But here he was, and all he saw was wrong. The worst of it all was the prison. Almost every day he visited the prison, dropping off some poor fool. Hundreds of men locked up in a hole, no trial, no nothing, just sitting behind bars in a room about 130 degrees on a hot day, shitting in a little drain, eating next to nothing, with not much hope of ever getting out. Trials were held once a year, if that; and during the solitary several-week session of jurisprudence, of the three hundred prisoners awaiting justice, only a dozen or so might find their way to the courtroom. The rest just sat, all of them together, in an unlit cell so crowded that men were forced to sleep on their feet, and so fetid that the rotting air, like ammonia, burned your eyes and throat. Sometimes a prisoner’s file was simply lost, and then the accused could stay in prison, forgotten, until he died. The only way out of prison, innocent or guilty, was to bribe the prosecutor or judge. Getting arrested in Haiti was like getting kidnapped by the police. Terry saw all that, and he felt like a cog in an unjust machine. He tried to explain what he was doing in Haiti to his nephews, and they didn’t understand.
Kay White told me later that she started seriously worrying about him all alone out there in Haiti those first few months, before he met the judge. Cops’ wives hear a lot of stories about their men and their service revolvers, the way their eyes get to tracing the oily whorls of steel, the gun hypnotizing them, telling them to do bad things.
Terry would get on the phone with her those first few months and she’d say, “Honey, you sound so depressed.”
“I’m just not getting enough sleep.”
She’d say, “I’m proud of you.”
What she meant was, You’re a hero, but Terry knew that wasn’t true. He wasn’t a hero at all. He knew what a hero was. A hero was somebody who conquered himself. Broke down his fear into so many little pieces he could ignore them. He came from a family of heroic men. His grandfather had been a hero in Normandy. Never talked about that, didn’t need to. His uncle had been a hero in Vietnam. “Did my job”—that’s all he said. Terry was forty-two years old when he got to Haiti, and that’s an age when men take stock of things. Pretty much all he did was take stock of things. When he was a kid, he thought he’d be president one day. Hah! Then he scaled down his ambitions, and scaled them down way more.
Now he was a taxi driver in Hades.
2
The only thing that really made Terry happy those first few months in Haiti were the afternoons joshing around with this kid, Beatrice. When Terry arrived on Mission, he shared a house out near the Uruguayan base with a couple of other UNPOLs, a Spaniard and that Jordanian guy. The house was tended by a lady named Mirabelle, who swept and straightened and washed the men’s clothes and prepared a meal every evening. Mirabelle sometimes came in with her daughter, Beatrice, a studious, pretty girl who wore her hair in cornrows dotted with blue and yellow beads. Beatrice would help her mother finish the household chores, then sit at the kitchen table in the afternoon and do her homework. She was in her final year of lycée and dreamed of attending medical school in Port-au-Prince.
Although the composition of the household had varied over the duration of Mirabelle’s tenure as maid, from occupant to occupant an avuncular fondness for Beatrice had been passed down: the men of the household had paid Beatrice’s school fees since she had begun lycée. Coming home from patrol, Terry would tutor Beatrice in English in exchange for lessons in French and Creole. In three languages, he chafed her about boys and made her giggle; when he learned of her ambitions, he suggested to her that she could probably study abroad, and he looked up suitable programs for her on the Internet — in Canada, in France, and in the United States also. He liked her clean, well-scrubbed schoolgirl smell, which wafted across the kitchen table like hope, and her intelligence and drive. He liked the thought of this small girl one day wearing a doctor’s coat and treating swollen-bellied little babies and toddlers with rusty red hair. Thinking he was going to make it all possible for Beatrice was pretty much what kept Terry going those first few months on Mission.
Then, just six weeks before the final examinations that would have marked the culmination of so many years’ effort, Beatrice stopped coming by the house. A day or so passed, and Terry asked Mirabelle if Beatrice was sick. He was eager to see her. There was a transitional undergraduate program at Florida State, his own alma mater, for which he thought she would be ideal; and he had a notion how such a program could be paid for through the Rotarians. Mirabelle shook her head. She told Terry that Beatrice was going to be leaving for her uncle’s house in Port-au-Prince on the very next boat; she was dropping out of school. Then Mirabelle began to cry.
Soon Terry, who had two decades’ experience in this sort of thing, coaxed the whole story out of Mirabelle.
Mirabelle and Beatrice lived in a neighborhood of small tin-roofed shacks not far from Terry’s house. For several months now, an older boy in the neighborhood, from a larger, wealthier household, had been aggressively courting Beatrice. Toto Dorsemilus was in his middle twenties, one of the young men in the orbit of Sénateur Maxim Bayard. In the evenings when the Sénateur was in town, Toto would sit and play cards on the Sénateur’s terrace as the Sénateur received his guests.
Every afternoon Toto would wait for Beatrice at the gates of the lycée and offer to drive her home on his motorcycle; when popular acts like Jean Jean Roosevelt came to town, he bought Beatrice a ticket. When she refused to go out at night with him alone, he bought tickets for her friends. In this crowd of teenage girls he stood out for his age and size: he wore his beard in a goatee, and on his thick fingers he had a handful of rings — a skull and crossbones, a garnet, and an opal. He wore oversize jeans that hung down over his buttocks and a basketball jersey that showed off his broad shoulders and thick arms. It was his habit to chew on an old toothbrush, as someone else might gnaw an unlit cigar or a toothpick.
Mirabelle told Terry that the other afternoon Toto had been at the gates of the school, waiting for Beatrice on his motorcycle. Beatrice ordinarily refused his offers, but there’d been a big storm that afternoon, and she had just purchased new shoes, a pair of dark leather penny loafers that had cost the better part of her mother’s weekly salary. She accepted the ride, and Toto suggested waiting out the rain at his house: the narrow pathway that led to Beatrice’s own home was too slippery in the mud to reach by bike.
Had it not been for the bruises across her daughter’s face and shoulders left by those heavy rings, Mirabelle might not have realized the next day that anything was wrong, but the bruises, and later the swelling, made it clear that something was very wrong indeed. Beatrice told her mother that she had been raped. Moreover, she was terrified that it would happen again. For this reason, mother and daughter decided together that she would flee — immediately — to Port-au-Prince.
For the first time since his arrival in Haiti Terry felt as if he had a reason for his presence there. He took Mirabelle’s hand, which was hard and lined by twenty years of rough manual labor, all invested in her daughter. When there were no houses to clean, she had cut cane, gathered plantains, or walked hours in a burning sun to sell a meager harvest of manioc and yam at far-flung local markets. Plenty of nights had seen Mirabelle go to bed hungry, the food in the family cooking pot reserved for her daughter. Terry, still holding the thick, dry hand, looked in Mirabelle’s eyes and told her that he would help.