The seersucker shirt sleeves were rolled up to the elbows. A dark stain worked its way down the spine as the tropical island sweet dripped. Khakis accentuated his athletic butt cheeks. His feet swiftly stepped past the discarded plastic piece and exposed-bone carcass of a dog. A baby tied to the back of a black mother with a cloth cried with the lethargy of having cried for hours with its fingers inside its mouth. The mother kept humping her big butt to soothe the child while pumping a stick inside a bucket.
Starch white eyes on coal black faces watched the white man with the mysterious overhead large backpack. They had stopped their soccer game with the paint thinner box as a ball. A three sizes too large purple soccer jersey with the straps being so large that the kid's nipples were exposed. A donkey rebelled with hee-haw against pulling a cart, the overcrowded conditions, the battering sun, life in general, the lack of union-induced rules for regular breaks, or god knows what. The man stopped in front of a store with a red, hand-painted sign: Avis.
"Xavier, my plane was delayed. I have to get a move on before sun down. There is no time for tea this time. I swear, I'll bring Legos for your kids next time."
"Americans, always rush, never love our people."
"I fucking told you not to refer to me as American. I'm a bird watcher from Europe. That's what you tell people."
"Calm down, grumpy. I got the keys right here. It's a 2014 Range Rover. There are only two of that year on the island. You won't find a better car anywhere."
The man looked at his gold rimmed aviator wrist watch: June 20th, 2016, 2:31 PM. He pulled a thick, folded vanilla envelope out of his front pocket. Xavier smiled exposing a gold tooth sparkling in the tropical sun. "I love you European birdwatchers."
"Fuck you, too!" growled the muscular, white man as he swung himself into the driver's seat of the SUV heralding from colonial times of conquering remote, rugged terrain. He pulled out a laptop with reinforced metal corners and a handle. It was a big bulky thing as useful for battering a skull into pieces as it was for computing tasks. He flipped it open and held his eye still in front of the camera until a chirp released him and send the screen flashing to life. MIL-56 was the model number printed on it. A gray scaled satellite view was transposed to a brown-and-white image. An orange circled pulsed in the middle of the city. Circles of light lines extended outwards to help him find the range.
He pushed the gas. The heavy roar of the engine warned people milling all over the road to get out of the way. The expanse of the rubbled city stretched out with black faces and bare black legs in flip flops slowing him down like molasses slows down a drowning fly as it tries to escape from the deadly embrace of being caught on an underplate filled as a trap.
The hood got blocked from advancing by a tightly packed crowd wielding signs with "Bronte a la presidencia." The angry crowd started rocking his car. He put his hand on the back of the passenger's head rest to twist his body around to look for an escape back. The crowd chanting "Bronte" had fully enclosed him. He let the car slowly roll forward. The soft offroad tuned suspension made the rocking even more intense. A bug-eyed woman with a rainbow towel wrapped around her heard got in front of the windshield and stared the man down.
The crowd on top of a nearby white-washed one story high building unrolled a banner with "Dieter a la presidencia." The crowd poured towards the building. They started banging against the building with sticks and rocks. A lad jumped onto his hood and climbed the roof with the national flag that he waved in big wide swings.
The sentiment of the crowd towards the driver changed. A woman placed a small, white candle on the hood. She let the liquid wax first drop onto the hood and then pressed the candle into it. A sticker with Bronte's face was planted on the side window. A mango was placed on the hood as an offering. A voodoo doll was placed on his hood. A man sprinkled goat blood in three wrist flicks across the hood. A twenty year old woman screamed hysterically at the car and went into a full body convulsion with her eyes rolled back to expose the white. A priest in full dress stepped in front of her, put his palm on her forehead, and after a ceremonial moment of pause pushed her backwards onto the filth of the floor.
A drummer with a heavy candombe drum hanging from a sling over his shoulder started walking next to the Range Rover and fired up the crowd. A baby was placed on the hood that was increasingly decorated as an altar. The baby was tied up into a bundle and softly munching with his teeth on nothing. The mother had seemingly faded away. Fist pumping locals walked alongside the Range Rover, which had become somewhat a leader of the marching crowd.
The Range Rover had slowly inched forward and separated its followers from the main movement. The followers one by one realized that the march was elsewhere. They trickled away until only four weary black faces that rather looked gray from tire were still marching next to him. The baby was still on the hood. He opened the car door, grabbed the baby in a swift motion, pressed it on the next woman together with a twenty dollar bill, and disappeared back inside the safety bubble of the Range Rover before the tired followers reacted.
He punched the gas. The ceremonial offerings on his hood were lifted into the slipstream, hopefully not hitting pedestrians too painfully. A big, colorful voodoo snake stabbed by a dagger and eating a card emblazoned his driver side window, painted there by one of the protestors. The suburban space was emptier and let him drive faster. The potholes with waste water splashed high, when a tire hit it with a hard knocking sound. The inhabitants were stoic to the filth rain coming down on them.
The single story barracks gave way to corrugated sheet metal huts. Those gave way to tarps hanging from branches of the increasingly richer plant life until the thick jungle with its plethora of large, vibrantly green leaves swallowed the road. Leaves and small branches were hitting the windshield. He was a in a tunnel of green. The tires carved a heavy groove into the wet, muddy dirt. Occasionally, a tire spun out and flicked mud on the side of the Range Rover.
He stopped at a voodoo altar. Sticks were poked into the ground. Flower garlands were hanging from the sticks. A bundle of leaves was placed in the center. Someone had painted circles with white powder. He got his Cold Steel SRK six inch stainless steel combat knife out to scrape the political stickers from the car. A black monkey with oversized limbs was watching him. The fingers were skinny and long. They wrapped around the branch with a fluidity that betrayed the straight lines of bones so much that they looked like tar oozing around the branch. It was a stomach sickening sight. The tiny black eyes twitched following the man with every movement, as he wiggled the tip of the knife under the stickers. A low cargo boat horn rolled over the bay from the distant harbor.
He walked to the passenger side to pull a book out of his backpack. It was a pristine field guide for birds. He fawned the pages open against the palm of his other hand. Then, he firmly grabbed the spine and vigorously bent the book back and force. He let it drop to the ground and kicked it around a bit, almost getting into the passion of playing soccer, as the corners of the book dug into the soil. He picked it up and very carefully wiped away all dirt to give it the air of being a much loved for yet very worn book. He threw it on the dashboard and drove on.
The road got steeper. The tires had to fight with increasingly large rocks that stuck out of the packed, muddy road. The sunlight pierced the canopy increasingly as the thick shrubbery vanned with increasing altitude. By the time the sun turned the sky into a shimmering orange, the jungle forest had receded enough to reveal the city far beneath with the long fingers of land extending into the Caribbean Sea. The bump of the tires hitting a large tree root shook him out of his dreams about the distant beauty of scenery.
A small collection of huts opened up the tight space that had been hugging the road. A black dog chained to a stick was barking at his arrival. The beam of his headlights made the dog jump to the side. He stopped in front of the last hut with the sign "Maria." A chubby woman with a large rump and large breasts that rested on top of her rump stepped outside. "Master, master," she called out waving at the man.
He stepped out of the Range Rover, the engine shutting down, the air fan still whirring to cool the engine. "Maria, I'm glad to have made it. The city is explosive like a powder keg."
"Come here," she pulled him into a warm hug, "you don't need to be down in the filth. Stay up here in the beauty of the mountain. There are a lot of bad people down there. When our nation is in its darkest time, the cockroaches come out from their crevices. Here at the mountain top, we are so close to the sun that no cockroaches dare coming here."
