Read Online Dog War by Anthony C. Winkler - Free Book Online

Peeping Tom, she told herself sternly in the evenings during contemplative moments of retreat under the bedspring, and while she did her-best to refrain from staring, she could not help herself when she encountered outlandish scenes she had seen before only in Cinemascope movies.
    It was not so much the foreignness of the place, for as a Third Worlder of moderate means Precious had been amply exposed to glimpses of America in television, movies, and magazines and knew what to expect. But what stunned her on her first drive through America was that the whole place appeared spanking new and shiny. Compared to Jamaica, which seemed steeped in a perpetual mildew and grubbiness, America shone as if it had just been polished. But the curious thing was that it was a shine and a sheen visible only to new immigrant eyes, for when Precious repeatedly mentioned how America looked gleaming and shiny to her, Shirley said gruffly that the whole stinking city was getting nasty and shabby, that Precious felt as she did only because she couldn’t yet see American grime. There was Jamaican grime and there was American grime, and your eyes had to get used to American grime before they could see it. For an example, she pointed to a white man slumped against a bus bench and said that he was an American beggar, and when Precious looked at the man and saw that he was not only white but that he wore shoes and a presentable pants and shirt, she scoffed and said that such a man certainly wouldn’t be a beggar in Jamaica, to which Shirley replied, “Exactly! What dey call poor here is a joke to us. Is de same way with grime. Our grime is not deir grime and deir grime is not our grime, even though an ignorant person might think dat grime is always grime,” and Precious felt so stupid and put in her place that she stopped passing comment about America and contented herself with merely gawking.
    Precious made one last brave attempt to defend her maligned Jamaican senses and score at least one point by sarcastically remarking to Shirley that at least murder was still murder in Jamaica or America and the two countries had that-much in common. But Shirley again scoffed and said that murder in Jamaica was one body with a machete chop or perhaps one measly bullet hole, but that murder in America was at least two bullet-riddled bodies along with a gunman suicide. That was real murder, not your fool-fool garden party that know-nothing Jamaicans called murder.
    Precious sat glumly in the front seat after that and held her peace, for the discussion was beginning to give her a complex. Shirley drove slowly through one neighborhood after another, past shopping malls and stores and parks, and tried to point out all the sights and places of interest, but because of her complex, Precious could hardly concentrate enough to listen. Finally she blurted out, “I not going let you give me a complex. I say de place look shiny and new. And it look shiny and new. And dat is dat.”
    “Mummy,” Shirley chided, “this is not Jamaica.”
    “I am aware of dat!” Precious grumbled. “But you can’t do everything better dan us! You can’t have you own special grime dat only you can see! And you can’t murder better dan we murder! Out of order!”
    “Mummy, I’m just saying dat we do things big here. We don’t murder one like Jamaicans do. We bag ten and fifteen on de spot. Sometimes we bag twenty-five, thirty.”
    “Stop you boasting! And stop running down you homeland! You born and raise in Jamaica, too!” Precious said shrilly. And she steadfastly refused to listen to any more of her stuck-up daughter’s patriotic ranting and raving.
    The hardest thing for Precious to get used to was the constant spectacle of whiteness all around her, the unending procession of white face after white face frothing down the streets and through the malls in a perpetual tide of foam and spume.
    The first time, for instance, when Precious came across a white man digging a hole in