The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  The thing could have gone better but okay, it’s done, and now Burnette realizes he and Vincent are at the center of a surging uproar, surrounded by a shrieking mob and it’s not clear what component of the spectacle has them so inflamed but the sight of a white man beating the tar out of a black man in Haiti has never qualified as a dependable crowd-pleaser. Renee’s being jostled in the frenzy but she’s still holding the gun and doesn’t seem concerned and then a man, not old but resembling something smoked over a brazier, is standing next to her, a skinny little guy wearing white pajamas and a houngan’s crimson sash—this is Bòkò St. Jean—and St. Jean says, Shoot him, and Burnette, with dumb innocence, asks Why? and the old wizard says, He serves the devil. He brings the devil here.

  The crowd cheers the verdict of their priest but Burnette retrieves the pistol from Renee and says, Maybe next time, and hauls the dazed Honore Vincent to his feet, keeping one hand in the waistband of the giant’s pants as he wrestles him through the crowd and out to the road, wondering Where the fuck are my boys? prepared to fire upon anybody who approaches with a hint of Mexican in the family tree, and he’s pushing Vincent down the middle of the road in the direction of Saint-Marc when he sees two vehicles: the Brazilian’s SUV and the Mexican’s black SUV, and there’s Scarecrow and there’s Reginald in the middle of a shouting match with four members of Saint-Marc’s finest, on a patrol out of the city to check out the big party.

  Reginald spots him coming down the road with Vincent and says something that Burnette can’t hear, something like, Look, here comes the boss, because the police turn to look, saucer-eyed, and by the time he gets there, the cops are rambunctious, their guns drawn, intending to arrest the lot of them, and Burnette quickly realizes they’re in trouble because he doesn’t recognize a single one of these men. Recruits, newbies—therefore trigger-happy, terrified, and dangerous. He pinpoints their leader and takes the initiative, calling him out, Corporal, attention, I need to speak with your commander, Captain Joncil, immediately. The corporal recovers enough to say he wants to see IDs, he wants some explanation for this wild cowboy shit and Burnette tells him to send a man to find Captain Joncil and bring him here.

  What’s your name? he asks, and the kid, a brave and competent kid, says Corporal Antoine. Do we have an agreement, Corporal Antoine? and the kid mulls it over and they do. Burnette’s awareness of the rest of the scene enlarges enough to hear a woman crying and he finally turns and peers over to the black SUV and sees the Mexican slumped in the driver’s seat with his pants open and wanger exposed and a skeletal mulatto woman, much distressed, in the passenger seat. Burnette looks to Scarecrow, Did you whack this guy? and Scarecrow says, Nope, after your big man there walked away, I approached the vehicle and this dude here was getting a blowjob from the female and I knocked on the window and when it went down I darted the guy just as the cops pulled up. We have about five more minutes to get some cuffs on the dude before he wakes up.

  They ignore the three policemen and order the woman out of the vehicle and go about their business of securing the Mexican and Honore Vincent and transferring them to the backseat of the UN SUV and then the truck returns from town with Captain Joncil and it’s long-lost brothers when he sees his American army friend and Burnette walks him down the road away from everybody and tells him what he needs to know and slips him ten very beautiful one-hundred-dollar bills. One mind, one heart, one currency.

  Back at the vehicle, Honore Vincent is kicking and thrashing in the backseat and the Mexican is coming around and Scarecrow and Burnette cuff their feet as well and tape their mouths and Burnette asks Scarecrow if he wants one of these uniformed Saint-Marc cops to ride with him and Reginald back up to Le Cap and Scarecrow says, Nope, I got it, bro, and he bangs both perps with morphine from Burnette’s med kit and takes off before the police have second thoughts about further matters of legality and profit.

  Everybody’s on buddy terms now and the cops join Burnette back at the fete, their mouths watering from the pervasive aroma of grilled beef, and Burnette checks in with Renee, who is enjoying her elevated status as a kung-fu goddess. You’re okay then? he asks her and she says, Sure. perfectly fine, although she thinks she might have given herself a mild sprain, kicking that ugly son of a bitch, and they stick around for another hour as the sun sets and the dancing begins and she says, Okay, I’ve had enough, and he gets a lift down to Port-au-Prince with Renee and Gerard, who drop him at the Hotel Montana, and she tells him, Sorry for the trouble. Thanks. See you later. And of course he does, the following night, on the road south of Moulin Sur Mer.

  The second night, shortly before dawn, he’s been in his room at the Montana for thirty minutes. He’s washing up and the phone rings. It’s the defense attaché from the embassy, he’s down in the lobby and he wants Burnette to come down with his gear and the attaché is driving a van hauling the dead girl and they head to the airport, the attaché tells Burnette the embassy wants him to accompany the body back to the States, and when they arrive at the airport the DCM is there with an honor guard and he pulls Burnette aside and tells him a C-130 has been diverted from its regular supply run to Gitmo to pick up the girl and he wants Burnette to get on that plane and not come back. Burnette says, Sir, I’m just following orders, and the DCM wants to know whose orders and Burnette says, Sir, I work for JSOC, and I’ve told you everything I can.

  We’ll see about that, Sergeant, fumes the DCM, and the bird comes in, they load up the casket and fly to MacDill and Burnette catches the first flight available down to Miami and back to Haiti into foreign policy hell, a madness co-produced by a squabbling, elbowing rowboat full of US government agencies, battling over a single oar. DOD seems to be playing it straight, happily mired in its doctrine, blithely committed to the ideal, standing up an indigenous quasimilitary police force to defend and protect (or one day overthrow) the freely elected government of Haiti. The DCM, suited up for the team at State, has a low opinion of the elected government, finds himself persuaded by the arguments, if not the morals, of the elite families, and is intrigued by this warlord up in Cap-Haïtien, a former comrade of the guerilla hero Jacques Lecoeur, a messianic braggart who claims he has been chosen to bring true democracy to his nation. The CIA has been funding this guy, Ti Phillipe, the commander of the Cap-Haïtien police force, but they’ve been funding him on the sole principle that the Agency funds everybody, and they know this guy has serious, perhaps insurmountable public relations problems, plus there’s an issue with his mental health. The DEA is in play too, lobbying its interagency counterparts to preserve the status quo.

  Whoopee, Burnette says to himself with the blackest cynicism when he’s back that night on the island, driving north with Gerard toward a possible coup supported by half the embassy, with the other half supporting a countercoup, which Burnette himself and his D-boys have been sent in to assist. By the time they reach Plaisance, thirty miles south of Le Cap, Burnette observes solid evidence of how Colonel Dupuys has spent the past three days negotiating with Ti Phillipe, the talks no more than a stalling technique while Dupuys musters loyal forces from throughout the island, the roadside through Plaisance lined with cattle trucks and pickups and SUVs ferrying north a hundred members of the national police and palace guard. End of story, really. Burnette hooks back up with Tilly and Spank, who have almost succumbed to boredom, and the next day and the following day the D-boys are in discreet attendance of the rout, Dupuys and his men driving Phillipe and his men out of the city west to Fort-Liberté and then, after the gesture of a last stand, over the DR border into exile.

  Dupuys reconstituted the Cap-Haïtien force, installing loyalists from the capital and the central plateau, outsiders destined to indulge in their own salad days of abuse and corruption. Burnette got on the satphone and called in a ride home for Tilly and Spank and then cajoled Gerard to take him up into the mountains to track down Margarete and her brother, found them well and safe and Reginald determin
ed to rebuild their lives on their own land, in their own place, and Burnette vowed to help.

  On his last day in Haiti, in Port-au-Prince, Burnette paid a visit to the American consulate, checking on a visa application for Gerard and then, his request spurned, paid a visit to the American embassy, where he was made to wait at the receptionist’s desk until he found himself suddenly flanked by a pair of marines and a flak from State, his escort to the airport.

  Au revoir, Haiti.

  Book Five

  Prelude: Enough Is How Much?

  Oh, but the end of safety comes to us all. Right to where we live. My dear, someone once said, security is superstition. The fearful are caught as often as the bold. And only faith defends.

  —Jacki Lyden, Daughter of the Queen of Sheba

  This is how the dead come back to us, he thinks, rotting angels, bagged and tagged and shipped home to America in the deceptively clean and shiny crates of their uselessness. Dispensed, expired, return to sender. The sight, its mimicry, feels vaguely sacrilegious. He has never seen a flag-draped coffin loaded onto a C-130 before and the fact of it this time is wrong but how to say something about that to the marines from the embassy and now he’s not sure what to do with the flag, the thick stiff starchy cloth like a pup tent or bistro awning folded sloppily in his hands and in his distraction he drops the flag to the floor of the aircraft, unaware of it underfoot.

  They are in the dark deafening tunnel of the fuselage, securing the metal casket to the bolts sunk in the deck and Burnette wants this crazy thing, this demented harebrained scheme, over with right now, there’s a Navy doctor in perturbed attendance who came in on the plane diverted from Gitmo, nervously agreeing, and as soon as the cargo officer gets off the intercom to the cockpit he raises the ramp on the C-130 and they’re rolling thunder across the tarmac and Burnette and the doc open the casket.

  Mother of God, says the medical officer. What the fuck is this?

  For the past twelve hours she has not spent more than sixty minutes out of Burnette’s sight but the blood still sickens him, dried in her hair and on her face and chest, necessary for the subterfuge on Route Nationale One and the Saint-Marc police station and at the Haitian coroner’s, and she looks genuinely dead and miraculously beatific, an early Christian saint pierced by pagan arrows or skewered by a legionnaire’s lance, her hands folded above her womb and the rosary she asked for recovered from her purse in the car and interlaced between her fingers like a binding web of pearls. Start talking, Sergeant, says Doc, pulling a stethoscope out of his black bag. I get a call from my command in Gitmo at 0430 telling me to get my ass on this bird and go to Haiti to monitor and assist in a NASA field test.

  NASA? Now it’s Burnette’s turn to be shocked. N-A-S-A?

  Correct, says the doc, poking a digital thermometer into her ear canal. Now what in God’s name is going on, man?

  Look, sir, says Burnette. I need to know your security clearance.

  I’m good on that, says Doc, trying to draw a blood sample from the crook of her arm. I was told I’d be monitoring a TS project in suspended animation. Give me a break, I told the guy. NASA’s doing long-term space travel experiments in Haiti? I don’t fucking believe it. Now I really don’t believe it, unless the idea is to send dead people to Mars.

  Is she dead?

  Pretty close. Who shot her?

  It was staged. That’s all I can say.

  Burnette tells Bòkò St. Jean to step up and revive her and Doc says, Wait, wait, wait, who’s this guy? He a doctor?

  Yeah, sort of, says Burnette. A bush doctor.

  Mother of God.

  Doc watches speechless, standing by with his stethoscope and a syringe full of atropine and another with epinephrine to plunge into her heart in the event of the houngan’s failure, but St. Jean prays and separates her blood-caked jaw and he takes a chicken feather and dips it into an old aspirin bottle and sprinkles the antidote into her mouth and steps back, praying still, a soundtrack of reverent mumbo jumbo to accompany the secular grand magic of chemistry. After a while her lips bunch sourly and her eyelids twitch though they remain closed and Burnette leans over her, waiting and holding his breath, terrified by her etiolated appearance, watching for her lungs to refill.

  Hold me up, she says from inside the coffin, the weakness in her voice causing him a twinge of despair. Eville? And her eyes are still sealed but her forearms lift and she gropes to be taken up, she gropes like a sightless infant for the support of his arms, fingers clenching and unclenching, the gold crucifix dangling between them in front of the faith of his own believing eyes. They are taxiing and turning into the wind and the engines scream and then they are in the rumbling air. He works his hands under her shoulder blades and his face is in the coffin his cheek to hers, his body radiating heat like a lamp, and he says, Ready, here we go, and lifts her to a sitting position and her chin cradles loosely on his collarbone. She feels like a corpse too, not rigid but inhumanly cold. Pulse is not great, says the leery Doc, who has seized one of her wrists.

  Burnette?

  I’m here.

  I don’t want to open my eyes, she says in a sick little girl’s voice.

  Why not?

  I like where I am.

  Where are you?

  I don’t know.

  Let’s get you out of this fucking box, he says. It’s giving me the creeps.

  He stands her upright, her arms still monkeyed around his neck and she says, I’m freezing, where are my shoes? and immediately her teeth chatter and her frame quakes and now he remembers the flag and knows what to do with it and she opens her eyes, which are vacant but then gradually her irises seem to collect the sun flaring through a port window, golden splinters of consciousness, an upwelling lambency of returning life, the opposite of what he had upon occasion observed in the eyes of the dying, dog or person or horse or elk all the same when the interior light flicked off in their eyes. Gone in an instant and you knew it.

  Can you stand on your own? he asks.

  Keep me warm, she stammers, and he makes her sit in one of the canvas seats along the fuselage and wraps her in the flag and she becomes giddy, makes a sound like an unhinged giggle that worries him, and he borrows a flight jacket from one of the crew and drapes it over her shoulders and sits down next to her and hugs her close and she says, That is so much better, Ev. The doc presses in with his stethoscope and examines her pupils with a penlight and says, If this wasn’t classified, boy, this would be one for the books, and Bòkò St. Jean nods sagely from his seat farther down along the wall and says, Pa pwobwem, pa pwobwem, Ayibobo, amen.

  I can’t believe you wrapped me in the flag, Dottie tries to joke, the words chopped through her busy teeth. I’ll never hear the end of it, she says, feigning some category of sartorial irritation, and Burnette is so relieved he momentarily chokes up before he pulls himself back together enough to croak, You look like hell.

  Thirsty, she says, and the doc comes back with a bottle of water and Burnette asks him to find a rag or hand towel or something and what she doesn’t drink he uses to begin a delicate cleansing of her face and throat, finally dabbing around the circumference of the real wound he fastidiously plugged into the side of her head with the empty sterilized brass casing of a .357 round, a tiny cookie cutter to stamp a precise hole, his frantic night-vision surgery the night before on the roadside near Tintayen, removing the perfectly round bullet-sized flap of skin with a scalpel from his medic’s kit, trying for a credible volume of her own blood without nicking a vein, St. Jean splashing a bottle of pig’s blood on her clothes and car seat to add to the illusion of gore, the police captain and the bokor’s nephew keeping Parmentier at bay across the road in the quarry.

  Ow, she says, jerking away from him. That fucking hurts.

  Your feeling’s coming back.

&nbs
p; And you thought I had none. Fuck, Ev! I said that hurts.

  As much as being dead?

  Being dead, she says and her voice trails.

  Every few seconds like a slowly blinking light she moans and he asks Doc to bring another bottle of water and his SF med kit which he opens and then twists the cap from a prescription and gives her a tablet and takes one for himself and she swallows it before asking what is it and he tells her oxcycontin, which is how he treats his back injury, and Doc, overhearing, says Go easy with that stuff and Burnette says, Roger that.

  They doze off together in the opiated warmth of their awkward cuddle and wake up on the touch down at MacDill and she squeezes his hand with a force that tells him her strength has returned and she says softly, Thank you, and tells him, Your gift to me is my death, and he doesn’t like the tenor of that and doesn’t know what she means and maybe she senses his puzzlement and disapproval because her attitude springs headlong forward to the self he knows best.

  I am your zombie bitch forever, she says, and he says that’s the last zombie joke he ever wants to hear. She looks at the aluminum casket, shuddering, and says I have to climb back in there, don’t I? and it’s different now and she doesn’t want to and asks for another one of his pills and then he lifts her back into the box and tucks the day pack with her personal effects next to her side. He’s already feeling queasy himself when she says she might throw up and it’s a grim moment when he lowers the lid, her eyes watching his as it brings its darkness over her, and then the ramp is down and he can see the hearse out there and the reception of another honor guard and they take her away as a Jane Doe to the morgue, the Navy doc riding with her, and they clear the area of all personnel and here she is again, popping out of the death cake and onto a gurney to be whisked to an isolation ward at the base hospital for two days of observation and interviews, access restricted to a small cadre of wide-eyed doctors, military neurologists and psychiatrists joined by her professor from Harvard and an agency scientist, a biochem specialist from a disbanded DOD team formerly tasked with conducting psychotropic experiments on enlisted men at Fort Dexter, Maryland, during the 1980s, and, yes, some space agency geek from Hunstville, the calculated decision to use the houngan’s powders a natural outcome of a highly classified research mission that from the beginning carried a NASA imprimatur. Her final visitor, at dinnertime on her last night there before discharge, is her father.