A Brief History of Seven Killings (49 page)

Not true?

Nah, man, that deh part true, but is not ’cause him have no Jesus power, pussycloth idiot always a gwaan like him about to give you five loaf and two fish.

Huh?

Priest walk through ghetto because he the only man in the ghetto that not even puss ’ fraid of. Why you think man call him Priest?

Well, he . . .

Learn this, white boy. Is long time Priest want to be big shotta. Long time. Every day him asking the don, Don, man, gimme a gun nuh? Gimme a gun nuh? You no see me born fi turn rudie? Well Shotta Sherrif get tired of him ah yap-yap like them little pussyhole and give him gun. You no know what the boy do? My youth shove the gun in him brief and right deh so, all of a sudden kapow! Him shoot off him cocky. Is a wonder how him never dead.

One time me ask Shotta if he did take the safety off on purpose but all now him no answer me.

Is a wonder how him never kill himself after that. I mean, if you can’t ram out the pussy, wha you ah live for?

Brother’s still gotta tongue.

Wha you just say?

The Eight Lanes. It’s true, Priest didn’t do shit to set me up with the Eight Lanes. I just asked the nervous lady at Jamaica Council of Churches if I can talk to some of the people behind this peace treaty. She made a call and next thing I knew she said you can go down there tomorrow. Jamaicans, they never leave their prepositions out. It’s always either up here or down there, up there or down here. Nothing like Copenhagen City, that’s for sure. You veer through the market and if you’re not dizzy enough from all
that
stuff, wood stalls full of bananas and mangoes and ackee and grapefruit and jackfruit and frill dresses and gabardine cloth for pants and—blink you’ll miss it, rolling papers, and reggae bumping, always bumping, you’re never going to hear that shit on the radio, then you almost walk past Lane Number One of the Eight Lanes.

But every lane has a corner and every one has four to six guys on the corner standing on the verge of getting it on. They left me alone so I figured that by now, thanks to the Singer, they’re used to white people strolling into their territory. Better answer: nobody moves without the don’s say-so. Nothing like four hungry boys waiting to pounce being held back by an invisible leash. Priest was so busy warning me about Copenhagen City that it didn’t even cross his mind I might go to the Eight Lanes. He said it only the day before I came down here. Priest also thinks I’m working on his clock. He also thinks I’m some stupid American who is still alive only because of him. But Lord knows coming down here might have been a stupid thing to do.

To think I try so hard not to be lumped with those fuckers on the North Coast wearing Jamaican Me Crazy t-shirts, but how many times can you say, Brother, I’ve been to the real Jamaica. I was down here with the Stones when they were recording
Goats Head Soup
at Dynamic Sounds though I got nothing to do with the record being an absolute piece of shit. And in the years since 1976 Peter Tosh can actually see me in the same room without insisting I leave. And you should have been there when I told the Singer that his version of “And I Love Her” was Paul McCartney’s favorite Beatles cover ever.

So no, I’m not scared to go deep into Kingston. But sweet Jesus, there’s deep and there’s this. And it’s the kind you’ve never seen before despite the hundred times you’ve seen it. I tried drawing parallels before but you just can’t when you’re there. You pass the boys on the corner and it never occurs to you to look up, to get a sweep of the place. So you pass the boys and the men playing dominoes. The man facing me had swung his hand far back to whirlwind slam it on the table and win probably so I could see his smirk, but he sees you and his hand slows down and he just places the domino on the board all delicate like the play itself is so lame that he’s ashamed that a white man was around to see it.

You continue and you wonder if you’ve just become the show. You expect people to look at you, even stare, but you just never expect it, the movie thing. Where everything grinds to a slo-mo and your ears pick up silence like it’s at full volume and you wonder if somewhere music just stopped, or a glass just shattered or two women just gasped or if it was quiet all along. And you pass the first house, no, not a house, somebody’s home maybe, but definitely not a house and you try to not stare past the three children in the doorway. But you do anyway and you wonder how come it’s so well lit? Is it a corridor between houses or is the roof gone? But the wall is blue and deep and you wonder who is it that thought to take care of the place.

The little boy, wearing a yellow Starsky and Hutch t-shirt that reaches his knee, smiles, but the two girls, both bigger, have already been taught not to. The one on the lowest step, almost down in the road, lifts her dress up to show her jeans shorts underneath. The door behind them is so weathered
it’s driftwood, but I try to not look at that either because just two feet or so down a woman is on the steps combing the hair of a bigger girl on the step right below. And between the three kids and the woman—mother?—is a brick wall with so many bricks dug out that it’s a checkers pattern. Somebody started painting it white but gave up. It kinda throws you for a loop because the PNP won the election and this is PNP turf. You’d think their own slum would have come off looking better, but it’s worse than the JLP area. And worse is always relative each day in Kingston and—what the fuck, there is a fucking man sitting on the side of my fucking bed and I’m thinking about a fucking ghetto that is fucking ten miles away.

Oh shit, dude, sit up straight, don’t sink further into the bed. Come on, you’ve been here, what now, ten minutes? Are you asleep? I’ve done that, resting my forehead in my hands with my elbows on my knees, but usually I’m not asleep, I’m tripping. I don’t know. Fuck it, I’m going to roll. What’s the worst that could happen? Him panicking for a little before he realizes I’m still asleep. It’s only natural I should roll, he’d think it weird if I didn’t roll a little. Wouldn’t he? I want to see his fucking face. He rubs the back of his head, bald, I see that now, and his hands reddish brown? Maybe it’s blood rushing? I’m going to roll over and kick him in the back. Yes, that is what I’m going to do.

No. I just want to get up in my own fucking hotel room and order a fucking cup of joe, which will suck because this is a cheap-ass hotel that thinks Americans are too stupid to know what real coffee is supposed to taste like which is kinda true if you always drink shit to the last drop, but I’ll drink it anyway, because I just need to keep my mouth busy while I transcribe this fucking tape from yesterday that might not even have anything juicy on it.

And then I can grab my knapsack and pull on my jeans and jump on a bus and look at people thinking holy shit, there’s a white dude on the bus, except they won’t think it that way and I’ll just mind my own damn business and get off at the bus stop in front of the
Gleaner
and talk to Bill Bilson even though he’s a fucking stooge for the JLP and the American government who’s always feeding that guy at the
New York Times
some horseshit.
But he’s essentially a good guy and he’s always good for an anonymous quote or two and all I want to do is ask him if Josey Wales couldn’t remember what day it was when the Singer got shot (but what a tragedy it was), how come he could tell me they shot him just as he was about to hand his manager some grapefruit even though nobody knew this little fact other than the Singer, his manager and me, since I’m the only person they have spoken to about it. I mean, it’s not like it’s a secret or anything but it’s the kind of detail that only slips loose after you’ve done the long hard work of making an interview subject comfortable.

Of course I’m not going to mention the grapefruit, only that this don seems to have a really intimate knowledge of the ins and outs of this assassination attempt, which by the way I’m not allowed to call it. The last time I asked the Singer who tried to kill him, he looked at me, smiled and said that is a top secret. I didn’t bring this up with Josey Wales either because I dunno, last time I checked I didn’t have FUCKING PANSY tattooed on my forehead.

Shit, I can’t keep my thoughts straight. This is not what happened. I mean, this hadn’t happened yet, I’m still at the edge of the Eight Lanes looking for Shotta Sherrif, not Josey Wales. Why the fuck am I thinking about Josey Wales? He’s not even the kind of guy that anybody’s mind runs on and I’ll bet anything he prefers it that way. Josey Wales is Copenhagen City. That was afterward, Alex Pierce. What you learned in the Eight Lanes sent you to Copenhagen City just to clear shit up. But first I was in the Eight Lanes. And if I was in the Eight Lanes I was there to see Shotta Sherrif. I wanted to know if the peace treaty was still on, given the outburst of killings on Orange Street and Pechon Street last week, where a JLP youth shot a PNP youth over his girlfriend. And that last showdown with the police where the boys in black and red recovered a stash of guns and ammo the likes of which you can’t even find in the U.S. National Guard.

Of course I could never ask a question like that. After passing the welcoming committee that gave me the skinny on Priest, I found him sitting under a street lamp waiting for me. In fact, that’s what he said, Brethren, me did a wait ’pon the I long time. The I meaning you, meaning me. Ghetto
communiqué, more backward and more forward than the phone. He was just sitting there on a steel barstool from an actual bar, thirty feet from the corner where I came in, smoking a cigarette, drinking a Heineken and watching the domino game play itself out. He looked like the kind of man you go up to and ask, Hey, you seen this dude named Shotta Sherrif?

—You know that’s not the place one expects to see a shiny barstool.

—Or the second coming of Jesus. With a tape recorder.

—I get that a lot.

—You get what?

—Never mind.

He also knew I came to talk about the peace treaty. Turns out he and Papa-Lo ended up in the slammer the same time, right about when goons tried to take out the Singer, and like any group of reasonable men who happen to be thrown together they started to reason. Next thing you know, there’s a peace treaty with even singer Jacob Miller writing a song about it—okay, not great—and the Singer coming back to seal the deal with another concert. I wanted to know what really kicked off the treaty and if the future of it’s already gone to shit. I asked him about the night before the army killed those boys at Green Bay, the thing that kicked off this peace treaty in the first place. Had he heard of Junior Soul? You can’t trust that a gunman with a name like a doo-wop singer actually exists, but surely if he did, Shotta Sherrif must have heard about him. I mean, he’s crucial to the birth of this peace treaty too, well, in a fucked-up kinda way.

—No, star, me no know a who that? And that nuh JLP business?

—They said Junior Soul was a PNP goon.

—Goon?

—Shady character.

—Shady?

—Never mind. So he wasn’t from around here?

—Nobody from here ever name so, Jesus boy.

That was pretty much all she wrote with Shotta Sherrif. Before I asked him if I could speak to anybody else he grabbed me, looked around to see if anybody was watching and said, This yah treaty have fi work, my youth.
It have to. He was almost pleading. I asked his men some silly questions about if they knew that the “More More More” singer was actually a porn star and left.

Priest found me somebody even more useful days before. He took me down some really scummy, shit-leaking lane in the JLP half of Kingston to meet one of the men who got away from Green Bay, my first time meeting a guy from the actual Wang Gang. He took me to a bar less than twenty feet away and just started talking. Word was this Junior Soul guy had slipped himself into Southside, a JLP area, making pals with the Wang Gang, letting slip that the army was short on men to guard a work site out in Green Bay. Junior Soul linked them up with a Mata-Hari from the Kingston hotel who told the boys they would get guns soon, along with three hundred U.S. bucks each, then fucked three or four of them to seal the deal. Priest told me about Junior Soul but the survivor told me about Sally Q, such an un-Jamaican handle. Poor kid, probably not even seventeen yet, but kinda old for a Jamdown kid to be first tasting pussy.

So this Junior Soul guy shows up January 14, he remembers, well, he remembered after I gave him my pack of Marlboros, seventy bucks and the Gerry Rafferty cassette I didn’t even remember I had in my knapsack. He showed up with two ambulances
it did look kinda suspicious
the kid says, but to tell a young shotta that there’re guns for the taking if you only come and get it, it’s like telling a junkie there’s some horse in a dumpster down the alley with nobody’s name on it. He said something and it was crucial motherfucking info and I can’t remember what. Have to check my notes.
Most of we was Rastas, you know, not labourites
. That’s it.
We never did inna the politics and the politricks, seen?
Not in nobody pocket so we work for either side, seen?
But it was January, right after Christmas, and everybody knew that nobody in the ghetto would have any money, worse, the Wang Gang had burned all bridges with the other gangs in Kingston.

So new housing site go up and them looking for yardie to guard it, but them not giving you no gun so you have to find you own gun. Me know it never sound too right, but when baby mother up north tell a man she need baby feed’n and baby mother down south say you pickney need school uniform, you just don’t think certain things. Anyway, this man with gun did link with the soldier and me no know, soldier not so Quick Draw McGraw with them trigger, you understand. If it was police me would a tell Junior Soul ’bout him bombocloth and beat him up too. But we never have no need to worry ’bout soldier as long as we stay out of them way. As me say, we never did inna the politics thing. But me no know, from the soldier say that all of we should stand up over there, by the target, I just, I just drop like me faint, drop, even right before they start to fire. Me crawl through macka bush, and me did barefoot too. Don’t think me breathe till me get ’way from that army land and into the cane piece. The man them did all have helicopter to search for we. Is a wonder how them no find we since all that macka cut up me foot so bad that me leave a trail of bloody footprint all the way to safety. But me did know Green Bay. Is me save four man by leading them out of the bush, into the cane piece, thank Jesus that the cane did grow tall enough to hide we from the helicopter, and all the way to downtown to Sister Benedict school. One of we manage to make out the other way to the sea and two fisherman pull him out of the water. For once we call police. More time them would be only glad to kill we, but if is one thing that make them blood run cold is when soldier get to do it first, since the only thing police hate worse than gunman is soldier. You believe it, me brethren? Police is who come and protect we!