Kingston Noir (23 page)

Saw, yes. She saw, having walked in on them. Four years ago. Him and the nasty-dutty black bwoy, in their parents’ house on that lovely and still, so still, Norbrook night. Still but for the peepers. Still for once, miraculously, with no noise of traffic at that hour from Norbrook Road; no dogs in neighbors’ gardens barking in argument with dogs barking in rage; and a moon, a
moon
as generous as gold, that had gleamed its determined but gentle white through so many Upper St. Andrew streetlights. That night, in the blood, in the flesh: remember it. Remember, as you knew then, that there are times when people, people like your beloved younger sister, should have stayed as late at the party to which she had gone with those several friends as she had said with such certainty only a few hours before she had planned to do—because if she had done that, if she had kept to her word, you would then finally,
finally
have been able to do all the things that you had so longed to do and had never done, never dared to do, even if, especially if, they were things to do with and to a bighooded nasty-dutty black bwoy who labored, sweaty and dirty as those people always were, with his sweaty-dirty, but not young and gorgeous and big-hooded, uncle in your parents’ garden. Then, in those most secret times, you can at last be free, you can soar, you can even be dangerous and disgusting and take some of the nastydutty black bwoy all the way down your throat (Jesus
Christ,
the hood), and
taste
him in the very back-back of your throat, Massa God, before he pulls it out and whips you with it in the face because no one will know, no one who knows you will ever know. There are times when you know, as you knew that night, that your parents were indeed in Fort Lauderdale for the weekend (they had called back to the house only a few hours before that evening, and Yes, dear, your mother had said—her voice as always so warm but cool, her voice as always so assured provided that your father was not
anywhere nearby—we arrived safely, though Daddy is a bit cross because, well, you know, he’s tired, eh? But everything is fine so far … Yes, my dear, and Aunt Hyacinth says hello again). In Florida for the weekend and not due to return until the following Tuesday …
you and Leigh Anne by that time of course old enough to stay at the house on your own, the two of you well into your twenties; knowing that they were away visiting the aunt who lived there and several other relatives, and shopping up there as people like themselves so loved to do when provided the slightest opportunity; knowing that your sister was going to her blasted party over in Russell Heights shortly, so that you had been able to tell the helper, Yeah man, go home at five thirty, Leigh Anne and I can take care of everything from here, no problem—you so confidently told the helper, although you did not, in that moment, actually anticipate that anything would really be possible with the nasty-dutty black bwoy who still, that late afternoon, sauntered about the grounds with his machete looped on the side of his pants
:
the gardener’s nephew who came often to assist his uncle, and whom you had imagined on first glancing at him to be named Ransford or Davion or one of those typical ghetto names that black ghetto dwellers love to give their children.

But the bwoy’s name had in fact been Michael: a slender black Michael with beautiful teeth and lips—beautiful everything, as it turned out—who, like his uncle, your parents’ elderly gardener, had always smelled of the garden and of the sun, sun and earth and sweat: a younger, always bare-chested man with those nipples, that stomach, those narrow hips, that backside, and with who knew, until that night, what size and shape of hood: that nasty-dutty black bwoy who, like his uncle the gardener, walked always with a machete slung in such a manly way on his waist and had learned from an early age, like his uncle, to call you “sah”; that bwoy who had actually looked at you and
looked
at you so many times over the years—he, the gardener’s nephew, daring to look at you, the Shepherds’ son—as you, sometimes just as daring if not more, had looked back at him, at
that blackness that had never been yours:
those
Shepherds were not black, they were most certainly not black. You looked, though carefully, quietly, with lowered glance; sometimes even daring, gazing out from your grilled bedroom window, to watch him water the hanging baskets or bend over to chop away weeds from the ornamentals … he being nearly the same age as you, perhaps a year or so older? Yes, he had actually told you his age when, at last, impossibly, your hand, that night, had found its place on his hood, as he had gripped you at the neck and forced your face into his chest—

(But Leigh Anne is—is—is dead, he thinks. The one person who knew, the only person aside from the gardener’s nephew and himself who
knew
.)

It was not supposed to be. Never supposed to be. But yes, you’ll be back late, nuh? he had asked his sister. Yeah man, she had replied—murmured, actually, momentarily distracted with pulling some loose thread out of her skirt—and had mentioned something about maybe staying late at her friend Jessica’s, in Allerdyce. She and Peter had known each other even then, and Peter, soon to be her fiancé, had arrived not long after that to drive her over to their friends’, though she had always preferred to do her own driving whenever possible … that was Leigh Anne, that was her very independent streak. And she had, not long after that, departed … leaving him alone on the grounds with the nasty-dutty black bwoy walking around, swinging his hips and machete—for by that time the gardener-uncle also had gone, had in fact taken off early that afternoon and left his nephew behind to do the rest of the cutting and chopping and cleaning up. Cutting and chopping … and thinking about those words, and seeing the machete gleaming on the black bwoy’s hip had given him some pause … for hadn’t there been so many stories in recent years about men being “chopped up” by gardeners? Something gone wrong one day? A bit of temper in one, a slip of cruelty in the other? A demeaning word tossed just once too often from brown to black? The final comprehension, by the black, that the brown’s lowered gaze barely concealed an
abiding contempt? The black perhaps finally understanding, perhaps after fifteen or twenty years of service chopping back their damned trees and cutting back their blasted bougainvilleas, that the words “dutty” and “nasty,” if never uttered directly to him, were most certainly thought by several (if not all) members of the household about him? Yes, maybe a definite Yes to all, and the possible Yes had, for at least a few moments, given him considerable pause … yet that evening, at last, impossibly, they had met. Brown, black. After dark, well after twilight. Met in the washing room with its washing machine, heavy sink, and constant smell of chlorine, amidst which the helper—Carlene, a young black woman from Trelawny whose only enemies on earth were dirt and Satan—in daylight hours scrubbed and wrung stains from clothing, curtains, bed linens soiled by brown people’s sweat.

Just a glance and a very slight smile that could not truly be a smile but was—that was all it took, it seemed, as he found himself there, in the washing room where he never went, when the gardener’s nephew was at last there, with grave concentration washing his hands and forearms before leaving for the evening. Yes sah, de bus mi a tek a T’ree Mile, the bwoy had said (beautiful teeth, he had noticed again; black skin, gorgeous teeth): full patois, not one English sentence in there. Bus a T’ree Mile, den mi haffi walk. Although he did not think of it at the time, he would remember later that the bwoy had not mentioned that, upon leaving the house, he was also required to walk all the way down the long stretch of Norbrook Road to Olivier Road, then past the golf course to Constant Spring Road, then take the Constant Spring bus to Half Way Tree where he would change for a bus that would take him closer to Three Mile. For some reason the bwoy—machete still shining on his hip—had not mentioned any of that.

But really, there had not been much else. They had not had to make uneasy talk about football, or the weather; they had not had to talk about how wonderful Henry, the bwoy’s uncle, had been all
those years, working such long hours and so reliably for the family; they had not had to say anything about the amount of traffic on Norbrook Road these days, nor about the number of doctor birds that had dived into the garden one afternoon, spun in ever-widening circles, and then departed almost as suddenly as they had appeared, never reappearing in the family garden in that number. It had seemed as if all at once, their faces had come together. Hands. Arms. Crotches, and hands in crotches. Without the saddling or comfort of language, except for a few very soft words the bwoy had whispered in his ear—“You can suck m’hood?” and “Gwan, hold it tight fi mek i’ ’tand up”—words like that, which he was sure he had returned with similar requests—little had been said. Suddenly he was smelling, tasting that black bwoy in him, within him, on him, and, impossibly, himself on the black bwoy, the bwoy who did not speak or chose not to speak English, and that fast, yes, that fast, he remembers, everything was black: night, skin, and the space in the throat that aims to grip the tightest. Although it was not possible, the black bwoy’s tongue was in his mouth, his in the black bwoy’s, and—

(Smells. Sweat. Armpit stink, mansmell, crotch. Sweat, crotch, hoodsmell. Lift up the hood and sniff the tip. Sniff it before you suck it. Before you put your mouth on it, smell it. Breathe it. Taste. Unwashed hood after a full day, rass, and rank crotch. He was smelling it. I am smelling it, he had thought. Smelling you. I am smelling your fleshsmell ranksweatfleshsmell and

Yes.
Yes.
Tasting it. Tasting you. Michael. Nasty-dutty black bwoy. Sucking me sucking you. Here.)

“Michael,” the bwoy had said while somehow managing to keep his tongue pressing against the other’s—lowering a hand to his machete for only a moment, to in fact release it as he released the button that clipped his trousers closed—saying the name again, “Michael”: his name, simply his name.

There are times, even if you are standing in shock at your sister’s funeral, gripping the pew railing in front of you as the organ, in all
its sorrow and wail, begins to call your name, when you can hate her with every inch of your blood and bone, and wish her dead yet again for having done certain things: for having once called you that name,“Chunkybatty,” when you were all children and you’d had, in truth, a chunky batty, though you gradually outgrew it in adolescence, in fact grew by all accounts into a slender young man: but that name and its humiliation, Chunkybatty, remained and scalded the scorn of childhood awkwardness and shame that three of your favorite cousins never forgot, and laughed over every chance they got—laughed over for years as you, small boy at the time, had stood there, Chunkybatty, stood there and looked at them. Or you could hate her, deadsister, for telling your parents, although you had sworn her to confidence, that one of your teachers had severely scolded you for looking “unkempt” in your uniform in an afternoon class; or hate her for snapping at you, “No, stupid,” when you as her older caring brother had merely asked a question about one of her friends who had been ill, and had later, most unexpectedly, at a tender age, died; or hate her and very much wish her dead, again and again, for returning home early from a party when she had told you several times only hours before, No, she would definitely be home late, of course, with Peter, with Andrea, maybe with Karen too: with all of them, she would be home late. But no, not late that evening, because she and Peter had had a rare disagreement early on that had escalated into a bitter fight, and “Home,” she had angrily said, “Enough already, man. I’m leaving. Home,” she had said—and home she had come, in someone else’s car—in Andrea’s car, or Deirdre’s; in the car of one of those friends who were now somewhere behind you in the organ-wailing church. There are times when you should know that these things might happen. But when you cannot take your tongue out of a nasty-dutty black bwoy’s mouth and cannot stop inhaling the smell of his sweat and tasting it too, the sweat and smell and kisses and cock pressing against you, inside you, and then deeper inside still, of a black bwoy gardener who is in fact not at all either
nasty or dutty; when you cannot, will not, give up the feeling of his warm warm strong black, so black, arms about you holding, holding, like
that,
and the feeling of his mouth upon your neck, warm, soft, moist, whispering into your most receptive ear his name, his most holy beautiful two-syllabled name; when you have sucked and kissed and even, oh my God,
swallowed
his rank hood and everything that makes his flesh, that flesh, possible, and he has kissed your belly and then so easily, so calmly and gently, eased his thick black hood into your backside hole, your battyhole, and fucked you, fucked you standing up with his gleaming machete on the concrete floor of your parents’ washing room, his trousers on the floor tangled up in yours and his hood pushing, pushing inside you as you gasp and shudder and reach behind you for his neck, his arms, for something to grab onto because the pain and pleasure and sheer raw burn of his flesh are too much, beyond all things, beyond imagining, beyond even “Michael!” you had actually called out, calling his name in spite of yourself, “Michael—”

There are times like these when you simply cannot be as aware of things, of sounds and vibrations and suddenly approaching lights, as you ought to be, as you must be. As you must be, by God, especially inna Jamaica, bomborassclaat. Receiving him, receiving his warm rush inside yourself with no thought in those moments of danger or disease or even his black skin so far up inside you, against you, on you, you cannot completely be in your “right mind”: you are in fact deluded, diverted, disoriented unto joy, freedom, release: release from the black bwoy, the brown boy, the black bwoy and the brown boy kissing and sucking, and if only, oh my God, you thought, if only we could—

But then. Then. Then she was there. Standing there, the person who drove her home mercifully having left her by the front veranda because she had wanted to be “alone,” as she had said as the car pulled up the driveway. “Just leave me at the house, I’ll be fine. Anyway, Leighton is home.”