Jon Evans - Swarm

I sat up straight, my heart thumping, tried to breathe deeply but my lungs seemed unable to expand. The voice that emerged from my throat was nasal and strangled: “Is this normal?”

“No,” Jesse said quietly.

Two uniformed men approached the Toyota, moving lazily, guns holstered on their hips. I told myself that was a good sign, and glanced over at Sophie beside me. She was watching but utterly motionless, like a wax dummy. I could hear her breath thick in her throat.

Zavier exchanged a few laconic words with the men in Creole. They didn’t seem particularly interested. One seemed about to turn and walk away – but the other leaned down, looked past Zavier, and saw our four white faces. For a moment he stared at us with naked amazement. Then his expression hardened, it was like seeing a steel mask come down over his face, and he pulled Zavier’s door open and barked a command.

Before Zavier could move, Jesse said, urgently, “Zavier, get us to Port-au-Prince and I’ll pay you ten thousand dollars.”

The big man with the golden teeth hesitated, looked up, asked a question. The man outside repeated his order, louder this time, a note of anger in his voice.

Zavier raised his hands in a peaceable, easy-now expression, turned to Jesse, awarded him one of his glittering smiles, and said, “OK.”

His right hand fell onto the stick shift, his left hand onto the wheel – and suddenly the Toyota’s engine roared into life. We had stopped about five feet from the roadblock log. Zavier spun the wheel one-handed, gunning us around it, while power-shifting into second. The whole vehicle lurched and tilted drunkenly by about thirty degrees as the left-hand tires went off the road and onto the steep downhill slope, while those on the other side flashed inches past the tip of the log. The uniformed men had only begun to shout with outraged disbelief as Zavier crashed into third gear and accelerated away. The whole stunt-driving maneuver occupied less than three seconds.

“Zavier,” Anya said in a taut but giddy voice, as the roadblock lights faded away behind us, “you should drive for Formula One.”

Zavier’s chuckle was deep and throaty. “Lewis Hamilton,” he advised us. “He is the best.”

“What about that UN checkpoint on the way in?” I asked, as Zavier piloted us down the winding road at stomach-wrenching speeds, through darkness so total that the windows seemed draped in black velvet. “Do you think they’ll stop us?”

“There’ll be more police checkpoints, too,” Jesse said grimly. “Those guys had radios. Maybe we should have Zavier drop us off as soon as we get into cell coverage and try to make it on foot.”

“We won’t have a prayer,” Sophie objected.

Anya said, “Maybe my uncle’s men will find us first.”

“Zavier,” I said. “ Est-ce que c’est possible attainer Port-au-Prince et eviter les policiers? ” I wasn’t sure if “attainer” and “eviter” were actual French words, but figured he would get the gist.

“Oui,” he responded.

“How? Comment?”

Zavier flicked a glance over at Jesse. “Ten thousand dollars.”

“Yes. Cash.”

“Then I take you to Port-au-Prince. After we go down, after,” Zavier tried to think of a word, gave up, and took his hand off the steering wheel to mime the notion of hills, “there are other roads. Other roads, no police.”

We all breathed easier after hearing that. Until we turned off the highway, and onto those other ‘roads’: dirt tracks wrenched into tortured landscapes by the rainy season.

The Toyota bounced and rattled along at maybe ten miles an hour. Our lone headlight illuminated endless fields, only occasionally leavened by the silhouette of a building, an animal, or even a tree. It occurred to me that I had seen hardly any trees in Haiti. For the most part it was like driving through a dead and blasted land.

At one point the car got stuck in mud outside a tent city of earthquake refugees and we all had to get out and push it free. The night air was cool and damp, the flapping of the tents in the breeze sounded like some kind of dying animal, and a small crowd of solemn-faced Haitians in rags grew around us as we worked, watching silently, as if we might suddenly disappear if they spoke. Their wordless gazes felt like a terrible burden and it was a relief to get moving again. After that I couldn’t really fall asleep, I had mud caked all over me and was too tense and nervous, but I slipped into a kind of waking daze. Sophie’s head rested heavily on my shoulder but I could tell from her breath that she too was still awake.

When I noticed ragged wooden huts, and people sleeping in rags in the mud, I sat up and began to look groggily around. Dawn had stained the eastern sky. Smoke curled into the air from a couple of open fires, and I heard the distant growl of a dirt bike.

“Are we there yet?” I asked foggily, like a child.

“Soon,” Zavier assured me. “Soon.’

The slums grew denser. The sun rose, and wildly colourful taptaps began to pass us, jammed full of early-morning passengers. We passed high walls painted with the colourful logos of Bintang beer and Comme Il Faut cigarettes. Zavier stopped at a Total station to fill up. From there the road was paved, and busy with traffic, until we crossed a bridge and turned down a steep, muddy track into an urban valley between and below two busy major roads, near what might once have been a creek but was now a sewer.

The water was clogged with an amazingly dense and kaleidoscopic mass of filth and garbage. About twenty feet away from its edge there began a shantytown of a thousand tin huts and narrow mud pathways, barely big enough for two to walk abreast. There was so much earthquake damage that it looked like some low-rent Godzilla had gone on a random walk through the neighbourhood and reduced half its buildings to rubble. Even the intact ones were invariably cracked and skewed. Above them, a madman’s spiderweb of improvised electrical wiring hung from leaning wooden poles that looked homemade. Zavier parked the Toyota at the edge of this interstitial hive.

“Where are we?” I couldn’t imagine why we had stopped in such an awful place.

“ Chez moi ,” he explained. “My home. Vous pouvez rester ici. ”

Three other vehicles sat parked at the edge of the shantytown. All were in even worse shape than Zavier’s Toyota. The rusting carcasses of two more lay nearby, half-buried in silted mud and garbage. We emerged from the car and stared at the sea of poverty and filth.

“You know things are bad when this is your refuge,” Jesse said gloomily.

Two neighbourhood kids ran up and began to chatter to Zavier. Moments later they were joined by a young woman, and then an old man. Soon a dozen people surrounded him, calling for his attention. He spoke to them briefly and powerfully, seemingly dictating the solution to some local dispute, and they listened with careful attention. Around us Zavier seemed hesitant, deferential, even submissive, but in the shantytown his body language and tone of voice were those of a king.

Crisis apparently resolved, he turned back to us and said, “You come with me.”

Zavier’s home was one of the shantytown’s largest, which wasn’t saying much: it was maybe twenty feet square, made of sheets of corrugated tin set directly into the mud. The roof was held down with heavy stones. Gaps were patched with sheets of canvas or plastic bags. We had to stoop as we entered the curtained opening that served as a door, to avoid banging our heads.

Inside was nicer. A selection of ratty carpets mostly covered the dirt floor. There were cushions and stools to sit on, a little stove, and a big wooden box in which various plastic and metal subcontainers rested, some full of rice and beans. A solidly built woman with a weathered face, dressed in a red-and-white dress, was boiling water and frying plantains on the stove. Four children of varying ages slept on ragged blankets. A wooden counter that had once been a sawhorse held four piles of clean blue-and-white clothing, school uniforms, folded and stacked with reverential attention. They had made lemonade out of the earthquake’s lemons by running a clothesline between two parallel cracks. On the wall opposite, a crucifix hung between two small and strangely detailed painted human figures, one made of wood, one of carved bone. Later I realized those were voodoo fetishes.