Jerry's Subs Continued......

Lately he found himself often thinking of the trip he took to Vermont while he was in college. He had gone with a girl from Boca Raton who wanted to learn to ski. They flew in late at night and when he stepped off the plane it hurt to breathe. He could never have believed that the air could be so thin and so cold. Ice crystals formed in his nose with every breath. He took a walk very early the next morning to breathe the air and to feel the snow. The air was light and still and the whole world was peaceful and silent. The snow lay everywhere covering and softening all signs of man’s struggle to survive. Here there were no putrid canals, no pigs rooting through last night’s garbage, no women ringing bells just after dawn crying, “savon-laver, savon-laver!” or “Chabon!” hoping to earn a few gourdes to get breakfast for their children. The sun’s early rays shone warm and friendly on his back as he walked up the ski slope. He felt light and strong and confident, as if there were solutions to all the world’s problems and he could solve them if he could just got enough people together to work at it with their best energy. Throughout the day, the sun played in and out of the clouds, always appearing when he got too cold and began to wish for warmth. In Haiti he never wished for the sun. In Haiti there are things you can never escape.
Lately, he found himself wondering more and more if it was too late. He never again felt the way he did that week in Vermont. Now as the days went by, each one dominated by the heavy, bleaching heat of the sun, he felt that the colors of his life were fading and he was slowly dying. Each new day the sun beat down, was one more day the world would not change, and one more day that he had failed to change it or himself.
Jean Baptiste still had not come. He wiped away a bead of sweat about to trickle down his chest and scowled more deeply. He decided to let Jean Baptiste go if business didn’t get better by next week.



Ti Louis was hungry. Nothing new about that. He had nearly always been hungry even when Papa and Maman were alive. A bowl of mais moulu or rice and beans once or even twice a day wasn’t enough for a boy of ten. Paying for school was out of the question. But when Papa and Maman were alive he had a place to sleep out of the rain. When he slept indoors with Maman and Papa he was protected from the gede and the loups garous who roamed the streets at night and changed shapes into pigs or hens or dogs and waited at crossroads for little boys. Then Papa was caught in a manifestation on the Grand Rue. He was found lying face down with a bal in his back after a speeding pick-up filled with chimeres sprayed the sidewalk with machine guns. Maman had gone to work buying crackers and Chiclets in bulk and selling them by the roadside on the route de Delmas. She didn’t make enough to feed Ti Louis even one small bowl of rice and beans per day. Between her tears and Louis’ screams she had dragged him to one of the orphanages run by blancs from New York and promised to come back for him in a few weeks. Ti Louis waited patiently. Three weeks became four and four became ten. At night he would sing the songs that Maman always sang to help him fall asleep and sometimes he would dream that he was in Maman’s arms sleeping safely, away from all the loup garous and all the black magic that was out in the night. After four months he began to forget Maman’s voice and Monsieur Vixamar the director, began to notice Ti Louis’ soft brown eyes. One night just after Ti Louis had stopped singing his mother’s songs, he felt a rough hand on his thigh and smelled the mixture of rum and tooth decay of Monsieur Vixamar’s breath above his face. That was the last night Ti Louis spent at the orphanage. The next day he slipped out the gate and into the street. Better to face hunger, fear and loups garous on the street than submit to the loup garou in the orphanage.
He was hungry now all the time. For the past five months nights were spent in a locked doorway if it was raining or on the grass and dirt in a dark corner of the Champ de Mars away from the chimeres and occasional police patrols who would whip you if they found you lying on the grass. Begging from people with no money was hard, stealing was easier. Ti Louis heard a rumor that his mother had died of AIDS or been killed with a vaudou curse by the bocor . He joined a pack of six other street boys in their daily search for food. They were barefoot, dressed in dirty rags, and the only baths they took were when they couldn’t find shelter from the rain. Soon Ti Louis was just one more of the thousands of street boys in Port-au-Prince who almost certainly wouldn’t live to see his 16th birthday. And if he did, it was through selling drugs, his body, or by joining the gangs of chimeres killing people like his father whenever a Grand Piston ordered a show of force.
Ti Louis liked to dig around in the garbage pile behind Jerry’s Subs. You could almost always find something only half eaten, wrapped in paper napkins if the sun or the roaches or the rats hadn’t gotten to it first. This morning before the rest of the boys joined him, he headed to the alley behind Jerry’s to see if there was anything that would ease the hunger pangs constantly biting his stomach from the inside out.


Already the heat was strong. Before starting the diesel generator Jerry flicked the air conditioner switch. To his surprise it came on with a soft whir. Electricite D’Haiti usually supplied power for a few hours only three or so days a week. He cursed EDH reflexively under his breath and walked over to the back of the store to check the refrigerator. Maybe today would be a better day. He pulled open the refrigerator door and immediately smelled that some of the jambon was beginning to turn. He cleared the top layers of jambon, salami, and sliced dinde and walked to the back door to throw it out on the garbage pile. As he approached the back door he could hear a scratching noise outside. He sighed. A pack of dogs or rats in the garbage pile. Like all the merchants around the champ de Mars he paid a private company to remove his trash once a week. Since the embargo Jerry was lucky if they came once a month. Some of the few blanc customers he had in the past few weeks had complained about the rats around his store. He had begun to keep a pile of stones just outside the door to scatter the rats in case some blancs from the UN or one of the medical missions came in for a sandwich.
He opened the door and felt the burning fatigue of the sun on his face. He stooped over and picked up a large round stone. The searing fingers of the sun reflected off the aluminum wrappers in the garbage pile and blinded his eyes for a moment. He blinked a few times as he straightened up to throw. He blinked a few more times as if he hoped that when he opened his eyes reality would be changed, he would be somewhere else. A small boy with large brown, frightened eyes stared at him from behind the pile of wrappers, stained napkins, and rotting food. Jerry put his hand up to shade his eyes from the sun.
In between Jerry and the boy rays of heat shimmered and danced off the stones paving the alley. The waves of heat rose up into the air and began to vibrate, change colors and form a picture. Jerry saw himself buying a new blue and white school uniform, shoes and a book bag. The colors shifted and the boy was sitting at a table and Jerry was helping him study. A shimmering ray became bright white light and Jerry was at the Cathedral in the front pew as a row of boys and girls in white dresses and white shirts and pants knelt to receive their first communion. The heat became a pale blue and Jerry was leading a large eyed timid boy into the water at Cormier Plage to teach him to swim. Soon Jerry and the boy were laughing and splashing and the waves melted into black night pierced by small stars. Jerry was lying in bed with a fever and the boy, a young man now, was softly singing an old Haitian lullaby while gently sponging Jerry’s head with a cool wet cloth. The blackness of night faded to soft white. Jerry and the boy were dressed like Eskimos and Jerry was laughing as the teenager tried the first time to walk in the icy snow of Vermont.
The snow scene burst into a rainbow. Jerry was sitting in a rocking chair while four little children in brightly colored shirts and dresses opened their Christmas presents on the floor before him. The boy with the soft brown eyes was now a man and stood by the rocking chair with his arm around a woman made even more beautiful by the expression of joy on her face. For a moment, Jerry felt a cool breathe of air brush through his hair, drift down the back alley and out towards the ocean. Jerry blinked again.
The frightened boy had scooted out from behind the garbage pile and was beginning to slink towards the end of the alley. Jerry looked at the rock in his hand. “I can’t do it, I can’t! ” he moaned. “I’m too old and too afraid!” he whispered in anguish. He let the rock slip from his fingers.
When the rock hit the ground the boy slipped out of the alley and back into the dirt and bustle of an early morning on the Champ de Mars. He dodged several taxis as they curled and twisted around one another dropping off and picking up in the Champ’s distorted figure eight traffic pattern. He picked up speed as he broke through the group of pistache and shaved ice sellers on the opposite corner of the street. He jumped the small fence and ran across the grass past the playground that was always closed to children towards the military caserne at the bottom of the Champ de Mars. As he reached the opposite end of the Champ he was out of breath, but figured he was now safe so he slowed to a walk. The sun was brutal now and the run had made Ti Louis glisten with sweat. Thirst had overtaken hunger for the moment.
“Arrete!” Ti Louis heard a voice behind him. Fear leaped up again as he turned. A dripping, red-faced Jerry came running up to him. Ti Louis was too surprised and too tired to run again. Jerry stopped, bent over, gasping for breath. Finally Jerry caught his breath, straightened up and said “Tell me your name?”