Back to Blood: A Novel

by Tom Wolfe

  “You’re… Haitian?” said Nestor, not knowing any better way to put it.

  “I’m so light skinned,” said Ghislaine. “Isn’t that what you’re thinking?”

  Yes, it was… but Nestor couldn’t think of any tactful way to talk about it.

  “There are a lot of light-skinned Haitians,” said Ghislaine. “Well… not a lot… but a fair number. People don’t notice us for that very reason. Our family, the Lantiers, are descended from a General Lantier, one of the leaders of the French forces that first occupied Haiti in 1802. My father did a lot of research into it. He’s told my brother and me not to bring up the subject… about being Haitian, I mean. It’s not that he’s ashamed of being Haitian, not at all. It’s just that in this country if you say you’re Haitian, people pigeonhole you right away. ‘Oh, so that’s what you are, a Haitian.’ That means you can’t possibly be this… or this… or capable of that or some other thing. And if you tell people you’re French, they’re just not going to believe you, because they can’t imagine anybody born and raised in Haiti being French. But that’s what the Lantiers are.”

  Nestor was bowled over. He didn’t know what to think. He had been ready for her to turn out to be some rare bird of paradise, from the way she looked… Haitian?—and she claims she’s French?

  She smiled at Nestor for the very first time. “Stop staring at me like that! Now you see why my father told us not to bring up the subject? As soon as you do, people say, ‘Oh, you’re Haitian… one of those… and we can’t count on you for whatever-it-is.’ Come on, admit it. I’m right, aren’t I.”

  That made Nestor smile at her, partly because smiling was easier than trying to come up with some appropriate comment… and partly because that smile of hers really lit up her face. She became a different person ::::::radiant… is the word, but she’s vulnerable at the same time… she needs a protector’s arms around her… and what a pair of legs!:::::: but he hated himself for even thinking about that! Hers was the pure kind of loveliness… and there was something else, too… She was so smart. He didn’t say that to himself in so many words at first. The things she knew, the vocabulary she used… it all built up gradually as she spoke. Nobody he knew would ever say, “He swaggers in a certain manner”… They might say “swagger”… maybe… but none of them would ever use the expression “in a certain manner” or a little thing like “he doesn’t.” He didn’t have a single friend who ever said “he doesn’t.” They all said “he don’t.” On the rare occasion he heard “he doesn’t,” it touched off a visceral reaction that made him sense “alien” or “affected,” even though he knew, if he thought about it, that “he doesn’t” was plain correct grammar.

  “Anyway,” said Ghislaine, “I had to tell you, because it gets down to the heart of what happened at de Forest. My brother was in that class.”

  “He was?—when the teacher knocked that boy to the floor?”

  “When he was supposed to have knocked ‘that boy’ to the floor. ‘That boy’ is a big, tough Haitian kid named François Dubois. He’s the leader of some gang or other. All the boys are terrified of him… and I’m afraid ‘all’ includes my brother. I’m sure it happened the other way around. The teacher, Mr. Estevez, is a big man, but I’m sure this Dubois kid knocked him to the floor… and to cover it up, Dubois starts pressuring boys to tell the police it all started when the teacher, Mr. Estevez, knocked him down. And my poor brother let himself be used that way. Philippe is so desperate to be liked by the tough guys… Now this Dubois has Philippe and four other boys enlisted to back him up when the police come. The rest of the class says they don’t know what happened, they didn’t see it. That was the way they weaseled out of it. That way they didn’t have to lie to the police, and at the same time they didn’t have to incur the wrath of Dubois and his gang.” Incur the wrath. “A teacher hitting a student—that’s a very serious thing right now. Not a single student, not one, says that Dubois hit Mr. Estevez. So Mr. Estevez doesn’t have one witness to support him, and Dubois has four or five. The next thing you know, the police come out of the school with Mr. Estevez. They’ve got his hands handcuffed behind his back.”

  “Well, what did Philippe say happened?”

  “He wouldn’t talk about it to me or my father. He said he never saw what happened, and he didn’t want to talk about it. I knew right away that something was up. I mean, most kids—if something sensational like that happens at school—or even if it’s not sensational—you can’t keep them quiet. All we got out of him was that the whole thing began with this Dubois kid saying something to Mr. Estevez in Creole, and all the Haitians in the class start laughing. Mr. Estevez—”

  “Wait a minute,” said Nestor. “He won’t talk about it—then how do you know he’s being set up to lie for this kid Dubois, him and the four other boys?”

  “My father and I overheard him talking in Creole with a boy from the class named Antoine, one of Dubois’s posse, I think they call it. They didn’t know anybody else was home. I don’t know Creole, but my father does, and they mentioned the four other boys.”

  “Who were they?”

  “I don’t know,” said Ghislaine. “Just other boys in the class. I’d never heard of any of them. They only said the first names…”

  “Do you remember them, the first names?”

  “I remember one, because they called him ‘Fat Louis.’ They said it in English… ‘Fat Louis.’ ”

  “What about the other three?”

  “The other three? I think—I do remember one was named Patrice. That stuck in my mind… and the other two… both names started with an H… I remember that much… hmmm… Hervé and Honoré!… That was it, Hervé and Honoré.”

  Nestor took a small spiral notebook and ballpoint pen out of his breast pocket and began jotting down the names.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I don’t know exactly,” said Nestor. “I have an idea.”

  Ghislaine looked down and twisted one hand around the fingers of the other. “You see why I hesitated to talk to a police officer about this? For all I know, you’re obliged to give all this information to—well, whoever you report to, and maybe that’s enough to get Philippe in trouble already.”

  Nestor began laughing. “Your brother is in no danger right now, even if I turned out to be a real tough cop. First of all, what you’ve told me so far doesn’t even reach the level of hearsay. I’d have nothing to go on other than his sister’s imagination. Besides, our department has no jurisdiction in anything that goes on inside Lee de Forest or any other public school in Miami.”

  “Why not?”

  “The school system has its own police force. It’s been out of our hands from the beginning.”

  “I didn’t know that. They’ve got their own police force? Why?”

  “You wanna hear some hearsay of my own?” said Nestor. “Officially they’re there to maintain order. But mainly, if you ask me, they’re there for damage control. They’re supposed to bottle up bad news before it gets out. They didn’t have any choice with this one. The thing had turned into a riot, and there was no way to keep it in the bottle.”

  Ghislaine said nothing. She just looked at Nestor—but her stare became a plea. Finally, looking deeply into his eyes, she said, “Please help me, Nestor.” Nestor! No more Officer Camacho. “You’re my only hope—his life is about to be ruined… before it’s even begun.”

  At that moment she was radiant again, radiant as any angel Nestor could possibly imagine. He wanted to put his arms around her and be her protector. He had no idea what to tell her. He only wanted to hold her and assure her that he was by her side.

  With as reassuring an expression as he could contrive, he stood up and looked at his watch and said, “It’s time for me to go. But you have my number. You can call me any time, and I mean any time.”

  They walked out of Starbucks side by side. They were about the same height. He turned his face close to hers. “I have a couple of ideas, but I need to
do some research.”

  He put his arm around her shoulder and pulled her closer as they walked. It was supposed to seem like an avuncular hug, the semaphore for “Buck up, girl. Don’t be so worried.” He gave his eyebrows a mysterious arch. “If worse comes to worse, there are always… things… we can do.” He made we carry the weight of the entire police force.

  She gave him a look you could anoint a hero of the people with. He thought of her legs, to tell the truth, and looked down to get a seemingly random look at them next to his. So long, firm, and bare… He quickly and resolutely chastened his thoughts.

  “Look,” he said, “Is there some way I can talk to Philippe, without making it look like I’m a police officer asking him questions about some case?”

  Ghislaine started twisting her fingers again. “I suppose maybe one afternoon you could just happen to be there, I mean at our house, when he comes home from school—something like that?”

  “Approaching destination on the right,” said that woman from somewhere up in the GPS cloud. Okay, it was all computerized, that woman’s voice, but still—::::::how do it do it?:::::: Like that time up in Broward when he spun out on a slick pavement and wound up rolling backward into a creek. And he’s sitting there with the water up over the Camaro’s bumpers, wondering how to get out of this, and that woman says in the calmest voice imaginable, “Recalculating,” and in no time she’s back, and she tells him to drive three-tenths of a mile upstream on the creek bed and turn left where the remains of an old paved country road stick down into the water—and he drives exactly three-tenths of a mile in the middle of a creek and turns left—and it works! She had it right! He was outta there! ::::::But how do it do it?::::::

  Now he slowed down on her say-so, and the houses began drifting by, the kinds of houses they used to build way back in the twentieth century… all that white stucco and clay-colored rounded roof tiles, and so forth. The lots were narrow, and only a few of the houses were any more than twenty-five feet wide… but there were plenty of tall shade trees, indicating it was an old section… With the sun almost directly overhead, the trees cast blotchy shadows upon the stucco and on the front lawns. The houses were pretty close to the street. Nevertheless, the lawns were a lush green, and they had shrubs and brilliant flowers, fuchsia cockatoos, lavender and yellow irises, bright scarlet petunias… Nice neighborhood! This was up in northeastern Miami, the so-called Upper East Side… plenty of upscale Latinos and Anglos up here—and lots of Latins and Anglo gaybos, for that matter… Immediately to the west on the other side of Biscayne Boulevard were Little Haiti, Liberty City, Little River, Buena Vista, Brownsville… Nestor could imagine the Latins and the Anglos up here thanking God every day for Biscayne Boulevard, which fenced them off from the badlands.

  “You have arrived,” said the unseen Queen of the magical GP Sphere.

  Nestor pulled over to the curb and looked to his right. ::::::What’s that? Ghislaine lives… there?!:::::: He had never seen such a house… It had a flat roof you could only see the edge of… walls of white stucco with two narrow bands of black paint about a foot below the roof, running all the way around the house… a couple of dozen tall narrow windows installed next to one another to create an enormous curve that began on one side of the house and swept around until it took up close to half the front. He just stood there gawking until a front door opened and her voice rang out:

  “Nestor! Hi! Come in!”

  The way Ghislaine smiled! Her sheer unconcealed joy as she hurried toward him! He wanted to stand there with his chest inflated like the prince’s in Snow White and have her rush into his arms! There she was! Ghislaine!—in her long-sleeved shirt and her shorter-than-short shorts, lovely long legs bare! Only at the last moment did he manage to restrain himself. ::::::This is police work, damn it, not a hookup. Nobody authorized this police work, but—but what is this all about?::::::

  Now she was right in front of him, looking into his eyes and saying, “You’re ten minutes early!”—as if that were the most loving tribute a man had ever paid to a woman. He was speechless.

  To his amazement, she took his hand—not to hold, however, just to tug on and said, “Come on! Let’s go inside! Wouldn’t you like some iced tea?”—all the while beaming a smile of the purest, most defenseless love, or so it seemed to Nestor.

  Inside, she took him into the living room, which was flooded with light pouring in through the immense array of windows. The other walls consisted, top to bottom, of shelves of books interrupted only by a door and spaces for three jumbo posters featuring men with hats, European posters, judging by the hats they advertised: “ChapeauxMossant,” “Manolo Dandy,” “Princeps S.A. Cervo Italia”…

  “Have a look around!” said Ghislaine. Her tone was one of inexplicable excitement. “I’ll get us some iced tea!”

  When she returned with the iced tea, she said, “Well, what do you think?”

  Nestor said, “I… I don’t know what to say. This is the most… amazing house I’ve ever seen.” He had started to say “unusual.”

  “Well, it’s all Daddy,” said Ghislaine. She rolled her eyes in a rather jocular what-can-you-do way. “It’s all Art Deco, inside and out. Do you know Art Deco?”

  Nestor said, “No.” He shook his head slightly. Here was another of those things that made him feel so—ummmm not so much ignorant as uncultivated, around Ghislaine.

  “Well, it’s a French style from the 1920s. In French it’s ‘Les Arts Décoratifs.’ That means a lot to Daddy, its being French. I’m sure that’s why Daddy bought this house in the first place. It’s not very big, and it’s not all that grand, but it’s an original Art Deco house. These easy chairs and the coffee table, they’re authentic pieces of Art Deco furniture.” She gestured toward one of the chairs and said, “Here, why don’t we sit down?”

  So they both sat down in the Art Deco easy chairs. She sipped some tea and said, “These chairs all by themselves cost Daddy a fortune. The thing is, Daddy doesn’t” ::::::doesn’t:::::: “want Philippe and me to forget that our origins are French. We’re only allowed to speak French at home. I mean, Creole—Daddy loathes” ::::::loathes:::::: “Creole, even though he has to teach Creole at EGU. He says it’s so-oh-oh-oh-oh primitive, he can’t stand it. That’s why when Philippe came home from school speaking Creole with a kid like this boy Antoine, who grew up without ever knowing anything but Creole… and Philippe obviously wanted to be accepted by this, I’m sorry… imbecile—it just killed Daddy. And then when Philippe talked back to Daddy in Creole to impress this moron… that’s when Daddy really went up in smoke. I mean, I love Daddy, and you will, too, once you get to know him” ::::::“once I get to know him,” meaning…?:::::: “but I think Daddy has just a tiny bit”—she put a thumb and forefinger out in front of her until they were this close to touching—“a tiny bit of snobbery. For example, I could tell Daddy didn’t want to let on how excited he was about my joining South Beach Outreach.” ::::::my joining, not me joining:::::: “I honestly think he was more excited—”

  “What’s Philippe think about his French origins and everything?” said Nestor. He hadn’t meant to cut her off, but he had no patience with Daddy’s snobbery and South Beach Outreach and the rest of this social stuff.

  “Philippe’s only fifteen,” said Ghislaine. “I doubt that he thinks anything about it at all, not consciously. Right now he wants to be a Neg, a black Haitian, like Antoine and this Dubois, and they want to be like American black gangbangers, and I don’t know what American black gangbangers want to be like.”

  So they talked about Philippe’s troubles and schools and gangs.

  “This city is so broken up into nationalities and races and ethnic groups,” Ghislaine was saying, “and you can try to explain all that to somebody fifteen, like Philippe, but he won’t listen. And you know what? Even if he understands, it’s not going to make—”

  Ghislaine suddenly shhhhhhut her lips with her forefinger and turned toward the rear of the house… listen
ing… Barely above a whisper to Nestor: “I think that’s him, Philippe. He always comes in through the kitchen door.”

  Nestor looked in that direction. He could hear somebody, presumably Philippe, plunking something heavy down on the kitchen table… and opening a refrigerator door.

  Ghislaine leaned over, and in the same whispery voice, she said: “He always gets something cold to drink as soon as he gets home from school. If he thinks Daddy might be here, he gets a glass of orange juice. If he knows Daddy won’t be here, like today, he’ll get a Coke.”

  Thunk. The refrigerator door closed. Ghislaine looked that way warily before turning back to Nestor. “Daddy doesn’t try to keep Coke out of the house, but every time he sees Philippe drinking one he’ll say, ‘Just like drinking a liquid candy bar, isn’t it.’ Or something like that, and it drives Philippe crazy. He can’t stand it. When Daddy says things that are supposed to be funny, Philippe doesn’t dare laugh… because half the time Daddy’s slipped in some sort of… some sort of subtle sarcasm he’s got to deal with. He’s only fifteen. Sometimes I think I should say something to Daddy about it.” She looked rather searchingly at Nestor, as if he might have some wise counsel to offer.

  Nestor smiled at her with as much warmth as he could put into a smile… smiled a couple of beats too long, actually. “Depends on your father,” he said. Depends on your father? What was that supposed to mean?… It meant that he was distracted… He loved the completely vulnerable, unguarded look on Ghislaine’s face… a look that seemed to say, “I surrender my judgment to yours.” When she leaned forward like that, her face was barely eighteen inches from the knees of her crossed legs. Her shorts were pretty short. Her beautiful legs were vulnerable, unguarded innocence in its carnal manifestation. He wanted to embrace—::::::Cut it out, you idiot! Isn’t it bad enough that you’ve decided to stick your nose into a School Police case? All you need to do now—:::::: He forced this business of conceivable carnal attractions out of his head. But his smile and his stare never changed. Neither did hers… until she began to compress her lips slightly… Nestor interpreted it as meaning “We can’t say everything that’s on our minds, can we.”