How to Escape From a Leper Colony (22 page)

The jangle of the door was heard again. Mr. Manachandi walked in slowly with his shoulders stooped over and his hands clasped in front of him. “Do you have a chair?” Mrs. Delroy asked. Mr. Corban rushed back and pulled Father Simon’s stool toward the man who said thank you in a voice that seemed to have a hard time getting up his throat.

“This one,” Corban said and turned back to Mrs. Delroy. He reached his hand toward the Virgin. “Why, I had a young lady in here last week who loved it. Very stylish and holy all at once. Very good for a young person.” Mrs. Delroy nodded and turned to Mr. Manachandi.

“No,” the man said quietly and breathed out deeply as though settling in.

Corban studied the man for a moment. “Perhaps you need an urn?” He thought on the ornate silver urn he had polished a few nights ago with toothpaste. That one was his own, but there were others that a teenage girl might appreciate.

“No. No. No,” Mr. Manachandi began, his voice still small. He shook his head and closed his eyes, as though to muse on his own desires. Mrs. Delroy turned away from the flashy coffin and walked to stand beside her man. Her shoes made an undignified squeaking noise on the polished floor. Mr. Manachandi opened his eyes. “Something pure and natural,” he said firmly. “Something like Gita.” His face threatened to crumple into tears but instead he only clenched his fists.

Mr. Corban put his hand to his chin and squeezed it. He looked about and saw the simple pine coffin. He did not think this was the right choice. He wished they would go with the golden casket, but he would show the pine to them anyway. They deserved to make their own mistakes. They looked like two people whose lives were about to begin.

For Nicholas Friday

1.

It is the night of Easter Sunday. I’ve already been to chapel and received God on my tongue. I sit in my cell with the lights off. Everyone’s light is off. I wait for the man with the cross to begin his walk. He’s been doing it once a year for the whole twelve years I’ve been in here. Carnival is coming in a few weeks. The queens have already had their pageants. The steel bands are practicing every night—until late in the morning. But this man. He will come, I believe. He always comes. I wait for him. And I think about why he is doing his penance. And I think about why I am doing mine.

I have a view of the sea. During Carnival I can hear all the music. I can fling a note down onto the parade revelers, hoping it gets to the big-bum woman I like the best. At night I hang my hands out of the bars, palms open, and cup the salt air. They say they will move me to the big jail in St. Croix, but they haven’t yet. Maybe they won’t ever. From my cell I can look over the parking lot at Fort Christian and think about how maybe in another earlier life I would be locked up in there instead. In a dark cell with thick red stone walls. But even then I’d have a view of the sea. I’ve only been in the fort once, for a field trip in seventh grade where I feigned disinterest as I closely studied the walls and passageways for how a man in those days could use shadow and color to escape. Now they use it to give classes to the kids who are really good at painting and drawing. Imagine that. An old jail can be used for art classes.

I wasn’t so good at art. I wanted to be a magician. My mother bought me videocassettes that came with foam balls and a magic wand. I studied the cassettes. I rewound them until they warped and would stop and skip and pause at the most inconvenient places. They instructed on how to pinch the foam ball between your knuckles and still wave your hands, which words to avoid with a plastic coin wedged under your tongue. But the biggest part of the magic was the trick of convincing your audience that you have indeed yielded everything—look, my hands are empty, nothing behind my ear, my sleeves are loose. The confidence it took to say “look inside the cup, see nothing is there” even though you know that if they decide to touch the cup, if they ask you to pour water in the cup, if they even walk around to your side of the table to see the back bottom ledge of the cup … the trick would fail. Confidence is the biggest trick.

When I was about ten years old I learned to lie. This, as with my other vices, came of love. I loved raw brown sugar. I loved that the grains were thick and amber colored. I loved that if you put some in your mouth you had to crunch on them and they wouldn’t melt like the dust of the bleached processed kind. I loved the smell of molasses the brown grains gave off. They were real. The white sugar seemed smooth and fake. Like a girl in my fifth-grade class who wore lipstick. White sugar seemed to be trying hard to be something it was not. We didn’t get brown sugar in the house often because it was more expensive. But sometimes my mother would need it. And then I’d find ways to devour it.

On the day I learned to lie I poured myself a glass of milk. To sweeten it I poured in brown sugar straight from the bag. I sipped the milk and continued pouring and sipping until I had a cup of drenched sugar with a shallow layer of milk on top. I was impressed with myself for making this new treat and for hiding it—like a magician. I put away the bag of sugar and sat at the table to eat my milk sugar with a spoon. That was when my mother swung in. If you ask me now I think she must have watched me all along. She must have waited for me. She took out the bag of brown sugar and asked me why the bag was so near empty. I shrugged and sipped my milk—careful not to gather up any of the sugar.

“Cooper. How much sugar you put in your milk?”

“None, Mommy.”

“So then where all the brown sugar that was in this bag?”

“I don’t know, Mommy.”

“You better tell me or you going get beat.”

What is the need to have the truth all about? If she knew, why didn’t she just take the cup from me? Why was it so important that I confess?

“I don’t know where the sugar gone.”

“Come here.”

I got up from the table and walked to her, not once looking back at my cup to incriminate myself. When I was close enough she grabbed me by the arm like I imagine she must grab robbers on the street before lowering them into her squad car. “Why you lying? Just tell me.”

“Mommy, I don’t know nothing.”

She raised her hand and smacked me on the arm. I still didn’t know. She unleashed her belt and brought it down on my back. I still didn’t know. Again and again, I didn’t know. I crouched on the floor crying. She went to the table and snatched up my cup and poured it out into the sink. I stared with horror and disbelief as the sugar came slopping out.

“A whole cup full of my brown sugar. How did it get there, Cooper?”

I didn’t know. I had no idea. She beat me again and again until she was tired and my body was welted. I never ever knew how the sugar got into the cup. And finally she let me be. “You scare me,” she said as she left me welted on the kitchen floor.

For the life of me I could not figure out how the sugar got in the cup. Somewhere in my body, I knew I had done it. Somewhere in me was the memory of pouring the sugar in, of crunching the sugar in my teeth. But if you had given me a lie detector test I would have passed. The only rule of good lying is the ability to convince yourself.

So of course I became a thief. I couldn’t help the cliché. Which didn’t go over well with my mother, who is, you must know, a cop. My guess is that she’s the reason they keep me here in the St. Thomas jail. She likes to visit me and make sure the guards are sneaking me in a bit of the skunk ganja from Jamaica. The inmates here know my mother. They remember that she let them off for speeding once or that she only dragged them home when they’d been caught drinking underage at the club. The other officers really respect her, ’cause she doesn’t wear lipstick and put her hair up all nice on the job. When she’s in uniform she looks like a man—and most folks think she’s at least a dyke. They know that if they’re in a tough place, she won’t worry about her nails or cry—she’ll have their back. And because of her I have my own cell almost. My spare bunk is reserved for people passing through.

Most of the time I’m by myself at night. If the moon is big I’ll be looking at the tide pulling in hard and slow. Looking at a crazy man jogging and punching the air like a boxer. Looking at a car drive by every now and then. So it made sense that it was me who saw the white man with the cross on his back. No long robe. No crown of thorns. Just a big wooden cross, bigger than his whole body. And when he stumbled and fell almost into the water, there was no Simon to share the burden of that heavy wood. Just me above, waiting and watching.

2.

When my mother brought me home from the hospital, two days after I was born, she placed me in a suitcase full of her clothes. I slept in that suitcase full of her clothes for the first year of my life. She wanted me to become something transient. Something very much like clothes. Something that should be easily packed and carried with you. Perhaps even checked in at the airport so that during the plane ride the luggage will be in someone else’s care.

It turned out that I would not be so easily transported. The clothes took my smell, be it of pissy diaper or freshly powdered behind. They were my playthings. The buttons shone and were pleasant to chew on. The zippers made a jagged sound that was funny to me. The clothes took my weight and my form. A T-shirt that I slept on top of no longer fit my mother when she tried to put it on. It was not surprising then that my mother left me behind with the clothes when she walked out with her big empty suitcase.

I never saw her again. My grandfather let me stay in his house because that is where my mother had left me—among the clothes on the floor in the room that had been hers in his house. But he did not really raise me. He told me stories about my mother. He brought me the letters she wrote—because she wrote every Christmas and for every one of my birthdays. But he was not a Daddy. Many fathers are not Daddys. There are Papas and Fathers and Sirs, even those who go by their first name. Perhaps he was a Papa. Mostly, he was committed to other things. He made costumes for Carnival. That is what he was. A maker of costumes. A maker of pretty things. He made costumes for the parades and for the pageants. Sometimes he made all the costumes for all one hundred members of a troupe. Sometimes he made the one big mass costume. A thing that had to be carried on your back up the parade route. A thing that was taller and wider than the wearer and made the wearer something else.

My grandfather was the best at what he did. And he was busy. Our walls were forever lined with straying sequins. The floors were always slippery with glitter. The dining table constantly being piled with cloth and sewing needles. My bedroom, which was my mother’s bedroom before it was mine, was the changing room. Often a stranger who had been trying on a costume would leave her stockings or panties behind. I would wear them—to see what it was like to be someone else. It was a kind of costume.

Many of my uncles and aunts lived in the house for short periods. They were temporary parents. With them I did well, though I came to expect constant newness. I came to expect it and not see it as abandonment but as a new chance to remake myself. I treated all my relationships like this. I was not interested in keeping the same friends year to year. This meant switching schools because on this small island the schools are also small and in two years I would have made friends with everyone who would have me.

I switched schools often and this was facilitated by an uncle or an aunt who wanted me to attend the school she or he had attended. They would hold my hand and march me to their old third-grade teacher. Or their middle school schoolmaster. Or their old high school principal. A uniform would be made quickly and without flare, this was not Carnival, so that my skirts never had the stylish box pleats or paneling of the other girls’. And by the time I graduated from high school I had attended all the public schools and private schools that would have me.

The reputation that followed me was that I had kissed every boy on the island. Or if I had not kissed that boy then I had kissed his friend. I never kept a boyfriend when I moved schools. Even though some of the boys did not want to leave me be. They insisted that love should cross school walls. That we could meet at the movies or the beach and still be boyfriend and girlfriend. That sounded like a trap to me. But I knew that I was not normal and that these sorts of silly attachments were indeed normal, so out of pity I sometimes had sex with a boy. To get him to leave me alone. It was my way of saying Here, you have had me. Now let me be. This left me feeling less guilty when I would not return his calls. The general assumption was that I was a bit of a slut. And this was true. I felt I was a better person for it.

3.

I figured out what the song meant one day when I was hanging out in Frenchtown. I feel okay around Frenchies. They act like islanders but I blend in with them and they’re nice to me. Dutch was drinking his beer and when a car drove by blasting “Legal” he smiled. “You better hide for Carnival.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the song, partner. You know,
kill the rabbits.
”