Fete-finished feet change into old sneakers. Hands pull ragged T-shirts and shorts from car trunks. Ripping. Baby oil slathering, skin greasing. Women tuck hair under caps, men fix wigs, before waves of footsteps tramp through sleeping side streets. And the bands of vagabonds, pagans, and cursed are gathering, at 4:00 a.m.
They laugh loud and share bottles of spirits. Liquor fires voices and the last few asleep wake and stare. Independence Square is the deadly magnet, pulling trucks full of steelpan, sound systems, hoarse singers, and the hordes of devils — mud, cocoa, paint-covered bodies, and lost souls. Jab Molassie. Crude-oil rhythm. A guttural, primal scream is building, coming from pavement cracks, the bellies of rats, the white-rum spittle of the madwoman, from the city itself and its demons.
* * *
Ata goes with Fraser, Vernon, and Alan to the edge of the cauldron. They park by the empty Savannah and walk through residential Woodbrook, to the Slingerite Jouvert band starting point. Ata’s same vagrant square. Ghosts of the homeless are there in the crowd now, alive like the throbbing truck, volume on the huge speakers turning up, louder.
“You should have joined,” Fraser says to her.
Ata takes a swig from the bottle Vernon hands her, coughs, and shakes her head. The metallic mixture scours her insides, opens her nostrils.
Vernon’s eyes are red as he looks at the blend of bisexuals, gays, lesbians, heteros, smearing black paint onto each other. He laughs. “Da’ is a batty-boy band.”
She chokes and shakes her head again, handing the bottle back to him.
“So, I guess it’s not for you, then, is it?” Fraser holds Vernon’s red gaze. “At least not in public,” he adds and watches Vernon check Ata quickly.
She turns away as Vernon mutters, “I gone, yuh-see.”
“I need some of that paint.” Ata looks at Fraser lighting a cigarette for Alan as Vernon slips away. She crosses the road to get daubed.
“I need one too.” Ata signals when she returns.
Fraser backs away from her stench and she tries to gauge his glittering eyes. She rubs the black slime across her bare stomach, wipes her face with it, and stamps, opening up her hip bones to the rhythm.
Her legs, like all the others’, start champing and chafing as the truck moves off, dragging them slowly down the street. Fraser’s feet shuffle him along too. Alan walks, just behind, his marijuana veil shutting him out. Like Fraser, he couldn’t take the halfways. As artists, it was their right to be extreme. Fraser couldn’t join in so he wouldn’t dance just a little, he walks. And he asks himself, why even walk and watch, when it’s just a shell of myself moving?
* * *
Vernon heads down Frederick Street to the boiling depths of Independence Square, searching for his fellas wrapped in chains, trailing the heavy lengths behind them.
In the thick of it, no skin bare of jab oil. Mouths dribbling red. Ropes cinching waists, roiling, convulsing on the slick asphalt. Hard hats and sunglasses, coiling tails and pitchforks, rods and whips. Bras squash onto glistening hard chests. Shower caps and granny’s nightie ripping and dripping Huile Diablo.
The lash of a chain on the street or a barricaded shop front, a broken chair frame dragging along, are the cruel, chinkly-metal slave sounds, clearing a path for Vernon and the jabs.
* * *
Ata chips along on the side of the band, tobacco rush giving more head. Bottle and spoon ring ting ting ting. Bram bram … Tin-lash, bat-screech echo … bram bram. Miles, yards of road, writhing snakes to the beat chip chip … to the shuffle and shrill. Unavoidable marching orders.
Ata curls back to Fraser and Alan when they stop. She stays on without them, when they insist.
* * *
Sam holds he daughter against him, sitting low on a bucket, in the yard in Belmont. The child-mother standing at the gate in she big old duster, a do-rag on she head. He could see her bam-bam rolling under the loose clothes, bumping just a little, when she flex her toes in time to the music. Face peeping, hands holding on to the gate — wouldn’t give you no sign she was dancing, otherwise. This mother, eh. Sam hold his baby closer.
Them boys on the corner had wake her up, with they warming-up and daubing-up racket. And then them jab-jabs start passing, and the drunken neighbor step out in he Bat suit. Every year since Sam small heself, this man making up he own black wings and cloaking up heself all over — coming out, well high and drunken, to play Bat for the whole Carnival. And the next neighbor, on the corner there, blasting music right through the three days. Sam know about what does go on in this street. That is why he come to hold his daughter. As a boy, same size as she, his mother used to hold him, and his grandfather would raise him, to see. This is where he bruk out as a boy too, and start to play heself. This must be what they call old now — Sam here holding he lil’ girl and worrying.
* * *
Now Ata and the rum-pickled serpents surge on, shedding, becoming insects. Afro-combs rasp graters, crickets calling dawn — day breaking. They stare at each other’s strange, muddy features. Tiny feet burning, marching still. Dry paint cracking, rattling. Morning releasing full day. Carnival Monday. And they keep chipping, jagged and colorless as a predawn sea, splashing at the foot of the hills.
* * *
Sammy baby’s lil’ heart cool back down now. And the sweet-biscuit she nibbling making her smell even more baby again. She three-year tiny foot looking so new, and fitting the pink slippers so neat. Look at this — she bumping too. Comfortable now in morning light, she bumping her little self and saying, in time, “Haw.” The damn Donkey song pound so much till she know it. “The donkey hee, the donkey haw, the donkey eat with a knife and fork. Whoa…” The mother come bumping to her child, and he see it again, the lil’ dancing. Baby leave him sitting there and she bouncing and stamping. Watch t’ing. His child. And just now she go be wining waist. And then what he go do?
* * *
A syncing crotch nestles up behind Ata’s rolling ass. She slides down and back up, and it follows sweetly. She leans back onto the wet stomach and matching thighs. Gluey with the Donkey laugh, she looks over her shoulder and the girl’s perfect teeth grin at her.
The band bunches up for their last ole-mas jump. The stands and bare stage sprawl open and wide for them, day-hot. They mount. And the hills clap. Applauding no one but their soaked-up, nasty selves, stretching a tongue, a foot in the air, stamping and prancing and dancing on that big stage. “Gone clear.”
One on top another, on top another, pumping. “Juxtaposition.” Thong in a man’s crease, buttocks quivering.
They trickle down the exit ramp, sated. Stained up and spent but beaming, with the broad daylight and hills. Heat-ripple thirst wavering, seeking water.
“HOW I LONG TO SWIM,” Fraser says to Alan.
The clear morning sparkles his tiles bluer than the Tobago sea. “What I would give just to float…”
“I could take you to the beach, it’d be empty now.”
“And do what — sit and watch? Dip my feet? The doctor says I’ll be able to swim again in a few months’ time.”
The nurses has gone, Fraser had asked them to leave early. Instead of breakfast now, he sits puffing smoke on the veranda with Alan. The faint sounds of the end of Jouvert barely make their way into the green valley.
“I could cook, so when Helen and that lot come by, we have a lime, like we used to.”
Fraser turns his appetite-less eyes on Alan and he shuts up. They are huge now, his eyes. Clear at this moment but far as the little clouds in the distance. His fingers are longer too. Fraser admires his own slender hand dangling the cigarette and notices how straight the smoke rises. Not a breath, on his veranda. Nor a strand of will to deal with the counseling, the contacts, the fuckers … Alan hasn’t said anything even though he must know.