“An American preacher. He brought his entire church to Guyana and set up a commune. It didn’t work out well.”
“How so?”
“They had troubles. The entire group drank Kool-Aid laced with poison. They all died. There were nine hundred of them, as I remember, maybe more. The joke around here is that if you had to choose between Kool-Aid and living in Guyana, Kool-Aid would win out most times.”
(17)
Ava walked out of Cheddi Jagan airport into an atmosphere that even in the morning was fetid. She looked for a sign with her name on it. She noticed the person holding it before she actually saw the sign: a lone white man with blond hair, towering above a sea of black and brown faces.
She waved at him and he burst through the waiting group. He was wearing a red polo shirt with PHOENIX sewn over the heart, brown cargo shorts, and white socks pulled up to his knees. He walked awkwardly, with his knees almost locked, and his upper body was also stiff, biceps pushing out his sleeves, broad chest, thick neck. Weightlifter, she thought. Steroids.
“Welcome to Guyana,” he said, reaching for her bags. He had a big, loopy smile on his face, and bright blue eyes that were nothing but friendly.
He led her through the crowd with his elbows stuck out to help clear her path. He threw the bags into the rear seat of a black Jeep with a gold phoenix stencilled on all four doors. Ava guessed she was expected to ride up front.
The car was running and the air conditioning was going full throttle. She shivered and sneezed. Some of the worst colds she’d had in her life had been the result of going from heat and humidity into freezers posing as retail stores. When she asked him to turn the air conditioning down, he looked at her as if she were demented but did what she asked anyway.
“I’m Jeff,” he said.
“Hi, Jeff. How far is it to the hotel?”
“About forty-five kilometres,” he said.
“Half an hour?”
“You haven’t been here before, have you?” he said. She detected a New England accent.
“No.”
“Didn’t think so. We’ll be an hour, maybe longer.”
“That much traffic?”
He laughed. “Yeah, sort of.”
They hadn’t travelled more than a kilometre when they ran into a line of cars slowly bobbing and weaving from one side of the two-lane road to the other. Jeff joined the conga line. “They’re trying to avoid the potholes,” he said. “There are a few stretches of road between here and Georgetown that aren’t riddled with them, but not many. So we’re going to go as fast as the slowest car ahead of us. That’s the way it is. Sorry.”
“I’m glad you have a Jeep.”
“There are some potholes even the Jeep couldn’t get out of, especially in town.”
Some of the holes cut across both lanes, and that caused extra delays as the incoming and outgoing traffic sorted out who had the right of way. Ava tried not to feel nauseated, focusing her attention on the scenery. It was mainly country, low-lying land dotted here and there with what looked like rice paddies. In the distance was the familiar sight of a sugarcane field. Sugar and rice — the agricultural staples of the poorest countries in the world.
The monotony of the landscape was punctuated every couple of kilometres by a village or, more often, a group of ten to twelve shacks. They were built almost right up against the edge of the road. There wasn’t a brick in any of them. Most of them had some kind of wooden frame, the walls an interlaced mixture of planks of different woods, tarpaper, and corrugated tin. The windows were covered with strips of cloth.
Some residents stood leaning against the houses, watching the cars slalom past. Others sat outside on stools, goats tied to pegs bumping against them, children and chickens running around freely. Ava jumped a few times when she saw a child come too close to the road, but Jeff didn’t flinch or slow down his twenty- to thirty- kilometre-an-hour crawl.
The area reminded Ava of parts of the rural Philippines where no one worked and each day was spent watching life drive by. She wondered how many of the people living in these shacks had travelled more than ten kilometres from where they lived.
The road began to improve a little after an hour, and Ava guessed they were getting close to Georgetown. Jeff had been quiet and intense during the drive, and Ava hadn’t wanted to disturb his concentration. Now she said, “I don’t mean to be nosy, but I thought I detected a bit of a New England accent.”
He didn’t take his eyes from the road. “That’s smart of you.”
“I went to school in Massachusetts for two years.”
“I’m from Gloucester.”
“How did someone from Gloucester find their way down here?”
Now he looked towards her, hesitated, then said, “I’m — I was — a fisherman. I came down here on a shrimper out of Florida. We were buying our catch at sea, paying cash to Guyanese boats. What the skipper didn’t tell us was that those boats were financed by local gangsters, and they weren’t too thrilled about our little black market, about us stealing from them. We were in the middle of a deal when two speedboats came out of nowhere and put us out of business.”
“How did they do that?”
He glanced at her again. “They shot the captain and the other two men on the Guyanese boat and threw their bodies into the sea. They took our boat, scuttled it, and set us adrift in a lifeboat.”
“Shit.”
“Big-time shit. We somehow found our way to Georgetown. The skipper went to the cops and they acted as if what had happened was the most natural thing in the world. They told us we were fucking lucky to have made it to shore and maybe we ought to let it go at that. The skipper and the rest of the crew flew back to Miami, but I decided to stay here a while. That was five years ago. It ain’t Miami but the work is steady, the beer is cheap, and the women are slutty.”
“Those sound like great reasons to stay.”
Jeff shrugged. “I didn’t mean to sound like an asshole. It’s just the way it is here.”
“I didn’t take any offence,” Ava said. She noticed they were driving through larger concentrations of housing.
“Georgetown,” he said.
The driving began to occupy him again as the potholes expanded in number and size. As they manoeuvred their way into the city, Ava was immediately taken by the fact that nearly every building was made of wood. A lot of the houses were ramshackle affairs two or three storeys high, with three or four apparently boxed together and some on stilts. Most of the wood was grey, bleached, weather-beaten, not unlike houses she’d seen on Cape Cod, except the houses on Cape Cod had glass windows, not wooden shutters or strips of cloth. In New England there had been flashes of colour as well, something Georgetown was almost devoid of, aside from a
wall that had been painted in red with GOD IS IN CHARGE. ALL IS WELL.
The storefronts were a bit more colourful, their wooden exteriors decorated with hand-painted signs advertising a variety of wares and services. Their windows and doors were protected by thick metal screens, and inside it looked as if the service counters and cash registers were separated from customers by a metal fence that extended from countertop to ceiling. People were passing money through one slot in the screen and getting goods back through another.
“If they didn’t do that,” Jeff said, motioning to a string of storefronts, “they would be getting robbed every other day.”
They were driving through the middle of the city now. Large white edifices began to appear, and they passed
