A Brief History of Seven Killings (7 page)

Lady Pink open from nine in the morning and only have two things on the jukebox, some nice ska from the sixties and sweet rocksteady, like the Heptones and Ken Lazarus. None of that Rasta reggae fuckery. If I come across one more pussyhole who won’t comb their hair and recognize Jesus as their lord and saviour I might send that little fucker to hell. Take that joke and bank it. The wall is too red for pink and too pink for purple and have gold record all over, which the owner himself spray-paint. Lerlette, the skinny girl, is up onstage, she the one who always want to dance to Ma
Baker. One year we provide security when Boney M. come to Jamaica and nobody knew that three woman and one man from the Caribbean could all look like such sodomite. Every time the song end with the chorus,
she knew how to die!
Lerlette split right down on the ground and hold up her two hands in gun pose like she’s Jimmy Cliff in
The Harder They Come
. Girl must be putting her pum-pum through all kinda distress. Weeper used to fuck her too.

When she finish her dance, she pull back on her panty and come over to my booth. Me have a rule with woman. If your titty prettier and your body hotter than my woman, I’ll deal with you. Otherwise fuck off. Ten years and I still never meet that woman. Dog years it take me to find Winifred, a woman who would breed the kind of boy I would want as son, because a man can’t afford to have loose seed around the place. Last week Weeper come around the house with a son from some woman in Jungle, even he can’t remember her name right. The boy was either retarded or start smoke the ganja way too early, drooling and panting like a big dog. In Jamaica you have to make sure that you breed properly. Nice little light browning who not too dry up, so that your child will get good milk and have good hair.

—Beg you di bone nuh?

—Dutty gal, move you bombocloth from here so. You no see big man is here?

—Lawd, yuh hard, eh? A weh Weeper deh?

—Me look like Weeper’s keeper?

She doesn’t answer, just walk away, pulling her panty out of her batty. I know for sure her mother drop her on the head when she was a baby. Twice. If it’s one thing I can’t stand is when people chat bad. Worse, when they know better. My mother send me all the way to high school. I didn’t learn a fucking thing, but I listen to plenty. I listen to the TV, to Bill Mason and
I Dream of Jeannie
, and the radio serial on RJR at ten every morning, even though that was woman business. And I listen to the politicians, not when they’re talking to me and pretending like I’m some backward ghetto naigger, but when they talk to each other, or to the white man from America.
Last week my son say,
Daddy you want know say di I? I ah go ’pon di base fi check a beef, sight?
and I slap that little wretch so hard he nearly cry. Don’t talk to me like you was born behind cow, I say to him.

Damn boy look at me like I owe him something. That is the problem with these young rudies, they wasn’t around for the fall of Balaclava in 1966, but I done talk about that. Everybody talking like they only know ghetto, especially him. See him on TV couple years ago and was never so shame in my life. To think you have all this money, all these gold record, have lipstick print on your cocky from all sort of white woman, and that is how you talk?
If my life is juss fi mi, mi no want it?
Then give it up, pussyhole, I coming right ’round there to take it.

Now Weeper, him different. The first day he come out of prison—not a good day to leave either, he come out right in the middle of war—the man have a big bulge in his back pocket. When he pull it out, there was so much red ink on even the cover that I ask him if he was bleeding from him batty. Turn out to be red ink from the only pen he could thief in prison. I ask if he write another book in the book. No star, he say. Bertrand Russell is the most top of the top ranking, me brethren, me can’t outwrite him. Bertrand Russell is a book I still don’t read yet. Weeper tell me how thanks to Bertrand Russell he don’t believe in no God no more and me have one or two problems with that.

Waiting on Weeper. Now there’s a title for a song, a hit record too. Last week I tell him, and the youths Bam-Bam, Demus and Heckle, that every Jamaican man is a man searching for father and if one don’t come with the package, he’s going to find another one. That’s why Papa-Lo call himself Papa-Lo, but he can’t be the father of anything anymore. Weeper say the man gone soft, but I say no, you fucking fool, look closer. The man not getting soft, he just reach the age where the person in the mirror is an old man who don’t look like him anymore, and he’s just thirty-nine. But that’s an old age out here, the problem with getting so far is that he don’t know what to do with himself. So he start to act like he no longer like the world he himself help create. You can’t just play God and say I don’t like man no more so make me wipe slate clean with the flood and start again. Papa-Lo start
thinking too deep and start thinking that he should be more than what he is. He’s the worst kind of fool, the fool who start believing things can get better. Better will come, but not in the way he think. Already, the Colombians start talking to me, they tired of them loco Cubans who sniff too much of what they should only sell, and the Bahamians who are of no use since they teach themselves how to freebase. The first time they ask me if I want to sample the merchandise, I say no,
hermano
, but Weeper say yes.
Brethren, coke was the only way me could fuck in prison
, he say to me, knowing that no man in the ghetto would dare come up to him and call him battyman because of it. That man still send him letters from prison.

People, even people who should know better, start to think that Papa-Lo getting soft, that he don’t care about enforcing for the party no more. That he going slip and allow PNP man to move in on territory and that Jungle and Rema, always up for grabs, will soon bleach their green shirts and dye them orange. He not getting soft, he thinking deep, which politicians don’t pay him to do. Politicians rise in the east and set in the west and nothing you can change about them. Here is where we go down two different road. He want to forget them. I want to use them. They think he no longer care about the people but the problem is that he starting to care too much and he already dragging the Singer into it.

They call me first, last year. They call me to a meeting out by Green Bay and the first thing I ask was, where’s Papa? The black one (almost all of them white, brown and red) said
Enough of the Papa, Papa time gone, new blood time now
, talking like he playing fucking ghetto for
Candid Camera
. At one point the little pussyhole Louis Johnson hold a note upside down, some bullshit on embassy letterhead about some ambassador’s reception, and pretend that it was some agency memo, reading and smiling at the others as if he con firming some bullshit that he tell them about me. Papa don’t care about the dutty life but what these retarded batty fuckers don’t get is that I don’t care either. Medellín on line two.

So I let Louis the con man sweet me up with his con-plan. I listen to them tell me with a smile that they don’t think they can trust me and pretend I don’t understand when they say give us a sign, like this is the Bible.
I act the fool until they tell me what they want plain. Louis Johnson is the only man from the embassy I meet. He maintain the links with black people. Tall, brown hair, and dark glasses to hide him eyes. I tell him that he’s in Copenhagen City now, otherwise known as the palm of my hand, and if I feel like it, any minute now I can make a fist. I lift up my shirt and give him the history of 1966. Left chest, bullet almost reaching the heart. Right neck, bullet straight through. Right shoulder, flesh wound. Left thigh, bullet bounce on the bone. Rib cage, bullet rattle the bones. I don’t tell him that I about to set up a man in Miami and one in New York. I don’t tell him that
yo tengo suficiente español para conocer que eres la más gran broma en Sudamérica
. I chat to him bad like some bush naigger and ask dumb question like, So everybody in America have gun? What kinda bullet American fire? Why you don’t transfer Dirty Harry to the Jamaica branch? Hee hee hee.

And they tell me the news, that the Singer’s giving money to Papa-Lo and them two thinking big, thinking of some way to eliminate the need for all people like them. I pretend that Papa-Lo didn’t already tell me that from the last time he kill a boy in Jungle and regret when he see that he was heading to high school. And I say to the politicians and the Americans sure, to prove that me is the don of all dons I going do what need to be done. The man say let me be clear that the United States government does not support or condone any illegal or disruptive action of any kind in sovereign territories that are her neighbors. They all act as if I don’t know that they already planning the double cross, already searching for who in my crew they can meet alone like Nicodemus in the night to tell him to take care of me as soon as I deliver. So I’m here waiting on Weeper, to talk things that only him and I can talk about, because tomorrow I going take care of a few people. The next day I goin’ take care of the world.

Nina Burgess

S
eventeen buses.
Ten minibuses, including one calling itself Revlon Flex that already passed twice. Twenty-one taxis. Three hundred and seventy-six cars, I think. And not once did the man step out of his house. Not even to get some air, not to make sure that the guards are doing their job. Not even to tell the sun, later me brethren, I man have some serious work to do. The man on the lime green scooter came back in the evening and they sent him away again, but not before he got off and spoke to the man at the gate for two minutes and seventeen seconds. I timed him. Danny’s watch still works, but it wasn’t until lunch one time at the Terranova when I ran into a former schoolmate, breast droop down like a tired goat, but still a stuck-up bitch, that I found out Timex is the same watch
that my daddy gave Hortense last week for fifteen years of meritorious service to the household
. Bitch was calling me cheap. I wanted to tell her how happy she must be as a married woman now that she no longer have to bother with looking attractive, but I smiled and said, I hope your little boy can swim because I just saw him running for the pool.

I wish they would invent phones that you can take with you, or I would have called Kimmy and asked if she’s gone to see her poor mother and father yet and what are we going to do about leaving this country before something worse happens. Knowing Kimmy she probably finally showed up in her Ganja University t-shirt and jeans, the one cut off halfway down the backside, calling Mummy her sistren and saying that this is all the plan of Babylon shitstem, and it’s not the robber they should be mad at but the shitstem that robbed them first. That’s what they say at the Twelve Tribes meeting place in that rough-and-tumble neighbourhood called West Kings House, near the home of the Queen’s representative. I really need to get
better at this sarcasm business. I might be a snob, but at least I’m not a hypocrite, still coasting around because I have nothing to do now that my life’s dream to fuck and breed for Che Guevara blew up in my face. Nor am I hanging out with rich people in West Kings House who now don’t wash their hair and calling themselves I-man to upset their parents, when everybody knows in two years they’re going right back to their father’s shipping company to take it over, and marry whichever Syrian bitch just win Miss Jamaica.

Car three hundred and sixty-seven, sixty-eight, sixty-nine, seventy. Seventy-one, seventy-two. I need to go home. But I’m outside here, waiting on him. You ever feel like home is the one place you can’t go back to? It’s like you promise yourself when you got out of bed and combed your hair that this evening, when I get back I’ll be a different woman in a new place. And now you can’t go back because the house expects something from you. A bus stops. I fan it off, trying to tell the driver that I don’t want to get on. But the bus is still squatting there, waiting on me. I step back and look down to the road, pretending that people aren’t in the bus cussing that they have home to get to and plenty pickney to feed so why that damn woman don’t get on the bus. I walk away, far enough for the bus to drive off, but walk right back to the bus stop before the dust settle.

The bass creeps up on me from across the road. It sounds like he’s been playing the same song all day. It sounds like another song about me, but there’s probably two dozen women in Jamaica right now and another two thousand in the world who think the same thing anytime a song of his come on the radio. But “Midnight Ravers” is about me. One day I’m going to tell Kimmy then and she’ll know, won’t she, that just because she’s the prettiest doesn’t mean she get all of them. A white police car with blue stripe going all around parked itself by the gate. I didn’t even see it coming. Jamaican police tend to use their siren all the time, just to get people to clear the street so they can reach Kentucky Fried Chicken quicker. I never had any dealings with the police. That’s not true.

There was that one time when I was on that No. 83 bus to Spanish Town for an interview because that’s 1976 for you, you take a job where you can
find it and this was a Bauxite company, when three police cars sirened us down and forced the driver to stop right there on the highway.
H’everybody h’evacuate the ve-HI-cle right at this present moment
, the first policeman said. Right there on the highway. Nothing but a thin stretch of road with swamp on both sides and everybody had to file out. Most of the women started cussing about having to get to work on time, most of the men stood silent because the police only thought twice about shooting women.
Dis h’is a spat searrrrch
, the policeman said.
We h’are gonna do the proceejah of getting all of unu name
.

—And you name what, sweet girl?

—Pardon me?

—You, the hot ting that ah carry the swing. What you name?

—Burgess, Nina Burgess.

—Bond, James Bond. Sound like you h’in movie picture. You carrying a conceal weapon h’under there? Mind me have to search you.