An Untamed State (22 page)

“What are these for?”

Victor grinned. “You can’t be showing that pretty hair and those pretty hands where we’re going.”

Michael nodded as if he understood. Victor also handed him a Glock 9 mm pistol, the weight of which felt good in Michael’s hand, heavy. He traced the barrel with his fingers, inhaled the scent of gun oil as they drove through the worst parts of Port-au-Prince hunting for a woman who could not be found in a place where everyone was an expert at hiding.

Every so often, they turned down a narrow street or alley and stopped. Victor, Patrick, and JoJo pulled red bandanas over their faces and the four men knocked on doors, threatening to kick them down. Michael always stood near the back, standing at full height glowering and sweating beneath his mask, his gun tucked into his waistband, the grip visible. Victor flashed Mireille’s picture and shouted a barrage of questions and wouldn’t stop until he got the answers he wanted. The answers were always the same. No one knew anything.

“We are in the Wild West,” Michael thought after they stopped at a run-down, one-story house that looked more like a rambling shack. The door was flung open and a loud television blared into the street. A young man sat in a lawn chair near the front door, cradling a beer. He barely looked up as the four spilled out of their car. Victor didn’t bother with a mask this time. He simply walked up to the young man, who stood and grinned.

“Victor, man, sa k pase?”

“M ap boule, TiPierre. M ap boule. Look, man. M ap chache kouzen mwen.” He handed TiPierre a picture of Mireille.

TiPierre whistled low. “Li anfòm.”

“Chill, that’s my blood.” Victor looked back over his shoulder. “And that’s her husband. Don’t be bringing that around him. Just tell me, does Laurent have her?”

TiPierre looked at the picture again and shook his head. “Nah. We got out of that. Too much legwork, too many crying bitches.” He held two pinched fingers to his lips and pretended to inhale. “We’re into something else now.”

Victor kicked the broken glass at his feet then looked TiPierre in the eye. “If I find out you’re lying and your crew took one of mine, pral gen yon gwo pwoblèm, okay?”

TiPierre nodded. “I hear you, Victor. I hear you. We wouldn’t mess with your family. Like I said, too many crying bitches, always wanting to go home, thinking they’re too good for you, asking for bottled water and shit. No thanks.”

Victor stepped around TiPierre and peered into the house, where a woman sat on a couch watching television, holding a young child. “Your woman let you back home?”

“Today,” TiPierre said, laughing. “I don’t know about tomorrow.”

Victor rubbed his chin. “Where is Laurent these days?”

“He’s living with his sister, laid up with some lady. You know how he is.”

“How he can get women with that face of his, I don’t know.” Victor shook his head and took one last look around before fixing TiPierre with a hard stare. “We’ve got to get going but if you hear anything, you get in touch with my guys. Don’t fuck me on this.”

TiPierre smiled, didn’t blink. “I got it, man. I got it.”

Back in the car, Victor rubbed his forehead and turned to Michael. “Someone’s lying but I don’t know who. All these motherfuckers do is lie until they start believing they’re telling the truth.”

Michael fingered the grip of the gun again. “I could kill a living thing to save my wife,” Michael said. “I would feel neither shame nor sorrow.”

Victor nodded and started the car. “We’ll see if it comes to that. We have more hunting to do.”

They drove off into the night, the only sound Victor tapping the steering wheel to an indeterminate beat. Michael held his wife’s picture in the palm of one hand and the gun in the other. He would feel nothing at all until he found his wife.

I
stood beneath the weak stream of lukewarm water, scrubbing my clothes, trying to rinse away all they had seen. When I finished, I wrapped myself in a towel and returned to my cage under the careful watch of an armed escort. They could see the wildness in me, how it shrouded my body, how my body was nothing, how I was capable of anything. I randomly clawed and hissed to remind them that I knew I was an animal. Sometimes, I spit. I did not care.

Alone, I set my clothes on the end of the bed and waited for them to dry. I refused to look at my body. I hurt enough to understand. Outside, it was fire hot and raining, a heavy, pounding rain and the air was thick with the smell of it. Children ran down the alley, their feet splashing in puddles.

I was no one so I had little to think about. I sat carefully on the edge of the bed and tried to make sense of living in that cage for the rest of my life, of being meat and bones for a man with cruel appetites. I could do it for the child who belonged to the woman I had been. It was nothing at all to make that choice for her, for him, for his father.

What you can never know about being kidnapped is the sheer boredom, the violent loneliness, the unending hours alone with nothing to do, nothing to look at, no kindness to be found. To distract myself, I started reciting parts of the Immigration and Nationality Act I had memorized. I thought of my favorite legal statutes and then I reached the limits of such memory. I thought about the ongoing cases I was working. I thought about my clients, so many of them willing to do anything to stay in the United States.

After listening to their stories, I always told them I understood what they wanted, that I was a child of immigrants, that we were more alike than different. It was a gentle lie. I told them I would fight for them and I did even though I had no idea, at the time, of what I was truly fighting for.

One of my first well-paying clients was a woman named Chloe Kizende. She was Congolese, the daughter of a wealthy diplomat, and seeking asylum, running from aimless and blood-hungry rebels who were tearing her country apart and doing terrible things to people from families like hers. She sat across from me, in her finely pressed linen suit, her hair piled regally atop her head in thick braids. She was in Miami, she said, because at least the heat was somewhat familiar. I could smell her perfume as we spoke, expensive. She spoke with an English accent. I had so little empathy for her situation, as we sat in my air-conditioned office, me wearing my own finely pressed suit. I thought of how nice it must be for her to buy her way out of a hell too many people were trapped in. That irony was not lost on me as I whiled the hours and days away in my cage between one horror and the next. I finally understood humility and how little I once possessed.

I had to stop thinking about my old life. I was no one. I had no career. I had nothing. I was nothing. I said these things to myself over and over and over. My stomach growled. I had eaten so little over so many days. I made myself forget the taste of every perfect thing I had ever eaten—
pain au chocolat
in Paris, beans and rice in Little Havana, my mother’s
griyo
, thick steaks grilled on the back patio of the farmhouse, Michael’s elaborate pasta dishes. I made myself forget what it was to be full, to be satisfied. I chewed on a fingernail. There was a knock at the door and the Commander appeared. He crossed his arms across his chest. I crossed my arms across my chest.

I looked up and glared then looked away. I wanted to be alone.

“You don’t look happy to see me.”

I looked down at my bare legs, tried to pull the thin towel around me and down my legs a little more. “You shouldn’t sound so disappointed,
Commander
. I might start to think you’re getting ideas about me.”

“Maybe I would like to keep you more than I want the money. You offered yourself to me, after all.”

I raised my head. “I offered myself in exchange for a child’s life. There is a difference.”

He shrugged. “The reason matters little to me.”

There was no choice for me. I could not return to a family I no longer knew. I could not survive the rest of my life in a cage. “I don’t care what happens to me.”

The Commander laughed, a grating sound, higher pitched than seemed fitting for a man of his stature. “You care, very much, even if you do not realize it.”

“You know nothing about me.”

He shrugged. “I imagine you are hungry.”

My hunger was so intense it could have consumed me but I did not respond. He took me by my elbow and pulled me to my feet. In the kitchen he pointed to an empty seat. The woman who had untied me days earlier was standing at a small stove. When I saw her I lunged toward her hissing, frothing at the mouth. She shrank from me, looked down. “That’s right.” I shouted. “Don’t you look at me after what you did.”

The Commander grabbed me and forced me into a chair. “My sister was acting under my direction.”

I sat, gritting my teeth as I crossed my legs. I tried to breathe through the pain, a constant, a second skin, overwhelming me completely. He had a sister. He had people to whom he belonged. It made no sense.

I twisted my rings back and forth trying to clear my head and understand what he wanted from me. He always wanted something. There was always a ransom to be paid.

The Commander sat across from me. “Negotiations with your father have stopped. He refuses to pay and I have compromised too much already. I understand why he is so successful in business. He is a man of conviction.” The Commander scratched his chin. “I must say I admire his resolve—to sacrifice his own child, my goodness.” He reached across the table and grabbed my left hand. “We are going to get to know each other very well as you become accustomed to your new life.”

I closed my eyes for a moment. I sat still. I burned. My heart became smaller and smaller and it ached and blackened. My heart was no longer safe; it never had been. I opened my eyes and stared up at the ceiling, the dim lamp hanging loosely, wires exposed. “You are lying.”

He held his hands open. “I have no need to lie. I have never lied to you.”

The scar beneath his left eye pulsed, slithered across his face and swelled like something serpentine. I tried to pull my hand away from his but he tightened his grip and then he used his other hand to remove my rings. Before I could stop myself and remember I was no one, I stood and reached across the table for that part of myself I was still holding on to. “Don’t take those,” I said. He held the rings, cupped in his hand, and raised his arm. I stepped around the table and jumped up, tried to reach his arm. He laughed, began dancing around the small kitchen, taunting me.

His sister said a name I didn’t recognize. She said, “Stop being childish.” He ignored her.

Beads of sweat trickled down my face and neck, pooling in the new, deep hollow above my collarbones. I was so hungry. The air in the kitchen thickened with the smell of grease. The Commander grew bored and grabbed me, twisted me around and pulled me against him, my spine curved sharply against his chest as I tried to break free. His breath was hot on my neck. “You have no need of these rings now that you belong to me.”

The towel wrapped around me began to loosen. I dug my bare heel into his foot. He wore pristine white sneakers. “My father is going to pay the ransom. I know he will. I will not belong to you. Let me go.”

The Commander dragged his tongue from my neck, along the bone of my jaw, up to my ear. The smell of his saliva repulsed me. The texture of his tongue repulsed me. The sticky wet sound repulsed me. He held me tighter, like he was trying to pull my body into his. “I would be happy to reunite you with your husband and child in order to further compel your father to pay or you can honor our previous arrangement.”

My fingers slowly uncurled. The thought of my husband and child in this hell was beyond imagining. “Leave her family alone. Don’t mention them. Don’t even think about them.”

He pushed me into an empty chair and leaned against the edge of the table. “Don’t you mean your family?”

I didn’t answer. The woman at the stove, my tormentor’s sister, set a plate of food in front of me—rice and chicken in sauce. My stomach growled loudly and my mouth watered. The food steamed, making me even hotter.

She set a fork to the left of my plate. “Eat,” she said, gently.

When I was young, we had an uncle in Cap-Haïtien. He owned a store, sold phone cards and convenience store items at outrageous prices and did well for himself. I once overheard my mother say he also sold other things and the way she said it made me think he was a gangster of some kind, trafficking in something exotic like stolen electronics or maybe even drugs. Our parents would send us to our uncle for two or three days each time we visited Haiti so we could see more of the country. The drive, overland, was a long, miserable affair. By the time we arrived we were always cranky and bickering.