A third man runs in from the lobby, gun in hand.
I turn and fire. The bullet hits him in the neck and he careens onto the stairs. My ears are ringing. I walk toward him, shoot him again, step over, and mount the first tread.
The stairs are blurry and slow. I use the railing. Slow-motion fog world lasts until the final tread. My foot lands; I turn into the hallway and full-auto gunfire explodes from every direction. One knee buckles. Bullets rip the wall above me. Fog world goes blood mist and cordite.
Carel leaps through the mist, jumps over splattered black bodies, kicks a gun away, and shoots a Tonton whose leg is vibrating on the wood floor. A figure appears at the doorway behind me. Over my shoulder, Carel fires twice into the cordite smoke, spins, races down the hallway away from me, and fires again.
I stand and stumble through my room’s splintered, open door, and—
Blood spatter everywhere. Shell casings; cordite smoke. Pocked walls and chewed shutters.
A large black man is naked, slumped half off the bed, and shot to pieces. Two of Carel’s Scouts stand the room’s center, both bleeding, their submachine guns smoking. Four Tonton bodies and their weapons litter the floor. The bed sheets are sticky red; Anne is in the bed. Her eyes roll to white and she falls off onto the floor. Cambronne’s teenage girlfriend wide-eyes me from the pillows. She’s not a teenager, more like ten or eleven. Her eyes are birthmarked white and stay on me as her left hand sneaks toward . . . a pistol ruffled in the sheets.
“Gun!” I shoot her twice in the chest. She bounces into the headboard.
Carel’s Scouts fire into the bed, wall, and floor. I duck shell casings and plaster debris. One Scout staggers into the wall, heaving for air his lungs can’t breathe. His eyes roll; he struggles his Uzi up under his chin, hesitates, and pulls the trigger. His head splatters the wall and ceiling.
The other Scout squeezes at arterial blood pumping from his neck and chest. He falls to sitting, says, “Take the kaffer’s head.”
Carel enters the bedroom with the last Scout behind him. Back-to-back, they fire a waist-high full-auto line through three walls of the room. Carel grabs Anne half-naked from the floor, jerks her to standing, and out to the hallway.
The unwounded Scout shoves me out into the hall, but stays behind with the Scout bleeding out from the neck wound. I hear “Pamwe chete,” then a gunshot.
Footsteps pound up the front stairs. Carel detonates his bomb. The explosion splinters the stairs and shudders us all into the walls. The unwounded Scout runs out of the bedroom with a bag in one hand, Uzi in the other, chokes on bomb-dust cloud, and shoves me toward Carel and the back stairs. Carel counts to three, then detonates another bomb Anne planted in the lobby.
The four of us fly down the back stairs, jump a second set of dead Tontons, and scramble into a waiting truck, our bloody faces and hands lit by the fires and screams we leave behind.
Gunfire explodes; bullets rip our truck.
After two miles, the truck’s engine succumbs to the bullets. Anne scrambles into clothes and boots from the truck and we bolt into the bramble and thatch. Carel and the surviving Scout bracket Anne and me in a serpentine column. For three hours we trek down-mountain through trampled vegetation and vibrating urban jungle. Sporadic gunfire echoes on the roads and deep in the tin-shanty mazes we skirt. In the distance, fires glow across the sprawl of Port-au-Prince. My legs continue to cramp and buckle. Carel says commandeering a vehicle inside the city limits isn’t worth the risk with no hostage to transport.
Finally, we reach the last ridge on the southwestern outskirts of Port-au-Prince. Carel stops our column; I collapse against the rusted shell of a stripped car and slide to the ground. My one good eye still has some focus. I rub my left thigh, then the right, then both hips. My insides gurgle, feel like mush.
Below us, a brightly colored, overturned tap-tap bus belches smoke, then flame. Voices shout Kreyol. Bodies and shadows scurry in every direction. The black smoke rolls into the street. Beyond the smoke, deep in the distance, the Port-au-Prince Iron Market appears to be on fire, as are both airport runways farther north. The dark is wet, smoky, suffocating; I’m dizzy, fuzzy; have trouble breathing—
The ten-year-old I shot straddles my hips, her chest pumping blood, her fingers clawing out my eyes. I bat at her face. She slaps me awake, leering into my eyes—
“Bill! Stop it.” Anne says, “Get up. Walk, or Carel will shoot you.”
Pant. Swallow.
Slap. Anne uses both hands to grab my collar. “Get up!”
I stumble to standing. Blood dribbles from my bandages. My balloon face is hot, my legs cramping again. “Is she dead? The girl? Did I kill her?”
Carel reaches past Anne, grabs my shirt, and jerks me square to him. “You killed us all.”
Anne pushes him away but doesn’t disagree.
Carel and his Scout discuss whether to commandeer a vehicle now that we’re outside the city. We drop out of the jungle down to the road. Anne strips her strap T-shirt, then stands mid-road, naked from the waist up, like she’s delirious. A conscripted tap-tap van stops. Carel and the Scout kill the Tonton driver and his shotgun rider. Anne helps me into the back seats, the air humid with blood. Everything goes black.
***
Bright lights flash. My hand jerks to block the glare. Carel is driving, talking to Anne. She’s seated with me, behind him. Anne shakes my arm and shoulder. “Bill. We’re here; Jacmel. Have to find the contrabander with our boat. Where is he?”
“Huh?” Dry swallow. “Bar Guilanno’s. The hardware store in back.”
“It’s three a.m., Bill; where will our contrabander be at three a.m.?”
“Right. Right. The dock, with the fishermen. The harbormaster’s house . . .”
Anne grips Carel’s shoulder and says, “I best clean up first.”
We stop just west of the harbor. Anne splashes filthy beach water on her arms and face, then mine, scrubbing away the dried blood of a ten-year-old I murdered.
I mumble, “God, I’m sorry, I—”
“Bill.” Anne slaps me. “Get ready.”
At the Jacmel harbormaster’s house, Anne tricks the contrabander captain out and into our tap-tap van. His accent is French. “No. I cannot. You are too dangerous.”
Carel is cold and calm. “We go to your boat now, or you die telling me where it hides.” He points to Anne. “We have our own captain.”
“No. You are too late. The dawn comes; no contraband boat can leave now.” He points toward a silhouette—the deep bay’s outer shoreline that will be clearly visible in one hour. “My boat will need all sixty minutes just to escape our bay. By then, when we reach the maritime line, where the navy patrols, it will be sunrise. The navy will sink us.”
Carel says, “Get the boat.”
“No. You can only cross the maritime line in absolute dark. Tomorrow I will take you.”
Pop. Pop. I look up at our tap-tap’s roof. Pop. Pop. Drops of rain; it can rain down here.
Carel says, “Take us to the boat and load; we’re going now or you’re dying now.”
***
The boat is long and open with three 150 hp outboard motors. Our captain jumps aboard with the dock rope. He makes another plea. “If we survive the bay and then the maritime line, we must sail parallel to the coast for 120 miles, until we reach the end of the peninsula and open ocean. There is little chance we sneak past all the patrol boats.”
Carel says, “Go.”
The captain points into the dark. “After the patrol boats would be five hours of ocean. A plane with radar and we are dead. A problem with our motors and the storm coming from the east will catch us.”
Lightning drills the mountains to the east and the sky explodes. Rain sheets the Jacmel dock and boils the bay. I ask about the ropes and leather cuffs anchored into the bench seats.
The captain answers me as he casts off at gunpoint: “Tie-downs. For when we can no longer hold on.”
***
The navy doesn’t intercept us at the maritime line, but ten minutes past it the storm worsens, battering us from the north and east as we race west along Haiti’s long Tiburon Peninsula. The dead girl says this voyage will kill me; the dead girl says it will be fair. She says her gun will find my family; she says hell is only minutes away.
At Vache Island the ocean seems to shudder, confused by energy from every direction. Open ocean slams our boat, breaking high and hard, jarring the hull and my unmended insides. The captain ties himself in and we do the same. The murdered girl doesn’t; she smiles from across the bench and never takes her eyes off me. Spindrift and spray flash in the lightning.
The dead girl ties herself to me and whispers wet in my ear: God hates you for what you did. He will want something soon. More men will rape you while you drown—
“Bill!” My face and shoulders are jerked backward from the water, back into the boat. Anne’s armlock is cinched around my neck. She ties her leg to mine, then hooks our arms before I can roll us overboard. The world goes black.
***
I wake to roar. Engines, not storm, the boat pounding into waves. A rope cinches me to the bench, another to Anne’s leg. Carel and Anne bail water. Carel’s last Scout is gone. My one eye adds focus. Land materializes off the bow. The captain shouts: “Jamaica; Kingston.”
I look behind us at the storm wall, yell at Anne: “Downtown. The dock at Church Street. Myers’s building. Will be locked down; empty.”
Carel eyes the storm wall, shouts to the captain: “Church Street dock. Not Port Royal.”
The captain skirts us past a blurry Lime Cay, windblown and foamy, and ducks into the bay. The waves cut by half. The captain holds his speed straight across the bay toward the spillway at Church Street.
At the concrete dock, we crawl off the boat. Downtown is deserted; usually is if a big storm’s coming. The Myers’s building is one block inland.
Panting, I point due west two miles and tell the captain: “The best hurricane hole is at Port Henderson—the canals there. No gas, but your boat won’t sink if the storm’s bad.” I give him all the money I have. “Sorry; thanks.”
Carel gives the captain money, shoves the boat off the dock, then strips his shirt and wraps his weapons in it. We walk/limp deep shadows to the Myers’s nineteenth-century fortress of cut stone. I fumble the keys to the modern lock.
The three of us hurry inside; use a flashlight to climb the wood and stone stairs.
In my boss’s palatial office, I open his verandah doors. Framed with civilization, Carel and Anne look half human, monsters from a Faustian play. Each of us grabs a Myers’s bottle. I limp outside onto the bayside verandah and chug from mine, lips numb on the bottle.
Anne and Carel take turns washing Haiti into the bathroom sink. I will avoid the bathroom and its ornate framed mirror. I want to puke over the railing but can’t make my stomach work.
Carel and Anne reappear, both swallow pills, then spread the weapons on my boss’s teakwood desk. Carel begins cleaning the weapons. Bits of his and Anne’s conversation drift out. Anne argues that ganja should wait for another day when Carel is stronger.
Carel says, “Make the call. We do the ganja,” then toasts his fallen comrades—whom my actions killed.
Anne drinks to each toast. Neither she nor Carel looks at me alone on the verandah.
Carel says, “No reason to keep him. He’ll have us in shackles, the first warder who asks.”
Anne hugs Carel tight. “We sail together; we finish together. And that includes Bill.” Anne leans away to see Carel’s eyes, tells him “I mean it,” then reaches for the telephone.
I keep my hands on the iron railing and look east toward the Tower Street Penitentiary and the storm approaching. Anne gave me pills in the boat, probably some type of speed, made me swallow them; that’s why I’m not shivering or dead. Anne’s magic will wear off.
Behind me, Anne hangs up the telephone, then walks out to me. She chugs from her bottle. Carel follows her out. Her hand with the bottle points north, uphill into the Blue Mountains. “We’ll ride out the storm up there, do the ganja business, then run. C’mon, we best be goin’.” Anne is exhausted, but the phone call put purpose and fear in her eyes and she makes sure I notice. “My people up-mountain already know about the Oloffson. They say that girl in my bed was a Petwo baby.”
“A what?”
“A talisman to protect Cambronne. She had the white birthmarks around her eyes and the mark—the red dagger and blue bayonet.”
“Sorry, I don’t get—”
“She belonged to a bokor, Bill. Those are the bad, bitter-loa ones, woman sorcerers from the triangle above Souvenance, if you don’t know your Corazón Santo. Worse, the girl was a mambo’s”—(high priestess)—“daughter. To harm her is to insult God.”
Carel laughs, then winces. His eyes harden at the pain. “In Afrika, this vodou kak is the venda, child body parts and mystics—end of the day, she’s religion; just another way to mount an army.” Carel sucks a mouthful of rum he has a hard time swallowing. “And it works. Saw kaffers run through AK rounds. Didn’t know they were dead.”
Anne frowns. “Laugh if you want, Scout, but we just birthed the Crusades in the Corazón Santo. Our friend in the white suit has our names. The Oloffson has Bill’s name and this address here.” Anne points at my verandah. “Every true believer the bokor has in Jamaica is eyes-wide-open and on the street. I’m surprised they aren’t already here.” Anne stares hard at Carel. “Vodou or not, now or when the storm is over, all manner of well-armed, unhappy mickers will be comin’ our way.”
I tilt down more rum. “What was her name?”
Anne keeps her eyes on Carel but answers me. “Best you put the baby away.”
“What was her fucking name?”
Anne turns slowly, her green eyes as cold as I’ve ever seen them. “Ezili.”
The Windward Passage
Now
Chapter 19
Bill Owens
Anne and I stand the flybridge. The Sazerac Star crashes the waves at full throttle. We’re running east in the high-water channel between Tortuga Island and Haiti’s north coast. To starboard are the lights of Port-de-Paix, Haiti’s main Coast Guard gunboat station on the north coast. The Esmeralda is fifty feet behind us. Dead ahead, somewhere in the black, is Hurricane Lana.
Anne points to Haiti’s coastal lights and yells over the engines’ drone: “Cubans will’ve notified the station. Either we’re inbound for Haiti’s north coast, or running the channel for the Dominican Republic.”
No sirens blare from either side of the channel. We blast past the Port-de-Paix station.
For two hours, we run in the rough water into a blackish electric dawn. Just before we reach Cap-Haïtien and her large bay, Anne veers out hard to avoid the city’s naval fortifications. For ten brutal minutes both our boats are naked to the open Atlantic. The wind slashes and the waves double.
Two miles past the city lights, at the far eastern rim of Cap-Haïtien’s bay, BeBe and the Esmeralda overtake us, then veer into the wide bay. Anne follows him in.
The ocean wind and waves quit. We cut our engines, slow-motor toward deep shadows that hide the bay’s southern rim a mile ahead.
On our far right, two miles west across the bay, lights twinkle Cap-Haïtien’s harbor and shoreline. Anne points there. “Five hundred UN peacekeepers with their backs to this water. Five thousand Ida rebels surround ’em on the land.”
“Sounds like the Alamo. They lived twenty minutes.”
“Same’ll be true here. UN soldiers been plundering every city they occupy. The bunch up at Leclerc was caught running a sex ring with the rebels’ children.”
Those stories are not new, and not j
ust here.
Anne shows me seven fingers. “We’re eight when we get Susie back. Nine if Siri stays the course.” A fatal grin brightens Anne’s face. “Add the police we’ll have to evade as well, and that’s six hundred gunmen for each one of us.”
Six hundred to one, and she’s grinning?
We stop short of the southern rim’s shadowy mangrove thatch. Both our boats bob in the inky water. Taller shoulders an AK-47 at the trees. Anne’s other gunman does the same. They’re aiming at barely discernable bits of colored clothing that mark a lone anchorage. It’s midmorning-storm dark. The bats and birds should be slicing the treetops, but aren’t. Silhouettes of nervous cormorants and terns watch us instead. Low thunder rumbles out of the mangroves, over us, then out into the bay.
Anne squints into the mangroves. “Drums.”
On the Esmeralda, BeBe raises binoculars. Our boat’s gunmen listen to the unseen drums, their trigger fingers keeping time on milled AK receivers. I pat my pistol. Anne points east over Taller’s AK barrel into a dark tree canopy that spreads in every direction.
“The Gryphon is fifty miles into the groves. The hurricane will hit him first and leave him first.” Anne pivots 180 degrees west. “Bois Caïman where we’re going is seven miles west, five past the city lights . . . but the road is along the picket line between the UN peacekeepers and the rebels. The UN and national police have the low ground and the city to the north, the Ida rebels have the high ground and jungle to the south.”
“What about Haiti’s army?”
Anne shakes her head. “Bill Clinton invaded after the last coup d’état; disbanded the army in 1994. UN’s the only army now. And like I said, the rebels are rabid-mad at ’em.” Anne looks at me, then Sistah. “The hurricane’s winds will be the rebels’ forward assault line, the great equalizer their commander’s been waitin’ on.”
Yep, see it like a movie. The UN peacekeepers will lose 50 percent of their fighting strength to storm defense. The national police will lose 100 percent, saving themselves, their property and families. Our 600-to-1 snowball’s chance improves to a mere 250 to 1—not enough to matter. But if Bois Caïman is the “sailor’s star” in Eddie O’Hare’s poem, then Bois Caïman is where we have to go.
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