Pynter Bender (24 page)

Pynter walked to the middle of the yard and turned his scooter over with his feet. He glanced at Peter. His brother crossed his legs and turned his head away.

Over the next few days, word spread across the valley then spilled out beyond it that Old Hope was going to do battle at the crossroads. That whether or not the men of Déli Morne were brave enough to leave their homes and face them, Old Hope – the smallest village above the canes – was going to be there. And to hell with the curfew and the soldiers and everything else.

They'd gathered the wads of mud-soaked sacking to protect themselves, and gallons of tar and pitch-oil. They'd dug a pond at Cross Gap Junction, half filled it with water and laid a few large stones around the edges.

Coxy Levid sat in the middle of all the preparations, a cigarette smouldering between his fingers, nodding at the sheets of canvas and hessian the men passed over to him. He dipped a finger in the fuel mix and smelled it. He crouched over the things they pulled from sacks and shielded them from the view of curious eyes, flicking his ash and smiling.

Sunday brought with it the sullen-faced anger of the women. There were quarrels everywhere across the valley – tearful voices overridden by the edgy belligerence of men.

Late evening, Pynter went to the back of the house, stripped and tipped two buckets of water over himself. He turned round to reach for his clothing and saw Tan Cee standing in front of him. She'd made a thin line of her lips. Her eyes were red and staring.

‘You sempteen soon,' she said.

‘Thought 'twas only Deeka believe dat,' he said. ‘Thought 'twas only …'

‘Didn say I believe it. I want you to stay home, dat's all I sayin.'

He ignored the square of cloth she was holding out for him to dry himself with. He began pulling on his clothes. They were the loosest he could lay his hands on. He'd also taken his pair of running shoes.

‘S'why I have to go,' he said.

He felt the tremoring in Tan Cee's shoulders as he brushed past her.

He took the mud track down to the river through the canes.

The clearing he stepped into was like the inside of a church, the tangled arch of leaves a fluttering weave of light above him. The smell of the place had changed – a mix of mould and mint – and there was no longer the print of a man's body on the leaves. The light was bottle-green and shimmering like liquid.

Arilon and Frigo were waiting at the entrance. In the fading light, they climbed the foothills up through the high forests then down again, pausing briefly amongst the wild breadfruit plantations of a dismal valley that Old Hope called The Stoop. Frigo had drawn his shirt close. Arilon was wiping his sweating neck with his bare hands. ‘What you fink goin happm, Pynter?'

Pynter turned and headed towards the voices and torches at Cross Gap Junction. He could tell them, even before they joined the throbbing, wavering mass of people there, that if they survived the night, neither they nor Old Hope was going to be the same again.

‘Y'all know how dis Guy-Fox-burnin' come 'bout?' Frigo said.

‘Tell us,' Arilon said.

‘Well, Guy Fawkes was one of us, yunno. A blackfella from dese parts, one o' dem man who walk. He had a lil bizness wiv de Queen-in-Englan'. How you call dat, Paintuh?'

‘Love affair?'

‘Uh-huh! She was married to the King, you see, and he was de cook. So it had to be a love affair an' nuffing mo', y'unnerstan? Problem was de fella never satisfy. He feel dat since he the one to make de Queen feel good, he should get promote from cook to King. An' 'twasn't even as if he could cook proper food. S'only man food he could cook. Anyway, he get rude. He start makin fuss. He want mo' consideration. He don' wan' to cook nobody no mo' food. Is he dem s'pose to cook for. So guess what happm?'

‘What happm?' Arilon said.

‘He challenge de King fo' a fight. Well,' Frigo shrugged, ‘de King bus' his arse an' jail de fella fo' life.'

‘Thought dey burn 'im,' Pynter said.

Frigo shook his head. ‘Nuh! Is Old Hope people burn 'im. Every year we burn de fella fo' de embarrassment he cause us. Fo' de bad name he give to Ole Hope man.'

Arilon dropped a hand on Frigo's shoulder. ‘S'awright, fella; you get yuh revenge tonight.'

Dusk had begun to smudge the leaves by the time they got to Cross Gap. It had taken them an hour to descend the foothills and another to make their way around the tiny village of Bayo above the southern valleys, where the river flowed away in a giddy haze towards the swamplands and the sea.

The men had already lined up drums of fuel. At either end, dousers stood around a large metal tank of water, so that they could kill the runaway fires and stray flames which, unattended, would chew into the woodwork of the nearby houses and nibble at the dead leaves of the cocoa plantation and turn the night into a blazing disaster.

There was a buzz in the crowd which seemed to rise up from the bowels of the earth and fill the air with a quivering expectancy. A voice just in front of them rose above the din.

‘Kelo, you sonuvabitch – go burn your wife.'

‘Nice night for burning all kind o' wickedness,' came the reply.

‘Perfect.' The men hugged and laughed, then lost themselves amongst the suck and surge of bodies.

The two sides faced each other. The fighting men from Déli Morne had been coming year after year to try and wrest control of the celebration, so that Old Hope could be reminded of the youth called Solomon who danced and burned on Guy Fawkes Night in '56, and the part that Coxy Levid played in it. They were there to rip that big red star from Coxy Levid's padded crotch and crush it, the star on which Coxy would flick the match that would lick the wick that would make the flame that would pass the fire to the drum of tar and petrol.

People began to rush away and Pynter moved with them, his hand on Arilon's shoulder. He knew that the seconds it took
Coxy to dip his hand into his drum and raise it with a fireball for the first explosive throw was all the time they had to find themselves some cover. They sheltered in the shadows of the cocoa trees that leaned over the road. From time to time Pynter scanned the edges of the crowd, his heart a hammer in his chest.

‘No soldiers?' Frigo said, his forehead glistening in the gloom. Pynter did not answer him.

A rain of fireballs brightened the night. A sudden uproar as one of the men caught fire, was dragged to earth, doused with water, then rolled rapidly in the dust.

‘Supposin?'

Pynter lifted a staying hand at Frigo. Something in the sound, in the feel of the crowd, had changed. A woman pulled her stall of roasted corn from the path of the flow of people. Her torch toppled over and became a bright, amber bloom as it struck the asphalt.

Pynter said, ‘They here.'

The vehicles had rolled in silently. He had not heard the sound of engines in the distance. Frigo ducked into the crowd, disappeared a while before resurfacing beside him. ‘Twelve Lan' Rover,' he said. ‘Mebbe more. Dey cut off de engine. Dey push dem in.'

The jeeps emerged like submarines from the mass of milling bodies. They stopped a little way ahead of Pynter and his friend, blocking the road from their end. Then, as if the soldiers had rehearsed it, the engines and the headlamps were switched on. The glare cancelled the yellow flickering glow of the masantorches and hardened the shadows on the faces of the padded men standing with their shoulders fused together.

Perhaps the soldiers had not expected this: the padded men, so much larger than they really were. The oil drums filled with flames behind them. The steady gazes. Perhaps their months of warring with the people of the north had taught them something about this sudden quiet. That all of this – the slow circling of the crowd, the mild-mannered question from a woman somewhere
in the crowd, ‘Which one o' you deh murder lil Jordan?' – was no less than their first step on the gentle road to hell. The soldiers froze and looked back at their vehicles.

A shout rose up from somewhere, then a gasp – as if the air itself above them heaved. A streak of yellow turned their heads towards the sky.

An effigy was sailing down from the coconut tree above the road. Veins of living orange had already begun to spread through the white jacket and trousers and consume the arms and legs. They recognised the figure of Victor, and felt the hurl of laughter hit the air. Two soldiers rushed forward to beat out the fire. The effigy exploded and sent them scuttling backwards. Now hands were pointing at the crab of a figure skittering down the tree.

‘Kicker,' Frigo shouted. It was Jordan's little brother.

Three men in plain clothes leapt out of the crowd, almost as if they'd been spat out by the mass of milling bodies. Pynter launched himself after them, dodging the arm that shot out to drag him down. His eyes met the soldier's briefly. He brought up his elbow, caught him on the jaw just below the ear. The man's feet folded under him, his windmilling arms bringing down the other just ahead of him. The other man was bearing down on Kicker, but the boy reached the ground before he could get to him and scuttled off on all fours. Pynter had just about caught up with the soldier when all of a sudden the soldier seemed to be in a pool of yellow flames. He was alight from the moment the fireball struck him.

Now the shouting stopped. Pynter grabbed the man and pulled him down. He rolled him on the earth, kept rolling him until a shock of water struck them. Then he was up, swinging right then left, as another figure lunged towards him.

He allowed the soldier to catch hold of his shirt. And then he pulled the trick that every child in Old Hope knew from the time they learned to walk. He tore his shirt front open and slipped the
garment off his shoulders, leaving the man standing with only the torn shirt in his hands.

A sky-splitting roar swept him up as he plunged into the night.

F
OOTFALLS ON
the road below too smudged to make much sense of. The far-off soughing of the canes like a low receding tide. A woman's laugher, then a girl's, that were foreign to Old Hope. In this gloom, even the sounds of the house were different. The humming of the roof was harsher. The eaves protested in the wind. The floorboards creaked in ways they had not done before.

Deeka's face was above him. He lifted a hand, touched her, and it was real. When he looked again she was no longer there.

This was not his mother's bed. It smelled of camphor, Vaporub and methylated spirits. Deeka was a high dark shape above him again. She said something, and a hustle of feet rushed in and filled the room. His mother was holding a lamp in front of her. He could not read the expression on his brother's face. Or that of the girl who stood beside him, with hair tumbling down the side of her face like black water.

Deeka placed a finger on his chest and prodded him. He looked at her hands and nodded without knowing why. The girl stepped forward and rested a hand on his as if she'd always known him.

‘Pynto,' Patty said.

The girl pushed back her hair and smiled. She leaned over and stared into his eyes, switched her gaze to Peter then back to him.

‘I'z Windy,' she whispered. She turned her head up at the women. ‘He – he …'

‘He awright now,' Elena said. The girl straightened up and stepped back.

Patty took the lamp from Elena's hand and pushed them all out of the room. She sat on the bed beside him. She folded his hand into a fist, then cupped both her hands around it.

‘We thought … we thought you gone,' she said. Her voice fluttered in her throat. She brought his hand up to her cheek and held it there.

‘Deeka bring you back,' she said. ‘Yuh granny fight. She…' Patty shook her head. ‘Now I know she de only one dat could ha' bring you back.'

He wanted to ask her from where.

‘We, we been movin you round Old Hope. You in my house now.'

‘How come?' he said. His voice surprised him. Patty brought her hand to her mouth. A chuckle slipped out between her fingers.

‘Lordy,' she said. ‘Yuh voice break in yuh sleep?'

She moved to get up. He shook his head. Patty sat back.

‘Where's Tan?' he said.

‘S'not Tan Cee, Pynto; is Deeka bring you back, y'unnerstan?'

He shook his head. ‘Tan not here?'

‘She gone get something for you. S'Deeka…'

‘Who de girl?'

He felt the hesitation in her hand. ‘She yuh cousin.'

Patty looked down at him, her eyes glistening in the lamplight. ‘Anita come home.'

His aunt said nothing for a while. She'd turned up her chin at the ceiling and seemed to be daydreaming.

‘Las' Friday, Cross Gap people bring you home,' she said. ‘An' then…' The bed quaked under her shifting weight. ‘What happm t'you from school, Pynto?'

He took her hand. He closed his eyes. ‘Nuffing,' he said.

They had examined his body, she said. They bathed him and found nothing wrong with him. There was no sign of hurtin anywhere. He looked perfect except for the sleep they could not wake him out of. And then he'd started slipping away – as if he'd decided to abandon them. As if he owed them nothing and they did not matter any more.

His mother brought the baby to him, thinking perhaps that if anything could bring him back it had to be all dat love he got for lil Lindy, cuz it didn feel or look like illness to nobody. The baby cried. Lindy would not stay with him. The chile behave like if she never know him.

Santay refused to come. But Tan Cee would not leave her yard until the woman told her what to do.

‘Make war wiv 'im,' the woman said. ‘Upset de sonuvabitch. Make 'im vex.'

That didn make no sense. An' besides, a pusson didn have de heart. Only Deeka did.

Patty unfolded his fingers and laid her palm flat against his. She widened her eyes and chuckled.

‘She curse you, Pynto. She call you every dog-an'-sonuvabitch in Ole Hope and de rest o' de world. She roll you on de bed like one of Birdie dumplin'. An' what happm?' A laugh broke out of Patty. ‘Is not fight you start to fight 'er back? An' dat mean you ferget dat is dead you was deadin o' something; not so? Three days, nobody get no proper sleep becuz of you. Boy! You really a dog for true.'

There were terrifying moments when they thought they'd really lost him, when he seemed to be clawing himself out of the earth. He'd said unrepeatable things to Deeka that had no right or place in a decent yooman mouth. He'd argued with a woman whose name he did not call. And who was this uncle named Michael whose hands had been so freezing it paled his skin to ashes and shivered his limbs so much? They'd had to hold him down.

Patty spoke as if the people he'd met in that place that the illness had taken him to were real. She was laughing now as if he'd just played the biggest joke in the world on them.

He watched his aunt patting his hand, arcing her neck, smiling at the ceiling and the lamp, so taken by the story she was shaping with her hands it seemed to matter little whether he was listening or not.

He remembered drifting down Old Hope Road, the houses a brown unsteady blur on either side, and people floating past like smudgy ghosts. Somewhere along the road a woman's voice said his grandfather's name and straight after that he wasn't walking any more. Hands were holding him and he was travelling through air.

Pynter closed his eyes and tried to recollect the days he'd lost. The morning after Guy Fawkes Night, Old Hope was buzzing with his name. Coxy came down early to the yard, cocked a thumb at him and smiled. And by the time Pynter stepped on the road for school, he learned that he had the fastest feet on earth. He was the young-fella who ran and danced on wind, who slipped between the fingers of a hundred of Victor's soldiers and left a coupla buttons from his shirt in their murderin-an'-killin hands. All of it, to deliver Muriel last lil boy from their terrible killin ways.

Miss Muriel was waiting for him by the side of the road with a small paper bag of sugar apples. She gave it to him. This, he knew, would go on for a while until they'd wrung the last little bit of joy from what he had done. Eventually they would have to face up to what really happened the night before at Cross Gap Junction, and what was sure to come. And what was to come would be no Guy Fawkes make-believe.

Sylus didn't come. Instead, he'd sent men who were the offspring of friends or relatives further up the foothills. They'd burnt the jeeps. They'd ragged up the ones who'd chased after
him and lil Kicker. They'd told these young soldiers it was nothing personal, and sent them walking home.

Sylus and his men would arrive when he was ready, and Pynter thought he knew how they would come. It would be the way they'd taken Marlis Tillock, the way they did it in the north, in the quietest hours of the night, sometime close to morning. They would not announce themselves. They would enter a house, hold a torch to faces, select the youth they wanted and leave as quietly as they came.

He'd gone into school that morning and leaned against the wire fence in the courtyard. Sislyn saw him from the staff room and came out to him.

‘What's wrong?' she said.

He did not answer her. She followed him to their place above the lagoon.

‘I leavin school,' he said.

She sat down. She didn't look at him. ‘That's what you bring me back here to tell me?'

‘Don' have no choice.'

‘Don' tell me that!' His words had brought her to her feet. Now she was in his face.

‘Listen, young man. Don' tell me I waste my time with you, y'hear me? Don't tell me I waste my … my …' She choked on the words, brought a fist up to her mouth as if she wanted to stuff the words back down her throat. She pulled her shoulders back and sucked in a lungful of air. When she looked at him again her face was calm. ‘Sorry – I have no right. I fool myself. I think I have. I don't.'

‘I know you leavin too,' he said.

She looked at him quickly. ‘Where you get that from?' Her brows came suddenly together. ‘Is that why…'

‘No, miss.'

‘How did you…'

‘I feel it.'

She was staring out to sea. A stiff breeze was kicking up the water below. It was one of those mornings when the light followed the curve of things and did not leave a shadow.

‘I have a doctorate to return to,' she said. ‘England – I need to.'

Pynter shook his head. ‘Not Englan', miss.'

‘Follow me,' she said, striding ahead of him.

He could barely keep up with her. At the entrance of the small library, Sislyn stopped abruptly and turned around to face him. Now only her lips were moving. ‘I won't ask you why, Bender. I don't want to know. But I want my pound of flesh; I'm holding you to something.' She flicked her fingers quickly before her. ‘Ten months – that's what you've got. In ten months' time, you come back here and do the exams. It's all you've got to look forward to.'

She stepped up onto a stool and began pulling books off the shelves. The desk shuddered under the weight of the armful she dropped on it.

‘I'll have those replaced.' She returned to the shelves. ‘Conway wants you for Economics. Edwina says you're born for Biology. And God knows who else wants you for whatever else to make them feel that they've been teaching.' She dropped another armful on the table, jumped off the stool and looked him in the eyes. ‘I'm signing you up for these: the history, the language, the literature. That's you. Read what they say, see if you agree and either way, work out some damn good reasons why, then come back here and sit the exams.'

She emptied her bag on the floor and chucked it at him.

He did not take it. Sislyn raised fighting eyes at him.

‘Dat's a woman bag,' he said. ‘A fella can't …'

‘Walk the public road with it? That's not my problem. Take it!'

She walked him to the gate. They stood there a while staring at the little road that led straight down.

‘Don' know what to say,' he said.

‘Don't say anything, then. Tell me, Bender, and this is purely academic – can a woman love two fellas at the same time?'

‘Not only two, miss – a whole heap of them,' he said.

She rocked back with laughter.

‘Go,' she said.

‘Remember me,' he said.

She nodded and turned away.

‘What you thinkin?' Patty said. He didn't know when she'd stopped talking.

‘I lef' school,' he said. He felt tired. He wanted to sleep.

Patty got up and pushed the window wide open. He looked up at the light. Out there, a patch of purple sky, the top of the tres-beau mango tree, a slice of the hill above it – a bright truncated world.

‘In ten months I go back,' he said.

Patty was silent for a while. And when she spoke she sounded almost frightened. ‘Ten months – s'a long time, not so?'

His aunt seemed to be reminded suddenly of something. ‘Arilon say a fella come a coupla times askin after you.' She furrowed her brows at him. ‘An' de fella look more like you dan Peter. Dey won' tell 'im where to find you. He say he goin come again.'

Pynter said nothing; instead, he lifted her hand and rested it on her stomach. He held her gaze. She read the question in his eyes. She looked down at both their hands and nodded.

‘Pynto?' she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. ‘How – how come you know dese tings, Pynto?'

He winked at her and smiled.

Later, he emerged from Patty's house to find Anita standing with her daughter in the yard. A red woman in a sea-blue dress, fuller-fleshed than all her sisters, her brown hair rolling down her thick shoulders in coils. Her back was turned to him but as soon as he reached the doorway, she stiffened.

Anita did not turn to face him. She looked over her shoulders with eyes that made him think of chicken hawks. A fast bright flash of teeth. Patty prodded him in the back. He nodded at Anita.

Windy pushed back her hair and lifted her chin at him. Patty's voice was a breath behind his ear. ‘Girl-cousin never stop askin after you.'

They'd arrived at a time when the valley was foaming white, as if all the clouds that ought to be above them had left the sky and settled on the canes. The canes were pluming weeks too early. The weather had confused them. They feathered the air in waves, raised no odours on the wind and barely made a sound. But all that beauty was hiding a disaster. For it meant that the sugar had left the stems and made of the flesh a useless watery sponge.

That evening, Pynter sat slightly apart from them. His mother and Patty had their heads together. Tan Cee leaned against Coxy. Patty was pleased that her place was the one he'd opened his eyes in, and that she was the first to hear him speak with the voice of a man. Daytime was all right, she told him. Nights were dangerous. Oslo and the rest of his scooter-mad friends headed for the hills above the canes where they made leaf caves out of the bamboo. Peter did not go with them. He'd made a place for himself up Top Hill way, which he was telling no one about.

Anita would not tell them where she came from, or why she arrived so suddenly with her daughter, whom no one knew she had.

Been a long-long time, Tan Cee said. Too long p'raps. A pusson no longer knew Anita. They couldn't pull Anita close if she kept from them the one thing they could close their hands around: a lil bit of her past.

Anita leaned against the house and looked about her. She talked but made no conversation with them. She tapped her fingers against her legs, nodded at the things they said to her without
really hearing them, smiled when they least expected it and reminded them of things she said they told her, months before she came. She wanted her own house, she said. She'd brought enough money for that. Deeka pointed at the plot of land where Columbus used to collect butterflies, a little way from Tan Cee's. And Coxy, who'd been staring at Anita above the flaming tip of his cigarette, told her he would build her house and that he wouldn't charge a thing.