Authors: Nick Lake
— I promise, she said. Please, just go. I won’t say anything. I promise.
Tintin lowered the gun.
— The lwa are on your side, girl, he said.
I knew he was thinking of the stone, and how it had protected me. He tucked the gun in his waistband.
— Come on, Shorty. Let’s blow this joint, he said. We got to get back to the Site. They’ll be wondering where we gone.
He picked up his T-shirt and walked back round the house, and I followed him.
We never spoke about that day afterward. It was the best day of my life, then it was the worst, and then it was this worry that was always at the back of our minds. But I guess that girl kept quiet, cos we never heard shit about it after. Biggie never even knew we’d left the Site.
I never left it again, till the day I got shot.
Listen. I was with Biggie two years after that.
This is what we would do in Biggie’s crew:
We rode high on chrome bright as sky, rolling to heavy beats.
We had nothing but love for our crew, nothing but steel for the haters.
We sold drugs.
We killed people.
Mornings, we did our deliveries. We rode two or three in the car, one on shotgun – except it wasn’t always a shotgun, sometimes it was an AK or a Glock. The gangs got all these guns from Aristide, back in the day. Now we had anpil guns, but bullets were much harder to find. So most of the time we tried not to use the guns if we didn’t have to. Sometimes we used machetes.
As we passed, everyone said hello.
— Bonjou, they called. Bonjou.
Me, I smiled at them, but I’m not so good at talking as Biggie. I have a tattoo on my arm, though, an AK, to show that I’m a killer. So if I was shotgun I showed my arm out the window, so that people could see. Then they knew not to fuck with me. Me, I know how to cut heroin. I know how to cut people. I know where to shoot people so that they die.
Now, I think these are things I never should have learned.
This one time, we passed my manman. She saw me in the car and she made a noise, like,
tssssuuuu
, sucking air through her teeth.
Biggie stopped the car.
— Y’a pwoblem? he said.
— Gen pwoblem, said Manman. Not with you, anyway, Biggie. But that’s my son in your car. My kid.
Biggie laughed.
— I don’t see a kid, he said. I see a soldier. My frère chou-chou. This kid’s one of my bodyguards. I love him, man. I love all my soldiers.
Manman looked at the gun in my hand. She said:
— Chita chouter yon jour wap fait goal.
That’s something Manman used to say to me a lot. It means, if you keep shooting, you’ll make a goal. It means, if you keep doing like that, you’ll get what you’re aiming for. It means, basically, stop doing that, or you’ll get what you deserve.
Usually I laughed when Manman said it; it’s such an old woman thing to say. But then I had a gun in my hand and she was talking about shooting and it made me uncomfortable.
— Bullshit, I said in English. I put up two fingers in the peace sign. Peace, Manman, I said. See you around.
Her face went hard.
— What about school? she said. Aren’t you going to finish school? You could have a job, you could make money . . .
— I have a job, I said. I make lots of money.
Manman’s eyes went all narrow, like she was closing something to me.
— You will end in blood and darkness, she said, like the houngan told her when she was ansent with us.
Biggie gunned the gas.
— Wow, your manman is a hard-ass, he said as he pulled away.
— Word, I said.
That’s what I always say when I don’t know what to say.
Biggie was nearly always with us. When we rolled, he leaned out the window. He would be smoking a blunt – he was always smoking. He grinned at people, and he rapped to them about how the government threw him in jail and he was too young for it. I thought he still was pretty young, so he can’t have been in jail long, but I didn’t say that.
We handed out bags of drugs, and people gave us cash. We put the cash in the trunk of the whip. Some of that cash went to the kids in Solèy 19. It was for them to go to school.
Biggie said:
— No moun wants to help us in the Site, so we got to help ourselves. Give the kids an education.
Biggie has a daughter who’s three. She’s cute. Biggie said she’ll go to America, go to college. I hope so. Sometimes when I looked at her I thought of Marguerite. She wasn’t far away – she was in Solèy 10, where the Boston crew hang. She’s my twin, so she was 14 then, too. I wondered what she looked like; I thought about it all the time. I wondered if she was as tall as me, if she was good at mending things and making things work like I am. I pictured her in my head, but it was difficult – the image was all blurry, and it was hard for me to know how her child face would change as she got older. I hoped she was pretty, and had lots of friends, and didn’t roll with any gangsters.
Afternoons, we handed out food from one of the trucks, or we just chilled. There was a game we played, too, and I was the best at it. It’s called ghost-riding the whip. This is what we did: we took Biggie’s whip and we found a nice long street. Then we took a brick and we jammed it down on the gas – only not too hard, cos then the whip rolled too fast. We made the car roll and we walked alongside, and the game was to rap a whole song before the car drifted and we had to reach in and grab the wheel.
I was good at it cos I’m the best with machines. Sometimes Biggie even let me drive the whip. And I always fixed it if it broke, which was often. Once Biggie got so stoned he fell asleep at the wheel and crashed the car into some people and a wall. One of them had a gun, so some shit kicked off right there, and Biggie had to kill that guy. Me, I had to repair the car. I didn’t have to repair Biggie, cos Stéphanie got him some bandages and she did his stitches herself.
Biggie was pretty good at ghost-riding, too, but he wasn’t so interested in the car; he was more interested in the rapping. He rapped all the time. It got a little annoying, actually. So mostly he just let the car crash while he rapped. He thought that was funny. It kind of was, I guess.
Sometimes they went on missions. Me, not so often. The guys called me the Mechanic. A gun jammed, they brought it to me. Biggie crashed the car, they brought it to me. Dust got in the carburetor – that happened a lot – they brought it to me.
As well, I did the accounts. I wrote down who owed what, how much we’d handed out. I wrote down who we were sending to school. I updated the maps. Biggie loved this. He said before I came we were losing anpil money, and now we were rich. Tintin called me a geek.
But sometimes I did go along. Sometimes we went on missions to Boston, and then I rode shotgun if I could. Usually the fights were for show – everyone hid behind houses and shouted a lot and shot without really looking. No one wants to die.
— I don’t want to die, Biggie said. I got a kid, man. I don’t want to die.
He said that, but he was still a gangster. So sometimes, yeah, people died. Sometimes people just got hurt, and then Biggie had to call Stéphanie and ask her to help. She helped a lot – more than she should have, I guess. But I could see from her eyes that she loved Biggie. Stupid, I think. Still, it’s her life.
Listen. I’m telling you all this for a reason. So you understand the routine, so you understand the life, so you understand what happened next.
This is what happened next.
This was the end of 2009. I was 14, and it had been 2,501 days since Marguerite was taken.
We were down near the sea and we were standing in the back of a truck, Tintin and me, throwing bags of rice and flour to the people. Some of the other Route 9 soldiers were standing by the truck with their guns up. Sometimes people got too desperate, then they mobbed the truck. The guns were to stop that.
Stéphanie was on the truck, too. She was watching to see how much food was being distributed. It was NGO food that she’d got her hands on somehow, you see. She couldn’t get her trucks in here, but she could get inside herself if she was prepared to take the risk. For her, it wasn’t much risk, though. She was the girlfriend of a hardcore chimère leader.
Someone asked if we had bandages.
— I’m sorry, Stéphanie said. No medical equipment. Just food. We’ll try to bring some next time.
The guy got pretty angry, but a chimère stepped forward with his gun. What was the guy going to do? He backed off.
Just then, a shot rang out. One of the people below us in the crowd – a woman with a baby slung on her front – went down on her face. Someone screamed, then more people screamed. In a flash, it wasn’t a crowd anymore, but a riot.
Boom
.
That was a shotgun. It took one of the chimères below us in the chest and he flew –
bang
– against the wall of the truck. I was on the metal floor, and I didn’t know if I’d dived down or if someone had pushed me. There were people screaming and screaming, and I heard the whine of a bullet as it went over my head. Our guys were shooting back now. Tintin was swearing as he emptied his AK.
I stood up, and there was my pistol in my hand. I stared at it in surprise for a moment, then I looked out over the crowd. I saw a guy in a balaclava pointing a machine gun at us. I aimed and pulled the trigger, calmer than I felt, and I smelled the sulfur and cordite as my gun bucked in my hand. I didn’t wait to see if he was down. I turned and looked for other chimères, and saw another balaclava running toward the truck. I shot his legs, and he went sprawling.
Then I saw someone else.
I saw a girl. She had bandannas on that covered her mouth and hair, but I could tell it was a girl just from the eyes, and she was pointing her gun at me. It was a Heckler. Expensive weapon. She was my age, and her eyes were big. She was no more than ten meters from me.
I’m dead, I thought.
I’m dead cos I can’t shoot her.
She was wearing a Jay-Z T-shirt; she had little bud breasts. She must have been my age, maybe even younger.
And then I thought, oh, shit.
This girl, she was my age and she wasn’t shooting, either. I could hear Tintin next to me, shouting something to me, but I wasn’t listening. Everything was chaos, but in the center of the chaos there was this girl. She was all I saw. I was looking at her eyes and I
remembered
those eyes. They were small, like almonds. They had freckles either side of them, like I have freckles. They were the precise color of the sea at dusk.
They’re my eyes. They’re my sister’s eyes.
Slowly, I lowered my gun. I stared into this girl’s eyes, into Marguerite’s eyes, all the time.
I counted:
Time since the bullets started: 1 minute.
Time since I last saw my sister: 2,501 days.
Time since I was a whole person: 2,501 days.
Time since I loved her: forever.
Behind me, Stéphanie said:
— Down! Down!
But I ignored her. I nodded to the girl and she hesitated, then she nodded back.
People always say, like, time stood still, when something big goes down. It’s a thing that people say. But, mwen jire, that’s what happened at this moment. Everything stopped, and nothing and no one was moving. There was this gull above me and it just froze in the air, hung there, and I could see the people holding the guns, the people cowering on the ground, and they weren’t moving, either.
There was just Marguerite, and her eyes, and I could see that glow coming out of her, that glow I remembered, like her soul was just shining out of her, like she was a burning thing made to build, not to destroy. She had this little half-smile on her lips, and I could see her – she was filling my eyes – but in the corner of my vision I could see the street where we found the baby, too, and I could see the bit of beach where Dread was pushed, burning, into the sea.
Both those moments were happening at the same time as this one, and also the time when Marguerite found the baby rats, and the time she handed over the baby, and all these other memories, too, like all the times we were on the boat with Papa, looking up at the Site.
I swear, man, mwen jire, this moment went on forever. I could see those freckles on her nose, like a constellation. I could see that everything was going to be all right now. My heart was something so, so slow in my chest; there was a rushing in my ears, like the sea, like holding a shell to the side of your head.
She’s alive, I thought.
And then I thought, of course she’s alive.
No one could ever hurt her, no moun in the Site ever said no to her, even – she was that special. She was, like, this angel in a human body; she was the picture on the wall of the morgue, floating in the air, too perfect to stand on the filthy ground. Anyone could see that.
She raised one hand, and I raised my hand, too, or maybe it’s better to say that my hand raised itself, and gave a little wave. I didn’t have shit to do with what my body did really, cos I was just looking at Marguerite. The whole world had shrunk down to those eyes and those freckles. It could have turned to night and I wouldn’t have noticed, cos now Marguerite was the sun.