Is Just a Movie. Earl Lovelace
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as his way of sharpening his determination to stand against humiliation from any agency, be it individual or the state. They didn’t burst out laughing like at Terry’s salacious tales or feel the need to draw imaginary guns from their hips as at the adventures of Shane. They listened somewhat uneasily, sensing that Sonnyboy was waiting for the occasion to prove how ready he was to confront the world and they took note to make sure not to be the ones to give him the provocation they believed he was seeking.
And he went on growing into his manness, nurturing his resentment at the world, waiting for it to provoke him, ironing and seaming his trousers and stepping out with what would become his trademark neatness, his long sleeves folded at the cuffs, his handkerchief flapping over his back pocket, his hair in a muff, a little face-powder to take the shine off his forehead, making his way to the fêtes in the RC school, daring the girls to refuse to dance with him, waiting for a fella to oppose him and so provide the confrontation he was inviting. But he was lucky, and the only trouble he get in was a few skirmishes with fellars over gambling and a few over girls at a dance, nothing major, until the stupidest thing get him the trouble his grandmother tell him he was all the time looking for.
One night he and some fellars see this drunk Indian man by the shop, one of them search his pocket and they shared the few dollars found on him. Robbery with violence was the charge. His grandmother couldn’t save him. That was the first time he went to jail, to the prison for youths where he would learn to box, would discover his aptitude for drums and his ability to wring a thrilling delighting power from his favorite percussive instrument, the iron. When he got out two years later, he had this nervousness about him as if he was spoiling for a fight, with a kind of aggressive listening and an ear tuned to pick up any slight, and it would be that keenness of hearing that would get him in the next set of trouble. Some obscenity about his mother. In this one, Marvel had a bottle and he had a knife. Marvel get cut. When he come out of jail, he had added a greater deliberation to his movements and stillness to his stance. He became a fella who although he did not appear to be looking, took note of everything around him. Later, this alertness would grow to become the foundation of a new sense of ease that helped him to control his aggression and banished his nervousness when he began to speak. For this development he had to thank Victor Rooplal, a dougla fella, who the first day he appeared in Cascadu, approached the Junction with a sense of ease, his two empty hands swinging, the pale flabby muscles of his arms displayed in a sleeveless merino, with a tailor’s measuring tape hanging around his neck, and beside him, but not looking at him or speaking, as if they were having a disagreement that they had not resolved, a good-looking, brown-skinned woman, a Spanish, with long black hair, Marissa, a thin noisy battleax of a woman, who could have been at least ten years older than him, carrying in one hand a paper bag with what the town of Cascadu would discover later contained the few clothes she had hurriedly grabbed when she made up her mind to run away with him before the man she was living with came home from work and in the other hand a cage with a young parrot that Rooplal had won some days before in a dice game from a woodsman in Navet, Sonnyboy and the fellars looking out from under the Health Office building where they were playing the gambling game wappie, uncertain of any connection between him and the woman until she stopped, reached into her bosom, took some money out of her brassiere and give it to him without a word and continued walking toward the gas station where it was discovered later a relative lived, while Rooplal crossed the road to the Health Office building, in his hand five single-dollar bills smoothed out and packed together to make them look like a million, fellars seeing him coming, thinking he’s easy pickings made a place for him. He find a place to sit down and begin to call his bets with the careless confidence of a man who know what he doing, and by the time the sun went down that evening he had everybody money in his pocket. Next weekend he would do it again, win-out everybody, leaving fellars to wonder if he was all that lucky or if he had a system of marking cards that nobody could detect. So that after that Saturday the only ones to bet against him were strangers and thirsty, impatient young fellars like Sonnyboy, who initially refused to be intimidated by his apparent skills, but who would in time discover that betting against him was throwing away money.
Rooplal settled down in Cascadu in a little house not far from the RC school, making a living gambling and ministering to distressed women needing help in matters of love, the steady stream of them going to him for bush baths and love potions, women talking of him in whispers, his notoriety spreading among them as an obeah-man, a seducer, whose magical charms none of their gender could resist, and the young fellars of the town holding him up as their authority on women, politics, gambling and race.
Rooplal was of mixed blood, African and Indian, this happy convenience making him welcome in each camp, entitling him to shower abuse on members of either group with a coarseness they tolerated from no one else, no side able to accuse him of prejudice since he shared his heritage with both; in his case, the two bloods canceling out each other, as equally potent warring and destructive poisons whose only virtue was to produce an offspring that was acceptable to both and that could be claimed by neither. Under his influence, Sonnyboy told the story again of the incident with his father, but where in earlier recounting he shared the blame between the people and the police, under Rooplal’s prompting, he now put the responsibility almost solely on the people. Rooplal, it turned out, was also a tailor of some reputation, but had to leave his sewing machine behind because of the circumstances in which he ran away from Navet. By judicious management of his funds, Marissa saw that he paid down on a new sewing machine and did her best to encourage him to give up obeah and gambling.
He worked at tailoring for a little while, but he couldn’t sit still for long in what was his tailor shop while card was playing out in the town, and eventually he spent most of his time gambling and the rest of it dodging men who came looking for him to get the clothes they had paid him to sew. Marissa, who had to bear the brunt of their anger because she was the one they met when they went to his home, now began to appear at the gambling place to call him, with some sternness, to come and complete the work he had accepted down-payment on. She was also not happy with his relationships with the women. She herself had gone to him for help to get her husband to pay her more attention and had ended up leaving the man and running away with him. The less Rooplal listened to her, the more she nagged. She began to reprimand him in public and to do everything in her power to shame him into becoming the man she wanted him to be. They were well matched in the department of stubbornness, he with the ability to ignore her and she with the tremendous power to nag again. She would leave him eventually after years of pulling and tugging, the final straw discovering he and a woman, both of them naked, in a secluded area on the bank of the river, in what he insisted was part of a ritual of healing. That night during an argument with him she burnt herself attempting to lift a pot of boiling water off the fire to pour on him. After that, he became very uneasy in her presence, and their relation went further downhill. One day after another quarrel, while he was under the Health Office gambling, she gathered up her belongings and put them in a paper bag to publicly display how little she had profited from being with him, next, she poured kerosene over all the clothes he had in the house, piled them in the middle of a room and left a lighted candle in the midst of the pile so that by the time it burnt itself out and caught the clothes on fire she would be far away. In a rush of spite she opened the cage and let out the parrot that Rooplal had come to treasure since he had fed it hot peppers to make its tongue flexible and had taught it to use obscene language, but the bird flew around the house for a while and then returned and stood on top the cage. In the end she put it back into the cage and took it with her to the taxi-stand where she stood waiting for a taxi and relating to anyone willing to hear all the intimate business that went on between Rooplal and her, while the parrot who answered to the name Cocotte went on cursing in its cracked voice the private parts of everybody’s mother, until a policeman came. He couldn’t do nothing because the woman was not cursing and there was no law under which he could arrest a parrot. And she went on telling to the crowd that had gathered the terms of endearment Rooplal had used to woo her, the darlings, the sugarplum, the ointments with which he would anoint his body, the places on her own that he would kiss, what he would do with his tongue, where on the bed he would place her, her helplessness in the situation because of the powers to charm that he possessed. She was still carrying on when her taxi came. She had just put one foot in the taxi when the onlookers were attracted to the appearance of a stream of white smoke in the air, somewhere in the vicinity of the RC school. Thinking that it