"Chili Mac's West Indian."

"Get the fuck outta here!" Stony looked shocked.

"I met his old man once. He sounds like Harry Belafonte."

"You're kiddin'!" Stony frowned and gulped down half his glass of water. The waitress brought the clams and steamers. They dug in. "I'll tell you what it is with them. Jamaica's a very heavy-duty place, very poor, especially Kingston. There's a lotta rough numbers goin' down there, some very bad scenes. Everybody's poor as a nigger, that whole colonial riff. They got these dudes, Rudies they call them; bad-ass lots, farm boys that came down to the big city, got stiffed and just hang around rippin' everybody off, an' they got these other dudes called the Rastafaries—you ever see them with those big rug heads? They walk aroun' with machetes tellin' everybody that Haile Selassie's God. They got a lot of these bad boys out in Brooklyn, that whole reggae number. I'll tell you something, the only good thing comin' out of Jamaica's grass." Stony methodically dunked the snout-shaped steamers in a bowl of clam broth and popped them in his mouth.

Butler sat silent except for the slurping noises he made sucking his clams from their shells.

"You know, and they come up here, an' some of them get into a bougie trip, X-ray technicians, registered nurses, white-collar office jobs, go uptown and see Rev Ike every Sunday. You know, money is honey and all that, and they hate niggers, New York niggers, street people. They're into this whole high yellow attitude, you know? An' they're closer to Africans than any cat you'll see on Lenox Avenue, but maybe it's that thing of comin' from an English colony. They think they're Limeys. An' when they got jobs in hospitals, uh! Fo-geet a-baht it! Brutal motherfuckers, not physically, at least not what I seen, but mentally, they got no respect for human dignity. They talk to these old people like they're six years old. Throw 'em around like sacks a rice. You know, an eighty-year-old dude who's paralyzed takes a dump in bed the fuckin' nurse comes in. 'Oh, Meestah Cohen, you a bod boy, now I got to clean you op.' But like really loud, you know?" Stony winced. "An' I look into this guy's eyes, right? The guy has a Ph.D., spent fifty years teachin' in some college somewhere. He wrote three books." Stony pushed his empty plate away, crossed his legs and lit a cigarette. "It's tragic, Butler. No sense of dignity, ach!" He bit his lower lip. "I gotta get the fuck outta there. You know what this fuckin' guy says to me? The guy's forty-six years old. He got Parkinson's disease, paralyzed from his eyebrows down. A goddamn courtroom lawyer, Butler. I come into his room, ask him if he needs to go, he mumbles, 'No,' so I says, is there anything I can get for you?' Forty-six-years-old, Butler, a vegetable, but I can see his brain is cookin', right? lie mumbles somethin'. I can't hear, so I says. 'What?' An' he mumbles it again, still can't hear him, so I put my ear to his mouth. You know what he says? He says, 'Can you get me justice?'"