He killed himself five weeks later, running the car engine in her garage while she weeded the backyard vegetable garden.
Jean-Jacques didn’t like touching strangers, but he put his arm around the woman’s shoulder. She didn’t move into his hold but she didn’t move from it, either. He looked again at the thin silver cross around her neck. He felt her agony. He sensed his opportunity.
“He’s in a better place,” he said. “You must take comfort in that.”
“I do,” the pantry manager said. Her resolve lingered, but was softer. Jean-Jacques pulled out the teardrop pendant under his shirt and told the story of his mother, and his mother’s courage, and his mother’s death.
That he welled up during it was not part of the plan but it still happened.
“She’s with the Lord now,” the pantry manager said.
“Do you believe that? Like—for real?”
Jean-Jacques didn’t feel good about exploiting this woman’s faith. It wasn’t a good thing to do. It wasn’t an ethical thing to do. But he’d killed. He’d destroyed. What was one more little sin in the name of duty?
She told him that yes, yes, she did believe and he needed to, as well. It didn’t take much more to get her to the Chaplain. Jean-Jacques needed a holy man to find holiness, after all. Did she know of anyone like that?
“He’s… it’s tough to explain. I was raised Presbyterian. We show our belief and love through deed. We don’t talk. We don’t share. We live in the quiet, and consider. Then we act. The Chaplain, though, it’s different.”
As she talked about him, her face took on a look similar to those Jean-Jacques remembered from the isolated beachhead on Big Mullet Key, where all the Haitian adults on the sailboat sang and prayed for their safe deliverance.
“It’s—well, it’s divine. I don’t know what else to call it.”
Jean-Jacques nodded and asked if there was any way he could hear this man preach. The pantry manager didn’t seem to hear him, though. She’d slipped into the free association of people on the cusp of oldness.
“It’s not true what they say about him, you know. None of it is. The news. The government. They’re all liars. They’re all atheists. They made up that story about kidnapping the politicians in the ballroom. To make him look bad. To make us look crazy.
“The federals?” The woman sniffed with a righteousness so pure it could’ve pierced glass. “They killed my son.”
With that she told Jean-Jacques they needed to get back to work.
* * *
Jean-Jacques was already in line for the subway body scanners when Emmanuel texted. “Meet at the bus stop on Myrtle Road.” So Jean-Jacques walked up the stairs to the street and met him at the bus stop on Myrtle Road.
They took seats in the rear of the bus, the only other riders a wild-eyed boho girl high on something and an old man in a collared linen shirt and straw hat who reeked of cigar smoke. Jean-Jacques had figured they’d be Little Haiti–bound, but the bus sliced southeast instead.
He turned to his cousin. “Can I ask?”
“Sure.” Emmanuel shrugged, taking off his crimson-stickered lanyard and sticking it in a pocket. He was Tier 4. “I can’t tell, though.” Jean-Jacques stared hard until the younger man coughed out more. “Lamar Pierre asked for us. I don’t know.”
Jean-Jacques nodded, and settled into the window seat, sliding down and tucking his legs against the seat in front of him so his knees were horizontal to his eyes. The city passed in flashes of iron and cement. Lamar Pierre, huh. It wasn’t the Chaplain. But it was leadership.
Maybe he’d spooked the pantry manager over his inquiries during their holy talk. She could’ve called Lamar Pierre as soon as he left. He hadn’t seen Pierre since the first night Emmanuel brought him into Mayday. The older Haitian man had greeted him with a full hug and a solemn “Be home, brother.”
Pierre had mapped a similar journey as Jean-Jacques, with one major distinction: after Haiti, after Empire City, after tours of combat duty with the International Legion and the U.S. Army, he’d been sent to a rehabilitation colony. Block Island, to be exact, which must’ve been where he met Jonah Gray. Jean-Jacques hadn’t mentioned that, though, during their time together over asosi tea. Instead he’d listened to the older man hold forth on the importance of service, about how too many warfighters got lost in the margins of America because they forgot that true power came from working for others. Too many warfighters, Pierre opined, wanted to be celebrated. Too many warfighters wanted to be served themselves. It had had a corrosive effect. On souls and society alike.
“Selfless service is one of the army values,” he’d said that night, deep in his speech. “When’s the last time you heard anyone say that out loud?”
Despite himself, despite his mission, too, Jean-Jacques liked Pierre. He even admired him, in those long, dark minutes he’d listened to the Mayday pitch. The way he talked about duty was pure Legion, and Jean-Jacques agreed with much of it. The group before the individual. The mission before the group. Quiet professionalism, no matter what. But there was something off about the man, and it wasn’t just the way his face always twitched when he shifted from kreyol to English and back again. The singularity in his vision smacked of fanaticism, and Jean-Jacques reminded himself that Pierre had failed the medical tribunal for a reason. They had a lot in common, true enough. But he was an active warfighter. Pierre was a veteran with troubles. That difference mattered.
The bus continued through the far districts of the city, miniatures of street life and human rumpus at every corner. The neon glam of a boho district somewhere between up-and-coming and trendy. The punk grime and graffiti of the district just beyond it. The tidy bedlam of the market in a Taiwanese district, an old lady holding a dead rooster by its neck in one hand and a designer purse in another. Wide avenues, overpasses, chrome and mortar. Then thin arteries of bumpy road among a haze of concrete. People got on the bus, people got off. Emmanuel listened to music through a phone while Jean-Jacques kept to the window. They crossed into a district made up of wogs, the kind that went to food banks. Did Jean-Jacques hear a faint prayer chant of a muezzin or was he imagining it? He couldn’t tell. They passed a landfill set along a row of sunken houses raised above ground level, old dirt backfilled around the buildings. To Jean-Jacques, it looked like a row of urban igloos. Antennas spotted the houses’ roofs while droopy power lines connected them.
He thought about Little Haiti, and it being nicer now than it had been during his boyhood. Maybe Pete was right about that, he thought. Maybe home should get nicer.
They crossed brown water over a high bridge. On the other side was a big green park with big green trees framed by a big empty sky. The road widened out into avenue size again. Pylon dividers became strips of grass. Wood houses with front yards and mailboxes sprang forth. Jean-Jacques cracked the bus window. He smelled wind and sea.
He turned to his cousin. “Where are we?”
Emmanuel took out his earbuds. “Cape Hope,” he said. “Never came here for a beach day or crazy Irish girls?” When Jean-Jacques didn’t respond his cousin just laughed. “Need to get out more, homie.”