No Hiding Place

by Alex Clermont

ALSO BY ALEX CLERMONT

  Eating Kimchi and Nodding Politely

  Missing Rib

  You, Me And The Rest Of Us: #NewYorkStories

  No Hiding Place

  By Alex Clermont

  Copyright (c) 2016 by Alex Clermont

  ISBN: 978-0-9973850-2-1

  The author can be contacted at AlexClermontWrites.com

  Cover photo by Brenton Rogers

  Cover design by Alex Clermont

  No Hiding Place is taken from the short story collection You, Me and the Rest of Us: #NewYorkStories. To find out more about the collection visit the website for the book at NewYorkStories.AlexClermontWrites.com.

  DEDICATION

  This story is dedicated to the brown, the poor and the dead who have been forgotten.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Dedication

  No Hiding Place

  About the Author

  Also by Alex Clermont

  A Note From the Author

  NO HIDING PLACE

  His parents named him Edouard, or rather, that’s what his mother named him. It was the first thing she said as the doctor wiped the blood and plasma from her baby’s face and placed him in her weak arms. The rest of her body was equally weak, but she maintained enough energy to hear Edouard’s first cry and kiss her husband, who was both ecstatic at seeing his first child and upset because he didn’t at all like the name chosen for him.

  He wanted Federico, but slowly abandoned the argument during the second trimester when the pain of pregnancy morphed into the look of pregnancy. His pitiable, semi-immobile wife, with her swollen body parts and needy ways, made it seem unseemly to argue with her. He didn’t, and so he accepted the name Edouard as he accepted the kiss from the mother of his child who lay on the birthing bed in the Kings County Hospital obstetrics unit.

  They both looked at their newborn son and tried to divine some meaning from the lines on his face. Without saying so to each other, they tried to guess at the future ahead of him, based on their own past.

  Edouard’s father, Francis, was born in La Saline, a rural area of Haiti where ditches were as common as streams of open sewage were as common as poorly built homes were as common as hungry children. That is to say, they were very common. Francis grew up in that country when its president-for-life, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier, ran it. Baby Doc’s father, “Papa Doc,” was also president-for-life and passed down the title to his son along with the wealth he accumulated from murder and large-scale grift.

  The cross-generational kleptocracy robbed Francis of a well-funded school, decent healthcare, and food that reached above subsistence standards. Though his environment was filled with the constant threat of government terror, Francis was never conscious of how poor things were. He smiled with classmates in his dilapidated, for-profit grade school. He memorized French verbs and basic math in his mother’s ventilated shack of a house. He later gained skills as a mechanic and dreamed of a job fixing cars when he graduated high school.

  He would tell his friends, “I won’t be rich, but there will always be work. From what I see, that’s the most important thing a job can offer.” He was confident he would have at least that, or more, when the country’s dictator fled in panic to live comfortably in France with the millions he had stolen from the miserable nation.

  Francis was graduating high school when Haitians ousted their ruler and elected their first president—a peasant priest named Jean-Bertrand Aristide, who raised the minimum wage and pushed through other minor reforms the effects of which were evident to Francis when he traveled to Port-Au-Prince on the weekends to drink with friends and fuck random women he met at zouk clubs. Francis didn’t care to keep up with local news, so as he danced or worked under car hoods he never felt the stirrings of a coup. He didn’t know that, internationally, the new president was being described as an insane, narcissistic communist; that all the western countries were calling for his removal.

  What Francis did notice, and what made him flee the country as quickly as possible, was a coalition of old Baby Doc cronies who had organized with former military henchmen under a new banner. With the help of the United States’s National Endowment for Democracy, they began organizing paramilitary death squads that massacred anyone they felt was responsible for the first free election in the country’s history. Francis was walking away from his last bit of fun in the city when he saw one of these squads, armed with sugar cane machetes, bust into a bar and chop off heads and arms.

  Among the butchered were some of Francis’s schoolmates who didn’t pursue the same pleasures as he did. They mainly spent their weekends talking to other Haitians about social issues and organizing movements that could make a positive change. For this they had their brains blown out or had their vaginal walls torn by gang rapists who never bothered to use condoms as they spread disease like a biblical plague.

  In La Saline, Francis had seen the remains of his dead, and badly burned, cousin. He understood that, though he lived an apolitical life, he was in danger of being swept away in a terror that was less about politics than it was about power—exercising it and keeping it. With his mother dead the year before and no children that he was aware of, he found his way across the border to the Dominican Republic.

  The kind of life he was leaving behind became obvious to him at the borderline. Haiti didn’t have much in the way of environmental regulations leaving both native and foreign corporations alike to abuse the land as much as they did the people. The grass was literally greener on the other side.

  With one foot on overworked dirt and the other on rich soil, Francis moved on. He kept moving until he found himself near San Juan de la Maguana.

  He made a life for himself near the outskirts of the pretty little city by fixing cars and performing other mechanical small jobs. Though he tried to continue his life as he had left it in Haiti—full of drudgery alongside superficial pleasures—he couldn’t stop dreaming about the dead bodies he had seen. Francis’s sleep was filled with reoccurring nightmares about the time he was approached by members of the rebellion and escaped death only through the distraction provided by American soldiers who drove by in their Humvee. The US soldiers gave friendly waves to the known killers who immediately cared less about Francis and let him walk on. He had night sweats thinking of an alternate ending where he was cut into pieces, but still alive to see everything that he loved burned up in a hell on earth.

  In his little part of town Francis was known as a fixer but not as a smiler. That changed the day he met Edouard’s mother.

  Edouard’s mother, Estefani, was born and raised in the hilly areas around San Juan de la Maguana. She grew up poor but not surrounded by the same fear that gripped Francis’s family and friends. Her father and brother worked on their farm and grew the things they needed to live, while her mother worked in the city as a maid for a well-off couple who were five shades lighter than Estefani, her family, or Estefani’s neighbors—most of whom had fled from Haiti generations before.

  That generation found themselves running into another dictator, Rafael Trujillo, who was trained by the United States military, and followed the well-trodden path of killing and taking. His favorite people to kill were Haitian immigrants and, in a vicious act of mass murder that Estefani’s family somehow avoided, Trujillo ordered what Dominicans called “the cutting.” The euphemism ended with government troops going into the hillsides and slaughtering thousands of people.

  Estefani’s oldest brother told her stories about it when she was a child and spun outlandish tails like her grandmother having to hide in a grave next to a fresh corpse in order to keep her dark skin from being seen by the military men. The bedtime stories frightened Estefani to sleep as she closed
her eyes and lay on the floor mat that was also her bed. Her brother, though, knew that there was a much more boring truth to it: anyone who was black was asked to say the Spanish word for parsley. If their tongues had been trained in Haitian Creole rather than Spanish they would have trouble pronouncing it and, summarily, they would be shot in the face and left to decompose on the lush, green Dominican grass.

  Since she was a child, Estefani had soaked up stories like these and became a student of the history of brutality that shrouded her island like a thick blanket—creating an aggressive heat while also blocking out the sun. Remnants of Trujillo’s administration still controlled much of the country well after his death and Estefani found that out at a young age.

  Her aunt, a breathtaking woman, was seen as a kind of prize that one of the local gangster-politicians believed was his to take. As a little girl brought along to a get-together, Estefani saw her aunt reject the small man in the middle of the medium-sized crowd. His nose flared and he spoke a few serious words before angrily walking away. Later that night, when Estefani ran outside to chase a stray dog, she saw them both next to the brightly lit back doorway. Some more words were said and her aunt was slapped across the face and then thrown down onto the dirt where she was raped