Haiti Noir - Edwidge Danticat [38]
“Without fear of the nighted wyvern,” he pronounced in a fat mellow tone, as Charlie hove up to the table, still raking water out of his thin hair with his fingers.
“Something cheered you up,” Charlie said, raising an eyebrow as he sat down.
“I ordered for us,” Doctor Oliver said, and at that moment a waiter began setting down platters of poulè kreyòl and banann peze. They ate without talking very much, which was the custom of the country. Or, rather, Doctor Oliver pushed his food around his plate, since the drug he had taken destroyed his appetite. As the dishes were cleared, he ordered them postprandial glasses of the marvelous rum. Just beyond the hotel’s outward rippling of light, drums had begun a rich insistent rhythm. The ceremonies Charlie had mentioned would be gunning up now, not far away.
“Thanks for putting me onto Magloire.”
“He take care of you?” Charlie seemed pleased.
Doctor Oliver reached for the envelope in his shirt pocket, then stopped. “He said something to me: Fòk nan pwen.” He couldn’t remember the rest of the phrase. “I didn’t get it.”
“Magloire said that?” Charlie’s eyes had narrowed. “That’s Bizango, basically. Vodou for most people here is Ginen, which is a whole lot like charismatic Christianity from all I’ve seen of it, but there’s this other thing that goes on, a kind of inversion of it, I mean. Left-handed.”
The word sinister surfaced in Oliver’s mind, like a paper flower blooming in a glass. Charlie Chapo’s left hand pumped on the tightly folded triangle of red.
“I mean,” Charlie Chapo was saying, “from the ougan’s point of view, well, yeah, Ginen is all sweetness and light, but it’s hard to get paid for that, see? So most of them work with the left hand too, that’s how they put it. For people who’d sell their mother or eat their own children to get what they want, sometimes …”
“What do they want?”
“Power. Sex. Money. Power.” Charlie shrugged. “Same as you, right? It’s not like these are the only people in the world who’ll throw a lot away for immediate gratification. In the long run it’s not such a good idea, because they have to bind their spirits to make them deliver like that, and the spirits can be pretty angry once they get loose. But in the short term, fòk nan pwen pou’m pa jwen.”
“That’s it,” said Doctor Oliver. “What does it mean?”
“There’d have to not be any for me to not get some.”
Charlie frowned. “Let me see what he got for you.”
The jab of anxiety Doctor Oliver felt was, thanks to his pill, no worse than being prodded with a hair. He pulled the small red and gilt envelope from his shirt pocket.
“Huh,” said Charlie Chapo. “That’s a ghost-money envelope. I get them in Chinatown and use them to give money to people down here. Well, no reason Magloire wouldn’t have a few.”
When Charlie Chapo opened the envelope and curled his index finger into it, Doctor Oliver felt a stronger stab: somebody’s messing with my dope. Charlie Chapo rubbed a generous amount of white powder between his thumb and forefinger. “I don’t know,” he said, and dragged his finger through a drop of water on the table. A smear like white paint appeared on the wood of the tabletop.
“I wouldn’t run this up my nose.” Charlie caught Oliver’s eye. “It’s lime, I think.”
“What, quick lime?”
“No, no! They’re not trying to hurt you. It’s like chalk, basically. They use it for whitewash.” Charlie closed the envelope and flicked it across the table like a paper football. “What did you pay for it?”
“Twenty U.S.”
“Right,” said Charlie. “Kind of suspiciously cheap, don’t you think?” He looked out the ring of local light toward the fires on the barricades. “I dunno, though, in ’97 I could have bought an assault rifle for that in the capital. Twenty dollars.”
“Ever wish you had?” Doctor Oliver managed to ask, from the depths of the chill now locked around his