Irene stands up and crosses the room, kneeling before Abel, and for a moment you worry that she will choke the life out of him before you even have a chance to. Instead she studies his face. She is thinking about the picture, the one under the mango tree, and when she recognizes him, she walks out of the room, collects her purse from the hall, and leaves for good, slamming the front door so hard it shakes you. You look at the two girls left in the room and reassure yourself that no matter which one ends him, it will actually be you. If only he could see you as he’s falling. If you still had a mouth, you would be laughing. If you still had a body, you would dance.
THE LAMB OR THE LION
Kingston, 1966
ABEL
Wherever he goes, Abel drags the dead man with him. It is his first day back since the murder of his partner six weeks ago, and here is Abel in his police car, stalled in downtown Kingston traffic on his way into the station, and there is Bully haunting the passenger seat beside him, the front of his uniform stiff from the dried and caked blood, the once black color dyed a rusty brown. Bully has become an extension of Abel’s imagination, a flickering light that goes on and off without notice. It’s been a struggle to stay focused on the living world.
Tomorrow God comes to Jamaica. Haile Selassie, the emperor of Ethiopia, has announced that he will stop in Kingston on his Caribbean tour, and so every one of his followers on the island has migrated to the capital by any method they can manage. Rastafarians have gridlocked the roads. They arrive stuffed into the backs of chicken trucks from their mountain hamlets or on foot from the slums of West Kingston. They walk in the road and alongside it, pushing their belongings in wheelbarrows, dragging them in overstuffed rucksacks, or holding them in their arms.
The Rastas remind Abel of the men who ambushed his partner. As he watches them snake between cars, trying to get to the other side of the street, he feels a tremor begin in his left leg that slowly builds and moves throughout his entire body. He tries to steady himself by gripping the steering wheel tighter.
Bully’s acrid sweat, his living smell, is still emanating from the driver’s seat. Abel wants to stick his head out of the window to escape it; he would rather inhale the saltwater air, mixed with exhaust, but he doesn’t want any of the pedestrians to notice that he is shaking.
You mus’ push the man outta fi yuh head, Vera tells him each night when he wakes from the same nightmare. He can’t, though. The sight of his partner crumpled on the hood of their car, dying, will never leave him. His wife cannot understand or maybe she just refuses to. Vera had never liked Bully, had long harped that the man was a bad influence. Her lack of empathy is just one of the things that has pushed them apart during the first year of their marriage.
Another is the fact that Abel didn’t want to return to the police force after Bully’s murder; he never wanted to join in the first place, he knew he wasn’t cut out, but Vera threatened to leave him if he quit, just as she insisted that he join up. There are not many options for people like him, she’d reminded him over and over. She means for the poor, the too country, the uneducated. When they argue, he stops short of blaming her for Bully’s death, but a part of him does. After all, everything that Abel is now is her creation. The word that she has said the most this past year is sacrifice. It was she who sacrificed her family and their money to be with Abel. It was she who went from training as a bookkeeper for her father’s law practice to working at a garment factory, she likes to remind him. Whereas Abel actually improved his circumstance, going from being a rich man’s chauffeur to a constable. They still don’t have much money, but they have a future, if he gets promoted. They have respect.
If Abel does not perform his fair share of sacrifice, he knows their marriage will end. Lately he’s been worrying that she wants him to die, to get killed on duty, just to spare herself the embarrassment of divorce. Why else would she insist he keep a job so dangerous?
If that is his wife’s wish, Abel is wondering if today is the day it will come true, when he hears the police dispatcher’s voice through his radio: Child stuck in tree in Harbour View. He breathes, relieved for the easy task, hopeful that he will live to see the evening.
It was no secret that what he and Bully had for the last year was not a real partnership. Bully doled out orders and Abel obeyed them. Now he must act on his own until he’s paired with someone else, but he’s not sure he even knows how. The last time Bully ordered Abel to do something (Follow me and watch the door, Abe), Abel refused, and now his partner is dead.
Abel decides that if he can think like his partner—Bully was a thirty-year veteran of the constabulary force, after all—he has a better chance of surviving. He’s tried so hard to get inside Bully’s head he feels like he has come to know him better since his death. What he saw as cruelty in his partner now seems like a means of survival.
He turns on his siren and waits for the other cars to move. The cars in front of him begrudgingly ease into the next lane, but as soon as one moves, new people flood into the open space, trying to get across the street. Abel honks his horn, but the crowd ignores him. The sky, filled with a glaring sun all morning, suddenly becomes overcast, and Abel prays for rain, a reason for people to flee indoors.
He begins inching forward, pushing on the gas pedal gently. A group of women holding palm branches bang on the hood of his car, but he keeps moving, leaning on the horn, no longer timid, imagining that it is Bully’s leg pressing on the gas, not his own, until they are forced to clear out of his way.
* * *
Now here is Abel at the house in Harbour View, walking around to the backyard where he finds that the boy looks about nine or ten—too old to be so cowardly. Abel, a country boy from Harold Town, grew up climbing trees, often with his friend Stanford. His mother worked as a maid in Kingston, so he barely saw her. He never knew his father. He was raised by his grandparents, who taught him to farm, how to subsist on whatever was growing around him. He is thinking someone should have already taught this boy the rules of survival, when the boy’s mother puts her hand on his shoulder, wringing the fabric of his uniform with her nervous fingers.
“Lawd Jesus! Him soon drop an’ bruk up himself!” she shouts.
A twenty-five-foot drop, Abel estimates. But a voice inside of him says, Good, fall, and he imagines the lanky body plummeting, the legs realigned at odd angles. He knows the voice is not his own; it is Bully’s. People can see the boy from the road, so some have decided to use the top of a cement fence as bleachers to see what Abel will do next.
“Hurry up and get the bwai down, Red!” someone shouts when Abel takes off his hat for a moment, exposing his cinnamon-colored hair, to wipe the sweat from his brow. There are at least ten onlookers by the time he inches up to the tree—men, women, and children—all laughing at the coward. As Abel stands surveying the backyard, an afternoon shower erupts, his prayer answered at the worst time, and he looks up at the boy, knowing he’ll lose his grip on the slippery bark.
The boy’s features are hard to distinguish in the distance, but Abel can see the white of his teeth as he winces in pain, struggling to hold on. He imagines Bully pulling out his gun and pointing it at the child, ordering him to come down by his own will or prepare to face God’s. Abel fondles the handle of his gun, but no—he is not his partner. He doesn’t have the clout to get away with breaking too many rules.