The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel (6 page)

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Authors: Rahul Bhattacharya

BOOK: The Sly Company of People Who Care: A Novel
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‘You only saying that cause of the name!’
‘You ever seen how he hug up them other player?’
‘Who got de record? Who got de record?’
‘Antiman.’
‘Shut up your stupidy mouth, banna, shut up you jokey skunt.’
‘Antiman must dead.’
‘What if I’m antiman? You’d kill me?’
This was me. The man looked me square in the eyes.
‘Yeah.’
‘Alright, I’m an antiman, kill me.’
‘You en’t. You jus saying so.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I could tell, banna. You wouldn be standing here before me otherwise.’
‘I’m an antiman, kill me.’
‘Turn round and show me.’
‘What?’
‘You batty.’
‘Why!’
‘I could tell if you a battyman or not.’
‘Alright, but not here. Come outside.’
I went outside with a person whose name I did not know. He had shining teeth. We walked a short distance from the shop.
I turned around and showed him.
He crept closer.
‘What you doing?’
‘Shh. Bend over.’
I bent over.
He went on his haunches, studying my anus quietly, intently, and then leapt to life.
‘You got a pleat! You cyan be battyman! I tell you so! You en’t no antiman!’
He ran back triumphantly towards the shop.
‘The man have a pleat! The man got a pleat!’
His victorious march had little impact. For a much greater fight
had broken out. It was the two youths. The fight had just finished as a matter of fact. I could not tell the damage. But by the tin wall of the yard I saw Labba lecturing the defeated youthman.
‘A little provocation is a dangerous, dangerous thing, bai. Learn that.
Learn
that. Learn it
over
. You ain’t hear Sparrow sing provocation is against the law? You a yootman. Vibert’s cousin, Odetta, you hear she story? She just a harmless chile but always like to be
seen
as a badgirl, always carryin a knife pon she. One time she uncle tell she she dance like a goat. She flick out she knife for joke, but it ketch the man straight in the jugular.
Kachack
. The man dead. And I blame him. Yes! I blame that man for he own death. Because why? Because he make the provocation. The same thing going to happen to you one day, y’unstand?
Kachack
.’
‘What happen to Odetta?’ I asked inquisitively.
‘She done come out of jail, buddeh, she come out quick. She have a baby and the court go easy on she. But the man – he dead dead dead.’
Labba glared at the youthman.
The youthman looked chastened.
And I was flushed with gratitude that my pleat had been located.
I went back in, to such a terribly poignant event, I almost wept. As humans and the powis around him rose and fell, the dacta had stayed fixed at his spot on the bench, eyes set like quartz stones.
‘I’m veveveve very rich spiritually. I do say my prayers because I do recognise there is a Supreme, and I get answers, I get clairvoyance, I could actually do telepathy, I actually recognise that you could talk to the supreme source, you could get answers. I personally come from a family which know a lot of herbal remedies and cures so as I was in desolate situation and places. I’s be in the mountain there’s be no hospitals. After some time I start seeing this is good thing and I start doin my own research. I write potion within my head that I could just lay my hands on, the type of illness the patient may have and get em going. Sometimes for weeks you don’t see another person, just there by yourself. No, no, no, you
don’t. I enjoy that, we live in close contact with animals and birds, know the time when they would come and know the time when they would go, the time when they would feed cause normally I would feed them. Just like I would feed this powis. Know when the rain would be there, when the storm would be there. Know when a person coming. As bad as it may sound on them, I don’t like really hypocrites. To be hypocritical I feel is a terrible sin. Know wha I mean?’
And upon that the Siddique man came and uprooted Dr Red and plonked him outside the shop. It was startling, so unjust. He tried to come back inside, bumping up the three steps like his knees were giving way. The Siddique man held his palms out again and administered a simple, firm push that toppled Dr Red to the ground. His cap fell off, exposing a patch of bald, which, in the circumstances, carried an unbearable pathos. I gathered that Dr Red had as usual imbibed and not paid. Even so. I had assumed that he commanded respect in his surroundings; that he had insight, gravitas, and mere merchants at the very least would look up to him.
He petered out into the dark.
Below the mango tree Nasty and a short dreads in denim hotpants had drawn long knives and were holding them at each other like fencers. They had clothing wrapped around their free hands and made to use it like a shield. The moon was a ghostly galleon, as we learnt in school, and underneath such a moon they went at each other in grasshopping jabs. I could not tell if it was a serious affair or not. Where Labba and Baby were cracking up watching them, slapping their thighs and the tree trunk in laughter, Nasty seemed to have some blood on him. Neither of the combatants looked amused. It was actually a little distressing.
Things, one sensed, were getting out of hand. Morning was not far. I felt multiple organ failure coming on. I went to the nearest shack and lay down on the floorboards and rolled into a ball. I was struggling. It was the shack of December, a returned porknocker. As I lay there like a wretch he kept saying he cyan sleep on any
surface but a hammock because for the last twenty years he’d slept in a hammock so a flat surface don’t make sense no more. He lit the small gas stove in the corner and said he would cook an overland omelette. He could cook any damn thing at any damn time and this damn thing was an overland omelette. And that was the last thing I remember before somebody shook me awake and poured cold water down my throat with the words, ‘Drink it up, Gooroo, drink it,’ and then I balled up again, with groans that I could hear in echo but not repress. In the morning December said, ‘The man chant in Indian all night.’ He made a sound of tumbling marbles. ‘I try talk to the man, right, but the man dreaming in Indian. All night he go on in Indian.’
THE river was red as blood underneath. I held myself down as long as I could, coming up with a gasp for life, trying to clutch at the new day. Baby was at work already, on his haunches, sawing a piece of wood. Apparently we were to leave soon. We were to borrow Labba’s boat. Labba himself was not coming. The last time out he’d been bitten by a snake. He was carrying no antivenom and his foot had swollen up like a pumpkin. He spent a month laid up alone, pacing his supplies before gathering the strength to return to the settlement. He still hadn’t the vigour to go backdam. But Foulis would be there most probably.
We had a boat but no paddles. This is what Baby was working on. He had collected discards, a broken plastic barrel cover, a torn mosquito net, planks of wood, a tattered foam suit somebody had retained from their time as a water-dredge diver.
He whittled the planks of wood to thin shafts with a saw. With a knife he cut two large almond shapes out of the barrel cover. He nailed an almond to the end of the shafts. The opposite ends he nestled in pieces of the diving suit and fastened them with shreds of the mosquito net. This was the grip for the top hand. He fished out the multiracial candidate’s bandannas and tied them a quarter
of the way down the shaft. This was the grip for the lower hand, for the wood was abrasive and cuboidal.
Labba’s was a weathered blue and red boat and too big for two. We loaded the supplies on the polin in the centre. Roots brought us cane, lemon, plantain and ganja from his patch of farm across the river, and we picked half a dozen pineapples from the bush behind Labba’s shack.
Baby had a final chat with Labba about location. We fist-bumped goodbye to all. ‘Time slip away, brotherman,’ said Roots; and with that we left.
Baby took the bow, striding it with a crazed Ahabian glint in the eye and burning bush at the mouth, and I, lily-limbed coolie I, the stern. The early thrill! To think we were hitting this fantastic reptile, to think that we’d be making that bend in the river there, confronting the epic scopes beyond.
It was gruelling work. It was not ten minutes in and I felt the first surges of lactic acid. Baby repeated what Labba had told us, that the water was the highest in eighteen years, and we got to pull. I took a while to start paddling smoothly, to work out the angle at which the almond best entered the water, the balance between pushing down and pushing back. It was so easy to be overcome by the river. The current, so placid from afar, felt colossal. Our movement, if the word applied, was laboured and defeated. To look up was a chilling exercise in futility. The river and its immemorial force furrowing a continent – against that two pointless paddlers. Mistake to stop a moment and marvel at the scale of this helplessness. A flicker of doubt could stall progress; if recovery was not immediate, the work of five minutes could be undone in thirty seconds. The only strategy was to stare into the tugging brown water with a dumb, blind competitiveness.
I suspect I contributed appallingly little to our propulsion. Baby stood most of the time, making powerful muscular incisions into the current, sometimes on one side and sometimes another. We crissed and crossed the river. I could not tell if it was deliberate.
Sometimes we got enmeshed in the vegetation at the edge of the water and pulled ourselves forward using vines and branches. Baby called this monkeyjumping and said it was necessary to monkeyjump across certain parts. He looked like a real pioneer, bare-chested, ganja still in his mouth, cutlassing the creepers and hauling us forward, asking me to mind the whiplash of the branches. I received the vines he left behind and pulled us on. Sometimes the bottom of the boat would scrape against the roots and you had to push out again. We took several breaks, in which we turned to the only snap of rum we had, chasing it down with river water. Though Baby warned against stopping too often, I needed the breaks. He talked incessantly through them. One time, monkeyjumping just like this, he saw a camoudi looking at him. He stretched out the paddle to frighten him away, but the camoudi leapt on the paddle and landed in the boat. He said it was twenty feet. He stamped on its neck and flipped it over with the paddle. He added wistfully that he would like to be a male camoudi cause the ooman be four times more heavy and that is a nice thing to have pon you.
We paddled on, looking for turbulence, crissing, crossing, monkeyjumping, the efforts diminishing me towards a standstill. Even the breeze was against us. The trees were thin and tall and the water so high that it felt like they were floating. Two or three hours into the ride a hard rain began to fall. It was so fucking beautiful. The tall dark forest shook and swayed, hundred-foot timber trees flailing about like dandelions. Winds of forest fragrance whooshed out in wet gusts. Brown ripples swept across the river and stung the skin. We rowed hard and sometimes shouted and rowed. We stopped occasionally to bail out water and tighten the polin over the supplies, and thereafter shouted and laughed and rowed. ‘If you en pulling hard you en pulling at all,’ hollered Baby. ‘Pull, bai, pull. You cyan be saaf, bai, you cyan be fockin saaf. Pull it now, Gooroo, pull yuh fockin skunthole.’
We had entered a fifth hour when Baby began to make halts to check. Several false stops later he was convinced he’d found the
spot. We took a minute. We’d done seven miles, he said. Alone in a smaller boat with a good paddle he could lick it down inside two hours.
He went out to find the trail. I waited in the boat.
I couldn’t feel my shoulders and arms. I chewed on a piece of cane and watched and smelt and got pinged by the rain. I thought of how it might be to surrender to the torrent and let it take you all the way like old Kaie of legend.
Baby was soon back. He tethered the boat and concealed it behind bushes. The paddles and the polin he hid inside the hollow of a trunk. We put on shoes and gathered our things and began walking. The trail was fresh squelch and the trees were still swaying apocalyptically though the rain was now beating slower. The immense wetness of the rainforest made one feel submerged, but for the smells. The smells were many, mud and leaves, heart of trunk and rotten fruit; the rustle of small animals, the slither of lizards, they all came scented. It was soggy underfoot, thick squelch or big drenched leaves, brown, red and green, twenty or thirty deep. It was walking on marshmallow. My shoes were heavy with water and mud and the backpack was eating into my shoulders. I had two stalks of cane in one hand with my slippers looped through them, and a cutlass in the other. I was tripping over roots and branches.
After thirty minutes we reached a clearing which looked like it had been hit by a great storm. There were ditches and deep furrows and enormous fallen trees. We walked along a palm trunk that ran over ditches and pools of slush, and then through a tunnel of head-high bush we walked into another little clearing. Here a creek gathered briefly into a small pond, and beyond it a thin path led to two raised shacks.
The shack we took had a blissful front veranda. In one corner a tilting table was carefully placed an inch away from the wall with its legs in plastic bowls of water, measures to keep out the white ants that had eaten much of the country. In another corner stood an iron barrel with its top taken off and a slot bust open in its
side, the fireplace. On the front door was visible the faintest chalk writing: ‘labba you boat under water’.
Inside, the space was divided by a partition as in the shack at Menzies, making two rooms of identical size and symmetry, with a door and two wood windows that had swollen beyond their frames. We sat down for a few minutes on a low wooden platform in the back room, constructed, I think, as a bed. The Bible lay on it. The window framed a solitary Congo pump, long, lofty and lonesome. The rain had stopped.
Presently we heard a man call out, ‘Yes, Labba, yes.’
Naturally he was surprised when two gents who were not Labba emerged from the shack.
From what I gathered Baby and the man, Foulis, did not know each other much, but were both pardners of Labba. And it was Labba they talked of for a while, about how he was getting on after his snake bite. Foulis warned us about the evening vipers around the shack – he’d killed six in the last fortnight. He was a quiet welcoming man with an understated air. He had large brown eyes, lovely against the rest of his body which was close to pitch black. He kept himself to himself.
Only a few pieces of coal we’d brought with us had remained dry. Baby used them to get a fire going in the barrel. He went out to fetch some bush for bush tea, leaving me to hot up the pot. I filled water from the vat which caught the rain and placed the pot on the barrel top. The surface was kinky; the pot toppled over and put out the fire.
Baby returned to damp fumes. For the first time he lost his patience with me. He muttered about where the skunt we gon get wood now, all the wood outside wet. More embarrassing still, he cussed himself for letting a man who knew nothin bout fire mind the fire.
Eventually, with hard-won scraps of dry wood, he got a flame going again.
Dinner was rice and a spicy blackeye stew, consumed in silence.
Darkness came suddenly and absolutely, and with it exhaustion. Baby lit a ghostly bottle flambeau in the shack. We slung up hammocks on each side of the partition. I fell asleep for a few hours and woke because I was full of piss. Heeding the viper warnings, I did not go out till Baby, who had the torch, got up to go as well.
Genetha, Genetha
he hummed plaintively as we pissed into the bushes. He said it was a long-time song, the tale of a woman who had fallen from a high position.
It rained hard again at night, and everything had to be rearranged to fit the holes in the roof, and the tin din, loud, vibratory, uncompromising, was both pleasure and noise – not, I suppose, unlike steelpan.
 
 
WORK began the next morning pretty much. As it was going to be for a short time, Baby talked to Foulis about the prospect of joining him. ‘Yes, man, yes,’ Foulis responded. ‘Nah take worries.’ He offered Baby a quarter of the takings. It didn’t sound like much, but it wasn’t a bad deal. At the dredges the owner kept seventy per cent, and the remaining thirty was shared by the workers – the people at whom Baby had hissed ‘fockin slaves’ at Pamela Landing. But the dredge owner didn’t contribute his own labour, as Foulis would, and Foulis had already done the ground work. The offer was really because Baby was Labba’s pardner, and as Foulis said more than once, Labba had taught him all he knew about porknocking and life in the bush.
Water is the essential truth of Guyana. One’s encounters with it were so frequent that one felt a little amphibious. Water everywhere, beneath the house, at the gate, at the margins of a road, falling from the roof into the yard, on leaves, grass and on sodden wooden posts, in canals and trenches and ‘blackas’, in the dark rivers and the ocean – too much of it, in too many forms, you sensed, for it to be of any account. Yet the most innocuous drop carried a stealthy force. Leave a cutlass in a shallow of the creek where the
water barely trickled. Nothing in it, you might think. In a few hours water and sand will have filed the blade so that you could ‘slice clean through caiman’.
And if water was Guyana’s essential truth, then porknocking was its most essential endeavour. It felt to me a miracle. There is a man in the forest; it rains; from this he makes diamond. The water cuts the land, washes away the filth and the soil and the sand down to the gravel, and there buried in the mounds of worthless pebbles lie the shimmers of desperate human coveting.
A porknocker carried little equipment. He might work as part of a gang; equally he might be alone. In the old days he knocked about with rations of salted pork. Saltpork had given way to saltfish and saltbeef. But fishknocker sounded like a coital position and beefknocker like bootlegged gin. Whereas porknocker got the glory, got the rawness, got the adventure, got even the lone sorrow.
Foulis, like Labba, mined diamond. It was easier to do by oneself than gold, free of the processes of gold. And the idea of the diamond, the elusive single piece that could change one’s life forever, was the more alluring.
Our days passed slow and voluptuous. Although its volume dwindled with every shower, the rain still fell every day and night. We woke usually to the wet tingly aftermath of the night rain. There would be a heavy shower in the late morning and another one in the late afternoon. At dusk there was sometimes a spell of thunder, often without rain, the accompanying lightning was not in streaks but shapes, along the outline of large clouds, and not white but a fluorescent violet. Sometimes without thunder or lightning there could be a great rustling through the trees that bode a biblical downpour. But not a drop would fall. The trees would continue to shake violently for an hour, followed by a period of utter still, the kind of still that can make a man go mad, and Baby told of a Berbician unaccustomed to the forest who wandered off for a few minutes into the bush, and began to scream, just so. Afterwards, in the heart of the night, came again the melodramatic tin-roof
orchestra. Here, waking up to see that nothing was getting wet, Baby would give praise to the rain. It meant the gutters kept denuding, the gravel kept collecting.
I would rise at six without prompting. Though you couldn’t see the sun rise because of the forest cover, the morning light beamed in strong and direct through the eastern window, its frame laced with heavy clinging drops that made a man pine for a sweetheart. Baby would have already brought some fresh bush to brew, and its tea tasted not unlike peppermint, softer, more medicinal. Over in the other shack, Foulis, an earlier riser still, would have got his pot going. His shack was of a unique floor plan, with a small room in the front and a large veranda behind, three times as long as the room: or perhaps someone had simply taken down the walls. As the pot cooked he would sit on a flat stone in the absolute centre of the space and read and reread a thriller (he’d read the current one,
Never Bitten, Never Shy
, five times). Sometimes he would stop reading and stare into the bush for ten minutes at a time, getting up only to check his pot. Nobody said anything to each other in the mornings, save for maybe ‘maanin’ and often not even that but just a nod.

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