by Brian Hodge
Looking at the moon-dappled cascade of her hair upon the pillow, Napoleon wondered if Mr. Andrew appreciated it enough to run his hands through it, or if its wild beauty was lost upon him. Either way would make him hate the man all the more. Thief.
Napoleon knelt beside the bed, Mr. Andrew’s breath just inches away. It smelled bad in here, some foul whiff beneath the lingering scents Mrs. Evelyn had left behind to fade with time.
“Light,” he whispered.
It flared with the shocking brilliance of a blast, and his hand clamped down over Mr. Andrew’s mouth just as the man began to twitch. Mullavey’s eyes fluttered, while Napoleon touched the long, heavy tines of a meat fork to the man’s wattled throat.
“Hey, boss,” Napoleon said. “Don’t you be moving, now.”
He was fully awake, glaring with confused anger, flicking from Napoleon’s face, to Bertin at the door, back again. From behind the hand came a soft grunt.
Clarisse was beginning to rouse as well, rolled over with sleepy eyes that went wide as she uttered a small cry. Her covers fell away and she squirmed out of the bed, long limber body wholly bare — he wanted to stare and dared not, it would only bring grief he could ill afford. She threw on a gauzy blue nightgown that lay draped upon Mrs. Evelyn’s huge dressing table, and then he had to look, for just a moment. Saw the remains of a meal there, dirty dishes on a tray, T-bones stripped of meat, scattered silverware, and a wine bottle as empty as a soul betrayed.
“Napoleon?” she whispered, then, with understanding: “What are you DOING?”
Mr. Andrew cleared his throat sharply, and Napoleon slid his hand down to let him speak, left the fork in place.
“I think the lady deserves an answer. And I’d dearly like to hear it myself.” Eyes darting to the door too many times to think he was merely watching Bertin.
“You got no guards awake now. Be a long time before they wake up.” He smiled while this sunk in. “And you got no staff left in this house. We’re saying goodbye.”
He frowned. “Where in hell do you think you’re gonna go?”
“Anyplace we want. Give us our green cards and we’ll be on our way. Where is it you keep them, in that safe downstairs?”
Mr. Andrew’s eyes rolled as he laughed through clenched teeth. “Ungrateful little son of a bitch, that’s what this is about? Green cards? And if I refuse?”
It was the question he had dreaded, had known would come just the same. And while threats did not feel natural coming from his lips, he had prepared. Studying, back at Mama Charity’s, the man he’d brought here many weeks ago. Justin Gray. Even if Justin was tearing himself into little grieving pieces over his wife, it was plain to see how easily threats might come to him.
“Then I’ll stick this fork in you as many times as I need.”
Mr. Andrew blinked, frowned, then his brow smoothed. “Like hell you will. That’s bullshit.”
“I’ve gone this far, boss. Now you tell me what I got left to lose.”
Mr. Andrew breathed heavily through his nostrils in defeated fury. “Do I at least get to put on my pants?”
Napoleon threw the covers aside and took a step back. Scowling, Mr. Andrew sat naked on the bed, his paunch drooping into his lap, both it and his chest matted with graying hairs. Napoleon saw the cast for the first time — what had happened to his left hand? He kept the meat fork aimed toward the bed while sidestepping over to the closet, grabbing the slacks and shirt that dangled from an inside hook. He tossed them onto the mattress.
While Mullavey dressed, taking his time, Napoleon kept one eye on him, the other on Clarisse. She stood tensed by the dressing table like a fawn ready to bolt, and he felt an ache that went deep in his soul.
“Why don’t you start dressing yourself too,” he told her. “I came for green cards, but damn it, you don’t know what you’re doing, now please, come with us so we don’t have to make you.”
“I’m going nowhere with you, you hear me, nowhere!” Clarisse nearly spit the words. “Big dreams, you got, huh? I know where you’re going, and you think I don’t know what it’s like there? You think I don’t already know? I see it on the TV, people screaming, people shouting, every time the army in Haiti says something new about Aristide!” Her hands were clenched in front of her, fists imploring as she screamed. “I see them and I know not even one in ten thousand can even dream of living in a house this fine! I’m not going to throw that away, and you’re not going to take it from me! Not you, not my mother, nobody!”
Napoleon kept his eye on Mullavey, now dressed, sitting with bare feet on the edge of the bed with a smile of satisfaction. The loser of the war, the winner of a battle that was a moral victory Napoleon could never allow. If Clarisse stayed, then handing over the green cards didn’t really matter anymore, because Mr. Andrew would be keeping much more than pride.
“Bertin,” said Napoleon, pointing with his left hand. “If you got to do it, pick her up and carry her, but I’m not going to be leaving her with him.”
Bertin, protesting behind him, “She don’t want to go, man, can’t you see—”
“Do it!” he shouted, and his voice was more than his own, he could never have raised it in such thunderous fury. Macandal, inside him. Not one of them in this room failed to notice.
Bertin scooted around him, holding a long bread knife from the kitchen. Skirting the bed, around to the other side, and Clarisse squeezed against the dressing table as Bertin held a hand out to her, asking her, begging her, to come.
Napoleon had never guessed the depths of her fear of losing this life she had gained purely by chance, nor how powerful her aversion to risking the fall back into poverty. He knew only what he saw: Clarisse seizing a steak knife from the remains of the dinner left on the dressing table, and shrieking as she plunged it into the side of Bertin’s neck. To the hilt.
Bread knife dropped, head snapping in the direction of the wound, Bertin’s eyes bulging while hands clutched at blood. He staggered. He choked. He fell.
Napoleon screamed, high and loud, and where was Macandal now? Movement, in the corner of his eye—
Mr. Andrew leaned over to the night table beside the bed. How measured he was, with no wasted motion, as he drew the pistol from the drawer, then stood in bare feet, his soft paunch hidden behind a shirt, no hesitation whatsoever in his eyes.
Napoleon wheeled for the door, heard the shot, felt the tiniest of breezes passing his shoulder, and then he was pounding along the hallway with the speed of a gazelle. From behind came the crack of one more shot, and another reprieve.
He gave brief thought on the second floor landing to the sleeping guard, the gun that would surely be inside his jacket — but no, guns were alien to him, and this was no time to test a new skill. He launched himself at the banister and slid the length of the stairway to the first floor.
Footsteps above, on the run, and Mr. Andrew’s breath. The funeral stillness of the house was sliced through by Clarisse, wailing in anguish. Napoleon could only hope it was remorse, but had to admit, he just didn’t know anymore.
Napoleon followed a random path mapped by panic, the pursuing footsteps growing faint, fainter, gone. He charged along an enclosed porch, screened against mosquitoes, then banged through its door and was free of this house. Tears streaming cold upon his cheeks in the fresh air as he set across the back lawn. Rolling manicured green, now black with night, vague shadows whipping past, and the white gazebo floating off to his right.
Every color was at once brought to shocking life, and here he was, in the center of the flood. With the flip of one master switch in the house, night was no more. Lights beaming from trees, from the back of the house, with no shadow wide enough, deep enough.
Anything for more speed. The wall was close enough to see every crack, the treeline near enough to see the grain in the bark, the veins in each leaf. Far from behind he could hear the scrape of opening doors, Mr. Andrew’s study, he’d heard that sound for years on days too fine to leave outside, some
times you had to open wide and let the great outdoors come in—
He felt it before he heard the thunder: a blow hard enough to have come from a club. It hit him in the rump, the right cheek, through the back pocket and out through the front. He pitched face-first to the ground with arms and legs flying, and the single gunshot rolled heavy across the lawn. It was no pistol, had to have been one of the hunting rifles bracketed on the study wall.
Hardly any pain, still. Napoleon began to hope that he’d merely been grazed. Only when he tried to crawl did he realize.
Only when he rolled onto his back and looked down did it begin to throb.
He had no more hip.
Where once was a pocket now was a crater. He floundered in wet grass. Here, it ended here? Sky above, past the harsh glare of lights, and when had the stars come out to stay? Gulping for breath, he searched among them for signs, hidden pathways … had Macandal left him some way home? But he found nothing.
All that came, in time, was the staring face of Andrew Jackson Mullavey. Napoleon groped for the meat fork, but it was gone, and what use anyway against the rifle slung from Mr. Andrew’s shoulder? Mullavey lowered into better light, his mouth half open, and upon his chin shone a slick wet film. He looked upon Napoleon with the same wonder in which an adolescent boy might regard his first deer.
“Thank you,” he said softly, and wiped his lips.
Napoleon coasted along varying levels of awareness, tried to struggle against Mr. Andrew but it did no good, as the man looped a knotted length of rope around his joined wrists. He began to walk back to the house, and while Napoleon first was aware only of the fading whisper of feet on grass, the rope then pulled taut, and he was being dragged across the ground. Every bump and ripple of lawn jarring through his shattered hip, and at last he could feel the depth of its pain.
Halt, facedown in the grass, his body nothing but chips of bone and sorrow, and then his arms were yanked taut again. Rising this time, overhead. His head rolled back and he could see the rope trailing up, up, over an oak limb and down again, and once Mr. Andrew had tied it off — it took ages, he was working with one hand and one elbow — Napoleon dangled with his feet barely skimming the ground.
He lost the time, somewhere in the stars, somewhere between the desolate hoots of an owl. There was calm, and numbness, and warmth down his leg, while thoughts meandered among Miami streets that could only be imagined, faces that could never be forgotten.
He felt a tug and heard ripping cloth, and realized it was his shirt, parting over his back.
Mr. Andrew stepped around to look him in the eye, and had he ever more resembled his brother in his life? He jammed some sort of rod beneath Napoleon’s chin and levered up his drooping head.
“You tell me something,” he said. “You tell me what I ever did to you to deserve this kind of treatment in return.”
Had he been defiant he could have spat in the man’s face; or wise, he could have summed it all up in a few words; or strong, he could have ripped free of the rope and used it as a garrote. But in this moment he was none of these, eloquent only in the art of suffering.
Mr. Andrew released his chin and took a step back, let him see the whip, dark leather uncoiling to the ground. He flexed his one good hand around its stout handle.
“This whip’s been in my family for generations.” Mullavey’s voice was distant, practiced. “I oil it once a month. And I try to picture who my great-great-granddaddy might’ve used it on. You’ve seen his portrait on my wall, you know what kind of eyes he had. Good leather, last you forever, you treat it right. Kind of like friendship, in that sense.” He raised it to his nose, eyes shut in ecstasy as he breathed its scent. “Twelve-foot bullwhip, weighted inside with lead shot? A whip like that, in the hands of a man who knows how to use it … they say he can damn near chop wood.”
Mr. Andrew began to walk back behind him, the whip trailing after like an obedient serpent.
“That’s what they say, anyway.”
Napoleon, looking to the sky, saw faces in the distance, near the tree line. An ember of hope glowed … but they did not move. Those who were not his people anymore, from the cane fields, drawn by … what, the gunshot? They stood at the open gate in holy terror.
He began to pray. Perhaps the loa would take pity on him, accept his tears as the finest offering he could make, and spirit him away beyond the reach of pain, beyond the sound of weighted leather uncoiling to slice through the air—
Coming, coming—
Denied.
Christophe wasn’t sure why the feeling stole over him that he should check on Napoleon and Bertin. He knew only that there came a moment when time enough had become, instead, too long.
Looking back along the length of the bus, it was hard to feel much beyond the ebullience of the others. They had first filed onto the bus with an almost reverential fear, taking seats in silence. Conversations had picked up soon enough, though, noise mounting in chain reaction, and laced with giddy laughter. If anything was contagious, it was joy.
Windows up against the chill of night, the bus was a riot of voices. It was too easy to lose track of time, and the fact that all the risks were not yet behind them.
Christophe levered the door open, stepped down to the ground. Listened to the night, the massive stillness of the countryside and its myriad small components. Such clamor behind him; Napoleon and Bertin could have run shouting toward the bus, and he would never have heard them.
Too long, too long.
Back on board, he called for a moment of quiet.
“I should go see if anything’s keeping them,” he said. “I could use someone, though, to make sure I don’t lose my way.”
A young woman volunteered; stout, heavy hipped, a smile that might be very warm when not so strained. She said her name was Tulia, and they left the bus after he retrieved a flashlight from a utility box. They spoke little, and he was content to remain a step behind her as she led the way.
He had always found night more conducive to thinking than day, and let thoughts drift. Justin, April … he supposed he cared as much about what was to become of them over the next few days as Justin seemed to care about the Haitians. He’d not blamed this couple for the continued misfortunes after the death of Carrefour Imports, not precisely; he had simply recognized them as agents of fortune. Except Ruben Moreno, no one else had ever stuck their neck out quite so far on his behalf.
Let me know, Justin had said right before they’d left Mama Charity’s house this evening, for good. Call in a few days, after you get them there. I want to know. His eyes staring, dark ringed for two days. Gravedigger’s eyes. He had embraced them both, Christophe and Napoleon, then gone upstairs to resume his vigil, without another word.
A promise Christophe would keep.
He and Tulia came within sight of the wall surrounding Twin Oaks long after the glow of the lights was visible through the trees. He touched her elbow.
“Stay here,” he whispered. “If anything happens to me, go back and tell the rest there’s no more reason to wait. And pray that one of them can drive that bus.”
Onward, alone, until he came to the wall, walking its back length for a time, then stopping. He chinned himself up to peer over, cushioned by ivy, holding himself in place for so long his lingers began to ache. Though he barely noticed.
A young man hung from his wrists midway between the house and the wall. Black skin, blue pants, and red stripes overall, harsh in the unnatural glare. Distance and obscurity meant nothing. Christophe knew.
Nor was Napoleon alone. A group had crowded around him, with a lethargic commitment to taking his body down. He could only assume these were the Haitians with whom the gradual rift had developed; those left to tend the cane fields, within walking distance but a distinct world away.
Of Mullavey, there was nothing to be seen … unless that was his silhouette in the great house, standing motionless while backlit in a window. Overseeing, like some self-appointed god.
&nbs
p; Christophe dropped back to the ground and followed its scalloped course, past trees grown so mighty the wall was beginning to buckle from beneath, from the roots.
At last it led to an open gate, where a small knot of the Haitians had gathered. More than one looked to have come suddenly, out of disturbed sleep. With ragged clothes and old worn shoes, they looked at him, and here was another wall: suspicion.
He kept his distance, and in time, Napoleon’s body was brought through the gate. There was no need of checking for pulse or breath, not in a body so torn its ribs could be seen through splits in the skin. Where was his divine rebel now?
The Haitians spoke neither to him nor among themselves, merely went about what seemed like condemned obligation. As Christophe watched they carried him in the direction of the river. Lost first to sight, then to his ear…
All but one man, with wrinkles upon wrinkles, and skin so black he looked blue. Small-framed, arms and legs like sticks. His eyes appeared cloudy, and he had lost more teeth than he’d kept. He looked like an ancient child.
“Were you from the house?” the old man asked, in the Creole patois Christophe had not spoken for years. “I don’t remember.”
“No,” he answered, in the same. And though he’d thought he would save the tears for later, he felt the first salty burn, and let it flow. “What will happen to his body?”
“The river gets it.” The old man smiled, showing blackened gums, and he scratched his thin white mat of hair. “The river has swallowed a lot of bones over the years.”
Christophe trembled as he nodded, then pointed to the wall, through this wall that shielded them from view of the house. “Why do you let him do these things to you? A man. He’s just a man.”
Those ancient eyes softened with, of all things, pity, as if he were gazing upon a simpleton. “No, no, that’s where you are wrong,” he said, and raised a pair of fingers. “He is two.”
Moments later the outside lights winked off, and they stood bathed in darkness. No more than a vague shape, the old man turned and walked away, into the trees.
