A Brief History of Seven Killings (30 page)

Cars are speeding up. I’m watching them for so long that I don’t know
for how long the guard had left his post. But I do know my watch is saying that Lansing has been in there fifteen minutes. I walk right up to the gate and push my head against the bars.

—Hello? Hello? Anybody there?

I don’t know where the guard went. It’s just a little latch on the fucking gate. I only need to lift and I’m inside. Can we say unauthorized access? Fuck Hunter S. Thompson, I’m Kitty Kelley. I almost touch it when another guard shows up. He’s not the guy who was here before. Lighter skinned, with a scar on his right cheek like a telephone. I beat myself up inside for drawing conclusions. No I don’t, not really. It’s pretty obvious that these guys aren’t police, or even a decent class of security guard either, even if they are all carrying machine guns. Maybe the Singer just hired some boys from the ghetto. I really should have known better than to trust Lansing. He’s probably looking out from some window inside, getting off on leaving his good buddy Alexander Pierce to wait in the heat. I’d almost think he has the Singer by the window laughing too, but I can’t imagine somebody so cool wasting any time with a prick like Lansing, no matter what he’s there to do. Still.

The gate opens only wide enough for his BMW to slip through. My heart jumps, I swear I’m a teenage girl. But it’s not him. Somebody else is driving it, a thin Rasta with a woman who looks like one of the back-up singers in the right seat and another guy in the back. The driver’s pissed, glancing behind him and then at her, then at me, then driving off. Only when he’s driving off do I realize he’s heading off into serious darkness. Headlights roll past on the street. I forgot that it’s past eight. They’ve turned on lights on the second floor. The gate closes. I’m kinda sure that I’ve been waiting outside this gate forty-five minutes now but honestly I’ve lost count. Do you know where my friend is? I say to empty space. The guard left his post and I think about slipping in again. It would be so easy. Well, up to the point I actually enter and ten guards throw down on me before they ask questions.

A Red F100 truck slams its brakes and makes a hard right up the driveway. I jump out of the way. Inside are two men, both dark and both wearing
shades even though it’s night. The driver stares at me and I try with every fucking thing I’ve got to stay looking at him. The other guy is tapping the side of the truck. The engine is still running. Then the gate opens only three feet or so and seven men, in jeans, khakis, bell-bottoms and all carrying guns and rifles, head for the truck, jumping in the back. The last, a short man with dreadlocks and a red, green and gold tank top, glances at me for a second but does not stop running. The truck backs into traffic without looking and heads left. The gate opens wider and I’m jumping out of the way of a blue Escort that shoots down the driveway, packed with four or five men sticking their guns out the window. I was too busy rolling on the pavement to count. The car makes a left on Hope Road and other cars slam their brakes. I pick myself up and look over at the guard post. Nobody closes the gate. I think they’re all gone.

It’s the first time I’m on his property. Is it his home? I don’t even know. The full driveway is a roundabout with a set of trees in the center that take you to an entrance with four pillars, and a doorway with a double door that looks half open. Two floors and all the windows are rusty colored and open. The band is still playing but everybody outside is gone. I walk left, over to his beaten-up truck. My dad had one of these, not the same truck but an old beat-up one that he loved more than his kids. I think he loved the truck so much because it was the only thing that could get old but would never die. Well, that was until it did. So fucking weird, but there’s music clearly coming from inside and yet outside is quiet. It doesn’t sound quiet, not with the stop-start keyboards and drums and the traffic, but it feels quiet, which is starting to bug me. I don’t know how else to explain. I can’t believe that son of a bitch Lansing just left me out here. Maybe he’s really standing me up. Maybe it’s the dark crouching all around me. Does anybody inside know that the guards have all left with the gate wide open? Shift change? New guys running on Jamaica time?

Fuck this. And fuck him. I should have known. Maybe he was getting back at me for all the stuff I’ve said behind his back, because now I feel like a fucking fool. Except that Mark Lansing is just not somebody I would talk about ever, not even to say some shit about him. And who would I say it to?
Fuck this son of a bitch and you know what, fuck this whole place. Maybe I’m kidding myself. Again. Maybe I better get a fix on Mick Jagger’s whereabouts just so that I can keep my fucking job, or at least rendezvous with this photographer that I still haven’t met. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure he’s still in the country.

I turn and walk out the gate. Hope Road is busy. I don’t have a thing in Lansing’s car so I keep walking. Cars keep moving along and I see a white Escort that looks like a taxi. Well, the driver has his arm out the window, which usually means he’s waving folded dollar bills in between each finger from collecting the fare himself. I wave him down and he stops. I open the door to get in, look up the road and see a blue car turning into the driveway.

Nina Burgess

E
vening catch me.
I’ve been walking for hours. Yes buses pass me up and down and some of them even stopped, but I’ve been walking for hours. I’ve been walking from Duhaney Park where my parents live, call it northwest from His house, if you call His house the center. Kimmy thought I was coming after her so she ran. She thought I was coming at her with the belt held wrong, strap in my hand, buckle hanging waiting to whip an eye out of one of her fucking sockets. She ran like she was the bitch in
Black Christmas
who dies first. She even stumbled over the vacuum that Mummy forgot to pack up because she was just so distraught over how her oldest daughter turn into some stinking pum-pum, Rasta-loving slut.

But I wasn’t going after Kimmy. Just like her to want to be the screaming girl in an evil movie, it makes her the center of attention again. I’ll bet she probably thinks this thing backfired, not because my father was on the floor catching his breath and my mother was screaming for me to get out with me ignoring her, and not even because this didn’t play out anywhere near she was hoping. It was because she couldn’t find a way to make all this about her. I should have ran after her and dropped at least two solid welts on her back. But when your mother keeps screaming about how you’re a demon from the black pit of Gehenna and it must have been because she didn’t give up anything for Lent why the devil slipped inside her and replaced her sweet baby with a devil, you can either tell her that she needs to watch better movies or you just leave. And that is what I was doing. Kimmy just happened to be in the way of the door. She kept screaming all the way to her bedroom, sorry, former bedroom, and shut the door.

I dropped the belt and went outside. As soon as the sunset touch me I started to run. Six o’clock already come and gone. When Mummy called it
sounded like an emergency, so I pulled on green track shoes that I hadn’t worn since Danny, who bought them because track shoes is foolishness after all. I haven’t run track since high school so why would I need them? At some point I stopped running from my parents’ house, maybe when I ran out in the road and that first car slammed the brakes and told me about me bombocloth. Or maybe when I kept running in the middle of the road and another car slammed the brakes and said that bitch mad as shad. Or maybe when I got on the bus that took me to Crossroads even though I didn’t want to go to Crossroads and couldn’t remember when I got on the bus.

The visa is a ticket. That is all it is. I don’t know why I am the only one who sees that. The visa is a ticket out of the hell that this fucking PNP going bring on the country. You have to watch news to know. You don’t have to wait till one of Mummy’s horsemen of apocalypse shows up or whatever the r’asscloth that means. She who love to go to church to hear about signs and wonders and how we’re living in the last days. Ungrateful wretches the two of them, don’t they see this is the . . . this is the . . . shit, I don’t know what this is, or why I’m in Crossroads when I need to be at Hope Road. Shouldn’t talk, I should just show. I should just get the visa and the plane tickets and shove it to them before they have time to talk or have fucking Kimmy convince them out of it, like her parents are supposed to wait and see for when the shitstem supposedly right itself. I get off the fucking bus.

I left before I heard my father catch a breath. Serve him right. Serve everybody right. I’m getting just a little sick and tired of every man including now my damn father feeling that as soon as they see me, they get license to be on their worst behaviour. Great, now I sound like me mother and kiss my r’ass if that’s who I want to turn out like. My daddy beat me like I was a little girl. Like me was a bloodcloth pickney and is Kimmy fault. No is not her fault. She is just a damn jackass who worth whatever man tell her she worth, including Daddy. No, is the Singer fault. If he didn’t fuck me, me wouldn’t have anything to do with him and if the embassy did just give me the bombopussy r’asscloth visa and don’t tell me no fucking shit ’bout me don’t have no bombocloth ties like me would want to run away to the fucking country
where Son of Sam shooting people in the head and big man raping little boys and white people still calling people nigger and trying to stab them with a flagpole in Boston and not caring who take a photo, they have another fucking thing coming.

Jesus bloodcloth Christ I hate when I chat bad. I also realize that for the entire little rant I was also chatting it aloud and the school girl who just happened to be walking right beside me take foot and run across the street. Pity car never lick you down, I want to say. It reach the tip of my tongue but I don’t say it. Instead I walk east of Crossroad and all the buses and people and school girls in blue uniforms and green uniforms and boys in khaki uniforms growing up too quick, and head for Marescaux Road.

On the bus my heart is pumping hard again, harder than before when I hit Daddy. And it won’t stop. I’m on the bus with suitcases, handbags, knapsacks, shiny oxford shoes and modest heels. Everybody leaving school and work to go home, but not me. I don’t even have a job. And my damn feet are scratching me because of these damn track shoes. I catch a woman on the left, four seats to the back, looking at me and wonder if something is wrong with me. My hair doesn’t look too mad, I think. And my t-shirt is back in my jeans and I certainly don’t look like I begged a free ride from the bus conductor. I wait for her to look up again from her newspaper and when she does I glare at her. She looks away quick. But the damn woman made me miss my stop. I come off when the bus stops and realize that I was wrong. The woman made me miss plenty stops, at least five or six. That’s when I started walking. I didn’t even think about it, or how long it would take or just how far off I was. Lady Musgrave is one long road.

My legs must know why I’m doing this because my head doesn’t have a clue. Maybe there’s nothing else to do, maybe there’s nothing else but it. Is this what a job is supposed to do, fill this space that I think I’m feeling now that I need to fill with an it? Such bullshit. I don’t know what I’m talking about. My parents don’t even want to be my parents anymore. Maybe I’ll just stand there, outside his gate, until something moves me or I find something to do. Maybe whether they want to move is beside the point and all
that matters is that I get these fucking visas and they can do whatever they want with them. I tried, yes their disgusting Rasta fucking daughter. Maybe I should have asked what irked them more, the Rasta part or the fucking.

At the intersection I stop. I want to lie down in the grass on the sidewalk and I want to run and keep running. I open my handbag and pull out my compact, but I swear to God I can’t remember when I had a handbag. I know for some woman it’s like an eleventh finger and you don’t even think about it, even if you change every day. But I can’t remember the handbag either. Who can run with a handbag? I must be going crazy. I’m going to the Singer’s house to get money for something for people who don’t want it or me, but I’m going anyway. Because, well because. Somehow I feel as if this is the first time I’m looking at myself today. Seems I’ve been lying to myself about my hair, which is a madwoman mess. It looks like I pulled the rollers out but did nothing after that. One big curl is jutting out of the top left of my head and another big curl is down past my right brow. My lipstick looks like it was put on by a blind baby. Shit. I would run from me.

I choke up. Damn r’asscloth, I’m not crying right now. You hear me Nina Burgess, I’m not crying right now. But the grass looks so good, I want to just stoop down and bawl, loud enough that people will know to leave the madwoman alone. What kind of a wretched woman I must be, just like my mother thinks. Maybe it’s the walking that’s driving me mad. Who else would be walking anywhere right now? Last night I actually thought I was going to walk home all the way to Havendale, like an idiot. Does any woman my age, any woman I went to school with, have any purpose? Why don’t I have a man? What was I thinking, hoping to move back to America with Danny? He was here to score some local pussy, so mission complete. This message will self-destruct in three years. I really should have beat the shit out of Kimmy. Or at least given her one kick.

Between the walk and the stopping that’s when evening crept up on me.

—Excuse me, sir, what time you have?

—What time you want?

I look at this fat son of a bitch, clearly walking home even though he’s wearing a tie and say nothing. I just look.

—Eight-thirty, he says.

—Thank you.

—That would be p.m., he says and grins. I put every single bad word and ugly thought I can think of into the stare I give him back. He walks off. I stand there watching, yes, for the first and second time he turns around. You know something? All man is fuckery. Yes every woman know this, but we forget it every day. But leave it to providence, sooner or later in the stretch of a day some man will remind you. My heart is pumping again. Pumping hard. That might be because I can finally see Hope Road. Cars and buses cut across my view, east to west, west to east. I’m running again. Hope Road can’t hit and run me fast enough. I don’t know why, but I just have to run, I have to run now. Maybe his car is driving out, maybe he’s set to go to Buff Bay, maybe somebody coming to see him and will take up his time, maybe he just finished rehearsing “Midnight Ravers” and is finally, finally remembering what I look like. I just have to get there now. That one year running track did not come back and it’s my lungs that feel like it’s going to burst, not my heart. But I can’t stop, I almost run into Hope Road, making a sharp right and going still. Your mother and father won’t want it, another me is saying and it’s slowing me down. Fuck her. She can kiss me r’ass.