Boozehound - Jason Wilson [80]
Later, we walked to the beachside bar, and my friend Kevin purchased, for a simple glass of rum, a straw hat painted fluorescent green and orange. Our bartender, the same one who’d run out of rum the night before and charged us for using our own, told us that cruise ships would soon be returning to Jacmel, calling there as they did thirty years ago. When we scoffed and pointed out all the garbage and metal debris littering the harbor, the bartender said, “Cruise ships already call at Cap Haitien in the north. The cruise companies just don’t tell the Americans that they’re coming to Haiti. They say it’s a ‘secret Caribbean island.’ ” It’s true about Cap Haitien. If your cruise ship has stopped for a boozy afternoon on a “private island” called Labadee … well, you’ve actually been in Haiti.
Saintil suggested we go see a Carnival cockfight that was happening on the outskirts of town, and we reluctantly agreed. As our truck approached the cockfight pit, a fight had already begun. Under the thatched roof, men cradled roosters, and each of the birds’ heads was covered with a sock or a rag so they wouldn’t be provoked to bare their talons before the fight. We bought tickets and squeezed past barefoot spectators who spilled off the wooden benches and leaned on one another to see two roosters tearing each other into a bloody mess. The fight took an agonizing twenty minutes, with the crowd cheering each time one of the cocks staggered backward after a blow. Finally, one of them fell, and we watched money change hands.
We waited in the sun for the second fight, watching a friendly, toothless old man and his son sharpen their rooster’s claws with a rusty knife. We stood trying to decide if we wanted to continue to sunburn ourselves or squeeze back under the roof. We watched a woman ladling a red homemade liquor out of a huge washtub. Nearly one hundred men drank out of the same rusty metal cup. We broke open our bottles of Barbancourt and passed them around.
Finally, as the hot stench of sweaty bodies stuffed in tight quarters under a sunbaked thatched roof reached its peak, the two cocks began fighting. But just as one rooster lunged for the other, the friendly toothless old man leaped into the ring and stood screaming with outstretched hands. The whole pit erupted in Creole curses and yelling. Saintil translated the argument to us as if this sort of thing happened every day: The old man who jumped in the ring shouted that the opposing rooster was under a voodoo spell and that a zombie walked among the spectators at the cockfight. The old man declared that he was a powerful man and insisted upon standing in the ring to ward off the effects of the zombie. Of course, the other men around the pit didn’t like the idea of the old man standing in the middle of the cockfight and took issue. Another half hour of arguing ensued, with a lot of shoving and pointing. Finally, the fight was canceled. A young boy walked through the crowd, carefully counting bills out of a paper bag, paying back those who’d gambled. Judging from the tenor of the now-angry cockfight crowd—and in tune with my sudden desire to join PETA upon return home—we decided to return to Jacmel before the next match started.
Later that evening, Kevin, Míchel, Saintil, and I sat at our hotel’s patio bar with more Barbancourt and listened to a ragtag band consisting of ten men and only three instruments: a bongo, a homemade banjo, and a pair of maracas. The old man with the maracas,