Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [48]
Sonny was confused. “But aren’t I in trouble?”
McClure had almost stopped laughing, but this set him off again. “Nah, you aren’t in trouble, nobody’s in trouble. Look, I don’t give a damn how Merrill got that deal, I just don’t want him thinking he can pull that shit without me knowing. Unh-unh, not on my watch. That’s the one thing I won’t give him. Plus, you know, I sort of hate the son of a bitch.” With an amiable, stinging slap to Sonny’s back, McClure veered off toward the parking lot. “Later, pro, I’ll give you a call. We’ll get together sometime and hack it around.”
Sonny walked into the pro shop with the dazed air of a man trying to remember where he’d left his pants. Tommy Ng was spinning a ball on the face of a sand wedge, a zen thing he could do for hours.
“Sonny, are you okay?”
Sonny sat on the stool behind the counter. He still had his money, he still had his job—so why did he feel so bad?
“I think I’m going crazy,” he said.
Tommy popped the ball into his hand. “Oh, gee, for a second I thought it was something serious. Crazy, sure, that’s nothing, sooner or later everybody goes crazy around here.” Tommy waited a couple of seconds for Sonny’s comeback; when nothing happened he spoke again, more gently now.
“Hey Sonny, you want a beer? It’s almost Happy Hour, why don’t we go get a beer.”
“Yeah,” Sonny said. He was trying to reconcile the two pictures in his head, his daughters side by side with crazy McClure. Why he’d think of his kids just now he couldn’t say, but the pain of their absence seemed to have a different feel—like a tumor in his gut? Like he wasn’t allowed to hope. Outside it had started raining again. Back in the locker room the generals were playing cards. Sonny stared at the rain and decided he would never understand anything.
“Sure,” he said to Tommy. “Let’s drink a beer.”
Bouki and the Cocaine
Syto Charles saw the go-fasts before anyone. They started coming in the spring after the peacekeepers left, always at night, always running very fast, spearing out of the south with a shrill, concussive roar that he didn’t take for anything but trouble. Soon every Haitian on the southern coast knew about the boats from Colombia, how they crossed the sea in ten bone-crunching hours with the payloads of cocaine and gangster supplies that their partners on the Haitian side needed to set up shop. Michelet, the police chief of Marigot, could be heard on the air six times a day denouncing this new and barbarous threat. “Anyone with informa tion should please inform us,” he woofed on Radio Lumière, his voice deep but warbly, lacking tonal weight. “We need every citizen’s vigilance to help us fight this terrible scourge.” Planes came and went from Jacmel at all hours of the night, the planes, people said, that were hauling the drugs to America. Rival gangs were shooting it out in Port-au-Prince, while in the mountains above the capital, Miami-style mansions were crowding out the farms.
“Ah-ha,” said Lulu, watching a go-fast pass a quarter mile off their bow, streaking south through the soupy predawn light. Syto’s younger brother Louis was a strapping man in the prime of life, by nature both happier and more caustic than Syto. The same gracefulness that made him attractive to women also made him a first-class hand on the boat, though lately he’d been calling himself an artist and had grown increasingly slack about catching fish. “So those are the bums who are ruining the country.”
Syto was kneading a piece of coral out of one of their nets. “In case you haven’t noticed, the country’s already ruined.”
“They just come and go like that and nobody stops them?”
Syto frowned at the net. “You’re welcome to try.”
For a moment they watched the go-fast, an open-hulled flange with a low profile and three podlike heads tucked behind the windshield. Great rooster tails of foam vaulted off the stern; the boat was beautiful in the purplish gray light, beautiful in a cold, cruel, luminous way.
“Fout,” Lulu muttered, then with a bit more malice, “just look at that boat.” He glanced