Kwae’s vision was still blurry from the tranquilizer when a figure appeared in the doorway. My mother? Vish? Wouldn’t it be a laugh if it was Vish’s mother? He could make out a buff shape and a big head. “Doh tief my head,” Kwae choked out. His blood pumped faster as the blur turned into a man pulling up a chair next to him.
“Yuh know what your problem is, dougla?” the man began. “You think too much about the wrong things.”
“You jagabat!” Was it really Redman? “You and my Judas man, eh?” Kwae’s voice rose as he tried to get up from the chair.
“Actually, you little cynic, your mother and I,” Redman replied coolly. Kwae stopped short as the words registered.
“Your mother was right. You do have a short fuse.”
“Don’t even try to bring my mother into this,” Kwae growled. “I won’t fall for that piece of la.”
“You don’t have to.” Redman placed an envelope within Kwae’s reach. Kwae stared at it, then picked it up and spilled the contents onto the table — a badge, an ID card, and a tape recorder. He read the name on the badge — Simon Redman James.
“So you were an undercover, huh?”
“And still am.”
“And the tape recorder?”
“Play it.” Redman leaned back in his chair, a smile curling the corner of his mouth.
Is this all part of his extended torture? Kwae wondered. If it is, I’ll have to give the local boys credit for going so far. He reached out and pressed play.
It was a conversation between Redman and his mother. She was crying and going on about how she had to find a way to keep Kwae out of trouble so he would not end up in jail. He needed a strong lesson to make him quit his life of crime.
Kwae stopped the tape. “So why did you decide to help my mother?” he asked softly.
“You see, kid,” Redman’s voice boomed, “I realized that you were different. I thought since your mother knew what you were into, she coulda talk you out of it. But she’s a smart woman, and she knew you would not change your ways just through her talking to you.”
“So you all decided to shake me up a bit, huh?”
“Yup. And your boyfriend was pretty keen on being the one to declare you guilty. He was upset at being drenched in your lies.”
“So what now?”
“You’re free to go.” Redman got up and left.
Kwae sat, the words free to go resounding in his head. He still felt as though something was weighing him down. Two new mixed recruits appeared and escorted him to the showers.
While the refreshing water sprayed over him, he thought that maybe working with his brother wouldn’t be so bad. Maybe I could even get a car of my own and join the Indo boys on the track. Yeah. His weight was washing down the drain with the dirt from his body. And as for Vish, well, I hope he can forgive me. We’ll just have to find a new lovers’ retreat and stay away from the swamp. Who knows? Maybe we could explore Asa Wright — after all, they have caves and lots of birds up there in the forests of the Northern Range.
Kwae dressed and gathered his belongings. He walked across the building and passed through the moss-green iron gate of the prison. Outside he took a deep breath — Ah, the fishy smell of canal water! And in the car park across from the jail, he heard the putt-putting of a car engine. It definitely needed a new transmission.
Nowarian blues
by Ramabai Espinet
Santa Cruz
I was at a midlife crisis, though I had only just hit thirty — a fool, a failed musician/songwriter — and my question those days was always the same, Where to live? A migrant’s question, the first uprooting all it takes to turn you into a rolling stone forever. The song in my head had a title, “Migration Blues.” It had two or three unfinished lyrics too, what I thought of as the bluesy half-tones of my own makeshift life: Moving south / ocean waves / a backyard / mango trees, plum, and zaboca / ackee trees in sunlight / the sea at my back / would I still cry / I, and I and I / would I be happy / would I be sad / moving south again...
I had not been a successful migrant. This I will admit freely. Not that too many migrants make it anyway by dint of their own resource, especially taking into account the color scheme of these northern climes. No, it takes backative to make it: the sale of family land back home, the hitching of your wagon to a well-established husband, of the appropriate hue, maybe, a disconnected act of whoring or kissing ass, growing a thick hide where once there was skin.
Sometimes the need for a change of gears overpowered me, although at the time I was working in relative comfort and autonomy for a modest worker’s wage as a counselor in a shelter for battered women. I took offense one day when a lunchroom argument erupted about rough sex, which was fine, they all agreed, as long as the controls, put in place beforehand, remained intact. This got me irate. “How can anyone guarantee this?”
“Well,” and they spoke as one, their patronizing, indulgent tone setting me off further, “we discuss it before, agree on the limits, and then proceed. We are reasonable people and besides, who would risk a relationship for some excessive pleasure?” A relationship. The very word put my teeth on edge. A roughness that was smooth, smooth.
I couldn’t stop myself: “But how allyuh could program everything so? Yuh discuss everything beforehand? Sex too? Next thing dey go be setting up guidelines for ‘managing dangerous sexual adventures’ or some stupidness like dat...”
One of them spoke. Her voice was dangerously kind as she murmured, “And what would you know about it, you? Sexual adventures? Come on, now...”
The Trini in me was crazy, my anger too alien and damn ignorant altogether in that charnel house of political correctness. My rage let them off the hook. It left me sitting there perplexed and wondering about my own freakish take on everything. I would, if I wanted rough sex, have plunged into a maelstrom with my lover, his every move and mine unpredictable, dangerous, taking both of us into uncharted territory — or else why bother?
It hit me that I had to leave this city soon. I had worked at Carrie’s Place for two years, and its vibe was now claustrophobic. I was bred in such an ordered space — missionary zeal, appropriate codes of conduct, common sense — and the demon inside me busted off its fragile tapia roof as soon as it could. I left home alone, estranged from my family who migrated after I did and settled out west. I ended up here, in Toronto — one more immigrant, a visible minority worker counseling battered women and children. Their fright in the face of life’s blows, the cavernous wasteland of despair my job revealed, pushed my own unease into the background and helped in postponing my own reckoning.
I felt useful there. And I liked feeling useful. But I was lonely, no lover, no real friend except Ella from back home, she who had migrated too and married instantly and well to a prof in the university where she first landed a clerical job. Now she was the manager of the institution’s Office for Racial Equity, almost an ombudsman’s (-woman’s) position, she would brag, poking fun at my own lean and hungry ways.
“You need a good professional man who adores you and who you can grow to love, sweetie.” She would chuck my chin and threaten to introduce me to yet another engineering type from her husband’s department. “They come in all stripes these days, sweetie,” she would go on, until I collapsed, giggling at the thought of a procession of would-be suitors inspected by her, surreptitiously or otherwise, and all for my benefit, though a couple of times she did let slip that a meeting had gone on too long or a setup for me had, alas, boomeranged in her direction.