On Labour Day Radix was pressed into driving upstate to visit Amarelle's sister
who with her husband always arranged for friends from the city to get away from
that boring Labour Day parade, with its corrupt union leaders and fawning politicians
walking down Fifth Avenue; away, too, from the violence prone West Indian carnival
in Brooklyn with the steelbands and the bum bum rollers and revelers playing mas'.
Get away from all that, drive along beautiful highways to a place called Poughkeepsie,
where they promised good food, clean air and quiet leisure activity.
There was the problem of getting there.
The Bronx had its own travel frustrations, the narrow choked roadways, careless
people walking and claiming as much right to the streets as any BMW; the potholes
that weren't there yesterday. Radix had grown accustomed to all that.
When he started travelling too far out from those landmarks and had to rely on
those green oblong signs he felt a strange fear.
He wasn't much good at road map reading; he felt certain he'd get lost somewhere
along the route, miss an exit, run into strange territory, some tiny close-knit town
whose residents could tell straightaway he didn't belong there. For her part Amarelle
couldn't understand why someone with a college degree would find it so difficult to
follow a road map.
Once they got to the three-lane highway Amarelle immediately adjusted her seat
from the straight-up position; she lay back and commented on passing scenery; then
she closed her eyes behind her sunglasses, coming alert only to remark how lovely
it must be to live out here once they'd saved up enough money to buy a house, which
was what upward-thinking people did.
The long rolling expanse of road, other people leisurely in their cars, the trees
changing to fall colours – what freedom!
She was looking forward to the comfort and space upstate, to meeting friendly
people who had jobs and could afford the things they owned. No hostile stares; no
Fordham Road; no sidewalks choked with people peddling cheap watches and ency-
clopedias.What freedom!
For his part Radix, driving in the centre lane, pretending to focus on his driving,
was thinking of the sudden collapse of the Soviet Union. Did these people rushing
by strapped in their seatbelts understand the significance of what was happening in
the Soviet Union? Did they have a clue?
He'd come to associate the rise and fall of nations with the fortunes of one man,
be it an Abraham Lincoln or a Napoleon. Now it was the turn of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Of course, it was a far more complicated process but it pleased him to think that way.
When he came off the highway and turned into what looked like suburban, not
upstate New York, he followed Amarelle's directions (her car seat was upright again);
he drove slowly through neat orderly streets; past a white kid in a bright blue parka
pedalling his bike and trying to outrace a chasing dog; past a stretch of wooded area
beautiful and desolate, a shopping plaza.
And he hoped that when they arrived at Amarelle's sister he'd meet someone he
could talk to about Mikhail Gorbachev, for at that moment nothing else in the world
mattered.
(from "Ah, Mikhail, O Fidel!" a novel by N.D.Williams)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 