(a true story)

I don’t remember her name, but I know she must have lived in a house that had a clear view of the street. It was probably on a second or third story because the owners there usually live on the bottom floor and rent out the upper floors. I’m assuming a bit because she didn’t exactly say this, but said she was “Looking out of the window of my house” when she saw the incident. I also clearly remember that she was wearing a black North Face jacket. She showed up in front of our house in a beat up Mission Van along with a bunch of other well dressed folks.

I knew the route well they had used. It was the only way up to where we lived. The road started in Port-au-Prince where they would have flown in from Miami and it wound over the first range of mountains before dropping into the Fond-Verrettes Valley…. There they would have driven through the river before making the final steep ascent twisting through the Pine Forrest into a remote zone the natives there called Chadek. That’s where we lived. The name comes from a tree that grows there bearing a fruit best explained by “A mix of grapefruit and orange”.

…as they stiffly got out of the back of the beat up van, I smiled a bit to myself… I knew the road. Taking it in a pickup with good suspension was a rough 4 hour journey… they must have gotten bounced around in that van quite a bit.

We lived on a small mountain that overlooked the sprawling valley and I never tired of the view from the back of our house. It seemed like people’s eyes were drawn up first where we could see the highest point of the country from there. Pic la Selle. It towered remarkably higher than its surroundings and the natives would sometimes talk of the “devil or something” that lived at the top. Some days we fancied we could see the ocean to the south from our vantage point. When I stood there, I usually saw something new that I just hadn’t noticed before and always enjoyed taking new comers to see the awesome view.

Sometimes a person was so taken in with the panorama that they forgot anyone else was there.

She was a good conversationalist and I hadn’t talked to many other people (other than those I lived with) in my own language for about 6 months… that’s probably why we were standing at the overlook on the side of the hill and I was pelting her with questions about where she was currently living, if she had grown up there, and if she had any pets.

Come to find out she had lived in New York City for quite a few years… as I had also.. along with the other 8 million people that lived there. New York City is divided up into 5 main boroughs, 59 districts and covers around 300 square miles of urban jungle.

“Yup” I commented…. “There’s always something going on there. The city never sleeps they say”.

She half turned towards me from the view in front of us. “I watched a man get beat up on our street one day,” she said. “I was looking out onto the street through the window of my house when-”

While she stood there and recounted the incident, I was taken back to a quiet street in a small apartment on the 3rd floor. Our house was lined up with La Guardia’s runway 4-22 and I got to where I hardly noticed the endless flow of planes coming right over the top of our roof. One day my dad came home after being up town and said that he had just witnessed a couple guys robbing another guy right on our street. I remembered him standing in the kitchen telling us about it. “He had a new bike, and 2 guys came out of nowhere and started beating this guy with long leather belts,” my dad said. “The belts had big heavy belt buckles on them. One guy continued to beat him and the other guy was trying to wrench his bike away. When I went towards them, they both ran away.” I remembered my dad saying that when he had reached the man, he kept asking Dad… “Am I ok? Do you think I should go to the Hospital?”

“Ya” she said as she was finishing the story. “I really thought those 2 guys were going to get his bike away from him, but he kept holding on. They may have eventually gotten it, but then this man came running down the street and they both ran away.”

We stood for a bit in the silence. There was always movement to watch in the valley….. a farmer with a hoe in his garden. A lady spreading out fresh laundry on the tall spiky plants… the endless running of many children.

“Did you live in Woodside, Queens on 64th street” I asked.

She looked surprised. “Yes, how did you know?”

“Well” I said, “That man running down the street was my father”