Haiti Noir - Edwidge Danticat [37]
Doctor Oliver spent the hottest part of the afternoon in his hotel room, half-watching coverage of the demonstrations on Haitian national television. When he woke the screen had gone blank and the day was almost over. He put on his shirt and ambled out barefoot. Charlie Chapo’s dust-covered truck was parked in the hotel lot, so he was unsurprised to find the man himself in the bar, drinking a large glass of the excellent local rum, except that it was rare for him to drink hard liquor. Charlie had taken off both his hat and his head rag and the remnants of his extremely dirty hair were sticking up. Doctor Oliver sat down and ordered the same.
“Bwa debèn,” Charlie was muttering fixedly, as if it were a mantra of some kind. “Bwa debèn.”
“What?” said Doctor Oliver, as jovially as he could. Charlie Chapo started as if he had not previously been aware of the doctor’s presence.
“Ebony wood.” His left hand had begun folding his red head cloth into ever smaller triangles. “It used to be code for slave cargo, back in the day when they had to smuggle them. Of course, whatever real ebony there might have been here was slashed out and ripped off and sent to Europe along with the gold and the coffee and sugar and hope, till there’s nothing left but bare rock most places, and women making dirt cakes instead of corn bread. That’s us, monchè! We find a place as close to Paradise as this universe allows, that’s what we do to it. Sa kab fèm rele Mèt Kalfou mwen!”
“What?” Doctor Oliver repeated. His sense of incomprehension had now taken on an ominous cast. Charlie Chapo was pumping that triangle of red cloth very hard in his left fist and Doctor Oliver felt obscurely that this action might cause something bad to happen.
“Oh,” said Charlie, looking at his left hand as if it belonged to somebody else. “I mean, do things the way I shouldn’t. Sorry …” He shook out the bandanna with his right hand and wiped his forehead with it. It was getting dark quickly. Bats skimmed the surface of the pool and a cocotier by the railing shivered its long fronds in the breeze. In the far distance they could both see the series of flaming barricades that cut the town off from the airport and the road down to the capital. Doctor Oliver’s apprehensive feelings intensified as he touched the vial in his pocket where his two remaining pills still clicked. He considered that Charlie Chapo might possibly have taken care of his problem personally if he’d wanted, instead of fobbing him off on Magloire. Charlie Chapo was occasionally assumed to be a drug dealer himself because he had no other obvious portfolio. His presence in Haiti was one of the many anomalies from which the whole country sometimes seemed to be constructed.
“My people can’t get in and I can’t get out,” Charlie Chapo was saying. “It just gums everything all up—and for nothing, that’s what gets me sometimes. You know a bad day here can be—”
“Very bad.” Doctor Oliver felt the truth of this in his spleen at the moment he said it.
“And you know, I hate it that they killed that poor woman. I just don’t— All right, there’s no less point in that than in anything, but it really didn’t have to be her.”
Charlie Chapo drained his rum glass and shook himself all over, then turned on Doctor Oliver a lopsided smile. “I just need to clean out my head is all.” There was something in the way he said it that made the doctor think he could lift off the top of his skull and rinse out the inside and replace it. “Do you mind if I use your shower?”
“Go for it,” Doctor Oliver said. “There’s even soap. It’s from Taiwan.”
By the time Charlie returned to the table, it was completely dark. The barefoot servants had lit the lamps, and the fires on the barricades