Benjamin, My Son E-Book

Geoffrey Philp

• Herausgeber: Peepal Tree Press
• Kategorie: Krimi
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Seitenzahl: 296

Beschreibung

Jason Lumley is in a Miami bar when he sees a newsflash reporting the murder of his politician father, Albert Lumley. With his girlfriend, Nicole, Jason returns to his native Jamaica for the funeral. There the murder is regarded by all as part of the bipartisan warfare which has torn the country apart. But when Jason meets his old mentor, Papa Legba, the Rastafarian hints at a darker truth. Under the guidance of his locksman Virgil, and redeemed by his love for the Beatrice-like figure of Nicole, Jason enters the several circles of Jamaica's hell. The portrayal of the garrison ghetto area of Standpipe is, in particular, profoundly disturbing. In his infernal journeyings, Jason encounters both former acquaintances and earlier versions of himself. In the process he confronts conflicting claims on his identity: the Jason shaped by the middle-class colonial traditions of Jamaica College and the Benjamin who was once close to Papa Legba. Benjamin, My Son combines the excitement of the fast-paced thriller, the literary satisfactions of its intertextual play and the bracing commentary of its portrayal of the sexism, homophobia and moral corruption which have filled the vacuum vacated by the collapse of the nationalist dream. Geoffrey Philp was born in Jamaica. He now lives and works in Miami.

Leseprobe

BENJAMIN, MY SON

GEOFFREY PHILP

LIVICATION

The book that you are holding in your hand is a miracle, so give thanks to the Creator of all miracles.

Give thanks to the elders and ancestors: my mother and father, who taught me about loving and letting go; my teachers in the flesh: Dennis Scott, Mervyn Morris, Kamau Brathwaite, Martha McDonough, George Lamming and John Hearne, who one rainy afternoon in the Extra-Mural Center (UWI-Mona) taught me how to write fiction; the teachers who’ve inspired me: Derek Walcott, Pablo Neruda, Tony McNeill, Joseph Campbell, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor, J. California Cooper, Edgar Mittelholzer, Sam Selvon, Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Orlando Patterson, Roger Mais, James Joyce, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and, yes, V. S. Naipaul.

Give thanks to my friends who have stood by me in the past two troubling years: Josett Peat, Lou Skellings, Lisa Shaw, Florentino Gonzalez, Colin Channer, Preston Allen, Edwidge Danticat, Mervyn Solomon, Kwame Dawes, Gina Cortes, and Susan Orlin; Erika Waters and the staff of The Caribbean Writer, Janell Walden Agyeman of Marie Brown Associates, Mary Luft of Tigertail Productions, Pastor Annette Jones and Carol Hoffman of St. John’s on the Lake; Victoria Kupchinetsky of PEN whose generous grant helped with this and many other projects; and Hannah Bannister and Jeremy Poynting of Peepal Trees Press who continue to create miracles for so many Caribbean Writers.

Finally, give thanks to my family: Paco, abuelo, rest in peace; Anatolia, abuela, the matriarch; Tathi and Batsheva, my sisters; Frank, my idren; Judith, Winsome, Dicky, Ansel, Paul, Hal, Madge, Heather, Stephanie, Cherrie, Edison, Ronald, Debbie-Gaye, Ricky, Terry and Kerry—it finally happened!

For Nadia, my traveling companion; Anna, Andrew and Christina, for all the years of laughter, tears and joy, give thanks, give thanks, give thanks.

Follow me and I will be your guide

Away from here, and through an eternal place:

To hear cries of despair, and to behold

Ancient tormented spirits as they lament

In chorus the second death they must abide.

Canto I, The Inferno of Dante

From xxx translation

“A house divided against itself cannot stand”

Mark 3:25

CHAPTER ONE

“Bumbo,” said Trevor, and he moved closer to the television. “Jason, you’ve got to see this, man. What the hell’s happening in Jamaica?” The camera probed the silver edge of the tide. “Move closer, man, you’ve got to see this.”

I wasn’t usually interested in what Trevor watched in the afternoons, especially before our Wednesday night domino tournaments. Oprah and Court TV had him hooked. If he couldn’t find anything interesting on either channel, he switched to CNN. It really didn’t matter to me what he watched. What mattered was that we won all our games and picked up a little money along the way, for we had become local celebrities at Churchill’s, our favourite bar in Little Haiti.

“Turn it up! Turn it up!” I said. “That’s Dada!”

The scene on the television resembled something out of Rwanda or Haiti. The streets were littered with corpses that had been covered with newspaper while the police and itinerant mad men stared implacably at the cameras and shooting continued in the background. I could almost smell the bodies, necklaced with tires, burning in the middle of Kingston – the black smoke coiling lazily over the cobalt blue waters of the Caribbean Sea.

“Although one of the assailants, Desmond Russell, political henchman for the PNP, was killed in self-defence by Albert Lumley, Minister of Justice,” said the CNN reporter as he loosened his tie, “it appears that the other assailant or assailants are at large. Some suspect it was a drug-related murder. Others suspect political motives. David Carmichael, leader of the PNP, whose headquarters have been firebombed, has called for calm. In the midst of this unrest, the Prime Minister has declared that the state of emergency will not interfere with the upcoming cricket test match between the West Indies and England. The start of the match, however, will be delayed until Saturday...”

Gina, the waitress on the night shift, came in from the kitchen. She was a small woman with a leathery tan, raven black hair and a broad gap-toothed smile, but she also had a stare that could cool down the most hotheaded patron and sober them up immediately.

“You know that man? I’m so sorry to hear,” said Gina.

“Don’t be,” I said. “It was only Dada. El padre putativo.”

Dada. This was the first word my mother taught me – even before she taught me her own name, and before she slipped off to America to forget him. And I know why. As soon as I had sense enough, I hated him, too. Hated him for what he had done to my mother, hated him for what he had done to me, hated him for what he had done to that beautiful, damned island.

No wonder I kept ending up in these dead-end bars. I looked up at the nets above our heads and across to the west wall that was decorated with scenes from the Everglades: ospreys and egrets in the gnarled limbs of cypresses, alligators lolling in the river of grass. Above the mural, a blue marlin suspended over the cigarette machine gathered dust on its dorsal fin. In front of me, a heron was harpooning a rat snake, and under its wings an octopus was mired in murky ink, shifting its shape and colour in an aquamarine haze.

An ad for a new barmaid was plastered over the jukebox.

“Watch it with the puta business in here,” said Trevor and slipped a coin into Galaxomaze, a video game he played whenever he was nervous. “Gina runs a respectable bar,” and he winked at her.

Dressed in black and wearing his favourite T-shirt – one of the many he’d won at Churchill’s for drinking every brand of beer in the bar – his war uniform as he called it – Trevor was ready for the domino tournament that night.

At thirty-five, six years my senior, Trevor was a thin gangly man with bulging eyes, a scraggly goatee, and a bad temper. He had promised me earlier that he was going to send every double, including mine if I was careless, to the bone yard. “Call Range Funeral Home!” he shouted, waving his hands in the air like an obeah man exiling unclean spirits, before he slapped down the killing card, “This one’s going straight to Woodlawn!” I reckoned we would win about a hundred to two hundred and fifty dollars that night, and I needed it.

I gazed at the screen and watched the most recent videos of Dada campaigning at a political rally. Twirling his hands in the air and snapping his fingers like a whip, he was coaxing the crowd into a frenzy and railing against the curse of drugs – his lifelong mission. Some women at the front of the stage tried to reach for the cuff of his pants as if he were some aged televangelist stalking the stage for converts.

One woman leapt on the stage and kissed him full on the lips (security around Dada was always lax when it came to women), but his bodyguards soon dragged her off. Dada, without missing a beat, continued his speech. He clearly enjoyed the encounter and he was glowing. I always imagined he would die from a heart attack in the arms of some girlfriend who wanted more than his mind after he’d given one of his famous speeches. But murdered, I thought, even Dada didn’t deserve to die like that.

“So who’s that?” Gina asked pointing to the television.

“That’s my big brother, Chris,” I said and I touched her hand, trying to reassure her I was okay. “He’ll probably be taking over everything.”

“That’s your brother? He doesn’t look anything like you.” I think she was surprised that I was taking Dada’s death so coolly, but she didn’t know Dada.

“You meant darker, didn’t you?” said Trevor.

“I meant different,” said Gina. She glanced at Trevor. “You know, I don’t deal with that shit. Never forget that,” she said sternly and picked up a mop she had left by the freezer. Pine Sol smothered the smell of Tuesday night.

Gina was very sensitive about skin colour and Trevor should have known better. Gina’s friends often teased her about her twin sister, Lily, the negrita, who was a shade darker than she was and who walked around Miami with packets of charms and oils in the waist of her dress. Lily, unlike Gina, was not ashamed of practising Lukumi, or Santeria as her gringo friends called it. Gina visited the babalao only when things were bad and she couldn’t turn anywhere else. She reminded me of Dada’s friends, who after climbing out of poverty and ridding themselves of what they saw as superstitions, still went to an obeah man if things were spinning wildly out of control.

“I’m sorry,” said Trevor.

Trevor had already cleared the first three levels of the game and had chosen a light sabre as his weapon, but he was caught in a black hole that reduced the screen to a pinpoint of light. His craft veered off course, wheeling and tumbling through the gravitational pull of a small moon, a coin trailing a spire of flame through the stratosphere, and crash-landed in the lunar dust.

“So how come you never told me about him?” Gina asked.

“Not you, but I told Trevor and Nicole about him. And he’s really my half-brother by my father’s first wife.”

“Jesus!” she said. “How many times was your father married?”

“Three times and with several mistresses and girlfriends in between.”

“So do you have any other brothers you haven’t told us about?” Gina asked.

“No, I’m my mother’s only son.”

“I mean by your father,” she said.

“Stepfather,” I reminded her.

“Whatever,” said Gina.

“I don’t know.” Who could tell with Dada?

“I know what you mean,” said Trevor, his Honduran accent slipping. “I know what you mean.”

Trevor was trapped between dimensional strings, and it would take some time before the machine decided on what level he would find himself. Pulling back on his bar stool, he started humming, “Papa was a Rolling Stone”, and I hit a high five with him. Gina turned away from us.

Trevor and I both hated our fathers. His father, like a good many Caribbean men, had fathered several children in and out of wedlock. He also beat Trevor’s mother regularly. When Trevor was old enough to defend his mother, his father threw him out of the house.

“I can’t believe you’re acting this way, Jason,” said Gina. “Your father just got killed!” and she turned off the television. She walked along the counter, stacked a few dirty dishes, and then went back to the kitchen. “I’ll be in the back if you need me. I’ll get the Red Stripes for tonight.”

“Why’s she taking it so badly?”

“I guess she misses her father in Cuba,” said Trevor. “He’s sick and she feels guilty about leaving all her family behind. But she’s more worried that she may be tempted to chuck it all and go back to Cuba. But enough of that. When do you want me to pick you up to go to the airport?”

Brandishing his light sabre, he defended himself against a snake woman who had emerged out of the dust and wrapped her tentacles around his ankles.

“Where am I supposed to be going?”

“To the funeral,” he said. “I know how you feel about him, but you have to go to his funeral.”

“And why is that? Have you forgotten what he did to my mother? He’s the one who broke my mother’s heart and killed her.”

“Jason, she died from pancreatic cancer.”

“That’s the medical name for it. But you know the real reason she died. She didn’t deserve to be abandoned for her own cousin. Why should I honour a man like that?”

“Because you need to,” he said. “He’s the one who brought you up.”

That was the only reason I could think of to attend his funeral. He had brought me up, but I figured it was only out of guilt because he had abandoned my mother.

“Just because I lived under his roof doesn’t mean he owned me. He could never understand that with all his power, he could never control me. Did I ever tell you he tried to get me to change my name from Stewart to Lumley?”

“No,” said Trevor.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just before I came to Miami to live with my mother, he asked me to change my name. When I came to America, I decided to put him and all that behind me. Because of him, I wanted nothing to do with the island. That’s why I became an American citizen. I even have a passport to prove it.”

“A passport doesn’t prove shit. If anything it makes it more important for you to go to the funeral.”

“Going to the funeral won’t solve anything. It will just make matters worse. There are too many people down there that I don’t want to see. Not now. Besides, most Jamaican men don’t know their real fathers, so why should I go back for a dead stepfather?”

Trevor was thrown into the dungeon of the overlord, Galaxomaze. The beast sidled up to him and chewed off his arm. He was losing power.

“And that place,” I said. Trevor braced himself for my favourite litany that I counted out on my left hand, “It’s just full of people who lie and are dunce, lazy, slack, and arrogant.”

Trevor shook his head and twirled his mug of beer making the frothy head rise to the top.

“Well, at least toast the motherfucker,” he said. “I’m not playing with you or drinking with you until you toast him.”

“Okay,” I said. “To Albert. Rest in peace. Now drink up.”

“I’ve never turned down a beer in my life,” said Trevor. Which was true. Trevor had never turned down any drink or drug in his life. Ever since he was dishonourably discharged as an army medic, he’d done every drug on the planet: ice in Seoul, LSD in Chicago, heroin in LA and crack in Miami. I’ve never met anyone so obsessed with his own destruction and who pursued his goal with such diligence.

And like all addicts he always claimed he could quit at any time and if things got too bad, he’d take the cure – rehab. And things weren’t going well. His ex-wife was remarrying.

Trevor swivelled on the barstool and opened the pouch around his waist. He looked around the bar, glanced over by the door, and showed me a spliff he’d tucked away in the lining.

“Got some good herb today. You got to try some of this. It’s from your hometown. Good Lamb’s Bread, bro. With this herb I’ll be able to see right through the dominos. You gotta smoke some with me, bro.”

“For the millionth time, Trevor, I don’t smoke the stuff any more.”

I’d stopped smoking herb a few years ago. I’d bought a nickel bag in the Grove and went back to my apartment to get high and watch The Three Stooges. As I lit up the spliff, I flicked on the TV and there was a graphic report on a DEA agent who was tortured and killed by drug traffickers. I saw his remains being loaded into the back of a pickup truck and I couldn’t take another draw. Every spliff in America was tainted with his blood.

“Yeah, yeah, I know. You only smoked it with your Rasta brethren. What were those guys names?”

“Papa Legba and Reuben.”

The names alone brought back a torrent of memories. When I turned twenty-one and couldn’t take it any more in Albert’s house, I wandered around the island for about three months before coming to Miami, wandering around as aimlessly as I was doing now. I spent most of the time with Reuben and Papa Legba, the Rasta elder who renamed me Benjamin, according to the calendar of the Twelve Tribes of Israel.

“Papa Legba, that’s the name I liked,” said Trevor. “He must have been able to get his hands on some good weed. You know you’re the only Jamaican I know who doesn’t smoke weed.”

“It’s the company you keep. And they’ve been teaching you too many bad words.”

“What the raas do you mean by that?”

“See what I mean.”

“Well,” he smiled, “if you’re not going to smoke, at least walk with me,” he said, and swallowed the rest of the beer. Trevor had defeated Galaxomaze by using his own power against him. He was about to rescue the alien princess, but hesitated at the door. The old star fighter had lost his nerve. He ran towards the alien princess and she plunged a dagger in his chest. Game over.

“Okay, I’ll walk with you. The cops have been sniffing around here.”

“Fucking cops,” he said, “why don’t they just let us be? We’re already cornered here in this rat hole. What more do they want?”

“See, that’s just why Gina wants me to walk with you. She doesn’t want any trouble with you and them.”

By the look on his face, I knew I’d struck a nerve. But I hadn’t meant to.

“She said that? She had no right to say that, bro! She had no right to say that,” and he raised his voice so that she could hear him. “I’m so pissed I might take my business to another bar where I won’t be insulted.”

“Take it easy, Trevor. She heard you. She heard you.”

“I don’t care if she heard me. She insulted me, bro. I’ll go somewhere else. I will.”

“She doesn’t mind you smoking, but do it as far away from the bar as possible. She likes you. You’re one of her best customers.”

“I’ll say. I already owe her next week’s paycheck.” He lowered his voice. “Tell her I’ll have the money for her by next Friday.”

“I know you will,” I said and I wasn’t patronizing him. Trevor was the best telemarketer for our company NileSource Inc. If Trevor really put his mind to selling four hundred units, he could do it. A few years back, he’d been the vice president of Thaganana Limited in the Cayman Islands, but he smoked the company into bankruptcy.

I still hadn’t learned all of Trevor’s tricks, though he had been guiding me since we first met up four years ago. In that first telemarketing job, I was assigned as his junior partner and he stood up for me in the first few months when I was struggling to meet my quota.

“He’ll come along,” said Trevor, and I never let him down. So when a senior supervisor fired Trevor for drinking on the job, this supervisor and I almost came to a fistfight, but I fooled him with my best yardy accent:

“Is blood claat fight, yu want? I will fuck yu up you know, boy!”

It had been a long time since I’d been in a fistfight and fortunately he got scared and backed off. Score one for the yardies. I left the job and we both went to work with at NileSource Inc., which paid better. I’d even been able to save some money, and was planning to take a vacation in Jamaica and look up Dada. I wanted him to see that although I’d dropped out of college, I’d made something of myself. Maybe then we could talk.

But my mother’s death put an end to that. After several costly misguided diagnoses, her health insurance was capped off at a hundred thousand dollars. I still owe Jackson Memorial, where she worked as a private nurse, twenty thousand dollars for her initial care at the hospital. I had to sell her house to pay for a condition that proved to be terminal. “Always keep property,” Dada advised, “no matter what.” I used all the money I’d saved to give her a decent funeral. It wiped me out. However, I refused on principle to take any money from Dada. I didn’t want to owe him anything.

Trevor stuck by me all those times. He took me in after I had moved from apartment to apartment to apartment and when I was homeless for a while. He got me drunk when I needed to get drunk, and kept me sober when I had to be. Trevor even lent me some of his clothes, mainly T-shirts, some of which I kept long after I moved out of his place.

But now I was in more financial problems. Our company was in a slump and we were laying off workers. Some were leaving on their own. Trevor and I had been below our targets for three months and we were barely hanging on to our jobs. The only reason our boss kept us on was that he knew we were good and couldn’t be blamed if people didn’t have any money. I needed to pay the rent, my student loan, Visa, and MasterCard bills. Calls from my creditors were coming in at all hours of the night and morning. I hated owing anyone anything and I could feel the frustration rising in my temples every time the phone rang. Sometimes, I just let the phone ring without checking the caller ID, sometimes losing a call from Nicole, my girlfriend. But I lived in constant fear of the bill collector and the repo man.

Right now, the rent was the most important because if I didn’t come up with the money, I’d be on the street again. I knew I could always stay with Trevor, but Nicole didn’t like going over to his place because Trevor was a slob. Always hungry, his apartment floor was covered with boxes from Papa John’s Pizza, Suzy Lai’s, or Hammond’s Tasty Flakes.

“So how are you going to break this news to Nicole?” He rubbed his finger against his wedding band.

Sometimes I don’t know how we ended up being friends; our minds work so differently when it comes to important matters. Trevor had been divorced for eight years, but he never took off his wedding band. The minute I got divorced from my ex-wife, Simone, I pawned my ring and I came to Churchill’s to celebrate my own liberation day. I played a game of pool with him and we’ve been friends ever since. Churchill’s became our sanctuary against all that was happening outside. It was unaffected by the race riots swirling around Miami. Here we could sit and have a drink in peace without anything disturbing us.

“We had another argument,” I said.

“Whatever it is, apologize and buy her flowers. I learned the hard way not to fight with women.”

“That’s why I need some extra money,” I said. “I am going to buy her some flowers. Her father was over at her apartment and we got into an argument.”

“About what?”

“Besides the fact that he says I’ll never amount to anything, he also found out that I supported David Carmichael when I was in Jamaica.”

“Who’s that?”

“He was once the Prime Minister and her father was one of those who feared that Carmichael would introduce communism into the island. Her father lost everything, and blames it on Carmichael. He’s an ex-cop and he’s trained his dog, King, to shit whenever he says Carmichael’s name.”

“You really are in the crapper,” Trevor said. “But don’t let something this small come between you,” he said. “That’s nothing if you really love her. You do love her?”

“Yes,” I said. That was about the only thing in my life that I was certain about. “But I’m not certain we want the same things.”

“Give yourselves time,” he said. “Nicole is a good woman. You should hang on to her no matter what.”

“But, Trevor, what can I offer her? She has this great job and a great future and look at me. What do I have to offer her except words?”

“Sometimes words are all you got, bro. Do you know how many situations I’ve had to talk myself out of? And if you’re so strapped for money, why don’t you just swallow your pride and go down to Jamaica. Or are you still too proud to beg? What is it with you Jamaicans? If my old man dropped dead tomorrow, I’d go see if he left me any money in his will.”

The thought had crossed my mind.

“Why would he leave any money for me?”

“You never can tell,” said Trevor. “Just because of your stubbornness you could be cheating yourself out of your inheritance. Give up some of that pride they taught you in that ‘English’ boarding school you attended. A little humility could solve all your money problems.”

Trevor was right. Despite my doubts about going back, even the remotest chance of an inheritance was worth the trip. I needed the money.

We pushed away our mugs and stepped out of the bar into the night air. I looked away to the lights from the Haitian Marketplace. A jitney crawled by, bumping over the potholes and splashing through the dirty water to pull up by the bus stop. A woman in a tight floral dress that barely covered her buttocks got out and a man called after her, “Cherie, take me home.” She pulled down her skirt, turned, and in a second was gone. The jitney trundled on.

A barefooted man was ambling unsteadily up the street, evidently drunk. As he passed, he bumped into me, staggered backwards and held on to the side of the building for support.

“Beg your pardon, boss,” he said, “beg your pardon.” He looked at me from behind a mat of hair that arched upward from the top of his head, then curved down to cover his face. I thought I recognized him, but a crust of grime covered his forehead and twisted Raybans shielded his eyes.

“Spare a dollar, boss?”

I reached in my pocket and gave him a dollar. Trevor kissed his teeth. The man took the money, gave me a drunken blessing, and continued up the road.

“Motherfucker, I can’t believe you,” he said. “You don’t have a pot to piss in, but you’re giving money away.”

“There but for the grace of God is what my mother used to say.”

“You one crazy nigger,” said Trevor.

Winston Churchill looked down on us from the bar sign and flashed his famous symbol across Miami. We were waiting for the light on the opposite side to turn green when Trevor dashed across the lane and I followed him. He slipped his hand into the pouch and pinched out the spliff from the lining. He palmed the spliff and headed across the yard to a tool shed we’d discovered one night when we couldn’t hold down any more beers. It was covered with a web of philodendrons and honeysuckle and was invisible from the street. Here, Trevor could smoke his spliff in peace.

Trevor looked up and down the road, then parted the vines to go through the door. As he cleared the leaves, a man emerged from inside with what looked like a crack pipe in his hand. He pulled a gun from inside his vest.

I couldn’t run, so the minute I saw the gun I knocked it away. Trevor hit him in the stomach and then across the temple and he fell. He was remembering all that they’d taught him in the army. The man’s head hit the asphalt. Trevor turned him over to check his pulse and found a police badge inside his vest. He showed it to me.

“What are we going to do?” I asked.

“He’s still alive, but he’s going to need help. He’s been smoking crack and his pulse is high. This concussion isn’t going to help him either. You get the hell out of here. Get as far away from here as possible. This is serious shit, bro!”

“But I can’t leave you here!” He was my friend. I wasn’t going to leave him as I had left the others.

“You don’t have a choice. This is serious shit. This is jail time, bro.”

And that was when I panicked. I had once visited Trevor in the Dade County Jail when he was arrested for possession and distribution of crack, and I never wanted to go back.

Trevor had blown his entire paycheck on over thirty grams and had it stashed in his car when the police pulled him over, so they charged him with intent to distribute. He called me from the pay phone in the cell and Nicole and I went down to see him. We couldn’t afford the ten percent premium to post bond for him because he was now being treated as a dealer. The humiliation of being searched, checked at every point and the sound, more than anything else, of those huge iron gates closing behind me, gave me nightmares for a whole week. I never wanted to go through that again.

“What about you?”

“Don’t you understand? You can do all the drugs in the world, but you never hit a cop. Get out of here, bro. These guys, even when they’re breaking the law, always have their partners near, so get out of here, fast.”

“But...”

“Get the fuck out of here!”

Trevor lifted the cop over his shoulder and I took off in the opposite direction. I had barely gotten to the other side of the alley when I heard, “Freeze.” I ducked down immediately and hid behind a dumpster.

“Freeze!”

“It’s okay,” said Trevor. “It’s okay.”

“Shut the fuck up and put him down!”

“It’s okay,” said Trevor. “It’s okay.”

“I said, shut the fuck up! Is there anyone else with you?”

Trevor didn’t say a word. I peeped through the gaps between the houses. It must have been the injured cop’s partner.

“Could you help me here,” he said to policeman. “This guy’s in trouble. I used to be a medic. I saw him when he fainted over there.”

I didn’t want to leave, but I had to. I turned, began walking down the lane, then a quick step, a jog, and then a full sprint away from the bar. I ran and I ran until I couldn’t run any more.

I went straight to Nicole’s apartment and hid out there. I didn’t tell her what had happened with Trevor, but I did tell her about Dada’s funeral. As I talked with her, I figured if I went down to Jamaica, my brother, Chris, with his connections in the government, could protect me from extradition or anything like that. Anything was better than Dade County Jail.

That night we started packing for Jamaica.

CHAPTER TWO

The wind ripped across the face of the flag flying at half-mast inside Jamaica College Cemetery that Friday morning. Green ribbons and placards – “Death to all PNP. Blood and Fire. Fire Burn PNP. Long live the JLP” – hung from the trees surrounding the cemetery and flapped furiously in the stiff breeze. In accordance with his last requests, Dada wanted a small service instead of an elaborate ceremony at the National Arena. But this was not to be. The small chapel on Matilda’s Corner was crammed with people who had known and supported Dada over the years.

At least I was dressed properly for the service and hadn’t broken any of the unwritten rules of protocol. We had rushed everything, and Nicole and I had barely enough time to pack all the things we needed. Nicole had to get a new dress and I had to get a new suit. By the time we’d finished shopping and bought our tickets, it was already Thursday afternoon. Luckily, because of all the commotion about the state of emergency, with the help of my brother we had managed to slip through customs and got home in time to get a good night’s rest before the funeral. I’d even had time to check my voice mail at home and my office for any messages from Trevor. He hadn’t called.

Now, afraid that I might draw undue attention to myself, I moved with Nicole into the transept away from the honour guard, teachers, and alumni of Jamaica College. Dada, my brother and I were Old Boys. Many in the Prime Minister’s cabinet were Old Boys, as indeed were many of Jamaica’s leaders. Friendships made there frequently endured through JC alumni’s professional lives. We were expected to become part of what Dr. McClaren, our headmaster, stealing a phrase from W. E. DuBois, called “the talented tenth”. We were expected to lead, to rule this island, and I was failing dismally.

During my years at Jamaica College, this church had been the safest place I knew, for it kept me away from my father’s sordid world of affairs and politics. I had moved from choirboy to acolyte and my mother even thought I’d join the ministry, but life got in the way. Now I had to face everything on my own.

Women wailed as the priest intoned the last words of the order of burial: “Surely we brought nothing into this world, and it is certain we can carry nothing out. The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away. Blessed be the name of the Lord. Amen.”

The congregation responded and a volley of gunshots rang out from the trees. Nicole tugged at my arm, but no one – not the dons, gorgons and guinea gogs, linked arm in arm with the politicians, pastors and pundits – moved. They’d grown accustomed to these displays of grief from party supporters. No funeral was complete without a sharp burst of an Uzi to punctuate the mourners’ sorrow.

The cameraman from JBC panned the mourners, and held on Nicole’s face as she bowed her head, lost in her own private prayer. Her black dress, with silver lining around the neckline, accentuated her dark brown hair, olive complexion and the emerald green eyes that she had inherited from her great-grandfather.

The camera then swung around to the Prime Minister, and then to David Carmichael, the leader of the PNP. My brother, Chris, always the dandy, wore a brand new Armani suit. He stood out among the Old Boys with their dull blue blazers, the school insignia, Fervet Opus In Campis, embroidered across the pocket. Almost six feet tall, about the same height as Dada, Chris’ eyes were set wide apart, and this often made him look as if he were going to break out in laughter at any moment. Now though, his eyes were squinted to slits and the bags underneath them showed his exhaustion as he lowered his head with senior members of the JLP as the casket was lowered into the ground. Chris had taken care of all the arrangements. And when he was too exhausted to carry on, he had been helped by Dada’s lodge brothers, who were the pallbearers.