Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [52]
For two weeks Lulu didn’t miss a day on the boat, and he talked about money so incessantly that Syto wondered if his brother had gone boujwa, money-crazy. “You know,” Lulu would say, “in a way it would be terrible to have a lot of money. All these people hanging around, all these women in your bed, you’d never know if it was you they liked or just your money.” Moneymoneymoney like an itch on his tongue, this from a man who claimed he could hear dogs chuckling to themselves and who the voodoo gods favored with frequent possessions and dreams. One day as they were hauling in the lobster traps, Lulu said, “You know, Syto, I don’t think it was the devil who tempted Jesus. I don’t think the devil was out there with him at all, those forty days in the wilderness. That was just Jesus all by himself, oui. Nobody out there tempting Jesus but Jesus himself.”
Syto was worried for his brother. He was worried for them both, but when they found another load of contraband—four duffel bags this time, in the shade of the trees that rimmed Pointe Boucan—Lulu studied the situation a moment, then said:
“I don’t even want the shit.”
“Well I sure don’t want it,” said Syto. “So what do we do?”
A black and green dragonfly skittered past their heads. The sea rustled against the rocks like a cow scratching its back. “No way we’re giving it to the cops,” said Lulu.
“No.”
“So is there any politicaille we can halfway trust? Even this much.” Lulu flashed the tip-end of a finger.
“How about Méreste?” Syto suggested.
Lulu made a gagging noise.
“He used to be a priest.”
Lulu’s head tipped forward, conceding this.
“He’s Lavalas,” Syto said, invoking the once-revered name of President Aristide’s party.
“I thought he was MPP.”
“Whatever, I can’t keep them all straight anymore.”
“Okay, we might as well. He’s probably our best shot.”
Senator Jean-Mario Méreste received Syto and Lulu in his walled compound on the outskirts of Jacmel. Dressed in a white guayabera and drapey linen slacks, he accepted the contraband with a furrowed brow, praising the Charles brothers’ steadfast civic spirit and respect for the law. Within days, as if by coincidence, the senator’s entourage was flaunting Uzi machine guns as they tooled around town in new Toyota pickups. Senator Méreste had acquired a Mercedes SUV, and was being mentioned on the radio as a possible presidential contender.
Well, what could you do. The evenings he wasn’t fishing Syto sat in his meditation place under the almond tree, and while the leaves dropped around him like exhausted birds he tried to put the whole business out of his mind. Neighbors came by to gossip and sympathize, and often Esther sat with him under the tree, silently stitching up the shredded nets he brought in. She never spoke—she’d had the pa-palé disease ever since their daughter’s death—but it wasn’t a surly or raging silence, Syto knew that now. At first he’d thought she was angry with him, which he understood—wasn’t he furious with himself? Though why that was he couldn’t exactly say. But with time he began to suspect that her silence had nothing to do with him, that she was performing an act of intense devotion like the nuns who pledged themselves to mindfulness of God, adhering to a passion so pure and strict that their lives amounted to a form of prayer.
It demanded respect, this kind of silence; he no longer tried to trick her into talking, though it was lonely, having a wife who never spoke. They were in their quiet mode under the almond tree one evening when their neighbors hustled up carrying Lulu in a sling. His eyes were swollen shut, his face resembled pulped fruit, and from the whistling in his chest Syto knew that several of his ribs were broken. The neighbors had found him slumped in the Jacmel town square, blubbering with pain and delirious rage. They got him into a tap-tap headed for Marigot, and on the way, revived by water and a couple of hits of rum, he told them how he’d stood outside Méreste’s gate, denouncing the senator in such livid terms that his thugs had no choice but to rush out and beat