Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [20]
“And the Bigaud?” the Frenchman asked in English. “The Bathers?”
“He couldn’t get it.”
A quick grimace, then a fond, forgiving smile; he was gracious in the way of a pro stuck with amateurs. He acted like a gentleman, but he wasn’t—it was only since he’d lived in Haiti that Mason found himself thinking this way. Only since he’d met the first true gentleman of his life.
They gave him the money in a blue nylon bag, and he made them wait while he counted it. Later, perversely, he would think of this as the bravest thing he’d ever done, how he endured their stares and bemused sarcasm while he counted out the money. When it was finished and he’d zipped up the nylon bag, the Frenchman asked:
“What will you do now?”
Mason was puzzled, then adamant. “I’m going back, of course. I have to give him the money.”
The Frenchman’s cool failed him for the briefest moment. He seemed surprised, and in the silence Mason wondered, Is my honor so strange? And then the smile reengaged, with real warmth, it seemed, but Mason saw that he was being mocked.
“Yes, absolutely. They’re all waiting on you.”
At the house in Pacot he stuffed the cash up a ten-dollar voodoo drum he’d bought months earlier at the Iron Market. Then he settled in and went about his business, staying up late at night to listen for the door, going down to the park in the afternoons to take his daily drubbing at chess. He realized he was good at this kind of life, the lie of carrying on his normal routine while he kept himself primed for the tap on the back, the look from the stranger that said: Come. Meet me. Late at night he could hear machine guns chewing up the slums, a faint ghost-sound, the fear a kind of haunting. During the day he would look at the mountains above like huge green waves towering over the city, and he’d think, Let it come. Let it all crash down.
He missed the paintings with the same kind of visceral ache as he’d missed certain women who’d meant something to him. He missed the mulatto in a way that went beyond words, the man whose aura of purpose burned hot enough to fire even a cautious blan. My friend, Mason thought a hundred times a day, the phrase so con stant that it might have been a prayer. My very good friend whose name I don’t even know. The air felt heavy, thick with delay and anticipation, though the slow sway and bob of palm fronds seemed to counsel patience. Finally, one evening, he’d waited long enough. He carried his chess set past the park into the Salomon quarter, an awful risk that the mulatto would surely scold him for, but he couldn’t help himself. He had trouble finding the street and had almost given up when it appeared in the ashy half-light of dusk. He turned and walked along it with a casual air. Just a glance at the house was all he needed: the green walls streaked with soot, the charred stumps of the trees, the blackened, empty windows like hollow eye sockets. Just a glance, and he never broke the swing of his stride, never lost the easy rhythm of his breathing.
The next day he went back with his truck and driver, poking around under the guise of official business. He knocked on doors and explained himself; the neighbors shuffled their feet, picked at their hands, glanced up and down the block as they talked. Lots of shooting one night, they said, people shooting in the street. Bombs, and then the fire, though no one actually saw it—they’d rolled under their beds at the first shot. The next morning they’d edged outside to find the house this way, and no one had gone near it since.
When did it happen? Mason asked, but now the elastic Haitian sense of time came into play. Three days ago, one man said. Another said a month. Back at the office Mason went through the daily logs and found an incident dated ten days earlier, the day he’d left for Miami. The text of the report filled a quarter of a page. They had the street name wrong but otherwise it fit, the shooting and explosions and ensuing fire, then the de factos’ response to the O.A.S. inquiry. Seven charred bodies had been recovered from the