Guerrillas

“He didn’t say anything. But I assume the boys are still in control. The only lucky thing is that none of the big guys have been killed yet. Because, once that kind of killing starts, it isn’t going to stop. It’s going to be South America for a couple of generations. Meredith frightened me on Sunday. He talked about Jimmy Ahmed as though he wanted to kill the man. I’d never heard anything like that before. But that was when they were dressing Merry up to throw him to the crowd. Now the two of them have to run.”

  Roche said, “So Jimmy is washed up?”

  “I think so. According to what I hear. Nobody is mentioning him anymore. He gambled and lost.”

  Roche said, “I can’t imagine Jimmy taking that kind of gamble. I wonder whether things didn’t just happen around him.”

  Harry said, “Jimmy was always washed up here. I don’t know who told him otherwise. I don’t know what they told him in London. But at a time like this he is just another Chinaman.”

  Roche said, “I suppose I’m washed up too.”

  Harry said, “I wouldn’t say so.”

  Roche smiled. “Sablich’s will also want to dress up somebody to throw to the crowd.”

  Harry said, “Let us listen to the news, nuh. Bring out the radio, nuh, Jane. They had a little thing on it last night. I don’t know whether you hear it. ‘The causes of the disturbances are still not clear.’ ”

  She went and got their plastic-cased transistor and tuned it to the local station. Bringing Christ to the Nation ended. The announcer hurried through a commercial, identified his station; and the news from London was relayed. Reception was good. There was nothing on the headlines, nothing during the first half of the news. Then it came, after an item about Argentina.

  “… still tense after two days of rioting. Earlier reports of police desertions and the resignation of the government have now been officially denied. Government sources now say that the police have returned in strength to most areas of the capital from which they had previously withdrawn, and that most services are working normally. There are no reports of casualties. The causes of the disturbance are still not clear. But a correspondent in the area says in a despatch to the BBC that speculation about a concerted anti-government rebellion can be discounted. It seems more likely, the correspondent adds, that the disturbances were sparked off by radical youth groups protesting against unemployment and what they see as continued foreign domination of the economy …”

  Jane said, “I’m glad to know what it’s all about.”

  Harry said, “You mean about the ‘foreign domination.’ But in the end, you know, that is what those guys down there would believe they were doing. Because what they’re doing is too crazy.”

  “That’s how it will go down in the books,” Roche said. “That’s how it will be discussed. That’s what you can start believing yourself. And start acting on.”

  Dazzle, like the dazzle of the sea, came to a part of the city: the new tin roofs of the shantytown redevelopment, catching the sun.

  Harry said, “Police withdrawing from areas of the city? I am damn glad I didn’t know it was so bad.”

  “Perhaps in a couple of days we’ll know how bad it is now,” Roche said.

  They sat and watched the silent city. They began to feel the heat of the sun on their faces and legs. The wet Bermuda grass was drying out. In the light the old fires in the city hardly seemed to smoke.

  Harry said, “We used to have a private security patrol up here. Ten dollars a month. Twenty-four hours. I bet you a lot of people now wish we still had it.”

  Jane said, “Why did you stop?”

  Harry made a theatrical sour face and hunched his shoulders up and down. “Some people say they didn’t like it, some people say it was too expensive. But mostly it was because in a situation like this people never cooperate. They always think they can buy peace for themselves when the time comes, and so they get picked off one by one. They much prefer doing what they’re doing now. You know Yvette, Jane? She is baking cakes for the police. And, my dear, icing them. As though is some kind of kiddies’ carnival going on in the station. And Joseph too. Making his nice little sandwiches. He even chopping off the crust.”

  Jane said, “Ten dollars a month? Was that all they charged?”

  Roche said, “It was cheap, wasn’t it, Jane?”

  “Per house,” Harry said. “But they weren’t so hot, you know. Some smart guy came down from the States and decided to give the guards motorbikes and two-way radios, and to increase the charge to twenty dollars a month. And that was that. Those guys just went crazy about their bikes and radios. They start going so fast that if you stand outside your gate and shout ‘Help!’ you’d be damn lucky if they hear you.”

  PRECISELY AT eight o’clock the helicopters arrived. A magnified mosquito hum at first, and then, very quickly, a roar and a clacking, destroying silence, making conversation impossible on the porch. They came from the right, from a source in a part of the bay hidden by the hills. The noise of one helicopter overrode the noise of the others. The house seemed to shake, and the brick-floored porch on its platform of packed earth felt unstable. (The porch, built on sloping land, had sunken in once before; the surface bricks had been taken up then, and there had been nothing below, a depression, the packed earth having subsided.) Noise engulfed the house; dust blew about. The pale shadow of the flying craft rippled down the sloping garden and then fell on the tops of the trees beyond the gully at the foot of the garden. The American markings on the helicopter were large; the men inside weren’t in uniform.

  Other helicopters were flying over other areas of the hills. And, in the distance, helicopters of another type, seemingly broken-backed, were moving in staggered flights of three across the sea that was still smooth, across the gray-green mangrove and the brown plain to the airport, hovering close to the ground there, then rising and flying back the way they had come, black insects returning to their hidden nest.

  Harry said, “Licks.”

  Noise engulfed the house again: the patrol helicopter returning. It covered them with its shadow; the porch felt fragile. And the air was full of dust.

  Away on the plain the helicopters continued to move in threes, coming down to the airport and almost settling, and then whirling away as if angered.

  Harry said, “Peter, you have glasses? Binoculars, nuh.”

  Roche shook his head. His face had gone blank.

  Harry said, “I hope Joseph ain’t running out into the garden with my glasses. It’s just the kind of thing he would do. Foolish, nuh. But they would pick him off easy-easy from up there. I must say I feel naked like hell sitting out here. The Americans shoot everybody. They’re worse than the South Americans.”

  Roche said, “We didn’t have to wait too long to find out how bad it is.”

  Harry said, “And I was trying to hide a little revolver from Joseph. I was wondering when this was going to happen. The Americans are not going to let anybody here stop them lifting bauxite. You see, Jane? They don’t just read pornography.”

  They heard their helicopter come close, and they waited. But this time it flew lower, seeming to follow the road down to the city.

  Harry said, “I knew this government could never fall. It’s like that advertisement for Rawlplug or whatever it is. Fix and forget.”

  Roche said, “I saw this once before. Or something like it. I saw a small town emptying. It was in the middle of the day. The cars were racing out in one direction. Along the same road in the other direction a column of armored vehicles was moving in. They don’t move fast, but they always look as though they do. Behind them was a column of mounted policemen with guns. They were taking their time. They had all the time in the world. Even a small man looks tall on horseback. They were wearing flak jackets, so that they looked like invalids with weak chests, as though they were all feeling very cold. I believe it was the most obscene thing I had ever seen. Preparations for a killing.”

  Jane said, “You mean we just have to sit here and watch this ha
ppen?”

  Roche said, “You won’t see anything from up here.”

  They remained on the porch, talking little, watching. But there was little new to see. They saw only what they had already seen: the helicopters patrolling the hills above the city, the other helicopters ferrying men and vehicles to the airport.

  The sun grew hotter; slowly over the hills and the plain the bush fires were rekindled. They left the porch and went inside. They were subdued. They sat in the front room, still cool, and looked out through the picture window at the brown lawn and the contracting black shadow of the house.

  Harry said, “I can tell you what is happening down there now. A lot of guys are running for cover. Every man is sobering up fast. Everybody forgetting about the palm branch and the Arrow of Peace. ‘Me? How you could think I had anything to do with that nonsense?’ The same people who were going to pull the place down. Every man is now a government man, and they love the Americans. The whole thing can make you cry.”

  Then silence returned, and they listened, waiting for disturbance. The light hardened; the heat began to have a settled quality. From time to time, with relief, they heard the clacking of a helicopter. The brown lawn became bright; the picture window began to radiate heat. They were silent. The emptiness of the house became oppressive; they became dissatisfied with being together. Each of them wished to be alone.

  In the cool of the early morning both Roche and Jane had been glad to see Harry. Now, with a formality they would have used with a stranger, they saw him to his car. His white canvas shoes made his feet look as big and busy as before; the antique revolver bulged in the pocket of his tight shorts. But he took desolation with him; and he left desolation behind.

  At midday they closed the back door, shutting out the glare of the porch and the view of the city, where here and there, on a tin roof, sunlight glinted, where swamp and sea and land blurred in the heat haze. They waited for disturbance. But the city remained silent. There was no sound of disturbance, no sound of gunfire. All afternoon there was silence.

  There was silence when they opened the back door again and sat out on the porch in the shadow of the house. The declining sun touched the rainless clouds and the high-banked smoke of bush fires and the rubbish dump with bright color. A bicycle bell rang somewhere below and the noise came up clear. Then a radio was heard, and another radio seemed to answer from another part of the hills. The city was returning to life at sunset, slowly, returning to life as it did—in times that now seemed remote—after very heavy rain. The lights came on. There were few patches of darkness; there were no fires. And all around and below the hills radios played.

  But the house on the Ridge remained empty, dead. Adela, reappearing in the morning, moved without her thumping strides. Her flesh seemed to have grown softer; she moved as though not wishing to draw attention to herself. The tension seemed to have gone out of her body. Her nostrils no longer quivered, and there was a little smile in her round eyes. No one asked her about her absence, but she said, “My godmother was very sick.”

  “HELP DE poor! I am very grateful. Help de blind! I am very t’ankful.” The blind and legless beggar was back, red blank eyes in an upturned face, his chant steady and loud, gliding about his stretch of pavement on his little low cart.

  Friday afternoon, and the city center had filled up again: the vendors of sweets and cigarettes and Turf Club sweepstakes; the middle-aged women with “belly-full” cakes and currant rolls in glass cases; the bicycles and the route taxis, the drivers from time to time putting out an arm and making an involved gesture, like a dancer’s gesture, to indicate their route; the coconut carts and vans. Water from a thousand waste pipes ran in the open gutters. But there were no school uniforms among the pavement crowds, and, though there were few policemen, no loitering groups. People looked about them as they walked, and some people walked as if on broken glass. They were rediscovering their city: the arrow daubed and scrawled everywhere, some shop windows still shuttered, some boarded up. One or two shops, smashed open and exposed, seemed to have been abandoned by their owners: the walkers moved away from those, as though part of the pavement had been roped off.

  Roche stood outside Sablich’s parking lot and waited for Meredith.

  Meredith was on time. He was driving his little blue car. Roche had expected something more official. He wasn’t sure how he should greet the friend who had become the minister. For a minute, though, greeting Meredith, opening the car door, getting in, looking with Meredith for traffic before they drove off, it seemed that nothing had changed since Sunday. But as soon as they were in the stream of traffic, and the time had come to speak, Roche felt ill at ease. The words he had been hoping would come to him didn’t come. He was unwilling to say anything about the events of the week, remembering what he had heard from Harry, and from people in the Sablich’s office, about Meredith’s part in those events. He was silent a little too long; and then he saw that it was also too late to say anything about Meredith’s appointment as a minister.

  Meredith said, “I’m glad we were able to do something, Peter. I’m sorry it was such short notice.”

  The friend, the minister, the radio journalist.

  They were driving to the radio station to record the interview for Meredith’s Encounter program. Meredith had mentioned it on Sunday; and Roche hadn’t forgotten. He had speculated about it; he had run through various kinds of interviews in his head; he had prepared. The recording had been arranged the previous day, and apparently in something of a hurry. And it had been arranged rather officially. Meredith’s secretary in the ministry, and not Meredith, had telephoned.

  Roche said, “It may be our last chance.”

  As he spoke, Roche remembered what Jane had said on Sunday. She had said that Meredith didn’t like Roche being on the island; but that when Roche had said he was leaving, Meredith’s face had fallen. Roche glanced now at Meredith. But Meredith’s expression hadn’t changed.

  Meredith said, “Why?”

  “I feel there’s nothing for me to do here.”

  “Don’t say any more. We’ll save it for the studio. Otherwise we’ll lose it. When I spoke to you at Harry’s on Sunday I was thinking we might do something philosophical and offbeat. But it’s all become highly topical. That happens a lot of the time. If you chase the topical too hard you can end up being stale.”

  Everywhere walls and windows were scrawled and daubed with the arrow. But the city showed little damage. Not many buildings had been totally destroyed by fire; and often, even in the streets of the Chinese wholesale food shops and the Syrian cloth shops, though a shop had been blackened at pavement level, its upper floors still looked whole.

  Meredith said, “Miraculously, it still works.”

  And for a moment he was like a friend again, like the man Roche had known in the earliest days. But the alertness was new: the small hunched figure at the wheel, the small gripping hands, child’s hands. The wounded, determined smile, hinting now at secrets, was new, and belonged to a new man—the man receiving looks from people in the streets, and acknowledging the looks with a slight movement of the head: a nod to someone who was looking for a nod, but, to someone who might resent a nod, nothing, just an involuntary movement of the head. He had been confirmed in his power; he was a minister in a government that had survived. But Roche thought that Meredith was still uncertain; he was still a man who thought he was presuming.

  Roche had been embarrassed. Now he began to feel sickened.

  Meredith said, “Jimmy sprang a surprise on us.”

  Roche thought, but without anxiety: He’s prepared something for me.

  Meredith said, “How is Jane?”

  “Jane has very much withdrawn into herself.”

  “I imagine we’ve sunk even lower in her estimation.”

  “She’s leaving us, you know.”

  “One day, I suppose, we’ll go over the brink. It was a close thing, Peter.”

  “Were the helicopters necessary?”


  “I don’t know. The soldiers didn’t leave the airport. But I don’t know.”

  The radio building, a new building on three floors, was set far back from the road. The in-gates and out-gates, on either side of a brick wall, were open. Inside, policemen with rifles stood behind a wooden barrier; they were the first armed policemen Roche had seen that day. Between the whitewashed curbstones of the in-lane and the out-lane there was a garden: the ornamental blue-tiled pool empty; shrubs and plants dusty, growing out of dusty earth, but their flowers bright; clumps of the small gri-gri palm with their curving, notched trunks. The lane was black, freshly surfaced, the asphalt tacky in the heat. The parking lot, marked with new white lines, was in the shadow of the building. Meredith parked carefully, avoiding the white lines.

  When they had got out of the car and were together again, walking to the entrance, which was at the side of the building, out of the sun, Roche said, “What about Jimmy?”

  “He’s not present.”

  “Not present? What do you mean? He’s been arrested?”

  “That would be excessive. There are other people who will settle accounts with Jimmy. He’s in retirement. But you know more about Jimmy than I do.”

  It was cool behind the glass doors. Meredith had lost his uncertainty. Here he was the journalist and the minister; he had stopped smiling and his manner was businesslike and official. The big brown woman at the desk stood up and was introduced to Roche. The policeman with the rifle stiffened and stared.

  Meredith said to the woman, “We’ll use E studio.” He said to Roche, with a smile, “It has a nice view.”

  They took the elevator and went up two floors. Meredith turned on a light in a dark corridor. They went a little way down this corridor, and Meredith pushed open double doors and turned on another dim light. The small room ahead was in darkness, the larger room to the left was bright.

  Meredith said, “The studio manager’s not here. But I think we can go in. As you can see, it isn’t exactly BBC.”

  He led Roche, through double doors, into the larger room. And when they were there he said, “Peter, do you mind waiting here for a little? I’ll go and see what’s happening to the SM.”