Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

He felt like this wasn’t some isolated incident in his life: that for a good long time now, the Marguerite Laurents of this world had been looking down their long, pointy noses at him, obstructing and impeding him. The way it was supposed to have worked was like this: law enforcement for ten years, then elected office. That’s the way it worked in Watsonville County, either law enforcement or military. They told him, “First you carry a gun, then you run.” So he carried a gun and ran twice. First he took a shot at state senate, but he never got the kind of full-throttle support from the local big shots that he’d needed to win the primary, which was an injustice after the sheer donkey hours he’d put in over the years. He and Kay had been shaking the money tree for all and sundry for a decade now: cocktail parties, fund-raisers, you name it. Knocking on doors, doing favors. It didn’t matter. No gratitude. Then, after Sheriff Shook’s heart attack, he’d expected that the sheriff’s job would be his, until Tony Guillermez and company decided that the Republican Party needed more Hispanic faces. “I can campaign in a sombrero,” Terry said. Not even a chuckle out of Tony. So that was that.

Then even the job was gone, when the new sheriff, a Democrat, fired all the Republicans. His right to do so, Terry would have done the same. Deputy sheriff is a political appointee. Been that way since Hector was piddling the rug. Still a bitter pill to swallow, since no one could really argue with his results, his arrest records, the clearance rates. Heard from a friend of a friend that twice in the last five years he had been very nearly Southeastern Lawman of the Year. Putting Marianne fucking Miller in that job, what a crock. Then came all the money problems. What a man did was provide for his family, and for a long while there, ipso friggingo facto , Terry was hardly a man. Now with this new job in Haiti, at least they could pay the mortgage.

Truth be told, Terry hated Haiti. Later, he’d laugh about how much he hated it. At the time, not a whole lot of ha-ha-ha . Last place he ever wanted to be in his whole life was Haiti. The number of times Terry had fantasized about one day living in Haiti was precisely zip. Would leave tomorrow if he could, never come back. He didn’t like the people, who kept making fun of him; he didn’t like the food, which was spicy and greasy. Just didn’t see much point in the place. This was his first time in a third world country, not counting a week in a resort in Cancún, and he hadn’t liked that much either. Came as a surprise to him that everyone was so fucking broke. He’d seen poverty back home — what cop hasn’t? — but Haiti was something else. All his life Terry had dreamed of being rich, and now in Haiti he was rich and he didn’t like it. Children walking barefoot with five-gallon drums of water on their heads, kids with hair red at the roots. Babies with swollen bellies, just like on TV. Back home, poverty smelled like fat and grease, like buckets of french fries simmering in the sun. But Haiti was like old sweat, bad fruit, shit, and ammonia. Every day he’d drive back from some small Haitian town with a prisoner or two handcuffed in the backseat, the smell so strong he’d gag.

Everywhere Terry went, people asked him for money, not just kids, but adults too, even fat, sleek, healthy-looking adults, like sea lions barking for fish. How the hell can you be fat when kids are hungry? Damn country made no sense to Terry. It was like a reflex with them, he thought: they saw someone white and the hand came up. Blan, ba’m yon cadeau —White, give me a present. He’d say no and they’d start shouting at him. Or he’d give them his change and they’d ask for more. The worst part was that he couldn’t criticize, not really. These people just wanted to suck on the same teat he was sucking on. He just had the good fortune to get on it first.

Terry knew what was right and what was wrong. That’s why he had gotten into law enforcement. Back in the States, he’d locked up bad guys. Threw them in lockup because they were scumbags. Got them to tell their sad, mean stories. Didn’t hate them, didn’t love them, just didn’t want them on the same streets as the people he loved. He’d felt proud of his work: it was something he could explain to his nephews. His father had once told him, “Never do a job you can’t explain to a child.” So he told the boys: “I keep good people safe from bad people.”

But here he was, and all he saw was wrong. The worst of it all was the prison. Almost every day he visited the prison, dropping off some poor fool. Hundreds of men locked up in a hole, no trial, no nothing, just sitting behind bars in a room about 130 degrees on a hot day, shitting in a little drain, eating next to nothing, with not much hope of ever getting out. Trials were held once a year, if that; and during the solitary several-week session of jurisprudence, of the three hundred prisoners awaiting justice, only a dozen or so might find their way to the courtroom. The rest just sat, all of them together, in an unlit cell so crowded that men were forced to sleep on their feet, and so fetid that the rotting air, like ammonia, burned your eyes and throat. Sometimes a prisoner’s file was simply lost, and then the accused could stay in prison, forgotten, until he died. The only way out of prison, innocent or guilty, was to bribe the prosecutor or judge. Getting arrested in Haiti was like getting kidnapped by the police. Terry saw all that, and he felt like a cog in an unjust machine. He tried to explain what he was doing in Haiti to his nephews, and they didn’t understand.

Kay White told me later that she started seriously worrying about him all alone out there in Haiti those first few months, before he met the judge. Cops’ wives hear a lot of stories about their men and their service revolvers, the way their eyes get to tracing the oily whorls of steel, the gun hypnotizing them, telling them to do bad things.

Terry would get on the phone with her those first few months and she’d say, “Honey, you sound so depressed.”

“I’m just not getting enough sleep.”

She’d say, “I’m proud of you.”

What she meant was, You’re a hero , but Terry knew that wasn’t true. He wasn’t a hero at all. He knew what a hero was. A hero was somebody who conquered himself. Broke down his fear into so many little pieces he could ignore them. He came from a family of heroic men. His grandfather had been a hero in Normandy. Never talked about that, didn’t need to. His uncle had been a hero in Vietnam. “Did my job”—that’s all he said. Terry was forty-two years old when he got to Haiti, and that’s an age when men take stock of things. Pretty much all he did was take stock of things. When he was a kid, he thought he’d be president one day. Hah! Then he scaled down his ambitions, and scaled them down way more.

Now he was a taxi driver in Hades.

The only thing that really made Terry happy those first few months in Haiti were the afternoons joshing around with this kid, Beatrice. When Terry arrived on Mission, he shared a house out near the Uruguayan base with a couple of other UNPOLs, a Spaniard and that Jordanian guy. The house was tended by a lady named Mirabelle, who swept and straightened and washed the men’s clothes and prepared a meal every evening. Mirabelle sometimes came in with her daughter, Beatrice, a studious, pretty girl who wore her hair in cornrows dotted with blue and yellow beads. Beatrice would help her mother finish the household chores, then sit at the kitchen table in the afternoon and do her homework. She was in her final year of lycée and dreamed of attending medical school in Port-au-Prince.

Although the composition of the household had varied over the duration of Mirabelle’s tenure as maid, from occupant to occupant an avuncular fondness for Beatrice had been passed down: the men of the household had paid Beatrice’s school fees since she had begun lycée. Coming home from patrol, Terry would tutor Beatrice in English in exchange for lessons in French and Creole. In three languages, he chafed her about boys and made her giggle; when he learned of her ambitions, he suggested to her that she could probably study abroad, and he looked up suitable programs for her on the Internet — in Canada, in France, and in the United States also. He liked her clean, well-scrubbed schoolgirl smell, which wafted across the kitchen table like hope, and her intelligence and drive. He liked the thought of this small girl one day wearing a doctor’s coat and treating swollen-bellied little babies and toddlers with rusty red hair. Thinking he was going to make it all possible for Beatrice was pretty much what kept Terry going those first few months on Mission.