Bob Morris_Zack Chasteen 02 (13 page)

“No problem,” I said.

Alan went back to his conversation. I looked around the place. One word came to mind: austere. A wooden desk in a corner with a laptop in the middle of it, no clutter of papers or files. A round dining table with four cane-back chairs. Wood floors, no rugs. No television, no stereo, no art on the walls. The only adornment—a floor-to-ceiling bookcase along one wall, filled with hardbacks, nonfiction mostly, and a few framed photos.

It wasn’t exactly cold—the killer view provided décor plenty—but it was the kind of place where a guy like Gandhi would have felt right at home.

I heard Alan saying, “Yes, that’s right, we have at least fourteen homes already under way there, and with luck there will be another dozen added to it. Can you excuse me for just one moment?”

He put a hand over the phone again and said: “Zack, I’m sorry, but this could take a while.”

“That’s OK. I just wanted to know what time we need to head out in the morning.”

“Oh, let’s say by eleven. That’ll put us there by one o’clock with time to spare.”

He went back to the phone. I showed myself out the door.

On the walk back to my cottage I swung by the resort’s beachside restaurant and hit the buffet line—jerked pork, corn pudding, and sliced mangoes. The tables were all filled with couples, or couples with other couples, or people getting ready to be couples. I could have sat by myself but I didn’t want to risk someone sitting down with me and trying to make friends. So I wrapped the food in a plate and took it with me. I ate it sitting on the cottage porch. It was gone in about five minutes. That included picking my teeth.

I went inside, took off my clothes, and stepped in the
shower. The water was hot. It felt good. I kept inching up the temperature, letting it get good and steamy, fogging over the glass shower stall, turning the tiny bathroom into a sauna.

I do some of my best thinking in the shower. And I was sorting through the pieces of the day—Darcy Whitehall’s circumspection, the scene at the airport, the property off Old Dutch Road—when I heard laughter. More like giggles, actually. Women’s giggles.

I turned off the faucet, slid open the shower door. And there, looking in from the bedroom, stood Darlene and Lynette. They were all dressed up for a big night out, and they looked fairly fetching. Skimpy dresses, little left for the imagination.

I fumbled for the rack, came up with a face towel and used it to cover up as best I could. More giggles from the two of them.

“You don’t have to be shy,” Lynette said. “We already saw you.”

“Boy, did we ever,” said Darlene.

They looked at each other and whooped it up.

Lynette said, “We were standing here trying to decide if we should step in there and join you.”

“It’s a very tiny shower,” I said.

“Uh-huh, and you’re a very big boy,” Darlene said.

They laughed some more, really cracking each other up. I stepped out of the shower, found a larger towel, and wrapped it around me.

The two of them looked around the cottage. They weren’t impressed.

“Excuse me for saying so,” said Lynette, “but this place is a dump compared to ours. How come they stuck you up here?”

“I’m on a tight budget,” I said. “It was all I could afford.”

They both looked at me with real sympathy. Then Darlene perked up and said: “Well, honey, it is time to put on your party clothes. We’re gonna go out and play.”

“Or,” Lynette purred, “we could stay in and play.”

Darlene eyed my bed and made a face.

“Our bed is bigger,” she said.

“Plus,” Lynette said, “there are mirrors on our ceiling.”

“And in our bathroom they gave us all these body oils,” Darlene said. “We got hot oils and cold oils and soothing oils and arousal oils.”

“Only, we hadn’t gotten to use any of them yet,” Lynette said.

I turned them toward the door.

“Well, I’m sure you won’t have any trouble finding someone to use them on,” I said. “There’s lots of guys out there.”

“But we like you, Zack,” Darlene said.

“And I like you, too, but it has been a long day.”

I got them to the porch, and they stood there pouting.

“You owe us a rain check,” Lynette said.

I smiled.

“And we’re going to cash it in,” Darlene said.

I smiled some more and kept on smiling until they walked away.

The next morning, Darcy Whitehall dispatched another big black Mercedes for us to take to Benton Town, but Alan wouldn’t have anything to do with it. He insisted we go in his car—a battered Honda Accord missing two hubcaps.

Otee drove. I rode up front with him. In addition to the Browning in his waistband, Otee had brought along a long black rifle case that no doubt held what it had been designed to hold. It occupied the console and rested in my footwell. Alan took over the backseat, spread out papers from his briefcase, and started working on his laptop from the moment we were rolling.

Fifteen minutes from the resort and we were on a snaky mountain road that looked down on a clay-colored river. The mountainsides were green, green, green—a proliferation of silk cotton trees and gumbo limbos and tree ferns. Every now and then, a mongoose would dart from the underbrush and skitter across the blacktop.

Alan shut down his computer and closed his briefcase.

“So tell me about this thing we’re going to,” I asked him.

“Quarterly meeting of the Benton Town Co-op,” said Alan. “It’s a loose federation of church groups and schoolteachers and people from the community trying to take care of things
that need taking care of. Electricity to all the homes. Running water. HIV-AIDs awareness programs. Meals for the elderly. And, of course, decent housing.”

“Which is where you come in.”

Alan nodded.

“Homes for the People has built nearly a dozen houses in Benton Town. We’ve had quite an impact on the quality of life there. But, as you’ll see, there is still a great deal that needs to be done.”

“Guess that makes you a pretty popular guy up there. You can count on the people of Benton Town to vote for you in the election?”

“Let’s hope so,” said Alan. “Of course, some will vote against me just because I’m PNP.”

I was no expert on Jamaican politics, but I knew that PNP stood for the People’s National Party, the ruling party, which had been in power since the late 1980s. The JLP, the Jamaican Labour Party, was its main opposition.

Party faithful of every ilk were zealous about promoting their allegiances, wearing T-shirts in party colors and taking advantage of any opportunity that presented itself to promote their cause. All across Jamaica, hand-scrawled posters covered telephone poles. Political slogans were emblazoned on stop signs. And since political parties seemed to sprout like weeds after a rain shower—the Jamaican Democratic Party (JDP), the National Democratic Movement (NDM), the United Party of Jamaica (UPJ)—it was an island splattered with acronyms.

“You got a good chance of getting elected?”

“I think so,” said Alan. “Trelawny Northern generally goes PNP. But Kenya Oompong was born in the district and she’s standing for election, too. So that could siphon off some of the vote.”

“Who’s Kenya Oompong?”

“Founder of Nanny’s People United, the NPU, the one they call Nanny Two. A complete radical, a Marxist, but a smart woman. Brilliant, even. Went to the London School of Economics. Returned to Jamaica a few years ago and started organizing in the garrisons.”

“Garrisons?”

“The worst neighborhoods of Kingston, places of awful poverty, places like Grant’s Hill and Tivoli Gardens and Trench Town.”

“Where Marley sang about.”

“Yes. You know why they call it Trench Town?”

I shook my head.

“Because it has a ditch running right through the middle of it, a sewage ditch. Not a pretty place,” said Alan. “Each of the garrisons has allegiance to a different political party. The gangs that run the garrisons also run the dope trade. The politicians get the police to lay off the gangs and the gangs deliver the vote.”

“Sounds like Chicago in the good old days.”

“We get the system we deserve, I guess. And it’s not really in the interest of the politicians to change things.”

“You talk about politicians like you aren’t one of them,” I said.

“Trying hard not to be,” said Alan. “But Kenya Oompong and the NPU are trying just as hard to paint me as old guard, part of the privileged class.”

“Not to burst your ideological bubble or anything, Alan, but your father is one of the wealthiest men in Jamaica. You
are
part of the privileged class.”

He smiled.

“Money,” he said. “It’s such a goddam burden.”

A few miles later we turned off the blacktop and onto a dirt road that twisted along a hillside planted in banana trees. Goats roamed with impunity, and Otee did an admirable job of dodging them while Alan and I talked.

Alan was an easy guy to like. Smart, self-deprecating, not a shred of arrogance about him, seemingly devoted to a life of public service. A rare young man, indeed.

“What makes you so sure the NPU isn’t behind the bombs?” I asked him.

“It’s just not their style,” he said. “For all her faults, Kenya Oompong is not inclined toward violence. She started off by going into the garrisons, trying to get the gangs to put down their weapons and preaching reform. Almost cost her life. More than one garrison gang tried to do her in.”

“What kind of reform is she preaching?”

“A lot of it is typical Marxist dogma. The working class must rise up and throw off the shackles of oppression. That kind of thing. But she couples it with a back-to-the-land spiel, a sort of New Age nationalism. Says that Jamaicans should be living off the bounty of the island, tending plots and raising livestock, instead of slaving at resorts and taking care of white foreigners. It’s why they call themselves Nanny’s People.
They’re following the same route the Maroons did nearly three hundred years ago when they said to hell with the plantations and headed for the hills. And it’s why they call her Nanny Two.”

Otee let out a snort.

“Bet Nanny Two, she coochie don’t shoot bullet,” he said.

Alan laughed. He looked at me.

“Part of the legend of Nanny was that she had a secret weapon for fighting the British. As the story went, whenever the Brits launched an attack, Nanny would throw up her skirt and show them her vagina and stop them in their tracks. Then, while they were standing there gape-mouthed, she’d fire bullets out of it and cut them down.”

“Pretty neat trick,” I said.

“Kenya Oompong has some pretty neat tricks of her own. She knows how to rally a crowd and attract attention, that’s for sure.”

“She have a lot of followers?”

“More than most people ever thought the NPU would have. She staged some well-publicized demonstrations at a couple of resorts in Negril. Convinced several of the staff—kitchen help, housecleaners, maintenance crews—to quit their jobs and follow her to the hills. They squatted on property and claimed it as their own. That got the ball rolling and others joined up with the NPU. Now there are NPU settlements all over the place.”

“I came across some squatters yesterday,” I said. “In the hills above Falmouth, off Old Dutch Road by Fishkill Morass.”

“Oh, really? What were you doing up there?”

“Just sight-seeing,” I said. “You familiar with that area?”

“Not as well as I should be. It’s in my district. Or, rather, what will be my district if I get elected. I need to pay a visit there.”

He didn’t give any indication of knowing about the land his father owned. And I didn’t press the matter.

“Government doesn’t do anything to stop people from squatting on the land?” I said.

Alan shook his head.

“Squatting is something of a tradition in Jamaica. According to the last statistics I saw, only nine percent of Jamaicans own
their homes and forty-seven percent rent. The rest, as many as a million people, are squatters,” said Alan.

“Must make for some nasty legal squabbles from time to time,” I said.

“Oh, yes. Landowner wants to sell his property, the squatters can tie it up and stake a claim. Landowner most always ends up winning, but yes, it can get ugly,” said Alan. “It’s one reason why we started Homes for the People. Turn squatters into owners. Pride of ownership is a powerful thing.”

The road got worse the farther we went, boulders occasionally blocking a portion of it and causing Otee to take precarious detours along nonexistent shoulders. It was treacherous going.

After twenty minutes we rounded a corner and Alan had Oteele stop the car.

“Just look at all that,” Alan said. “Beautiful, isn’t it?”

Beyond us spread a landscape of slender, jagged mountains, some of them looking like dunce caps, others like cathedral spires. The seismic upheavals that created them eons ago had also formed hundreds, even thousands, of small, isolated, bowl-shaped valleys that pockmarked the blanket of vegetation as far as we could see.

“Cockpit Country,” I said.

Alan nodded.

“British had another name for it,” he said. “Nanny and her people were always ambushing them up here, so they used to ride two to a horse, back-to-back. That way they could keep an eye out in all directions. Called it the ‘Land of Look Behind.’”

“Gee, maybe I ought to sit on the bumper, watch our rear flank,” I said.

Alan laughed.

But I couldn’t help noticing that Otee had taken his hand off the wheel and let it rest on his rifle case.

The road ended in Benton Town, which wasn’t so much a town as it was a broad scar at the base of a mountain—muddy streets and ramshackle stores and glassy-eyed men sitting on rum-shop steps.

It was about as downtrodden a place as I had ever been. The only exception was a horseshoe of new concrete-block houses set around a playground near the center of town.

There was nothing fancy about the houses. They all followed the same cookie-cutter design with living room at the front, kitchen in the middle, two bedrooms in the back, but given the surroundings they might as well have been mansions.