Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [55]
Michelet’s face turned positively saurian. “Yeah,” he grunted, “let’s talk about your brother. How is his health these days?”
Syto eagerly bobbed his head. “Fine, good, sure, he’s going to be okay. No problem there, m’sieu le chef.”
“He deserved it, you know, that punishment he got. Those were some pretty bad things he was saying about me.”
“Oh my brother,” Syto wailed, tilting his face toward the clean aqueous light of the trees, “listen, my brother goes a little crazy sometimes. You know he’s an artist? Yeah, he’s one of those crazy guys. But we’re watching him, don’t worry about a thing, chef. He won’t be bugging you anymore.”
Michelet scowled. He pondered a moment, then snuffed his nose. “Charles, it’s not a good idea to mess with me.”
“No, m’sieu le chef.”
“We’ve got the Americans breathing down our necks on this, they’re screaming at us to shut down the go-fasts. So if you know anything, you better tell me.” He knocked the gear into reverse. “And if you don’t, stay the hell out of my way.”
Syto was already nostalgic for his previous life, when all he’d had to worry about was coaxing a living from the fished-out waters off Trois Pins. “You take even the little fish like this?” a blan once asked him, one of the aid guys who occasionally came around to pester the fishermen with stupid questions. Syto had shrugged and stared at his feet, somewhat cowed by the blan. “Well, sure,” he’d answered. “If I don’t take it, somebody else will.” And that’s what it was coming to, Syto reflected, either you took what you could or you starved to death, but fishing was a relatively obscure arena. The whole world, on the other hand, was mad for drugs. He worried so much he thought his head might explode, and by the time Nixon finally showed up, Syto was more than ready to get rid of the stuff.
He came in the middle of the night with three of his friends, all of them burly, glowering, coal black youths with stylish silky clothes and gold chains around their necks. Lulu was with them; it had been years since Nixon visited Trois Pins and he couldn’t remember his way in the dark, finally stumbling onto Lulu’s hut by chance. Nixon had been born in Port-au-Prince under Duvalier père, when a rumor was going around that the American president was planning to visit; the boy’s mother, Syto and Lulu’s older sister, had named her son after the great man in hopes of winning an audience and maybe a break for her son. No visit had ever materialized, and only such breaks as Nixon could conjure for himself out of Haiti’s thin air of opportunity. In recent years word had drifted back through family channels of the fortune Nixon made during the embargo, buying gas over the Dominican border and running it into Port-au-Prince on armed trucks.
Now he was said to own gas stations and a fleet of tap-taps. Little Nixon, Syto thought as he stared at the bull-necked tough across the table, Nixon the skinny, sickly kid whose mother used to ship him off to Trois Pins whenever he needed fattening up. First he asked for a tumbler of water, which Esther placed before him on the table. Nixon took a pinch of the powder, dropped it into the glass, and pushed it into the light of the single candle. The crystals sank, then vanished before they reached the bottom. Next he placed some powder on a piece of cigarette foil and held it over the candle, the stuff melting and bubbling like cane syrup, liquefying into brown goo. Now he pinched out a thicker wad of crystals and scraped them into a line on the wooden table. He took a slim golden reed out of his pocket, hunched over the table, and proceeded to introduce the drugs to his nose.
Lulu shot Syto a horrified look—You suck it up your nose? Nixon sat back and smiled in a distant way; fireflies seemed to be floating inside his eyes. “Uncle,” he said, “where did you get this?”
Syto told him. Nixon seemed to know all about the go-fasts.
“How long have you had it?”
“About a week.”
“Who else