Lisa Allen-Agostini - Trinidad Noir

“How you mean you ent selling me? Man, don’t talk foolishness now. Two kilos. Go and bring it.”

Trey shook his head. “Nah, partner. I done. You go have to get that someplace else—”

The report of the gunshot silenced them both. Blood drained from Garvin’s face and he was as white as the wall he had to lean against to keep from falling.

Leaving him standing there, Trey ran to the back of the house from where the noise had come. Tasha’s still body was sprawled on the ground by the kitchen door. Danny was standing in the doorway, dazed, a.38 in his hand. Trey rushed to his side and grabbed the gun.

“She was picking the lock, Trey. She was coming to tief the weed...”

“Boy, you mad or what? What we going to do now? Eh?” He turned to his dead ex-girlfriend. Knowing she had probably been trying to steal the ganja was no consolation. He stooped and stroked her silky, dark cheek. It was still warm, unblemished, and as soft as it had been in life.

Danny sprang to action. “Boy, we don’t have no time for that. We have to move she.”

Trey nodded. At least he had some garbage bags at hand.

When Garvin got home he was trembling and pale. Antonio found him there, still jittery and sickly yellow, four days later. Tasha was gone, and so were two kilograms of product. Antonio wanted an explanation and he wanted one quickly.

“Is-is-is Trey!” Garvin stammered, breath cut short by the fingers tightening around his throat. “He trust the weed and then tell me he don’t have the money.” Antonio relaxed his grip. Trust the weed? Why would Trey want two kilos of weed on credit? Antonio glared at his brother, but Garvin just gave an anxious smile.

They pulled up at Trey’s gate in Antonio’s Lexus SUV, a shiny black monster that Antonio probably loved more than he did his whiny, dishonest little brother. It was nearly 1 in the morning.

“Trey!” Garvin bawled at the top of his lungs. “Trey!” There was no answer. Antonio leaped from the van and strode up to the house. Kicking in the front door, he entered. There were no signs of life or weed, except for endless ashtrays overflowing with cigarette and spliff butts.

Garvin murmured weakly, “Like they gone.”

Antonio, a stronger, larger version of Garvin, was not amused. He pulled his Magnum Desert Eagle from his waistband and put it to his brother’s temple. “You go find them, right? And find my weed. If I only find out you had anything to do with this—”

“But how you go say that, Antonio?” Garvin whined.

“You like to tief too damn much. You feel I don’t know you?” Antonio flicked off the gun’s safety and rubbed the chrome muzzle against Garvin’s cheek. “If I only find out,” he repeated. Then he uncocked the gun and stuck it back into his waistband. He turned to look at the contents of the house again. It was on the dresser in Trey’s bedroom that he found what he was looking for — a block of board wax wrapped in a plastic bag labeled, Zora’s Sweetbread and Cakes, Toco Road, Sans Souci . He grinned. There was no humor in the smile.

Once again, Trey was surrounded by black garbage bags. This time they were empty. Danny, sprawled in a beanbag next to the bed, was nearly unconscious. Trey was feeling no pain himself. It was the last of the weed, a nearly impossible amount to smoke out in three days, but with dedication and a lot of help from their friends, mothers, and Jimmy, they had done it. The evidence was up in smoke. Mostly, anyway. Aunty Zora had seen her way to baking a most excellent batch of sweetbread with an unusually strong herbal kick.

Trey stumbled to his feet and zigzagged to the bathroom. As he let a stream of urine hiss urgently into the toilet bowl, he vaguely heard a car pull up outside in the silence of the Sans Souci night. Moving to the window, he saw the moonlight bouncing off the glossy surface of a familiar black Lexus. “Shit,” he muttered. Danny was bleary-eyed when Trey tried to shake him awake. “Danny, boy, get up. Garvin and he brother come looking for we.”

This was instantly sobering. Danny shook his head to clear it. “What the hell we go do?” he asked in a whisper.

Trey was down on his hands and knees, avoiding the windows. “Well, first thing is to get to ras out of here.”

They slipped silently out the back door as Garvin and Antonio walked through the front gate. The three dogs, rushing at the strangers, kept them occupied, and at first they didn’t see the two figures running down the road. It was Garvin, shaking Sarah off his left ankle, who spotted them.

“Look them running!” Antonio and Garvin gave chase into the bush. But the dark night, even lit by a full moon, confounded them. They were soon lost. There was a rustling to their right. Garvin, who had never been in a forest before, whimpered, “Antonio, what was that?”

Antonio sucked his teeth and kicked at the undergrowth. “What you get me in here, Garvin? You’s a real clown, boy. I don’t know why I does trust you with anything.” They kept walking for about an hour, drifting further and further into the bush. Then they spotted it — a sloped clearing planted with lush marijuana trees higher than their heads. Garvin was the first to rush in.

“So, is here he get it!” he exclaimed. In the quiet forest, his voice was a cannon.

“What you talking about?” Antonio asked, fingering a leaf with admiration. Even in the dark he recognized it was good weed.

“Trey. This is where he get the—”

Too late, he realized his mistake. But Antonio already had the gun to his head.

“I thought you say he tief the weed from we.”

Garvin gave a sickly smile. “Well...”

“I tell you already, I go kill you for tiefing from me.”

“But Antonio, listen, this is the weed, man! I smoke it myself!”

Neither of them heard the footsteps behind them. A pair of gunshots shattered the quiet of the night. Antonio never had time to turn and fire a single bullet.

The tall, bald-headed man with the smoking gun spat on the two bodies before turning on his heel, saying, “Come back to tief my weed again, you bitches. Not one fart of that.”

In the fisherman’s hut on the beach, Trey and Danny shivered for a few hours until dawn before creeping back to the house. Garvin and Antonio never came back for the Lexus, so eventually it replaced the battered Land Rover as Zora’s delivery van. And in Zora’s backyard, a new bed of ixora bloomed unusually well that year.

Couva

When she first saw the jogger, Hemrajie was sitting on the porch as she did most evenings. She did not notice him until he had run past the house. He wore a white strap jersey, maroon shorts, and his back looked very straight and very strong.

“Who is that?” she asked Feroza, who was sitting with her on the porch as she did most evenings. Feroza looked up from her newspaper. The man was already past the last house of the village, running steadily down the road which snaked through the cane fields. The sun’s rays reflected off Feroza’s spectacles, dazzling Hemrajie, who blinked and turned her head.

“Dunno,” said Feroza. “I never see him before.”

“Me neither.”

They watched the man run around the corner and disappear behind the rippling cane stalks. The sun was glaring but low, and the evening darkness would come suddenly. Hemrajie took a sip from her glass of iced tea. Feroza resumed reading the newspaper. She had already finished the second of the three cigarettes she allowed herself. A half-filled cup of coffee sat on the iron-fretted center table next to a clay pot with African violets. Feroza drank so slowly that her coffee always got cold before she finished, and she would never let Hemrajie reheat it in the microwave. The two women looked very different. Hemrajie was fat and dark-skinned, Feroza fair and very thin. Hemrajie had round features — round eyes, round nose, a pursed mouth. Feroza had small sharp eyes, a hooked nose, and prominent front teeth. She had married at twenty-one and divorced at twenty-five. Her husband had been an alcoholic. Hemrajie had never married, had never even had a boyfriend. And when Feroza told her stories about her married life, Hemrajie was glad to have avoided the beatings and the bad sex.