Marlon James - A Brief History of Seven Killings

All this time the man who killed me still will not die. Instead he rots. I watch him as his secretary touches his white scalp, teeming with veins like little blue snakes, and washes his thin hair in black dye. His new wife will not touch the stuff, it ruins her fingertips and blackens her nail polish. You sure you don’t want it a little grey, Mista P? Make it look young but little more natural? Me want it black, you hear me? Me want it black . The PNP ran his party out of power, but he dresses every morning as if heading to work. Such a strange decade, it looks nothing like the seventies and he’s lost with nobody around speaking his language anymore. His party’s thugs no longer want him and the thinkers never needed him so now he shouts out against communism and socialism, his jowls swinging like a rooster’s. I watch him while he walks to the car, forgetting for the third time this week he is no longer allowed to drive. He trips on the garden hose and falls hard on the concrete. The fall knocks the wind out of him, killing any hope of a scream, shout or sob. He lies there for nearly an hour before the cooking woman sees him from the kitchen window. New hip, new pacemaker, new blue pills to fuck the wife who had gotten used to him flop on top of her, still like a slug. He laughs at death again. At me.

I watch the man who visited him once at night. He’s fatter too, and bigger. Too big for both to take up the same space. Flights to New York and Miami. Business bursting out of back pockets, one thousand dead. Money comes out in the wash and buffets up the ghetto. In the ghettos abroad people sniff, cook, boil and inject. Colombia, Jamaica, Bahamas. Miami. It’s an amazing scenario. We see murders everywhere . D.C., Detroit, New York, Los Angeles, Chicago. Buy guns, sell powder, when building monsters don’t be surprised when they become monstrous. New riders, new posse, the likes of which they have never seen. In New York, the headline type is an inch thick: Jamaican Got City Hooked On Crack . A juror listens to the Ranking Don on trial, no friend of Josey Wales. Her first time in court.

— Me shot him in the head.

— Where in the head?

— Back.

— How many—

— One time. You only need one.

— What did you do with the body?

— Dump it in a gully. Then tell the driver to burn the car.

— What did you do when you learned he burned all the evidence, sir?

— Me didn’t do nothing. I go to me bed.

He looks at her as he says the last line. A juror, dressed like a schoolteacher, doesn’t sleep for three days.

Three killers have outlived the Singer. One dies in New York. One sees and waits in Kingston surrounded by money and cocaine, and one vanishes behind the Iron Curtain where he sits knowing, waiting for the bullet to the head. Soon.

Three girls from Kashmir sling on bass, guitar and drums, fresh faces brimming out of burkas, propped up and held together by a backdrop of the Singer streaked in red, green and gold stripes, thick like pillars. They call themselves First Ray of Light, soul sisters to the Singer smiling with the rising sun. Out of a wrapped face comes a melody so fragile it almost vanishes in the air. But it lands on a drum that kicks the groove back up to where the song lingers, sweeps and soothes. Now the Singer is a balm to spread over broken countries. Soon, the men who kill girls issue a holy order and boys all over the valley vow to clean their guns, and stiffen their cocks, to hold down and take away. The Singer is support, but he cannot shield, and the band breaks away.

But in another city, another valley, another ghetto, another slum, another favela, another township, another intifada, another war, another birth, somebody is singing Redemption Song, as if the Singer wrote it for no other reason but for this sufferah to sing, shout, whisper, weep, bawl, and scream right here, right now.

Y ou think he’s napping?

— Me no response for that, boss.

— Huh? Okay, fine, just point me to his cell.

— I point it out two minutes ago. Is not like nobody else down here in the dungeon.

— Dungeon? That’s kinda inappropriate.

— When you done see your way out.

— Not escorting me all the way?

— Don’t like the dark.

Footsteps echo as I walk and all I can think about is I kinda wished I saw it myself. No kidding. They swooped down on that lil’ motherfucker Griselda Blanco style. Such a wicked idea perfected in Jamaica. Give it to the dearly disappeared bitch, if nothing else she did leave us with one great invention. This is how it went down. With his dad Josey counting down the days until he was extradited to the U.S. for murder, racketeering, obstructing justice, narcotics et cetera, et cetera and so forth, it was up to his son, Benjy Wales, all grown up (but fatter, darker and more boring-looking than his dad) to rule as the don of Copenhagen City. Sorta like a regent, or placeholder, or some thing like that. So Benjy was putting together the Papa-Lo Memorial Commemorative Annual Cricket Match. Anyway, somehow this meant a meeting on King Street, which is east of West Kingston. It’s always tricky business when a don of the West heads east, worse, heads off by himself on a bike. He gets to the intersection probably just staring ahead, minding his own business, when this other bike pulls up right next to him. By the time he look over to see who it was, two men in black open fire, blasting his heart out of his chest.

Funny, eh? The thing about Benjy, yeah his pops is Josey motherfucking Wales, and he saw gunfire all the time, but he still traveled the world, well the States, went to a posh school and never had to go to bed hungry a single day of his life. What do you get? A fucking gunman who’s too used to the good life. He might as well be any fucking brat stepping out his pop’s apartment in Central Park West. His father who has brought this country to a standstill at least three times is in prison about to finally get his ass handed back to him, and what does golden boy do? He goes off by himself on a fucking bike? What did he think, that every other gunman would be in church? And a Griselda-style killing doesn’t just happen out of dumb luck. That shit was not just set up, but coordinated right down to that particular intersection. These young boys, they really don’t think. I’m fucking old. I used to think old was the first time you bent over and grunted ugh when you straightened back up. Now old is running into enemies too old to fight, where all you got left from an old war is fucking nostalgia. And any kind of nostalgia is something to drink not shoot over.

Entry wounds to head, chest and exit wounds in head, neck, shoulder and back. Last week I spoke to this Doctor Lopez who was the doc on call in the ER that morning. Bombo r’asscloth, he says, I’ve never been so scared in all my life. And not just basic fear for himself but fear like it was about to be Armageddon in the ER. By the time Benjy Wales got to the hospital the boy was pretty much a goner, all that was left was to call it. But Benjy’s body came with around three thousand party crashers, all spilling in and out of the ER. All that was left was for the doctor to call time of death, but because three thousand people are outside, expecting you to pull a Jesus because that’s what doctors do for a don, you go through the most ridiculous theater not named kabuki. Doctor Lopez was telling me all this. They had to transfer him to a bed, which was already a waste of space, but by then the crowd was shouting BRING BACK BENJY so loud you could hear them all the way down in the valley a mile away. First they tried to restore the airway, which is what you’re supposed to do, to gain control of catastrophic hemorrhage. Except by the time they brought him in there was nothing in his lungs but blood. Meanwhile the crowd was getting louder, and the doctors had to go through this fucking charade with a corpse. Imagine trying to restore circulation to a body that’s just done with circulating. No pulse, no pressure, no level of consciousness whatsoever. It’s not that he had stopped, he was fucking done. I asked him at what time were they going to tell the crowd he was just dead, and he said, No lie, boss, by the time we started to resuscitate him I was hoping for a miracle too . Outside the crowd was pushing so hard they broke two glass windows.