It always fucking ends this way, said Eville, and Tom couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, his congenital optimism replaced by this devastation of malaise, the insinuation that he had not done the job he had been asked to do, that he had somehow performed shoddily, dishonorably. Harrington, who had seen them, watched them—Eville and his men and other Special Forces teams salted throughout Haiti—knew that the truth burned brightly at the other end of the spectrum. They came and left with a deep faith that they could fix things, but they couldn’t fix Haiti, and now in their failure they had begun to hate the island in order to keep from doubting themselves.
Eville Burnette waved off Tom’s attempt to commiserate; he didn’t need an apologist and he didn’t want a cheerleader and they would have this mandatory silence between them on the subject of failure. Instead Harrington invited him to dinner the following night though he wasn’t sure if anyone was actually free to leave the base.
Bring some friends if you want.
I have friends? Eville asked, but he was smiling.
The sergeant warmed to the idea of stepping out, stepping away, the one thing you could almost never do on a deployment but who was left to tell him no. His mood swung up and the smile expanded into his eyes. Hey, he said. It’s okay. I did what I came to do, the people of this country are free again, we only lost one of our own, and I didn’t have to kill anyone.
But Harrington found himself thinking darkly that maybe we’d all be better off if you had.
Harrington and Dolan came to a stop in an infernal tangle of traffic, opposing lanes suddenly head-to-head, drivers standing in the road engaged in the popular theater of shouting matches.
Connie Dolan said with a mischievous lilt that he had no idea humanitarian do-gooders like Tom were inclined to be so kissy with the military and then laughed when he saw the spark in Harrington’s eyes. No, come on, he said. What’s the deal with Eville?
This is an easy one, Tom said, his voice deliberately tight. What did you say you used to do? Special agent for what?
Okay, I got it, said Dolan, bemused. Everybody gets a kick out of playing wiseass with cops, right? You want me to guess. He knew the girl.
Right, but Tom didn’t know how the sergeant knew her, only that he had the uncomfortable feeling they knew each other from somewhere else besides Haiti. There was something about them together I couldn’t see, couldn’t understand, said Tom. Something about their relationship was really off. Or really on. Maybe that was it.
You’re saying they had a thing together.
I doubt any man could have a thing with Jackie.
You say that because?
She was insane.
Dolan seemed to consider this. And you’re familiar with the insane, he said. That’s not a question.
That goddamn girl, Tom said, talking to himself, a gravelly release of breath. She had managed to make him less of a man than he thought he was and he had done everything he could to forget her, to will her nonexistent, but there was no reprieve from a succubus and for the two years since he had last seen her Jackie had found her way into his dreams, waiting there for him on the street corner of his libido like a neighborhood whore, and now here out of the blue was Dolan, delivering her volatile presence back into Tom’s life and in that respect it hardly mattered if she were dead or not.
What do you mean, That’s not a question? he said, snapping at Dolan. What the fuck is that supposed to mean, I’m familiar with the insane?
It’s a joke.
Give me a heads-up the next time you plan on being funny.
Drivers slammed horns, threw up their arms, got out, yelled, and Tom thought, being summoned as an expert witness to pronounce over the dark adventure of Jackie’s life was the last thing he ever wanted to be doing with his own and yet once again he was trapped by his unhealthy curiosity for her. Unhealthy to the point of diseased, he’d say—he had caught something from her, some decay transmitted from soul to soul, but then he recollected contemptuously that by her own admittance she lacked a soul.
At the intersection ahead they could see a scarecrow of a man urging a dump truck to back up to allow a group of men to push a battered pickup, its bed loaded with passengers who refused to get out, off the road where a row of grimy makeshift garages strewn with iron carnage awaited it. Across the street, a dealership’s lot was filled and gleaming with row after row of Japanese-made SUVs. A few minutes later a pair of men dressed only in soiled pants, a ruffle of sweat at each man’s waistband, came weaving through the clot of traffic with a casket balanced on their heads, six brass handles to a side and upholstered in velvet the color of a green lollipop. Good God, Dolan observed drily, they’s burying James Brown, and they inched forward toward the sooty crucible of the city.
What do you think? Tom asked Dolan, nodding out the windshield as they began to enter the ramshackle neighborhoods and Dolan said he’d seen worse, the slums of Rio, San Juan, Bogotá. But he hadn’t seen anything yet.
Where the road gullied at the next intersection a traffic cop stepped out of nowhere and whistled for Tom to stay put and when Tom tried to go around the policeman skipped in front of him and banged his fist on the hood. All right, Tom said, smiling coldly back at the man’s glare. No problem.
And as they sat watching the cross traffic pour through he told Dolan of the night a month after the invasion when he was stopped in this exact spot, everything pitch-black except the double and sometimes triple row of taillights of the cars in front of him snaking up the hill toward the choke point at Delmas, bumper-to-bumper and no one moving, no one coming down, either, because the people trying to go up had blocked the lanes. A storm that had been up on the mountains had slid down on them and it rained catastrophically for twenty minutes like it was coming out of a fire hose, a constant artillery of thunderclaps. In the white flash of lightning he saw a roaring avalanche of broken, brilliant glass crashing down, and then it stopped for a minute and Tom rolled down his window to get some air. Everything was quiet, people had turned off their headlights and everything was dark. Then he began to hear a deep, approaching rumble and as the wall of water came down the gully Tom could hear the screams of the passengers inside one of the cars in front of him as it surged up and rolled and tumbled in the flood down toward the sea. Lightning flashed again and he could see people, families, children, swept out of their shacks, their arms flailing, the water rising until he could feel it tugging at his front wheels and he got out shaking and went down the line of cars behind him trying to get people to back up but they were paralyzed. Tom could see the glowing terror of their eyes as he came out of the darkness to their windows, the white ball of his face bobbing around, adding to the horror, but the flash flood wasn’t the worst of it.
He went back to his car and the water hadn’t come up any more but it started raining again, not heavy this time but steady and unpleasantly cold, and as he looked across the new gorge of the flooded intersection at the line of cars on the other side, four cars up he saw a cracking sprinkle of lights, like flashbulbs popping out little tongues of hot color, then a huge boom detonated off over the harbor and the sky was illuminated just long enough for him to see a guy move from the fourth car up to the third car up and then it was black again and then he saw another pop of yellow-red lights and then the form of this man moving to the next car and bzzrt, he had a machine pistol or an Uzi and was going from car to car spraying people as they sat cowering from the storm and Tom thought, Shit, there’s only one car left and the water’s going down and what’s he going to do, wade across and keep going down the line? but when the killer walked up to the driver’s window of the last car and bent over to look in, a blue-edged cone of white light took his head right off. Finally, cars behind Tom were backing up, their tires spinning on the wet tar, and he got his own car turned around and got out of there, going the opposite direction from where
he wanted to be, and he wasn’t thinking clearly because he thought he’d go to the airport and get a plane out in the morning but of course there weren’t any flights because the airport had been closed for months and he thought, Okay, I’ll still go to the airport because the 10th Mountain Division is there, thinking they can do something, they can help, so he drove up to the main gate into a sudden blinding sun of kleig lights and voices yelling at him to get the fuck out of his vehicle and lie on the ground and he’s lying in the mud screaming, I’m an American for God’s sake, and they shout back, Are you in trouble?
Not me, Tom tried to explain, but there’s people—
The soldiers he can’t see behind the lights shout back, Then get the fuck out of here, man. What’s wrong with you, you crazy asshole?
So he got up out of the mud and gave the finger to the 10th Mountain Division and drove across the road to the LIC, which was still abandoned and full of squatters and refugees and he parked next to the night watchman’s kiosk and crawled into the backseat and smoked a pack of cigarettes and then pretended to himself, I’m sleeping. The sky began to turn light and Tom wanted a shower and his bed back at the Oloffson and he wanted a drink, he wanted ten drinks, so he got behind the wheel and went back the way he was trying to go the night before and the road was empty. The intersection was ripped up, a gouge in the earth stinking strongly of death and sewage, the cross streets above it and below it torn apart, houses sheared in half, awful-smelling red mud and soggy household trash everywhere but no cars, nothing, empty. Nobody and nothing on the road but Tom. Nothing in Haiti ever gets cleaned up, so what was he supposed to think? He climbed down into the debris-strewn channel of the intersection and followed the raging path of the water down to the sea, where he stood staring at the unspeakably contaminated shallows. Nothing. He couldn’t go to the police—the police had been disbanded—and the American military was too obsessed with protecting itself from God knows what to be bothered. For days he queried everybody he thought might know something, he knocked on doors of the houses that had survived the deluge, he went to the Haitian radio stations, but no one had heard of a car being washed away or a gunman going from car to car assassinating people and then getting shot himself and Tom thought, What am I supposed to do with this? And it dawned on him, if he wrote it into a report, it happened; otherwise, it never happened.
So what’d you do? asked Dolan.
I haven’t really thought about it, he said, until that cop brought his fist down on the hood, and Dolan told him, You know, Tom, you can’t go bearing witness to every fucking terrible thing.
CHAPTER FOUR
In the final days of the occupation the photographers owned the veranda at the Hotel Oloffson. From midmorning until lunch you’d find them here in their bulging vests stirring coffee and passing around a pack of cigarettes, their cameras in pieces on the tables, a glossy-black clutter of expensive metals and indestructible alloys, canisters of film scattered about like unchambered rounds of ammunition, telescopic lenses like mortar tubes, their vernacular as esoteric as the military’s, distilled with acronyms, equipment referenced by numbers alone. But most of the time, and this, too, like the soldiers, the photographers were waiting, slumped on the cool veranda in wicker chairs, passengers on an old riverboat trapped in the stagnant eddy of Port-au-Prince, saying little, the light gone, the light coming, the light something nobody has time to stop and think about, the story over, the story just beginning, the world being created here and the world in agony and dying.
On that Thursday morning, on a day as dull as all the others in the aftermath of the elections, the photographers gathered as usual for a late breakfast—nothing planned, exactly; a farewell meal but they didn’t bother to call it that. Like the correspondents, they were always forming and dissolving, bumping into each other in New York and London, in Berlin and Paris and Rome, Tokyo, Mexico City, regrouping as a tribe in every god-lonely place in the world where hatred gushed through the streets in order to supply the citizens back home with the images of the endlessly playing movie called Other People’s Problems. The ones who had gotten up early to find something to shoot were trudging back in from their prowl across the festering city; the ones who had closed down the bars straggled red-eyed to the veranda from their rooms in flip-flops, shirttails out, hair still wet, camera bags slung over their shoulders. Tables were dragged together. Joseph, the waiter, brought glasses of watery orange juice and omelets.
Tom Harrington sat by himself at the table to the left of the diamond of steps leading to the flowered grounds, doodling in the margins of his running list of phone numbers. He waited for a callback granting him an audience with the recently installed Minister of Justice or a few minutes of conversation with somebody, anybody—the incoming president, the outgoing president, the chief of the National Police, the family pets of the children of any member of the high court—but the new government and its followers were no longer immune to the international press and its toxicity, no one was talking, and for the immediate future, it seemed, that phobia had splashed over onto the NGO community as well and Harrington’s painstakingly arranged schedule of meetings had stalled in a limbo of postponements. Give us time, the nouveau politicians had assured him, to get accustomed to the idea that we are actually running the country, since we’ve never even run so much as a gas station in our ass-whipped lives. Even Gerard, his fixer, had become bored after their breakfast together and had gone down to the gates of the compound to sit with the other drivers and translators playing cards in the shade of the coconut palms.
Eventually latecomers began to sit at Tom’s table—a tall, freckled, red-haired lunatic from Colorado whom Tom had once seen photograph over the shoulder of a macoute gunman as the gunman emptied his pistol into a teenage boy; a shy photographer from Japan with an upturned bowl of shiny black hair and a permanent smile who had begun his career by snapping soft-porn shots of high school girls in Osaka; a blonde-haired, deeply tanned woman from the Washington Post, all arms and legs in trekking shorts and tank top who had cataloged the most grisly human rights abuses after the coup d’état, hundreds of photos she had shared with Tom, the entire trove copied, cataloged, and stored in his Miami law office in boxes marked Evidence. She was headed home to Washington, the Japanese fellow had booked a thirty-six-hour flight to East Timor, and the lunatic was off to Chechnya to disappear, Tom later heard, into the bloody storm of Russia’s unforgiving little war, and if you love the zone too much that’s what happened—one way or another you became your own vanishing act. A friend of Tom’s, Daniel, an AP photographer, took the last empty chair, unclipping a walkie-talkie from his belt and setting it on the table; he wasn’t going anywhere because Haiti was his home. It was a fact few outsiders readily appreciated because it made no fucking sense to most of them and to many Haitians as well, that Haiti was a world you might freely choose to live in—You live here! For God’s sake, why?
The story was dead, the Haitian people were becoming invisible again, imaginary creatures, right before the magnifying eyes of the international press and there was nothing the pep could do about it—their success would not bring the journalists back, their failure would no longer earn the dubious privilege of the media’s attention. The woman from the Post mentioned she had gone to Cité Soleil yesterday morning, to document the inauguration from the perspective of the gangrenous slums, but had left after twenty minutes, unnerved by the hostility and threats. Journos had always been welcomed in the slums as protectors, their presence evidence that somebody in the world had taken notice of the people at the bottom but an unscalable fence of acrimony had been erected, kids with guns were taking over the infested grid, forming gangs, against all blans because everybody was leaving and nothing had changed and in fact nobody cared. In the past she would have persisted but now even persistence felt like part of the larger betrayal of these youth who had paid in blood for the fraud of democracy.
Freedom has made them feral, said the red-haired lunatic.
None of the whites at the table wanted to talk about these things.
It was at this moment, sitting on the veranda of the Oloffson with the photographers, that Tom Harrington saw Jacqueline Scott for a second time. She took one step out of the shadow of the lobby onto the veranda and paused to glance around and she seemed dulled in some way and uncertain, common traits of someone freshly arrived in the muddle, but still her beauty rifled through him and he wanted very much just to be able to look at her quietly and dream, as he might at the movies. A mere glimpse of her energized Tom in the doldrums of the morning.
Do you know this girl behind you? he asked the Post photographer, who turned to look as Jacqueline Scott stepped back into the hush of the lobby, all dark wood and rattan furniture and ceiling fans.
I think that was Jackie, she said. Right. I took her along yesterday to Cité Soleil.
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover Page 5
