Iron Balloons Read online

  “So how I know Pelham and Tina?” the coughing smoker paraphrased. He rocked back and forth in the damp grass, looked up at the star-spangled sky, and paused to watch the gyrating mass of bodies on the deck of a projecting section of the second floor.

  “They said you were staying with them,” said the owner, whose name was Anil.

  The coughing smoker grunted, “Through work,” but stopped short of explaining that he was a banker like Pelham though he’d worked in theater since he was a child.

  What would have been the point? Anil was a bookseller whose big new house had only one shelf of books. On another evening, at another time, he would have said something snide. But to be snide you have to feel superior, and in this case he did not. The man had things he didn’t have.

  The man had his son.

  “I got the glass because I wanted to give the house a spiritual feel,” said Anil. “Like a temple or a church, you know. The way they kidnapping people in Trinidad these days, in all you do, you better keep God close by.”

  “God does whatever he wants to do,” the coughing smoker said, taking a pull and coughing through the mentholscented smoke. Under his breath, he said, “If he exists at all.”

  He glanced up out of habit when he said this and shifted to the side. His reaction made him feel stupid. His shift had been reflexive, but in any case too slow, nothing you could say was lightning quick, nothing that could beat a thunderbolt. So what had been the point? There was no point. Which was the point. Which was why he felt stupid. Stupid in the presence of Anil, whom he thought of as a stupid man.

  Self-conscious now, he began to see himself the way that others saw him, and saw himself the way he was—terse in speech, erect in posture, shoulders square, gaze slanted—and he made a show of moving like the music moved him.

  It was a fast, percussive soca tune, repetitive and simple as rain, but he moved slowly, torso bouncing on the bass line, head nodding off the beat.

  “This is a good fête you have here, my friend … nice house too … but by the way, you heard anybody say if they found a chain?”

  “No. You lose one?”

  “I think so. The clasp was giving trouble and I forgot to fix it.” He slipped his hand inside his shirt and made quick searching moves along his neck. “Listen. I catch you later. I going and retrace my steps.”

  He lied. He hadn’t worn a chain in his life. Yes, he lied. And so have I … but not directly … in a way. You could call it acting. I’m the coughing smoker. This is all about me.

  Tina met me in the living room, which was overdone with stuffed chairs in frames of dark wood. In another house, mahogany is the wood you’d assume, but Anil is the kind of guy who’d import dark wood from Botswana at four times the cost, who’d make a point to buy things that allow him to say, “Is one in the island. Only one in the place.”

  Tina sat across from me beneath a heavy chandelier. There was a glass table between us and we made small talk. She used to be a flight attendant in the air hostess days and she’d read some news in the Guardian that morning about BWIA that made her think for sure that by year-end the airline would be closing down.

  She asked about Anil and I answered while imagining whole scenes in which he appeared with his son, the son telling him that it was insensitive and plain stupid to have a contractor redo the plans he took the time to draw, and him telling the son that he think he know every damn thing because he go to big school in England. Line by line, beat by beat, scene by scene, I built it up, while Tina, in a low red top and tight black pants, hair pulled back into a frizzy bun, watched me through the mentholated haze, bemused.

  In another country, Tina would have been mistaken for a trophy wife. She was thin with high cheekbones and breasts that were pertish even though they’d nursed four children. With a shade seen only on brass instruments and certain roasted nuts, her skin was a lust-arousing bronze; but here in Trinidad she was less a trophy than a nice enamel mug.

  “There’s a fellow been asking for you,” she said. “Say he want to meet you but he kinda shy. Say he writes plays and he did you in CXC. You want me bring him to meet you?” Before I could reply, she added, “I going to find him and two glass o’ rum.”

  I was expecting a boy of eighteen or so, but instead I met a man. He was dark with a nose that looked like a frog about to jump; and without looking, I could tell his skin was rolly-rolly where his head met his neck.

  “Roger John,” he said to introduce himself, while swiftly executing several moves—taking my hand, lighting a cigar, sitting down, and shaking his head as he cleared his throat.

  “Lemme tell you something,” he began, in a voice whose loudness I was sure would get no less if the music was turned down. “You change my life and you don’t even know. If it wasn’t for you, I would still be doing what I was doing before. But because o’ you I leave that one time. I was a police. From I leave secondary school I gone in the force. And I moving up and moving up and moving up and t’ing, getting promote and promote and promote, but I never feel no satisfaction. And I keep saying, ‘Is what so? Is why I ain’t satisfy?’ Same time, all my friends and them was telling me I had a flair. Cause I is a man could take off anybody from I was a small, small child. Any little t’ing you could say or do, I could do it just so.”

  He held out the cigar to me as if it was a ganja spliff. I reached for it and then declined, remembering that when he spoke he made a kind of squashing sound as if his mouth had extra spit.

  “So anyway,” he continued, “I say maybe is because I never pass no subjects in school. And I start to study that, and when they kick me off the force cause they say I taking bribe and all kinda mix-up, Anil hire me as a bodyguard, cause you know dem fellas and dem like to kidnap dem Indians cause they have the money to pay. So one day, he ask me where I get my flair and I say I have that flair from I born and he now tell me that I belong in show business. And you know what? Is like God was talking to me. And I say I going and develop my talent. But I say at my age now I ain’t want to start at the bottom, so I say lemme take some evening classes and do some subjects. And when I doing English literature I come across your play, Uncle Tony Never Come Back, and I say, ‘You know what, boy, you should stop this foolishness ’bout show business and all that, but you should still use your natural flair—cause I’m a people person—and write some plays.’ So I start to write some skits. Well, as you know, Anil is a businessman, and when I show him what I doing and tell him that I ain’t bothering with the classes again, he say this t’ing could make some money, and he lend me some and I put on the play and it was a hit. And the rest, as they say, is luxury. You ever hear ’bout we? Crack Up & Company.”

  The look on my face must have told him that I hadn’t, so he went on talking and I leaned forward with my elbows on my knees as if in deep interest, but the truth was that I’d seen a woman who even in this country could have been a trophy wife, and leaning forward offered me a better look.

  She’d come around and down the spiral stairs behind and to the right of him, paused to look into her bag, then moved toward my right, his left, drawing my eyes but not my head, in sly pursuit.

  When she disappeared out of the living room into the passageway, I felt compelled to cast my mind around the corner, to pursue a glimpse of her through concrete walls.

  In those days, I was no longer what you’d call a believer. I’d already lost religious faith; but I still had trust in certain instincts, still believed I had the knack for telling when a special thing would come my way. My wife, Maria, used to call my instincts animalistic, used to cuss and say I was a ruthless predator who needed flesh to stay alive, that my instincts had one purpose, finding women dumb enough to stray ’way from their herd.

  Yes, I’ve failed Maria. But she’s not the only one. I’ve failed more important people in more fundamental ways.

  “Roger,” I muttered, as I thought of one of them, “can you bring another rum?” He’d begun to talk about collaborating on “a modern
type o’ version” of The Joker of Seville.

  He continued slinging words across his shoulder as he walked away. When he reached the landing of the spiral stairs, I turned my head to watch the wall.

  My palms began to itch and I rubbed them as I talked to Maria in my mind—I’ve never found seduction easy. It’s never really simple. At first. There’s a part in the beginning when the glands are warming up and the old fears about yourself are hard and cold. When the glands are warm and the fears heat up, the fears will melt. But till then they’re hard. Like rock. And you think you’ll never be able to lift them up or roll them back or mash them down.

  If you back out soon, you can be safe. But if you stick it out, man, if you stick it out, and the glands warm up and their heat begins to cause the fears to melt, you’ll get a high, a real high, and you’ll feel like you can play any role you want, that you can play the man you used to be, the one with the prospects, the good playwright, the good husband, the great father—no, the great dad—and you’ll feel a jet of coolness just below the surface of your boiling blood.

  I was in the middle of these thoughts when I sensed the woman coming down the hall. The music was too loud for me to hear her steps along the marble floor, so I stood and looked at Anil’s art collection, which was not as bad as one would be inclined to think. With my back toward her when she came into the room, I thought, I’d sweep around and catch her from a turn. But as I timed her, voices shot above the music like a flock of startled birds.

  “Come here, girl, and meet me father.” I heard the woman laugh and suck her teeth, then Roger asking, “You deaf or you dotish or what?”

  The woman sucked her teeth again.

  “Come,” he said, laughing. “Come. This man is me father right here.”

  He caught me by the arm and turned me, used his other hand, the one with the rum, to fan the woman over, then he gave me the glass. He was standing to the side. She and I were face to face. She was as dark as dried blood, with a plump upper lip, and she wore a floral dress with darts that made it fit. Above her low neckline there was a heavy line of shadow where her bosom pressed together, and a fading scar beneath her right collarbone.

  The first words I heard from her were: “Lord, Roger, why you like to misbehave so?” The second set of words were: “Nice to meet you, Daddy, but I really have to run.”

  I was out in the backyard when I saw her again. Two hours or so had passed. There were three retaining walls that kept the house from sliding off the ridge into flickering Port of Spain, and I was sitting on the highest one.

  Light was spilling from the house and draining down toward me, streaming in between the trees, beading on the blades of shaggy grass.

  My mind was heavy and the weight of all my thoughts had drawn my chin toward my chest. My eyes were closed. I felt sleepy. Five rums had passed and I was trailing off.

  I was halfway gone when my nerves began to buzz. There was a drone inside my head—a slur of heartbeat, music, tree frogs, crickets, wind, and distant human voices, plus the intermittent murmur of an engine woken up to take some people home—and something had disturbed it. Before I looked, I caught her smell. It was musk so I expected Tina. I don’t remember how I felt when I saw her.

  “Is okay for me to pass?” she asked from twenty feet away. She had the wariness of someone speaking to the owner of a cranky-looking dog. “You okay?”

  “Yes,” I said, still sitting. “Yes. What about you?”

  “I didn’t mean to dis you like that before, but I had to take care of a little thing.”

  “Oh. Don’t worry. I didn’t take it too badly.”

  She crossed her arms and moved toward me. In her heels she was a little tentative, and every time she lost her balance she would make a squeaky sound. But soon she was in front of me, so close that touching her would not involve the full extension of my arm.

  “You not from Trinidad …” she began.

  Now my senses were fully aroused.

  “Dominica,” I said coolly. “But I live in Jamaica … Kingston … Kingston, Jamaica … where the bad-johns live.”

  “I couldn’t quite catch the accent. But anyway …” She began to say something, then changed her mind and tried to make a clever observation: “Everybody nowadays is a mix-up, they say.”

  “So they say.”

  “I gone for a smoke.”

  She picked her way along the wall some twenty yards away and lit up. “Don’t mind me,” she said when I caught the early whiffs of ganja. “I could move further down.”

  She was making a bit of a fuss about bothering me, but it was clear that she wanted to talk. When she’s good and ready, she’ll come, I thought. She’s what? Forty? Forty-five? A little younger than me. We ain’t no students. Either of us could teach this class.

  Up the slope in a diagonal, two shadows came from opposite directions, looked around, then lay down quickly in a chaise beside the pool.

  “The smoke is okay?” she asked after being silent for a while.

  “Come here often?” I replied without looking.

  I lit a cigarette. But before I could insert it, I began to cough.

  “Not really,” she said, coming over. “But I had to come. You know how sometimes you run from something, but as time goes on you realize you can’t run anymore? How sometimes you try and resist something and you try and try until you give in because you face the fact that you can’t resist anymore? Well, is like that. I had to come out here. I have a thing to do.”

  “Anil is your boss too?” I said, pretending to be naïve. “Not just Roger John’s? Big party going on and the man giving you things to do?”

  “I never said anything about anybody,” she said, shifting her weight from one leg to the next. “Is more like I’m on a sort of mission.”

  “Oh, excuse me,” I said in Roger’s voice. “Lemme turn my back. Imagine, such a big house with so much space but not enough bathrooms to handle a normal fête crowd. Dem people is crosses in truth.”

  “With such a serious face, who woulda think you was so dotish?” she said through a chuckle, as she put one foot up on the wall right next to me.

  “If you’re on a mission,” I said, “who send you?”

  I was thinking that I knew these kinds of games enough to know that all we had to do was keep it going till one person dropped the subtext and came out straight. Directness would be the cue to act surprised, then flattered, then confused.

  “Who sent me?” she asked, slowly bending and straightening her leg, like she was warming up.

  I brushed imaginary dust from her pumps.

  “Yeah. Who sent you out here at this time of night, in a place where it have bad-johns who live in Jamaica … where they ain’t no decent men? Only rogues.”

  “Your son.”

  “Roger is a fella full o’ jokes, eh? You know he’s not my son, right?” I began to explain, then changed my mind. What would have been the point? The whole thing was too silly. Too complicated. She must have known his introduction was a joke.

  She began to answer, then cut herself off. Fell silent. It was an active silence, one that kept demanding that we talk. I wanted to talk—for there to be talking. Talking had lifted my mood. But I didn’t quite know what to say. I was in that stage before the glands had fully warmed, and the old fears were still looking heavy and tough. I began to smoke again.

  If either of us had walked away at this point, there’d be no story to tell. But maybe it wasn’t just the staying. Maybe it was the staying plus the cough. Because it was the cough that made her touch me. It was a simple pat on the back, then a resting palm, fingers kneading knots from my shoulder.

  Without asking, I laid my face on her raised leg. The skin was warm and damp with perspiration and must have been smooth. I don’t know. I’d planned to wait awhile before I rubbed.

  “You know, I’m not here to talk about Roger,” she said, holding the weight of my head with the muscles of her thigh.

  “I know,” I sai
d, my mind advancing to the moment when she’d let me touch her in more daring ways.

  I wrapped one arm around her calf and drew it closer. She pulled away, dropped her foot, and took some hasty backward steps.

  “I was sent here by your son.”

  I picked up my rum glass, which had been sitting on the wall. I shook my head and drained the glass. “You wouldn’t understand.”

  “How you so sure?”

  I passed the glass from hand to hand. “Because … because … because there are a lot of things you don’t understand.”

  “I might surprise you.”

  I wheeled around and threw the glass away. “My blasted son is dead.”

  There’s a story that my older brother Kenny likes to tell. Many years ago, at a party in Dominica, a woman walked up to him and said, “You know, every time I look at you I have to shake my head.”

  “Yeah? And why’s that?”

  “Because when you were twelve, you died—for a good few minutes—and came back to life again.”

  She told Kenny that our father had brought him to the hospital to have his tonsils taken out and that during the operation he’d died. His eyes had rolled over and he’d lost his pulse.

  They tried to revive him. CPR. Other things I have forgotten now. Perhaps electric shock. Then, as the doctor moved to drape him and pronounce the time of death, my brother moved his hand, flexed his wrist, I think—there’ve been many versions of the story, so it’s hard to say which one is true—breathed deeply, and began to live again.

  Kenny claims to have a memory of another life. But in truth, he’s claimed a lot of things, among them that I’m going to go to hell because I’m an unbeliever, that I have a sly vindictive side, and that I did everything possible to save Pierre, my son.

  Whenever he tells the story of his crossing—the words are his, not mine—he always says it had the feeling of a dream. And whenever I ask him how he knows it wasn’t just a dream, he tells me that he simply knows, that it didn’t look like a dream, that the best way he can explain it is by saying he knows it in the way he knows when a movie was shot on video or film, that it’s a deepness thing, a texture thing, a feel thing, a mood.