“Not like cow or animal in street.”
This argument went round and round, up into the mountains and down, past seaside Gommier and pretty Roseaux and muddy Chardonette, one of those arguments that start out as banter but before long start to rankle, just two guys in a car, each thinking the other’s an asshole.
“So just where is this lady supposed to pee?” Terry said. “Just stop in the nearest Starbucks?”
“In my place, lady not make pee in side of road like animal or dog.”
“Are we in your place?”
“In my place, we have no United Nations. No peacekeepers. Lady not big shame, like here. My place is no-problem place.”
Terry looked at me. The incident had been weighing on him. There was hardly a tree in sight, a lady’s been walking since before dawn with a goddamn goat on her head, she feels the need — who the hell was Ahmet to judge her? People here gotta live in poverty, suffer from dawn to dusk, sweat rivers, and die young — and Ahmet, with his pompadour and mother-of-pearl — handled revolver and three-bedroom apartment in Ankara, is going to tell them in their own country where they can and cannot pee? What you got to understand is that this was the hajji mentality.
“So what do you think?” he said.
Here was an examination it was very simple to pass. “Their country,” I said.
“Damn straight,” Terry said. “Who the hell cares where this lady pisses?”
“Not me,” I said.
“What you got to understand is that for the towelheads—”
“I hear you, brother.”
“Those ladies—”
“They suffer, man. They suffer.”
I don’t believe Terry had expected me to capitulate so quickly. He seemed unsatisfied. We sat in silence for a moment or two, until from the other table a harsh, cruel laughter broke the early-evening calm. A couple of UNPOLs — one from Burkina Faso, the other from Benin — were trying to feed scraps of barbecued chicken to the chickens pecking under the table and were kicking away the hungry dogs attempting to steal some chicken for themselves. This was cracking the table up. Terry got a disgusted look on his face, seeing that.
“Knock it off,” he said. “You don’t got to humiliate those damn birds. It’s enough you’re eating their carcasses.”
The Africans laughed. Terry glared at his colleagues for a long time in a way that wasn’t friendly. I don’t think they understood the menace implicit in his low voice, or they thought laughter would defuse it. The guy from Benin kept feeding the chickens their kin. Terry’s stare was a prelude to standing up. It shocked me how swiftly his mood had switched from placid good humor to something nearly violent. An afternoon with Terry White was not necessarily relaxing.
Then the tension was over. The African UNPOLs backed off, still laughing, and Terry grinned at me: we were complicit, if but for a moment, on the side of justice. That gesture endeared him to me.
Terry told me that before coming to Haiti he’d been in law enforcement almost twenty years. “What you gotta understand is that a professionally conducted interrogation isn’t fair,” he said. Terry talked, he gave examples, and with a little prompting, he talked some more. Later he told me that his testimony had sent a man to death row — that’s something. How’d that feel? “Like it was the best thing I ever did,” he said, but not callously, rather as the only decent end to an all-around bad business. Terry told me that he’d been active in Florida Republican politics for years: at one point he’d taken a run for sheriff and lost. “Now, that’s a brutal game, Florida politics. Those boys don’t play.” So how’d you end up in Haiti of all places? He told me about Marianne Miller, Marianne Miller being his erstwhile rival back home. The upshot of the narrative cul-de-sac was that no one had appreciated what a terrific law enforcement official he was, not least the new sheriff, who had let Marianne Miller whisper poison in his ear, which had led to the complicated imbroglio that had led to the best interrogator in Florida being out of a job, then going broke, then ending up in Nowhere, Hades.
Terry was not interested in me. Not once did he ask what brought me to Haiti, what my work consisted of, or where my family was from. But had he pressed the issue, I would have told him that I had followed my wife here: she was a civilian employee of the United Nations, working as a procurement officer; and I would have mentioned that I intended to use my time in Haiti, after a decade working as a journalist, to complete a novel. Terry’s sole attempt to broach the conversational divide was to ask where my wife and I were living.
We rented our house on the rue Bayard from Maxim Bayard, a member of the Haitian Sénat. The previous tenant had left the Mission to return to Zimbabwe, and we had taken the keys directly from him, completing the details of the rental with the Sénateur by email. The Sénateur had left a small library of spiritualist literature, in both French and English, on the bookshelves: books on the interpretations of dreams, a volume on yoga, guides to communication with the dead, the margins filled with handwritten comments in bright red ink. This was all I knew of the man.
“Maxim Bayard is a maximum asshole,” Terry said.
It was like learning that Terry knew Mick Jagger. I leaned forward as he maneuvered his plastic fork and knife around on the table so that the fork was perpendicular to the knife, with a small gap between them.
The fork and the knife represented vehicles in the parking lot of the Bon Temps, a little hotel and restaurant not far from our house, where Terry had been at lunch with colleagues on a Sunday afternoon. “This was my car here”—he indicated the knife—“and this was a white pickup truck here.” He gestured to the fork. “And if you were backing up the pickup, maybe it’s not easy to get out, but there was plenty of space, if you don’t drive like a monkey’s ass.”
Terry had been gnawing on a chicken bone when he heard the crunch. He looked up. The fork had backed up directly into the knife.
“Whoa!” Terry had shouted, and all the other UNPOLs swung their heads around to see what the commotion was about. He was on his feet and walking toward the lot when the driver pulled forward and slowly rear-ended his vehicle all over again.
What Terry could recall about the Sénateur with overwhelming clarity was the expression of happy unconcern on his face. Terry had spent more than a little time as an ordinary traffic policeman, and he had never seen anyone cause an accident in this manner and subsequently display no trace of anxiety. “What you got to understand is that I was in uniform. I was armed. This was a UN vehicle,” Terry said.
And yet this man not only betrayed no sign of worry, he was still maneuvering his pickup to make a third try at the tricky turn. Terry figured that if he hadn’t walked over, the older fellow would have kept ramming his vehicle over and over again until sooner or later he succeeded.
“That’s my car,” Terry said.
“The wife of my driver, she is having a baby,” the Sénateur said in heavily accented English. “I cannot ask him to work, with his wife in the hospital.”
It all made sense in the Sénateur’s mind — you could tell. In his mind, there was some seamless chain of cause and effect that left him blameless and Terry’s vehicle dented. Something in his half smile suggested that to the contrary, Terry was at fault here, that Terry didn’t care enough about his driver’s wife. The Sénateur’s smile incarnated what Terry hated most: arrogance, impunity, indifference to the consequence of one’s actions. It was the smile of a man who believed — nay, knew—that he was above the law.
Then one of those crowds that seems to spring up out of nowhere in Haiti on a moment’s notice was watching Terry and the Sénateur. Terry could hear schoolchildren giggling. There is a terrible power in laughter: Terry began to sweat, and his face went red. The Sénateur began to laugh also, and he shouted something in Creole to the onlookers — the only word Terry could understand was “blan.” Terry felt humiliated in the eyes of his peers, who considered the encounter from the doorway of the hotel.