Bivouac Read online

  “I can’t believe you wouldn’ tell anybody where you were. What is wrong with you? Mama is very worried about you.” Clarice was moving around the room trying to create some semblance of order. After a while she gave up. “Hey? Hey? Talk to me. Are you alright?”

  He stared into a corner of the room. He wanted them to leave. He began to smell the room properly now. The waft of air from the open window and the cracked door stirred up the latent musk. He chuckled to himself.

  Clarice said: “Delores wants to talk to you. Now hear, she didn’t want to come so don’t get upset and start bawling her down, but I think this is pure foolishness so you better talk to her. I mean, you must be gone mad, man. She deserve better. It’s alright if you want to vex and confuse everybody else, but this woman hasn’t done anything to be made a fool of like that . . .”

  “Clarice, please . . .” Delores said from the bathroom.

  “You see? She is afraid of you. Anyway, right is right. Please. Explain yourself, sir.” Clarice stood in front of him. He stared at her feet. “My God. You haven’t even combed your hair!” She placed her hand on his head and raised it so he had to stare at her face. She had on makeup: pink lipstick—he hated that; she must have come straight from work. “You look bad, sah. Delores, come out of there. Come. Talk to him.”

  He got up and stretched. Clarice stepped back. He got down on his knees and reached under the bed for his sneakers. He sat on the bed and slapped them on the floorboards. Then he pulled them on. He ignored the laces.

  “You can’t just change your mind about a wedding, okay? There are other people involved, not to mention Delores. You can’t be so selfish, man. People will start calling you a madman.”

  He got up and moved to the bathroom. Delores moved away from him as if he was a madman. She sensed something disquieting about his silence. She was afraid. He turned on the tap and splashed his face.

  “Look, you better say something. The cake is still there, the food is spoiled, but we can work that out. Delores’s parents will sue if this thing doesn’t happen . . .”

  “They won’t . . .” Delores’s voice trembled.

  He turned to her and felt a deep pity. He could only see a shadow for her face but he could feel her fear and despair. She looked so small and vulnerable.

  “They will,” Clarice said with emphasis. “Now, you better get your act together . . .” She stopped as he walked past her toward the door.

  He turned around and looked at them, smiled slightly, shook his head, and then continued. Stuffing his hands deep into the pockets of his shorts, he trotted down the stairs. He stooped for a few seconds to regain his balance, then his shadow cut through the light and vanished into the dark.

  “Come, Delores. He wants to go home now,” Clarice said. But when they did not hear the car door open they looked out and saw him walking toward the edge of the woodlot. Clarice shouted his name. He did not turn around. He continued walking steadily until the forest swallowed him.

  He felt the wetness of the thicker grass in the bush. He could hear the two women talking to each other. He watched as Clarice ran to the car and started it up. Delores stayed at the door. Clarice maneuvered the car toward the spot where he’d disappeared. He stood behind a tree as the lights glowed through the bushes. She moved slowly, the car rocking on the tractor-tire marks. When the lights were off him, he moved farther away, though still at the edge of the bushes. She blew the horn and shouted his name. She did this for about ten minutes and then she stopped the car. The air of the lot was cut through by the din of crickets and frogs. After another five minutes, Clarice moved the car back to the shack. Delores stepped down to the ground and walked toward the car. Clarice stepped out and they stood beside each other staring directly at him in the forest. They remained in silence for another few minutes until it became clear that nothing would happen.

  “Let’s go,” Delores said. “Let’s go.”

  The car bumped through the woodlot toward the dirt road that led out to the brightly lit highway. He stepped out of the bushes and stood staring at the car. One of them must have seen him, because the car stopped. He stayed still. He saw Clarice’s shadow emerge from the car. Slowly, Delores’s shape emerged as well. He did not move.

  “I thought you said you saw him. You see him?” Clarice asked.

  “It was nothing. Just a shadow,” Delores said, moving back to the car. “He’s gone.”

  He watched the taillights bump along the lot until they turned onto the paved road, and then all light was gone. He stood in the darkness listening to his heart pulsing. There was something complete about this whole thing. He knew that it would not be long before he walked out of this place, went back into the world. Delores understood what it all meant. In a peculiar way, he was sure she’d been expecting it to happen. He walked slowly back to the hut, his head bent down . . .

  * * *

  Back in town, to life, no one spoke to him—not really. The jilting of Delores was like a death best left ignored. He did not see her for almost a week, and then they met for lunch, and soon they were an item again. This time marriage was not mentioned. He had tried to explain to her what had happened several weeks later.

  “I needed to escape, to get away . . . It was all coming down.” He spoke slowly.

  “You needed space . . .” she said sarcastically.

  It had been the gradual movement back into the mundane of a relationship without direction that assured Ferron that there was no future with Delores. They would get married, have children, but he was sure they would be divorced. The apparent reason would be his unfaithfulness, but the real reason would be sheer disinterest. He had known this for sure.

  But then the rape had injected something emotional into the relationship. At least she expressed real anger. That she blamed him was clear. That she felt it was unfair to blame him was clear. But that she still, despite that, blamed him and felt great anger toward him was even clearer. It was hard for him to ask her what she’d wanted him to do, whether she’d wanted him to fight, get shot, even die for her, whether that is what she expected. It was hard for him to tell her that he, too, had been so scared, so petrified by everything, that the night had left with nightmares. He could not tell her that because in many ways, he did blame himself. His sense of relief at being alive after it was all over was something that filled him with guilt and left him incapable of even fighting with her. But the worst truth was something she never actually said, but that they both knew to be true. Before the rape, all affection had dried up between them. Now, after the rape, the absence of affection had to be filled with some other emotion because they were connected by this trauma. What he felt was resentment, even anger, at the idea of having to feel something, having to think of themselves as two people who needed to support each other. He felt her withdrawing from him, and he did not mind her doing that. He disliked himself for feeling incapable of giving her the affection and care she needed. He felt overwhelmed by deep anxiety about being near her, about being in this mess with her. Everything about that night was a massive weight, a very inconvenient mess. He recognized that what she had experienced was far worse than anything he could have felt, but managed to push that farther back in his mind. The more she grew cold with him, the more she seemed to blame him for what had happened, the more he felt himself pulling away emotionally. After a few weeks they started counseling with Dr. Davis, a bearded ex-Catholic priest who seemed to have no clear agenda for their sessions. It became clear that they were covering their anger and resentment with something that looked like boredom and disinterest. After a testy session which revealed that they were no longer being physical with each other, Dr. Davis had suggested that perhaps they needed to remind themselves why they were together in the first place. If the bed was a “site” of contention, and if, “as was understandable,” it brought back unpleasant feelings that had to do with the rape, then they should start meeting in public places. So, for a month or more they’d been meeting in public places,
trying to “regain some balance.” The meetings were flat and dull unless they quarreled. Even then their fights were not loud, but filled with snide remarks, sarcasm, heavy silences, and very short sentences. The meetings continued largely because neither was willing to be the one to admit that their relationship had been purely physical. His father’s death had provided a good excuse for avoiding the last two meetings, and now, with the visit to the clinic, he was going to add another excuse. He was not going to tell her he would not be able to make it. He would just not show up, would call her later and tell her why.

  Now, even though he knew that if he bolted again everyone—everyone, including his sister and his mother—would see him as a predictably weak person, a selfish person, the worst thing that could have come into Delores’s life, he still wanted to run. He needed to run. And he might have taken off to the shack had he not known that they would come to find him there and, more importantly, had he not felt so sick in the stomach. To go up there with the plans for the funeral still not put together and his sickness at such an intense level would have been too much even for him. The pain in his stomach had gotten progressively worse. He could feel the churn of acids by midday. The best he could manage was escape into Kingston proper. He would avoid places where he might run into friends and family. He would head downtown to the Institute’s library or to one of the downtown high schools to watch a football match or something. Each day he would plan something. Now, with the sickness, his plan was to go to the clinic on Maxfield Avenue, a rough area on the edge of downtown where his mother had taken him as a child, but where he did not have to go since he could have seen doctors at the university. But down on Maxfield Avenue, he would be away from everybody for at least half the day.

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  I have really learned nothing in three months. The greater joke is that I am supposed to have learned something about the newspaper business. It is impossible not to feel despondent when someone says to you—a big fifty-five-year-old man—“Oh, you will get the hang of it.” Especially when the person is an illiterate. There are techniques but no mysteries. Putting a paper together editorially is a matter of intelligence. Getting at the news requires minimum intelligence, a lot of time, and an ability to bully and threaten. You also need to have a sense of your own importance and to press it firmly. This I cannot take on at my age. Strictly speaking, I am not interested in the news; it makes me reflect too much on the inevitability and finality of death. I am sad about having wasted so much time “working” and not writing enough. All I had wanted to do was to finish three books in 1982. Now I must aim at 1983, which means publication in 1984.

  I always had doubts about the amount of work I’d put in at the Centre. I had to do it—we had to eat—which seems so melodramatic, but it was true. After the two years that I put the family through, everyone needed some fat days. So I worked. And from 1973 to 1976 I worked eighteen hours a day from Monday to Friday and six hours on Saturday and sometimes on Sunday. I also drank a lot. I stopped drinking for six months in 1974, and again after September 1979 (though, at the time of the Centre crisis, I drank heavily one night at Femi’s house with Andrew present—all rather embarrassing now). Now, I don’t drink. It is hard to know why. But I do know, if I started to drink again, what it would make me. It is enough to be unemployed, but how miserable it would be to be constantly drunk, drinking what money we don’t have—and drinking with whom? I suppose I never was one to drink unless there was a performance to make it worthwhile—a stage, an audience. Now, no one would drink with me. They would just feel sorry for me. They have fled like rats. It is as if this thing is a disease.

  They shouldn’t mind. Here we are in the glorious decade—Restoration Jamaica. Now we can put off puritanical austerity and buy American apples and grapes, import good shoes from foreign, and to hell with turning a hand to make fashion. The whole thing seems like such a pathetic farce now, an absurdity. When I listen to the music, Bob Marley is dead, and it is as if everyone is smoking cocaine or that crack to make music—it is so manic. I am too old to even understand what a party is. The clowns are back in their suits and it is now fine to cheer on a light-skinned beauty queen. Everyone is getting fat. Even the good Trotskyites are buying and selling real estate. Why would anyone want to see me now? I am dead, really. Dead.

  There is no mystery about their decision to sack me from the Centre. They had to defend this newspaper, but just who demanded it, I cannot guess. He had to get Burns to be the hatchet man (of course, Burns lied to me about his pleading for one year more), but they are all in my debt and they will pay. They know they owe me a great deal. And here is the pathetic irony of it all, that no one could have planned better. I am sacked for challenging the integrity of this newspaper. And who hires me to write editorials when I have nothing left, but the same newspaper? If I had the energy, I would despair at the pantomime of politics. Now, the editor is trying, as an Oxford man, to make it up to me. Imagine that—his loyalty to me as an Oxford man far exceeds his loyalty to me as a human being unfairly done in. But they don’t know how much they have destroyed me. Every single one of that lot. What they have done to my family. They have succeeded in creating some of the conditions leading to Ferron’s setback. Yes, the irony of my being here is sharp.

  eight

  First there was the long squeal of brakes and tires. He waited. It was like stubbing a toe, he thought—a short span of time, a few seconds, and then the pain reaches. There it was. Crunching metal, a thud, then the sound of glass. Ferron imagined a rain of splinters across the street.

  “’Im dead! ’Im dead!”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  The rest was just noise. People were running to the scene.

  Ferron stared through the blackness of his palms past the pink line of light seeping in through the tiny space between his little fingers. He framed her in the slit and moved with her like a camera. She was a flash of white light, a quick blur darting out of frame as she rose with unexpected speed for a pregnant woman to go outside to join the others.

  He did not move from his seat in the clinic’s waiting room. His heart thumped. Somebody could have been dead out there. Bleeding. He closed the tiny peephole and listened to the shuffle of feet, the doors opening and closing, the exclamations, the questions, the clamor of horns and engines whenever the door opened.

  * * *

  “Next . . . Mitzie Lowe?” A man’s voice. Ferron looked up. It was a teenager with a card in his hand. He had just walked in. He looked around. Ferron was the only one in the waiting room apart from the nurse who was still on the phone.

  “Mitzie Lowe,” the boy said in a louder voice.

  The nurse looked up. “You might as well go in, you hear,” she said to Ferron. The boy discarded the piece of paper and walked out of the office. Ferron went in.

  The doctor was an Indian with a smile. He spoke like a television commercial with an Eastern lilt: “Eat, avoid stress, no milk—lactose is acidic, you know—rest, and exercise.” He was scribbling down a prescription. “Tell your mother sorry; tell her to come see me, eh? Walk with crackers. Cream crackers. No salt. Forget the prescription, man. The nurse will give you some antacid. Tell her is for your mother. They are friends. No coffee, no cigarette, no booze. Feel better now. Good. Try that. Always try eating right . . . The next person is Mitzie Lowe, you remember that? Easy: Mitzie . . . Just say Mitzie, alright? Or Lowe. Either one. Pregnant woman . . .”

  The doctor did not wait for answers; he just kept on talking. Ferron walked out, tired. The lobby was full again. Evidently the crash victim was either dead or was in perfect health. Otherwise he would have been in the clinic already. Mitzie, the pregnant woman in white, was back at her seat, fanning herself with an old Gleaner. She seemed more excited now, as if she wanted to talk to somebody. The rest of the lobby was completely still. People stared into space. Patient. Ferron looked directly at her.

  “Mitzie Lowe?” He smiled.

&nbs
p; “About time too.” She got up with exaggerated strain. She walked toward him. She was smiling warmly.

  He moved to the side. She followed him. He shifted again and she moved with him.

  “But what is this?” She stopped. Mitzie had a streak of amber running along the side of her hair. She fiddled with a necklace. “You don’t wan’ me to pass, sir?”

  Ferron moved aside. She walked by him, brushing her hips against his hands. There was more than enough space to avoid contact. He decided to wait for her to come back out.

  Ferron bought a corn bread and butter from the Rasta vendor whose cart was parked in the corner of the parking area. Ferron ate slowly, watching the doorway for the pregnant woman.

  She walked out, rummaging in her bag for something. He looked around. There were no cars in the parking area. She did not look like a car owner. Then she looked up and around, spotted the vendor’s cart, and moved toward it. Ferron walked out of the shadow beside the cart. She smiled. He smiled back. The Rasta was hustling.

  “Yes, dawta, yes. Juice, baby mother?”

  “Ice water, in a cup,” she said. She was looking at Ferron. “What?” In the sunlight, her eyes seemed crammed with riddles. They sloped slightly, the eyelashes thick and long.

  “What?” Ferron was suddenly uncomfortable. She was too confident, able at any time to embarrass him.

  “You watching me like that . . . What happen?” She was taking the ice from the Rastaman.

  “The bredda like what ’im see.” The Rastaman grinned. Ferron was grateful for the support.

  “Oh. Is that so?” She turned to Ferron.

  “Maybe.”

  “Maybe, nuh.” She laughed, chewing the crushed ice.