The Origin of Waves (6 page)

All of a sudden, cutting into my dreams of the past, John begins to speak. “Time!” he says.

“Eleven? Twelve?” I tell him.

“Time for a drink, man!” he says.

“Twelve,” I say. And we order our first drinks.

“No later?” he says, sipping.

“Looks like night, eh?”

“Midnight.”

I drift off through the strength of my Scotch, thinking of John’s mother. She would be singing as she moved the iron over the sea-island cotton shirt, smoothened like a thin sheet of ice. She had a voice. It was good enough for her to be the soloist in the District of Paynes Bay Women’s Choir of Voices. “To Be a Pilgrim” was her favourite hymn. John’s father did not
live with them. But he visited every other Saturday, when he brought pieces of pork and beef. Once, he brought a sheep’s head, and water coconuts and, as usual, money for John’s support, and money for John’s mother’s support, and money for John’s school fees. That time of the sheep’s head, with mutton attached to the head, and the eyes like pools of glass, the mutton soup that John’s mother made, with dumplings of Robin Hood all-purpose flour mixed with cassava flour, was the Saturday John scored fifty runs for the school’s cricket team, and clinched the Second Eleven Cricket Championship. We had the soup before and after his triumph.

John’s father was a policeman, a constable. He was a constable for fifteen years. Nobody asked him why, but he gave everyone the reason. “You expect that it easy for a man like me to get three stripes on his blasted arm? With things the way they is, in this blasted country, and in this blasted constabulary? Answer me!” But no one dared.

So, he would come on his green Raleigh bicycle, and ring the bell making the first few notes of the current popular song which John and I would have listened to on the nightly Hit Parade, on Rediffusion Radio. All the songs were American songs. Billy Eckstine, Sarah Vaughan, Ella Fitzgerald, Nat-the-king-of-them-all Cole, Cab Calloway, and Louis Jordan were our stars. We listened to Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra only at Christmas time to hear about white Christmases and “set-um-up-Joe,” and compared
that
American
sadness about drinking with the revelry of rum poured in larger quantities, without sorrow and loss of love, in all the rum-shops in our neighbourhood.

On his arrival, smiles would break our faces tightened against the closeness of the humidity on our bodies. And in our growing up, I always wondered why Saturday afternoons, when he visited, were always the hottest days of the week. The
ting-a-ling-ling
of the Raleigh’s bell would announce him, and he would skip off the bicycle, and in the same motion bring it to its ticking halt, prop it against the side of the front-house, the front room of the house, and knock on the gate of the paling where John’s mother had installed a bell against thieves and unannounced visitors and intruders. He would stand on the single coral-stone step leading into the kitchen and smile, waiting for her to say, “Come in, man! Why you ringing a bell?” He paid the rent for the house.

John would put the newly borrowed library book,
Treasures of the Oriental Caves
, face downwards, breaking its spine, and his mother would shout at him, and tell him to have “more respect for books and the knowledge inside the damn book”; and he would leave his index finger between the pages, and continue smiling. And John’s mother would smile.

“But look at you!” she would say to John’s father. She greeted him this way every other Saturday afternoon. Her greeting showed her love, faithful and constant during his long absences from her bed.

“How I look?”

“You look like you want feeding. You had anything to eat?”

“Look at my boy!” he would say to John.

And the shillings, with the Queen’s smiling portrait scratched into their silver alloy, would come falling, one for me, four for John, and many more for John’s mother.

Even when John’s father was visiting, his mother would sing her favourite hymn, “To Be a Pilgrim.”

“I’ll fear not what men say …”

In my small mind, I would think she was trying to tell John and me something about the ways of mankind. Perhaps something said by the neighbours, her friends, in the shop where she bought groceries, standing in patient suffering for hours on Friday nights, talking out the business and secrets of the other women in the neighbourhood, their histories that went back for three generations sometimes. And behind her back, talking about her business. “Did you not know that that man don’t sleep with her in the same bed every night? Yesss! He does-only-come-home once in a blue-moon.” “
Prompt
, though!” “Yess. Every-other Saturday night he there, and by three o’clock Sunday morning, he gone!”, while she watched the tricky iron-and-copper scales manoeuvre profits and losses, in the cunning hands of Mistress Edwards, the shopkeeper. All that time, all that talk, all that waiting while the talk walked through the crowded small shop. There, on
Friday nights, her waiting was appeased by the sweet voice of Ella Fitzgerald.
She
liked her, too … 
Evening shadows make me blue
 … “That man she have for a husband …”

“I’ll fear not what men say …”

Sometimes, too, I would think she was emphasizing the words to include her resentment of the manager of the hotel, whom she swore did not pay her the full amount he collected from the tourisses to pay for getting their laundry done.

“I’ll fear not what men say …”

“Those ten needles from the cobbler! What a thing, eh?” John says.

“And the tube,” I say.

“Floating out, like a big, black Lifesaver, like the ones my uncle used to send in the parcels from Brooklyn-U.S.A., in the barrel of clothes and shoes, with the five-dollar money order. Always with the five Amurcan dollars in the money order, every-every month …”

“I had thirteen patches on the tire when she went out. Black and red pieces of rubber that I got from the man who repaired bicycles. We patched-them-on with Dunlop glue.”

“And pump-up with a bicycle pump!”

He closes his eyes. To bring back more memories? To restrain the intervention of the strange atmosphere in the bar in which we are sitting now? And he gives a sigh. Not a heavy sigh, as people make when they are remembering sorrow in their past, or in the dark
clouds. But a sigh, a soft exhalation of air to underline the happiness of that past.

“Let’s have one more,” he says. He raises his hand and Buddy comes towards us. “One for the road!”

“Can’t walk on
one leg!”
I say.

“The time?” he asks again. “I have to go somewhere, but not now. Sometime …”

“You want to know?”

“The time?”

Men have come unnoticed into the bar. In our conversation that takes me across so many miles of sea, I do not notice the change in temperature in the room when they entered. Most of them are sitting on high stools, leaning on the bar. Buddy is busy. The room is warm. And friendly. And their talk is like a glow from a fireplace, like a low-hanging cloud. John looks around with some wonder at the peace in this bar. And then he rubs his hands together. I can feel the warmth in the room, just as I can feel it after I return to my house from my walks on Yonge Street to the Lake. Just as I feel after a long hot bath in December and January, with bubbles thick as clouds that hang in the sky when the rain is coming and make the water and the sea black and blue. We have been sitting for one hour now, and we are on our second Scotch. He has ordered Cutty Sark because, “Shit, the amount o’ Cutty Sark, CS, that black people in the States, in Amurca drinks, shit, we could own the goddamn distillery!” He holds his glass with the thumb and index finger, the other three fingers of that
hand, his right, cocked at an angle horizontal to the mouth of the short, stubby, cheap glass. “One thing about living in the States, we drinks the best and we eats the goddamn best, if you see what I’m saying!”

“Overrated,” I say.

“Cutty? Or the States?”

“Overrated. Lemme show you the thing I was telling you about that I wrote, that I keep in my wallet, about never working again …” And I take from my wallet a piece of paper and hand it to him. It is a card two inches square, and laminated. It was dog-eared before I got it laminated at Grand & Toy. He takes it from me, holds it with the thumb and index finger of his left hand, and puts it close to his eyes and reads it. “
‘December the twenty-sixth, nineteen hundred and eighty-six anno domini. I have decided not to work for anyone after this date.’
Is this
it?
Is this some kind o’ poem?”

“It’s a tract.”

“Like in religious tract?”

“It is a political tract.”

“What drove you to stop working? An accident? Sickness?”

“Nothing,” I tell him.

“Come clean with me, goddammit!”

“A woman.”

“Sexual harassment, then. You got that shit, too?”

“No. She died.”

“Goddamn! I’m sorry, man. Let’s have another drink. A double. Goddamn!”

He places the piece of cardboard face down on the round, shiny table on which our glasses have made interlocking rings of water. He traces a finger on one wet circle nearest to him, and ignores the message in my tract.

“Is
this
it?” he finally says, after he traces a few more figures in the wet rings. He makes one long line with the water.

“What do you mean, is this it?”

“Is that goddamn
all?”

“This,” I say, taking a photograph from my wallet, and placing it into his right hand, “this.” He holds it again with his thumb and index finger, as if he is holding something precious, brittle, and old. The photograph is of a woman. I do not tell him who she is. It is a black-and-white. Aged now. To look like sepia. A crease on the glossy surface looks like a wound along the woman’s face, a wound that will not heal. And the wound runs at an angle over her face, touching her breasts.

“Indian?” he asks.

“No.”

“Looks Indian. Your daughter?”

“Not Indian.”

“Your daughter,” he says, not asking.

“A woman,” I say.

“Whose
goddamn woman?”

“My woman,” I say. And he roars with laughter.

“You’re robbing the goddamn cradle, man!” The other men and women in the bar raise their eyes in
our direction and then lower them to their glasses and cigarettes.

“Goddamn!” he says.

“Chinese,” I say.

“I’ll tell you one thing! About the Chinese and Chinese food! God’s gift to man. And something else! But what about the Chinese? Their food? Or something else you have in mind? A Chinese restaurant near here?”

“We’re close to Chinatown.”

“Goddamn! I hear they really know how to
take care
of a man! I love Chinese food! This your woman? Goddamn!”

“A friend.”

“Friend, my arse! You’re screwing her.
Fooping
. And at your age? Goddamn!” The men and women in the bar look up again. And then, when his voice fades, as the match to a lighted cigarette dies, they lower their heads and their eyes, and light fresh cigarettes and go back to their drinks, pretending they are not listening. “Tell me something. How old is this chick?”

“Her name is Lang.”

“Ling?”

“Lang.”

“Ling or Lang? Make up your goddamn mind! Like in Ming Dynasty? Ling or Lang?

“Forget it.”

The barman brings us double Scotches this time, with no chaser. John has ordered them so. We sip in
silence. Voices around us speak softly. A woman laughs, and her voice carries like a bell.

“I like this place,” John says.

“She is why I stopped working,” I say. He just stares at me. The woman laughs again.

“Lemme show
you
something,” he says. “Lemme lay
something
on you.” And he feels in his right trousers pocket, bulged big, taking the shape out of its custom-made fit, and extracts a billfold, about two inches thick. He takes out a plastic card holder, and, like a magician flicks his wrist and makes a flower grow, he makes the billfold become long, and longer, and it unfolds like a snake above the shiny, round table-top. Facing me through the plastic are credit cards. I have never seen so many different gold credit cards before: American Express, Visa, and MasterCard are visible, but there are many others. “Lemme show you something,” he is saying, as he tries to turn the plastic snake over on its back. Backing and coinciding with each credit card is a Technicolor snapshot of a smiling face. “I call these my family.” I count thirteen sections in the body of the wriggling plastic snake. Thirteen faces that do not all look white, but are all smiling, all healthy, most dressed in sweaters and brightly coloured blouses, and three in white shirts. “This is what I call the family.” He holds his thumb on one framed photo in plastic at a time, and as he does this, he gives me the name. Those touched by his thumb are all girls, these children-members of his family. “From the same woman,” he says. “From
Hyacinthe,” he says, still holding his thumb on the plastic frame. “Faye.” And he moves his thumb over the sectioned plastic snake, and says, “Roberto. Ricardo. And Umberto.” The plastic becomes shorter, its body disappearing under his thumb. “Hanz. Gerhart. Franz. And Frederich.” There are only three ribs left in the diminishing, fluttering plastic spine of the snake. Three faces. And then a fourth. “And Omawale Rashid.” He says this with his eyes expressing great pride and love, holding the shortened snake now, with thumb and index finger, as he was holding his glass of Cutty Sark on ice. “The last o’ my thrildren, a boy! From the woman I living with now.” He places the two-sectioned snake flat on the shiny, round black table-top, with new water rings accumulated, and he says, “The three women I married-to. Best three women in the whirl! Hyacinthe, the
parlez-vous
woman. Isabella Maria Groppi, the Eye-talian. And Maude, the German
frauleene!”
Like a man who has accomplished a brilliant trick of magic, hypnotizing his audience into profound silence of disbelief, like a man who has triumphed over an opponent at a poker game of five-card stud, he fixes the plastic frames back into the palm of his hand, snaps the billfold shut, and pushes it back into his right trousers pocket. The magic is over. “Tell me about
your
family,” he says, sipping his Scotch, pleased with his performance.