Haiti Noir

Magloire went back to the market quickly, his head illuminated with a pleasant ruby light. He had two minds, or more than two, and had just shifted from one to another. A certain mind had been molded by the bon freres of Saint Jean Bosco who had taught him his trades. This mind could calculate, plan ahead, and undertake the interminable transactions needed to acquire ven dola (in this case)-it was like the mind of a blan, he thought, or even of a Haitian filozof, for some Haitians were educated to the point that they no longer heard the spirits, or if they did they were afraid.

But now, as he sailed through the market streets, his mind was washed clean of all that arithmetic that had burdened it earlier, for Doctor Oliver had simply answered his prayer- without knowing it he had obeyed the will of ezili Je Wouj, not because he knew her or served her the way Magloire did, but because he was a good man of the right instincts who could let himself be moved to restore order to the universe by folding a twenty-dollar bill into the warm pale palm of Magloire’s hand. Tout pou nan amoni, Magloire was practically singing to himself as he fractured Doctor Oliver’s deuce into larger soft piles of Haitian currency, the bills limp and fragrant with a fruity, sweaty smell and so blackened from passage from hand to hand they were entirely illegible. He purchased small but double rations of charcoal, oil, rice, and dried beans, and canned milk for the children, then green coffee beans for his mother and a handful of ibuprofen tablets for himself-his head had hurt a good deal earlier from the all the transactions scrambling in it. At another stand he bought two red candles and a ball of black string. There were then left four hexagonal coins; enough for a basket of green oranges.

He divided his purchases into two sacks and the smaller of these he locked in a cupboard when he returned home, putting the iron key into his pocket. Anise looked at him sourly as he did so, for she knew very well what that was about. When he gave her the condensed milk for the boy she brightened, then asked him sharply about the medicine, but he pointed out that it was no longer needed, for the boy was well, happy today, teasing the chickens out in the yard, and then he gave Anise the oranges. As for his mother, when she received the charcoal and coffee she smiled at him with all her four remaining teeth.

Magloire had to hasten now, fast, the red light in his head compelled him, over the unpaved road that wrapped around the outside edge of Morne du Cap beyond the dwellings of the town, then splashing across the beach where the tide was coming in, as the sun, still blazing hot, tilted just a little toward the west. Hopping from boulder to boulder around the next point, he climbed into the walls of Fort Picolet, which in the time of the heroes two hundred years before had been the scene of a great battle between indigenes on shore and the French warships. Now the fort was full of spirits, and there were other sevite there pursuing their own missions. Magloire paused to draw breath and looked down the black stone spikes of cote de fer, where two or three youths were scribbling on school paper, just above the spring of ezili Freda, but it was ezili Je Wouj who would catch and deliver his desires. He climbed a little further, till he was facing her grotto. There he lit a red candle for her, and left a complex little bundle of black string, a figure eight bound to itself with a tightly wrapped waist, like the waist of a wasp that might sting.

Descending, his head began to hurt again, perhaps because of the heat and sun, which now flashed directly into his face from the mirroring sea. He had already taken two ibuprofen. Could they have failed so soon? If he had more money he would buy sunglasses like those Doctor Oliver always wore. The luminous red glow of ezili Je Wouj was fading from his brain, and a grimmer something else began to replace it. The boys above the spring were smiling at him and showing him their scraps of paper, on which they had been scrawling phrases over and over until the papers grew dark and confused as a jungle at midnight and finally became a perfect graphiteshining black.

These were Vodou passports the boys had made, and they wanted Magloire to purchase them, or maybe just admire them. His other mind was forcing itself back, the one with the calculations. The tide had certainly come in now and he would undoubtedly get wet when he crossed the shoal. He could not wait, so procuring dry trousers would be added to his mountain of difficulties. When he looked at the blackened papers the boys were showing him, his whole brain felt scribbled over in just the same way. In a headachy flash he perceived for the first time the flaw in his situation: he had spent the whole twenty dollars without obtaining what Doctor Oliver wanted. Indeed, he no longer had a clear notion what that thing was.

Doctor Oliver spent the hottest part of the afternoon in his hotel room, half-watching coverage of the demonstrations on Haitian national television. When he woke the screen had gone blank and the day was almost over. He put on his shirt and ambled out barefoot. Charlie Chapo’s dust-covered truck was parked in the hotel lot, so he was unsurprised to find the man himself in the bar, drinking a large glass of the excellent local rum, except that it was rare for him to drink hard liquor. Charlie had taken off both his hat and his head rag and the remnants of his extremely dirty hair were sticking up. Doctor Oliver sat down and ordered the same.

“Bwa deben,” Charlie was muttering fixedly, as if it were a mantra of some kind. “Bwa deben.”

“What?” said Doctor Oliver, as jovially as he could. Charlie Chapo started as if he had not previously been aware of the doctor’s presence.

“Ebony wood.” His left hand had begun folding his red head cloth into ever smaller triangles. “It used to be code for slave cargo, back in the day when they had to smuggle them. Of course, whatever real ebony there might have been here was slashed out and ripped off and sent to Europe along with the gold and the coffee and sugar and hope, till there’s nothing left but bare rock most places, and women making dirt cakes instead of corn bread. That’s us, monche! We find a place as close to Paradise as this universe allows, that’s what we do to it. Sa kab fem rele Met Kalfou mwen!”

“What?” Doctor Oliver repeated. His sense of incomprehension had now taken on an ominous cast. Charlie Chapo was pumping that triangle of red cloth very hard in his left fist and Doctor Oliver felt obscurely that this action might cause something bad to happen.

“Oh,” said Charlie, looking at his left hand as if it belonged to somebody else. “I mean, do things the way I shouldn’t. Sorry…” He shook out the bandanna with his right hand and wiped his forehead with it. It was getting dark quickly. Bats skimmed the surface of the pool and a cocotier by the railing shivered its long fronds in the breeze. In the far distance they could both see the series of flaming barricades that cut the town off from the airport and the road down to the capital. Doctor Oliver’s apprehensive feelings intensified as he touched the vial in his pocket where his two remaining pills still clicked. He considered that Charlie Chapo might possibly have taken care of his problem personally if he’d wanted, instead of fobbing him off on Magloire. Charlie Chapo was occasionally assumed to be a drug dealer himself because he had no other obvious portfolio. His presence in Haiti was one of the many anomalies from which the whole country sometimes seemed to be constructed.

“My people can’t get in and I can’t get out,” Charlie Chapo was saying. “It just gums everything all up-and for nothing, that’s what gets me sometimes. You know a bad day here can be-”

“Very bad.” Doctor Oliver felt the truth of this in his spleen at the moment he said it.

“And you know, I hate it that they killed that poor woman. I just don’t- All right, there’s no less point in that than in anything, but it really didn’t have to be her.”

Charlie Chapo drained his rum glass and shook himself all over, then turned on Doctor Oliver a lopsided smile. “I just need to clean out my head is all.” There was something in the way he said it that made the doctor think he could lift off the top of his skull and rinse out the inside and replace it. “Do you mind if I use your shower?”

“Go for it,” Doctor Oliver said. “There’s even soap. It’s from Taiwan.”

By the time Charlie returned to the table, it was completely dark. The barefoot servants had lit the lamps, and the fires on the barricades seemed much further off-as did the dark portents of Charlie’s earlier words. On the strength of Magloire’s quick visit, Doctor Oliver had dry-swallowed one of his two remaining pills and he now felt quite agreeably insulated from… what had it been?

“Without fear of the nighted wyvern,” he pronounced in a fat mellow tone, as Charlie hove up to the table, still raking water out of his thin hair with his fingers.

“Something cheered you up,” Charlie said, raising an eyebrow as he sat down.

“I ordered for us,” Doctor Oliver said, and at that moment a waiter began setting down platters of poule kreyol and banann peze. They ate without talking very much, which was the custom of the country. Or, rather, Doctor Oliver pushed his food around his plate, since the drug he had taken destroyed his appetite. As the dishes were cleared, he ordered them postprandial glasses of the marvelous rum. Just beyond the hotel’s outward rippling of light, drums had begun a rich insistent rhythm. The ceremonies Charlie had mentioned would be gunning up now, not far away.

“Thanks for putting me onto Magloire.”

“He take care of you?” Charlie seemed pleased.

Doctor Oliver reached for the envelope in his shirt pocket, then stopped. “He said something to me: