by Brian Hodge
The presentation of a simple, elegantly printed invitation got him cleared at the door of the banquet hall without incident. After which he mingled with people so overstuffed with themselves he wondered what he had ever seen in this world to begin with.
The invitation had been a coup of acquisition he’d coaxed Nan into making. Phoning her at work the morning after he had aborted her attempt at his salvation, and convincing her to call the CEO Alliance. She played the role of a secretary inquiring about the possibility of a representative from Mullavey Foods’ advertising agency being allowed to attend the honors.
Why do you want to go to this? Nan had asked. So willing to forgive. Sounds like it’ll reek of boredom.
I’m thinking of moving, I can’t stay here. And I like New Orleans. Every lie came so easy to him; they always had. Can you imagine a better place to schmooze and look for a new job?
Savior to his rescue, Nan had come through without a clue as to how thoroughly she was being used. Part of him hoped she never lost that naïve trust; most of him hoped she did. Forgive me…
The Commodore Lafitte: mingling while a string quartet sent soft pleasantries lilting through the crowd, some five hundred strong. Waiters bearing trays circulated with champagne and hors d’oeuvres, while bartenders dispensed mixed drinks and looked like more interesting conversationalists than the guests.
Justin hadn’t had occasion to go formal since his first wedding, had forgotten the trim fit of a tux, how smoothly on top of the world they made you feel. Two days ago, when being sized up to rent the thing, he’d gotten the black jacket a size too large, so it would adhere less snugly over a concealed pistol.
Twenty minutes after Justin’s arrival, a P.A. squealed with the announcement that dinner was about to be served. He sat at a round table he had chosen, near the back, so that he might attract no notice from the head table.
It was only after he was seated in the company of strangers that he caught his first sight of Andrew Jackson Mullavey since their truce. The broken hand had healed, at least to the extent he no longer needed a cast. He looked annoyingly healthy, rested, and so much for hopes of a cancerously guilty conscience.
Mullavey and his peers were ushered up to their seats at an elevated banquet table. Its length was bisected by a lectern and microphone, from which would pour tribute and praise and honor; these for a man who deserved only his very own circle of hell.
But Justin would settle for watching him bleed and die, as long as the man knew who was pulling the trigger. For once he knew who, Mullavey would also know why.
It seemed so little to ask.
For the food, Justin had no appetite; for the parch of his throat, he drank only water; and for every question put to him by a dinner companion, he had a lie. He could walk through this banal gauntlet and they would never suspect a thing. Had he ever been so broken apart, inner man at such odds with the outer?
At dinner’s end, when the men and women who cleaned the tables went unnoticed by those who had dirtied the plates, when cigars were lit and drinks poured anew, the swell of two hundred conversations wrapped themselves around Justin’s head. To tighten like a tourniquet. He shut his eyes and searched his arid heart for one last plateau of calm, lest these people burst his brain.
Introductions, master of ceremonies at the lectern, “It’s been my great privilege to know the gentleman at my right for nearly twenty years…”
Justin dropped head to hands, dreading the eruption of applause that only he would recognize for the sham it was. He was drowning in a sea of soft, complacent hands, and polite masks that covered malignancy.
Let it end here. And now.
The smoke of gunpowder sweet within his nose, Eel was but a conduit of flesh for a god who drank every sensation like rancid wine. Machete drawn from the altar, he saw with eyes of six senses, and yes, Nathan recognized the change within him. But raised chains made poor weapons.
The magic of marassa, these two linked from womb onward: Let one die after weeks of despair, let the other die before the eyes of those whose admiration he needed most in this world, and learn that even there he was not safe.
Lean muscles flexing, blade striking chain with the vicious birth of sparks, again, and blade cleaved ribs, and Nathan fell to the floor. Long legs stanced wide, legs shared by man and god alike, Eel leaned over like a field worker clearing underbrush. The machete falling, again, again, while every part of Nathan’s body that he raised in defense came undone, came free, fell away. Strangled cries drowned in blood, and here was magic: death inflicted from afar, by effigy.
For what greater effigy was there but shared flesh, bone, and heritage? One life split into two halves.
And when it was finished, Eel tossed the machete to the stone floor, where it hit with a sharp clank.
White man, heart of darkness, streaked with crimson. He followed a line of candles that burned along one brick wall. They flickered with drafts that were like the breath of gods slumbering beneath the blind world above.
He stepped into the slow, chilled current of the underground river, to wash away the last of Nathan Forrest. Soon, he would sleep. And then he would leave this place behind like the forgotten tomb it was.
Blind or not, there was a whole world waiting above.
With so much yet to learn.
How would he do it, when the moment came? Wait until the banquet ended, when a flood of well-wishers would besiege their Man of the Year? This seemed best — he could get so close then, the pistol drawn and no one would be any the wiser until both judgment and Mullavey fell.
Every superlative painted upon the man he could turn to his advantage; one more coal thrown on a fire to forge hatred. Justin began to smile, to play his role once more.
A part of him had hoped he would not be so eager.
It began low, a soft moan; it wasn’t until the third time that everyone began to pay attention. All eyes, all ears on the man at the microphone whose plump and ruddy face flickered with annoyance, just who could be so rude as to interrupt such a moment as this—
And then he looked to his right.
Andrew Jackson Mullavey had gotten a water glass halfway to his lips before it shattered in a hand gripped by seizure. Eyes went white, rolling back in his head, and he moaned one last time before whipping back into his chair with such force it surely cracked vertebrae. His shriek rose, hoarse and strained, short but intense … and then repeated endlessly, as if he were panting his soul away.
The banquet hall burst into uproar, five hundred insular lives glued to chairs. They could only watch with heads aswivel and mouths agape, do you see what I see? Mullavey surged to unsteady feet and wavered while the woman at his right pushed away to stare in mystified revulsion. She didn’t resemble his wife in the faxes April had received, and this was proper. He should die without love at his side.
People converged on him, the table swept clean and remaining dishes shattering across the floor. They laid him out and held him down as if this were some manner of convulsion. He thrashed beneath their hands, and one that probed his mouth to prevent him from swallowing his tongue promptly lost fingers.
The shriek went on and on, music to pierce the din. Justin was on his feet with hundreds of others, one voice lost amid the uproar, and if anyone heard him laugh they never showed it.
Mullavey abruptly fell still, silent, with loose-draped limbs. Justin shouldered close enough through the crush of gawkers in formalwear to see a thin streamer of blood that had seeped from Mullavey’s nose and stained the white tablecloth like a crushed rose.
While the pleas for help screamed on — call an ambulance, is there a doctor in the house?
Justin turned away, back through the crowd, and every face he met reflected only confusion at his own. Joy, even laughter, at a time like this? For once he was happy to withhold a secret from the world. Let them all wonder.
The door looked a thousand miles away, through enemy territory. But he made it. And kept going.
He had, of course, been robbed of a moment rightfully his, rehearsed in his mind a thousand times. His hand stayed before the sacrificial plunge that would have bathed him in a savage redemption. But that was all right. Surely some other, greater, hand had been at work tonight. Whether righteous or corrupt, he would not question. One man’s cruelty was another man’s benevolence.
And as with men, he supposed, so it was with gods.
Justin left the hotel and hit Poydras, ignoring the cabs while yanking loose the black bow tie, baring his throat to the night. His shoes a quickening clockwork pace along sidewalks, while buildings towered above him, the color of gravestones. He let the city swallow him whole, in welcome anonymity.
While the Mississippi lay a few blocks ahead.
He would go there, lean upon a railing along the riverwalk, listen to the soft slap of waves and stare at passing barges, and stay put until the wind off the water left him all but frozen.
Such a thin boundary, at times, between laughter and tears. He crossed that line with three blocks yet to go.
Of course, without a formal declaration, he couldn’t know for certain that Mullavey was really dead.
But sometimes you had to take things on faith.
35
Saut d’Eau
Midsummer days of pilgrimage, when the promise of renewal could descend upon even the most blighted land. Justin’s plane touched down in Port-au-Prince at dusk, on a July evening newly kissed by rainwater rinse. Stranger in a strange land; here he was the minority. He’d heard somewhere that it could be very therapeutic to strip away everything that defined both the backdrop and the foreground of your life. He’d also heard it had driven some to madness. All dependent, he supposed, on what lay there to be seen when you looked unflinchingly within.
Christophe Granvier was there to meet him, the first time they’d set eyes upon one another since late November, though there had been the telephone conversations. Christophe had seemed to take it as sacred duty to inquire about April, how she was, had there been change. And five months ago, checks began to arrive in the mail, one per month, drawn against a Bahamian bank. No notes accompanying them, just Christophe’s signature. He never asked about them on the phone, as if the one who called and the one who wrote these checks were two different men who showed their concern in wholly separate ways.
So Justin cashed them, not too proud, and never mentioned them either. As if his silence, too, were a part of the bargain.
In this airport filled with armed guards viewing him with suspicion or resentment, he and Christophe embraced on first meeting, with strength born from old grief that remained unshared until this moment, when eyes triggered emotions that voices never could. And the only comfort lay in two arms.
“You look good,” said Justin.
“I look alive.” Christophe, now full-bearded, smiled. “That’s something.”
He led Justin away from the terminal to an old Jeep, worn and battered by most American standards, and here a hallmark of affluence to which few could aspire. They spoke little on the trip from the airport. History ran strong in this land, like a wound that could never fully heal. Justin felt it in the air the moment they put the airport behind them, once that air he breathed was wholly Haitian. It was a heaviness entirely separate from the humidity.
The Jeep climbed hills on their way out of town and toward the mountains, along streets carved through slums worse than anything he could imagine, at which he could only stare. Entire homes built of tin or plywood, sometimes packed so tight that groups of families or friends were forced to sleep standing up, leaned upon one another like boards against a wall. They drove through foul scents as solid as clouds … dead fish, raw sewage.
Yet it felt more alive than anyplace he had ever been in America, its residents out in droves. Playing cards and dominoes, drinking tea and bottles of rum, while everywhere hung the scent of burning charcoal, and the meals it cooked.
“Don’t panic if you hear gunfire,” Christophe told him. He drove quickly, and riding was an exercise in whiplash. “It won’t be for us.”
“Probably, you mean?”
“Well,” and he shrugged. “What guarantees do any of us have?”
Life under dictators. Perhaps his white skin was a shield of sorts, the same as his passport. Very conciliatory these days when it came to America, these coup leaders who had ousted Jean-Bertrand Aristide from office. They were anxious to return to the good graces of the U.S., have the economic sanctions lifted. Without actually restoring the nation’s first freely elected president.
“Do we drive on up there tonight?” Justin asked.
“I thought we would wait for morning. Anyone’s first trip to Saut d’Eau should take place in daylight, just so their first look at it, they can truly see it.”
“It’s that beautiful?”
“You will see. Trust me.”
Which went without saying. Trust was, of course, the whole essence behind this trip.
Legend had it that on July 16, 1843, a man named Fortune was out looking for his lost horse near the mountain village of Ville Bonheur. He came to a palm grove and beheld the Virgin Mary, atop a palm tree, within a dazzling light. A shrine was built, and word spread of healings, of blind made to see, deaf made to hear. An appearance decades later was said to have ended when the light became a pigeon that flew into the mists of a nearby waterfall at the end of the La Tombe River, a waterfall called Saut d’Eau.
Catholic priests took it as a godsend, the first vision, one more wedge to drive between Haitians and the vodoun these priests so despised, that rendered them so obsolete. But they couldn’t have been more wrong, for the peasants saw their Blessed Virgin as a manifestation of Erzuli, goddess of love. On annual pilgrimages the vodounists paid homage at the sacred falls, taking its spirit back from the priests for their very own, until Catholic converts and vodounists alike came side by side, and votive candles mingled with offerings of consecrated food. Year after year after year.
Justin supposed it was this he most admired about the Haitian people: their resilience under opposition. They had a rare strength. Many a lonely night he had passed with a book, that he might learn more of them, how they coped and survived.
For if they could, couldn’t he?
It was time to answer that question once and for all.
The morning after his arrival, with the sun still low, Justin and Christophe left his small mountain house. Driving deeper into the mountains, on winding roads whose potholes bounced the Jeep like a toy, sixty miles north of Port-au-Prince.
They shared the road and ruts with the Haitian capital’s version of public transit. Trucks and buses called tap-taps careened along as if their drivers were possessed; they were painted in bright, riotous colors that screamed almost as loud as their horns, were christened with names of hope, and were packed with boisterous pilgrims who called to one another in a language Justin couldn’t understand, but whose joy needed no translation.
The sun burned with sodden heat by the time they reached Ville Bonheur. Christophe parked with trucks and tap-taps that unloaded worshipers by the hundreds. The atmosphere was one of both sacred purpose and carnival festivity. On crates and tables, vendors hawked roots and herbs, charms and medallions. Women in bright headcloths had begun cooking huge pots of rice and beans.
“Did you bring anything of value?” Christophe asked. “Money, your wallet, anything?”
Justin shook his head. “I left that back at your house. Just brought these.” From a shirt pocket he drew two squat candles. “This is all.”
“Smart.” Christophe secured his ignition key on a chain to loop around his neck. “Pickpockets,” he explained. “They’re not all holy, the reasons for coming here.”
They joined in with the steady flow of faithful who began the half-hour hike to the falls. Justin stripped his shirt away well before the halfway point, used it to mop the cascade of sweat from his face.
The penitents grew quieter along the path
, every step from the village one more toward solemnity. And only at such a time, Christophe explained, would he be able to see so many different Haitians in one place: young and old, rich and poor, mulatto elitist and coal-black peasant, prostitute and nun. They would never be any more the same within than they were here.
It touched his ear well before he was even aware of it, a soft hiss, no more. Louder every few steps, until he realized that the falls were near. The sound strengthened a flagging resolve, gave power to legs weakened by the climb and the sticky heat of morning.
When at last they arrived, the air itself bathed in the roar of the falls, and he could see, Justin knew Christophe had been right. His first glimpse should be by day. The beauty of Saut d’Eau overwhelmed the newcomer like a revelation from the divine.
Overlooked from above, it spread before them in a panorama as old as creation, and as fresh as morning. A green cathedral of soaring trees, this holy sanctuary that no manmade building could equal. The river split into three separate falls that plunged a hundred feet onto limestone worn as smooth as shoulders, and from its thunderous spray rose a mist of perpetual iridescence. The air felt far cooler here than back on the trail, this vaulted basin plunged into shadow by a canopy of foliage that kept most of the sunlight above.
Spirits lived here; why should they not? All, to the Haitian mind, were but singular expressions of one all-encompassing God.
And everywhere — in pools of calm, or beneath the cleansing rinse of the falls, or standing upon the ground with arms outstretched in supplication — he saw the slick black skin of the pilgrims.
His was the only white face among hundreds. Last night, strangers in Port-au-Prince had stared as he rode past, a blanc whose reason for coming they would never know. But here it seemed of no concern. A question of belonging, perhaps. No one would come here by mistake; everyone was drawn by need.
