by Ben Fountain
“Forget it man, I’ve had it with drugs. I did the right thing and it almost got me killed.”
Syto sagged, pulled up a chair, and eyed his brother’s latest painting. A tall, skinny black man in a top hat and tails was grinning while a cane field burned in the background. With his fancy clothes, his sunglasses and smart walking stick, this had to be Gédé, the voodoo god of death who doubled as the oversexed lord of misrule. He seemed to be dancing a little jig while the fire raged at his back, delighting as always in chaos and havoc. Papa Gédé was one of the lwa who’d come with the ancestors from Africa and had sustained them through the bitter times of slavery and beyond. Even now, in the globally networked age of computers and cell phones and transnational crime, the lwa refused to fade away, refused to abandon their serviteurs. Syto could no more imagine negotiating life without them than he could without his eyes or the guidance of his reason.
“Lulu, I’m dying here. I’ve got no idea what to do with the stuff.”
“You should’ve thought about that before you took it.”
“Listen, the only thing I was thinking was I didn’t want those guys to get it.”
Lulu seemed to soften at this. He was dabbing jots of red into the lurid night sky; since his beating he was using a lot of black and red.
“Where is it now?”
“I dug a pit in the Erzulie house, under the altar.”
“How much?”
“Three bags, like the first time.”
Lulu blew out his cheeks and reached for a different brush. Tiny human silhouettes took form inside the fire, either dancing or dying, it was hard to say which.
“Does Esther know?”
“She helped me hide it.”
Lulu painted for a minute, then sighed. “Okay, brother. I’m listening.”
“Well,” said Syto, “I was thinking we should get in touch with Nixon. He might know some people who could help us out.”
“Nixon? He’s just a kid!”
“He’s a grown man, Lulu, you’re forgetting. And he’s family. We need a guy we can trust.”
Lulu considered as he touched up Papa Gédé’s mouth, limning the teeth so that his smile took on the raucous leer of a skull. “Nixon. Okay.”
“But I can’t go myself, Michelet’s watching me. And I bet he’s watching you too.”
The brush froze in mid-stroke. “You mean he knows?”
“I think he’d take me if he knew for sure, but he’s suspicious. His guys keep driving by.”
“Shit, Syto. This is serious.”
“No kidding. So we better get somebody to Port-au-Prince quick.”
They sent word to Nixon through one of Lulu’s girlfriends, a marchand who traveled to Port-au-Prince every week with loads of oranges and limes to sell. In the meantime Syto put on his slackest Bouki face and went about his business, which at the moment involved dragging his boat up on the beach for caulking and repainting, a yearly chore that kept him near his house and also out in circulation among his neighbors. If Michelet wanted him, Syto reasoned, he’d do the snatching when Syto was alone. As it was Land Cruisers full of flunky cops eased through the village several times a day, a heightened presence that naturally made people talk. Working there on the village commons of the beach, Syto heard the rumors like everyone else, that a local had gotten hold of a load of contraband. And he noticed how pleased his neighbors seemed about this, how they laughed and jittered around in a hyper way whenever they talked about putting one over the cops.
When Michelet came it was in the full light of day, alone, pulling up to Syto’s house in his government-issue Nissan pickup. Syto and Esther were just finishing their midday meal under the almond tree; Esther looked at Syto with utter calm, her eyes more eloquent than years of talk. He can’t touch us, her face implied, and it was true, Syto realized—since their daughter died they had nothing to lose. He felt the fear snap off him like a hat snatched by the wind.
“M’sieu chef des gendarmes,” he said with goofy formality, walking over to the truck. “This is certainly an honor.”
“Hello, Charles,” Michelet said, politely enough. “I want to talk to you.” From his truck he surveyed Syto’s small lakou: the cleanswept yard, the one-room house with its neat kitchen garden, the crooked hut set back among the scrub trees. Syto had built the hut years ago as a devotion to the goddess Erzulie.
“Of course, m’sieu le chef.”
“I want you to tell me about the cocaine,” said Michelet.
“Of course, m’sieu le chef. Which cocaine, please?”
Michelet’s teeth did a slow, decalcifying grind. For all his power he looked whipped sitting there in his truck, like a man in serious trouble with his wife. “We heard that a load of contraband was dropped at Cayes Caiman last week. On Thursday. And you were seen there on Thursday.”
“Yeah? Hmmm, I don’t know, m’sieu le chef. Cayes Caiman, yeah, sure, I go over there sometimes, it’s a good place for sirik and chadwon. But you know I’m not so good with days. Thursday, you said?”
Michelet gave him a hooded, menacing look. “You were seen, okay? We know you were there. So if you know anything about that contraband, you better tell me.”
“M’sieu le chef, of course I will tell you about any drugs I see. Whenever I see anything I go straight to the police, just like the time me and my brother brought the sacks to you. Let the past be your guide, please, m’sieu le chef. You know we’re men of honor here.”
Michelet’s face turned positively saurian. “Yeah,” he grunted, “let’s talk about your brother. How is his health these days?”
Syto eagerly bobbed his head. “Fine, good, sure, he’s going to be okay. No problem there, m’sieu le chef.”
“He deserved it, you know, that punishment he got. Those were some pretty bad things he was saying about me.”
“Oh my brother,” Syto wailed, tilting his face toward the clean aqueous light of the trees, “listen, my brother goes a little crazy sometimes. You know he’s an artist? Yeah, he’s one of those crazy guys. But we’re watching him, don’t worry about a thing, chef. He won’t be bugging you anymore.”
Michelet scowled. He pondered a moment, then snuffed his nose. “Charles, it’s not a good idea to mess with me.”
“No, m’sieu le chef.”
“We’ve got the Americans breathing down our necks on this, they’re screaming at us to shut down the go-fasts. So if you know anything, you better tell me.” He knocked the gear into reverse. “And if you don’t, stay the hell out of my way.”
Syto was already nostalgic for his previous life, when all he’d had to worry about was coaxing a living from the fished-out waters off Trois Pins. “You take even the little fish like this?” a blan once asked him, one of the aid guys who occasionally came around to pester the fishermen with stupid questions. Syto had shrugged and stared at his feet, somewhat cowed by the blan. “Well, sure,” he’d answered. “If I don’t take it, somebody else will.” And that’s what it was coming to, Syto reflected, either you took what you could or you starved to death, but fishing was a relatively obscure arena. The whole world, on the other hand, was mad for drugs. He worried so much he thought his head might explode, and by the time Nixon finally showed up, Syto was more than ready to get rid of the stuff.
He came in the middle of the night with three of his friends, all of them burly, glowering, coal black youths with stylish silky clothes and gold chains around their necks. Lulu was with them; it had been years since Nixon visited Trois Pins and he couldn’t remember his way in the dark, finally stumbling onto Lulu’s hut by chance. Nixon had been born in Port-au-Prince under Duvalier père, when a rumor was going around that the American president was planning to visit; the boy’s mother, Syto and Lulu’s older sister, had named her son after the great man in hopes of winning an audience and maybe a break for her son. No visit had ever materialized, and only such breaks as Nixon could conjure for himself out of Haiti’s thin air of opportunity. In recent years word h
ad drifted back through family channels of the fortune Nixon made during the embargo, buying gas over the Dominican border and running it into Port-au-Prince on armed trucks.
Now he was said to own gas stations and a fleet of tap-taps. Little Nixon, Syto thought as he stared at the bull-necked tough across the table, Nixon the skinny, sickly kid whose mother used to ship him off to Trois Pins whenever he needed fattening up. First he asked for a tumbler of water, which Esther placed before him on the table. Nixon took a pinch of the powder, dropped it into the glass, and pushed it into the light of the single candle. The crystals sank, then vanished before they reached the bottom. Next he placed some powder on a piece of cigarette foil and held it over the candle, the stuff melting and bubbling like cane syrup, liquefying into brown goo. Now he pinched out a thicker wad of crystals and scraped them into a line on the wooden table. He took a slim golden reed out of his pocket, hunched over the table, and proceeded to introduce the drugs to his nose.
Lulu shot Syto a horrified look—You suck it up your nose? Nixon sat back and smiled in a distant way; fireflies seemed to be floating inside his eyes. “Uncle,” he said, “where did you get this?”
Syto told him. Nixon seemed to know all about the go-fasts.
“How long have you had it?”
“About a week.”
“Who else knows?”
“Only us. But the cops are hanging around, they’re suspicious.”
“Anybody else? What I mean is, any étrangers?”
“No, only Haitians. Just us and the cops.”
“How much is it worth?” Lulu asked. His eyes shone like lacquer in the candlelight.
“The going rate’s four thousand,” Nixon told him. “Four thousand dollars U.S.”
“For one sack?” Lulu cried, delighted, but Nixon frowned and glanced at his friends. Then he turned back to his uncles and spoke very slowly.
“That’s four thousand,” he touched the kilo bag on the table, “for one of these.”
When Syto heard that, he assumed he was going to die. There was too much money involved, too many desperate people, but the next moment he was thinking: is this what a black man has to do to get a little respect? Risk your life, as Lulu had done when he denounced the government thieves? As Nixon had done running his contraband gasoline? And he sensed the same motive in Méreste and Michelet, that they’d taken the drugs as a matter of self-respect—you were either a chump or a thief, those were your choices in this world. Syto despaired, knowing he’d never be able to explain his sense that they were all, however improbably, on the same side.
“We need help,” Syto said, staring at Nixon over the candle. “We can’t do this alone.”
“Well,” Nixon said, “there’s a problem. I think I know the people who brought this in. For me to take it back to Port-au-Prince when these people still have a claim on it—I can’t do that. It’s too direct, I wouldn’t be able to walk the street. There’s a way we can do it, but you have to get it to Port-au-Prince yourself. Once it gets to Port-au-Prince we can wash it, but until then I can’t touch the stuff.”
Syto wanted to weep. “There’s three hundred kilos here,” he said, waving at the sacks that seemed as big as tanker trucks. “The cops are watching every move I make.”
Nixon frowned; he was sympathetic, to a point. “Uncle, I hope you think of something soon. And if you don’t, I suggest you put these sacks in your boat and go dish them in the sea.”
It was tempting. There were moments during the next few days when Syto felt like dishing the drugs or himself into the sea, whichever would bring the fastest relief. People began to talk of strangers cruising the highway, slick-looking characters from Port-au-Prince who were nosing around the local beaches and coves. The cops continued to harass Trois Pins with their presence, and Michelet brought the pressure in other ways: the next several nights a U.S. Army helicopter thundered over the village, its spotlight scything through the palms and huts as a canned Creole message blared from the loudspeaker. The Americans had done this before, during the invasion, when they’d rained words of goodwill down on the people; now they were giving lectures, reminding the people of Trois Pins of their patriotic duty to surrender drugs and criminals to the law. At times it seemed to Syto that the helicopter was parked on top of his house, shattering his mind with its demonic whacka whacka whacka while the voice droned on like madness itself.
“Yeah,” Lulu said one afternoon, “they’re trying to get inside your head. They’re trying to drive you nuts.”
Syto’s jaw was still tingling from the percussive effects of last night’s visit. “Well, they’re succeeding. I’m not sure how much more of this I can take.”
Lulu studied his brother with solemn eyes, then went back to his painting. He was working on four different pictures at once, various incarnations of Gédé propped on chairs and easels with Lulu pivoting on his stool in the middle. All month he’d been painting Gédés, anticipating a big demand from the nonexistent tourists as Papa Gédé’s fête and All Souls’ Day approached.
“So what are you going to do, brother?”
“I don’t know.” Syto pulled a chair into the shade of the lean-to. It was early afternoon, the air thick as paste; a couple of houses away someone was noodling on a drum. “I’m empty, man. I can’t even think.”
“Michelet still hanging around?”
“Esther took a bunch of eggplant into Marigot yesterday. He stopped her and searched through all the baskets.”
“That bastard.”
“It’s only a matter of time, Lulu.”
Lulu was painting a funeral procession of dancing Gédés, the coffin borne aloft at a rocking, joyous angle. Syto looked closer: inside the coffin a handsome couple was screwing for all they were worth.
“I tell you what I think,” said Lulu. “I think you ought to dish it.”
Syto groaned.
“Yeah, slip out on the boat while everybody’s doing Gédé and dump it, just get rid of the shit.”
“I can’t do that.”
“What, are you kidding me Syto?” Bop buh bop bop brrrrp—the drummer burned into the sexy, driving beat of the banda, Gédé’s song. Lulu’s hands trembled for a second, then stopped. “You want to die for a bunch of junk you suck up your nose?”
“No, but I don’t want to live as a fool either.”
“Syto, man, nobody’s calling you a fool.” Brrrr-rup bop bop. Lulu’s eyes flickered and rolled back; the drum was edging him toward possession, but he gasped and shook his head, pulled out of it. “We aren’t cut out for this stuff,” he continued, clearing his throat. “Listen, even Nixon won’t mess with this and he’s tougher than any Macoute. And us, we’re just paysan, okay? That’s just who we are and there’s no shame in it, we were born to serve God and live unimportant lives. So forget the drugs, Syto. Let those thieves fight it out.”
“I just don’t want them to have it, that’s all.”
“Neither do I,” Lulu snapped in a thrumming, nasal voice, the voice Gédé took when he possessed someone. Lulu slumped as if unconscious, then shook himself awake. “So dump the shit,” he said, more or less himself again. “Just dump it and be done with it.”
“That’s not good enough. They almost killed you.”
Lulu frowned and turned to a different painting, a Gédé leaning forward with his hands on his cane, butt thrust between the tails of his frock coat. He was diddling his pink, rather dainty tongue at a group of high-toned bourgeois women.
“That was my affair,” Lulu said, techy, annoyed. Brrrrp-bup. “I went kind of crazy that day.”
“Maybe I’m a little crazy too,” Syto said, scaring himself. “Just once in my life I’d like to stick it to those guys.”
Lulu abruptly pushed to his feet, the stool flying backward as he swagged and reeled around like a spooked horse. He was trying to fight the god coming into his head, but Lulu succumbed so easily to possession—a little drumming could do it, a little dancing and rum, or at times th
e mere sight of someone else who was possessed. “Look,” he said, his voice a high-tension drone, “this is your affair, you’re the one who took the stuff. You tell me the plan and I’ll help you, but it’s not my deal. You have to decide, Syto.” He tried to walk, but one of his legs stayed rooted to the ground. He heaved at it like a stubborn tree stump, then lurched off, dragging the leg behind him.
“But I’ll tell you this,” he said over his shoulder, “you better figure out something fast. Because when I look at you lately, I’m seeing crosses in your eyes.”
Lulu shuffled into his hut; Syto heard him collapse on his mat, and soon a slurred, restive muttering drifted back through the door, the hiccupy ke ke ke of the gravedigger’s chant. Syto felt the skin along his spine prickle, a hundred tiny needles jabbing to the bone. He stared at the paintings. Think of something, he told himself. Think.
Syto Charles bought a seat on the last tap-tap out of Jacmel on All Hallows’ Eve, just as the Gédés were starting to appear on the streets. Waiting in the bus with his hat pulled low he watched them emerge in their absurd clothes, their faces crudely smeared with white greasepaint. They went around harassing people with their jokes and stupid songs, air-humping the women with their fluid hips. The victims shrieked and played along, but even as they laughed they stiffened and shrank away, uneasy in the living presence of death.
At sunset the tap-tap finally trundled forward, Syto bowing his head and saying a silent prayer of thanks. His big cardboard box was secured on the roof, sealed with tape, additionally bound in sisal twine, and labeled “Café” on every side. He was stunned to have made it out of Marigot, much less Jacmel, but he’d counted on the confusion of the holiday to give him a small bit of cover. As the tap-tap left the city and climbed into the mountains it passed streams of people dressed all in white, groups of voodoo dévoués walking to their temples with a Gédé sometimes prancing along, teasing the crowd. Looking out across the mist-bleared valleys and hills Syto could see bonfires fluttering on the peaks, the dusk rising to them from the folds and hollows like a gray green swamp seeping out of the earth.