by Ben Fountain
“Lulu, wait a second.”
Lulu swung the boat around and aimed for Bois Rouge.
“Lulu, wait.” Syto’s fear had more to do with breaking safe, numbing habits than rousing the ire of some ruthless gang. “Lulu, come on. What are we supposed to do if we get the stuff?”
“You have to ask? We’re going to give it to the cops, of course.”
Bois Rouge was a narrow teardrop bay with a rind of beach packed into the heel, rock clusters flaring across the sand like the rusted-out hulks of old wrecks. They found three duffel bags draped across the rocks, a hundred kilos in each, each kilo triple-wrapped in thick, clear plastic. The brothers loaded up the bags and sailed for Marigot; by mid-morning they’d landed on the mushy beach, hired a couple of kids with a wobble-wheeled bouret and carted the bags to the police station, the former pus yellow barracks of the Haitian Army redone in searing white with snappy royal blue trim. These were the new civilian, postinvasion police, recruited and trained by the Americans to be the guardians of the dawning democratic era, and as the brothers waited in an outer office Syto reflected that, yes, there was definitely a different feel about the place. It wasn’t just the paint job, the matching desks and chairs, the glossy validation of fax machines and computers. The old police used to shuffle and slouch around like a bunch of punks—until they wanted you, and then they moved pretty quick—but this crew carried themselves with the same crisp air as the people over at the tax office.
And yet here was Michelet running the place, Michelet with his oblong, strangely blunted head, like a coffee bean squeezed between your thumb and forefinger. A man of medium height, with brisk, officious eyes and the cinematic mustache he’d worn in the army, the pencil-thin wisp like an advertisement for how well the world should think of him. As a soldier he hadn’t been known as one of the high-profile rapists or torturers, though he’d slap the odd chicken thief around now and then. He’d been clean enough for the Americans to recycle into the police, a professional who could brace up the situation long enough for the blans to pound their chests and leave.
“Well?” he said, stepping into the room, raising his chin at the scruffy fishermen. “Well? What is it?”
Lulu laughed, wasting a little more of Michelet’s time. “We heard you on the radio,” he said to Michelet. Several policemen had gathered around. “About the go-fasts, you know? We heard you telling everybody you wanted vigilance. Well,” he kicked his bare foot against the sacks, “here’s your vigilance.”
Michelet frowned, then nodded at the duffel bags. The youngest cop fell to his knees and cinched open one of the bags. He looked inside, pulled back for a brief, hysterical giggle, and looked again.
“It’s cocaine.”
“Bullshit,” said Michelet, but he dropped to his knees and peered into the bag, lifted out a kilo with both hands. “Where did you find this?” he barked at the brothers.
“At Bois Rouge,” Lulu answered. Syto just watched. He remembered Michelet; the chef, of course, would not remember Syto. “On the rocks over at Bois Rouge. We saw the go-fast leaving and we went in and took it.”
Michelet attacked the other two bags, wrestling each one open, raking out the top layer, then thrusting his arm all the way to the bottom. He was sweating when he sat back and looked at the brothers, as moist and trembly as a virgin on the cusp. “So tell me,” he said, simpering, practically gagging on his smile, “did you happen to see any more of these?”
Syto sailed out alone to do his fishing that night, as regular in his work as the seasons and tides. He fished during the full moon like everyone else, and he fished during the waning moon when no one else bothered, and under the new moon, which was even worse, and before hurricanes, which was sheer futility, but since his daughter died several years ago, catching fish wasn’t so much the point. Most nights the only other boats he saw were go-fasts. If he was working close to shore they’d aim for his boat, perhaps attracted by the light from his lampe-batterie; Syto would go on setting his hooks and lines and ignore the banshee shriek bearing down on him, and when they saw it was a fisherman they’d cut to the side, the hull flashing sleek and pale in the night.
Tonight he baited his string of hooks with pisket and chicken guts, spotlit the water with his lampe-batterie, and then drifted, not so much thinking about things as biding with a certain awareness of his life. Réfléchi, that was better than direct thinking for the world of problems you could never really solve. The problem of contraband, for example, or the confusions of politics, or the trouble that came of needing to eat every day. Or the death of children, a cruelly regular thing in Trois Pins. He and his wife had lost four, the first three as infants and the last, Marie-Lucie, when she was almost seven. That one was never far from his mind, a petite, clean-limbed, willful little girl who’d insisted on starting school at age five, nagging her father until he enrolled her at Marigot’s ramshackle École Supérieure. One day she’d been skipping rope and singing out her lessons, and the next she was trembling with fever on her mat, her ankle blanched and puffy as a rotten fish. By morning both legs were swollen, her eyes glassy and distant. Syto borrowed a neighbor’s chestnut mare, wrapped Marie-Lucie in a towel, and cradled her across the saddle, and they didn’t climb down until the shambling little horse carried them all the way to Jacmel. On the road Marie-Lucie went out of her head with fever, talking and singing with such familiar exuberance that Syto thought he would go insane with grief. At the clinic the doctor shook his head—no antibiotics, the embargo had seen to that, there wasn’t so much as an aspirin to be had. They gave Marie-Lucie a bed and Syto a mat; that night the life poured out of her like water from a pail, and the next day, cradling her body again across the saddle, Syto didn’t so much want to die himself as to lie down in a ditch and wait for time to end. People walking along the road understood at once; they stopped, took off their hats, and bowed their heads, and many called him “brother” and offered a prayer. But just as he passed the Avant-Poste in Marigot, the soldiers on the gallery had burst out laughing. A whole row of them lazing there in the shade, chairs tipped against the wall, rifles propped nearby; Syto remembered Michelet among them, Michelet with his sergeant’s stripes and prissy mustache, his trousers tucked smartly into gleaming boots. At that moment Syto had felt murder in his heart—how dare they—and then he realized they weren’t laughing at him, they hadn’t even noticed him passing by. One of the soldiers had simply told a joke—it had nothing to do with him, and yet their laughter cut deep, rankling over the years, his mind playing the sound of it over and over as he rode the ocean swells at night.
Within a week all the Marigot cops were driving Land Cruisers. Michelet himself had paid cash for one of the big fine farms near Cyvadier, or so the rumors went; eventually he went on the radio to defend himself. “All contraband has been sent to headquarters in Port-au-Prince,” the chief declared, and he, personally, “God’s creature and servant,” was directing the local drug interdiction effort, “in concert with the American antidruggists.”
People shrugged; the truth was right before your eyes, but what could you do? “Our problem,” Lulu said on the boat one day, “is that we’re chumps. We let those guys run all over us.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Syto objected, reaching over the side for a handful of water to splash on his head. It was a hot, cloudless day; the water around them was the same dazzling blue as the sky, so that at times Syto had the unsettling sensation that they were floating free in space. “We’re fishermen, we earn ourselves an honest living. Have a little respect for yourself.”
“Respect? Come on Syto, it’s like Bouki and Ti-Malice and we’re poor dumb Bouki, those cops are driving around laughing at us.” Every Haitian grew up listening to the old tales about dimwitted Bouki and sly Ti-Malice, an operator who was always taking Bouki to the cleaners. Though it seemed you were supposed to feel sorry for Bouki, Syto had noticed how people took smirking pleasure in Ti-Malice’s cons and scams.
“Well, I d
on’t have any regrets,” he said. Though he was just as disgusted as Lulu, he wouldn’t admit it. “We tried to do the right thing.”
“You try to do the right thing, that’s a good way to starve.” Lulu paused to light a cigarette. “Bouki starves while Ti-Malice gets nice and fat.”
Syto didn’t need it, Lulu’s reminders of just how degrading life could be, but Syto also knew this: after Marie-Lucie died he would have gone crazy if it hadn’t been for Lulu mouthing off on the boat, cracking jokes about their luck, the fish, the world, or Lulu falling down possessed because of the rhythm of the waves, or Lulu sitting in the stern and saying things like “I think that Man is the shadow of God” or just smoking and being a bum, so that Syto had to jump up and scold him instead of quietly fishing until he broke in two from grief. But one morning Lulu announced that he was an artist, and now he spent most of his days painting the dreams he had at night, making dark, blobby pictures that seemed to rise out of an underwater realm in his head. When he got three or four together, he’d go hang around the square in Jacmel and try to sell them to the blans who wandered through, aid workers, mostly, sometimes a dazed tourist or two.
“Tell me this,” Lulu went on, mumbling now. He was using both hands to coil the pisket net, which required him to hold the pull line in his mouth; between the rope and the dangling cigarette there wasn’t much room for talk. “Does Esther know about the drugs?”
Syto considered. “I think so.”
“You think so? You mean you told her?”
“Well, no.”
“Did she start talking?”
“You know she hasn’t.”
Lulu spun the net outward with a twist of his arms, the net flaring, smacking the water like a fond kiss. “Well if you didn’t tell her and she isn’t talking, how do you know she knows?”
“She may not talk, Lulu, but that doesn’t mean she’s deaf. She goes to the market, she listens to the radio. She knows what’s going on.”
“Too much chagrin,” Lulu said. The net was sinking through the water as if drifting off to sleep. “Too much sadness, I really feel for her. I guess if you guys could have another kid…”
Syto shook his head. The midwife said there would be no more children; Marie-Lucie’s birth had torn Esther too badly. Lulu fell silent for a time, watching the water, then he gave the net an exploratory tug.
“How much do you think those drugs were worth?”
“I don’t know,” Syto answered. “A lot, I guess. If you believe the radio.”
For a moment the only sounds were the water’s slap and gurgle, the creaking of the mast like a bone out of joint. Both brothers were thinking the same thing, and each knew the other was thinking it, but neither was willing to say the words.
“She needs a change in her life, Esther,” said Lulu, and he began drawing in the net. “And you too, Syto, you’re in a major rut.” The net surfaced, a fist of sardines clumped at the end. “But change is always hard, that’s a true fact. And speaking for myself, I’m a peaceful man.”
For two weeks Lulu didn’t miss a day on the boat, and he talked about money so incessantly that Syto wondered if his brother had gone boujwa, money-crazy. “You know,” Lulu would say, “in a way it would be terrible to have a lot of money. All these people hanging around, all these women in your bed, you’d never know if it was you they liked or just your money.” Moneymoneymoney like an itch on his tongue, this from a man who claimed he could hear dogs chuckling to themselves and who the voodoo gods favored with frequent possessions and dreams. One day as they were hauling in the lobster traps, Lulu said, “You know, Syto, I don’t think it was the devil who tempted Jesus. I don’t think the devil was out there with him at all, those forty days in the wilderness. That was just Jesus all by himself, oui. Nobody out there tempting Jesus but Jesus himself.”
Syto was worried for his brother. He was worried for them both, but when they found another load of contraband—four duffel bags this time, in the shade of the trees that rimmed Pointe Boucan—Lulu studied the situation a moment, then said:
“I don’t even want the shit.”
“Well I sure don’t want it,” said Syto. “So what do we do?”
A black and green dragonfly skittered past their heads. The sea rustled against the rocks like a cow scratching its back. “No way we’re giving it to the cops,” said Lulu.
“No.”
“So is there any politicaille we can halfway trust? Even this much.” Lulu flashed the tip-end of a finger.
“How about Méreste?” Syto suggested.
Lulu made a gagging noise.
“He used to be a priest.”
Lulu’s head tipped forward, conceding this.
“He’s Lavalas,” Syto said, invoking the once-revered name of President Aristide’s party.
“I thought he was MPP.”
“Whatever, I can’t keep them all straight anymore.”
“Okay, we might as well. He’s probably our best shot.”
Senator Jean-Mario Méreste received Syto and Lulu in his walled compound on the outskirts of Jacmel. Dressed in a white guayabera and drapey linen slacks, he accepted the contraband with a furrowed brow, praising the Charles brothers’ steadfast civic spirit and respect for the law. Within days, as if by coincidence, the senator’s entourage was flaunting Uzi machine guns as they tooled around town in new Toyota pickups. Senator Méreste had acquired a Mercedes SUV, and was being mentioned on the radio as a possible presidential contender.
Well, what could you do. The evenings he wasn’t fishing Syto sat in his meditation place under the almond tree, and while the leaves dropped around him like exhausted birds he tried to put the whole business out of his mind. Neighbors came by to gossip and sympathize, and often Esther sat with him under the tree, silently stitching up the shredded nets he brought in. She never spoke—she’d had the pa-palé disease ever since their daughter’s death—but it wasn’t a surly or raging silence, Syto knew that now. At first he’d thought she was angry with him, which he understood—wasn’t he furious with himself? Though why that was he couldn’t exactly say. But with time he began to suspect that her silence had nothing to do with him, that she was performing an act of intense devotion like the nuns who pledged themselves to mindfulness of God, adhering to a passion so pure and strict that their lives amounted to a form of prayer.
It demanded respect, this kind of silence; he no longer tried to trick her into talking, though it was lonely, having a wife who never spoke. They were in their quiet mode under the almond tree one evening when their neighbors hustled up carrying Lulu in a sling. His eyes were swollen shut, his face resembled pulped fruit, and from the whistling in his chest Syto knew that several of his ribs were broken. The neighbors had found him slumped in the Jacmel town square, blubbering with pain and delirious rage. They got him into a tap-tap headed for Marigot, and on the way, revived by water and a couple of hits of rum, he told them how he’d stood outside Méreste’s gate, denouncing the senator in such livid terms that his thugs had no choice but to rush out and beat Lulu down in the middle of the street. Lulu’s strength seemed to return as he told the story; by the time the tap-tap pulled into Marigot he’d miraculously rallied enough to break away from his friends and dash to the police station, where a confrontation with Michelet led to his second beating of the day.
“I think the cops would’ve killed him,” said Alcide, one of the men who found him in Jacmel. “But we told them he was crazy, he didn’t know what he was doing.”
Lulu grabbed his brother’s arm and pulled him close. “I’m not crazy,” he told Syto in a clenched hiss. “I’m just looking for a little justice in this life.”
“See what I mean?” said Alcide, rolling his eyes. “Totally nuts.”
In the days that followed Lulu’s girlfriends worked in shifts, nursing him through the hell of his healing pains. They arrived according to some unspoken schedule, always carrying a pot of griot or fried plantain, and there was hardly any unpl
easantness among them, at least until they were sure he was going to live. After several weeks he was strong enough to move back to his house; meanwhile Syto sailed out on the hot summer nights and grimly did the fishing for both of them. At this time of year the fish were always sluggish, the baret and snapper yet to make their runs; Syto had to sail out five or six kilometers to make a decent catch, out where wicked squalls whipped through several times a night and salvos of flying fish exploded from the dark, stinging like clusters of tiny whips. Late one afternoon he piled his gear into the boat and headed out to sea, rowing first into the cut at Cayes Caiman to pluck sea urchins off the rocks for bait. It was a hot, bright day, the light a harsh actinic blue. He fetched his boat up on the scrap of beach, then hunted among the sluices and tidal pools for chadwon, the waves swatting the boulders with sharp, crackling sounds. He was picking his way along and not thinking of much when the duffel bags caught his eye, three of them laid in a row at the edge of the woods like cooling loaves. He scrambled up the beach and stood over them, blinking, swaying, strangely short of breath. Sunlight pulsed off the water in glittering barbs. Cicadas rowled in the woods that skirted the beach, the big, solemn trees looming at Syto’s back like a congress of village elders. For several moments he thought about Michelet and Méreste, and Lulu’s savage beating, and the soldiers’ cruel laughter and the shame of being a Bouki, but there was really no need to convince himself. The second he saw the stuff he knew he was going to take it.
“You’re asking me?”
Lulu was sitting under the lean-to in his yard, a rough shelter of palm fronds he’d woven together to keep the rain and sun off his head while he worked. Crinkled tubes of paint, old cans stuffed with brushes, half-finished pictures propped on wobbly easels—Lulu sat on a stool in the middle of it all and painted.
“Lulu, come on. I’m just asking for a little help here.”
