“Roy! It’s you! You’re back from the dead!” Colin shouted,
exhaling clouds of atomized ethanol.
“Colin. How did you find me?” Roy wondered.
“I saw the sign,” he said, “This way to Undergrounds. Roy
Makonnen, proprietor.”
“I added that,” Leona said, “to honor you.”
Roy fetched a can of turpentine from his house and hurried back
down the alleyway.
Upon returning, he found Colin pouring a round of shots for all
of them.
“We go way back,” Colin explained.
“Where are you living now?” Roy said.
“Here, there, and everywhere. I’m not sure you can call it living
exactly.”
“And money?”
“I’d been raised to believe it grew on trees. Evidently, I was
unprepared for root rot.” He took out a bank card and placed it on the
table. “On its last legs, I’m afraid. Any chance I could crash here for
a few nights?”
And so it was that Roy took another lost soul into his home, or at
least one that was on the verge of capitulating.
The shipment of Blue Mountain coffee arrived, delivered by a
man who would have been hard to lose in a crowd, had their been
one. As Niles Nelson bowed to enter the establishment, his mane of
dreadlocks nearly swept the floor. Stretching out to his full height, he
looked around and exclaimed, “Well, what do we have here? Limbo?
Some secret society?”
“You must be our new deliveryman,” said Roy.
“I am,” Niles answered, sitting down at the bar, “Old Ernest
didn’t like having to bend down for your doorway.” His scarred face
was initially unsettling but after breaking into a smile or a laugh it
was as if the continuum of beauty bent back upon itself, hideousness
and splendor briefly touching each other.
“Hope you don’t mind me asking,” Colin said, never retiring.
“Dreads caught on fire,” Niles explained, “Never toke in bed.”
“Does it hurt?”
“Only when I look in the mirror,” Niles laughed.
Roy shook some of the shiny brown baubles in his hand and
breathed in the redolence of earth and air. “You’re from Jamaica,
then? Have you been to the Blue Mountains?”
ABYSSINIA
34
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