The Rhythm of the August Rain (18 page)

“They not going to bite you,” Akasha whispered before leaving them.

The small room they entered was crowded enough without adding two more people to the clutter. Posters covered the walls with images of Marcus Garvey and the late Ethiopian emperor, and the low table in the middle was laden with candles, books, and ashtrays. Hanging over the sagging sofa was an ornate silver cross, and sitting cross-legged on it was Redemption, lighting a giant, cone-shaped spliff. I-Verse was seated on a chair near him, the third man absent, and Shad and Shannon were waved to two stools. After the host had taken a long pull and held his breath, he exhaled a sweet-smelling cloud and gave the joint to I-Verse, who did the same. Shad took the spliff from him and inhaled as much as he dared, the scratching in his throat almost making him cough, before handing the cone to Shannon while he held the smoke in his mouth.

She stared at the joint. “I don't think—”

“Just a little,” Shad said, one eyebrow lifted in warning as he exhaled, and she took it carefully between her fingers.

“All right.” She closed her eyes as she inhaled a tiny puff.

Shad swallowed the burning in his throat. “Is good weed this.”

“The best.” The old man slapped his knee.

“Ras Redemption, how long you live up this side?”

“Almost forty years now.”

“You might can help us then. You ever see or hear of a foreign woman name—” Shad looked at the journalist, the weed making all names disappear.

“Katlyn. She lived in Gordon Gap for a while.”

Shad cleared his throat, a reminder to Shannon to let him lead the conversation. “This was about—”

“Thirty-five years ago.” Shannon gulped on her second little pull. Frowning, Shad gestured toward the sofa and she handed the joint over.

Redemption sucked hard on the spliff, making a deep, throaty sound that seemed about to split his small body. “This sweet lambsbread, man.” He looked at the spliff. After he passed the ganja to I-Verse, the old man leaned back on the sofa, his eyes on the ceiling, and questioned Shannon. How old was the woman? What was she doing in Jamaica?

“They call her anything besides—what you call her?”

“Katlyn.” Shannon took the photograph out of her bag and passed it to Redemption.

The old Rasta stared at the picture for a while, his face morphing from caginess to controlled surprise. The creases beside his mouth got deeper, his eyes narrower. Finally, he threw the photograph on the table and put his feet flat on the floor. “I and I might have something for you.”

“Anything you know—”

“I going to need little help, though,” the man added, the Rasta vocabulary abandoned.

“What kind of help?” Shad could feel his pulse speed up, hear his words slow down. The room was feeling close and hostile, the weed swarming his brain.

“I need some bills to help me.”

Shannon looked at Shad with vague, pink eyes.

“Money,” Shad told her, looking behind him, measuring the distance to the door.

“You—you want me to
pay
you for the information?” she said to Redemption as she tried to sit straighter.

“How much?” Shad asked.

“Pshaw, man,” I-Verse said on the inhale, spliff in hand, “she have plenty money. She not working for a big magazine?” No smoke came out of his mouth, as if it had been absorbed by his bloodstream.

“I don't have it on me, but if—”

“You want information, you pay the bills.” The old man sucked in the remains of the joint. “Come on Sunday. We having a Nyabinghi.”

T
he yellow behemoth clawed at the earth, noisily seeking treasure—and charging a fortune to do so, Eric was sure.

“You ever want to drive a bulldozer?” Shad shouted.

“Never,” Eric shouted back.

It was the first day of work clearing Miss Mac's land, heavy rains having held back the start.

“You can't go into the job with water filling up every trench you dig,” Lambert had explained on Monday morning. “It's bad luck to start on a rainy day, anyway.”

The next morning, soon after the sun had dawned in a clear blue sky, Eric had been jarred awake by Shad's banging on his door. “Time for action, boss,” his new partner had yelled.

When they'd arrived at the site, Lambert was already addressing a cluster of villagers beside the road, each one carrying a machete and a stick. He was introducing the foreman, a stranger to the village, a serious-looking man wearing delicate metal glasses and heavy work boots.

“And you see this man, Mistah Roberts?” Lambert had been saying in patois, pointing to the foreman. “He know what he doing, so don't question him. He a fair man, give you a fair day's wages, and you won't have no argument with him if you do your work like he say. But if you have a problem, go to him, don't come to me. I don't want to see nobody come up to my house to complain about Mistah Roberts or tell me about this or that. Mistah Roberts is your boss and I am Mistah Roberts's boss. You have a problem, you see him. That how it go.”

Roberts had stepped forward and given instructions for the first day's chopping of brush and grass. Teams were assigned, locations on the property pointed out.

“But first,” the foreman had said, pulling a quart of white rum from his pocket, “the libations.”

Lambert had gestured to Eric and Shad to come closer. “Either one of you want to say a few words before we start?” Eric had shaken his head, wary of superstition since his altar-boy days helping to change wafers into the body of Christ. Beside him, Shad had nodded eagerly.

The foreman led the group halfway down the unpaved driveway to Miss Mac's empty house and, after the workers gathered in a circle around him, poured the contents of the bottle onto the dirt.

“Blessings to the ancestors,” one woman said to nods and mutters.

Shad had stepped forward. “Please bow your heads.” Hats were removed, heads were lowered.

“Oh, good and gracious and
beneficent
God,” the bartender had prayed with fervor, “as we proceed on our mission to make Largo Bay the beautifullest place in Jamaica, we ask You to be with us, keeping all the workers them safe and everything good, because we know, God, that You is the One who make us to build this hotel right here, right now. We been suffering for the last years since the old hotel gone, and You know that now is our chance. We ask all Your blessings on this construction, God, that Mistah Lambert may guide everything good, and that the foreman know what he doing, and that the rain hold up long enough to build it on time. Thank You for this opportunity to dream dreams and make visions come true, God, in this our Savior Jesus Christ name. Amen.”

After the chattering workers had dispersed, Lambert had said a word to Roberts, then walked over to where Eric and Shad were standing. “I should put you two to work,” the big man had said with his ho-ho-ho. “Toughen you up a little.”

“When hell freezes over,” Eric had said. “Been there, done that, with the old hotel.”

Lambert had paced a few steps. “Everything's set to go, except for—”

Just then, a truck had roared around the corner and pulled up, a sunflower-bright bulldozer on its flatbed. The contractor had leaped into action, walking the operator through the job. After that, the men's eyes had been riveted by the machine as it reversed off the truck, the big treads dropping dried mud from the last job. Half an hour later, the dozer was creating a ruckus and a driveway into the heart of the property.

Eric had been ready to leave, could smell his coffee already, but he knew that Shad would want to watch the action. It was always like that with Shad. If history was to be made, something new was to be seen, he had to be part of it.

“I always want to drive a tractor,” Shad said after they'd found a tree to lean on where they could hear their own voices. “Nobody can stop you when you driving one of them things.”

Eric had a flashback. “I remember when the bulldozer came to clear the land for the first hotel. The old guy who was driving it had to pee all the time, kept leaving it and going into the bushes. Now that I think about it, maybe he was just extending his hours, making more money. Funny, I never thought of that before.”

“I wasn't there then. Old Man Job hire me after that, when you was getting ready to dig the foundation.”

“Yeah, that's right.”

Shad pinched his starched jeans higher and squatted down. “Speaking of money, boss, I want to talk to you about something.”

“No raise coming, buddy. Sorry.”

“You forget I add up the money, boss, or subtract, is more like. No, is something else. I was thinking we could make some money from my wedding.”

Eric looked down at Shad, the man's eyes glued to the dozer, beads of sweat already glistening on the chocolate scalp. “What you talking about? Weddings don't
make
money, man, they
cost
money.”

“But I was thinking that, instead of a regular reception, we could hold a pay party. We could call it Shad's Rocksteady Reception. Play some Millie Small and Desmond Dekker, you know, old-time reggae.”

“Wait a minute.” Eric pushed away from the tree. “You're thinking of getting married in the church, then telling the guests to come back to the bar and
pay
for the reception?”

Shad rubbed his chin. “You think they would vex?”

“You're damn straight they'd be vexed. You don't charge people to come to your wedding.”

“But they wouldn't have to spend no money on gifts. They just pay at the door.”

“You talked this over with Beth?”

“Not yet.”

Eric looked at the machine reversing over a small mound. Shad's schemes were not usually harebrained. “What's up, the wedding getting too expensive?”

Shad stood up, straightening his jeans. “The wedding expensive, boss, but is the ring business. I want to give Beth two nice rings, one with a diamond.”

Two villagers approached, thwacking away at the bushes with their machetes, leaning on their sticks for support, and Eric and Shad returned to the bar, where the conversation continued over coffee. The pay party, they finally agreed, would be held one week
before
the wedding, the coming Saturday, and Shad would get his cousin's husband to be DJ.

“That way you'll have time to buy the rings before the wedding,” Eric suggested.

“And we can split the profits, boss, fifty-fifty.”

“No way, this is your idea and your wedding. Just don't destroy the place or hand me a bill at the end of it. Pay the cost for whatever liquor you use, and the rental is my wedding gift.”

The name for the party, the groom-to-be insisted, had to remain Shad's Rocksteady Reception. “The words flow nice,” he affirmed.

Halfway through reading the
Daily Gleaner
later, Eric looked at Shad washing dish towels at the sink. “Tell me something, has Shannon gotten any closer to finding that Canadian woman?”

“An old Rasta man tell her to come to a Nyabinghi on Sunday coming. He say he can help her.”

“A Nya—”

“Like a church service, but a Rasta ceremony, plenty drums and food.”

A tremor rose up Eric's spine and he shook out the newspaper to straighten it. “I don't like the sound of it. I don't like her going up there. All kinds of things could go wrong, you know that. Next thing, with all the ganja—”

“I going with her, don't worry, and Carlton.” Shad rubbed his ear with his shoulder as if a mosquito were bothering him. “Who tell you about the Canadian woman, boss?”

“Eve told me.”

It felt good to say that his daughter had confided something that her mother hadn't. Ever since she'd danced for him to Bongo's ditty, and maybe because he'd clapped, Eve had started peeling back the layers with her father. First she'd asked him, mumbling, biting her lip, if she could take all her drumming lessons at the bar. The next day she'd asked if she could have lunch with him after her lessons. The first lunch was painfully silent, but he'd waited for her to start talking, keeping his own mouth shut until she'd opened hers. She'd come with a box under her arm the following day and asked if he'd play Scrabble with her.

“My teacher—Miss Simmons—said we're to play at least ten games—to keep our brain synapses running over the summer or something,” Eve had said after she'd taken her first seven letters.

“You mean to keep you away from those awful video games you were telling me about,” her father retorted as he examined his rack, sure she was going to beat him.

“Everybody plays video games. They help your reflexes.”

“Reflexes to be trigger-happy, you mean, all that violence. In my day all we had was good old movies. We didn't even have a TV at home until I was in my teens.”

“What do you call those cowboy-and-Indian movies? People used to die in them all the time.”

“Yeah, but you didn't see any blood.”

“Still violence,” Eve had countered under her breath.

He loved her spunk, loved that she was undaunted by their difference in age or by his being her father, even if he didn't feel like a father. She had a solidity about her, a maturity to her pancake face that looked older than her years, and now that she was looking up more, her eyes—his blue eyes—said that her word was her bond.

Halfway through the game the day before, she'd thrown him for a loop. “Mom is doing some detective work here, you know.”

“What detective—I thought she was writing an article.”

“She is, but she's looking for some woman, too.” The story had come out. Eve had walked into Shannon's bedroom to find her staring at an old photograph of the woman. “She said Angie, that's her editor, asked her to find out about the woman. She was here a long time ago, but she never went back home to Canada.” The girl had gone back to the game unperturbed.