“Really?”
“Yeah,” he said, and sprayed some of the ant killer on his legs. His kimono came undone at the belt and fell away from his body. Valerian looked at his genitals and the skinny black thighs. “You can’t go round like that in front of the ladies. Leave that alone, and go tell Sydney to give you some clothes. Tell him I said so.”
The man looked up letting the kimono hang to his sides. “You ain’t gonna turn me in?”
“I guess not. You didn’t take anything, but we’ll have to figure a way to get you some papers. Go on now. Get some clothes.” Valerian took the ant spray and set it down near a heavy plant of many shades of green. Its leaves spread out healthily and long stems stood straight up among them. Stems with closed buds. Valerian peered into the plant and frowned.
“What’s the matter with it?” asked the man. “Looks sick.”
Valerian turned the pot around for a different view. “I don’t know. It’s been in bud like that for I don’t know how long. They won’t open no matter what I do.”
“Shake it,” said the man. “They just need jacking up.” And he walked over to the cyclamen and with thumb and middle finger flicked the stems hard as though they were naughty students.
“What the hell are you doing?” Valerian reached out to grab the man’s hand.
“Don’t worry. They’ll be in bloom tomorrow morning.”
“If they are I’ll buy you a brand-new suit; if they die I’ll have Sydney chase you back into the sea.”
“Deal!” said the man. “I know all about plants. They like women, you have to jack them up every once in a while. Make em act nice, like they’re supposed to.” He finished flicking the cyclamen stems and smiled first to himself and then at Valerian. “Did you ever hear the one about the three colored whores who went to heaven?”
“No,” said Valerian. “Tell me.” And he did and it was a good joke. Very funny and when Jadine ran to the greenhouse certain the noise coming from it was somebody murdering somebody she heard laughter to beat the band.
SYDNEY had put some of his boss’s old clothes in the guest room for him, and Valerian sent him off with Gideon to get a haircut, because Sydney refused flat out to cut it. Valerian half expected the man would get into town and not return, since he had given him enough money to buy some underwear and some shoes that fit him better than his did. While Valerian had dinner alone that night served by a silent steeping butler, and while Margaret pouted in her room and Jadine ate with Ondine in the kitchen, Mr. Green alias Son drifted off with Gideon and Thérèse in the Prix de France. With country people’s pride in a come-from-far guest, they paraded the American Negro through the streets of town like a king. Gideon even got one of his friends to give them a free taxi ride to the outskirts of town, and then they had to walk and walk and walk up into the hills to Place de Vent before they reached the powder pink house where he lived with Thérèse and, sometimes, Alma Estée.
Thérèse was in ecstasy and kept moving her head about the better to see him out of her broken eyes. As soon as they had got ashore she let it be known to every island Black she saw that they had a guest, a visitor from the States, and that he was going to spend the night. Her pride and her message ran all over the streets and up the hillside, and at various times during the evening, heads poked in her doorway, and neighbors dropped by on some pretense or other. Thérèse sent Alma Estée flying back down the hill to the market for a packet of brown sugar, and she went into the bag that hung by her side under her dress for money for goat meat and two onions. Then she brewed black thick coffee while she listened to the men talk and waited her turn. Gideon told her stories on Isle des Chevaliers, but here at home he did not socialize with her—he kept to himself or spent his free time with old cronies. Only at work on the island of the rich Americans did he entertain her. Now she was to be privy to the talk between them, and in her house at that. She would also have a chance to ask the American Black herself whether it was really so that American women killed their babies with their fingernails. She waited until Gideon had cut his hair with clippers he’d borrowed from the man who sold rum. Waited until great clouds of glittering graphite hair fell to the floor and on the bedspread they had wrapped around the man’s neck and the front of his whole body. Waited until Gideon was through with his boasts about when he was in the States, boasts about the nurse he had married, the hospital he had worked in, the hatefulness of that nurse and all American women. Waited until Gideon had lied about all the money he made there and why he returned home. Waited until the stranger who ate chocolate and drank bottled water was properly shorn and his neck dusted with baking soda, and Alma Estée was back and the meat was frying on the two-burner stove. Waited till they ate it and drank coffee loaded with sugar. Waited till they opened the bottle of rum and the chocolate eater had coughed like a juvenile with his first taste of it. Thérèse served the two men but did not eat with them. Instead she stood at the portable stove burning the hair she had swept up from the floor, burning it carefully and methodically with many glances at the chocolate eater to show him she meant him no evil. When they had eaten and Thérèse had grown accustomed to the rhythm of their guest’s English, she joined them at the table. Alma Estée sat on the cot by the window.
Son smoked Gideon’s cigarettes and poured the rest of the rum into his coffee. He stretched his legs and permitted himself a hearthside feeling, comfortable and free of postures and phony accents. The tough goat meat, the smoked fish, the pepper-hot gravy over the rice settled in him. It had been served all on one plate and he knew what the delicacies had cost them: the sweet, thick cookies, the canned milk and especially the rum. The nakedness of his face and head made him vulnerable, but his hosts gave him adoration to cover it. Alma Estée had taken off her short print dress and returned in her best clothes—a school uniform—but Son knew right away that she had not had school tuition for a long time now. The uniform was soiled and frayed. He could feel her waves of desire washing over him and for the first time in years he felt like a well-heeled man. Thérèse urged him on into a feast of plantain and fried avocado, then leaned toward him in the lamplight, her broken eyes cheerful, and asked him, “Is it true? American women reach into their wombs and kill their babies with their fingernails?”
“Close down your mouth,” Gideon said to her, and then to Son, “She’s gone stupid as well as blind.” He explained to Son that he used to tell her what working in an American hospital was like. About free abortions and D & C’s. The scraping of the womb. But that Thérèse had her own views of understanding that had nothing to do with the world’s views. That however he tried to explain a blood bank to her, or an eye bank, she always twisted it. The word “bank,” he thought, confused her. And it was true. Thérèse said America was where doctors took the stomachs, eyes, umbilical cords, the backs of the neck where the hair grew, blood, sperm, hearts and fingers of the poor and froze them in plastic packages to be sold later to the rich. Where children as well as grown people slept with dogs in their beds. Where women took their children behind trees in the park and sold them to strangers. Where everybody on the television set was naked and that even the priests were women. Where for a bar of gold a doctor could put you into a machine and, in a matter of minutes, would change you from a man to a woman or a woman to a man. Where it was not uncommon or strange to see people with both penises and breasts.
“Both,” she said, “a man’s parts and a woman’s on the same person, yes?”
“Yes,” said Son.
“And they grow food in pots to decorate their houses? Avocado and banana and potato and limes?”