Not long after Fazil arrived, Clive was working on a Monday night when, barely an hour into his shift, he pulled over on Amsterdam and vomited a salmon-colored froth onto a hardened gray snowbank. He was so suddenly and intensely ill it was all he could do to drive the taxi back to the garage, stopping periodically to be sick again, and then struggle home. He thought he’d eaten something bad and figured he’d be back on his feet the next night; instead, he awoke drenched in sweat and delirious with fever. The illness lasted for days. Fazil moved his mattress against the wall to create as much distance between them as possible. Ouss cared for him to the extent possible when he wasn’t at work, bringing him soup and medicine and washing Clive’s sheets at the Laundromat.

Just an hour before he fell ill, Clive had paid his weekly lease, six hundred dollars he now had no chance of recouping. When he was finally well enough to return to work, he showed up at the garage only to have Larry tell him he’d found another driver for his shift. He would have to wait until a spot opened up. Two weeks passed.

Sara called. “I expected you to wire us something last week.”

“Things are hard up here at present.”

“Well, down here at present your son is growing like a weed and needs new polos and trousers and shoes.”

“You think I don’t know your extensive list of demands, what with how you do remind me?” he snapped.

For a moment Sara didn’t speak. He could hear her breathing into the phone slowly and deliberately.

“This is not about me and you. It is about your son.”

He hated when she called Bryan your son—as if Clive didn’t know, as if he needed reminding.

Rent was due but he couldn’t pay it. Their landlord came to the apartment and told him in front of Fazil and Trev and Sachin that he had a week to pay. That night he took Ron Rawlins’s business card from his wallet and turned it over in his hands. He walked to a pay phone. He dialed the first digits. Then he heard Ron’s voice, Good on you, in his head. He hung up. He tore the card in pieces and tossed them in the rubbish bin on the street corner. He did not trust himself with it.

Two days later, he returned to the apartment after a day spent fruitlessly walking the city looking for HELP WANTED signs, his feet aching, and found Sachin sitting on the couch. Sachin looked up at Clive, his green eyes sparking. “Where is it?”

“Where is what?”

“You know very well.”

“Please, Sachin. I’m too tired for this today. If you’re vex with me, say so and be done with it.”

“You bet your dick I’m vex. This morning I had four hundred dollars in an envelope under my mattress. Tonight, I don’t.”

“You think I took it?”

“I know you owe rent.”

“But I’ve been gone. I’ve been out since this morning.”

“Says you,” Sachin spat.

Clive heard the sound of a key in the lock. Fazil stepped inside. When the small old man saw the two of them, frozen and glaring at each other, he hunched his shoulders and disappeared quickly into the bedroom.

“I’m giving you a chance to make it right, Clive. You give me what you did take and we’ll be cool.”

“I didn’t take your money, Sachin. How would I even know where you hide it?”

Sachin clapped his hands and released a dark, amused laugh. “How would you know?” He was wired; he spoke with a red-hot smoothness. “Clive, even you could find a stack of cash in a room that’s nearly empty.”

“I don’t know what else to say,” Clive whispered. “We’ve lived together a long time. You know me. You know I would never—” He heard the floorboards creak in his bedroom beneath the light weight of Fazil’s body settling onto his mattress and he knew. Small, silent Fazil who never bothered anyone. He also knew there was no point in accusing him to Sachin, who would never believe him, blinded as he was by his anger. “I wouldn’t,” Clive said finally, uselessly.

“You have until tomorrow night.” Sachin stalked off to his bedroom and closed the door behind him.

He should not have thrown away Ron Rawlins’s card. It had been exactly the wrong thing to do. What else was new? The next evening, he went to the Little Sweet. He planned to stay there until closing, then remain out until two or three A.M., by which point, he hoped, Sachin would have blown through his anger and turned in for the night. He ordered his pepper pot and Carib, then another beer and another. Vincia pursed her lips but did not comment. The radio was on; the local Caribbean station was broadcasting a cricket match, Barbados Pride versus Leeward Island Hurricanes. By his sixth beer, he could feel the grass on the pitch like velvet beneath his fingertips. He closed his eyes and said a silent prayer that when he opened them he would be sitting in his grandmother’s kitchen. She would be rinsing dishes in the sink. She would swat a mosquito and scowl, and how happy he would be.

When he opened his eyes, he was in the Little Sweet, his empty plate before him. He looked through the storefront at the street. Sachin was standing on the sidewalk, staring at him through the glass.

ONE AFTERNOON when he was fourteen, during the boys of Everett Lyle Secondary’s brief love affair with boxing, Clive took a punch to the gut so powerful it knocked the wind out of him. His mouth opened and closed like a fish’s on land as he waited what felt like an eternity until the air rushed back in. It was Thomas Hinton who had walloped him that time, a shy, handsome boy, well liked by the girls, who would go on to become the landscaping foreman at one of the resorts on the south coast. Clive remembered the intensity of the punch, but he did not recall feeling any pain at the moment of impact. This must have been partly because of the adrenaline of the fight, his body thrumming with it as he tried to get off his best shot to a chorus of cheers and jeers. But mostly it didn’t hurt because Thomas was his friend. So were Damien and Des and Don, and because they were his friends, his body seemed not to believe the physical seriousness of their blows. Those matches in Don’s yard never hurt. It was the great irony of their contests. They administered injury to one another in order to teach themselves something of the violence of manhood, yet each blow was carried on the wings of fraternal love; you could feel it as plainly as you tasted the tang of blood seeping from your split lip. Because of this, those afternoon sessions were no preparation at all for what finally did come, on a frigid February night in New York. As he understood very quickly after he left the Little Sweet and followed Sachin around a chain-link fence to a vacant lot (broken glass glistening like jelly in the moonlight), it was not the physical power of a blow but the contempt which fuels it that makes it so terrible.

Why did he go with Sachin? That’s what he would ask himself after, leaning against the fence and spitting blood onto the sidewalk, his face mangled and swollen. He could not explain it. Sachin had stood on the sidewalk outside the Little Sweet, staring at Clive through the glass with such coldness. He curled his index finger, gesturing for Clive to come out as if offering an invitation. Clive felt his body rise from his chair. He had the feeling that he was walking toward something he’d been trying to avoid for a long time, that Sachin had something to show him about himself, and that it would be the truth.

When they entered the vacant lot, Sachin stumbled on the uneven ground, then swung his arms wildly to steady himself. He was very drunk. “This is your final chance,” he slurred. His voice was brittle and ironic, as if this were a poorly acted performance they were both in on, as if his own anger were hilarious to him.

“I didn’t take your bloody money,” Clive grunted through clenched teeth. He was suddenly furious, because he understood now that Sachin didn’t even really believe he’d taken it, but it didn’t matter. He was hated.

The first sloppy blow glanced off Clive’s jaw. Sachin spun on his own momentum, regaining his footing just in time for his chin to meet Clive’s fist. Clive heard the gnash of Sachin’s bottom teeth smashing into his top teeth, saw his head snap back.

Well, Clive thought, he’d given Sachin his chance. It wasn’t his fault if Sachin had shown up too drunk to put it to use. He turned and walked over the uneven ground toward the sidewalk. He was almost at the fence when he heard the pounding of feet behind him. Then Sachin was on him. An arm hooked around Clive’s neck, the crook of an elbow crammed against his windpipe. He fell to the ground and Sachin sprang on him. Clive felt every blow—on the rim of his eye socket, his throat, his chin. Finally, he was able to grab hold of Sachin’s shirt and shove him off. Sachin flew backward. Clive heard a crack. Skull hitting concrete.

The night filled with a terrible stillness. Sachin lay on the ground, motionless. “No,” Clive whispered. “No, no, no.”

Then Sachin raised his arm. Clive had never felt such relief in his life. Sachin brushed his hand against the back of his head, held it up to the moonlight to confirm a gummy swipe of blood. He pushed himself off of the ground and rushed at Clive. Clive let Sachin pummel him, too terrified of what he’d almost done to retaliate.

Sachin began to laugh. “Is the big man scared?”

He punched Clive in the gut. Clive did not respond.