Haiti Noir

“Oh,” said Charlie, looking at his left hand as if it belonged to somebody else. “I mean, do things the way I shouldn’t. Sorry…” He shook out the bandanna with his right hand and wiped his forehead with it. It was getting dark quickly. Bats skimmed the surface of the pool and a cocotier by the railing shivered its long fronds in the breeze. In the far distance they could both see the series of flaming barricades that cut the town off from the airport and the road down to the capital. Doctor Oliver’s apprehensive feelings intensified as he touched the vial in his pocket where his two remaining pills still clicked. He considered that Charlie Chapo might possibly have taken care of his problem personally if he’d wanted, instead of fobbing him off on Magloire. Charlie Chapo was occasionally assumed to be a drug dealer himself because he had no other obvious portfolio. His presence in Haiti was one of the many anomalies from which the whole country sometimes seemed to be constructed.

“My people can’t get in and I can’t get out,” Charlie Chapo was saying. “It just gums everything all up-and for nothing, that’s what gets me sometimes. You know a bad day here can be-”

“Very bad.” Doctor Oliver felt the truth of this in his spleen at the moment he said it.

“And you know, I hate it that they killed that poor woman. I just don’t- All right, there’s no less point in that than in anything, but it really didn’t have to be her.”

Charlie Chapo drained his rum glass and shook himself all over, then turned on Doctor Oliver a lopsided smile. “I just need to clean out my head is all.” There was something in the way he said it that made the doctor think he could lift off the top of his skull and rinse out the inside and replace it. “Do you mind if I use your shower?”

“Go for it,” Doctor Oliver said. “There’s even soap. It’s from Taiwan.”

By the time Charlie returned to the table, it was completely dark. The barefoot servants had lit the lamps, and the fires on the barricades seemed much further off-as did the dark portents of Charlie’s earlier words. On the strength of Magloire’s quick visit, Doctor Oliver had dry-swallowed one of his two remaining pills and he now felt quite agreeably insulated from… what had it been?

“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.