The Amazing Absorbing Boy (29 page)

This girl was different from both women. Canella was tall and assured and Dilara was delicate and bird-like. Carmen was medium everything and even though she appeared rough-and-tumble, I felt it hid an interesting softness. I was glad she decided to sit with me in the coffee shop until the arrival of the westbound train; and sitting there, I wished Pantamoolie and the other Mayaro boys could see me. Once Pantamoolie had told me that Spanish girls were hot-blooded and up for anything.

In half an hour or less, I felt the reputation may have been undeserved. Her full name, she said, was Carmen Isadora
Cienfuegos. She told me that when she graduated from Pine Ridge Secondary in a couple months she wanted to volunteer at some old people place before she started college. It was because of her grandmother, who was suffering from early-stage Alzheimer’s. Now the old woman talked constantly of Cuba and of Carmen’s parents as if they were still living. “Do you know what she used to tell us when we were kids? We had a small gas lantern, the only thing we brought from Cuba, and in the nights she would place it in our bedroom and say it possessed a special kind of light. One that would summon our parents’ spirits no matter where they were roaming.”

“In brightest day, in blackest night …”

“Yes?” she asked.

“Another type of lantern. From a comic book.”

“Tell me about it.”

I missed the next train and the one after. I didn’t care. When I got to Regent Park it was already dark. I pretended the streetlights were magic lanterns and all these people walking about sneaked little glances to see whoever they had left behind. I believe I saw my mother dressed up as in the week before her death. But her cheeks were not bony and she was not wearing an ill-fitted wig but looked as pretty as I had ever seen her. I even heard a tiny bit of Nutcracker music.

T
he first thing Uncle Boysie told me as we were leaving the airport was, “This
migpiling
scrawny bit of fur floating around, people does make so much fuss about?”

“Is not real snow,” I told him. “Is flurries.”

“Furries? How come I never hear about them?” He glanced at me as if I was involved in creating a bogus Canada for Mayaro people. But soon he turned his attention to the other passengers on the Airport Express. “How come it have so much grey-hair people around here? They never hear about dye or what?” And a few minutes later. “Why everybody so quiet? Like they in a witness protection programme or what?” He was speaking loudly, in the Trinidadian manner, and when he asked if there was some pundit convention at the airport, I had to quietly explain they were all Sikhs who wore turbans and dressed like Trinidadian pundits.

On the 401 highway he inquired if there were loads of
rubbish and broken-down shacks hidden behind all the fancy buildings like in Trinidad and I told him I didn’t think so. He had not changed one bit, although it was strange seeing him in an expensive fur coat, white hat and two-toned shoes. He looked like a mobster, through and through, and while we were walking to our apartment building I noticed people staring at him. This affection—if it was that—was not returned by my uncle as he watched the big iron garbage units by the parking lots and the overturned shopping carts and the drawings on the walls and the young people smoking in little groups around the boardwalk and the clothes on some of the balconies. “I thought you say it didn’t have no hide-away
mash-up
place? What is this then? And where all these people from? Trinidad?”

“All over. And they going to pull down the entire place soon.”

“What you mean pull down?”

“Relocate everybody elsewhere.”

“Oho. That is why all of a sudden you father get a tick in he bottom. Running away at the first sign of trouble. The
neemakaram
home?”

He was at home and the biggest surprise to me was how quiet and nervous he appeared. He seemed almost afraid of my uncle. My father was taller and maybe a couple years younger but Uncle Boysie had the kind of thick neck and solid-looking fat that in Trinidad gave him the mark of a
badjohn
. “You mean to say that this is the best place you could find to live, Danny?” he asked my father. “And where all the
machine and fancy unit you invent? Where the talking bicycle and the furniture that does follow you around the place and the teeth make from plastic?” He pretended to be peering around. “You father was a big inventor in Trinidad, you know,” he told me. “But the only thing he invent was a scheme to get out of the island.”

He heaved one of his suitcases on the kitchen table, unzipped it and began digging inside. “Aha. They didn’t find this.” He pulled out a bottle of Puncheon from one of the pockets, uncorked it and took a big swig. “For the cold.” He plucked out some T-shirts and threw one at my father and another at me. “These bitches and them seize three-quarter of me luggage in the airport. All me curry
chataigne
and
mauby
and herbs I does use for the constipation. Is a good thing they didn’t poke inside me bottom. That is what they do with these Guyanese in JFK, you know. Prospecting for park-up gold.” He pulled out two envelopes from a mess of yellowish underwear. “Customs people don’t like to dig around too much in smelly jockey shorts and thing.”

My father was walking from one end of the living room to the other but when Uncle Boysie placed the envelopes on the kitchen table, he immediately stopped his pacing. But my uncle leaned back on his chair and unloosened the top button on his trouser, which meant he was in one of his talkative moods. He began by mentioning all the crime in Trinidad, the rise of Colombian and Mexican drug gangs, kidnapping children for money, and the government big boys building huge walls to hide-away the slums. “The country
have too much money, if you ask me. It give people a whole new setta vice.”

He reached for the two envelopes but only to replace them in his coat pocket. I wondered if he was torturing my father but it seemed he still had a lot to spill about Trinidad. Everybody was going mad one by one: the prime minister wanted to build a palace for himself on one of the smaller islands off the east coast; the leader of the opposition claimed to receive visions that directed him to travel about in a horse-drawn buggy rather than his car; the police commissioner complained that a few smartass journalists who were forever complaining about bribes—rather than using the proper word, gifts—were giving the practice a bad name.

My father went to the balcony for a smoke and Uncle Boysie gazed at him. “How two of allyou making out, boy?” His voice was softer now.

“We okay, uncle.”

“I don’t expect you to complain. You not like that.” He got quiet for a couple minutes before he asked, “How college going?”

“I had to finish a preparatory course first. Sort of finish high school.”

“You pass?”

I nodded.

“When you will begin then?”

“In the beginning of February.”

“A month or so away. So you will have to buy uniform and thing soon.”

“They don’t wear uniform here.”

“Eh? No uniform? You sure is a real college? What about the fees?”

“I trying to save up from my work.”

He got out the envelopes once more from his pocket. Now I too was curious about their contents. “So where you does sleep, Sammy?” I felt embarrassed to mention the foam but my uncle followed my gaze to the rolled-up bundle against the living room wall. “Later on we will take a little vacation in a hotel. It have any nearby?”

“They might be expensive, uncle.”

“You don’t worry you head about that, Sammy. You working?”

“Yeah. In a video store. Three days. Wednesday and weekends.”

“It look like I have a lot to do in these ten days.” He called out to my father who came immediately. “I have something for you, Mister Persad.” Uncle Boysie fetched a glasses from a case in his shirt pocket, adjusted it over his bulky nose, and read the names on the envelopes carefully before he gave the thicker one to my father. I saw him scrutinizing my father with the same suspicious expression as when one of his Mayaro customers asked for an extension on their credit. Without removing his gaze from my father, who was chewing his lower lip nervously—which made him look younger, almost like an
ownway
schoolboy—Uncle Boysie said, “Sammy, tonight you will sleep in the bedroom. Me and you father have a lot to discuss.”

That night was the first in ten months I slept on a real bed. But I was not as comfortable as I should have been. Visions of my father and uncle quarrelling and fighting and one throwing the other off the balcony flashed through my mind. I listened carefully for some commotion from the living room and when I heard little sopping sounds—like a baby sucking air from an empty bottle—I was mystified. I placed my head against the wall but still could not figure what was going on. Finally I decided to pretend I was getting something from the fridge.

My father and uncle were in the living room, my uncle sitting on the foam and my father on the couch. My father was crying. Sobbing like a baby, with his hands rubbing his eyes. It took a while for the shock to wear off but when it did, I felt disgust, pure and simple. I know it sounds bad on my part but the sight of a big man crying in this quiet weak way, with his shoulders bobbing, just didn’t seem right. I didn’t care what it was that had set him off. And that night in my father’s room I tried to imagine what had happened. Did Uncle Boysie threaten him? Was it connected in some way with the envelope? I thought of something else: this was just the first night of Uncle Boysie’s ten-day stay.

I slept badly that night, alert to any kind of commotion, and I awoke later than usual so I had to rush to the bathroom to hurriedly bathe. When I left, my uncle was snoring loudly on the foam and my father was coiled up on the couch. I was relieved because I wasn’t in the mood to face either of them. I got to work almost an hour late and Mr. Schmidlap rapped
his wristwatch gloomily and glanced at me. That entire day I tried to figure out what had led my father to cry so openly and worried about what might be going on in the Regent Park apartment. After work, on the streetcar, different scenes flashed through my mind, but the one that I wasn’t prepared for when I returned to the apartment was the sight of Uncle Boysie sitting on our couch and dressed in a London Fog trench coat, black serge pants and white gloves. He also had on a broad, striped tie. On his head was a Panama straw hat that tourists to Trinidad usually wore. The only thing missing was a butterfly net. In fact he looked exactly like a tourist but dressed for the wrong climate.

“Where you going?” I asked him, glancing around to make sure there was no unconscious body lying around.

“Montreal.”

“This time of the evening? And wearing that? You know how far Montreal is from here?”

“You have a aunt living they, boy. You mother cousin. She married some bottomhole, I can’t remember his name.” He fished into his coat pocket, maybe for the address. I realized he was thinking of the country’s size in Trinidadian terms, where “extra long trips” were any that exceeded an hour.

“Montreal is nearly six hours away by train.”

“So I dress up for nothing then? What it have closer?”

“What you looking for?”

“It have any nearby rumshop?”

I felt this was his aim all along but I had to tell him, “I don’t think so. In any case they might be closed up by now.”

“What about these joints?”

“What sort of joints?”

“Joints, nah man. Pussyahs.”

“Strip joints?”

“Righto pappyo.” He grinned.

“I think I usually pass one on Yonge Street.”

“Pass? Only pass?”

“I believe you have to be eighteen to go in.”

“You not eighteen yet? Look how tall you get in one year.”

“I will turn eighteen in February.”

“Listen, boy, you is a man once you does pee froth. Now tell me if you prefer the outfit I land in or this one?” He changed hurriedly; and on our way to the Dundas streetcar he told me, “Consider tonight a early birthday gift.” I glanced at his fur coat and hat and prepared myself for the worst. But he was in completely different mood from the previous night and I wasn’t sure if he was playing when he called Union Station
Onion Station
, or when he glanced at a poster of the Maple Leafs and said,
hawk-key
, stretching the first syllable as if he was clearing his throat. When we got off at the Yonge station he pulled his coat tightly around him and asked, “Like you in a hurry to get to the place or what?”

“Everybody does walk fast here. Cause it so cold.”

“It damn cold in truth. I feeling it right through me pyjamas.”

“You wearing pyjamas under your pants?”

“I prepared for anything.”

I didn’t know what he was talking about and I was afraid to ask. I slowed my pace to match my uncle’s but the minute he spotted the sign, Pink Pussycats, the letters flashing in red and yellow, it was I who had to keep up with him. His face lit up as he passed under the billboard with a flashing naked woman. I followed him inside. He chose a front table. A woman with nothing on top came over and asked for our order. Uncle Boysie looked at her breasts as if he was fixing to feast. I almost bolted when he leaned over like if he was planning to smell the woman’s breasts, but he tipped his hat in an old-fashioned way and someone at a nearby table applauded, either at the woman or Uncle Boysie’s courtesy. I felt embarrassed to be sitting right next to him as he bawled out, “Pussyah, girl!” and “Wine and shake it good,” and “Clamp that pole tight.” By the end of the night, I was sure he had spent more than a hundred dollars but he didn’t seem too concerned. A man who was dressed almost the same as my uncle kept glancing at him suspiciously. On our way back Uncle Boysie talked endlessly about the different variety of breasts he had seen and about where these women had shaved and what he would do if he had a girlfriend like one of the strippers. Then he got back to the breasts. “I prefer mine like grapefruit. The watermelon variety does look nice but in a couple years they does turn to long papaw. The coconut type not too bad either but they too kissmeass stiff. I like them to jiggle.” He mentioned several other fruits, and insisted on calling the place “the Pink Pussyah.” I had never seen this side to him and I wondered if his monthly restocking trips to Port of Spain had been all
business. Or his weekend journeys to San Fernando to see Abdullah the Butcher wrestle.