Color Him Dead (10 page)

“I need no rum or fish,” said Drew.

Chaka’s voice hardened. “Look man, Seright? Well, I play no games, not with a
blanc.
You think I only guess why you came? No, man, I learn things from people and I put them together.
Coutay,
you came on flight fifty-one from Barbados. You catch taxi belong man name of Gregory, tell him you wish to see the capital. You ask questions and learn that Ba’ngton gone to Europe with sick wife, so you no longer wish to see our capital with its lovely white mansions and its dying black babies. You learn that Ba’ngton live in the bush when he home, but Gregory he will not carry you. You learn that his wife lives on an island, so you go to Petty-lay, look at the island through the glasses, try to rent a boat. Nobody carry you, for it is Ba’ngton land and nobody approach Ba’ngton land at night. A painter would now have decided to paint some other scenery. But you, you talk to a girl, Leta, you draw her picture and tell her you wish to paint on Ba’ngton’s Isle. She tells you men have died there, that trees grow from the tombs of dead soldiers, voices call at night, and tunnels beneath the land hide the bodies of dead Ba’ngton slaves. Still you wish to go, so Leta has her cousin to take you over. But on the island you paint very little. Mostly you wait. I wait also in my bus, and I wonder why you wait. And today, Leta comes ashore because you send her away, and my mind tells me something will happen. So I go over and catch you in the fight with the red man.” He paused for a drink. “I liked the fight, particularly when you strike out after Doxie give you his best. He does not expect people to get up after they have been kicked.”

Drew’s mind was racing. Lord, here he’d been squatting on the island, feeling so goddam clever and inconspicuous, and all the time he might as well have been wearing a neon sign on his back saying:
I’m up to no good.
Chaka’s information had so far been chillingly correct.

“Go on,” he said.

“Later I found your gun, and I ask myself: Why he didn’t kill Doxie? Then I understand. Doxie is the little one, the barracuda, and you saving you stren’th for the shark.”

“Ian Barrington?”

“Weh.”

Drew smiled thinly in the dark; he was not surprised. Given the same circumstance, with nothing more than surface appearances, he might have drawn the same conclusion. But now Chaka was waiting. What to do? Confirm or deny? Neither, he told himself, let it ride, play along, and hope to hell you’re not getting sucked into quicksand.

“You mentioned help,” said Drew.

Chaka leaned back into a more relaxed position. “There is a small French island thirty miles from here. When you ready to leave, I take you there and give you the papers you need to stay.”

“After I knock off Barrington,” said Drew.

“Weh.”

“Can’t you kill him yourself?” asked Drew.

“With this—” Chaka held up one hand with fingers curved “—I could crush his head like a dry gourd. But he knows me, and I cannot get near enough. No black man gets near him.”

Drew felt as though he were teetering on the edge of a snake pit. Already he knew enough to be dangerous to Chaka. More knowledge could only make it worse. Still if he accepted the identity of Barrington-killer, he’d have to pretend an interest in the other’s motives. “Why do you want him dead?”

“You know the man, and you ask this?” The question was rhetorical, for Chaka continued without pause. ”
Coutay,
once I work for Ba’ngton, like my mother and father and their fathers before them. Always we have been Ba’ngton’s, like animals in the pen. But special, you see, because one Ba’ngton a hundred years ago liked to watch his slaves fight. He say to himself, I will breed a team of giant fighters. He never think that someday a giant may step on his master.” Abruptly, he turned to Drew. “You know this name, Chaka, where it coming from?”

“No,” said Drew.

“T’ch’ka,” pronounced Chaka, clicking his tongue against his palate. “Ruled the Zulu empire a hundred years ago. I took his name when I left Ba’ngton, where I was called Albert. Now I call myself Chaka because these people cannot speak the Zulu. I am a chief, but only of a few charcoal burners and fishermen. I command them to fish, they fish. Mend nets, they mend. Bring rum, yes, and carry the guns which I buy with money from the rum. But fight against the whites? Ah, their eyes go round, they have fear. Always the soldiers have come when white man’s blood runs. But they will learn this is no longer true. The Federation is dead, and the British will not fight for this poor island. With Ba’ngton gone, the others will not stay, and there is all that land to divide among my people.”

“Are you a communist?”

“You wish me to be a communist? All right, I bow to Moscow. You wish me to be Ras Tafari, I bow to Addis Ababa. You wish me to bow to a dead dog, I do that too if it will help my people.”

Drew released a yawn which was not all assumed. Nervous tension was boiling inside him; he couldn’t think in the presence of this hulk—he wanted to get away without having to make a definite commitment to help. He pleaded a headache, remarked to Chaka that he would sleep now and talk more later, since there were many things yet to be worked out. Chaka reluctantly agreed, and Drew stepped out of the cab. The engine started with a cloud of blue smoke and Drew remembered: “Hey, my bullets!”

The truck moved forward and Chaka’s arm came out of the window. The lead pellets clattered over the highway. Drew picked them up, thinking of trust and friendship. Neither of those could exist between black and
blanc;
only marriages of convenience and passion, like his and Chaka’s, his and Leta’s.

He hobbled up the path as dawn filled the eastern sky with a color of spoiled salmon. Tall palms arched overhead, rising from the lighter green of banana leaves. Here and there a cocoa tree stood with pods appended to its trunk like afterthoughts.

Chaka’s project receded to the back of his mind, and once again he was filled with the purpose which had sustained him for so many years. Edith’s memory … that was his problem now. What was her doctor’s name? Ainslee, Aintree? Close enough, Leta would know where to find him.

He dreaded leaving the bush and going to the capital. Nature was constant; grass knew no fashion, it was always green, and birds sang the same songs forever. But cities changed, new gadgets appeared, new idioms, new mannerisms. And people … God, he’d have to stay out of sight. Leta’s barbering had made him look exactly like the picture on his wanted poster.

Ainslee was the kind of physician you call Doc instead of Doctor—a bullock-headed man with a red face, curling sandy hair, blond mustache, and a basketball-sized paunch which hung over the belt of his green Bermuda shorts. His bedside manner would have been improved by a shave and some breath-sweetener, but Drew was relieved when Doc accepted Drew’s story that he’d received the leg injury—and by implication, the cheek scar—in a car wreck. Doc pulled his swivel chair up to the examining table, palmed Drew’s leg, poked it so that it swung like a limp, dead tentacle, then leaned back and ignited a foul cigar butt. “I think you’ve got a Pott’s fracture. Can you fly to Trinidad for X-rays?”

“No. What’s a Pott’s fracture?”

Doc leaned over, grunting as he settled his paunch between his thighs, and held the glowing end of his cigar uncomfortably near Drew’s ankle. “You have two bones in your lower leg, the fibula and the tibia. When the break occurs simultaneously in both bones just above the ankle joint, that’s a Pott’s fracture. That’s what happened to you. Obviously it wasn’t properly splinted, and the flesh was badly torn. The lack of sensation indicates nerve damage as well. Come into the hospital. We’ll immobilize the leg in traction—”

“No.”

Doc frowned at Drew through a haze of smoke, then shrugged. “I can bind it with tape to give it strength, but I’m not optimistic—”

“Okay, tape it.”

While Doc applied the spiral of tape, Drew tried to think of an unobtrusive way to bring Edith into the conversation. But it was Doc, finished with the leg and fingering Drew’s battered scalp, who provided the opening:

“Contusions, lumps, cuts, nothing serious. Where did you run into Doxie?”

Drew kept his voice casual. “On Barrington’s Isle. I was spear-fishing, ran across Mrs. Barrington, we talked, Doxie ordered me off, but I didn’t like his tone. We fought.”

Doc nodded. “I knew I’d seen that kind of head injury before. Those sharp little heels have brought me more than one patient. One of his victims died, another drools at the mouth and has to be fed by his wife.” Doc threw his cigar butt at a cuspidor and missed. “Can’t hate the poor bugger, I suppose. Years ago he got into it with a man’s wife, and the man fixed Doxie with his cutlass. Brutal job. He came to me once for help, but there was nothing left—”

“Yes.” Drew wanted to get back to Edith. “Mrs. Barrington told me you’d treated her for amnesia two … three years ago.”

Doc reddened, coughed, fluttered his fingers searchingly over his shirt pockets, then opened his desk drawer. His voice was gruff and defensive. “Two years ago September.” He lifted out a cigar and glared at Drew. “Brought to me with a simple breakdown due to extreme emotional shock. Therapy called for rest and sympathy, but Ian hustled her off and they shot a lot of blasted electricity into her skull.” Doc lit the new cigar, just as foul as the old one. “You owe me two dollars,” he said, then added in a tone of mild apology: “It’s against my policy to discuss other patients.”

Drew pulled out his wallet and pretended to search through a sheaf of garish West Indian currency. Hoping his voice was casual, he asked: “In a case like hers, how do you bring back the memory?”

“You wait. You might speed it up with gentle reminders of the past, relive pleasant things she’s done before. But only pleasant things. An unpleasant shock might send her off the deep end again.”

In the street, Drew found that his taped leg now bore a small fraction of his weight. The black wool suit Leta had borrowed from her cousin pinched his crotch and held his shoulders in a full-nelson. But he felt good; he knew what to do about Edith. He would bring back her memory; she would be fully alert to the evil she had committed, and she would understand the revenge he was exercising. She was a witch, and she must confess her witchery before she was tied to the stake and the faggot lit beneath her….

But first he had to learn what had set her off.

Inside the tiny Carnegie library, Drew shuffled through a dusty file of two-year-old newspapers and found nothing which might have shocked Edith out of her mind. But two were missing: September 5 and September 21. A yellow woman, who looked as dusty as her shelves, suggested that the
Voice of St. Patricia
could fill the gap. Drew shrank from submitting himself to the professional curiosity of newspapermen. Perhaps Leta knew someone on the
Voice
editorial staff.

The little rum shop where he’d left her seemed dark after the glaring sun of the street. A red-cheeked cable ship crewman sat at the bar with his knees caught between those of a chocolate girl in a white jersey. Leta sat at a corner table, shredding a napkin and rolling it between her fingers. He wondered how she felt, waiting for him in the place where she had once awaited girl-hungry sailors and yachtsmen.

Her eyes lighted up as she saw him, then filmed over with a guarded wariness, as though she were not sure what changes had come over him during his absence. He sat down across from her and asked if she knew anyone with the
Voice of St. Patricia.
Yes, she said, she knew an American who worked on the paper. She’d known him for two years, and he’d once given her a pair of red panties and silver earrings.

If the man had been here two years, Drew reasoned, he would not have seen that incriminating photo which hung in three thousand post offices. He explained what he wanted and asked Leta either to bring the papers or the man himself. She left and returned with a tall man in his middle twenties with a waxy strand of blond hair in his eyes. He sat down without invitation and said he couldn’t understand how Drew had escaped notice, since any white man on the island rated a line of copy each time he sneezed. He pulled a notebook from his pocket. “Name, occupation—?”

Drew stretched out his hand and took the pad. “I’m on a secret government mission. Did you bring the papers?”

Blinking as though a bright light had been flashed in his eyes, the man drew the rolled up newspapers from his hip pocket and laid them on the table. “Whatever’s in there, it’s the biggest coverup since Pompeii. I sneaked these out of the editor’s file.”

The issue of September 5 was a chronicle of death and grief. Four members of a family of six had died of food poisoning, and the police had arrested the cook, said to be a practitioner of Obeah. A pan man in a steel band had died of fever, and a colleague had said, “Well, he’d served his time.” Two missing fishermen had been given up after two weeks; a stowaway had died of pneumonia in the refrigerated hold of a banana ship; two fourteen-year-old servant girls had died in a fire—

He opened the second paper and found the same recital of death and accident. He was scanning the legal notices when Edith’s name leaped out from a column of agate type:

He stared at it for a long time, trying to remember where he’d seen those names before. Of course! Those two fourteen-year-olds who had died in the fire. How had Edith gotten mixed up in that?

He needed more information, but he didn’t trust the newspaperman. He handed the papers back and thanked the man. When he’d gone, Drew turned to Leta.

“I want a lawyer. A barrister, that is, who isn’t tied up with the government or with Ian Barrington.”

She looked thoughtful. “There is a black man, Guillard D’Arco. Sometimes he speaks in the
savanne,
tells the people about Abraham Lincoln and asks them to vote for him, instead of as the
blancs
say. Sometimes he calls Barrington names which make the people walk away from fear to be near him. One time, when Doxie kill a banana worker in a fight, Guillard take him before the judge and Barrington must pay the family—”