CHAPTER FORTY
An unsettling shapelessness seemed to wash in on Burnette, a sluggish but relentless tide of gloom. His sense of direction and larger purpose blurred; the bona fides that formed a protective casing around his identity felt pocked and friable and he had begun to think it was possible he had lost his bearings, that he had been dropped into some barren worthless place he had never been before, without any recognizable landmarks, without so much as a north star to lead him out again and home. Whatever he had to report to the Friends of Golf about Haiti or the knavery and dereliction of the Pakistani colonel or his assessment of the field performance of the undersecretary’s daughter had remained unsolicited and unsaid, a debriefing in search of an audience, and he had to guess his value to these men was either negligible or, improbably, overlooked.
And yet at the same time he felt strangely upheld by a countervailing force, the sharp attention paid to the details of his movement and support, an unfamiliar luxury of methodical thinking applied to his individual but lesser needs, a diametrically opposite pattern for how any military looked at and accommodated a single human being, as though he had undergone a metamorphosis into a more elite but insubstantial caste, less collective but also less productive, a more symbolic level of existence, an aristocrat without a grand calling, separate and privileged but essentially useless, attended to by an invisible network that anticipated the meaningless requirements of his day with astounding clairvoyance.
That afternoon in April, after he and Sanders Coleman had returned the golf cart to a Pinehurst staffer, an ordinary man stepped out of his ordinary car in the drive, hailed Burnette, and waited for him to check out of his room and then took him to the Moore County Airport in the nearby Sandhills. He drove Burnette onto the tarmac and parked next to a little bird—a red-and-white Bell 44—and, like the chauffeur in Miami, handed Eville a clipboard with papers prepared for his signature. Burnette asked what they were and the guy said finance docs and a speak-no-evil form and gave the captain a new credit card and a second card printed with a cryptonym (for Agency use only), access code, and password for another account opened in his name at a bank in the Bahamas. What’s this for? asked Burnette and the man said, You’re asking me? Whatever you do, don’t file on it. All right, said Burnette, scanning the secrecy oath, which identified his updated TS security clearance, then scrawled his name at the bottom of the page.
What’s level five? he asked and the guy said there was no level six. Burnette said, What’s yours? and the guy told him three, see-no-evil, and he got out and strapped himself into the cockpit of the helo and before Eville knew it he was back at the Green Ramp at Pope, hitching a ride to Fort Bragg and his off-post town house, where his footsteps reverberated in the late-afternoon glare of uncurtained nothingness. He took an aggravated inventory of the shabby crap his wife had left behind—a veneer-nicked dresser, a yard-sale recliner, a folding chair, an old TV with rabbit-ears antennae, dust-covered stacks of several dozen books on the living room floor, a table setting for one but no table, a coffee mug with a Special Forces decal, a pot for boiling and a pan for frying, sugar packets from McDonalds, surplus moving cartons. Nothing in the bedroom but his weight-lifting bench and barbell and iron discs and, in the bedroom closet, his rack of uniforms and meager supply of civvies and, pushed to the corners, his personal cache of weapons and fly rods, boots and running shoes, and two wooden apple crates holding framed desktop pictures and photo albums of his beloved and the accumulated miscellany of a soldier’s life. It almost felt like too much, just by the sad weight of its being so little.
On the kitchen counter next to the cliché of unopened bills he found the note she had penned in February—Ev, I’m sorry, I just hated watching everything get smaller. Take care, xo Cheryl—and he picked up the wall phone to call the firm where she had planted her tiny flag in the world as a paralegal and stood listening to the deadness in the line until he understood it as a mercy. He knew the immediate choice was to stay there and wallow in the misery hole of his lonesome domain or get out and so he located the keys to his truck and got out, driving over to the base, parking in the lot at Third Group and sitting there for a moment, disoriented, watching the snake-eaters come and go in their BDUs and Girl Scout caps, unsure of the many things that now confronted him as they had not before—Should he report to his old company or continue on to the compound where the D-boys assembled? Should he be in uniform or street clothes? Did he know enough now to know if he pussied out of Delta he would nevertheless live happily ever after among the brethren of an A-team, or would he kick himself down the road of his life for being a back-away slink, a quitter, not up to handling the full experience? At this point was it even possible to hit the reverse button, cancel the offshore accounts, sever his ties with Chambers and his cohort of overlords, and rewind the tape to where his ambitions were sweet fine dreams of higher callings but still only dreams, idle and weightless and not much more, prodding the drudge of a day’s work, where someday was a story you made end however you pleased and not a confusing, potentially self-defeating reality in which you always played the weakhearted moron who blew it, a defeat made manifest by the poverty of your own character.
But he scolded himself then because he was a soldier who had never thought to ask himself how far is far enough. Forward wasn’t a compass point as much as a vow. Therein lay his father’s lesson—the intrepid never yearn, they fly right past on their way to the getting done. He scolded himself for trying to make sense of the layered shit of Haiti, one cover atop another stacked atop another, its pointlessness and contradictions, the totally fucked-up cast of characters, the setups he should have seen coming from a mile away, the intrigues right in front of his eyes that he never noticed come together into the switch-out. The amorphous mission—blob, not creep—had warped his mind and misaligned his thoughts and left him groaning inwardly with some genuine existential soulburn.
He let it all churn a few minutes longer until he had reduced the problem to a single lazy cause, blaming the girl for everything but for no better reason than the fact that she rattled him to his core. There wasn’t enough training in the world to teach him how to get it right with Jackie—she made him feel bad about himself, dulled and inferior in a way he never imagined. That alone was what was so hard to let go and everything he disliked and mistrusted about her had vectored into play the last time they were together in the north, before she removed herself to the capital near the end of March.
She hadn’t connected with him for a few weeks and he let himself believe he had seen the last of her. Then she was there one evening at dinnertime, sitting down at his table at the Christophe, wearing a robe-like white cotton dress identical to the ones he had seen on a choir of Haitian Pentecostals, hymn singers gathered like egrets by the water on Sunday nights. Jackie said she needed him and he said what’s up and she told him she had been invited to a ceremony out in the countryside and she could go alone but having an escort would be the wiser course. I want to know more, he said warily, trying to read behind the appeal of her good-natured smiling, the untrustworthy display of innocence, and she told him there was a religious service near Grande-Rivière-du-Nord worth checking out and he assumed she meant evangelicals and church and agreed to take her in his banged-up CUCV, a handed-down Chevy Blazer from the US military to the blue caps.
It was a fragrant, beautiful sundown drive past cane fields and sweet potato plots and peasants moving steadfast toward a peaceful end to their day. They traveled down a paved road lined by cacao groves and breadfruit trees and the feathery plumage of coco palms, the air warmed and dreamy with the aroma of woodsmoke and burnt sugar and orange blossoms, the unhurried long procession of humanity along the shoulders like a stroll of neighborly souls as the CUCV motored past respectfully in low gear, the only vehicle on the darkening lane.
On the ride in, Jackie seemed a wiser, chastened version of herself, shorn of the aggressive
snip of sarcasm, even her camera put aside for the night, surprising Eville with her straightforward and sometimes unguarded reply to his cautious efforts to chat her up. She had stood down, he thought, retired her out-there hard-boiled Agency persona for a few hours and allowed him short glimpses of her bedrock sane self, a rational being named Dottie. Oh, she said with a soft thoughtfulness, when he asked, not expecting any honesty, why she had chosen to make herself such an active participant in her father’s black universe and everything that path implied. Well, she said quietly, explaining her sedition against her parents had run its course.
I had my little rebellion against it, believe me, she said. You can ask, but trust me, it was all a prodigious bore. I was meant to do this, I was schooled in the trade. It could have been my brother, but he was timid, so it was me. Her father thought the males of her generation were more willing to let things go, to just forget about it, but females were less forgiving of that that was unforgivable. My dad says females are elephants, she said. He believes people who don’t crave justice and vengeance are empty, that there’s something vital missing from their spirit. I have my father’s commitments, she said. Things are not unclear. He asked her then about schooling but she only told him her degrees—her undergraduate work at Yale in Islamic studies—living in Turkey, you know, piqued my interest—and a masters in ethnobotany at Harvard and he didn’t have a clue what ethnobotany was. A lot of stuff, traditional medicine and altered consciousness and those areas, she told him, but ultimately, for me, she said, it was about primitive forms of biological warfare. You’re messing with me again, he said, and she laughed merrily and said, Oh, come on now, Captain, have I ever? and when he thought about it, he flashed on Iraq and Desert Storm, enclosing his existence into a hazmat moon suit, and saw the logic, if not the motivation, behind how she had paired her studies.
I suppose that makes sense, he said, except when I try to plug it in to what you’re doing here in Haiti.
I’m doing research, she said. I’m learning. Let’s talk about something else.
They continued on for a while without words and he impulsively asked if he could ask her something personal and went ahead and asked without consent.
Do you trust your father?
I trust my father’s cruelty, she said.
What’s that mean?
I don’t know, she said. It seemed the truest thing to say.
Then she said when they crossed the bridge ahead to slow down and go left and he turned off the paved surface onto a dirt track that followed a river he could hear but not see. They drove until darkness closed in, deeper into the bush, where the air began to pulse and he bent his head toward his open window, listening to the faint beat. Drums? he said, and the volume of the drumming swelled and then, farther on, pressed like thunder into his skull as they arrived at a clearing teeming with peasants. He killed the blinding offense of the CUCV’s headlights but not before the drums fell silent and the beams froze a tableau of heaving dancers in the yard of a mud-walled farmhouse. Then all was blackness with stabs of flame from rag-wick torches and above the thatched roof a rosy slosh of sparking light from an unseen bonfire blazing behind the house. And centered in that arc of radiance, on rough-hewn flagpoles flew the rippled standards of a houngan, a sight Burnette knew fairly well. When she had told him ceremony, he should have known right off what she had meant. White-eyed silhouettes surged forward to engulf the vehicle. Say again, you’re invited, right? he said, groping the cuff of his pants for his ankle holster and sidearm. Jackie said, Yeah, trying to push her door open against the gaggle of bodies swarmed against it. I think we’re like the guests of honor.
After all the time he had logged with his A-team in the time-lost hinterlands of Haiti, he was inured to this, the sweaty glistening clamor of faceless humanity in the middle of the night, the raised chorus of anonymous voices and the ambiguity of their passions, never sorted out until you finally identified a ringleader or appointed a spokesman. The Americans were there to breach the villagers’ barrier of fear, behind which they cowered and behind which they suffered. Yet vodou was no Halloween trick in Haiti, although it made some of the team members piss their pants to contain their laughter, just as it gave others the creeps. What’s the problem here? Werewolves, would come the answer. What’s the problem here? A witch placed a curse on my sister. What’s the problem here? A devil has taken possession of the dog. Burnette and the team would nod grimly, stifling their amusement or disgust, at each fantastic fairy-tale account of supernatural mischief. They snapped off the tips of their chem-lites and swabbed phosphorescent crucifixes over the thresholds of families with infants, to ward off werewolves who would come at night to steal the children’s souls. They’d track down the witch and put the fear of the Lord into her until the jealous scheming hag lifted the curse. They’d put a bullet into the heads of the devil-dogs, foaming with rabies. Sometimes it felt as though they had stepped back into a shroud-misted ancestral past to the birthplace of psy ops. As far as Burnette was concerned the vodou dramas were fascinations and part fun and gave him the blood-thrill of a medieval rush, summoning visions of Beowulf and Grendel, men who were giants and women who were swans and the venerable age-old tactic of magic on the battlefield.
Nothing truly bad had ever happened when he found himself among the vodouistes and he didn’t expect it now, lowering his pants leg back over his pistol and following Jackie out of the car. This was, in its style, an imperial conclave among an exiled tribe, a secret society’s coronation of its new empereur, the final night of a two-day fete and a jubilant display of vodou’s three Ds—drunks, drums and jungle dancing. Burnette was not immune to the internal stir, the itch of the rhythms, the loosening of hips and heels. An elderly man with white sideburns, narrow-shouldered above his royal girth, his dignity uncompromised by bare feet and his wide-brimmed crown of woven fronds, stepped through the crowd and—Ah, mon cher, ma belle mademoiselle—clasped Jackie’s hand in both of his.
He was the gros neg himself, the new empereur assuming the throne of the one recently expired, cloudy-eyed but vigorous, and as he conversed with Jackie in Kreyol Burnette again had reason to marvel at her quick fluency, two weeks further along and years beyond his own baby talk. The drums had resumed their artillery roar and from behind the farmhouse a chant floated out in clipped exhalations like a pounded song. Come, come, said the empereur, and they were led by the old man through the revelers past embered cookfires and children spooning callaloo from their gourd bowls and into the candlelit house itself, people resting on wooden benches against its shadow-played walls, no other furniture in sight, and they followed him to a windowless side room, where the empereur kept his household altar for his patron saint, the tempestuous succubus Erzulie Mary. In some other place, at some other time, the lwa, it seemed, had confessed her attraction for Jackie into the empereur’s ear, and this was how Burnette learned that the undersecretary’s daughter was running some kind of stealthy ops with the witch-doctor crowd.
From the altar’s motley stack of bottles the empereur selected and uncorked one filled with clear liquid and dribbled a serving of its contents on the ground, quenching the great thirst of the lwas, then drank himself and passed the bottle to Jackie, who repeated the ritual offering and passed the bottle to Burnette, who did the same without hesitation, gasping as the tongue-cauterizing moonshine raked his throat, the clairin like an emulsion of fire ants. Another simple rural man appeared clutching a live chicken to his chest and the empereur received it into the bony gnarl of his own fingers and with a sudden surprising force twisted off the bird’s head and sprinkled the altar with its blood and then bloodied the feet of his guests and handed the carcass back to the farmer. Bon, rasped the panther-faced empereur, kissing Jackie’s cheeks and shaking Burnette’s hand. Bon, he said, the lwas are happy, I am happy, and Burnette asked what had just happened and Jackie told him they had been presented to the spirits and, without
objection, inducted into the empereur’s cult. You don’t have a problem with that, do you? she said. It’s honorary. She took the bottle and another swallow of clairin and handed it back and he dared another gulp as well.
Far fuckin’ out, he said. Do I get a tab to sew on my uniform?
The empereur left them there and disappeared, perhaps to attend to occult duties, and Burnette and Jackie wandered back outside with the incendiary gift of the bottle, behind the house to where the real jamboree unfolded on the foot-packed red earth beneath the thatch of a hounfour’s peristyle—a rapturous danse macabre performed by a cluster of houris and a trio of bare-chested men with red kerchiefs knotted at their necks, a line of drummers enslaved to goatskin drumheads, whipped on in their mania by spectral masters and the dancers themselves ebony dervishes, slickened with spirit-energy. Jackie tipped the bottle skyward and lipped the neck like a glass trumpet and chugged and slanted her body against him, the side of her hip tapping his own with the salacious beat, a provocation not so terribly hard to reconcile with the moment. He could have moved away but didn’t.
All was as it should be until a pair of spinning houris were seized by the gods, their eyes rolled back into their sockets as the bolt of possession passed into them like electrocution and the women fell, convulsing, to the ground, and flailed until each was claimed and taken—ridden—by a separate lwa, each a mortal horse with a divine rider, jabbering prophecy and esoteric instruction. Moved by the equally powerful spirit of overproof alcohol, Jackie surrendered herself to the show. Burnette tried to grab her back but she flung herself out to the peristyle, her gyrations an awkward white-girl version of letting go and Burnette stood appalled for the next few minutes watching her thrash around, Jackie oblivious as the object of far too much male attention, until she suddenly slumped to the dirt and Eville prayed, My God, stop her right now, do not let her rise up a madwoman speaking in tongues.
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover Page 59
