Bodily Harm (35 page)

“What else?” says Rennie.

“That’s all,” says Paul. “It’s just a hole in the ground, with the earth that’s been dug out. It’s quite large, there are trees around it. I’m walking towards it. There’s a pile of shoes off to the side.”

“Then what?” says Rennie.

“Then I wake up,” says Paul.

Rennie hears it before she realizes what it is. At first she thinks it’s rain. It is rain, but something more. Paul is out of the bed before she
is. Rennie goes into the bathroom for a large towel, which she wraps around her. The pounding at the door goes on, and the voice.

When she gets to the livingroom what she sees is Paul, stark naked, and Lora with her arms around him. She’s dripping wet.

Rennie stands with her mouth open, holding her towel around her, while Paul grapples with Lora, pushing her away from him, holding her at arms’ length, shaking her. She’s crying. “Oh God, oh Christ,” she says.

“What is it?” says Rennie. “Is she sick?”

“Minnow’s been shot,” Paul says, over the top of Lora’s head.

Rennie goes cold. “That’s incredible!” she says. She feels as if someone’s just told her the Martians have landed. It must be a put-on, an elaborate joke.

“They shot him from behind,” says Lora. “In the back of the head. Right out on the road and everything.”

“Who would do it?” Rennie says. She thinks of the men, the followers, the ones with mirror sunglasses. She tries to focus on something useful she could do. Maybe she should make some tea, for Lora.

“Get your clothes on,” Paul says to her.

Lora starts to cry again. “It’s so crummy,” she says. “The fuckers. I never thought they’d go that far.”

Dr. Minnow is in a closed coffin in the livingroom. The coffin is dark wood, plain; it rests on two kitchen chairs, one at either end. On top of the coffin there’s a pair of scissors, open, and Rennie wonders whether they are part of some ritual, some ceremony she doesn’t know about, or whether someone’s just forgotten them.

The coffin is like a stage prop, an emblem out of some horrible little morality play; only they’ve forgotten to say what the moral is.
At any moment the lid will pop up and Dr. Minnow will be sitting there, smiling and nodding, as if he’s pulled off a beautiful joke. Only this does not happen.

Rennie is in the livingroom with the women, who sit on chairs or on the floor, children sleeping in their laps, or stand against the wall. It’s one o’clock at night. There are other women in the kitchen, making coffee and setting out plates for the food that the women have brought: Rennie can see them through the open doorway. It’s a lot like Griswold, it’s a lot like her grandmother’s funeral, except in Griswold you ate after the burial, not before, and you did the hymn-singing in church. Here they do it whenever they feel like it: one starts, the others join in, three-part harmony. Someone’s playing the mouth-organ.

Dr. Minnow’s wife has the place of honour beside the coffin; she cries and cries, she makes no attempt to hide it, nobody disapproves. This, too, is different from Griswold: sniffling was all right, into a handkerchief, but not this open crying, raw desolation, this nakedness of the face. It wasn’t decent. If you went on like that they gave you a pill and told you to go upstairs and lie down.

“Why this happen?” the wife says, over and over again. “Why this happen?”

Elva is sitting beside her, holding her hand, which she rubs gently between her own two hands, massaging the fingers. “I see him into this world,” she says. “Now I see him out of it.”

Two women come out of the kitchen, carrying a tray with mugs of coffee. Rennie takes one, and some banana bread and a coconut cookie. It’s her second mug of coffee. She’s sitting on the floor, her legs are going to sleep beneath her.

She feels guilty and useless, guilty because useless. She thinks of all the history that’s lying there in the coffin, wasted, a hole blown through it. It seems to her a very tacky way to die. Now she knows
why he wanted her to write about this place: so there would be less chance of this happening, to him.

“Should we be doing anything?” she whispers to Lora, who’s sitting beside her.

“Who knows?” says Lora. “I never went to one of these before.”

“How long does it go on?” says Rennie.

“All night,” says Lora.

“Why this happen?” says the wife again.

“It was his time,” says one of the women.

“No,” says Elva. “A Judas here.”

The women stir uneasily. Someone begins to sing:

“Blessed assurance, Jesus is mine,

Oh what a foretaste of Glory divine,

Perfect salvation, sent from above,

Washed in his goodness, lost in his love.”

    Rennie is uneasy. It’s hot in the room and too crowded, it smells of cinnamon and coffee and sweat, a sweet, stuffy, unhealthy smell, clogged with emotion, and it’s getting so much like Griswold she can’t bear it.
What did she die of? Cancer, praise the Lord
. That was the kind of thing they said. She stands up, as unobtrusively as she can, and edges towards the porch, out the door that stands mercifully open.

The men are outside, on the concrete porch that runs around three sides of the house. The drink here is not coffee; in the dim porch light the bottles gleam, passing from hand to hand. There are more men, down below in the garden, there’s a crowd, gathering, some of them have torches, there are voices, tense, rising.

Paul is out there, a conspicuous white face, standing to one side.
He spots Rennie and pulls her back against the wall beside him. “You should be in with the women,” he says.

Rennie chooses to take this not as a put-down but as a social hint. “I couldn’t breathe,” she says. “What’s going on down there?”

“Nothing yet,” says Paul. “They’re mad as hell though. Minnow was from Ste. Agathe. A lot of people here are related to him.”

Someone’s carrying a chair over to the porch railing. A man climbs up on it and looks down at the upturned faces. It’s Marsdon. The voices quiet.

“Who kill this man?” he says.

“Ellis,” someone calls, and the crowd chants, “Ellis, Ellis.”

“Judas,” says Marsdon, almost a shout.

“Judas. Judas.”

Marsdon raises his hands and the chanting stops.

“How many more times?” he says. “How much more, how many more dead? Minnow a good man. We are going to wait till he kill all of us, every one? We been asking, many times, we get nothing. Now we gonna take.”

There’s shouting, an enraged cheer, then one clear voice:
“Tear down Babylon!”
In the dark below, bodies begin to move. Marsdon bends, stands up again; in his hands is a compact little machine gun.

“Shit,” says Paul. “I told them not to do that.”

“Do what?” says Rennie. “What are they going to do?” She can feel her heart going, she doesn’t understand.
Massive involvement
.

“They don’t have enough guns,” says Paul. “It’s as simple as that. I don’t know where Prince is, he’ll have to stop them.”

“What if he can’t?” says Rennie.

“Then he’ll have to lead them,” says Paul. He pushes off from the wall. “Go back to the house,” he says.

“I don’t know the way,” says Rennie. They came in a jeep.

“Lora does,” says Paul.

“What about you?” says Rennie.

“Don’t worry,” says Paul. “I’ll be fine.”

They go by the back streets, Lora first, then Rennie. The only place to be, in Lora’s opinion, is out of the way. It’s muddy here from the rain but they don’t bother to pick their way around the water-filled potholes, there’s no time and it’s hard to see. The only light comes from the small concrete-block houses set at intervals back from the road. The road is deserted, the action is a couple of streets farther down towards the sea. They hear shouting, the smash of glass.

“Bank windows,” says Lora. “I bet you anything.”

They cross a side street. For a moment there’s a glimpse of torches. “Don’t let them see you is my motto,” says Lora. “In the dark anyone’s fair game. They can apologize afterwards but who cares, eh? There’s going to be a few old scores settled, no matter what else they do.”

Now they can hear gunfire, irregular and staccato, and after a minute the feeble lights in the houses flicker and go out, the underlying hum in the air shudders and cuts. “There goes the power plant,” says Lora. “They’ll take over that and the police station, there’s only two policemen on Ste. Agathe anyway so it shouldn’t be that hard. There isn’t a hell of a lot else to take over around here. Maybe they’ll smash up the Lime Tree and get drunk on the free booze.”

“I can’t see,” says Rennie. Her sandals are muddy, the bottom of her skirt is dripping; she’s more disgusted than frightened. Window-breaking, juvenile delinquency, that’s all it is, this tiny riot.

“Come on,” says Lora. She gropes for Rennie’s arm, pulls her along. “They’ll be up here in a minute, they’ll be after Ellis’s people. We’ll take the path.”

Rennie stumbles after her. She’s disoriented, she has no idea where they are, even the stars are different here. It’s slow going without a moon. Branches heavy with damp flowers brush against her, the smells are still alien. She pushes through the leaves, slipping on the wet earth of the path. Below them is the road. Through the undergrowth she can see moving lights now, flashlights, torches, and hurrying figures. It’s almost like a festival.

When they finally reach the house it’s completely dark.

“Damn,” says Rennie. “We locked it when we went out and Paul’s got the key. We’ll have to break in.”

But Lora’s already at the door, pushing. “It’s open,” she says.

As soon as they’re inside the door there’s a sharp glare, sudden, against their eyes. Rennie almost screams.

“It’s only you,” says Paul. He lowers the flashlight.

“How in shit did you get back here ahead of us?” says Lora.

“Took the jeep,” says Paul. To Rennie he says, “Get your things.”

“Where’s Prince?” says Lora.

“Down there being a hero,” says Paul. “They’ve got the two policemen tied up with clothesline, and they’re declaring an independent state. Marsdon’s writing a proclamation and they want to send it out over my radio. They’re asking Grenada to recognize them. There’s even some talk of invading St. Antoine.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” says Lora. “How the shit would they do that?”

“In the fishing boats,” says Paul, “plus whatever other boats they can grab. They’ve got a bunch of Swedish tourists in the police station, and those two German women who are making one hell of a fuss. They’ve requisitioned them. Hostages.”

“Can’t you stop them?” says Lora.

“You think I haven’t tried?” says Paul. “They won’t listen to me any more. They think they’ve won. It’s way out of control. Go into
the bedroom,” he says to Rennie, “and get your stuff. There’s a candle in there. I’m taking you over to St. Antoine, you can get the morning plane out. If you were smart,” he says to Lora, “you’d go with her. You’ve still got your passport.” Rennie lets herself be ordered. This is his scene after all, his business; he’s the one who’s supposed to know what to do next. She hopes he does.

She feels her way along the hall into the bedroom. There isn’t much to pack. It might as well be a hotel room; it has the same emptiness, the same melancholy aura of a space that has been used but not lived in. The bed is tangled, abandoned. She can’t remember having slept in it.