Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [50]
Syto sailed out alone to do his fishing that night, as regular in his work as the seasons and tides. He fished during the full moon like everyone else, and he fished during the waning moon when no one else bothered, and under the new moon, which was even worse, and before hurricanes, which was sheer futility, but since his daughter died several years ago, catching fish wasn’t so much the point. Most nights the only other boats he saw were go-fasts. If he was working close to shore they’d aim for his boat, perhaps attracted by the light from his lampe-batterie; Syto would go on setting his hooks and lines and ignore the banshee shriek bearing down on him, and when they saw it was a fisherman they’d cut to the side, the hull flashing sleek and pale in the night.
Tonight he baited his string of hooks with pisket and chicken guts, spotlit the water with his lampe-batterie, and then drifted, not so much thinking about things as biding with a certain awareness of his life. Réfléchi, that was better than direct thinking for the world of problems you could never really solve. The problem of contraband, for example, or the confusions of politics, or the trouble that came of needing to eat every day. Or the death of children, a cruelly regular thing in Trois Pins. He and his wife had lost four, the first three as infants and the last, Marie-Lucie, when she was almost seven. That one was never far from his mind, a petite, clean-limbed, willful little girl who’d insisted on starting school at age five, nagging her father until he enrolled her at Marigot’s ramshackle École Supérieure. One day she’d been skipping rope and singing out her lessons, and the next she was trembling with fever on her mat, her ankle blanched and puffy as a rotten fish. By morning both legs were swollen, her eyes glassy and distant. Syto borrowed a neighbor’s chestnut mare, wrapped Marie-Lucie in a towel, and cradled her across the saddle, and they didn’t climb down until the shambling little horse carried them all the way to Jacmel. On the road Marie-Lucie went out of her head with fever, talking and singing with such familiar exuberance that Syto thought he would go insane with grief. At the clinic the doctor shook his head—no antibiotics, the embargo had seen to that, there wasn’t so much as an aspirin to be had. They gave Marie-Lucie a bed and Syto a mat; that night the life poured out of her like water from a pail, and the next day, cradling her body again across the saddle, Syto didn’t so much want to die himself as to lie down in a ditch and wait for time to end. People walking along the road understood at once; they stopped, took off their hats, and bowed their heads, and many called him “brother” and offered a prayer. But just as he passed the Avant-Poste in Marigot, the soldiers on the gallery had burst out laughing. A whole row of them lazing there in the shade, chairs tipped against the wall, rifles propped nearby; Syto remembered Michelet among them, Michelet with his sergeant’s stripes and prissy mustache, his trousers tucked smartly into gleaming boots. At that moment Syto had felt murder in his heart—how dare they—and then he realized they weren’t laughing at him, they hadn’t even noticed him passing by. One of the soldiers had simply told a joke—it had nothing to do with him, and yet their laughter cut deep, rankling over the years, his mind playing the sound of it over and over as he rode the ocean swells at night.
Within a week all the Marigot cops were driving Land Cruisers. Michelet himself had paid cash for one of the big fine farms near Cyvadier, or so the rumors went; eventually he went on the radio to defend himself. “All contraband has been sent to headquarters in Port-au-Prince,” the chief declared, and he, personally, “God’s