But hello, Jackie was only stone-cold drunk, and when she didn’t get up he rushed toward the heap of her, face-first in the dirt, to carry her out of the hounfour back into the darkness in the not-so-heroic cradle of his arms. He recoiled when he put her down to open the door to the CUCV and she wobbled and swiveled to her knees and vomited what smelled like rancid kerosene on his boots. Nice, he said derisively, shaking his unsympathetic head, and when he finally scooped her into the passenger seat she toppled across onto the driver’s side as well and he couldn’t make her sit back up. Which meant, for fuck’s sake, that he drove the entire way back to Cap-Haïtien with Jackie’s head jostled about in his lap and her mouth half-open.
The dashboard instruments cast a greenish velvet illumination and he looked down between his legs at the tarnished flax of her hair and felt her face pressed dead against his enlivened cock, a bad affair that he only made cravenly worse as he drove along and thought delicious, lust-tormented things. He watched the road and didn’t watch the road, trying not to swipe any pedestrian looming out of the dark at the same time his eyes insisted on tracking the sublime curve of her torso to her legs, bare to midthigh where her dress had bunched. He stretched his right hand over onto her rounded hip, patting then stroking as if to comfort her. She didn’t respond and he wasn’t trying to comfort her and he reached farther and edged up her skirt until it was at the waistband of her panties and his hand was locked into a sequence of trespass, palming her butt, and she didn’t wake up. By now he was trembling and he let his fingers glide along the veiled crack of her ass down into the crevice below and its patch of heat, where his fingertips rested on the sealed lips of her sex and when she still didn’t move his index finger tested the tension of the elastic of the silky fabric and its rim of escaped hair and he realized with a shock what he was doing, about to stick his finger in the cunt of an unconscious woman, and withdrew his hand carefully from its scavenging path of violation and carefully rearranged her dress over her legs and drove on with her mouth lolling atop his hard-on, telling himself he was the lowest of indecent men.
In the Christophe’s car park he dragged her inconvenient rag-doll carcass out of the CUCV and humped the load up past the disapproving night watchman and through the lobby and up the staircase to his room, muscling her over his shoulder like a sack of rice and cussing to himself all the way, into his ascetic’s matchbox cell, taking her straight to the bathroom and slinging her down propped into the corner of the shower stall. He struck a match and touched the flame to a candle in its holder on the back ledge of the sink’s basin and a small sphere of light jiggled into the room.
The water system was, as always, turned off at this time of night although as always the maid had filled a five-gallon bucket set next to the toilet for flushing. He was too exasperated not to pour it on her, for her own good, of course, but he picked up the bucket and put it back down trying to decide whether he should undress her first, the pros and cons of disrobing a knocked-out hellion who just might regain consciousness in midstripping, and concluded, To hell with it, man, and dumped the water over her head, jumping back as she woke up with a sputtering howl, lashing out with a flurry of blind swats and kicks overtaken by a bout of dry heaves that calmed soon enough to profanity-laced moanings as she collapsed herself into a soggy fetal position and fell back asleep. He retreated through the shadows to his narrow bed, satisfied that she would live to continue tormenting him another day.
But he should have known that wasn’t going to be the end of it, that Jackie had a trick of resurfacing. Sometime before dawn her clammy naked body tried to wedge itself onto the single mattress next to his sweltering naked self and he played dead—there was no room for her in the bed regardless—and the next thing he knew she was kneeling over him, straddling his hips, tugging his penis into the automatic compliance of an erection, and he growled at her, the spontaneity of his rejection puzzling even to him. What do you think you’re doing. Get off, and she said, Oh, come on, Burnette, fuck me, let’s just get beyond the sex, okay. Do it. His cock was a flagpole, straight up in her grasp and she began to lower herself onto him when he pushed her sideways against the wall and rolled himself off the mattress, crawling on his hands and knees to find his sleeping bag and foam pad, his stomach knotted into a queasy spasm of wrongness. He spent the remainder of the night there on the floor feeling like a steamed dumpling, the heat too heavy and the air too close, the bag pulled over his face, listening to the swishing pant and muted snores of her breathing as she lay above him in bed, asleep again within minutes of their uncoupling, which he would never be able to explain to himself, lacking any real principle to account for his sudden unmanly priggishness.
In the morning as he dressed she remained asleep, her body contorted like a drowning victim, legs and arms broken wings jutting awkwardly, her brow knitted and face strained with frowning concentration, her lovely breasts exposed, the sheet wrapped at her waist like a toga in disarray. He tiptoed into the bathroom but when he came out she was sitting up, hugging her elbows, her head inclined toward him with an impersonal smile, her eyes hostile, waiting to hear what he might say.
See you around, he said, grabbing his kit and getting the hell out of there before she could open her mouth, say something to enrage him—conceivably even a good morning would do the trick. The beast of the field, the somehow guilty one, gnawed by his own conscience, the molester, the could-have-been rapist, the unsated victim, running away.
Was this how all men act and think? It would not console him if they did.
He shut off the truck’s engine and followed the sidewalk across Third Group’s campus to Bravo Company’s headquarters and the hayseed noncom stuck on the desk greeted him with a knowing smirk and another collection of paperwork. Early on in the invasion, he had seen this kid sauntering around one of the FOBs in Haiti with a big-ass Bowie knife strapped to his leg and had asked him, Who are you supposed to be, Davy Crockett? Yuck, yuck, said the kid, my dad carried this evil blade in ’Nam.
Top, I’m not letting you go until you fill out every one of these suckers.
You heard then?
I heard a rumor, sir. I heard you no longer exist, heh heh. Also I’m supposed to tell you to report inside the fence at the Wall tomorrow at 0700. Ask for Lieutenant Colonel McCall.
He told the staff sergeant he was looking forward to it and suddenly he was, anything to reestablish a zone of routine and daily regimen in his life where he did not have to think quite so hard about the rightness or wrongness of his actions, where his decisions were given the reliable benefit of a context, straightforward and practical, ABC, one-two-three, God and country, faithful obedience to the higher cause, and when he finished with the paperwork he walked down the hallway to the team rooms to visit with his former detachment, to say hello and say good-bye, but the only men he found there were the team’s jug-eared choggies, Wascom and Boles, transferring gear and weapons from the permanent main locker into two footlockers and Burnette asked, You guys going somewhere? and they looked up, preoccupied but grinning, and Boles said, Hey, Top, back in time for the farewell party! and Wascom said, Yes, sir, Bosnia.
He walked out of there trying to remember who said it, an aphorism he would never forget, first because he had always thought it was nonsense and then because he came to know it was wise. War is but a spectacular expression of our everyday life.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
As the sun went down he went to Kmart to do a simple thing that would make him feel better, normal, human, real: shopping for his spartan comforts, a pillow and a two-pack of pillowcases, a plush bath towel, shampoo and soap, a coffeemaker and floor lamp, then to the supermarket where he bought a bachelor’s ration of coffee and eggs and bacon and beer and a hand of greenish bananas and cigarettes and a copy of the Fayetteville Observer. On the way home he stopped at his favorite sandwich shop and took away a foot-long Italian sub and back a
t the apartment unloaded everything and stood up the lamp next to the recliner and sat down to eat the sub and read the newspaper, glancing at the headlines and then the sports section—and thumbed through the classifieds, used trucks first then real estate, acquiring a ballpark sense of the value of what was left in his name, mulling upgrades or downsizings or flat-out liquidation. Generals were materialists, not foot soldiers, who only wanted their due, hard enough to get as it was. He owned the town house but wondered if he should own a bed? At this point, probably not. My bed was subtext in the sentence—This home—and his life was trudging off in some other direction.
He read on, fantasizing about buying a motorcycle or a boat, scanning the job market with a sense of relief that he had not been put on this earth to be frog-marched through the adventureless monotony of a civilian’s life, the unnatural atrophying blood-thickening safety of it all. Because it nuzzled keenly against one of his fondest dreams, he saved for last the listing for pets, the critter sales and giveaways, humane or something less, sniggering at the lady-favorite rodent breeds, Pomeranians and Yorkies and quivering Chihuahuas, vermin-sized lumps of uselessness, scowling at the much-maligned gangsta dogs, pit bulls and Rotties and Dobes, his blessing and empathy offered to the legion of mutts in need of anything resembling a home, missing the bold and stalwart heelers that you would find in any Montana paper, the habit of his search designed to mire his heart in nostalgia, hoping for (and dreading) a listing for a setter or a Lab, anticipating the pain and the memories, the dogs of his boyhood the most cherished of lost friends—the hunts with his dad and the dogs for grouse and duck, the true love of endless happy canine kisses, the furry spring of joy in every waking morning whatever the season. The perfection of his imagined life culminated with a dog, yet under the circumstances he could not have the dog unless he had a woman who loved dogs, or just a woman who loved him, a yearning as distant from his reality as the moon.
The beer and the sandwich and the sedative of the newspaper and the darkness falling beyond the lamplight had left him sleepy, and he pushed back the reclining mechanism of the chair to stretch out and close his eyes for a nap before going out to join the gang at Rick’s bar and lay there thinking about the one good thing that had happened in Haiti in the past two months, or at least the only bad thing that had ended up all right.
The morning after the Pakis brought in the bodies and the wounded and the detainees, he was with the Caricom troglodytes when they unlocked the cargo containers where Lecoeur’s people had spent the suffocating night. The Jamaican police herded the prisoners out into the glaring sunlight, the wailing and crying began anew, and the clamor excited the surly Jamaicans, who began a type of indiscriminate batting practice with their batons on the shoulders and buttocks of anyone not nimble enough to skip out of the way. He had stepped in and put a stop to it and made them separate the women and children from the men and then he ordered them to release the women and children. Go, he told them in Kreyol, you’re free. Go where? a woman asked. Get out of here now, he said, pointing across the airstrip to the front gate, wanting them gone before the Jamaicans questioned his dubious authority to bark out commands. He exchanged hopeless looks with a young woman clasping the head of a little boy to her skirt, his limbs as insubstantial as twigs, and he understood she didn’t want to move. He had to shout, to step toward them menacingly, Allez, allez! and they scuttered away like a flock of black geese, casting panicked glances over their shoulders at the fox on their heels.
The beefy captain of the monitors squared off in front of him, nostrils flared and glowering, his rotund face a graven image, a countenance like a vicious walrus—Tell me who you are again, mahn—and Eville realized at least here in the compound this undercover journo bullshit was out the window and he would need to present himself dressed in cammies, holster his 92FS on his belt, offer and receive salutes.
That day, though, and the days to come, left him with a lasting foul taste of complicity, as if he had been required to attend a workshop in the effective application of human rights abuses, and his opinion of Third World law-and-order professionals jumped to a more elite bracket of disgust and incredulity. Lecoeur’s downtrodden men were marched to a small concrete-blockhouse isolated at the back of the compound, where they were told to sit in the dirt and be quiet. Within minutes the heat and the excruciating blaze of sunlight had become unbearable. He asked the Jamaican captain to explain the protocol and the captain said they were waiting for the interpreter to arrive so the interrogations could begin. One of the prisoners pleaded to use the toilet, several others began to beg for water. What are they crying about? said the captain. Eville translated their distress and the captain said, Tell them to shut up, tell them to shit in their pants. This is what we’re going to do, okay? said Burnette, and he put three prisoners, sworn to take a hasty dump, in the back of the CUCV and picked one of the policemen to ride up front with him and ferried the Haitians to a line of port-a-johns across the base and cut off their flex cuffs and let them shit on the promise they would not seize the opportunity to overthrow the government. Water, water, the others begged, the lot of them unfed and dehydrated since being hauled out of the mountains. He got back into the CUCV and drove over to the UN mess hall and grabbed a couple cases of MREs and bottled water and by the time he returned to the blockhouse the interpreter was inside with half the cops who, from the sound of it, were beating the daylights out of one of the detainees.
All right, listen, he said to the captain with as much cool equanimity as he could muster. Stop this right now or I am personally placing you under arrest.
The captain laughed in his face and got on his radio instead and Ev himself stormed into the blockhouse to try to reason the Jamaicans away from their sport of official cruelty. Next thing that happens, a Pakistani aide de camp drives up respectfully requesting to escort Eville back to headquarters for chitty-chat with Colonel Kahn, who berates him for illegally assuming command of a UN-Caricom-controlled joint operation and sends him back to the interrogation follies under strict orders to observe and assist or run away home to the land of namby-pamby. The day proceeds and ends with eight more pointless innings of sadistic self-fulfillment for the thugs in uniform, pounding a gram’s worth of intel out of a ton of cowering screaming flesh. He had never seen anything like it, a day of useless petty brutalities administered by such a surplus of defective people, and it crossed his mind that they continued on for the double pleasure of defying the precious oversensitivities of a white American arsehole. Now what? he says as the ignominious afternoon clots to an end. Back to the lockup for the wretches, and since no one else will do it, he drives back to the mess hall and returns to the cargo container with food and water before the detainees are chained in for the night. He doesn’t feel like the good guy. He feels like the good guy who failed.
If he wanted, he could have bunked on the compound overnight in an air-conditioned officer’s billet but he thought why punish himself and he drove out the front gate nodding at the mud-headed Paki guards, hankering for a nightlong lineup of cold beers back at the Christophe.
He doesn’t recognize the girl—she was sitting cross-legged and humped over on the side of the road fifty yards outside the gate, her face concealed behind the shield of her hands as though she might be weeping—but he recognized the boy standing next to her—mother? sister?—rigid with unearthly patience, his clothes in shreds, his belly puffed with malnourishment, a small ebony statue meant to convey the fierce stoicism of survival branded into all the children in the world to whom the world has shown only horror, supernaturally resilient children who refused to perish, like burned roots that keep sprouting into an otherwise charred and lifeless wasteland. Children who would grow into adulthood singing songs of war.
He pulled over a few yards past them and put the CUCV in park and walked back and stood in front of the pair until she looked up, not crying after all but desolate and dazed with fatigue, her sad
wondering eyes searching his for evidence of his intentions. He said, Madame, you were with the people taken from the mountains, yes? and she said, a birdlike peep, Oui.
Where did they go?
Back to the mountains.
Why didn’t you go with them?
God has abandoned me, monsieur.
Naturally she was frightened by him, her shyness and her fear wholly appropriate to the mystery of his presence, yet he gently coaxed out the shards of her life—here’s a piece, here’s another piece. The boy was her son, his father had been a teacher murdered by the tyrant’s army three years ago when the soldiers came rampaging up the valley into the mountains after Jacques Lecoeur, burning schools and houses and crops, hacking to death villagers too slow to escape into the sanctuary and subsequent hardships of the jungle. She had plucked the boy up from the flames and fled with the other refugees, joined by her older brother Reginald, her only living relative, a coffee planter who became one of Lecoeur’s men, a brother who protected her and her son, and fed them, when they would not have been able to endure, as others had not endured, without protection and food. Now he was one of the prisoners rounded up by these foreigners who had come to Haiti—not the Americans but these other men, neither black nor white nor Christian—and it made no sense to her to return to the mountains without her brother and his guardianship. Why should I make such a difficult journey to starve there, monsieur, when I can starve here without the trouble?
The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover Page 60
