you think this missing ball is? Look, I want you to shut your eyes and mark a spot with this pencil.’
And sometimes again Bolo would ask us, ‘What sort of things you been dreaming this week?’
If you said you didn’t dream at all, Bolo looked disappointed. I used to make up dreams and Bolo would work them out in relation to the missing ball.
People began calling Bolo ‘Missing Ball.’
Hat used to say, ‘Look the man with the missing ball.’
One day Bolo went up to the offices of the Guardian and beat up a sub-editor before the police could be called.
In court Bolo said, ‘The ball not missing, you hear. It wasn’t there in the first place.’
Bolo was fined twenty-five dollars.
The Gazette ran a story:
THE CASE OF THE MISSING BALL
Penalty for a foul
Altogether Bolo spent about three hundred dollars trying to spot the missing ball, and he didn’t even get a consolation prize.
It was shortly after the court case that Bolo stopped barbering regularly and also stopped reading the Guardian.
I can’t remember now why Bolo stopped reading the Evening News, but I know why he stopped reading the Gazette.
A great housing shortage arose in Port of Spain during the war, and in 1942 a philanthropist came to the rescue of the unhoused. He said he was starting a co-operative housing scheme. People who wished to take part in this venture had to deposit some two hundred dollars, and after a year or so they would get brand-new houses for next to nothing. Several important men blessed the new scheme, and lots of dinners were eaten to give the project a good start.
The project was heavily advertised and about five or six houses were built and handed over to some of the people who had eaten the dinners. The papers carried photographs of people putting keys into locks and stepping over thresholds.
Bolo saw the photographs and the advertisements in the Gazette, and he paid in his two hundred dollars.
In 1943 the Director of the Co-operative Housing Society disappeared and with him disappeared two or three thousand dream houses.
Bolo stopped reading the Gazette.
It was on a Sunday in November that year that Bolo made his announcement to those of us who were sitting under the mango tree, waiting for Bolo to cut our hair.
He said, ‘I saying something now. And so help me God, if I ever break my word, it go be better if I lose my two eyes. Listen. I stop reading papers. If even I learn Chinese I ain’t go read Chinese papers, you hearing. You mustn’t believe anything you read in the papers.’
Bolo was cutting Hat’s hair at the moment, and Hat hurriedly got up and left.
Later Hat said, ‘You know what I think. We will have to stop getting trim from Bolo. The man get me really frighten now, you hear.’
We didn’t have to think a lot about Hat’s decision because a few days later Bolo came to us and said, ‘I coming round to see you people one by one because is the last time you go see me.’
He looked so sad I thought he was going to cry.
Hat said, ‘What you thinking of doing now?’
Bolo said, ‘I leaving this island for good. Is only a lot of damn crooks here.’
Eddoes said, ‘Bolo, you taking your box-cart with you?’
Bolo said, ‘No. Why, you like it?’
Eddoes said, ‘I was thinking. It look like good materials to me.’
Bolo said, ‘Eddoes, take my box-cart.’
Hat said, ‘Where you going, Bolo?’
Bolo said, ‘You go hear.’
And so he left us that evening.
Eddoes said, ‘You think Bolo going mad?’
Hat said, ‘No. He going Venezuela. That is why he keeping so secret. The Venezuelan police don’t like Trinidad people going over.’
Eddoes said, ‘Bolo is a nice man and I sorry he leaving. You know, it have some people I know who go be glad to have that box-cart Bolo leave behind.’
We went to Bolo’s little room that very evening and we cleaned it of all the useful stuff he had left behind. There wasn’t much. A bit of oil-cloth, two or three old combs, a cutlass, and a bench. We were all sad.
Hat said, ‘People really treat poor Bolo bad in this country. I don’t blame him for leaving.’
Eddoes was looking over the room in a practical way. He said, ‘But Bolo take away everything, man.’
Next afternoon Eddoes announced, ‘You know how much I pick up for that box-cart? Two dollars!’
Hat said, ‘You does work damn fast, you know, Eddoes.’
Then we saw Bolo himself walking