‘COMEBACKEE’ – A Short Story by Harold A. Bascom

Aug 18, 2019 News

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My well-meaning aunt suggested that I meet Grantley, the brother of a close friend of hers who had returned to Guyana for a three-week vacation. ”
Anne! Listen! To! Me! … If you get in on him, who knows? You stand a good chance of him coming back, marrying you, and later sending for you. You know what that is for you in this hard guava season country? Eh? They say oil coming and oil doan spoil, but good women suffering here! Anne, is a break you could be getting just so!”
The truth was, if something like that could have happened, I wouldn’t have minded at all. But, again, much depended on what he looked like. I wasn’t going to take-up with any creepy thing that crawled out of a plane from Ol’ York; but yet at the same time, I wasn’t going to watch a gift horse in the mouth. So, I said: “Aunt Milly, what this Grantley look like, and how old is he?”
“Man, Anne, he looking so good, you won’t believe sixty—not hard an’ dry out like how we men does look just in they forties! Plus, them big men does take care of nice women like you good! On top o’ that, I hear he doing good in America—got he own business and a big house—the works. This could be the person to give you a real break in life! I know your big son over in the States, but it going take him a lil time to send for you. This is an opportunity, Anne!”
My aunt wanted me to come along with her to a function in West Ruimveldt where he would be present. I told her okay.
When the minibus dropped me and my aunt to the lil get-together, I knew I was looking ‘good.’ Not boasting, but God blessed me with a beautiful face on top of a beautiful body and added to that, I always looked ten years younger than my real age. So, that night when me and my aunt walked in, the music stopped, and the next sound you heard was the sound of men’s lusting tongues hitting the floor. Lol. Ya’all doan worry with me; I’m just being dramatic.
But it wasn’t hard spotting Mr. Grantley, the ‘comebackee.’ He stood out in a coffee-coloured snap-brim hat, a neatly pressed cream shirt, and slim-fitting pants with seams sharp like knives over shoes that were new and shine. The big man looked good! And there was no need for my aunt to introduce us. Mr. Grantley came over smiling widely.
“This is the Guyanese beauty I missed,” he began. “Nothing like this in New Yark,” he said. And so we got to talking. He was fast: It wasn’t long before he proposed a relationship which I deftly parried with the appropriate, let’s-get-to-know-one-another-first’ kinda talk.
We started going out, and that is when I discovered that he loved to drink. For me, that was a first strike against him. I hate men who can’t hold they liquor! My late husband was a cruel drunk and I have hidden scars of being brutalized by him to prove it. The second strike against Mr. Grantley was when he took me on a shopping trip with him to Bourda Market where a school friend of mine who lived in Albouystown had a small business. “Gat to get me some meat,” Mr. Grantley twanged.
We got into a taxi and soon were at the market where he stopped at a little butcher stall over from where my friend sold tripe. He wanted pork chops. When the girl took the meat down from the hook and started cutting, Mr. Grantley, took off on her:
“You call those pork chaps, huh? What kinda pork chaps are those? I won’t give my dawg in New Yark something like that!”
And he and the girl fetched away. She started cussing him about how he bigging up he salt-water yankee self; and to my surprise, Mr. Grantley lost his accent and began cussing her right back, tit for tat, in impeccable Guyanese. That was the third and final strike against him; as far as I was concerned, he was out!
In the height of it, I had crossed over to my friend with the tripe stall who was worried. “Annie!” she quaked. “What if he come over here and start saying that me tripe too stink and it nothing like he tripe in New York?” And together we had a good laugh at the jackass.
After we got back to where he was staying, I kindly told him I didn’t think a relationship with him would work. He begged and promised he’d stop drinking and that he’d be nice to people. When I didn’t budge on my decision to not be with him, he started calling me all kinds of unambitious.
“What I’m offering you is an opportunity to leave Guyana!” he snapped. “You’re blowing it!”
“I’m good,” I told him.
“You’re so stupid!” he ended. “You know what? Huh? You’re going to be here living a local hand-to-mouth life until you die! You’ll never get out of Guyana!”
I left feeling bad about myself; but at least he didn’t get anything from me despite the amount of money he had given me.
That night, I told my aunt what had transpired, and guess who she was upset with? You guessed right:
“Anne, man you move wrong!” she fretted. “You mean you allowing a man with he own business in New York and a five-bedroom house in Long Island to slip out yo’ hand, just because he wasn’t nice to a butcher shop girl in Bourda Market?”
“Man, Aunty,” I said, “is much more than that.”
“What else so bad?”
“He drinks a lot, Aunty. He just remind me so much of my dead husband.”
“Okay,” Aunt Milly said and sighed. I knew she was disappointed; but she knew that when my mind was made up, it was made up.
One year later, it so happened that I got a visitor’s visa to the United States and traveled soon after. After I got off the plane at JFK and was picked up by my big son, there was one thought foremost in my mind: to find Mr. Grantley and show him that despite what he had said, I still managed to get out of Guyana and to the USA without him.
One weekend when I was with a friend in Queens, we started talking Guyanese old story and eventually we got around to men. I told her about me and Mr. Grantley.
“Grantley…Hmm; name sound familiar. Describe him for me,” she said.
“I can do better than that, Yvette. I still have a picture of me and him on my phone,” I said and found him.
“Oh! I know him!” she said, chuckling.
“He lives on Long Island,” I said. “He showed me a photograph of his house.”
“You want to see him?”
“Not really,” I said. “The truth is, I just want to look him in the face and say, ‘See? You didn’t bring me to the States, but I’m still here!'”
My friend laughed and it was a funny laugh. I remembered my granny who liked saying that every kee-kee, kee-kee nah laugh.
“Listen,” she said, “tomorrow I’ll pick you up.”
“And you’ll take me by him.”
“Just be ready,” she said. “I’ll pick you up around ten.”
That Saturday morning in Brooklyn felt very much like a Saturday morning in Georgetown minus the brownstones. Yvette drove to a church, pulled into its parking lot, and turned off the engine.
“What we doing here, Yvette?”
“Patience, noh girl,” she said, as we looked at a line forming before the church door. In the line were decent looking people and unfortunate looking people—mostly unfortunate looking, though.
“What’s going on here, Yvette?”
“The church runs a food bank.”
“I didn’t know food got bank,” I chuckled.
“They would collect food from big businesses and so on and give it out free to the unfortunate.”
“Okay,” I said, and then I saw another man join the line. He looked familiar. Suddenly, my hand flew to my chest in shock. The man was Mr. Grantley and he was not impeccably dressed as he had been in West Ruimveldt. Now he was in a washed-out pair of jeans, a dingy white t-shirt, a cap turned back, and he pushed a rickety shopping cart before him. “Oh, my, God!” I gasped.
“That is the Mr. Grantley you tell me about?”
“Oh, Jesus Christ! … Yes,” I gasped.
“What is it we uses to say in Guyana? ‘Come come see mih and come come live with mih, is two different things?”
“Jesus Christ!” I hissed.
Yvette laughed. “Want to go talk to he?”
I shook my head. I wasn’t that vindictive. “So, where he really lives?”
Yvette started driving off. “In some dotty room below some Haitian people on Flatbush Avenue,” she said while waiting to make a left turn out of the church’s parking lot.
“Oh Jesus Christ,” I whispered, as I thought of all the people, pumped up on lies, who returned and continue to return home on vacation.
A strange sadness enveloped me.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper)

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