Pynter Bender (31 page)

‘That's him?' she said.

When they entered the room there were three bodies stretched out on the floor washed in yellow candlelight. One was under the window at the far end of the room; another was against the wall under the picture of the grandparents. The third lay face
down in the middle, using his folded arms as a headrest. Hugo was sitting upright on the sofa, his eyes shut and head thrown back, breathing heavily through his mouth.

‘Robert?' Tinelle said.

The young man in the middle of the room lifted his head. He woke the others with a tap of his shoe against their ribs. Pynter watched him closely. Tinelle leaned over her brother and tugged the lobe of his left ear. Hugo came to life, staring wild-eyed about the room until he focused on Pynter.

‘How – how did it go?' he croaked.

They turned to Arilon. His face was crushed, his lips and eyes swollen, and there was the stink of swamp mud. The three strangers rushed out of the room with Hugo after them.

‘I'll prepare some water,' Tinelle said and hurried off.

Arilon was leaning against the doorway, swaying slightly. And to think that Sylus had only just begun to work on him. At least that was the sense Pynter had made of Arilon's chewed-up words up there amongst the pipes.

He was glad the others left them to themselves. There was something he'd begun to say to Arilon out there in the dark and now he wanted to finish it. Pynter traced the trail of mucus trickling down Arilon's nose, settling in the crevices of his swollen lips. He placed himself in front of him, but Arilon would not return his stare.

‘You tell Sylus everything about us,' Pynter said. ‘You tell 'im where we live and what we look like. You tell 'im all you know about Paso. And dat is worse, becuz till now, they didn know what Paso look like. Now they know.' He stuck a finger in the hollow of Arilon's throat. ‘You owe me a life, fella. In fact you owe me two. Yours, fo' sure, an' Paso. Cuz s'far as I can tell, Paso good as dead.'

Tinelle came back into the room with a handful of clothes and dropped them on the sofa. ‘For you,' she said to Pynter. To Arilon she said, ‘I left yours by the bath.'

Later, washed and dressed in Hugo's clothes, Pynter lowered himself onto a chair. He was aching everywhere. At his yard, they would have laid their hands on him. They would have scrubbed him down with bush or bark, in water laced with powders and herbs, to soothe him and help him sleep.

They gathered around Arilon. After a tense, uncertain glance at Pynter, the youth tried to tell his story, but he couldn't do it.

Tinelle rested her hand on Arilon's, briefly. ‘We got to get you out of here,' she said. ‘First thing.'

‘Later, I'll run them home,' Robert said.

Arilon wanted to go right now. He blinked at them through his swollen eyes. ‘Trouble out there,' Tinelle said. ‘And I should say this now.' She brushed her nose and turned away. ‘Pynter's not travelling with you.'

‘I take them together,' Robert said. The youth began striding across the floor towards her. Tinelle stopped him with her gaze.

‘It doubles the risk,' she snapped. ‘And besides, Pynter got that shoulder to look after.'

Robert lifted an irritated finger at Arilon. ‘You really want to go first, fella?'

‘I s'pose,' he said. ‘In fact, I definitely s'pose I want to go first, specially if Pynter prefer to stay with Miss, erm, Miss Finelle.'

Hugo stood up. ‘That's settled, then. Night all.' Tinelle muttered something and Hugo remained where he was.

Robert jerked a thumb at Pynter. ‘That one make his own way, then. After you two finish with him, of course.'

Tinelle pretended not to hear him. She reached for the phone and dialled. She asked for a man named Simon. There was a shoulder she wanted him to check, she said. Could he remind her what to do? And, oh!, there was a hand too. A thumb. Was there …

Tinelle listened with her eyes closed. She put down the phone and came over to Pynter, asked him to curl his fingers in then straighten them. She closed her eyes and slipped her hand along his arm right up to his shoulders. Nothing broken or dislocated,
she said. Most likely a torn ligament. She would bandage it the way Simon said and wait till he came to fix it.

Tinelle did the same with Arilon. She said nothing to him, just gestured to Hugo, who went into his room and returned with a small box which he handed to her. She spent a long time over Arilon's hand.

That night Pynter slept fitfully. In his dreams he was balanced on a high branch above the town and Arilon was calling him with soft gestures from below. When he woke in the middle of the night he saw that they had forgotten to blow out the candles. The room was washed in a reddish glow from two remaining stubs placed beneath the table. Tinelle was curled up amongst the cushions near the record player. Robert was on all fours above her, his head bent low, his whispers deep and pleading.

At first Pynter thought she was asleep, but above the breathing of the boys he could hear her saying, ‘No.' Robert's was a grumbling insistence. And then they both saw him. Robert retreated to the middle of the room.

Pynter lay back and imagined Sylus searching the streets and alleyways for them. He wondered what, if they'd caught him tonight, they would have done to him. What might his last moments have been like? Certainly not like his father's – to whom death had seemed like nothing more than a willingness to shut his eyes on a world of which he said he'd seen too much. Perhaps he, Pynter, would have gone screaming in astonishment at his own blood, like Marlis Tillock, like Jordan. Like Zed Bender under that tree.

He pushed himself up on his elbows and looked over at Tinelle. Despite the presence of the others in the room, he felt alone with her. He mouthed her name and then gave it sound. Tin-nel-le. And when she stared back at him he knew then that he would never need to go down on all fours before her, and even if he chose to she would welcome him with those wide and quiet eyes.

I
WANT TO BE
with you
, he'd said. And all she could think of when he left were his hands.

That's what Tinelle told him afterwards.

And because she could find no way of responding to those words, she busied herself with caring for his dislocated shoulder. She asked herself who the hell was she to fight it, to resist him. He puzzled her. He was a shy fella, yet so full of himself.
I want to be with you
– he'd said those words to her again. He was the type who talked and touched, which was why she always asked the kind of questions that made him talk a lot.

It was a good time for loving. Sylus's men were speeding through the streets, from late evening till the early hours of the morning, their jeeps making thunder along the Carenage below.

The grapevine hummed with talk of fresh arrests, more disappearances and Victor's new and killing ways.

It was a good time for the soldiers too, because the rains that fell in heavy curtains erased the blood left on grass and asphalt and concrete, hiding their crimes. But in the enormous silence of the cushions in the house above the harbour, they felt secure.

She had to teach him everything. Everything astonished him: her nakedness, the contrast their bodies made, the impossible warmth between her thighs, the way they fitted, how close to pain the sound of so much pleasure was. Everything was new to him and that made her feel untouched and new too. They loved
with an abandon that mocked the stiffness of the portraits on the walls. Anything could trigger them, for her especially, she said, the sweat beads gathered on his upper lip.

‘You know nothing about wimmen,' she said. ‘What you been doing all this time?'

He paused from tracing circles around her navel. ‘Livin to stay alive.'

‘You nice,' she breathed finally. ‘Nice enough to kill for.'

‘You the kind who kill for love?'

‘What make you think it is for love?' A smile crept across her face. ‘You worry too much,' she said, throwing a leg across his stomach.

‘I never worry,' he said.

But he did worry. He had to have words with Paso. He needed to let all of Old Hope know what Arilon did not say to him up there amongst those rusting reservoir pipes.

Every morning he opened his eyes to Tinelle's rafters, he told himself he was going to do it today, he was going to leave. But he did not count on the girl readjusting him in the way she did; making him want to close his eyes to everything but her. Because it was a good time; despite the curfews, it was an easy time. Love slowed him down, it was a kind of forgetfulness.

A
RILON'S RETURN
lifted the heaviness that had descended on Old Hope.

They greeted him with a new pair of trousers hung on the back of his chair, and a beautiful blue shirt laid out on its seat.

They wanted to know what happened. All of it. They begged him for the story behind every bruise and swelling on his body, especially how that bright-eye fella got him out. He must tell them what it felt like to get snatched back from the hell of Sylus's hands and be driven home in a fancy silver car.

Pynter Bender – Deeka Bender gran'son – what a fella!' Twas that young-fella eddication that saved Arilon. Did he know that? A pusson was sure of it. In fact a pusson know it. It didn have no other argument for it. He study a whole heap o' science in dat fancy school of his, not so? He don' have dem whiteman eyes fo' nothing. Becuz everybody know that science is whitepeople obeah. They walk on water wiv it; they run the world wiv it. It make dem fly; it give dem underwater-boat-and-plane; and bullets as big as a house that mash up other people country. So, wicked as Sylus an' Victor is, they don' stand a chance against high science.

Besides, eddication is better than a ticket. It better than a passport too, cuz it take a pusson anywhere they like, includin the big-an'-soft-an'-wide bedroom of a nice-lookin girl in San Andrews.

It didn't matter at all that Arilon barely answered them. They put it down to the terrible thing that must have happened to him. For they'd seen his face and the broken thumb and something in his eyes that was not so different from what they'd witnessed in Jordan's the day Sylus's men returned him to Old Hope.

At least Jumbie Boy was all right. S'matter o' fact, he wasn' no Jumbie Boy no more. He was Missa High Science. And Ole Hope better prepare demself for Sylus and his men, cuz when you snatch a bone from a dog, you expect dat dog to turn around and bite you. So the men's attention turned to ‘preparations' for the soldiers' possible return. They talked about the storm of stones their jeeps were sure to meet as soon as they entered Old Hope.

During the weeks it took Arilon to recover, he filled their nights with song, until one morning, his finger cured, he left his yard and went up to the foothills. They heard the sound of his chopping for the best part of the day. He returned with portions of wood – twisted branches and the convulsed roots of trees – and piled them in his yard.

They counted the days and waited, for, as Deeka Bender told Old Hope, there was a pattern in every madness and if there was a story in there, time was going to unfold it.

And, sure enough, one morning a few weeks later, Old Hope woke, cocked an ear up at the hills and what they heard was just the argument of birds, the sigh of cane and the snore of the wind in high places. Arilon's chopping had stopped.

He worked only nights with a masantorch, in the company of his own songs and the chipping of chisel into wood.

The morning came when word brought them down to the roadside. The twisted roots and branches had taken on the shapes of humans – people shapes whose bodies followed the contours of the roots and branches: limbs wrapped around or turned in on themselves; heads staring down at backbones; heels fused with
neck and collarbones; skin shivering with the teeth marks of the chisel that chewed into them.

They had no name for this. They had no words for all the things those faces said. They had no measure for the feelings that it left them with. Although Muriel started weeping.' Twas as if, she said, Arilon was telling her that he got a glimpse of the place Sylus had taken her lil boy, Jordan, and this was what it looked like.

Perhaps Anita had been taken to a place like that too. Perhaps she hadn't completely left it. A pusson couldn say for sure. What was certain was that she left her steps one evening, drawn perhaps by the gatherings in front of Arilon's house, and went to see for herself. The few times Anita strolled up Old Hope Road, women never stopped to talk to her. For she moved and looked like no other woman in these villages above the canes: the rust-brown hair that rolled down her head in coils and settled on her shoulders; big, cattish eyes; all that flesh that hadn't been firmed up by walking or hard work; and a smile that was too steady to be real. Still, they did not expect the screaming alarm with which she jumped back from Arilon's creations and the haste with which she retreated to her house above Deeka Bender's yard. And they certainly didn't expect her to come back for them with a machete.

Anita was calling them by names they'd never heard before. And as Arilon watched those shapes of frozen hurt become chipping under Anita's flailing machete, there was perhaps a glint in his eyes that looked like gratefulness. When there was nothing left but useless bits of kindling, he gathered the pieces and set fire to them. From now on, he would return to making beautiful furniture.

But those shapes that Anita destroyed did not seem to want to leave her. Evenings, she fought them in her yard. They were crowding her, she said. They were trying to get their hands on her skin. They wanted to steal her hair. She mistook mosquitoes for helicopters. She forgot her clothes sometimes, talked to people in
the air, stood in the rain and danced and became a golden gloria lily with a singing voice more beautiful than Patty's.

And all the while, Tan Cee kept Windy at her shoulder. Nights, she brought the girl over to her house and made her sleep there. For they'd seen enough of this to know that those people in Anita's head were going to multiply. That some time soon, they were going to step out of Anita and merge with the people and the children around her, and that swinging machete would not know the difference. They explained everything to Windy.

One day Elena dressed herself in a way they'd never seen her do before and left for San Andrews. She returned in a white van, with five strapping young men beside her. Anita smiled at them as if she had been expecting their arrival. They threw a long white canvas shirt around her shoulders and laced it up, talking all the while to her, their voices soft and soothing like a chorus of urgent lovers. Anita was laughing as she went with them.

Elena sat on the stones and wept.

Tan Cee returned to her house and threw out what remained of Coxy's belongings: a bunch of photographs wrapped in a grey plastic bag, mainly of himself and his brother in Barbados; a wooden case packed with tools; a green transistor radio; a limp scattering of work shirts and trousers; and five boxes of Anchor matches. Deeka poured a cupful of kerosene on the pile, struck a match and dropped it on them.

Coxy wasn't there when the wardens came. He'd been working on somebody's house somewhere on the island. When he returned, he walked into Anita's house, pushed open the windows and returned to stand on the steps. He lit a cigarette and when the smoke cleared they saw that he was looking down on them. Coxy hung there a while, scratching his head. Then he went into the house.

That night Deeka had her eyes on Tan Cee; she was laughing too easily and teasing the hem of her dress.

‘Leave Coxy to me,' Tan Cee said. ‘Is all I askin. Please.'

She dropped the bit of yam she'd been eating on the stones and stepped out into the night.

Deeka turned to Elena and Patty. ‘Y'all sister jus' wake up,' she said. ‘An' …' Her voice retreated in her throat. ‘Like y'all dam' well know, is hell to pay.'

There was nothing they could do about Tan Cee. There was a saying in these foothills that a heart that loses its moorings drifts into a place much worse than madness. It gets bitter as a galba seed, and the quietness it sinks into is as unforgiving as a grave. Which was why when Tan Cee told them a couple of days later, ‘I sendin Windy over to her mother house to sleep,' they barely blinked at her. They did not bother to point out that Coxy was still there and didn't want to leave. That he'd bought new blinds and hung them up himself. He sat on the steps the way he used to with Anita, smoked and hummed the songs she taught him.

‘S'your modder house,' Tan Cee said. ‘It belong to you now. 'Twill always belong t'you. De same way.' She closed a fist around Windy's hair. ‘De same way this belong to you.'

Tan Cee scarcely ate. She walked the path between her doorway and Anita's when Coxy wasn't there, slept during the day and would spend the nights sitting on her step.

She remembered how the trouble had begun with Coxy. Pynter was ten at the time. He'd just returned to the yard from one of those night-time disappearances he used to worry them with. He was rubbing his throat with his hand. She remembered the trembling fingers, the rage in his eyes.

‘If a woman married a fella, Tan,' Pynter said, ‘dat fella s'pose to go kiss-up an' hug-up in anodder woman house?'

They played it like a game, the child telling her in bits and her fitting in the rest.

Soon she had a picture of the woman in her head – not only what she looked like, but the kind of person she was, the sort of clothes she would ask a man to buy her, the colours she preferred. What unmentionable things she would whisper in Coxy's
ear to get the kind of answer that would make her laugh out loud and then roll over. How much of a man she made him feel; and why, over the years, even if Coxy always came back to her bed smelling of sex and frangipani, he would never want to leave the young woman he'd built that little house for. For such a girl could cost a man his soul. And she'd done so to Coxy even before he could lay a hand on her. So much so that Old Hope and the people of Déli Morne could never forget the price that Coxy had to pay for Wednesday nights with that Laughin Girl from Kara Isle.

Solomon had been Coxy Levid's best friend – the kind of friend a man told almost everything to: the amount of years that he, Solomon, had tried for children, and the shame he felt when he realised his life was cursed to dry up and die with him. It made a fella restless. It pushed him out there, searching for some woman to rescue him from oblivion.

That was the feeling that sent his best friend Solomon travelling north by boat to Kara Isle – the silent, arid place of docile men and beautiful women whose complexions ranged from sapodilla brown to the blue-black of star apples. The women, they said, were as silent as the island. That was why Miss Florelle – this Laughin Girl – stood out from all the rest. She did not fit in. Laughin Girls had no business being born on Kara Isle. She was not no ordinary Laughin Girl either, but a special one whose age didn show nowhere on her skin or in them big brown eyes of hers.

Coxy claimed her, in his mind, the very day Solomon brought her back and made her say hello to him. Solomon should have known straight away that there was trouble ahead when Coxy lit a cigarette and did not place it in his mouth until the fire reached his fingers.

A coupla months later, Coxy was still thinking of that girl when he began to build the house on the lil piece of land he won in a gambling game of rummy. He started building it before he
made his intentions clear even to himself. He always make 'imself believe that piece of land was a secret. As if he think a pusson stupid. As if people never talk. So the little wooden house took shape in privacy, except of course for what he hinted to Miss Florelle. And even then it was always the kind of house that fit a girl like her: small-bone, y'know, put together perfect like a postcard. A pine house settlin back on twelve pretty legs, with flowers all the way around. She could just smell the flowers, not so? And the pine, didn she smell the pine oil on his fingers?

Florelle was his to have on the seventh of November – two days after Guy Fawkes Night, just a coupla days after Solomon danced and burned. It was the very first thing Coxy did after Solomon burned. He went to his friend's shack and told the girl that the house he'd built was hers. He said he planted canna lilies, spider plants, white anthuriums and frangipani flowers in the yard because he took the time to learn the things she liked. She would like the wooden veranda, which was not yet painted because the colours were for her to choose. Hers, as long as she allowed him in once a week to smell the pine of the bed he'd built with his own two hands, and sleep on the sheets she washed and ironed every week. Just once a week. The rest of the time was hers to do with as she pleased. Just give him Wednesday nights.

It was the thing he had had to do to get those Wednesday nights that Déli Morne did not allow Old Hope to forget. They threw it in their faces every Guy Fawkes Night. They would keep reminding Old Hope for ever of that fireball that fell on Solomon.

Solomon was laughing when it came straight out of the sky and fell on him, clothing him in blue. Blue flames – not yellow like it ought to be, but a hungry, licking blue that fed on him as if his skin were fuel. Solomon never stopped laughing. The terrible blue did that to him. It made him dance and laugh because screaming wasn't enough. They watched him till he fell at the
feet of men too dumbstruck to do anything to help. Except Coxy, of course, who'd been battling with the flames that were feeding on his best friend. Coxy rushed over to the drum of water and started howling like a dog. How could a pusson account for that – cry out so hard-an'-loud and not mean it at all?

But Solomon brother told it another way. He swore Coxy went to the drum not just to cry but to wash the smell of high-octane petrol from his gloves – fuel that had no business in a Guy Fawkes Night. And besides, he saw Coxy Levid's lil smile as his brother lay there sizzling, and a whole heap of satisfaction was in that grin.

Solomon's Laughin Girl took her little brown case packed with personal things: a blue cotton dress, the nightdress that felt and looked like water, a very large bottle of Pond's Face and Hand Care Lotion, three shades of Island Palm lipstick, a bottle of Jeyes antiseptic lotion and a small plastic bag crammed with seeds, dried flowers and rooting things. She left with Coxy, he carrying her case, she the flowers and the seeds. The little mauve church hat with the perfectly rounded top that he'd admired so much on her the first time that they met was tilted over her left eye, the way the women in American magazines wore them.