Free Claire of the Sea Light by Edwidge Danticat

skeptical. Though he was only nineteen and had gotten the job through his father’s connections, Max Junior still knew a lot about the radio business. Besides, Bernard trusted him.
    “I’m feeling everything you’re saying, but the management won’t buy it,” Max Junior said while keeping Bernard company one afternoon as Bernard typed away on an old electric typewriter at the far end of a long desk in the newsroom. “Who’ll sponsor a program like that?”
    “The government should sponsor it,” Bernard said, as he retyped that day’s news from the wires into conversational Creole for the announcer to read on the air. “We’d be offering a public service.”
    “You should pitch it to our boss,” Max Junior said. “But I bet he’ll be too scared to take it on.”
    Just as his friend predicted, Bernard’s program was not picked up, at least not with his involvement. But a few weeks later, while typing that afternoon’s news script, Bernard heard a taping for a program called
Homme à Homme
, or
Man to Man
. The program, announced the host, a former army colonel, would consist of in-studio conversations between gang members and Cité Pendue and Ville Rose business leaders.
    “They’ll hash out their differences,” he heard the colonel say, “with the help of a trained arbitrator.”
    The first program did just that, pairing an ice factory owner, who’d had his place broken into at least once a month for over a year, with another gang leader from Cité Pendue,a nemesis of Tiye’s, who was believed to have vandalized the ice factory.
    “What do you expect?” the gang member told the ice vendor. “You’re chilling in all this ice while we’re here boiling in hell.”
    The arbitrator, a female psychologist, who’d called in to the station from Port-au-Prince, then suggested the obvious, that the businessman find some way to share his ice, sell it at a lower price to the people who lived near his factory, and that the gang leader respect the property of others.
    What’s worse, Bernard was forced to hear the entire show again on the radio his mother sometimes had on in the restaurant, as he was serving drinks to Tiye and his crew, among others. Tiye and his friends had known about Bernard’s pitch for the show—he had approached them as possible guests—and, as he served them their beers, they teased him. “Hey, man, they stole your idea!”
    A few of them tried to grab Bernard as he put the bottles on the table—as if to squeeze out the anger they knew was bubbling inside him. The more they laughed, the angrier he got. Tiye was still laughing when he said, “Bernard, bro, that show is kaka. I should find them all and kick their ass.”
    “That’s right,” Piye, Tiye’s second lieutenant, chimed in.
    “Bernard,” someone else said. “You should kick the ass of the guy who stole your show.”
    Just then Bernard’s mother called him over to the kitchen, to pick up more beers, he thought. But on top of the old refrigerator in which they kept the drinks was his mother’s mostlavish personal acquisition, an old rotary phone. His friend Max Junior was on the line.
    He thought Max Junior would be calling about the show, but instead his friend said, “I’m calling to say good-bye, man. My fucking father is sending me to Miami.”
    “Really?” Bernard said, both incredulous and sad. “When are you coming back?”
    “I don’t know,” his friend replied.
    “Who’s doing your show while you’re gone?” Bernard asked.
    “I’m not sure,” Max Junior said.
    “Maybe I can fill in for you,” Bernard said.
    “Maybe,” Max Junior said, then added, “Man, they stole your idea.”
    “Truth is,
Homme à Homme
is not the show I wanted to do,” Bernard said, trying to contain his sadness over both his departing friend and his show. “I wanted something closer to the skin. Something more personal.”
    Tiye and his guys were chanting from their tables, “Kraze bouda yo! Kraze bouda yo! Kick