The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  Now tell them this, said Eville, as he made an incision below the man’s larynx. Tell them this man is gravely injured and must go to a hospital. Tell them a helicopter is coming to take him to the hospital.

  You planned this out, didn’t you? Tom said, his ears already tuning to the faint sound of a machine, its premature arrival suggesting it had been in the air and shadowing them all along.

  You’re wrong, said Eville.

  You think these guys are pissed now, wait and see how unhappy they are when a helicopter shows up.

  Tell them the UN wouldn’t allow this mission to proceed without security.

  This is not a UN mission. I am not under UN jurisdiction.

  Whatever you say. Tell them I tricked you.

  When the bird was above them in the valley, Lecoeur’s men became more agitated, hollering accusations, air whistled in and out of the lungs of the man on the ground, and Jackie, red-eyed and disheveled, was back on her feet, clutching her vest closed and shrieking for her camera.

  Get this crazy bitch to back off, Eville said to Tom, and then he yelled at Jackie not with anger but as if she were on the other side of the river, to stand still and accept what he was asking Tom to do.

  Don’t fake it. Smack her a couple of times.

  I can’t do that, said Harrington.

  Our friends here need some satisfaction.

  That’s not who I am.

  Kneel down then and keep this guy breathing, said Burnette, and he jumped up in a fury Tom had never before seen him express and with the back of his hand slapped Jackie hard enough to snap her head around and then he hit her again with enough force to send her spinning to her hands and knees.

  How do you say stupid cunt in Kreyol?

  I don’t know.

  Then the medevac was down and they had to wrestle her aboard. Her camera had disappeared and she brayed for it relentlessly, refusing to get on the helicopter with Eville Burnette and the man she had almost killed, who was strapped down to a canvas stretcher and lifted by his angry comrades and passed through the hatch to the waiting hands of Pakistani soldiers, his face strained and bloated over and smeared with mucous, the tube from Harrington’s ballpoint pen implanted in his windpipe. There was a fair chance it might go bad for Tom if he did not get on the helicopter himself.

  Harrington told Eville he still had a job to do and was confident the situation remained manageable as long as Jackie did not stay behind as she insisted, her own eyes swollen half-closed and cascading tears, a madwoman in a tempest screaming over the roar of the propellers that she wanted her camera and that Tom needed her. But she and Burnette were the last people on earth he needed now and the only thought in his mind was to separate himself from them. Eville was in the hatchway yelling for her to get aboard, Tom was behind Jackie pushing against her manic resistance, which suddenly turned Amazonian and he found himself flipped sideways onto the ground, looking up as Burnette hopped out and wrapped her thrashing and kicking into his powerful arms to heave her inside the fuselage and then Burnette bellied inside himself as the helicopter began to rise and veer away, leaving in its wake a hurricane’s eye of silence.

  When the shouting and protestation began anew he sat up and slowly stood, dispirited but resolute, repeating to the guerillas that they must honor their promise and take him to Lecoeur. But Lecoeur was there already, had mingled among the band of his men who had come out of the forest but had not stepped forward to identify himself and Harrington had not recognized him. His bushy hair and Che beard were clipped off, his clean-shaven face revealing a weak jaw, the vocabulary of his clothes—a tracksuit, cheap running shoes, and a sports jersey, as if he had just come from a soccer match—separating him from the insurgent peasants and their idiom of torn and muddy trousers and straw hats. His bitter questions were to be expected, and Tom, without answers, first told the lie that Eville Burnette had suggested and confessed he was as dismayed and outraged by the behavior of the girl as they were, and could not explain it. But Lecoeur and his men had suspected from the beginning that the man was an American soldier and were now convinced the woman was a spy and Tom thought wearily, Well, we’re all spies, aren’t we. It seemed to be a preexisting condition, like whiteness.

  She’s a journalist, said Tom. She didn’t come with the soldier, she came with me. Then, feeling the unease of his former lie, he said the soldier had tricked him and immediately regretted this declaration of naïveté. Lecoeur asked what the soldier had hoped to gain by coming into the mountains but Tom again had no answer except to say that Eville Burnette had assured him that it wasn’t his idea. But the blans had compromised the security of Lecoeur’s stronghold in the mountains and Harrington said he was sorry. I cannot explain any of it.

  I believe you are our friend, said Lecoeur. But is it true you have come to investigate me? You have come to examine our hands for innocent blood?

  It’s true that I have come to talk to you about the bourgeoisie who are missing. Maybe you know what happened to them. Maybe you know where I can find them.

  Monsieur Tom, here in the mountains, the macoutes have not stopped their war with the people.

  Yes.

  What do the Americans want in Haiti? They said they came to throw out the macoutes, but the macoutes are still here.

  Yes.

  If you ask me if I still must fight for freedom, the answer is yes. If you ask me if I still must fight to protect the people from the macoute, the answer is yes. If you ask me is there freedom without justice, the answer is no.

  Lecoeur’s hand signaled toward someone behind him and a skeletal youth stepped forward from the circle of men who had listened solemnly to the conversation. Monsieur Tom, this boy will take you back to the village. Lecoeur called another man’s name and the camera reappeared, the unspooled celluloid curled on the ground like a molted snakeskin. Tom put the camera in his day pack and turned to leave but Lecoeur placed light fingertips on the white man’s arm and steered him aside.

  In the night, no one is in control, Lecoeur said. Walk fast.

  They moved swiftly along the narrow trail through the steam and scratch of the jungle, fast enough to reach the village of Bois Caïman before twilight. By the time they arrived the muscles in Tom Harrington’s legs were a persistent ache, his shirt transparent with sweat, pants wet to midthigh and boots soggy from the last river it had been necessary to ford. A helicopter passed unseen, somewhere overhead, headed up-country, and he began to feel the vibes, something wrong in the air, when none of the village’s children ran out to greet them, and then his guide pulled up and, pointing ahead, uttered the words, Armée Rouge. Tom looked toward where he had left his SUV on a vacant lot at the edge of town. Two white Toyota Hilux pickup trucks were now parked next to it and heavily armed men were milling about.

  Who is the Red Army? Tom asked the boy.

  Macoutes.

  What are they doing here? he asked, but the boy reversed down the path back toward the safety of the bush and Tom braced himself for trouble and walked on, crossing a footbridge over the cool invitation of the rushing river that separated the village from the wilderness.

  They were from the elite families and not hostile and in fact greeted him with a pretense of camaraderie that he did not bother to reciprocate. He was surprised, though, to see that he knew the man who presented himself as their leader, Emil Gaillard, a slightly obsequious mulatto educated by Jesuits in New Orleans and said to be the bastard black sheep of the family of Gaillard landowners. During the first weeks of the invasion his ambiguous loyalties tipped toward the peasants when he joined a mob in the town his family had controlled for centuries to uproot the Haitian army’s casern and afterward had handed over captured weapons to the Special Forces. Not long thereafter, Harrington had interviewed him briefly about a massacre during the time of the de facto regime
, and Gaillard had introduced him to a tenant farmer, a survivor of the atrocity. We are here, Gaillard explained, to protect you from the chimères, but Harrington was unfamiliar with this word.

  The phantoms, they come from the mountains to do us harm.

  This recurring irony of protection merited only Harrington’s ingratitude. Obviously Emil Gaillard and his gang were using his presence in Bois Caïman as an excuse for a show of force. But Gaillard reminded him the northwest district was notorious for its Balkanized mentalities, the unpaved road back to Route National One winding through partisan villages in perennial conflict with one another, daylight being the only condition for safe passage. Now the sun was setting and Gaillard offered an escort to the highway.

  You call yourself Red Army, said Tom. Is the Red Army on the side of the people?

  But there were no sides beyond the blood of one’s own. The chimères attack our families, Gaillard said, his nervous eyes and the timidity of his English creating a supreme impression of untrustworthiness, and please don’t say we have no right to defend ourselves.

  Bon, said Tom. Where are the bodies and the graves? Give me evidence, eyewitnesses, police reports, something to work with beside rumors and, receiving no reply, told Gaillard, Look, I don’t think I can unravel this on my own.

  The sun is down. Please, for your safety, accept the escort.

  That would send the wrong message. No one in Haiti is my enemy.

  Perhaps the wrong message is the only one you have brought, said Emil Gaillard, and in another minute the paramilitaries of the Armée Rouge had shouldered themselves together in the cabs and beds of the two trucks and driven away into the darkness with headlights off. Looking at his wristwatch, Harrington gave them a five-minute lead before driving slowly down the dusty lane through the center of Bois Caïman, glancing at the shacks on either side, their interiors a warm glow of candlelight crossed by cautious shadows, then accelerating at the edge of town onto the rough road through the countryside.

  He did not slow his approach to the next village a few miles farther on, unable to recall if it was a good village or a bad village, but sped through without incident, nearly hitting a dog that ran barking toward his tires. Intermittently along the shoulder of the road, pedestrians loomed out from the void and flashed away, silhouettes of blackness absorbed by blackness, their unseen faces turned from the glare of his lights. Neither could he remember the affiliation of the next village, or the third, so that by the time he saw the firefly radiance of a single lantern in the middle of the road at the entrance to the fourth village and then the rocks lined up behind it, he could not be sure which faction might be manning the roadblock, friend or foe, or even assure himself that anyone was his friend, this night in the mountains, but he had been waved through countless roadblocks during his time in Haiti, more often than not by swaggering kids extorting a toll of a few gourdes, and was not automatically concerned.

  He downshifted to cut his speed, and peered ahead at the boundary where his lights met the darkness but saw no one and tried to determine if he could leave the roadbed and go around or if he would have to stop to clear the rocks when, in front of him, the illuminated road suddenly filled with wild shapes and he kicked the brakes to avoid slamming into their midst. Before he could roll down his window to speak with someone, a large rock shattered the windshield, a boy ran forward with a club, and the driver’s-side window caved in like a cup of stinging ice thrown at his face. Hands thundered on the roof and a man tried to open the door to pull Tom out at the same time Tom released the clutch so abruptly that the vehicle nearly stalled before squealing forward, bodies diving away, bodies flying back, the sound of hands thumping the side panels, a clatter of stones bouncing off the hood, the underframe grinding against the rocks piled across the road. He could smell the tires spinning and a man rushed forward waving a machete. The front end of the SUV reared up and seemed to jump the obstruction and race ahead and Tom swerved just in time, he thought, to miss the man but the left headlight went dead at the precise moment the man somersaulted into the night and vanished, a laceless shoe sailing through the broken windshield like a wingless bird to land in the passenger seat. He had been holding his breath without realizing it and let out a gasp and began hyperventilating as he navigated the seamless, sinister pulse of emptiness that was the road. The night had not produced the first flood of terror he had experienced during his time in Haiti, but the first that seemed shockingly personal, the first that seemed to be only about him.

  The moon began to float above the eastern mountains, silvering the road, the light in the trees ghostly. Finally his hands stopped shaking on the wheel and his breathing returned to normal. Not far from where the route rejoined the highway, when he ran straight over a dog rocketing into his path without slowing down or stopping, Tom Harrington cursed Jackie Scott and Eville Burnette and then cursed himself for the harm he had done and drove on in despair.

  The lateness of the hour had softened the edges of Cap-Haïtien’s ubiquitous decay, the city’s unfortunate residents shuttered behind a self-imposed curfew, abandoning the filth-strewn streets to the scurry of rats and garbage-fed dogs and the otherwise peaceful slink of the nocturnally homicidal. The Hotel Christophe had switched off its generator for the night and he left the SUV in the car park without summoning the courage to inspect the damage to its front end. He went through the darkened lobby toward the bar, knowing it would be closed but hoping the bartender had forgotten, as he sometimes did, to lock its cabinets. But his luck continued downward and when he couldn’t locate the night watchman he went back out to the street to roam for a drink, walking toward the smell of the sea and glancing up each decrepit avenue for any sign of life, though even the buildings appeared dead and rotting. Finally he saw tiny tongues of flame flickering on the pavement a few blocks up one of the side alleys, like votive candles placed at a shrine, and as he came closer he saw the shadows under a balcony assemble into a chiaroscuro tableau of women tending homemade oil lamps in front of an open doorway dusted with light so weak and granular it seemed to Tom you could wipe it away with a rag. A man’s overexcited voice argued from inside the shop. They were vendors, these women, their hope for a sale unchecked by the dread of midnight, and he glanced at their small piles of wares spread out on scraps of cloth—individual cigarettes from a crumpled pack of Comme Il Fauts, Chiclets, a meager pyramid of oranges, matchsticks, lumps of charcoal, a tiny container of Vicks VapoRub. He saw in their saucer eyes Christ risen with money in his pocket and he bought the cigarettes and nodded sympathetically at the pleas from the other women and stepped into the shop and back out a minute later with a Coke bottle tapped with clairin, the smell of the homemade rum like fruity kerosene and the taste like molten tinfoil in his dehydrated mouth. By the time he found himself ascending the Christophe’s stairway to his second-floor room, he had sucked up half the bottle and his head seemed to dance, free of weight or substance, and his feet were made of stone. He keyed open the door and stepped in and stepped halfway back into the hallway, speechless.

  There you are, said Jackie, her face brightening in a way that struck him as shameless and bizarre, considering the tenor of the day and the unexpected shock and seizure of her nakedness, a spasm of unwanted lust suffocating Tom like a knot binding his diaphragm, her body and its litheness a searing memory of something powerful he had once owned but had misplaced or forfeited or left behind. She was lying atop the bedsheet, reading what he could see was a Kreyol language primer by candlelight, and she calmly placed the book in the cradle between the scoop of her pelvic bones and folded her arms over her breasts and looked at him now with an uncertain smile.

  That very morning he had woken up in a dreamy state of arousal, fantasizing about their night together but, quarreling with Eville Burnette at breakfast, he had forgotten to mention the arrangement, the shortage of rooms and beds, and the whole idea of being with her had been spoiled by
the turmoil of events.

  You’re bleeding, she said, her absence of great concern equal to the numb indifference he felt at this hour for his own well-being.

  He could not find words in his mouth for anything but the obvious. Where are your clothes? he said stupidly.

  It’s hot, she said, unapologetic. Her hair, stringy and unbrushed, made her appear less guarded. Perspiration trickled down her face as it did his. Why are you bleeding? I was getting worried about you. How did it go?

  Where am I bleeding? His hand rose instinctively to his face and he tried to focus on her eyes and not the untimely puerile thrill of her body, the moist flush of her skin.

  Your cheek, she said, studying him, directing. The left side. Higher.

  His fingertips found the dried edge of the cut and the almost imperceptible ooze and he looked at the blood on his fingertips and looked at her and asked in a daze of puzzlement, Why are you here?

  On the nightstand next to the candle was a glass of water and as she reached for it and sipped he stared blindly at her breasts, seeing but not seeing, and then averted his eyes when she turned back to lean toward him on an elbow with a look of guileless concentration. I actually don’t understand your question, she said, her appraisal of him matter-of-fact. Where else would I be?

  Why aren’t you with Eville?

  Why would I be with Eville? she said, making a sound of exasperation. Tom, close the door. Or just stand out there all night, but either way you’re stuck with me, she said, the press of her lips making a coquette’s quick pout and he noticed the caterpillar of discoloration above her jaw where she had been tattooed by Eville Burnette’s knuckles. You could have told me there was only one bed.

  Okay, okay, he said, shutting the door behind him, conceding his day pack to the floor yet still unable to step forward into the room. Look, this isn’t going to work, is it? Not after today. Not like this.