Kipling Plass E-Book

Berkley Wendell Semple

• Herausgeber: Peepal Tree Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 605

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

Heartbreaking, shocking, and lyrical, "Kipling Plass" introduces us to a teenager abandoned by his mother after her mental breakdown. Set in a multiracial Guyanese village during the 1980s economic collapse, the novel grapples with the tensions between social solidarity and dog-eat-dog individualistic ruthlessness. Amidst crumbling social structures, Kipling Plass and his teenage friends navigate physical and emotional survival, all while wrestling with their own confusions of sexual and social identity. This compelling literary fiction debut promises to be among the very best novels you've encountered.

Leseprobe

KIPLING PLASS

ALSO BY BERKLEY WENDELL SEMPLE

Poetry

Lamplight Teller

The Solo Flyer

The Central Station

Flight and Other Poems

BERKLEY WENDELL SEMPLE

KIPLING PLASS

First published in Great Britain in 2024

Peepal Tree Press Ltd

17 King’s Avenue

Leeds LS6 1QS

England

© 2024 Berkley Wendell Semple

Print ISBN13: 9781845235925

Ebook ISBN13: 9781845236038

All rights reserved

No part of this publication may be

reproduced or transmitted in any form

without permission

CONTENTS

Prelude

1. Morning Comes

2. Runner, Runner

3. Anita in the Schoolyard

4. A Murderer Dreams of Riches

5. The Trip

6. The Work of Hunters

7. Fisherman 1

8. Waiting for Mamai

9. Mr Plass and Aunt Esther

10. Limers

11. True Lies

12. Skylab and the Hole in the Ground

13. Fisherman 2

14. Blue Ganesh

15. Killer of Dogs

16. A Visit to Central

17. The Death of Miss Minette

18. Black Maria

19. The Sea

20. Strange Love Business

21. Sunday Morning

22. A Burial and a Visit

23. Fisherman 3

24. Locusts

25. Licks

26. The End of the Affair

27. The Wedding Party

28. The Panchayat of the Doolams

29. How Mad is Mad?

30. Fisherman 4

31. A Little Nastiness in the Night

32. Daylight Ravers

33. The Haynes Woman

34. The Mad Bad in Canje

35. The Ways of the Dead

36. Ghat and the Burning Girl

37. Dark Night into Day

38. Masquerade

39. Butcher Boys

40. The Devil in the Interior

41. Farewell Party

42. A Child is Born

43. The Interrogation

44. Aeroplanes

45. Cutlass

46. A Story and a Death

47. Simone

48. The Night is Diwalian Dark

49. Butterflies

50. Something Wicked

51. Confession Time

52. Killer, Killer

53. Yankee Bai

54. Fisherman 5

55. The Marathon

56. The Return

57. Thiefman

58. Mr Ramphal and Tit Try Kangalang Harry Arnold

59. The Forever War of the Ramphals

60. Rice Money

61. The Palace of Loneliness and Fear

62. The Future

63. Rain Fall

64. Finding a Father

65. In My Father’s House and Moving On

66. You Raise Good and Proper

Epilogue

A note on words

PRELUDE

Someone calls my name and I come back from my reverie. People are leaving, a mourning throng in funereal black, lined like ants on the narrow track that leads away from the graveyard to the road. Someone urges me out of the cemetery yard with a hand between my shoulders. I go, dry leaves crunching under my feet. I should have said something, mentioned some small kindness, made some pithy pronouncement – no long speech to tempt the listeners’ patience, no tearful tribute, no theatrical flourish of showy grief. The thing had to be simple and plain.

Even in the church, we shied from the mic when called to the rostrum. The silence became unbearably taut. Finally, an old man rose and wobbled forward to mumble something indecipherable. Then another and another stepped forward. Their brevity elicited applause. In all, perhaps ten minutes passed. Even the preacher, sweating hard, made quick work of his sermon. It was about divine love, about loving the loveless. I was drawn to the scar on the preacher’s otherwise handsome face.

Outside the church, four pallbearers lifted the coffin onto the bier, and wheeled it out, feet first, to the hearse, for the short, slow ride to the graveyard. We on foot processed to the cemetery, singing old hymns I remembered from childhood: “Shall We Gather at the River”, “Rock of Ages”, “Blessed Assurance”, and, most plangent, “In the Sweet By and By”, where we sang of our hopes to meet on that beautiful shore.

In the cemetery, no one called on me to say anything and I stood apart and watched. What could I have said? That I knew the boy who became the dead man, that he was so, and he was so. Perhaps no one remembered who I was. For an earlier generation, my name and face would have meant something. There were no faces I recognised among those who were clumped thick around the hole in the ground, peering down at the burnished, old-fashioned coffin, at the little window in the top through which the tenant would not see the last ritual of his passing. The earth reclaimed its lump of clay. There was no crying, no show of grief or sadness. This seemed fitting.

I knew the boy but not the man. That I was there at all was an accident – as, too, was his reason for being here. A week earlier, on a misty foreday morning, driving east on the Rupert Craig out of the capital, he had fallen asleep at the wheel of his brand-new RAV 4 near Non Pariel, swerved right, crossed into westbound traffic and was broadsided by a speeding padi truck. That was it. He was fifty-nine, three years older than me. I might have said to the people here that the dead man was a childhood friend – but just an acquaintance when we were men. But they knew his age and they knew more about the man than could be said at such a moment. Little was said and most of it was lies. I said nothing. I did not want to lie.

Out on the road, I stood on newly mown grass plunging down to a trench reeking of new spawn and pollywogs among the hyacinths and regia. It was the season when, as boys, we would have waded in and, with our arms plunged up to the elbows in mud, culled wriggling hoori, hassa, sunfish, even alligators and snakes from the murk. Most of us had fled the country, some like me to the snow countries up north, others to the islands. In ten years, the country had been emptied of its bright and beautiful, drained of our talents and brains. Now, some were returning home to visit. Things were changing.

There were bright streetlights along the road, once a two-lane blacktop where the tar bubbled in high sun. Open cowpasture of tawny sawgrass had made way for houses; jhandees flailed behind whitewashed palings and there was a car in every yard. As if by magic, some witch’s wand was turning spiffy and new all that had been old and decayed.

I had imagined the place different, but not as different as it was. It was twenty-five years since my last visit, and I saw the results of the recent economic boom. New buildings were going up everywhere; skeletal frames and scaffolding towered in the sky. In the street near my hotel, a thousand foreign tongues were raised in the cadence of commerce. Those of us returning, coming in from the cold, saw that, with oil, everything Guyanese was in vogue. They had even resurrected me from the dustbin of history, so that I might say wise and foolish things on their television shows. I was now a guest speaker and lecturer, invited into the private homes of important people who remembered that once, a long time ago, I had run marathons and won medals in important races. And here I was, a guest in my own country. I had changed, too, but though glad to see all this new prosperity, I did not feel renewed.

Standing in the road I felt dazed and vague. Images of men and women slid across my retinas without being fully apprehended. A riot of words struck my ears. They signified nothing. I hear an insistent chorus of waves from the sea, and a small voice, sounding like my own, with a child’s lilting timbre, soft and adolescent. It spoke the Creole of courtesy and good manners; it said, Open your eyes. I did and recalled myself to the present. Somewhere nearby a televised cricket game blared. The wind, reeking of crab and kelp, rode into Abary. A flock of ibises, brilliantly pink, passed overhead in a chevron, making for the marshes. I stood with my hands folded across my chest and waited for Audibey to come with the car that would take us back to Central.

I watched the departing crowd, strangers to me, studying the faces, trying to link a new generation to my own. They were heading for the rumshop and I imagined the ready banter of reminiscence once the rum was on the table, the drumming, the music, the mean talk, then, near false dawn, the descent of drunken joviality into fisticuffs and sometimes knife play.

I could not remember what the new buildings had replaced, except the church had once doubled as a dance hall. In its stead was a bond warehouse, square with a curved roof, on which a rooster weathervane half-turned in the wind. It seemed incongruous. I began to doubt what I knew.

The cemetery itself was larger, more populous. Where once the proliferating green had been left to grow riotous and wayward, meticulous order now reigned. The neem and samans had been delimbed or made to canopy over the path that divided the plot. The narrow tracks between the tombs were kept weeded and the closely mown lawn had been edged with a fierce accuracy. Its green was so green it seemed artificial, like astroturf. The tombs, lined up just so on a grid, were newly whitened, save where lichen grew at their bases. The vanity of the living impinged upon the careless dead.

Coming into the village earlier that day, riding shotgun while Audibey drove, I’d asked her to stop so I could walk into it. She walked alongside me, tall, thin, and pretty. Her face was more our father’s than my own, with an Indian hint of her mother in the long straight nose and the luxuriant, anthracite-dark hair harnessed behind with a little girl’s red ribbon. She was thirty, twenty-six years my junior, the late late child of our father, who had been thought long past his seeding time. She’d been a surprise for him and me, but not her mother, who was young enough to be my father’s daughter and my sister. Perhaps there is hope for me, yet.

The lights through the trees dappled the tombs below. I tried to remember who was buried where, but time had weathered away epitaph and date on the shale and concrete. Once, long ago, I had slept on the tombs in the mora’s shade and shied down mangoes from a tree that was no longer there, eating the fruit nourished by my ancestors and slurping its juice from my fingers.

As we walked on, I recognised names on the newer tombs. Here was Mary Abna, a childhood sweetheart who died of leukaemia while I was at the university, and there, Dado Narine, and next to him, his wife, Two Panty, whose real name, blurred on the basalt headstone, I could not recall. Over there in the bamboo shade was Ma Tussette, the obeah woman, and her beloved brother, Uncle Percy, the old sluice watchman. There were many many more.

So much death. I felt weary and turned back to the road.

“Which one is he, the dead man?” Audibey asked.

I was puzzled and looked at her uncomprehending.

“What do you mean?”

“In your book,” she said. “The one you wrote in the exercise books in Dad’s library. Which boy is the dead man?”

“You read the book?”

“Yes. It is good. I like it. Dad read it too.”

“Really?”

“We talked about it. He said you could have been a novelist.”

“Really?”

“Yes! So, who was the man?”

I told her.

She nodded calmly. “Are the rest of them alive, your friends in the book?”

“Some are. Where are the books now? I haven’t seen them in thirty years.”

“They’re where they always were, on a shelf in Dad’s library. He put them in plastic covering.”

“He did?”

“You can read it over now that you are here. When did you write it?”

“I was sixteen when I finished the first draft. Then I worked on it when I was twenty or so. I was at the university then.”

“Here?”

“Yes, at UG. I was twenty-two when I went to the States.”

“I wasn’t even born then,” she said, smiling. “You are old enough to be my father instead of my brother. You are an old man, you know that?”

“I know,” I said.

“Why didn’t you ever have children?”

“I don’t know.” This was an honest enough answer. I had taken no precautions not to have them.

“Don’t you want any?”

“I am not sure.”

“When we came to visit you when I was little, you lived with a beautiful white girl in that snowy place.”

“Iowa.”

“Yes, Iowa, and the white girl’s name was Hildred. What happened to her?”

“She went away and never came back.”

“You were teaching at that little college. Are you still there?”

“No, I moved to a bigger college in New York.”

“The big bad city?”

“It can be called that.”

“Why are you always sad? I mean you look sad.”

“I don’t feel sad.”

“Your face tells it, though.”

I said nothing. It was not how I saw myself. Lonely but not sad, fatigued maybe.

“It’s your eyes,” she went on; “they seem far away. They look like they are begging for something – pleading.”

“A girl I once dated called it the orphan’s gaze. It’s the look that allows you to be adopted and given some tenderness. Women will always be there to take care of you.” They did, mostly, and I was never in want. But it was never the cure for all that ails me.

We had driven on in silence to the church to await the arrival of the dead. She left me there and went to Berbice to visit friends. I suspected there was a lover somewhere further up the coast.

Now, waiting on the road, I was anxious for Audibey’s return. There were still stragglers going to the rumshop. A lifetime teetotaller, I did not want to be invited to join them. I could refuse, of course, but that would only encourage further insistence that I down my fires like a man.

It was getting dark. The trees turned silhouettes, and flocks of egrets homed for the marshes and the stacks of the old brick kiln. The evening litanies of village life began. Thin boys wielding switches lashed and yipped the cows out of the backdam to their pastures behind the houses. Girls, dark and pretty in their summer frocks, came out onto the road, strutting past like models, their faces shiny with health, boys in small groups trailing after them. Lights came on in the houses. Children were being shouted at. One was being beaten, the bawling loud and theatrical. Mosquitoes made halos around our heads, whining for lifespans longer than they are allowed. Tractors coming from the ricefields passed in trains, leaving clumps of mud on the road from the plough blades hanging behind.

The crowd had thinned out, leaving only a clique of four young men passing a spliff between them, laughing with too much mirth. One said very loudly, “The fucker was a gay, but nobody could tell he that to he face.” They laughed and shuffled and smoked their spliff. One of them with spiky dreadlocks looked at me and turned back to his companion. Then he looked at me again, crossed the street and stood very close to me, peering at me, his head slanted to one side. I looked at him. He smiled. He had white, feral teeth.

“What the fuck,” he said. “You mean is youself standing here like a stranger among we and don’t say a word.”

I said nothing. He called to the others excitedly. “Come and see who we have here.”

They shuffled across the road, their pants low on narrow hips.

“Look at he,” the boy said. “Take a good look and tell me who is he.”

They walked around me. One touched me lightly on the upper arm.

“He favour somebody I see on TV.”

“Is he,” said the first boy, “the big run man, Kitting Pass, the marathon man from big marathon race and school textbook.”

“Yes,” said another. “Is the bad skunt runner. He won big Olympic medal and all kind of skunt. Shake the man hand, nuh.”

Two of them grabbed my hand and began to pump it vigorously, all the while talking to each other in that vulgar, amiable way they have.

“Kipling Plass,” I said.

“Yes man,” one of them said, “come and drink with we nuh.”

“Yes, man,” said another, “you must fire one and two and three with we.”

Audibey came just then, pulling her car very close and pressing on the horn. I walked towards her. The boys followed.

“Another day,” I said. “I will be back. We can have a few beers then. But look, have a few on me.”

I reached into my pocket and held out a twenty US dollar bill to get their attention. They looked at me and I gave the money to the nearest of them and got into the car. Audibey pulled away, leaving the boys behind.

“Yes, they recognise me from their textbook.”

She smiled. “So they know who you are?”

“They called me Kitting Pass.”

“Close enough,” she said.

We drove on. At the turn in Airy Hall going into Huntley, the light went out in all the houses.

“A blackout,” Audibey said, “but they’re rare these days.”

“Yes,” I said, “that is another difference. When I was growing up, we had them almost every night, sometimes for many days in a row.”

“So Mommy said. She called and said I must take care of you. Were you in love with her?”

“Why do you ask?”

“It’s the way she always talks about you, with such fondness.”

“I’m her stepson,” I said. “Of course she loves me. But to answer your question – no, I was not in love with her, but I cared for her very much. We have history. What did she tell you?”

“She told me everything – about the pandit and about the baby she lost. Why do they call her Peep?”

“I don’t know. Did she tell how she came to be with our father?”

“She said she was sick after she lost the baby and ran away and lived with you and Daddy while she recovered. Then, when you won the athletic scholarship to America, she stayed on with Daddy until they had me. Is that it?”

“That is it,” I said. “That is how my friend became my stepmother, so my sister could be my daughter.”

“Don’t forget that Daddy could be my grandfather.”

I did not eat with Audibey that night. I went to the library and found the exercise books still there. The covers were faded and the face of the long-dead prime minister was blurred in sepia on the blue. My name was written there in careful cursive, and the number of the book. I picked up the book that said #1. The pages had gone yellow. I was tender with the turning of the leaves. I opened the first page. Chapter One was written on the top and the number of the page was below. I sat close to the open window that gave onto the rice field, and, by tallow candle and the silver moon, read my history.

1. MORNING COMES

Sun comes up like a big egg yolk over the sea, over the wide canal and the river, over the high treetops. Curlews and kecks raise up from the basmati in a big flock what darkens the sun, wings beating like rain on a rooftop, cawing loud and long. The village wakes up with somebody hollering, a baby crying, a cow lowing on the savannah, a fowl-cock crowing or music turn on loud in a house. Then the rookootooks of all the sounds together: people screaming, car horn beeping, birds cawing, tides running with a splashing sound, water gushing from the standpipe’s throat, dogs barking, donkeys braying. Morning come to Mahaicony.

I run along Main Road, my barefoot slapping on the macadam, through Catherine, through Bary, pass the houses lining both sides of the road, pass trees what hide the face of the houses, pass a plough-blade cake-up with mud on the road corner and an old brukup car by the koker and the splash of fish in the trench. I run and feel lithe like a spore-flower in the wind. I run toward the sea and the sea calling, Come and drown your black body in the deep-deep abyss of my skuntian darkness, or mayhap it just saying, I am the big sea, hear me holler and roar.

The sea going out until it so far out that you can’t see it. Is a gone sea, leaving starfish and four-eye fish in the tide pools, and strange kreketeh snail on the beach. Then egrets, sandpipers, curri-curri, hoatzins and harpies with owl-like faces, plovers and noisy black rook bird come for breakfast. I run through the crowd of them and they fly up and circle back in midair and land again.

I run pass driftwood white like cloud, and long ropes of kelp and pieces of broken trawls, and the bruk-up skeleton of the trawler Hans Bahlin with barnacle and green moss clamp on its wood like cracra sore. I run and the morning is bright and shiny and new; the air fresh with smells of cedarwood and crab and dead leaf and spawn of fish and salt on leaf. I run and run where the beach sand is hard and my foot doesn’t sink in mud. I run fast until I too tired to run and realise I reach Novar, because Coolie people on the beach doing puja and chanting to Krishna, their god of many hands, to their god of elephant face and to Hanuman, their monkey-face god of mischief and fun. They burning agarbathis and sagebrush and sandalwood and lighting banga fires and setting them on the sea with food offerings and bunches of bright flowers, to float away on the waves.

I sit down with Rag, who really name Ragubir Rampartab under a corrida tree. Rag is an old fisherman and he tells me that his wife Nandrani sick bad with sugar disease and going dead soon cause she don’t want to eat or drink. Rag cry, saying he use to beat she up good and proper when he was a drunken skunt and live in the liquor bottle and how he sorry bad, sorry more than bad because she was a good wife and don’t cause he no trouble – like take a sweet man to do secret nastiness. Is he self was a terrible husband to treat she so bad when he suck down daru in his youthful days, and spend time in whore house with bush whore and with bad woman in this village and that village. He cries like a woman with plenty eye-water falling. It makes me want to cry, too, so I leave Rag and run back up the beach.

Rain start fall when I reach Goodfaith Beach; is devil rain self, coming down hard slantways, rain-claws tearing and ripping away fistfuls of sand. The sky turn sodden and dark, and the sun is just a yellow glare behind grey curtains of cloud. I take shelter under a benab what a fisherman put up inland of the beach under the cedar trees. I feeling tired like rass, like I going faint away. I sit with my head between my knees and close my eyes. Then I run like the wind self all the way home to Mamai house.

Mamai in the kitchen blowing the red eye of fire in a coal pot so the kindling catch and flame up high around the kettle. I come up the back step ready to set foot in the house, but Mamai closes the half-door quick so I just stand there looking at her, and she looking at me. We say nothing. Mamai too fine I think, too magga, like a starvation child. She face hard and fine like she doesn’t eat properly, but she eyes big and round and clear like nighttime gingimanan manicou. She head tie-up African style with a cloth round and round. She still has on her pink nightie what thin and worn-out and showing her small bubbies. I feel so guilty looking at her bubbies that I look away. She smiles.

“Boy, go wash your foot,” she says in a soft voice.

I look at my foot and it cake-up with mud and small pieces of wood and leaf, with cow dung between my toes. I go downstairs in the yard and wash my foot at the standpipe and go back up. Mamai change into a house frock. She leaning out the front window with she fine beetee in the air, looking over at Mr. Ramsammy house where Anita milking a cow near the back step. Mr. Ramsammy up on the back landing, scratching his seed and brushing his teeth and spitting down on the septic tank below in the yard. When Mamai hears me, she comes inside and sits down at the table so we can eat – roti make from real flour and corn beef stew chased down with special Ovaltine tea.

We don’t talk while we eat because is bad manners to talk with mouth full of food. Pure nastiness. And Mamai doesn’t have much to say ever. She too quiet. The woman born so. This makes people mistrust her and think her secretive and cunning. But Mamai never care about such things. She doesn’t know how to be anything but she own-own strange self. She’s the kind of woman who doesn’t like to deal with other people. Maybe that is why people say she is mad-cuirass woman. All I know is Mamai not regular in the regular way of a woman. Today, she more regular than usual. She talking to me at least, not just sitting in a chair staring out into space. She not crying and crying the way she does sometimes, with sadness of the heart and depression of the soul; she not hearing voices of jumbie skunt what sometimes provoke her nerve with secret whispering inside she skull, making her holler and scream and carry on. This happens two times before when Mamai run-out she mad head and neighbours have to come to help me put her to bed.

After we eat, I go downstairs and heat the mud oven what we use to bake pastries and bread, while Mamai rolls pastry dough. I fire the banga to a blaze until the fire burns down properly so there is no tall tongue of fire, just red banga burn down black with secret fire inside. I put on the door, so the oven stays hot, and go upstairs. Mamai finishes rolling pastries and puts them on a baking pan ready for baking.

She has made pine tarts, patties, cheese rolls and salara; we bake butterflap, cheese straw, tennis rolls and shingle too. It takes us almost all afternoon to done bake. After that, Mamai goes upstairs to take a nap while the pastries cool down. I sit on the veranda and read When He Was Free and Young and He Used to Wear Silks, a funny book of stories by this man, Austin Clarke, a Bajan, and howl big laugh until my belly nearly bust.

Near sunset, I help Mamai take the pastries out to the road to wait for Sookuru car to Central. Mamai leaves me in the road waiting because she says she having nara in her small belly what hurting her. I sit down in the road-corner grass reading my book when Carl rides up on Bhoje bike, towing Hari on the crossbar. Carl gets off with his long, tall self and push he nasty hand in Mamai basket and grab two cheese roll and start stuffing them in his dutty mouth like a hungry-belly dog.

“That is for customers, man,” I say.

“I is customer,” Carl says.

“Please for a salara, man Kippy man,” Hari says.

I give him one and the two of them get back on the bike and ride away laughing.

“We going hunting tomorrow,” Hari holler.

Sookuru pick me up late, and all the way to Central he picking up and dropping off this and that body. In Central, I drop off the pastries at three different shops and go back home. Is getting dark. Mamai laying down in the big chair reading The Scholar Man by O.R. Dathorne. The radio on and the death news coming through. A man what sound like Wordsworth McAndrew saying that Winston Saul, a resident of Cove & John, depart this world on August 17th. He was the father of Naomi, Cyril, Shanti, Simone, Selma, Rudolph, Ralph, Desmond of the United States, Joyce, John, Joan, Kaye of Trinidad, Carlos, Kate, Clive, Derek, Desiree, Winston Junior and Frank of England. The body will leave Likins Funeral Home at…

“Sookuru come late?” Mamai say.

“Yes, Mamai.”

“But you get there before shop close?”

“Yes, Mamai.”

“You going to film show with Anita tonight?”

“She don’t like cowboy film show. She say is too much shooting in it. They showing a movie name Last Train from Gun Hill starring Kirk Douglas and co-starring Anthony Quinn. I going with Derek.”

“Alright, but I going to sleep after Let the Lion Loose. I have to go to Berbice and buy flour tomorrow. Bathe and eat your tea before you go.”

“Aright,” I say and go into the bedroom. I hear the theme song for Let the Lion Loose startup. Mamai like this radio show too bad. Is pure big people lovey-dovey stuff, with killing and lying and plenty other big people fuckery.

That night, after I come home from film show and lay down under the mosquito net, I dream bout Anita. In the dream, she standing by a riverside in a nice frock what make of white lace looking whiter in the moonlight. She calls me in her nice voice, what like a song of the sweet Guyana singer, Ms. Pamela Maynard. Anita’s mouth not making sound at all, but I read her lips them to see that she saying, Come to me. When I get in front of her, she pulls up her frock and tells me, “Kiss it.” In the dream, something sweet goes out of me and leaves a nice lithe feeling. Come dayclean, I wake all sticky and clammy.

2. RUNNER, RUNNER

Plenty days Mamai silent, sitting by the window, looking out at nothing at all. She there and not there – away from sheself. I go to school and come back; she still there in the same position. When she’s like that, I go to the backdam for firewood and come home with wood heavier than my weight, balance on my head; I go swim in the wide canal and feel for tilapia in the roadside trenches and ride stray donkey across the low pasture; I climb high limb of the tallest mango tree to pick ripe mango and eat them sitting in the tree; I play soccer, cricket, rounders in the schoolyard. I come home late in the night when stars out plenty, and the moon big and silver and shiny like coin. I travel far from home.

One time, I hear that the great runner, Clement Fields, live in Wismar and I decide to go there to see the man and to talk to him good and proper about running. Is a man I admire. Is he what make me start run. One time, he run a marathon what pass through the villages. Me and Carl stand on road corner and watch the runners come up from Berbice, Clement Fields leading a big crowd of runner. He ahead of the closest man by three minutes. He just a small man with fine leg and a white patch in the front of his head. I remember how he run smooth and soft, not breathing hard, hand and leg moving with a rhythm like dancer. Since then, I read about him in newspapers plenty time. I start run like him.

I go and see Clement Fields one-time Mamai run-off out her head. I leave her sitting by the window staring into the distance. I thief money from she purse for fare to Wismar. I take an early bus to Georgetown and take another bus to Mackenzie. I cross the Demerara, brown, vast, running silent between banks of stalls and rum shops and other small buildings. I climb a high hill of white sand and watch where the Pullman train with a thousand-thousand car rumble down the line, full with bauxite, wheels screeching and scraping and sparking. It was long in passing over the trestle, long in going by where I standup looking, the noise painful to listen to. The din from the bauxite mine across the river loud too, and smoke, black, white and red, pour out the big pipe over the low buildings. From the hill, I look back and see boats on the brown water and people waiting on the landing. Everything look far from where I was. The sound of music playing, people shouting and cursing, roar of engines and beeping cars was raw in my ears. The rookootooks of town life lashing me right left and centre. I miss the sound of wind in the trees and birds in the sky.

Mr. Clement Fields live in a quiet place name One Mile, a little town with houses facing one another across a narrow laterite road. His house on the right, concrete with a flat roof and paint green like all the houses on the street. The houses here different from houses in Mahaicony. They not on stilts. I don’t see any rice field at all, not even coconut tree. I see pear tree and cashew tree and fat-pork tree what grow everywhere. I think this is poor people place and lack plenty thing. I think maybe this Wismar place have lazy people because I don’t see no garden and no arbour of vine and no cow and no sheep. Is a place of dust and dry sand, not green like the village.

When I knock on Mr. Clement Fields’s door, a woman come and ask in a nice voice who I am. I tell her that I is Kipling Plass from Mahaicony and come to see Mr. Clement Fields, the greatest runner of all time. Is a short, clear-skin woman, neither fine nor fat; she look like a mother. She tell me come in and I go into the house and see Mr. Clement Fields sitting down in a big chair in the dining room. He listening to the radio on top a glass case thing, and I see all kind of trophy and ribbon and medal in it. He have four glass cases full up like that. My heart full up with love and I want Clement Fields to be my father. I want to hug up with the great man. I want he wife to be my mother and not a mad woman sitting by the window looking out morning till night.

I sit down near Mr. Fields and Mrs. Fields go in the kitchen and come back with cake and drink.

I tell Mr. Clement Field that he run real good. That I see he one time in Mahaicony.

He laugh a nice laugh and slap he fine leg and clap he hand and rub them together.

“So you come all the way from Mahaicony?”

“I think about running all the way here, but it too far.”

“That is far,” he say. “Where your mother and father?”

“I don’t have no father,” I say. “I have a mother but she mad.”

Mrs. Fields asked me to explain. I did.

Mr. Fields look at me and shake his head slow and sad. Mrs. Fields get up and hug me up tight to her soft bubbies. She have a nice flower smell and I just stay where she holding me close. I want suck she bubbie but I don’t say so. I just let her hug me up and say in she soft nice voice, “Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear,” sweet and lovely like real-real mother to a child.

After I hug up with the woman, I drink cool five-finger carambola juice and eat cake. Mr. Clement Fields show me all the trophy and ribbon and medal in the glass case and tell me in what race he win them. He have four children and he call them and tell them to take me out and play. Three boy and one girl. We go in the back yard and they show me Guinea pig and rabbit in little cages. He have a big tent thing in the back what look like the Umana Yana where he hold party and thing. We go out on a big sand pasture where they have a cricket pitch and a rounders circle and play. Mr. Clement Fields have a club call Clem-O-Shine. I play with his children and eat some more food. One of the children name Claire and is she I like most.

In the late afternoon, Mr. Clement Fields walk me down to the river and we cross the river. He put me on a bus and pay for my ticket and wait till the bus leave. As we sit in the terminal, he tell me all about running technique. He say I must relax and get comfortable when I run; I must be at ease with myself; he tell me what food to eat and drink to drink.

I tired too bad when bus come and sleep good and proper all the way to Georgetown. Conductor have to wake me up. I get in the Georgetown bus back to Mahaicony.

When I get back home is almost eleven in the night. The village quiet-quiet. A big moon in the sky and plenty star twinkling. Mamai still sitting by the window, looking out on the darkness. She pee-up herself. I can smell it. I just go and sleep because I tired bad. But next morning, when I wake up, she making tea in the kitchen and singing, Good news, the chariot iscoming, good news the chariot is coming, good news and I don’t want it to leave me behind. I stand there looking at Mamai and she turn and look at me and smile a nice smile and say, “But is where you go all day yesterday.”

“I went to see Mr. Clement Fields in Wismar,” I say.

She don’t say nothing to that. She just crack an egg in the frying pan and start sing she church song again: I have a long white robe in Heaven, I have a long white robe up there. Good news the chariot is coming – and other skuntian words. That is when I learn that madness come and go. Is like tide on the river, going out and coming in, but not so regular. Mad people don’t have no way of helping theyself when they run off in the head. They don’t have any power. Is like something inside them tell them what to do, like demon what take over the small girl in Exorcist film starring Linda Blair. Mad people like Kangalang Harry Arnold, though, have demon in them all the time. He have madness that is always around. It don’t come and go like Mamai madness. I frighten bad that Mamai going catch madness what don’t go away. I know if she have stay-around madness, they going put she in mad house or maybe, like Kangalang, she go start walking street with she bubbie and patacake showing to everybody, without shame or care for sheself. I frighten bad.

3. ANITA IN THE SCHOOLYARD

First time I see Anita, she was sitting by herself on the schoolyard fence, holding a flower up to the sun and pulling off petals one by one and singing a song so soft I can hardly hear. The place is noisy with girls playing rounders and talking in little circles. Anita by herself. She not wearing school uniform neither. She has on a frock what tear up by the hem and she doesn’t have on shoes, not even push-toe rubber slipper. She hair comb nice, though, with a part in the middle of her small head and plait in two long rows on both sides of her fine face. Her hair oily and dark like coal. From then on, I want to be near her. I don’t understand it. Is like she is for me and me is for her. But I don’t like the feeling. I don’t like that every time I see her, I want to hug her and say nice things to her. Sometimes I see her and feel like crying because of the strange tender feeling I have for this Coolie girl. I should feel so for Simone, who is the nicest looking girl in school, but I don’t. Is Anita I have the tender feeling for.

I don’t like how I feel, so try not to go near her. But I can’t stay away from the Coolie thing. I like how she quiet, and hardly say a word all day, not even to answer teacher question. She eyes them is the first thing I notice. She has big round eyes shining in her small face. I like how she smell – like coconut oil and fruit. But I uncomfortable around her. Something not right with the girl. She not regular. She too brazen the way she looks me straight in my face. It make me nervous, make me clumsy, make me not regular. I get vex and pinch she or mash her foot when nobody looking. She always alone in the same spot. She too strange.

Them schoolgirls say Anita comes from Creek in the backward part where poor Coolie people live. They say her father does beat up her mother bad, even on the public road, and how her mother takes other men and leave he skunt high and dry. They say Anita people so poor that her mother have to sell her patacake so she can eat daal and rice. Coolie wata rice pork and spice, wash yuh beetee with daal and rice they sing. They say if it wasn’t for Blackman minister, Anita would never come to school at-all, at-all. They say how this Anita, with her one-grain dress and she barefoot Coolie rass, does stink up the whole classroom. Look she nuh, them say, look how she always smiling with her teeth skin-up like roast dog self.

One girl say, “One time, when we shying star-apple near Madoo place by Waterside Canal, we see she mother hug-up with a man behind coconut tree. He had he hand up she skirt and rubbing up she patacake. If you see them run when we holler at them. Was a man we call Shetland Pony, who real name is Dorcus Ramlattan, a dougla man from near Bath. I see them with me own-own eye.” Another add, “My mother say women like Anita’s mother going dead early cause god watching them dutty ways and this Anita is like she mother self. See how she sit on fence with she leg wide open. See how she does look at Kip strong-strong with she brazen self; see how she playing with flower, like a lil girl in fairytale book. One of these days I going give she one slap cross she nice face.” And another say, “The girl have lice; I see nit in she hair, and she have cracra and junjah and cheera corner mouth. My mother says cheera is sign she don’t eat proper. But is why Kip always looking at she so strong? Is like Kippy like Coolie meat.”

“Hear this now! Me mother say Anita real-real father is a man name Ramsammy from Abary,” says Dorothy Smith. “He used to have plenty cow and sheep and thing, but now he like we. Me mother tell me a true story bout he – well that is not quite true, girl, is lie I telling. Mami never tell me. What take place is I listen with me brazen self when Mami talking to Bacharan daughter, Sita, the Coolie lady what sell bara and polori. She say how Anita grow up with her grandmother in Creek cause was pure violence and skunt between her whoring mother and drunk father.”

“But what wrong with Kippy, though?” says Eve Kalicharan. “What between him and the Coolie thing with she one-panty self? Is like she have plenty power over him; he only have eye for she. Maybe she work obeah and make he fall in love with she dutty rass.”

Them schoolgirl always talking loud enough so I hear them. I just stand there and look away but my ears always open. Is from them I learn all I know bout Anita. I sieve truth from gossip but is a hard thing to know truth from true lies. Anita strange, though. Even other Coolie girl don’t like her. They talk about her the same way Black girl talk about her.

Anita doesn’t talk back; she acts like she doesn’t hear them. I don’t know what happening to me. I dream plenty dreams about her. Two times I dream me and she holding hand on Main Road; me and she kissing up behind school under the back step in home economic building – the kissing place, where last year, Manish Wata get catch with Tar Baby, a black-black Coolie Madras girl, doing nastiness. The headmaster expel them from school.

Why does she look at me like she waiting for me? It makes me pagla and soft inside. She has lip what turn up like duck and shows her white teeth them and her pink tongue. I feel upset and vex. I pinch her neck real hard. But she doesn’t holler or nothing. She look at me with her round eye and her white teeth. Then she kisses me. Is the first time I kiss a girl. I just shock. She holds me around my neck and kisses me hard. Anita’s lips soft and sweet. I kiss her back. I just standing in the schoolyard kissing Anita. I don’t even hear people laughing and carrying on. But when I come to myself and look round, I see people laughing and pointing and talking. Anita still kissing me while I looking round like frighten boy.

“Oh lord, look – Kip kissing up the nasty-skin girl,” says Arlene Simmons.

“I never see such thing in me born days,” says Bina Patel.

“She going give he junjuh,” says Joy Carla Forde.

“She going give he plenty lice in he hair,” says Desiree Gomes.

“Is like Kippy like she. He kissing she back,” says Sabita Cowsilla.

“Kippy is a dutty boy. My mother says them Plass has mad people in the family. Kippy cousin, the English Black man, is mad like cuirass.”

“Is what happening here today-today, in the pure light of day, girl Orita girl? Kippy come out arts and craft room and walk toward the Coolie bitch like bad John. This boy too mad; next thing you know is big pashway. What mad-skunt Kippy go and do? Let we go closer and see if Kippy using he tongue on her in the French style. Boys always want put tongue in girl mouth. Is a nasty business, though sometimes it feel nice. One time, behind Marcel them cake shop, I let Carl suck up my tongue. He like it, but when he try and touch me patacake, I give he one slap cross he blackface. That is when he cuffed me in my head. Carl have a bad heart, but that is another story.”

“I hear my mother say that Kippy’s mother make him with her cousin, the Black English man, in the big house where Aunt Esther with her fat self talk name all day. The Englishman is Kippy’s mother uncle son. Kip is an incest child and that means he ain’t regular. Is probably why he kisses up the Coolie stink girl. Them Plass use to own plenty land in Creekside during riot time, so the story goes, but Coolie people kill out the whole family and leave only the English Blackman and Kippy mother. The two of them commit skunt and make Kippy, so we can’t blame he, and is also because the Coolie work obeah on Kip and make he basodee. Kippy go have to go see Ma Tussette so she can take away Coolie spell and bacoo jumbie demon from out he brains what the Coolie girl put there with her kalimaipuja business, so Kip go like Blackman negro girl in the regular style,” says Marva Gill.

“Kippy not mad,” Simone say.

“Kippy read too much book. He always talking book book book and running in the morning by heself all the time. Is pure madness in Kippy’s head since he small.”

“I feel up he tolo one time when me and he share a desk in Teacher Desmond class.”

“I like Kippy.”

“Everybody like Kippy, but he mad like cuirass.”

“Yes, he make Coolie girl take away he mind. Is cause he is incest child and don’t have a regular father.”

“Kippy never should born so he don’t turn mad like Kangalang Harry Arnold and walk around smelling like latrine with he big tolo hanging out he pants like black mamba snake.”

“O God! Run girl, run. Here come Teacher Clive; he has a vex look on he face. Run nuh. You so slow, girl. I don’t want any licks today. Teacher Clive too stern with he fine self. I hear he does fuck the buck girl English teacher even though he have wife. Teacher Clive does frighten me too bad… Stop now, stop, let we stop right here, Orita girl, and see what happen. Teacher Clive have Kippy by he ear and taking he upstairs. Headmaster go bust Kippy beetee today with licks from the big cane. I sorry for he rass,” says Simone Peters.

“Bell ringing. Run you slow rass and get in line before Teacher Clive gets vex and beat the whole class.”

“Here come the Coolie girl walking slow and soft, strolling like she on catwalk with she lice-hair self. Why she smiling up so? Look she pretty self; this girl madder than Kippy.”

“Is true. Look how she laughing up with she own self like she hearing a joke in she own head. Is so whore does smile to theyself when they remember things.”

“Say something to she.”

“Teacher Clive looking.”

“But where Kippy skunt? He probably in headmaster office now, waiting for he licks. Kippy beetee go bust today-today.”

4. A MURDERER DREAMS OF RICHES

Mr. Ramphal, the richest man in the village, tell a man to go see another man who live in Tain, and he went. The man take Madhoo taxi and go up there and stand in the man yard waiting. This man come down and give him a paper bag and go back upstairs without saying a word. The man stand in the yard, holding the bag, not sure if he should move or not move. He wait there like he waiting for something. Then he go out the yard to Main Road to wait for bus. Is a hot day. Tar bubbling in the road. He see a dog, fatigue with heat, moving slow and staggering, and a Coolie woman, skin shiny with sweat, hiding under her umbrella. The air thick and hot. In the distance, heat shimmering like a wall of liquid glass. It hard to breathe. The man with the paper bag sit down in the bus shed with it on his lap. What’s in the bag? It soft like paper but have some weight. He lift it up and put it down and weigh it in his hand like scale weighing fish or coal or provision at market. He average the bag weigh ten pounds, the most twelve. How Ramphal go know if he open the thing and take a peek? He can’t know.

The only instruction Mr. Ramphal give he is: “Don’t look at what you bringing.” Why Ramphal say this? That is something people say about bacoo in bottle. Don’t open the cork. It don’t feel like bacoo in the bag. And who is Ramphal to tell him what to do and what not to do? He is big man, not child or woman. Who is Ramphal to say where he can look and not look?

What Ramphal is, he not sure. The man own rice field and tractor, and plenty cow. The man own couple fishing trawler. How the man come to get all these things he don’t know. People say the man have bacoo what make him rich. People say Ramphal sell he soul to the devil. They don’t understand how this man, who five year ago own just one rice field, turn sudden rich like oilman of Arab country. Mr. Ramphal don’t reveal he secret but the man with the package know two things about how Ramphal get some of his money. Is not fishing. He know that Ramphal trawler Amassagana not for fishing. Is for bringing ban goods from Suriname. Fishing is only play-play.

When he work on The Amassagana, the man didn’t do any fishing. He just load ban goods in Paramaribo and take off ban thing when they reach Bary sluice in the night. Was he and five man he didn’t know good. He mostly stay by heself when he work with them men; they drink too much rum and was sometimes too drunk to drive the trawler properly. Then Mr. Ramphal take him off the boat and have him spraying pesticide poison in rice field what make him sick. After that, he weed trench for the man and drive tractor for the man and beat-up other men for the man. The man was big lender of money to small farmer up and down the coast, and when they don’t pay, he and the man son-in-law, Mohun, and sometimes the other one, Tit, go see the farmer and give he some lash to hurry up the payment. One time, he went with the man grandson, a fellow people call Stepping Razor, but who really name JagMohan. This JagMohan like cutting people with cutlass and knife. In Dundee, one time, he went with Stepping Razor to collect some dollars from a man name Mohabir who owe Mr. Ramphal, and this Stepping Razor don’t even ask question, just start with the cutlass business and chop Mohabir five-six time cross he head and back, saying all the while, “Pay the man, pay the man, pay the man.” He never went to collect with Stepping Razor again. The man serious, body thin like twine, face hard and sharp like razor self. Instead, Mr. Ramphal tell him to pick up package for him. This is his first trip.

What inside the bag? He want know and how can he know except by looking? Is curiosity what kill kitten, he think. Play with fire and fire go burn you. Fuck with Ramphal and Ramphal go fuck with you. But then he think, Fuck it. Wah cum suh duh wha tuh much guh ova.

When he open the bag and look inside it, right away he start sweat and feel like fever burning in his belly. He look at the money, plenty big roll wrap round with rubber band, same size, same thickness. He close the bag and stand up and go outside the bus shed and look up the road and down the road. Then he go back in the shed and take out a roll and count the money. Is ten thousand dollars in a roll. He count the rolls and see is twenty-five roll. He do a bit of primary school mathematics and come up with a total of two hundred and fifty thousand dollars. He whistle and do the math again. Then he close the bag and sit in the bus shed for a long time, quiet, his mind racing like horse round Rising Sun race track. Three bus pass but he don’t get up to flag one down. He just sit there and think and he think for a long long time. Then he get up and flag the next bus.

The first thing Ramphal ask him when he bring the money is, “You open the bag?” He think of saying no but he don’t.

“Yeah,” he tell Ramphal.

Ramphal look at him strong with his red-red eye and smile. The man frightening for so. He can’t say what it is about the man that make his skin crawl. Maybe is the way Mr. Ramphal laugh, inside heself, so nothing showing outside. This Ramphal not regular.

“Why?” Ramphal say. “Why you open the bag when I say not to open the bag.”

“Cause is me eye,” he say. “I responsible for what I see in there. But nobody own me eye.”

Ramphal laugh he funny laugh behind his eye. All this time he staring at the collecting man very hard, as if he is surprised, but he face saying something soft.

“You take any of the money?”

“Not a cent.”

“Why not?”

“I is not a thief.”

Ramphal look like he disappointed. His head move forward a little from his long fine neck and the inside smile come again.

“You is a thief man,” Ramphal say.

“No,” he say.

“I see you,” Ramphal say, but this time he not smiling. “If I find you was a thief, you would not be walking in this world.”

Mr. Ramphal take a roll out the bag and peel off some bill and give it to the man. When he reach out and take the money, he finger touch with Ramphal finger, and a shock went through his body like electric. This time Ramphal looking at him and laughing his secret laugh.

“I can’t trust you to do this anymore,” Ramphal say. “Is too risky. I told you not to look in the package.”

That night in his little logie near Canal Dam, the man torture himself with thinking too much. All night long, while mosquito whine and beetle crash on the naked bulb hanging from a wire above his head, he keep asking himself over and over again why he didn’t take the money and run. He keep finding reason not to run and saying to himself that he do the right thing. But when he think again, he tell heself he is a stupid skunt, a fucking jackass. He could be in Mabaruma or Lethem by now. Why he didn’t take the money and run? This fighting with himself go on until morning comes. What disturb he most is Mr. Ramphal, how the man talk like he know what’s in his head, how the man laugh like jumbie, mocking and jeering. Why didn’t he take the money and run? But it too late now. He lay on the bed top under the mosquito net, sweating and thinking, Stupid, stupid man. Then he think about the way the man laugh behind he eye without showing laugh on his face, the way the man talk with his voice rough like sandpaper scratching on metal. He think, “Next time is boat.” He think about that a long time and then he smile and smile and go to sleep, because a new butterfly of a plan just flutter into his head.