The Amazing Absorbing Boy (2 page)

I removed these and gazed at the photographs, one by one. I believe my mother was proud of the big one that hung over the bureau in the living room as I had often seen her watching it while Moolai was massaging her. Her wavy hair was around her shoulders and the way she was looking up at the photographer made her eyes look big and mischievous. It was hard to connect her with that picture. She was more normal in the old black-and-white picture with a wooden frame that stood above the doorway to the kitchen. There, she was standing next to Uncle Boysie and they seemed to be going
to a function or something because her hair was plaited and Uncle Boysie was wearing a tie and a jacket that surprisingly did not push against his belly. When I went into her bedroom, the first thing that struck me was the smell of camphor and Limacol and I wondered whether this was the odour of death some of my school novels mentioned. On her dresser was the tree-shaped picture holder. It was not covered, maybe because there were missing pictures from some of the branches. The tree looked as if it was dying. I was in two of the branches though, one as a baby with my mother holding me up and the other for my fifth birthday.

Over the years, most of the pictures had been removed from the walls and whenever I asked my mother about it, she would say it was to repair the frames. In one, my mother and father were sitting together and the only thing I could remember was that his shirt was unbuttoned and she was staring sleepily at his smoke rings. I believed she removed it after Matapal, the old half-crazy fisherman who delivered moonshine, bonito, and
carite
every other Friday, made some joke about it.

I don’t think my mother ever liked Matapal, because he smelled of rum and dropped a trail of fish scales from the front door to the kitchen. She always left the kitchen while he was scaling the fishes and during that time, he would tell me nonsense about how he had discovered gold chains and necklaces inside some of the fishes. Once he said there was a picture on every scale and he held up one against the window and said he could see a scene of my mother there. “Funny little scene, boy.
Never imagine you mother like this.” When he was describing these pictures, he would stretch his arms like a big seabird and his beard would seem to get longer and his face blacker. One night during a storm, he went to untangle a boat’s anchor and no one ever saw him again. I have to say that I missed his stories but more than that I missed the newspapers in which he rolled up his fish, for it was there that I first saw the comics of the Phantom passing on his secret to his only son and Mandrake discovering a whole race of people who lived behind mirrors and the miserable little girl who was always pulling away the ball from Charlie Brown.

After Matapal drowned, it was my job to buy fish from the Mayaro market. I enjoyed going to the market because it was always packed with
caimite
and
sapodilla
and
soursop
, and vendors who sold
doubles
and
pone
and pickled
pommecythere
. Some of the vendors still referred to me as “Danny’s boy,” which was strange, as I had not seen my father since I was six and even then he was always leaving home to go on his trips. Once, Pantamoolie’s father, who sold
dasheen
and cassava, called me “the
nowhereian
son,” which was the first time I had heard the word.

Uncle Boysie always used the word in an insulting way so I was surprised when a month or so after the funeral he too said, “It look like you will come a
nowhereian
soon, boy.” We were about to close up the shop and I felt then he had found out about my evening trips along Plaisance but a couple days later he asked me, “So what you think about Canada?” Like everybody else in Mayaro, he pronounced it as
Cyanada
.

“I think it have bears and thing.” I couldn’t tell him about Captain Canuck and Wolverine because I was sure he didn’t know about superheroes.

He looked at me suspiciously before he said, “Oho. You mean the hairy kind.” After a while he added, “You know it have a lotta people who does go up there. Picking apple and grapes.”

The next day at school, I asked Pantamoolie, “So what you think about Canada?”

“These Cyanadian people have a special gland below they armpit which does keep away the cold.” I was about to laugh when he added, “Shave ice does fall from the sky. In all different flavour and colour. Lime and orange and chocolate.”

“Who tell you that?”

“
Reader’s Digest
, man. You don’t read or what?”

I should have known better than to ask Pantamoolie, as he was a big liar. For years, he tried to get us to call him Panther but nearly everybody chose Panties instead and he soon grew resigned to it. He claimed that his father who sold in the market was really an undercover agent, and that he had once seen Mr. Chotolal fingering Miss Charles in the staffroom. In form three, he tried to convince the class that Hanuman, the monkey god, was the world’s first superhero as he had super strength, could fly, had a mace as his weapon, and his name ended in “man.” But Pantamoolie’s picture of shaved ice stuck in my head and during the lunch break, I went into the school library and pulled out a really old book with pictures of Eskimos spearing seals and dogs pulling people in
sleds. Some of the names of places like Ottawa and Toronto reminded me of our local Carib ones like Arima and Mayaro.

I think it was maybe four or five days after Uncle Boysie asked the question that he told me he had written my father.

“About Mummy?”

His face hardened a bit and I thought he was going to say something about how my father was a useless nowhereian but instead he said, “About you.”

“Me?”

“Is time he take on some responsibility.”

I wondered if my father was coming from Canada to live in our house. I pictured him wearing one of these white gowns like a crazy scientist as he tried experiments from
The Wonder Book of Wonders
that was packed with directions for making magnets and flashlights and water clocks, and crystals from ordinary cupboard items. Soon after he had left for good, I discovered the book in the closet in my mother’s room. It was hidden beneath neatly folded jeans and overalls, and the minute I opened the book I knew it had been my father’s.

But why would he come now? When I was in primary school, my mother used to make up stories of him soon sending for us, but as the years passed and he did not show up, she began repeating some of Uncle Boysie’s criticisms. He was “a dreamer” and “was always running away from his responsibilities” and he “made promises he could never keep.” I stopped asking her about him as it was sure to put her in a bad mood, so I never mentioned
The Wonder Book of
Wonders
or his drawings of strange, triangular fishing boats, and seines with bulbs instead of corks, and lawnmowers with wings, or even the fancy Timex watch he had sent for me on my tenth birthday.

One day after our term exam in July, I told Pantamoolie my father would soon be coming to live with me. Immediately he asked, “He will bring down any of these Cyanadian gadgets?”

“Yeah, man. Some that he invent himself.”

“You think he might bring a motorbike?”

“I don’t think that will fit in a suitcase.”

“He could fold it up. A German Lugie then?”

“Luger?”

“Same thing. Or a Gatling gun like the one Django the movie
badjohn
had.”

“I really don’t know. Might be illegal.”

“What about one of these gadget that could see where it have fish below the water? Tell you exactly where to fishen.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I believe he might.”

During the following weeks while I was packing away small tools in Uncle Boysie’s shop I sometimes imagined my father and myself together on a boat, riding the breakers until we were past the Bocas and could see Venezuela. Sometimes in these scenes we actually landed on Venezuela and chatted with the Warahoon Indians who were so impressed with all my father’s gadgets that they loaded us up with
tattou
and ‘gouti and rainbow-coloured macaws and playful baby monkeys. Each day I waited patiently for Uncle Boysie to tell me, “Well, boy, he coming tomorrow.” But as the months passed, I began
to feel that my uncle’s promise was no different from my mother’s, when I was much younger. Just ole talk.

I soon began to see myself living my entire life right in Mayaro. Maybe I would inherit Uncle Boysie’s shop, as he wasn’t married and had no children of his own. I would also get a big belly and sit behind the counter quarrelling with the children for interfering with the stocks and appliances. I might even go to Lighthouse rumshop by the beach every weekend for a nip of Puncheon rum. One Friday after school I did exactly that but for two beers instead and when I arrived at the shop trying to fight my drowsiness, my uncle glanced at me, pushed his hand beneath his shirt and began scratching his belly. He usually did that when he was thinking of something. In the following weeks, I saw him scratching, too, whenever I took down one of the comics fastened with clothes clips to a line of polyester twine across the haberdashery section, and when he saw my shoes muddy from searching for Loykie, my sick friend who lived in the mangrove with his mother. To tell the truth, I soon forgot Uncle Boysie had ever mentioned my father but exactly nine months after my mother’s funeral, he told me, “He sending for you.”

“For me? Who?”

“You father, boy.”

“You mean to go up to Canada?”

“Righto pappyo. Cyanada.”

This was too much to digest. I had imagined my father would be joining me in Mayaro so Canada was the furthest thing from my mind. “What I will do there?”

Uncle Boysie reeled off a list of jobs he had most likely picked up from his rumshop friends. He made the place seem only slightly different from Pantamoolie’s crazy land. And he kept this up during the four weeks before I left, joking about “white chicks” and some Canadian wrestler before getting serious with warnings about
ownwayness
. On the night before my departure, he gave me a long speech that sounded as if he had crammed it from a book, because it didn’t resemble any of his previous advice. But I was really not paying him too much attention as my mind was already far, far away. I was on a plane zooming through fluffy patches of clouds to a land where flavoured shaved ice fell from the sky. A
nowhereian
, at last!

I
n the months before she died, my mother stopped talking of my father. Uncle Boysie took over and sometimes from my mother’s quietness, I felt she didn’t agree with my uncle’s criticisms even though she once used to say some of the same things, except in a more resigned way. Her silence took me back to the time after his last disappearance from our house. I remember how she fussed about fixing this or that around the house to surprise him when he returned. She tried to convince me he was on a ship travelling from port to magical port and he would one day return with gifts spilling from his pockets and stuffed inside soft velvety boxes. She kept that up for months, even when that final disappearance lasted longer than the others.

Once I heard a neighbour telling her, “Is the good-looking one and them who does cause the heartache, Sylvie. Real charmers but
skeffy
like hell.” From my mother’s little
smile I felt they were talking of my father. He appeared that way in the pictures, too, with his unbuttoned shirt and long hair and stubble on his face and his bored look. But then most of the pictures were removed (one by one, the happier ones first) and my own memories of his time with us—broken up by his trips away—faded and I began to see him from Uncle Boysie’s descriptions: a lazy, good-for-nothing scamp.

So I didn’t know what to expect when I landed in the Toronto airport and glanced around. There were a few men with beards and turbans but they all seemed to be working in the building. I walked to a bench and when a middle-aged man with a moustache sat next to me I wondered if he was my father and Canada could make people shorter and fatter but the man hailed out a woman in an accent like rolling marbles.

After ten minutes or so, I went outside but the place was too cold so I returned to the bench. Could my father have forgotten the date of my arrival? Did Uncle Boysie’s letter somehow get lost? This was worse than getting stranded in Port of Spain or San Fernando with no money for passage. Then I remembered the five hundred dollars Uncle Boysie had given to me and I cheered up a bit. In any case, I had a visa for six months. By then most of the people from the flight had disappeared with their families so I dragged my suitcase once more outside.

“Your name is Sam?”

It was a man leaning against the wall and smoking. He looked a little like Lee Van Cleef from the Westerns, sort of grim and calculating but then I saw the person from the pictures
in our living room. I told him yes and followed him to a bus a little distance away. I hauled my suitcase up the steps and we sat on opposite seats. While we were waiting for the driver I expected that he would ask about the trip or about Mayaro but he just gazed outside. Maybe was feeling shy just like me, rehearsing what to say because we had not seen each other since I was six, which was eleven years ago. Then the driver who was well dressed for a bus man came in and we took off.