Everyday Psychokillers (16 page)

Next, twelve years passed as Henri pulled and shoved on the two-handled saw, one or another brute version of himself attached to the other end, on the other side of one and then another tree. Although he knew there was always a man on the other end of the saw, he caught only glimpses, and he could see only one part of the man's body, or another part. With so much time passing, Henri didn't know if he'd worked the saw with one other man, with many men, with many parts of men, or with shadows of himself. At first he clung to memories of blue-and-white china on silver trays surrounded by tiny, immaculate cakes. He sucked particles of the goodies from the air and through time, as when he was a boy he'd sucked crumbs with his lips from the emptied plates. He pictured himself tugging the punkah cords instead of the two-man-saw, standing behind the reclining bodies of two lithe ladies and a plump one instead of two spindly trees and a shrub. He pictured the ladies fanning the pages of the books they carried, little paper books with strips of velvet to mark their places, and he pictured the lines of print lifting from the fluttering pages and making one zigzagging string of linked letters that, if stretched out, could bind the entire plantation and leave it gagging in the sand. Sometimes he pushed and shoved so hard and with such relentless rhythm that the man on the other side of the tree, at the other end of the saw, would howl at him to slow down. “You're gonna kill me,” the other man said, or “Why you wanna kill this tree so bad?”

Henri worked with such intensity that he blocked out all sounds but the sounds of his mind. His eyes were like the eyes of a person talking on the telephone, eyes that sometimes shift, but are usually vacant, as if focused on a cottonball floating a foot away. Henri worked so hard that by the time his mind shifted into the present, it was twelve years gone by and the fields were burning, the slaves' tiki huts were burning, the jungle was wet and smoky and burning too, around him. He'd missed the years of brewing plans and whispers, and suddenly the place was in revolt. Henri looked at the other end of his saw, but no one was there. He shook the saw in the air and it made a thundering sound. He took the sound into his body. His mind cleared and his eyes narrowed with a sudden blank wisdom. He could feel his brain thump in its shell. The last of his boyhood seemed to fall to his feet in a heap like heat at the end of a long day, to slough itself like a snakeskin. All around him rioting raged. He began to move through the bodies, the snakeskin caught around an ankle, clinging but weightless. Slaves strung Frenchmen from trees by their garterbelts and torched them as they dangled. They knocked Frenchmen from their horses, looped their feet into their stirrups and set the horses dragging them, panicked, through the burning fields. Others they herded with sticks, past the flames and into the ocean where they splashed, spasmed, and sunk like wilted leaves.

Slaves in Revolt! Runaway Slaves!

Henri trudged through the rioting like he was bushwhacking dense jungle brush and soon he reached the great house. Coifed heads of ladies and their sappy children bounced down staircases and wobbled on the verandah.

“I want Monsieur!” Henri hollered, his saw flashing and flinging sparkles in the flaming air. And although he'd kept to himself, seething all those years with all that was left of his memory, and although not one of his fellow slaves could claim to have known him before that moment, every man who heard him holler for Monsieur saw him and shook with fear at the sight of him. Henri Caesar was enraged to a higher and fuller pitch than anything around him. It was his great black beard that seemed to produce all the smoke, and it was his mirroring two-man saw that seemed to produce all the flames. All the men around recognized him instantly as the most brutal of them all.

Of course, these were primarily field men, who'd never set foot in the big house before, so when Henri called for Monsieur, they produced for him the evil overseer they'd captured and bound in his own whip. And by this time it was indeed the same difference to Henri: the evil leader of the outdoors rather than the evil leader of the indoors. The men propped the overseer against a pillar in the palatial front foyer of the house. Henri offered the other end of his two-man saw, and a good dozen men took it, hands over hands in a massive clump; they needed that many men, the story goes, to balance the determined rage that Black Caesar emanated as they sawed the overseer into pieces.

For a while, several years in fact, Caesar and his gang tracked and ambushed French patrols along the jungle roads while the war raged around them. It was a busy time. Caesar led his gang and his gang admired his anger. Caesar liked the way the men talked about the way he looked, how he looked like a part of the jungle, and the way his voice carried, how it carried like a disturbance in the weather, and the way he smelled, how he smelled like a deep fire, like he'd risen from underground. He liked to watch the men josh with one another and then fall silent when he approached, waiting for his nod before they continued. After a while Haiti was little more than a smoldering, heaving, barren mound, so the French soldiers went home. With the land spent and the French gone with their lovely imports, Caesar found himself one evening wandering the beach with his followers, kicking at the sand, and hungry, and bored to boot. Several leagues offshore, a Spanish ship was anchored, and when Caesar glanced up from the sand and saw it, he felt something rise in his memory. The ship looked so delicate and frilly from that distance that Caesar set his sights on it, as a child might set his sights on the moon when it glows in the night like a sugar cookie. His men saw the stillness that overtook his bulk as he gazed at the ship, but they couldn't see the sweetness that tickled the back of his tongue. This is when Caesar conceived himself a pirate.

“Come,'' he said to the men. They stole a fishing boat and paddled out there in the quaking night. They slit the throats of the sleeping sailors, all except the captain and two seamen, because while Black Caesar was fevered and reckless with years of battle and pillaging, he still carried the history of being shown in so many ways that he was merely brutal, that any notice of any other aspect of him had been mistaken. In other words, he was not stupid enough to ignore having been taught that he was stupid, and so he cleverly abducted these men whose skills he needed. He forced the Spaniards to teach him their seafaring ways (brutally, but perhaps not
merely
brutal), and much to his own surprise he learned so handily that after a few weeks he lined them up on the bow and one, two, three, stabbed each once in the back and tipped him into the ocean.

With a sort of scavenging decorum, Black Caesar embarked on his pirating career. He knew better than to attack well-armed merchant ships and instead raided smaller vessels and coastal villages in Cuba and the Bahamas, and then, when his trail got hot, in the Gulf of Mexico. He and the pirate José Gaspar worked roughly the same territory and had a kind of professional ethics going on for a while, kind of stayed out of each other's way and sort of cornered different markets you might say, working with such differing aesthetics that they had only being pirates in common.

There was a lot of pirating going on, swords, limbs, and treasures flying, and soon it started to get just plain silly.

Black Caesar saw Gasparilla (which was what José called himself) as something of a dandy, because he kept headquarters at a rococo Boca Grande mansion, guarded by men with cannons. Behind the mansion, in dingy shacks (because while he might have enjoyed dungeons, it's enough to ask swampland to hold up a mansion, you don't then also try digging basements), Gasparilla chained the ladies he captured in his attacks on Spanish ships, the wealthiest ladies, the ones whose bodies, he imagined, flowed with royal blood. He staffed his mansion with many servants who, of course, scampered around cleaning everything and were charged, also, with running out back to wash, primp, and deliver ladies for rapes. “It's lady time!” Gasparilla proclaimed, on the edge of his chair, pattering his feet on the parquet floor in his shiny shoes. He pinched his cheeks and fluffed his pillows when he sent servants out to fetch some, as at other times of day they might fetch wine or cured ham from the smokehouse. The mansion brimmed with servants and the shacks brimmed with ladies, the whole shebang surrounded with enormous guns and men to fire them. Imagine it! He called the place, no lie, Captiva.

And Gasparilla liked people knowing Captiva was there, so they'd get the idea they could attack it and take it, so they'd be approaching with a gang of buddies and all their hopes for stealing booty, and then: Crap! they'd see the fancy house and the cannons, feel dumb and go home. No Captiva for you, if you know what I mean.

Black Caesar appreciated the desire to make people feel dumb, but ostentatious pride naturally struck him as infantile and rang of unexamined hypocrisy. His own headquarters consisted of a pack of palm-thatched huts and a pack of roaming dogs to guard them. Grubby, ragged, mangy, ugly, low and brutal, rotten, and, Henri thought, comfortable, appropriate, and kind of true. Although his enterprise was vastly lucrative, Caesar stashed his loot on scattered coastal islands and maintained a haggard appearance. It was Gasparilla's pretenses and snottiness that ticked him off. Fancy-pants Officer José, who'd felt snubbed by the royal court back in his Navy days and turned against everything Spanish. Kinda slimy. Reminded Caesar of a quick lizard with a gaudy multicolored tail. Dressed up, sure, but a lizard's a snake with legs or it's a mini crocodile, and there it is and that's that. It was the perfume, how José liked to pretend he was an aristocratic man, like he thought it was something to be an aristocratic man.

After a while the part about the captive Spanish ladies really started to piss Caesar off. He'd been to dinner at José's and seen the servants fanning and primping the ladies in preparation for Gasparilla's bedtime sessions, and he really thought this would be more in line with his own life, that of all pirates
he
should be stringing up royal ladies, that Gaspar had unwittingly stumbled into a practice that actually belonged to
him
, if only for the sake of something like metaphoric justice. So one night he got pretty drunk and his crew got pretty drunk too, and you know how it goes. Caesar started bitching about Gasparilla and what a dandy he was, and how he had these ladies chained up in back and they all went over to Gasparilla's mansion and snuffed out some guards, quiet as Bruce Lee, and stole away, giggling, dragging behind them the youngest most tender of the ladies in Captiva. Slinking dogs that they were. Sly foxes in a henhouse. Kidnapping the kidnapped ladies.

Of course when you're a pirate you can't expect to just get away with something like that, and the very next day Black Caesar and his crew abandoned their dumpy camp and moved south. Some say Gasparilla was there, sword in hand, actually driving them out, chasing away the little scavenger ship with his big billowing one, if you can imagine them, zipping through the coastal waters in their respective ships like that.

Some nights while his crew snoozed, dead to the world in the ship's rocking belly, Henri stood on his deck, rising and falling with the choppy swells. He listened through the layers of sounds that carried no human voices in them: waves, wind, great heaving sails, rope tails coiling and uncoiling from masts and booms, the hollow aching noises of a wooden ship in night waters. You have to remember the atrocities perpetrated against the slaves. Colonists trained their imaginations to run in a single inventive direction, they competed with one another, they proved their ingenuity by the tortures and complex deaths they could produce. Slaves were whipped more regularly than they were fed, and of course there were the irons on the hands and feet, the iron collars, the blocks of wood to drag wherever they went, the tin-plate masks strapped over faces to prevent the eating of sugarcane. Mutilations were common, limbs, ears, and sex organs. Whipping was interrupted in order to dress wounds with salt, pepper, citron, hot ashes. Colonists were known to leap upon slaves and sink their teeth into their flesh. Which is different than simply biting.

They poured boiling wax on arms and hands and shoulders, emptied boiling cane sugar over heads, roasted slaves alive on slow fires, buried them up to the neck and smeared their faces with sugar and fastened them near the nests of ants or wasps, made them eat excrement and drink urine, filled them with gunpowder and blew them up with a match.

I don't know what Henri did about his memory. What do you do with a history like that? I don't know what he thought about in the night, rising and falling on the deck of his ship. Stars like electrified insects. Waves beating the hull, wind whipping sails.

The revolution that rumbled and then raged in Haiti was real, no kidding, with real lives and real humans. It happened and happens. But actually picturing it, actually trying to take it into your mind—because of the atrocity—I mean there's no way. You can't take it in. It's uncontainable. It's too much.

You have to abstract it. You have to see its ridiculousness. Like you go into shock after too much pain, you're over a cliff, you're dead to it, you're just behaving, your jaws are still snapping, but the rest of you is gone—

They say that after the duel with Gasparilla, Black Caesar settled around where I lived, maybe fifteen minutes away, if you take 1-95. Fancy-pants show-off and the grungy monster. In Tampa, they have a whole festival about José Gasparilla to this very day. Perhaps it's because Caesar was a transient, as we were transient, my whole town except for the Seminoles, or perhaps it's because they say he looked like a monster, but, as I mentioned, I lived right near where Caesar retired and I never heard of him the whole time I lived there. He'd disappeared into the fog of history, which exists, I suspect, somewhere under the grid of pavement that seems to float like an enormous raft over the muck and ruin of the Everglades.