Benoit folded the money into a neat rectangle and slipped it into the breast pocket of his shirt.
“What you want?”
Cooper withdrew Eugene’s snapshot of the brand from the pocket of his jeans and flipped it like a Frisbee onto Benoit’s desk. Benoit peered at the picture when it landed but didn’t reach for it.
“Amazing thing,” Cooper said. “Cousin of mine dropped dead at a barbecue a couple years back. Everybody from both sides of the family attended the funeral. Watched his casket drop six feet down. It was a nice service.”
Benoit looked at Cooper through the Robert Redford frames.
“Turns out,” Cooper said, “couple weeks back, this same cousin of mine washed up on a beach looking like he’d lived a couple hard years since we saw him at the barbecue. Imagine that-somebody getting pulled out of his grave, brought back to life, used as some kind of drugged-up slave, then put out of his misery once he’s outlived his usefulness.”
Benoit picked up the picture and tossed it to Cooper’s side of the desk. “Unless your family known for interracial marriage,” he said, “you as full of shit as Petit-huit.”
“Maybe so,” Cooper said, “but I know from that brand that somebody here in the great land of Hispaniola fed my poor cousin some coup poudre, waited, hell, I don’t know, maybe a few days, shot him up with conconbre zombi, and put him to work. Might have put him to work in a nuclear submarine too, but that’s another story.”
“Mon ami,” Benoit said, “don’t take this personally, but you one crazy motherfucker.”
Cooper took the picture back.
“You saw the brand?”
Benoit looked at him. Taking his time.
“Oui,” he said. “Je l’ai vu.”
“Who uses it?”
Benoit leaned back in his seat and shrugged. “You know as much as you tryin’ to make me think you know,” he said, “then I don’t need to be tellin’ you the wrong people hear I’m the one spilling the beans, there be more than three hundred dollars to be paid.”
“Eternal damnation,” Cooper said, “staved off only by the periodic sacrifice of live chickens?”
“Answer to the question you fishin’ for is the Bizango sect of the Petro voudoun. Our meeting now be overwith.”
Benoit stood, extending his hand. Cooper rose and took it but clasped the doctor’s palm in a vice grip when the man tried to let go.
“Where do you suppose one could run across a Bizango bokor?” he said.
Benoit fought a wince then went with the flow, Cooper admiring the savvy with which Benoit pretended he had wanted all along to continue shaking.
“Valley behind the hills east of Pignon,” he said. “Maybe this side of the DR, maybe not. Village called La Vallée des Morts.”
Cooper clamped on. “How do I get there?”
“Easy.”
“Fire away.”
“W-w-w,” Benoit said, “dot-Mapquest-dot-com.”
Cooper smiled tightly, gave Benoit his hand back, and, working his way out of the H. L. Dantier General Hospital, admired the impressive method by which Benoit had told him to go fuck himself.
He would actually have taken Benoit’s dot-com advice had he brought his laptop along for the ride. There had, however, been no reason to bring it, considering he knew all but Port-au-Prince to lack even the hint of a cellular signal, and microwave transmissions compatible with Cooper’s wireless modem to be entirely absent, islandwide. He detested logging on to the Internet with standard dial-up connections-waiting endlessly for a mechanical device to respond to commands was contrary to his character-and so he found a library.
Working off a recommendation from the cabbie who retrieved him from the hospital a mere hour after his call, he found a place that resembled an American library in the same way Benoit’s hospital matched an American medical center. Even so, Pignon wasn’t tough to pinpoint on the maps the place kept in stock: it looked to him to be five or six hours north of Port-au-Prince by way of a highway called Route 3. Cooper saw that with the exception of a single dotted line-the border with the DR-none of the maps provided by the Rastafarian working the back room charted anything for a forty-mile stretch east from Pignon, on either side of the border. The north-central plateau, as the maps told him the place was called, appeared to deserve nothing more than blank paper on the otherwise detailed drawings. There was one notable exception to this: on the smallest map he was given, a lone French word had been scribbled across the plateau.
Translating loosely, Cooper took the word to mean “badlands.”
Cooper strolled around the corner from the library, took about ten minutes to find what he was looking for, knocked on a door, slipped the woman who answered a few words in his best Haitian Creole, flashed her 250 bucks in twenties and fifties, and with that amount, procured the rusted, lime green ’74 Chevy pickup she and the family kept parked out front. He could hear the whoops and wails of capitalist glee through the missing passenger-side window as he leaned into a throttle lag you could count in geologic time, the dying engine block coughing as it started out but gaining momentum as it went, Cooper mashing the pedal to the floor.
He headed back into the city and found an open-air bazaar that, from all appearances, functioned as the local equivalent of a Wal-Mart. He maxed out a plastic bag with American candy bars, bottled water, local rum, a blanket and pillow, hiking boots, and a half-dozen T-shirts. It cost him eleven-fifty, Cooper figuring he was lucky the first merchant could break his twenty. For pit stop number two he hit the only gas station for miles, top-ping off the tank; despite encountering something of a language barrier with the station’s owner, he also managed to procure a short, battered oil drum he’d spotted beside the station’s twin mounds of trash bags. He filled the drum with fuel too, getting about thirty gallons in there, and secured it in the bed, utilizing, as a sort of poor man’s bungee cord, an extra plastic bag he’d procured at the bazaar.
Thinking, Richard Petty I ain’t, Cooper floored it out of the parking lot, keeping at it until the Chevy reached the point at which its pace registered on the speedometer.
12
The Chevy’s radio actually worked, Cooper homing in on some spooky-funky Creole tracks with the radio’s bent tuner knob until the reception faded about an hour north of the city. Route 3 was the shittiest, most potholed road he’d ever driven. He remembered seeing sinkholes take out quarter-mile stretches of dirt roads in a documentary he’d caught on the Raid Galouises cross-continent racing competition, but outside of that, Route 3 took the crown.
Further, he soon found you couldn’t let your attention wane while navigating Route 3.
It happened twice. He saw nothing for eighty or ninety minutes-no man, no beast, no roadkill, just plain zero sign of life along an endless stretch of speed bumps. Then, suddenly, from around a blind turn, came a converted school bus. Bearing down on him like a bat out of hell, the bus hogged the whole fucking road, its driver playing chicken and ready to mow him down until Cooper skidded into the grass and took out a stretch of saplings to avoid the collision. For the second sneak attack, Cooper at least showed the good sense to careen off the highway the minute the bus came into sight.
At dusk-losing faith in his ability to avert another transit bumrush-Cooper decided to heave to. He spied a suitable thicket and drove off-road straight into it, burrowing the Chevy into a bank of ferns. He turned off the tired old engine, threw on the emergency brake, got out, urinated, threw back two Snickers and half a bottle of rum, procured the blanket and pillow, lay back on the pickup’s red vinyl seat, and zonked-sleeping like a baby despite the incessant whine of mosquitoes nosediving for his flesh.