Collected Short Fiction

  And added, ‘Like he getting married again.’

  Hat wasn’t too far wrong. One day, about two weeks later, Popo returned, and he brought a woman with him. It was his wife. My auntie.

  ‘You see the sort of thing woman is,’ Hat commented. ‘You see the sort of thing they like. Not the man. But the new house paint up, and all the new furniture inside it. I bet you if the man in Arima had a new house and new furnitures, she wouldnta come back with Popo.’

  But I didn’t mind. I was glad. It was good to see Popo standing outside with his glass of rum in the mornings and dipping his finger into the rum and waving at his friends; and it was good to ask him again, ‘What you making, Mr Popo?’ and to get the old answer, ‘Ha, boy! That’s the question. I making the thing without a name.’

  Popo returned very quickly to his old way of living, and he was still devoting his time to making the thing without a name. He had stopped working, and his wife got her job with the same people near my school.

  People in the street were almost angry with Popo when his wife came back. They felt that all their sympathy had been mocked and wasted. And again Hat was saying, ‘That blasted Popo too conceited, you hear.’

  But this time Popo didn’t mind.

  He used to tell me, ‘Boy, go home and pray tonight that you get happy like me.’

  What happened afterwards happened so suddenly that we didn’t even know it had happened. Even Hat didn’t know about it until he read it in the papers. Hat always read the papers. He read them from about ten in the morning until about six in the evening.

  Hat shouted out, ‘But what is this I seeing?’ and he showed us the headlines: CALYPSO CARPENTER JAILED.

  It was a fantastic story. Popo had been stealing things left and right. All the new furnitures, as Hat called them, hadn’t been made by Popo. He had stolen things and simply remodelled them. He had stolen too much, as a matter of fact, and had had to sell the things he didn’t want. That was how he had been caught. And we understand now why the vans were always outside Popo’s house. Even the paint and the brushes with which he had redecorated the house had been stolen.

  Hat spoke for all of us when he said, ‘That man too foolish. Why he had to sell what he thief? Just tell me that. Why?’

  We agreed it was a stupid thing to do. But we felt deep inside ourselves that Popo was really a man, perhaps a bigger man than any of us.

  And as for my auntie …

  Hat said, ‘How much jail he get? A year? With three months off for good behaviour, that’s nine months in all. And I give she three months good behaviour too. And after that, it ain’t going have no more Emelda in Miguel Street, you hear.’

  But Emelda never left Miguel Street. She not only kept her job as cook, but she started taking in washing and ironing as well. No one in the street felt sorry that Popo had gone to jail because of the shame; after all, that was a thing that could happen to any of us. They felt sorry only that Emelda was going to be left alone for so long.

  He came back as a hero. He was one of the boys. He was a better man than either Hat or Bogart.

  But for me, he had changed. And the change made me sad.

  For Popo began working.

  He began making Morris chairs and tables and wardrobes for people.

  And when I asked him, ‘Mr Popo, when you going start making the thing without a name again?’ he growled at me.

  ‘You too troublesome,’ he said. ‘Go away quick, before I lay my hand on you.’

  3 GEORGE AND THE PINK HOUSE

  I WAS MUCH MORE afraid of George than I was of Big Foot, although Big Foot was the biggest and the strongest man in the street. George was short and fat. He had a grey moustache and a big belly. He looked harmless enough but he was always muttering to himself and cursing and I never tried to become friendly with him.

  He was like the donkey he had tied in the front of his yard, grey and old and silent except when it brayed loudly. You felt that George was never really in touch with what was going on around him all the time, and I found it strange that no one should have said that George was mad, while everybody said that Man-man, whom I liked, was mad.

  George’s house also made me feel afraid. It was a broken-down wooden building, painted pink on the outside, and the galvanized-iron roof was brown from rust. One door, the one to the right, was always left open. The inside walls had never been painted, and were grey and black with age. There was a dirty bed in one corner and in another there was a table and a stool. That was all. No curtains, no pictures on the wall. And even Bogart had a picture of Lauren Bacall in his room.

  I found it hard to believe that George had a wife and a son and a daughter.

  Like Popo, George was happy to let his wife do all the work in the house and the yard. They kept cows, and again I hated George for that. Because the water from his pens made the gutters stink, and when we were playing cricket on the pavement the ball often got wet in the gutter. Boyee and Errol used to wet the ball deliberately in the stinking gutter. They wanted to make it shoot.

  George’s wife was never a proper person. I always thought of her just as George’s wife, and that was all. And I always thought, too, that George’s wife was nearly always in the cow-pen.

  And while George sat on the front concrete step outside the open door of his house, his wife was busy.

  George never became one of the gang in Miguel Street. He didn’t seem to mind. He had his wife and his daughter and his son. He beat them all. And when the boy Elias grew too big, George beat his daughter and his wife more than ever. The blows didn’t appear to do the mother any good. She just grew thinner and thinner; but the daughter, Dolly, thrived on it. She grew fatter and fatter, and giggled more and more every year. Elias, the son, grew more and more stern, but he never spoke a hard word to his father.

  Hat said, ‘That boy Elias have too much good mind.’

  One day Bogart, of all people, said, ‘Ha! I mad to break old George tail up, you hear.’

  And the few times when Elias joined the crowd, Hat would say, ‘Boy, I too sorry for you. Why you don’t fix the old man up good?’

  Elias would say, ‘It is all God work.’

  Elias was only fourteen or so at the time. But that was the sort of boy he was. He was serious and he had big ambitions.

  I began to be terrified of George, particularly when he bought two great Alsatian dogs and tied them to pickets at the foot of the concrete steps.

  Every morning and afternoon when I passed his house, he would say to the dogs, ‘Shook him!’

  And the dogs would bound and leap and bark; and I could see their ropes stretched tight and I always felt that the ropes would break at the next leap. Now, when Hat had an Alsatian, he made it like me. And Hat had said to me then, ‘Never fraid dog. Go brave. Don’t run.’

  And so I used to walk slowly past George’s house, lengthening out my torture.

  I don’t know whether George disliked me personally, or whether he simply had no use for people in general. I never discussed it with the other boys in the street, because I was too ashamed to say I was afraid of barking dogs.

  Presently, though, I grew used to the dogs. And even George’s laughter when I passed the house didn’t worry me very much.

  One day George was on the pavement as I was passing and I heard him mumbling. I heard him mumble again that afternoon and again the following day. He was saying, ‘Horse-face!’

  Sometimes he said, ‘Like it only have horse-face people living in this place.’

  Sometimes he said, ‘Short-arse!’

  And, ‘But how it have people so short-arse in the world?’

  I pretended not to hear, of course, but after a week or so I was almost in tears whenever George mumbled these things.

  One evening, when we had stopped playing cricket on the pavement because Boyee had hit the ball into Miss Hilton’s yard, and that was a lost ball (it counted six and out) – that evening I asked Elias, ‘But what your father have with me so? Why he does
keep on calling me names?’

  Hat laughed, and Elias looked a little solemn.

  Hat said, ‘What sort of names?’

  I said, ‘The fat old man does call me horse-face.’ I couldn’t bring myself to say the other name.

  Hat began laughing.

  Elias said, ‘Boy, my father is a funny man. But you must forgive him. What he say don’t matter. He old. He have life hard. He not educated like we here. He have a soul just like any of we, too besides.’

  And he was so serious that Hat didn’t laugh, and whenever I walked past George’s house I kept on saying to myself, ‘I must forgive him. He ain’t know what he doing.’

  And then Elias’s mother died, and had the shabbiest and the saddest and the loneliest funeral Miguel Street had ever seen.

  That empty front room became sadder and more frightening for me.

  The strange thing was that I felt a little sorry for George. The Miguel Street men held a post-mortem outside Hat’s house. Hat said, ‘He did beat she too bad.’

  Bogart nodded and drew a circle on the pavement with his right index finger.

  Edward said, ‘I think he kill she, you know. Boyee tell me that the evening before she dead he hear George giving the woman licks like fire.’

  Hat said, ‘What you think they have doctors and magistrates in this place for? For fun?’

  ‘But I telling you,’ Edward said. ‘It really true. Boyee wouldn’t lie about a thing like that. The woman dead from blows. I telling you. London can take it; but not George wife.’

  Not one of the men said a word for George.

  Boyee said something I didn’t expect him to say. He said, ‘The person I really feel sorry for is Dolly. You suppose he going to beat she still?’

  Hat said wisely, ‘Let we wait and see.’

  Elias dropped out of our circle.

  George was very sad for the first few days after the funeral. He drank a lot of rum and went about crying in the streets, beating his chest and asking everybody to forgive him and to take pity on him, a poor widower.

  He kept up the drinking into the following weeks, and he was still running up and down the street, making everyone feel foolish when he asked for forgiveness. ‘My son Elias,’ George used to say, ‘my son Elias forgive me, and he is a educated boy.’

  When he came to Hat, Hat said, ‘What happening to your cows? You milking them? You feeding them? You want to kill your cows now too?’

  George sold all his cows to Hat.

  ‘God will say is robbery,’ Hat laughed. ‘I say is a bargain.’

  Edward said, ‘It good for George. He beginning to pay for his sins.’

  ‘Well, I look at it this way,’ Hat said. ‘I give him enough money to remain drunk for two whole months.’

  George was away from Miguel Street for a week. During that time we saw more of Dolly. She swept out the front room and begged flowers of the neighbours and put them in the room. She giggled more than ever.

  Someone in the street (not me) poisoned the two Alsatians.

  We hoped that George had gone away for good.

  He did come back, however, still drunk, but no longer crying or helpless, and he had a woman with him. She was a very Indian woman, a little old, but she looked strong enough to handle George.

  ‘She look like a drinker sheself,’ Hat said.

  This woman took control of George’s house, and once more Dolly retreated into the back, where the empty cow-pens were.

  We heard stories of beatings and everybody said he was sorry for Dolly and the new woman.

  My heart went out to the woman and Dolly. I couldn’t understand how anybody in the world would want to live with George, and I wasn’t surprised when one day, about two weeks later, Popo told me, ‘George new wife leave him, you ain’t hear?’

  Hat said, ‘I wonder what he going do when the money I give him finish.’

  We soon saw.

  The pink house, almost overnight, became a full and noisy place. There were many women about, talking loudly and not paying too much attention to the way they dressed. And whenever I passed the pink house, these women shouted abusive remarks at me; and some of them did things with their mouths, inviting me to ‘come to mooma’. And there were not only these new women. Many American soldiers drove up in jeeps, and Miguel Street became full of laughter and shrieks.

  Hat said, ‘That man George giving the street a bad name, you know.’

  It was as though Miguel Street belonged to these new people. Hat and the rest of the boys were no longer assured of privacy when they sat down to talk things over on the pavement.

  But Bogart became friendly with the new people and spent two or three evenings a week with them. He pretended he was disgusted at what he saw, but I didn’t believe him because he was always going back.

  ‘What happening to Dolly?’ Hat asked him one day.

  ‘She dey,’ Bogart said, meaning that she was all right.

  ‘Ah know she dey,’ Hat said. ‘But how she dey?’

  ‘Well, she cleaning and cooking.’

  ‘For everybody?’

  ‘Everybody.’

  Elias had a room of his own which he never left whenever he came home. He ate his meals outside. He was trying to study for some important exam. He had lost interest in his family, Bogart said, or rather, implied.

  George was still drinking a lot; but he was prospering. He was wearing a suit now, and a tie.

  Hat said, ‘He must be making a lot of money, if he have to bribe all the policemen and them.’

  What I couldn’t understand at all, though, was the way these new women behaved to George. They all appeared to like him as well as respect him. And George wasn’t attempting to be nice in return either. He remained himself.

  * * *

  One day he said to everyone, ‘Dolly ain’t have no mooma now. I have to be father and mother to the child. And I say is high time Dolly get married.’

  His choice fell on a man called Razor. It was hard to think of a more suitable name for this man. He was small. He was thin. He had a neat, sharp moustache above neat, tiny lips. The creases on his trousers were always sharp and clean and straight. And he was supposed to carry a knife.

  Hat didn’t like Dolly marrying Razor. ‘He too sharp for we,’ he said. ‘He is the sort of man who wouldn’t think anything about forgetting a knife in your back, you know.’

  But Dolly still giggled.

  Razor and Dolly were married at church and they came back to a reception in the pink house. The women were all dressed up, and there were lots of American soldiers and sailors drinking and laughing and congratulating George. The women and the Americans made Dolly and Razor kiss and kiss, and they cheered. Dolly giggled.

  Hat said, ‘She ain’t giggling, you know. She crying really.’

  Elias wasn’t at home that day.

  The women and the Americans sang Sweet Sixteen and As Time Goes By. Then they made Dolly and Razor kiss again. Someone shouted, ‘Speech!’ and everybody laughed and shouted, ‘Speech! Speech!’

  Razor left Dolly standing by herself, giggling.

  ‘Speech! Speech!’ the wedding guests called.

  Dolly only giggled more.

  Then George spoke out. ‘Dolly, you married, it true. But don’t think you too big for me to put you across my lap and cut your tail.’ He said it in a jocular manner, and the guests laughed.

  Then Dolly stopped giggling and looked stupidly at the people.

  For a moment so brief you could scarcely measure it there was absolute silence; then an American sailor waved his hands drunkenly and shouted, ‘You could put this girl to better work, George.’ And everybody laughed.

  Dolly picked up a handful of gravel from the yard and was making as if to throw it at the sailor. But she stopped suddenly, and burst into tears.

  There was much laughing and cheering and shouting.

  I never knew what happened to Dolly. Edward said one day that she was living in Sangre Grande. Hat said he saw h
er selling in the George Street Market. But she had left the street, left it for good.

  As the months went by, the women began to disappear and the numbers of jeeps that stopped outside George’s house grew smaller.

  ‘You gotta be organized,’ Hat said.

  Bogart nodded.

  Hat added, ‘And they have lots of nice places all over the place in Port of Spain these days. The trouble with George is that he too stupid for a big man.’

  Hat was a prophet. Within six months George was living alone in his pink house. I used to see him then, sitting on the steps, but he never looked at me any more. He looked old and weary and very sad.

  He died soon afterwards. Hat and the boys got some money together and we buried him at Lapeyrouse Cemetery. Elias turned up for the funeral.

  4 HIS CHOSEN CALLING

  AFTER MIDNIGHT THERE were two regular noises in the street. At about two o’clock you heard the sweepers; and then, just before dawn, the scavenging-carts came and you heard the men scraping off the rubbish the sweepers had gathered into heaps.

  No boy in the street particularly wished to be a sweeper. But if you asked any boy what he would like to be, he would say, ‘I going be a cart-driver.’

  There was certainly a glamour to driving the blue carts. The men were aristocrats. They worked early in the morning and had the rest of the day free. And then they were always going on strike. They didn’t strike for much. They struck for things like a cent more a day; they struck if someone was laid off. They struck when the war began; they struck when the war ended. They struck when India got independence. They struck when Gandhi died.

  Eddoes, who was a driver, was admired by most of the boys. He said his father was the best cart-driver of his day, and he told us great stories of the old man’s skill. Eddoes came from a low Hindu caste, and there was a lot of truth in what he said. His skill was a sort of family skill, passing from father to son.

  One day I was sweeping the pavement in front of the house where I lived, and Eddoes came and wanted to take away the broom from me. I liked sweeping and I didn’t want to give him the broom.