Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [14]
Late one afternoon he’d barely set up his board when a scrap of skin and bones came running toward him. Blan! the boy shouted, grinning wickedly, veni gon match pou ou! Mason packed up his set and followed the boy to a secluded corner of the park, a patch of trees and scrub screening it from the palace. There on the bench sat a mulatto, a young Haitian with bronze skin, an impressive hawk nose, and a black mass of hair that grazed his shoulders. His T-shirt and jeans were basic street, but the cracked white loafers seemed to hint at old affluence, also an attitude, a sexually purposed life that had been abandoned some time ago. He simply pointed to the spot where Mason should sit, and they started playing.
The mulatto took the first game in seven moves. Mason realized that with this one he was allowed to try; the next game lasted eleven moves. “You’re very good,” Mason said in French, but the mulatto merely gave a paranoiac twitch and reset his pieces. In the next game Mason focused all his mental powers, but the mulatto had a way of pinning you down with pawns and bishops, then wheeling his knights through the mush of your defense. This game went to thir teen moves before Mason admitted he was beaten. The mulatto sat back, eyed him a withering moment, then said in English:
“All of these nights you have been trying to lose.”
Mason shrugged, then began resetting the pieces.
“I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to be so stupid, even a blan,” said the mulatto. “You are mocking us.”
“No, that’s not it at all. I just felt…” Mason struggled for a polite way to say it.
“You feel pity for us.”
“Something like that.”
“You want to help the Haitian people.”
“That’s true. I do.”
“Are you a good man? A brave man? A man of conviction?”
Mason, who had never been spoken to in such solemn terms, needed a second to process the question. “Well, sure,” he replied, and really meant it.
“Then come with me,” said the mulatto.
He led Mason around the palace and into the hard neighborhood known as Salomon, a dense, scumbled antheap of cinderblock houses and packing-crate sheds, wobbly storefronts, markets, mewling beggars underfoot. Through the woodsmoke and dust and swirl of car exhaust the late sun took on an ocherous radiance, the red light washing over the grunged and pitted streets. Dunes of garbage filled out the open spaces, eruptions so rich in colorful filth that they achieved a kind of abstraction. With Mason half-trotting to keep up the mulatto cut along sidestreets and tight alleyways where Haitians tumbled at them from every side. A simmering roar came off the closepacked houses, a vibration like a drumroll in his ears that blended with the slur of cars and bleating horns, the scraps of Latin music shredding the air. There was something powerful here, even exalted; Mason felt it whenever he was on the streets, a kind of spasm, a queasy, slightly strung-out thrill feeding off the sheer muscle of the place.
It was down an alley near the cemetery, a small sea green house flaking chunks of itself, half-hidden by shrubs and a draggled row of saplings. The mulatto passed through the gate and into the house without speaking to the group gathered on the steps, a middle-aged couple and five or six staring kids. Mason followed the mulatto through the murk of the front room, vaguely aware of beds and mismatched plastic furniture, a cheesy New York–skyline souvenir clock. The next room was cramped and musty, the single window shuttered and locked. The mulatto switched on the bare light overhead and walked to an armoire that filled half the room. That too was locked, and he jabbed a key at it with the wrath of a man who finds such details an insult.
“Is this your house?” asked Mason, eyeing the