“THE NARROW ESCAPE”
Richie darts through the moving
traffic of Halfway Tree square. Car brakes scream as a driver
swerves violently to avoid hitting him. The car engine shuts off
and it stops abruptly. Irate drivers honk their car horns
angrily as the domino effect of the near accident causes a
traffic jam.
Richie takes a quick peek over his
shoulder in mid flight to see if he’s still being pursued
closely. He had to run through the back of the plaza, hide
behind a dumpster, scale a back wall, and run through an alley
way with a mob of angry shoppers in hot pursuit. He doesn’t see
any of his pursuers close behind him and darts down Odeon
Avenue.
A few people standing at the bus
stop across the street look on curiously as Richie runs by. It’s
not unusual to see a youth fleeing on foot in Kingston,
especially here a few blocks away from Ambrook Lane and Molynes
Road.
Richie scales the five-foot wall of
Saint Andrews Anglican Church and lands in the cemetery. He’s
close to safety. A shortcut through the cemetery leads to the
back alleys and gullies into the heart of the ghettoes of
Waltham Park and he’s confident none of his pursuers will pass
this line.
Half way across the cemetery Richie
slows his gallop and begins a brisk walk. His heart pounds like
an angry kick drum in his ears and his lungs gasp desperately
for more oxygen than is available in the air. He glances back
one more time for reassurance. All is clear, only tombstones and
whitened sepulchers bear silent witness to his escapade. He
looks down and is surprised to see blood on the left side of his
shirt.
Richie realizes he’s been shot and
begins to panic. What he thought was sweat is blood. His whole
body reacts to this gory discovery. He suddenly feels a burning
sensation in his shoulder. It feels as if someone placed a red
hot marble in the joint. He breathes deeply to calm himself
down. He doesn’t feel right and decides to get to Ambrook Lane
close by where he knows some people from his old high school,
Tarant Secondary.
Richie tries to move his left arm
and finds out he can’t move it, it’s numb. He tries to flex his
fingers and they won’t move. He looks down at his left hand and
sees his fingers curled and frozen in the shape of a partially
open fist. The burning sensation in his shoulder intensifies.
He gets to the wall at the back of
the cemetery and has difficulty scaling it. Without the use of
his left hand he uses his right hand to hoist his body awkwardly
on top of the wall then drags himself over it. The pain is
excruciating.
His chest paints a bright crimson
streak of blood across the top of the wall as if paying a blood
sacrifice of atonement to the dead, for the desecration of their
sanctuary. What should’ve taken 10 seconds takes him 10 minutes.
Finally he gets over the top of the
wall and jumps down into the grassy open land behind the
cemetery. He lands on the ground, stumbles, and falls as he has
no balance with his numbed arm.
The fall jars his shoulder and the
marble of fire feels like the sun has taken up residence in his
shoulder. Richie shuts his eyes tightly and cries out in agony.
He goes from seeing blood red, to seeing pitch black, to seeing
blood red again and his breathing becomes labored.
He’s not far from his destination
but each footfall ignites an inferno in his shoulder. Sweat
pours down his face and half his body feels ice chills while the
other half is on fire.
Richie feels confused and has
difficulty concentrating as he enters some type of delirium. A
couple voices call down to him from the gully bank. He looks up
but can’t focus enough to recognize the faces. The shapes on the
gully bank begin to take on alien forms, morphing from one shape
into another.
He feels he’s losing his mind and
fights to regain control of his faculties. He eliminates the
fear that the shapes on the gully bank are police as the voices
sound familiar and friendly. The two alien shapes run down
towards him and take him by the arm. He cries out in pain when
one of the shapes grabs his left arm. The shapes realize he’s
badly hurt and lead him gently up the gully bank by the other
arm.
Richie wakes up in the back room of
a shack to find Flex his old high school friend and his cousin
Billy Boy fanning him with a piece of cardboard. The ball of
fire returns with a vengance and his face contorts into a weird
shape as he winches in pain.
“Ow long mi dey yah?” he enquires in
anguish.
“Bout 15 minutes,” Flex answers.
“Wi
fine1
yuh inna di gully a walk round like a mad man,” Billy Boy adds.
Richie forces a smile.
“15 minutes! Jah kno sey mi
tink sey about two day mi a sleep
fa2.
Iya dis shoulda a bun like fire an I caan move it a inch.”
“Wi sen fi Jah Blue fi im come check
it out. Yuh waa some water?” Flex asks.
“Yes I, give thanks.”
Flex hands Richie a
cheese pan3
full of cool water. Richie uses his right hand to bring the
large pan to his mouth and drinks copiously as if trying to cool
the fire in his shoulder.
Jah Blue walks in through the door.
The men greet the Dred respectfully. He has a knapsack of herbal
medicines slung across his shoulder and begins to spread out
bottles on the ground right away.
“Mi come as soon as I man
ear4.
Babylon a swarm di place like
fly,” Jah Blue comments.
Richie’s heart skips a beat.
“Well Rastaman wi haffi move fast.
Check out dis shoulda yah an si wha you can do. I man caan move
it and it a bun I like a fireball in dey,” Richie states rather
calmly.
Flex passes out cigar sized spliffs.
Each man takes one and lights it up. Blue has his herbs and
medicine bottles laid out neatly on the ground. He lights up his
spliff and inhales deeply.
As he exhales he utters a
healing incantation, “Calling I'n'I ancestors, God
Shango5
and Imhotep6
god of medicine guide I'n'I hands, Rastafari.”
Smoke flows out his nostrils and
mouth like the muffler of a tractor trailer and the small room
fills with weed smoke.
“Awright7
lay down mek I tek a look,” Blue orders.
After a strenuous effort Richie lays
down wincing with every inch of movement. His shirt is covered
with coagulated blood.
Blue opens the shirt and has to peel
it away from his skin. As he peels it over the wound a plug of
clotted blood is pulled up revealing a small hole in the crease
between Richie’s shoulder and chest. A fresh trickle of blood
begins to flow from the hole. Blue uses his thumb to depress the
area around the bullet hole. Richie grimaces and grits his teeth
as painful electric shocks shoot out from the ball of fire in
his shoulder down to his toes.
Blue asks for a clean towel and some
hot water. Billy Boy leaves to get the items as Blue rummages
through his collection of bottles and dried herbs. He pours a
combination of liquids into the cheese pan Richie drank out of,
then crushes dried leaves from the Bissy, Cercee, and
Leaf-of-Life plants together and adds them to the cheese pan. To
this he sprinkles some salts from one of the bottles and kneads
it all together. He then takes a piece of cheesecloth from his
bag and makes a poultice.
Billy Boy returns with two towels
and a dishpan of hot water. Blue pours some liquids from his
bottles into the dishpan and soaks a towel in it then uses the
towel to wipe away the blood from the wound. The scalding water
sears Richie’s skin but is cool compared to the inferno in his
shoulder. Awed, the men look on in silence as Blue works with
the proficiency of an experienced surgeon.
Blue goes into the side pocket of his knapsack
and pulls out a tweezer. He burns the tips of the tweezer with a
lighter until they’re red hot then straddles Richie and orders
Flex and Billy Boy to hold his legs down. Blue opens a small
vial of 110% proof white rum and pours it into the wound, then
probes the hole with the tweezer.
Richie’s body convulses in pain. He
grits his teeth, shuts his eyes tightly and grimaces in agony.
Tears squeeze out from under his eyelids and run down his cheeks
but he makes no sound.
Blue continues to probe in the wound
and the tweezer makes contact with the bullet fragment. Pain
racks Richie. He kicks his legs so hard Flex goes flying into
the thin wooden wall of the make-shift shack.
It feels like molten lava is
cruising through the veins in his left arm. The ball of fire
burns so intensely his ears begin to ring. All Richie can think
of is hacking off his shoulder to relieve the unbearable pain.
Blue pulls out the bullet with the
tweezer. The fire and pain vanishes from Richie’s shoulder
immediately and he regains movement in his fingers. Richie’s
relieved. He tries to move his arm and everything is back to
normal.
“Di bullet did a press pon some
nerve inna yu shoulder,”
Blue explains as he puts the poultice on the wound.
He reaches into another part of the knapsack, retrieves a roll
of gauze
then uses it to wrap Richie’s shoulder.
“Everyting8
cool an wi heal up in a few days,” Blue assures.
Richie smiles in relief as he tests
his shoulder to see if it really functions as before. He’s
satisfied with the result and wonders how such a small
projectile could’ve inflicted so much pain.
“Give tanks Dred. Jah kno ah
don’t kno wha mi woulda do
widout9
yu.”
“A nuh nutten dat yute man. Is
di natural order fi Rasta help all fellowman. Ear mi nuh,
I man affi leggo10.
It late an Babylon a crawl round like ants.”
“Respect Dred,” Richie acknowledges.
Blue packs up his stuff and leaves.
Richie gives Billy Boy the money and
chain to hide. Flex enters hurriedly with a
shirt……
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Chapter 17 Excerpt
“RICHIE SETTLES
IN”
Richie serves a customer then
returns to the sofa in the living room. James is seated in a
chair smoking a cigarette. Richie admires the work the carpenter
did to reinforce the door with the 2 by 4 and door stops and
likes the grills that were placed around the windows. He’s
amazed by the whole set up and absorbs the new world around him
in every detail like a sponge.
He studies James carefully and
intuitively likes something about him. This is Richie’s first
exposure to drug addicts and he wonders what magic in cocaine
makes people want it so bad. He heard crazy stories about crack
addicts and imagines this white powder is a mind altering drug
that makes fantasies real to the user.
He has smoked weed for as long
as he can remember but weed never had any addictive hold on his
mind. In Jamaica the Rastas said cocaine is the devil’s
substance, an artificial chemical invented by evil white men as
part of their global white supremist agenda to take over the
world by controlling people’s minds.
Richie had seen some of the most
vicious killers in Jamaica snort this substance before they went
on murderous rampages during the elections of 1980. Many of
these notorious killers didn’t have a reputation until they
started snorting and were only violent when they snorted.
It was rumored on the island
that cocaine was brought in by the CIA to help Seaga’s
pro-capitalist party win the election. That year was the
bloodiest in the history of Jamaica’s elections. All these
thoughts run through Richie’s mind as he tries to understand the
world of drug addiction.
“Things are usually slow around
this time in the afternoon. That’s how it is when you just open
up shop,” James states to entertain some conversation with the
rather reserved Richie.
“Yeah, so wha, a
heepa1
peeple a go come buy lata2?”
Richie asks intrigued and dying to slake his curiosity.
James holds up his hand.
“Ho! Ho! Slow down man I can’t
understand that shit when you talk so fast.”
Richie’s patois sounds like
rapid fire Spanish with a Caribbean accent. Richie catches
himself, recalling the days back home when he’d run into
tourists and had to speak slowly for them to understand him.
“I want to know if plenty peeple
a go come buy di drugs later,” he repeats slowly syllable by
syllable.
James smiles at the new diction
but at least he can comprehend.
“Yeah, hell yeah. With this good
shit?” James exclaims, his voice raised an octave with a comical
expression on his face. “You damn right the whole neighborhood
will be copping in a minute. One thing’s for sure and two things
for certain you Jamaicans keep that good shit.”
James salivates just thinking of
the beige colored shiny flakes of cocaine in the packets, called
fish scale because they glisten like the scales on a fish. This
is a tell tale sign of the cocaine’s potency and the type
smokers like best.
“So wat dem do wid it? Smoke
it?” Richie asks naively.
He’s heard about
people smoking coke but he never saw anyone smoke it in Jamaica.
Coke was virtually unknown on the island and very few people had
it.
‘Give me a
packet and I’ll show you.’
James smiles
satisfactorily at the question.
“Yeah, some people smoke it, some snort it and some shoot it.”
Speaking about the drug unleashes a flood of cravings in him.
“Man, that white
stuff is the manna of heaven, divine snow flakes. It’s the white
man’s greatest invention. There ain’t nothing in the world like
it. Nothing in the whole wide world,” James emphasizes with
religious zeal.
‘The Rastas was
right after all,’
Richie thinks to himself.
“So wha? Everybody
in di neighborhood use it?”
“Damn near everybody I know. Some
muthafuckas act like they ain’t down but most of them use it on
the d. l.
Richie doesn’t
know the meaning of d.l. but surmises James means in secret.
James pauses his
scheming to bamboozle a packet of cocaine momentarily to answer
Richie’s enquires. His mind’s been working overtime all morning
on an angle to trick Richie, however, he finds himself taking a
genuine liking to him.
Something about
Richie’s innocent naivete, his inquisitiveness and his seeming
genuine interest in the drug game intrigues James. He senses
Richie must be new to America and finds his ingenousness
admirable.
It reminds him of
when he was young and in the Marines. Whenever he travelled to
different countries he was always genuinely interested in
learning everything about the culture of the people in the
countries he visited.
James realizes he
doesn’t even know Richie’s name.
“What’s your name
again?”
Richie ponders
momentarily.
“Yardie, mi name
Yardie.”
James is
suspicious………..
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