The lawyer cleared his throat. “One, we’d protect your cousin.” Jean-Jacques just blinked. If these guys were as bad as the Bureau said, Emmanuel deserved the consequences. “Two, you help deliver Mr. Gray, the War Department will authorize your return to the International Legion. You’ll get a combat platoon there. Helped draft the paperwork myself.”
Empty seconds passed. Jean-Jacques took all that in. Don’t think too fast, he thought. They’re trying to get you to say something too fast. He considered why the War Department would change its mind. What could possibly matter more than the PR the Volunteers offered? Celebrity had replaced service. GI Joe from World War II, Mud Grunt from Vietnam, the thing that’d made them heroes was their normalcy. Boys-next-door saving democracy with rifles and heart. The Volunteers were the exact opposite. Three men in a military of five million. Their heroism lay in the extraordinary.
A military of five million, Jean-Jacques thought again. That’s it. More than anything, wars need bodies.
“Recruitment,” he said, amplifying the last syllable of the word. “Yeah. An army of peacemonger vets would be bad for that.”
“Hypothetically,” the lawyer began.
“I got you,” Jean-Jacques said. “That stays here.”
He said he’d do it. To get back to the Legion, he’d do pretty much anything.
“One final question for you, Corporal.” It was the older agent talking again, Larsen from the task force. Jean-Jacques thought for sure he was going to make the typical remark—why hadn’t they been selected for the Hero Project? Federals loved that one. Instead Larsen cocked his head and asked, “Why leave Abu Abdallah breathing?”
Getting this question from citizens was one thing. They didn’t know any better. Getting it from federal cops was another. They should have. The new anger he’d come home with rose into his throat like sour phlegm, but Jean-Jacques managed to keep it there, despite himself.
He stared out at the younger agents with the fringes of his eyes while remaining fixed on Larsen. “Duty, homie. That’s all.”
They thanked Jean-Jacques again. He stood up and chugged the rest of his beer. He tossed the bottle into a corner trash bin, making the lawyer flinch. As he reached the doorway, he turned to ask the thing that’d been bothering him since the agents had begun their pitch: Why had his little cousin become an activist? How did a kid from Little Haiti become interested in rehabilitation colonies? Why give a fuck?
It was the stammering one, Stein, who answered. “Because of you.”
* * *
They’d left Haiti because wants had become too impossible and needs had become too scarce. His mother paid off smugglers an aid worker recommended. She and her precious, plump toddler boarded a wooden sailboat headed northwest toward the Keys, a small pack between them to carry the entirety of their lives. America awaited, and not just regular America. Empire City was their goal. Empire City, the place of old stories and new dreams.
Empire City was also where a cluster of relatives had found refuge. One was willing to pretend to be his mother’s sister so they could get the right papers. That woman was Emmanuel’s mother. She’d urged them to hurry. The news said the government soon planned on making it even harder for Haitians.
Glimmers of the journey had lingered with Jean-Jacques. Nothing more than images, really, disjointed and useless to trust. The boat, overcrowded, packed full like black sardines. A little son and his mother fighting for space with shame, then elbows and teeth. Twelve nights under a tarp fine as silly string, clinging to one another for warmth against the open Caribbean wind. Nuts and jerky and bits of fish the men caught and cooked in seawater. He hadn’t wanted the fish, not at first. Fussiness soon gave way to hunger.
Then, light and fresh as young rain: a trace of a private smile on his mother’s mouth, her long, lean face up and defiant against the horizon. She’d set her left hand over the teardrop hanging from her neck, a little cheap turquoise thing, too scratched and worn for any thief to take notice, and she was tapping at it, ever slightly. Through constant dredging of the memory, this moment had been placed just before land was spotted, before hope and survival were, too, that isolated beachhead on Big Mullet Key their sailboat would run aground on, sparking songs of jubilation and prayers of joy to the three Christian gods and the old vodou ones, too, to anything up there that was listening. That face. Alone with herself and her pendant. Had it been a birthday gift from her parents, left over from a childhood in sleepy Port-de-Paix? A trophy her future husband had won her in the fixed street games, disregarding the odds with all the power of a bright new love? Maybe a family heirloom that dated back to the Haitian revolution. Maybe still just something she’d found in the dirt at the port. There was no way to know now. He’d never asked about the pendant when he still could have. But it was Jean-Jacques’s remembrance. That image, that moment, that distant smile had happened, and it’d happened on that sailboat, his mother’s secret thoughts alone against the sky of the unknown.
* * *
The streetlights outside the Bureau’s satellite office burned with a watcher’s eye. Summer’s throes meant sticky air and bug songs and a fat sort of indolence. Jean-Jacques couldn’t figure the last time he’d been in Ash Valley. High school, maybe, for a water polo match? The outer district was white working class and had been for a century. Too far out for the gentrifiers to care, too raw and sunken for the suburbs to come for it. Polish, Irish, Hungarian, Albanian, Appalachia transplants—different but not, the same but not, united in a sort of tacit understanding that there were worse places in the world to live.
Jean-Jacques would’ve found it decent enough if it weren’t so gray. It was like the entire district had been dipped in chimney smoke. There was nothing ironic about Ash Valley, especially its name.
He got into the car he’d borrowed from one of Britt’s boyfriends—they’d proven to be welcoming and helpful, to him at least—and considered texting Flowers. After the Bureau’s interview, or whatever it had been, he felt like alcohol, good alcohol, too. And maybe light talk with a bohemian who didn’t care about the things he did and didn’t care that he didn’t care about the things they did.
He texted his cousin instead.
Emmanuel answered in seconds. “Need you, son… Xavier Station. RIOT!”
Jean-Jacques closed his eyes and held his breath, letting out air slowly through his nostrils. He felt the magnetic pull of family, supreme, inevitable, the same pull he’d resisted eight years before, knowing it was all or nothing, knowing he needed to make a break for far away or he’d be stuck forever. He’d promised himself then to never return. He’d abided by that even as his mother lay dying, she herself telling him to not come back, that she’d be fine and would be in the front row the next time they redeployed back to America, clapping along with all the other proud Ranger moms. But instead she withered away like a raisin person, eighty pounds of flesh stretched across brittle bone in a one-room apartment, alone. All because he’d believed it weakness to come back, even for her. Even as she’d believed the very same.
For duty, yes. For country, yes. But also: for pride.