Driftwood
Nolan Turner

The sun came up form behind the pale green hills for the first time in a week, and the seagulls shot up from the wet soil as the coco taxis sped in and out of Havana. The ditches had been dug in a hurry—in the precious time when the rain stopped—and as they filled, the men driving the taxis had to settle for dropping the bodies into any opening they could find; or worse, in the open fields and in the tall grass, shaded by bowed palms, where they sank slowly into the wet soil. As the ditches filled to the top with green and bloated limbs, the last of the taxi drivers would remove the shirt from the topmost body and scribble something in red spray paint across the chest. A pack of turkey vultures, brought in from the woods by the smell, had perched themselves on a busted telephone pole and watched as one of its members dug into a chest with “No Más” painted across in red.
Wade sat along the rim of a wrecked fountain dedicated to San Cristobal and took a long pull from a jug of water. As first light came in above the roofless city, he noticed a lack of motion: the old Buicks and Cadillacs sat fender-deep in water, their pastel paint jobs fading away, holding still long enough for time to finally catch up. The street merchants—used to hawking pirated copies of Footloose or Die Hard from cardboard boxes propped up on milk crates—had been relegated to the shelters with the other survivors; Wade noticed they were always first in line for soup. What he missed the most was the music—especially missed the trio of old, unshaven Habaneros who used to sit near the water’s edge along el Malecon and strum their guitars and play their trumpets, and the way the music reminded him of summer. The music was gone, though; and the old men probably dead.
The storm had swept across the city center and made its way South, down toward the hills and government run sugarcane crops. Wade watched as a group of shearwaters on their way North from the Falklands for the winter circled the square and darted upwards, their pale wings moving through the clouds like patches of ice drifting across an ocean. Cryptic messages scrawled in Spanish across boarded up windows, left for a clean-up crew that may never come, told the story of what happened to the people who lived in the houses.
Back in the states, Wade was a boxer. Amateur stuff. He fought out back of hillbilly bars in Rapid City, in barely-lit YMCA basements in Bismark and abandoned grain silos outside of Butte that doubled as low-rent meth labs. He never made much—one hundred a fight, maybe two—and sometimes he took a couple of hits of meth or a gram of coke as payment. After a fight, the drinks were free and the women unfamiliar and eventually things got bad. Those nights, after a third-round knockout, the women didn’t care that his nose had been broken so many times that it looked like a totem pole or that his right ear had started to cauliflower—because in those kinds of fights no one wore any headgear. His wife had to stay home with the kid.
Toussaint returned with a loaf of bread, two beers and a plastic bag filled with fruit tucked beneath his shabby coat.
“The bread is wet,” he said. “But it is the best that I could do.”
Wade tore a large piece off of the end. “Everything is wet.”
The two men cracked their beers and stayed perched below a balcony twinkling with a string of shabby Christmas lights which no more than ten years ago would have been illegal. A group of thin, unshaven men walked past, whispering in Spanish.
“They never used to whisper,” Wade said. “They know I don’t speak.”
Toussaint removed his felt hat and wiped the water from his dark, shaven head. “Everyone whispers now,” he said, reaching into the plastic and pulling out a bruised fruit the color sandpaper. “It isn’t personal. Try the mamey.”
“Where did you get this?” Wade asked, hitting the round fruit against the edge of a wall to expose the pink flesh beneath.
Toussaint motioned East. “The markets,” he said. “The fruit is lying around the floor, drowned in the water. People walk by and take whatever they want. No one has shame anymore.”
The wind, which had calmed significantly in days since, swept with ease through the streets of Old Havana, weaving through demolished buildings and down narrow, empty alleyways like a ghost. The book markets and cobblestones of the Plaza de Armas had been overrun with muddy water, leaving the roads to shine in the new daylight as the soggy pages of books made illegible by the rain slid their way towards the coast like papier-mâché ships.
As they walked through the wet and empty streets, Wade saw a body, naked and lying face up in the mud, sliding slowly with the current towards the ocean. Wade looked at its arms. Thick and strong—a fighter’s build. Flies hung up on the face and privates, taking only what they needed. The skin, bloated and green, had expanded away from the bone, leaving Wade to think the corpse looked like a duffel bag filled with matchsticks. Wade watched body sway in the breeze. He felt a sweetness in the air as the mud rushed through the slanted streets, ankle-deep, brown and gold and full of minerals, sticking to bare leg-hairs and making those who still wore shoes wish they didn’t
. “I don’t see no peace,” he said.
Toussaint lit a crumpled cigarette and threw the match into the water. “What?”
“They say you find peace at the end,” he said.
They headed North again, towards the smell of fish and wet wood. Toussaint stopped off to speak to a dark man thatching a roof. Wade headed off down a narrow alleyway filled with shivering dogs and posters turned to pulped mush by the storm, and he approached an old man, barefoot and huddled in rags, seated in front of a pile of stucco and bricks. The man held his hands close to his mouth to cough, and his body shook violently as he did. Wade handed him a bottle of water, which he took with his thin, ropey arms. Pathetic, Wade thought.
What bothered him most was the hands: the way the old, scraped skin just sagged off of the bone. The way the black dirt caked beneath yellow fingernails. The way the veins popped out like hills along a plain and the way the fingers bent and twisted in from years of arthritis. Wade looked quickly down at his hands: they weren’t in the best of shape, either. His palms were covered in callouses and his left pinkie didn’t bend anymore. Wade had gotten out before things got too bad—before his hands had turned to stone and he couldn’t pour a glass of water or hold a kid.
“Su Casa?” Wade asked, motioning to the pile of bricks. The old man nodded.
The rain started up again and the old man had nestled beneath a salmon-colored wall to keep dry. As Wade reached in to take back his bottle of water, he stared into the man’s face: the skin along his cheeks contorted like burnt rubber, and his eyes were sunken in and dull. The face seemed familiar to Wade—like a face he had seem some time ago. He wouldn’t remember the name of the kid with those same eyes—it had been years ago—but Wade knew he had seem them before.
It was raining that night, too, as they drove across the slick highway from Rapid City. Sparks of lightning hit far off on the horizon and the beads of water came down hard on the pavement. Wade held an icepack to his cheek and had an ACE bandage wrapped around his head to slow the bleeding. Emily fiddled with the knobs on the radio, settling on a college station from Missoula where the student DJ’s played jazz through the night.
“What does it feel like?” she asked.
Wade moved the icepack from his face and looked at Emily. “What?”
“I was just wondering,” she said. “It never happens, and so I was just wondering what it felt like.”
“I have a headache,” he said. “I don’t need this.”
Emily tapped her cigarette against the cracked window and the headlights caught intimate glimpses of wolves and deer rolling across the plain. “I bet it feels awful,” she said.
“Just shut your mouth.”
Wade had beaten guys tougher than that before. The kid was six foot nothing and hadn’t weighed more than a buck eighty. Back in Bismark Wade had knocked out this Eastern European guy—Croatian or Latvian or something—who must have been 6’ 6” with arms like redwoods. He knocked him out in the third and went right to the bar. But this was just some kid who didn’t have Wade’s reach and couldn’t speak a lick of English. “Good fight,” he ad said as they left the bar. They should have checked his gloves, Wade thought. There was no way he was clean. Why didn’t they check his gloves? Wade had beaten tougher guys than that.
He pressed the icepack back to his face. “It feels like nothing,” he said.
“Nothing?”
“It feels like nothing.”
“I bet it hurts.”
Wade felt the bandage on his head—it was wet with sweat and blood. “You’re just lying there,” he said. “Empty. Like your spirit’s gone and you don’t know how to get it back. You’re nothing.”
The sky cleared quickly, and Wade left the old man with a simple goodbye and walked out towards the avenue to find Toussaint.
They headed towards the water. The city remained quiet except for the singing of sea-birds and the hum of the waves. The sidewalks were littered with splintered wooden ladders left to rot in the cold, shards of clay pottery bobbing up and down in the dirty water, and people, hungry and shivering, squatting with their families and their meager belongings, looking through small and suspicious eyes at the pair of men walking down the street. Wade watched as a frail old woman practiced santeria in a boarded up doorway; chalk circles drawn on the pavement and a large wooden bowl ready to pool the blood of a chicken awaiting slaughter. A dedicated street vendor, in an act of great sympathy or pure can-do spirit, had gotten his business back up and running, handing out chicharrones de empella in twists of wax paper to anyone with one free hand and a mouth, accepting only donations in return. The smell of fried pig skin rose up and lingered above the block.
Near the end of the street, a mansion had been reduced to its four long, slender posts, half of an elaborately marbled staircase and one peach-colored wall. A little boy, shirtless and frail, played along the staircase while a sturdy man with greasy black hair picked through the rubble. Toussaint moved towards a man sitting near the front of the house, while Wade made his way through the wreckage.
Even the decimated skeleton of the old mansion was a sight. Tall porticos had crumbled into large, jagged pieces of stone which pooled along the wet earth. The elaborate facade of the mansion had been ripped off, spreading soggy pieces of pink and orange stucco across the property like splatters of paint on a canvas. Rich Persian carpets, ruined by the water, sulked beneath the weight of the fallen roof, beginning to smell like death. Wade walked carefully through the mansion, avoiding broken glass and splintered wood, and made his way towards the staircase where the child played. Small porcelain figurines had been lined up along the base of the staircase—by the boy—and Wade walked towards them and noticed they were miniature farm animals. He picked up a buffalo—its horns painted with care—and headed to the top of the stairs.
Up there, Wade could see through the wreckage and out into the city. The tall man with the black hair picked through a pile of broken wood and pulled out a handful of wet, gold jewelry and stuck it in his pocket. This used to be someone’s home, he thought. Their livelihood. Now it was nothing but rotted wood and broken trinkets to be picked apart by lowlifes and street urchins. There was no one around to protect it anymore. The wind and the rain took everything from these people and they couldn’t do anything. Wade watched as the boy carved something into the marble of the staircase with a shard of glass.
“Váyase ya,” he called.
The child looked up, dropped the piece of glass and hopped down from the staircase.
Wade walked down to where the boy had been, kicked away the dust from the glass and tried to read what had been carved into the marble. From the stairs, Wade could see just above the tops of the homes along the street and out towards the city center. The sky out on the horizon was enormous: the thick white clouds billowed towards the blue and shaded hills and the steel-colored sky rumbled with the sound of thunder. The expanse of that sky, exploding with clouds, and the way you could see a storm coming hours before it hit reminded Wade of Montana. Wade hadn’t thought much of home in these last years—of the sky that ran on into Idaho or the late nights shooting gophers out of a pick-up truck or driving out to Little Bighorn with Amy to lay out near all the graves and smoke dope, hoping to see visions of Crazy Horse and ancient buffalo. That was before the kid, though. Amy couldn’t do stuff like that after the kid.
Toussaint called to Wade. “Let’s go.”
He jumped down and walked towards Toussaint. “This is a shame.”
“This house belongs to a friend of mine,” Toussaint started. “But he has left town.”
Wade brushed a wet leaf from his arms. “Where did he go?”
“No one knows,” he replied. “They say he vanished after the storm.”
Wade spit. “There’s a lot of work needs to be done here.”
“It wasn’t worth it to him.”
An old woman shuffled past, asking for change. They headed again towards the water.
The clouds above the water-line had turned orange as the night approached. El Malecón was nearly deserted; no cars passed through the streets which shined with water, the old men who dangled their feet off the pier to catch dinner were nowhere to be found, and the children along the seawall who played games with the waves were with their families or worse. On the opposite side of the street, the buildings sagged under the weight of the water and the streetlamps weren’t going to be lighting the way anytime soon. A group of children passed by, shirtless and glistening with the rich water, thin as bamboo stalks, and glanced at the two men with hunger burning from their eyes as they walked on towards a decimated home and picked through the remains. Across the water, the other districts were just visible in the thinning light, and even the smallest pinprick of light or plume of smoke was cause for just a little bit of hope.
Wade and Toussaint leaned against the seawall. Wade lit two cigarettes and handed one over to Toussaint. “You remind me of a young Leon Spinks,” Wade said. “When he was in shape.”
“Is that a compliment?”
Wade ran his fingers through his hair. “I’m saying you look like you can throw a punch. You ever think about boxing?”
Toussaint blew smoke through his nostrils. “I don’t go in for those things,” he said, motioning towards his arms. “I’m not as strong as I look.”
“Everyone should know how to throw a punch,” Wade said. “To protect themselves.”
The kids across the street spoke loudly at each other in Spanish as they picked through the rubble and the sun dropped down under a paper skyline. A group of seagulls landed along the edge of the water and searched for food.
“The city looks worse as the sun goes down,” Toussaint said. “With the sun, you see people trying. When it is dark, no one does anything.”
“We do what we can,” Wade said as he flicked his wrist towards a bird perched on the seawall, trying to scare it. “I like to think we’ve done some good. If only by virtue of sticking around.”
Wade looked out into the ocean. A few small ships came in towards the harbor, bearing small packets of toiletries and canned food—nothing that would do much good, except try to bring some normalcy back to the people in the city.
Toussaint tossed his cigarette to the ground and reached into his pocket for another. “When my wife was killed, that’s when I left Haiti.”
Wade looked up. “I’m sorry.”
“She was shot in a MINUSTAH conflict,” Toussaint said. “And then I ran. I left my home. I could not think of anything else to do. I thought that if I ran, I would eventually forget.”
The water crashed into the pier and the seagulls let out their loud caw and an old wind chime clanked up against a wooden post along the pier. “It’s all still there.”
Across the street, the kids were smashing the old house up. One of them had a baseball bat that he took to stained glass windows and marble vases and old colonial busts. The others lit matches and flicked them into the rubble, each one sailing through the air like a comet in the clear night sky. Their pockets were overstuffed with anything that shined as they walked away from the house and the flames came up. They walked towards Wade and Toussaint, ribs outlined through their pale stomachs and eyes sunken in and silhouettes illuminated by the growing fire.
“Nosotros perdimos todo con la lluvia,” the tallest boy said. “¿Que tienes para compartir?”
Toussaint crushed his cigarette butt into the cement of the seawall. “Nada. Nosotros perdimos todo. Tiempos dificiles.”
“Entonces danos lo quesea que tengas.”
Wade stood up straight and looked at the kids. “What are they saying?”
“They want our money,” Toussaint replied.
“Tell them to eat shit.”
“I did.”
“Are you all deaf?” Wade asked, staring the tallest boy in the eye. “Comer la mierda!”
One of the kids reached into his pocket and pulled out a dulled silver revolver, rusted along the butt and the barrel.
“Wade,” Toussaint said, “Don’t say anything. Let me handle this.”
Past the kids, Wade could see the flames from the house spreading quickly. They tore through the open space in the center, and in to the other rooms and up on to what was left of the walls. The smoke came up from the remains of the building and into the night air, the thick black mixing in with the dark gray of the rainclouds and drifted inland, towards the hills and the shallow ditches.
“No,” Wade said. “Fuck this.” He pushed the largest of the kids. “Do you hear me? You aren’t taking anything from me.”
The kid holding the revolver held it towards Wade, with a slight sweat breaking down his forehead and a shake in his arm. “Su dinero!” He yelled. “Wade,” Toussaint pushed his arm in front of him.“Just give him your money—it is not worth it.”
“Tell these kids to eat shit.” Wade looked straight at the boy with the gun. “Do you hear me? Eat shit.”

When Wade awoke, he could still remember the sound of the gun firing. Beneath a patchwork roof, Toussaint and several other men huddled around him. Thick white candles burned in a circle around his body, lighting the interior of the church. Most of the pews has been ripped up and torn apart, and water pooled beneath holes punched through the floorboards by falling debris. Shattered chunks of stained glass littered the floor near what was left of the walls, dotting the wet and muddy wood with splashes of color. Wade could hear Toussaint speaking softly to the other men in Spanish, and he looked over to see his t-shirt tied tightly below his shoulder and blood gushing from his arm.
“That piece of shit shot me,” Wade said.
Toussaint looked up. “He also took your wallet.”
One of the men said spoke slowly to Wade in Spanish, nodded at Toussaint to grab hold of his arm and reached into the wound with his fingers.
“Stay calm,” Toussaint said, “He’s trying to find the bullet. He’s a doctor.”
Wade screamed as the man dug his fingers into the wound, feeling through his tissue and stretching the opening out every so slightly.
Toussaint took a fractured piece of clay pottery filled with water and tipped it toward Wade’s open mouth and stroked his hair. “Just relax, you’re going to be fine.”
Most of the roof had fallen in on itself, leaving arches broken and splintered and elaborately carved marble tiling to extend on upward into nothing. Uprooted power lines sagged from one side of the building to the other, flowing down from the half-there walls of the church like strands of wild black hair. Wade looked up through the broken beams of the roof and saw that the clouds had burned off and the clear night sky had become visible for the first time since the storm had come in to town. A group of three small shearwaters, their wings the color of ash and their bodies white, swooped across the sky and landed on the leveled spire of the church. Wade stared at the birds as the stranger dug through his body to find a bullet, and the birds did not move. The sun went down until it was nothing but a faint and distant fire on the horizon.
“Look at those birds,” Wade said. “They came a long way to be here.”
Toussaint grabbed hold of Wade’s good arm. “Try not to talk. It will be over soon.”
“They were just passing through and now they don’t want to leave.”
“Shh. Be quiet.”
Wade winced. “Do you ever miss Haiti?”
Toussaint smiled. “I still dream in French.”
Wade wiped the sweat from his eyes and looked up. The rainclouds had moved inland, down towards the plains and the treeless hills, to wash away the stench of death. Wade thought briefly of what he had seen—the lifeless eyes, the limp limbs—like a kid seeing snow for the first time. It had existed before, but only as words and ideas. Never something real. The pain rushed through his body as the doctor dug through his wound for the bullet, and though he could faintly hear Toussaint whispering to him, his mind was far off, in a bar outside of Boise—what was the name?—where he screamed at her for hours after the fight. Rain pelted the sheet metal roof and Wade had taken three shots of something poured from a mason jar and he kept yelling about something that escaped him now. She had looked out into the rain—towards the blue-green hills that looked sinister at night—and she may have been crying. Wade screamed as the doctor pulled his hand—red and sticky with blood—from his body, his mind wandering to the storm and all of the fatherless children left in its wake.