….a novel in progress
AT around 11 am he took the shortcut through a broken backyard fence and walked over to the adjacent street where two or three of his best friends lived. He was dead broke and had to start thinking of another fifteen cents for today’s 1pm matinee.

There was no way he was going to miss the Randolph Scott double, ‘Coroner Creek’ and ‘Buchanan Rides Alone’ after all the talk he had heard, here and there, about Scott and Forrest Tucker’s tit for tat egotistical competition and cruel mangling of each-other’s right hand in ‘Coroner Creek’, and Scott as the individualistic drifter in a despotic town owned and ruled by one family in ‘Buchanan Rides Alone’.

He walked past Quentin’s house that was now deserted since his family had moved to another street about three blocks north towards the sea. His eyes always enjoyed contemplating the veranda where they had played Bezique in the late afternoons, when Quentin’s little brother always ended up with the Ace of Spades which he called the Ace of Bushy, in reference apparently to the traumatic shock of once seeing his mother’s hairy private parts….this sort of standard bold topical joke circulated among various village boys who had had the same experience in their family at least once.

He smiled to himself when he saw the apparition of Quentin’s mother’s face at the long window-sill of the drawing room gallery behind their front door.

She would sit there in a rocking chair reading, glancing up now and then from her paperback novel to respond to someone from the village hailing her as they walked by on the busy street, or simply to regard the passengers inside the big orange public bus changing gears as it went by.

To him she was words like: Fantastic! Amazing! Unbelievable!…. because she had first lent him ‘Riding Through’, with the cowboy drifter leaning on a bar illustrated on the soft cover…then one time she gave him ‘Mosquitoes’ by William Faulkner and told him no matter how difficult it was, read it.

He was still reading it, after six months or more. No teacher, no adult female had ever made reading novels and talking about films such a priority with him.

He was still trying to figure out which actress she reminded him of. Not Barbara Stanwyck, whom he had seen in ‘Blowing Wild’, nor Susan Hayward in ‘Garden Of Evil’…now he got it!

She was like Joan Crawford in ‘Johnny Guitar’, she liked that film too, talked about it a lot. She looked like Crawford a bit, but not so serious.

He walked by Gary’s big two-storied white wooden house with a dark red door…Gary was probably sprawled in a Berbice chair beneath the two open sides of a glass window, the only one ever open, next to the veranda and closed door, he could be reading Albert Camus’s ‘The Outsider’ or Somerset Maughm’s ‘Cakes and Ale’, or Ralph Ellison’s ‘Invisible Man’ or…but he didn’t want to be seen by him now…Gary had evolved from being one of the older boys in the neighborhood Quentin and himself had once played cricket and slingshot war with to become an outstanding College student with many diplomas, yet he always seemed to feel Gare’s self-conscious obsession with his dark skin color…Gare seemed either to love it too much or not enough. He had realized that Gare had had a crush on one of his sisters, the darkest one…their family was one of those whose racial blend produced some children lighter or darker than others.

It seemed Gare had quietly tried to court her on the basis of their similarity in color, and the achievements of his academic education…he hadn’t realized she was one of those girls who were attracted to males who were adventurous outdoor types, who could build a raft from wild trees and paddle it from one of their big rivers to another, who could play soccer and score goals, who could hustle several girls like her and screw them all.

He and Quentin liked to watch a little black van from the huge Estate Conglomerate Gare’s father worked for, deliver to Gare’s house those special ‘high class’ soft drinks no one else in the neighborhood got, which came in tall white bottles with bright watercolor labels and red, orange, yellow, blue, mauve, and black metal caps.

Gare’s father, whose wife was absent, was a strange man who smiled while making strange jokes, like calling his darker sister his slave if he saw her towing him home from school at the back of her bicycle, or, if he saw him eagerly running some errand for Quentin’s white mother, he in turn became her slave….his dark sister had said he must never disrespect Gare though, because he would probably one day become an important professor, or some other important person, but it was best to simply leave Gare and his father to themselves.

Rick’s father’s little shop was the kind found all over the country. He liked the aroma of cheap aerated lemonade guzzled in the heat of the day, the two or three green or white empty bottles always left on the battered wooden counter, their gold and silver metal caps on the shop’s dusty un-swept concrete floor, the grated coconut dyed red in cakes baked brown beside the large oblong slab of sweating white cheddar cheese, and the cut roll of luncheon meat in the red framed glass cage, the large square or round bottles stuffed pell-mell with local confectionaries like red and white ripple peppermint and brown butterscotch sticks, the escaping fragrance of Lifebuoy soap in red boxes on the shelf on the far wall behind the counter where Rick sat in an old unraveling cane chair, a twirling flycatcher tape dangling from an overhead rafter, the large rusting freezer humming and smoking when Rick opened it to sell something… “What’s on today?”

Rick’s dark handsome face over the counter said, before he could even sit on the well-used bench beneath two tall orange-painted wooden shutters flung open to the bright midday sunshine.

He told him, and Rick quickly said he saw them already when a downtown cinema had brought them back, long before the riots and the arson and the general strike and the curfew and the total shutdown, which was why they were out of school for months now.

Usually he would sit on the bench and question Rick’s memory, digging for proof of a lapsed memory in Rick’s slim dark face. This was because if Rick already saw at least one of a 1pm double, it would be tough to convince him it was worth taking fifteen cents from his father’s till and laying it on the counter.

The whole process started with the present crisis when Rick’s old man went out all day to emergency civilian meetings, which meant that Rick had to tend shop days, but was relieved near 4pm by the old man, allowing Rick to cross the street and sit under the old Guava tree and listen to Nehru, the jack-of-all-trades, or himself, retell about the films Rick had sponsored.

“Ask Desiree nuh? Only she at home now,” Rick said with a sly grin, knowing another kind of story could emerge from his visit to Desiree next door. He grinned knowingly back and went over into the dusty yard next door with the old wooden bridge and a derelict fence overhung by a delicious gennnip tree.

He like the flaking orange-brown and white painted house with its rotting row of rain-stained Portuguese relief oblongs below the front windows above the stairs.

The bottom-house was enclosed by rotting sagging walls of lattice-work, and he walked into the cool shade beneath the house, passed the abandoned old matchbox black Ford, its rusty tire-less rims sunk into the dusty soil.

It had been Desiree’s long deceased grandfather’s car, the original owner of the yard and house which his son, her father now in Canada, hoped to return to sell, wind up his affairs a
nd get his two daughters out of the country, away from as chronic quadmire the future held in store, she said he had said, adding, “Dad wants us to come back with him because poor Mom died a few years ago after a failed operation.”

There was only herself and her elder sister left in the country, and her sister was one of the nurses kept busy at the public hospital attending to the casualties and fatalities from the riots and violence.

He passed the old rope – swing hanging from a beam, then Desiree’s pink bike leaning against a concrete post where a pair of red initials in a heart with an arrow through it was almost erased by a few wild broad brush-strokes of the same pink paint she had painted the frame of her bike with.

She was in the backyard catching ripe star-apples with the front of her short dress. A few little boys who lived across the back alley were in the tree. He glimpsed her glossy red underwear when she turned and walked towards him holding the front of her wrinkled dress like a bowl with the star-apples, and the glow of her solid sunny sienna thighs gave him the same surging, tingling feeling he had suddenly discovered recently after rubbing a sweet itch that produced bursts of grayish liquid out of his erect emerging manhood.

She called out: “One O’clock, right Andre?” And he said: “You goin?”

And she said: “I broke man!”, as he walked behind her up the old backstairs to the cool dim kitchen overlooking the backyard. He watched her tip-toe and empty her dress on the kitchen table, “Lemme search for some change in the bedroom”, she said, and as he walked behind her into her little bedroom above the backstairs she turned and looked at him quickly with her grayish eyes and cute face that reminded him of Dorothy Malone, except for her brown skin and husky reddish hair and said: “Don’t get any ideas”, and he said: “About what?”, knowing she was referring to last week before they had left to see “The Wonderful Country’, with Robert Mitchum and Julie London, and ‘Man Of The West’ with Gary Cooper and Julie Adams at Hollywood cinema; that was when all the grazing and touching of their skin as though it was accidental, and the stares she gave him, finally led to the edge of the bed where they admitted they wanted to see each-other’s bodies, and began trying their best to discover pleasure, and she had told him to slow down, but it was too late and everything shot out of him unto her and the sheet and she had said: “Oh gawd, if Vanessa see this she goin to know!”.

But now she was saying calmly as she stooped down opening and closing drawers, “I’m not goin to say it!”, while he sat on the edge of her bed and admired the colored photos cut out of Screenplay magazines of Silvana Mangano, Dorothy Dandridge, Donna Reed, Elizabeth Taylor, Debbie Reynolds, Clark Gable, Sidney Poitier, Montgomery Clift, James Dean and Jeff Chandler pinned on the blue wall behind her bed.

He remembered how exited she had been that day after pulling the sheet off her bed and stuffing it in a wicker basket, hurriedly taking a shower, returning with the towel around her, pulling on fresh panties beneath it then standing before her mirror with nothing else on, brushing back her wet husky hair like a boy, the brush clattering on the Vanity top, shaking Yardley’s talcum powder from a tin onto her chest and back, asking him to spread it on her deeply grooved spine, then grabbing a wrinkled tight white shirt, squeezing into black and silver-striped peddle-pushers, and slipping on her blue canvas espadrilles before they ran down her front stairs over to Rick’s and begged for a few butterscotch sticks, then walked down her busy street and around the corner to Hollywood holding hands.

“See you Dez”, he said at her bedroom door, and she said: “Dre, if you get through come round and tell me ‘bout the double, right?” “ Sure sugar”, he said like a playboy and ran down the backstairs. Twenty minutes to go. Jeeps and land-rovers roared by with black-bereted sad-faced British troops sweating profusely through their soaked fatigues, tear-gas canisters dangling from their large breast pockets, their fingers on the trigger of their automatics braced across their knees, guarding hand-cuffed East Indian and African prisoners, some in torn blood-stained shirts at the open back of the land-rovers.

He stood outside the market glancing at its steepled Roman numeraled clock every few minutes.

He wasn’t going to make it today. He watched the pale turquoise cinema a block away and the crowds swarming outside, and the bikes piling up under its marquee.

The sky was a bit cloudy, it had rained earlier in the morning, and the sandy gravel outside the market door was damp. He watched a young man lean and lock his bike against a big municipal tool box.

He looked away, then looked back just in time to see the man put his hand in his pocket and pull out a few notes.

For a split second he saw a quarter fall to the damp sand. Coin and sand were almost of the same color, and when the man’s shoe-heel stepped back onto the quarter and pushed it deeper into the sand he couldn’t believe his eyes.

Before the man had vanished into the dim interior of the market he leaped like a dog on a bone, grabbed the quarter in a handful of gravel and began the hundred yards dash to the cinema’s smelly ticket booth to the stalls as an usher slammed windows over head, and the volume of ‘The Story Of My Love’ by Paul Anka started to dwindle.