He rowed, and they said nothing more, and in a while they had returned to shore and life among the people who lived there. A few of them were in the water and on the beach when the dark green rowboat touched land and the black man stepped out and drew the boat onto the sand. The old man in the white bathing cap was standing in waist-deep water, and the woman who was the manager of the trailerpark stood near the edge of the water, cooling her feet and ankles. The old man with the cob pipe was still chipping at the bottom of his rowboat, and next to him, watching and idly chatting, stood the kid with the long blond hair. They all watched silently as the black man turned away from the dark green rowboat and carried his fishing rod and tackle box away, and then they watched the girl, carrying her yellow towel, magazine and bottle of tanning lotion, step carefully out of the boat and walk to where she lived with her mother. It was very hot, and no one said anything.
Dis Bwoy, Him Gwan
IT WAS MID-OCTOBER. The leaves were already off the trees and were leathery brown on the frozen ground, and in the gray skies and early darkness you could feel winter coming on, when one afternoon around four-thirty a blue, late model Oldsmobile sedan with Massachusetts plates slowly entered the trailerpark. It was dark enough so that you couldn’t see who was inside the car, but strange cars, especially out-of-state cars, were sufficiently unusual an event at the trailerpark that you wanted to see who was inside. Terry Constant had just left the manager’s trailer with his week’s pay for helping winterize the trailers, as he did every year at this time, when the car pulled alongside him on the lane, halfway to the trailer he shared with his sister, and Terry, who was tall, wearing an orange parka and Navy watch cap, leaned over and down to see who was inside and saw the face of a black man, which naturally surprised him, since Terry and his sister were the only black people for miles around.
The car stopped, and the man inside rolled down the window, and Terry saw that there was a second man inside, a white man. Both looked to be in their late thirties and wore expensive wool sweaters and smoked cigarettes. The black man was very dark, darker than Terry, and not so much fat as thick, as if his flesh were packed in wads around him. The white man was gray-faced and unshaven and wore a sour expression, as if he had just picked a foul-tasting substance from behind a tooth.
“Hey, brudder,” the black man said, and Terry knew the man was West Indian.
“What’s happening,” Terry said. He kept his hands in his jacket pockets and looked down from his full height.
“Me wan fine a particular youth-mon, him cyall himself Seberonce, mon. You know dis a-mon, me brudder?” The man smiled and showed Terry his gold.
“Bruce Severance?”
“Dat de mon.”
“He ain’t here.”
The man smiled steadily up at Terry for a few seconds and finally said, “But him lib here.”
“Yeah.”
“Where him lib, tell me dat.”
“That trailer there,” Terry said, pointing at a pale yellow Kenwood with a mansard roof. The trailer sat on cinderblocks next to a dirt driveway, and the yard was unkempt and bare, without shrubbery or lawn.
“Okay, mon, many tanks,” the black man said, still smiling broadly, and he rolled the window up, stopped smiling, backed the car into the driveway of the trailer opposite, and headed slowly back out to the main road.
Terry stood and watched the car leave, then walked on, turning in at his sister’s trailer, which was dark, for she wasn’t home from work yet, and made to unlock the door, when he heard his name coming at him from the darkness.
“Terry!” A blond, long-haired kid in a faded Levi jacket stepped around from the back end of the trailer and came up to him.
“Hey, man, some dudes was just looking for you.”
“I know, get inside,” the kid said urgently, and he pushed at Terry’s shoulder.
“Take it easy, man.” He unlocked the door and stepped inside, and the skinny kid followed him like a shadow.
“Don’t turn on the lights. No, go back to your room and turn on one light, then come here. If they know you were coming here and then no lights go on, they’ll figure something’s up.”
“What the hell you talking about? You high?”
“Do it. I’ll explain.”
Terry did as he was told and came back to the darkened kitchen, where the kid, Bruce Severance, was standing at the window peeking out at the entrance to the trailerpark. Terry opened the refrigerator, throwing a wedge of yellow light into the room.
“Shut that fucking thing!” the kid cried.
“Take it easy. Want a beer?”
“No. Yeah, okay, just shut the door, will you?”
“Sure.” He took out two cans of Miller’s and shut the refrigerator door, dropping the room into darkness again. Handing the kid one of the cans, he slid onto a tall stool at the kitchen counter and snapped open his beer and took a long swallow. Across the room by the window the kid opened his beer and started slurping it down.
“I thought you was down in Boston,” Terry said.
“I was, but I came back up this morning.”
“Where’s your van?”
“I put it someplace.”
“You put it someplace.”
“Yeah. Listen, man, there’s some heavy shit going down. When’s your sister come home?”
“Around five-thirty,” Terry said.
They sat in silence for a few seconds, and then Terry said in a low voice, “Your deal came apart, huh? That’s your Jamaican out there, and his friend, right?”
“Right.”
“They didn’t want to buy your New Hampshire homegrown? Good old Granite State hemp grown wild in the bushes ain’t smoke enough for the big boys. Funny.” He paused and sipped his beer. “I’m not surprised.”
“You’re not.”
“No. When those kinda guys set something up and it’s running smoothly along like it’s been doing, with you doing the dealing and them doing the supplying for as long as this setup’s been working, they get mad if you try to change the rules. But you, I guess you know that now.”
The kid said nothing. A minute passed, and then he said almost in a whisper, “If you’re not surprised, how come you never said anything?”
“You wouldn’t have heard me.”
“They just said they didn’t want to buy, they wanted to sell.”
“You let ’em try some smoke?”
“Yeah, sure. We met, just like usual. In the motel in Revere. And I gave them both a joint without telling them what it was, you know?”
“And first whack, they knew you had something they didn’t sell you, right?”
“Yeah. But they didn’t believe it was hemp. They thought I was dealing for somebody else. They knew it wasn’t red or gold or ganja or anything they’d smoked before, but they wouldn’t believe this shit is growing wild all over the place up here. I told them all about the war, and the stuff about the Philippines and the government paying the farmers to grow hemp for rope back then and how the stuff went wild after the war, all of it! But they thought I was shitting them, man.”
“I wouldn’t have believed you, either.”
“But you know it’s true! You’ve seen it, you even helped me dry the damned stuff and brick and bale it! You even smoke it yourself!”
“No more, man. The shit makes me irritable.”
“It makes you high, too,” the kid said quickly.