Bob Shacochis - The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

Command — not Special Operations but the dinosaurs, the fossils, the holdbacks in the regular army, the ones still fighting communists and Vietnam — had forbidden Master Sergeant Eville Burnette and his captain and warrant officer and the nine other commandos on their A-team to go anywhere near the National Palace during the inauguration, and it didn’t matter that the team had a right to be there in the background, taking pride in the moment with the men they had trained, and it no longer mattered that for eighteen months, while the Green Berets had been living hard and working like sled dogs, the politicians in Washington couldn’t decide who the enemy was. Were the good guys the bad guys or were the ones they had come here to kill — the macoutes and the vampires and the tyrants — the bad guys, and after a while it seemed the answer was, well, everybody’s a bad guy but work with them anyway. But now here was a fresh new answer, definitive and irreversible, the bad guys were the Special Forces, a magnet for negative press, straggling back in from their little kingdoms with weapons missing and vehicles unaccounted for, guilty of the twin heresies of self-reliance and self-importance, and no one stepped forward to protect them from the outrage of the generals.

It always fucking ends this way, said Eville, and Tom couldn’t help but feel sorry for him, his congenital optimism replaced by this devastation of malaise, the insinuation that he had not done the job he had been asked to do, that he had somehow performed shoddily, dishonorably. Harrington, who had seen them, watched them — Eville and his men and other Special Forces teams salted throughout Haiti — knew that the truth burned brightly at the other end of the spectrum. They came and left with a deep faith that they could fix things, but they couldn’t fix Haiti, and now in their failure they had begun to hate the island in order to keep from doubting themselves.

Eville Burnette waved off Tom’s attempt to commiserate; he didn’t need an apologist and he didn’t want a cheerleader and they would have this mandatory silence between them on the subject of failure. Instead Harrington invited him to dinner the following night though he wasn’t sure if anyone was actually free to leave the base.

Bring some friends if you want.

I have friends? Eville asked, but he was smiling.

The sergeant warmed to the idea of stepping out, stepping away, the one thing you could almost never do on a deployment but who was left to tell him no. His mood swung up and the smile expanded into his eyes. Hey, he said. It’s okay. I did what I came to do, the people of this country are free again, we only lost one of our own, and I didn’t have to kill anyone.

But Harrington found himself thinking darkly that maybe we’d all be better off if you had.

Harrington and Dolan came to a stop in an infernal tangle of traffic, opposing lanes suddenly head-to-head, drivers standing in the road engaged in the popular theater of shouting matches.

Connie Dolan said with a mischievous lilt that he had no idea humanitarian do-gooders like Tom were inclined to be so kissy with the military and then laughed when he saw the spark in Harrington’s eyes. No, come on, he said. What’s the deal with Eville?

This is an easy one, Tom said, his voice deliberately tight. What did you say you used to do? Special agent for what?

Okay, I got it, said Dolan, bemused. Everybody gets a kick out of playing wiseass with cops, right? You want me to guess. He knew the girl.

Right, but Tom didn’t know how the sergeant knew her, only that he had the uncomfortable feeling they knew each other from somewhere else besides Haiti. There was something about them together I couldn’t see, couldn’t understand, said Tom. Something about their relationship was really off. Or really on. Maybe that was it.

You’re saying they had a thing together.

I doubt any man could have a thing with Jackie.

You say that because?

She was insane.

Dolan seemed to consider this. And you’re familiar with the insane, he said. That’s not a question.

That goddamn girl, Tom said, talking to himself, a gravelly release of breath. She had managed to make him less of a man than he thought he was and he had done everything he could to forget her, to will her nonexistent, but there was no reprieve from a succubus and for the two years since he had last seen her Jackie had found her way into his dreams, waiting there for him on the street corner of his libido like a neighborhood whore, and now here out of the blue was Dolan, delivering her volatile presence back into Tom’s life and in that respect it hardly mattered if she were dead or not.

What do you mean, That’s not a question ? he said, snapping at Dolan. What the fuck is that supposed to mean, I’m familiar with the insane ?

It’s a joke.

Give me a heads-up the next time you plan on being funny.

Drivers slammed horns, threw up their arms, got out, yelled, and Tom thought, being summoned as an expert witness to pronounce over the dark adventure of Jackie’s life was the last thing he ever wanted to be doing with his own and yet once again he was trapped by his unhealthy curiosity for her. Unhealthy to the point of diseased, he’d say — he had caught something from her, some decay transmitted from soul to soul, but then he recollected contemptuously that by her own admittance she lacked a soul.

At the intersection ahead they could see a scarecrow of a man urging a dump truck to back up to allow a group of men to push a battered pickup, its bed loaded with passengers who refused to get out, off the road where a row of grimy makeshift garages strewn with iron carnage awaited it. Across the street, a dealership’s lot was filled and gleaming with row after row of Japanese-made SUVs. A few minutes later a pair of men dressed only in soiled pants, a ruffle of sweat at each man’s waistband, came weaving through the clot of traffic with a casket balanced on their heads, six brass handles to a side and upholstered in velvet the color of a green lollipop. Good God, Dolan observed drily, they’s burying James Brown, and they inched forward toward the sooty crucible of the city.

What do you think? Tom asked Dolan, nodding out the windshield as they began to enter the ramshackle neighborhoods and Dolan said he’d seen worse, the slums of Rio, San Juan, Bogotá. But he hadn’t seen anything yet.

Where the road gullied at the next intersection a traffic cop stepped out of nowhere and whistled for Tom to stay put and when Tom tried to go around the policeman skipped in front of him and banged his fist on the hood. All right, Tom said, smiling coldly back at the man’s glare. No problem.

And as they sat watching the cross traffic pour through he told Dolan of the night a month after the invasion when he was stopped in this exact spot, everything pitch-black except the double and sometimes triple row of taillights of the cars in front of him snaking up the hill toward the choke point at Delmas, bumper-to-bumper and no one moving, no one coming down, either, because the people trying to go up had blocked the lanes. A storm that had been up on the mountains had slid down on them and it rained catastrophically for twenty minutes like it was coming out of a fire hose, a constant artillery of thunderclaps. In the white flash of lightning he saw a roaring avalanche of broken, brilliant glass crashing down, and then it stopped for a minute and Tom rolled down his window to get some air. Everything was quiet, people had turned off their headlights and everything was dark. Then he began to hear a deep, approaching rumble and as the wall of water came down the gully Tom could hear the screams of the passengers inside one of the cars in front of him as it surged up and rolled and tumbled in the flood down toward the sea. Lightning flashed again and he could see people, families, children, swept out of their shacks, their arms flailing, the water rising until he could feel it tugging at his front wheels and he got out shaking and went down the line of cars behind him trying to get people to back up but they were paralyzed. Tom could see the glowing terror of their eyes as he came out of the darkness to their windows, the white ball of his face bobbing around, adding to the horror, but the flash flood wasn’t the worst of it.