Bivouac Read online

Ferron studied the short man carefully, trying to construct a fiction around his wrinkled face and bored eyes. The orderly scratched his head with the pencil. Sparse clumps of hair littered the glowing surface. He would make an ugly corpse. Ferron wondered if the orderly ever imagined himself on the trolley. That kind of thinking must come with a job like that. The orderly slipped the pencil behind his ear, which glowed transparent against the sunlight creeping over a huge Bombay mango tree behind the morgue. A line of sweat trickled along a vein that snaked down the middle of his forehead.

  “Well, is him this?” He lifted the edge of the sheet at the old man’s head. The nose was stuffed with bloodstained cotton. The cheeks were bloated. The old man’s face was discolored—bluish. Ferron could see a hint of cotton sticking out of the corner of the mouth, mingling with his graying moustache. His eyes were closed. It was not like sleep—there was nothing there. Nothing.

  “Who you taking him to?” The orderly fanned a fly from the open wound on the right side of the head. “Travis?”

  “No. Abrams,” Ferron said. He wanted to ask about the wound. It was a tidy incision just above the right ear.

  “Abrams? From where? Not from Mandeville?”

  “No, town. We taking him to town.” Ferron tried to discern any reaction from the orderly. There was none. He nodded and then leaned forward, peering at the wound.

  “It will alright,” the orderly said, pointing to the wound with his chin. At first Ferron thought he was talking about the heat in the car and the body. “Tha’s which part the doctor cut, eh? You cut it right there soh, an’ then you strip it back—jus’ fe see the brain, yuh understan’? After dat, yuh jus’ pull it back over. No need to sew ’im up, really. Mos’ time yuh can jus’ hide it. Nobadda fret ’bout it. Is a simple job, you know. Dem can jus’ stitch up clean-clean and pack the head good-good. No problem at all. Nobody will notice,” he assured Ferron with a smile.

  “Right.” Ferron could feel the acid starting to churn in his stomach.

  “Well, the res’ looking quite good, eh? Not bad. Could be worse.” He waited for Ferron to agree.

  Ferron nodded.

  The orderly craned his neck to look under the right ear, then satisfied with his appraisal, he turned to Ferron and reassured him: “Easy job. Them can fix him up no problem. Even me could do it.”

  Ferron smiled stupidly.

  “I know some Morgans, you know? Your people from Mandeville here?” The orderly was organizing the papers on the pad. Ferron just wanted to take the body and leave. He looked down into the parking area for Cuthbert. The Volvo was parked on the banking. The Toyota was gone. Cuthbert was not around.

  “From Mandeville?” the orderly repeated.

  “No, St. Ann.”

  “Oh . . . St. Ann. Nooo . . .” He pulled the sheet over the old man’s face. “I know the face though.”

  “Television,” Ferron mumbled. A part of him hoped his father would be recognized. The squalor of this piece of business had cheapened the man’s death, deprived him of dignity. It embarrassed him.

  “No . . . no.” The orderly passed the clipboard to Ferron, indicating where he should sign.

  Ferron looked back down the hill. Cuthbert was standing beside the Volvo eating from a box of Kentucky chicken. Ferron waved him to come up.

  The orderly took the clipboard from Ferron and walked back into the morgue. A few seconds later he was outside. “Nuh this man use’ to run the Hilo supermarket hereso in Mandeville?”

  “No,” Ferron said. “Not him.”

  “Jesus Christ, the man favor Missa Morgan! Mus’ be a jacket business,” he laughed.

  Ferron watched Cuthbert amble up the pathway with a bundle of white sheets. In the parking area, the Morris Oxford was back. This time the woman walked with three other women. They were dressed in white and their heads were tightly turbanned. The driver of the car, a skinny dark man wearing a red tam, did not get out. The women were singing as they climbed the hill to the morgue.

  “Shit, I know them woulda wan’ come with this foolishness,” the orderly said, hurrying inside.

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  A supposed poet gave me some poems to read. They are awful. He is not a poet. Again the pathos. I shall suggest that he send them to publishers. The pathos is that he thinks he is a poet. Again the arrogance, the lack of humility. The lack of a sense of scale. I do not have the spare energy to deal with this.

  Financial success is unbeatable in a capitalist country and we have it, running into many millions. Just keep up the form, invent new gimmicks, and advertising will do the rest. It cannot ever be important that there are not enough readers to increase sales because readers read to nonreaders and that nonreader is our man and his ignorance must not be disturbed. Keep it that way for as long as possible. The Adult Literacy Program was and is a failure and now we are going to kill it, but delicately, not as crudely as the Jamaica Information Service. What else do we need to kill?

  I must try to probe the backgrounds and working careers of the black people in here. Could it have been a straight political choosing? There was obviously no “cultural” choice; speech will tell you—and speech will suggest that Tivoli Gardens is very strong. Again, my ignorance of offices might be responsible for this. But it is appalling what an effort has to be made by them to speak English. Further resentment comes from the articles I did on the “Great West Indian Writers” in my clearly idiotic effort to let them know that we have had quite gifted writers—world-class writers and there is something of a tradition of good writing. But this fell on deaf ears. And here in the office, it annoyed the younger writers. Too much space given to these old writers, they murmured. Perhaps they are right. After all, these are new times, and that lot were all brainwashed by colonialism and it is roots time, reggae time, man time now. Ah, my Revolution has finally arrived! Revolutions are for the young. I am now, at best, an old campaigner. Well, what to do? My point has been made and as I am clearly not going to be paid separately for doing those articles, I don’t care if the others are not published. I hope the two I did will at least lead to some sales for those writers.

  SIX

  They drove back without stopping. Few words passed between them. Cuthbert drove slowly. He was not sure how he would explain the body to the police if they were stopped. Ferron had somehow not gotten a receipt or whatever was needed from the orderly. Ferron kept looking into the back of the car. A year ago, he had dreamed of his father’s death. They were riding in a taxi, a black cab. His father sat beside him staring out of the window. He was dead.

  “He will alright,” Cuthbert said.

  “I know. It’s just strange. It feel strange,” Ferron said. He looked back again. This is when he noticed the Toyota—the cream-colored one with the two men. The car was behind a truck, but Ferron recognized it from the headlights. They were on in the broad daylight. He kept looking back. The Toyota stayed with them.

  After about an hour he asked Cuthbert to stop at a roadside kiosk. Cuthbert nodded and stopped in front of one of the vendors. Ferron did not move. He looked through the rearview mirror, watching for the Toyota. The Toyota slowed and parked at another kiosk a few yards behind. Ferron stepped out and walked to the vendor, still watching the Toyota. The men were not buying anything. Four boys were shoving plastic bags full of oranges into the windows of the car.

  “Buy me a bag too, eh?” Cuthbert said.

  Ferron bought two bags of oranges and came back to the car. Cuthbert started the engine.

  “Wait,” Ferron said. He was staring in front.

  Cuthbert looked over at his cousin. Ferron peered into the rearview mirror. Cuthbert turned around and then looked in front.

  “You feel they following, eh?”

  “What you think?” Ferron asked.

  “Maybe. But is a free country, man.” Cuthbert started the car and swung onto the road. The Toyota followed.

  In Kingston, Cuthbert lost them. He drove into Beverly Hil
ls at breakneck speed, took a secluded side road, and then doubled back down onto Hope Road. By the time they were in Cross Roads, there was no sign of the Toyota. Cuthbert smiled. “Bitch!” he said. They continued downtown to the funeral home. It was still light when they reached.

  seven

  For the next two days Ferron had the old sensation of wanting to run. This time he was trying to resist the urge, but in the past he’d done that kind of thing a lot. When things became too pressured, he would pack a bag, take a van downtown, and get on the first bus to any destination that suited the length of time he had to escape. If he had a day, he would take a bus to Edgewater—that dry landfill of a suburban experiment which overlooked the Kingston Harbour. He would walk along the scarred, salt-white roads toward the large marl hill where only the most rugged of bramble survived. It was always hot, blazing, unrelenting. He would crawl down a narrow pathway to a small crevice in the face of the hill. This faced the sea and was completely hidden from the road. He would sit there and stare at the sea for hours, simply allowing his mind to empty. Nothing happened around there. The occasional plane would land at Palisadoes, a boat would trundle by, and a few sea gulls would dive at some prey on the water. Nobody would know where he was. He would disappear for the whole day relishing his return to the dorm to the chorus of “Where you was? People was looking for you . . .”

  When he needed to disappear for longer periods, he would take the bus to St. Mary. It was always to the same place, a small community called Clonmel where an old girlfriend of his had grown up. He had spent one summer there working with a church theater group and had become a part of her family. They always welcomed him with fried fish, buttered hardo bread, and milk. They asked no questions. Mr. Robertson was a plump, cheerful man who worked for the Education Ministry, but farmed in St. Mary. His wife was a retired schoolteacher who still ran the small primary school built on their property. All their daughters, seven of them, were either in boarding school, at the university, working in Kingston, or abroad. The parents lived alone and welcomed Ferron’s visits. He would stay for several days, and they would let him stay aloof, go for long walks, or simply talk about anything at all. Nobody knew where he was. Nobody needed to know.

  There was one farther destination he would use when he did not want to see anyone at all. He’d used it when his need to write had been greatest—or his need to make sense of his life. There was something about this place—like a place of punishment. Whenever he felt he’d hurt someone, or failed himself, he’d go there to wallow in self-pity, to suffer from the fear of being alone in the woods, with fantasies of being attacked or killed by some wandering person. The plyboard shack was in an open lot somewhere in Jack’s Hill. He’d discovered it when he was going on a long hike into the hills. Someone must have intended to live there, but changed their mind. They had probably thought better of such seclusion. It was stark, had scarcely any furniture but was quite dry. He’d made a mental note to return there when he needed to. One evening, on a whim, he decided to take the chance. It had been after an argument with Lucas, or something painful like that; he found the hut and spent the night. The fear nearly destroyed him, but he left the next morning feeling somewhat cleansed by the ordeal. He spent three more nights there during the very difficult period of examinations and final assignments; then it became a writing retreat. Nobody, as far as he could tell, knew about the hut, nobody except one of his hallmates. He thought he needed to let at least one person know, so that if he died there, the body would not be left to rot to nothing.

  The last time he’d been there was when the wedding to Delores was in its first incarnation. Two weeks before the event, he’d panicked. He was also working on several postgraduate assignments. At home he grew silent. He could feel heaviness and gloom consuming him. It was not long before he knew he was going to go into the hills to wait out the wedding. He watched friends and relatives planning everything. The old man asked him what was wrong. He did not answer. The old man said laughingly, “You’re going to bolt, aren’t you?” Ferron laughed, and the two just sat there laughing, and nothing else was said.

  He’d bolted the next night. It was that escape to the Jack’s Hill hideaway that now most occupied his thoughts . . .

  * * *

  When his sister and Delores eventually found the hut and tried to bring him home, he’d been there for several days. There were clothes strewn all over the bed and sweat-stained socks stank in a pile behind the door. Books and letters were scattered where he had left them after a frantic search for a lost chapter of his thesis. This document supposedly contained the secret to the completion of the project he was working on. He’d found it, but was wrong. The writing was weak and the only relevant aspect of the paper was a sentence that was in itself a naive misinterpretation. He stopped working on the assignment. He’d brought several packs of beer with him and stayed indoors drinking. After the beer he went hungry; he had no more money.

  He’d spent hours standing at the window looking out into the woodlot. The earth was parched. Whatever grass survived the onslaught of the tractor tires was withered. Huge tire marks crisscrossed through the dried mud. The trees started uncertainly a few chains away from the building. There were stumps and felled trunks tangled among the hardy bramble. Gradually the forest assumed a sturdier character. Beyond that was darkness.

  He’d seen the sky purple gently above the treeline, heard the faint sound of traffic on the highway about a mile away. It would get dark soon. Acid burned in his stomach. He’d felt hungry and worried, certain he had an ulcer, but the pink antacid fluid had dried up in the bottle that lay on its side on the floor. He couldn’t afford another bottle. Probably couldn’t even make it out to the highway . . .

  * * *

  The food was finished but that hadn’t worried him. Hunger would draw something out of him. It produced a mediocre poem about writing. The creative secretions stopped.

  He went to bed early and did not sleep until it got light. No clear moment of structured thought came to him during the night. In the afternoon, when he could think clearly, he could not recall his thoughts of the night before. He burned the poem and placed another sheet of paper in the machine.

  His eyes began to ache again. He rubbed them and winced at the pain. They felt heavy and watery. A grating irritation, like a tiny grain of gravel under the eyelid, cut into one eyeball. He held the eye open until it dripped tears. He hoped that would wash out the particle. When he let the lid fall, the pain was still there. He dragged the lamp with its naked bulb into the bathroom. He stared into the mirror, the light blazing under his chin. The image was grotesque. There were sunken holes on his eye sockets, his cheeks, and under his lip. He pulled open the damaged eye again, raised the lamp to the side, and winced as the glare pierced into his cornea. It was bloodshot, but there was no foreign particle in the eye. He blinked and blinked again. The eye still hurt. He put down the lamp and doused both eyes with water. His nose was flowing. The irritation got worse. He thought of rubbing the eye until the pain became so unbearable the eye would grow numb. He resisted the urge.

  * * *

  He must have fallen asleep because he did not hear the car drive up, nor for a time hear the two women whispering outside the door. He heard the knocking and the calling. He didn’t move. Nobody was supposed to know where he was. They continued to call. The knocking stopped. There was a long period of silence. Perhaps they feared that he was ignoring them in anger. Then it must have struck them that perhaps he was dying inside the room, so the knocking became more insistent. He did not move. He wanted them to go away.

  He could hear them walking around the house. Clarice did most of the talking. She kept calling his name and then she started to shout. She was silent for a few seconds, then she sent Delores to check the back for a door. Delores said she could find no entry. Perhaps he wasn’t there and Harry was wrong. Was there another cottage nearby? Delores thought it better that they left. Clarice wouldn’t leave. She said he could
be dying inside and in need of help. Delores didn’t say anything. Clarice began to knock on the door again. She kept calling his name.

  He stayed still. His eyes were open now. He thought about what he must look like. His shorts were filthy but he had already worn the red ones so much that it became painful to put them on. He had grown used to the smell of his body. He made sure to keep a clean shirt and trousers in his bag for his return trip to town. He’d have to hitchhike home so it was important that he at least looked decent. His hair and beard hadn’t been combed for days. The knots were tight and hard. He didn’t want them to see him like that.

  Clarice had started to push against the door. He thought of getting up to open it, but his body did not respond. He just lay there smiling and wondering whether she would manage to break it down. Clarice was a determined woman. Delores’s attempts at discouraging her were futile. Delores said that perhaps somebody else lived there and it could be very dangerous if they came home and found two women trying to break in. Clarice told her to either shut up and help or just go and sit in the car. Delores shut up and helped.

  The door was rotten so after a few blows it cracked and Clarice got her hand through to unlock it. The room was filled with glaring white light. They had parked the car directly in front of the door and the headlights were on. He turned his head and squinted into the glare. Clarice stood with her legs slightly apart, silhouetted by the light. She was wearing a light skirt and her legs were outlined through the fabric. She whispered his name with caution. He kept staring. His eyes dripped. Delores leaned against the door looking away from the bed. He watched her. Clarice walked into the room and moved toward the bed. When she was very close, he moved. She stopped and called his name again.

  He sat up on the bed and propped his chin in his hands, his elbows pressed into his thighs.

  “You alright? You alright?” Clarice peered into his face. “Your eyes are red.” He closed his eyes. “This place is a mess, man. Where is the window? Delores, don’t just stand there, open the windows, eh?” Delores moved quickly to the window in the bathroom. She did not look at him. She stayed in the bathroom.