Brief Encounters With Che Guevara: Stories by Ben Fountain

Author:Ben Fountain
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Nature, Short Stories (Single Author), Fiction, Birds & Birdwatching, Voyages and Travels, American, Americans, General, Short Stories
ISBN: 9780060885601
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2006-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Bouki and the Cocaine

Syto Charles saw the go-fasts before anyone. They started coming in the spring after the peacekeepers left, always at night, always running very fast, spearing out of the south with a shrill, concussive roar that he didn’t take for anything but trouble. Soon every Haitian on the southern coast knew about the boats from Colombia, how they crossed the sea in ten bone-crunching hours with the payloads of cocaine and gangster supplies that their partners on the Haitian side needed to set up shop. Michelet, the police chief of Marigot, could be heard on the air six times a day denouncing this new and barbarous threat. “Anyone with informa tion should please inform us,” he woofed on Radio Lumière, his voice deep but warbly, lacking tonal weight. “We need every citizen’s vigilance to help us fight this terrible scourge.” Planes came and went from Jacmel at all hours of the night, the planes, people said, that were hauling the drugs to America. Rival gangs were shooting it out in Port-au-Prince, while in the mountains above the capital, Miami-style mansions were crowding out the farms.

“Ah-ha,” said Lulu, watching a go-fast pass a quarter mile off their bow, streaking south through the soupy predawn light. Syto’s younger brother Louis was a strapping man in the prime of life, by nature both happier and more caustic than Syto. The same gracefulness that made him attractive to women also made him a first-class hand on the boat, though lately he’d been calling himself an artist and had grown increasingly slack about catching fish. “So those are the bums who are ruining the country.”

Syto was kneading a piece of coral out of one of their nets. “In case you haven’t noticed, the country’s already ruined.”

“They just come and go like that and nobody stops them?”

Syto frowned at the net. “You’re welcome to try.”

For a moment they watched the go-fast, an open-hulled flange with a low profile and three podlike heads tucked behind the windshield. Great rooster tails of foam vaulted off the stern; the boat was beautiful in the purplish gray light, beautiful in a cold, cruel, luminous way.

“Fout,” Lulu muttered, then with a bit more malice, “just look at that boat.” He glanced sourly over his shoulder at their own rig, a shallow-draft sloop with a bamboo mast and all manner of junk strewn about—nets, homemade oars, crumbling Styrofoam buoys, a sack of rocks for throwing at the occasional thief. “So how do they do it?” he asked. “They meet their guys on shore and pass it off?”

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