Read Online Blank Confession by Pete Hautman - Free Book Online

Port-au-Prince.
    â€œBut not me, no. I have no truck with gangs. I go to work instead.” He flexed his large long-fingered hands. “I make things for to sell. That is how I meet your grandmama.”
    â€œHe was selling voodoo dolls for the tourists,” Mémé yelled from the kitchen. “I had to kick him off the sidewalk.”
    Pépé chuckled. “Your grandmama has ears like a cat. But it is true. I was selling in front of her mama’s shop. But I charm her.”
    â€œHe was very charming,” Mémé said.
    As we set up the board for another game, he asked me how school was going. Pépé was always curious about highschool. He had only an eighth-grade education, so to him the higher grades were like a mythical world in which the secrets of the universe were being taught. My world was as mysterious to him as his Haitian childhood was to me.
    I found myself telling him about how a lot of kids were using drugs. He asked me how they got them. I told him about Jon Brande. I don’t know why, but I had always found it easy to tell Pépé things I would never tell my parents. He was a good listener, and he never tut-tutted me or made me feel stupid.
    â€œThis boy, he sounds like a
djab
,” he said.
    â€œWhat’s that?”
    â€œA spirit person. Powerful and most dangerous. You avoid him?”
    â€œI try. Only he thinks I owe him money, so …”
    Pépé became serious. “You borrow money from this
djab?
”
    â€œNo!”
    â€œFrançois, don’t you be filling that boy’s head up with that nonsense!” Mémé shouted from the kitchen.
    Pépé rolled his eyes and winked at me. He moved a checker forward and lowered his voice. “You need money?”
    I shook my head. I knew Pépé and Mémé had hardly enough money to get by. Pépé worked as a janitor for an insurance company downtown, and Mémé had a parttime job teaching French at a charter school. I wasn’t about to give their rent money to Jon Brande.
    For a few minutes we played checkers without talking. I saw an opportunity and made what I thought was asneaky move, but Pépé said, “You do not want to do that.”
    â€œWhy?”
    â€œLook at the board.”
    I looked at the board, and after a few seconds I saw the trap he had laid for me. I took my move back.
    â€œYou must always think three moves ahead,” he said.
    â€œThree’s a lot.”
    â€œNot so much if you use your
tête.
”
    I used my
tête
—that means “head”—and came up with another move.
    â€œBetter,” said Pépé. “What you going to do about this
djab?
”
    â€œI don’t know. I have a friend, he says to not pay. Now Jon’s mad at him, too.” I told him about Shayne and about the fight with Trey. Pépé listened. When I’d finished talking, he reached out a long index finger and slid a checker forward.
    â€œNow you got two
djabs,
” he said.
    â€œTrey’s a
djab
too?”
    â€œNo. The boy who fights for you.”
    â€œShayne’s not a
djab,
he’s a good guy,” I said.
    â€œ
Djabs
are not good or bad. Maybe they cancel each other out.”
    Mémé came out with two glasses of lemonade and plunked them down on the table. “Don’t listen to this crazy old man,” she said. “You have a problem with a boy at school, you go to your teachers. Or the police.” She stomped back to the kitchen.
    Pépé leaned over the checkerboard and whispered, “She does not understand
djabs.
”

21. MIKEY
    Monday morning, six forty-five, I was in my underwear trying to decide between my navy-blue double-breasted and my charcoal-gray three-piece when I heard a motorcycle engine, then a
bleet-bleet
from the driveway. I looked out my bedroom window to see Jon Brande sitting on his bike. Something was wrong with his face. I put on my glasses for