Kingston Noir Read Online Free PDF Page B

she lean against me heavy when my hand touch her skin, cause it touch her light-light. And when it touch her now she hug me up like she surprise, and is like her surprise make me feel my own kinda surprise. You know them kinda surprise there that make your hair lie down instead of stand up? Like say when you see a great cricketer make a late cut … pull back hard like him going rass a square cut through the gully, and when you expecting force now, him just take the hard-hard willow and feather-touch the ball through the slips. Or when a corporal in the off-key police band step forward in him white tunic and play one of them soft Latin tunes on him dull trombone.
    Yeah man, certain kinda surprise make your hair lie down all over your body—at least that’s how I feel it in my mind.
    So no, I wasn’t lying to anybody, least of all myself, when I brush my hand through Cynthia hair and say, “I believe you. And I know you done sort out how we can do it safe.”
    Cynthia didn’t talk much while we was making love that night. Like most Jamaican woman she mostly moan and groan. Jamaica woman take sex serious—it’s a thing I come to notice—sex and dancing, not too much laughy-laughy going on. Cynthia just moan. Anything more than that is one and two, “Uh-huh” and “Eeh-hee.”
    Cynthia talk loud with her body though. She drill me with it. Me, a man who think me know how to handle woman. Backside! Cynthia make me feel like a recruit. She handle me with efficiency and power, like she had to break me down and build me back up again to make me understand, in case I didn’t understand before that I was her own.
    Is only one time she talk. The whole time she talk only once. I was over her and she swing out her legs and wrap them around my back, and she put her two hands on my throat and put her mouth to one of my ears—that time her breath hot-hot—and say, “Men have done a lot of things for me, My Lord, but one thing”—her breath catch up, and her voice sink low—“one thing a man never do for me yet, My Lord. You know what it is?”
    “No. What?”
    “You know what it is?” This time her voice deep in her chest like she was shy. “No man ever kill for me yet, My Lord, no man. Oh Jesus!” Same time she grab me and start to tremble.
    That was the seed. Plant like that. Simple, quiet. She never mention it again. But it take root inside me. Deep inside me.
    Deloris till the soil and Cynthia do the planting. That’s the truth. I’ve gone over this moment many times in my head and I understand it clear-clear now.
    Be that as it may, fucking Cynthia didn’t make me stop sleeping with Deloris. And a part of me feels like when she came back from Miami she must did know something happened because I was a different man. I picked her up at the airport and give it to her three times. And so it became every day after that, even in the office sometimes—just lock the front door and bend her over the sewing machine. I was really hungry for Cynthia but I couldn’t have her. She kept telling me to wait. So Deloris got her share.
    One morning as I was making love with Deloris in this same little cottage right here, she asked me if I find the man for Cynthia yet. And is like that question give me more strength. And it come in like she realize it or something, because after that, whenever she wanted me to put it on a certain way, she would mention Cynthia in my ears … like tell me that Cynthia call her to talk about the dress … or Cynthia call to ask her if she know anything about how the search for the husband going.
    Did Deloris actually know? Like know ? I don’t really think so. The way I work it out is that she saw Cynthia as something damaged, and because I knew what that damage was, she was off limits to me. So thinking of Cynthia as damaged gave Deloris power over her. And if she have power over her, then it mean where Cynthia was concerned, she, Deloris, have power over me. And how she feel powerful now she