by Robert Stone
"You're fucking right you would. If you thought you could just go back up there and forget about us you'd be making a bad fucking mistake. If we called on you, you'd deliver."
"Yes," Michael said.
"You know," Hilda said, "I'm not like the cabrones that say America this and America that. I lived in America a long time. I lived in Rhode Island. Americans are sometimes OK with me. Some of them." She looked from Roger to Michael, a guilty comic coquette's glance. "The good-looking ones, know what I mean?"
"These two are good kids," Roger said. "John-Paul loved them dearly."
"Go on," Hilda said, "go ahead, Michael. Dance the dance there. Go with your friend."
When they were outside, among the drums and the exhausted serviteurs, it struck him that Hilda and her friends must be waiting for night—that whatever happened to them would happen shortly. The darkness came down quickly, the sudden night of that latitude. Lara whispered in his ear.
"Marinette! Marinette is here."
That was as much as she could tell him. Hours ago, seconds before, she had fallen. After falling she had no idea of time; she had fallen into the darkness at the world's first beginning where the only light came from the glowing snake.
"Where is my brother?" she had asked.
She was with him. She saw Marinette in the snake-light.
"John-Paul?"
"Little sister," said John-Paul.
She felt great sadness and cried. She carried the two govi that held their two souls to the wall of the hounfor. Michael was beside her.
"Lara," he asked, "what do you think they'll do? Are they going to let us go?"
But she was past such questions, dancing now with an old woman in stained silk and lace who held a lit cigar in her mouth. The dance was a whirl, and as the old woman performed its turns, she made a noise between her clenched teeth. The noise sounded like the rage of a child, but it was a louder and more savage sound than any child could make. Her eyes were not dull like those of the other dancers, but keen and charged with an anger as fierce as her scream. Lara, trying to imitate her, to match her moves, in her own exhausted state could not get close.
The old woman, or man, whichever it was, took the cigar out of her mouth and flicked the ash like a comedian. She threw back her head and screamed louder. What followed might have been composed of words or mere sounds, he had no way of knowing. Instinctively he moved away.
"Marinette!" Lara shouted.
Then Marinette seemed to find Michael and to laugh at him. She pointed and screamed and then planed out her arms in imitation wings and circled Michael as though she were pretending to be an insect. Lara was laughing.
Marinette embraced him; he stood stock-still, choked by the smell of her sweat-drenched silk and lavender perfume. There was a gray wig on her head, a painted beauty spot on her cheekbone. Her clothes seemed genuinely old, taken out of a chest, and her with them, out of the same chest or the same grave. He followed her gestures and saw that she was holding a pair of rusted gardening shears. She swung the shears over his head, screaming into his face. Lara was screaming too, kneeling. The other serviteurs pressed around her, holding red cloths to her head, kerchiefs and bandanas. Then Marinette swung out of sight, into the darkness.
Michael knelt and brought Lara to her feet. She had stopped screaming. She rested her head against his shoulder. He thought she looked more beautiful than he had ever seen her.
All at once a plane passed overhead. From its lights, he thought it was a medium-sized passenger plane, a DC-7. It flew at an altitude that seemed to him no more than a few hundred feet. Looking after its passage, Michael saw that more milicianos had gathered at the edge of the lighted hounfor. There were a dozen or so, looking easy, rifles slung. It seemed to him that there were more islanders as well, swaying to the quiet drumming that had followed the departure of Marinette, clapping their hands gently. Lara clung to him. The mambo, smiling, gave her some of the colorless rum to drink. Lara put the stuff away like water. When Michael tried the bottle, he gagged on less than a mouthful.
He tried to take Lara in his arms, to comfort her. Give her a moment's rest. Somehow she had the soiled-rag smell about her. He looked into her face and saw that he was holding Marinette. She laughed at him, her eyes were sly, bright with triumph. She began to scream, a kind of yodeling ululation, in mockery of him. She spat and he saw her hatred. She waved the shears in front of his face.
"Lara," he said.
Someone shouted in Creole.
"Kiss the blades," someone said evenly.
He tried. He would think afterward that he had tried. He could not close his eyes on the hateful stinking figure that whirled in front of him.
"Hag," he said. He screamed it. People shouted. He began to fall; by the time he righted himself, he saw Lara again. She had turned away from him.
"Lara!"
It was Lara, no longer Marinette. It was his Lara, he thought, returned to him, beautiful and wise, her legs steady beneath her, her moves that of the athlete he remembered. She carried two of the small decorated jars that stood on shelves along the temple wall. She turned, facing him across the hounfor.
He thought he heard shots in the dark forest around them, in the direction of the ocean. But now a tall man stood in front of him, a man in a bent stovepipe hat. He wore an old frock coat and red vest decorated with knitted vevers.
"Michael," Lara said to him. "This is Ghede. See what he has for you." The serviteurs came to Michael as they had to Lara, pressing their red bandanas and kerchiefs against his head. He heard the drums beat. "This is for you, Michael," Lara said.
Then he wondered if she was the same Lara after all.
In front of him was the tall man in the top hat, smiling.
"Michael," Ghede said. "Michael. Mickey boy."
"He's Ghede, Michael," the mambo said, offering him rum.
"Drink it, Michael, mate," said Ghede. Then he was gone.
Listening, Michael knew immediately the drums were speaking to him. It was so obvious, he thought; they had been playing out his fortunes from the first moment he had heard them, so many hours before. They had never left him. They were filled with fragments of his life's time, encoding voices he knew. In the rhythm of the seconde he could hear his own breathing against the respirator, as it must have sounded under the ocean.
"Oh, Michael," Lara said. "Our Ghede. Papa Ghede. Our great Baron. Baron Samedi."
He wondered if he had ever realized how sweet her voice was, how strange and lovely were the little touches of island music in her speech. He looked at her beside him. Whatever love meant, he thought, was here.
Now Baron Samedi came again, out of the darkness, around the poto mitan where the spirit of Dambala held power. Baron Samedi pushed a wheelbarrow. The wheelbarrow had a rivet that made it look flexible. In it, its red strangled tongue brighter than anything else in the flames, was a goat.
"Hi ho, Michael," said Baron Samedi. "Hey, look here what I have got for you."
He began to back away. Lara went with him, after him. The mambo came, and the great Baron, the Baron Samedi.
"Who are you, for Christ's sake?" Michael asked. He was backing away fast, moving so quickly that Lara had begun to hurry to keep up with him. "Who the fuck can you possibly be?"
Baron Samedi began to laugh, a false hearty laugh like a clown's or a clergyman's. He shook the wheelbarrow and the goat in it. The drums beat for them.
"When the man has his life between living and dying he got to know me. Ho ho. Such a rogue, Michael. Don't know what lies between."
"And it's where he's at," Lara said. Or someone using Lara's voice, because she would never say "where he's at."
"Hey, Michael," Baron Samedi called. "Live for Sunday or go to the graveyard. What for Michael—am I Baron Samedi?"
"Listen to him, Michael," Lara called. She sounded some distance away. There were fewer fires. The crowd was milling close.
"Yes, I say!" shouted Baron Samedi. "I am the Baron S
amedi. Without Friday, I can't be. Without Sunday, ain't no me. In that space..."and the Baron drew a long breath, pronouncing a word that Michael was not born to hear.
"Who are you, man?" Michael asked him.
For an answer he got clown laughter and ho ho ho and the shaking of the wheelbarrow. Suddenly he was at close quarters with Roger Hyde.
"If I were you," Roger said, "I wouldn't try to play these games."
"What?"
"If I were you," Roger said, "I should save my life."
When he ran into the darkness, the drums seemed to be keeping after him. He was running before he knew it, himself taken by surprise. He had started somehow, and thereafter it had been impossible to stop, impossible to do anything but increase speed. Waist-high scrub kept tripping him up, throwing him against the stony ground and stripping his skin as though he were being dragged the distance he covered. Then he was running in shallow water with a firm rocky bottom. He saw fires ahead and turned to get his bearings. He had covered a great distance from the lodge. Its ceremonial fires were still burning and he could see figures outlined against them.
The drums sounded on, and it was still his time they beat. He ran through black space, splashing, running as it were in his own grave, running away from Baron Samedi, whose dark space he inhabited, the presiding god of his life and lord of his adventures. The lord of all who had made a grave of their lives. Baron Samedi's drums still beat for him.
But there were fires ahead too, and electric light flickering among them. He was encouraged, although the water around his legs was growing deeper and the bottom grew softer and clung to his steps. He heard shots, someone was firing; the reports were mostly single but now and then there came a burst of automatic fire. None of the shooting was close as far as he could tell.
His exhaustion made a copper taste in his mouth. He could hear his own breathing, a dry wheeze, unrelieved. Still gagging on the taste of the fiery alcohol, he wanted water. He put down a hand as he ran, trying to scoop up something cool and drinkable; the move threw him off balance, into a series of crazy-legged staggers from which he recovered with difficulty. His cupped hand brought up something bad-smelling, much too thick to drink and too repellent.
He thought he heard other runners behind him, splashing through the same stream he had followed, fanned out from bank to bank. He saw a car maneuvering along a road fifty yards away, halfway up a rise. The fires ahead were close to the road, barrel fires that stank of gasoline and sent out fumes of oily black smoke, visible in the fire's own light. The hill along which the road ran was walled by ridges of congealed earth whose contours showed against the firelight like the definitions on a relief map. At the top of the same hill, searchlights were being played around the valley. He did not try to stay out of their way, only to find his own by their intermittent patterns.
For a while, as he ran, he believed absolutely that Baron Samedi was running with him, not staggering in the same ungainly manner but moving along beside him, for amusement, to exercise his possession. He had to concentrate to put the thought out of his mind.
Reaching the road, he saw that its surface showed the traces of paving. For the first time since he had started running he was confronted with his own rational intentions. He had been running with the god entirely. The god had been his pursuer, his goal, the notion of his nearly mindless flight, the process of running.
Along that remnant of a modern road he felt he was either leaving the illusion of his master's presence or entering an illusion in which he was free of it. He had stopped running. There was no more breath for it.
Before him was a blocu. Fifty or so island people, almost all of them men, stood in the road. Piles of old half-burnt tires were heaped along the shoulder. Big hundred-gallon drums filled with tire strips sent up a black stink, like meat butchered and roasted raw, the living flesh of some vile animal. Farther from the road he could see stripped tires piled in towers and burning. Others stood as though prepared for the next occasion, a midnight Mass of Pére Lebrun, when the living meat would be less exotic, a more familiar dish, and the mystic ritual would be transubstantiation in reverse as every grain of life transcendent was burned howling out of the beast.
A big young cane cutter approached. "Hey mon, you got somefin' for me, yah?" "Lajan, blan," another kid called. Patois hung at that end of the island. Her part. Who? Lara, her name was Lara. Her soul had belonged to Marinette, as his to Ghede, the Baron Samedi. There was a race and he had run it. She was gone.
He had wads of dollars and local bills. He straightened them out, flexed them with an appealing snap and delivered. He half shouldered his way through the crowd, a discreet, polite and most accommodating way of shouldering. The handouts worked somewhat; by the time he was out of bills he was among the losers and runts who had been forced to the rear and had nothing to play against his fear except their need and desperation. These were not to be despised, because he had survived the blocu. There had not been much tourism on the island for years, and the hatred of the islanders had cooled somewhat.
Walking beside the potholed road, he was never alone. The drums kept him company. Figures passed him, some moving so quickly he might have been standing still. From the darkness people shouted his name. Voices addressed him as Legba; sometimes he thought he was wearing a stovepipe hat. On his chin he felt the fringes of a false beard.
There was a car behind him sounding its horn. He moved farther off the road, but after the car had eased past it stopped for him. It was a Mercedes, the sleek fender covered in red dust. An island soldier was driving it and there was a soldier with an automatic rifle beside him.
The rear door opened and Michael saw a long-legged olive-skinned man with a neat mustache settled in the back seat. He was in uniform; his collar was adorned with the red tabs of a senior British officer. It was Colonel Junot, the administrator of the new order, graduate of Fort Benning and veteran of Grenada.
"Spare yourself, Ahearn," the colonel said. "I'll take you where you're going. Oh me," he said, seeing Michael's spattered trousers.
"No," Michael said. "I've worked it out."
The colonel reached out patiently and took him by the arm. "Yes, yes, worked it out, very good. Here, come take a ride with me."
So Michael got in and the soldier handed him a Miami Herald.
"To sit on," the colonel explained. They followed the road along the Morne until they were driving far above the ocean, with the stars overhead and a risen moon at the edge of the sea's dark horizon. Low clouds dissipated against the jutting rocks below the road.
"Too bad, you can only get the view here by daylight, Ahearn. This is one of the great views of the Western Hemisphere. The French wanted to fight the Battle of the Saints here. On that bay!" He pointed into darkness to the right. "Well, you can't see it now."
When they had gone a little farther, Colonel Junot said, "Dutch Point! Lovely peninsula. I suppose you know we haven't been having many visitors recently. It's our somewhat violent political situation. Social unrest, you see."
"Yes," Michael said.
"Well, here's a secret. The cruise line companies use Dutch Point all the same. They just don't tell their passengers where they are. They tell them it's Point Paradise. Where could be sweeter? Mum and Dad and the wee bairns go to Point Paradise, wot? So close the bloody roads to the point, and put a skirmish line of about a hundred-fifty rent-a-cops to seal it off. Let a couple of colorfully garbed vendors and a steel band through. Good, isn't it?"
"It's good thinking."
"Yes," Junot said, "good thinking on the part of the cruise lines. Paradise Point. Bloody tourists disport themselves in the surf, no idea they're in between a Glock and a griddle, I mean a hot spot. No, they're in Paradise. If we had those rent-a-cops stand down, the bastards would think they'd died and gone to hell. They'd experience some social tension."
"You're taking over, aren't you, Colonel?"
The colonel shrugged modestly.
"Will you continue th
e Paradise Point tradition? With the cruise lines?"
"Certainly," the colonel said. "But one day we won't have to build paradise with rent-a-cops. With luck—and, unfortunately, a little discreet repression—we'll have good old paradise back all over the island. Paradise, paradise! Upscale, upscale!" The colonel laughed and sighed.
"I'm afraid for my friend," Michael said. "Lara Purcell. I left her behind. I'm afraid they may hurt her."
"I know your story, Mr. Ahearn. I know you're a thoughtful man, friend of herself. Well, you don't have to worry. Because everything is under control, including the lodge. And she will be safe, I can promise you. So you don't have to worry. Understand?"
Michael said nothing.
"How'd you like to live in someone else's paradise?" the colonel asked.
"I can't imagine it."
"Think of it as a misfortune. A huge fucking pink misfortune."
"I guess I don't understand," Michael said. "I haven't been here long."
"Yah, man. But I think you understand, eh? I would be surprised if you don't have a piece of the picture."
The road headed down toward a concentration of light at what appeared to be the end of the island. The mass of land gave way to an expanse of rolling moonlit ocean; just short of the waves were fields outlined in geometric patterns of red and white light.
"We don't have a choice, do we?" the colonel said. "We've inherited bloody paradise and now we've got to live by selling it. Paradise and every naughty little thing." He leaned back in the seat and slapped Michael on the knee.
"Oh yes, we have all those naughty things they want and don't need. The drugs, the coffee, the chocolate, the rum and the orange-flavored booze, the tobacco, the girls and the boys. Shouldn't have them. Bad for you. Live longer without them but they're oh so nice, yes, indeed. How you want them all. And that's our fortune."
The car passed a checkpoint at the approach to the All Saints Bay international airport. There were soldiers everywhere in the uniform of the island's new army. The soldiers took a look inside the Mercedes and waved them through.
