The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (61 page)

Nothing truly bad had ever happened when he found himself among the
vodouiste
s and he didn’t expect it now, lowering his pants leg back over his pistol and following
Jackie out of the car. This was, in its style, an imperial conclave among an exiled
tribe, a secret society’s coronation of its new
empereur,
the final night of a two-day fete and a jubilant display of
vodou
’s three Ds—drunks, drums and jungle dancing. Burnette was not immune to the internal
stir, the itch of the rhythms, the loosening of hips and heels. An elderly man with
white sideburns, narrow-shouldered above his royal girth, his dignity uncompromised
by bare feet and his wide-brimmed crown of woven fronds, stepped through the crowd
and—
Ah, mon cher, ma belle mademoiselle
—clasped Jackie’s hand in both of his.

He was the
gros neg
himself, the new
empereur
assuming the throne of the one recently expired, cloudy-eyed but vigorous, and as
he conversed with Jackie in Kreyol Burnette again had reason to marvel at her quick
fluency, two weeks further along and years beyond his own baby talk. The drums had
resumed their artillery roar and from behind the farmhouse a chant floated out in
clipped exhalations like a pounded song. Come, come, said the
empereur,
and they were led by the old man through the revelers past embered cookfires and
children spooning callaloo from their gourd bowls and into the candlelit house itself,
people resting on wooden benches against its shadow-played walls, no other furniture
in sight, and they followed him to a windowless side room, where the
empereur
kept his household altar for his patron saint, the tempestuous succubus Erzulie Mary.
In some other place, at some other time, the
lwa,
it seemed, had confessed her attraction for Jackie into the
empereur
’s ear, and this was how Burnette learned that the undersecretary’s daughter was running
some kind of stealthy ops with the witch-doctor crowd.

From the altar’s motley stack of bottles the
empereur
selected and uncorked one filled with clear liquid and dribbled a serving of its
contents on the ground, quenching the great thirst of the
lwas,
then drank himself and passed the bottle to Jackie, who repeated the ritual offering
and passed the bottle to Burnette, who did the same without hesitation, gasping as
the tongue-cauterizing moonshine raked his throat, the
clairin
like an emulsion of fire ants. Another simple rural man appeared clutching a live
chicken to his chest and the
empereur
received it into the bony gnarl of his own fingers and with a sudden surprising force
twisted off the bird’s head and sprinkled the altar with its blood and then bloodied
the feet of his guests and handed the carcass back to the farmer.
Bon,
rasped the panther-faced
empereur,
kissing Jackie’s cheeks and shaking Burnette’s hand.
Bon,
he said, the
lwas
are happy, I am happy, and Burnette asked what had just happened and Jackie told
him they had been presented to the spirits and, without objection, inducted into the
empereur
’s cult. You don’t have a problem with that, do you? she said. It’s honorary. She
took the bottle and another swallow of
clairin
and handed it back and he dared another gulp as well.

Far fuckin’ out, he said. Do I get a tab to sew on my uniform?

The
empereur
left them there and disappeared, perhaps to attend to occult duties, and Burnette
and Jackie wandered back outside with the incendiary gift of the bottle, behind the
house to where the real jamboree unfolded on the foot-packed red earth beneath the
thatch of a
hounfour
’s peristyle—a rapturous danse macabre performed by a cluster of houris and a trio
of bare-chested men with red kerchiefs knotted at their necks, a line of drummers
enslaved to goatskin drumheads, whipped on in their mania by spectral masters and
the dancers themselves ebony dervishes, slickened with spirit-energy. Jackie tipped
the bottle skyward and lipped the neck like a glass trumpet and chugged and slanted
her body against him, the side of her hip tapping his own with the salacious beat,
a provocation not so terribly hard to reconcile with the moment. He could have moved
away but didn’t.

All was as it should be until a pair of spinning houris were seized by the gods, their
eyes rolled back into their sockets as the bolt of possession passed into them like
electrocution and the women fell, convulsing, to the ground, and flailed until each
was claimed and taken—ridden—by a separate
lwa,
each a mortal horse with a divine rider, jabbering prophecy and esoteric instruction.
Moved by the equally powerful spirit of overproof alcohol, Jackie surrendered herself
to the show. Burnette tried to grab her back but she flung herself out to the peristyle,
her gyrations an awkward white-girl version of letting go and Burnette stood appalled
for the next few minutes watching her thrash around, Jackie oblivious as the object
of far too much male attention, until she suddenly slumped to the dirt and Eville
prayed, My God, stop her right now, do not let her rise up a madwoman speaking in
tongues.

But hello, Jackie was only stone-cold drunk, and when she didn’t get up he rushed
toward the heap of her, face-first in the dirt, to carry her out of the
hounfour
back into the darkness in the not-so-heroic cradle of his arms. He recoiled when
he put her down to open the door to the CUCV and she wobbled and swiveled to her knees
and vomited what smelled like rancid kerosene on his boots. Nice, he said derisively,
shaking his unsympathetic head, and when he finally scooped her into the passenger
seat she toppled across onto the driver’s side as well and he couldn’t make her sit
back up. Which meant, for fuck’s sake, that he drove the entire way back to Cap-Haïtien
with Jackie’s head jostled about in his lap and her mouth half-open.

The dashboard instruments cast a greenish velvet illumination and he looked down between
his legs at the tarnished flax of her hair and felt her face pressed dead against
his enlivened cock, a bad affair that he only made cravenly worse as he drove along
and thought delicious, lust-tormented things. He watched the road and didn’t watch
the road, trying not to swipe any pedestrian looming out of the dark at the same time
his eyes insisted on tracking the sublime curve of her torso to her legs, bare to
midthigh where her dress had bunched. He stretched his right hand over onto her rounded
hip, patting then stroking as if to comfort her. She didn’t respond and he wasn’t
trying to comfort her and he reached farther and edged up her skirt until it was at
the waistband of her panties and his hand was locked into a sequence of trespass,
palming her butt, and she didn’t wake up. By now he was trembling and he let his fingers
glide along the veiled crack of her ass down into the crevice below and its patch
of heat, where his fingertips rested on the sealed lips of her sex and when she still
didn’t move his index finger tested the tension of the elastic of the silky fabric
and its rim of escaped hair and he realized with a shock what he was doing, about
to stick his finger in the cunt of an unconscious woman, and withdrew his hand carefully
from its scavenging path of violation and carefully rearranged her dress over her
legs and drove on with her mouth lolling atop his hard-on, telling himself he was
the lowest of indecent men.

In the Christophe’s car park he dragged her inconvenient rag-doll carcass out of the
CUCV and humped the load up past the disapproving night watchman and through the lobby
and up the staircase to his room, muscling her over his shoulder like a sack of rice
and cussing to himself all the way, into his ascetic’s matchbox cell, taking her straight
to the bathroom and slinging her down propped into the corner of the shower stall.
He struck a match and touched the flame to a candle in its holder on the back ledge
of the sink’s basin and a small sphere of light jiggled into the room.

The water system was, as always, turned off at this time of night although as always
the maid had filled a five-gallon bucket set next to the toilet for flushing. He was
too exasperated not to pour it on her, for her own good, of course, but he picked
up the bucket and put it back down trying to decide whether he should undress her
first, the pros and cons of disrobing a knocked-out hellion who just might regain
consciousness in midstripping, and concluded,
To hell with it, man,
and dumped the water over her head, jumping back as she woke up with a sputtering
howl, lashing out with a flurry of blind swats and kicks overtaken by a bout of dry
heaves that calmed soon enough to profanity-laced moanings as she collapsed herself
into a soggy fetal position and fell back asleep. He retreated through the shadows
to his narrow bed, satisfied that she would live to continue tormenting him another
day.

But he should have known that wasn’t going to be the end of it, that Jackie had a
trick of resurfacing. Sometime before dawn her clammy naked body tried to wedge itself
onto the single mattress next to his sweltering naked self and he played dead—there
was no room for her in the bed regardless—and the next thing he knew she was kneeling
over him, straddling his hips, tugging his penis into the automatic compliance of
an erection, and he growled at her, the spontaneity of his rejection puzzling even
to him.
What do you think you’re doing. Get off,
and she said,
Oh, come on, Burnette, fuck me, let’s just get beyond the sex, okay. Do it.
His cock was a flagpole, straight up in her grasp and she began to lower herself onto
him when he pushed her sideways against the wall and rolled himself off the mattress,
crawling on his hands and knees to find his sleeping bag and foam pad, his stomach
knotted into a queasy spasm of wrongness. He spent the remainder of the night there
on the floor feeling like a steamed dumpling, the heat too heavy and the air too close,
the bag pulled over his face, listening to the swishing pant and muted snores of her
breathing as she lay above him in bed, asleep again within minutes of their uncoupling,
which he would never be able to explain to himself, lacking any real principle to
account for his sudden unmanly priggishness.

In the morning as he dressed she remained asleep, her body contorted like a drowning
victim, legs and arms broken wings jutting awkwardly, her brow knitted and face strained
with frowning concentration, her lovely breasts exposed, the sheet wrapped at her
waist like a toga in disarray. He tiptoed into the bathroom but when he came out she
was sitting up, hugging her elbows, her head inclined toward him with an impersonal
smile, her eyes hostile, waiting to hear what he might say.

See you around, he said, grabbing his kit and getting the hell out of there before
she could open her mouth, say something to enrage him—conceivably even a
good morning
would do the trick. The beast of the field, the somehow guilty one, gnawed by his
own conscience, the molester, the could-have-been rapist, the unsated victim, running
away.

Was this how all men act and think? It would not console him if they did.

He shut off the truck’s engine and followed the sidewalk across Third Group’s campus
to Bravo Company’s headquarters and the hayseed noncom stuck on the desk greeted him
with a knowing smirk and another collection of paperwork. Early on in the invasion,
he had seen this kid sauntering around one of the FOBs in Haiti with a big-ass Bowie
knife strapped to his leg and had asked him, Who are you supposed to be, Davy Crockett?
Yuck, yuck, said the kid, my dad carried this evil blade in ’Nam.

Top, I’m not letting you go until you fill out every one of these suckers.

You heard then?

I heard a rumor, sir. I heard you no longer exist,
heh heh
. Also I’m supposed to tell you to report inside the fence at the Wall tomorrow at
0700. Ask for Lieutenant Colonel McCall.

He told the staff sergeant he was looking forward to it and suddenly he was, anything
to reestablish a zone of routine and daily regimen in his life where he did not have
to think quite so hard about the rightness or wrongness of his actions, where his
decisions were given the reliable benefit of a context, straightforward and practical,
ABC, one-two-three, God and country, faithful obedience to the higher cause, and when
he finished with the paperwork he walked down the hallway to the team rooms to visit
with his former detachment, to say hello and say good-bye, but the only men he found
there were the team’s jug-eared choggies, Wascom and Boles, transferring gear and
weapons from the permanent main locker into two footlockers and Burnette asked, You
guys going somewhere? and they looked up, preoccupied but grinning, and Boles said,
Hey, Top, back in time for the farewell party! and Wascom said, Yes, sir, Bosnia.

He walked out of there trying to remember who said it, an aphorism he would never
forget, first because he had always thought it was nonsense and then because he came
to know it was wise.
War is but a spectacular expression of our everyday life.

CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

As the sun went down he went to Kmart to do a simple thing that would make him feel
better, normal, human, real: shopping for his spartan comforts, a pillow and a two-pack
of pillowcases, a plush bath towel, shampoo and soap, a coffeemaker and floor lamp,
then to the supermarket where he bought a bachelor’s ration of coffee and eggs and
bacon and beer and a hand of greenish bananas and cigarettes and a copy of the
Fayetteville Observer
. On the way home he stopped at his favorite sandwich shop and took away a foot-long
Italian sub and back at the apartment unloaded everything and stood up the lamp next
to the recliner and sat down to eat the sub and read the newspaper, glancing at the
headlines and then the sports section—and thumbed through the classifieds, used trucks
first then real estate, acquiring a ballpark sense of the value of what was left in
his name, mulling upgrades or downsizings or flat-out liquidation. Generals were materialists,
not foot soldiers, who only wanted their due, hard enough to get as it was. He owned
the town house but wondered if he should own a bed? At this point, probably not.
My bed
was subtext in the sentence—
This home
—and his life was trudging off in some other direction.

He read on, fantasizing about buying a motorcycle or a boat, scanning the job market
with a sense of relief that he had not been put on this earth to be frog-marched through
the adventureless monotony of a civilian’s life, the unnatural atrophying blood-thickening
safety of it all. Because it nuzzled keenly against one of his fondest dreams, he
saved for last the listing for pets, the critter sales and giveaways, humane or something
less, sniggering at the lady-favorite rodent breeds, Pomeranians and Yorkies and quivering
Chihuahuas, vermin-sized lumps of uselessness, scowling at the much-maligned gangsta
dogs, pit bulls and Rotties and Dobes, his blessing and empathy offered to the legion
of mutts in need of anything resembling a home, missing the bold and stalwart heelers
that you would find in any Montana paper, the habit of his search designed to mire
his heart in nostalgia, hoping for (and dreading) a listing for a setter or a Lab,
anticipating the pain and the memories, the dogs of his boyhood the most cherished
of lost friends—the hunts with his dad and the dogs for grouse and duck, the true
love of endless happy canine kisses, the furry spring of joy in every waking morning
whatever the season. The perfection of his imagined life culminated with a dog, yet
under the circumstances he could not have the dog unless he had a woman who loved
dogs, or just a woman who loved him, a yearning as distant from his reality as the
moon.

The beer and the sandwich and the sedative of the newspaper and the darkness falling
beyond the lamplight had left him sleepy, and he pushed back the reclining mechanism
of the chair to stretch out and close his eyes for a nap before going out to join
the gang at Rick’s bar and lay there thinking about the one good thing that had happened
in Haiti in the past two months, or at least the only bad thing that had ended up
all right.

The morning after the Pakis brought in the bodies and the wounded and the detainees,
he was with the Caricom troglodytes when they unlocked the cargo containers where
Lecoeur’s people had spent the suffocating night. The Jamaican police herded the prisoners
out into the glaring sunlight, the wailing and crying began anew, and the clamor excited
the surly Jamaicans, who began a type of indiscriminate batting practice with their
batons on the shoulders and buttocks of anyone not nimble enough to skip out of the
way. He had stepped in and put a stop to it and made them separate the women and children
from the men and then he ordered them to release the women and children. Go, he told
them in Kreyol, you’re free. Go where? a woman asked. Get out of here now, he said,
pointing across the airstrip to the front gate, wanting them gone before the Jamaicans
questioned his dubious authority to bark out commands. He exchanged hopeless looks
with a young woman clasping the head of a little boy to her skirt, his limbs as insubstantial
as twigs, and he understood she didn’t want to move. He had to shout, to step toward
them menacingly,
Allez, allez!
and they scuttered away like a flock of black geese, casting panicked glances over
their shoulders at the fox on their heels.

The beefy captain of the monitors squared off in front of him, nostrils flared and
glowering, his rotund face a graven image, a countenance like a vicious walrus—
Tell me who you are again, mahn
—and Eville realized at least here in the compound this undercover journo bullshit
was out the window and he would need to present himself dressed in cammies, holster
his 92FS on his belt, offer and receive salutes.

That day, though, and the days to come, left him with a lasting foul taste of complicity,
as if he had been required to attend a workshop in the effective application of human
rights abuses, and his opinion of Third World law-and-order professionals jumped to
a more elite bracket of disgust and incredulity. Lecoeur’s downtrodden men were marched
to a small concrete-blockhouse isolated at the back of the compound, where they were
told to sit in the dirt and be quiet. Within minutes the heat and the excruciating
blaze of sunlight had become unbearable. He asked the Jamaican captain to explain
the protocol and the captain said they were waiting for the interpreter to arrive
so the interrogations could begin. One of the prisoners pleaded to use the toilet,
several others began to beg for water. What are they crying about? said the captain.
Eville translated their distress and the captain said, Tell them to shut up, tell
them to shit in their pants. This is what we’re going to do, okay? said Burnette,
and he put three prisoners, sworn to take a hasty dump, in the back of the CUCV and
picked one of the policemen to ride up front with him and ferried the Haitians to
a line of port-a-johns across the base and cut off their flex cuffs and let them shit
on the promise they would not seize the opportunity to overthrow the government. Water,
water, the others begged, the lot of them unfed and dehydrated since being hauled
out of the mountains. He got back into the CUCV and drove over to the UN mess hall
and grabbed a couple cases of MREs and bottled water and by the time he returned to
the blockhouse the interpreter was inside with half the cops who, from the sound of
it, were beating the daylights out of one of the detainees.

All right, listen, he said to the captain with as much cool equanimity as he could
muster. Stop this right now or I am personally placing you under arrest.

The captain laughed in his face and got on his radio instead and Ev himself stormed
into the blockhouse to try to reason the Jamaicans away from their sport of official
cruelty. Next thing that happens, a Pakistani aide de camp drives up respectfully
requesting to escort Eville back to headquarters for chitty-chat with Colonel Kahn,
who berates him for illegally assuming command of a UN-Caricom-controlled joint operation
and sends him back to the interrogation follies under strict orders to observe and
assist or run away home to the land of namby-pamby. The day proceeds and ends with
eight more pointless innings of sadistic self-fulfillment for the thugs in uniform,
pounding a gram’s worth of intel out of a ton of cowering screaming flesh. He had
never seen anything like it, a day of useless petty brutalities administered by such
a surplus of defective people, and it crossed his mind that they continued on for
the double pleasure of defying the precious oversensitivities of a white American
arsehole. Now what? he says as the ignominious afternoon clots to an end. Back to
the lockup for the wretches, and since no one else will do it, he drives back to the
mess hall and returns to the cargo container with food and water before the detainees
are chained in for the night. He doesn’t feel like the good guy. He feels like the
good guy who failed.

If he wanted, he could have bunked on the compound overnight in an air-conditioned
officer’s billet but he thought why punish himself and he drove out the front gate
nodding at the mud-headed Paki guards, hankering for a nightlong lineup of cold beers
back at the Christophe.

He doesn’t recognize the girl—she was sitting cross-legged and humped over on the
side of the road fifty yards outside the gate, her face concealed behind the shield
of her hands as though she might be weeping—but he recognized the boy standing next
to her—mother? sister?—rigid with unearthly patience, his clothes in shreds, his belly
puffed with malnourishment, a small ebony statue meant to convey the fierce stoicism
of survival branded into all the children in the world to whom the world has shown
only horror, supernaturally resilient children who refused to perish, like burned
roots that keep sprouting into an otherwise charred and lifeless wasteland. Children
who would grow into adulthood singing songs of war.

He pulled over a few yards past them and put the CUCV in park and walked back and
stood in front of the pair until she looked up, not crying after all but desolate
and dazed with fatigue, her sad wondering eyes searching his for evidence of his intentions.
He said, Madame, you were with the people taken from the mountains, yes? and she said,
a birdlike peep,
Oui.

Where did they go?

Back to the mountains.

Why didn’t you go with them?

God has abandoned me,
monsieur
.

Naturally she was frightened by him, her shyness and her fear wholly appropriate to
the mystery of his presence, yet he gently coaxed out the shards of her life—here’s
a piece, here’s another piece. The boy was her son, his father had been a teacher
murdered by the tyrant’s army three years ago when the soldiers came rampaging up
the valley into the mountains after Jacques Lecoeur, burning schools and houses and
crops, hacking to death villagers too slow to escape into the sanctuary and subsequent
hardships of the jungle. She had plucked the boy up from the flames and fled with
the other refugees, joined by her older brother Reginald, her only living relative,
a coffee planter who became one of Lecoeur’s men, a brother who protected her and
her son, and fed them, when they would not have been able to endure, as others had
not endured, without protection and food. Now he was one of the prisoners rounded
up by these foreigners who had come to Haiti—not the Americans but these other men,
neither black nor white nor Christian—and it made no sense to her to return to the
mountains without her brother and his guardianship. Why should I make such a difficult
journey to starve there,
monsieur,
when I can starve here without the trouble?

I want to help you, he said. Will you let me help you?

She lowered her head without answering and so he sat down next to her in the dirt,
watching the traffic pass on the road, and waited for her decision. Finally she whispered
to her knees, Why would you help me,
monsieur
? and it pained him mightily to realize why she would ask this question, that nothing
might strike her as more poisonous than his star-spangled good intentions. And what
could he tell her, how should he answer? Because I need to help
somebody
? Because I am an American and I can? Because God and my own mother would scorn me
if I didn’t? He wanted to sigh, Give me credit for being decent. Or trying. It was
the thing he could do for himself. The purifying act.

She is not grateful for his attention; she is a woman, and hesitant with suspicion.
He looked to the boy for an ally. Are you hungry? he asked, and the boy bobbed his
head meekly once,
Oui,
his eyes flicking toward his mother, unwilling to assume that the acknowledgment
of his hunger might actually contribute to its relief, and Burnette said to the woman,
Come,
his tone light and invitational,
Get into the car,
careful to not make it sound like a command, and she rose from the ground resolved
to her fate, now deposited in this
blan
’s hands, attempting to smile, the sinewy strength and childlike youthfulness of her
body resurgent, taking her son’s hand, and they came.

In the roadless mountains the rivers flowed undefeated, the color of lapis, as they
had since time immemorial, but the tidal river below this bridge on the road from
the airport to the center of the city looked and smelled like a channel of diarrheal
sludge, its filth oozing toward the nearby sea through the middle of a dung-colored
slum, a warren of repulsive miseries, constructed entirely of wreckage and garbage
and degradation. Even the charity of a penny would not fall their way. He saw her
gazing out the window into the twilight at its hovels and cook fires and children
romping in its pestilence of mud and knew this was their squalid fate, the hell where
she and the boy would be absorbed and vanish were they left on their own.

Across the bridge he turned toward the harbor and drove through the broken streets
to the quay, where he knew vendors had claimed a sidewalk outside the gates of the
port and its massive warehouses, hunched over their iron cauldrons stoking nests of
fragrant coals, cooking the fare they would sell to the sailors and stevedores for
their dinners. There were no stalls, no chairs or tables, just the market women and
their steamy pots, and he stopped in front of one of the cooks because her plump face
was creased with laughter for no apparent reason and he bought each of his foundlings
a scoop of rice and beans ladled with conch stew and grated cabbage, the meals served
on paper plates and eaten with a communal tin spoon. The kid and his mom sat together
eating in the backseat of the CUCV, chewing rapidly, with the watchful vigilance of
alley cats. The boy cleaned his plate first and his mother shared what remained on
hers. He went to another vendor and bought them bottles of lurid-colored soda and
leaned against the hood while they washed their meal down, trying to devise a plan,
until she came out of the vehicle to return the bottles and the spoon and approached
him demurely to say thanks and then raised the dark lambency of her eyes to his with
a quizzical expression.