Authors: Nick Lake
I thought, Biggie is Route 9. If I can become Route 9, too, then maybe I can fight Boston and get my sister back. I was sure she was still there in Boston, cos it was the Boston crew who had taken her, who had killed Papa. Besides, I knew she wasn’t in Route 9 cos I’d never seen her, and I was sure I would recognize her, even now, four years later. She was more than my best friend. I wondered if she would recognize me, though.
— How can I become a chimère? I said to Biggie.
I wanted a whip, too. I wanted everyone in the street to like me how they liked Biggie.
Biggie laughed.
— It’s easy, he said. Just ride with me.
The next day, Biggie picked me up again. It was evening, in fact. Stéphanie was in the passenger seat this time, riding shotgun. In the Site, riding shotgun isn’t just an expression – she was holding the gun. I was surprised by that, cos I’d seen aid workers before and they didn’t usually have guns. I noticed that she was pretty, much prettier than I had realized the previous day. She had blue eyes and kind of light-brown hair, and her face was a little oval. She was young, also. Mid-twenties, no older.
— Salut, she said over the boom of the bass.
I said hello to her, too. My face was burning, cos looking at her made my skin tingle. Biggie turned and grinned at me, and I began to shake cos I was sure he knew what I was thinking.
— You still want to be a chimère? he said.
I nodded.
— Bon. Bon. Route 9 till you die, yeah?
— Yeah, I said.
— Those Boston motherfuckers, they killed your papa, n’est-ce pas?
I was surprised he remembered that, cos the day before it didn’t seem like he knew me from when me and Manman went to Dread for shelter.
— You remember that? I said.
Biggie laughed.
— I remember everything, he said. I know you were pulled from your manman by Aristide, too. I know Dread Wilmè lifted a tank off you to save you, even though he was full of bullet holes.
I didn’t tell Biggie that Dread didn’t pull any tank off me, he only got me out of the way of a tank, but it didn’t seem important, and anyway, I was pleased that Biggie knew who I was. It was like a famous person took the trouble to stop and talk to you when he noticed you. Like that. Back then, I thought Biggie was awesome. I thought he was a stone-cold gangster, g-star, cooler than the other side of the pillow. I was, like, Biggie’s groupie; it was fucking embarrassing, looking back.
Stéphanie sighed. It was something she did a lot, I came to know.
— Fucking UN, she said. Dread Wilmè distributed more food and medicine than we ever could, and they fucking kill him.
I don’t know what surprised me more. The way she could swear in Kreyòl, or the way she was criticizing the UN. I thought the UN and the blancs were the same thing. But I thought of the way that Stéphanie brought those tins of food and medical supplies into the Site and helped Biggie to give them out, and I thought she was pretty cool for a white person.
— If you want to be Route 9, you have to prove yourself, said Biggie. Do you know what I mean?
I didn’t know, but I nodded.
— We just got one thing to do first, he said.
Biggie continued to drive. As we turned onto different streets, I saw my map in my head, so when we pulled up outside a shack, I knew it was the address of a Route 9 chimère called Tintin.
Biggie got out and told us to follow. We went inside. Tintin was sitting on a petrol drum. He wasn’t much older than me. He was rocking back and forth, making a whimpering sound. I saw that there was blood on his chest, and he was clutching it as if he wanted to stop it leaving his body, or to push it back in.
— Aiie, said Biggie. That’s got to hurt.
— It’s not a party, said Tintin.
Biggie laughed.
— And the Boston guys?
— I took them by surprise. Two of them are dead, for sure. The other, maybe not. I shot him in the hip, not the stomach.
Stéphanie made that sighing noise again.
— You were attacked, yes? she said. By militias loyal to the new government? They hate you cos Route 9 used to fight for Aristide. Yes?
Tintin looked at Biggie.
— Just say yes, said Biggie.
— Yes, said Tintin.
— Good, said Stéphanie. Right, you were wounded in political violence, so the blancs have to treat you.
She said that like she wasn’t blanc her ownself. She rooted around in her pocket, came out with a plastic-sheeted card.
— Show this at the checkpoint, she said. Say I sent you. The soldiers are to escort you to Canapé-Vert Hospital, OK?
She took something from another pocket – it was a bundle of cash.
— Show this, too.
Tintin looked grateful. He took the card and the money and we left, but not before Biggie clapped Tintin on the back. It looked like that hurt, but Tintin didn’t say anyen at all.
After that, we drove onto another street, and then another. As we slowed, and Biggie turned the engine off, I noticed that we had come to the shack of one of Biggie’s customers; I knew it from the map I had drawn. What his customers bought, I didn’t know.
No, that’s a lie, and I don’t want to lie to you. You’re the voices in the darkness, and I have to tell you the truth, or maybe you’ll never let me out of here. I knew even then that they bought drugs. I just didn’t care.
Would you care? I was living in a place where it was common to eat mud. Don’t you judge me, motherfuckers. People call us gangsters, but who’s helping the people here apart from us? No moun wants to pay for education; no moun wants to pay for hospitalization. NGOs don’t come into Site Solèy. You want free food, the only place you get it from is a chimère. Biggie and Tintin threw sacks of food that Stéphanie brought to them out of a truck every Friday, fed half the Site like that.
As we sat there outside the house, Biggie turned to me.
— Can I see it? he said.
— See what?
— The pwen. The one you got from Dread.
I stared at him. Everyone knew Dread saved me, but I didn’t know they knew about the pwen. Biggie saw the expression on my face.
— My houngan, he said. Your manman goes to him, too.
I nodded. That made sense. I took the stone from my pocket and showed him.
— Can I touch it? he said.
— Uh, yeah, sure.
He rubbed the stone.
— Smooth, he said. Who’s in it?
— I don’t know. An ancestor spirit, my manman says.
Biggie handed it back.
— You got protection, Shorty, he said. That’s good. You got his stone. Me, I got Dread’s bones. Me and you, we bulletproof. You go in there, ain’t nothing can touch you when the shit goes down.
— What shit? I asked.
Biggie just looked at me, and he knew that I knew what was going down. We got out of the car, but Biggie didn’t open the door right away. I understood then that he had turned his engine off before we stopped, and I told myself I was stupid for not noticing it at the time. He didn’t want no moun to hear, I guessed.
Me and Stéphanie got out the car. Biggie handed me the shotgun.
— You know what to do with this, right?
I suddenly became aware of my heart in my chest. It was banging like it wanted to get out, like it didn’t want any part of this.
— Yeah, I said.
— This guy inside, he robbed from me, said Biggie very quietly. He took my stuff and he sold it to Boston. Can you believe that?
I shook my head. I couldn’t believe it, but he was right. Shit like that could get you killed.
— I should never have trusted him, Biggie said. Dude used to roll with Boston. I’ve heard him stand tall about all the men he has chopped with machetes. I only let him live cos he always has money; he’s always able to buy.
I thought of the men – the boys – who had killed my papa, of the machetes they had held. Was it possible that this man in the shack was one of them?
Yes, I thought. Yes, it was.
— Buy what? said Stéphanie, but I could tell she was joking.
— Food, of course, said Biggie. He put his hands together as if he was praying, like he was a saint or something, and that made me laugh a bit on the inside, and my heart calmed down a little.
— You want me to . . . ?
— Yes, said Biggie. Yes.
I was thinking about that night my papa died, the blood everywhere. I was looking at the door and picturing the man behind it, and I wondered if he really was one of the bandanna men. I decided he was.
I remembered how my papa had looked, the fear in his eyes, as the machetes came down. I began to hate the man behind that door.
Stéphanie stood in the street, her arms folded. I noticed that she stood at such an angle that no moun could shoot her from inside; it was like she’d done this before. She looked bored, I remember thinking.
Biggie reached into the back of his waistband, took out a pistol, and moved to the door. He made a gesture to me that I didn’t really understand, then he kicked the door open.
I was in front of the door and I raised the shotgun as the shadow of a man loomed before me. I pulled the trigger. It was that quick. There was a
boom
so loud, like the world was falling down, and I saw a spray of black and red. I was thrown backward, and my shoulder was screaming where the stock of the gun had blown back into it.
I staggered forward to see what I’d done. There was a dead man lying on the floor, but I was only half-conscious that it was me who had killed him.
I turned around. Stéphanie was kissing Biggie, her tongue in his mouth, and that made me nearly as sick as the blood all over the place. She pulled away and she smiled at me, a strange smile.
— Bon, said Biggie. Welcome to Route 9.
I was twelve.
Toussaint spread out the map on which, in a few strokes of ink, he would plan the doom of the French. They had landed more troops: an inevitability. It had been many weeks since the immolation and slaughter of their first landing party. For now, they held only the ashes of Cape Town and some scrubland that lay around it. The French would needs move into the interior if they wished to regain the country.
Toussaint would be waiting for them. Not for the first time, he blessed the features that allowed Jean-Christophe to blend in with the French, or at least with the mulats. He looked down at the map before him. He had drawn it himself, marking the places where there were mountains, where there were woods, and where there were plantations that could sustain them. He had traveled to all these places himself, had covered the length and breadth of the land on horseback or on foot.
The French could look at their imperfect maps and think,
oh look
,
there is a valley that will lead us nicely into the foothills, with plenty of fresh water to drink, and far from any of the known negro strongholds.
But Toussaint looked at his own map, and he saw the hidden caves that he had marked along the side of the valley, the trees below that obscured them from view.
The other generals, Jean-François and Biassou, thought it was hubris that motivated Toussaint to confront the French on open ground, but Toussaint believed he had something the French didn’t have, certainly not in so much detail. He had the streams and the potato fields; he had the ravines where an army could lie concealed. He had the land.
As he had maintained from the beginning, there was no point taking Haiti if they couldn’t hold it afterward. So as he had traveled, he had encouraged and cajoled, too. He had convinced bloodthirsty soldiers to put down their swords and to take up plowshares, for a time at any rate, before they picked up their weapons again. He had devised a simple system of two bowls, one inside the other, with watered sand between, which allowed food to remain cool for longer, and therefore not spoil. As he traveled the country, he taught people the principle of the cooling bowl, and in this way the vittles and viands that were required by citizen and soldier alike were made to last a little longer.
He had ordered the cultivation of everything that could be cultivated, and that included his staff, whom he had instructed to seek out literate soldiers, and to learn to read and write from them. He had put aside stores of dried foods, of simples, of water. Others suggested these things, too – his army weren’t ignorant beasts, much as the commissioners might like to think it – but it had been given to him to unite the efforts of all, to hold the plan, whether it was a sequence of steps in his mind or a map that lay before him.
He traced a finger along the road to Marmalade, north of Cape Town. He had stopped short of crossing Cape Town off his map, but the place was all but destroyed, burned in a vengeful fire. Sometimes, in his sleep, he saw people screaming in the flames, and he asked himself if he should have taken on this mantle, and not simply have run when the revolution began. Yet where would he have gone? He would have been caught up in the violence, whether he liked it or not. Besides, he had seen what was to come. He
knew
slavery was going to end, and so he had to bear the duty of being the one to end it.