Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [63]
As soon as he walked down to the courtyard he heard one of his neighbors hissing at the side gate, trying to get his attention. It was barely light, but the streets were already full with vendors hawking their wares and people walking back from Mass, children heading to school and camions and taxis dropping off and picking up fares. His neighbor Darlie, a tall and skinny girl with long braids dangling past her waist, quickly slipped through when he opened the gate and pulled it shut behind her.
“Pastor,” she whispered, “last night they took the church’s generator and when Gigi tried to stop them, they picked her up and threw her off one of the terraces.”
“O bon dye,” My God, he mouthed, raising both his hands to his head. How could Gigi, another kind neighbor, have put herself between an armed gang and a generator? And how could he have not heard her screams from his room?
“Is she alive?” he mouthed. He knew better than to use his voice box, which would draw attention.
“One of her legs is broken,” the neighbor continued. “She’s in the hospital.”
My uncle reached into his pocket where he had his passport and plane ticket, and into his jacket pocket where he often kept his Bible, on the off chance there might be a few dollars left. All his money was gone.
“But this is not what I came to say. Pastor, you should leave now. They’re coming. Go away quick. They’re coming.”
She unlatched the gate and slipped out. My uncle was trying to close it behind her when a man’s large hand reached in and yanked the metal latch away from his fingers. A short, beefy youth with a small Haitian flag wrapped around his head quickly stepped into the courtyard. He had a face pockmarked with what looked like lines of razor scars. He was followed by another man, this one taller, thinner, with a thin, uneven beard and a white fishnet cap covering an abundant head of long dreadlocked hair. A bald-headed man followed. The last one opened the gate wider to allow in a few others. Then followed another group, then another, all their faces quickly merging into one angry haze. Suddenly he understood the true workings of a mob, one infuriated body morphing into another until they all became limbs to one raging monster.
The courtyard was soon filled with young men. And when he looked up at the balconies and terraces, they were crammed too.
“Pastor,” the chief dread shouted, his voice strained and hoarse. “Thanks to you, we lost fifteen guys yesterday and we have six with bullet wounds. Because you let the fuckers in, you need to pay or we’ll cut your head off.”
The chief dread particularly cited the cases of two young men my uncle knew, both not yet twenty years old. During the raid, a bullet had fractured one’s ribs. The other had been shot in the stomach. Their families were afraid to take them to the public hospital, the chief dread said, because, assuming that they were all criminals, the police routinely shot young men with bullet wounds there. They needed money to find a doctor for these men and others, a doctor who would come to them.
The amount he was asked to pay was too impossibly high to even remember. It might as well have been a billion dollars. Hoping to bargain, reason, my uncle reached over and tried to touch the dread’s burly arm. The dread shoved his hand aside with enough force to make him nearly lose his balance. As he steadied himself on his feet, my uncle raised his voice box to his neck and said, “Tande.”
The chief dread motioned for quiet from the growing crowd.
“I need time,” my uncle continued. “I need to make some phone calls. I need to get in touch with my family in New York. I need to ask them to send me some money. My phone is not working. I have to find a phone. Come back this afternoon, at one, and I’ll have something for you.”
The chief dread looked over at the crowd, then up at the classroom balconies, eyeing those gathered for their approval. He then raised his sizable hands in the air and like Moses parting the Red Sea, signaled for them to scatter. But they didn’t go far.