We must work harder. We must keep stirring the pot, Mambisi Colon
exhorted, trying to keep the family spirits up.
But anxieties were mounting among many of the John Wayne Cotter
Pyramid players. It was looking bad for everyone still in the game.
Judy Wiener felt the acute embarrassment of having to admit she
might lose her investment. Some teachers, the sensible non-players,
formed huddles of their own. In the hallways, in the cafeteria she
could sense them smirking. Mrs. Caratini didn't drop by as often. And
the students, surely they must think something was going on. What did
they make of someone knocking on the door, interrupting the lesson,
calling the teacher outside for a hasty conference?
One morning Xavier came into the room, handed her an envelope and
said brusquely, "Here". When she opened it she found 10 hundred dollar
bills. She looked at him, confounded, trembling. Where did you get
this? He said one of the teachers gave it to him, told him to deliver it
to her. "I didn't ask any questions." What did he mean, One of the
teachers? "I didn't ask any questions." She looked at the bills, she
looked at Xavier. What did he mean, he didn't ask any questions? But
Xavier had retreated to his desk; his head was down, as if after hard
hours at his night job he didn't want to be disturbed.
Did he know what was in the envelope? Which "teacher" in his right
mind would ask a student to deliver an envelope with a thousand
dollars? What was going on here?
Minutes later, a knock on the door. When it opened, Mambisi Colon
walked in. Her manner suggested unhappiness. Judy Wiener looked up
and her face must have betrayed bewilderment and fear.
"I was robbed last night" Robbed? "Yes, robbed. Three men came to my
house late last night and demanded money." Judy Wiener's face went
white with shock. Did she call the police? "Hell, no. I don't want the
police meddling in my business. Nobody's going to pull a stunt like this
and get away with it." What stunt? What was she talking about? "I'm
saying, three people barged into my home and demanded their money
back. One guy, I know who he is, wanted his money back. Which was
fine. But then he called the names of two people and he said they
wanted their money back too. One of the names was yours."
Judy Wiener felt pierced through the heart. She uttered a half-
credulous laugh. "Me?…my name?" "Yes, your name." Her wide open,
not yet accusing eyes studied Judy Wiener's face. "But that's im-
possible. I didn't ask anyone to do anything like that. In any case,
my group split off from your family, remember? We meet in Queens."
"That's what I figured. It doesn't make sense. And you're near the top.
So why would you want your money back? Anyway I wasn't going to
give them anything; but then these two other guys, they were
wearing these snow-day face masks so you could only see their eyes
and nose, they had guns in their waist bands." Judy sat down slowly,
horrified. "Yes, guns; they unbuttoned their coats and I saw these
guns. And I knew right away I'd be dead, dead, if I didn't hand over the
money. So I gave them the money. $3.000. They wanted it in three
separate envelopes. I gave it to them"
Judy Wiener was now speechless. She hoped her face conveyed the
proper sag of commiseration, didn't give away anything else. She
sensed Mambisi Colon's eyes still looking for clues, for some give-away
flicker of complicity.
Over at the computers her class was pecking away at the keys. Xavier
looked up from what he had written and said, What a predicament! as
if the words he'd just typed had given him great satisfaction. "I'll be
with you in a minute," she shouted, deflecting the watchful suspicion
on the other's face, and giving herself reason to breathe.
And Mambisi Colon turned and walked away in a flourish, showing off
what she was wearing that day ̶̶ shiny black pants, shiny black shoes,
a turtleneck sweater ̶ as if to suggest the loss of $3.000 in one night
had not in any way devastated her wardrobe. "I'm going to get to the
bottom of this, " she shouted at the door. And Judy Wiener looked
down at her desk and said, "Well, let me know what happened."
She looked at Xavier. She knew that inside his shiny skull lay answers
to all this. She had only to walk over there and gently tease the truth
out; but would he be willing to talk to her? Maybe he was writing it all
down in his Journal. From his hunch over the keyboard she sensed a
surly concentration.
At the end of the class, without another word, Xavier left the room.
She restrained an impulse to call him back.
For the rest of the day she felt wretched with guilt and worry; it was
difficult to concentrate on familiar tasks. She muttered fretfully to
herself; and from a distance she sensed in the hallway the alarm
among teachers generated by Mambisi Colon who must have told her
story a hundred times and mentioned Judy Wiener's name; so that, like
it or not, her name was now linked to some alarming gun-brandishing
incident in the Bronx.
She braced herself expecting to be stopped and questioned, with
unctuous smiles from the questioner, about rumours of her
"involvement". She was ready to protest, I really don't know what this
is all about.
(from "Ah Mikhail, O Fidel!", a novel by N.D.Williams, 2001)
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 