The Ovelias at Benzie Hill Dump

Today the dump smells like burning flesh. I  taste it on my tongue as Babou turns the corner into  the Benzie Hill peninsula: a film of charred hair and  fat and bone. Reminds me of the day Alex arrived  from Corfu and Papou roasted a whole lamb in the  front yard. It didn’t smell like this yesterday.  

“What the dump supposed to smell like, malakas?” Alex says from the backseat. 

Not like whatever died between your teeth.  

That’s what I want to tell him, but I don’t. I wait for Babou to defend me. I wait for Babou to hear his  son calling me a poutana or poútsos or whatever dirty  word they think I don’t understand. I wait for Babou  to remind Alex that I’m a Kokkinos too, but Babou  doesn’t. His eyes are on the shoreline behind the mangroves. Babou’s so busy watching the sea that he  drives the truck right into a pothole. The sheep in the  truck bed all scream at the sudden blow. Babou calls the hole a little whore just like he did when he hit it yesterday.  

Alex reaches around the driver’s seat to rub  Babou’s shoulders. He whispers something soothing  to our father in Greek. Something loving. His English  is never that tender. 

“Government need to fix these roads!” Babou  says. “Fucking potholes gonna eat up all my chassis.” 

“It’s the rain,” Alex tells him. It’s been raining  for a week. Yesterday, it rained so much that the sea  flooded the road, and now all the gravel churns in the  marsh. Babou’s brothers had to postpone their return  from Havana because of all this rain.  

My whole body rises from the passenger seat  when Babou punches the gas. I wonder how Black  Alex is fairing in the back with the sheep. Wet and  cold, for sure. Probably flat on his back in the mud  after that sudden lurch. Poor guy. It’s a sin to have him  out there in the rain, but Babou says someone has to  stop the sheep from jumping out of the truck. 

We fly out of the pothole and into a pool of red  clay and ash. A wave of slurry rushes over the cab.  

Babou slams the brakes. Every hair on my neck  stands up as he roars. I’ve never seen him like this.  All nervy and angry and bursting at the seams. The  only time I’ve seen him anywhere near as anxious  was just before summer break started – when his  ex-wife called to tell him their son was moving in  with us. Babou and Mummy had whispered all night,  their backs bubbling with tension. But this…this is  far worse. Something’s been eating at Babou since  Thursday, the day Papou called us up to the fish house  to haul Freezer 4 to the dump.

Babou should’ve been thrilled to finally  put “The Frozen Bástardos” to rest. At least that’s  what I’d expected. Babou had been harping on his  father to trash that tin box for years. It worked in extremes, either so cold it grew spikes that pushed  the doors open or so hot the fish would broil to a not  so delightful medium well. Who knows how many  millions of pounds of grouper and lobster we’ve lost  to that freezer just so Papou could save a grand  or two.  

Babou had fantasized about what he’d do to  that freezer when it finally conked out. Beat it. Piss on it. Take a dump in it. He even had me research how  to make a homemade bomb to blow it up. I was sure  we were going to light a bonfire at the landfill when  Papou finally told Black Alex and the other Haitian  workers to load the wreck into the back of the Ford. But we didn’t. Babou didn’t even take advantage of the  fire Mr. Turnquest, the dump manager, had blazing  when we got there. Like today, Babou’s eyes were on  the sea, watching the whitecaps leap like lambs across  the roiling surface.  

Babou reaches past Alex, opens the sliding rear  window, and calls to Black Alex.

“Hey, buddy, you okay?” 

Obviously not. The man’s drenched in mud.  Still, Black Alex gives Babou a thumbs up and smiles. 

“Okay, buddy! Keep your eyes on the water.” 

Jesus, Babou couldn’t think of something better  than “buddy”? Makes my skin crawl. If you ask me,  we shouldn’t have to call the man anything but Alex.  Since he started packing grouper and lobster in my  grandfather’s fish house six years ago, he’s been Alex.  And at half the salary of a Bahamian worker, you’d  think Alex would at least be entitled to his own name, but no – he gets demoted with an epithet when a kid  who’s probably the twentieth Alex in his cousin group  comes along. We should be calling my brother Greek  Alex or White Alex, but I guess Papou thinks white  is default. “Black Alex” came so naturally that day he  called for help at the ice machine. When both Alexes  showed up at the ice dispenser, Papou didn’t miss a  beat. Not you, Aleximou, Black Alex. 

Papou didn’t even look up when the room went  quiet. He just kept on filling the bags of fish with ice  as if what he’d said didn’t weigh an ounce. As if he’d  always referred to his employees in this way. Maybe  he had. Maybe that’s what Papou had always called  Alex when his back was turned. 

Maybe that’s what Papou calls me… 

Alex makes a hissing noise as he watches Black  Alex surfing sheep in the spry. If he and my half-sister  had stayed in Long Island after the divorce, he’d have  sucked his teeth like we do here. I wonder if he’ll  be like Papou, who still asks me what “muddasick”  means after being here for, what…fifty, sixty years? 

Alex says something to Babou in Greek. I only  catch snippets. I know “parakalo” means “thank you”  and “poutana” means whore, but nothing much else. Mothers pass down the language, and my mother isn’t  Greek. But Alex’s mother is, so he and Babou whisper  to each other in a language I won’t ever understand.  

At the end of the conversation, Babou nods. He  reaches over to open the sliding window again. 

“Come inside, buddy. We can’t see shit for all  the waves anyway.” 

I jump out of the truck to give Black Alex my  spot, but when I step out, Alex leaps over the center  console and steals the passenger seat. Black Alex and I  are forced to take the back cab.  

“You soaked to the bone, my friend,” Alex says,  craning his neck around the passenger headrest. “Get  the man something to dry off with, baglamás!”  

I offer Black Alex a towel from the beach bag  Mummy keeps in the truck, but he doesn’t notice. His  eyes are fixed on the sea. He’s been just as anxious as  Babou these last three days. It didn’t take long for me  to realize that our journeys to the dump weren’t to  tote garbage. Freezer 4 on Thursday was a good cover.  The dumpster on Friday was a bit of a reach, but I  allowed myself to believe the lie since Mr. Turnquest  often misses the fish house on his garbage route. But it was clear yesterday that these trips to the dump were  smokescreens for something else. Papou’s cheap, but  he’d never dig around the dump for furniture like the locals do. He doesn’t even buy furniture second-hand.  But even if Papou was a scavenger, everyone knows  Mr. Turnquest sets fire to the landfill on Thursdays,  so I knew whatever we were looking for wouldn’t be  found in the rusted remains of iron bedframes and  ruptured car batteries. Yet, we were there, sifting  through cinders for nothing. So, when I tell you that  the dump didn’t smell like this yesterday, I mean it. It  smelled of copper and acid, not blood.  

What really set the red flags aflutter was Mummy. The day Papou called us to haul Freezer 4 to  the dump, her face went ashy. She called me into the  laundry room to hang out the clothes, which I hadn’t  done since I was in primary school. When Babou  took the wet sheets from my hands and told me to get  in the truck, Mummy didn’t object. She just stood at  the front door and watched us drive away.  

That night at dinner, all Mummy talked about  was the dump. She asked me how it went, as if there  was something spectacular about going to the Benzie  Hill Dump to trash a freezer. I suspected she’d been  worried about Babou. Maybe she thought he’d get  too excited about finally triumphing over the Frozen Bástardos. Perhaps she’d been worried that Babou  would make good on that homemade bomb. But  when I told her the boring truth, I saw for the first  time the sunken spaces around her eyes. I saw how  relief fleshed her cheeks when I told her that boring  truth, and how her cheeks flushed fuller and fuller  every day after that when we came home from the  dump with nothing exciting to report. This morning  when Papou told us to take ten or so of the older  sheep to the dump to graze, I knew something was off  – because since when do we graze sheep at the dump?  – but even more so because Mummy told Babou point  blank I couldn’t go.

He only fifteen, Pano.

And I was thirteen.  

So, you want him to go through what you went  through? Not my child!  

You knew what you was signing up for when  you joined this family, Kimmy.

Not this! The coke, yeah, but not this! 

She’d started crying. Softly so I wouldn’t hear  from the living room, but not softly enough if I were listening from the bushes under their bedroom  window.

Send another worker. Y’all done got Black Alex. We can’t, Kimmy. They’ll talk.  

They ain’t gah talk. They illegal. They won’t risk getting deported.  

I could feel Babou’s sigh in the walls.  

They might today.  

But Mummy wouldn’t budge. So, Babou pulled  the trump card.  

Alex going.  

Mummy sucked her teeth.  

Alex is a big twenty-year-old man. 

But she didn’t stop me from jumping into the  truck when Black Alex ran the last sheep into the  loading bed. She stood in the doorway, cheeks hollow  and grey, raindrops clinging to her red curls. She  watched as we drove all the way from the house to the main road. I imagine she’s still there in the doorway  waiting for us to come home, hoping the news I bring  will be as unexciting as it has been for the last three  days.  

A cloud of smoke meets us at the dump. We  hop out of the truck, and raindrops laden with ash  leave dark streaks on our faces. A small fire blazes on  the northern side of the landfill. It stinks. 

Two figures, one tall and broad in the shoulders  and the other short and stocky, stand near the fire.  The shorter man squirts liquid from a bottle over the  flames. Neither rain nor the smell of burning meat  can hide the scent of kerosene.  

“Papou!” Alex cries. He runs to our grandfather  and hugs him. Papou smiles as he pats Alex’s back,  but there is more worry there than joy. He speaks to  him in Greek, low and secretive.  

The taller man steps forward in police garb.  Sergeant Dean, our local inspector. He shoots Babou  an awkward glance. 

“We have to move fast, Panagiotis. Turnquest’s  already called the station about the fire.”

Babou nods. He shifts his gaze from the sergeant to Papou, who grips his shoulder nervously.

“You bring the sheep?”  

Babou motions to Black Alex unloading the  animals from our truck. Then he follows Sergeant  Dean into the mangroves at the end of the peninsula.  Papou sighs, and, seeing me for the first time, ruffles  my red curls. He hands me the bottle of kerosene. 

“Go to Papou’s jeep and fill it up.” 

Before I can protest, Papou waddles after Babou  and Sergeant Dean, who are now crouching in the  bushes. Alex falls into stride with Papou, matching his  gait and rapid Greek perfectly.  

When my Uncle Peter’s daughter Maria graduated from primary school, Papou hosted an  ovelias. He slaughtered two lambs and roasted them  on spits in his front yard. My friends at school made  so much fun of me that when it was my turn to  graduate, I was happy that I didn’t get an ovelias of  my own. Papou bought me and my parents an all expense paid trip to Atlantis in Nassau. I thought  it was a special treat, but then a year later when  my Uncle Tasso’s son Nick graduated, Papou held another ovelias with three roasted lambs. I saw the  glee in Papou’s face as he carted the skinned carcasses  through the crowd of family and friends. He loved  ovelias. He looked for reasons to host ovelias. So why,  then, I asked Mummy, didn’t I get an ovelias when my  cousins had? 

Mummy had stopped the comb mid-stroke  through my hair. Sighed in her heavy way, like a metal  press clamping down hard on her chest.  

For a long time, I figured it was the divorce that  Papou couldn’t forgive. I’ve never met my siblings’  mother, and before Alex moved back to Long Island  this June to live with us, I’d only met my siblings  twice. The flights were too expensive, Babou had said,  though I knew that was bullshit. Mummy drives a  Benz. Eventually, I pieced two and two together and  realized that maybe the reason Papou never hosted an  ovelias for my was also the same reason my siblings  stopped visiting us nearly ten years ago. Delilah and  Alex had only just arrived from Corfu that July night.  Mummy had placed a plate of pastitsio in front of my  sister. Delilah had sneered at the plate and then threw  it across the room. Mávri pórni, she’d said.  

I knew that phrase. I’d heard my Papou whisper  it under his breath. I’d heard Yaya chuckle over it like a secret sweet whenever Mummy and Babou were  out of earshot. Babou cried when I asked him what  it meant. He hadn’t had the heart to tell me. But my  cousins did.  

Mávri pórni, they said. Black whore.  

For my Papou, men are ranked like the rungs of  a ladder. At the bottom are his “black boys”, Haitians  who work in the fish house under the constant threat  of deportation. Then, there were the island blacks,  simple men from whom he’d buy grouper and lobster  at $10 per pound to sell on the international market  at $50. Then there were the powerful black men  in parliament, the men who came part and parcel  with the generous exemptions Papou’s money could  buy. But these rungs were all below Papou and men  like him. His children could marry at their rung or  above, condescending only for a conchy joe [i] if no  other options made themselves available. So, when  my father brought my mother to his parents with a  ring and a promise, Papou looked at the suspicious  curl of Mummy’s hair and the breadth of her hips  and realized that Babou was climbing too far down.  He packed a suitcase for Babou and sent him to  Corfu. Babou came back two months later with Alex’s  mother, who – after seven years and two babies – took  her alimony and child support back to Corfu for good. 

That was how my parents told the story, and  that’s the story I believed. I didn’t have a reason to  question it until Alex arrived from Corfu in June and  brought with him the details my parents left out.  I ignore the hot sting of salt water in my eyes and do  as Papou told me. Of course, Papou parked in the  middle of a trash heap. I have to tiptoe around bags of  dirty diapers and medical needles to get to the jeep.  There’s a 9-gallon fuel tank in the backseat. In his  haste to fill the bottle, Papou had left the spout open  on the tank. I close it quickly, but it’s too late. Half  the kerosene has already leaked into the muck. Gas  had poured down the side of the jeep, pooling in the  doorframe. There’s a pile of rags in the seat next to the  fuel tank. I grab one to clean up the mess. My hand  comes up sticky. Sticky and red.  

Black Alex comes running when I scream.  

“It’s just transmission fluid,” he tells me as he  cleans my hand. He gives me a smile, but I know that  smile. It’s the smile Black Alex gives Papou when he’s  reprimanded for not sneaking Grade B fish into the  more expensive Grade A boxes. It’s the smile Black  Alex gives Uncle Peter when he’s cursed out for not  prepping the big boat fast enough for the monthly trip  to Havana and Labadee. It’s not the smile he gives me  when he’s fixing me a plate of griyo and plantains. It’s the smile he gives when he remembers that his wife  is in Haiti and that he needs her here in Long Island.  The smile he knows he must give to get his wife a  work permit. But I don’t need to recognize that smile  to know what’s on my hands is not transmission fluid. 

“Out of the way! Out of the way!” 

Babou and Alex come hurling towards the van,  toting a limping red thing between them. At first, I  thought it was Papou, but he’s running behind them,  huffing and puffing and crying. Babou pushes me  and Black Alex away from the jeep and thrust the  fuel tank into the litter of burnt trash. Alex lays the  limping red thing into the backseat of the vehicle. It’s  Uncle Peter.  

“We didn’t see the rocks,” Uncle Peter whimpers, clutching his neck. I can see the pulpy  ridges of a gash. Short curtains of skin that once held  his neck together hang by threads. The blood sounds  like a gurgling stream. Babou grabs one of the rags I’d  intended to clean the jeep with and presses it against  his brother’s neck.  

“Where’s Tasso?” Uncle Peter cries.  

“He’s fine. He went back to salvage the cargo.” 

Tears stream down Uncle Peter’s cheeks. “The cold  front came out of nowhere. We didn’t see the rocks!” 

Papou rushes towards the jeep, crying,  “Petermou, Petermou!” He soothes the soft down of  Uncle Peter’s receding hair and kisses his cheeks.  

A sound like a cherry bomb cuts through  the rain. Black Alex stiffens. He looks toward the  peninsula where Sergeant Dean fumbles out of the  mangroves.  

“There’s more, Mr. Kokkinos.” 

But Papou doesn’t answer. His head is buried in  Uncle Peter’s chest. Sergeant Dean pulls Papou out of  the jeep and shakes him. Regret flashes across his face  when Papou howls, but only for a moment. He turns  to Babou when Papou falls to his knees. 

“Panagiotis, there’s an air ambulance waiting at  the airport. I called this in as a fishing accident. Take  your brother now, before the squad gets here.” 

Babou nods. He says something to Papou in  Greek and kisses him. Then, he looks at me. I’ve  crushed the bottle Papou gave me. Two of my fingers  are bleeding. 

“Listen to Alex,” Babou tells me as he leaps into  Papou’s jeep. “You do whatever he says!” 

Babou peels out so fast that the back tires throw up  two waves of mud. I’m spattered with all the island’s  dirty things.  

Alex sighs and looks up at the sky. The rain is  coming down harder. He turns to Black Alex and  the sheep. 

“Get them ready.”  

Then he turns to me.  

“You. Come.” 

I follow Alex to the end of the peninsula where  the mangroves wait. Two more cherry bombs snap  from behind the bushes. There’s something else. A  whimper. A sob.  

And then I see her crawling from the buttonwood,  covered in silt and blood. The cargo Tasso went to  salvage.  

I’m not a fool. I knew lobster and grouper couldn’t  buy Mummy a Benz. It was the bags of white powder  that Babou and his brothers hid in the old outhouse. I figured that by the time I graduated from high  school Babou would finally tell me the truth behind  our money. I figured he’d finally tell me why he didn’t  expect me to go to college. Why he wanted so badly  for me to learn the family business and get along  with Alex, the true heir to his partnership in the  “enterprise”. I’d thought it was just drugs. It never  occurred to me why my uncles always made a stop in  Labadee on their way back home from Havana. As I  peer into the bloodshot eyes of the woman crawling  on the bones of her elbows, I realize that my family  has a very diverse portfolio.  

“Grab her,” Alex tells me.  

Every nerve in my body ignites. But I don’t  move. Grab her for what? 

Alex groans and slaps me across the back of my  head.  

“Come, píthikos, grab her!” 

The slap shifts me into autopilot. I pull the  woman up to her feet. She’s slick with mud and sweat.  There’s a leaf in her nose. I pull it out so she  can breathe. 

“Follow me,” Alex says. He disappears into the  mangroves. 

 I urge the woman to wrap her arms around my  neck so I can carry her. I’m not a big guy, but she’s rail  thin. Like she hasn’t eaten in weeks. There are sores  all over her body. Not boils – insect bites. Cockroach  bites. She shivers as she nestles into my neck. 

We find Sergeant Dean on the other side of the  mangroves standing in the center of a mass of bodies.  There are men with cracked skulls and brains oozing  out like egg yolk. There are women with arms and legs  dangling at their hinges. At my feet is a little girl, one  eye gazing at the bulbous grey clouds above, the next  socket a mess of meat and sinew. I almost wish she  weren’t still alive.  

Papou’s favorite story is the one where he got  deported. He’d arrived in The Bahamas by boat in  1969 to visit his godfather, who owned a restaurant  and motel in downtown Nassau. The boat, he’d say,  was horrible. The cots were thin and stiff. The decks  were cramped and rickety. He’d kissed the ground  when they finally docked in Nassau and went on to  work illegally for almost four years in his godfather’s  restaurant. Immigration came for Papou when the  new party came into government and cracked down on his godfather for not having a business license.  They put Papou on a boat that would take him back to  Greece. When he recognized the boat as the baot that  had brought him to The Bahamas, Papou leapt from  the deck into the harbor and swam to shore to marry  his god-sister. No one ever came after him.  

Black Alex didn’t have a funny story like Papou.  He hadn’t had a stiff cot to sleep on or cramped decks  on which to promenade. Instead, he’d been packed  like a sardine into a pilot boat, a pilot boat I now  realize was Papou’s, to breathe in the hunger and  sickness of other refugees. Every morning the captain  would lower a bucket of hot water and a pink Crystal  Wedding Oats cup into the hull, and all twenty of the  people packed into the hull would pass that bucket  around, taking a sip of the tepid water. A journey that  should have only taken two days stretched into ten,  and the whole time Alex was sweating and farting  and relieving his bowels in one spot because getting  up and walking about the deck was too risky. What  if a Defense Force boat spotted them? What if pirates  stopped them? What if the captain decided to lighten  the load? He’d stayed put because as hellish as it was  in the hull, it was better than outside.  

I asked Alex why he did it. Why risk his life to  work for pennies in a fish house? To live in a country that treated him and his people like vermin only  suited to groom yards and clean bathrooms.  

“Because,” Alex told me, holding a picture of a  woman long damaged by salt water, “it’s more than  I had.” 

Sergeant Dean is watching the water, where I  spot Uncle Tasso in a skiff. He beaches the skiff and  pulls out two bodies. They fall to the sand with wet  slaps, tongues lolling. Eyes rolling.  

“We still missing three,” Uncle Tasso says. His  eyes are red. His shirt is torn. There are long scratches  on his chest and belly. Fingernail scratches.  

“Hopefully, the current took them out to sea,”  says Sergeant Dean. “Otherwise, we’ll have to keep an  eye on the beaches in case they wash up somewhere  public.” 

Tasso sinks into the mud. He covers his face  with both hands and sighs.  

“How many?” 

Sergeant Dean does a quick head count. 

“Twelve dead. Five almost.” 

Tasso counts the bodies.  

“I only see seven.” 

Sergeant Dean licks his lips. 

“We’re working on them.” 

Tasso looks confused, but then he sees it. The  black smoke. He smells it. The burning flesh.  

“You can’t do that! These are people.” 

“These are dead,” Sergeant Dean says. He’s  trembling. 

Tasso shakes his head. Jumps up. Darts towards  the fire behind the mangroves. 

“They deserve a proper burial.” 

It’s Alex who stops Tasso.  

“I don’t like this either,” Sergeant Dean says,  voice dry and cracked, “but we got a squad of officers  on their way here to put out this fire. If they get here and find out what’s burning, your daddy gets deported  and you and your brothers go to prison for the rest  of your lives. I can’t help you anymore than I already  have.” 

Tasso gazes into the mangroves.The rain falls in  a soft curtain. The sheep bray in delight.  

“What’s with the sheep?” Tasso asks.  

“They sick,” Alex says. “We had to put them  down and burn the bodies to stop them from  spreading disease.” 

Tasso nods. Understands. He pushes the mangroves aside to join Black Alex at the fire, but  then stops. Looks at me. At the woman in my arms.  

“If we can save any of them…” 

Tasso smothers a sob. He disappears behind  the bush.  

Sergeant Dean stares at the sea. “Make it quick,”  he says to no one in particular.  

I can’t believe I didn’t recognize that sound  before. That sound like cherry bombs. I hear them every Easter when Babou and his brothers hunt  pigeons. I realize what makes that sound only when  Alex pushes the gun against the little girl’s head at my  feet and pulls the trigger.  

The woman in my arms would have screamed  if she could, but her throat is in shreds. Instead, she  lets out a sound like a broken squeak toy. I can tell it  hurts, but her fear is greater than her pain. She lets  out another torturous whisper when Alex shoots a  man with his femur jutting through his knee.  

Alex does this twice more before he approaches  me. The woman’s feeble, but she clutches my hair. I  feel her eyes on me like fingers, clawing, insisting I  help her. But my eyes are on Alex.  

Alex walks up to an inch of my face and  glares. We have the same eyes – sea green. That’s how  everyone knew I was Babou’s son. And that’s what  made Alex’s mother realize she’d finally had enough. 

You broke her, Alex told me at his homecoming  ovelias. You broke my family the moment you were born. 

The cold steel bites my fingers. I look down  and find Alex’s gun in my hand. The woman begins to tremble. She shakes so badly that one of her wounds  reopens. The blood is warm against my chest.

“Please.” 

I don’t know whether she said it or if I did. I do  know that I am crying. Alex sighs.  

“She dead anyway. Look at her.” 

I don’t have to look at her. I feel her fading  against my neck. 

“We can get her to the air ambulance,” I say. We  could take the truck and –  

“She’ll talk.” 

No, she won’t. She can’t even speak. Her throat  was crushed against the rocks. I can see bits of coral  in her chin.  

“It’s her or the family.” 

“You can’t do this,” I say. Hot water drains down  my leg. Alex smiles sadly.  

“Yes, you can.”

The woman shakes like a palm frond in a  hurricane when I lay her down in the mud. She  clutches my feet weakly. I kneel next to her and take  her hand. I push the gun against her temple.  

“Alex…” 

I don’t hear her until after the gun goes off. It’s  like someone punched into my gut and tore out my  spleen. My body goes cold as all of my blood rushes  to my hand, as if to drag the bullet back into the  chamber. But it’s too late.  

Something warm wraps around my back. It  pulls me to my feet, forcing me to drop the woman.  It’s Alex. My Alex. Not her Alex. Her Alex will soon  burn her body with some sheep to cut the sin. I forget  myself and burst into tears, burying my face in Alex’s  chest. Alex caresses my back as my sobs crest and fall.  

“It’s okay,” he whispers into my hair. “You did a good job. You did it for us, Zachary.” 

[i] Conchy joe: a term coined by Loyalist immigrants  to identify poor whites who had settled in The  Bahamas prior to the American Revolutionary War.