But when the dictatorship finally collapsed-without any help from his pigeons-he started again. He’d stopped briefly in the early eighties, when some soldiers came and collected his birds because it was rumored that he was breeding carriers to send messages to armed invaders in the Dominican Republic. Pascal’s father had been a pigeon breeder since he was a boy in Léogâne. But as the trees in the provinces vanished into charcoal and the mountains gave way, washing the country’s topsoil into the sea, they, like the others, stayed and raised their two sons and at least a thousand pigeons, which, over the years, they sold both alive and dead. Pascal’s parents had moved to Bel Air at a time when the neighborhood was inhabited mostly by peasants, living there temporarily so that their children could finish primary school. They sold rice and beans, of course, and fried plantains and cornmeal, but their specialty, for a long time, was fried pigeon meat. They had a slightly larger yard than most of their crammed-in neighbors, so they had closed it off with sheets of rusty corrugated metal, and there, at four long wooden tables beneath a string of light bulbs which dangled from a second-story clostra-block window, they served up to thirty customers per night, if the turnover was fast. Pascal’s parents were shop owners and restaurateurs in Bel Air.
(The men of Baz Benin gave themselves the monikers of Nubian royalty, which also happened to suggest, in Creole, menacing acts- piye, for example, means “to pillage.”) The shooting was in retaliation for a series of fatal kidnappings, some of which the Baz Benin men had committed and some of which they had not. That person, Piye, was killed when a special-forces team shot several bullets into the back of his head as he was lying in bed one night. The two dozen or so young male inhabitants of the warehouse called it Baz Benin, for reasons that only the person who came up with the tag knew for sure. For a while, there were no gang wars there was just one gang, whose headquarters were in a large empty warehouse, painted with murals of serpents, lions, and goats, and Haile Selassie and Bob Marley. It had a few Protestant and Catholic churches, vodou temples, restaurants, bakeries, and dry cleaners, even Internet cafés.
What about you?” Bel Air was actually a mid-level slum. Pascal Dorien was living in Bel Air-the Baghdad of Haiti, some people called it, but that would be Cité Pendue, an even more destitute and brutal neighborhood, where hundreds of middle-school children entering a national art contest drew M-16s and beheaded corpses, and wrote such things as “It’s not polite to shoot at funeral processions” and “I’m happy to have turned in my weapons.
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