Pynter Bender Read online

  Miss Cynty reminded him of tight-skinned fruits: avocados, watermelons, star apples and plums. She was looking into Birdie’s face and smiling – a slow upward curling at the corners of her mouth that ended in a tiny trembling, and her expressions were changing all the time. They slipped across her face like a soft wind over water.

  He’d seen how Miss Cynty halted the talk of men whenever she walked past them, the way she froze their gesturing hands, the slipping of their eyes along her body and the way those eyes rested on her shifting hips. He wondered if they ever saw what lay behind her eyes.

  Now she was talking to Birdie with that whispery, liquid voice of hers. Birdie brought his ear down towards her lips; and what seemed to come out of her was a low and endless thrumming. His uncle dropped his right hand down the side of Cynty’s face so that his fingers grazed her collarbone.

  Pynter watched his uncle’s fingers talk: stiffening from time to time, describing little circles beneath her jawline, brushing the softness there. Once, a sound came out of him, a rumble that was also a sigh. His uncle rolled his head. Another sound came out of him deeper still, and all the anguish and the trembling he’d so far hidden from them came out in his breathing while Cynty kept her lips flush against his ear. The only sign of life was the soft throbbing of her throat and the air that hummed around her.

  Pynter had never seen Birdie like this before; never seen beyond the heaviness, the laughter and the thunder. He lifted his head, conscious of his own breathing, the throbbing in his throat, and realised that now he was the only one in the room with them. The others had left so quietly he hadn’t felt a single movement of the floorboards. He rose quickly and tiptoed out of the door.

  Outside, the women stood in a small huddle. They were murmuring amongst themselves. Patty made a flapping gesture with her arms. A chuckle escaped Tan Cee which she cut short with her hand. Deeka’s bony shoulders stood above theirs like the flat of a broad-bladed oar.

  Pynter felt as if he were looking at them from some place much further off, that none of this had anything to do with him. He looked past their shoulders. The night felt sonorous and endless. He felt the familiar urge to slip into it and walk, perhaps to his little rock above the sea. To sit at the very end of it with his feet over the waves and think of nothing in particular, or perhaps the father of his mother’s last child, Lindy, whom she was so certain would arrive one day, soon. It was always soon – even after ten months, as if for this man especially, she did not measure time in days but by the strength of the conviction that she carried in her.

  ‘What troubling you now, Ole Fella?’ Tan Cee had broken away from the others and come over to him. Her voice was gruff and mocking, her hand warm against his neck. She was looking into his face with the narrow-eyed intentness he had grown accustomed to.

  ‘You growin,’ she said, nodding in that far-eyed, private way of hers and smiling. And it was true that in these, the hardest, most unforgiving months of the year, his body had surprised them. Now Tan Cee and his mother had to lift their chins to look him in the eyes.

  He rubbed his head and looked up at the window, gaping like a tongueless mouth out at the night. ‘They quarrellin,’ he said.

  ‘At least you catch that part.’

  ‘They arguin. They … ’

  ‘That what itchin you?’ She was laughing at his confusion and he was in no mood for that. He was about to turn away and leave her there when he felt her hand around his shirt tail. She drew him towards the steps.

  ‘What make you feel you got to know everyting, Pynto Benduh?’ There was no trace of humour in her tone now.

  She released his shirt, grabbed his arm and pulled him down beside her. ‘She telling ’im to let her go. She want to hear ’im say it. Y’unnerstan dat?’

  ‘No.’

  He’d said it coldly, irritably, and that raised the irritation in her too. ‘Well, you de edicated one – work it out yourself.’ She’d made as if to get up, but changed her mind. She pressed her back against the upper rung of the step, slanted her head away from him and said nothing more.

  Her hand came up and cupped his ear. It was one of her tricks. She hadn’t done it for a long time. He closed his eyes and rested his weight against her. His mind drifted back to Birdie and Cynty and their wordless struggle in the house. He thought of Birdie’s hands washing Cynty’s face with air, her half-closed eyes, the throaty whispers pouring from her lips.

  This love they said started when they were children. Their mothers had brought them to the river one Saturday morning and had raised their heads to see them holding hands – two children staring at each other so ignorant-an’-confuse a pusson didn have the heart to chastise them.

  It was not attraction, they were too small for that; and love was not the name for it, they said. Not at that age. It was what happened to a pusson not looking for somethin and findin what they always want. A kind of recognizin. The difference was, it happened to them from childhood. And in a way, those two had never unlinked their hands from that very first time they met in the river.

  Cynty was tiny, they said, with limbs that told them she was going to be small-boned like her mother. Her limbs had lied. It was as if her body had decided to ignore itself and go along with Birdie’s. His chest deepened, and she’d fleshed out straight away. And wasn’t it true that Cynty was the only woman in Old Hope who fitted Birdie’s embrace?

  It was an old love, Deeka told them once. Gloria lily love. The kind every yooman been was afraid of and yet longed for at the same time, for it could not be killed by absences or distance, Birdie’s rolling in and out of jail for so much of their lives was proof enough of that. A kind o’ love that was so certain of itself it put no emphasis on claiming. Which was why in all them years he was away, Birdie allowed Cynty to have whatever man she wanted, but she must never bear his seed.

  A little fella named Tobias filled those absences. Cynty had brought him to Old Hope from somewhere else. And he was everything that Birdie was not. A small man, so small, in fact, she could lift him with one hand and cradle him in her arms. When Birdie arrived from jail, he retreated beneath the house, sat there with his elbows on his knees while the little house rocked above his head. After that first time he disappeared, returning only when Birdie went off again to jail.

  There had been a joke in all of that. A little story. The small atrocious things they’d done to Tobias during Birdie’s absences. For a start, Old Hope did not see him. Even when he said hello and smiled at them, Tobias wasn’t there. For in this village above the canes, to laugh with a man was another way to embrace him.

  Besides, he was half a man. His body said so. Imagining him with Cynty jus’ didn make no sense. It bothered them. It left Old Hope men with an itch they wanted to satisfy. Which was why he shouldn’t have trusted Gordon Coray’s invitation to join them at the rum shop. He should have noticed the eyes behind the smiles of the men sitting on the wooden stools. Should never have gone past the first glass of rum they handed him.

  He was strong they said, his body fought the liquor. It took a while before it seeped into his limbs and turned them to rubber. The rest was easy. Gordon placed his hands beneath his armpits and lifted him as easy as a lil sack of sugar. They slipped his trousers off.

  Rumour was, the laughter reached the houses on Top Hill. It turned the women’s heads down towards the rum shop, for they’d heard in it the devil in their men. At least he’d woken up in Cynty’s bed. She’d known where Tobias had gone to and that very same laughter had made her leave her house and walk towards the shop. She never told Tobias about it, and he did not remember anything; or if he did he never showed it. He said the same hello to everyone and seemed a happier fella when they winked at him and grinned.

  Pynter raised his head. He was startled to see Tan Cee’s eyes on him. She’d remained so still she might have fallen asleep. He wondered how long she’d been looking at him that way.

  ‘Make sense,’ he said.

  ‘What make sense?’
She folded her arms around her stomach and leaned forward. He caught the smell of cinnamon.

  ‘Is not jail this time,’ he said. ‘Is a different kind o’ leavin – not knowin where a pusson off to; not sure they comin back.’

  She said nothing for a while. She seemed to be looking past him at some far thing overhead. ‘Yes,’ she breathed, finally. ‘Heart feed on hope, Pynto. You starve de heart of hope, it die. Birdie have to unnerstan that.’

  He came to his feet before her, reached out a hand and pulled her up. Now they were standing exactly as they had been earlier. He slipped his arm around her shoulder. He felt her stiffen. He did not drop his arm.

  She was looking up at the window. ‘The kind o’ thing they got between them, breakin loose is not de same. Birdie have to make it easy fo’ Cynty. He have to tell ’er go.’

  ‘Tan,’ he said. ‘I know a way to go. I know a way dat’s not down there.’ He pointed at the road below.

  He thought she hadn’t heard him.

  ‘Tan, I … ’

  ‘Fo’ true?’ She kept looking away from him.

  ‘For true.’

  He felt her move against him. ‘You carry so much hate fo’ ’im – an’ a pusson don’ know why. You behave like if he done you something. You fink he don’ know dat? You fink …’ Whatever she was about to add, she choked on it.

  He looked up past the foothills towards the flake of moon that had risen above the valley – bright white like a half-closed eye. It crossed his mind that he had never seen Tan Cee cry.

  ‘S’not me,’ he said. ‘He the one behave like if y’all done him something.’

  She did not catch his meaning. But the tone of his voice must have told her that she wouldn’t like what he was about to say. But right now, he told himself, he didn’t give a damn. All this trouble with Birdie had left him with a flippin headache. Tan Cee was giving him one of those tight-lipped, sideways looks.

  ‘What Birdie always runnin from? Eh? An’ don’t tell me is John Seegal. Cuz is a long time since John Seegal gone. What kind o’ pusson prefer jail to family, Tan?’

  ‘Watch yuh mouth, Pynto. Y’hear me.’ She’d stepped back from him. She’d closed her fist and was holding it up before her like a warning.

  He grinned at her and raised his voice a pitch. ‘S’not you, s’not Patty, s’not my modder. S’not even Deeka. S’all of y’all put together. Don’ matter what Birdie make y’all believe. Don’ matter what happenin in there right now.’ He pushed a thumb at the house. ‘He don’ like wimmen. Dey frighten ’im. He prefer the company o’ fellas. Man! And de sonuvabitch should say so, becuz … ’

  He saw the hand coming towards his head. He leaned away from it, ducked the second swing and jumped away from her, blowing her a kiss as he ran off.

  21

  A DEAD MAN had shown him the other way out of Old Hope. That was what he wanted to say to Deeka. He wanted his grandmother to know that he was Zed Bender born again, Zed Bender who’d fled the canes with a girl named Essa and got caught and killed somewhere up there in the foothills, under a tree that he, Pynter, had finally discovered. He’d wanted to go past the place where Zed Bender had fallen and find out, not what he and Essa had been running from, but the thing they had been running towards.

  He was finding the ‘ghost roads’ all the time. It was easy when a pusson knew how. You ask yuhself: in Zed Bender time, what mus’ a runnin pusson do to get ’way from Bull Bender and his dogs? And suddenly the landscape rearranged itself before you. Something adjusted in your head and the way you saw things changed. You saw the cleavage between boulders, like the space between two thighs, become a little passageway; you noticed the trees that hugged a particular hillside, at the top of which a narrow plateau ran. You noticed the way a branch was made to grow, and the large, flat stones that pointed to a gully.

  He sat on the floor with his legs folded under him. Patty brought the lamp down over the sheet of paper. He took her purple marker and began to draw, while Birdie’s bulk leaned over him like the shadow of a storm cloud.

  He told them that the island was like a lizard with a shortened tail that lay belly-down on the ocean. Up there, behind the Mardi Gras, if a pusson climbed past it, they would see the receding ash-dark humps that were the lizard’s spine. It was those humps Birdie should be heading for.

  Travelling up to it was like climbing through the seasons. A pusson leave the simmering heat of the flatlands, go past the cooler, wetter belt of cocoa, bananas and fruit trees, until they meet the forest that had always been there. You step over streams that never make it to the sea. And from there, the climbing gets much harder because the soil is never dry.

  Up there is a different country – a bone-deep chill and unforgiving winds. The trees are short; their branches hug the earth. The spaces between them are almost as wide as a road. On moonlit nights you see the ocean on the left below you. And when there is no moon, there is just an arcing void of darkness.

  You run north like Deeka say; keep runnin until you see a gatherin of lights below you; a brighter patch of sea. You swing left there, and down towards Kanvi.

  Pynter dropped the pen. It landed with a soft plok on the paper. The movement seemed to startle them.

  He avoided their gazes and sprang off the floor. ‘I go wiv ’im part-way,’ he said.

  The factory whistle had not yet sounded across the valley when Chilway arrived. The air was chill and damp, with the kind of morning stillness that made even the furthest sound seem as if it were next door. They’d fed the fire in the yard with long-burning wild-pine wood. Patty had thrown a few handfuls of nutmeg shells into the blaze to suffuse the early morning air and make the waiting easier.

  Deeka had ordered them to place two masantorches in the yard. She’d even planted two along the path that led up from the road. Patty complained she felt exposed. Deeka retorted that she should go put on more clothes.

  Chilway had replaced the yellow Austin Farina with a white Land Rover. They noticed his hair was much whiter than it was the last time he came for Birdie and he was wearing spectacles. The four men who usually walked behind him were now at his side.

  Deeka was dressed as if she’d prepared herself for church. She’d swept the house too, and spent a good part of the night clearing the yard of leaves. She’d even broken a bunch of hibiscus and dropped it in a bottle on the table in the hallway.

  Chilway nodded at them all and offered Deeka a hand. She did not take his thumb this time. Her fingers wrapped around his completely. The four men helped him to the steps. From there he looked across at Patty and what passed across his face could just as easily have been a grimace or a smile.

  ‘You want a drink?’ Deeka said.

  ‘What you got?’ He gestured at the men who backed away from him. These were tall men – greying at the temples – whose faded khaki shirts and trousers were always beautifully ironed. The dark-brown polished leather belts they wore and the batons which hung down from their sides seemed as aged and well-kept as they were. These were men with wives and children, Deeka had said. They returned to the same bed every night; they comforted their children, they were fussy about their food, they tended their women’s flower gardens. They’d seen their women bleed. Things like these made all the difference between a warden and a soldier.

  Deeka splayed her fingers and counted as she listed for Chilway, ‘I got Jack Iron, Mountain Dew, Sea Moon – and I have a drop o’ special.’

  ‘Everything, Miss Deeka. Mix them. What can’t kill will fatten. Is mix-up-ness I want today. Is confusion I courtin. Put it in a cup inside the house. An’ when you bring it out, pretend like if is water.’

  Deeka went into the house, returned with the drink and placed it in Chilway’s hand.

  He gestured at the men again and they stepped further back from him. He brought the cup to his lips and lifted his eyes at Deeka over the rim. Chilway didn’t shift his gaze until the cup was empty.

  ‘When last you see a doctor?’ Deeka said.
>
  ‘Fuh what? For him to tell me what I know already?’

  The men were looking at him with the same interest that Deeka was. They kept shifting their eyes between Chilway and the house. Chilway didn’t seem to notice them. ‘Kinda quiet here,’ he said.

  ‘We quiet people,’ Deeka said.

  ‘That wasn’t what got report to me.’ A laugh broke out of him.

  ‘Foolish,’ he said. ‘Foolish.’ He fluttered a wrist at his men. ‘I keep telling y’all, fellas, is not gun that make you smart, is brains. When Sylus come and tell me – mad like hell – that Miss Dee send for me, y’all remember what I tell him?’

  The fellas nodded.

  ‘I say to him, I say, “Sergeant Sylus, you telling me what Miss Dee say, not what she mean.”’

  Another laugh escaped him. It ended in a fit of coughing that pulled his body forward. Deeka took the cup from his hand.

  ‘Because, fellas, if y’all don’t realise it yet,’ Chilway stretched out his legs and leaned his back against the steps, ‘Birdie not here. Birdie gone.’

  He kept his finger in the air as if to say that there was more to come. ‘I’ll tell y’all something else, fellas: Miss Dee wasn’t askin for me; Miss Dee was askin for time. Now, in the interest of procedure and because we, the servants of Her Majesty and all them law deh, have to be seen to be performing we duties in accordance with them self-same law deh, I ordering y’all to proceed inside Miss Deeka house and search, with the caveat of course that none o’ y’all don’t turn the lady place upside down or destroy her possessions. Else y’all will pay for everything y’all break. Now please proceed, then come back and report to me.’

  Chilway seemed very pleased with his own words. Deeka’s eyes flitted over him the way she had done with the soldiers when they came. He was smiling too much; was too relaxed. He was not the kind of man to make a joke of trouble. She handed him the cup of rum and topped it up.