Mr. Clarinet

Her dirty bellow echoed around his brain. He imagined himself fucking her. He couldn't help it. Eight years and nothing but his hand for relief.

Now he had a problem—a hard-on. He stole a quick glance at his crotch. It was a major one—a rock-solid sundial he felt poking right past the fly of his shorts and pushing against his trousers, setting up a tepee over his groin.

"So…tell me about The Fugitives?" he said, almost gasping.

"Fugees," she corrected with a giggle, and then she told him: two guys and a girl, the singer. The guys were Haitian-Americans and the girl was African-American. They played hip-hop soul, and their latest album, The Score, had sold millions worldwide. They'd had big hits with "Ready or Not," "Fu-Gee-La," and "Killing Me Softly."

"The Roberta Flack song?" Max said.

"The same one."

"With rapping over it?"

"No—Lauryn sings it straight, Wyclef says, 'One time…one time' all the way through—but it's set to that hip-hop beat."

"Sounds terrible."

"It works, trust me," she said defensively and a little patronizingly, as if Max wouldn't get it anyway. "Lauryn can really sing. I'll try and find it on here. They're live on the radio."

She turned the radio dial and flipped through stations playing snatches of funk, reggae, calypso, Billboard Top 40, Kreyol language, hip-hop, but she couldn't find The Fugees.

As she leaned back, Max stole a glance at her chest. His eyes passed through the gaps between the buttons of her blouse: white push-up bra with lace-trimmed cups, small, teak-colored breasts puffing over the edges. He noticed the traces of a smile in the corners of her lips. She knew he was looking her over and liking what he saw.

"So what about you?" Max asked. "Tell me about yourself. Where did you study?"

"I majored in economics at Miami University. Graduated in 1990. I worked for Citibank for a few years."

"How long have you been back?"

"Three years. My mom got sick."

"Otherwise you would've stayed in the U.S.?"

"Yeah. I had a life there," she said, a hint of regret waving behind her professional smile.

"So what do you do for Allain Carver?"

"Personal assistant stuff mostly. They're thinking of getting me into marketing because they want to launch a credit card, but that's on hold until the economy picks up. The U.S. is supposed to be coming up with this aid package, but we haven't seen dollar one yet. Don't suppose we ever will."

"You don't like us much, do you?"

"I don't know what you people think you're doing here, but it isn't making things any better."

"Nothing like getting off to a positive start," Max said and looked out of his window.

* * *

Twenty minutes later, they came to their first town, a dusty pit of peeling, battered buildings and roads even more damaged than the ones they'd come down.

The Land Cruiser slowed as it turned into the main street, which was choked with people; the dirt-poor, wearing international-charity clothes that slipped off their waists and shoulders, walking on shoeless feet calloused and deformed into human deep-sea-diver boots, all moving at a plod dictated more by habit than urgency or purpose. They looked like a defeated army, a conquered people, broken in two, shuffling off into a nonfuture. This was Haiti, barely a footprint out of slavery. Many were pushing crude carts cobbled together from planks, corrugated iron, and old tires stuffed with sand, while others carried big woven reed baskets and old suitcases on their heads and shoulders. Animals mingled freely among the people, at one with them, their equals: black pigs, sunstroked dogs, donkeys, skinny goats, cows with protruding ribs, chickens. Max had only seen this sort of poverty on TV, usually in news clips about a famine-hit African country or a South American slum. He'd seen misery in America, but it was nothing like this.

It killed his hard-on.

"This is Pétionville," Chantale said. "Home sweet home for as long as you're here."

They drove up a steep hill, took a left, and rolled slowly along a heavily potholed side road flanked by tall, whitewashed houses. Two palm trees stood at the end of the road, where it curved off and led back down into the middle of the suburb. In between the trees was the entrance to a drive. IMPASSE CARVER was painted on either trunk in black lettering.

Chantale turned into the drive, which was dark because it was lined on both sides with more palm trees, sprouting in front of high walls, whose leaves intertwined under the sky and filtered the light through in a murky, aqueous green haze occasionally broken up by sharp bolts of bright sunlight. The ground was perfectly smooth and even, a relief after the ruptured streets they'd driven down.