The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  Up through the galley hatch he handed her another drink, a battery-powered lantern, a red-and-white enameled tin platter piled with food, shallow ceramic bowls, the silver cocktail shaker, and, finally, his own glass—How about some Verdi while we eat?—and she heard him slip a tape into his portable cassette player, the volume low, the opera like an imperceptible murmur blended into the lap of the sea against the hull. He climbed the steps into the tent of buttery light where she sat on the side of the cockpit and poured himself another martini, sipping thoughtfully, eating little while she gorged herself. She nagged him to eat more and he told her his stomach was not inclined at this time to accept her superb advice.

  You know, he said in a hushed voice, back there at the harbor, when I saw that old hotel, it made me think of Pittsburgh.

  Really? she said with a full mouth, voracious, a little animal with a huge appetite. Why?

  There were smokestacks, as you might imagine, he said. But just as much, in my memory of Pittsburgh, there were the onion-shaped steeples of the Orthodox churches. You couldn’t get away from the Eastern Europeans—Ukrainians, Slovaks, Serbs, Polacks, Czechs, boatloads of them come over to work in the coal mines and coke furnaces or the steel mills, but there was a bigger reason. They were running from the Russians, they hated the goddamn Communists. I used to resent them as a kid—a hick is a hick, no matter the country of origin—but you can’t hate them and love the American dream at the same time.

  My grandmother was Eastern European, right?

  Not at all, he said. She was a Croatian from Dubrovnik, which is nearly the same as being an Italian. Better, I would say—less emotional. Roman Catholic, well educated, and worldly. She was no peasant, I can tell you that. When I look at you . . . well.

  I’m like her, aren’t I?

  Yes.

  And your father? All-American war hero, right?

  Anglo-Irish-Welsh-Franco-Germanic stock, a full house, as they say, fourth generation. A hardworking man with a ferocious sense of right and wrong. Unfortunately, he was an Episcopalian. Your grandmother fell in love with him anyway, proving once again that love, as they say, is subversive and one might even say willfully blind.

  So how did they meet? Dottie asked.

  Well, he said, pausing to sip his martini, did I ever tell you your grandmother was the organist for St. Paul’s, the big cathedral in the center of Pittsburgh? Hired by the bishop, who adored her, as did everybody who ever met her. Every other morning but Sunday you’d find her over on the east side at St. Nicholas’s, the Croatian church. All the Roman Catholic Croats from the old country understood each other in a way other people would never understand. After what they’d been through, they understood the Communists and the mujos better than anybody. And after the war Pop worked in the mines as a union organizer. You’d never know it from looking at him—he was one tough bastard. If he smelled Red on you, run for the hills. He’d crack your head in a minute. He took the Cold War very personally. As did your grandmother. As do we all. Beware the Bear, or it will eat you.

  His elbows on his knees, her father drifted into silence, staring down at the glass in his hands, until finally, well supplied throughout her childhood with her father’s ideology but underfed on ancestors, she said And?

  Pittsburgh, he said, as though he had forgotten the story he had begun. Great place to grow up. Muscular, self-confident, visionary. I had what would have to go down in the books as a wonderful childhood. The classic edition—delivered newspapers on my bike, had a home away from home at the movie theater. The three Ps—picnics, polka, pinochle—at the Knights of Columbus hall. The wedding parties at the Croatian Club—man, you would have loved those! Me and my pals went to the CYO dances. I was an altar boy and proud of it. Call me a mackerel eater and I would sock you right in the nose. I sang in the boy’s choir—and not just because my mother was the director. Fished and camped and hunted with Pop up in the mountains, joined the Cub Scouts and the NRA and then the Boy Scouts. After the war, Korea, McCarthy, when it became apparent yet again that the union and the mine owners were of the same mind about the resurgent Communist threat, they thought, correctly, it would be in their best interest to cozy up to Pop and the other district leaders, and so they began to invite him out to Mellon’s Rolling Rock Club in Ligonier—the Mellon brothers were famous bankers, you know—to play golf and talk business and share the common ground of their patriotism. Pop would take me to caddy, and by the time I was in high school at St. George’s I was one of the top caddies at the club, the boy all the Ivy-League educated executives, all the presidents and operators of the companies, wanted carrying their bags on weekends. If Pop wasn’t playing, I’d hitchhike out to Ligonier myself. I knew the links. They loved me, and when I learned the game and started kicking their ass, taking their money and dating their daughters, they loved me even more. There’s a lesson there, Dot, if you can see it. Generation to generation. By their example, those men showed me what it meant to be a true American. Not just on the Fourth of July. Every fucking day of your God-given life.

  She could hear this all night, sponging up the spill of details from his hidden past, which, by extension, was her hidden past, its dormancy throughout her life a vague frustration, but the cadence of his voice had begun to swing and pull and slide and she watched him empty the shaker’s contents into his glass, waiting with undue patience for the last drops to emerge, and worried out loud if it might be bad for him. Dad, martinis with antibiotics . . . is that a good idea?

  Rule number one, honey, he said. Never admonish a man on vacation that he is drinking too much.

  She listened carefully for what was not there, the slightest hint of anger or irritation in his tone, and said, Fine with me, and, already tipsy, went below to mix her third rum and Coke.

  Rule number two, her father said as she climbed back into the cockpit. Sacrosanct. Thou shalt not vomit belowdecks.

  I know that, she said. Is there a rule number three?

  Ah, he said, feigning deep consideration. Rule number three takes us to a much different place. Rule number three: Dedicate your life to something larger than yourself or you will never be fulfilled and you will never be happy and you will never be worth a damn to anybody.

  Do you think that was Mom’s problem? she said innocently.

  Your mother, he said. She certainly didn’t like the rules. I have to say, for almost twenty years, ever since you kids were born, your mother never gave me a day of happiness.

  Wow, she whispered.

  You are my brilliant, beautiful daughter, he said, gesturing toward her with his drink, sloshing vodka on her bare feet. I want to ask your permission to ask you something very, very serious.

  Okay, she said, watching his head begin to droop in increments. Permission granted.

  Rule number three, he said.

  Have a cause to live for.

  Live and die, he said, revived with a sloppy gush of exuberance, and his head snapped upright. Correct, beautiful. Live and die. Rule number three.

  We’ve done rule number three.

  Correct. Rule number four. The oath of secrecy. Thou shalt not tell. Ever.

  Tell what?

  Tell anybody.

  Tell them what?

  Vows are sacred. And, in my case, legally binding. Between us, okay, but that’s as far as it can ever go. Classified.

  Okay.

  Promise.

  I promise.

  Very well. Excellent. Otherwise, you know . . .

  I promise. Stop worrying. I know how to keep my mouth shut.

  You are my beautiful, courageous daughter, he said, the words tiptoeing from his mouth. You are of an age. You have reached the age.

  For what? she asked warily.

  You have a grave responsibility, an imperative . . . praying for p
eace is not enough. You have to take risks. Act.

  I know that, Daddy.

  Okay . . . right. How do you know that?

  Because I’m your daughter. Because of the way we live. Because, I guess, of what you do.

  Ah, he said. Exactly. That’s what I mean. You’re old enough now to know what it is I do.

  I know what you do, she said with a confidence that was not unwarranted. Like so many others in the diaspora of Golden Ghettos spread across the globe, she was a member of a family that existed in proximity to the headlines, tonight’s dinner table conversations more often than not the morning’s breaking news. In her father’s office, prominently displayed, was a photograph of him shaking hands with the president (not Carter—anybody but Carter, who once described Cold War warriors like her father as paranoid) and another of her young father laughing with a team of Green Berets at their outpost in the Vietnamese highlands. The list of family encounters with VIPs was impressively and tiresomely endless, especially considering that, after pleasantries or cocktails or dinner, she and her mother and brother were frequently asked to leave the room. Counterterrorism—she was aware, vaguely, that the official focus resided there, floating atop an unabashed hatred for the Soviet Union and its proxies. Her dad had a boss, a guy named Dick, who answered to someone who answered to a presidential envoy named Bremer, whose boss was the president himself. Somewhere embedded in the program were the ambassadors and the secretaries of state . . . mostly, she got the sense, on the sidelines, official parents you maneuvered around, hid things from, interacted with only on a need-to-know basis, which meant almost never.

  You work for the government, she said. Special assistant to the ambassador (which was how she had been instructed to answer the question, What does your father do?).

  Correct. Yes and no. And what is it I do?

  Stop the Communists, I guess, from taking over the world.

  Grind them to dust.

  And you’re winning. We are.

  I think you should understand something about the world we find ourselves in, he said. Until Armageddon. One war moves aside only to make room for another. Until the Day of Judgment, I should say. Peel back Communism and the mujos await. Okay, okay, he said, waving off an imaginary rebuttal. That point is contested, but hey, if you liked the Stalinists, you are going to love the Salafis. Badda bing. Hey, how ’bout that Islamic bomb! Badda bang.

  Dad, she said, you’re lighting the wrong end of your cigarette.

  The fuck, baby.

  Here. Let me light it for you.

  I would hope to find you receptive. Simple matter. Good and evil.

  I’m not sure I’m getting this.

  Let me ask you a hypothetical. Can I ask you a hypothetical? If you had the opportunity, you’d help me out, right?

  If I had the opportunity? Sure.

  So you’d help.

  Just say the word, she said, humoring him. This was the second time her father had seemed to solicit her participation in something shadowy and she still had no premonitory sense of what he wanted from her.

  You are at the age, he said, struggling to his feet, and she held her breath, waiting for her father to fall, while he managed the steps down to the cabin to sprawl unconscious on his bunk.

  She awoke in the middle of the night to a stream of terrible gibberish coming from him in a language she did not understand and tried without success to rouse him from his nightmare and comfort the trembles of his fever. She awoke again sometime later to an overpowering gagging stink infusing the cabin and wrapped her pillow over her face and tried not to breathe through her nose. In the morning she found herself alone and went on deck to discover her father hunched in the water off the stern, his body orbited by minnow clouds of tarry shit.

  Good morning, sunshine! he called out in a wretched attempt at cheer. Having a little episode here.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  The morning seemed to contain an implicit lassitude, without energy or desire, but even the fuse of her enthusiasm failed to ignite her father’s spirit. Come on! Dottie encouraged him, singing Madonna lyrics into an invisible microphone, dancing on the bow with campy provocation to no avail, her vitality diffused into an inert atmosphere. The seabirds themselves refused to fly.

  Listless, her father cleaned himself and his soiled bunk, had a spartan breakfast of coffee and bread, then held hands with Dottie as they prayed silently together to God, Saint Christopher, and Saint Nicholas for safe passage and with particular attention to Stella Maris, the Star of the Sea, and he recited out loud the Sub Tuum Praesidium—We flee to your protection, O Holy Mother of God.

  The spread of the sky was yellowed and creased like old parchment, the sun blotted into an edgeless ochre smear. She had never before heard about the lodos, a southwest wind fabled for its virulence, born out of the Sea of Marmara in the last months of summer and known to gather in its gust-blown skirts plum-colored clusters of malignant squalls. Her father knew of the lodos and its fearsome reputation among sailors, yet motored south out of the cove anyway, the mainsail hauled optimistically into an eerie humid calm. Once past the island he had given her a compass heading and retired, spending the morning belowdecks, inhaling naswar, opiated Afghani snuff, to ease the assault of his double-barreled malady, an uncharacteristic bout of depression added to the dysenteric churn in his gut. Later in the morning the wind strengthened and shifted head-on and when she sensed the change in weather she called for him, then shouted out for help, but he did not come.

  The seas began to stand up higher than she would have thought possible, and then out of the swells a thick dark monster with a sudsy crest butted against the bow, washing the deck with warm blue water, and she could feel the boat buck and shudder and pause beneath her feet, a slow second’s sensation of backwardness before gravity returned and the vessel dived into the trough, a motion that seemed to catapult her father into the cockpit, grabbing her shoulders to steady himself.

  All right, he said, ordering his daughter to keep the boat pointed straight into the wind. Then she watched his off-balance performance as he slackened the mainsheet from its cleat to reef the sail, scrambling ape-like on all fours beneath the furious dragon wing of slapping fabric, tying square knots down the length of the boom, and then told her, as if he were suggesting something mildly interesting, to try falling off twenty degrees to port and he let the boom scythe out and, once secured, the Sea Nymph heeled over confidently into angry water, rocketing at a diagonal through the bludgeoning waves.

  The breeze has picked up, hasn’t it, he said, the assertion, like his expression, a bit daft and lordly, standing with her, shin-deep in the cockpit, water boiling through the scuppers. She stood in combat with the wheel as her strength and confidence returned, the boat a great-hearted warhorse splitting the advancing ranks.

  Sorry I screamed, she said.

  Listen, he said, sitting down on the deck with his legs in the cockpit’s well, and then he quizzed her—What if he wasn’t here? What would she have done?—and nodded with lethargic agreement at her answers, embellishing them with advice. As he spoke, she stared in dismay at twin lines of brown slime draining from his nostrils, imagining for a second the harrowing possibility that her father was discharging shit from every orifice, and she said with great concern, Dad? There’s this stuff coming out of your nose, and he told her about the naswar and its medicinal benefit but did not try to reassure her that all was well.

  Last night, he attempted to explain, his head swaying morosely with the pitch of the boat. Talking about Pittsburgh . . . honest to God, it made me miss my mother terribly.

  He told her he didn’t mean to put her in a bad position and she said, Stop thinking that, okay? I love this. But her arms had grown tired, her bladder ached, she was thirsty, and he told her to hold on a few minutes longer and he wou
ld take over for the afternoon watch.

  He disappeared below and cut the engine and returned with her grandmother’s ivory rosary draped around his neck, a notebook and pen and a handheld device he identified as a GPS, something new from the military, a hookup to outer space, and with blank, hunched indifference to the moment, keyed sequences and copied down coordinates like a deskbound bookkeeper and staggered back below to consult the navigational chart. The promised minutes grew to twenty and then he finally came back on deck and relieved her at the wheel, adding an afterthought as she clambered below, the disheartening news that the head was out of order, use a bucket.

  Once inside the cabin, however, a claustrophobic stench of confinement immediately magnified the faint sensation of queasiness she had been feeling for the past hour and she buckled over with nausea, instinctively lurched for the head, and vomited bananas and cereal into the vile soupy clog of her father’s excrement. When she tried to pump the bowl clean, the toilet flushed upward with a surge of seawater, spewing out its abomination onto her ankles and feet, a horror to which she contributed a fresh pint of vomit, her convulsion so violent that she pissed her swimsuit. She made a mindless dash to her bunk only to discover that lying down made everything worse and she puked a spoonful of yellow bile onto her pillow and curled into the slope of the hull, her cheek pressed against the thunder of the wood, the misery she felt organic and elemental and enslaving, the boat’s heaving stitch her body’s own, her cowlike moaning syncopated with the cymbal crash of cooking pots in their cabinets. Immobilized, she closed her eyes, suspended in vertigo, and thought the only thought possible under the circumstance, that dying would be better than this.

  She lay folded in, hugging herself like a mummy buried in a jar, her sentience wrecked, unaware of the passing hours and her father’s headlong race for the distant shore. Then she felt her consciousness summoned, water splashing in her face, sputtering in agony for her father to stop, yet when she opened her eyes her father was not there. When she made herself sit up her feet dropped into a slosh of floorboards and books, their wet pages waving underwater like anemones. Her confusion evolved to fear but nothing like the petrifying fear she experienced after wading aft on rubbery legs to the cabin steps and hauling herself out of the flood halfway into the roar above, deafening and all-engulfing, her father struggling at the helm with blazing eyes and the euphoric look of a deranged prophet. The Sea Nymph exploded through mountainous seas as the heart of the storm, still a mile away, bore down on them off the starboard bow, a bloated twisting octopus that consumed the sky, evil purpled tentacles whipping forward, dragging behind a curtain of white rain seamed with incandescent bolts of lightning.