Inspired by the moment, he kissed her. She reared back, beestung. “He’s not looking,” Terry said, and he tried to kiss her again. She writhed in his arms, and Terry realized that she was serious, that she would not kiss him. The mood was broken. Terry could see in Nadia’s green eyes reproach and contempt. His high emotions were like a bubble, as quick to explode as to expand. All the drama and the tension of the long week settled on his shoulders. He wanted to sleep.
But the judge didn’t want to leave the club. Soon Terry and Nadia were seated at a table with the judge and a half dozen other men, beefy men with bad skin, gold chains, and expensive wristwatches. Terry knew some of these men by name. They were members of the Port-au-Prince political world: a couple of deputies from up north, and a man who worked in the prime minister’s office. Terry’s Creole wasn’t good enough to understand the conversation, which came to him as isolated words floating through the loud music. Terry understood that in these men’s eyes, he was the judge’s pet blan. He wondered whether it had been worth all the struggle: maybe Johel was just another Haitian politician. Terry watched couples dancing, their laughing faces like masks. Loneliness assaulted him with a violence that was almost physical. His life, he thought, had amounted to nothing: he had built nothing, made nothing, begat no one. He wondered, should he disappear tomorrow from the planet, whether anyone would truly mourn him.
Then he felt a pressure on his thigh. It was Nadia’s hand. Her face gave nothing away: it stared into the distance, pretty and impassive. He could see Johel’s face, fat and shiny with sweat, laughing at some joke, exulting in his triumph. Someone slapped Johel on the back. Terry sipped his drink, melted ice and lemon juice and sweet, thick rum.
8
I took Kay to the airport the next morning, the first flight out of Jérémie in a week.
“I don’t want to see him,” Kay said when she learned that Terry and Johel were coming back from Port-au-Prince that evening.
“Then you should go home,” I said.
“And do what?”
We sat under the sign that read BIENVENUE À JÉRÉMIE. LA CITÉ DES POÈTES, and watched the marchandes sell spiky-headed pineapples, immense grapefruit, finger bananas, and oversweet mandarins. You would never have known driving through Jérémie that morning that there had been any disorder at all, except for the Uruguayan APCs parked at aggressive angles to the street in front of Mission headquarters.
“I guess I lost,” Kay said with a brave, unhappy chuckle.
“Don’t think about it that way.”
“How should I think about it? I came to Haiti with a husband and a dream, and I’m going home—”
“That’s how you should think about it. You’re going home.”
Kay offered me a banana. Then she peeled one of her own.
“Are you going to miss me?” she said.
“Of course.”
“Well, I’m going to miss you.”
We might have gone back and forth like this had my phone not rung. Kay saw me glancing at it and said, “Go on.”
I let it ring — it seemed the least I could do — but as soon as it was done ringing, it rang again.
This time I did answer it. It was Marie Legrand, Toussaint’s mother. I couldn’t understand a word she was saying. It was as if she were falling from a very high place. Finally I understood what she was telling me.
* * *
Nadia, Johel, and Terry drove back that day from Port-au-Prince. They left the city after breakfast, the three of them hungover. Between them, they’d slept no more than a dozen hours.
It took a couple of hours to get out of town, crawling through downtown and past the Martissant slum, then through Carrefour, the traffic tight. This stretch of road leading out of Port-au-Prince was as nasty a corner of the planet as any Terry had ever seen: tin-roofed shacks festering in sun-scorched chaos all the way to the sea. Nadia dozed in the backseat while the judge and Terry nudged their way through town, no one talking.
But when they got on the open road, the judge slapped his thigh and said, “Holy shit.” Terry and Nadia understood: they were warriors coming home from battle, and they’d won. Soon Andrés Richard called, congratulating Johel. Then Père Samedi. In the light of day, the judge’s victory was an even more amazing accomplishment than it had seemed the night before. Terry knew that even Nadia had been caught up in the dream. When they stopped to buy gas in Les Cayes, a small crowd gathered around the pump, all of them wanting to see the judge or shake his hand.
Terry could see Nadia’s eyes in the rearview mirror. It made him happy to be so close to her. He felt as if the two of them could speak with no words, his sighs sufficient to tell her that he loved her, her glances in the mirror enough to let Terry know that she was proud.
The night before, Kay had called him. She told him that she was headed home.
“I think that’s for the best,” Terry said.
“There’s still time for you to come too,” Kay said.
That Kay would even suggest such a thing — that’s how little faith in him she had. The trip to Port-au-Prince had been his plan; his force of will had animated their adventure. It was strange to Terry that Nadia understood so much more clearly the dimensions of his soul than his own wife.
They had been driving all morning, Terry and Johel switching places behind the wheel, when Johel’s phone rang.
* * *
Rumors, like fire, drift in subterranean currents until exploding promiscuously: some had known for days that there was a dead boy lying behind the market, and others knew that he had died in the riots, hit in the chest by a tear gas grenade, and still others whispered that the PNH had taken his body and thrown it behind the market, where the pigs gathered. Then everyone knew about the dead boy who was lying in the field, until eventually the juge de paix heard the story, came to the market, and ordered the cadaver transported to the morgue, where the attendants rifled through his pockets, found his phone, and called his mother, wanting to know if she knew what everyone knew, that Toussaint was dead.
* * *
I went with Madame Legrand to retrieve Toussaint’s body from the morgue. She owed morgue fees for the three days they’d held him.
They hadn’t done much for him in the morgue. You sure wouldn’t want your mother to see you like that. It was just a concrete box with three dead people on the floor, and one of them was Toussaint. He was lying on the stained concrete floor, facedown, butt in the air, no shirt, blue jeans down around his hips, no underwear. His chest had been bruised by the force of the projectile, but the thing that got your eye wasn’t the wounds, it was Toussaint’s ass, hanging out in the air. What the dead don’t have is any dignity.
Madame Legrand looked at her son. I thought for a moment that she was going to vomit or faint, but she just stood there trembling, as if she were very cold. We watched Toussaint for a long time, both of us waiting for him to move, but he didn’t, not so much as a twitch. The room smelled of decomposing flesh and Lightning. Then we walked into the morgue attendant’s little office.
“He’s mine,” Madame Legrand said. “He’s my child.”
The morgue attendant was fiddling with a pencil, trying to figure out the secrets of the lottery. It was all in the numbers, and he was adding and subtracting long columns. He looked up from his work and said, “You got to give him a good funeral now.”