GUYANESE HORROR FICTION KAMARANG…Sealey and the girl with changing names

Mar 02, 2020 News

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By Michael Jordan

The boy came in around midnight, bringing the smell of the girl with him. In the fluttering flambeau light, his eyes lifted to Sealey, who was smoking in his hammock.
“Night Mr. Sealey.”

Sealey pressed his cigarette out against a post. He lit another at the flambeau, then turned back to Leon. “So how the young rooster?”
Leon responded with a tired, dreamy smile. “Okay Mr. Sealey.” He stepped further into the pork-knocker’s logie, stumbling slightly in the gloom.
From his hammock, Jerry Mentore laughed. “Ha…like she wear you out, chap.”
The boy smiled again. He shifted to his hammock next to Sealey’s. He removed his boots, then his jersey. A strong, unmistakable feminine odour wafted over them.
Jerry Mentore sniffed the air loudly. “Hay…go bathe, man.” He leaned to the floor, then flung a boot at Bap Reggie, who was snoring in his hammock.
The snores ceased abruptly. Bap Reggie stirred, grumbling a curse.
“Wake up, Chap,” Mentore said loudly. “Leon come back.”
Bap Reggie scrambled up, immediately awake. His grin was wide in the darkness. He began to cheer, Jerry Mentore joining in.
“Ahh raaight…the man with all the luck…”
“The young rooster…”
They were all grinning like schoolboys.
“What she name?”
The boy held up his hands, laughing.
“What she name?” pressed Mentore.
“Carmelita.” He said the name slowly.
“Car-mel-ita. Sounds Brazilian. She’s Brazilian?”
“How much fuh a night-sleep?” Leon?” asked Bap Reggie.
The boy gave Bap Reggie a sideways, mischievous glance. “But what this old man want with night sleep?”
Laughter…Bap Reggie, unabashed, joining in.
“But serious, Leon,” Mentore said. “How much?”
“I dunno,” Leon said, smiling.
Mentore shifted impatiently, almost tumbling from his hammock. “How you mean you doan know? Yuh been with the woman, or yuh ain been with the woman?”
The boy nodded. Again that tired, dreamy smile.
“So how much?”
“I tell you I don’t know.” The boy was smiling, eyes half-closed. Now he yawned, and stretched himself out in his hammock.
And then, like a flash of light, understanding came to Sealey.
“Leon, you still got the two pennyweights I gave you?”
Leon’s eyes fluttered open. He stared at Sealey, surprised.
“Yes Mr. Sealey.”
Mentore was glancing from Sealey to Leon.
“Wait a minute. You mean you didn’t pay?”
Leon said nothing, but the dreamy smile had returned. He pushed a hand into his trouser pocket. It came out with a wad of paper. Sealey watched him unfold it; saw the dull-glittering metal inside. He stared at the gold, feeling a pang of jealousy, mingling with a sense of foreboding. Leon let them stare at the gold for a moment, then stretched out again in his hammock.
Mentore emitted a sigh. “Lucky son of a…”
Hay, wha ’bout introducing me tomorrow…eh Leon?”
But Leon was already asleep.
*
Vibert Sealey stared at the ceiling, his senses tuned to the Kamarang night. Somewhere overhead, he heard a passing night-bird’s mournful cry. Distant music from the direction of the Jaguar’s Den disco. Alvin Benn had switched to oldies. The Drifters’ Strangers on the Shore… Suddenly he felt lonely. Bap Reggie was snoring in his hammock. Jerry Mentore had gone back to the Jaguar’s Den. Maybe he should have gone, too. Sat with old friends, gotten drunk and talked nonsense till the sun came up over the mountains.
Why…oh why…must I go on like this…
Should I be a lonely… stranger on thu-uh shore
Memories…memories…
It was on a night just like this that he had met her. He had been just a boy back then.
But he had thought that he was a man because he had spent three years in the bush. He had been through the dreaded Itanami Falls. Seen a man’s shoulder swiped open by a jaguar at Three Miles.
He’d had his share of women…who won’t, moving with Jocelyn Walker?
And all of this had made him think he was prepared for life. Josephine taught him different.
That was the time of the Tumatumari gold shout, when men were finding nuggets as big as eggs. Jocelyn Walker’s crew had done well, too. The celebrations began on the trail, as they headed out of Tumatumari by truck; everybody half drunk and they hadn’t even reached Bartica.
Jocelyn Walker was talking about a pleasure-girl that was waiting for him in Georgetown. His friend, Rudy Wilson, a short, quiet, big shouldered miner from Bartica, was talking of the things he would do for his grandmother and sister, and of a girl he wanted to marry, when the truck suddenly veered off the trail.
Sealey and Walker had managed to jump free just as the truck plunged down the Tumatumari gorge, taking Rudy Wilson and ten other miners with it.
The memory of the truck slipping on the red loam and tottering over the gorge, and the screams of the trapped men remained in his head, even after the funerals.
He had wanted to get away from Bartica after they had pooled their money and given something to Wilson’s grandmother.
Instead, the two days they had planned staying had stretched to a week. He had expected the men to be subdued. Instead, the liquor had flowed more than ever. The laughter and cursing were louder. He sensed that they were all trying to drown out the memory of those screams. He joined them too, drinking to forget, but somehow drunkenness had refused to come.
If they had left earlier, he might never have met her.
They had started drinking at the Diamond of Joy, then they had moved to Flash Nelson’s place, then to Chiefie’s Shop in First Avenue. Around midnight, they had moved to a new open-air dancehall built at the edge of the riverside. There was a huge full moon, like the one now over Kamarang. The juke-box was blaring out an Eddie Hooper tune. Jocelyn Walker had an arm around a prostitute they called the Black Pearl and was singing
‘Where are your friends now
“Oh yeah…where are they…”
And he had thought of Rudy Wilson and was about to drink again when he saw her coming down the walkway.
God, the things he still remembered. How small and girlish she had looked. Her lips pouting and haughty-looking, but with a trace of sadness. The mole just above her left breast. The way she would squeeze her thighs together, as a signal that she wanted to make love. The playful way she would catch a tendril of her reddish-brown hair in her mouth, when it blew loose in the Bartica seawall breeze.
He had danced with her. She had seemed to sense his loneliness and had sat and listened to him talk about the accident; listening to him as if he was the only man there.
That beauty, those eyes with the hint of sadness, her hard life—father dead, mother an alcoholic—had brought out a protectiveness in him.
They had tried to warn him, even before they realised how badly he had fallen.
Boy, you don’t know that woman. She goin to carry you to the mountain top and then drop you down, and you gun break up in lil pieces like flippin’ humpty dumpty, and nothing could put yuh back together again…
That warning had bothered him. He had sometimes sensed that hardness in her; at other times, something wild and unpredictable. The intensity of her lovemaking excited him. But it scared him too; made him wonder if he could ever be enough for her. Sometimes she stared at him as if he was the only man in the world. Sometimes she behaved as if he didn’t exist. Sometimes he seemed to catch a secret, mocking smile at the edge of her lips.
But he had told himself that they were jealous. They didn’t know her the way he did. He had taken her from Bartica, when he could no longer stand to see her being touched by other men. He had rented a house in Georgetown, running around like a jackass, trying to stock it with everything she asked for. He eventually left her at home to return to the bush. For once, he had been reluctant to leave the city.
It was a miner at Tumatumari who started the trouble. The man had just come in from Georgetown. He said he had seen her drinking with a half-Portuguese chap at the Ritz. Sealey had put the man in a lock…almost broken his neck. He hadn’t known his own strength back then.
But he couldn’t work after that. He caught the first truck out and returned to Georgetown… to a house that was empty as a hall cleared for a dance:
The furniture he had bought at Fogarty’s…gone.
The new double-bed…gone.
The De Luxe fridge…gone.
The cabinet with the fancy Pyrex ware…gone…
Even his clothes were missing; his shoes, his hats—even back then, he had loved hats.
All that was left was a cup, a plate, a sponge by the sink, and a pair of her red panties on the bathroom rail.
Thinking of it now, he realised that he had nearly gone mad, the way he had searched for her. At Bartica, he heard something about her spending money on a tall, half-Portuguese man named Johnny Perreira. But she wasn’t there. She wasn’t anywhere that they said she was.
It was at the Ritz that he finally found Perreira; this tall, light-skinned man, wearing his suit, his hat, and a cloud of red rage was in Sealey’s head, and he had Perreira by the fuk’in throat, just squeezing, just squeezing, just squeezing…
He did not see the knife. All he knew was that suddenly his hands and legs were heavy, all his anger was draining away, and he was slipping to the ground in tangled slow-motion.
And the red mist cleared and now he saw the knife handle sticking out of his side.
Stabbed…stabbed…dying over a whore…
It was three weeks before he could leave the hospital.
Afterwards, he knocked around town, drinking out the little money he had, feeling sorry for himself, until Jocelyn Walker came from the bush and straightened him out.
Welcome, boy, Walker had said.
Welcome to the world of foolish pork-knockers…
It was when he had finally stopped his mad search that he had finally found her. Or rather, she found him.
He was going home from a drinking session in Lombard Street, when a woman in the darkness said: “Vibert?”
She was wearing a flowered dress like the one he had first seen her in. It looked old, rumpled, too big for her. She, too, looked worn and older. There was no sign of the jewels he had made for her; even the gold tooth she’d once flashed was gone. But there was still enough of the girl he had known to make his heart turn over.
She asked for something to eat, and he bought her a meal and drink at a Chinese restaurant. As she took the first spoonful, a tear slid down her cheek. He had given her money to return to Bartica.
She had looked at him…that sad, soft-eyed look that had melted him before and made him stupid. That was the last time he had ever seen her. Months after, he thought of her, wondering at the look he thought he had seen in those slanted eyes, wondering if she had meant it this time.
Where was she now? Had she married? Was she still alive?
Even after all those years, he still hadn’t forgotten her. And the thought of what might have been, had he given her that second chance, was still a wound in his heart that hurt most on nights like this.
…and when sleep finally came to Vibert Sealey, he found that she had followed him there. He was a boy again, still aching at the loss of her. There were tears at the back of his throat and he was travelling on a strange, wide jungle river in his mad, endless search. Hundreds of water dogs swam alongside the leaky corial in which he sat. A soft-glowing orange sun was setting in the east.
The squint-eyed Amerindian boatman was smiling at him. He reminded Sealey of Tony Perez, his old friend from Kamarang.
“You sure you want to find her, boy?” the boatman said, when they were halfway across. “She will build you up, then break you into little pieces. Little, little, pieces,” he said again, dipping his paddle, which Sealey now saw was a man’s leg, into the water.
Suddenly it was twilight, and he was walking along a thin jungle trail. A huge bird beat its wings overhead. It flew past him, then stopped in the middle of the trail. It waited until he was close, then it flew down the track, stopping again to stare at him. It knew where she was. He could see the amusement in its red eyes.
You sure you want to find her, boy? It said with its eyes. You know where she is now? She’s with Johnny Perreira…red-skinned Johnny Perreira…
Suddenly the bird gave an alarmed squawk and flew into the bushes. Three veiled women were coming toward Sealey. They made no sound. He could not see their feet.
“You know where I can find Josephine?” he asked, deepening his voice, pretending to be brave.
They said nothing, but they shook with silent laughter. As they passed him on the trail, the woman nearest to him reached out and grabbed at his crotch.
She was in a troolie hut at the end of the trail. His Josephine. She lay naked on a bed of skins. She was smiling, eyes half-closed, a tendril of her reddish-brown hair caught playfully between her lips; her hips undulating in a strange, boneless rhythm.
Suddenly he was naked, and she was pulling him down onto the skins. He was about to kiss her when he saw that she wasn’t Josephine, she wasn’t Josephine at all. She was Leon’s girl, he couldn’t kiss Leon’s girl, but he kissed her and drew her close. He tried to enter her, but she pushed him back. She placed a hand on her full, black crotch. She reached out, brushed sticky-wet fingers to his lips; the smell of her pungent even in his dream.
“You can’t leave me now,” she said, her voice filled with a fierce tenderness. She stroked his face again. “You will always come back to me…”
She opened her thighs again. He hovered above her for a moment …
and
then
he
fell…
She entwined him. She writhed beneath him like a limbed serpent, her movements carrying them from the blanket of skins to the hut’s entrance and into the forest. Strange stars stared down at them. She stared up at him, and writhed, and smiled with cold amusement in her eyes.
Who are you? he tried to ask. What do you want from me?
But she just kept on writhing, and smiling with cold amusement into his eyes.
Taken from the Guyanese supernatural novel Kamarang by Michael Jordan. Book design and illustrations by Harold Bascom.)
Copies of the illustrated edition of Kamarang are on sale at Austin’s Book Store. KAMARANG is also available on Amazon in Kindle and paperback.
The author can also be contacted for autographed copies on +592 645 2447 or by email: [email protected]) 

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