The Bigger Light (12 page)

He liked this letter better than any other he had written. And he would read it over and over searching for mistakes (he had actually written it four times, before it was in this present form); and when he liked it in its present form, he had shown it to Dots. Dots read it and folded it back into its creases, put it into its envelope (she was cooking at the time) and said, “Why all of you black men always being so abusive to white women? Fuck white woman, fuck the white man, fuck this, fuck that, and still always ready to jump into bed with the first one? You didn’t have to tell the woman ‘Fuck’ in this letter!”

Boysie noticed that the envelope was smudged by tomato ketchup. He put it into another envelope and wondered what he could say to Dots’s comments. He was so angry, he regarded her as so ignorant for making that comment, “What the fuck does that have to do with it?” but he could not get the strength to talk with her about his own reaction to her comment; it was irrelevant, but it bothered him. Dots, he found out at last, was a fool. Her comment made him even more keen to send the letter to Mrs. Doris McGibbon Anderson. “Fuck her!” And he
was not even running behind white woman when she made her generalization! Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the brown winter coat emerging from the subway station, just near the eave of a house which was his benchmark of her arrival. He ran to the picture window and saw her. This woman, I am sure, won’t make such a foolish comment on my letter, he said to himself, watching her walk upright, sure and secure of her gait, along the short street of his vision.

She was about five feet seven inches tall. She was wearing a brown winter coat which was cut like a man’s coat. She wore a white scarf around her neck. She carried a white plastic shopping bag, like the ones you got in expensive stores, in her right hand. She wore a slightly sloppy hat on her head, on the right side of her head mostly, and it gave her a touch of smartness. Her boots this morning were white and shining. And she wore large glasses that made her look a little like an owl. He saw her for exactly three minutes, and then she disappeared. And he knew he would not see her again until the following morning.

He remained at the window looking out. Toronto was white this morning. The snow was coming down, and when he followed it, he could see the swimming pool and the tennis court and the badminton court, and the play area with the dead trees planted in white cement snow, and they all looked like slightly oversized games for children. There were children skating down below. No one was in the area where the swimming pool was. Boysie remained looking down, and the thought of jumping out of a window occurred to him, and when he saw the games of the apartment grounds, and the people walking through the games, he thought of other things. He had never really thought of suicide. He just wondered what people who thought seriously of it thought of just before they contemplated doing it seriously. He thought some more of the
people down below in the transformed playing area of the apartment building and then he left the window. He was ready to go out now.

“Meeeeoowwwwwwwwww!”

“You goddamn cat!”

“Meeow!”

“What the fuck do you want, cat?”

He opened a new can of cat food, left it in the jagged-edged can, and dropped it on the newspaper on the kitchen floor, just beside the cupboard in which Dots kept the vacuum cleaner. “When I come back, I hope you are dead, you goddamn cat!”

Just then the telephone rang. Who could it be? Perhaps the car dealer calling about his new car, or the landlord. Had he paid his rent? He was paid up three months in advance.

“Hello?”

“You feed my cat, yet?”

It was Dots. It was the first time she had ever called him from her work.

Boysie was sitting in his new 1973 black Buick that had everything in it, power brakes, power window winders, tape player, FM and AM radio, and he did not feel elated. He had been sitting in the car for ten minutes, in the parking lot of the car dealer’s; the keys were his, possession was his, all the papers were signed and in order, and he could not bring himself to feel the power of ownership. He tried to feel elated, something of the pride he had felt when he and Dots drove the panel truck along the street where Henry lived the day they first got it: that day marked his change in fortune in this country. A secondhand panel truck with nothing inside it but two old ripped and soiled seats and a lot of metal space behind him.
And he was so happy then. Now, still owning the truck which took him to work, with all his cleaning materials, with his name printed on its sides,
BOYSIE CUMBERBATCH, CLEANERS, INC
. (“I must remember to change that to
BERTRAM CUMBERBATCH, JANITORIAL SERVICES, INCORPORATED”
), and sitting in this new car, it was as if nothing had happened to him. “I must remember to get my new batch of cheques changed to Bertram Cumberbatch, Janitorial Services, Incorporated, too! And I should have put that as my office and title after the letter to the editor of
Chatelaine!
” But he decided it was wiser not to have done that: just another case of a black person who was a cleaner; and to own a cleaning company was the same thing as being a chief cleaner.

Where should he drive his new car? He thought of the persons he knew, and like the telephone calls he would make to check on them, or see whether he wanted to talk to them, and finding them all disappeared, Boysie again felt the helplessness of being without friends. There were lots of friends to be got, but these were West Indians, men he had met as he visited the Colonial Tavern during his coffee breaks from cleaning the downtown offices of his contracts, and would see leaning against the bar, talking to Canadian women, men dressed in the latest flashy clothes, like pimps, as he found out when browsing through a magazine,
OUI
, which the young Canadian fellow had brought into Mr. MacIntosh’s office one night. These West Indians he would see at the Colonial Tavern all wore dark glasses, shades, as if they were standing outside in the West Indian sun; and the way they walked! with their fists clenched and dropped at their sides while they moved their feet, as if they were merely sliding, and being so important and so silent inside the Tavern, but laughing so loudly when they were standing up outside on the sidewalk just in front of the
place. Goddamn pimps! They disgusted him. And he would drink his Scotch fast and get away. He could not talk to any of them. To be seen talking with them on the street would be to mark himself as one of them: and he couldn’t have that! for he was moving up.

And he thought of going for a drive. But to go for your first drive in a new car, by yourself, without even a woman beside you, that was no fun. He thought of going up at the Doctor’s Hospital and showing Dots the car, but that was against his plans. This car was going to be his car. His. Not his and hers, nothing like that. His. And hers? No, he wasn’t such a Northamerican as that! If he was in Barbados, the first place he would drive a new car would be up at the airport, to see all the people who were leaving the island, and those who were coming in as tourists, and he would see many people he knew who were sure to walk round his new car and ask him, “How much horses under the fucking hood, Boys, old bean?” and kick the tires, and look inside, and ask, “Air-condition in this blasted thing?” although none of them had ever sat inside a car with air-conditioning; but they would have heard of these from the tourists and in magazines. But he was not in Barbados now, and that kind of literacy about things never owned and observed was not common here. He started the engine, and drove out of the dealer’s parking lot. He peered through the windshield, wondering why the people were a different colour from when he drove his truck. And then he turned the windows down; and realized how cold it was, and that the glass was tinted. “Good!” It meant he could not be seen easily from the outside.

He drove along College Street going west, and he relaxed inside the luxurious upholstery, fiddled with the press-buttons on the dashboard, changed the stations in the FM radio,
searching for the CBC, and all the time the Buick, moving like water on glass, carried him aimlessly through the lightly falling snow. He got annoyed with the snow for falling on a day like this. It was only two in the afternoon, and he had still lots of time before he had to get home, change, and drive to work in his panel truck. For the time being, he would try hard to enjoy this latest possession, which was so difficult for him to enjoy by himself.

The light at the corner was long in changing. He looked through his tinted windows at the West Indians and Italians and other immigrants bundled up, most of them in cheap winter coats because they had little money for such luxuries, most of them walking fast but not moving fast because the ice under the snow was tricky, all of them serious with expressions of caution on their faces. A woman the size of Dots was coming out of the West Indian shop owned by a Portuguese just where he was stopped, on his left hand, waiting for the light to change. He should stop a little further along this street, right in front of the other West Indian shop which sold Jamaican meat patties, and make them see who was getting out of this big black goddamn Buick. Yeah, do that, Boysie.

There was a time when he would wrap the steering wheel of a car, of his truck, round and round as if it was a piece of elastic rubber band, and park in the smallest possible space, wrapping and wrapping, tires screeching, and he laughing as he looked out and saw people marvelling at his dexterity with a car. But now he drove slowly along the line of parked cars on the north side, looking for a space big enough to park his new automobile. And when he found one, the size of his car and almost half as much again, he pulled alongside the car in front of the space, and turned his steering wheel until the body of the car was exactly forty-five degrees from the angle of the
parked car (although he could not have worked this out mathematically in his mind: it was practice and having the car at that angle from the sidewalk); he moved in, and stopped, exactly equidistant from the car in front and the one behind. He peered through the windshield and saw the greyish snow coming down lightly, and he saw a few aimless West Indians walking in the street, their colours now darker and looking purplish. He revved up the motor and then turned it off. He locked all his doors, and he remembered to press the button which lowered his car aerial. “Can’t have nobody damage that!” A man came out of the shop while he was still adjusting his clothes to get out of the car. The man stopped. He looked at the car, stared through the tinted windshield at the driver of the car, and without changing the expression on his face he walked on. “You blasted … these doors locked, though!” The man was eating what looked like a meat patty.

Boysie got out of the car, and locked the door. He straightened himself, adjusted the fit of his cashmere winter coat on his shoulders, pulled his felt hat down at a firmer level, not too cockily, and went into the shop.

Noise hit his ears the moment he opened the door. The place was filled with West Indians and it seemed that all of them were talking at the same time. It took him a while to understand what they were talking about. They were not talking about anything in particular, just talking and making noise.

“Wappning, man!”
one man screamed.

“Oh-God-oh-God-oh-God!” another shouted, as if he was intending to make his words into a song, with a beat like a calypso. And he spoke so rapidly that all the “Oh-Gods” seemed to be one word.

“Wappneeeeen! wapppneeeeen! wapppneeeeen!”

“Oh-God-oh-God, why all-you didn’ come to Dresser partee, last night? Dresser had par-tee for soooooo …”

The place was cluttered with pictures of soccer stars and cricket stars from the West Indies. “Two more patties here!” There were old photographs of the Honourable Marcus Garvey. All the photographs were taken in the same shot. Garvey was wearing a derby hat, and his cheeks were fat as they say of a man who eats too many pork chops, and his lips were thick and his whole face like the face of a prosperous West Indian small merchant, who was dressed in tweeds and standing in the hot sun. There were flags of red black and green. The music was loud. Nobody was listening, but they all seemed to be moving to the rhythm of the song. “… 
give the donkey first second and third …
” and Boysie wondered what Sparrow was singing about: he had never heard this calypso before. It might have been the latest tune from the last Carnival in Trinidad. “Bring more pep-puh, bring more pep-puh, oh-God-oh-God, all-you turn Canadian fast, yes!” … 
if you was the king of beasts
,
you would be toting that
 … Boysie wasn’t sure whether one of the customers had spoken this, or whether it was part of the calypso; and the place was dark, and he couldn’t get his eyes adjusted to the gloominess, although he used to be at home in the Paramount Tavern just down the street from here. “… oh Christ, man, this blasted country
hard
like rass! I know two-three fellows who walking ’bout for six months still looking for their first work, and people telling me this country, Canada, more better than the States … give me the States any time!”

“What can I do for you, sir?”

A man was shaking most of a bottle of pepper sauce on his patties, and the waitress, a young woman from one of the islands who hadn’t talked yet, was standing like his judge over
him and over the bottle, waiting perhaps to see that he didn’t use too much of the pepper sauce, for this was a West Indian eating place, and a lotta Wessindians going come in here and first thing they going axe for is for pep-puh, and if there ain’ no rass pep-peh in the patty shop, what the rass, man, “What the rass!” Some of the pepper had been spilled on the waitress’s dress. She was not wearing an apron. “Looka this man, though!” she said, and moved away holding on to her dress which was very short for this type of weather. “What can I do for you, sir?”

The man behind the counter had been talking to Boysie almost the moment he came into the shop. And he had moved away to serve other customers, but had come back to stand in front of Boysie, behind the counter, where Boysie was now watching a fly. A goddamn fly in winter?