-4-
Billy got out of the hospital the day they buried Cooter.
He was the only one at the graveside. Billy and the priest, who didn’t even look at him. And a brass urn full of ashes.
Billy’s hands were burned. He had bandages around his face and under his clothes. Billy felt the fire still burning in his skin and the screams still burning in his head. They would have kept him in the hospital but despite everything they say about providing medical coverage if you don’t have money, they will kick a meth head out after a couple of days. He didn’t have any money, so he walked home. Back to Cooter’s.
The house was a blackened shell. The fire department had been able to save the front steps. The rest was cinder.
Billy sat down on the top step, rested his elbows on his knees, hung his head, and cried until there was no moisture left in his body. The urn sat next to him. No one had claimed it, so they’d given it to him, and he carried it all the way back.
He heard a car pull up and stop, but he didn’t look up.
“You that white boy,” said a voice.
Billy looked up slowly. Moving fast hurt. It broke blisters. So, Billy moved like he was old. Uncle Conch stood on the soot-covered little bit of pavement that ran between the two halves of the front lawn. He wore a black suit and a shirt the color of snow. His hat hid most of his face, so
“You that white boy,” he repeated, his thick Haitian accent making everything sound like a song. “You was friends with Cooter.”
“I guess,” said Billy. He realized that his nose was running and he sniffed. Tasted some tears, so he wiped his eyes.
Uncle Conch looked down at the urn. “That my Cooter?”
Billy nodded. “You weren’t at the funeral, so they said I could have his ashes.”
“Yeah,” said the old man, “I’m too close to the grave my ownself for me to want to visit a boneyard.”
That made sense to Billy, and he nodded.
After a while, Uncle Conch said, “You and Cooter always doing the drug.”
He never said ‘doing drugs’ or ‘smoking meth’. Doing the drug.
“I guess.”
Uncle Conch stepped a little closer. He had bad legs and leaned heavily on a cane that was carved wit snakes and skulls.
“Why you do the drug?”
“What?”
“The drug. Why you and my Cooter always do the drug? Where it take you?”
Billy thought about that. “Away, I s’pose.”
“You suppose? You don’t know?”
“Away.”
Billy stared down at the lawn. The heat had withered the grass to brown strings, and the fire hoses had turned that to clingy seaweed. The tendrils were wrapped around the legs of half-melted flamingoes and the throats of charred gnomes.
Another shuffling step closer. “Tell me,” he said.
Billy squinted up. “Why do you want to know about that stuff?”
Uncle Conch lowered himself down to the step. It took a long, painful time for the old man to do it. Billy tried to help, but he was too badly burned. When he was down, Uncle Conch took a minute to catch his breath and he produced a spotless white handkerchief and mopped his brow. Billy was pretty sure he’d never seen anyone use a handkerchief before, not outside of a movie.
“Tell me, boy,” wheezed Uncle Conch, “why you and my Cooter always want to go away? What you want to get away from?”
The open mouth of the grave was right behind the old man. The coffin was down in here, but the graveyard guys hadn’t come to fill it in yet. They hadn’t covered the grave, either. Nobody gave much of a shit.
“I don’t know.”
“Tell me, boy. I got to know.”
Billy looked at him. “Why? What does it matter now?”
“It matters to me. Cooter may not be a saint, but he all the family I had left. Tell me what he wanted to do. Let me carry that for what time I got left. Give me that much so I don’t bury his dream, too.”
Billy stared at Uncle Conch for almost a minute before he could answer. “You were in Haiti when we were growing up,” he said. “Cooter and me were always getting kicked around, you know?”
“No, I don’t know. Tell me.”
“I don’t know…I saw Haiti on the news and stuff. I know that you guys had it worse down there than we had here…”
“Poor is poor is poor,” said Uncle Conch. “Kid starving in the street don’t measure his hunger ‘gainst some other kid he never me. Kid still hungry. Kid still cries when he hungry.”
“Yeah, but it wasn’t just that. Cooter’s mom was pretty cool –she was your daughter?”
Uncle Conch shook his head. “My sister’s daughter. Only one of us to leave Haiti in a hundred years.”
“Until you.”
The old man shook his head. “I live here, boy, but I ain’t ever left Haiti. Haiti is home. I’m a Boukman –you know what that mean?”
Billy shook his head.
“My great-great-many times-great granddaddy was Dutty Boukman, a houngan from Jamaica who settled in Haiti. Let me tell what a houngan is,” said Uncle Conch. “That’s a sorcerer, a priest of the old religion. Dutty led the first slave revolt in Haiti. He that strong. He that fierce a man. Once Dutty shucked off his chains no man could put them back on again. Them French they had to shoot him a hundred times to bring Dutty Boukman down. Why so many times? Because Dutty was filled with the loa of Kalfu –and that is one powerful spirit. Kalfu is the loa of the crossroads and every slave who ever died had to stand before that spirit and tell Kalfu how they died and who killed them. Kalfu got so angry he looked for the right man, the right slave, to open a doorway in his soul, to let him come through. That’s what Dutty Boukman did. Dutty’s heart was so filled with hate for the slavers that he opened up the door in his soul and let Kalfu come walking through. Oh, now Kalfu is not Casper. You know Casper, the friendly ghost? Like on TV? No, Kalfu not like that. Kalfu controls all the evil forces of the spirit world. He bring bad luck and hard justice. Dutty was filled with that dark magic and when he told all the other slaves to rise up, they rise up. That was 1791. By 1794 slavery was abolished in Haiti. That’s how strong Dutty Boukman was. That’s the blood that flows right pass the crossroads. The river of dark blood that flows over the years from him to me.” He paused and sadness filled his eyes. “And to Cooter. And that river of blood end with Cooter, but it don’t make the little boy strong. All that river did was wash him away, and up in heaven his mama is singing a sad song.”
The birds in the tree seemed to echo that music.
“I live here, but Haiti is in me.” Uncle Conch touched his chest. “When I die here, my soul will be buried in Haiti.”
Billy nodded. That was something he could understand. “Cooter and me always wanted to find a place that we could call home. My mom died when I was two, so I never got to know her. Cancer. Sucks, but I was over Cooter’s all the time. His mom was so great, you know? She was always singing songs.”
“Little Bird,” said Uncle Conch, and there was a smile buried down inside the wrinkles on his face. Sad, and deep and real. “That’s what we called her. Little Songbird.”
“She was great. She was the best. But…you know, she died, too. A bus hit her. I mean, how random and fucked up is that? How does God allow a bus to hit someone like her? Fucking bus should have hit my dad. Or Cooter’s dad. Those two assholes should have had a fleet of busses hit them. Fuckers.”
Uncle Conch nodded. “I didn’t know that about her husband. Not until I get a letter and she tell me. I was putting money together to come here and talk to that man when I get the other letter. ‘Bout the bus.”
They sat and thought about it.
“You didn’t come, though,” said Billy. It wasn’t an accusation. He was putting it out there to see what it looked like.
Uncle Conch nodded. “I didn’t come. Not til after the quake.”
“Yeah.”
“I think the quake was a judgment
on me.”
Billy looked at him. “What?”
“The loa --they know what kind of man I am.”
“Cooter said you were a priest, too,” said Billy. “They said in your village back on the island people thought you could magic and stuff. Tell the future, cure all sorts of diseases and raise dead people. He said you were a good guy.”
The words were kindly meant, but Uncle Conch looked sad. “What Cooter know? All he knows is what his mama, Little Songbird, tell him, and what she know? Over here her whole like, just hearing ‘bout things in letters. No…it’s the loa who know the truth. They know that I carry Boukman blood –hero blood—and they know I studied the ways of the houngan, but they also know I ain’t done much with it ‘cept make myownself happy. Drink and pussy and some deviltry to make the long nights scream. Yeah, you can fool your family but you can’t fool the loa.” He paused and Billy did not interrupt. “Maybe I’m a bad man, white boy. Maybe I’m a bad man like Cooter’s dad. Like your dad.”
Billy said nothing.
But then Uncle Conch shook his head. “No, not like those cockroaches. I don’t put my hand on a woman and I don’t put my hand on a baby. Even so…I’m a bad man. I done bad things.” He nodded to the rhythm of his own thoughts. “Haiti a bad place. Hard place to be a good man. Easy place for a bad man to be a bad man. Bad is more fun.”
“I--.”
Uncle Conch laughed. A deep, rumbling laugh that had no humor in it. “Don’t worry, white boy, I ain’t going to do bad things to you.”
“You weren’t bad to Cooter.”
The old man sighed and ran his fingers along the outside of the brass urn. “I wasn’t good to him, neither.”
“You paid his bills, man. You gave him a place to live.”
Uncle Conch turned and looked at the charred walls behind him. “All I gave that boy is a place to die, and I think he was dead before they cooked him in there.”
But Billy shook his head. “No, man, that’s just it. Cooter and me…we could always get free. We could get away anytime we liked.”
The old man’s brows knitted. “How? How you and my Cooter get free?”
When Billy didn’t answer, the old man nodded.
“The pipe,” said Uncle Conch.
“I guess.”
“That got you away?”
“Yeah.”
“All the way away?”
Billy thought about it. “At first, yeah.”
“What happened at first?”
“At first, man, we’d light a pipe and take one hit and we were gone. Really gone. We were flying.” He closed his eyes to summon the memory, and his body swayed as if he was gliding on the winds, riding the thermals, high above it all. “That’s how we escaped, man.”
“Escaped?”
“Cooter’s dad. Mine. When Cooter’s dad went to jail, we sailed so high that night. Oh, god, we were all the way up. Flying like birds.”
When he opened his eyes, Uncle Conch was not looking at him. Instead he was studying the soot-blackened flamingoes.
“That why you got these birds all over the lawn?”
Billy sniffed back more tears. “That was Cooter’s idea. He said that maybe if we got high enough we’d fly way up in the sky, like the flamingoes. You ever see them? They soar up there, not a care in the world, just floating on the wind like nothing beneath them matters. Nobody can touch them up there. They’re so high. And so free.” He looked at the melted wings of the pink plastic birds. “Now Cooter’s gone and the all the flamingoes are dead. Cooked, man. It’s all cooked.”
A sob broke in Billy’s chest and he hugged his ribs with bandaged hands as he wept for Cooter.
Uncle Conch laid a hand on Billy’s trembling shoulder.
“Why’d they have to do that?” sobbed Billy. “Why’d they have to do all that? So we stole their yard stuff. So we took some stupid pink birds and stupid gnomes and that other stuff. If they were mad about it, most they should have done was mess us up a little. They done that plenty of times. All they had to do was knock us around a little and take their stuff back. And, look, man, they didn’t even take their shit. All that stuff’s still here. What was it all about, man? What’s the point of anything if they didn’t even take their stuff back?”
He kept crying and his voice crumbled beneath the weight of it. The only word he could manage was, “Cooter…”
Then Uncle Conch bent close and whispered in his ear.
“Now you listen to me, boy,” he said, “I told you once that I’m a houngan and the blood of Dutty Boukman run through my veins. Told you that my many-times grandfather got so mad, so damn mad, that he opened up a door in his soul and let something evil come right on through.”
“Kalfu,” said Billy.
“The loa Kalfu, lord of the crossroads, bringer of hard justice.” Uncle Conch picked up the urn. “I just ‘bout pissed on everything good there was in the Boukman name. I left my Little Songbird to get knocked around by a weak, bad man. I let her boy die trying to fly away from this shithole. I done that. I could have changed it, but I didn’t, so I done that.”
Billy shook his head, but Uncle Conch was staring at the urn. He opened it and looked at the soft gray nothing that was Cooter.
“I done this,” he murmured. “I got no one else alive on this earth who is blood kin to me. The Boukman name, proudest blood of my people, dies when I die. And if I die this moment, right now, then that blood turns to piss that ain’t worth hosing off the street.”
He drew a long breath.
“But I got me a little breath left and a little blood yet, and I got me a heart that is so full of hate that it wants to burst open and break the world. So what you think I should do?”
Billy said nothing. His eyes were huge and round.
“You ‘member Cooter said I could magic, white boy. Pretend I’m a genie in a bottle and you can ask one wish. What that wish going to be?”
Billy looked at the urn and down at the melted flamingoes and then up at the endless blue sky. “I guess I’d want two wishes,” he said.
“What wishes, boy?”
“I’d want to see Cooter again. He’s my best friend, you know? He’s the greatest, Cooter’s the king. I’d want to see him again. Not with burns on him, though. Like he was yesterday morning. Laughing and happy, singing to himself like the way his mom used to. That’s what I’d wish for.”
A tear broke from Uncle Conch’s eye and wandered over the million seams and lines in the old man’s face, burning like hot silver.
“And what’s your second wish? You want me to burn those boys who burned Cooter? You want me to raise the devils of hell to burn them? Or how about I call the loas of vengeance and we turn these melted gnomes into a pack of monsters to hunt that pack of monsters. I could do that. That’s dark magic. I call Kalfu and I could do that.”
But Billy shook his head. “No…if I only had one more wish after that, I’d want Cooter and me to fly out of here. Far away. Like flamingoes, but not melted ones. Not fly like we’re smoking ice, but really fly. All the way into the sky. That would be the shit, man. That’s what Cooter would want.”
Uncle Conch stared at Billy for a long, long time.
“That’s all you want? You can have all the revenge you want and instead you want to fly away with my Cooter like a couple of birds?”
Billy closed his eyes. “Big pink flamingoes, man. So high…so free…”