Far Encounter
by Peter Lundell
A mud puddle can do so much.
Sean McGregor sped his motorcycle down a rutted, rock-studded road through the Haitian countryside. Men stopped and stared, machetes hanging in their hands. Half-naked children lined up in front of mud huts and waved. Fruit-laden donkeys jittered at his engine’s roar and backed up, no matter what direction they faced. Endless bumps jarred Sean’s wrists and elbows, and to spare his back, he crouched bent-kneed off the motorcycle seat.
At noon he had left the Peace Corps dispensary in the North Central Plateau. Port-au-Prince was still four or five hours off, but the road gave him precious solitude from his irritating coworkers. And from the Haitians he was supposed to help.
His thoughts again found their way to Celeste, who had promised to wait for him in the States. She was his heaven.
Here and now he would settle for a bit of fun, but Haiti offered little of that.
On a whim he popped a wheelie as he crested a hill. Dashing down the other side, his wheels coursed into a rut.
The rut bottomed into a mud puddle. A deep one.
He yanked the handlebars back, but the front tire lodged in the mud, the seat surged upward, he threw himself against the rising back end, but the rear fender kept coming, thrusting him higher, catapulting him over a donkey, the bike flipped, hit the donkey, he kept flying, and crashed on his right shoulder.
A massive shock wave reverberated through him.
No. This didn’t happen.
His breath caught in his throat and wouldn’t move.
He lay still. The motorcycle lay still. The sound of the donkey’s hooves kicking in the dirt interspersed its horrified screeches.
An overhanging tree dulled to a gray blur. No air was coming in. His lungs screamed for air. Pain pierced his neck, back, and shoulder, then stabbed the whole body. Still no air. The gray blur turned black.
He lay motionless. How long, he did not know.
Then a trickle of air seeped in, slowly increasing until his lungs were bellowing, and blackness turned to blurry gray. His head throbbed and his body quivered under the slashing pain. Flipped. Where’s bike? I’m on bike. No. Mud puddle. Donkey.
“Blanc! Blanc! Blanc te frape bourik!”—A white hit a donkey! Voices climbed upon each other. Sean rolled from his side onto his back, recoiling in a spasm of pain. The voices ceased, then resumed. Another voice, maybe the donkey’s owner, spat like a machine gun. The donkey made no more sounds. The whole world writhed in a blur.
One voice seemed to command the others. Then several hands began to lift him, and it felt as if a knife pierced his neck. The voices calmed, and the machine gun voice burst out again. The commanding voice silenced it, and a number of hands took hold of Sean and lifted. The pain slashed with new energy. He screamed loud and long.
He stopped when they laid him on a straw mat over the uneven dirt floor of a hut. Several hands cut at the torn jacket over his bleeding shoulder and gently peeled back the fabric. His shoulder recoiled under a bath of cool water and jittered violently from a cloth wiped over it.
The benevolent torment stopped, then a hand tugged at his helmet. Sean gasped. A young woman peered down at him. He could not distinguish the details of her brown face against the dark ceiling. She and a man pulled at the helmet again. Sean screamed and touched his left hand to the helmet, motioning outward. The man and woman fumbled with the helmet and pulled. Sean screamed and repeated with his left arm. The hands fumbled, pulled outward and lifted the helmet off over his deep gasp.
His neck down through his upper back and right arm felt as if it were on fire, knives jammed between every bone. On his junior high playground, Sean had learned not to cry. Now he wished he could. Because he felt fear outgrowing his pain. He knew that jeeps or trucks—anyone who could help him—rarely passed on this pathetic excuse for a road.
The man with the commanding voice talked above him. The woman responded agreeably to whatever it was he said. She called him “François.”
The doorway filled with black heads. The air felt dead, embalmed in mixtures of smoke, dung, urine, straw, and stale beans. A small window above him permitted a beam of light to filter through.
An open stretch unfolded; he shifted. A slight hill. Steeper down the other side. A donkey backed up from the edge of the road, jerking its helpless master with it. A mud puddle.
As his vision cleared, he could see that the whitewashed mud walls contoured in and out and formed ridges over the supporting posts. A kitchen area and two chairs stood on one side of the room, and a door to another room stood across from the outside door. The woman wore a brown, threadbare dress, with her hair pulled back into a knot. Her teeth and the whites of her eyes contrasted her smooth brown face. She laid a cool, wet rag on his forehead and pulled his torn shirt back over the wound on his shoulder. She casually brushed several flies away. Smoke drifted in past all the staring heads and through the doorway.
The man, François, bent down to Sean. “Kote ou te sortie?”—Where did you come from?
“La Victoire.”
Voices murmured at the door.
“Corps de Paix”—Peace Corps.
The voices talked louder.
“Kote ou te alle?”—Where were you going?
“Port-au-Prince.”
The voices quieted and the man spoke softly to the woman. The two stepped out of the hut, chasing away the onlookers as they went. Chickens cackled and clucked. Soon the woman returned, removed the rag, soaked it, and placed it back on his forehead.
Darkness slowly overtook the indistinct lines of the walls and doorway. Small tin oil lamps now flickered, and voices outside the hut seemed to keep each other company. The woman sat beside Sean and hummed softly to herself. Two boys stumbled into the room, and she abruptly shooed them out, where they whispered on the other side of the doorway to the other room.
The woman looked down on him. “Mwe rele Angelique”—My name is Angelique. “Ii ou?”
“Sean.”
“Shaann.”
Sean surprised himself by smiling.
The voices outside disappeared one by one, then someone shut the door and window. François did not return. Angelique put the two boys to bed in the other room then returned and laid a straw mat beside him. She sat down, closed her eyes and began to sing. Sean couldn’t make out the meaning except for “merci.” Then she clasped her hands together and talked to herself, gently rocking. Perhaps she was praying.
There would have to be a god for that to be any use. And if there were one, he-she-it would have to care. Even if this god cared, the woman couldn’t have much to be thankful for.
She finished and smiled. “Bon nuit.” She put out the light and stepped into the other room.
Then the horrible reality pressed him like a millstone: They’re just leaving me here.
The pain seemed to dull from simple exhaustion. The hard, dirt floor rose slightly under the small of his back. He shifted until the ground felt flat. In the quiet, several dogs barked in the distance. He willed himself to dredge up a good memory.
Celeste stared over a candle jammed into a Spanish wine bottle. Under the dim lights of the restaurant, the candle’s glow danced across her face. Her mouth twitched at its corners, embarrassed that he should look at her when she was beginning to cry. Her eyes glistened and her voice quivered. “I’ll miss you.” He reached his hand, but she kept hers under the table.
Cicadas sang steadily. They were company, but distant, unconcerned companions. Their sound ushered another memory.
Sean spoke to the pilot over the drone of the engine. Sunlight glinted off the waves, and blue turned to gray by the shore and to shades of green as the colors rose out of the sea to a wide plain with fringes climbing gently, then steeply, into mountains. An updraft caught the plane on its approach to a ridge. It was like sailing. A cloud floated far ahead, too far and too high. It billowed a mass of cotton up to the sun, almost too bright to look at. The plane would never reach it.
One dog kept barking alone. Stupid dog—alone and barking in the dark. Sean cursed Haiti. He cursed the road and the donkey. Someone rustled in the other room, and all fell silent again. The world was black, and the pain did not sleep. All he had was his thoughts.
With a steady shrill the jet engines pushed upward. The runway dropped slowly back, and long strings of lights curved and crisscrossed into the suburbs. Beyond them lay only dots. The wing lights blinked through a misty shroud. He had reached the clouds. The jet burrowed into them and broke through the top. A full moon beamed above the white expanse. Sean knew he would never reach the moon, because the moon hung much higher than he could go. So many things he would never reach.
The wind hissed through a crack in the blackness. To someone else it was home. To him it was a coffin. Lying hopelessly and wondering if he would die in a mud hut in this stinking pit of poverty had not been on Sean’s job description. “Why did I ever come here?” he mumbled. “Should’ve never joined the Peace Corps. Should’ve never come here.”
Celeste pulled a handkerchief out of her purse and wiped her eyes. “Don’t cry,” he said. “I’m coming home. See me fly.” . . . The plane sped like a go-cart down the valley, with green rising up either side. Several pillars of smoke gave away locations of mud huts on the mountainsides. The plane leveled off then began to climb—away from the huts, away from mud puddles. . . . But a donkey jerked back, its eyes glaring white. Its master yanked the rope—gaping at Sean as he flew, as he shattered.
The pain would not sleep, and the musty stench hanging in the room grew heavier as the night dragged on. He wished someone would open the door or window. With no treatment, he might never leave this tomb. Or he might never walk again. He wished he would lose consciousness, because he did not have the bravado to die.
He cursed Haiti again. It could rot and die for all he cared. But it already was. Why had he ever cared? If these people would ever learn to do anything right, they wouldn’t be so poor, and the road would have been paved. No help, no communication, and no one smart enough to do anything about it.
François, with the commanding voice directing the others, was the only one who seemed to know anything. And now he’d gone off and disappeared.
Then came a sound. Outside the door. Feet scraping the dirt. A muffled voice, low, not calling or talking to anyone. A single voice, chanting. Perhaps a prayer or incantation. More shifting feet. Then a scratching above the door, perhaps the doorframe, something scraping or pressing into the wood. The chanting again.
Should I shout? Call Angelique?
The feet shuffled away, and the stillness returned.
There would be no point in waking her now.
He stared into the blackness and drifted.
He grabbed for Celeste’s hand, but she was gone. He peered around the restaurant; all the chairs sat empty. . . . The plane broke over a ridge, and a valley rushed below, spreading to the sea. The water sparkled in paisley patterns of currents and winds blowing contrary to currents. He smiled at the pilot, but the pilot was not there. He looked behind him and no one was there. He sat alone in the plane not knowing how to fly it. The engine’s drone grew louder and louder until he could not think. . . . He looked away from the moon’s gentle glow on the jet wing to talk to the man beside him. The seat was empty. The seats across the aisle were empty. He stood up. The jet was empty. He ran to the cockpit and burst through the doors. No one. The glowing dials of the instrument panels framed the windshield, through which the empty beam of the moon hung so far out of reach.
Angelique was patting his face and holding his jaw when Sean heard himself screaming. In the black room he could see the outline of her body. A tear slipped down the side of his face. Finally. He was crying. It was easier to cry in the dark than in the daylight.
***
He must have fallen asleep again, because the next thing he saw was cracks of light tiptoeing on the contoured mud wall. Angelique opened the window shutter to let the morning in, along with the chorus of donkeys, dogs, guinea hens, and chickens. She hummed as she opened the door.
Then she screamed.
Sean defied the pain to lift his head and see. White powder lay scattered in front of the door, and the severed head of a chicken hung by a string above the frame. Angelique never stopped yelling as she trampled the powder and yanked out the nail that dangled the chicken head. Then she bolted out of sight.
He lowered his head. Behind him stood the two boys, jittery and bug-eyed with fear.
Murmuring rose all around the hut. Children appeared in the doorway and adults stood several feet behind them, some shaking their heads, others talking and gesturing. The children silently stared at Sean, their eyes wide.
Superstitious idiots.
But he had heard stories. People being cursed, getting sick, dying. He had never been the target before.
His stomach ached.
Then he realized his bladder was next to bursting, and he let the repulsive inevitable happen. This primeval rat hole made him urinate in his own pants—with an audience. He closed his eyes and tried not to think about it. A sniffing noise descended on his warm, wet thighs. He opened one eye to a goat peering down through rectangular pupils and angular skull. One of the boys pulled the goat outside and returned to stare at Sean. The adults began pointing at him as they chattered.
He hated every single one of them.
Angelique returned, quiet and angry. She swept the powder away with harsh strokes of the spindly broom then slammed the door on the observers. As if Sean and the two boys were not there, she began shouting into the ceiling. The boys fell to their knees. She placed her hands on each of their heads then on Sean, shouting the whole time. Incantations—no, a strange kind of prayer. She was yelling at the ceiling again.
She finished, turned to him and spoke rapid fire, apparently explaining. He caught some of the words: donkey dead, owner angry, voodoo, Sean . . . dead.
“Superstition,” he told himself. “That’s all it is.”
He could hear her breathing.
“That’s all it is. Nothing more. Right?”
She paced the room.
He pretended to not feel the anxiety shivering through him.
She stopped and stood over him, her eyes glowering. She sure took that stuff seriously, but she wasn’t afraid. Only mad. She was different from the others, as if she knew something they didn’t.
She paced again and continued praying at the ceiling until her voice gradually calmed and she said “Amen.”
She brought a dish of rice and beans, and with a tarnished spoon proffered it to Sean. His nose crinkled, but his stomach was empty, and he received a few spoonfuls. She tried to tip his head up to a tin cup of water. He gasped. She let his head back down and tipped the cup over his lips, letting half the water run down his neck; the rest he choked on and swallowed. He thought of his father who had contracted amoebic dysentery while on a trip to Africa.
He could now see that the roof was made of straw, and spindly lengths of twisted wood spanned the room along the tops of the walls. On them lay a few sawed planks on which rested woven baskets. A cockroach skittered down a wall. He lifted his left arm to smash it but could not reach.
When she finished, she rose and went outside. Without her, the room felt like a tomb. The sun rose higher in the sky, stoking the day’s heat in this thatch-roofed oven.
He wondered where his motorcycle was.
The weakest of breezes struggled through the little window. Someone was chopping wood. Each strike of the ax jabbed at him. He began to cry again. He wanted Angelique to come back. He might have called her poor, but somehow it didn’t seem like the right word anymore.
One of the boys pushed open the door. He was eating a mango, and the sticky juice oozed down his face and hands. Angelique came in and sat down with a cup of water and small plastic bowl of cornmeal. The cornmeal was bland, but he was too hungry to care anymore. She tipped the cup to the corner of his mouth rather than the center so less water would be lost, and the little that escaped felt cool across his cheek. He choked only three times before he finished. Angelique smiled and held the smaller boy.
A man appeared in the doorway and spoke harshly—the machine gun voice. Angelique stood and shouted at him. He spit back a sharp rebuke. They screamed at each other. At the same time. And did not stop. Then the man quieted and nodded.
Sean smiled. She must have told him off.
After the man left, she babbled at him again: Donkey’s owner. Wanted money. No, Angelique said, no money. Take motorcycle.
Take the? My motorcycle? How could you— Sean groaned loudly.
“Shhhh.” She sat and covered his forehead with her hand.
The smaller boy sat on her lap.
A cheerful voice came from outside, and two people entered, carrying buckets of water. Angelique thanked them and talked with them outside.
Sean clenched his teeth. How could that stupid woman give his bike away? He should never have come to this wretched place. Why couldn’t these people . . .
No. Stop.
Honesty check.
A donkey was a man’s livelihood. Sean would probably never ride the motorcycle again anyway.
He was the one who had popped a wheelie without seeing what was on the other side of the hill.
Angelique had given him hours of attention.
These people had brought water.
Angelique dabbed a wet rag on his face and body again. It occurred to Sean that the whole time he had lain there, she had done very few of the daily chores Haitian women always did. He smiled at her, and she smiled back.
Shackled by the constant pain, Sean faded into a delirium as the sun faded into evening.
The clouds billowed high and white. Sean tried to reach them but could not. He only felt himself falling through empty space, reaching, groping—but grasping only air. Falling, helpless, abandoned. . . . he hit the ground hard, much too hard.
A shiver of pain ran through him.
Tip-taps crept across the thatched roof, tapping faster and harder, hushing all other sounds. The sky rumbled over the descending darkness. An oil lamp flickered for a while, casting shadows around the room that was once again shut up like a tomb. Drops randomly fell through the roof, some on his body. Angelique was talking again, or praying, rocking gently. The oil lamp went out, and there was only the rain. Sean wished the rain would wash him away.
Though he was weak from hunger, eating was too painful. He knew Angelique knew it, or she would have fed him continually. He felt his body slipping, as if into a hole.
What felt like a temporary death cradled Sean through much of the night. If he awoke in the morning, he would receive life back again. He only didn’t want to be permanently maimed.
At the village market a man with a humpback approached him with hand outstretched, palm up. His arm was contorted from broken bones having never been set. Another man walked with the help of a crutch. His left leg was shorter than the right, and the foot turned up and in so that he actually walked on his ankle. Sean tried to turn away, but he was bent and twisted just like them.
His eyes flashed open, he was breathing hard. He was afraid to sleep but too delirious to stay awake. Sometime in the night the rain stopped, and the creeping quietness made the darkness empty again. No one knew where he was. Lost in this hut on the far edge of nowhere—and no one would find him. But death knew where he was. It crept toward him. Waiting. Sean drifted again.
Grandfather lay comfortably. His glasses were on just right, and even his mustache was combed. Sean kept expecting him to open his eyes and smile and raise his hand so Sean could pull him out of the coffin. But they shut the lid.
The cicadas revived and serenaded the black emptiness, as if to keep death at bay. Sean surprised himself by wishing Angelique were awake to pray. Death had no right to take him yet. But in the clinics he had seen death care nothing for rights. Permanent pain and disfigurement cared nothing either. A person had no rights. A person only had hope, and sometimes not even that.
The darkness felt like a death shroud, wrapping him in a quiet, sinister menace. His neck, back, and shoulder continued to register knives jabbed deep and twisted in his wounds. He blinked hard to hold back the delirium of exhausting pain.
Celeste, his heaven. He would think of Celeste.
Walking on a beach, sun shining, his hand in hers, wind wafting their hair. She smiled. He smiled and smiled and smiled. They splashed in the waves. She skipped ahead and turned, arms wide to embrace him. He raised his hand to her. But she backed up and kept backing out of reach. His legs would not move. She kept backing. Waves washed higher on his legs, then his waist. Her arms lowered and her smile faded. Another wave bashed him off his feet. She faded. He floundered in the surf, gasping for air. She disappeared. A final wave battered him in a stinging salt burial and sucked him out to oblivion.
He awoke with a gasp. His eyes opened to the blackness, which was no different from his keeping his eyes shut.
Escape was an illusion. Alone in a tomb, but for Angelique. She would at least distract him and her prayers might keep death away until daylight. He began to call her, but only wearied breath passed his lips. He tried again and spoke it, “Angelique.” But he heard no stirring in the other room.
If he were at a threshold, it would not be for her to hold him back. No one could do that. A man, even a young and foolish man, had to face his fate.
Afraid to die and afraid to live, Sean began to cry. He wept gently and quietly; anything more was too painful. And finally, “Dear God.” He hoped there was one. And he kept weeping. “Dear God” was all he knew to say.
Sometime in the night he saw himself lying beside a well. In his mind’s eye he gripped a rope with a bucket on the end that carried his whole life. As if by his decision he could hold on or let go.
The rope chafed his hand. The memories, desires, and assumptions filling the bucket were surprisingly heavy.
He might never walk again, never hold Celeste. The rest didn’t seem worth so much. Not worth the strain of hanging on.
The rope slipped.
Maybe he would walk, would hold Celeste. But even that didn’t seem right.
The vision grew clearer. Everything in the bucket was about him, what he had, what he wanted, and even coming to this miserable country to prove what a good person he was. “What a lie,” he whispered.
His breath grew shallow. He could live or die with little difference between the two. And the two seemed hardly different.
He let go.
The end.
For a moment he stopped breathing. It no longer mattered.
But his breath fought back and kept him alive.
Perhaps he would last the night. He would await his fate in the daylight.
The cicadas quieted, and all was still.
One last time he whispered, “Dear God.” Sean slipped into sleep. He did not dream, and he did not strain toward what was out of reach.
All was silent and black.
***
The morning sun shone through the open window, and the neighborhood donkeys, dogs and chickens howled their usual cacophony. Angelique was singing softly in the other room. One of the boys got up from a chair and went in to her. She came out smiling at him, still wearing the same threadbare dress she had at the beginning, probably her only one.
He was still alive. Whether that was good or not, he couldn’t decide.
But something was different.
She scooped something out of a pot and into the plastic bowl then sat down to spoon feed him. Rice gruel. Sean choked and ate without thinking and without caring.
He couldn’t tell what had changed.
Her chocolate brown hand was hard-work rough yet tender-woman slender. This hand had certainly never worn a diamond, never driven a car, never lifted a crystal glass. Instead it held the spoon that fed him—with love and no complaint.
Then he could see. After all this time he could finally see.
She was not poor. He was.
His lips trembled. His eyes began to water, until tears streamed down both sides of his face, even though it was daylight.
She peered down at him, puzzled.
If he died today, he would die a poor man.
So much of who he was now seemed flimsy—as if he had been living on a stage. His life had been a masquerade appearing to be more than it was. Because so many others lived their own masquerades, he had harbored the illusion that stages equaled reality. The things he’d done and valued now looked like facades with no substance behind them except sticks to prop them up.
Her poverty held a richness he had never considered. Perhaps it was not too late for him. Perhaps he could still live before he died. And the Haitians would teach him.
He looked up through blurry eyes. “Padon mwe”—Forgive me.
She wrinkled her eyebrows, obviously not understanding. Sean did not try to explain.
He closed his eyes and let the tears flow. “Padon mwe.”
She spoke softly, something about his not having to feel sorry. She rose and took the plastic bowl then returned with a cup of water. He drank most of it.
Sean gazed intently at her until his eyes held hers. “Merci.”
She smiled and cocked her head to one side. “Pa de qua”—You’re welcome.
The knives kept stabbing and twisting as the morning aged into another day of torment. The sun’s rays slanted higher, and the heat found its way back in. He didn’t mind so much any more.
While Angelique dabbed the wet rag on him again, her head popped up.
Then Sean heard it. A rumbling sound, turning to drumming—thumping, steadily pounding. It gradually grew louder, along with a high-pitched mechanical whine. It was moving, coming closer.
“Li vini!”—They’re coming! “François vini!” She beamed at him and ran out the door.
The drumming grew louder. Louder. The hut began to vibrate, and Sean felt the staccato beat of air pressure. A helicopter hovered overhead.
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