But even though we sit down there eating and talking about serious things, the woman was so at ease with me. She laugh and smile. One time she ask me what she must call me.
As I say before, in Jamaica a woman like a big man. One who is prosperous, and show that he can be in charge. What I said was something like, “Call me what you want to call me,” and leaned back with a smile to show her my confidence.
“But I don’t know what to call you,” she say, laughing again.
“All right, so what you think people call me normally,” I ask her, like a tease.
“You mean, like, who?” She look a little confuse.
“Well, like the woman we see outside the restaurant selling orange.”
“I don’t know. I will just call you Mr. Detective, then,” and I swear she was flirting with me.
Now she tell me a lot of things. I sat there and listen to everything she was saying—everything. The truth is that the whole situation was a piece of nastiness, and the man was the problem. But the way she tell me the whole thing, she made it sound like she want me to find him because he did not know what he was doing, and he need her to save him from himself.
“I have to tell you something that I can’t tell anybody else,” she said. And I tried not to look as if Deloris had already told the story to me. I didn’t want the thought of Deloris in the room. “I have AIDS. Well, I am HIV positive. Me and my daughter. He gave it to us. Now you must know that I can’t blame him for it. I mean, he said he only found out when I got tested for my application for the police training school. The coaching business I was doing at Ardenne High School gave me a little something, but it wasn’t enough. And before the child, and before he lost his work, my teaching job at the business college was enough. You know, I teach a little math and accounting, and I was getting enough from that to make ends meet. And on top of that I started to do a little investing. I was doing so well, you know. Careful, taking small risk. But honestly, I got a little greedy—that is how I would put it. You remember that scheme? They came to our church and told us that God was blessing people left, right, and center, and these people, people I trusted, people I went to school with, people from my church—all of them stood up at the altar and talk about how God bless them with this investment. Pressed down, shaken up, and flowing over. So I decided to put in my savings. And everything crash. Everything crash. Which is when I decided maybe the police was something I could try. I would get a little more money than the teaching and I could still coach.
“Well, they tested me, and I was positive. And I told him, and he started to get vex with me. He got tested and he was positive, and he continued with the vexation. But he knew the truth. And I told him, I told him to his face. I said,
Clarence, I come from nothing. You know where I grow up, you know how poor my people were, you know how I take my talent and run for my school and run for Jamaica and get scholarship to Nebraska and how I got my degree, and how I went and got pregnant careless and I had to come back to Jamaica. And you know how that whole thing took away my career as a sprinter. And you know how much I fought you when you said you want to marry me. How you tried and tried and begged and begged before I said yes. And I married you, and I decide to make my life with you. You know what I gave up for this, and you know that I have no reason to lie to you. You know that is not my style. You know I am not afraid of you, or any man. You know I don’t take crap from nobody, especially you. So don’t you dare lie to me, and worse, come accuse me of something you know I didn’t do.
“Well, he admitted it. What else was he going to do? She was a woman living in St. Elizabeth. He said she was sick. He found out she was sick, and he was worried but was afraid to check himself. He bawled, bawled the living eye water. And I told him it was all right. And we decided to make it work. But after about a week, he started to talk the same foolishness again. Started to say that I deceived him, and that I brought this thing on him. I can’t explain to you how two people could start to hate each other in such a short time. I can’t explain how much nastiness came out of that man’s mouth to me. I can’t explain how he put his hand on me. I can’t explain how he started to mistreat that girl, the same girl who he claimed he loved like his own daughter. The kinda nasty things he said to her, talking about how she is a dirty white bastard, and all kinds of sickness. And then what he did to her—touch her, force himself on her, and told her, told her to her face that he was doing it because I gave him this sickness and he wasn’t going to let anybody that I love ever have a peaceful life.”
She stopped talking at that point and just stared out the door to the parking lot like she was waiting for someone to walk in. When she start to talk again, it was like she was talking to herself.
“I have never told anybody this thing. Never. But that is what he did. That was the last thing he did before he left. He left me a note. He said he was going to kill himself and that I shouldn’t look for him. He said that he had destroyed his life, destroyed the only person who ever loved him, and now he had destroyed the life of an innocent child. Mr. Brown, I can’t tell you how hard it is for me to look at my daughter knowing that I brought this thing into her life. I brought this darkness into her life. She is positive. She might live a longer life than me. She might. But what kinda life is that?
“So tell me, am I so sick to start to worry about him, to wonder where he is, to wonder if he really is going to kill himself, to wonder who going to look after him when he gets sick? I can’t tell anybody this thing. How can I tell anybody that I still love this man? Maybe it is not love, maybe it is something like a sickness that makes me think that me and him are now tied up in a way and we can’t be separated. Me and him and my daughter. All I know is that I need to find him, and I want you to help me find him.”
“Deloris say you want me to kill him,” I said, the word coming out with difficulty because my throat was dry-dry.
“I never said that. I just said to her that he has done some things that no woman can forgive. I told her me and my daughter was sick because of him. I told her I needed you to help me find him. I never said I want to help him. I couldn’t explain that to another woman. She heard what I said, and maybe the way she understood me, she conclude that is kill I want to kill the man. But that is not what I said.”
It was enough for me. I agreed to find him. But deep inside me, what she said about him, about loving him, about being tied to him, that thing made me sick to my stomach. Not because I thought it was a sickness in her, but because I was jealous.
This was her flaw, and yet it was a flaw that pushed her further away from me. Right there, I wanted to find the man. Right there, I had a desire to do something evil to that man.
I could have started right away. In truth, I could have found that man in no time at all. But I have to say that after this lunch with her, I turned into a different man. I was behaving in ways that I knew was sinful and not right, but I walked into it same way, every step telling myself, man, you have to do better.
When we step out into the sunlight outside the restaurant, the woman selling orange just say casual, “Nice man, nice man. My Lord, buy the lady a orange, nuh. She look like she could eat a sweet orange.”
Now, “My Lord” is what a man would normally call me, but some of them young girls start behave like man these days.
Cynthia smile. “My Lord,” she say. “Buy me a orange, nuh.”
And the way she say that, I know I was in trouble.
I pretend it was the glare making me rush for my shades. And when I walked that woman to the taxi place … imagining her naked body, sweating, moving over me, her breasts, her strong thighs, her batty—
Jesus
… Pushing through the crowd until I found one of my connections and give him some money, plus more, and tell him to take her to where she want to go as she protesting that she could just catch the bus, and all the noise around us, the traffic, the people chatting, the woman selling this and that, the bus and truck, the car horn, despite her protest, despite the world happening around me, all I could hear in my head was one thing:
I have to fuck you.
For the next few days, all I did was scheme to do exactly that. Just to say it now fill me with such shame. I never used to talk about lovemaking like that. So why I was thinking that kinda language with her? Is not like say she was the kinda woman who use that kinda language. But I was entering a dark place, a place that was not really me.
I made a plan. A simple plan—make the search look like the hardest thing in the world, just like I used to do when a business hire me to steal information, and check in with her regular, and tell her things that was not really anything, not so much updates … that might not be the word … more like warnings …
I need to talk to you, off the cell phone, though
…
Best to talk in person … Hey, you don’t know who might be watching you
…
I don’t know
…
You can never tell
…
I know the drive long
…
With the toll on the causeway it should take me door-to-door a hour and mash
.
She lived out in Portmore, what was just beach and alligator swamp in the ’70s when I was a boy. Quarter-million people out there now on the dump-up land looking over them shoulder for alligator—when it rain like is Florida them live.
She lived in one of the newer schemes out there in a regular hot two-bedroom flat prefab with a grill-round veranda add on.
At first that is where I’d give her the reports. She wouldn’t really make me come inside. Maybe it was because the little girl was home on summer holiday. But that suit me fine because since the little girl couldn’t hear, I could put forward some good arguments.
Now, they say self-praise is no recommendation, but when I think back I have to say that my argument them was good. Watch the ride:
I need some encouragement
…
My services are free, but a man could use a brawta now and then
…
I could search better if I could smell you on my lip all day
…
I wouldn’t call it love, but all I know is you come in like you want to live inside my head all day
…
All I want is a little taste
…
So couple days of this went on, yes—at first I used to only go out there in the day time. I mean, Deloris wanted me to help Cynthia, but woman have instincts, and they get sharper when some suspicion give them the vague feeling you might want to be taking them for fool. So no vague feelings was going come from me to Deloris. So no regular nighttime visiting.
Until Deloris came to me in my office one afternoon looking kinda sad and say she sorry to give me short notice but she going to Miami to buy two new machine later on and she did mean to tell me before and she did mean to cook several meal for me that she could leave in the fridge, for she know me is a man who don’t eat out a-road, and again she sorry for the short notice but could I cook for myself for one night while she gone …
As I’m saying this now is like I’m there … in Cynthia kitchen. Me and her face-to-face like we going dance a rent-a-tile tune. I can see everything like is right now … the two-burner stove, the pot of stew peas, the wall black up behind the stove … the Formica counter stain but clean-clean … the empty plate them on the table with a small slice of tomato still in mines … my belly full, the little girl sleeping.
Yeah man, everything was coming together nice, and so I time it good and put the argument to her. When I put it, this is what she said: “What, you don’t believe me when I say I have AIDS?” And the way she say it, the serious way she say it, I knew right there that she was ready.
I wanted to say,
AIDS can’t come between two people who love one another
. In my head she woulda took this as a joke, cause I woulda said it like a joke. I know how to do those things.
Be that as it may, I didn’t joke it out though, I took it to her serious. I put my hand to her face and she flinch like she think I was going box her—reflexes, you know. And she lean against me heavy when my hand touch her skin, cause it touch her light-light. And when it touch her now she hug me up like she surprise, and is like her surprise make me feel my own kinda surprise. You know them kinda surprise there that make your hair lie down instead of stand up? Like say when you see a great cricketer make a late cut … pull back hard like him going rass a square cut through the gully, and when you expecting force now, him just take the hard-hard willow and feather-touch the ball through the slips. Or when a corporal in the off-key police band step forward in him white tunic and play one of them soft Latin tunes on him dull trombone.
Yeah man, certain kinda surprise make your hair lie down all over your body—at least that’s how I feel it in my mind.
So no, I wasn’t lying to anybody, least of all myself, when I brush my hand through Cynthia hair and say, “I believe you. And I know you done sort out how we can do it safe.”
Cynthia didn’t talk much while we was making love that night. Like most Jamaican woman she mostly moan and groan. Jamaica woman take sex serious—it’s a thing I come to notice—sex and dancing, not too much laughy-laughy going on. Cynthia just moan. Anything more than that is one and two, “Uh-huh” and “Eeh-hee.”
Cynthia talk loud with her body though. She drill me with it. Me, a man who think me know how to handle woman. Backside! Cynthia make me feel like a recruit. She handle me with efficiency and power, like she had to break me down and build me back up again to make me understand, in case I didn’t understand before that I was her own.
Is only one time she talk. The whole time she talk only once. I was over her and she swing out her legs and wrap them around my back, and she put her two hands on my throat and put her mouth to one of my ears—that time her breath hot-hot—and say, “Men have done a lot of things for me, My Lord, but one thing”—her breath catch up, and her voice sink low—“one thing a man never do for me yet, My Lord. You know what it is?”
“No. What?”