Kingston Noir (24 page)
“But are you sure?” the other person had asked as she had prepared to get out of the car—the driver had in fact been Andrea, dear Andrea Harvey now sobbing quietly in the third row on the right, clasping her hands beneath her chin and rocking back and forth as her parents, beside her, hold her, or at least her father does. “Are you sure? You seemed really upset when Peter said—”
But she had almost snapped at Andrea as she occasionally snapped at him: “I’ll call you tomorrow, man. Thanks for the ride, Andrea, but really, man, I’ll be fine. Good night.” And had walked away from the departing car and—perhaps more rapidly because she had indeed been on the verge of tears, or, in fact, had actually been crying, thinking of some of the things that Peter had, so unexpectedly, said during their foolish argument—she had walked faster, faster, and that quickly, without of course at all expecting to, had come upon—Them.
Them,
there and—there.
Black, brown. No, not a woman and a man, but—the gardener’s—the gardener’s
nephew
? And her (but
No.
No. No no
no
)—her
brother
?
There. In the concrete washroom smelling as always of chlorine and—and what else? Flesh? Sweat? And something else, the smell of—
Oh yes. My God. The smell of—
Unmistakable.
That
smell, and men. Two men. Flesh. Sweat.
In the concrete washroom, the first and only time she had seen her brother’s … her brother’s … yes, bending; yes, engorged; yes, and the black bwoy, the gardener’s nephew, holding it in his hand, in his
hand
, as he had moved and rocked and pushed behind, behind, behind her brother. Behind Leighton Andrew Shepherd. Her brother.
She had looked at him. She had not looked at him.
He had looked at her. He had—
(But then she had been so upset upon leaving the party that she
had not even thought to call, and would he have heard his phone ringing anyway if she had called? Would he have heeded the ringing? Would he have stopped? Where was his phone anyway, just then? And would he have cared?)
And Michael—
Not again. No. After that evening, none of them had ever seen him again. Never seen again the nasty-dutty black bwoy who somehow in one of those smell-and-suck moments, one of those oh-my-God-he-is-
inside
-me moments, had become to him, finally, “Michael.” Not the nasty-dutty black bwoy, but … “Michael,” he had thought and thinks now in the church, his parents bent beside him. Yes.
She had looked at him that way every day she had seen him for the couple of years she’d had left to live. She had looked and
not
looked at him that way especially in his dreams: dreams of broken twisting stairs, dreams of drowning … dreams of reaching hands cut off at the wrists. Dreams of black bwoy kisses, thrusts, embraces. Dreams of
that
one. Michael. And dreams of faces. Hers. His.
There are times when you know that you should not be standing—somehow managing to stand—during your sister’s funeral, feeling glad, as you do now, and happy—oh, rass, tell the truth,
relieved
—as you feel now, that she is dead. Though you are sad, devastated (well, no, actually, much much more than devastated), that she died as she did and that, oh God, you never had a chance to say goodbye or I love you, or a chance to tell her how much how much how
much
… and only you can know what the rest of that sentence would say—you know that you should not feel this most secret feeling of deliverance, yes God, and safety, God, that she who knew about
that
and
him
and all of
it
, though it was only one evening and little more in fact than an hour, if that, is now dead. Though you may hate the roses that surround her corpse and wonder why the bomborassclaat your parents chose all these outdated Anglican songs for the organist to play as the minister proceeds onward and onward still, you know that, though this secret mixture of hatred and relief just may kill you one day, if you are fortunate, it will not. It may not kill you, this enormous hatred and relief, if you … if you
what
? Yes, what? But you do not know the answer to that question right now. Do not know it, and will not, until—yes, you think, closing your eyes briefly, exactly: until. Until that day, whichever day that will be. And then, dear Lord. Oh,
then,
Jesus. Fury. Fury like fucking. Glory.
But for now, perhaps, for him—for all of them—what follows will be enough: the moment when the organ begins once again to wail and soar as the minister’s voice carries over all of their heads its long and incantatory litany of woe; the ancient keening of
On this day, dearly beloved
, and
We ask this of our Lord
,
Heavenly Father,
toward climax unto crescendo unto the deeper breath that is no breath at all—that is in truth scarcely a sigh, the gasp and gape of loss: the loss that unleashes all manner of good sense from the hands, that undoes the reliably quiet dignity of the wrists, and rips open the chest for the returning raven’s descending glide
in
and
in
.
His mother has begun to shudder and give way even more beside him, he feels it; his father has at last slackened and surrendered his shoulders to the raven’s claws and the dip of its narrow beak over the exposed neck so pathetic and vulnerable before the soundless glide: this he knows also. Knows it as he feels the hand that cannot possibly be his hand, but is, rise not to his face (to his shock now wet, then wetter, then warmer still), but to his mother’s shaking arm; his hand that speaks to her the words that his mouth, so dry, unlike his face, cannot.
She would not have wanted those roses.
And what would … what would the nasty-dutty … what would
Michael
have thought of—what would Michael have felt about the—
It is only then that he notices that Michael’s uncle is not anywhere in the church.
But now—is it in fact now that he becomes aware of that great dark bird—the raven, perhaps, or some other creature—descending over his head, as if to enclose his wet, warm face between its wings?
And then what will happen next?
he thinks. But never mind: for, as he already knows, there are times when, even though you are secretly glad someone is dead, and even though the brief grip of a beautiful nasty-dutty black bwoy
Michael
’s arms about your straining body reached deeper into your
cunt
, yes,
say it!
—deeper into your brown male cunt than you could possibly have imagined, to the point even of bringing you dreams of hood smell and the incipient taste of piss as you bend once again to suck and kiss it, you know that somehow, even with the great dark bird descending over you and your mother and father giving way next to you, you will somehow continue standing. And, at the dreadful service’s end, you will walk with everyone else out of the church, away from the awful flowers. Away from that thing dressed up to be her—the thing that is
not
her, no, and that will never speak. At least, so he hopes. He hopes it will never speak. Let him believe so, at any rate: believe in the possibilities of the spreading day outside and all the silences and accompanying noise, as the dark bird’s wings now almost completely cover his face and its beak poises as if to take aim where his skull is thinnest, as it now wraps itself entirely, ever so gently, in the way of a shroud, about his head.
BY
C
HRISTOPHER
J
OHN
F
ARLEY
Trench Town
T
here have been so many lies told about my late brother in the Jamaican press that I feel compelled to send this e-mail to the
Gleaner
, especially since many of the falsehoods originated with me.
I don’t expect you to publish all of this, or even most of it, but rest assured that I will post the entirety of it on my new website:
TheRealProofWatson.com
. Unfortunately,
ProofWatson.com
had already been taken and is selling unauthorized paraphernalia—hash pipes, roach clips, rolling paper, etc.—bearing my brother’s image. My lawyers are looking into it.
In the wake of my recent early retirement—something that the
Gleaner
issued not a tweet about—I have finally been able to speak freely about some of the cases that I worked on with the assistance of my brother Proof. I had always wanted to be a writer of some sort—buy me a few Red Stripes and I’ll recite most of the Claude McKay canon—but I was derailed from that track by a family tragedy early in my life, and any poems I might have had in my heart I covered with my badge. Surprisingly, in the wake of the media frenzy brought about when tales of some of his exploits surfaced, many of my colleagues on the Jamaican Constabulary Force, some of whom I served with for a decade, were stunned to hear that Proof and I were related. I would have thought our shared surname would have been a clue, but following up on evidence was never a strong suit of members of the department. Which is precisely why my brother’s mysterious gifts were so extraordinarily useful during our collaborations …
On my first morning as assistant commissioner, I decided to enter the Kingston Central Police Station through the back door. The rainy season had begun, and it seemed the showers would never stop, and the wet had soaked my uniform to my skin in just the brief time it took me to dash from the front door of my apartment building to the front seat of my secondhand Fiat 500. I was particularly perturbed by the drenching because I had gone to great difficulty to iron my clothes the night before, hoping, almost certainly in vain, that creased pants and a pressed collar would boost my standing with veterans of the force who had been dismayed about having a thirty-year-old as the second-in-command, and someone largely raised in America, besides.
So I went round to the back alley, intending to dry off in one of the rear rooms before making a grand, sartorially correct entrance. But before going into the stocky brick-walled headquarters, I spied in a back alley strewn with garbage a rastaman with Rapunzel-length dreads taking the kind of hits that would make a cricket ball wince. Two men held the rasta’s arms as a third delivered head and body shots; a fourth man watched, every so often punching numbers into an incongruously pink cell phone. To my shock and disgust, the assailants were cops. The sun was just rising, and the rain was still falling, and so it was hard to see exactly who was doing what to whom. But as I sprinted through the mud to offer assistance, the identities of all the figures in this drama soon became clear. I recognized the one delivering the blows as a man everyone called Officer Coconut, a sour brute with a roundish skull and wispy hair like his namesake; the man on the pink phone was my superior, Commissioner Manatt.
“Wa a gwaan?” I asked. (When I’m excited, my patois tends to come out.)
The commissioner put away his phone. The officers let the rasta drop and, limp as a banana peel, he tumbled into the commissioner, who pushed him roughly, face first, into the muddy ground.
“’Im two ears hard,” the commissioner growled, giving a dismissive wave to the beaten man.
With that, he lit a cigarette, looked at me, and laughed; his officers joined in. The commissioner had an acne-scarred face and a nicotine-stained voice and his laugh was anything but mirthful. I always did dislike him—never trust a man who enjoys wearing epaulets.
“A good mek ’im tengle up,” the commissioner continued. “Dat deh a fi uno!”
He thrust a soggy manila folder into my arms, flicked away his cigarette, and went into the station and out of the rain. His men followed him, with Officer Coconut shooting me a last smirk before closing the double doors behind him.
I bent over the rasta, rolling him faceup. He was shoeless, as usual, and his black shirt and jeans were caked in mud. And of course, though it had been a number of years, I instantly recognized his thick-featured face: the full lips, the flat pharaonic nose, the heavy serious brow. In fact, his looks very closely resembled my own. I knew him all too well, even better than the others.
“Do you have a spliff?” my brother Proof asked.
The commissioner had given me a case to solve on this, my first day in my exalted office. This was preemptive punishment, of course, an attempt to taint the golden bwoy before he became the heir apparent. Personally investigating a crime was substantially below my new rank, but after what I had witnessed in the alley, I quickly decided I couldn’t trust whatever was going on to anyone else. Officers all around stared as I led Proof through the station, and the buzz continued, like the sound of angry bees, as I ushered the mud-dripping dreadlock into my office. I had been set up in a glass cubicle that was less private than I desired, and smaller than I deserved given my new station. My office was full of light, but it might as well have been a dank dungeon with bars; I felt like I was both incarcerated and on display, like Rilke’s panther. I had moved in days ago, but I had yet to unpack my boxes, and I had put but a single picture on my desk. As Proof dried off and cleaned up, I pulled down the blinds in my fishbowl workspace, and then flipped through the manila folder to familiarize myself with the case.
The folder contained a small sheath of damp papers. On top was a Post-it from the commissioner’s secretary that the prime minister’s office had called—this case was high priority. Beneath that was a news clipping from the front page of the Sunday
Observer
featuring a woman, maybe twenty years old, with cocoa-colored skin and sea-green eyes with a slight Asian tilt. She had a long, lithe body and was looking back at the camera over her shoulder with a Mona Lisa smile. She was wearing red running shorts, track cleats, and a midriff-bearing, crimson jersey with the number 45. She had the sort of face that launched ships, the kind of behind that inspired dancehall hits, and a pair of legs that looked as sweet as stalks of sugarcane.