasses make people think there is something behind him face. His baby mother get a good job in the freezone only because she was the only woman in freezone history to send in a real job letter, of course one that Weeper, not she, write.

Now every Weeper story have only one hero, and that is Weeper, except for the man who send him letter still, the man who he love to talk about all the time, this man who did this, this man who said that, this man that teach him this, and with a little coke or even less H, he let the man do that and both of them feel good. Weeper will talk about the man like he couldn’t care less what anybody else think, because everybody know Weeper is the fucker that will kill a boy right in front of his father and have the father count his last five breath. Just don’t ask him about the Electric Boogie.

Weeper even have a story about the Singer. A man can’t pay attention to everybody, especially if he in a place on a mission, but Weeper for some reason take it personally. Nineteen sixty-seven and Weeper was a boy from downtown in Crossroads, the middle ground between uptown and downtown, staying out of trouble, thinking that with Maths, English and Technical Drawing he could apprentice for some architect somewhere. Weeper didn’t forget to comb him hair that day. He was wearing the grey shirt and dark blue pants his mother buy for church. Picture Weeper walking through Crossroads like a head cock, rocksteady bouncing in his shoes, looking way too boasty for a boy downtown. Picture Weeper looking different from everybody else, because unlike everybody else he have somewhere to go.

As Weeper make a left to go to Carib Theatre the police draw down in numbers. Two truck full with police, one grabbing him, another butting him with the rifle, another kicking him in the head when he fall down. In Gun Court the police say he resist arrest and wound two officer with intent. Milord says, You are charged with one count of robbery of the Ray Chang Jewellery store in Crossroads along with wounding with intent, how do you plead? Weeper say he don’t know nothing about no robbery, but the police say they have witness. Weeper say you don’t have nothing, you just round up any black man you see uptown like Marcus Stone from Copenhagen City in jail for a murder that happen forty-eight hours after he was arrested. That made the law look either stupid or corrupt or both. The judge give him the chance to reveal his accomplices. Weeper say there are no accomplices because there was no crime. Weeper was innocent but he couldn’t afford a lawyer. The judge give him five years in the General Penitentiary.

The day before prison, police pay Weeper a visit. Boys from Copenhagen City, Jungle, Rema and Waterhouse not friends with the police. But police show him what to expect from prison. Even then, even after the sentencing, Weeper is still holding on to hope, because his mother was still alive and he has three GCE passes and is about to make something of himself. Weeper think it an even match, they with the power, he with being right. He thinking surely a boy wearing glasses can’t be a rudie. Weeper
thinking even up to that point that God at any minute was going to take Daniel out of the lion’s den. Six policemen, one of which say Weeper, we come to give you something. Weeper who up to that point still named William Foster, but the police say him cry like a girl. Weeper, who can never keep a smart word in his mouth where it should stay, tell the man that he kinda pretty but ’round there is only exit not entrance. The first swing of the club didn’t break his left hand but the second one did. The policeman says you goin’ tell h’us h’all o’ you accomplicisties. Weeper bawling from pain but still he can’t lock off the smart mouth. Don’t you mean accomplice? he says. The police say we know how to make you talk, but they know Weeper have nothing to say, they were the same police who just pick him up because dutty ghetto boy have no right to palaver in decent clothes like him is somebody, and is thief the bloodcloth boy thief the clothes from decent people and nasty naigger must always know them place.

They break the left lens of his glasses, a break Weeper wear even now, when he can afford to change it. They take him to a room in the lockup he never see before. Take off all his clothes, even brief, and tie him down to a cot. The policeman say, You know what them call the Electric Boogie, pussyhole? One of them come ’round with an electric cord they rip out of a toaster. They split the two wires. Mind they call you a battyman one police say when another grab onto Weeper’s cock and wrap the first wire ’round the head. Then they plug in the cord. Nothing happen when they do that, but something happen when they take the other cord and touch his fingertips, gums, nose, nipples and asshole. Weeper didn’t tell me any of this, but I know.

Weeper was something new to prison. A man that damage before, not after they lock him up. I hear that the first week in prison everybody stay out of his way because a wounded lion was more dangerous than a healthy one. Anybody could take him, but whoever did was going to hell with him. Weeper can carry whole line of conversation with his eyes alone. Still do, another reason why he’s the best to work with. He on one side of a grocery shop, I on the other side, and between two winks and a stare we both know that he’s taking the back door and I’m taking the counter and shooting anybody who so much as reach down to adjust their pants or go into their
handbag. Weeper’s gun have five notches on the left side, none on the right. Each notch, a policeman. And—

—Yow! Yow, Josey! Brethren, come back, planet Earth need you.

—Weeper? Is when you get here? Don’t think I see you come in.

—I and I come in two minute ago. You think that’s a good idea making dream distract you in this bar?

—’Cause why?

—Huh? Nothing, star. Man like you don’t have to watch you back anyway when man watching it for you.

—How come you just coming?

—You know me, Josey. Every road must have a roadblock. So is which world you coming back from?

—Pluto, the one far out.

—Seen. Where the woman have one breast but two pussy?

—No, man, more like
Planet of the Apes
.

—Might as well sink down the cock ’pon two monkey, since—

—Don’t start with that man come from monkey fuckery again, Weeper.

—Who say that?

—No so your atheist evolution idiot brethren chat ’bout.

—Yeah, man, me and top-ranking Charles Darwin. Brethren, nobody come from monkey. Well, except for Funnyboy, must be some gorilla poom-poom him push out of.

—Weeper, what the bloodcloth.

—What? What?

—Brethren, me pretty sure my beer was more than half.

—Good to know.

—Pussyhole, you drink off me beer?

—Didn’t look like you was using it. What Granny used to say? What stay too long serve two master.

—Granny know, say you drink man backwash?

—For serious, is where you did gone?

Weeper even more chatty than usual. Might be because of this bar where liquor loosen every tongue but mine. He know I hate him getting high when
we in the middle of business. He going to say that the C take the edge off, but that’s just some fuckery he hear from a white man in lockup on narcotics charge until the embassy come for him, or from some movie, he don’t know what the fuck it mean. In this state he will pick a fight when there is no fight to pick. And he more paranoid than Judas hiding after he betray Jesus.

—Hey Josey, your Datsun outside? Man over there. Three o’clock.

—What, what the bloodcloth you talking ’bout now? And what it have to do with my Datsun?

—That man, three o’clock.

—How much time I must tell you not to use that American movie bullshit with me?

—Fine then, pussyhole. Man behind you to the right—don’t look. Tall, dark not handsome, lip like fish hanging off, at the bar but talking to nobody. Three times now he look over here.

—Maybe him like you.

Weeper look at me hard. For a second I think he going to say something stupid and make me cuss him out. Weeper earn the right to do what he want to do, even if it is some sodomite business. He’ll talk about it all the time but sideways like an Aesop fable, or a riddle and rhyme. He can shape and mold it and make it Greek, his word, not mine, I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about with that Greek shit. But that don’t mean he want anybody to say it back to him. Something happen when somebody tell you something about yourself even if you already know.

—Man, fuck a battyman, he says. I kick my own foot.

—That man watching us.

—That’s what the C telling you. Of course he watching us. If I was him in the bar I wouldn’t be able to take my eye off me neither. This is what him really dealing. He, like everybody here, recognize me, then he recognize you. He right there thinking, Who in here did they come to cancel and how long before they kill him? And should I just chill out to the max, or should I run like a pussyhole? I don’t even have to look, one hand on him drinks, other tapping the bar. Watch him look away quick as I swing around, one, two, three . . . now.

—Haha, man knock over him own drinks. Brethren, maybe is a police.

—Maybe you should stop feeling up you bloodcloth gun. You have twenty-two days of Christmas leave to add couple more notch.

Weeper stare at me hard then laugh. Nothing like a Weeper laugh, it start like a wheeze, then somewhere, and you never know where, it explode into the biggest thing in the room. Who teach this little black man that he can laugh so? It spin off in the whole room and other people start laughing, not knowing why.