Miguel Street by V. S. Naipaul

clean, you hear.’
    Eddoes was crazy about cleanliness.
    He used to brush his teeth for hours.
    If fact, if you were telling a stranger about Eddoes you would say, ‘You know-the little fellow with a tooth-brush always in his mouth.’
    This was one thing in Eddoes I really admired. Once I stuck a tooth-brush in my mouth and walked about our yard in the middle of the day.
    My mother said, ‘You playing man? But why you don’t wait until your pee make froth?’
    That made me miserable for days.
    But it didn’t prevent me taking the tooth-brush to school and wearing it there. It caused quite a stir. But I quickly realised that only a man like Eddoes could have worn a tooth-brush and carried it off.
    Eddoes was always well-dressed. His khaki trousers were always creased and his shoes always shone. He wore his shirts with three buttons undone so you could see his hairy chest. His shirt cuffs were turned up just above the wrist and you could see his gold wrist-watch.
    Even when Eddoes wore a coat you saw the watch. From the way he wore the coat you thought that Eddoes hadn’t realised that the end of the coat sleeve had been caught in the watch strap.
    It was only when I grew up I realised how small and how thin Eddoes really was.
    I asked Hat, ‘You think is true all this talk Eddoes giving us about how woman running after him?’
    Hat said, ‘Well, boy, woman these days funny like hell. They go run after a dwarf if he got money.’
    I said, ‘I don’t believe you.’
    I was very young at the time.
    But I always thought, ‘If it have one man in this world woman bound to like, that man is Eddoes.’
    He sat on his blue cart with so much grace. And how smart that tooth-brush was in his mouth!
    But you couldn’t talk to him when he was on his cart. Then he was quite different from the Eddoes we knew on the ground; then he never laughed, but was always serious. And if we tried to ride on the back of his cart, as we used to on the back of the ice-cart, Eddoes would crack his whip at us in a nasty way and shout, ‘What sort of cart you think this is? Your father can’t buy cart like this, you hear?’
    Every year Eddoes won the City Council’s award for the cleanest scavenging cart.
    And to hear Eddoes talk about his job was to make yourself feel sad and inferior.
    He said he knew everybody important in Port of Spain, from the Governor down.
    He would say, ‘Collected two three tins of rubbish from the Director of Medical Services yesterday. I know him good, you know. Been collecting his rubbish for years, ever since he was a little doctor in Woodbrook, catching hell. So I see him yesterday and he say, “Eddoes (that is how he does always call me, you know) Eddoes,” he say, “Come and have a drink.” Well, when I working I don’t like drinking because it does keep you back. But he nearly drag me off the cart, man. In the end I had to drink with him. He tell me all his troubles.’
    There were also stories of rich women waiting for him behind rubbish tins, women begging Eddoes to take away their rubbish.
    But you should have seen Eddoes on those days when the scavengers struck. As I have told you already, these scavengers were proud people and stood for no nonsense from anybody.
    They knew they had power. They could make Port of Spain stink in twenty-four hours if they struck.
    On these important days Eddoes would walk slowly and thoughtfully up and down Miguel Street. He looked grim then, and fierce, and he wouldn’t speak to a soul.
    He wore a red scarf and a tooth-brush with a red handle on these days.
    Sometimes we went to Woodford Square to the strike meeting, to gaze at these exciting people.
    It amazed me to see Eddoes singing. The songs were violent, but Eddoes looked so sad.
    Hat told me, ‘It have detectives here, you know. They taking down every word Eddoes and them saying.’
    It was easy to recognise the detectives. They were wearing a sort of plain-clothes uniform-brown hats, white shirts, and brown