Haiti Noir_The Classics

by Edwidge Danticat

  Max didn’t know exactly which street he had to turn down. He couldn’t remember how many he’d passed on his way up before he’d noticed the bar. He was close to the center of town, but not that close, somewhere in the middle. He passed one road, looked down it, but it wasn’t the right one. There was a supermarket on the left and a graffitied wall to the right. Maybe the next road. Or the next. Or the one before. He’d meant to ask Huxley for directions, in between one of the four or five other drinks they’d had together. He’d forgotten. Then he’d stopped caring sometime after he’d lost count of the drinks he’d had. The Barbancourt had told him he’d find his way home no problem. He carried on walking.

  His shoes were starting to pinch the sides of his feet and scrape off the flesh on his heels. He hated them, those nice, new, shiny, leather slip-ons he’d bought at Saks Fifth Avenue at Dadeland Mall. He should have broken them in before he’d put them on. He didn’t like the clack-clack the heels were making in the road. He sounded like a young horse in its first shoes.

  And then there were the drums—not any closer than when he’d first heard them, but clearer, the sound raining down from the mountains like rusty cutlery; a full battery of snares, tom-toms, bass drums, and cymbals. The rhythms had a jagged edge. They’d gone straight for the drunk part of his brain, the part he’d hit when he’d fallen off the wagon, the part that would hurt like a motherfucker in the morning.

  Someone tugged at his left sleeve.

  “Blan, blan.”

  It was a child’s voice, hoarse, almost broken, a boy’s.

  Max glanced from side to side and saw no one. He turned around and looked back up the road. He saw the bar’s lights and people in the distance, but nothing else.

  “Blan, blan.”

  Behind him, the other way, downhill. Max turned around, slowly.

  His brain was on the graveyard shift, everything taking its time to fall into place, adjust, calculate. His vision had dancing ripples before it, as if he were at the bottom of a deep lake, watching pebbles falling through the surface.

  He barely made the boy out in the darkness, just a hint of silhouette against the orange neon.

  “Yes?” Max said.

  “Ban mwen dola!” the boy shouted.

  “What?”

  “Kòb, ban mwen ti kòb!”

  “Are you—hurt?” Max inquired, stumbling in and then out of cop mode.

  The boy came right up to him. He had his hands out.

  “Dola! Ban mwen dollaaarrrggh!” he screamed.

  Max blocked his ears. The little fucker could scream.

  “Dola?” Money. He wanted money.

  “No dinero,” Max said, putting his hands up and showing the boy his empty palms. “No money.”

  “Ban mwen dola donk,” the boy whined, breathing hotly all over Max’s still-open palms.

  “No dollar. No peso, no red fucking cent,” Max said and carried on walking down.

  The boy followed him from behind. Max stepped a little faster. The boy stayed on his heels, calling after him, louder: “Blan! Blan!”

  Max didn’t turn around. He heard the sound of the child’s feet scuttling after him, soft footfalls underscoring his cracking heels. The boy wasn’t wearing any shoes.

  He walked faster. The child stayed right on his tail.

  He passed a road he thought looked familiar, and stopped abruptly. The boy thudded against the back of his legs and pushed him. Max bounced two steps down, losing his balance and his bearings. He took a couple of wild, desperate steps to steady himself but put his foot through a sudden empty space where there should have been road. His leg went down, down, down. And then his foot splashed into a puddle. By then he’d already tilted too far over. He fell straight down, landing hard on his front, bumping and grazing his chin. He heard something scrape away down the road.

  He lay still for a few seconds and assessed the damage. His legs were okay. No real pain. His torso and chin didn’t hurt much. He was conscious of something nasty, the notion of pain, waving at him behind opaque glass, but it was a crooked shadow in a still-beautiful, silky mist. In the days before general anesthetic, they must have given future amputees Barbancourt communion.

  The boy cackled over his head: “Blan sa a sou! Blan sa a sou!”

  Max didn’t know what the fuck he meant. He got up, pulled his leg out of the crater, and turned around, uphill, pissed off as hell, his chest now stinging with pain. The rum’s spell was broken and all the nightmares had come rushing back. Half his trouser leg was soaked in a cocktail of piss, dead oil, and matured sewage.

  “Fuck off!” he shouted.

  But he couldn’t see the boy. The boy was gone. In his place, in front of Max, stood about a dozen street urchins, all no taller than ten-year-olds. He pick out the edges of their heads and their teeth, those who had them or were baring them, and the whites of their eyes. He could smell them—stale woodsmoke, boiled vegetables, earth, moonshine, sweat, decay. He could feel them peering at him through the darkness.

  There were no lights on this stretch of road, no inbound or outbound cars. The bar lights were now pinpoints in the distance. How far down had he come? He stared quickly to the street on his left. Two rows of boys were standing across it, blocking his way. He wasn’t even sure it was the street he wanted. He had to retrace his steps, maybe go back to the bar, start again. Ask for directions this time.

  He started forward but stopped. He’d lost his shoe in the crater. He looked down at the road, but he couldn’t find the hole he’d gone down. He touched the ground with the ball of his foot but felt solid asphalt.

  The drumming had suddenly stopped, as if the players had seen what was happening and come over to look. Max felt like he’d gone deaf.

  He took off his other shoe, slipped it in his jacket pocket, and started to walk up the hill. He stopped again. There were more kids than he thought. They were stretched out all the way across the road. He was standing right in front of them, close enough to inhale nothing but their gutter-fresh stench. He was going to say something but he heard small whisperings behind him, words evaporating in the air like raindrops on a hot tin roof.

  When he turned around, there was another cordon of boys, roping off the way down. He noticed shapes now moving up from Pétionville town center. More children, heading his way. They were carrying things—sticks, it seemed, big sticks, clubs.

  They were coming for him. They were coming to kill him.

  He heard a rock fall off a pile to his left and roll down into the street. The whispering around him increased to tones of rebuke, all coming now from the same direction. He followed the sound and traced it to the doorway of an empty building. He looked closer, pushed into the darkness for the lightest tones, and he saw that they were passing out rocks, to each other down the line. Half of them already had one in their hands, held down by their sides. When everyone was armed, he supposed, they’d rain them down on him. Then the others would beat the life out of him with their clubs.

  His mouth went dry. He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t think. He couldn’t sober up.

  The rum came rushing back to him. His body suddenly felt good, his throbbing chin dulled, his head was light again. He was brave and invincible.

  It didn’t seem so bad. He’d been through worse than this. He could push his way through. Why not give it a try? What the hell?

  He took a couple of steps back and squared his shoulders for the bulldozer run. He could hear them behind him. He didn’t look. Could they see what he was doing? Probably. These kids lived in the dark. Had they second-guessed him?

  When he charged, he’d knock three or four of them down. They’d pelt him with rocks, but if he kept his head covered and ran like a motherfucker, he’d escape the worst of the barrage.

  Uphill, drunk, not so young anymore. Where was he going?

  They’d chase him and he wouldn’t know where to turn. He’d worry about that later.

  And how many were there?

  A hun
dred. Easily. He was dead.

  The rum rush deserted him. Optimism split on him too.

  The drum started again—just the one, the same deep slow beat he’d heard in the courtyard earlier in the evening. This time it sounded like bombs dropping on a distant town or a battering ram striking a city’s gates. The beat didn’t go into his heart but right behind his ears, every note a grenade exploding in his skull, sending shock waves down his spine, making him wince and shudder.

  Think again, he told himself. One more try. If that fails, run.

  “You want money?” he pleaded, despite himself. No response. The rocks were passed on in silence, the kill hands filling up, the circle almost closed. It seemed hopeless.

  Then he remembered his gun. He was armed, full-clip.

  Suddenly a motorbike roared into life at the top of the hill, the engine shocking the night like a chain saw in a chapel. It was the kid in the white suit.

  He came down the hill, the bike slowing to a growl and then a purr as it neared the circle around Max.

  The kid put his bike down and came over to Max.

  “Sa w ap fè la blan?” He spoke in a deep, ragged voice that belonged to someone five times his age.

  “I don’t understand,” Max slurred. “You speak English?”

  “Inglishhh?”

  “Yeah, English. You speak?”

  The kid stood his ground and looked at him.

  Max heard it before he saw it, something slicing through the air, something heavy, aimed right at his head. He ducked and the kid in the suit swung into space.

  Max dug a furious left-right combination into the kid’s ribs and solar plexus. The kid gasped and cried out as he folded over like paper, sticking his chin straight out for a right hook, which Max slammed home and sent him sprawling to the floor.

  Max grabbed the kid in a choke hold, pulled out his Beretta, and jammed the barrel through his mouth.

  “Back the fuck up or he dies!” he yelled, looking all around him. The kid was flailing at him with his hands, kicking at the ground, trying to tip Max over. Max stamped on one of the kid’s hands with his bare heel. He heard bones give and a strangled cry boil in the middle of the kid’s throat.

  No one moved.

  What now?

  He couldn’t exactly drag the kid around with him as he looked for his way home, checking every street until he found it. No way. Maybe he could use him as a shield, push him as far away from the crowd as possible, then cut him loose and go on his way.

  No way would they let him.

  He could try and shoot his way out.

  But no, he wouldn’t use it. Not on fucking children.

  He’d fire in the air and run as they hit the deck or scattered or panicked.

  “Put your gun away!”

  Max jumped.

  The booming voice had come from above, in the black sky, behind him, downhill. Still keeping his hold on the kid, Max shuffled around toward Pétionville. The view ahead was completely blocked by the man’s body, which Max couldn’t see but sensed, massive and heavy, the thunder in dark, roiling clouds.

  “I won’t ask you again,” the man insisted.

  Max took his gun out of the kid’s mouth and slipped it back in his holster.

  “Now let him go.”

  “He tried to fuckin’ kill me!” Max yelled.

  “Let him GO!” the man boomed, making some children jump and drop their rocks.

  Max freed his assailant.

  The man barked something in Creole and blinding-white overhead lights came on. Max looked away, hand up against the glare. He saw the kid on the ground, blood all down the front of his suit.

  Suddenly Max could see every millimeter of the immediate street. The children were standing around him three rows deep. They were all skinny, dressed in filthy rags, many only in shorts, turned away from the light, hands shielding their eyes from the glare.

  The same voice barked in Creole again.

  The kids all dropped their rocks in a collective crash. The rocks rolled down the road, some thudding into Max’s bare feet.

  Max squinted into the lights. The voice was coming from above the row of floodlights.

  The voice boomed again and the children scampered, a stampede of tiny, mostly bare feet ripping down the road, puttering away as fast as they could. Max saw them running through Pétionville’s square, over a hundred of them. They would have torn him to pieces.

  He heard the sound of a big engine turning over and saw twin sets of exhaust fumes rising up behind the lights, in the shape of upended pine trees. It looked like a military jeep. He hadn’t even heard it coming.

  The man’s accent was straight-up English—not a hint of French or American in it.

  Max felt the man looking down on him, at least a good extra foot taller. And he felt his presence—powerful, magnetic, and crushing—enough to fill a palace.

  He came closer to Max.

  Max looked but couldn’t see his face.

  The man reached down and grabbed the kid by the middle of his jacket and plucked him clean off the ground, as though picking up something he’d dropped and come back for. Max only saw his bare forearm—thickly veined and heavily muscled, bigger than one of Joe’s biceps—and his fist—blunt and heavy and crude as a sledgehammer head. Max swore the man had six fingers. He’d counted five knuckles, not four, when he’d seen the hand bunch up the boy’s suit jacket into a handle.

  The man was a giant.

  The overhead lights went out and the main ones flicked on, dazzling Max all over again. The engine kicked into action.

  Max’s vision regrouped in time to see the jeep reversing quickly down the hill. It reached the roundabout, turned left, and headed off down the road. Max tried to see the people inside but he couldn’t make anyone out. From where he stood, it looked empty, driven by spirits.

  DAME MARIE

  BY MARILÈNE PHIPPS-KETTLEWELL

  Dame Marie

  (Originally published in 2007)

  On the morning I was leaving Port-au-Prince for Dame Marie, stopping through Jérémie, a mourning dove paused an instant below my window, and when it flew away, it dropped an underbelly feather that descended to the ground calmly like a large snowflake.

  It was hot in the plane, so small that we had to bend down to get in and take our seats. During all of takeoff and a good while afterward, a red rooster in a cage stacked in the back with luggage kept screaming for glory, for the thrill, for the torment. The pilot smiled each time he heard it.

  The singing of the rooster, however, made me think of the sounding of the bugle that I imagined Gustave heard so strongly in his heart when, in New York, he made the decision to change the course of his life—perhaps he hoped to change that of his countrymen as well—by joining the rebel groups. He must have heard it also when he said farewell to his family, over the phone with some, or over coffee as he did with Uncle Edward who tried to dissuade him.

  The sound of the bugle must have been present still when he disembarked at night with his companions on the white beach at Petite Rivière de Dame Marie; also present when he saw that they had been abandoned by those who had trained them and that the thirteen others who were to join them with a greater stock of munitions ten days later did not appear over the water’s surface or at the edge of the white sand where they had been expected; and still again present when the winds blowing strongly over the ocean saw him disappear toward the mountains to hide with his companions—one black man and twelve pale-skin mulattoes in a country of black people.

  And at last, he must have recognized the now-familiar sound when he faced death in the mountains of L’Asile with the remainder of his companions, survivors of this retreat that was a two-and-a-half-month fight against government forces—finding himself discovered and finally out of munitions, he cried, “If we must die, let us die like brave men!” And, lacking bullets, he started throwing stones.

  It is bullets, then, that killed him, not decapitation.

&nb
sp; I have waited numerous years to learn that, years spent uselessly holding up under this weight lodged in the heart of memory, personal memory and family memory.

  Years to suffer this image, the emotion, the anxiety over this other death by decapitation that we always thought had been his own because of the gruesome newspaper front-page photograph of his severed head that had publicized his capture.

  But he is no less of a martyr, and is a political martyr for sure. But for me, and of greater importance still, he is a martyr of the faith, of his faith. I long thought of the day when I would stand on the beach at Dame Marie, holding a candle—humble luminary to celebrate the man with a great heart.

  If it is true that one can weep eternally for a life that seems wasted, cut off too young at twenty-three, it is also true that there are hearts whose sensitivity is so great, so vibrant, so intensely impregnated by all of life’s experiences, that their life is in fact, in its substance, infinitely richer, denser, more profound, and, in a way, longer because it is fuller.

  I think of the internal journey that it must have been for Gustave, this last travel going from New York to L’Asile, stopping through Dame Marie. I see it as a rite of passage going toward what parcel of divinity he carried in him, a rite that would allow his giving birth to the Jesus of his being.

  * * *

  To come to Dame Marie by the road, leaving from Jérémie, means that one arrives from high up, over the hills. The church nests in the village under a vast, clear sky and shines like a pearl, first from afar and minute, then growing more and more at every turn of the road, down to the public square’s small green garden on the coastal strip, at the edge of the blue sea.

  So, I was finally standing on the white sands of the beach at Dame Marie. Under the midday sun, I held a votive candle for Our Lady of Perpetual Help. It would have burned seven days if winds allowed it—because winds always blow there, the same winds that would have pushed them, these thirteen companions, whipped them, caressed them, drunkened them, even.