Kingston Noir by Colin Channer Page B

during the day, but I am—how do you say it—light sleeper. I wake up at everything. But at nighttime like now, I am wide awake.”
    Hmph . That is the sound that Miss Tina did make as she walk off, and when Miss Tina did tell me this, I did make the same sound too. I tell you already, at a certain hours of night or morning, is only gunman and duppy supposed to be on the streets. We all know who the gunmen was. That was Soft-Paw and the bwoy-dem. So maybe the white gyal with the camera was practicing to be a duppy all along.
    As to how the bwoy-dem tell it, for the six nights that the white gyal was here in August Town, there would always come a time, maybe at two or three o’clock, when they would see her before she did see them. Soft-Paw would walk up behind her, not making a sound. That is how he get his name. He would touch her suddenly, maybe on the back of her neck, and the bwoy-dem was always surprised to see that the white gyal never ever jump or look frighten or catch her breath. And they did even respect her a little too for this. But they notice something else—that she would seem to even relax at Soft-Paw’s touch, like she was ready to lean back slow, if only him would press into her and hold her right there—something romantic like that. No romance did ever happen, but the bwoy-dem say it did always have that feeling.
    Without turning round, the white gyal with the camera would reach into her pocket and take out a crisp green hundreddollar bill and hold it up for Soft-Paw.
    Soft-Paw would take the money and push it deep into his own pocket. Then he would ask her, “How tings?”
    “Fine, yes. It is good. I am getting the pictures.”
    “Let me see?” And Soft-Paw was really asking. It wasn’t his usual way of giving orders. It was like he was really interested.
    She would turn the camera screen to his face then, and flick through the pictures. Soft-Paw see that she was getting everywhere in August Town. He see pictures that look like she was standing in the middle of the riverbed down by the part of town they call Angola, the moonlight showing how the houses on the bank was close to falling in the sand. He see pictures from outside Judgment Yard, the red and green and yellow flags flapping in the night as if it was a balmyard and a cure for deep sickness was inside. And he see pictures of the actual balmyard—Bedward’s church. Bedward was that mad fellow who say he was going to fly. And then there was pictures of the plain and empty road, and pictures of the standpipe dripping water, and pictures of the old men in the square playing dominoes, and of Miss Tina standing under a streetlight looking at her red fingernails. And apparently Soft-Paw did sound almost sad when he tell the bwoy-dem that he had a feeling like he would love to always see August Town through the lens of the white gyal’s camera, because he see things that he never see in all his twenty-nine years—a kind of loveliness in the people and in the place.
    And I even understand there was more than one picture of me.
    Every day and every night was the same until just like that, six of them pass and we know is only one more to go before the white gyal with the camera leave.
    And all that week it seem that Soft-Paw wasn’t himself, and every day him wasn’t himself a little bit more. And maybe he just had a feeling growing inside him, a feeling he wasn’t used to having, like he was bout to lose something, something more than the hundred U.S. the white gyal was giving him every night.
    Well, on the sixth day everybody see that Soft-Paw was in a right foul mood. He was walking up and down August Town in the middle of the day like he on a rampage. When he see a mongrel dog, he kick it in its ribs. When he pass a clothesline with the just-washed clothes hang out to dry, he flash out his knife, cut the line, and make all the clothes drop back in the dirt. Soft-Paw must did know in himself that this kind of behavior is what you expect