The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  He drove over to the cathedral and found Margarete sitting listlessly on the front step of the bungalow, watching her son playing in the yard with a stick and an empty plastic water bottle. She shyly redirected her attention to Burnette’s approach, her face warming, the apathy erased, when he told her he had spoken to her brother Reginald and explained the transfer and the prospect for his imminent release. Here’s food and water, he said, bringing in the cartons and placing them in the kitchen area that adjoined the second room, the bedroom, a curtain hung across its doorway. Let’s go shopping, he said. He asked her what she wanted to buy first and she answered shame-faced, her eyes downcast, pulling at the hem of her soiled T-shirt. Si vous pait, monsieur.

  Burnette, he insisted.

  Monsieur Burnette. A bucket, please. Soap.

  We’ll start there.

  Excuse me, we need to bathe.

  They drove to an intersection where the money changers lurked and he unsnapped the Glock 19 in his ankle holster as a precaution and whistled over one of the boys, who passed him a grimy clump of black-market gourdes in exchange for his crisp twenty-dollar bills. Along a street of crumbling warehouses built by the French planters out of coral and limestone blocks, they found a neglected arcade with a dry-goods store and bought those few things she desired and more, a washcloth and a towel and a comb, toilet paper and a box of Kotex and toothbrushes; he bought her a cheap wallet and a purse to hold the cash he planned to give her. The boy stood mesmerized but selfless, not really like a boy at all, until Burnette asked if he would like something and his mother said, He would like books, please. To write in or to read? said Burnette. Can he read? Both, Margarete said. And a pencil. What about a box of those marbles over there? he asked the kid, and for the first time was rewarded with the daybreak flash of a smile. Then he said, You need clothes, yes?

  In the marché, as they wandered from stall to stall, she picked through the bins of secondhand giveaways—the charity of humanitarian collection from faraway worlds, purchased by the ton by a network of middlemen and shipped to merchants in places like this—she held a dress or a skirt or a blouse to her body, this sensual tableau of public intimacy like a gentle step toward partnership, pausing, lifting, spreading the fabric over her breasts or hips, tentatively soliciting his approval, her chestnut eyes sparkling when he gave it. They filled a handled plastic bag for her, and another for the boy, and then found stiff pairs of Taiwanese running shoes for both of them. At the farmer’s market Burnette had to leave when it became obvious that his presence inflated the price of everything and he sat outside at a two-stool kiosk, drinking a beer, until she and the boy appeared with their sacks of provisions, rice and flour and cornmeal and oil and spices and cassava and mangoes and, because there was no refrigeration at the bungalow, no other fresh meat than a plucked chicken, tonight’s dinner and tomorrow’s lunch and tomorrow’s dinner.

  Day by day he watched their purloined spirits revive, the shine of livable life return to their faces, their hearts less silent, opening to this new beginning. If he had wanted anything from her maybe he would have acted differently, maybe he would have felt some discomfort behind his actions, or the opposite, a sense of ownership; it could have gone either way, it could have become emotionally confusing, something less than straightforward, especially after her brother moved in with them in the bungalow, but it hadn’t, because he wanted nothing from Margarete except her permission to let him help. She had to submit to him, the patron, the benefactor, in that way only, to collude in the availability of his goodness without reflecting back indebtedness or judgment, because it wouldn’t have worked any other way than that way, their tacit agreement to just let it be.

  He went to say good-bye the morning he was recalled to Port-au-Prince but couldn’t find them in the time he had—the boy was in school, the brother somewhere on patrol in the city with the HNP, Margarete was wherever she was. At the rectory, the bishop himself poked his august head out from behind his office door, curious to have a visitor, sending a look toward the old woman at her desk, a more beatific version of a facial message Burnette knew all to well, Glory be, a white man. Get his money. Precisely why he had come, still toting around a fistful of cash, and he paid the rent for the bungalow for the next nine months—it wasn’t much by home-front standards—and he made the self-important crone promise to tell Margarete he would stay in touch, however unlikely that seemed at the time. Very well, monsieur, said the bishop’s secretary, her eyes round with skepticism, as she counted the bills a second time. Bon, she said tartly, looking up from her desk to mock him. Au revoir.

  He was dreaming and he was waking and he kept his eyes closed until the final image of the dream slipped away and with it its illusion of healing, the bungalow shimmering in a dazzled aqueous light floated inland from the harbor, Margarete on her stoop happy, her ordeal in the mountains no longer the single hellish force shaping her present circumstance or her son’s future, dressed in a sleeveless shift, canary yellow with a print of sunflowers, the color striking against the mahogany sheen of her bare arms, her nails a sexy red, her hair fastidiously cornrowed, her white teeth perfect between the swell of her lips; the boy on his bike out front in the street, pedaling hard with a look of orgasmic determination, other boys on foot chasing him with the same look of determination but less sublime, shouting, My turn! My turn! Between him and the woman, there is a fluency they never could manage, but now they have a conversation that is more than a conversation and Margarete’s side of it seems to go like this:

  When you were always a loser there was never any side to pick because the allegiance of a loser is worthless, and whatever seemed to hold forth the slightest possibility for survival, you attached yourself to it without questions and clung to it until, like everything else, it passed you by. She herself would never assign the indomitability of the human spirit to her actions, no more than she would ascribe a similar canine version of motives to a dog. What benefit might come from her own examination of her circumstances? She was alive, and for the living being alive and staying alive was a reflexive force that only death denied. And why would anyone choose that option when death, a tireless chooser, would work its way around to you soon enough. In the meantime, given life, there were always moments to live for.

  Look, the boy is laughing, Margarete said. Come inside and I will fix you lunch.

  The memories he carried of Margarete and her son were like a missal, a little black prayer book always there in his back pocket. Shit, Burnette said to himself, opening his eyes to the empty apartment in Fayetteville, I’ve been dreaming in Kreyol.

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  Fort Bragg, North Carolina

  0700.

  Burnette stood outside the Wall, this nonplace among the pines, confronted by a singular, mind-bending catch-22, this one served forth as the army’s special ops version of an unvoiced ontological riddle. He showed his ID to the sentry at the gate who shook his head nope and handed it back. St. Peter’s challenge at the gates of heaven: No authorization onto the compound without verifiable nonexistence—Kill yourself and come back. Burnette insisted. The guard double-checked his visitors list. Sorry, go away. Burnette kept insisting until the guard phoned inside to the security desk and ten minutes later someone of unidentifiable rank strolled up and signed for him and escorted him inside and signed again and escorted him back out after his sit-down with the deputy commander and his briefest of meetings with the boorish evangelical superman, Colonel Hicks.

  The second time Lieutenant Colonel McCall addressed him by his former rank, Eville had the sensation of sitting in an ejection seat, preparing for the explosive thrust that would catapult him out of this mystery tour. Are you familiar with the term deus ex machina, soldier? Har-har.

  Welcome back, Master Sergeant Burnette, said Lieutenant Colonel McCall. The modest office like a guidance counselor’s, and McCall himself requirin
g no more description than the stereotype he embodied to action-figure glam perfection, a magazine-cover SF operative, a brutally handsome graying-at-the-temples brush-cut Caucasian male specimen containing a mountain of clear-eyed self-esteem, triple-X buff, squared-away in body, tightly wrapped in soul, a standard-bearer at the center of a superpower’s cosmos. You could never be this man if you weren’t born this man, and being born this man took centuries. He leaned over his government-issue desk and swung out his arm, gripping Eville’s hand in a handshake, the squeeze a fleeting pressure, just right and nothing more, no unnecessary redundant muscle-message about his prowess, then motioned Eville toward the facing chair.

  How was your Haitian vacation?

  Weird, sir. Not fun in the sun.

  How’s that?

  I guess I never felt so dispensable.

  I’m thinking something like a kestrel. Alone, small, powerful. Built to strike but there’s a problem. I don’t know—fog, no visibility, hot winds blowing cold shit. Something like that?

  Sir?

  We’re not sparrows or jays, right? We’re hawks, falcons. I’ve seen eagles. I’ve seen pterodactyls.

  Yes, sir.

  Colonel Hicks encourages his men to use metaphors, said McCall, flex and stretch the gray matter, maintain cerebral agility. Think two ways at once, concrete and abstract. Embrace the binary but engage the spectrum. Yes, no. Life and death, creativity and killing. Think about it—it makes sense. Employ both sides of your brain, see the complete picture, see beyond the picture, use the Zen advantage. Have you heard of another outfit in the military that values a fucking metaphor?

  No, sir.

  Fucking right, Top. Show me them gobblers.

  There it was, Eville told himself, the second time, Top, and no way on earth the LTC was making a mistake.

  Yeah, so, I like what I’ve heard about you, Burnette, but here’s the deal, said McCall, arching back in his seat and clasping his hands behind his head. Don’t get me wrong. The colonel wasn’t pulling the wool over your eyes or something like that. Okay? You weren’t sent back to Haiti as a Title 10 operation, under the purview of DOD. You were assigned to a Title 50 operation, which meant for two months you were no longer officially DOD, and commo stays superencrypted within Agency channels, although it seems no one was explicit about that detail when they brought you in. When we lend you out to the Agency, we don’t want to hear a word about what you’re up to, but you probably figured that out. Am I right? Whatever you do for them is their business, not ours, unless it’s ours too, if the ops are joint. Otherwise, it’s their mandate, their budget, their lawyers, their scalps. Whatever blowback’s coming, they own it. Anyway, the deal is, you were a captain when the powers that be needed you to be a captain, when the circumstance required an officer of rank. Anything less than a captain would have been taken as an insult by our exalted frenemies, okay. But okay, you’re not a captain, Burnette, though we’ll set you up on a fast track as a mustang, if that’s agreeable to you. Okay? Okay. So listen.

  Sir, I’m a little confused. Am I still in Delta?

  Where you are is standing on a bridge. You want to go back to where you came from, get your life back as it was, okay. I can refer you over to JSOC and they’ll do the deed. Or you could cross the bridge. Have you already crossed the bridge? Yes and no. You’re in the middle of that bridge. The army’s still the army, right? We can’t just wave a wand.

  Here for you, sir, said Burnette.

  Fucking-A. All things are possible, said McCall. The bureaucracy can literally evaporate and we all stand around and say, Gaw! People tell me you’re good. People tell me you belong inside the fence. That said, let me say there are no guarantees. You’re going to have to go through the assessment and selection process like any other deadly dreamer. Your job is to qualify. If that happens, my job is to make all your best bad dreams come true.

  Yes, sir.

  Okay, Top. First things first. I have to demote you. It’s a technicality. Don’t think twice about it. My advice—laugh it off. When we bring you in, there’s a big fade on rules and rank. But as a noncom you can’t volunteer for Delta if your rank is higher than E-6. I have to bust you back a grade. It’s temporary.

  Yes, sir.

  Good. Great. So, Sergeant Burnette. How’s forty-eight hours sound? Get your affairs in order.

  That won’t be necessary, sir.

  Wife? Kids? Gerbils?

  No, sir.

  You poor son of a bitch. That’s what I like to hear. You’re a phantom already, an outrider. All right then, the commander wants a word with you.

  He was escorted down the hall to the office of Colonel Hicks, where he stood at attention waiting for the colonel to get off the phone. Then he was off the phone, scribbling intently on paperwork, speaking to the paperwork.

  Burnette, you spoke with McCall?

  Yes, sir.

  Everything good to go?

  Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.

  I take it your golf buddies aren’t shipping you east with that insidious heathen scumroach.

  No, sir.

  I don’t know what the fuck is on their minds sometimes. The golf boys. You know what I should have done? I should have had you put a round in Khan’s eardrum while you were down there on Devil’s Island. That would have saved us a load of trouble down the road.

  Yes, sir.

  All right, Burnette, said Colonel Hicks. The colonel finally looked at him dead-on and his eyes turned hard and Eville knew he was being judged plainly and unapologetically as a killer, Hicks trying to gauge what Burnette figured was either there or not, and nothing he might say would ever change Hicks’s opinion of what he saw in the depths of any man. The colonel picked up the phone again. God bless you, he said, stabbing a button for an outside line. This shit is like God and satan. It’s place is eternity. We’re going in and hell’s coming with us. Go get yourself trained, son. Then get your ass back here and help me fight my holy war. We are a warrior nation.

  For the next seven months he was an anomaly out on the bridge, half in and half out among a rich harvest of valedictorian ultrajocks and brainiac gunslingers. The only control he could exert over his identity came to the forefront when the instructors tried to paint him with a call sign he had resisted ever since grade school, teachers and teasing classmates alike mispronouncing his given name, his mother picking him up at school when he was sent home for fighting. It’s all right, Ev, she would console him. No damn vowel will ever make you Evil, so don’t be silly. You’re Eville, short e, like Mount Everest, that’s what you tell people, and it’s a proud American name, your great-grandfather’s name, and you have my permission to sock anyone in the nose who thinks it’s okay to insult our family. Roger that, said the instructors, acknowledging the can of worms. Harassment and bullying were anathema inside the fence, no buffoons in animal skins, no flat-headed drill instructor sadists; even the twenty-something junior recruits displayed a level of maturity that came across as some strange generational defect of perfection, the selection process designed to create a force about as diverse as an Amish picnic.

  How’s Burn One? That work for you? Everyone had to have a nickname, too, but after his classmates saw how the call sign incident had ruffled his feathers, they took the easy way around this one sensitivity and let him be what he was thankful to be, Montana, and later, when his buds had a closer look into his life, Scout.

  For a D-boy, free thinking and creativity abounded within the confines of how to find someone and kill him. That’s what Delta did. That was all that Delta did. Back inside the Wall at 0700 that first morning he was grateful, too, to be a busy man again, quickly immersed into an all-consuming training curriculum. Through May, June, and July the program was keen on honing marksmanship skills, that talent brought with him from his boyhood that had allowe
d him to evolve into an ace weapons specialist in the Green Berets. One day in June, right after the Khobar Towers bombing in Saudi Arabia, the top instructor approached him and said, Montana, I’m making you my pet sniper trainee. You will leave here with a PhD in ticket-punching. You good with that? and he was, his nascent but still amorphous identity as a government-certified assassin snapping into focus by several more degrees, as did the larger panoramic focus of eventual targets, an expanded view provided by the smithereened deaths of nineteen of his fellow servicemen, out in the godforsaken alcohol-free, woman-bashing Arabian desert.

  They taught him the hoodlum trades, how to crack safes and steal cars and break into just about anything locked down or up. They taught him the pyro-art of demolition, how to build an esoteric variety of bombs and how to blow them up in a variety of enjoyable ways, some spectacular and ear-splitting and others percussively hushed and eerily musical. They taught him the spook skill sets, the range of tradecraft essential to the universal rhythms and textures of espionage, the second oldest profession. An instructor from the Secret Service dropped in one week to impart his knowledge of executive protection, the bodyguard business and its counterintuitive appeal, the Lord calling you to take a bullet for a pinstriper who would never take a bullet for you. When he wasn’t majoring in counterterrorism, Delta’s raison d’être, he was cross-training as a medic, cross-training in cutting-edge communications, taking language classes over at the Schoolhouse, going back to the apartment most nights with a briefcase full of manuals, falling asleep in the recliner with homework in his lap, his wristwatch waking him at 0500 for a six-mile run. He had quit his pack-a-day only to replace cigarettes with an hourly dip of Copenhagen, one of the three ingredients behind the blend of smell inside the Wall: minty spit, whiskey sweat, and cordite.