They were bold, these kids; stared you straight in the face, a dare in their eyes and in the set of their shoulders. Just yesterday, the grandson of Moses' old classmate, Ruthie, a boy barely out of diapers, had challenged him. Moses had almost hit him, deliberately, as the boy deliberately took his time strolling across the street. His eyes held Moses' defiantly through the barrier of the car windshield.

“No watch me; wha you ah watch me for?” the boy demanded, in a voice that, like his balls, hadn’t yet dropped. He was cocked for a fight, that one, unbowed by Moses' size and age, though the elder was neither a small man nor a young one.

“That boy have the devil in him,” Moses thought to himself, the bad john in him refusing to give ground first. He would chuckle to himself later about the idiocy of engaging, at his age, in a staring contest with an infant. But, in the moment, he was ready to draw on the young upstart. In his day, the disrespected elder would have already unleashed his belt across the boy’s back, with yet another beating awaiting him at home. But like that new calypso said, ‘That was yesterday’. Today’s drama, however, was worthy of high noon on Main Street in those old westerns Moses still enjoyed. Eyes locked, neither man nor boy so much as twitched.

Then a bang somewhere in the distance – a gun? backfiring car? – broke the tension; and both moved on.

The scene replayed in Moses' head, now, a full day later, as he set up for his usual Friday night fish fry on the steps in front of Sister Brown’s Shoppe. He’d grown up in that shop as surely as he had the adjoining house; both faded yellow and fading. The produce gathered dust on the shelves, most Antiguans routinely strolling well-lit supermarket aisles these days. Corner shops like his mother’s were dinosaurs; like his mother had herself become, like he was fast becoming. More and more, he was feeling like a breed on the brink of extinction, or at any rate out of place in the urban port town he’d always called home. It had been a ghetto long before he’d even known the word ghetto, but it had looked out for its own. Now, everybody was fair game; and nobody respected the pecking order anymore. Take that boy of Ruthie’s. At his age, Moses and other boys like him—who’d just as soon bust a boy’s head open with a weighty stone as invite him to kick a football around—knew to show deference to men and women with silver in their hair. They knew their place or someone would show them to it. But complaining to Ruthie would be a waste of time. She’d always been a soft girl; probably had as firm a hand with that boy as she’d had with his wild mother. He’d grow up to beat her, that one.

“Hey, Moses,” a young voice said close to him, and he was startled.He tried to cover it up with a shuffle and a cough. People usually didn’t get the drop on him like that. He was ex-U.S. Army, had eyes in the back of his head; or so the boys gossiped among themselves. He’d heard them, and knew this was one of the reasons they didn’t rob Sister Brown’s Shoppe or Moses' haul from the fish fry that they huddled around every Friday.

He didn’t fool himself that it was his company that drew them; knew it was the random scraps of fish and cassava bread which they devoured like the neighbourhood’s stray cats devoured the fish guts. But then, that’s just what all those boys were, strays; not one of them sure of his place in the world.

Take this one, Paul; he was one of the better ones. He was talented and diligent, practicing at the Hell’s Gate pan yard across the way as often as the senior pannists would let him, outplaying them all. He was still awkward in his skin, though; light skinned and baby-faced and tall, but as flimsy looking as a sheet of low grade paper. Next to the raggedy bunch, he was also almost preppy looking; shirt tucked in and pants pulled up around his waist, he was a bit of a rebel that one.

Looking at him, it was hard to believe he was baby brother to the neighbourhood’s main terror – a mean, blunt looking boy who called himself Knife. His rep offered Paul a measure of protection, though Moses would bet good money that the brothers weren’t particularly close. Paul kept far from Knife’s posse, and was the only one of the boys who seemed genuinely drawn to Moses and whatever dated wisdom he had to offer. It was a bit ironic that Knife’s Don was Moses' own son, Mosiah, who chewed those boys up and spit them out like gum that had lost its flavour.

Moses sighed. He didn’t want to go there; less he thought about that particular failure, the better.

“Get the grated cassava out of the fridge, bring it out,” he told the boy. Paul was the only one of those boys he allowed to cross his front door threshold, though he tolerated them hanging around the shop step well enough. That was partly his mother’s influence. Sister Brown hadn’t allowed him to bring any of his boyhood friends inside the house. The shop had been prosperous then and his mother proud and sour. She still was proud and sour. But a person was less intimidating when you changed their pissy sheets and lifted them naked in and out of a bath everyday. It was the same iron bath he’d splashed around in as a boy.

It was unsettling, this morning ritual, and not because of her nakedness. He’d gotten used to that, didn’t see it anymore. But seeing her arms and hair thin, her face wrinkle and bend in on itself, her skin soften to pseudo-baby smoothness didn’t sit well. It was like he could still see the woman she’d been hovering over or sometimes just under the quiet, withering form she was today. Sometimes, he couldn’t tell which was real. Sometimes, the illusion made him queasy; so queasy, in fact, that he could taste the vomit in his mouth.

“The picture on the wall, that’s your mammy?” asked the boy, startling him again.

“Boy,” Moses said, uncoiling his irritation. The boy recoiled, a snail ducking its head back into its shell. Moses turned his rebuke into a weak joke: “You have Carib in you or something? You move quiet-quiet like you wan’ ambush somebody or something.” The boy half-smiled, still uncertain but warming to the half-compliment. Moses took the cool plastic container of grated cassava, asking, “what picture?” as the boy took over fanning the coal pot arch with the stiff piece of cardboard.

He knew the picture the boy was talking about; it stood out from the many, many photos littering their walls and the top of the never-touched-except-for-cleaning glass cabinet. There was one of Moses in his army uniform, a foolish boy with a bright smile. There was one of those posed studio shots with him and his young American bride, Jackie; about half his size and height, and twice as strong (though, in the end, cancer had been stronger than both of them). There was one of Mosiah, the boy they’d made together; he was maybe two in the picture, in another of those nondescript studios. Most people looked frozen in those pictures but his boy looked like he was about to jump off the chair and make a grab for the camera. Perhaps the fault had been in Jackie’s death; that Mosiah had been forced to grow up without a mother; that Moses had been, by turns, lost in the movement, lost in his grief, and ultimately just lost. It had to be the father’s fault when a boy grew into a young man who didn’t know himself.

When Paul had to prompt him again about the picture, Moses grew just a little bit frustrated with himself and how he seemed to be zoning in and out today.

“Yes, that’s Sister Brown in another lifetime,” he replied. The picture being discussed hung on the wall between the portrait of Marcus Mosiah Garvey that had held pride of place all his life and the piercing image of Malcolm X that he himself had added. In between them, his mother’s eyes blazed with the fire of youth and the authority of one who’d been a leader in the Garvey movement at a time when her peers back home in Antigua could still remember the sting of the whip.

If the stories were true, some hadn’t had to rely on memory. She’d helped change that, on her return, as a leader in the movement that saw cane fields burn and the white plantocracy fade into the background. She hadn’t made as much of an impact though, with her crazy Garveyite notions, among people to whom Liberia – the Promised Land in Garvey’s back-to-Africa movement – was part of a vocabulary they didn’t care to learn. He remembered people didn’t care to hear much about Africa during his days in the movement in the 1960s and 1970s either, when he and his other Dashiki-wearing friends were scorned as radicals; worse, Communists.

He remembered, too, that his mother hadn’t cared much by that time as well. He never knew what had killed the fire in her eyes; maybe just time (and loss) as had been the case with him. But, as a boy, he’d used the picture on the wall to imagine a sweeping tale filled with adventure and heroism. He’d been driven to add to the tale when, burned by the racism of being a ‘boy’ in the Man’s army, he discovered his own rage. As he saw with his own eyes Billie Holliday’s Strange Fruit, young Moses had called to mind that picture of Sister Brown and of Garvey alongside, like her groom.

“She was a Garveyite,” he told the boy now, that old pride in his voice.

The boy looked at him blankly, “A what?”

Moses wanted to smack him across the back of his head; matter of fact, a good cuff would do all these boys some good. “What they teaching you-all in school these days?” He demanded.

Paul shrugged. By now, the other boys were gathering, the smell of frying fish and cassava bread drawing them. As he schooled them, in-between frying and selling, he felt a bit like Malcolm preaching on a Harlem street corner. Moses had seen him once and had felt maybe the way Biblical Saul-cum-Paul had felt in the presence of that blinding light, transformed. He didn’t imagine he was having the same kind of impact on these boys, not in these Godless times. That’s the thing he tried to communicate to them though, if their thick skulls would just let it in: that with the hope of his people firing his own rebellion, he’d been God. They all had, as they marched on African Liberation Day in defiance of the politicians trembling under Big Brother’s glare. They’d all felt it, as surely as they felt the invisible targets on their backs; they’d literally been on fire like the Holy Spirit itself was pouring into and out of them. His son’s smaller hand in his own, he’d also been the Father. They’d been far from heavenly, the bunch of them, but they’d felt powerful; God-like. But it was Satan’s time now, he supposed. These things went in cycles.

A golden-apple-yellow sports car pulled up to the curb, and the boys’ attention wandered. He saw the boy, Paul, stiffen as the girl, Nzinga, stepped from the car in barely-there clothing and lots of bling. Even Moses knew that face; it hung from many a billboard on the island and popped up on TV often enough. Queen Nzinga they’d dubbed her after her Party Monarch victory; but, sure as day, he’d get blank looks if he mentioned the original Queen Nzinga, of the Ndongo and Matamba peoples, to any of these kids. The name was where the similarities ended in any case. No formidable warrior queen, Antigua’s Nzinga, pale and European-featured, was the island’s soca siren – a bewitching vixen and hot commodity. Young as she was, old as he was; she still gave Moses a tingle. He had no illusions about the power she held over these boys with their asses out and their pants down around their knees. Boys of any generation were still just boys.

“Two, please,” Nzinga said in a voice that made Moses think of Lauren Bacall. Sultry was the word for it. She smiled at Paul. “Hey, baby-brother,” she said. It was his brother Knife’s nickname for him; and she was Knife’s woman. The devil himself blew his horn at that point, a disembodied hand waving Paul over. The younger boy went, dragging his feet. The hand disappeared into the blackness of the yellow tube-like car; re-emerged and handed off something to Paul. Money? Drugs? Moses couldn’t be sure; but, same difference.

Moses sighed, one sigh too many on a night as unremarkable as any other. But there was no denying the feeling sneaking up on him. It was the ridiculous encounter with Ruthie’s grandson yesterday; he couldn’t shake it or the boy. Couldn’t shake his failures and how it infected this community. Knife, Ruthie’s grandson, all these boys were just sugar ants – stupid and hungry. But Mosiah, his boy, was the worst of the lot. A grown man now, he was a banger in a three piece suit; a banger with the power of the ballot box behind him.

“I running for office, daddy,” the boy had said eons ago. Moses had been foolish enough to be a little proud, too. That pride had turned to shame as he’d watched his son fill his pockets off the fat of the community he’d grown up in, turn children on their own parents, turn old people from revered elders into scared children. Well, Moses refused to be afraid. He didn’t lock any of his doors – not his car door, not his front door, not the door to the shop – almost daring them to come; but they never did.

The girl smiled at him as she took the money, flirting. “You know, Mr. Moses, I see where Comrade Mosiah get his looks.” It felt like she was taunting him. The boys laughed nervously. She strutted off, peacock proud. Paul wandered back and the car took off. Moses aborted the impromptu lesson, closed off the fish fry early. His stomach felt sour and his heart ached.

There was gun fire that night, as there was too many nights. If Moses heard it at all, he only turned in his sleep; maybe imagining it was a car backfiring.

In the morning, he bathed and dressed his mom. The boy, Paul, was on the front step when he opened the front door. His eyes were red and puffy.

“Knife dead,” he said, without prompting.

Moses didn’t know what the boy was feeling; didn’t know what to say, or even what made the boy come to him. But he seemed about to embarrass them both by crying. Moses imagined he’d feel the same way when they came to tell him Mosiah had been killed. The power of Parliament couldn’t protect him forever. He was a common – maybe uncommon – drug boss, and, in time, some young hot shot would try to out-Don him. It had happened to every bad john from Jesse James to Saddam Hussein. He, Moses, would die of old age, he’d long ago decided; and not until Mammy didn’t need him any more. But his boy’s blood would flow out, violently; of that he had no doubt.

He took his mother to the beach as usual that Saturday, inviting the boy, Paul, along for the first time. He couldn’t think what else to do.

The boy was a tentative swimmer and Moses found himself giving him some pointers while Sister Brown sat in the shallow end watching them. Neither of their hearts was in it, though.

The sea water, the water Antiguans said could heal anything, burned their open wounds.