A Brief History of Seven Killings (36 page)

Home. Watch it, Miss Kim, you’re calling the place something not even Chuck calls it. I’m going to walk into the living room right now thinking about exploding buses and say, Chuck, and he’s going to say
Yep? What’s shakin’ honeybun?
and I’ll feel like a rabbit safe in a hole. No I’m not. That’s some stupid shit from a stupid book for God’s sake stop thinking, Kim Clarke. Late day at work, usually he’s home by now. Usually I would have cooked dinner by now, the shit you can get away with when you’re making it up as you go along,
damn, babykins, I didn’t know Jamaican rice had pepper in it,
he said last night. Look where that thinking shit has gotten you, now gulls are out the window. Now I’m the woman who lives close to seagulls. I hate gulls. Little bitches plopping down their little shitty batties like unwanted guests every afternoon and taking over my own damn terrace saying
move bitch is fi we terrace now. I don’t know why they keep coming, there’s no food outside and I sure as shit am never going to feed them. And they’re so damn loud and nasty and only fly away when they see Chuck. They couldn’t care a r’asscloth about me. I know what they’re thinking. They’re thinking we was here first, long before you start shack up with man and we was here before him too. Screaming like they know stuff about me—get away from my window or my American Chuck will pull out his American gun and bang bang Quick Draw McGraw and put a lead one through your head, see? Jesus Christ, when did I start watching cartoons?

Today I will love his hair. I will think about his hair and how it’s brown but never one colour brown and red when it gets near his cheek and how he likes it short like a soldier but now he’s growing it long because I said honey you’d make a nice pirate thinking the sentence would vanish to the same idle place it came from but he loved it so now he’s my sexy pirate—I never called him sexy. Must be because I said honey.

Sexy.

Sexy is John—what’s his name? What is his name?
Dukes of Hazzard
, General Lee, not the brown hair one he’s too husband-looking, the John one, damnit shit his name is John.

Sexy. Luke Duke sliding off the car trunk lifting one leg into car and squeezing his snake down the other leg, do other women see this or only me? Kim Clarke, you pervert, you nasty girl. He never wears a brief, that John. Schneider.
Dukes of Hazzard
’s showing this week on the satellite dish, the only satellite dish I know is the big one outside the JBC TV station back in Kingston but Chuck put one up on his roof.

Yes, today I will think of how I love what he is about to do with his hair. Yesterday, I loved how he always took his cap off when he came through the door,
yes ma’am
. Any door. The day before, I loved how he calls me Miss Kim anytime I go on top when we fuck, no I don’t like it, don’t like it at all, the Miss Kim not the fucking, but I like that he likes it so much, of course he likes it the black bitch that finally makes him go wild—he must have heard the story about Jamaican girls two years before he even landed with a technical drawing kit and a cock-stand. Americans call cock-stands
hard-ons, which makes no sense. No. He’s sweet. The man sweet, and nice so till, and he lifts me up with his two hands like me make out of paper but hands so soft so sweet and he lifts me up and put me on the kitchen counter and smiles and says
hey babykins miss me?
and I think about it more than once that yes, I did miss you, I did miss you because when you’re not here it’s just me and thoughts and I hate thinking, I fucking hate it gone to hell.

Leave the thinking to Chuck.

Leave the moving to Chuck. Leave the deciding what to take with and what to leave behind to Chuck. I like the second half of that thought much more than the first and ohshitjesuschrist.

Oh wait,

it’s a muffler.

It’s a blast from a muffler.

Jesus Christ breathe, Kim Clarke. Breathe in, out, in, out, in, out. That’s the third time I called myself Kim Clarke without thinking right before that I need to call myself Kim Clarke, or after saying look at that I called myself Kim Clarke. Even this thinking about Kim Clarke is about me reaching the point where I don’t even have to think about it anymore, or that other name. Fuck that person. See? I say fuck like an American, like Chuck who still says darn it—cute. Chuck and his
motherfucker
, every time he watched Monday night football it was about
motherfucker this
or
motherfucker that
or
it’s called a spread offense, motherfucker
. Nobody in the game uses their feet, but it’s football. I love how Americans can just claim something to be whatever they feel it is, despite clear evidence it’s not. Like a football game with nobody using any feet that takes forever. Last time he had me sit through that shit I said baby only sex should last this long and he called me his
sexy little slut
. I didn’t like that either, it was one of the two hundred mistakes men make every day with women they live with, and it made me wonder just how many women has he actually had sex with. I mean, he’s not bad looking. No, he’s cute. No, he’s handsome. Look, right now three thousand Jamaican women probably hate me because I’m with him. I have what you want, you pussyholes. Me, Kim Clarke. Come and get it if you bad.

Lie that. I know for a fact that Jamaican women not out there looking for
a white man from foreign. Most of them can’t even figure out what they would look like naked. They think white men are all balls no cocky, which only prove that they’ve never seen a blue movie. Coming home in the sun, three p.m., Montego Bay feels like Miami, you never been to Miami, Kim Clarke. But still, coming home, going home I hope Chuck isn’t there. That was harsh. Uncalled for he would say, which he’s been saying a lot these days, making me think that everything that come out of me mouth tainted with something. That is not what I want to think, I just want some me time. There I go again talking like a hurry-come-up American for so long that now I can’t drop the Yankee talk even in my own head. Straight thinking please! I just hope he’s not there because I just want to sit in the settee and hear my own breathing and watch
Wok with Yan
on TV and just put the brain on rest because all of this, this living, this walking, this talking, this sitting in space that is still not my space is fucking hard work. Existing is hard work. No it’s not. It’s the living that’s bombocloth hard. I swear sometimes.

Are these gulls hearing what I think? Is that what they are doing outside? Listening to my thoughts and laughing. Does fly and roach spray work on birds? Maybe they would rip my skin apart and eat it. Fucking hate the damn birds. Fucking don’t know what to do with all these Chuck-isms I speaking lately. It just happens doesn’t it, some point where a man just start living all over you.

Chuck isn’t home. This couch feels nice. I fall asleep in the couch all the time but never fall asleep in the bed. Most nights I just lie on Chuck’s bushy chest to listen if his heart ever skips.

I really need to clean this house even if we’re leaving. Even if we’re leaving at the end of next month. Would have given anything to have cut this place loose in December. I want a white Christmas. I’ve been dreaming of a white Christmas. No, I’ve been dreaming of a faraway Christmas. The quicker I can get away from this godforsaken country, the better. When Chuck told me he was from Arkansas I think I asked him if that was near Alaska. He asked if I just love polar bears or lumberjacks. Whatever that meant. I rubbed his belly and said I have the big bear I love but he didn’t think that was so funny. American men are strange. Can’t take a little joke,
but then find the most fucked-up shit funny. There I go, thinking like an American again, fucked-up shit, thinking like him. Today I shall love his hair. I will sink into this settee and close my eye and think about his hair. And what to pack.

They’ve had enough, really they’ve had just about enough from this comic opera of a government. Funny, this house is far from the road, right by the sea that’s roaring all the time with those white feather bitches cawing outside my window and yet traffic sounds still find a way to get down here. Like that damn horn interrupting my thoughts. But they’ve had enough really, he said they said. Time to cut this fucking place loose, his boss said. Enough of this government and this Michael Manley wanting to suck cash from the bauxite companies like they don’t already do enough to help this country.
Shit, Alcoa transformed this fucking backwater island, sure they didn’t build the railway but they certainly put it to profitable use. And other things: schools, modern buildings, running water, toilets, it was a slap in the face really, demanding a levy on top of all we do for this country. And that slap in the face was the first shot heard around the world for Jamaica’s entry into communism, mark my words. Nationalization is always the first step, how these fucking people voted the PNP back into office is a fucking mystery to me, babykins
. He’s said this little rant so often that I can almost recite it verbatim, even the mixed metaphors. So what about that pitch-lake you guys left that’s only good for gunmen to dump bodies in so that they will disintegrate without a trace? I say. Sometimes I have to remind even him that three feet north of this vagina is a brain. Still, even an American man don’t like when a woman’s too smart, especially a Third World woman whom it is his duty to educate. This couch is softer than I remember.

Two years since the election. Jamaica never gets worse or better, it just finds new ways to stay the same. You can’t change the country, but maybe you can change yourself. I don’t know who’s thinking that. I’m done with thinking, quite frankly. Every time I think it takes me to a bus exploding or me looking down the barrel of a gun. Shit, all that shaking is me, not the couch. I mean, settee. Goddamn, that man is changing me. I like to act like I don’t like it. But I don’t think I fool him. He looks at it as some kind of
victory every time he gets somewhere with me, because truth be told I don’t let him get very far. That sounds harsh. I hope I’m not harsh. I can’t even remember how we went from howdy to him taking me out, his term not mine.

Figuring things out is a dangerous thing. It makes you look backward and that’s also dangerous. You keep doing it you find yourself right back at the thing, the one thing that pushed you forward in the first place. I don’t know and I swore I put myself on the damn couch to stop the fucking thinking. I wish he was home. Silly girl you just wished he wasn’t. Barely five minutes ago, girl, I was with you I heard every word. Can people do that? Can people want to be with someone all the time, okay most of the time, and yet also wish they were alone? And not in little compartments but at once? At the same time? All the time? I want to be alone but I need to not be. I wished Chuck was one of the men I thought that would make sense to. Usually I just turn on the radio and let it fill the house, noise, people, music, company that I don’t have to acknowledge or respond to but I know they are there. I wish I could do that with people. I wish people would do that with me. Where’s the man who I can be with who doesn’t need me to need him? I don’t know what I’m talking about. Need is the only reason I’m right here, right now in this room. No. Jesus, what a bitch. Today I shall love his hair.

Tonight I shall love all the sounds he makes when he sleeps. The heehaw, the whistle when one of his nostrils blocks. The half of a sentence. The mumble. The flap flap flap flap snore. The groan. The American fart. That part of the night, three-ish, four-ish, when I can ask a question and he’ll answer, which is how I know he’s not really sure how his family will react to meeting a woman like me, though his mom is just the sweetest gal, really just the sweetest. I know all his sounds because I never sleep. Up all night, sleep all day, there are names for women like me. Women like me don’t sleep. We know that the night is no friend of us. Night does things, brings people, swallows you up. Night never makes you forget but it enters dreams to make you remember. Night is a game where I wait, I count off until I see the little pink streak cut through our window and I go outside to see the
sun rise over the sea. And congratulate myself for making it, because I swear, every night. Every night.

Last night I realized I could kill anybody, even a child. Maybe a boy. Don’t know about a girl. Just because you don’t sleep doesn’t mean you don’t dream, there’s something my mother never told me. Last night I could have killed a kid. There was this gate and it was just some rusty gate but I knew I had to get through it. The only way forward is through. Who said that? I had to get through it, if I didn’t I would die, get cut open, sliced with a knife from the neck right down to labia with me screaming all the time, I just had to get through the fucking gate. And there was this kid at the gate, one of those children you see in movies where you can’t tell if it’s a boy or a girl. Maybe he was white but white like linen not skin. And the whole time I could see the white alarm clock about to hit two a.m. and the four walls around me, two glass windows, even the sky outside, but I could also see the gate, and I could hear Chuck snoring but I could also see the kid and I could look down and see slashed-up flesh where my feet was supposed to be. I had run my feet off. And I wanted to go through the gate and this kid was blocking it with this look, not threatening but confident, smarmy, cocky—Chuck would have said cocky. And I took this knife that I had and grabbed him by the hair and lifted him up and drove the knife in his heart and because the blood was blue I didn’t feel bad about stabbing him again and again and every time the knife went through his skin it’s like his flesh was too tough and the knife bent in a different direction than where I aimed and the kid was screaming and laughing and screaming and the only thing to do was pull out the knife and saw his head off and throw it away. And scream as I ran to the gate. Then I woke up. But I wasn’t asleep.

Maybe I should bathe or something. When Chuck was going off to work he asked what am I up to today? Shouldn’t have told him nothing because I went out. Maybe I should take off these clothes or at least these shoes. Even a man who loves to say
babykins, I don’t know about this fashion shit
, knows the clothes I wear to go out is not the clothes I wear to buy bread. And if he sees his woman in the good clothes he would know she was trying to im
press a man and might have succeeded, but that man is not him. I really should at least take off this blouse. Or lie down until the gulls fly away. Maybe if he asks I can say I was dressing up for him, hoping we would go out.
But babykins, nowhere’s safe outside
, he’s going to say.
Not even in Montego
. I’ll say that Jamaicans shorten Montego Bay by saying Mobay, not Montego. I’ll say I want to go out, I want to dance and he’ll say
but I dance better than you
and I’ll pretend that last one didn’t sting. The truth is I don’t want to go dancing. Every time I ask I hope he says no. I just want him to believe that I’m interested in doing everything with him. Maybe he’ll come home with friends again and I’ll have a reason to keep these clothes on. The last time he brought home four men from work, all of them looking like shorter and taller versions of him, all of them with the same burnt white skin. The short blond one, I swear his name was Buck, but it was close to Chuck, said
well, you’re as fine looking a squaw as I’ve ever seen
. And here I was getting upset when Jamaican man call me beef. Tonight I going love the way him sleep. I going to lie on him big chest and lick him hair and I going to hold tight so that he can’t go without me. There’s this memory I have of waiting for my sister to sleep then grabbing the tail of her nightie and wrapping it ’round and ’round my hand so that if the duppy come to snatch me away he would pull her too and wake us up. Except I don’t have a sister.