Bob Shacochis - The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

Do you think he can help me? she said.

Who? Help you what?

This voodoo person. Help me get my soul back.

I don’t know. Ask Gerard.

I am a Christian, Gerard protested from the backseat, and Tom doubted whether he had heard such nonsense between blans in his entire life.

But he’s a priest, right? she persisted. A type of priest.

Yes, a houngan, Tom said again. The best ones were keepers of an encyclopedic knowledge of folk medicine, they were repositories of the history of their people, they single-mindedly preserved the songs and rituals that shaped the Haitian psyche, they practiced healing and they battled against darkness, as any truly religious person does. The worst ones trafficked in nightmares, when they weren’t trafficking narcotics. I don’t know if this houngan in Saint-Marc is a good one or a bad one, he said, and if she was determined to see a priest, why not start on more familiar ground and go speak to a Catholic priest, someone with whom she might at least share a culture and common language of faith.

They don’t know anything, she said matter-of-factly. They’re part of the whole fucked-up problem.

You’ve talked with them then? he asked, and received, in the peripheral frame of his glance, a thin-lipped frown and an angry toss of her head in reply. No answer. No comment. My spokesperson will have a statement for you in the morning. Jackie was beginning to rattle him. Lost your soul, eh? Tell me about it. Lost your soul? Listen, who cares? He tried to stop caring, that occupational habit, but for Tom caring was a need, however deformed, and he couldn’t make it go away, he could only be a smart aleck about it.

They crested a bald hill at a speed that caused a moment’s sensation of levitation inside the car, the threat of being sent airborne, and Tom swerved wildly to avoid a broken-down tap-tap parked half in the road, throwing Jackie into his side, their first touch, neither of them wearing seat belts. The lurching awoke Gerard out of his doze and Tom heard him clear his throat and spit out the window — the money was a godsend but Tom was fully aware that this day so far was beneath Gerard’s dignity, chauffeured around like some missionary boy — and Jackie, straightening up in her seat, seemed utterly unconcerned with both Gerard’s presence and Tom’s recklessness. Below them, the white sand of a crescent, palm-lined beach beckoned like a postcard, and they descended to where the road hugged the coast between sheer mountains and turquoise sea, such an inviting sea, the moist brine of its air a balm to the senses.

Several more miles up the road they flew by the entrance to the Moulin Sur Mer and went on to Saint-Marc and through the decaying hive of its center to the northern outskirts, in search of the metaphysically puzzling spark of whateverness the young and beautiful and immensely troubled Jacqueline Scott had declared as her soul.

That air of unfathomability that intelligent young women cultivated — what was that about, that calculated? that subconscious? that natural? turn in the self toward the art of deception? I am more than you see, and what you see is flesh? Duality (body and soul) begets duplicity (self and self and self and self, and who could dare say which one was real)? In any case, Jackie’s soul was gone.

Don’t laugh, she said, and Tom didn’t, but neither did he mourn or suffer, as one might, somewhere in one’s own soul, at the loss of another.

Above the city, high enough to give everything below its balconies the distance required to establish an appreciation for the disfigured beauty of Port-au-Prince, the Hotel Montana, flush from the windfall of the occupation, had renovated its terraces since Tom Harrington’s last visit, adding brooklike fountains and goldfish ponds, an oval poolside bar, a marble-tiled dining area open to sweet mountain breezes. Bougainvillea cascaded over the ledges into the clouds that passed above another less generous world. The elevation was not simply a physical fact of the hotel but a bracing state of mind as well, a reassuring sensibility, suggesting that the Montana was a fortress and sanctuary, evidenced most bluntly by the shotgun-carrying guard manning its steel gate, a secure oasis of calm luxury and competent service, a symbolic outpost for the globalization that Americans and Europeans, in their smiling overconfidence, were convinced would be tomorrow’s remedy for what ailed poor Haiti. The United Nations ran its office out of a ground-floor apartment; corporate businessmen met superbly dressed government ministers on the patio for lunch. Dignitaries stayed here, foreign-aid impresarios, mainstream correspondents intolerant of local color and unreliable phone lines, and now men like Conrad Dolan, private detectives on open-ended expense accounts. Scruffs lodged downtown at the infamous Oloffson, which Tom preferred, falling asleep to the disturbing lullaby of gunfire beyond the compound’s walls, although more often than he would have liked the nature of his business had made him a guest at the Montana, where his status as a professional would inflate in proportion to the surroundings. At least at the Oloffson, Tom reasoned, you knew you were in Haiti, not hovering above it with all the answers.

He left his bags and passport with Dolan, who lingered at the front desk, waiting for an introduction to the manager, and took a stool at the small bar off the lobby, the only customer and a greedy one, silently imploring the bartender to hurry with his rum sour, then drinking it down in gulps and ordering another, his thoughts clotted with the once living Jackie. He wanted to feel more for her — the anguish of her mortality and the terrible fullness of grief — but it wasn’t there; wasn’t, at least, available, and what he did not want to feel was what he seemed most in danger of, an ugly spreading stain of guilty relief that she was as far out of his life as the dead could be. But she was dead and he could not tell himself he was glad about it.

In a trance of return and memory, he gazed out toward the lobby as Connie Dolan stepped into it, paying a bellboy to carry the luggage to their rooms and Dolan then removed his blazer, hooking it over a shoulder with two fingers, turning and planting his feet to the expanse of the room, fixing himself into place with a predatory scan but there was nothing, nobody to merit his attention — two middle-aged white women on a bamboo-print couch sharing a pot of tea — until through the archway of the bar he spotted Tom, who regarded his approach for the first time with a healthy measure of suspicion.

Dolan eased himself down on an adjacent stool and wanted to know what Tom was drinking and they had an end-of-a-long-day contretemps, a testy little argument about whether Barbancourt or Havana Club, Flor de Caña or some swill Dolan had tasted in Bogotá, was the best rum in the world, and then as if to spite Tom, he ordered a vodka tonic and offered the gratuitous opinion that rum was an inferior liquor regardless of where it was manufactured or by whom. They shared a minute of petulance, nothing to say to each other while they finished their round and then backed up and began a fresh start with another, watching mindlessly the vivid green limes in the bartender’s black fingers, sliced and squeezed.

What was her name anyway?

Who? Dolan cocked his head just far enough to acknowledge Tom’s drink, Tom’s hand on his drink, if not Tom himself.

Dolan’s cooling into dyspeptic impersonality, both puzzling and a growing irritation, seemed to serve final notice that their relationship would not enjoy the harmony Tom had expected, that far from being Dolan’s guide and counsel, he felt himself being drawn into some vaguely macho competition, Dolan willing to challenge every trait of Tom’s, every insignificant decision and idle preference, on the base scorecard of who’s winning and therefore who’s not. Tom told himself to try not to make too much of it, that Connie Dolan was a cop and he was just being a cop, a big nasty dog, hard-nosed, mistrustful, and untrustworthy, not his sudden best friend or any friend at all. Jackie’s real name, Tom said with more sincerity. Back at the airport you said Jacqueline Scott was not her name.