Edwidge Danticat - Haiti Noir

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

“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, monchè! We find a place as close to Paradise as this universe allows, that’s what we do to it. Sa kab fèm rele Mèt 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 poulè kreyòl 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: Fòk nan pwen .” He couldn’t remember the rest of the phrase. “I didn’t get it.”

“Magloire said that?” Charlie’s eyes had narrowed. “That’s Bizango, basically. Vodou for most people here is Ginen, which is a whole lot like charismatic Christianity from all I’ve seen of it, but there’s this other thing that goes on, a kind of inversion of it, I mean. Left-handed.”

The word sinister surfaced in Oliver’s mind, like a paper flower blooming in a glass. Charlie Chapo’s left hand pumped on the tightly folded triangle of red.

“I mean,” Charlie Chapo was saying, “from the ougan’s point of view, well, yeah, Ginen is all sweetness and light, but it’s hard to get paid for that, see? So most of them work with the left hand too, that’s how they put it. For people who’d sell their mother or eat their own children to get what they want, sometimes…”

“What do they want?”

“Power. Sex. Money. Power.” Charlie shrugged. “Same as you, right? It’s not like these are the only people in the world who’ll throw a lot away for immediate gratification. In the long run it’s not such a good idea, because they have to bind their spirits to make them deliver like that, and the spirits can be pretty angry once they get loose. But in the short term, fòk nan pwen pou’m pa jwen.”

“That’s it,” said Doctor Oliver. “What does it mean?”

“There’d have to not be any for me to not get some.”

Charlie frowned. “Let me see what he got for you.”

The jab of anxiety Doctor Oliver felt was, thanks to his pill, no worse than being prodded with a hair. He pulled the small red and gilt envelope from his shirt pocket.

“Huh,” said Charlie Chapo. “That’s a ghost-money envelope. I get them in Chinatown and use them to give money to people down here. Well, no reason Magloire wouldn’t have a few.”

When Charlie Chapo opened the envelope and curled his index finger into it, Doctor Oliver felt a stronger stab: somebody’s messing with my dope. Charlie Chapo rubbed a generous amount of white powder between his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t know,” he said, and dragged his finger through a drop of water on the table. A smear like white paint appeared on the wood of the tabletop.