I want to help you, he said. Will you let me help you?
She lowered her head without answering and so he sat down next to her in the dirt, watching the traffic pass on the road, and waited for her decision. Finally she whispered to her knees, Why would you help me, monsieur? and it pained him mightily to realize why she would ask this question, that nothing might strike her as more poisonous than his star-spangled good intentions. And what could he tell her, how should he answer? Because I need to help somebody? Because I am an American and I can? Because God and my own mother would scorn me if I didn’t? He wanted to sigh, Give me credit for being decent. Or trying. It was the thing he could do for himself. The purifying act.
She is not grateful for his attention; she is a woman, and hesitant with suspicion. He looked to the boy for an ally. Are you hungry? he asked, and the boy bobbed his head meekly once, Oui, his eyes flicking toward his mother, unwilling to assume that the acknowledgment of his hunger might actually contribute to its relief, and Burnette said to the woman, Come, his tone light and invitational, Get into the car, careful to not make it sound like a command, and she rose from the ground resolved to her fate, now deposited in this blan’s hands, attempting to smile, the sinewy strength and childlike youthfulness of her body resurgent, taking her son’s hand, and they came.
In the roadless mountains the rivers flowed undefeated, the color of lapis, as they had since time immemorial, but the tidal river below this bridge on the road from the airport to the center of the city looked and smelled like a channel of diarrheal sludge, its filth oozing toward the nearby sea through the middle of a dung-colored slum, a warren of repulsive miseries, constructed entirely of wreckage and garbage and degradation. Even the charity of a penny would not fall their way. He saw her gazing out the window into the twilight at its hovels and cook fires and children romping in its pestilence of mud and knew this was their squalid fate, the hell where she and the boy would be absorbed and vanish were they left on their own.
Across the bridge he turned toward the harbor and drove through the broken streets to the quay, where he knew vendors had claimed a sidewalk outside the gates of the port and its massive warehouses, hunched over their iron cauldrons stoking nests of fragrant coals, cooking the fare they would sell to the sailors and stevedores for their dinners. There were no stalls, no chairs or tables, just the market women and their steamy pots, and he stopped in front of one of the cooks because her plump face was creased with laughter for no apparent reason and he bought each of his foundlings a scoop of rice and beans ladled with conch stew and grated cabbage, the meals served on paper plates and eaten with a communal tin spoon. The kid and his mom sat together eating in the backseat of the CUCV, chewing rapidly, with the watchful vigilance of alley cats. The boy cleaned his plate first and his mother shared what remained on hers. He went to another vendor and bought them bottles of lurid-colored soda and leaned against the hood while they washed their meal down, trying to devise a plan, until she came out of the vehicle to return the bottles and the spoon and approached him demurely to say thanks and then raised the dark lambency of her eyes to his with a quizzical expression.
Awkwardly, because it was an afterthought, he asked their names. Margarete, she said, and Henri. And yours, monsieur? Burnette.
We have to find you someplace to stay, he said.
He didn’t bother with the Christophe, which had for many months now been rewarded by the international crisis with a hotelier’s windfall of no vacancies. Behind the Christophe, up the slope of a wooded hill, was the only other respectable hotel in Cap-Haïtien, the Mont Joli, but when he rolled into the Joli’s car park Margarete seemed to shrink into her seat and her eyes darted across the scene—the hotel’s tropo-modern multistoried facade of affluence, the swaggering flow of NGOs with their briefcases and walkie-talkies, the landscaping of an off-limits world where the young woman and the boy themselves would be considered trash—and she turned to him with a look of frantic appeal that required no exchange of words and he said, Okay, I think I remember seeing some places back on Route Nationale, and he whipped the CUCV around and drove out toward the southern gate to the city where they found a depressingly seedy roadside pensione, its run-down rooms exclusively for Haitians. Bon, she said apathetically, no pwobwem, but he couldn’t bring himself to leave her there with the child.
He drove back into the city, aimlessly cruising its stricken neighborhoods, until ahead he saw the spire of a cathedral and eventually found its rectory attached to the backside of its hulk, the stern glow of light in its windows like a warning against intruding sinners. Let me ask here, he told the impassive Margarete. He went and rapped on the wooden door and heard from within a faint but shrill command to advance and so he advanced, stepping into the stark administrative space of Christ’s earthly accountants, forced to smile because the brusque elderly woman behind the metal desk at the rear of the rectory, the bishop’s secretary, reminded him of his own grandmother, a black-skinned bewigged version of her stout, no-nonsense self, reading glasses tilted on her nose, an earpiece mended with hospital tape. What is it, monsieur? asked the woman, scalding him from head to toe with her gaze, and he made a bumbling attempt to explain himself before his French, and the explanation’s own logic, faltered.
Where are they? said the bishop’s secretary. I want to see them.
He brought them in and tried to listen to the conversation, but the streaming speed of their language outran his comprehension. Okay, said the old bitch, switching to English, letting her eyeglasses fall and hang, fixed to a cord around her neck. Her face registered extreme doubt. You are keeping this woman, monsieur? she demanded.
Keeping?
I will not help you keep a woman for your own purpose.
It became clear to Burnette that the bishop’s secretary—dangling the prospect of a solution before him, a recently vacated gardener’s bungalow on church property, three month’s rent in advance and in dollars, daylight visitors only—was going to take Margarete and her son and not give them back, for the sole purpose, not of altruism, but of defeating the imperial white, the Pope himself meriting the same hostility from the Haitian clergy and its die-hard Duvalieristes.
Dako, madam, show us the house, please, he said, desperate to escape back to the Christophe, and the old woman took a set of keys from her desk and a plastic flashlight and walked them down past the cathedral to the next block to a two-room clapboard bungalow and Burnette said to Margarete, Okay? and Margarete shrugged in agreement, Yes, why not. He promised he would come back tomorrow with supplies and he turned to leave, rubbing the head of the boy affectionately, when Margarete reached out to touch his arm and said Monsieur, please, my brother, but he would not raise her hopes on that account.
As things went for the next two months, he would never have known his ass from a breakfast biscuit if it hadn’t been for this unlikely relationship, the serendipitous triangle between himself and Margarete and her sibling, their gratitude—fair enough—never forthcoming, the emotion instead replaced by their discreet unsolicited loyalty.
One day she would tell him, Mr. Burnette, do you know who Jacques Lecoeur was? He was what we call a bayakou.
I don’t know that word, he said.
Bayakou. In Haiti, bayakou is the laborer who comes at night to clean out the latrine.
When he returned to the UN compound in the morning he dropped by the medical tent to check on the condition of the wounded. Two, including the gunshot girl, had been medevaced to Port-au-Prince, sharing the helicopter with the body bags of Lecoeur and his dead compatriots; the other two lay on gurneys, befuddled by painkillers and the vagaries of misfortune. Ti Phillipe, he was astounded to discover, had been released an hour earlier. Released? he asked the staff, no one saying much until he took aside one of the Haitian orderlies. Why? To whom? The answers he received were confusing. The police had taken Ti Phillipe with them. Which police? The na
tional police. The HNP? Yes. Did they arrest Phillipe? No, the commander took him away in his Toyota HiLux. Which commander? The commander for Cap-Haïtien. Where were they going, do you know? I don’t know, monsieur, but the commander was angry.
There was a standoff in progress when he arrived at the shipping containers, the UN’s ad hoc penal colony, a half-dozen Haitian national police faced down by four Jamaican International Police Monitors, everyone armed but not quite dangerous, the detainees still locked in the oven, bellowing from inside and pounding on the metal walls. Both sides took it for granted the white guy had come to settle the conflict in their favor. The entire lot of them groused when he declared, I don’t know what the fuck is going on here, but at least let those people out of there to get some fresh air until we get Colonel Khan or someone over here to figure this thing out, his neutrality only managing to combine each side’s contempt for the other into a shared contempt for the interloper in the middle. Where’s your commander? he asked one of the Haitian cops.
He is speaking with Khan.
What’s his name?
Major Depuys.
Speaking was not the word he would have used to describe the interaction between the two commanders, the Haitian and the Pakistani, when he heard them inside Khan’s office, Depuys shouting in high-pitched French, Khan responding in French himself but only to an interpreter in the room who parroted the colonel’s supercilious tone. His entry into the fray had been denied by Khan’s deputy, who asked him to please take a seat and wait. What’s happening? he asked, and the deputy told him a newly commissioned police chief for Cap-Haïtien had arrived from Port-au-Prince bearing a militant jurisdictional grudge. Minutes later the door banged open and there was Khan, ushering out an enraged Major Dupuys, a tall lean man in an all-black uniform and a black baseball cap embroidered with gold letters, HNP.
Ah, Captain Burnette, said the colonel in English. Just the man I need. I want you to supervise the transfer of the detainees to Major Dupuys’s prison, where they are to remain incarcerated—and Captain, I hold you, not the major, accountable for this—until I receive further instruction from Port-au-Prince. Understood?
Yes, sir.
Very well. Get this foolish man out of my sight. He is giving me a headache.
The issue, the contentious heart of Major Dupuys’s grievance, was neither small nor inconsequential and it stripped away the illusion of his nation’s fragile sovereignty and the restoration of that sovereignty by the powers invested in the mission. It took Burnette all day to begin to grasp the situation, and another week to pry out the nefarious details. Essentially, the government of Haiti had never authorized Khan’s excursion into the mountains to take down Lecoeur and his men, although the palace seemed to have consented to a vaguely outlined operation to contact and assess the current status and activity of the evasive band of guerillas. When word of Khan’s bloody raid on Lecoeur reached the national palace, the government’s reaction was as you might expect—outraged impotence, hollow threats, a formal protest to the United Nations Peacekeeping directorate, a clamor for the dismissal and deportation of the Pakistani colonel, a demand that the bodies of the slain be delivered to Port-au-Prince and the immediate and unconditional release of the incarcerated, a demand that the colonel finessed by remanding the detainees into the custody of his American advisor until further notice. Maybe somebody at UN HQ in Port-au-Prince wanted the prisoners sent down to the capital for further questioning. Maybe not. The conflict took days to resolve. Meanwhile, Lecoeur was given a state funeral at the National Cathedral, eulogized by the president as a freedom fighter and a martyr and interred in an already crammed mausoleum, the country’s pantheon for assassinated and butchered heroes.
Seize the narrative. Cue the riots. He could feel the ground rumble under his feet and knew nothing here was bound to improve.
For Burnette, the story never really got any better. Work with me on this, he told Major Depuys that morning as they walked to their vehicles. I don’t like it any more than you do. But he would learn this lesson again and again—mistrust was organic; trust itself Sisyphean. Waiting in the cab of the major’s white pickup truck was Ti Phillipe, an immaculate bandage circling his neck like a priest’s collar. Como ye? he asked Lecoeur’s lieutenant. Feck you, Ti Phillipe said in garbled English, the clenched face, the black gleam of hatred in his eyes, making the curse superfluous. Burnette pulled the major aside. Okay, we need to talk. Phillipe was what?—a free man or the same as the other detainees? Major Dupuys had his own question.
You were there in the mountains. Why did the soldiers massacre these people?
No, that’s not correct. I wasn’t there.
You were there. You attacked this man.
No, I saved his life. We left before the soldiers came.
Why did they attack Jacques Lecoeur?
Honestly, major, I don’t know. I just know that it was the wrong thing to do.
This colonel was doing the dirty work for the big macoute families.
Maybe that’s the reason. I don’t know.
It would be some days later when he sat down in the UN canteen across from one of the Canadian pilots who had flown in the operation and heard a far simpler explanation that chilled him with its credibility. Anyone with a headset on, and that of course meant Khan as well as the flight crews, had listened in as Burnette radioed from the ground for a medical evacuation. The quality of the transmission, as was frequently the case, was poor, interrupted by static, open to interpretation. Khan’s voice entered the commo, asking the American for clarification—Have shots been fired? How many wounded? You never responded, the pilot reminded Burnette. Were you receiving? No, said Burnette, trying to remember if he had that right. Well, you can guess what happened next, said the pilot. Khan got on the intercom and told his troops to lock and load. He told them the LZ was hostile, they were coming in hot. We were still out a ways, but when we put down a half hour later, the fucking Pakis were squirting rounds as they came off the ramp. One of those things, right, said the pilot, reacting to the crestfallen look on Burnette’s face. Look on the bright side, Captain.
The bright side, Burnette said. That would be?
We’re in Haiti. The Big Stinky, eh? Cheer up. It doesn’t count.
To ease the tension, he let Major Dupuys dissuade him from going back into Khan’s office to get it straight about what to do with Ti Phillipe. They requisitioned a pair of Humvees from the motor pool and enlisted Paki drivers and returned to the cargo containers and Burnette explained the transfer to the Jamaicans, who took the occasion to recompose themselves into bureaucrats. Let’s see de paper, mahn. The prisoners broiled for another hour while Burnette returned to Kahn’s office for a written order and Dupuys tracked down the IPM captain to obtain a copy of the roster of the detainees. Finally the door was opened, men stumbled into the sunlight, Burnette intervening when the Jamaicans lurched forward. Put the cuffs away, he said. Step aside, goddamn it. Call the roll. When Margarete’s brother answered to his name, Burnette removed him from the group. Major Dupuys, he said, this man will ride with me. You guys are dismissed, he said to the Jamaicans. The detainees were packed into the open beds of the Humvees, the HNP climbed into the back of Dupuys’s pickup, Burnette coaxed the reluctant brother, wary of being singled out, into the CUCV and they convoyed out of the UN compound, halting for fifteen minutes at the line of port-a-johns.
You are Reginald, oui? I’m Captain Burnette.
I remember you. From the mountains.
He wanted to explain himself, to apologize, but it was too soon—it felt that way at least, too soon to warrant the brother’s trust, too soon to know what further trouble might insert itself between them in the coming days, and so he contained himself, offering nothing more than the one piece of information that could matter, that he was helping Reginald’s sister and nephew and would try to
arrange a visit. He glanced over to see the man’s rearrangement of fear and suspicion into baleful mystification, Reginald finally lifting and tilting his head to look at him, study him, calculating an array of possible motives or possible deceits, trying to understand the white man’s own face and expression but understanding nothing and asking, as his sister had asked, the question for which Burnette had no answer and many answers, Why? But the question was starting to bug him and his brain, held captive by the warden of a foreign language, had begun to fry.
Just accept it, man, he snapped in English. Comprenez?
Oui, noncomittal.
Comprenez Anglais?
No.
Okay then, pal. Let’s just keep it to ourselves.
They arrived at the central police station downtown with its bullet-riddled exterior, shot up by the marines in the first week of the invasion. This was not the deliverance the detainees had imagined and they became unruly with resentment and everybody, even the police and Dupuys, looked at Burnette as if he were to blame. Eventually the men were processed and registered and taken upstairs and divided between two large cells. He told them it was his understanding they’d be out of there in a few days and asked them to be patient and said give me your word you won’t try to escape and they narrowed their eyes and stared at him as if he were Mephistopheles reincarnate. I know you’re innocent, he said, although the truth was that he really didn’t know squat about any of them. He went back downstairs to the front desk and saw Ti Phillipe in an animated and unnervingly jocular conversation with some of the cops and he waited for Major Dupuys to get off the phone and said, What about Phillipe? and the major smiled and told him that Ti Phillipe had agreed to be his deputy. Burnette rocked back on his heels and said, Whoa, that’s what I call a reversal of fortune. He borrowed one of Dupuys’s men and returned to base and filled up the back of the CUCV with cartons of MREs and bottled water and drove back to the station and kept a carton of each for Margarete and unloaded the rest for the prisoners. The rules of the game, he told Major Dupuys. Unless you want me breathing down your neck night and day, I have to be able to trust you. You can trust me for three days, said Dupuys. Then I am letting them go.
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