Trinidad Noir: The Classics by Earl Lovelace

Author:Earl Lovelace [Lovelace, Earl]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: akashic books
Published: 2017-04-16T21:00:00+00:00

2.

It was minutes past nine, and though the street where the 626, without warning, had crossed over from life into death (and now lay by the curb, embalmed in silence) was a quiet, residential Woodbrook street, cars still came down it, one by one. I stared at each briefly but hungrily—for who wants to stand in the burning sun not fifty feet away from a violently masturbating vagrant?—but none was a white Galante that might be bearing my acquaintance and his “electrics guy.” So, gloomily, I watched each car come, decelerating as it passed, and then of necessity—just as it came abreast of the engrossed vagrant—braking for the major road ahead.

(“Um baaad!” bellowed the vagrant at sporadic intervals, glaring at the glass-paned door across the street, one hand working wildly in his trousers-front.)

Like that, there came down the road:

1) A dark blue Sonata driven by a young Syrian woman who, when she saw what she was pulling up next to, accelerated so desperately that she swung onto the major road barely ahead of a thundering garbage truck, which repaid her by shattering the quiet morning with a three-second blast of its horn.

2) A brown PAY Laser, piloted by a young creole tess who shook his head when he saw what he saw, bending over in such exaggerated disbelief or misapplied mirth that his forehead bumped his horn and made him jump.

3) A pastel Laurel, the padded cell of a well-dressed, middle-aged, red-skinned lady, who must have suffered terribly—or so the back of her head seemed to say—while she waited for a gap to open in the main road traffic, and who was full of hatred by the time it did, judging by the vengefully accelerating swerve with which she put behind her forever (except, perhaps, in her dreams) the lit and dreadful apparition suffusing her peripheral vision for a petrified Eternity.

None of these fazed the vagrant in the least.

(“Um baad!” bellowed the vagrant at the house with the two unseen occupants and the locked garden gate. “Um baaaad!!!”)

On the other hand, not even he could have ignored the battered pickup with three Indian guys wedged in front and a fourth with a power mower in the tray.

“Yuh crazy nigger!”

“Yuh nasty bitch!”

“Stay right dey, we bringin’ de police for yuh mod-ah cont!”

The vagrant’s hand stayed in his trousers but stopped moving. The guy in the tray jumped up and with an oath flung a cardboard box at him. (It missed.) Reflexively the vagrant picked it up, looked inside, then tossed it away into the gutter. With a chorus of obscenities the pickup turned onto the main road and was gone.

The vagrant looked dismayed. He glanced around him (including at me) disappointedly. And I was just judging it safe to return to my pool of shade, two car lengths or so from where he stood, when his gaze fell again on the glass-paned door, and I saw it strengthen there, and grip, and his hand slipped back into his trousers-front; and I

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