“Him not answerin his phone. You see him before him go?”
“Who you think you is, bwoy? To come here put question to me like you is police. You lick you head?” His father grabbed his arm and twisted it and Lloyd smelled Vernon’s familiar smell of rum and sweat and ganja and dirty clothes. “Gwaan ’bout you business! Facety and outta order pickney.” Vernon dropped Lloyd’s arm and pushed him away. “Gwaan home, bwoy. This a big man place.” He flung his arm at him in a go-away gesture.
Lloyd stood his ground. He took a step back but he did not leave. “Me just want know if you did see him before him leave for Pedro. That’s all.”
“Me never see him. That crazy old man . . .”
“Maas Benjy say you and him did have words.”
“Maas Benjy say what?” Vernon stepped forward and his hands closed on Lloyd’s throat. “What you tellin me, bwoy?”
“Him say . . .” Lloyd fought for breath. He tried to pull his father’s hands away, but he did not have the strength. He thought about drowning, sinking under the surface of the sea, a weight around his ankles, staring up to the light at the surface.
“Leave the bwoy alone, Vernon. What do you?” It was Miss Lilah. “You want get arrest for child abuse?”
“Don’t chat rubbish inna me ears, woman,” Vernon said, but he dropped his hands. “Don’t him is my son? Is for me to decide how to deal with him.” He slapped his chest.
“Gwaan home, Lloydie,” Miss Lilah said, pushing herself between father and son.
“You mother awright?” Without waiting for an answer, she said to Vernon, “Modern time now. Can’t just rough up a pickney inna the street like that. Go back inside.” Vernon kissed his teeth and turned away.
“You hear anything ’bout Maas Conrad?” Lloyd said to Miss Lilah.
“No, youngster. Me hear say him don’t come back. But mebbe him stop somewhere. Don’t worry you head yet.” Miss Lilah touched his shoulder and Lloyd wanted her help, her strong arms around him. He tried to smile and he knew his eyes shone with the tears he had been fighting since he woke.
“You a good lady, Miss Lilah,” he said. “You will tell me if you hear anything?”
“Ee-hee, Lloydie. Gwaan now. You granddaddy be awright.”
Unable to sleep that night, Lloyd left his mother’s house and went again to the wall at the eastern end of Gray Pond beach. His mother never heard the scraping of the inside bolt if she was already asleep. He had to leave the front door unlocked, for to click the padlock shut would trap her inside. He made his way to the hollowed out place he had fashioned in the stones and lined with an old feed sack. He leaned against a wooden light post, the power lines now ran along the new concrete ones on the Windward Road, and he stared out to sea, looking for his grandfather. There was no moon. He settled into his post and the waves of the starlit night soothed him. He thought of the questions he used to ask when he was much younger.
“Why you go sea alone, Gramps?”
“Why you leave out so early?”
“Why some fish bite only certain time of year?”
“How you know what bait to use?”
“Why sometime you drop a line and sometime you trawl?”
“How you know where to go?”
“Why you don’t wear a life jacket?”
I come from a line of fishermen was all his grandfather ever replied. And Lloyd would see that line of fishermen slanting into the sea; a line that could both feed you and cut you.
He thought of weekend trips with Gramps. He would leave for his anchorage at four in the morning, long before the garbage men started their work in the city and before the dancehalls turned down their music, in the coolest part of the night. He sat on the stern thwart of Water Bird, his hand on the engine, and Lloyd stood in the bow, holding the anchor rope to steady himself, staring ahead, taking the waves with flexed knees. They went together across the sea and they anchored and fished together. When the sun came up, and the ice cooler was full, and the fish had stopped biting, if the weather was calm, they went to one of the Portland Bight cays.
Tern Cay was Lloyd’s favorite, off Needles Point, encircled by a reef that not many fishers could find their way through, the white sand coarse, the sandflies few. Under a single straggly mangrove tree, Gramps would roast an unscaled red snapper on a square of zinc, the snapper’s skin crusted with salt, the fire small and hot, until the skin of the fish flaked off, leaving the pure white flesh for grandfather and grandson to eat in a thin sauce of seawater and onion and lime and Scotch bonnet pepper. Maas Conrad ate with his fingers and his favorite knife, which he cleaned by sticking into the sand where the waves broke.
Afterward, they rested in the small shade and Gramps told the boy dolphin stories. “Aah, me son, them animal smart so ’til. Them hunt together and them live together and them will even keep a man company a night-time. Sometime you hear them before you see them, you hear when them come up to breathe air like we. Them swim far and them dive deep. One time, over by Wreck Reef, when a big wave carry me over the reef, is a dolphin show me the way out.”
Lloyd believed these stories less as he grew older, but he often saw the dolphins that came to the entrance of Kingston Harbour, and he loved their sleek bodies and the way they swam beside boats big and small, like police outriders for high-up people. In the old days, his grandfather said, no fisherman would deliberately harm a dolphin for it was well known that such an action would bring big trouble on a man’s family.
The lapping of the waves pulled him into
