Oonya Kempadoo - All Decent Animals

“Well, gentlemen, I heading down de road.” Sammy’s time to kill is up. He leave them trying to figure out the words of the next song, and go to his car.

* * *

Them Syrian stores lock down with padlocks and chains, fluorescent lights in fabric shop windows. One’r two vendor stalls light up selling music, incense, and sweets. The shape of a rasta lean up in a doorway on Frederick Street, the main street. Is dead. Independence Square at night, silent, compared to day. Two coconut sellers guarding they vans, smoking cigarettes to pass the time. Sammy feel like he crawling past today’s leftover garbage, looking for leftover people. A few’a them there, liming, on their way home or going somewhere. A man buying salted peanuts, the nuts cart pressure valve screaming steam and the sicky-sweet smell of hot nuts and brown paper hanging in the night air. Fast-food glary signs calling leftover late-nighters in, to eat on them bright blue Formica tables. They have security at the door. The corner bar now full of dingy laughter, and the scratchy speakers playing drunken music for drunken men on the pavement. Sam didn’t stop. Straight home he heading.

* * *

The sticky night greet Sammy as he get out’a his car at home. In Central, on the flats, the heat and staleness of Caroni Swamp trailing inland, in the dark. Much as he want to pass by Douli, he didn’t. He restrain himself from calling her ’cause is lateish. And that always made matters worse unless they had arrange something first. His Queen was up but she wasn’t watching TV, which was strange ’cause she didn’t have no lights on neither. She was waiting for him, Sammy realize as he entered the house.

“Me son.”

From the time she say “Me son” he know something, but he still had to ask what happen.

“Oh Lawd … she…”

“DOULI!” Sam scream and pelt out as she grab at him.

“Don’t go, don’ go there! Sammy!”

But he gone already, speeding his car the lil’ distance to her house on the edge of the fields. “Douli, Douli, DOULI! I coming, I go take you away, out of that house, that…”

A crowd had gather up on the street outside Douli’s house, a police car, a ambulance. And fear. Big, cold, and sweaty fear, box Sammy. Whuddup. Beat him again and again, on he head, chest, legs. Whuddup, whuddup. Two-by-four wooden blows, force him to crawl forward, push through people. “Where Mamee? Where Douli? DOULI!”

Bags. Bags with zips. What they doing? The ambulance empty.

People tried to stop Sammy but he rip through.

Blood. Blood. Plenty blood. Oh God, no. Where she? No. He … he … NO!

The whole room red. Stinking red. Dripping red. Slimey and thick as the hot air choking. Sucky fluid, air bubbles rattling in Sammy throat. Red marks clawing mashed-up furniture, the walls. And he, the devil’ body, not covered yet. Not bleeding but covered in blood. Cutlass, Gramoxone poison, killer, bleed. BLEED. Blood.

Moms pull her son out’a the red room, away from the neighbors and wailing family. But he couldn’t hear them anyway. She couldn’t pull him away from the madness, a mad rush in him, raging red.

“Shhhhh.” Moms hold him tight on her chest. “Shhhhh. Sit down here, come. Hush. Don’t say nothing. Hold me. Here…”

The big stone was warm through Sam jeans. Skin hot. He touch it. Bury his face in his mother’s soft stomach. Bread. Ghee. Roti-skin softness.

“He chopped them up … her and his wife … then he kill heself. You couldn’a know, Sammy, no.”

No. No.

* * *

Fluorescent net and satin cover the table in the mas camp. Bright pink, green, orange. “ Ka-nee-val again, bacchanal in Port’a Spain. Whoa donkey. Whoa whoa donkey ”—riggadigging on the little radio—“ Whoa donkey. Whoa whoa donkey …” The gofer boy steps in the sewing room, cocks out his bottom, and does the jockey dance with his imaginary reins.

“Dat blasted song so stupid!” the high-pitched, hot-mouthed Firerago exclaims. “Why de hell they can’t sing sense no more? What is dat, eh? ‘Whoa donkey’ my ass.”

The boy slaps his behind with his whip and gallops forward to the table, in rhythm. He has everybody laughing, except the supervisor and the shy Chinese guy at the sewing machine, who just smiles to himself and keeps sewing.

Ata had left off drawing cardboard patterns to help Firerago and three other women make fabric flowers for the bridesmaid hat prototype. She takes a strip of satin and pulls the loose stitching along one edge. Watching Firerago’s hands, she follows, curling up the frill and punching it with plastic staples. One of the women winces and sucks her finger, burnt by hot glue. Firerago sucks her teeth and snatches the glue gun, admonishing her about how to glue the bases without burning herself.

Ata glances at the sewing guy. Three other machines around him are empty at this time of the evening. He had chosen to remain and work into the night.

“What yuh want, child?” Firerago brandishes the hot gun at the gofer. “Don’ upset nothing on dat table, yuh hear?”

The boy is beating the donkey rhythm on the edge. “Slinger say he coming in a hour, to see de bridesmaid costume.”

Firerago steups her teeth even louder and launches into an explicit tirade about Slinger unreasonable ass and the flicking impossibility of the flicking flowers and wretched straw hats. Why the brim have to be so wide? And who tell he it go be ready in a hour? “Look! You, move from here — out!”

Gofer shoots out the door and the flower-making pace picks up. Firerago stapling the blooming frou-frous onto the hat on the mannequin’s head in a vengeance, shooting the Styrofoam face every now and then, just for so. She is vicious with those guns — plastic staples, glue sticks, and bad-bad cusswords her bullets, interspersing the hour and intricate handwork.

The manager enters and goes over to gently check on the sewer. Ata watches him double-checking carefully, to see if he’s feeling well enough to stay on. The guy smiles and nods peacefully, without pausing the electric hum or taking his eyes off the piercing needle. Ata, like everyone else in the camp, knows that this worker, in the prime of his fashion design career, is dying of AIDS. He comes and goes quietly, to and from the busy mas camp, but mostly he stays, taking the shit longer than everyone else without a word of complaint. It is his choice, Ata reminds herself. His way of spending his last days.

“Can you put on the costume?” the manager asks Ata.

Her first thought is that she cannot be seen in one of those fluorescent spandex bodysuits. Skintight skinny legs and big feet — no! And, she objects, he could have asked one of their models or dancers.

When he assures her that the big netty skirt goes on as well — the whole costume, to show off the hat — she agrees.

“There,” the manager says as Firerago nestles the extravagant hat on her curls. “La Belle Creole. You look like a Boscoe Holder painting.”

“A blinding fluorescent one! Everybody can see still? Or youall need shades?” Ata looks around but there is no mirror.

Firerago tips her head, admiring. “Is nice, yuh know. You should see the effec’. But is A HUNDRED FUCKING FLOWERS! On that hat — one hundred blasted flowers, not to mention the freaking leaves and shoots!”

God of Design lopes through the door at that moment. He stops abruptly and drops his hands and bottom jaw. Theatrics again, just like how conversation drops to absolute silence whenever he walks in. “Oh … my … God. Good God. Isn’t it perfect? The skirt, that is — look at it! Just the right amount of fullness, move a little please, and bounce, and unh … Where is the shoulder piece?”

“Right here.” Someone loops the ruffle of flowers and net and spangly sequins over one breast and fastens it on Ata’s shoulder.