by Cole Alpaugh
The reggae raised his energy level a bit and his eyes stopped tearing. He could see the blood more clearly as it began pouring into the pond, rather than dripping. Minutes passed and his arms began to tingle, seemed to go to sleep. He was no doctor, but could feel his pulse changing, becoming erratic, as though his heart was confused. By then a crap-load of blood had found its way into the pond.
“I gotta move, boys,” Chase told his fish, not sure his tongue made the words, but pretty sure they wouldn’t understand anyway. And without food flakes, he was just a huge disappointment. He struggled mightily, clenching his teeth in case any pain decided to return, as he rocked back and forth, side to side. With a final thrust, he managed to roll onto his back.
His new view showed exactly why they’d picked this house, with the tall skinny trees soaring upward. These trees couldn’t be worried about wasting energy on lower branches. Their early lives had been purely a race to the sunshine, where they could finally spread out, grow leaves and sway mightily in the wind.
In a strong breeze, the canopy of trees waved like a field of wheat, tiny snatches of sunshine peeking through like flashes of lightning. Their chalet-style home faced the woods beyond the fish pond. It had two sets of sliding glass doors, with four huge panes of glass above. It was a struggle to heat in the winter, but he had loved feeling so immersed in nature, even when Tylea snuggled in next to him on the couch and stole the TV remote.
His little princess, Tylea.
His tiny, shy, bespectacled girl. He’d put the newspaper clipping in his journal.
Chase knew it broke one of the primary rules in the Spy Handbook—if there was such a thing—but he had his reasons for keeping a journal. Originally, he’d expected to one day burn it after having quit the business once and for all—one final grand gesture before setting out on a new life, with new adventures. Or maybe it was more like burning a mortgage after mailing off the last payment, a demonstration to say good riddance to that monthly burden.
Come to think of it, if his bosses ever found a journal containing details of his missions he could have been shot for treason. He laughed and it hurt again. And then the cold and heat came back hard and deep. His world blurred. It broke his heart to abandon Tylea like this. Even after she’d graduated from her big-kid booster seat, he had never left her alone in the Jeep, not even to run into the store or Post Office for just a second. Not even if he could still see her from inside. No way, not even when she begged him to go by himself so she could finish her book. He would never leave her alone.
Until now.
God, he was tired.
Why hadn’t he seen this coming? He wanted her to know it didn’t hurt in the end. When he’d started all this crap, he was just a stupid college kid, all jazzed-up about making a difference in the world. It had seemed so exciting. But his priorities all changed when Tylea came along. The best moments in his life were with her. Yes, and with her mom. He wanted to tell her not to be mad at him for dying and definitely not to take it out on her mother. None of it was Mom’s fault. She had a job to do. And he could tell Tylea for a fact that even the worst wounds eventually stopped hurting. The pain slipped away and you forgot why you were crying.
The things we can’t change, we just need to learn to accept.
There was silence. But it wasn’t because Chase was dead. He could still turn his head and see two little orange guys, again looking hopeful, staring up at the gigantic, shadowy thing that used to bring food.
Click.
Chase knew the familiar sound. It was the CD player when it turned off completely and all the green and red lights winked out. The quiet was too much. After a few small test breaths he swallowed a big gulp of fresh air, intent on filling the void. Okay, he had a lousy voice, but it was time for a lullaby.
Chase began to sing.
Chapter 25
Webster Jon Widgy streaked down the left sideline, waving his good arm, shouting for the soccer ball. He was clearly offside by twenty yards should the ball be passed to him, but this referee was not heartless enough to whistle the infraction. They’d never ask for it, but a team with four young lepers already down by a dozen goals catches a break every once in a while.
A twelve goal deficit was still pretty close for Chase’s team, all things considered.
His own little white ghost—his Little Zonbi—was pushing the ball up over the smudged chalk at midfield. Two tall boys marked her tightly, but they were no match. She stopped the ball with the sole of her right cleat, pulled it back to draw both defenders even closer, then flicked the ball forward between both their sets of legs and sprinted around them to receive her own pass.
“Dooble nutmeg!” screamed the delighted mothers who lined the dusty field. The women danced in the same spot the cheerleading lepers had twitched and murmured approval years earlier. Chase supposed most of those lepers were dead, and new drugs were helping to end the cycle of misery.
These cheerleaders were much more animated. Except for the tattered rag dresses and thick accents, these were the same mothers as on American fields, screeching at their kids, unsure of the rules but often swearing at the refs anyway. Chase’s Haitian Creole was progressing slowly, so practices were a mix of languages, but soccer was more a game of show than tell. And in a land accustomed to so much anguish, Chase tried to be careful with words. His soccer moms began assigning nicknames during the first day of official practice: Difom, Kakas, Kochma, and Maldyok, which roughly translated to Deformed, Carcas, Nightmare, and Bad Eye.
He made a new rule regarding nicknames.
Chase had suffered his own hurtful nickname early on, when first disassembling the pot farm. Moreau’s ranch had still been protected by hundreds of dead bodies when Chase took it over, claimed it for their home. He would hear the word Malveyan—or Evildoer—while picking up supplies in Port-au-Prince. But once all the bodies were laid to rest as carefully as someone not terribly familiar with the controls of a front-end loader could manage, curiosity began replacing suspicion.
“Lion is okay,” he’d told the mothers, who believed nicknames were critical to the sport. “Nicknames should be positive. Like Tig, or Rebel, but, silvouple, nothing about missing body parts.”
Zonbi stuck for Tylea and Jeneral was sometimes his.
The soccer dads were a different matter. The Catholic priests, responsible for the property and many of the children, had recently voted to ban all the fathers who hadn’t already been killed in the recent coup d’état, maybe for the rest of the season. Following a questionable call, two of them had brandished machetes and chased a referee off the field and down a narrow street. It was tough enough to get decent refs without crap like that.
The moms, though, had hearts in the right places. They were slowly learning proper etiquette and no longer cheered wildly when opposing players were injured. Getting them to stop bringing rotten fruit and cloudy water for halftime nourishment was another matter. Chase was still a stranger in a very strange land.
Tylea continued her magic on the soccer field. She dribbled past a chasing fullback who was unusually tall and bony as a skeleton. She did her step-over trick, faking a move toward the goal, and then dribbled into the penalty area to set up her right foot.
Webster Jon was now at the far post, unmarked because the other team knew he had only one working eye and often ran the wrong way when someone tried to pass to him; his depth perception had been wrecked by Hansen’s Disease. The boy’s breathing was wet and raspy because much of his nose was gone. Opposing players didn’t like to cover him for a number of reasons, even though all the lepers had the proper medical slips proving they’d been on Dapsone for at least two weeks and were not contagious.
“Zonbi, here I am!” He jumped up and down like a spastic pogo stick on his good right leg. Paralyzed small muscles in his left foot had turned his toes into claws and he couldn’t tie that cleat. He hopped and hopped, his beautiful new uniform—Chase had bought them for the whole team—dancing as if on a st
ring.
Tylea had a plan from the moment she’d stolen the ball deep in her team’s own end. She wasn’t captain just because Chase was coach; she’d earned it through her leadership, despite being the tiniest player on their dirt field. Her wonderful skills were from long summers of hard work and her love for the game, easily making up for any lack of muscle and size.
“Now, now, Zonbi girl!” Webster Jon called, and Tylea took one more quick dribble before chipping a crossing pass over the charging goalie. She hadn’t struck the ball hard, just enough to send it floating across the goal mouth. Chase’s left wing, Webster Jon, stopped his crazy hopping and tried to get a focus on the ball’s gentle arc toward him, the wide open net waiting for an easy header.
The mothers also froze. Their cheers stopped, and Chase could almost hear them draw in a deep, collective breath. All their teammates stopped to watch this pass, this gentle strike that seemed to travel in slow motion, first climbing out of reach of the goalie, then the lunging head of the last fullback. It had a slight backspin as it reached its apex then began its downward path toward Webster Jon’s grimy forehead. Poor Webster Jon couldn’t safely practice headers because of all the havoc his condition had wreaked on his face. Chase wouldn’t allow it. He had to look out for all the players, but some more than others. Webster Jon’s own mom wasn’t here to cheer, having left him as a baby at one of the countless Port-au-Prince orphanages.
But in a world that seemed to be trying its absolute best to run over or drag under an innocent, already damaged boy, Chase’s Little Zonbi refused to relinquish hope. She recognized the opening, the possibility of this fleeting chance for a kid which life had already been mauled pretty good.
***
Chase had spent two weeks recovering from a single bullet wound to the abdomen, while Mitra’s father tried his best to look after his granddaughter. Her inconsolable crying, the accusing CIA interrogations, and the apparent loss of his only child had left the man withered and hollow-eyed by the time the hospital set Chase free.
“You take care of this little scientist,” he’d said, hugging Tylea hard on his front step. Chase’s belly ached, but he knew Doctor Bam’s heart was broken. Chase had never seen him cry before. “It is hard being both mother and father. Very, very hard.”
In a bag of medicines and bandages given to him on his last day in the hospital, Chase found an envelope with a cashier’s check for five thousand dollars. It included instructions to disappear from the country.
So he gathered up his little girl and escaped to the bottom of his nightmare pool, a place where life was heavily cloaked in thick layers of despair. He chose a destination where even the slightest glimmer of hope would be hard to miss, even for him. Tylea’s mother was likely adjusting after a long debriefing process in Tehran, as the newly emancipated duo were settling in at an abandoned marijuana ranch on Montagne Terrible. The Jeep ride up was done after nightfall on purpose. Sometimes there really are monsters in the dark.
Haiti is a place so wrecked by wars and brutality that the last threads of hope remain only in hidden places. Fear is insidious, while love and compassion have been poisoned like the dying earth, the scorched and barren countryside, and the oily water. Nothing grows for very long, except maybe in secret places, where there were once great green fields of marijuana; where shiploads of guano and truckloads of nutritious eggs shells brought the dead soil back to life. A place that could one day feed whole villages, with a little hard work and a lot of hope.
Tylea didn’t leave her new room those first weeks. She’d drawn pictures or read one of her books for a while but mostly wanted to be alone, unless it was night. In the dark, she never let her dad wander farther than the bathroom, or to get a glass of water. Chase knew she could feel what was out in the dark, those real monsters.
And so he began cleaning up the death in the immediate area, tying a rope to Moreau’s guardian zombies, dragging their leathery corpses out into the nearest field. It was hard labor in the incredible heat and he’d shower off the stench a half-dozen times a day.
Each day, Tylea read a little more and began writing a journal. Chase felt more at ease, leaving her for a couple of hours at a time, but the same feeling of dread would return on the walk back up to the house after he was done zombie wrangling. His heart would be racing as he opened the front door, always imagining the worst as he went straight to her room. But there she would be, looking up at him from the middle of her bed curiously, her eyes puffy and red from recent tears.
Chase used the heavy equipment to dig a trench, a mass grave. He’d found a few young men from the valley who were desperate enough for money to help drag the lost souls to the edge of the pit, then send them rolling down to their final peace. At least he’d hoped it would be.
And then one day, Chase heard an unfamiliar noise when returning to the house to check on Tylea, a slapping sound echoing out of the open windows. He ran, throwing open the big heavy door and racing to her room.
“I’m sorry!” She was frightened and cradling something in her arms—a soccer ball found in one of the boxes in the hallway. She’d been juggling in her room, kicking the ball off one wall.
“Sweetheart.” He grabbed her close, hugging her with the ball squeezed between them.
“I love you, Daddy.”
“I love you, too.”
“I miss Mommy so much.” She buried her head in his chest.
“I do, too.”
After the last of their supplies ran out, Tylea ventured into Port-au-Prince with him, bringing her soccer ball for comfort in this strange, crazy place. She carried her ball into the market like a Teddy bear as he gathered canned goods and powdered drink mixes. But as he was packing the groceries in the back of their truck, she’d dropped the ball to her feet, slowly dribbling over to a group of young boys in a corner of the dirt parking lot. One boy tried picking the ball up, but the oldest scolded him. Tylea motioned them into a circle and they passed the ball across and around, performing one of her team’s drills. There was laughter.
Some of the laughter came from his little girl.
She sat staring out the window on the long drive back up the mountain and he could tell she was working on a plan.
“There are a lot of kids just hanging around, aren’t there?”
On the next supply trip into Port-au-Prince, Tylea forced him to stop at an orphanage and then at the two Catholic churches within a few blocks of the market. Either directly or through an interpreter, she explained her plan, asking for the blessing of the adults in charge. Chase knew it was her smile and her hope that made them agree to her proposal.
Their soccer league had been formed with enough kids for six teams. And the teams were picked in the classic American playground style, where the oldest or best kids were divided up, then took turns choosing players. These older players were also going to be responsible for finding a parent, priest, or some local drunk to act as their coach and stand on the sidelines. Those were the rules.
Stepping forward, Tylea made it clear she wanted to be one of the six kids to pick a team. The drafting began, one by one, with the next best player going as the first pick, and so on. Tylea, who had sixth choice, pointed to a small group of boys huddled in the back, boys who didn’t have their hands raised and weren’t crying out, “Souple, souple, souple!” or, “Please, please, please!”
“Ou!” Tylea said, pointing to the most agile looking leper of the four—a tall young boy holding a deflated soccer ball under one arm. The boy limped away from his friends to get in line behind his new captain.
“You dumb, blanc!”
“Aveg!” another said, which was the word for blind, and the boys all laughed.
“Asasen,” Tylea said in a dramatic voice, shrugging toward the leper over her shoulder—who was cowering, crowding close—but the other, older boys stopped laughing. Asasen meant assassin in Creole.
“Okay, blanc, my turn.” One of the older boys began the next round of picks, continuing
until every child had a team.
Tylea had chosen all four available lepers.
“They are secret weapons,” she told her father. “Nobody will cover a boy with leprosy.”
But Chase knew she was kidding. She had picked the children who needed the most hope.
Tylea led her teammates in quiet ways. When it was especially hot, and some were dropping back and about to give up and walk the last lap during practice, she’d drop back, too, say a few things to them and match their stride. Those strides might be labored, but would never slow to a walk or a stop. They would always finish the run, and although Chase didn’t think they ever came out and thanked her, he could tell by their looks it was what they meant to say. It seemed more than enough for her. This leadership made her a real captain.
Sometimes his little girl was ten, and sometimes she was much older and wiser than her father who’d run away with her to this place.
“You are different,” the boys would say to her, touching the incredibly white skin of her forearm as they sat in a group, sipping water in the shade after practice.
“No, not different, you stupid boy,” she’d say back, touching his uniform and hers at the same time. “We’re the same team. We’re the same.”
And, like nearly all these children of poverty and war-ravaged Haiti, his little girl came from a broken home. Sometimes, late at night, she would cry inconsolably for her mom.
Chase did everything he could, although there was no way to replace a mother. And yet, even a man with a lousy singing voice could soften the sharp pain of the world, especially when the words meant so much to a little girl who’s had a long, hard day.
He sang Bob Marley’s song, the one that comforted him as he lay dying, assuring him that it would all work out.
When the tears finally stopped and she’d fallen asleep in her soft bed, in their new life, he’d kiss her pale cheek and head to the ebony writing desk in his bedroom to draw up some new plays, trying to figure out how to win a game, or at least come a little closer to winning.