Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings

— You know why me giving you the job? ’Cause you is the first girl to come in here with some manners.

— Really, Miss Betsy?

We’ve also had this conversation before. She runs an employment agency that places mostly black women, mostly immigrants, into these posh houses to take care of their very young children or very old parents who, news to me, have the very same needs. In exchange for us putting up with whatever shit, sometimes literally shit, they don’t ask questions about immigration or employment status. So everybody wins. Well two people win, I just collect the money. I don’t know. It’s one thing when you ask your boss for cash, but it’s something else when the employer is only too happy to give it to you.

The first client she sent me to was a white middle-aged couple in Gramercy, too busy to notice their weak mother smelling like cat shit and talking about those poor boys on the USS Arizona . She was in a room by herself with the thermostat set at fifty degrees at all times. The first time I met the couple the wife didn’t look at me at all and the husband looked at me too long. Both wore all black and the same black round glasses, like John Lennon. She just said to the wall beside me, She’s in there, do what must be done. For a split second, I wondered if they expected me to kill the woman. And what woman? In the room was nothing but pillows and a bedsheet heaped up on the bed. I had to come in closer to see that there was a little old woman in the middle of the bed. The piss and shit nearly made me walk out, until I remembered the money orders were done coming from Arkansas.

Anyway, I lasted three months, and it wasn’t the shit. There always comes a point when you living in a house with a man when he start to think he can walk around with no clothes on. The first time he do it, I could tell he was really hoping I would be taken aback, but I just saw another old person to nurse. The fifth time, he said the wife was gone to her Mother of Veterans meeting and I said, So you need me to figure out where you misplace your drawers? The seventh time he jiggled it in front of me and I start laughing so loud I hiccupped. The mother in the room started shouting what was the joke and I told her. Hey, I didn’t care. She laughed too, saying his father was just the same, always putting on a show even when nobody bought any seats. From that day the mother was always sharp around me, she even developed a little sass. Too much sass for cocky jiggler. I quit before he fired me, and told Miss Betsy that while I will scoop up any load of shit, I’ll have nothing to do with a withered white penis. She was impressed that I managed to stay in standard English the whole time, even when I asked if this was a whorehouse with granny care as a fringe benefit.

— Is must be Immaculate High School you come from, she said.

— Holy Childhood, I said.

— Same difference, she said.

The day John Lennon was killed I was walking my second job in the park. Another old woman, whose forgetfulness didn’t yet reach the point where she forgot that she forgets. I had already taken her to the park, and was about to go to bed, when she suddenly said she wanted to go to the Dakota and would not shut up about it. It was either us walking or she flying into hysterics, which usually ended with her screaming that these strange people and a negro had kidnapped her.

— I want to go, damn it, you can’t stop me, she said. Her daughter looked at me like I was hiding her Valium. Then she just fanned the two of us off. Spent the entire night outside the Dakota with her and maybe two thousand other people. I think we sang “Give Peace a Chance” all night. At some point I started singing too and even started crying. She died two weeks later.

The next week I went to a Jamaican club in Brooklyn called Star Track. Don’t ask me why, I don’t like reggae and I don’t dance. And Lord knows I’ve never had any use for this community. But I felt like I just had to since I couldn’t get those deaths out of my head. The place was some old building with three floors, almost a brownstone. As I walked in Gregory Isaacs’ “Night Nurse” was playing. Some men and women looked at me like it was their job to sum up who came through the door, as if this was some western or something. Every now and then there was a whiff of either ganja or cigar smoke. If I stayed here long enough somebody from Jamaica was bound to think she recognized me, which just felt like the worst thing ever. Because at some point that bitch would ask me what was I doing, and before I answer, would tell me about what she’s been doing and where she’s living and who got totally fat and who’s just breeding like a fucking rabbit.

At some point the Rasta eyeing me since I came in slid up to me at the bar and told me I needed a back rub. This was the part where they taught you that if you ignore men they would go away. Except boys were always in the same class. At least let’s look at the man, somebody in my head who sounded a lot like me said. Dreads yes, but clearly groomed by a hairdresser. Light skin, almost a coolie, and lips thick but still too pink even after years of cigarettes trying to blacken them. What’s Yannick Noah doing here, I would have asked if I thought he knew who that was. He asked me if I thought the Singer was going to recover because it really doesn’t look too good. I came this close to asking what type of Jamaican uses a phrase like doesn’t look too good. I really don’t want to talk about the Singer, I said. I really don’t. He kept talking with the little Jamaican accent he got from his parents or maybe his neighbors. I didn’t have to hear him shorten Montego Bay to Montego, instead of Mobay, to know he wasn’t a real Jamaican. He gave himself away the second he asked me if I had cum. He left his number on the dresser when I was asleep. Part of me was prepared to be offended if I saw money under the note, but part of me kinda was hoping it was at least fifty bucks.

It’s 1985 and I don’t want to think I’ve been fucking no-commitment Jamericans and wiping old ass for four years, but work is work and a life is a life. Anyway, so the ma’am put me up with the Colthirsts who for a change had an old man to take care of. I don’t know. It’s one thing to have to clean woman parts but man parts was another thing entirely. Yeah, a body is a body, but no part of a woman body can get stiff and poke me dress. But then who was I fooling? The man probably hadn’t poked anything since Nixon wasn’t a crook. Still it was a man.

First day, August 14. Eighty West 86th Street, between Madison and Park. Fifteenth floor. I knocked on the door and this man looking like Lyle Waggoner opens it. I just stood there looking like an idiot.

— You must be the new girl they hired to wipe my ass, he says.

S omebody pull the sheet off. Looking at myself, my chest puffing in, my chest puffing out, some hair, two nipples, cock gone to sleep on me belly. Look left at him, he wrapped himself around in the sheet tight like caterpillar three days before butterfly. Not cold weather just cool morning. He lying there like somebody agree to let him stay or get too tired to disagree. First I thought him was just a spic with blond hair dye but he said he was a hundred percent honky juice, cousin. Morning, so say the clock by the bed, on his side. Outside the window, nothing in the sky proving morning right. Brooklyn navy blue. Streetlight throwing darkness in alleyway where man get kill, woman get rape and pitiful fool get mug with two bitch-slaps, the tax for being a sucker.

Three weeks ago, Saturday night, check the scene. Walking home the short way, the white trick, skinny muscle tight inside the cut-off t-shirt, not gym ripped but crackhead ripped and walking step behind like a Muslim wife. None of we saying nothing but Deniece Williams singing Let’s hear it for the boy behind a glass window two floors up with a line of panty hanging on the fire escape. Scope this ill faggot-ass bullshit this nigger say, popping out of the alley wall like him was a jigsaw piece. You two fudgepackers pick the wrong ghetto to get on with that nasty-ass shit. White crackhead inched back and I said stop. He’s still inching so I turn me head and look at him. Stop, I say. White boy make a sound like a snake hiss, something say the nigger about to get the drop on you. I quick-dodge the knife-carrying hand to the left, pull him down with me left hand, swing ’round my back to him and flick up my right hand. Knuckle right in the nose. Nigger yelling, but not before I knee him balls, take ’way the knife, then grab him left wrist, push against a board-up window and crucify the motherfucker. Nigger now screaming when I say to the white boy, Now you can run . Him laughing hard. We running, and grabbing, and laughing, and hardening, and stopping and a tongue in me mouth before I say I don’t use tongue. By the time we get to me walk-up, we leaping step two by two. Last flight of step, belt buckle pull, pants drop to the floor, brief down to the knee and battyhole up. You’re not worried about the gay cancer? He spit and push it in. No, I say.