The Tonton Macoute has surveilled me on many occasions and has interrogated me four times. My American-cop status flummoxes them. They are all rogue cops and sense that I am one, as well. They have seen me distribute cash for tips on Reginald. I am certain that they know who he is and perhaps where he is now. Tonton men have told me the cautionary tale of another American policeman who felt compelled to explore rural Haiti. Wayne Tedrow was white and lacked my protective coloration. The Tonton men have never threatened me; they have implied that black Americans with financial resources can buy their way into anonymous security and live safely in Haiti as long as their money holds out. They have further implied that this may be the case with Reginald Hazzard and have yet further implied that perhaps I should go home.

I’m staying. The Tonton men accept it with some reluctance- because Haiti is a dangerous place, I’m a black cop who speaks their language with no small flair and because they seem to like me. A Tonton man told me that LAPD had queried them about my whereabouts. The Tonton had not yet responded. It had to be a secondhand query initiated by Scotty. I gave the man some money and told him to rebuff the query. He told me he would.

I am always jaunting about Port-au-Prince, the larger nearby towns and more remote villages. I drink klerin and trip on all manner of Haitian herbs. I herb-tripped and retraced Wayne’s last day on earth. A bokur mixed me a potion named after Wayne. It is the most breathless mindscape. I often see faces out of my past in entirely altered forms. I think of my life as a middle-class black kid, a left-wing poseur, a policeman, a homosexual, a faux black militant and a killer. I live in a contemplative and unburdened state. February 24, 1964, and everything I have done to claim profit from it feels entirely irrelevant.

I occasionally think of Scotty. I think of Wayne frequently and Mr. Holly most of all. I loved him in the manner that the morally afflicted love those people who most exemplify their complex will to assert and to survive. I think we knew each other. In the end, it led to nothing more than that. Given who I am, he is and we are, it was a bond of some solvency-and, on my part, affection. I am oddly nurtured by it now.

Rural Haiti compels me. It is akin to a rough-trade zone in East Hollywood. I have attended a number of voodoo ceremonies. I have seen men and women zombified. Groups of men follow me sometimes, but I never feel threatened. I think of Wayne and our discourses on the dream state. I want to be physically immobilized so that I can be utterly still and devoid of the will to summon conscious thought and reaction. I have a stash of wildly powerful herbs and blowfish toxin that I’ve been saving for a special occasion. I carry it with me at all times. I seek stimulation and stimulation seeks me. I want to be chemically prepared to enhance any state of revelation that I may find myself in. I often recall my first conversation with Mr. Holly. It was during the Chicago police riot of summer ‘68. I was in a soutliside lockup, a racist-cop casualty who also happened to be a cop. Mr. Holly was in the early stages of entrapping me for OPERATION BAAAAD BROTHER. He quoted “a very wise woman,” whom I later learned was his Quaker leftist girlfriend. “ ‘Take note of what you are seeking, for it is seeking you,’ ” Mr. Holly said to me. It was an immediate recognition of my life to date and a spellbinding prophecy of my future. I was sitting on the bench at Cayes-Jacmel yesterday. I was mindscaping that very thought and looking out at the Caribbean. It was sunny and not quite hot. A vendor had sold me a shaved-ice treat laced with klerin liqueur. It was fruit-sweetened, with a bitter after-taste. Reginald Hazzard walked up and sat down next to me.

I recognized him from that day nearly eight years before. Wayne’s photograph was a flat, pre-disfigured image. This man was the man my doctor neighbor and I rescued from the robbery and the vicious police aftermath.

We said hello to each other. Reginald’s burn scars had faded and had left his dark skin blotched pink-white. He thanked me for saving him and told me he had heard rumors that a policeman had been asking questions. I was pointed out to him three weeks earlier. He had been following me since that time. He knew who I was at once. It took a long period of study for him to determine that I meant him no harm.

He had a bottle of klerin. We passed it back and forth. I did not press him for details on the robbery; he did not press me for details on my police career or my recent hometown celebrity. He knew a great deal about me. I sensed it readily and knew it would be ungracious to seek affirmation or in any way pry.

I asked Reginald if he felt safe in Haiti. Reginald said that he did, but added that he missed his mother a great deal. I did not mention his father’s death in the summer of ‘68, with Wayne Tedrow very much in its orbit. I did not mention Wayne as Haitian folk hero. I did not mention Wayne’s union with Mary Beth Hazzard or his quest to find the boy who so easily found me. He knew all of it, none of it, part of it or most of it. I understood that and again behaved decorously.

The sun fell low on the water. We sat silently much more than we talked. Reginald asked me if I had met Joan. I said that I had. Reginald placed an emerald in my hand and told me it was the very last one. I thanked him. He got up and walked away from me.

I bicycled into the Haitian interior. Villages were scattered along low mountain ridges and brush-covered plains. Fallen branches and sharp rocks shredded my tires. I continued on foot. The night grew darker. I sensed groups of men following me.

The moon gave me sight at odd moments. I got glimpses of far-ranging crocodiles and blood-marked trees. I felt the groups behind me expanding. I came up to a small village with a very small hotel. Car lights strafed me. I waved to the driver. He was wearing a white wooden mask.

I swallowed my special stash of herbs and entered the village. A dog wearing a pointed hat ran up and bit me. I walked into the hotel and spoke French to the desk clerk. He rented me a second-floor, street-facing room.

It was low-ceilinged and narrow, with just a sink, a chair and a bed. I turned the lights off. I held Reginald’s emerald and stood in front of the window. The herbs took effect. The moon made the green stone a prism. People passed in and out of the rays and said astonishing things.to me.

A group of men is forming outside now. They are looking up at me. There are three of them. They are carrying machetes in scabbards. They have left arms and wings where their right arms should be.

I’m becoming immobilized. My thoughts are dispersing as I start to form them. I will drop the pen I am writing with in a moment. The winged men are entering the hotel now. I have left the door unlocked for them.