(Continued from Slingshot! - part 1 )

"Okay. So then we were ready to kill Martin. It was at that time that we tied up our plot, how we were going to kill him. Now Martin knew how to get drunk, he used to drink and stagger home at night. So we tied up our plot like this - we would watch him, and when he was drunk we would hide our bodies in an alley, and then we would squash him!

"Not too much later, Ratokin came to my house and Ratokin said to me like this, 'Gabriel, behold the work of God! Martin is drunk, and Martin is going to his house, all alone. Let's go!' Truly true, I rose and I followed Ratokin. But we didn't have our 'festival', our slingshots! We were so happy to go and kill Martin we forgot our slingshots. So we had to go back and get them, and get plenty of lead balls.

"We said, shit! Surely Martin has had time to arrive at his house. But when we got to the alley, it was better than what we had thought. There was Martin, sitting down on a bucket with his back to us, right in the middle of the alley. We couldn't believe our luck! But we were scared because we knew Martin had a gun. We were so scared, we were shaking!

Ratokin took one side of the alley, and I took the other. We left a space in between us so that if the gentleman turned around and shot at us, the bullet would pass in between us, and we wouldn't get it. I looked at Martin, and my heart did not hurt for him, because he was too wicked, he did too many things that God and the ancestors did not agree with.

And I said, 'Ratokin, do you feel like you are able?', and Ratokin said yes, and I said, 'Ratokin so you feel yourself strong?', and Ratokin said yes. So I said to Ratokin like this, 'The gentleman has given us the back of his head as a present. Let us squash it, therefore! Shoot in the middle, don't shoot to the side.'"

Gabriel was sweating with remembered tension. He mopped his face with a red silk ceremonial kerchief, and sighed.

"Then the two of us tied seventeen frowns into our foreheads, and we remembered the people that died in Martin's hand, and the people that could not be found by their families because Martin took away their faces. We put man's balls in our asses, to be unafraid! And we put the lead balls in our slingshots, and we pulled on them and we shot together! The lead balls left from our hands and flew, together. ZIP! ZAP! And they hit the gentleman, they hit him with force, together at the same time. One hit the base of his skull, and one hit his neck, right on his spine. KUNG! KUNG! Martin fell! BLAM! Yes, he fell, stiff like a bull when they dig a knife into his head to put him down on the earth, before they cut his throat. Not even one little scream did Martin have time to push out of his mouth.

"We saw that we had put him down on the earth truly, and we were just about to run up on him to give him two more lead balls in his forehead and kill him for real. But God made us not show our bodies, for at that moment the man's wife came from God alone knows where, and began to shake that bag of filth, and say, "What's wrong with him, what's wrong with him?'

"Ratokin got crazy, because he wanted to finish killing the shit. He put another lead ball in his slingshot, and he - ZIM! KOW! - he gave that stupid woman a lead ball right in her waist. So fat she was with the benefit of the crimes of her husband, the lead ball actually entered into her flesh!

"She jumped up, and she ran away screaming! She screamed, 'Help, help, they have shot my husband, and I too, I have taken a bullet!' But nobody heard the sound of a gunshot, so nobody believed her, and they cursed that stupid woman until they saw the blood on her side. Finally some of Martin's acolytes came and carried him to the hospital. Oh, a black man's head must really be hard, for how did that shameless gentleman live, and not die?"

Tears of laughter were tracing two lines down the sides of Gabriel's short, blunt nose. He wiped them away, tossed the butt of his cigarette into the drainage ditch that ran through the middle of his temple, and patted his muscular chest.

"And we? Well, we hid ourselves and went home, but we were laughing so hard we almost couldn't walk. We felt ourselves free! We were brave! It was revolution that we made there! And what was the best tasting thing of all - Martin himself thought he was shot with a gun! He knew we didn't have guns, so he began to suspect some of the other dirty guys that were his friends. Then he accused some unfortunate, a poor man named Andre‚ who knew how to make charcoal stoves, because his father had taught him, and that was how he made his meager daily bread.

When Martin accused Andre, we went to Andre‚ and we took him into our bosom and we told him it was we who shot Martin, and behold in what way the work was done...

"Andre‚ laughed, Andre‚ laughed, Andre laughed! And when Andre was done laughing, we talked to him and we showed him things, and we taught him tings and we encouraged him. When done, Andre said, 'My dear gentlemen, you don't need to give your heads problems for Martin any more. I myself, poor unfortunate that I am, I will kill Martin with my own hand.'

"But thunder burn us, he never got the chance, because in that same time the blan soldiers (Note -literally 'white soldiers', the troops of the United Nations Multinational Forces) came, and they crushed the Haitian Army. We were so happy! And all the attaches went mawon, they all went into hiding. But Martin was stupider than all of them. The blan soldiers said that they came to put peace in the country, to give security for everyone. Martin was so stupid, he was so lost, he really understood that the blan soldiers could protect him. He believed in their guns, he thought because they had guns too, the blan soldiers were like him, and that they would protect him. So he stayed in his house like a king - the imbecile - and one day when he went out to go to a funeral, the people all remembered together what he had done, and they turned on him, and hit him with sticks, and broke his head open with rocks, and they cut off his hands so that he could not do his works any more."

Gabriel shifted on his concrete block, trying to keep his ripped up sneakers from the mud. The rain had started, dripping through the corrugated aluminum roof.

"You see, Mambo Kati, now Martin is dead and Franco has run away. Aristide has returned, and we are the masters of the country."

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