Peacekeeping

by Mischa Berlinski

  She was right back in his face. “Terry, what you need to do here is relax.”

  Terry was getting a little obsessive about things—he admitted it later, just that word. The house he was staying in out on the Route Nationale was like a hot concrete box at night. His Jordanian housemate spent all night watching bondage porn, and all night long Terry heard women begging and pleading, “Please, no, please.” Terry’s back would be killing him on his cheap cotton mattress, so he couldn’t sleep.

  He felt like this wasn’t some isolated incident in his life: that for a good long time now, the Marguerite Laurents of this world had been looking down their long, pointy noses at him, obstructing and impeding him. The way it was supposed to have worked was like this: law enforcement for ten years, then elected office. That’s the way it worked in Watsonville County, either law enforcement or military. They told him, “First you carry a gun, then you run.” So he carried a gun and ran twice. First he took a shot at state senate, but he never got the kind of full-throttle support from the local big shots that he’d needed to win the primary, which was an injustice after the sheer donkey hours he’d put in over the years. He and Kay had been shaking the money tree for all and sundry for a decade now: cocktail parties, fund-raisers, you name it. Knocking on doors, doing favors. It didn’t matter. No gratitude. Then, after Sheriff Shook’s heart attack, he’d expected that the sheriff’s job would be his, until Tony Guillermez and company decided that the Republican Party needed more Hispanic faces. “I can campaign in a sombrero,” Terry said. Not even a chuckle out of Tony. So that was that.

  Then even the job was gone, when the new sheriff, a Democrat, fired all the Republicans. His right to do so, Terry would have done the same. Deputy sheriff is a political appointee. Been that way since Hector was piddling the rug. Still a bitter pill to swallow, since no one could really argue with his results, his arrest records, the clearance rates. Heard from a friend of a friend that twice in the last five years he had been very nearly Southeastern Lawman of the Year. Putting Marianne fucking Miller in that job, what a crock. Then came all the money problems. What a man did was provide for his family, and for a long while there, ipso friggingo facto, Terry was hardly a man. Now with this new job in Haiti, at least they could pay the mortgage.

  Truth be told, Terry hated Haiti. Later, he’d laugh about how much he hated it. At the time, not a whole lot of ha-ha-ha. Last place he ever wanted to be in his whole life was Haiti. The number of times Terry had fantasized about one day living in Haiti was precisely zip. Would leave tomorrow if he could, never come back. He didn’t like the people, who kept making fun of him; he didn’t like the food, which was spicy and greasy. Just didn’t see much point in the place. This was his first time in a third world country, not counting a week in a resort in Cancún, and he hadn’t liked that much either. Came as a surprise to him that everyone was so fucking broke. He’d seen poverty back home—what cop hasn’t?—but Haiti was something else. All his life Terry had dreamed of being rich, and now in Haiti he was rich and he didn’t like it. Children walking barefoot with five-gallon drums of water on their heads, kids with hair red at the roots. Babies with swollen bellies, just like on TV. Back home, poverty smelled like fat and grease, like buckets of french fries simmering in the sun. But Haiti was like old sweat, bad fruit, shit, and ammonia. Every day he’d drive back from some small Haitian town with a prisoner or two handcuffed in the backseat, the smell so strong he’d gag.

  Everywhere Terry went, people asked him for money, not just kids, but adults too, even fat, sleek, healthy-looking adults, like sea lions barking for fish. How the hell can you be fat when kids are hungry? Damn country made no sense to Terry. It was like a reflex with them, he thought: they saw someone white and the hand came up. Blan, ba’m yon cadeau—White, give me a present. He’d say no and they’d start shouting at him. Or he’d give them his change and they’d ask for more. The worst part was that he couldn’t criticize, not really. These people just wanted to suck on the same teat he was sucking on. He just had the good fortune to get on it first.

  Terry knew what was right and what was wrong. That’s why he had gotten into law enforcement. Back in the States, he’d locked up bad guys. Threw them in lockup because they were scumbags. Got them to tell their sad, mean stories. Didn’t hate them, didn’t love them, just didn’t want them on the same streets as the people he loved. He’d felt proud of his work: it was something he could explain to his nephews. His father had once told him, “Never do a job you can’t explain to a child.” So he told the boys: “I keep good people safe from bad people.”

  But here he was, and all he saw was wrong. The worst of it all was the prison. Almost every day he visited the prison, dropping off some poor fool. Hundreds of men locked up in a hole, no trial, no nothing, just sitting behind bars in a room about 130 degrees on a hot day, shitting in a little drain, eating next to nothing, with not much hope of ever getting out. Trials were held once a year, if that; and during the solitary several-week session of jurisprudence, of the three hundred prisoners awaiting justice, only a dozen or so might find their way to the courtroom. The rest just sat, all of them together, in an unlit cell so crowded that men were forced to sleep on their feet, and so fetid that the rotting air, like ammonia, burned your eyes and throat. Sometimes a prisoner’s file was simply lost, and then the accused could stay in prison, forgotten, until he died. The only way out of prison, innocent or guilty, was to bribe the prosecutor or judge. Getting arrested in Haiti was like getting kidnapped by the police. Terry saw all that, and he felt like a cog in an unjust machine. He tried to explain what he was doing in Haiti to his nephews, and they didn’t understand.

  Kay White told me later that she started seriously worrying about him all alone out there in Haiti those first few months, before he met the judge. Cops’ wives hear a lot of stories about their men and their service revolvers, the way their eyes get to tracing the oily whorls of steel, the gun hypnotizing them, telling them to do bad things.

  Terry would get on the phone with her those first few months and she’d say, “Honey, you sound so depressed.”

  “I’m just not getting enough sleep.”

  She’d say, “I’m proud of you.”

  What she meant was, You’re a hero, but Terry knew that wasn’t true. He wasn’t a hero at all. He knew what a hero was. A hero was somebody who conquered himself. Broke down his fear into so many little pieces he could ignore them. He came from a family of heroic men. His grandfather had been a hero in Normandy. Never talked about that, didn’t need to. His uncle had been a hero in Vietnam. “Did my job”—that’s all he said. Terry was forty-two years old when he got to Haiti, and that’s an age when men take stock of things. Pretty much all he did was take stock of things. When he was a kid, he thought he’d be president one day. Hah! Then he scaled down his ambitions, and scaled them down way more.

  Now he was a taxi driver in Hades.

  2

  The only thing that really made Terry happy those first few months in Haiti were the afternoons joshing around with this kid, Beatrice. When Terry arrived on Mission, he shared a house out near the Uruguayan base with a couple of other UNPOLs, a Spaniard and that Jordanian guy. The house was tended by a lady named Mirabelle, who swept and straightened and washed the men’s clothes and prepared a meal every evening. Mirabelle sometimes came in with her daughter, Beatrice, a studious, pretty girl who wore her hair in cornrows dotted with blue and yellow beads. Beatrice would help her mother finish the household chores, then sit at the kitchen table in the afternoon and do her homework. She was in her final year of lycée and dreamed of attending medical school in Port-au-Prince.

  Although the composition of the household had varied over the duration of Mirabelle’s tenure as maid, from occupant to occupant an avuncular fondness for Beatrice had been passed down: the men of the household had paid Beatrice’s school fees since she had begun lycée. Coming home from patrol, Terry would tutor Beatrice in English in exchange for l
essons in French and Creole. In three languages, he chafed her about boys and made her giggle; when he learned of her ambitions, he suggested to her that she could probably study abroad, and he looked up suitable programs for her on the Internet—in Canada, in France, and in the United States also. He liked her clean, well-scrubbed schoolgirl smell, which wafted across the kitchen table like hope, and her intelligence and drive. He liked the thought of this small girl one day wearing a doctor’s coat and treating swollen-bellied little babies and toddlers with rusty red hair. Thinking he was going to make it all possible for Beatrice was pretty much what kept Terry going those first few months on Mission.

  Then, just six weeks before the final examinations that would have marked the culmination of so many years’ effort, Beatrice stopped coming by the house. A day or so passed, and Terry asked Mirabelle if Beatrice was sick. He was eager to see her. There was a transitional undergraduate program at Florida State, his own alma mater, for which he thought she would be ideal; and he had a notion how such a program could be paid for through the Rotarians. Mirabelle shook her head. She told Terry that Beatrice was going to be leaving for her uncle’s house in Port-au-Prince on the very next boat; she was dropping out of school. Then Mirabelle began to cry.

  Soon Terry, who had two decades’ experience in this sort of thing, coaxed the whole story out of Mirabelle.

  Mirabelle and Beatrice lived in a neighborhood of small tin-roofed shacks not far from Terry’s house. For several months now, an older boy in the neighborhood, from a larger, wealthier household, had been aggressively courting Beatrice. Toto Dorsemilus was in his middle twenties, one of the young men in the orbit of Sénateur Maxim Bayard. In the evenings when the Sénateur was in town, Toto would sit and play cards on the Sénateur’s terrace as the Sénateur received his guests.

  Every afternoon Toto would wait for Beatrice at the gates of the lycée and offer to drive her home on his motorcycle; when popular acts like Jean Jean Roosevelt came to town, he bought Beatrice a ticket. When she refused to go out at night with him alone, he bought tickets for her friends. In this crowd of teenage girls he stood out for his age and size: he wore his beard in a goatee, and on his thick fingers he had a handful of rings—a skull and crossbones, a garnet, and an opal. He wore oversize jeans that hung down over his buttocks and a basketball jersey that showed off his broad shoulders and thick arms. It was his habit to chew on an old toothbrush, as someone else might gnaw an unlit cigar or a toothpick.

  Mirabelle told Terry that the other afternoon Toto had been at the gates of the school, waiting for Beatrice on his motorcycle. Beatrice ordinarily refused his offers, but there’d been a big storm that afternoon, and she had just purchased new shoes, a pair of dark leather penny loafers that had cost the better part of her mother’s weekly salary. She accepted the ride, and Toto suggested waiting out the rain at his house: the narrow pathway that led to Beatrice’s own home was too slippery in the mud to reach by bike.

  Had it not been for the bruises across her daughter’s face and shoulders left by those heavy rings, Mirabelle might not have realized the next day that anything was wrong, but the bruises, and later the swelling, made it clear that something was very wrong indeed. Beatrice told her mother that she had been raped. Moreover, she was terrified that it would happen again. For this reason, mother and daughter decided together that she would flee—immediately—to Port-au-Prince.

  For the first time since his arrival in Haiti Terry felt as if he had a reason for his presence there. He took Mirabelle’s hand, which was hard and lined by twenty years of rough manual labor, all invested in her daughter. When there were no houses to clean, she had cut cane, gathered plantains, or walked hours in a burning sun to sell a meager harvest of manioc and yam at far-flung local markets. Plenty of nights had seen Mirabelle go to bed hungry, the food in the family cooking pot reserved for her daughter. Terry, still holding the thick, dry hand, looked in Mirabelle’s eyes and told her that he would help.

  That evening, Toto Dorsemilus was in the custody of the PNH. Terry was there when they picked him up.

  The next morning, Terry’s colleague, the young Canadian UNPOL who worked regularly with the sex-crimes unit of the PNH, took him aside and told him a number of disturbing details. The PNH records are poorly maintained, but she had learned from one of her counterparts in the sex-crimes unit that Toto Dorsemilus had been arrested twice before for the same crime under almost identical circumstances. Both times he had been released shortly after his arrest.

  Terry passed a number of rough nights thinking of Toto, hearing the scared women cry on the Jordanian’s computer. When the PNH arrested him, Toto, chewing on that old toothbrush, had looked Terry straight in the eye, fearless and arrogant. Terry was convinced that Toto Dorsemilus would soon be out on the streets again, and just a week later he was. Terry saw him on his motorcycle, riding down the Grand Rue. When he saw Terry, he slowed his bike down, looked him in the eye, and said, “Blan.”

  It wasn’t hard to find out what happened: Mirabelle had bought herself a television set with some of the money the Sénateur had given her and Beatrice, two thousand dollars in all. In exchange, they had agreed to drop the charges. Then the Sénateur had pressured the public prosecutor to release Toto Dorsemilus without further investigation.

  “Christ, Mirabelle, what do you need a television for? There’s no electricity,” Terry said.

  “Gen toujou lespwa,” Mirabelle said. A Creole proverb: There’s always hope.

  “And the next girl? How much is she worth?”

  “I only have one daughter,” Mirabelle said.

  “That’s a shame. If you had a couple of them, you’d be rich.”

  3

  Terry had been in Haiti four months or so when Kay decided to come down and visit for the first time. She was celebrating her fortieth birthday. She flew down to Haiti with a stomach full of butterflies, and not only because her sisters told her she was crazy to go on vacation in Haiti: “Wake up and smell the State Department travel advisories,” they said. But Kay knew that Terry wouldn’t invite her if she wasn’t going to be safe. No, it was seeing Terry that scared her. He’d been on Mission a couple of months—it was the longest spell they’d been apart since they were married—and for no reason she could explain, even to herself, the prospect of seeing him made her anxious, as if she were going on a blind date. She was worried that he was going to be a weirdo, or boring, or that she was going to hate him.

  Just as soon as she saw him, though, waiting for her at the airport in Jérémie, she knew things were going to be okay. He hadn’t shaved in a week or so, which was how she liked him best; and he must have dropped ten pounds, making his cheeks lean and angular. His skin was bronzed, and the smile he flashed her when she got off the plane made her know he was excited to see her.

  “Well hello, stranger,” she said, sliding into his arms. “Know where a girl can find a man around here?”

  That evening she sat with Terry drinking beer and eating barbecued chicken on the roof of his rented house. Both of his housemates were on vacation. Then Terry told Kay the whole Mirabelle and Beatrice saga.

  “And you fired her?” Kay asked.

  “Don’t you think it’s wrong, what she did?”

  “Maybe that money could change her whole life. You don’t know. Maybe she could pay for school. Maybe she could—”

  “If it’s wrong to buy justice, it’s wrong to sell it,” Terry said. “That’s not why I’m here.”

  Kay wasn’t sure that Terry was right. But she took it as a sign of his sincerity—and his love for her—that he’d spent two days getting the house clean on his own. He’d even washed the sheets by hand.

  The house was dark and charmless, with barred windows and low ceilings, but if you climbed up on the roof, there was a view of the Caribbean, which in the slanting light of sunset was a vast reflecting pool of ochre, crimson, and gold.

  “This isn’t the way I imagined it at all,” she said.

&
nbsp; “How did you imagine it?” said Terry.

  “Remember Black Hawk Down?”

  The next day, Terry took Kay to the beach. “You’re going to love it. It’s the best thing about this place,” he said. He’d been swimming every day after patrol for a couple of weeks now, and the regular exercise was starting to loosen up his back.

  About halfway between the Uruguayan military base and the airport, the beach was just longer than a football field, covered in all the debris and muck the people of Jérémie threw in the ocean and allowed to drift ashore: plastic bottles and tin cans, old shoes, plastic bags, the occasional rubbery remnant of some late night faire l’amour. The garbage skeeved Kay, but past the dirty shore, the water was as beautiful and limpid and as green as one could possibly imagine in a tropical beach, the temperature of a lukewarm bathtub, fringed by high, tumbling cliffs.

  There was some kind of sunken ship or submarine about ten minutes’ swim from the shore—just a turret perched a couple of feet above the low tide. Terry told Kay a story about that submarine. He said that in the war a German pocket U-boat ran aground there, manned only by a crew of three. The Germans came ashore, took one look at this lush land of brown rivers, gentle breezes, and pliant women, and decided to make for themselves a separate peace. The story seemed improbable to Kay—but she later found out that the town doctor was a guy named Schmidt. On his wall was a black-and-white photo of three white men, arm in arm.

  Kay swam and then sat on the turret of the submarine, splashing her feet and looking at Terry. She had always loved to watch him exercise. He cut across the bay with an efficient, muscular crawl, his elbow coming up sharply to his ear, full extension through the elbow and wrist, reaching with his fingertips, breathing only every third stroke, covering distance swiftly and effortlessly. While Terry swam, Kay daydreamed about the house she’d put up on the big bluffs overlooking the sea. If she could do it all over again, she often thought, she’d have developed property. That’s where her real passion lay, in making beautiful things. She couldn’t believe such a spectacular spot was undeveloped, just ten minutes from the town center, ten minutes from the airport, and two minutes from a white-sand Caribbean beach. Maybe, she thought, Spanish Colonial, with a red tile roof and thick white walls, the house cleverly designed so every room had sea breezes and a view over the open water. She thought of white curtains flapping crisply, and white cotton sheets …