Dog War (7 page)
“Did you find a lizard for Timothy Pigeon?” Precious asked in a whisper, propped snugly on each side by the wriggling bookends of her granddaughters.
Henrietta giggled. “Yes! You wanna see it, Grandma?”
“But don’t tell Daddy,” Cheryl-Lee warned. “Or he’ll tell us not to do it.”
“Don’t worry,” Precious whispered back. “Knowing your father, he might want to bathe de lizard to get it ready for Timothy Pigeon’s pants.”
Both children cackled gleefully at this idea, shaking so hard on the tiled floor that they vibrated Precious between them.
“Everybody still cozy under there?” Henry sang out in the daybreak treble of the capon.
Every home is a honeycomb of intersecting routines, private ceremonies, and personal habits. And so was the one in which Precious now lived and to which she tried to adapt. The children had their fixed schedules of school and play; Shirley had her bizarre police work that gave her the nocturnal habits of an owl, departing in the evenings for night patrol and returning early in the morning when the children were first stirring; Henry had his beauty shop where he gave perms and managed a staff of five beauticians, requiring him to leave shortly after the children caught the school bus and just as Shirley was settling down for her day’s sleep.
For the first week Precious was caught up in adapting to this hustle and bustle of intersecting domesticity without getting in anyone’s way, but after only a few days she had such a good grasp of who should be awake when, who should be rushing out of the door, who should be settling down for a day’s or night’s sleep, that she could contribute to the smooth running of the household in little helpful ways by settling down this one, fixing a snack for that one, or playing the cuckoo clock for any who overslept. Having served her domestic apprenticeship under the most cantankerous man to ever step foot across threshold, Precious was grimly of the opinion that no man or woman born was her match when it came to mastering household quirks and complicated timetables.
That Henry was a beautician struck Precious as suspiciously odd if not downright unmanly, but she was careful to keep a straight face and offer no unwanted criticism. She just knew in her heart that she would never sit down and chat about women’s hairstyles or perms or hair straightening with Henry no matter how hard he begged. If he wanted to discuss the criminal mind, slaughter in Africa, or the guttersnipe tactics of English football hooligans, she was more than willing to reply to the extent of her ability to hold intelligent conversation on these male topics. But if he should broach the subject of perms or dyes or hairstyles to her, she intended to yawn politely and remind him of his manhood.
During her first few days in America not an hour passed when Precious did not stumble upon a stupefying sight that made her just feel to stop and stare. America struck her as vast, strange, bizarre, and its exotic newness would have overwhelmed her senses and made her giddy had she not determined ahead of time to sternly repel geography. Of course, she knew that her-foot now walked the shores of a far-flung continent, but she-would still not allow herself to be bullied by the atlas. She remembered that Theophilus had told her that when he was in America, for one whole day all he could think about was, “Rass, dis place big, you know!” and that even as he stood at a urinal he had found himself silently and obsessively muttering, “Rass, dis place big, you know!” over and over again. But that was Theophilus. He was willing to kowtow to geography. Precious, on the other hand, knew who she was and what she was and was determined that no amount of continental land mass or foreign spectacle would reduce her to spatial muttering in the toilet.
Still, the first few days stunned her with such an unexpected array of sights that for nearly a week all she could do was gape and gawk. If she was not careful, migration was going to turn her from a decent Christian woman into a Peeping Tom, she told herself sternly in the evenings during contemplative moments of retreat under the bedspring, and while she did her-best to refrain from staring, she could not help herself when she encountered outlandish scenes she had seen before only in Cinemascope movies.
It was not so much the foreignness of the place, for as a Third Worlder of moderate means Precious had been amply exposed to glimpses of America in television, movies, and magazines and knew what to expect. But what stunned her on her first drive through America was that the whole place appeared spanking new and shiny. Compared to Jamaica, which seemed steeped in a perpetual mildew and grubbiness, America shone as if it had just been polished. But the curious thing was that it was a shine and a sheen visible only to new immigrant eyes, for when Precious repeatedly mentioned how America looked gleaming and shiny to her, Shirley said gruffly that the whole stinking city was getting nasty and shabby, that Precious felt as she did only because she couldn’t yet see American grime. There was Jamaican grime and there was American grime, and your eyes had to get used to American grime before they could see it. For an example, she pointed to a white man slumped against a bus bench and said that he was an American beggar, and when Precious looked at the man and saw that he was not only white but that he wore shoes and a presentable pants and shirt, she scoffed and said that such a man certainly wouldn’t be a beggar in Jamaica, to which Shirley replied, “Exactly! What dey call poor here is a joke to us. Is de same way with grime. Our grime is not deir grime and deir grime is not our grime, even though an ignorant person might think dat grime is always grime,” and Precious felt so stupid and put in her place that she stopped passing comment about America and contented herself with merely gawking.
Precious made one last brave attempt to defend her maligned Jamaican senses and score at least one point by sarcastically remarking to Shirley that at least murder was still murder in Jamaica or America and the two countries had that-much in common. But Shirley again scoffed and said that murder in Jamaica was one body with a machete chop or perhaps one measly bullet hole, but that murder in America was at least two bullet-riddled bodies along with a gunman suicide. That was real murder, not your fool-fool garden party that know-nothing Jamaicans called murder.
Precious sat glumly in the front seat after that and held her peace, for the discussion was beginning to give her a complex. Shirley drove slowly through one neighborhood after another, past shopping malls and stores and parks, and tried to point out all the sights and places of interest, but because of her complex, Precious could hardly concentrate enough to listen. Finally she blurted out, “I not going let you give me a complex. I say de place look shiny and new. And it look shiny and new. And dat is dat.”
“Mummy,” Shirley chided, “this is not Jamaica.”
“I am aware of dat!” Precious grumbled. “But you can’t do everything better dan us! You can’t have you own special grime dat only you can see! And you can’t murder better dan we murder! Out of order!”
“Mummy, I’m just saying dat we do things big here. We don’t murder one like Jamaicans do. We bag ten and fifteen on de spot. Sometimes we bag twenty-five, thirty.”
“Stop you boasting! And stop running down you homeland! You born and raise in Jamaica, too!” Precious said shrilly. And she steadfastly refused to listen to any more of her stuck-up daughter’s patriotic ranting and raving.
The hardest thing for Precious to get used to was the constant spectacle of whiteness all around her, the unending procession of white face after white face frothing down the streets and through the malls in a perpetual tide of foam and spume.
The first time, for instance, when Precious came across a white man digging a hole in the sidewalk of a street, she could not help but stare, for she had never before in her life seen a white man even carry a pickaxe in broad daylight, much less raise one to dig a hole. Of course, one knew from books and the cinema that white men did such things abroad, but schoolbook knowledge was simply not the same as seeing with one’s very own eyes.
She had been strolling with Shirley and Henry and the two grandchildren toward their car in the parking lot of a shopping mall when she spotted the white man digging the hole in the sidewalk pavement. Beside him leaned a big-belly black man who peered captiously down the hole and bellowed criticism and commentary over the digging. Precious stopped and stared, her mouth agape, at this scene from a movie.
“What you looking at, Mummy?” Shirley asked, edging closer and licking an ice cream cone.
“A white man digging a hole in de sidewalk,” Precious mumbled.
“Damn lazy brute dem,” Shirley groused. “Dey work for de government. If it take a normal man an hour to dig de hole, it take dem five.”
“But digging a hole!” Precious mumbled, confused. “I never know white man could dig hole.”
“Who say dey can dig hole? They’re damn lazy! You want to watch?”
Precious muttered that she did not, for she felt vaguely queasy at the thought of sticking her nose into another’s business, but Shirley had already seized her firmly by the elbow and was half dragging and pushing her across the striped parking lot toward the edge of the road where the men were working, all the while whispering to the children that Grandma had never before seen a white man dig a hole and wanted to see such a wonder up close for herself.
“Is that true, Grandma?” Cheryl-Lee asked in a whisper, excitement shining in her eyes. “You’ve never seen a white man dig a hole?”
Precious tried to mumble something in defense of this embarrassing shortcoming in her upbringing, while doing her best to shake off the official police death-grip with which Shirley steered her across the parking lot.
“Sometimes our garbage man is a white man, Grandma!” Henrietta blurted, skipping merrily at her side.
They were within earshot range of the digging men now, and Precious could even hear the big-bellied black man complaining about the depth of hole.
“It got to be deeper, I tell ya!” he was twanging to the white man, who was so deep down the hole that only his blood-gorged neck blazed above the ragged rim. “I know the line’s down there someplace! You just gotta keep digging!”
The white man hoisted the pickaxe and drove the blade into the earth with a porcine grunt, while the black man slouched with his hands resting heavily against his knees and peered attentively into the hole.
“This is fun!” Cheryl-Lee announced. “Watching a white man dig a hole!”
“How come we never did this before, Mommy?” Henrietta asked peevishly in a tone that implied maternal neglect.
“Lawd Jesus, Shirley!” Precious muttered, tugging at her daughter’s sleeve. “Dey goin’ see we watching dem. Come, make we go back!”
Shirley kissed her teeth in an expression of contempt.
“I am a taxpayer,” she growled. “I have the right to watch any man dig any hole so long as is my taxes paying for it. I am sitting right here and watching my taxes at work.”
She sat down stubbornly on the curb, licked her ice cream cone, and watched the white man dig. The children plopped down in an arc of silence and studiously peered. Henry leaned against the trunk of a tree and looked amused.
Before long they could hear the white man groaning that the sun was too hot and the work too hard, and he and the black man withdrew under the shade of a nearby tree and lolled against its trunk, chatting and swatting idly at the swarms of hovering gnats and flies.
“See what I tell you!” Shirley said triumphantly. “And you say white man can dig a hole! Dig an inch and him take a half hour break! Damn lazy brutes.” She lumbered to her feet and started across the parking lot toward the car.
Though the men had seemed oblivious to their presence, Precious thought some polite explanation of the family’s gawking necessary. With Cheryl-Lee hanging onto her hand, she strolled over to the panting white man whose face was broiled a florid and ugly red by the exertion and the hot sun and said, “That’s a very nice hole you were digging.”
The man looked at her quizzically, turned to his black companion, and asked, “What’d she say?”
“Grandma says she like the way you dug that hole,” Cheryl-Lee explained primly. “This is my Jamaican grandma,” she added.
The men whispered and stared as the family retreated toward the car parked in a distant corner of the enormous striped lot.
“I felt some explanation was necessary,” explained Precious as Shirley drove out of the parking lot. “So we wouldn’t seem uncouth.”
“Lawd God, Mummy,” Shirley muttered. “You don’t understand dis country, you know!”
“I just wanted to compliment him on de nice hole!” said Precious stoutly. “Hi! What’s wrong with dat? Henry, what’s wrong with dat?”
“Nothing!” agreed Henry brightly. “That man has probably dug a hundred holes without a single compliment from the public. I think it’s very thoughtful of you.”
“You would,” Shirley carped.
“I didn’t think there was anything wrong with saying something nice about the man’s hole,” Precious mumbled defensively.
But Henry couldn’t leave matters resting on that shaky note. He had to press ahead one obnoxious step further.
“Let’s play a game!” he said brightly, turning to the children in the backseat. “Grandma isn’t used to seeing white workers. From now on until we reach home, let’s find examples of white working men for Grandma.”
“Lawd Jesus!” protested Precious.
But it was too late. All the way home the children intermittently exploded into piercing squeals of triumphant discovery, crying out, “White man trimming a hedge!”
“White woman mowing the lawn!”
“White man walking a dog!”
“That doesn’t count! That’s not work! Does that count, Daddy?”
“White man painting a fence! Hah! That counts!”
Before long the two daughters were fighting over the passing pool of working white men, as each pirated examples from the other’s hard-won stock.
“That was my white man in the tree! Wasn’t that my white man in the tree, Daddy?”
“I saw the white man painting the fence first! Didn’t I,-Daddy? That’s my white man!”