Read Online On Sal Mal Lane by Ru Freeman - Free Book Online Page B

of her own less favorable ones, his pedigree could not quite compare with hers.
    “You wait then. By tomorrow Silva Madam would have told them a pack of lies and they won’t want to have anything to do with us. You wait,” Alice said. Invoking the specter of gossip was ordinarily sufficient to galvanize Lucas, but this time it took a further statement. “Or, what is worse, the lansis will get hold of them and who will be able to help them then?”
    At that, Lucas carefully snuffed out his beedi, tucked the left over half into the thatch of the roof over their veranda for retrieval later, and left without another word.
    And what was it about the Bolling family that so disconcerted both the Silvas and the likes of Lucas and Alice? Poverty, and the shabbiness that went with it, yes, but Francie Bolling, who had once been a movie star, and Jimmy Bolling, a former Mr. Sri Lanka, had done worse: they had not lived up to their potential. The advertisers and pageant officials and film makers had disappeared with the birth of their first child, and, as if to confirm that their day in the sun was most definitely over, a freak accident had left Jimmy Bolling with a twisted left arm that he carried folded across his middle, its strength atrophying each year until it resembled not so much a limb as a gnarled twig. All that remained was the memory of a blessed time and decades of anonymity stretching into the future, years that stood no chance when weighed against what had once been. Jimmy Bolling had hoped that one of his children would repeat the glory that he and his wife had enjoyed, but none had. Sophia had forsworn beauty pageants altogether, Rose and Dolly were plain and built so solidly that it prompted people like Mrs. Silva to liken them to oxen, and, as far as Jimmy Bolling was concerned, Sonna was a good-for-nothing.
    Lucas thought about all this as he went, picking his way through the mud and detritus of the compound. Even he, passive though he was, could not stand by and let the Bolling folk ingratiate themselves with the new family. That just would not do. No, these new people needed someone to protect them and obviously it would be up to him, like most things down that particular lane.
    Despite his sense of importance, Lucas was a frail man. He was narrow from head to toe, with sparse gray hair on his head and chest, thin long arms and legs, and a scrape to his walk from what Sonna referred to as lazy leg whenever he saw Lucas. Furthermore, though he always unfurled his sarong from its half-tie above his knees to its full length down to his ankles as soon as he crossed the main road and set foot on the bottom of Sal Mal Lane, there was no disguising the fact that Lucas was not, in his appearance, the kind of man to be taken seriously by the serious-minded.
    Safe in his own perceptions, however, as he tended to his sarong that morning, Lucas enjoyed the unknown quality of the new arrivals; his wife’s concern for them bode well, he felt, since Alice was usually given to letting her own melancholia sweep over and damn everybody she met, assuming that there was a gloomy order to the universe that she had not been capacitated to overcome. He had to wait a long while before he could get across the busy road, but he did not mind. This was actual work; he was going somewhere with a purpose.
    “Ai! Mr. Lucas! Where are you going?” Sonna Bolling yelled from his father’s doorway. He had discarded his Sunday church-going clothes and was lounging against the door wearing jeans and suspenders looped and crossed over his bare upper body.
    Lucas glanced up as he passed and was startled by what looked like a tattoo that covered the lower part of Sonna’s belly, a fist of writhing snakes, some of whose heads disappeared into his waistband. The tattoo was red and blue. It was not really a tattoo, it was simply colored ink from ballpoint pens with which Sonna had drawn a picture, an artful and very realistic one at that, in his