by Ben Fountain
“Ahhhh.” He grinned as he stepped inside the trailer, checking eight months of combat duty at the door. Melissa went up on her toes to smack his cheek.
“How about a shot?”
She’d already set out their supplies on the coffee table, the salt and limes, shot glasses, a bottle of tequila. The jet fuel of passion.
“Well,” he laughed, blushing like a prom date, “what I’ve really been craving is a beer. But let me hit the head first…”
They went in opposite directions, he to the bathroom and she to the kitchen. The trailer funneled sound so efficiently that they could talk to each other from opposite ends.
“Everything looks great!” he called from the bathroom.
“It ought to.” She opened the beers and quartered a lime while a platter of nachos spat in the microwave. “I’ve had nothing to do but clean house for eight months.”
“Hot water!” he shouted down the hall. “Clean towels! Oh dear sweet Jesus, Dial soap! It’s like I’ve been gone about six years.”
“Tell me about it,” Melissa said through clenched teeth. She stuck a lime wedge in the top of each beer. “We’ve got some catching up to do.”
Back in the den, sitting thigh to thigh on the sofa, she let him eat a few nachos and take a couple of hits of beer before she swung herself over and straddled his lap, her skirt riding artfully high on her hips.
“So how does it feel to be home?” she asked, her face six inches from his.
“It feels pretty good.”
She rocked back and had a good look at him. His skin was a coppery reddish brown, and he was leaner, his few soft edges burned away. She’d met him three years ago in the law office where she worked; Dirk had brought in a buddy who’d snagged a DUI, and while the friend met with counsel behind closed doors Dirk sat in reception and chatted up Melissa. He talked in the slow, careful manner of a man chewing cactus—it turned out he was from Valdosta, even farther south—a buff body with soulful, syrup-brown eyes and little knots of muscle at the hinges of his jaw, but it was his smile that made her anxious in an intensely pleasurable way, the coyote guile of it, his cockiness like a knockout drug. Straddling him now, rubbing his cropped hair and searching his face, she decided he looked mostly the same—a little dazed, maybe, and definitely older, his eyes newly creased with crow’s feet. Maybe Haiti aged you in dog years? He was only twenty-eight.
“You’ve lost weight,” she said, kneading his chest and ribs. He felt as hard as an I beam. “We’re gonna have to fatten you up.”
“I’m looking forward to that.”
She went to work on the buttons of his uniform blouse, flicking them loose with a picklock’s sure touch. Her bottom settled deeper into his lap; she could feel the loaf rising to meet her there, his maximum expression straining at his pants—it took only that much pressure to make her groan. Her mind was going slack, starting to empty out, awareness liquefying to pure sensation.
Dirk gently took her wrists and pulled her away.
“Lissa, stop. We got to talk, babe.”
“Talking’s for wimps,” she murmured, her voice slurred as a drunk’s. She came at him again.
“No, listen, I’m serious,” he said, and this time he firmly slid her off of him. Her ears were hissing like a lit fuse, and she felt giddy, dizzy with passion and guilt. How did he know? He couldn’t know. So how did he know—
“We can’t do this tonight,” he told her. One of his arms held her shoulders, sympathetic yet sterile, exuding a brotherly tenderness that scared the daylights out of her. “Tomorrow’s fine, we can do it all day tomorrow and frankly there’s nothing I’d rather do. But tonight I can’t.” He paused. “I can’t make love on Saturdays.”
Her lungs collapsed—there was no air, nothing inside to form a response. She found a reserve at the very tip of her mouth. “What are you saying?”
“What I’m saying is—look, it’s sort of complicated. But there’s one thing I wanna make clear right now, I’m still your husband who loves you more than anything.”
Now she was terrified; he’d never talked this way before.
“Something happened down there,” he told her, “something wonderful, in a way. And you don’t have to be scared, I promise you that. Just be patient, this is going to take a while to explain. Just trust me and everything’ll be okay.”
“Dirk,” she wailed, “what is going on?”
She didn’t follow any of it at first, the bizarre story he unloaded on her about poison powders and a voodoo priest and his initiation into voodoo society, then some garbled business about a ceremony, and someone named Erzulie. A person, or maybe not quite a person—a spirit? Who Dirk had married somehow? Melissa thought she might throw up.
“You’re telling me you got married?”
“Well, yeah. To a god. It’s not all that uncommon down there.”
Melissa couldn’t process the part about the god. “But you’re married to me.”
“And that hasn’t changed at all.” He squeezed her hand. “I know this is a lot to be laying on you, but trust me, it’s okay. We’re still married, I still love you, I’m still the same Dirk.”
She looked at him: he was, in fact, the same, so much so that it broke her heart.
“If nothing’s changed then why can’t we have sex?”
“Well, that’s only on Tuesdays and Saturdays. Those are the nights I have to devote to her.”
“Devote to her?”
“Be with her. Sleep with her.”
“What do you mean, sleep with her. You mean sleep with her?”
“In a way. It’s kind of hard to explain.”
She felt as if some part of her brain had been carved out, the lobe of reason, logic, reality-based thought. All the normal tools of argument deserted her, and so she sat mostly silent for the next two hours while Dirk described his journey into Haitian voodoo, which began as part of the mission, a standard hearts-and-minds tactic of the Special Forces—contact and co-opt the local power structure. In Haiti this meant befriending the village voodoo priest, who turned out to be one Moïse Dieuseul in the remote coastal town where the team was based. Dirk’s near-coherent French made him the team’s point man for local liaison, and from their very first meeting Moïse showed a special affinity for the young American.
“He called me his son,” Dirk told her, “he said that God had brought us together. At first I thought he was just juicing me, right? The guy’s a survivor, he figured to get on the winning side. But all this weird stuff kept happening between me and him, and after a while I’m like, okay, maybe I need to think about this.”
What kind of weird stuff?
Dreams, coincidences, uncanny divinations. Then Moïse proved his ultimate good faith by alerting Dirk to a plot by the local Macoutes to poison the entire Special Forces team, and after that Dirk was staying for all-night sessions, going deeper and deeper into the voodoo. Which led to initiation, revelation, the mystic marriage; the stories were blurring into a hopeless purée when Melissa looked at the clock and saw that it was five a.m.
“Are we talking about a real woman here?”
“This is Erzulie, Lissa, a god, a lwa. The voodoo goddess of love.”
“But you said there was a woman in a wedding dress.”
“Well, yeah, she came down and possessed a woman from the temple, that’s how it works in voodoo. She used this woman’s body for the ceremony.”
Melissa shivered, forged ahead. “So after. After you got, married. Was there, like, sex?”
“Well, no. Yes and no. It’s really hard to explain.” He paused. “It’s more of a spiritual thing.”
Melissa sputtered, rolled her eyes—was he giving her the world’s lamest line? “Dirk, dammit, for eight months I’ve been climbing the walls like a good Army wife, and now you’re telling me, you, you’re telling me, uh…” She found herself backing up. “Did you have sex with another woman down there? I mean a live human being, an actual person. Or anything else. Or whatever
.”
“Why no, baby, it’s not like that.” He cupped her face in his hands, turned her toward him; she searched his eyes and found them clear amber-colored wells, her own pocket-sized reflection peering back from the bottom.
“No way,” he said softly, “you’re the only one. You’re the only woman on Earth for me.”
Dawn broke, filling the windows with pale, milky light. Outside the birds began singing like hundreds of small bells, their notes scattered as indiscriminately as seed. Once the sun rose Dirk was released from his promise, and in the early morning they did make love, though it wasn’t the dirty movie that Melissa had been scripting in her head for months. It was, instead, as gentle as a stream washing over them, with Melissa quietly crying as Dirk poured himself out behind a sweet, knowing, mysterious smile.
It had started in dreams. Luscious, full-bodied dreams in which two beautiful women, one white and one black, were making love to him—Dirk put it down to the sexual deprivation of the field, combined with the Penthouse-fueled fantasies of any all-American boy. Then the team was tasked to nation-build in Bainet, and Dirk started making the rounds of the surviving power elite, the neurotic mayor, the budding Hitler of a député, the effeminate Catholic priest, and finally M’sieur Dieuseul, the locally renowned voodoo man. Moïse received the young sergeant like this was Schwarzkopf himself, inviting him into the shade of his thatched-roof temple where they discussed la situation over coffee, the stew of international politics and underground intrigue that seemed more intractable with each passing day. This was grunt-level diplomacy, basic hearts and minds; Dirk was already starting to cut his French with earthy Creole slang, and while they talked he eyed the voodoo gods painted on the walls, the horned, fish-tailed, vaguely humanoid lwa like creatures out of Dr. Seuss on drugs, then the snakes twined around the temple’s central pole like strands of neon-laced DNA. Voodoo had already become a running joke with the team, voodoo voodoo voodoo their simmering code for everything that was weird and wonderful in this brave new world. Then out of the blue Moïse smiled, gave Dirk’s knee a friendly pat, and said:
“Maitress Erzulie likes you.”
And he proceeded to describe the tag team that was so vividly running amuck through Dirk’s dreams—the black beauty was Erzulie Dantor, the white, Erzulie Freda, twin incarnations of the goddess of love. A week later, doing recon in the hills, Dirk and the team stopped in a village where an old woman announced that she could see the Erzulies floating around Dirk. This woman—she was a few spoons short of a full set? A wired smurf of a granny with notched earlobes and crazy African stuff draped around her neck, amulets, stoppered bottles, burlap sachets, and her mouth spraying Creole in an aerosol stream, shouting how good this was for Dirk, two Erzulies! Meaning his head was well-balanced, his person much favored. The news burned through the market in a flash fire of laughs, blan sa-a se moun voodoo li ye! The white guy’s a voodoo man!
“So what are they like?” Melissa asked. “These dreams.”
“Sometimes they’re pretty hot. We’re talking wet dreams here.”
“Dirk, gross.”
“Hey, it is what it is, baby, balls-to-the-wall sex. The kind with all that burning truth in it, like you and me got.”
“Yeah, right. Nice try.”
“Weren’t we telling the truth last night?” Cocky as the day she met him, which wasn’t to say he hadn’t come back a changed man, a more thoughtful, thankful man with a newfound gift for patience, a slackening of the male impulse to domineer. From the first she’d always been the one who tried harder, who sacrificed her pride to his moods and whims and relieved herself with tearful rages in the bathroom, but eight months of living with the wretched of the Earth had returned to her a kinder, gentler Dirk who appreciated the good love he had at home. But those dreams worried her, the sense of forces, vectors of conscience and control that she couldn’t see and didn’t understand. So can they read your thoughts, she wondered. Can they get inside your head?
“Anyway,” Dirk added, “she’ll probably start showing up in your dreams too.”
Melissa bristled. “I don’t think so.”
“Maybe not, but that’s how it usually works. We’re all connected now.”
And James, was he connected too? He called her at work every few days, “just checking in,” he’d say, “just watching out for my girl.” “You’re a special little lady,” he told her. “I want us always to be friends.”
“Sure, James, we can be friends.”
“Now you tell me if he’s not treating you right. I know how tough it can be when a trooper comes home, and if there’s anything, well, I just want you to know I’m here for you.”
“I appreciate that. But my husband’s treating me just fine, thanks.”
“If you ever need to talk, we could meet for lunch sometime, or maybe a drink if you want…”
Wasn’t going off to war supposed to screw them up? And yet she was the one brooding and holding it in, not faking, exactly, but struggling to maintain, putting a happy face on the pressure cooker inside. In their spare bedroom Dirk devised an altar out of an old mahogany cabinet, “so you can shut it when company comes,” he explained, “I don’t want you to be embarrassed.” Inside he stuffed all manner of junk, a miniature yard sale tumbling over the shelves: trinkets, perfumes, a silver comb and brush set, candy, minibottles of champagne and liqueur, a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary. He taped cheap-looking prints of the Virgin inside the cupboard doors, two different Virgins, one black with scars on her cheek, the other white with a jewel-encrusted sword through her heart. At sundown on Tuesdays and Saturdays he lit candles on the altar, sparked up some incense, and played voodoo drum cassettes on the boom box in there, the rambunctious afrobeat burbling through the walls like the world’s biggest migraine headache. They’d watch TV curled together on the couch, but when Leno or Letterman started to drag Dirk would kiss her on the cheek, sweetly tell her goodnight, and go padding down the hall to the spare bedroom.
So sign me up for Oprah, Melissa thought, the other woman in my life is a voodoo god. The sense of a third presence grew on her like guilt, like it was the haunting of every bad thing she’d ever done. Voodoo, living right here in her house: she was enough of a lapsed Baptist to know what they would say. Cast OFF that demon! Satan get THEE behind! Sur-REN-der is the key that unlocks sal-VA-shun! Here in the buckle of the Bible Belt religious messages were available in all styles, from sugar-lipped warbling to hillbilly gibbering to the sonic stampede of call-and-response. The susceptible could easily find themselves bombarded by signals, and Melissa was, now, for the first time in her life, though actual religion still seemed strange to her. God was out there somewhere, she believed, and beyond that everything else was up for grabs, but as Dirk told his stories those first few weeks she began to understand a little of it, how a shock to the system might trigger a bizarre religious kick. Though really, was there any other kind? In your face was how he summed up Haiti for her, a place where everything happened altogether all at once, food, sweat, shit, grace, god, sex, and death, the raw and the cooked of life coming at you without any of the modern veneers.
“One day we set up a checkpoint out on the highway,” he told her, “we were spot-checking all the SUVs for weapons. Then this big flatbed truck comes humping along, and there in the back, piled up in this huge mound are all these cow heads, hundreds and hundreds of bloody cow heads. So after it passes we’re all laughing and yelling at each other like, Hey, did you see that? Can you believe that shit? Cause once it was gone you weren’t sure you’d really seen it.”
She got it, sort of, how fluid and free your mind might become when life took on the quality of hallucination. How that might blow your coping strategies all to hell? Dirk meditated daily in the middle of the den, which Melissa took for a joke at first—Green Berets, snake-eaters, did not meditate, nor did anyone else she knew except people from Chapel Hill. “Keeping it real” was how he explained himself; meanwhile Melissa took wary note
of her dreams and watched her life fill up with nagging signs and portents. FORBIDDEN FRUIT CREATES JAMS, read the message of the week on Calvary Baptist’s streetside sign, which Melissa passed each day going to and from work. A few miles farther on, First Methodist inquired: ETERNITY—SMOKING OR NON-SMOKING? Pondering Satan, carrying on her nominally normal life, she didn’t feel so much fear as a kind of fraught spaciness, maybe fear spread thin. Then one Tuesday evening she and Dirk were cuddled on the couch, watching a M*A*S*H rerun while voodoo-trance music submarined through the walls. It began as a joke, a tease, Melissa’s hand crabwalking up her husband’s thigh, sneaking higher and higher until it reached his lap. Dirk smiled without turning from the TV and gently set her hand aside.
Thirty seconds later she was at it again.
“Melissa.”
“What?” she cooed, all floozy innocence.
“You know I can’t mess around tonight.”
“I’m not doing anything,” she blandly protested, but she giggled and found him hard when she squeezed again.
“Melissa!” The alarm in his voice hooked something fierce in her. He was helpless, she could fuck him anytime she wanted.
“Melissa, give me a break.”
“I’m not doing anything!”
“Yes you are. And I’m asking you to stop it, please.”
