Trinidad Noir Read online

  TRINIDAD NOIR

  This collection is comprised of works of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the authors’ imaginations. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Published by Akashic Books

  ©2008 Akashic Books

  Series concept by Tim McLoughlin and Johnny Temple

  Trinidad map by Sohrab Habibion

  ISBN-13: 978-1-933354-55-2

  eISBN-13: 978-1-617750-60-1

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2007940662

  All rights reserved

  First printing

  Akashic Books

  PO Box 1456

  New York, NY 10009

  [email protected]

  www.akashicbooks.com

  ALSO IN THE AKASHIC NOIR SERIES:

  Baltimore Noir, edited by Laura Lippman

  Bronx Noir, edited by S.J. Rozan

  Brooklyn Noir, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Tim McLoughlin

  Brooklyn Noir 3: Nothing but the Truth edited by Tim McLoughlin & Thomas Adcock

  Chicago Noir, edited by Neal Pollack

  D.C. Noir, edited by George Pelecanos

  D.C. Noir 2: The Classics, edited by George Pelecanos

  Detroit Noir, edited by E.J. Olsen & John C. Hocking

  Dublin Noir (Ireland), edited by Ken Bruen

  Havana Noir (Cuba), edited by Achy Obejas

  Las Vegas Noir, edited by Jarret Keene & Todd James Pierce

  London Noir (England), edited by Cathi Unsworth

  Los Angeles Noir, edited by Denise Hamilton

  Manhattan Noir, edited by Lawrence Block

  Manhattan Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Lawrence Block

  Miami Noir, edited by Les Standiford

  New Orleans Noir, edited by Julie Smith

  Queens Noir, edited by Robert Knightly

  San Francisco Noir, edited by Peter Maravelis

  Toronto Noir, edited by Janine Armin & Nathaniel G. Moore

  Twin Cities Noir, edited by Julie Schaper & Steven Horwitz

  Wall Street Noir, edited by Peter Spiegelman

  FORTHCOMING:

  Barcelona Noir (Spain), edited by Adriana Lopez & Carmen Ospina

  Delhi Noir (India), edited by Hirsh Sawhney

  Istanbul Noir (Turkey), edited by Mustafa Ziyalan & Amy Spangler

  Lagos Noir (Nigeria), edited by Chris Abani

  Mexico City Noir (Mexico), edited by Paco I. Taibo II

  Moscow Noir (Russia), edited by Natalia Smirnova & Julia Goumen

  Paris Noir (France), edited by Aurélien Masson

  Phoenix Noir, edited by Patrick Millikin

  Portland Noir, edited by Kevin Sampsell

  Richmond Noir, edited by Andrew Blossom, Brian Castleberry & Tom De Haven

  Rome Noir (Italy), edited by Chiara Stangalino & Maxim Jakubowski

  San Francisco Noir 2: The Classics, edited by Peter Maravelis

  Seattle Noir, edited by Curt Colbert

  And if somebody don’t buss somebody face

  How the policeman going to make a case?

  And if somebody don’t dig out somebody eye

  The Magistrate will have nobody to try

  And if somebody don’t kill somebody dead

  All the judges going to beg their bread

  So when somebody cut off somebody head

  Instead of hanging they should pay them money instead

  —Lord Commander, “No Crime, No Law”

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  PART I: COUNTRY

  LISA ALLEN-AGOSTINI Sans Souci

  Pot Luck

  KEVIN BALDEOSINGH Couva

  The Rape

  SHANI MOOTOO San Fernando

  The Funeral Party

  REENA ANDREA MANICKCHAND Caroni Swamp

  Dougla

  RAMABAI ESPINET Santa Cruz

  Nowarian Blues

  WILLI CHEN Godineau

  Betrayal

  JAIME LEE LOY Palmiste

  Bury Your Mother

  OONYA KEMPADOO Maracas

  Standing on Thin Skin

  PART II: TOWN

  ELISHA EFUA BARTELS Diego Martin

  Woman Is Boss

  LAWRENCE SCOTT Maraval

  Prophet

  ROBERT ANTONI Uptown Port-of-Spain

  How to Make Photocopies in the Trinidad & Tobago National Archives

  DARBY MALONEY San Juan

  The Best Laid Plans

  KEITH JARDIM Emperor Valley Zoo

  The Jaguar

  RIAN MARIE EXTAVOUR Tunapuna

  Eric’s Turn

  ELIZABETH NUNEZ St. James

  Lucille

  VAHNI CAPILDEO Fort George

  Peacock Blue

  JUDITH THEODORE East Dry River

  Dark Nights

  TIPHANIE YANIQUE Chaguaramas

  Gita Pinky Manachandi

  About the Contributors

  INTRODUCTION

  PARADOXES IN PARADISE

  People think they know the Caribbean, the white-sandy-beaches-rum-and-Coca-Cola-smiling-natives-waving-palms Caribbean—you know the one. And sure, the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago has sun, sea, beaches, the whole tourist schtick. But this southernmost country in the Caribbean archipelago is filled with paradoxes. She isn’t always the idyllic tropical dream. Far from it. Sometimes she’s a nightmare.

  In Trinidad Noir, you’ll trail the country’s criminals, her prostitutes, her officious bureaucrats, her police, her ordinary citizens. Expect to be intrigued. Expect to be entertained. But don’t expect to understand Trinidad.

  It’s ironic that this volume is the first noir collection to come out of this country because, in a sense, Trinidad was founded on crime. Christopher Columbus’s arrival in 1498 was the start of a criminal enterprise of epic proportions: it began with the theft of the island from its indigenous Carib people, then their genocide, followed by African slavery and the importation of indentured labor to man the obscenely lucrative cocoa, sugar, and coffee plantations of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Today, Trinidad’s political climate of excess and corruption is buoyed by an economy bloated with oil and natural gas monies and by an element of society afloat in drugs and guns. There’s fodder enough here for ten volumes of Trinidad Noir.

  Trinidad’s history is imprinted in the faces of her people: East Indian, Portuguese, and Chinese indentured laborers; descendents of African slaves; European colonials; and the Syrians and Lebanese who migrated here in the early twentieth century. Black, white, dougla, East Indian, Chinese, and Middle-Eastern Trinis—you’ll meet them all in these pages.

  The country’s profound cultural diversity has produced a resilient people. Trinis are characteristically God-fearing, family-oriented, and generous, but despite their apparent insouciance they can also be unscrupulous and divisive. They are often deeply religious yet ridiculously carnal, living a Victorian double-life. By night they love the same neighbors whom they claim to hate by day. Tension among these groups, most notably between the predominant East Indian and African populations, makes for political minefields in almost every aspect of national life. Yet in their everyday lives Trinis coexist peacefully: they live side by side, they intermarry, they lime and fete together.

  Each spring most Trinis throw propriety to the wind and strip down to soul essentials for Carnival. Carnival combines the pre-Lenten celebrations of the French planter class during slavery with African masking traditions to form what is arguably the greatest show on earth. Masquerading as characters inspired by fa
ntasy, film, Vegas, nature, and whatever else catches the designers’ fancies, hundreds of thousands of people take to the streets. Together they jump and wine—a sensual dance involving hip gyration—to calypso, soca, and pan, indigenous music created largely by the black working class.

  This collection includes stories by some of today’s most acclaimed Caribbean writers, and for such a small country, the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago has an impressive literary legacy. Among the endless traits that typify Trinis—depending upon whom you ask—is a graciousness which is humbling to encounter. We would like to thank our contributors for their immediate and enthusiastic responses to our requests for noir stories, an entirely new genre for some of them. In fictionalizing crime in the real crime setting of Trinidad, they have created a decidedly literary noir collection with their sometimes lyrical, sometimes humorous, sometimes nostalgic, sometimes shocking, but always inventive stories. Their quality characterizations, plots, and styles concurrently reveal the country’s darkness and its appeal with an unexpected and gratifying result: the Trinidad that emerges makes Trinidad Noir as much a delightful crime romp as it is an exposé of the seedy side of life.

  Although Trinidad has big-city aspirations in her two main urban areas of Port-of-Spain, the capital, and San Fernando, there is still plenty of country life in her cane-farming central plains, her southern swamps, and her coastal fishing villages. Set in the various parts of the country, these stories reflect the island in all her contradictions. As you turn the pages, you will experience a nation like no other. See for yourself, but bear in mind: there’s nothing a Trini won’t do for you, and there’s nothing a Trini won’t do to you.

  Lisa Allen-Agostini & Jeanne Mason

  Port-of-Spain, Trinidad

  May 2008

  PART I

  COUNTRY

  POT LUCK

  BY LISA ALLEN-AGOSTINI

  Sans Souci

  She always left him, wandering off like a cat without provocation or explanation, returning just as suddenly and without comment after a day or a week or a month. He loved her, but it was hard to keep track of where he stood in her life. He kept her clothes neatly stacked in a chest of drawers and hoped for the best.

  One day she just didn’t come back. He only found out by accident after six weeks that she had actually moved in with another man in his—their—neighborhood. It was a guy he knew well. They had smoked together and that made them friends of a sort. Not very good friends, evidently, as this guy had had no problem taking his woman away.

  After that Trey lost his appetite, partly because eating usually meant buying ingredients at the shop at the corner opposite her new home in Diego Martin’s mostly working-class suburb of Rich Plain Road. He saw her through the fence sometimes in a tiny pair of white short pants, new ones that she didn’t have when she lived with him, hanging kitchen towels out to dry on the lines strung outside. The pants were skintight and he recognized the imprint of her labia through their dense denim folds. The lower curve of her round ass hung just under the frayed hem. Instead of wanting to eat potatoes and corned beef, he’d taste her memory, salty sweet. He grew thin.

  Tabanca like that has two cures—new love or exorcism. He chose the latter, only because he saw her in the face of every woman he met and feared that any new partner would also prove fickle and desert him for another man.

  Leaving her clothes in the drawers and her compact of cheap brown face powder on the dresser, the only things she had left behind, Trey took off from Diego Martin’s close houses and cramped streets and headed north.

  Trey pored over the small pile of dark green herb in his left palm. Nimbly, he shredded the sticky, soft leaves and brown flowers hidden in the mass, picking out the polished black seeds and putting them aside. When the mix was cleaned to his satisfaction, he reached into the front pocket of his colorful nylon shorts and extracted a balled-up piece of white paper. This he unfolded into a two-inch square and poured the cleaned herb onto it. Behind his ear was a single cigarette. Trey pulled it from its nesting spot and broke off about half an inch. He sprinkled the tobacco onto the herb on the paper, then placed the end of the cigarette on the smoothed-out sheet. Rolling the herb into the shape of the cigarette, he meticulously straightened the emerging cylinder. When it was perfectly flush, he wrapped the paper around it, put it to his lips, and licked the flap shut.

  “Danny!” Trey called to a similarly clad young man lying on the beach in front of him. Danny had dozed off, his long, pencil-thin dreadlocks trailing in the golden sand. The hair was almost as light as the sand itself, in contrast to the owner of the hair who was midnight black. Danny jerked up, only to subside nearly immediately. “Danny,” Trey said on an intake, “you want some of this, man?” He extended the joint and held in the smoke to better absorb the THC into his lungs. Danny stretched out his hand and took the cigarette without opening his eyes. He put it to his lips and drew deep. It was his turn to hold in the smoke. As they sucked in the heady marijuana, passing the joint back and forth, the sea roared in the background. “Good stuff,” Trey murmured, his eyes reddening and narrowing as the weed took effect.

  “Yeah, I get it from a partner in the village. Not the usual suspect,” Danny replied. He sat up and looped his waist-length dreadlocks with one hand, tucking them into a knot. He looked over at his cousin, his eyes as red as Trey’s. “This man have it sick, horse. Only quality weed he supplying. No compress, only fresh.” He took another hit. “I trying to get him to sell me some more but he brakesing. Say the man who he getting it from gone away for a week.”

  The waves continued to roll up on the sand. Trey’s orange surfboard, leaning on the fisherman’s shed next to him, cast a long shadow across his deeply tanned face. His olive skin was freckled across the bridge of his nose, complemented by his short, nappy Afro, the color of brown sugar. Full lips curved into a slight smile as he contemplated the surf. His hand reached out to lightly caress the board, which was rough with a thick coat of wax. “You going and hit that again before it reach cigarette?” he asked Danny, who shook his head and passed it back to him. Trey nursed the joint until the weed was burned off and passed the rest of the funk back to Danny. “I ent feeling for no cigarette right now.” They were quiet for a few minutes. “Thinking of going back.” Danny said nothing. “Two months in the jungle is enough, man.” Danny smoked without comment. The murmur of the waves continued. “I go have to call them men to pick back up a little end in work.”

  “Is so you is a work jumbie, boy?” Danny finally replied. “Two months of surf, weed, and country food, and you ready to go back in the rat race?” He shook his head again. “Me, I wouldn’t rush back to go and work in no factory assembly line.”

  “Is not no assembly line,” Trey snapped. “I tell you, I is a technician. Is skilled work, man. And the two months was good, partner, but is time I go back. I have things to do.”

  “Like what? Tack back by that slut?” Danny rolled onto his knees and to his feet.

  “Don’t talk about she so.”

  “But she’s a slut, Trey. She leave you for your partner. How she go play you like that?”

  Trey’s golden eyes, about the color of his skin, gave him a ghostly appearance. Right now they were cloudy with weed and budding rage. “She make a mistake, all right? That don’t make she a slut.”

  Danny sucked his teeth in disgust and grabbed his own board from the sand. “I heading up the road. Later.” He flicked the butt of the cigarette into the blue ocean. “Tasha real chain you up, boy,” he muttered as he walked up the track leading to the main road. “If I was you, I would have shoot both of them.”

  Trey scowled and lit another cigarette from a pack in his pocket. “Is not Tash, is Garvin. That man is the one who is to blame,” he told his cousin’s broad back. Danny wasn’t listening, focused instead on scaling the rocky path without dropping or dinging his board on the huge stones on either side of the track. “Is Garvin who pull she in!” Trey swiftly sucked on the ciga
rette. “Is he, not she. Is he fault.”

  Danny’s blond locks disappeared over the top of the steep path. Trey was left alone with the rocks and the waves, the sand and the fisherman’s hut.

  Beyond the road, the Sans Souci forest towered, dim and green and forbidding. In two months, Trey had only been in the forest twice, both times with his cousin. They had gone to find a certain spring which Danny swore had the sweetest water in the world, but they had become lost in the undergrowth and never found it. They made do with the chlorinated water piped in by the public utility, but Trey craved the fresh, untreated water of the spring. He stubbed the cigarette out in the sand and rose, grabbing his board and heading toward the forest in bounding strides.

  Bareback and barefoot, his lean, muscular body quickly maneuvered the path. His calloused feet barely registered the bumpy pitch of the Toco Road before he was in the cool mulch of the forest. It was rainy season, but the ground wasn’t sodden, only damp and spongy with fallen leaves and topsoil. He had no idea where he was going, but with a quick glance around for a landmark, Trey moved into the woods. He passed a giant immortelle tree, a clump of stunted cocoa trees, a dead one stretched across what could have been a track. The gloom deepened as he walked, the trees becoming larger and taller, the ground softer and cooler despite the mid-afternoon heat.

  The light changed. It was somehow brighter, more airy. A sloped clearing appeared full of lime-green, leafy shrubs about a head taller than his six feet. “To ras!” he breathed, breaking into the space gingerly and leaving his surfboard behind.

  The weed was planted in even rows, smelling pungent, sweet, musky. As far as he could see, marijuana trees were coming into bloom, their small orange flowers just starting to show—plants ripe for the picking. Making his way through the rows, Trey tenderly brushed the leaves and stems. He almost missed the hut in the center of the field, stumbling when he noticed the galvanized steel sheeting that made up its walls and roof. The double gate, also corrugated sheets of steel, bore a heavy iron padlock threaded through a thick steel chain looped into a pair of holes in the gates. The message was clear: Keep out. To Trey that was as good as an invitation.