Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [51]
People shrugged; the truth was right before your eyes, but what could you do? “Our problem,” Lulu said on the boat one day, “is that we’re chumps. We let those guys run all over us.”
“Don’t talk like that,” Syto objected, reaching over the side for a handful of water to splash on his head. It was a hot, cloudless day; the water around them was the same dazzling blue as the sky, so that at times Syto had the unsettling sensation that they were floating free in space. “We’re fishermen, we earn ourselves an honest living. Have a little respect for yourself.”
“Respect? Come on Syto, it’s like Bouki and Ti-Malice and we’re poor dumb Bouki, those cops are driving around laughing at us.” Every Haitian grew up listening to the old tales about dimwitted Bouki and sly Ti-Malice, an operator who was always taking Bouki to the cleaners. Though it seemed you were supposed to feel sorry for Bouki, Syto had noticed how people took smirking pleasure in Ti-Malice’s cons and scams.
“Well, I don’t have any regrets,” he said. Though he was just as disgusted as Lulu, he wouldn’t admit it. “We tried to do the right thing.”
“You try to do the right thing, that’s a good way to starve.” Lulu paused to light a cigarette. “Bouki starves while Ti-Malice gets nice and fat.”
Syto didn’t need it, Lulu’s reminders of just how degrading life could be, but Syto also knew this: after Marie-Lucie died he would have gone crazy if it hadn’t been for Lulu mouthing off on the boat, cracking jokes about their luck, the fish, the world, or Lulu falling down possessed because of the rhythm of the waves, or Lulu sitting in the stern and saying things like “I think that Man is the shadow of God” or just smoking and being a bum, so that Syto had to jump up and scold him instead of quietly fishing until he broke in two from grief. But one morning Lulu announced that he was an artist, and now he spent most of his days painting the dreams he had at night, making dark, blobby pictures that seemed to rise out of an underwater realm in his head. When he got three or four together, he’d go hang around the square in Jacmel and try to sell them to the blans who wandered through, aid workers, mostly, sometimes a dazed tourist or two.
“Tell me this,” Lulu went on, mumbling now. He was using both hands to coil the pisket net, which required him to hold the pull line in his mouth; between the rope and the dangling cigarette there wasn’t much room for talk. “Does Esther know about the drugs?”
Syto considered. “I think so.”
“You think so? You mean you told her?”
“Well, no.”
“Did she start talking?”
“You know she hasn’t.”
Lulu spun the net outward with a twist of his arms, the net flaring, smacking the water like a fond kiss. “Well if you didn’t tell her and she isn’t talking, how do you know she knows?”
“She may not talk, Lulu, but that doesn’t mean she’s deaf. She goes to the market, she listens to the radio. She knows what’s going on.”
“Too much chagrin,” Lulu said. The net was sinking through the water as if drifting off to sleep. “Too much sadness, I really feel for her. I guess if you guys could have another kid…”
Syto shook his head. The midwife said there would be no more children; Marie-Lucie’s birth had torn Esther too badly. Lulu fell silent for a time, watching the water, then he gave the net an exploratory tug.
“How much do you think those drugs were worth?”
“I don’t know,” Syto answered. “A lot, I guess. If you believe the radio.”
For a moment the only sounds were the water’s slap and gurgle, the creaking of the mast like a bone out of joint. Both brothers were thinking the same thing, and each knew the other was thinking it, but neither was willing to say the words.
“She needs a change in her life, Esther,” said Lulu, and he began drawing in the net. “And you too, Syto, you’re in a major rut.” The net surfaced, a fist of sardines clumped at the end. “But change is always hard, that’s a true fact. And speaking for myself, I’m a peaceful