The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  And then there was a blast outside the Kinam, the concussion sending the faintest kiss of air across the cheeks of the diners, who collectively tensed and caught their breath. Excuse me, Harrington told the producer and slid back his chair. Someone nearby out in the darkness had fired a gun and Tom had been conditioned by Haiti and its predecessors to appreciate the coincidence of right time, wrong place. Now it was pure curiosity; before that, in El Salvador, pure paralyzing fear. The driver stood up with Tom and Harrington could see the butt of his pistol like a broken hip bone jutting out from his waistband. Everyone else stayed in their seats. If there was a story, they could hear it later.

  But there was no story to bring back to them with their meals. The hotel manager and the director were already on the sidewalk by the time the driver and Tom came out to peer into the darkness of Petionville’s decrepit plaza, empty but for a few hardened shadows passing underneath the vault of trees, a lone cook fire near the corner where the tap-taps stopped for the hordes of passengers during the day. They listened carefully for any further trouble but the streets were almost serene with the emptiness of their secrets. A few police milled about on the apron of the station across the block at the top of the square and it was there, the manager guessed, the shot had been fired. Sometimes, he said, these fools even shoot themselves accidentally, playing with their weapons.

  The four men returned to the patio in an expansive mood, the director asking the solicitous manager for a bottle of Barbancourt Special Reserve to be delivered to the table. Their food was served in a steamy cloud of garlic and chili vinegar and grilled fish and the talk turned to the year Tom Harrington had spent on the island investigating its massacres. Had he seen much of the American commandos who controlled the countryside? What did Tom think about the various pundits who were saluting or decrying America’s rehabilitation of the warrior culture? And then—Tom shouldn’t have been surprised but he was—the discussion turned to moviemaking. The people at the table were planning to make a soldier movie set in Haiti.

  This will be different, he overheard the director say to the screenwriter. We’re not doing this for our Haitian friends, he said and she smiled knowingly and nodded once that she understood. Let’s think patriotism, romance. A Green Beret and an aid worker? A Green Beret and a Haitian woman?

  Think The Sand Pebbles meets M.A.S.H., said the producer.

  What does that mean? Tom asked.

  I don’t know, said the producer, except they’re both great movies. You’ll help us out on this, won’t you?

  The waiter replaced their dishes with slices of lime pie and glass chalices containing smooth globes of mango sorbet. The director refilled Tom’s empty brandy snifter with Barbancourt, which he compared to the finest cognac.

  Tom smiled politely and sat back in his chair, not meaning to ponder the invitation but he looked to be doing just that. The proposition seemed so offhand and uncalculated that it struck him as cavalier, as if he were being gathered up to go to a party—come on, hop in—and although he had no idea what he might possibly contribute to such a novel enterprise as the making of a movie, of course, and perhaps naively, he agreed to the unlikely project.

  Haiti was the director’s true cause, his central passion—but Tom couldn’t say why, and never dwelled on it. Harrington saw him twice more: the next day at the inauguration, dressed in a business suit and seated among the dignitaries in the grandstand erected in front of the National Palace, and then a final time coming out of Galerie Issa with his entourage, stacks of paintings cradled in their arms. No one mentioned the movie to Tom again, and it was never made.

  On the periphery of the conversation, while they finished their pie and sorbet, Tom had noticed the screenwriter get up from the table and disappear back around the corner of the wall that separated the patio from the interior bar, presumably to find the toilet. Now she returned light on her feet, a gust of excitement, her face flushed with serendipity.

  There is the most perfect, lovely girl around the corner, she announced breathlessly to the table, and named a pixieish Hollywood actress who starred in romantic comedies as the perfect, lovely girl’s identical twin. The screenwriter imagined the wolf in her male friends’ expressions because she playfully admonished, You men stay away from her, with a theatrical drawl.

  The table trafficked in ingenues, though, and had no interest in her. On the other hand, the actress who had been compared to the girl around the corner was one of Harrington’s favorites, the standard-bearer for every Sally-next-door heartthrob fantasy the studios could confect, and he found the temptation to have a quick look irresistible.

  Excuse me, he said, popping up, a boyish grin on his face. I’ll be right back.

  For once in Haiti, he was having an unqualified good time. The evening had made him dizzy and unselfconsciously energized, drunk from the unaccustomed attention of well-known people, and Tom Harrington felt he had rare gifts to hand out to any audience: charm or knowledge or, god knows, some cause for happiness.

  He walked toward the soft-lit pool at the rear of the hotel, turning where the patio elbowed to the right along a stuccoed arcade, each of its arches providing a discreet shelter for diners seeking privacy. She was in the third alcove, her back to him, having dinner with a correspondent from the Guardian who had returned to London several months ago after the elections. The correspondent glanced up from his conversation with the girl and, smiling broadly, his eyes met Tom’s and he called him over. Suddenly embarrassed by his game, Tom lurched forward to the side of their table, trying to remember the fellow’s name, and took the journalist’s hand with unnatural exuberance, saying loudly, Good to see you, and When did you get back?

  Yesterday, he said. It’s too fucking quiet, isn’t it.

  Tom shifted his eyes expectantly toward the girl but her head was tilted down at her plate, only the golden crown of her head visible, the cut of her neck-length hair shielding her face—a remote angel—and she made no effort to acknowledge Tom’s presence, and so he returned his attention to her companion and they spoke for a few minutes about mutual friends, Tom’s eyes darting back and forth between the fellow and the girl until finally his Guardian friend felt prompted to introduce him.

  Do you know Jacqueline?

  When she raised her blue eyes to grant him an insincere smile, Tom was indeed astonished by her resemblance to the famous actress, and instantly inflamed by her cover-girl wholesomeness, the appearance of it at least. She had a nervous body, clapping knees and restless arms, but was not timid under the scan of yet another pair of fixated eyes, and regarded Tom with an utter absence of interest. Instead of dazzling, her beauty seemed to be the source of profound comfort and unending satisfaction, the American ideal, the girl every boy dreamed of courting and winning, the girl who made every one of them crazy in high school and wretched in college, their universal torture queen, blithe collector of tormented young hearts, the first and last girl to occupy their beautiful self-told lies of perfect love, perfect companionship, the one they could never stop needing and never stop hating and never get out of their minds. Hers would be a slavish cult of eager youth and wicked men, and Tom could only be thankful that, given the manifold distances between them—she in her midtwenties, he entering his forties; a mathematical separation not quite tainted by the dread of imaginary fatherhood—any intimacy they might impossibly stumble into would be short and bitter, rather than what it would have been otherwise: prolonged and destructive. Still, she was a cookie, a forbidden treat you may or may not be allowed, and although he had nothing to say to her and nothing came to mind, he could not take his eyes off her.

  Jackie’s a photographer, said the fellow from the Guardian, and Tom tried to see her more clearly through the perspective of her profession but she was too green, too studied in her wrinkled clothes: baggy, many-pocketed khaki pants and an immaculate V-neck T-shirt the color of a lemo
n. No jewelry, not even a wristwatch, except for small gold studs in her ears—not a total naïf, then; at least she knew not to bait herself for a mugging.

  Who do you work for? Tom asked.

  Nobody. She shrugged and examined her unpainted fingernails. Tom looked to the Guardian for an explanation but he cocked an eyebrow and shrugged as well. Weird chick, said his face, and Tom thought, Does she not understand where she is?

  Good luck, he said and retreated to his table.

  Later he would always think how peculiar it was, the way he met her—hardly a meeting at all. A comic impulse to mock the implication in the screenwriter’s half-serious warning to stay away from her. Tom had only wanted a look. It was nothing really, a sixty-second charade of voyeurism and desire.

  A quick look, and then he could tell himself that he knew her story, but it was the other way around, somehow she knew his, and it would be a while before he began to believe she had meant to be at the Kinam that night, sitting with an acquaintance of Tom’s, and only the details of how he came to her table could be called coincidence.

  Well? prompted the screenwriter, giddy with anticipation. Did you see her? What did I tell you? She’s fabulous, right?

  We’re engaged, Tom said, and everybody snickered. But he was afraid that somehow she embodied a cycle in his life, a bad old season blowing in, and already he hoped to see her again.

  CHAPTER THREE

  As they were leaving the airport, his anger with Connie Dolan receded toward the fact of the matter; the girl was dead—murdered—and he could not escape the guilty notion that he owed her this if nothing else, the decency of caring. Despite Dolan’s manipulations, he would consent to the intent of their partnership, without making much of an effort to explain to himself why.

  Tom merged with the traffic headed into the city, four lanes on a two-lane road and everybody doing as he pleased. Over on the right, that big compound is the LIC, he said. The Americans headquartered there, once they secured the airport.

  Yeah, yeah, fuck, said Dolan, paling, his attention fixed nervously on the road. You’re driving too fast.

  I should probably tell you about Eville, said Tom.

  On his final visit to the LIC, Harrington was overwhelmed by its stark atmosphere of pathos and impending abandonment, and it struck him as a pitiful thing when a great army decamps quietly at the end of an ambiguous campaign, neither victorious nor defeated but simply done, a giant suddenly weary of his own strength and the raw lack of circumstances to use it properly, the world rendered arbitrary by a vacuum of purpose. What was once a paranoid protocol of security checkpoints, identity confirmations, pat downs and wandings and assigned escorts from the Public Affairs office had dwindled to a lone guard waving Tom through the gates and past the outdoor souvenir market, an on-base convenience for the eternally busy Americans, the vendors staring out from their ramshackle kiosks like people resigned to the perpetuity of their thirst. They were there to sell to the soldiers, but the soldiers were gone. Well, very near gone.

  It was late in the afternoon the day of the inauguration and Tom had just come from the ceremony at the palace, where he had stood sweating on the lawn in front of the portico, straining to make out the portentous words of the new president, wearing for the first time the tricolored sash of his office, as he addressed his nation. He was tall and gaunt, bearded and handsome, impeccably dressed in a black suit—a former baker converted to the religion of politics by an ex-priest ascended through the politics of religion, but he mumbled into the thicket of microphones on the podium, and Tom couldn’t understand him.

  What’s he saying? Tom asked a stick-thin Haitian journalist pressed against him in the crowd.

  I don’t know, either, said the Haitian. He’s drunk.

  Did he just say, Fuck America?

  Non, monsieur, the journalist smiled with sly eyes, enjoying the question. The president cannot say that today. The president said, Beaucoup. Merci beaucoup, America. Tomorrow he can say this other thing.

  A dwindling afternoon of sepia-tinted air and smoky, dark palm silhouettes in the gauze of light. In a grove of hardwood trees next to the cavernous metal building where the military had established its command and control center, Harrington saw what he mistook for a barbecue, merry soldiers in running shorts and olive T-shirts attending burn cans topped by a blue whip of flames. Out the open door at the side of the building—a former warehouse for the boatloads of cheap bras and dime-store undies manufactured at the LIC before the embargo crushed what passed for an economy in Haiti—another soldier appeared with another carton of documents to tilt into the burn, the attendants stirring the heavy sheaves of files with iron rods, a self-cleaning military, emptying the infinite bureaucracy of its mind of petty obsessions, institutional whisperings, the myriad little secrets of the occupation. If you wanted to know what happened here, he thought, learn to read the ashes.

  Anybody seen Eville? Tom had asked.

  Who?

  Master Sergeant Eville Burnette, Third Group Special Forces.

  Their shaved heads nodded him through the door and his boots echoed the length of the concrete, through a space he had last seen veined with cables and wires and branchings of line, everywhere hookups and uplinks and patch-ins into the mad electric flow of information, wall to wall with cubicles and folding cots, gear everywhere, coffee urns and water coolers, uniforms bull-penned in a cacophony of briefings and debriefings, the human heat and stifling wet air shoved back and forth by industrial fans. Troops sacked out, officers on the phone, on the computer, talking to satellites, officers giving stand-up interviews to the networks, troops watching themselves on CNN, and if you asked anybody inside the LIC what was going on, the only true and enduring answer you could never get was, Nothing, or simply, Behold—we exist.

  Tom loved coming here, the odd sense of visiting a very efficient factory that produced essentially useless things.

  The Special Forces hated it at the LIC. Coming out of the countryside to Port-au-Prince, coming to headquarters, was the worst sort of punishment they could handle without dropping their legendary composure and going berserk. Here, in the LIC, generals weaned on the Cold War screamed about their mustaches, about the sleeves of their battle-dress blouses tucked in a jungle roll, told them to put their helmets on, take their sunglasses off. Stand straight, put on your seat belt, get a haircut now, I want to hear you sons of bitches speaking English. Yessir, sir. When they left their outposts in the hinterlands and walked into the LIC to deal with the conventional army, the SF pretended they were among foreigners, in another country altogether where they may or may not be the enemy.

  Eville and his team had been up north in Saint-Marc, the last Special Forces unit to be pulled back to the capital and now the last operational detachment left in Haiti, assigned the delicate honor of training a palace guard, the president’s own private army, its predecessor known worldwide and to history as the Ton Ton Macoutes, a synonym for paramilitary terror. They were the debutantes of the inauguration, the new guard, their presence heralding the official end to the American intervention in Haiti, and since the palace guard had gotten through the day without launching a coup d’état, and had further established its professionalism by restraining its natural urge to shoot, beat, or club the citizens, Harrington imagined Eville and his guys would be congratulating themselves for this memorable afternoon spent in the maternity ward of democracy, handing out cigars.

  But inside the LIC that day instead of celebration he found only gloom and disgust, its mighty enterprise humbled into the far corner of the vast warehouse that was a constantly shrinking warren of plywood stalls, bare walls without ceilings, blankets and rain ponchos draped for doors. Before calling Eville’s name, Tom stood on the threshold of the colony and listened: the springy patter of a keyboard, faraway rock and roll leaking out from someone’s headphones
, a tubalike fart greeted by a groan.

  In here, said Eville, and his voice led Tom through the maze to the sergeant’s kennel.

  Eville sat on the edge of his cot, hunched over, elbows on his knees, the son and grandson and great-grandson of a Montana ranching family, staring at his massive steer-roping hands as if they had been painted with disgrace. Tom lowered himself down on a footlocker facing him and sat quietly for a while, waiting for Eville to speak but he could not stitch together words and Tom was bewildered and saddened by the sight because the master sergeant was a strong man in every way, open and true even in his unmilitary emotions, and now Tom was seeing him made weak.

  Say, Ev, you all right, man?

  His team had been shipped out in the middle of the night. No warning, said Eville, nothing, just, Listen up, girls, there’s a C-130 waiting for you at the airport and I want you on it in one hour because you are outta here. Eville raised his head, his eyes red with the sting of betrayal. They left me and Stew and Brooks to sweep up, we have a couple more pallets to pack and then that’s the ball game, back to Bragg by the end of the week, Hey baby, I’m home, let’s pick up the pieces of our sorry-ass lives. He paused and shook his head like a boxer after a roundhouse punch, his flat, plain face contorted by anguish, and said softly—Eville was always soft-voiced, you could look at him and guess that about him—Man, we should have been there today. We were screwed by our chain, man.

  Command—not Special Operations but the dinosaurs, the fossils, the holdbacks in the regular army, the ones still fighting communists and Vietnam—had forbidden Master Sergeant Eville Burnette and his captain and warrant officer and the nine other commandos on their A-team to go anywhere near the National Palace during the inauguration, and it didn’t matter that the team had a right to be there in the background, taking pride in the moment with the men they had trained, and it no longer mattered that for eighteen months, while the Green Berets had been living hard and working like sled dogs, the politicians in Washington couldn’t decide who the enemy was. Were the good guys the bad guys or were the ones they had come here to kill—the macoutes and the vampires and the tyrants—the bad guys, and after a while it seemed the answer was, well, everybody’s a bad guy but work with them anyway. But now here was a fresh new answer, definitive and irreversible, the bad guys were the Special Forces, a magnet for negative press, straggling back in from their little kingdoms with weapons missing and vehicles unaccounted for, guilty of the twin heresies of self-reliance and self-importance, and no one stepped forward to protect them from the outrage of the generals.