The Dew Breaker (15 page)

The preacher continued talking about his wife, remembering how her lips were so memorable, bright pink against her very dark face, how the space between her mouth and nose was cupped, shaped like a seashell, how the tip of her nostrils seemed to dip into the shell whenever she smiled, and how he’d done his best that day to try and make her smile, just to see that one last time.

He had loved his wife as soon as he saw her—his voice was growing hoarse and tired—he’d had no family in the city when he came to her father’s church at fourteen. He said as much to her when he met her at the first service he attended in this church, and she insisted that her parents take him in.

He converted from Catholicism so he could sit in this church with her, becoming a minister so her parents—he was so glad that she was now with them in Heaven—he became a minister so her parents would let him marry her.

He was still speaking out his reverie when his stepsister Anne walked in and out of the congregation within seconds. Anne was returning from her first cosmetology class. He’d signed her up that morning, her third in the city. He could tell from the cool, distant look on her face that she knew nothing of the immediate threat, the killers lurking about, his possible arrest. His sister—for his father and her mother had ordered them to always call each other frè, sè, “brother,” “sister”—had remained in their home village until a few days ago. In the seventy-two hours she’d been with him, however, he’d told and retold her of the day of his wife’s death and now it was too much. She was angry, angry at him for spending so much of his time and energy on the people in government, tired of his delusions to one day unseat them and set the masses free when he’d simply walked away from his own family, his old life, the place where the brother, with whom she shared a mother and he a father, had drowned. She would now go to his house and wait for him, to tell him all this once he returned. Besides, she was hungry and wanted to get something to eat.

His sister’s quick appearance and departure did not break the preacher’s flow of reminiscences, however. A half hour later, as the preacher was still recounting the sad tale of his wife’s death, a fat man, whose very large head was crowned with a deep widow’s peak, burst through the church’s front door. Behind the fat man was a group of Volunteers, all dressed in denim uniforms and wearing dark glasses whose front surfaces were like mirrors, distorting the room into curvatures and the churchgoers into miniatures. The men waved their handguns and rifles at the congregation and told them to keep their heads down, their foreheads pressed against the pews in front of them. The fat man wobbled down the aisle toward the preacher, held a .38 in one hand and with the other grabbed the preacher’s neck, wrapping his long, plump fingers around the preacher’s Adam’s apple, putting extra pressure on the preacher’s voice box to keep him from speaking. The extra force was not necessary, for the preacher had spent months preparing himself for a moment such as this, imagining what he would or would not do in this exact situation, and now that the moment had come, he was glad that his body was cooperating, no unexpected pulmonary attacks, no sudden bowel movements.

A few of the Volunteers joined the fat man and the preacher at the altar. Two of them grabbed the preacher’s arms and swung them around behind his back and held them there. The preacher winced in pain only once as the fat man and the others shoved him toward the front door.

The street outside the church was suddenly empty, all the merchants and children gone, all doors padlocked, with no light streaming out.

The preacher imagined his neighbors trembling in their hiding places, wondering if they would be visited next. But tonight, it seemed, was his night, and his alone.

The preacher was thrown in the back of a truck. A group of Miliciens piled on top of him. He raised his feet close to his chest as they shoved him from side to side, pounding rifle butts on random parts of his body. His face was now pressed against the metal undulations of the truck bed, boot soles and heels raining down on him, cigarette butts being put out in his hair, which sizzled and popped like tiny grains of rock salt in an open fire. He was hit with jolts of shock from what felt like portable electric devices pressed against the heels of his now bare feet.

He welcomed the sudden jerk of the truck taking off to race down the empty streets, because it provided a brief interruption of the assaults. He felt a flurry of hands sweep over his face. Some raised his head, and for a moment he caught a glimpse of the unfamiliar faces surrounding him, many now with the dark glasses off.

A dusty black rag was wrapped around his eyes, then tied in rigid knots around the back of his head. Now that his eyes were covered, he craved to see.

The truck suddenly stopped. The men nearest to him exchanged a few words with the people in a car up front. It seemed to him that the conversation was about where to take him, the nearby military barracks or the prison, Casernes or Fort Dimanche. It was said that if one went to the former there was a small chance of coming out alive, but the latter was literally a sepulcher from which no one was ever expected to resurface.

He thought he heard Casernes, the barracks. The truck was off again, and the blows resumed for the rest of his journey. He lost track of his own movements, his body cringing at every strike.

The truck stopped once more, and he felt the truck bed slowly rise as the Miliciens jumped off.

He heard a woman scream, “Jean! Jean! Is that you?” And if his name had been Jean, he would have thought himself already dead, being called forward by his wife from the other side.

He tried for the first time to loosen his hand and foot restraints so that he could perhaps move closer to the empty space where the woman’s voice was coming from.

A shot was fired somewhere. In the air? At him? At the woman calling Jean? He didn’t feel the expected hot burst of flames anywhere on his skin. Someone dragged him by the legs, pulled him forward, removing his jacket, and then he felt himself falling from the back of the truck onto the concrete. He fell on his face, crushing his forehead. His blood quickly soaked the blindfold, a warm veil of red covering the darkness over his eyes. He was being dragged by the legs over the rise of a curb. With each yank forward, a little bit of him was bruised, peeled away. He felt as though he was shedding skin, shedding voice, shedding sight, shedding everything he’d tried so hard to make himself into, a well-dressed man, a well-spoken man, a well-read man. He was leaving all that behind now with bits of his flesh in the ground, morsel by morsel being scraped off by pebbles, rocks, tiny bottle shards, and cracks in the concrete.

He tried to make himself as limp as possible as he was pushed down some uneven steps that at different moments in his descent wedged themselves between his ribs.

He was probably in a cell now, for he heard the rattling of bars and a lock being turned. He heard some breathing, some of it labored, and loud, moaning men. The smell of rotting flesh made him want to sneeze. There were some shadows circling him, sniffing like rats following the scent of blood. His head was spinning like a child’s top. The shadows were spinning too and then faded all together.

He was disappointed to find himself awakened again sometime in the night. A warm liquid was trickling down on his face and when he opened his mouth to quench his thirst with it, he realized it was urine.

Ave urina! The ridiculous thought entered his mind from some source he couldn’t quite recall. Morituri te salutant, I who am about die salute you.

His blindfold was now gone, but his inflamed eyelids formed a cover of their own. He fell into his darkness once more, this time even more abruptly than before.

3

The lights suddenly went out in the house and all over Rue Tirremasse, just as Anne was feeling one of those odd sensations she’d been experiencing since childhood. Even though it was pitch-black, she felt a slight pinch in both her eyes, another curtain of darkness settling in, further deepening the obscurity around her. Her face was growing progressively warmer, as though the candle she now so longed to light had already been ignited beneath the skin on her cheekbones. A high-pitched sound was ringing in her ears, like a monotonic flute, just as her nose was being bombarded with the sweet, lingering smell of frangipanis in bloom. Anticipating the convulsions to follow, she lowered herself to the ground and lay on her back, spreading her arms and legs apart. She imagined observing herself from somewhere high above, perhaps perched from the ceiling, watching herself on the cool cement floor, looking like a butterfly whose wings had been fractured, forcing it to set down and slowly die. Her breathing was shallow, the pauses growing longer between each cycle. Her body stiffened and the inside of her mouth felt crowded, her tongue swelling and spreading out over her teeth, filling them with the briny taste of dirty seawater. Fragmented moments from her life were filing past her, event after event streaming by at high speed on the giant puppet screen she now imagined her mind to be: her younger brother’s drowning, her stepbrother’s departure from their seaside village, perhaps to avoid the waters that had taken their brother’s life, their respective parents’ death from either chagrin or hunger or both, her recent move to the city to join her older brother, his inability to stop speaking about his wife’s death, which, it seemed, was not so unlike this death she was sure she was experiencing.

Maybe she shouldn’t have left the church a few moments ago. He was going on again about his wife and she was tired of it. Based on her brother’s own accounts, she couldn’t help but blame him for his wife’s death. What made him think he could denounce the powerful on the radio, of all places, and not risk the safety of those he loved? She wanted to tell him these things, hoped she would get the chance. Yet there she was, dying again or possessed again, she couldn’t tell which. If she were possessed, then why did the spirits wait until she was alone to enter her body, mount her the way she’d mounted docile horses as a child? There was no one there to hear whatever revelations the spirits would communicate through her, and when she came around again, if she came around again, she would have no recollection of this semi-mortal trance, except perhaps the sudden certainty that even as she was lying there, somewhere her older brother too was failing. Either his body itself was dying or something inside him was dying, but she feared that she might never see him again.

4

He was told to release the preacher. The change of orders had come directly from the national palace. He had missed an important nuance; the preacher had been
arrested
rather than
killed
. The arrest had been sloppily handled.

It was supposed to be a quiet operation, his superior, Rosalie, a short, stout, bespectacled woman, told him. She was in her fifties and one of the few high-ranking women in the barracks. Somehow she had become a friend, even though he didn’t see her often. She was frequently at the palace, where she had direct access to the president, for whom she was trying to recruit more female volunteers. Like the president, she had a deep love for folklore, which according to her they discussed frequently. And since the president had named his volunteer militia after the mythic figure of the Tonton Macoute, a bogeyman who abducted naughty children at night and put them in his knapsack, she wanted to name her female force Fillette Lalo, after a rhyme most of the country grew up singing, a parable about a woman who eats children.

When she’d shared all this with him, over glasses of rum and Cuban cigars, she even sang the rhyme, as if he needed to be reminded of it.

Little Bird, where are you going?
I am going to Fillette Lalo’s.
Fillette Lalo eats little children.
If you go, she will eat you too.
Brikolobrik
Brikolobrik
Hummingbirds eat soursop.

For others, the song recital might have seemed menacing, like a blatant effort to cast herself as the hummingbird to his soursop, but not for him. She had taken him under her wing, seeing in him some of her own zeal for the job. But now she wasn’t singing or laughing. She was angry.

“By all accounts, the arrest turned into a cockfight,” she said. She had long tried to copy the nasal inflection of her boss, the president, coming up with her own variation of it. “You went into a church filled with people when you could have gotten him on the street. Why did you bring him here?”

There were too many people milling around outside the church, he wanted to say, including that damned boy. He hadn’t been able to get a clear shot. He thought he could do the job better right here, in the barracks.

“You wanted him to suffer,” Rosalie was saying, smirking almost as if in admiration. “You took too many liberties. You disobeyed.”

He had failed her, and himself. Now the palace wanted the preacher released. They wanted the preacher sent out into the night, fearful and powerless, wondering when he would see them next. They didn’t want him to become some kind of martyr.

“He’s your responsibility,” she told him, turning on her heel, as if for a military-style about-face. “I’ve seen him and he looks very bad. Under no circumstances should he die here.”

He called out to one of the many low-level Volunteers who were always waiting in the prison’s narrow corridors for the next order. “Bring the preacherman in,” he said.

As the Volunteer disappeared from the doorway, he felt the usual tightening in his throat. It was something he always faced in the few moments before confronting a prisoner. Would the prisoner be fearful, bold? Would he/she put up a fight?

He was not anticipating a struggle. He wouldn’t try the usual methods on the preacher. He would simply encourage the preacher to abandon his activities, then tell him to go home.

5

“Hey, preacherman!” a voice was calling from outside the dark cell. “Come on over here!”

The preacher had no idea where “here” was. The Voice would have to keep shouting if it wanted him to find it. The preacher was half sitting, half squatting, with his back against a clammy wall. He was surrounded by the half dozen prisoners who had pissed on him. Others were curled on the filthy floor, sleeping. The ones who had pissed on him were exchanging a few words. From their garbled conversations, he gathered that they’d performed a kind of ritual cure. They believed that their urine could help seal the open wounds on his face and body and keep his bones from feeling as though they were breaking apart and melting under his skin. When the prisoners who’d pissed on him heard the Voice calling from outside the cell, they quickly parted around him, leaving the preacher a blurred view of a single shadow peering in through the rusting cell bars.

“You,” the Voice called out to the others inside the cell. “Bring the new prisoner here.”

Once again the preacher felt the agonizing sensation of many hands grabbing him at once, then carrying him from the back to the front of the cell. His head was still spinning, but somehow he managed to make his feet touch the ground, even as he was being held up high by his armpits. When he reached the bars at the front of the cell, he grabbed them and held on tightly. The men who were holding him up must have felt his unexpected surge of strength; they released him and left him standing on his own.

The Voice was now only a few inches from the preacher’s face. It broke into a halting laugh.

“You’re a lucky man,” it was saying. “This is your lucky day, you lucky man.”

The metal bars slid open, displacing his grip on them; then the shadow grabbed him and slammed him against the outside wall. He couldn’t tell how many people were there, in the cell or in the cramped corridor between the wall and the cell. His body crumpled, his legs buckling under him as he slipped to the slimy foul-smelling ground.

The Voice ordered him to get up and follow it down the corridor. Was he moving or were the walls, caked with blood and fecal stains, moving on their own?

“Hurry up or I’ll leave you here,” the Voice said.

The preacher didn’t want to be left there, squatting in the squalid limbo between freedom and imprisonment, between life and death. He thought of his wife and his sister, imagining himself moving closer to one and farther away from the other. His sister would survive without him, he told himself. She was strong; she had always known how to do for herself. She had her faith, no matter that unlike him she’d remained a Catholic. She also had his house, which she could sell if she needed money. She’d just begun that cosmetology course. Once she was done with her course, she could work as a beautician or open a shop. The only thing that worried him as far as she was concerned was her epilepsy. Even when she was a child, she never seemed to accept or understand that she was epileptic, coming up with all sorts of mystical reasons for her seizures, everything but the disease itself. He hoped she would never choose to have children. She’d had one of her seizures at the beach while watching their young brother and had let him drown. It’s possible that his wife had also had epilepsy, had died from it. But he couldn’t be distracted by these things now. The Voice was slipping away from him. He had to focus, concentrate all the strength he had left on his legs. Using the wall to support his weight, he climbed onto his feet and followed.

There was light waiting for him at the end of the corridor, all of it spilling out from one room, which he assumed was his destination. He could see a little better now. Maybe the urine cures had helped.

Dozens of eyes were peering at him from behind the cell bars on either side of the corridor. Some of the prisoners whispered, “Bonne chance.” They also thought him lucky. He was going to be released or he was going to die. Either way, he was going to be free.