The metal grillwork is padlocked from the inside, so he knows Vera must be home, but he doesn’t say anything to Roman. He squeezes his hand through a space in the bars, uses his key to open the padlock, and fumbles with it for a few moments until he is able to pull the lock out. He goes inside the house, leaving Roman behind without a word.
He finds Vera asleep in their bedroom. He figures the same bug is still bothering her. He strips off his uniform and slides into a T-shirt and shorts, watching her, hoping she will wake, but she continues to snore. He goes into the kitchen, boils some ganja in water to make tea, and takes the steaming mug out to a chair in his front yard. Most evenings he sits here, watching like a guard on duty until the last of his neighbors arrives home from work. His squat cinder-block house is at the center of a dead-end street.
Roman is still there in his yard, to Abel’s annoyance, and now he whirls around, his back leaning against the fence, stretching one of his legs out to call attention to his genuine alligator-skin shoes.
“You shoot somebody today, Abe?” he says, fingers hooked on his red genuine alligator-skin belt.
He asks Abel the same question every day.
Abel responds as usual: “Tomorrow.”
“Me bet tomorrow,” Roman says. He flicks his fingernail against his belt buckle to fill the silence. The sound puts Abel on edge. It feels like a taunt, a reminder of the rumors he’s heard that Roman makes regular rounds with some of the women in the neighborhood, married and single alike. He should have told him to stay away from his wife. Now he feels like the moment has passed.
Abel looks down at his tea. He doesn’t want to look up and see Roman’s condescending smile. His teeth are gleaming white and perfectly straight. Like the belt and the shoes, they were a gift from Roman’s wife in Canada.
He hears Bully in his head again: Abe, if man wan’ act fresh and show you him teet’, you mus’ show him them back when you pick them up off the floor. Just a mile behind his house, their working-class housing development reverts once again into swamp and ruined cane fields. He can imagine Bully subduing Roman with his bare hands and leaving his broken body for the crocodiles. But though he carries his partner inside him, Abel knows his hands are still his own.
“Them nuh teach you fi shoot properly no more. You must make me show you sometime,” Roman says.
His first and only year as a constable, Roman took a bullet in the shoulder, protecting a distant cousin of Elizabeth II from an attempted robbery. He has a medal for it, a medal that Abel is certain Roman wears to sleep at night. Now, deep in his retirement, it seems to Abel that all Roman ever does is show him how things are done. It seems ever since he moved to the city there is no shortage of men in his life eager to school him. Even Roman, who does nothing now but live off remittances from his wife.
Abel thinks about the talk he wants to have with Vera when she wakes up. Practices what he will say in his head. Does she love him enough to accept him even if he’s poor? He doesn’t know if he can find other work that pays as much. He’s not skilled in anything else but farming.
“Going to the airport tomorrow?” Roman asks.
“The airport?”
“Them have you guardin’ him?”
“Who you a talk ’bout?” Abel says, annoyed that Roman is still in his yard, interrupting his thoughts.
“Who?” Roman says, shaking his head and laughing at Abel. “Them no let you in on nuttin over there? God coming, man. Fi dem God, at least,” he says, motioning off to the Rasta procession, which they can’t see but can hear coming from the main road. “Selassie coming. Him plane soon land come morning. Not that me believe in that madman business, but I want to see. Fi me father was a Garveyite back in the day. Him did always say we all fi go back to Africa. Me a go leave early to get one spot. Look how Jamaican people prostrate weself every time one cousin of the white queen come down from England. The same queen whose ancestors them did put we in chains,” Roman says, his voice rising. “Why we nuh make the same fuss when one black king come, when we a nation of black people?”
Abel shakes his head. He’s not thinking about Selassie; he’s thinking about Roman. And Vera. What if it’s already too late? He thinks of his wife getting sick this morning. He’d never heard her getting sick like that before.
He looks down at his tea again, wondering if the ganja is making him paranoid. When he looks up again, it is as if time has passed without him knowing. Roman is gone; it’s just past sunset, dark, but still light enough for him to feel safe. Safe enough to nod off into a dreamless sleep.
VERA
Vera somehow manages to clean the blood off the floor, careful to leave no trace, before she falls asleep. She dreams that Abel came home that day when she had Roman in the house, in their bed, and shot them both. When she wakes, she rubs the sleep out of her eyes, finds that she’s shivering. She goes to wrap the sheet around her, then feels that the bed is wet beneath her. When she looks down, she sees that the sheet is drenched in blood. She remembers the way Abel’s bullet passed through her in her dream and she screams.
Abel rushes into the room but stops abruptly, taken aback by the blood. His breath becomes ragged and the color drains from his face. She knows that seeing the blood has sent his mind somewhere else, back to the day Bully died.
“Abel,” she says loudly, trying to bring him back. She can see the effort it takes for him to focus on her.
“Is wha’ happen to you?” he says, kneeling beside her. Vera doesn’t know how to answer. Abel helps her out of the bed.
“Me no feel well.” A chill overtakes her, and her teeth begin chattering. “Help me to the bathroom,” she says, holding on to his forearm. He touches her forehead.
“You a burn up with fever.”
Vera doesn’t respond. Her uterus feels as if it’s trying to turn itself inside out.
“Help me to the bathroom. Me soon vomit.”
Abel obeys and helps her to the toilet. She throws up violently.
“Make me bring you to the hospital,” Abel says.
“Is jus’ my time of the mo—” she begins to lie, but another stabbing pain catches her off guard and she curls up on the floor, whimpering.
Abel turns on the cold-water tap and begins filling the tub.
“Make me go heat up some hot water fi you to take bath. Get clean and then we go to hospital.”
Her mind begins to race as soon as Abel leaves the room. Vera can’t stop shivering, nor can she stop the knife that feels like it’s moving in and out of her belly. Has she taken too much tea? Poisoned herself to the point of death? If he takes her to the hospital, she’ll have to tell them what she took. She’s scared that they might arrest her. She’s even more afraid that they’ll tell Abel.
Abel comes back into the room and pours the hot water he’s boiled into the tub.
“It soon ready,” he says, and she can hear the fear in his voice.
“Go get Marcia,” Vera says quietly.
“Marcia?”
“She a nurse,” she says. “Go get Marcia. Please.”
He sits on the side of the tub and studies her, ignoring her pain for the moment. She can see his mind working.
“Is miscarriage you have?” he asks.