A Brief History of Seven Killings (16 page)

Josey Wales, also known as Franklin Aloysius, also known as Ba-bye, who just come in with

Bam-Bam, who love to hold the gun but don’t know where to shoot.

Weeper, the police killer who have Babylon on the run. When he talk like a Jamaican he talk all coarse and evil. When he talk like a white man, he sound like he reading a book with big word. There is one thing about Weeper that no man who want to live talk about.

Heckle, who used to move with Jeckle until a bullet from PNP turn Jeckle from is to was.

Renton from Trench Town.

Matic from Trench Town.

Funky Chicken, who have the heroin shakes before they give him cocaine.

Two man from Jungle, one fat, one skinny, that I don’t know. The skinny one not even a man, not even a boy that much, him shirt open wide but no chest hair growing.

And me.

This is how ten man turn into nine. Three night ago. Matic from Trench Town try to light the C the way the Weeper show him, but he forget how and Weeper wasn’t there. A night with no moon and we with no flashlight to show the way to and from the house. Matic thinking he know the freebase and that a spoon full of C, is a spoon full of C, is a spoon full of C. Matic think that Weeper would leave C just anywhere and so he search the floor, in the corner, inside two cupboard near the window and in the ash of the coal stove near the door. He look and look and the other boys start looking too, feeling the C itch even though C don’t leave an itch, that is H. Matic find some white and when the other try to move in for him to
share it, he pull out him gun. He use him own lighter and cook powder. He remember to heat the C in water and adding the baking soda he see in the cupboard. He smile like a pro while the other men look at him like a hungry tiger. But Matic forget the rest. He forget the other liquid that Weeper use, the ether. He was also stupid enough to think that Weeper would leave a stash in the house. The C wouldn’t burn, it wouldn’t change. No smoke was coming for him to smoke it, so he lick it. Lick the fire-hot spoon so hard that we hear him tongue sizzle. Freebase hit with a quick kick and the kick takes eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Nothing. Fuckery this, Matic, then fall frontway him face slamming into the floor with a bam and him mouth start to froth. Nobody touch him until Weeper come and laugh and ask if we didn’t think it funny that a dirty, nasty shack like this don’t have no rat.

This is how nine man become eight. Last night Josey Wales tell we what we going do. Renton from Trench Town say him cut a hit tune and he not pulling no gun like that boy in the Heptones who in prison when white man put him song in a movie. He say that him baby mother go to the Singer record studio and they give her money for the baby and her mother and her whole family. And he know that she is just one of more than hundred people that get help from the Singer and what goin’ happen if that stop? Josey Wales say that don’t make him better that make him worse because all him doing is giving poor people fish to eat because now that he reach he don’t want nobody else learn how to catch fish for himself. Some of we receive that reasoning but not Renton from Trench Town. Weeper take out him gun to shoot the bitch right deh so. Josey Wales say no, man, listen to the man and understand him reasoning. Then Josey Wales say that one has to know the factors. We don’t know what he mean, so he say kinetic energy: KE = mv
²
/2 (where m is mass and v is velocity). Yaw. Deformation. Fragmentation. Bleeding. Hypovolemic shock. Exsanguination. Hypoxia. Pneumothorax, heart failure and brain damage. Bang. Him skull stopped the bullet but blood still splash on Weeper chest. Not me Starsky and Hutch t-shirt! Weeper say as the man body fall and he wipe brains off him chest. Josey Wales put the gun back in him holster.

This is how the white man teach we how to load an M16A1, an M16A2 and an M16A4.

Point the rifle muzzle in a safe direction.

Cock the rifle and open the bolt.

Return the charging handle to the forward position.

Place the selector lever on SAFE.

Check the chamber to ensure it is clear.

Insert the magazine, pushing it upward until the magazine catch engages and holds the magazine.

Tap upward on the bottom of the magazine to ensure it is seated.

Depress the upper portion of the bolt catch to release the bolt.

Tap the forward assist to ensure that the bolt is fully forward and locked.

You won’t need to put it back on SAFE.

This is what you get when you have man from Jungle. Them hot for the C so they freebase and freebase thanks to Weeper. Josey Wales leave we but warn that anybody leave him get shot, and we remember that they used to call him Ba-bye. As he and Weeper close the door they lock it and we hear a click. The house getting smaller and hotter and I think about the guard I going to kill, the police. The Babylon.

Seven man. Twenty-one gun. Eight hundred and forty bullet. I think of one man and one man only and is not the Singer. I think of him running into a wall and balling high voice like a little girl. I think of him saying is not me you come for who you come for downstairs because he must be a pussyhole like that. I think about man who cheat and get away and man whose luck run out. I look at him and say this is what death going to look like.

Sir Arthur George Jennings

A
nd now we
are in the time of dying. The year surrenders in three weeks. Gone, the season of wet hot summer, ninety-six degrees in the shade, May and October rains that swelled rivers, killed cows and spread sickness. Men growing fat on pork, boys’ bellies swelling with poison. Fourteen men lost in the bush while bodies explode, three, four, five. Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. I stole those words from a living man who already has death walking with him, killing him from the toe up.

I look down on my hands and see my story. A hotel on the south coast, a future my country could taste. Sleepwalking, they said when they found me, and so they build a picture from hearsay of my two hands held out in front and stiff like Frankenstein, my eyes closed, my legs stomping in a communist march, over the banister, three, two, one. They found me naked, my eyes alert but washed of their brown, my neck floppy and the back of my skull smashed, my penis at attention, something the hotel workers saw first. Hidden in my blood was dirt from a man’s push.

There are things about death that the dead cannot tell you. The vulgarity of it. Death changes where you die into a room where the body shames itself. Death makes you cough, piss, death makes you shit, death makes you stink from inside vapors. My body rots but my nails still grow into claws as I see and wait.

I heard that a rich man in America, a man with money and power written in his name, died inside a woman that was not his wife. An enormous boat of a man crushing the woman with his deadweight, a man who was burned eighteen hours later by his wife because she couldn’t bear to smell another woman on his body.

I was inside a woman whose name I cannot remember but she stopped me complaining of thirst. But there’s wine right here. Can you get some ice? Who puts ice in wine? I do, and there are other things I’ll do too if only you’ll get some ice. I run out naked, and giggling, it’s five in the morning. Tiptoe down the corridor like Wee Willie Winkle. The dead have a smell but so does the killer. My death took two, one to demand it and the other to make it so. Before I flew over the banister there was lemongrass and wet dirt, the crunch of a footstep on floors clean as mirrors.

I am in the house of the man that killed me. I have never smelled myself on his hands, just the linger of old death, not a stench but the memory of it, the iron tinge in the blood of stale kill, the sweet stinking lure of a body dead five days. In the world of the living he is a mature man now, not caring that he smells like he stumbled upon somebody else’s money, like expensive suits that used to belong to somebody else. Except he is not wearing a suit. I was naked when they found me and he is naked as I find him. His belly is rounder, his back ripples fat as he thrusts up and down and he’ll have to dye the back of his head again. His body hits hers in a sweaty slap, slap, slap. He grunts on top of her, the first runner-up he married. The white bed is a whirlpool. She notices that he is not stopping and taps him on the shoulder. His head is in the pillow but he’s holding her down, she’s in jail and knows it so she taps him again. He grunts and she pushes him
You know I don’t want to get pregnant you son of a bitch
. He plops his weight on her until he comes and blows his breath all out in the room. Jamaicans need to know that them leaders can work it, he says. It’s the first time in years that I’m hearing his voice, except it’s not years. I’m stunned that it hasn’t changed, still sounding improper even when he speaks correctly. I am in the wrong place and so is she. She is the first runner-up he married when he failed to get the Miss Jamaica. Her father wanted her to marry full white. Dry shit come of me batty before me make some Syrian with a Lebanese haberdashery marry my bloodcloth daughter, he said.

The woman whom I was inside I cannot remember her name. I never see her, not that I would know where to look. Maybe there was love but ghosts
haunt out of longing and I have no longing. Maybe it was not love or maybe I am not a ghost. Or maybe my longing isn’t for her. Who asks for ice in wine? Did she know that he was outside the door waiting on me? Someone called me a mangled spider with a cock on top. Not one of the hotel staff, they would have no knowledge of words like mangled. Maybe someone who was already happy to see me gone. I have no memory of his face.

The first runner-up pushes him off and hisses
Is a good thing I didn’t forget the foam
. Don’t . . . you . . . know . . . he pants the rest of it out . . . that birth control is a plot to kill black people? . . . and laughs. He rolls over and plays with himself. I want to slip inside him, to pretend that I would feel what he feels, but even at the foot of this bed I smell over a hundred dead men. A glass shatters and they both jump. Her nightie had been pulled over her breast so she pulls it down. You and that fucking cat, he says and gets up. I watch his belly settle itself and his cheeks go sallow, not even this, not even sex ruffles his hair, packed tight like the tin man. He makes me miss living, swinging, sagging. The bedroom has furniture she picked out, with knobs and curves and carvings of grapevines. A mosquito net hangs from the ceiling. A television hides in the corner, the door to the bathroom open but the doorway dark. He always thought that men who had any sense of style or beauty were perverts. I remember him saying this about another party member as he drove away. I never shared his hate because I saw Noel Coward every summer and called him uncle. He and his traveling companion.

The man who had me killed reaches for his gun, lying in wait on the bedside table, and leaves his pants on the floor. The first runner-up points to the pants and he makes a joke about never dressing up just to meet loose pussy as he goes through the door. I want to stay with her for a while, curious about how she regains a peace in herself, but I follow him.

In the living room is a man I can’t remember if I know. The living room is a cemetery, rank with dead smell. Some of it coming from the man. He is black one second, a hint of chinaman the next or maybe he shifts with shadow. I can already smell how he dies. He is coughing in a glass, saying,

—Me did think this was water.

—You don’t know what white rum bottle look like, or you can’t spell rum?

—Smell? I gulp before I smell. — Spell. S-p-e-l-l.

—Oh. Hearing not too good. Too much pow pow pow, y’know?

—How the r’asscloth you mistake that for water?

—I don’t know, water that come in a special bottle sounds like rich people things. Rahtid brethren, is so you gallivant ’bout the place?

—You expecting modesty in me own house? Or you seeing something you never see before?

—Ah, this is how rich people chuck it.

—Poor people wash them buddy by standpipe and you want to turn this into a class issue? How the bloodcloth you get in me house?

—Walk through the front door.

—How you—

—Enough with how. How you ask how so much?

—You rather why? Okay, make we talk ’bout why. Why the bloodcloth you in me house at . . . hold on . . . three in the morning? What we say ’bout you and me not to seen together in public?

—Never know that you bedroom public. How the mistress? Sound like she was doing good just a while ago. Real good.

—Man, what you want?

—You know what day today is?

—Hmmmm. Hmmmm. I going go with December third. That is the day that follow December second.

—Oi! Enough with your no manners, you better know who you talking to.

—No you better fucking remember who you talking to. Come into my house like some pussycloth house rat. You lucky Rawhide on leave tonight or you would be dead already, you hear me? Dead.

—Good thing for me then.

—I going back to bed. Leave the way you came.

—I was doing some thinking.

—Don’t hurt yourself.

—What?

—You were thinking.

—I need some money.

—You need some money.

—After tomorrow.

—Tomorrow’s already today.

—After later.

—I told you already that I don’t know what you talking about. I don’t know about it, I don’t endorse it, and I don’t even know you that well. Papa-Lo is the only man down there I know.

—Down there? Down there? Is down there you call it now? Artie Jennings never talked like you.

—You and Arthur talk good? ’Cause I have it on good authority that he not talking much these days.

The first runner-up steps into the room wearing the bedsheet.

—Peter, what is all the commotion? And oh my G—

—Jesus Christ, bitch, stop you screaming and go back to bed. Not every naigger is thief.

—Well, in this one case maybe your wife a little correct.

—Peter?

—Go to bed!

—What a slam. Me think the house just shake. Pum-pum lock off for the rest of the night?