The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [39]
“Need help?” Claude asked from a few feet away.
He’d been sitting on the porch with some of the men.
Dany threw his dusty shirt on the ground, climbed on top of the mausoleum, and sat down. His aunt’s body would be placed in one of the higher slots, one of two not yet taken.
“Excuse me,” Dany said, “for earlier.”
“I understand,” Claude said. “I’d be a real asshole if I got pissed off at you for anything you did or said to me at a time like this. You’re in pain, man. I get that.”
“I don’t know if I’d call it pain,” Dany said. “There’s no word yet for it. No one has thought of a word yet.”
“I know, man,” Claude said. “It’s a real bitch.”
In spite of his huge muscles and oversized tattoos, Claude seemed oddly defenseless, like a refugee lost at sea, or a child looking for his parents in a supermarket aisle. Or maybe that’s just how Dany wanted to see him, to make him seem more normal, less frightening.
“I hear you killed your father,” Dany said.
The words sounded less severe coming out of his mouth than they did rolling around in his head. Claude pushed both his hands into his pants pockets and looked off into the distance toward the banana groves.
“Can I sit?” he asked, turning his face back toward the mausoleum platform, where Dany was sitting.
“I didn’t mean to say it like that,” Dany said. “It’s not my business.”
“Yes, I killed my old man,” Claude said in the same abrupt tone that he used for everything else. “Everyone here knows that by now. I wish I could say it was an accident. I wish I could say he was a bastard who beat the crap out of me and forced me to defend myself. I wish I could tell you I hated him, never loved him, didn’t give a fuck about him at all. I was fourteen and strung out on shit. He came into my room and took the shit. It wasn’t just my shit. It was shit I was hustling for someone else. I was really fucked up and wanted the shit back. I had a gun I was using to protect myself out on the street. I threatened him with it. He wouldn’t give my shit back, so I shot him.”
There was even less sorrow in Claude’s voice than Dany had expected. Perhaps Claude too had never learned how to grieve or help others grieve. Maybe the death of a parent early in life, either by one’s own hand or by others, eliminated that instinct in a person.
“I’m sorry,” Dany said, feeling that someone should also think of a better word for their particular type of sorrow.
“Sorry?” Claude wiped a shadow of a tear from his face with a quick swipe of the back of his hand. “I’m the luckiest fucker alive. I’ve done something really bad that makes me want to live my life like a fucking angel now. If I hadn’t been a minor, I’d have been locked up for the rest of my life. They might have even given me the chair. And if the prisons in Port had had more room, or if the police down there were worth a damn, I’d be in a small cell with a thousand people right now, not sitting here talking to you.”
Claude threw his hands up in the air and, raising his voice, as if to call out to the stars slowly evaporating from the sky, shouted, “Even with everything I’ve done, with everything that’s happened to me, I’m the luckiest fucker on this goddamned planet. Someone somewhere must be looking out for my ass.”
It would be an hour or so now before Dany’s aunt’s burial at dawn. The moon was already fading, slipping away, on its way to someplace else. The only thing Dany could think to do for his aunt now was to keep Claude speaking, which wouldn’t be so hard, since Claude was already one of them, a member of their tribe. Claude