Kingston Noir (28 page)
“Lil Croc is still out there. A lot of his business is running numbers. With your particular skill set, you could help bring him down. Will you help?”
Proof, sucking on his spliff, said nothing.
“I don’t understand you,” I complained. “You hate cops. You cut me off. So why did you help with the case? There must be some reason you got involved.”
Proof was as silent as a calculator.
I continued: “Here’s my theory—I think, because of what happened to our parents, you want to give back. You want to use your math skills to fight crime. Tell me I’m wrong. Tell me I haven’t cracked your formula.”
From inside the apartment I heard the cry of a baby.
“Honey, are you coming back to bed?” a woman’s voice called out.
That sounded like Soledad.
I looked at Proof.
He smiled, exhaled a cloud of smoke, and slowly shut the door.
T
he rising sun picked out the points of the old tin roofs. Soon it would fill the narrow, potholed street with flame. Petunia wore a brown dress and white sneakers as she sat on the small veranda of her two-room, wood and concrete house, erect in her wicker chair, slurping her coffee, looking down the littered street from this small elevation over the hibiscus hedge to that house, that house, that damn house eight gates down, where that sports car was parked, that house with the coconut tree in the front yard and that bright red door.
This is fuckeries … you are fuckeries, she muttered. She put the tin mug down on the table next to her and reached for her phone.
Hunts Bay? Beg you send a squad car now. A girl and her baby dead in Greenwich Town … please, sir, as there is a God I not going answer any questions. What more you want but that a girl and a baby dead in Greenwich Town? I done give you the address already, sir. Don’t worry yourself with who me is. Just come. Just come. Just come.
When she got off the phone she thought of what she’d say when she was asked in person. Who she was?
If she’d been asked before two a.m. this morning, she would have mentioned four things: the daughter of a fisherman from Treasure Beach; a dropout from a nursing school in Mandeville; a woman who’d lived her forty-three years in the light of the gospel; and a former sinner who did not do what an older married man had commanded—which was to abort her child.
Her scalp itched under her store-bought hair as her mind took her back to that time.
When her mother had found out she was fooling with Mr. Gladstone, she’d beaten her with a mop stick and called her Jezebel and said if she ever took no more man again she was going to tie her up. And she’d been so afraid—not so much of getting hit again, but of being restrained—that she ran away to her father’s fishing shack one night when he was gone to sea. When he returned, she told him that her mother now had a new boyfriend and she, Petunia, didn’t like the man, and so she got put out.
She was seventeen then, but so small that folks who didn’t know her used to think she was twelve. Her father didn’t question her. He simply took her in.
She began to wish now in this moment of waiting that her father was alive. He would have taken care of Linton, that nasty, stinking dog. She wouldn’t have had to try.
In her mind she saw the shack where she used to walk down from their little house to meet her father just before sunrise, making sure to get there in time to hear the slither of wood on wet sand as he dragged his canoe ashore on Frenchman’s Cove beach. She saw in her mind the bright blue of the boat, and the way it glistened in the soft light of predawn, saw also the other men all along the beach, pulling their canoes ashore until the beach looked like it was littered with toy dolphins.
Her father’s face always broke into a smile when he saw her.
After a few weeks with him, when she was sure her belly would begin to show, she stopped going to school. Her father was not the kind of man who paid attention to this sort of thing. Though she knew now that she’d have been better off in life if he had. But he was a good man, and they grew closer as she lingered with him in the mornings when the boats came in. With school off her agenda, she had time to just sit with him on the prow of his blue boat named for her and give him his breakfast and ginger coffee—which she, Petunia, was drinking now on her veranda as she waited for the sirens to come.
Looking back now, with the eye of an adult, she understood a look that used to confuse her then, the look of a parent marveling at the miracle of his child while feeling the weight of sorrow. In her recollection, it was a look that never lasted. Like lightning, it would come in a flash, then her father would begin to laugh again, and rub his hands in her hair, and she would giggle and tell him not to wipe the saltfish oil ’pon her head.
On some mornings, though, there was not much laughter. At these times, he’d ask her when she planned to go back to her mother. As she complained, he’d say her mother was good, that he’d shamed her, that’s all.
She is from a good family, he would say. A better class than mine. I couldn’t married her—and they wouldn’ta let me marry her—so is like the shame is mine too. I feel that’s why bad luck take me and I mash up like this, just drinking rum and can’t even take proper care of me daughter. One day, though, one day, God might take a chance on me and give me a little grace.
The next thing Petunia saw, as she sat on her veranda, was her seventeen-year-old self waddling barefoot on the hot gray sand, her shame six months prominent, living off the fish and kindness of her father’s friends, and hearing someone calling her from behind. It was a young white man from Ohio who had come down from the Seventh Day Adventist church up in Mandeville to take her to the new home for unwed mothers.
We are a place of acceptance, he’d told her, where we believe you can be reborn.
And who wouldn’t want that? she thought, as some schoolchildren walked by her house in their uniforms, and radios and TVs sounded in the houses on her street. Who wouldn’t want that? So she went with him the next morning to Mandeville. And that is where her pickney Grace was born, and where she’d entered the college run by the Adventist church. But the same man who had saved her wanted her body in return so she left, ran away again.
She found a job at Kingston Public Hospital as a ward assistant, and settled in Greenwich Town. Rough place, everybody used to tell her. Out there is West Kingston. But at least, she told herself, it’s down by the waterfront, and her happiest times ever had been with her father, who had since died, down by the sea. And she needed to save money for Grace’s future. And in this neighborhood the rent was cheap.
Oh Grace, oh Grace, oh Grace—she glanced down the road at the red front door—why you cause this kind of crosses on me? But is not like nobody never tell you, said a chorus of voices in her head.
The girl grew pretty. On top of that she had tall hair and light skin. People used to say she look half Chiney. Went to good school too, Ardenne Prep. The kinda school that made her, Petunia, have to work two shifts three times a week and take the long bus ride up to Mona Heights on weekends to clean and cook, and wash married women’s skimpy underwear and exercise clothes.
But she didn’t used to mind the ride up there, in truth, because that is where she had found what she came to know as her rightful church.
One Sunday afternoon, her bus broke down near the US embassy on Old Hope Road, near Lane Plaza, and as she waited for another one to come she heard a glorious singing, and the spirit of the Lord led her to follow it, and she ended up going into the heart of a ghetto hidden away in the middle of that uptown splendor in a place called Stand Pipe; there she met the sisters of the Church of the Pentecostal Fire, Clarisse and Millicent and Hildred. And soon after she met them, they began to warn her that she had to think about where she was living, because a girl like Grace would not survive slum life.
That one did hurt her for true.
Slum life
. Like where they lived was any better, just because it wasn’t in West Kingston or felt like it was in the country, as people still fished out there by the waterside.
But who could have seen it coming?
Grace was a good girl, churchgoing and choir-singing all along. Then she turned thirteen and began to notice boys, and boys began to notice her, and what should have been an innocent time of bad perfume, and fumbled school fetes, and gossip, and giggles, and bad makeup, and the uncertain swaying of hips noticed mostly by boys her age, whom God in His mercy made inept and shy to protect the world from unfolding too soon, became something else.
Here in this place where the Lord had let the devil have free reign, thirteen-year-old boys weren’t the only ones to watch young girls. And Grace came to the attention of him, the one who drove that sports car parked before that house with that damn red door—and where is the damn police?—and nothing she could say seemed to deter her child from sneaking out.
She began to think now of the story she’d tried to use to scare her.
One night when I used to live with my father, the story had begun, I heard a commotion as I was walking past a bar, and when I went in there I see a man grabbing him up. My father was drunk already even though it was just past lunchtime, and the man was three times bigger than him, and the man had him down, you know, had bend him over and my father was down on one knee struggling, and then him see me, and when him see me him just twist the man and flip him over, and as the man was flipping over, my father just come up with him fishing knife and slit the man crossway from him right shoulder down to him left side, but not too deep. No guts did spill. And after that him just come to me and gave me some pocket money and order another Red Stripe. And I want you to know something, Grace: I might be a woman of God, but I know I have the devil inside. And sometimes when I see you with that damn Linton, or hear that you driving up and down beside him in him car in your school uniform, and going over there and passing through that red door, I get the look on my face that my father had when he saw me watching him fight that man that time. And let me tell you this, and I am only going to tell you one time: if you look under my bed, you will see my father’s knife.
And is not like I tried only one way, thought Petunia. She’d even tried to work with the other side.
One night she’d come home from her second shift and Grace wasn’t there, and she just knew she was over there behind that damn red door, and she’d marched over with a New Testament clutched to her bosom, and when the hooligans who worked for the dog saw the shape of her coming through the night, they met her halfway, stopped her in the public street, and roughed her up, and during the roughing up, Linton himself came out. He was dressed in just his underpants and a baseball cap, which did not prevent him from sauntering up the street.
I promise you, he’d said, that if you ever come over here and disrespect me like that, you going find Grace—and I don’t even know where the little stink-pussy red gal bloodclaat is—you going find her in a bag out at sea. And trust me, I was going leave her alone, but because of this now, I just going keep fucking her. And if she listen to you and bring some argument to me I going take it one step further and fuck her up. So if is that you want as her mother, then come over here and fuck with me again. Me no frighten for nobody. Is me run this place, and trust me, Mother, me can fuck any gal, anywhere, anyhow, anytime.
As she’d walked back to her house while those hooligans laughed, Petunia thought of all she’d seen those years at KPH, all those dark inventive ways in which men hurt women and young girls.
She’d waited on this same damn veranda the next morning, had watched her daughter leave that godforsaken house at sunrise and take that shameful walk while other girls were going to school. And she had tried to talk to her—nobody can say she didn’t try—but the gal wanted to walk inside the house without answering her mother, and when she grabbed her and slapped her, the bitch hacked and spat in her eye.
That night she did not work her second shift as scheduled, she went up to Stand Pipe to church, and there over a votive lit in the corner of the tabernacle she made her pledge.
Almighty Lord, the one true God who smote the enemies of David and Solomon, she invoked. The prayer was elaborate, the calling down of the ghost to witness, the calling down of fire, but the pact was straight. If you don’t protect my child, Lord, she said, I will have to bring the fire down on the enemy myself, like Elijah did to Baal on that holy mountain. So help me Lord to stay true and straight.
And even when Grace got pregnant by Linton, said Petunia to herself as she heard the sirens in the distance, she was patient with God. Had Job himself not endured more than that and without even the blessings that she had?
One night, when Grace was just two months pregnant and was still spending nights with that nasty thirty-odd-yearold Linton boy, and she, Petunia, confessed that she was losing faith, sisters Clarisse, Millicent, and Hildred reassured her.
Put it to God again in prayer, child. Put it strong-strong this time. We have a mighty friend.
And she smiled up at the big picture of Jesus over the altar, and in her heart she felt as if she and that man had an understanding, and as the sisters lay hands on her she bowed her head and smiled.
She said, Don’t pray for me or with me no more, my sisters. I have heard directly from the Lord.
What did the Lord tell her? Take the pickney out of school before she start to show. Lock her up in her room. Look for a new place. And move. When you go to work, tie her to her bed. Use tape and seal her. Put up black curtains. Lock every door.
As the daughter of a fisherman, she knew all about knots, and there was no slipping out of the ones she made.
It was risky to keep a pregnant girl tied up and immobilized, she knew, but she’d worked at KPH for a very long time, so she kept Grace hydrated with saline drips. Hand-fed her fish soup and chicken with dumplings at night.
