“I find a boat through zanmi Jean-Alexi. So they don’t steal from you, he pay at other end.”
Her heart was pounding so hard at the reality of leaving, she hardly heard him, didn’t care for the details. A good omen — Jean-Alexi would be on the other side for her.
They hugged to say good-bye. Thibant such a country peasant he insisted on sleeping at the side of the road all night to make sure he caught the first tap tap out of the capital in the morning.
“You tell Tante this is the money she owes me. This makes us square, okay?”
Uncle Thibant moved off quickly, and Marie realized with a sting it was to get away from her. No matter that she had been the one wronged. Especially in the country, people tended to condemn a person for her misfortune; it was easier that way. Thibant didn’t want proof of who Tante was. Easier to pretend when Marie was out of sight and gone.
Victim turns into monster, and they don’t want themselves to blame for it, wi?
Chapter 3
The horror of the boat trip was forgotten because Marie thought at last her life would change. “Change, life, change,” she chanted under her breath, to the rhythm of the waves, until the other girls thought she was singing, and they hummed along searching for the melody.
The slosh and thump of water against the boat’s hull, the constant fear of the mosquito whine of a Coast Guard boat coming to turn them back, or the equal fear that the smugglers running the boat would take advantage of the women, all vanished at the first sight of land. From far off the orange halo over the cities of South Florida looked like giant bonfires lit to signal them in. Magic names — Miami, Key West, Delray, Boca Raton — like incantations. No one waited for them, or wanted them. They stole in like thieves. But Uncle Thibant promised Jean-Alexi would be there to pick Marie up.
Grateful to have someone to take her away from the beach and the danger of police, she didn’t notice until later that he was also chatting up the other women in the group — the thin, young ones — who crowded into the back of the waiting van with her.
Behind the tatty front seats, the van was pure island, stripped out with nothing more than a filthy metal floor to sit on. At first, the most fussy of the group, those who had saved clean clothes to be worn after the landing, if there was a landing, tried to squat and preserve the impression they had struggled so hard to make — white blouses and dark, printed cotton skirts — of well-behaved convent girls. But the quick driving, the hard turns, knocked them over and into each other. Marie had to brace her legs against the side of the van to avoid landing on top of, or underneath, other bodies. They were like chickens thrown carelessly in a box on the way to the butcher.
The two men who crowded together on the passenger seat did not introduce themselves, did not follow polite island custom. They sat, squat and muscled, with blue-black skin, and hungry rat eyes. Marie knew such men from Port-au-Prince. They sat and drank till they were filled with lust, then they picked luxuriously, like choosing cuts of meat, and went up the stairs, and the girls didn’t talk for a long time afterward.
Jean-Alexi didn’t seem to recognize her. Or if he did, he wasn’t letting on. Not that she’d expected a honeymoon meeting. He’d lost weight and put on years — he looked old and tired for twenty-four. His eyes were scattered and hyped. The old cockiness gone.
The main thing she noticed was the increase of his dreadlocks — now enormous and dusty-cocoa colored, billowing up large like an engorged cockscomb, bundled in half with a tie like a huge crest. His hair frightened and fascinated her. A shantytown rooster. As she reached to touch one braid, unable to guess if it felt stiff and hard as rope or soft as fur, he grabbed her wrist hard.
“Now, little Erzulie, what kind of trouble you looking for from your Jean-Alexi? Nuh, girl?”
Marie tried to pull her hand back, but he held the wrist fast as with a band of steel, a deceiving strength from such a banty man, strength hid like a strand of spiderweb.
He looked back at her, foot tapping, other hand thumping the wheel, his eyes a cracked gold that didn’t seem right. Then he pulled her hand to his lips, stuck out his tongue, and ran it along the inside of her wrist.
“Hmmm, homegrown sugar, that’s what I miss the most of the island.”
At this possibility, the other two men looked at her for the first time, appraising.
“Too bad you’re Thibant’s folk,” Jean-Alexi said, and dropped her hand roughly.
“Not mine,” one of them said.
Jean-Alexi looked at him hard. “Way too precious for you, brother.”
Marie was confused at this behavior after the way he had been before and wondered at the change. Was this fierce new look and behavior some kind of act in front of the others?
The past gave her a flicker of courage. “We’re hungry,” she said.
“Well, let’s feed you,” he said. “Don’t you know? Now you’re in the land of plenty?”
His crazy eyes studied her, but she convinced herself he meant no harm. No love, either. She remembered the candy he gave her that day on the beach — a dried-out, pink piece of taffy too stale to eat.
* * *
There was whispered discussion up front while in the back the girls and Marie exchanged wondering looks. A few minutes later, they pulled up to a brightly lit building with glowing neon. Jean-Alexi rolled down his window and talked at length into a speaker box that crackled back answers to his words.
When he drove around the building, a girl was sitting in the window. Marie guessed the same one he’d been talking to through the box. Her skin was pale and blotchy, her eyes a drained blue, her whole appearance suggesting something uncooked. Greasy, long hair, the color of brass, was held up out of her eyes with black bobby pins. But Jean-Alexi spoke to her as if she were the most enchanting princess, and Marie felt a stab of something — embarrassment for him? Jealousy? Here he was, courting the lowliest of white women.
“How you doing this night, beautiful lady?”
“That’ll be fifty-two fifty, please,” she said, expressionless.
Marie liked that she wasn’t buying his stupid flatteries.
He handed the window girl a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill with a flourish. “How about I take you out after work sometime, pretty lady? Take you for some real food?”
Marie thought that maybe the girl only heard words through the earphones, that in person, communication was only one way, outward.
The girl blinked at the bill and hesitated, then took out a fat highlighter pen and ran a yellow line over it, then held it against the fluorescent light. She signaled back to her manager, who was busy shoveling fries into small paper pockets. He shrugged.
“I’ll have to get change.”
Marie looked into the main building where the tables stood under the scrubbing light that killed any shadow. Each detail — a crack in a plastic seat, a man’s stubbled chin — showed in stark relief, like looking at grains of sand under the clear ocean back home. The people at the tables seemed to be moving in slow motion as if they, too, were underwater. Eyes half-closed, they ate their food out of paper and avoided looking at each other’s face. The night was hot yet they were bundled up in long sleeves and jeans and jackets. They did not seem to know the temperature outside, to know where they were. Marie could tell them — she who still had the smell of sour bilgewater on her feet, who’d risked everything to arrive at this very spot. You are in the land of dreams come true. What would they make of her sacrifice? The thought came up inside her, unwanted: What if this place cost more than it gave, what if it was really no better than what had been sacrificed for it?