Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings

W eeper taking his own good time as per usual. He and the white men get on real well, real well since one of them show him how to shoot like a man and not a silly ghetto boy. That’s what Louis Johnson call him first, just like that. White man have balls, as I would say. Weeper jump up and pull a gun, a little pussy.38 right in front of the white man only to feel a bigger gun rubbing against him nuts. Me can kill you still, Weeper say. You got your gun on my brain and I got my gun on yours, Johnson say, which for a Jamaican is like killing you worse, no true dat? Weeper look at him and laugh and shake his hand, even hug and call him mi bredda. And is when you learn to talk like a yardie? What I remember was that he was wearing Wrangler jeans. American trying to look more American when he leave America. That was in this bar, Lady Pink down on Pechon Street, the last street between Downtown Kingston and Ghetto Kingston, which bring in fresh new girls every Thursday, although last week the new girl was the same girl from two years ago who still dance like a shaking banana tree. Things hard and getting more and more crucial by the day when a nursery worker have to skin out onstage. Weeper like to fuck her too.

Lady Pink open from nine in the morning and only have two things on the jukebox, some nice ska from the sixties and sweet rocksteady, like the Heptones and Ken Lazarus. None of that Rasta reggae fuckery. If I come across one more pussyhole who won’t comb their hair and recognize Jesus as their lord and saviour I might send that little fucker to hell. Take that joke and bank it. The wall is too red for pink and too pink for purple and have gold record all over, which the owner himself spray-paint. Lerlette, the skinny girl, is up onstage, she the one who always want to dance to Ma Baker. One year we provide security when Boney M. come to Jamaica and nobody knew that three woman and one man from the Caribbean could all look like such sodomite. Every time the song end with the chorus, she knew how to die! Lerlette split right down on the ground and hold up her two hands in gun pose like she’s Jimmy Cliff in The Harder They Come . Girl must be putting her pum-pum through all kinda distress. Weeper used to fuck her too.

When she finish her dance, she pull back on her panty and come over to my booth. Me have a rule with woman. If your titty prettier and your body hotter than my woman, I’ll deal with you. Otherwise fuck off. Ten years and I still never meet that woman. Dog years it take me to find Winifred, a woman who would breed the kind of boy I would want as son, because a man can’t afford to have loose seed around the place. Last week Weeper come around the house with a son from some woman in Jungle, even he can’t remember her name right. The boy was either retarded or start smoke the ganja way too early, drooling and panting like a big dog. In Jamaica you have to make sure that you breed properly. Nice little light browning who not too dry up, so that your child will get good milk and have good hair.

— Beg you di bone nuh?

— Dutty gal, move you bombocloth from here so. You no see big man is here?

— Lawd, yuh hard, eh? A weh Weeper deh?

— Me look like Weeper’s keeper?

She doesn’t answer, just walk away, pulling her panty out of her batty. I know for sure her mother drop her on the head when she was a baby. Twice. If it’s one thing I can’t stand is when people chat bad. Worse, when they know better. My mother send me all the way to high school. I didn’t learn a fucking thing, but I listen to plenty. I listen to the TV, to Bill Mason and I Dream of Jeannie , and the radio serial on RJR at ten every morning, even though that was woman business. And I listen to the politicians, not when they’re talking to me and pretending like I’m some backward ghetto naigger, but when they talk to each other, or to the white man from America. Last week my son say, Daddy you want know say di I? I ah go ’pon di base fi check a beef, sight? and I slap that little wretch so hard he nearly cry. Don’t talk to me like you was born behind cow, I say to him.

Damn boy look at me like I owe him something. That is the problem with these young rudies, they wasn’t around for the fall of Balaclava in 1966, but I done talk about that. Everybody talking like they only know ghetto, especially him. See him on TV couple years ago and was never so shame in my life. To think you have all this money, all these gold record, have lipstick print on your cocky from all sort of white woman, and that is how you talk? If my life is juss fi mi, mi no want it? Then give it up, pussyhole, I coming right ’round there to take it.

Now Weeper, him different. The first day he come out of prison — not a good day to leave either, he come out right in the middle of war — the man have a big bulge in his back pocket. When he pull it out, there was so much red ink on even the cover that I ask him if he was bleeding from him batty. Turn out to be red ink from the only pen he could thief in prison. I ask if he write another book in the book. No star, he say. Bertrand Russell is the most top of the top ranking, me brethren, me can’t outwrite him. Bertrand Russell is a book I still don’t read yet. Weeper tell me how thanks to Bertrand Russell he don’t believe in no God no more and me have one or two problems with that.

Waiting on Weeper. Now there’s a title for a song, a hit record too. Last week I tell him, and the youths Bam-Bam, Demus and Heckle, that every Jamaican man is a man searching for father and if one don’t come with the package, he’s going to find another one. That’s why Papa-Lo call himself Papa-Lo, but he can’t be the father of anything anymore. Weeper say the man gone soft, but I say no, you fucking fool, look closer. The man not getting soft, he just reach the age where the person in the mirror is an old man who don’t look like him anymore, and he’s just thirty-nine. But that’s an old age out here, the problem with getting so far is that he don’t know what to do with himself. So he start to act like he no longer like the world he himself help create. You can’t just play God and say I don’t like man no more so make me wipe slate clean with the flood and start again. Papa-Lo start thinking too deep and start thinking that he should be more than what he is. He’s the worst kind of fool, the fool who start believing things can get better. Better will come, but not in the way he think. Already, the Colombians start talking to me, they tired of them loco Cubans who sniff too much of what they should only sell, and the Bahamians who are of no use since they teach themselves how to freebase. The first time they ask me if I want to sample the merchandise, I say no, hermano , but Weeper say yes. Brethren, coke was the only way me could fuck in prison , he say to me, knowing that no man in the ghetto would dare come up to him and call him battyman because of it. That man still send him letters from prison.

People, even people who should know better, start to think that Papa-Lo getting soft, that he don’t care about enforcing for the party no more. That he going slip and allow PNP man to move in on territory and that Jungle and Rema, always up for grabs, will soon bleach their green shirts and dye them orange. He not getting soft, he thinking deep, which politicians don’t pay him to do. Politicians rise in the east and set in the west and nothing you can change about them. Here is where we go down two different road. He want to forget them. I want to use them. They think he no longer care about the people but the problem is that he starting to care too much and he already dragging the Singer into it.

They call me first, last year. They call me to a meeting out by Green Bay and the first thing I ask was, where’s Papa? The black one (almost all of them white, brown and red) said Enough of the Papa, Papa time gone, new blood time now , talking like he playing fucking ghetto for Candid Camera . At one point the little pussyhole Louis Johnson hold a note upside down, some bullshit on embassy letterhead about some ambassador’s reception, and pretend that it was some agency memo, reading and smiling at the others as if he con firming some bullshit that he tell them about me. Papa don’t care about the dutty life but what these retarded batty fuckers don’t get is that I don’t care either. Medellín on line two.