He could see, even in the twilight, a downward grade that looked to him like the view from the top of an Olympic ski jump. A few clicks down the slope he spotted a patch of green-had to be the lake, or the river, he thought, where Alphonse had caught the fish. Long fucking way to walk, he thought, for six skinny fish.
“We walk from here be go,” Alphonse said, stating the obvious in his triple-broken dialect. “The village you looking for? C’est-li là, down that bottom.”
Cooper threw the Chevy in reverse, backed into a thicket of dead brush, killed the engine, got out, pissed over the edge of the slope in a high arcing stream, returned to the pickup, dug into his bag, and came out with a bottle of rum. He noticed Alphonse staring, befuddled, the kid having watched his every move.
“How ’bout a highball, Kareem?” he said, and reached out to offer his guide a sip from the rum bottle. When Alphonse didn’t move a muscle, Cooper cracked the seal and took a swallow. “Cab’s yours,” he said, and opened his bag to offer Alphonse something from the selection of candy bars and bottled water. Hungry enough to overcome his reluctance, Alphonse chose a pair of candy bars. Cooper pulled out a pair of T-shirts to use as a pillow and climbed into the bed of the pick up with a Milky Way, some water, and the rum. When he’d consumed all three, he leaned through the rear window of the cab, where Alphonse, still befuddled, remained.
“Sleep tight,” he said. He rolled around until he got comfortable and dozed off, staring at a sky full of constellations bright enough to make the notion of a telescope seem absurd.
They spent a full day on the downgrade, Cooper seeing insufficient plant life to fuel a brush fire until they came to Alphonse’s lake, a verdant swatch of plateau spanning, by Cooper’s guess, a quarter of a square mile. The green appeared to be fed by a spring-a trickle of water tumbling downhill inside a narrow crevasse-looking to Cooper like a scale model of your average whitewater rapids, the creek about two feet across where it pooled, six or seven inches wide where it ran at speed. Wordlessly, Alphonse strode past the miniature lake and led him downhill. The foliage dried up and vanished again within yards. Cooper knew how it worked: dry as a bone for a few years; then a hurricane swept through, and the floods that followed tore every hint of vegetation from the slope, leaving even less to dry out over the succeeding years of drought.
They followed the creek as it zigzagged downhill, Cooper’s toes bruised and blistering inside his Port-au-Prince-issue hiking boots, the descent taking its toll. He checked his watch at two-thirty; it was bright and hot, a classic Caribbean heat but without the breeze, at least 105 degrees and sickly humid. Soon the pain of his blistering toes began to subside, and before he realized what this meant, Cooper looked up from the backs of Alphonse’s feet to observe the fact that they’d reached the base of the grade.
Alphonse pointed into the hazy distance, Cooper noticing the kid did not appear remotely fatigued. Following his finger, Cooper could see, maybe two miles off, in a greener section of the plain they’d just reached, a settlement. There was a patchwork of farmlands, a few dozen shanties, the same creek dribbling its way through town; there were no visible roads coming in or out, just the half-green village, a bone-dry forest behind it, and the endless brownish landscape rising in all directions from the valley.
The thing that appealed most to Cooper about this newfound testament to human survival was the hope that he’d be able to round up a watering hole, maybe find some unique local spirits-no doubt primitively distilled, he thought, but still home-brewed and pure.
He found it in the form of an open-air shack on the outskirts of town, literally a lean-to with a counter crafted from a slab of driftwood, Cooper wondering where you found driftwood in the desert. There were a couple of stools standing against the slab, with some tables and chairs filling out the rest of the place. Four locals populated the joint, pretty much just hanging around-two at a table, one at the bar, and the fourth behind the driftwood slab. Maybe serving. All four appeared dressed for farmwork.
He got the evil eye immediately, Cooper feeling like a drifter coming into the saloon in a Clint Eastwood movie, only with bleeding toes and blistered feet. He ignored the looks and took a stool at the bar. Alphonse followed his lead as he shrugged off his backpack and settled on the seat, Cooper trying to remember a good line from an Eastwood film to offer these boys, but it’d been too many years since he’d owned a television. He opted for the mock-idiotic-tourist routine instead, though he considered it might be fair to say he was in fact an idiot for even coming here at all.
Nodding at Alphonse, he said in drawling English, “Anything they got. Whiskey, rum-maybe something they make themselves.”
Alphonse, playing the role, jerked his chin at the bartender and banged out a stretch of his patented triple-broken dialect.
The bartender was bigger than the others, his skin a cup of strong coffee, forehead a little taller than you found on other West Indians, so that it gave the impression of a receding hairline. He smoked a cigarette with a long ash that dangled lazily from his lips. Everybody in here, Cooper realized, was smoking. He guessed the latest in filtered low-tar brands weren’t readily distributed in La Vallée des Morts. Secondhand smoke, going to kill him.
The bartender pushed off from the post he’d been leaning on. He didn’t touch the cigarette in his mouth, leaving the ashes to fall. He pulled an unlabeled bottle of clear liquid from a box.
“Deux?”
Alphonse hesitated but forged forth. “Wi, deux,” he said, and the bartender put a pair of paper Dixie cups on the driftwood slab and filled them before returning to his post.
Cooper looked around the place and got the other six eyes staring back at him, big, white orbs, sunk deep into dark, weathered sockets. The two at the table were young and sinewy, maybe even tough; clearly annoyed at the interruption, these boys formed the epicenter of the evil glare. Cooper put them in their early twenties. The guy seated at the bar was older, closer to fifty, with a short, gray beard that resembled lint balls stuck to his chin. Hunched over his drink, he stared back at Cooper with something like fascination.
Cooper figured the appearance in this bar of a pale, well-fed blan wasn’t much different from a moose or a bear coming off a yacht and sliding up to the bar at the Conch Bay Beach Club. He saw no need to consider the communal evil eye they were giving him anything more threatening than a symptom of shock.
He dug into his backpack and pulled out the props he’d stowed there, the driftwood slab as good a place as any to take them for a test drive.
On a white sheet of paper, he’d sketched a depiction of the brand. He’d folded the rest of the sheet of paper behind the image, so that he had a rectangle about the size of a four-by-six photograph with the sketch residing within the borders. Also in the stack of goodies he pulled from the backpack was the full set of Eugene Little’s Polaroids he’d snatched on his way out of the morgue-the shot of the brand on the victim’s neck, a profile of the poor kid’s face, and a head-and-shoulders portrait too, Eugene’s photography pretty good in that it made the body appear half-alive. Sort of like a mug shot of the kid, only with his eyes closed. The face was bloated and pale, and infested with sores, but it still gave the general impression of the boy’s appearance: if the chain-smoking bruiser serving the firewater in Dixie cups had known the kid in life, he’d also know him as captured in death by Eugene’s specialized form of photography.