chAPter one

the end

the Phone WAs next to me on the Bed, not ringing. ignoring this was proving difficult. It was a hot, slow January afternoon, just past 4:45 p.m., in the hills above Port-au-Prince, and the newsless pall that fell between Christmas and Carnival offered few distrac-tions. AP House, my bureau and residence in Pétionville, was quiet. My lone housemate, the staff photographer, was on home leave in Spain. Evens, our main translator and driver, was finishing some phone calls in the large first-floor office space before heading down the hill to his stepfamily’s place, where he’d been living since his divorce. The only other person around was Widler, a hardworking, taciturn Haitian mechanic, who was outside replacing the brake pads under my hopeless, thirteen-year-old Geo Tracker. I was up-stairs in my room.

The call I was waiting for was from someone at AP telling me that I could ship out. After two and a half years of disasters and riots—of personal and political intrigue, money-pit cars, and not one utility I could count on—I was done with Haiti. My friends were great. The house was terrific: a two-story with creek-stone walls on the first floor and a big terrace, set back among hibiscuses and lime trees beside the Hotel Villa Creole. From the slum ris-ing behind it, the sounds of children playing filled the day, and I’d fall asleep to hand-clap hallelujahs from the church at night. But AP had long talked about getting rid of the house, and my foreign friends, done with their two-year rotations, had mostly shipped

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14 the Big truck thAt Went By

off to the next crisis. AP’s international editor in New York told me I could pick my next position, so long as it was Kabul, Lagos, or Baghdad. I chose Afghanistan. It sounded like a good place for a break. All that was left was for the phone to ring.

To kill time, I played online trivia against a friend in the States. I was sitting on my bed in gray boxers and a sleeveless undershirt, sweating out the last of the Tuesday heat. We started a new game: Name a human body part for every letter of the alphabet, in a min-ute or less.

“I didn’t know jejunum was spelled like that,” I typed into the chat window as time ran out. “You win.”

I heard a loud rumbling outside. I looked out the window, but the yard was empty. Must be a water truck, I thought.

Then the bed started to vibrate. I heard plates rattling in the kitchen downstairs. The wooden mask from Mexico I’d always wor-ried might fall started to sway. Medicine bottles, suntan lotion, and bug spray shimmied on the round black table I always left clut-tered because I’d never counted on staying in Haiti long enough to need a dresser.

There had been a rumble on the island before, a little one, when I was the correspondent on its other side in the Dominican Repub-lic. This couldn’t be one of those. I stood up from the bed, bare feet against the wooden floor, but felt nothing. The roar outside got louder. Then the floor started to move. The vibrations got thicker. Christ, maybe it is one of those, I thought. What do you do in one of those? A doorway. Something about a doorway. I walked toward it but for some reason kept going into the hall. Then everything shoved.

I lowered myself, or maybe I fell. Then a shove came the other way. Then another, and another. Suddenly the house was an air-plane in a storm. Everything was falling. A framed photo from Jerusalem barely missed my head and cracked on the floor. Ev-erything was flowing now, blasts coming through the walls, waves through the floor. There was a contest between the up and down and the side to side. Who was going to shove harder, the up and down or the side to side? They were both winning. There was a mechanical roar.

I answered: “No no no no no no no no no. . . .”

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the end 15

The world turned gray and everything blurred, things falling long after there should have been nothing left to fall. The hor-izontal slats of the crank-out windows shot from their frames and burst across the floor. I watched the front wall crack in two, daylight pushing through the throbbing dust. With every heart-beat, the floor disappeared from under me and reappeared and was gone.

It was going to fall. I was going to fall.I heard a sound like trees being mowed down in a forest. It

was the house next door collapsing. Seconds to go. I thought about running through the shattered glass and tumbling down the stairs, but there was no time. When the second floor went, I could either be under it or ride down on top of it. I went with on top and braced for the pain.

i moved to hAiti in 2007� from the Dominican Republic on what was billed as a temporary transfer by AP. As the bus crossed into the desert that stretches from the Dominican southwest into Haiti, I opened an old New Yorker. My eyes landed on a short story by Junot Díaz, a Dominican American writer. As we neared the Haitian border, I flipped to the next. It was by Edwidge Danticat, a Haitian American. That felt like a good sign.

It was raining an hour later when the yellow coach bus pulled into Port-au-Prince. We had left the Dominican capital, with its tutti frutti–colored high-rises and oceanfront boulevard, for a city of drab, gray cinder-block shacks. In place of Burger Kings and walk-in sandwich shops I saw open-air markets with women crouching on blankets and shouting to customers, or gritting pipes in their teeth. People walked up and down hills, some carrying im-possible loads on their heads or stuffing themselves into the psy-chedelically painted pickup truck taxis I’d learn were called taptaps. Blue-helmeted United Nations soldiers splashed through a puddle in their white armored personnel carrier. I took a picture.

The next morning, I walked into the kitchen of my new house to find a large Haitian man pumping water from a blue jug. He turned, looked down at me, and flashed a 100-watt grin.

Evens Sanon is what journalists call a fixer—sort of a combi-nation tour guide, driver, translator, interview arranger, culture

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