“I already have.” He turned and filled his plastic cup with more of the orange bug juice. “Gonaives is my mother’s hometown. I’ve been there. She left when she was fifteen, went to Port-au-Prince. Then came to the States when she was nineteen.”
“How?”
“My father,” Marc said simply. He laughed then. “I guess I am the Haitian who has come farthest today.” He said it again in Creole just loud enough for Jean to hear and the older man laughed with the Army captain, nodding. He sputtered a string of syllables through his scrambled eggs and Marc nodded vigorously—Oui! Oui!Tory asked what the man had said and Marc whispered, “I’ve no idea.”
She smiled at that. Across deck, two of the men had finished their meal and produced a ball of thin line and a hook. They baited it with a piece of ham, tossing it out then tying it off to the rail.
“Will they catch anything?” Marc asked.
“Maybe. If they bait it so the ham doesn’t pop off in our wake, they might. It’s been known to happen.” She rested her arms on her knees, watching them fish. “Are they fishermen, or just well-prepared?” she asked.
Marc shrugged. “Definitions are fluid in Haiti,” he said. “Especially these days, as desperate as everything is. Most of the men here are from Port-au-Prince, or near. These are all very lucky men. To have these jobs. Where some of them come from…” He shook his head. “You couldn’t imagine. The conditions, and disease.”
Tory was watching the men by the rail with their fishing line. The boy, the teenager from Gonaives, had walked over to look. He kept his distance, though, she noticed. A few feet removed from the other two.
Without taking her eyes from them, she said quietly, “How many have HIV?”
Marc tilted his head. “In Haiti? God. A million. It’s one of the—”
“No, here. These men.”
He shrugged, curious. “I would have no way of knowing.”
“No, of course not,” she said, shaking her head, looking at him. “Dumb question. Never mind.”
Jean stood now, carefully folding his empty paper plate and pushing it into the garbage bag tied to the end of the picnic table. He moved his hand over the apples, picked one, and pushed it down into his shorts pocket, winking at Tory. Then he, too, wandered over to the fishing line. The apple rolled like a strange tumor in his pocket as he walked.
“This is like a vacation for them,” Tory said, and Marc nodded yes. Jean waved his arm at one of the men, saying something, and the fellow began pulling the line in to check.
“It is inevitable, I guess,” Marc said.
“What?”
“That one of them has HIV. At least one. Maybe two? Not all—God, I don’t think. But some. Someone here has it. Probably more than one.”
The line had no fish, no bait either. The boy ran over and took another piece of ham. Jean was speaking sharply to the two men; it was clear he wanted to bait it this time. On the deck, a few of the other men were watching all this, some still eating, a few talking quietly. One man had curled into a ball and was sleeping.
“Haiti is bad enough for HIV, but these men would be even higher risk,” Marc said.
“Why?”
He waved his hand in the general direction of the well-deck, the trucks. “Drivers,” he said. “They pick it up, spread it to the next town.”
“Prostitutes?”
“Sure. And wives. And girlfriends.”
Jean had folded the thin ham carefully, somehow running the hook through five or six times it looked like. He nodded at one of the younger men, and the line was tossed back in the water.
“Let it go out!” Tory yelled, hand cupped around her mouth, then said to Marc, “Tell them to let all the line out, way past the prop wash. There won’t be anything alive in there, they have to get it back farther.”
Marc spoke but they couldn’t hear over the noise of the ship so he got up and walked over, telling them what the female sergeant had said. The men looked at her then did as she advised, thin line spinning out from the rough brown hand, until just enough was left to tie to the rail.
Maybe it’s him,she thought, carefully watching the owner of the line. Then she looked at his friend.Or him. The boy walked by then, to get an apple, and the thought it might be him was too much and Tory dug into her front pocket for her cigarettes, lighting one, her hand shaking just a little bit.
Marc was back, smiling at her, his face and round scalp glowing in the sun.He really is beautiful, she thought. He looked as if he was about to say something, but sat next to her wordless, looking at her, then back at the men.
Tory smoked, her anxiety slipping a little. She ran her palm over her short hair.
“Do you think they know?” she said.
“What? Does who know what?”
“The ones who have it,” she said. “Do you think they know they have it?”
Marc put his hand to his face, wiping his dry lips and cheeks. He raised his eyebrows and sighed. It was all the answer he could give.
Jean laughed then, across the deck, the boy running over, a few of the men standing up.
“Poisson!”he shouted.“Agwé apportez pour nous!” His bait had worked.
Agwédelivers. The spirit of the sea provides.
Chapter
23
They survived the night. Barely, but—it seemed—intact. The worst hit around 0300. The worst for McBride, anyway. That’s when whatever illusions he’d had stripped away like deck salt in rain. There was always a moment, he thought; sometimes the moment came too late. It came at three in the morning for McBride, on the bridge. It wasn’t too late, it turned out, but you never know at the time. At 0300 the lights went out. Just a few seconds, not much more than a flicker, really. But in such a storm, with the battering they were taking, it was enough. His hands began shaking and he couldn’t stop the shaking, even holding them tightly together.All these people, was all he could think.All these people.
If ever he’d needed Davis, it was tonight. Davis’s strange talent lay with precisely a night like this: damage control, fixing on the fly, rerouting and reworking and forcing the last possible bit of life out of an engine, pump, generator. But Davis was of no use now, his own possibilities run cold. He might, actually, be dead. If so, McBride thought, they’d survive that, too.
As it is at sea, the morning was as if the night had not happened, all things calm, still. The ship lay adrift—full stop while she was checked nose to tail—exhausted, spent; from the night, from the pile of years. The bulkheads and seams were as the crew onboard: limp and worn, pulling for breath. Somewhat surprised, even, to see this new sunrise.
By 0600, the weather was completely done, the decks of the old ship steady and unmoving. On bunks, huddled in corners, flat on the floor in the small prayer room or one of the two children’s classrooms—wherever they found themselves overnight—the missionaries fell into listless sleep, drained and wasted, unable to move. Pastor herself was on the deck in a corner of the little ones’ classroom, legs out in front, two boys curled with their heads in her lap. They’d fallen asleep at dawn as she stroked their hair, now all the twelve or so adults and children in the room asleep, all except Pastor, sitting in her corner, hands still running over the boys’ heads. She stared straight ahead, lips moving silently, until her eyelids fell and she, too, drifted off.
Colgan and Johnson, the biggest men on the boat—both of them divorced, recovering alcoholics, who’d come to the ship to stay clean and pay their social debts—found McBride on the bridge. His young helmsman was curled up snoring on the deck; the skipper had told him to lie down and close his eyes and he’d kick him if he needed him. McBride had opened the door to the starboard bridge wing and was standing in it, hands hanging on to the old stained wood of the frame, the polished brass of the rail. He polished the bridge brass himself because he had no one to do it for him and he thought it was right it should be done. Colgan came up the stairs first, Johnson behind him, and when he got to McBride he embraced him, clamping his ar
ms around him. “God bless you, Skipper,” he whispered.
Johnson could keep an eye on the silent bridge. McBride took Colgan down below to the pit. It was a disaster. The bilges had filled in the storm, the violence of the ship’s rocking throwing oily seawater over everything. McBride showed Colgan how to operate the bilge pumps and what to keep an eye on as the piping shuddered and thumped the sludge through and up and over the side. McBride stayed almost thirty minutes, carefully circling the engine room with a flashlight, checking what he knew to check, hoping what he didn’t know wouldn’t sink them. The incredible thing was the Fiat, the old dying Fiat; still running.Thank you, McBride thought.Just take us to port, girl. And you and I shall both retire there. Colgan had found Davis’s rag bin and was wiping down the sides of the main. McBride patted him once on the shoulder, took a last look around, then climbed out.
At the top of the stairs, in the dark, empty passage near the dry-goods store, McBride broke down. Brief and controlled, but here it overcame him and he allowed it, for a moment, shoulders shaking, hand white around the rail. It passed, then, and he pulled himself together, deep breaths and head up. If asked a day before had he ever in his years at sea faced death he would have said, “Many times.” This morning he knew it wasn’t true, not like this; just once was the true answer: tonight. He’d seen the black tunnel open for them, the opposite and elusive cousin of the sailor’s green flash.
McBride found Pastor, boys in her lap, asleep in the kindergarten. He moved the boys, lifting them and laying them next to their parents still curled on the deck. Pastor had opened her eyes halfway, watching him, and when he’d moved the second boy he came back to her, taking her hand, and whispered, “C’mon now, Miss. To bed with you.”
She stood, stiff, leaning on his arm, and allowed him to guide her through the door and down the passage.
In the cabin of the ship’s engineer two exhausted souls lay at rest on the thin bed. Junior Davis, tied down by Pastor to weather the night, asleep on his back; he’d yet to wake, clothesline still loosely wrapped around him. Lorraine lay next to him, curled under Davis’s thin blanket, because she refused to go back to her own cabin.
Jacmel
Chapter
24
The boy who fetches water for the chickens is first awake in the Place d’Armes, an hour before sunlight hits the square. His tiny sister wakes with him but she is blind so will stay, still and quiet, in the wooden packing crate they’ve camped in next to the big statue. She sits as far back as she can get in the box, chin on bare knees and arms wrapped round her legs, silver-white eyes wide and unblinking.
The boy goes for water from the big barrel he knows behind Hotel de la Place and is back with his buckets in fifteen minutes. He delivers to the two old chicken men—also up before light—who tend their small roosts in a corner of the iron market. They pass him a few coins and he stands there, silent and unmoving. One old chicken man shoos a hand and yells at him to go away and then the boy speaks, eyes to the ground, reminding him he wasn’t paid at all the night before, nor the previous morning nor the night before that. The one old man grumbles but the other old man is already reaching into his pants—he saysgive me those back and the boy passes him the coins and the old man gives him instead agourde note. The old men begin to bicker but the boy is already gone, running back to his sister, empty buckets bouncing off his legs.
In the Place it is not yet dawn and none move about but you can tell most are awake or waking, the breathing of the square different, the air lighter. Eyes open but bodies curled under carts or market stalls, not willing to move yet, a few more moments of silence before day. Someone must be up for there is smoke, black and greasy, pungent burning wood and dung. The chickens cluck and peck and a dog barks and then that’s it, morning is here, still dark but morning is here, bodies emerge stretching and yawningbonjou.
Down and up cramped, colonial streets, a small group of men cross Jacmel’s three steep hillsides. They pass beneath hanging balconies encircled with wrought-iron and vines, past crumbling plaster walls and high gates, the morning smell of smoke then flowers then smoke again. Up and out early, the men are all important—they live in town, in houses. There are six men. Two of them own suits and wear them this morning, black with thin ties. The others have no suit, but dress well. One is old, but the rest are not, middle-aged and well-fed. They walk slow, so the old one among them won’t get winded. Slow, but with a walk of nervous purpose—walking forward but looking back sometimes, and around, to see if any watch; it’s early, but in Haiti someone is always watching.
A small squad of American soldiers arrived late yesterday, overland in two Humvees, fewer than ten of them, moving into a club not far from Place d’Armes. A FADH officer was seen to arrive not long after, and FRAPH goons. No one could say how they were received by the Americans, warmly or sent packing; they all left with the same stone look. But these town men gathered to talk and it was decided they should go as a group, also to meet the Americans soldiers, to tell them how it is here, and in the caserne on the mountain, before theattachés could work their snake charms on theblancs. The men walk quietly, not remarkable in any way, just a group of men, well-dressed for a work day, perhaps, but that is all. They were brave, though. Five others had not gone with them, afraid.
You are fools, to upset the cart.
No, we have a chance, one chance.
The Americans will be gone and then where will you be?
But Aristide will be back.
Who cares? The Americans will be gone, and where will you be?
We have a chance…
Two of their sons were in the caserne, and this had swayed the old man, and the old man swayed the other three. The old man had been in that prison himself, a guest of Papa Doc for five years. It was almost unheard of that one could be in such a place five years and emerge alive. But he’d done it, and then lived on twenty years—another fairly remarkable feat.
The men cross the Place, unavoidably in the open now, drawing courage from one another, heads up. They angle toward the club and the American detachment.
The club had been part of an American chain—Hard Rock Café. Effectively closed by the embargo, along with most of Haiti’s limping, empty resorts, it sat unused almost from the day it opened, the faded outline of the name still visible on the building’s stucco façade.
An American Green Beret master sergeant stood behind the iron bars of the gate, watching the sky lighten, listening to the songbirds in the thick, drooping trees above. He wore his flak vest but not his helmet. He’d been inside Kuwait and Iraq as a staff sergeant, then Somalia as a sergeant first class. His forty-eight hours in Port-au-Prince had prepared him for similar surroundings, but southern Haiti was different. Lush. Even here, in town. All green and sweet smelling. A small red bird landed on the gate, hopping, then another. The master sergeant pulled out a fat cigar, cut the tip, lit it.
Half the men inside were sleeping, the others poking around. They wouldn’t be staying—Special Forces teams were required to pay rent on whatever property they appropriated. But Master Sergeant Rice had slammed the brakes when he’d seen the place yesterday, walking back to the second Humvee to confer with the team’s captain.
“Hard Rock Café, sir,” he pointed out. “What more can I say, really?”
The men all agreed, captain included. There were opportunities for pictures here, and souvenirs. They were the only American forces for fifty miles, and who could pass this up?
“What self-respecting GI wouldn’t have bivouacked under a bar for a night or two passing through Paris?” the master sergeant said.
“I’m not sure it’s a clear parallel, Sergeant Rice,” the captain said, “but what the hell. As long as we found the door open—we’re just securing American property in a dangerous foreign country.”
Master Sergeant Rice had trotted around the corner, pulled his 9-mm from the holster, and blown off the gate padlock then the dead-bolt on the club’s heavy front do
or.
“Damn,” he said to himself. “Imagine that. Door’s wide open.”
The club was mostly picked clean—packed up by the owners, probably, and whatever left looted by the caretaker—but it didn’t dampen the team’s feeling of good luck. Most of the Special Forces ODAs in-country were sucking hind tit under General Meade’s bloated thumb at the Port-au-Prince airport, or out in the boonies, scrounging for a dry place to sleep and watching their backs. But here sat the 909th, playing eight ball at the Hard Rock Café on their third day in Haiti.
The main wall around the dining room was still covered with frames bolted in place, copies of gold records mostly. There was a Fender Stratocaster bolted to the wall, a signature scrawled across it. A bull of a Hawaiian sergeant squinted until he could read the signature. “Eddie Van Halen,” he said to the team medic next to him. “No shit.” He had a lump of tobacco under his lip, and spit on the floor, contemplating. “You think Eddie Van Halen was here, Doc?”
“What do you think, Mickey?” the medic said.
The team’s captain was named Greg Nellis. He was African-American, one of very few black soldiers in Special Forces. Two of his men didn’t like him much. He knew it. He didn’t like them, either. It didn’t get in the way. He got along with Master Sergeant Rice, and let him run the men. When they went up on the roof of the Hard Rock that night to fire up the prick radio and report in he told the battalion TOC they were hunkered down for the evening in an old hotel, and yes they’d paid the owner—no, he couldn’t see the name of the place, andoops! there goes the signal, I’ll call you in the morning. When he got off the line Rice told him one of the men had found a case of gin down in the basement.
Nellis grimaced and said, “Christ, we just got here.”
Rice shrugged. The captain had a point. “But,” he said, “it’s awful hard to look at free booze and not drink some of it.”
An equally good point.
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