The Columbus Affair: A Novel

Those industrious people built towns named for their founders—Trelawny, Accompong, Scott’s Hall, Moore, and Charles. They mated with native Taino women and forged paths through virgin wilderness, fighting pirates who raided Jamaica with regularity.

The mountains became their home, the forests their allies.

“I hear Big Nanny,” he told them. “That high yelp. It’s her. She be a leader. Always has been.”

He’d named her for Grandy Nanny, a Maroon chieftainess of the 18th century who became a great spiritual and military leader. Her likeness now appeared on the Jamaican $500 note, though its image was purely imaginative. No accurate description or portrait of her existed—only legends.

He envisioned the scene half a kilometer away. The dogs—equal to the mastiff in bulk, the bloodhound in agility, and the bulldog in courage—red, tawny, and spotted with bristled coats, running aligned, all four behind Big Nanny. She never allowed any of the males to dart ahead, and, as with her namesake before her, none challenged her authority. One that tried had ended up with a broken neck from her powerful jaws.

He stopped on the edge of a high ridge and surveyed the distant mountainsides covered in trees. Blue mahoe dominated, along with rose apple, mahogany, teak, screw pine, and thick stands of bamboo. He caught site of a fig tree, tough and stubborn, and recalled what his mother had taught him. “The fig dominates. It says to those who challenge it, ‘My will to power rests in your will to endure.’ ”

He admired that strength.

He spotted a group of workers on one of the mountainsides, arranged in a line, swinging picks and hoes, tools flashing in the sun. He imagined himself here three hundred years ago, one of Columbus’ misnamed Indians, toiling for the Spanish in slavery. Or a hundred years later, an African subrogated for life to an English plantation owner.

That had been the Maroons—a mixture of the original Tainos and the imported Africans.

Like himself.

“Yu wi go toward ’em?” his chief lieutenant asked.

He knew his man feared the dogs but hated drug dons, too. Jamaica was overwrought with criminal filth. The don presently half a kilometer away, being hunted by a fierce pack of Cuban bloodhounds, thought himself immune to authority. His armed henchmen had turned Kingston into a war zone, killing several innocents in the crossfire. The last straw was when a public hospital and school came under fire, patients forced to cower under their beds, students taking their exams with bullets whizzing outside. So he’d lured the don to a meeting—a summons from Bene Rowe was never ignored—then brought him into the mountains.

“A wa yu a say?” the insolent don asked in patois.

“Speak English.”

“You ashamed of who you are, Bene?”

“Ashamed of you.”

“What do you plan to do? Hunt me down?”

“A no mi.” Not me.

He intentionally switched to patois to let this man know that he remembered from where he came. He pointed to the dogs baying in their cages atop the trucks. “Dem will do dat for me.”

“And what will you do? Kill me?”

He shook his head. “Da dogs will do dat, too.”

He smiled at how much the bastard’s eyes had widened, pleased to know that someone who murdered for little or no reason actually knew fear.

“You’re not one of us,” the don spit out. “You forgot who you are, Bene.”

He stepped close, stopping a few inches away from an open silk shirt, tailored trousers, and expensive loafers. He supposed the ensemble was intended to impress, but little about this fool did. He was thin as sugarcane, with one bright and one glassy eye, and a mouthful of bad teeth.

“You’re nothing,” he told the don.

“I’m enough you think I should die.”

He chuckled. “That you are. And if I thought you worthy of respect, I would shoot you. But you’re an animal, one the dogs will enjoy hunting.”

“The government pay you to do this, Bene? They can’t do it, so they get you to?”

“I do it for me.”

The police had tried to arrest the no-good twice, but riots in Kingston had broken out each time. So sad that criminals had become heroes, but the dons were smart. As the Jamaican government failed to care for its citizens the dons had stepped in, handing out food, building community centers, providing medical care, ingratiating themselves.

And it worked.

People were willing to riot in order to prevent their benefactors from being jailed.

“You have thirty minutes before I open the cages.”

The man had lingered, then realized this was serious and fled.

Just like a slave escaping his master.