My Country Full of Thieves

Me I’ve slept on a concrete floor keloided with lumps of cement and felt the cheapness and rush of the Chansolme builders—who poured down the foundation for our house in Port’Paix—as a mess of tiny hills digging their summits into my back, a blanket under me and a sleeping two-year-old Gigi puffing his baby dreams into my shoulder and things in the dirt clicking below us like the tumblers in a closing safe, like even the Earth itself knows to lock up for the night in this country full of thieves, and me I’ve slept on the seat of a moving otobis with a portrait of Selena Bidi-Bidi-Bom-Bom-ing on the engine hood just out of my bleary sight while someOne or someThing ladled in careful, burnt-orange helpings of afternoon light through the window where my head rested, and me I’ve slept with my head on the skinny chest of the Chevalier houseboy and heardfelt the limbs of his heart drumming out loudly against the inside of his torso, let them kick my cheek as they jerked, still, with the what of what we’d done, and me I’ve slept through a hurricane, assembled from the odds-and-ends of ocean thunderstorms and air so moist it glints like plastic wrap and much much much wind on some faraway sea, detonating its first artillery round of rain onto our thin corrugated roof, and me I’ve slept (mostly) through my own conscience corseting me ’round the ribs, pruning a bunch of my breaths, after I’d gotten sick of me, my uncle, and my siblings Gigi and Joselín spending four post-hurricane months underneath the sagging silver gills of our thin corrugated roof, and I’d remembered the intricately gilded clock in the hallway right outside the Chevalier houseboy’s room in the Chevalier house, how it ticked so slow it always seemed like it was slipping us extra minutes on the sly, and I’d stolen it and sold it to the La Pointe hospital a two hour walk due east, the one staffed almost entirely by nice Cuban doctors who are intellectual sureshots when it comes to tacking your cough onto its cause but whose sense scatters like a clutch of schoolboys caught with a forty-ounce of rum when it comes to anything else up to and including going out to actually buy the clock they all agree the waiting room needs, sold it with a grin bright enough to hoist a dead thing from its deepsleep and ehn? se vre?!’d when my uncle told me that the Chevalier houseboy had been let go, voye ale’d, fired—first from the job, then like cannon shot over the Hispaniolan partition and into Saint-Domingue where he now sells helado de guayaba in Punta Cana—for stealing, yes, stealing, Dominique, I’ve always said you needed better friends, eske se pa vre?, and me I’ve slept very well despite myself, with Joselín’s big toe skimming infinity symbols into my scalp from how her leg dangles off the narrow twin bed so close to my and Gigi’s blanket, under the new roof I bought with the clock money, a roof not of skimpy pleated aluminum but of good sturdy metal crimped in a southern Delmas factory, each one of the four of us waking up, periodically, to turn onto our backs bellies-to-god and make some happy little sound at the sight of the roof still there and unslackened, waking up everybody else in the process, and me I slept on the raft, but me I’ve never slept half as shittily as I do in the Wauchula orange orchard.

Whenever I leave the other workers to take my naps, I do it in the afternoon between two and three. It’s while the trees in whatever section of the orchard we’re working are still flickering gaudy all over with unpicked oranges and everyone else is sweating, sweating hard and through their shirt-backs or their pant-inseams or the bandanas under their baseball caps, from a heat that’s reasserted itself after baring its neck real docile in the morning to north Florida’s front-of-the-day cold.

Ananda, so much older than me and so ferociously unrelentingly disturbingly patient with me that she slots into the softest parts of my mind and soul as a sort of surrogate/understudy grandma, says that the cold comes from the trees. Not the orange trees but the much taller ones that surround the orchard almost entirely. They’d ring it completely, those much taller trees, if not for the entrance/exit of the dirt road, at the far western edge of the orchard, that the harvesting trucks take; when you’re walking toward the orchard and you see that road striping coffee-with-lots-of-milk light through a greenery so rich it looks wet to the bone even when it hasn’t rained for days, you’d think that the top tooth of a comb had just been dragged through the center of the property, nuding pebbly scalp. Me I’ve had most of my superstitions marshaled up single-file and skewered by the sharpest ends of my real life—it’s a bit hard to care too much about what’s happening over there when there’s enough happening over here, and I’ve never had much of that thing, that Haitian thing, that turns your vision nomadic on or inside of your body so that you’re seeing with a big toe or the tip of your nose or the lines of your palms or the ache anchored at your lower back when your eyes are missing some strangeness ahead. But even I sometimes look up at those trees at a certain angle, and sometimes in the cluster of disoriented seconds after I’ve stumbled down a harvesting ladder with my burlap full of fruit, and would bet anything that I’m watching the chill Ananda talks about arc sinewy from treetop to treetop, promise I catch the many fibers of it cross-stitching tight tighter tightest into chalky little dolls of skinless muscle that dismount their branches to dive toward us.

There’s no tipping my head back to look at those taller trees when I’m this high up though. If I count on a hand the number of things I’m afraid of !heights! takes the pointer finger and thumb. And right now, like an out-of-practice tennis player, I know my form is shit—my chest’s a bit too far away from the treetop even though Ananda and everybody else has told me to keep my legs steady on the ladder but to bend forward, lean in close, so that if the ladder slips or cracks on either side rail (and that second outcome becomes likelier the deeper we burrow into fallthenwinter, since Campbell’s cheap wooden ladders absorb humidity then splinter when the detained water turns to ice), you can catch yourself on a branch or several instead of falling. Hold on as long as you can, if you can hold on at all, until somebody else comes to get you.

A single glance into the mostly-empty bag reminds me that it’s not that heaviness that’s got me swaying. I know that. I stand on the center rung of my flat wooden ladder with the burlap strap digging hard into my back and shoulder. There’s something else digging into that shoulder too. I glance up just briefly, briefly. Gaelle stares down at me from a neighboring tree whose leaves are as broad as the palms of children, keeps staring as the wind makes them pat her arm for attention. Her bag’s mostly full—I can tell by the distended canvas—but she’s not trembling with the weight. I’d be trembling. She’s only a few years older than me at twenty-three but when she watches me over the mantle of her wide, pretty nose and lips, close-flung still from the cleft upper lip Gonaïves doctors repaired as a baby, she might as well have helped put up an ancient Egyptian pyramid or two. I can’t stand that look, like any other look that plucks off several of my limbs and turns me smaller than myself, and so even through the nausea raising itself up Tower-of-Babel-high in my belly I suck my teeth and say,

“Where’s it sprouting from?”

“What?”

“You must be searching for the next orange branch to pick, ’cause I know you’re not looking at me like that. So where’s it sprouting from? Ears? Nose? Pussy?” I say the last one in Kréyol because Gaelle’s one of those born-again-then-again-then-again Port’Prince Christians who’ll skate a little off the top of whatever fried griot stand or dous-dous shop or airport restaurant she works at for the month, when she goes back to Haiti with the other guest workers, but draws and re-draws the line for immorality at cursing. Cursing in Kréyol especially, because there’s something about swearing in the first language you could sing in that chains it down as of your blood. If you love it you really love it. If you hate it you really hate it.

“Nika, you know how I feel about that rough language.”

“It’s just a word.”

“It’s obscene. Ungodly.”

“God doesn’t speak Kréyol. We’re safe from notice.”

Gaelle’s frown moves her trio of nose-lip-lip closer to her chin. “Careful, girl. Don’t let your mouth outrun your sense. You’ll wind up in some shit you’ve never seen before, messing with Him.” She turns back to her tree and her picking. Without even glancing at me, she adds, “Don’t stand on the rung with the balls of your feet like you’re doing—way you are now, I could say boo and you’d fall right down. You gotta grip it with your arches.”

It’s not until Gaelle’s taken her eyes off me, and her voice off me, that I realize just how much our conversation had been keeping me upright. I try to apply her advice but I’m heating up terribly under a midafternoon sun that’s somehow still inching (jerkily, it seems to me) higher into the sky on a bad, slow hydraulic lift. It’s the nausea that mutes my limbs, chokes out the low-grade skin-hum that normally tells me I’m feeling something, or at the very least ready to. It’s the nausea, so that I get off that ladder like an astronaut clambering onto a nickel-gray moon.

There’s damp grass there, beneath my feet, and a feral ground that bucks and bucks till I’m tempted to fall to my knees and search for the back of this rough green-furred thing, tempted to throw my legs on either side of it to ride out this moment.

I do none of that. Here’s what I do. Leave the flat ladder leaning against the treetop. Kick through oranges crushed into squat disks. Find the pale brown road the comb left. Knock a knee against one of the giant white collection crates at the side of the road, the one closest to us. Stand on my toes above the collection crate. Unhook the snaps at the bottom of the back to add my contribution to a pile already so large I could stick my arm in up to the elbow. Don’t stand as long as I want to in front of this bin or the other ones. Don’t watch the pounds of fruit make the bins glow steady candlelight colors from the inside out. Resist the beauty. Resist it. Easy enough.

Walk not too quick not too slow beneath a concave ceiling of knowing stares and eyerolls and teeth-sucking from Mirlande Asange Junior Marcelo Gaelle and all of the other workers still in the trees. Keep walking through rows of trees who wear their good health as vivid green ruffles right at the top of their spines. Find the two shacks at the eastern edge of the orchard, the one with the outhouse and, juuuust enough yards away so as to be acceptable, the one with the lunch fridge and the wooden chairs no one sits in unless they’re really really gunning for an ass full of splinters that day. Go to that second one. Go around back. Wait for the creeping vines at this edge of the property to lasso my ankles as I walk. Break them. Find the upturned stack of spare collection crates beside the drippy green generator. Climb inside. Will a blanket out of what’s left of the daylight and tug it up to my neck.

Thing is, I’m fine in the morning when we’re still on solid ground. In the first half of the day we clear the trees that bear their weight low, the ones with boughs that hang low enough to swab the ground with waxy leaves. I’m fine then. But around three p.m. every day we climb. So around three p.m. every day I sleep.

The nights around here? Come down as a darkness thick enough to chew. Joselín’s never liked the dark. The moyenne section Uncle Nico and I sent her to when she was five had an anatomy lesson that spent a bewildering amount of time on how the body’s organs are technically suspended in pitch darkness. So ever since then Joselín’s been afraid that all our skin, hers and ours, might slump down like a dropped curtain in the nighttime, that we could wake up from some dream to find ourselves leaching liquidlike into the evening. That’s why we used to let her sleep on the only bed in the house, before I got up here and sent back enough money to fund two more for Gigi and my uncle—the raised bed was closest to the spot on the wall where the most moonlight, taking the steady angled route of a parasailer, muraled the cement in porcelain-eggshell-ivory white. Sometimes I’d wake up to find Joselín, fully asleep, turning her face side to side in the light. Strange kid. Sick for the past week or so with a fever that refuses to break. She’d lose her mind up here.

I wake up to the darkness, still inside the crate, but I know it can’t be late. My naps only ever last three hours at the longest. For a few moments my own sightlessness has me working my jaw, that nausea from before rearing up toward my sternum brick-by-brick. Then the hand comes, flat against my cheek, its skin rougher than a leather harvesting glove.

“If you keep sleeping with your neck like that girl you’ll be talking over your shoulder for the rest of your life. Kou pa fé’w mal? Here, get up.”

Ananda takes me by the shoulders and does most of the “get up” work before I can think to twitch a single muscle.

“Ow, auntie.” There’s a whininess to my voice like this. I hearfeel the two words I’ve spoken and they’re lined with the long slow weeeeeehhhhnnnn of blood-drunk mosquitoes. I sound very young, as I often do around Ananda, and I’m not sure how to like it yet, so I take both my hands and press down hard on my voice till it’s low, till it sounds more like it does when I’m speaking Kréyol. “I don’t know how any of the zoranj you pick make it into the bag unbruised, with a grip like that.”

“I’m careful when I need to be. Careful with you too just now, a different kind of careful.”

“Careful!”

“I could’ve kicked the side of the box and woken you up like that, pitit. See? Careful.”

I’m sitting French-finishing-school straight, like there’s diagonal beams propping me up at my lower back, and I’m waiting for Ananda to say her latest thing about my sleeping. About this latest blowing off of work. Once, she found me and told me, “The fridge in the break room leaks like information from a Port’Prince government conference room, and the water comes out into the grass back here sometimes, you’ll want to move your crate a little farther away,” and once she told me, “Breadfruit if you eat it with the peel and all will keep you awake for as long as you need it to, it’s the bitterness on the tongue, prods you right awake, I used to chew it all the time when the boys got sick and wouldn’t let me go to sleep for nothing,” and once she told me, shouting like Ananda shouts, which is to say raspy and not so loud, a voice with potholes in it where volume dips and ducks out of notice at random, a voice punctured all over from a childhood she spent an’deyó—the rural north—Bassin-Bleu—climbing her rooftop with her parents and three sisters and shout-singing for two or three straight hours mési bondyé, gadé kijan la vi sa vini pou nou into the night to startle the flying, baby-eating skinchangers—the bacá—right off their terrible night routes, shouting at me, “What are you running from so hard and so fast that’s got you so tired, ehn?!” and once she found me and said, “Tandé, tandé,” and so I listened, listened with her to the wind roughing up tree leaves and fruit-gorging raccoons dragging their fat bodies through dead grass and the tune of the crickets which I swore followed the path of a perfect Nike check mark from ladle to tip as it screeched upward past several octaves to its crescendo, as if the bugs were looking out at the night and giving their approval. Listened, listened to night noise knitting up the different parts of itself even though the thing it made would disappear under sunlight in the morning, and things falling so deeply in love with one another that they would borrow one another’s throats to speak. The raccoons bared their teeth and let out the sound of rustling leaves. A creek nearby stole cricket song. Ananda and I listened, and then we left, and we went home.

Now, Ananda tips her head to the side, the motion-sensing fluorescent bulb beside us holding the sharp features of her face in a steady glow, and says,

“They’re about ready to throw you into a river, pitit.”

I get up and do my best to hide the way I twist my neck a little to pop a crick out of it. I climb carefully out of the box, one wobbly leg at a time, as I say,

“Who’s ready?”

“Who’s ready? Tch. You’re blessed with abundance. The men, the women, their children, probably, if they talk about you at home like they talk about you here. Their house cats, if they’re listening.”

“Ah auntie, it can’t be as bad as all that. Besides, if they threw me in a river you’d roll up your pant legs and climb in to pull me out right?”

Ananda crosses her wiry arms, bare even in this cold, and kisses her teeth. “I can’t swim, silly girl. And what about my sense of self-preservation, ehn? This isn’t some Greek tragedy.” She jerks her chin at me just slightly. “Be serious with me for a moment here. Do you have any idea how much they don’t like you?”

“Hm. ’S a good thing I get paid in those damp-ass dollars Campbell stuffs into envelopes every week, not old lady lip. They don’t have to like me.”

“When’s the last time you ate a lunch you brought here yourself?”

I am not superstitious. The ways in which the old aunties and tontons and even some of the younger workers look at the world…those ways are teeming with heart-lurching color—if someone sweeps their broom over your feet you will never marry—if someone puts their foot on the leg of your chair as you’re sitting in it you will get a terrible stomach ache—don’t walk on your knees or your mother will die—don’t walk in the house with only one shoe on or your mother will die—don’t play with your shadow or it will chase you home and smother you and then your mother and then she will die—but colorful or no, most of these things blanch bone-white in my vicinity. Most. I thought the food-based ways, the cursing-powder ways, were no different. I’ve trained in knocking fear flat on its back, belly-to-god. How could the terror of the cursing powder stand up to me? Go to some patch-bearded bokor or some manbo with plump, perfumed arms and have them consecrate ground herbs by invoking one of the fiercer vodou lwa, one of the ones closest to blood and steel and deadwhitepeople, have them strike viable for you powder that can rot a person from the inside out from simple ingestion, the decay so perfect that even the skin on the outside of that person’s stomach turns black as electric cable, as good leather, as the space between planets. So what? “So what?” I thought, after I opened the breakroom (breakshed??) fridge to find the lid of my tupperware container not so snug as I’d left it, though the stewed okra and sauteed beef tips were still resting on their bed of mais moulin and everything was exactly as I’d arranged it. And when I came in to find my orange Fanta with its tab open but its can still full, I still had that terror on its back. So what?, the orange en-sauce of my poulet-en-sauce is trickling over and down the side of my once-covered bowl, so what?, the foil around my sweet potato bread has a few more wrinkles than it did that morning. Ehn byen? For some naps taken behind a shed (no longer than two hours, ever)? For my moments of truncated sleep? When everyone else, even Mirlande, thin as a candlewick and liable to complain to a desert about its sand, can outpick me anyway?

And they weren’t even trying to hide their tampering, with these smoking-gun-ass attacks. I thought laxatives, onion salt, fish oil, dirt. I thought tiny amounts of Roma powder detergent, baby piss, crushed ants, lotion, a fingernail’s worth of Blue Magic hair pomade. In the dark, in the crate sometimes, I thought arsenic from the glass bottle processing plant down the street. I did not think cursing powder, because I am not superstitious. Because, on the whole, if you really consider it, I am harmless, just a bit lazy, and who rots a person from the inside out for a bit of laziness? I didn’t think cursing powder until leaving Campbell’s orchard one day in November, with the other workers, and Asange gave me that kiss. We carpool here in three cars—tonton Gino’s minivan, Junior’s silver 4Runner, and auntie Bethina’s Tundra pickup. On the one day in November, I watched the other workers climbing onto the bed of the pickup truck, Ananda included, and I waited for my turn. I was last. Asange was helping people climb on, crouching on the bed with his jean jacket bunched at the stomach and his sneakers unlaced. Stretching out a hand and helping them up. When it came to be my turn he dropped his hand. And before I could bend down a bit and jump up onto the bed myself, hands braced against the jutting lip of the unlatched back panel, Asange pulled the panel back up. Looking right at me—he was looking right at me—he stretched an arm out over the side of the pickup and patted the metal with his palm, twice, loud, the signal that auntie Bethina could go ahead and drive off because everyone was on. Auntie Bethina heeded the signal and the truck took off, its backlights riled into their reddish-oranges, and from where the back tires of the truck scoured into the ground, oblong clouds of dust crept skyward like breaths the Earth could hold no longer. The dark at five p.m. was still tentative and mesh-like, even in November, so I saw Asange pucker his lips toward me, the kiss. I think I heard the little smacking noise it made, slotted in somewhere between the sound of the truck motor running and the sound of me grinding my teeth. Some of the people in the truck bed turned to him and nodded. Then they turned their heads to me and just looked. It was a moment before Ananda, sitting on one of the arched wheel cutouts, realized what had happened. But when she did, she took her red-and-white lunchbox from her lap and stood, as steady as she’d be off the bed of a moving truck. Then, she leaned over and smacked Asange upside the head, right at the back where it becomes crown. So hard I actually heard it, and I smiled a bit at the dull, flat sound neutered of any echo. And then she walked right up to the truck window, still balanced as she’d be on level ground. She banged the window and it slid open under her palm and she said a single thing. The truck came right back for me.

I do remember the last time I ate a lunch I brought here myself. It was boiled plantain and chicken still crackling, steaming on its bone. I was five weeks, or it could have been six, off the raft and still puzzling the workers who’d been born here in the States with how well I could speak English, because very few of them knew about the typical Haitian school’s linguistic trident, French the middle prong and English and Spanish to flank it, until I told them. Gaelle and I upended buckets out in front of the breakshed and made seats out of them and ate like that.

“Okay,” I say to Ananda now. “Okay. I am Argentina’s soccer team—I have no fans here. But the season’s up in June, so three more months to go right?”

“June? Tch. Sooner. Campbell’s gotten a contract—oh, don’t look at me like that pitit, there are no secrets in this city—the contract Campbell’s just gotten with some Vero Beach juice company would make Scrooge McDuck tear his feathers out from jealousy. He wants half of this place picked clean by April.”

“Okay, so I’ll be fine till April.”

“You’ll be fine? Why are you talking like you’ll never see these people again?”

I falter, unsure. I can tell by her phrasing that there’s something I haven’t accounted for. Something I’m forgetting. I feel years flaking off of my voice when I say, when I insist, “I won’t.”

“Nika, this is a crew. We move from region to region together, remember? North Carolina for the grapes, ’Bama for the blackberries. Some Septembers we get up to Maine in time for the apples in the orchards outside of Bar Harbor. Some folks go off on their own, sure, but it’s better when we move together. Bosses can’t push you around as much. We talked about this, Nika. Kijan ou fe bliye?”

I’d absolutely forgotten, but despite that I say, “Nón, m’ pa’t bliye, auntie.” I think for a moment, about how well—shockingly well—the orchard jobs pay when drawn up against anything else willing to take on a pigeon-toed Port’Paix girl with no papers. Gigi and Joselín have had several months of uninterrupted schooling. Uncle pays for everything else and Gigi and Joselín attend their cinquième and their cours préparatoire, respectively, every day. Not a single day missed so far. “If all else fails I’ll just stay here. Some of the houses must be hiring.”

Ananda raises a sparse brow. “You? You’re going to yes ma’am and yes sir your way through your days? Wipe a white family’s ass for them? I see you knocking yourself out on purpose with a bleach-ammonia concoction by the end of the first week.”

“Come on, auntie. I could work at a house here if I needed to. If I had to.”

“But you don’t have to.”

“Auntie.”

“Look, way things are now, you’ve made most people here mad enough to leave you come June. They’ve been talking about it—”

“And you?” I ask. Jesus, I sound like a goddamn child.

Ananda’s face goes softer, even as she says, “And whenever they bring it up I tell them to dive into the dirt and play dead till the devil buys it.”

“Auntie!” I say, but I’m laughing.

“But girl, there’s only so much I can do alone. They want to leave without you. They really, really do. And I don’t want you ’round here by yourself.”

“So stay with me then.” I know it’s unfair. Know that Ananda has her boys, the two who still speak to her, just like I have Gigi and Joselín, to think about. Know she’s about five hundred dollars away now from affording the Chansolme smugglers who will bring her last two sons stateside, the same smugglers who’d brought the first three over for about half their current asking price (“inflation, auntie—it’s a killer, you understand”). But I’m a thief at heart from my country full of thieves and if I know anything at all it’s that fair weighs nothing against a good feeling. Since I got here Ananda has carted in almost nothing but good feelings for me.

“I’m not staying,” Ananda says, even though neither she nor I really need to hear it said. “And neither are you.”

“Ehn byen? You want me to make up with these people?” The fluorescent bulb beside us, dropping a circle of light round as a vinyl record into the grass immediately below it, begins to flicker. In the watery width of light Asange crouches on the back of auntie Bethina’s truck, kissing kissing at me.

“No,” Ananda says, and it’s immediate, and I relax my shoulders. “This isn’t a Bible story either, so this isn’t some turn-the-other-cheek bullshit. They tried to hurt you. If things were different I’d help you hurt them back. For now, though, you need them. Act like you need them, girl, work like you need them. Stay awake. Met’ fanm sou ou. It’s Carolina next, tandé?”

My uncle Nico couldn’t hold his phone steady through an entire conversation if you duct-taped it to the side of his head.

It’s still early when auntie Bethina drops Ananda and me off at Ananda’s place for the night. The girls from the apartment unit next door haven’t even left for the nightclubs over in Bowling Green yet. As soon as I’m inside, I dig out a ComCEL phone card with about twenty minutes left on it and call Uncle Nico from Ananda’s landline. As he speaks to me, he lists like a sideswiped ship from task to task. I can hear it. We are miles apart with a sea to stress the distance, and still this clumsiness that is also my own when I’m in the orchard makes my palms itch.

“Kika,”—the nickname takes me by the corners of my mouth and then I’m smiling, hunched over atop one of the kitchen’s bar stools—“you must be tired, isn’t it very late over there? You don’t have to call so many times a week, fi, you know? A wild pack of mountain dogs only ran through the living room once this month, and your siblings only lost one finger a-piece.”

“Tonton, you joke too much. And it’s the same time here as it is over there.”

“You don’t joke enough, fi. Consider something: it’s the same time on this beautiful coast as it is in your musty backwoods—that’s funny right there!”

“If you’re trying to pull a fight out of me, I don’t have one for you. I’m not in a rush to defend this place. The Wauchula backwoods are musty.”

“Aha! Yes, some joking—there we go.” Uncle Nico fumbles with his phone. As the receiver is kept away from his face by that clumsiness that we share, there is a moment without either of our voices. It’s a moment left ajar, and parts of Tonton’s nightly routine, and the Port’Paix night itself, jostle through the empty space till they’re right there in the kitchen with me. Uncle Nico storing pots in the back of the stove room. The neighbors playing a kompa-reggae mashup brash enough to tap my own foot against the barstool rung for me. The ComCEL female-robo voice cuts through and tells me that I have fourteen minutes left. When Uncle Nico speaks again, he says,

“Ti papa wants to talk to you,” and he puts Gigi on.

“Don’t listen to him Kika,” Gigi says. “I like that you call so much.”

“Ah, old enough to defend your big sister now? Six changes everything, huh bós?” He was still five when I left on the raft three years ago. In the hours before departure he’d cried so hard the toil of it fatigued him, rubbed his lungs thin, and through my actual leaving he’d slept as if tranquilized.

“Yes! I’m a big man now. All of my tears are in a bucket behind me.” I raise a brow, and ask, even though I already know the answer,

“Oh? And where’d you hear that last bit from?”

“Tonton Nico. He says men are born with all their power and every time you, um, I mean, we cry, the crying pulls out a little bit of it.”

I feel a headache come in through the middle of my forehead from somewhere. The other side of the phone receiver, maybe. The headache touches the skin below my hairline at first, bright and red as a sniper dot. But it gets in past the flesh-and-bone, and once it’s in there’s anger there to greet it and file it sharp. Tonton Nico has been steadily pulling more and more of this shit since I left. Every time I speak to Gigi there’s a version of him that makes a dais of the Sport Shake crate in the corner of Ananda’s kitchen and I see him nicked all over by Uncle Nico’s Haitian-Men-Should-Be’s—Haitian men should be lean with only the barest bit of fat on their bellies, Haitian men should be able to speak a single word and have the whole room tip their ears to listen to the rest, Haitian men should be able to discipline with a stern word or the back of a hand anyone in need of disciplining, and that means children, that means wives, that means the motherfucker at the gagé who shorts you on your payout even though your cock won fair and square, merde—I see him growing, aging, nicked and notched all over by the shit Uncle Nico speaks on but has never done, could never do, I see the nicking and notching migrating when it’s grown sick of the flesh of him, the blood of him, the mind of him, moving in deepdeepdeep then deeper still to keep scratching him up. I see him grow into a man with a scuffed soul. But how much of that shit can I say to a six-year-old, really, so I tap my split nails against the kitchen counter and say,

“Papi, listen to me. I need you to listen to me very closely. Are you listening? Good. Are you a robot?”

“What?”

“Hmm that’s not an answer. I’m getting a little suspicious here, Mr. ‘I’ll-Be-Back.’ Are you a robot?” The ComCEL robo-female voice cuts in as if to say I am! I am! when it notifies me that I have ten minutes left.

“No!”

“So then why wouldn’t you cry when you have to cry? Poop when you have to poop? Laugh when you wanna laugh? Men do that stuff. Robots don’t.”

“Okaaay I’m not a robot, and I don’t wanna be—they’re so loud when they move!—but I’m getting as strong as one. I carried one of the water pails back from the well all by myself.”

That’s what does it for some reason, that’s what reminds me—at least this week—that I am well and truly gone from them for now. Bringing water back from the well near Chansolme every day is usually a three-person affair, and with me gone, and with Gigi a little older now, of course he’d be made to help. I clear my throat, steam-press my voice so that it’s free of any shakiness, any wrinkling, and say,

“All right all right, Ti Goku. How’s school been?”

He sighs in the way I know means he’s bored with the question. “Easy, too easy! Yesterday I finished my addition test and just sat there to wait for everybody else.”

“Don’t be so hard on them, pa.”

You have eight minutes remaining, says the ComCEL lady robot.

“I love you Gigi, but I’m running out of minutes. Is Josie feeling well enough to talk today? Could you put her on the phone for me?”

“I love you too Kika! Uhhm…” Gigi moves the phone away from his face, and noises leak through from the Port’Paix house again: this time, something that sounds like sandaled feet running across the cement floor, too heavy to be Josie. Uncle Nico had told me that Joselín had been too sick to go to school for the past week, running a fever, throwing up anything he fed her, too sick to talk to me for more than a minute when I called. I’d sent over Advil, Robitussin, a home remedy that Ananda had made from yesken, rum and a bit of garlic, Vicks VapoRub, hot compresses, money for visits to the Cuban doctors, and in the evenings I prayed to god so ferociously that the things I said were basically threats: make her better, you’d better make her better for me, watch over her, you’d better watch over her for me. But now, the sound of my uncle’s frantic running, paired with Gigi’s hesitation, has me immediately suspicious.

“Kika!” Uncle Nico says.

You have seven minutes remaining, says the ComCEL lady robot.

“Josie’s still sleeping in the room. She’s been feeling somewhat better these last couple of days, can even walk around the house a bit now—”

“Put her on.”

“Ah? She needs to rest, fi. She needs her rest.”

“Put. Her. On.”

There’s a pause. There’s the electrical whir-whir-buzz of the phone. There’s the kompa-reggae mashup replaced now by Carimi’s “Bang Bang.” My one thought is what if he hangs up? Sometimes, even redialing after a disconnection eats up the set ComCEL time. But my uncle doesn’t hang up, and a moment later I hear Josie using her nickname for me, her voice bright and cheery as a radio jingle,

“Saint Domingue?”

“Jo? How are you feeling?”

There’s another pause, another moment slit open down its middle. I think I hear my uncle whispering something, so low and small that it darts into the steady shahhh-shahhing of the phone static and promptly disappears. When Josie speaks again, her tone is missing a bit of that cheeriness from before.

“Better, but I still get pretty dizzy when I walk around too much. Still getting major headaches in the morning.”

“Really? Tonton Nico didn’t tell me you were having major headaches.”

She’s lying. And Gigi was about to too. And Nico… My mouth fills with something acrid. I drag my split nails against the peeling countertop and get a few tiny wood chips under their edges for my trouble.

“Um, yeah, he must have forgotten to mention it. Anyway, did you get the tape I sent you? The one where I’m singing ‘Je l’aime à mourir’?”

“I did.” I had. When I’d first gotten the tape, I’d listened to it nine times in a single sitting. The headphones made my ears ache, but I listened to it three more times before Ananda called me out into the dining room for a late dinner. “You sound better than Francis Cabrel.”

“Tch,” she says, so much like Ananda, and it makes me laugh, “of course I do, Saint Domingue. He doesn’t let the song sit where it needs to sit, stand where it needs to stand. He rushes through it. And he wrote it too! That’s his baby! Ah, the neglect.”

“I’ll fly over to Astaffort and let him know.”

“You’d better.”

You have three minutes remaining.

“When are you going back to school Jo?”

“Uhm, I’m not sure…”

“Not sure?”

“Uncle Nico says—”

“Joselín!” Uncle Nico cuts in.

I sit up straight. “It’s okay Josie, finish what you were saying.”

“…Uncle Nico says there’s not enough money to send both me and Gigi, the both of us, to school this year. And Gigi should be the one to go because a Haitian man must be aware of the two worlds, the one out there and the one in his head.”

“What?” I say. My mouth is full of that acrid thing. I feel draconic. Like I could spit a hole through the ground. “What the…” I grasp for something that isn’t every expletive I know, and I know enough to combust a priest. “Josie, are you even really sick? Were you ever really sick?”

You have one minute remaining.

“No,” she tells me, and then there’s a lack of voices as the phone changes hands.

“Kika—”

“Tonton, tell me the truth right now.”

“Ah, Kika. These school fees! They’ve raised them this year, don’t you know? We can’t afford to send them both to class every day, and with the coup in the capital down south the tourists don’t even want to come to the north, so my pâté cart’s doing almost nothing for us. I’ve been using the money you send for everything else, and Josie, it’s okay if she misses a few weeks right? She’ll catch up.”

I go very still on my stool, like I’m posing for some anemic European art student who’s committing my form to canvas. Very still.

You have twenty seconds remaining.

“Kika? I’m sorry.”

You have ten seconds remaining.

“You hear me, Kika? I should’ve told you. I’m sorry.”

Campbell, without an ounce of grace to him as he comes across the orchard grass toward us a few mornings later, is a short wide man so sturdily built you look for steel bolts where his joints should be. Touched by Texas or some other cowboy haven, he’s never arrived to any of his once-a-month operation checks here without his oversized cowboy hat, bark brown. As he speaks, it inches slowly down his forehead and makes a break for his veneered grin. I don’t catch the first half of what he tells us; my anxieties, when they come for me, have always clipped me on the chin and forced my head upward, face-at-sky, and right now, as Campbell opens his mouth to speak and takes up my uncle’s voice to say not enough…for both…better for…the boy…I see wooly, gray clouds wadded with rain. The sky is in the worst of its teenage years, stormy and brooding, brooding. Campbell is saying,

“…so, in the spirit of some friendly competition, I have a little proposal—a little something to encourage you all out in the field while boosting Campbell Grove’s overall yield, kampren?” Marcelo and Junior are all trembling lips and muffled snorts beside me as they resist the urge to laugh at Campbell’s catastrophic mispronunciation of konprann, and I giggle quietly until I realize that it makes me the third peg that turns their duo into a trio, until I remember that that is a bad thing because these motherfuckers do not like me and I, the queen of reciprocity, do not like them right back. “Past three p.m., for the next month, you’ll each get a forty percent bonus on your hourly wage for every full bag you pick.” He grins, his veneers catch weak light and shake it back at us, and I resist the urge to flinch. “Mes amies, I want these trees stripped down to their boxers!”

For some hours, quite unlike myself, I marvel at this luck, this unthinkable coincidence. That only a few days after my bastard of an uncle told me about Josie’s schooling—and I’d left that kitchen with my trust in him hanging precariously on a single hinge, and I’d had Ananda check about the school fees thing with her friends in Port’Paix and her ancient computer and contacts she didn’t want to tell me about, and I’d found out that my uncle, at least, was likely telling the truth—I’d be face-to-face with a way to make extra cash. Even a month’s extra wages will be enough to send Josie to her cinquième for three months, I’m thinking, until I can find some work in addition, something to make this temporary fix a little less temporary… So I marvel at this luck. As the other workers and I write our names on our collection bonus bins, the line of them extending outward from the side of the breakroom shed, I turn the luck over in my hands. I put it in my mouth. I roll it under over under over my tongue. I take it out with my ink-stained fingers and hold it steady and gnaw at it like a teething baby.

For the front of the day, I walk around the orchard with a lightness I’ve never had here before. There’s tiny nibs of crisp, cool air affixed like cleats to the bottom of my shoes. I’m about half an inch off the ground always and I move so swiftly I nearly glide. My lightness turns me obnoxious in the direction of the other workers. Asange passes by while Ananda and I are taking our shared lunch in the grass beside the orchard entrance. When he stops and squats to greet Ananda with a “bonswa auntie” and kisses her on both cheeks like some sort of groveling mafia lackey paying respects to their don, I take a huge bite of a chicken beignet, wait for him to glance over at me, and grin open-mouthed around mashed up dough. Mirlande’s man stops by in the early afternoon to bring her a thermos of ginger tea to keep warm and as he’s driving in in his Honda CRV I cross the dirt path slow enough—a tectonic plate could’ve outpaced me—that he honks at me, and Mirlande, waiting, looking on from the trees farther down the road, sucks her teeth so loudly I think she might’ve swallowed some.

My lightness, this luck, hovers me just a little above my nausea when I climb the ladder with the other workers post three p.m., but the little is enough. My harvest bag is still mostly empty, and when I look at my collection bin at the end of that first day it’s much lower than anyone else’s—and only a fraction of what Ananda collects—but goddamn, this lightness. For days and days to follow it buoys laughter to the top of me, not just from chest-to-mouth but from chest-to-hair-follicle, that whole region of me alight like that. My lightness does something to the apartment I share with Ananda, presses its walls outward so they bow and the space is bigger and we can stretch our legs till the bones of them make the pop-crack-pop sounds of frying oil. And for the first time since she took me in, she talks plainly about her boys. It has been three years since she stopped by Henri Jonassaint’s house in Bowling Green and took me. She, like the other Haitians who’d lived in this area of northern Florida for a while, stopped by Henri Jonassaint’s house to see the latest batch of boat people. It felt like I was in a dog pound courting adoption then, hiding my fleas beneath my paws and making my eyes so wide they glinted so that one of them, one of the Florida-Haitians who came by, would choose to bring me home. Ananda came and said that she only had room for one and chose me out of everyone else because I was the filthiest, and the zip code she lived in had the best water pressure in all of Wauchula. For the first time since then, she talks with clarity about her boys. I don’t have to piece together the “should be about twelve now”s and the “could be up in Ontario with the oldest one about now”s and the other pieces of information that are all story-middle, no beginnings, no endings. Wheel of Fortune is on tonight but she doesn’t even interrupt herself to guess the words like she usually does when we have nighttime conversations in the living room.

“They all have the same daddy, you know? I let people think otherwise because I think it’s funny, and who has the time to chase down all those rumors pitit. Me, running people down and shaking them by the collar to make them unthink what they think about me, hah. Tch. Imagine. Same daddy. What would I do about five men, girl? I’d confuse those men with each other all the time. You know I’m bad with names.”

“Yeah, you called me Deidre for the first week we knew each other.”

“You look like a Deidre.”

“Auntie how many Haitian Deidres you know?”

She laughs. “Hmph, who knows? Your parents could’ve heard it from somewhere.” She feels me stiffen on the couch beside her and she catches my elbow like I might run at the mention of my parents. I might. She keeps talking.

“Those boys, they’ve never liked to fight. I thought I’d hit the jackpot with that. I had them all in La Saline, when I moved down from the north and met their daddy. It’s about thirty minutes outside of Port’Prince, you know it?”

“Yeah auntie, I know it.”

“Oooo those folks can fight, pitit. They turn it into an art, I swear, some multimedia shit. Fists of course, but other things too—Heineken bottles, rocks, sandals, aluminum panels that came off the roofs sometimes. My boys were safe, mostly, from all that because they didn’t like to fight.”

I’d like to solve the puzzle, Pat! says Emily, the Wheel of Fortune contestant. Taxi &—

“They didn’t like it when I fought either. The herring man shorts Isaac on his change, Alim stays home from school because the history teacher embarrassed him, the inseam rips on the dress pants Jackson saved up to have tailored…I got the money back and the pants fixed for free, and I’m sure that teacher salts her classroom doorway to this day to keep me out, and I did all that by yelling when I needed to and talking sweet when I needed to and threatening when I needed to, but my boys,” she says, laughing, “they hated it. Manmi poze san ou, calm down Manmi, let it go.”

It’s quiet for a long long time as I wait for her to continue. She puts her big dark eyes on me and raises a brow.

“Aren’t you gonna ask it?”

“Ask what?”

“Why three of my flesh and blood don’t talk to me no more?”

My body stiffens again. I try not to sound too eager when I speak. “Oh. Why?”

“For every boy I have in this country I did a different thing to make the money that got him here. Augustin, I ran a backpack with dense blocks in it from La Saline to a barge in the Miragoâne harbor. Jean-Ronald is my German baby because when I was a maid at Le Plaza in Jérémie—before the managers let me go because they had a bad feeling about me—I’d slip watches and wallets off German tourists when they came back to their rooms rumdrunk and half unconscious. And for Isaac I stood outside the Port’Prince airport and peddled and sang and danced rara dances to the rumbling of cars and the chweep-chweep of birds and the laugh track of Haitians living abroad who’d come to visit and I made so much money it made me too angry to see straight when I walked home, but I went back for months. For months I went back.”

I check to see if her hand is still on my elbow and it is. I wrap my hand around the wrist and keep it there.

I’d like to solve the puzzle Pat!

go for it.

“I Walk the Line” by Johnny Cash!

Boat from Cap-Haïtien to Key Largo. Another one to Jacksonville. Van to North Carolina, then. Truck to Montreal. My parents left on a trip with multiple hairy legs to it. Tarantula journey. This was ten years ago in the ’90s when they said, or thought—some mayors some farmers some teachers some janitors some lovers of cards some chefs some hair braiders some mechanics in the States, them, they said, or thought—that finding a single Haitian migrant who didn’t have AIDS was like playing Russian roulette. Many of the boats that landed in Miami had already been sent back. So, for my parents and the people they left with, Canada was the safer better easier option. The boats were good. Sturdy. “When we come back to visit,” my manmi said, “I’m gonna find another one of these and lie down with you on the deck and we’re gonna flop around like caught fish.”

Me my trip was technically a single leg. Not too hairy, but long at three days. Longer than even the smugglers expected. It was a thirty-foot sailing ship that I was in, but my head calls it a raft because every time I looked at the tapered junctures where the sides of the boat met they looked like they would give under my palms, like if the other passengers and I tried hard enough we could snap the welding and press the whole vessel flat as a flash card. This, I saw in the mornings: the ocean too blue for my eyes to bear more than two or three direct looks, tiny constant waves everywhere everywhere that turned the ocean top to crinkled packaging; a girl my age and color with a coily braid down her back and a baby at her breast; people doing their best not to make any eye contact with anyone else as they shat into one of the two buckets, lined with green plastic bags for ocean disposal, toward the back of the boat. Our sail was down most of the time, to avoid notice. The coastguards were heavy handed, always there like spots in poor vision, but I guess you could say we were lucky. Three days. I ran low on the boiled plantain and bit of fish I’d brought. I ate once a day. Each afternoon the girl would play with her baby beside me and the baby would reach for me with a chubby little fist that I pretended to nibble at. The baby would laugh. This, I saw at night: the passengers who hadn’t had the good sense to lie down on the boat floor before all the spots were taken slept sitting up or ball-curled or on their knees with the top halves of their bodies hanging over the edge of the boat; above us, a bright and milky spit-take of stars, thrown from some ecstatic cosmic mouth; and the moon, vulgar for this: round as a pendant, begging for the base of a throat.

The next two weeks, that lightness floats me. My bonuses are meager compared to Junior’s, to Mirlande’s, to Asange’s (which he often reminds me of as he bumps past me on his way to pour a full bag into his collection crate, “I’ll need a chiropractor after this one Nika”), and especially to Ananda’s, only enough, really, to afford a few extra phone cards a week, and some cuts of that goat flank meat Ananda and I both like, but I’m always conscious that I can make up for it, and that potential is a constant source of joy, yes, joy, that starts nowhere you’d expect, somewhere beside my kidney, and inflates extremely quickly, like I’m a recently crashed car and it’s the life-saving (maybe) bone-breaking airbag, and it lifts me and it floats me. So my heels skim only the surfaces of those fourteen days. Josie has missed three weeks of her cinquième, at least, (maybe more, depending on when, exactly, my uncle pulled her out of school) but it will be remedied soon, because I will make up for the bonuses I’ve missed.

Then there is a single bonus week left, and I’m dunked scalp-to-toe into its Monday, and that Monday ends like this. I’m on Campbell’s cheap-ass ladder post three p.m. I’m standing on a center rung, but this tree I’m at carries most of its oranges at its tippy top. They’re bunched funny into little upended pyramids, and I’m thinking about Ponzi schemes, and I laugh, and Mirlande is at the tree beside me and she’s always liked my laugh, she’s told me as much, “You have a domino laugh, you know? You start off and everybody else can’t help but follow suit, like the first domino that makes all the other ones fall,” and so she laughs too. So the two of us, we, we’re laughing, and I go to move up a rung on my ladder to get at one of the Ponzi-scheme-oranges. I lose my footing. Lose it, like a set of keys or a mind. I reach out and grab some branches to steady myself, but they fail me. The right hand. A sturdy but ragged branch slices through the harvesting glove on the right hand and, now in the mood for slicing, cuts right across the palm. I fall backward off the ladder, I know this, but if I were only a pair of eyes without a head to know things I’d say that it was the trees the oranges the sky the Mirlande tilting away from me, that they were the ones dragged backward downward gravityward by the scruffs of their necks.

I hit the ground hard. I hadn’t realized I’d gotten up that far. I feel perfectly fine at first, just stunned, just nauseous. The other workers run toward me, Mirlande down her ladder quick as a fireman down his pole, Ananda so immediately there it’s like I knocked her loose from myself when I fell, Auntie Bethina, Gaelle, and the rest, even Asange. And it’s as they’re coming up on me that I realize that the fine I’d felt was only the delay between the hit and its after, and when the pain comes there’s no mistaking it. I have it in my shoulder blades as a doubled throbbing and my cut hand as an ache that pauses in its aching every few seconds to burn and in my tailbone as a heavy beat I might mistake for my normal pulse if it would just stop twinging so strangely and in my throat as the urge to cry.

Someone lifts me and—

gaelle: Careful, watch her head—

carries me to the breakshed, where they ask me how my head feels—fine—and how my back feels—not so bad—and if I hurt anywhere at all—shoulders, hand, lowerback, pride—while Marcelo carefully removes the harvesting glove off my right hand and uses the first aid kit under the old crumbling sink to clean the wound. It’s tricky because the women have put me on my stomach, on a makeshift bed everyone has made of their thick denim jackets and insulated hoodies, so that they can lift my jacket and shirt and start icing the bruised parts of my back. It’s tricky because the angle at which my right arm now rests is awkward, but Marcelo is patient. I breathe in sweat and wood and citrus and some auntie’s perfume and the thing that Marcelo says, “You scared us, pitit, you really scared us.”

The next day I keep low on my ladder, and my picking is even slower now with the soreness, and the back brace Auntie Bethina snatched for me from the moving company she works for on weekends, and the hand Marcelo bandaged. By the twelfth and final crewmember who asks me how I’m feeling today, my voice is out of stock and I can only nod, with some sort of smile on my lips, and give them a thumbs up with my good hand. At three p.m. when I leave to sleep, I get no judgmental looks.

Climbing into an empty collection crate multiplies the occasional scream my tailbone makes when I move too quickly into a series of caterwauls, but I don’t stop until I’m in. The bit of sleep that I slide myself into is prickly with flesh-in-the-process-of-healing and hypersensitivity and cold wind, so it’s really a game of Tetris that I play with my own body, warping it around this or that discomfort until, finally, sleep—

—that doesn’t last for very long. I wake up before Ananda comes to find me, when the sun, as it’s climbing down its ladder, leaves the sky cluttered with pastel color. Under Himalayan salt-pink and the deep yellow of wrist charms my eyes go to the line of bonus collection bins, extending outward from the side of the breakshed. The workday must be wrapping up. Six more of them till Campbell’s offer expires. Gino comes by to empty his harvesting bag in his collection bin. Junior follows a few moments later to add to his bin. Then, for several minutes, no one. The end-of-the-day exhaustion is decelerating the pace of everyone’s collection, bonus or no. Each collection bin has an attached cover that we only ever flip closed at the very end of the day. We leave them closed and latched for Campbell’s trucks to collect when they drive through at around six p.m. Or seven p.m. I’ve only seen those trucks once or twice. If I want to do it, it has to be now. I come out of my sleep bin as cautiously as I can. The workers are snatches of black pants and chapped hands and braids tightened into buns at the base of necks.

Tonton Gino’s collection bin is only a few paces away from mine, so I start with him. I reach into his full bin. Glance up every now and again to find the other workers still distracted. The day’s cold has come back for its second shift and the oranges are so cool to the touch that they feel damp. The bottom of my collection bin is covered with scattered leaves and a few Jolly Rancher wrappers but otherwise, it’s empty. I lean forward at my waist and grit my teeth against the bits of my body that oppose that decision. I lean in until I’m as close as I can be to the bottom of the bin. Avoid the noise of the fruit impacting hard plastic. Check the tree line to see if anyone’s noticed what is happening. Breathe. Then, I go to auntie Bethina’s bin, fuller than Gino’s, full all the way up to the bin’s edge, and I take generous handfuls of that too. Lean forward. Check the trees up ahead again. A twitching in the corner of the eye. Just Asange, yawning, scratching his nose, then readjusting the strap of his bag.

The whole time, just like that, I go all the way down the line. I take handfuls from everyone’s crate, everyone. Except for Ananda’s. That is what trims my guilt down to some endurable size, the fact that I leave Ananda’s crate alone. Her collection today, like it has on all the days, fills her bin to overflowing. I don’t even grab up the oranges that roll off of the heap, the ones that have plopped down into the grass.

How quickly I change my mind in the days that follow. How quickly I realize that the rushed, sweaty handfuls I take from people’s bins and put into mine are nothing compared to what I could be taking from Ananda’s. She’s very close to her money goal, her last two boys, I know it. She won’t miss a few pounds. She won’t. When I take that first armful from Ananda’s bin and put it into mine, three days left on Campbell’s offer, I remember something Mirlande told me once while we rode home on the bed of auntie Bethina’s pickup. “You know what a nightingale floor is? They used to put them in Japanese palaces, and some temples, and they’d make these chirp-chirp-chirp sounds when anybody stepped on ’em. Assassin’s bane. Thief’s distress. Just think, you’re trying to sneak up on somebody and you’re launching a bunch of invisible little birds into the air, and they’re all singing here my ass is, come catch me, here my ass is, come catch me!”

That night, the Bowling Green girls from next door wake me up. Here now the car horn that rolls me over in my sheets. Here now the y’all coming or what? that sits me up so that I’m face-to-face eye-to-eye with my dresser and its middle row of missing knobs. Here now the girl what’s your rush, Bottom-Shelf Bacardi’s still gon’ be there when we get there, she told me she’s waiting for you that turns my head to the window, gentle about my stiff neck. Here now the fuck you! and the four-girl-laughter that tears off its scorpion’s tail, and here now, the fuck you! and the laughter, takes me by one shoulder, then the other, and shifts me bodily, utterly, toward the window. Here now, my sightline: the upside-down brooms, topped with consecrated castor oil always, that Ananda keeps on our porch for whenever she’s called on by neighbors to beat child-eating bacá from above their roofs, lawn grass in need of cutting, three girls in short dresses and doorknockers buttoning up their jackets, a silver Hyundai idling at the curb, its driver pretty pretty in a baby blue silk halter and lipstick to match. Here now the driver sticking her head out the window, careful not to disturb the two buns of intricately arranged microbraids on either side of her head, and letting loose a call with tugging-ropes to it, coooome ooon! And the girls are wearing tennis shoes not heels yet so they run, can run. I used to know all their names.

Before my workdays started to ransack me for energy, I knew all their names and we spoke sometimes and the driver even did my hair once, did it up with the same spirally buns she has now but with strands of my own hair straightened and gelled and looped and curved around one another.

I guess you could say that I follow them. I put on my back brace and I leave Ananda’s apartment and I take to the street (empty for now) in my house sandals. As it drives forward the silver Hyundai folds down a narrow flap of the nighttime darkness for me, metal glinting, and I follow the pressed path. An arm hangs out of the passenger window. It ends in five pink acrylics that tap their tapered points against the door. But they are in a car—a good model, only a few years old, 2001 maybe—and they leave me behind soon enough.

Thing is, I’ve already walked for yards and yards and yards and yards and I’d like to walk for several more.