Caribbean (123 page)

Then, assuming the postures of the great batsmen, he reeled off the names revered by West Indian boys, and by their elders too: “Sir Frank Worrell, from my island, Jamaica, maybe the handsomest man who ever played the game. I have a photo of him leaving the field at Lords after having demolished the English bowling. Head high, bat trailing, confident smile, he was a young god.

“Then there was Sir Gary Sobers,” and here he took a series of
wild cuts at the invisible ball. “Termed by critics in all countries the greatest all-round cricketer there ever was. Fantastic batsman, great bowler, maybe best at fielding with those catlike moves. He came from Barbados and blazed himself into glory.”

He stopped, broke into a smile, waved his bat a couple of times, and said: “And there was Sir Benny Castain of your island. He was the little round fellow that everybody loved. Used cricket as a key to men’s hearts.” He reflected on the impressive parade of world-class figures that had come from his little islands.

He spent the next minutes in a haunting ballet, swinging his bat in borrowed glory, reliving the time when his black fellows were champions of the world, and wondering when the days of glory would come again. Cars passing on the road stopped to watch this very tall Rastafarian in his green and gold tam, flying dreadlocks, flopping stenciled shirt and unkempt trousers as he epitomized in his dance the one sure thing in which his islands excelled. It was one of the passengers in these stopped cars who recognized Sally Wrentham sitting on a rock, watching the dance, and who hurried back to Bristol Town to inform her brother.

Halting his dance to the gods of cricket, Ras-Negus said to Sally: “And remember, these were all black men, not white, who mastered a new game and quickly became champions. If we did it once, we can do it again. In whatever field is necessary. You want our women to learn what Japanese women know about making televisions? They can do it. We can do anything, we black people.”

He danced away from her, still pretending that he was Sir Benny, but then he threw the bat away and went back to the car: “I mean it. You and I can do anything. Anything.” Then he added: “You with brains must tell me what. I with heart will tell you how.”

It was late when Sally delivered Ras-Negus to his digs and then headed for home. But when she reached her driveway, she was flagged down by a young woman who worked in her office and lived on her street: “I’ve been waiting for you, Sally.”

“Went for a long drive. We stopped at Pointe Sud for a chat, then I dropped him off at his place.”

“Who?”

“The Rastafarian. He has a world of ideas.”

The woman frowned: “That’s what I feared. Your brother was out
asking about you. I told him I didn’t know where you’d gone or with who. But later your father stopped by, and he looked pretty angry.”

“What did you tell him?”

“The same.” She hesitated a moment, then shrugged her shoulders as if she had reached a decision reluctantly: “I guess I’d better tell you, Sally.”

“What? Were they real mad?”

“This is something else. It’s about Laura.”

“An accident?”

“No. It seems she went to Trinidad, not Barbados.”

“Why would she tell a lie? What purpose?”

“To have an abortion.”

“Oh my God, who’s the father?”

“Your Rastafarian.”

Sally gasped. Then words and images flashed through her mind in a storm, helter-skelter: Poor Laura … what a horrible break … should we take up a collection to help her … no wonder Linc and Father were mad if they thought … Poor Laura, couldn’t she see what a pathetic substitute for a real man he is …

“Are you okay?” the young woman asked solicitously, and Sally replied, “I think I’ll take a walk. Sort things out,” and the woman said: “Good luck. When they questioned me they looked like a pair of sharks.”

Because she needed time to bring the hurricane revelations about Laura into focus, Sally took a circuitous route, and as she walked slowly, head down, through the warm April night, she tried to bring some order to her vagrant thoughts, and her first focus had to be upon her friend: Poor Laura. We must do everything to help her. I wonder what she thought that evening on our trip back from the north when the Rasta climbed into the back seat of the car to make passes at me. Had she been pregnant already? Oh my God!

Then she could think of herself: He never got me involved … well, not really. I took care of that as soon as my head cleared. But if that’s true, why did I seek him out today, want to talk with him? Because he has a vital message … I may not like it, and it may not pertain to me, but it could matter a lot to others.

Finally she reached the main point of her analysis: He sure knows what a black person is. He thinks like one. He has the vision, take it or leave it, he has it.

Suspicious of these easy conclusions, she realized they made her
look too good. A young woman who thought as straight as she wanted to ought to be judicious, fair to others, and aware of great social and racial problems. But then two other thoughts surged to the fore, and when she grappled with them she did not look so saintly, and she knew it. Why, if she was as interested in Harry Keeler as she apparently was, had she bothered to fool around with the Rastafarian on any terms whatever? Was her relationship with the white man so weak or so fundamentally wrong that the intrusion of the first vital black man, regardless of his appearance, posed a threat? As she asked herself this, she turned a corner, and in the light of the rising moon could see in the distance the headland at Pointe Sud where Ras-Negus had danced in honor of his great cricketing heroes, and she halted for a while to catch her breath and try to get the two men into focus. She could not.

Her final question struck close to home. If she suspected that Ras-Negus had first brought the phrase
You big fat white pig
onto the island, passing it along to sympathetic listeners in the barrios at night, where it lodged in the brain of the man who attacked the New York woman, was she not obligated to report this fact to her father, who was responsible for the safety of the island, or to Harry Keeler, who had to protect the income which the tourists brought?

Biting her lower lip, she strode forward, willing to confront the expected assaults on her behavior, but as she turned a corner and saw her house looming in the shadows, with who knew what awaiting inside, she slowed perceptibly, took deep breaths, and whispered to herself: “Come on, ladybug. Fly away home. You sought this out. And now your house is on fire.”

When she opened the door, no one shouted at her or demanded to know where she had been. Instead, she saw four extremely sober men gathered in the living room: her father and brother; Harry, her acknowledged gentleman friend; and Canon Tarleton, her clergyman. They rose as she came in, stood until she sat down and turned to look at her father, who said: “Sally, we’ve been terribly worried about you.”

“I took a ride to the airport with the Rastafarian.”

“We know. A person who saw you at Pointe Sud went to Lincoln’s café and told him.”

“It was just a ride. We had things to talk about.”

“If you’d told us,” Lincoln interrupted, “we could have warned you.”

“About what?”

In reply her brother said: “Both Canon Tarleton and Father have received letters from Jamaica … about your Rastafarian.”

“He’s not
my
Rastafarian.”

“Thank God for that,” Lincoln said, and he indicated that his father should hand over his letter, the long one from the Jamaican police, detailing Ras-Negus’ relation to the law, and when Sally finished reading she was shaken. Taken one by one, she could believe each of the legal accusations against Ras-Negus, for she’d had intimations which supported them, but she had never taken the time to tie one to the other until an unmistakable thread evolved. The Jamaican police had very carefully tied them together, and the result was ugly.

Seeing her shock, the men bore in with harsh and pertinent questions: “Have you ever seen him with ganja?” Yes, at Cap Galant. “Have you ever known him to speak to any All Saints person about ganja?” Yes, a farmer south of Tudor. At this information the two men of her family looked meaningfully at each other, and Lincoln said: “That’s where we think the airstrip is.” The next question came closer to home: “Did you ever hear him speak of the police as the ‘Great Babylon’?” Yes, many times. “And did you ever hear him say that this particular Great Babylon must be destroyed?” Many times.

But when they asked: “Did you ever hear him say anything about starting trouble for the police on this island?” she kept silent, because she had felt that her suspicion about the phrase “you big fat white pig” was that and nothing more. A coincidence in five words was not sufficient to damn a man.

The questioning now took a more delicate turn, with Canon Tarleton participating. The men wanted to know the extent of her personal involvement with the Rastafarian, and at first she thought she could handle this by confessing that she found parts of his philosophy about the future of black people fresh and challenging, but they pressed on. What her brother really wanted to know was: “Were you and he in any way personally involved?”

She stiffened. Her brother’s question was inept and she did not intend to submit herself to any kind of moral interrogation, and things might have become tense had not the phone jangled at this moment. It was for her father, and after only six or eight brief grunts of approval, with no words spoken, he jammed down the receiver, turned to his son, and said: “They’ve found the airstrip. Up toward
Tudor.” Before he dashed out the door, taking Lincoln with him, the commissioner turned to the minister: “Tarleton, you’d better show her that other letter,” and as the car roared off, the canon produced his letter from the minister in Jamaica regarding moral behavior and silently handed it over. As she read it, Keeler watched.

The ugly report—which explained Laura’s pregnancy and her willingness to have a Trinidad abortion—had a dull, sickening effect on Sally. Reading it twice, underlining the crucial words with her right forefinger, she understood why these four men had been waiting for her when she returned from her ride.

“I’m damned sorry,” Keeler said, moving his chair closer to hers. “I suppose you’ve heard about Laura Shaughnessy? I thought so.”

After looking closely at the two white men who obviously wished her well, she said: “Let’s get the facts straight. I had no amorous involvement with the Rastafarian, not in any way. He made approaches, two or three times, and I brushed him off for the clown he was.” She stopped, aware that what she had just said was only partially true. Then she added: “But as I said before, I did find him intellectually stimulating. It could be he represents the future.”

“God forbid,” Canon Tarleton said, and then Sally leaned back, totally relaxed, and said almost wittily: “And as for the question that’s really bothering you. No, I am not pregnant, and there’s no way I could be.”

The interrogation might have continued had not the phone rung again. Keeler answered it. This time it brought a crisp command: “Keeler? Lincoln here. North end of the island. We’ve found the ganja airstrip. Captured a two-seater plane. Pilots and the man tending the strip implicate the Rastafarian, so we’ve got to fan out and arrest that bounder. Now!”

Grabbing Sally by the wrist, Keeler said: “I’ll need your help to track him down,” and when she asked “Who?” he said: “Your Rasta Man,” and they sped off to pick up three policemen to help in the search, but even with Sally’s knowing guidance, they had no luck in finding him.

Like most clever marijuana smugglers, the brainy men who organize the routes and hire the operators, Grimble tried never to be tied physically to the operation. No policeman must ever see him at a secret airstrip or even close to an airplane, and he had learned never to sleep three nights in a row at any location, so when Sally led Keeler and the policemen to the shack at which she had deposited Ras-Negus
earlier that evening, they found nothing, for he had long since fled.

She remembered another house from which she had once picked him up for a night session of reggae and talk, but the people inside told the policemen: “We not see more than two weeks.” She remembered one last house, but it was empty, and that exhausted her clues. The men up north had proof of the ganja smuggling, but the mastermind of the operation was hiding somewhere, laughing at the frustration of Great Babylon, but after more than an hour of going to the kinds of places in which Grimble might be hiding, a boy of ten told the police: “You seek man long hair? Maybe he be with Betsy Rose.”

Betsy Rose was a woman from the British Virgins who had come to All Saints as a maid, and had fallen into trouble with her mistress because the master of the household delighted in sleeping with her. Betsy Rose had been kicked out, had drifted from one job to another, and had wound up the companion of a sailor who was not concerned about her male visitors. When the police stormed the house, they found her and the Rastafarian in bed.

At first, Keeler wanted to protect Sally from the ugly sight of rousting the Jamaican out, but then he had a stronger idea: “Maybe you ought to see your hero as he really is,” and he took her inside to watch as the police hauled the long-legged Rasta Man out from beneath the covers and on to his feet. Naked, he looked as if he were all hair, for his dreadlocks reached to his waist.

It was a revolting sight, and Sally thought: So much for the inner soul of negritude. But as she watched him struggle to pull on his trousers while Keeler held his left arm, she felt a sense of pity for the confused fellow: Loud talker, sweet singer, but still he winds up captured by white authorities. Not much different from Africa four hundred years ago, and the lyrics of the Bob Marley song echoed in her mind.

When Keeler and Sally reported, alone, to the prime minister waiting at the police station, Keeler said: “Good news. We have the Rastafarian locked up.”

“Where?”

“Stashed away in a shack out toward the Anse de Soir. What shall we do with him?”

After looking carefully about to ensure that no one could hear,
the prime minister growled: “Best if we could shoot him … about six weeks from now when no one’s noticing. But I’m sure there must be a better way. Any suggestions?”