Island on the Edge of the World

by Deborah Rodriguez

  Charlie slammed on her brakes, praying that nobody was following behind her. The car came to a halt and slid into the roadside barrier with a thud. She sat for a minute, her heart thumping. It was nearly nightfall, the rain was slowing, and there was not a soul in sight. Charlie unbuckled her seat belt and stepped down from the car to check for damage.

  The thick black bumper had done its job. She returned to the driver’s seat and backed the car up, but it was clear that there was not enough room to pass between the evenly spaced rocks. Suddenly she found the car surrounded by a handful of teenage boys, their arms crossed rigidly in front of their chests.

  “Need some help, blan?” one of them asked.

  “I’m good,” Charlie said out her window. “Just need to get around these rocks. Why are they even here?”

  “So that we can help you,” answered another of the boys, a cigarette hanging from his lips. Next to him was a smaller boy, in a backward baseball cap and a Michael Jordan T-shirt. Charlie watched as he tapped his mouth twice with two fingers, touched his stomach, and then held out his open palm toward her.

  “You’re hungry?” she asked, knowing full well he was looking for money.

  Nobody moved. Charlie reached across the front seat for her bag and pulled out a power bar. She tossed it out the window to the boy, who unwrapped it, took a bite, and chucked the empty wrapper down to the road without ever taking his eyes off of her.

  “So?” Charlie pointed to the roadblock ahead.

  “So what?” one of the boys answered. The boys’ laughter rang out across the misty valley.

  “What are you going to do about those rocks?” she asked.

  They stood their ground, all eyes locked on Charlie.

  She gave them a minute, then flung open her door and once again stepped out of the car. The rain had stopped, leaving the pitted asphalt a maze of puddles.

  “Now,” she said, placing her hands on her hips, “are we going to just stand here? Or are we going to keep playing this little game until the sun comes up?”

  The boys looked confused by this skinny white woman who charged toward the nearest rock, dug in her heels, and began to push. The tallest one was the first to make a move, joining in to help. The others followed.

  “Mèsi,” she said as she returned to the car and slammed the door. “And stay out of trouble,” she added as she shifted the car into gear and rolled forward, cramming a fistful of gourdes into the hand of the nearest boy as she passed.

  The sky had turned from dark to pink as the sun sank below the clouds toward the horizon. A rainbow sprouted out of nowhere, arcing toward the heavens like a beautiful arrow shot from a bow. Charlie smiled, then remembered the warning she’d learned from her friends in the jungle: Beware of the rainbow. It is a mystical path where the demon watches human beings to capture their souls. And, they told her, there is nothing beautiful in that.

  19

  Charlie was flinging her belongings into the suitcase with a vengeance. Despite Bea’s protests, it was clear the girl had her mind set on going home as soon as possible. She’d come back late the previous night, after Lizbeth was already mostly packed herself and in bed with her eyes closed. Lizbeth had listened while Charlie ranted and raved to Bea about some scam, about her stepfather being a tyrant and a bully—the man did sound like a real creep. All hat and no cattle. Lizbeth didn’t say a word, just lay there listening to Charlie go on and on until she was all talked out. Lizbeth didn’t mind. It wasn’t as though she was going to get a lick of sleep anyhow, not after all that hooey with Bea.

  By the light of day, Lizbeth was thinking she might’ve had too much of that rum the night before, sitting there on the veranda all that time with Bea and Robert. After Bea was done talking about Luke and all, she’d just kept going, pouring herself nips straight from the bottle. Now her mind felt as fuzzy as an old shag carpet.

  Charlie woke up still madder than a wet hen. Lizbeth felt sorry for the girl. If Charlie were her granddaughter, she’d charge right on up that mountain and give that man a piece of her mind, and then some. At least she’d like to think she would. Bea wasn’t talking about any of that. She was too busy trying to change Charlie’s mind, to get her to stay a little longer, try a little harder. The woman was scrambling to unpack the bags almost as fast as Charlie was filling them.

  But it seemed as though no matter what Bea said or did, it wasn’t making a lick of difference. Lizbeth’s heart ached for the girl.

  She decided to give it a go herself. “Are you sure he’s not just playing games with you, honey? That he’s not lying through his teeth about your mom?”

  “All I know is that if my mother truly cared about me, she would have found some way in all these years to show it.”

  “Well, seems to me just about everything else that comes out of his mouth is a darn lie. That man is slicker than a boiled onion. Are you sure your mother is all right?”

  “That guard barely batted an eye when I asked about her. And her garden looks as though she’s been up to a lot of hard work lately. Signs point to her being pretty all right, don’t you think?” She crouched to check under the bed for anything left behind.

  “Honey, I know it’s none of my business, but I think you oughta go back on up there to that place.”

  “Not on your life,” Charlie answered from the floor. “You couldn’t pay me enough to look at that pig face again.”

  “Now, you can’t let an ugly mug keep you from doing what’s right. Why, if I had to place a bet on it, my money would be on you in a match with that man. You’re a tough cookie, Charlie. The toughest in the batch.”

  Charlie straightened, her hands coming to her hips. “Well, this cookie has no interest in begging. If she wanted to see me, she would have done it by now. God, I wish we’d never even come down here.”

  Lizbeth heard her own words echoing in Charlie’s. “You don’t know what goes on behind somebody else’s curtains, Charlie. That man could be threatening her, or keeping her hostage somehow. Why, anything could be happening up there.”

  “She was out, doing errands. Nobody is keeping her prisoner.”

  “All I’m saying is that you oughtn’t give up so easily. You and your grandma came all the way down here with a purpose, and I think you should at least see things through.”

  “You came down here with a purpose too, Lizbeth. And you tried. And now you’re leaving. And so are we.” She handed Bea a comb. “Come on, Bibi. We’d better hurry. The plane leaves in just a few hours.”

  Lizbeth was tempted to share the truth of what she’d been toying with all night, tossing and turning in the hotbox of a hotel room. She had to admit to herself that, even though it might just have been the rum talking, she was a wee bit haunted by Bea’s words, or Luke’s words, or whoever’s words they were supposed to be. She had half a mind to change her plans. But now how was that gonna work? They’d hit a dead end. And besides, she’d never be able to see this through without Charlie and Bea along to help.

  Lizbeth was doing one final sweep of the bathroom for anything left behind when the knock came to the door.

  “You came to say goodbye?” she heard Charlie ask.

  Mackenson stood silhouetted in the open doorway, his cap in his hands. His eyes darted to the suitcases by the door. “You are leaving? I did not know.”

  “We are,” Charlie confirmed. “So long, Mackenson.” She shook his hand. “And thank you for everything.” She reached into her pocket for some cash.

  “But I did not come to say goodbye,” he said, stopping her with the palm of his hand. “I came,” he said, turning to Lizbeth, “because I have something to tell you.”

  20

  “Well, lookie there. What’s that on his head? Are those pills?” Lizbeth said, as they crawled past an intersection where a man was balancing a bucketful of medications for sale, the foil packets arranged in a circular tower reaching to the sky. “Don’t they have pharmacies in this godforsaken place?”

  Mackenso
n shifted in the seat beside her, biting his tongue to keep from responding. He tried to keep in mind how anxious this woman must be. She was probably just talking to keep herself calm, not really thinking about how her words might sound.

  He thought of the look on her face that morning, when he told her that Guerline had called him the night before to say she had been thinking about Senzey after the day they had visited her at the Hotel le Président. The girl was sure that if Senzey were still in Port-au-Prince, she would have heard from her. And that had made her think about where Senzey might go. Her friend, Guerline said, sometimes talked about the city of Jacmel, how she dreamed of going there someday. She had heard it was a place full of artists, of people making beautiful things, and she thought she might learn to be a real painter there. Guerline thought it was just a crazy dream. She had doubts that a girl, alone, with a baby, could survive doing that, in a place without any family to help. But it was all she could think of, and she wanted to let Mackenson know.

  Lizbeth’s eyes had turned big and bright with the news. The old woman, Bea, was certain that they must go investigate. Charlie had taken one look at Lizbeth’s face, which was full of hope, and agreed. So now they were on their way to Jacmel, with Mackenson coming along to help. Although he did not know how he would be of any help if this Senzey turned out to be the kind of girl he feared she might be.

  Mackenson wondered if Lizbeth was planning on talking for the entire three-hour trip south. Now she was commenting on the tap tap in front of them, bursting with passengers, with a goat balancing like a surfer on its roof. But it wasn’t the goat she was concerned with. It was the two little boys riding on the back bumper, smiling and laughing as they bounced up the hill.

  “Lordy, that looks dangerous. Who allows their children to do a thing like that? Why aren’t those boys in school?”

  Mackenson shrugged. “They cannot afford to pay. They are probably street boys.” He helped himself to a bottle of water from the bag at his feet, and handed one to Lizbeth.

  “Street boys? You mean like homeless?”

  “No. Maybe. I do not know. There are many kids whose parents cannot afford to send them to school, and who cannot be home to watch over them.”

  “So what happens to them?”

  Mackenson sighed. It was sometimes hard to make people understand, to make some sense of the struggles of his people, his country. “Some of these children grow up on the streets. Sometimes they stay out two or three days, and their parents do not know where they are. Some do not go home at all.” Mackenson thought about how lucky he was, in a way, to have Fabiola at home with their daughter, and the other two children who were now in their care.

  “What kind of a life is that for a child?” Lizbeth continued, leaning toward the front seat, peering through the windshield to get a better look.

  “You are right,” he had to agree. “A lot of these kids, they get used by others, who teach them to steal and rob. You have seen the boys washing car windows? They are doing that for a gang person. The gangs make a lot of money from the small boys with cute faces.”

  “Can’t something be done to help them?” Charlie asked from behind the wheel.

  “It is a very difficult problem to fix. Even if you took them and gave them money to go to school right now, they would have to start at the beginning. Great big boys in a kindergarten class. Imagine. That is very tough.”

  Charlie put her foot on the brake, lengthening the distance between their Mitsubishi and the tap tap.

  “So their parents have no control?” Lizbeth asked.

  “The boys like to have money.”

  They watched as the two kids hopped off at a stop sign, disappearing into the maze of traffic.

  Again Mackenson was thinking about his own household. It sometimes angered him, and even made him feel ashamed, that he did not seem to be able to do for his family what his mother, on her own, had managed to do for him and his brothers and sisters. Perhaps if the earthquake had not happened, they would not be in this situation. He would still be a teacher, and Fabiola might be still working as a cook. Even so, it was not as easy living in Port-au-Prince as it was living in the countryside, where he grew up. The cost for school—the entrance fees, ID badges, uniforms, shoes, books—was not as much there, and back when he was younger, there was enough work for the older children to help pay for the younger ones coming up behind them.

  “What are those things, pigs?”

  Now Mackenson turned to see Lizbeth wrinkling her nose. They were heading out of the city, passing over a canal buried so deep in garbage and plastic bottles you could not even tell if there was any water running through the channel or not. The black creatures had made it their home, rooting around through the trash as if it were an Independence Day feast.

  “So much garbage!” she said, shaking her head. “It’s no wonder y’all got the cholera down here.”

  Once more, he summoned the patience to explain. “Actually,” he said, “it was the UN that brought the disease to Haiti. Everyone thinks it is because the Haitians are not clean people, that we do not know how to be sanitary. That we are poor. But poverty doesn’t cause cholera. Bacteria does. And we do know about sanitation, although it is a difficult thing here, especially after the earthquake.”

  He thought back on the marches and protests that happened after it was discovered that some peacekeepers from Nepal had built a bad sewerage system at their camp, one that sent waste into a river that people used to drink, to cook, to wash, to bathe. There had not been cholera in Haiti for one hundred years, and now thousands were dead from it.

  “Oh,” Lizbeth said, “I didn’t mean that as an insult. I just can’t help but feel sorry for y’all. Everything just seems so darn difficult down here.”

  Mackenson smiled a small, sad smile. Although he was used to it, the misunderstandings, the insults and the judging never got any easier.

  “It is the same with the AIDS,” he said aloud, unable to stop himself from defending his country. “It is your country that blamed us for bringing the disease to them, when in fact some people say it came to Haiti with American sailors.”

  “I remember reading about that,” Charlie said, her eyes looking back on them from the rearview mirror. “In a class. Back then they were saying that there were four groups who carried the disease: homosexuals, hemophiliacs, heroin addicts, and Haitians. The ‘Four H Club’ is what they called it.”

  Mackenson groaned quietly.

  “Well, I’ll be—Isn’t that just awful? Shame on those people. It seems like it’s just one thing after another you’ve had to deal with.”

  “Exactly. Because that is when the tourism we had was ruined.”

  “You had tourists?” Lizbeth asked.

  “Of course. There were some very famous people who came to Haiti.”

  “Like who?”

  Mackenson counted them off on his fingers. “We had Mick Jagger, Jacqueline Kennedy, the Clintons, people like that. And many famous writers, too.”

  “What do you know?” Lizbeth laughed. “I can just see Jackie teetering around those downtown streets in her white gloves and high heels and that little pillbox hat of hers.”

  Lizbeth turned to look out the window beside her. The road had begun to climb, winding through a handful of villages busy with market activities, and was lined with bundles of sugarcane and mangoes, and sacks of USA Rice for sale. Dogs with swaying teats wandered the street, looking for scraps. Through an open church door, a pastor waved his arms in the air, his yelling and shouting silent, replaced by the whir of the car’s air conditioner and the calm of Bea’s soft snoring from the front seat.

  Mackenson savored the silence. He was tired of trying to explain, of trying to make people see the good he saw in his country and his people. He could not wait for the day when telling the story of his life did not bring pity from outsiders. He was proud of being a hard worker, even though he did not have much to show for it. It felt like he was always scrambling for m
oney, that there was never enough to provide for the needs of his family, especially now that it had unexpectedly grown. He remembered the Vodou practitioner who once told him that he sometimes did numbers for people to win in the lottery. He would do it for Mackenson, too, he said. Mackenson was polite, and accepted the numbers the man chose for him. But he did not play them. Mackenson did not believe in that kind of magic. What he believed in was hard work. But what do you do when there is not much work to be had?

  “Good God almighty! Poor thing.” Lizbeth was wincing at the sight of a cow tethered to a tree. “Why, he’s so skinny, there’s nothing between his nose and his hooves but hide.”

  “How much longer?” Bea asked, straightening in her seat.

  “She lives!” Charlie said, laughing.

  “I think we will be there in about two hours,” Mackenson told her.

  “Too much rum with your boyfriend last night?” Charlie teased.

  “Robert is not my boyfriend. That man must be young enough to be my son. That is, if I had been a child bride or something.”

  “Nothing wrong with being a cougar, Bibi.”

  “Stop your nonsense, Charlie. I simply find the man to be interesting, in an intellectual sort of way.” Bea tucked her hair back under her scarf.

  “He’s quite a charmer, don’t you think, Bea?” Lizbeth asked.

  “Please. Any Frenchman is charming. Charm is their default mode.”

  “A bird in the hand, Bibi,” Charlie said.

  “Mind your own business.”

  The countryside had turned green, with banana trees and palm trees and open fields stretching right out to the horizon. But the going was slow, the road twisting and turning like a snake, cars and motorbikes flying toward them, horns blaring.

  “You should honk on your own horn too, Charlie,” Lizbeth urged, her fingers gripping the seat.

  As they climbed, the acres of green became patched with brown, naked hillsides.

  “What happened over there?” Lizbeth pointed out the window. “A fire or something?”

  “The trees have been cut down,” Mackenson explained.