Trey and Danny directed the driver to a small house on a hill off the main road. It was where Danny lived and where Trey had been hiding out from the world for two months. The house was like most of the others around it, a humble concrete dwelling with a small front porch, a neat garden behind a chain-link fence, and three pot hounds skulking around the yard. “Rambo!” Danny shouted affectionately at the first brown mongrel to reach his feet as he pushed open the rusty gate. Hiding behind a lush ixora was a black bitch, marked like a Doberman pinscher but with none of the grace of the breed, and lounging on the front steps, just below the porch, was a dog that resembled both its parents, half-brown and half-black. Trey shot a warning look at the one behind the bush. Sarah was prone to snapping at strangers and Jimmy was already nervous enough. “Come nah, Princess,” Danny was urging the dog on the step, nudging her aside with his foot. “Move and let people pass. You feel this is your house, eh, girl?” Trey stayed in the yard between Jimmy and the growling bitch.
“That is you, Danny?” a woman’s voice called from the house. Aunty Zora leaned over the bottom half of the Dutch door leading to the kitchen. Her arms were covered in flour up to the elbows. Jimmy eyed her long salt-and-pepper dreadlocks with admiration. “Full some water and bring it for me, nah. This pipe giving trouble again.” Trey’s maternal aunt glanced at Jimmy with little curiosity. The boys were always bringing friends home. “Good evening,” she said mildly before disappearing back into the kitchen.
Danny changed direction, going around the house instead of through the front door. “Give me a minute, man,” he tossed over his shoulder as he headed to the kitchen, reemerging in a moment with a plastic pail in each hand. As he filled the buckets at the standpipe outside the kitchen, Jimmy edged closer to Trey.
“So, where the thing?” Jimmy asked, lighting a cigarette and peering around the yard.
“Cool yourself, nah,” Trey muttered. “We go handle it. Let the man see about he queen first.”
“Scene,” Jimmy agreed, swiping his brow with one finger and flicking the stream of sweat off to the side. “What she making?” he asked Trey, sniffing the fragrant air that smelled of vanilla.
“Sweetbread.”
“So much’a sweetbread? Is all up by she elbow I see flour. Allyuh have a bakery or what?”
Trey was growing testy. “She does make and sell. Sweetbread, cake, drops. All of that.”
“Which part she does sell it?” Jimmy was a talker. Trey was tired of it already.
“In the village there. In the shop.”
“Scene,” Jimmy nodded. The loaves of sweet coconut bread, full of raisins and cherries, were very popular. Aunty Zora was quite the businesswoman and had placed her products on shelves all up the Toco Road, a string of communities that curved in a rough semicircle around the northeastern tip of Trinidad from Valencia to Matelot. Danny, when he wasn’t surfing, delivered the goods in their old beat-up Land Rover.
After their visit to Aunty Zora’s, they stopped by the fisherman’s hut on the beach to load the maxi to the roof with stuffed black garbage bags. Then they drove off to town in Jah Bus.
Trey lay on his back in his dusty bedroom surrounded by bulging black garbage bags. His bloodshot eyes and slack expression told his mother the story when she opened the door. That, plus the unique aroma of twenty pounds of fresh weed.
“So, is so you come home and ent offer nobody nothing?” His mother sized him up. “Didn’t see your mother two months and you haven’t said a word. Smoking inside here by yourself.” She crossed her arms over her slender chest, tossing aside long dreadlocks with an angry flick.
Wordlessly, Trey reached into an open bag and grabbed a handful of weed. “Here, Mammy. Smoke. Have a time.” When she saw the quality of the herb, she smiled.
“Where allyuh get this? Danny farming now?”
Trey shook his head. “The less you know about this ganja, the better. Trust me.”
His mother hesitated, her smile slipping slightly. “Is tief you tief the weed, Tracy?” Trey took a pinch of herb from the same bag and started building a spliff. He didn’t answer. “So when they come looking for you, what we go do?” Her voice grew shrill.
“Let me study that. Besides,” he flicked aside a seed, “that ent go happen. The place was deserted and we didn’t tell nobody nothing. Is one man know and he ent go say nothing. That is the maxi man. And we pay he off good.” She looked skeptical.
“I hope you know what you doing.” She paused, watching him lick the spliff and light it. “And what you going to do with all this weed?” There were five or six bags, each two feet high and two feet wide.
“Don’t you worry about that,” Trey said through a cloud of smoke.
From the time Trey let it be known, through a hint dropped at the corner shop, that he had product to sell, the calls started coming. Man, hook me up with some of that was what he heard every ten minutes on the phone. Then there were the customers, mostly men, who drove or walked up to the house at all hours asking for a ten-piece or a five-piece, conveniently measured buds rolled into tinfoil fingers, just enough for a spliff or two. His neighbors were smokers themselves, so there was little chance they would turn him in to the police. As long as he kept things quiet, he would be fine.
The talk of Trey’s new hustle had to come back to Garvin, a man whose appetite for weed was exceeded only by his appetite for luxury. Lying in bed next to Tasha, Garvin inhaled the smoke from his fat, short joint. He passed her the channa pack, a marijuana cigarette resembling the paper cones vendors used to wrap channa in years before, when boiled chickpeas were a popular snack. Tasha took the cone and drew deep. The room was silent. The fifty-two-inch plasma TV was muted, showing images of gyrating bodies, rappers, and singers. Silk sheets slid noiselessly from her naked body as Tasha rose and padded across the plush white carpeting to the bathroom.
She surveyed herself in the mirror as she washed her hands after using the toilet. Same full breasts Trey loved. Same high, round butt. Same long, jet-black legs. Better makeup, definitely a better weave. Garvin wasn’t pretty but he was generous to a fault. And that fault was stupidity.
Sliding back into bed next to him, she asked, “So what now?” Garvin frowned, shrugged. He smoked some more. “Antonio coming back in five days,” she said pointedly. “He going to want to know where the weed is.” Again, Garvin shrugged. “What you going to tell him?” She didn’t wait for him to shrug again. “You going to tell him you lost five pounds of weed? Just so? Like magic?” Garvin looked genuinely troubled. His pale brow wrinkled, his thin lips folded into a scowl, even his nearly transparent ears looked upset, blushing bright red. “You forget how he get on the last time—”
“How I go forget?” Garvin snapped. “Is my ass he shoot!” Reflexively he grabbed for his flat behind, finger dipping into the round scar of the bullet wound. It was still pink and raw, a fresh reminder that he shouldn’t tamper with his big brother’s stock. But was it enough to stop him from “redistributing” over two Ks of compressed, high-grade Vincy weed while Antonio was on a buying trip to St. Vincent? Nope. Garvin frowned again, wiggling yellowish toes until their joints popped, a habit Tasha loathed.