Painkiller

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.

He awoke a little before dawn, and after a lengthy struggle getting the Chevy back on the road, logged another five hours of uphill bus-dodging. The roadside foliage lightened, thinned, browned, then vanished altogether by the time he turned a corner and came into Pignon, a sudden rush of cheap housing and emaciated humanity on what had become a beige moonscape of multiple-drought-scarred dirt. Cooper made an immediate guess of forty grand-forty thousand starving Haitians in a shantytown assembled for less than one-tenth that many. He’d seen it before, but witnessing the open sewers, bloated stomachs, and families of twenty peering out at his Chevy from a single room was still a shock-and this, just on the main drag. He tried to recall some recent history to assign the blame-Baby Doc Duvalier’s brutal regime yanking a few billion on its way out? A bullshit American economic embargo? Didn’t matter-not to these people. Cooper thinking now that Eugene Little might have had it wrong: the body from Roy’s beach didn’t have to be doing any hard labor to show signs of malnutrition and abuse.

The kid just had to live here.

He ditched the pickup in a roadside rut and kept the keys just in case, though he held little faith the truck would be there when he returned. Hell, he thought, I probably just made a donation-truck’ll be somebody’s home in a minute or two. Push it around the corner and you’ve got a roof ten times stronger than any I can see from here.

A rainbow-hued bus-no doubt one of the Route 3 battle group, he thought-roared to a stop a half block up the road, dropped some people, took on more, and sped past him in a burst of dust and foul exhaust. The shantytown express-cheapest way to travel slum-to-slum, Cooper thinking the bus offered something in the order of a sixty percent chance of death by head-on collision per trip.

He knew that people in a place like this would automatically tag him for one of maybe three classes of foreigner-missionary, doctor, or scientist. Anybody they’d seen before who looked like him had probably held such a role in society, so that was what they would assume him to be. Working with this notion in mind, Cooper hoofed it through the most crowded sections of the village, firing questions at anybody who didn’t look like they wanted to roll him for his shoes. He asked if anybody knew the way to La Vallée des Morts, where, he lamely attempted to explain, he’d been told a rare rhinoceros iguana had been seen. He’d come to study it-to verify its existence. It didn’t matter what he told any of them anyway, Cooper finding the Haitian Creole that had worked for him in Port-au-Prince didn’t do squat for him here. He was ready to toss the pointless ruse and start asking about Bizango zombie-branding techniques when he saw the answer to his troubles coming down a hill behind a set of lean-tos.

A beanpole of a kid, exceedingly tall and exceedingly skinny, was trekking down the barren face of the hill-the boy maybe seven foot one and a buck-fifty tops, Cooper figuring him for seventeen or eighteen years of age-and, out here, where rain might not have fallen for two years, the kid had a half-dozen fish dangling from a short length of twine draped over one of his arms. Cooper thinking the minute he saw the kid that what he ought to have working for him was the kind of person tourists usually had to beat back with a stick in the Caribbean: a guide.

And if he were planning on journeying through uncharted Haitian badlands in search of a Bizango medicine man with the aid of a guide, then it might not be a bad idea to do it with a kid who’s been out harvesting his limit of carp in the driest patch of earth in the Western Hemisphere. With people, he thought, starving right and left-hoping to score a quarter cup of rice anytime in the coming year-this kid’s got a fucking sashimi dinner lined up for every night this week.

When the foreigner in the flowered shirt, the blan, came up the hill to greet him, Alphonse knew he had been wise to listen to the priest and prepare for this day. For weeks now he had exercised vigorously and fished doggedly-staying at the lake until sunset to harvest more protein-even bragged to his peers of the dangerous journey on which he would soon embark. Some of them scoffed, ridiculing his piety, advising him instead to take the journey most of the others took: get the hell off this diseased plain and find something to steal, maybe deal some drugs with the proceeds and live the good life in Port-au-Prince. Most of Alphonse’s crew had already done exactly that, though he’d heard things about the good life they were leading in the urban slums. At least half of them were dead.

Alphonse was different. He listened to his elders, gave them respect, and had taken enough strength from their words to avoid the blasphemed fate of his peers. Alphonse was pious and committed, an open vessel through which Le Gran Maître could exercise His will. And now, with the blan in the flowered shirt coming up the hill, Alphonse was ready for his trial-he would embrace his journey into manhood and attain spiritual wholeness on the other side. He flung his catch of carp over a shoulder, allowing the fish to dangle behind his back, so he could offer a respectful posture for the stranger’s approach.

It would be best not to alienate one of His messengers.

I’m looking for a guide,” Cooper said in his half-assed Creole.

Standing on the incline, fifteen or twenty yards up the slope, he noticed that the two-dollar hiking boots he’d bought at the bazaar were already digging into his heels.

“Wi,” Alphonse said. “I am your guide.”

Cooper nodded. He hadn’t expected much resistance. “Heard of a place called La Vallée des Morts? East of here. Could be over the border.”

Alphonse stepped forward, and Cooper noted he was barefoot. It didn’t look as though the kid was carrying a pair either.

“I’ve heard cette place,” Alphonse said, working somewhere between busted English, ghetto French, and Haitian Creole. “My test is to take you there? Si ça, c’est vrai, I will that for you do. M rele Alphonse.”

They shook hands.

“Nice meeting you, Alphonse,” Cooper said. He didn’t bother giving his own name. “How much?”

Alphonse froze, looking shocked that this messenger from Le Gran Maître would offer to pay him. He appeared set to announce his refusal to accept compensation for such a journey when Cooper extended his hand and Alphonse saw in the hand a wrinkled mass of American fifty-dollar bills. Cooper readied to catch the kid’s eyes in case they fell from their sockets.

“How about two-fifty now,” Cooper said, “two-fifty when you get me there, and a bonus when we make it back-another two-fifty.”

Succumbing to earthly weakness, Alphonse snatched the bills, feverishly counted them, and shoved the money deep into his pants. Then he stood very tall and smiled a crooked, yellow-toothed grin.

“I am your guide,” he said.

“We hurry,” Cooper said, “there may yet be a ’74 Chevy with an empty navigator’s seat you can do your guiding from.”

Alphonse smiled, nodded, and followed Cooper down the slope, his faith implicit. He knew that along the way, Le Gran Maître would help him to understand the strange things this blan seemed to say.