by dannal
Standing at six foot six, and weighing over three hundred pounds, Momo knew most people in the neighborhood feared him. It was now time to redeem that fear.
Momo pulled the .50 caliber Desert Eagle pistol from his waistband. He started firing it in the air, its muzzle flashing brightly like a flare gun, quickly drawing the attention of everyone in the neighborhood. Porch lights and lamps in windows flickered to life all along the street, as everyone in a five-block radius was shaken awake by the sound of Momo’s powerful pistol.
A few people stepped tentatively out of their homes, peering down the street like cautious mice, eager to see what was happening, but willing themselves to maintain their distance. One by one the residents of Lemon Street, seeing Momo standing alone in the street, trudged toward him like zombies in their pajamas, bathrobes, and sweatpants, until a large congregation had gathered around the mountainous gang member.
“Big Flow is dead,” Momo said, when he had determined enough of the neighborhood’s residents were present for such an announcement. “He dead,” Momo reiterated, as he tucked the powerful pistol back into the elastic band of his long Miami Heat shorts.
A couple of people began to sob, and one woman gasped with horror and fell to her knees. A general groan rumbled through the assembly, and Momo knew that every man, woman, and child present felt a great sting at the loss of their leader, Big Flow. It was tough news to bear, as most of the neighborhood residents counted on the gang’s leader for everything from protection, to money for groceries, to a steady supply of weed and coke. Big Flow had always prided himself on taking care of his tight-knit community, and he would not hesitate to burn down anyone who dared to stand against him or his people.
“Momo’s in charge now,” Momo said soberly, looking from face to face, and seeing a wide audience of frowns. He wondered if what he witnessed was the heaviness of loss at the passing of a charismatic criminal leader, or if it was something much worse, dissent.
“Anything you need, you come and talk to Momo. You got a problem? You come and talk to Momo. Somebody mess with you? You come and see Momo. Momo gonna take care o’ y’all. You dig?”
One by one, folks began to nod their heads, reinforcing the mental image Momo had of them as zombies.
“Right now,” Momo said, hoping he could swiftly turn the tide in his favor, “we gon’ have a party. We gonna have a massive blowout. We gotta send out our master Big Flow with as much love as we can muster up, and we gonna celebrate the new sheriff takin’ over the town. Momo is takin’ over. Dig?”
The zombies nodded.
“Zann, Tiny Deege,” Momo said, motioning with his huge hand for two of his cronies to step toward him. “Go in my house, bring out the two folding tables from the back room. Set up one with as many boxes of Don Legado as we got. Zann, you set up shop rolling blunts for everyone. I’ll get you the weed, and if anybody wants it, the coke.
“Tiny Deege, you go get all o’ the Cristal out the garage fridge, grab as many bottles of Barbancourt rum you can find, and set up a blender on the second table. Momo gonna make some cocktails.”
“Yeah!” A couple people in the crowd cheered, at the prospect of receiving free booze and weed. It’s working, Momo thought. He knew it would.
In moments, Momo stood in front of a blender, haphazardly throwing together a cocktail of Haitian rum, expensive Champagne, lime juice, mint leaves, and ice. Momo was assisted by Tiny Deege, a young undocumented Haitian who was really small—not just short—but a proportionally small man: unusually small hands and feet; smooth bald head the size of a large grapefruit; short skinny legs; child-sized torso. No one knew why he was that way, they just accepted him, and called him Tiny Deege.
“Hey, everyone! Come and get a drink!” Momo shouted to the crowd. “It’s like my own kinda mojito. I’m callin’ it a Momojito. Come and get a Momojito!”
The crowd of shell-shocked zombies cheered, and crowded the cocktail table. At the other table, Zann, a skinny Haitian refugee with orange hair, thick black horn-rim glasses, and a shiny platinum grill over his teeth, carefully split the Don Legado cigars down their length with a razor, dumping out the tobacco and replacing it with marijuana, packing it firmly and licking it to seal it closed. He handed the finished blunts out like party favors to members of the crowd.
Another one of Momo’s associates pulled the four-foot-tall speakers from Momo’s living room out onto the lawn of the tiny turquoise house on Lemon Street. Within five minutes, they were listening to a gruff rapper belting out a violently quick staccato burst of vocals about an AK-47 blowing out windows like a hurricane.
Momo switched on the blender to churn another batch of his special concoction, when a stern face appeared across the table from him. It might have been the only person—now that Big Flow was dead—whom Momo actually feared in the world.
“Oh, hey, Mama Dorah,” Momo said, trying to sound as if he were happy to see the Haitian-American woman, who wore a colorful blue, yellow, and red karabela dress and matching headwrap. Even though she was only in her late thirties, Mama Dorah was largely considered to be like a mother and spiritual leader to Ti Flow, as well as everyone who lived on or near Lemon Street.
“A word,” Mama Dorah said with a deep, striking Haitian Creole-accented voice that invoked more fear in the neighborhood than Big Flow and Momo put together. She turned on her heels and walked directly into the house opposite Momo’s, where the door stood open, an eerie red-orange light smoldering inside.
“Yo yo, Tiny Deege, Zann, come with me,” Momo said to his cronies, as he followed the colorfully-dressed woman into her dimly lit home. “I ain’t goin’ in there alone,” he whispered to his friends.
A weird smell, like weed, perfume, and sweet incense, assaulted Momo’s nostrils as he passed through a wall of strung beads in a doorway to enter the woman’s living room.
Mama Dorah knelt by a low table, maybe just a coffee table, and the first thing Momo saw was a dead cat, gutted and sprawled out over a covering of banana leaves, various scattered bones, and a long, smoldering pipe.
“Oh, man!” Momo shrieked, looking at the cat’s red bloated entrails contrasted against the animal’s snowy white fur. “What you have to go and do a thing like that fo’?” He looked at Tiny Deege and Zann; both of them peered down at the table with moon-like eyes.
“Kneel,” Mama Dorah ordered. Momo knelt down opposite her, feeling a sick sensation inside his stomach, like two hands twisting a thick rope. Tiny Deege and Zann knelt with great reluctance.
“I have seen the future, Momo,” she said, tilting her head back and inhaling deeply. “I have seen the future of Ti Flow, and you sit at its head. You shall be its leader. You, and you alone.”
Momo felt himself relax a bit, despite the gruesome scene which lay out before him. “Thanks, Mama. You know I hoped you—”
“But first there is one thing you must do, Momo,” Mama Dorah said, pouring herself a glass of Haitian rum and taking a long swig. “There is a task that you must perform before you can truly call yourself leader. You must finish that which you once begun. You must finish what you started.”
“I don’t know what you—”
Mama Dorah looked directly at Momo. “You will go to a place where the earth once shook, where a mountain rumbled and spit sulfurous vapors and spewed ash, fire, and steam over an entire city.” Her deep voice grew in intensity. Her eyes darted wildly about, and she lifted her arms above her head.
Momo swallowed hard.
“You will go to a place where an entire city of people boiled in their own skin,” Mama Dorah shrieked. “All this happened on the day, on the day when the Christian God ascended into heaven. Thirty-thousand lives brought instantly to each one’s sudden, terrifying, and painful end.”
Momo made a face of disgust. “What you talkin’ bout, Mama?”
“You must go to the island. There you will find the boy. The boy who betrayed you, he betrayed me, he betrayed all of Ti Flow. He spat in all of o
ur faces. You must find him. And you must not only kill him, you must make him pay a great price for his betrayal. You must cleanse him through pain. This you must do. You must do this, or I swear by the blood on my hands that you should not return. You fail me, you should never again show your face here, lest you be smote down by my own vengeance. Do you hear me, Momo?”
Momo nodded, but he felt like he was going to throw up.
“You will finish what you have begun, or I will destroy you, Momo. I will turn your bones into ash, and I will drink your blood in my rum.” Mama Dorah’s eyes blazed with frightening fire.
“I’m sorry, Mama,” Momo stammered. He wondered if she would curse him or kill him with her mind just for asking a question. “But who do you want me to kill?”
“Do you not remember, Momo?” Mama Dorah’s tone was softer now. “Has it been so long that his face eludes you? Did his betrayal not sting enough for you to even remember the betrayer’s name?”
Momo shook his head, feeling sick inside. Tiny Deege was crying. Zann was wringing his hands together nervously.
“I shall tell you, Momo,” Mama Dorah said, her eyes locked onto his with a sinister gaze. “I shall tell you who you must destroy.”
She paused for a long moment, in which all that Momo could hear was the sound of his own throat as he swallowed dryly.
“His name is Josue Remy.”
Max’s machete cut through the stalk of sugarcane as easily as if it were cutting through air. Each stroke of the razor-sharp blade brought a satisfying zing to his ears, and another of the thick, fibrous stalks toppled free.
With a dexterity that only comes from experience, Max grabbed the cut cane, quickly lopped off its bright green, grassy foliage, and tossed the finished stick onto the half-filled cart hitched to a four-wheel-drive Polaris quad.
The work was hot, sticky drudgery, and it began shortly before dawn. Prior experience told Max that his back and shoulders would ache from shortly after he started cutting until days after he was finished, which would likely be long after the sun had gone down for the night.
“Another two or three hundred pounds and you can drive this load over to the shed,” Max said, taking a moment to run a sharpening stone over the length of his machete blade. Keeping the instrument sharp made for lighter work. It took a fine balance between keeping the work going and knowing when to stop and sharpen the blades.
Josue simply nodded and continued with his own task of cutting. He stood about a dozen feet from Max, and he zipped through the cane even faster than Max, taking full advantage of his benefit of youth.
One of the things Max loved about working with his Haitian friend was the younger man’s easygoing demeanor, and the fact that they could work side by side for hours and not feel obliged to fill in the gaps of quietness with too much chitchat. The two worked in near silence for most of the afternoon.
Once, Josue encountered a lancehead viper while pulling out a couple of freshly-cut stalks of cane. The coiled pit viper lifted his head menacingly. Its thick body writhed in a strange, mesmerizing fashion as the venomous snake threatened to strike.
Josue struck quickly, and he struck true. In the blink of an eye, he had separated the snake’s head from its body. He continued cutting sugarcane as if nothing had happened, ignoring the unnerving sight of the twisting body of the headless reptile.
Max hoped that by sundown they would have harvested nearly a quarter of an acre; this would produce plenty of juice to fill his five-hundred-gallon pot still.
Josue was now about twenty feet away from Max, hacking away at his section of the small forest of towering sugarcane with a cane knife. Just when Max felt confident in his skill as a cane cutter, he glimpsed his Haitian friend, moving effortlessly through the tall foliage, slashing the stalks down like a demon.
“Boss, water,” Josue said, glaring at Max with an expression of concern.
Max realized his partner had stopped just long enough to see him wipe his dripping brow and spit the thick saliva that seemed to be choking him. Max stopped cutting and took a long drink from a two-liter soda bottle half-filled with water, half with ice. The cool water was even more refreshing than Max had expected.
“It’s always good to have my mom here with me on harvest days,” Max said, laying his machete down on the seat of the quad. He took another drink from the plastic bottle.
Josue flashed his nearly perfect, pearl-white smile. Max didn’t know how a man with Josue’s background had such perfect teeth, and he never thought to ask. But the man had one of the most likeable, charismatic smiles Max had ever seen.
“You try doing this when you get to forty, Josue,” Max said, rubbing his left shoulder vigorously. “It’s not the same as doing it at twenty-five.”
“I just hope I look so good, I get to be forty.” Josue said with a sober expression. Max didn’t know if he was joking or not.
“Your flattery is good for a fifteen-minute break, I think,” Max said, realizing he had been looking for an excuse to take a breather. “Smoke ’em if you got ’em.”
Josue reached into his backpack, which was slumped into the rear cargo rack of Max’s quad. He produced a three-fingered leather cigar sleeve and removed two Arturo Fuente Hemingway cigars. He handed one to Max.
“Oh, you got ’em all right,” Max said, sitting down sideways on the Polaris’ seat. “Good choice, my friend. Got a light?”
The two men lit up and smoked the quality Dominican cigars in relative silence for a time, until Josue exhaled a large cloud of smoke and said, “Thank you for giving me job.”
“What?” Max asked, dumbfounded.
“I don’t remember if I tell you before. Thank you for giving me job.”
Max puffed his cigar and said, “You’re my best friend. I didn’t give you anything, Josue. You are my partner. Equal. Savvy?”
Josue nodded, but Max still saw the humility in the younger man’s eyes. It almost brought tears to Max’s. “Thank you, Maxwell. You help me. You save me.”
Max stood and placed a hand on his friend’s shoulder. “I’m not just being nice when I say this, Josue. You saved me. And I owe you the thanks.”
The two shared an embrace that made Max feel like the most unlikely father-figure in the world. Sure, he had rescued Josue from another life; a dangerous life the kid had not chosen for himself. But Max knew it was no accident Josue had come into his life. Without the young Haitian, Maxwell Craig was certain he would be dead.
“Now get back to work!” Max quipped, picking up his own machete and leading Josue back to the sugarcane field, where a wide swath of cane stumps protruded from the ground where they had already blazed through with their blades.
Max’s villa resided on a small island that the locals called an ilet. Situated among a cluster of ten similar small islands off the coast of a town called Le Robert, Max’s ilet, known as Ilet d’Ombres, translated ‘small island of shadows’, encompassed a total area of about six or seven acres of overgrown land. The property Max owned occupied only about half of the ilet, with a small resort hotel inhabiting the remainder to the east.
The property had remained on the market for nearly two years before Max took ownership of it. Accessible only by boat, most prospective buyers would have reached the end of the property’s long pier to find themselves a hundred feet from the parcel’s dilapidated villa, realizing they could not make more than a dozen steps before becoming ensnared in the ilet’s overgrown foliage: bamboo, palm trees, banana trees, balatá trees; they all grew together like a living wall, punctuated by bright red anthurium flowers and otherworldly looking bromeliads.
Max had been the first interested party to arrive at the dock armed with a machete and a hard-working Haitian friend. The two had hacked their way through to the villa in about fifteen minutes’ time, leaving a dumbfounded realtor standing behind on the dock, holding her briefcase.
The villa was old and had needed work, but was structurally sound. The area around the villa would need some
clearing, but otherwise contained some quite beautiful fauna and flora. Max had never lived somewhere that all manner of lizards, geckos and iguanas; scary, but colorful spiders; and a rainbow of unusual birds all roamed free as if on a tiny tropical and very private zoo. It only took about five minutes of poking around for Max to know the property was exactly what he had been looking for.
The real find on the property, though, was the cavern. Josue had been hacking through the tangle of jungly plants, exploring the island, when he nearly fell into the huge hole in the ground about twelve feet in diameter. Closer inspection revealed the hole to be the entrance of a cavern a dozen feet deep, and just over thirty feet in length.
Exploring the cave with flashlights, Max and Josue had discovered a small opening near the darkest recess, about two feet across, just above the lapping, tropical water of Le Robert bay. As he had inspected the opening, Max spotted a continous trickle of cool water dripping into the bay like a tiny waterfall. He traced the stream to its source, finding a miniature freshwater spring right inside the cave.
Max knew right away the cave was the perfect spot to situate his five-hundred-gallon pot still. Each time he made a batch of rum, Max typically needed to add a certain amount of water to the cane juice to get the pH level just right before pitching the yeast. Max attributed the spring’s unique mineral composition to the singular quality of his finished rum. And it became an essential element to his brand’s terroir, and the reason it would be impossible to reproduce the Fleur de Lis brand anywhere else in the world.
The shiny bulbous pot still always reminded Max of that scene from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory in which Gene Wilder fires up the bubble-sputtering soda-powered car with all of its brass and copper pipes and tubes. Max’s rum still did not seem so different. Looking like a big mushroom constructed of shiny, hand-tooled copper, the still featured a curvy swan’s neck on top and a separate fresh water-cooled condenser on the side.