Bob Shacochis - The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

Tom merged with the traffic headed into the city, four lanes on a two-lane road and everybody doing as he pleased. Over on the right, that big compound is the LIC, he said. The Americans headquartered there, once they secured the airport.

Yeah, yeah, fuck, said Dolan, paling, his attention fixed nervously on the road. You’re driving too fast.

I should probably tell you about Eville, said Tom.

On his final visit to the LIC, Harrington was overwhelmed by its stark atmosphere of pathos and impending abandonment, and it struck him as a pitiful thing when a great army decamps quietly at the end of an ambiguous campaign, neither victorious nor defeated but simply done, a giant suddenly weary of his own strength and the raw lack of circumstances to use it properly, the world rendered arbitrary by a vacuum of purpose. What was once a paranoid protocol of security checkpoints, identity confirmations, pat downs and wandings and assigned escorts from the Public Affairs office had dwindled to a lone guard waving Tom through the gates and past the outdoor souvenir market, an on-base convenience for the eternally busy Americans, the vendors staring out from their ramshackle kiosks like people resigned to the perpetuity of their thirst. They were there to sell to the soldiers, but the soldiers were gone. Well, very near gone.

It was late in the afternoon the day of the inauguration and Tom had just come from the ceremony at the palace, where he had stood sweating on the lawn in front of the portico, straining to make out the portentous words of the new president, wearing for the first time the tricolored sash of his office, as he addressed his nation. He was tall and gaunt, bearded and handsome, impeccably dressed in a black suit — a former baker converted to the religion of politics by an ex-priest ascended through the politics of religion, but he mumbled into the thicket of microphones on the podium, and Tom couldn’t understand him.

What’s he saying? Tom asked a stick-thin Haitian journalist pressed against him in the crowd.

I don’t know, either, said the Haitian. He’s drunk.

Did he just say, Fuck America?

Non, monsieur, the journalist smiled with sly eyes, enjoying the question. The president cannot say that today. The president said, Beaucoup. Merci beaucoup, America. Tomorrow he can say this other thing.

A dwindling afternoon of sepia-tinted air and smoky, dark palm silhouettes in the gauze of light. In a grove of hardwood trees next to the cavernous metal building where the military had established its command and control center, Harrington saw what he mistook for a barbecue, merry soldiers in running shorts and olive T-shirts attending burn cans topped by a blue whip of flames. Out the open door at the side of the building — a former warehouse for the boatloads of cheap bras and dime-store undies manufactured at the LIC before the embargo crushed what passed for an economy in Haiti — another soldier appeared with another carton of documents to tilt into the burn, the attendants stirring the heavy sheaves of files with iron rods, a self-cleaning military, emptying the infinite bureaucracy of its mind of petty obsessions, institutional whisperings, the myriad little secrets of the occupation. If you wanted to know what happened here, he thought, learn to read the ashes.

Anybody seen Eville? Tom had asked.

Who?

Master Sergeant Eville Burnette, Third Group Special Forces.

Their shaved heads nodded him through the door and his boots echoed the length of the concrete, through a space he had last seen veined with cables and wires and branchings of line, everywhere hookups and uplinks and patch-ins into the mad electric flow of information, wall to wall with cubicles and folding cots, gear everywhere, coffee urns and water coolers, uniforms bull-penned in a cacophony of briefings and debriefings, the human heat and stifling wet air shoved back and forth by industrial fans. Troops sacked out, officers on the phone, on the computer, talking to satellites, officers giving stand-up interviews to the networks, troops watching themselves on CNN, and if you asked anybody inside the LIC what was going on, the only true and enduring answer you could never get was, Nothing, or simply, Behold — we exist .

Tom loved coming here, the odd sense of visiting a very efficient factory that produced essentially useless things.

The Special Forces hated it at the LIC. Coming out of the countryside to Port-au-Prince, coming to headquarters, was the worst sort of punishment they could handle without dropping their legendary composure and going berserk. Here, in the LIC, generals weaned on the Cold War screamed about their mustaches, about the sleeves of their battle-dress blouses tucked in a jungle roll, told them to put their helmets on, take their sunglasses off. Stand straight, put on your seat belt, get a haircut now, I want to hear you sons of bitches speaking English. Yessir, sir. When they left their outposts in the hinterlands and walked into the LIC to deal with the conventional army, the SF pretended they were among foreigners, in another country altogether where they may or may not be the enemy.

Eville and his team had been up north in Saint-Marc, the last Special Forces unit to be pulled back to the capital and now the last operational detachment left in Haiti, assigned the delicate honor of training a palace guard, the president’s own private army, its predecessor known worldwide and to history as the Ton Ton Macoutes, a synonym for paramilitary terror. They were the debutantes of the inauguration, the new guard, their presence heralding the official end to the American intervention in Haiti, and since the palace guard had gotten through the day without launching a coup d’état, and had further established its professionalism by restraining its natural urge to shoot, beat, or club the citizens, Harrington imagined Eville and his guys would be congratulating themselves for this memorable afternoon spent in the maternity ward of democracy, handing out cigars.

But inside the LIC that day instead of celebration he found only gloom and disgust, its mighty enterprise humbled into the far corner of the vast warehouse that was a constantly shrinking warren of plywood stalls, bare walls without ceilings, blankets and rain ponchos draped for doors. Before calling Eville’s name, Tom stood on the threshold of the colony and listened: the springy patter of a keyboard, faraway rock and roll leaking out from someone’s headphones, a tubalike fart greeted by a groan.

In here, said Eville, and his voice led Tom through the maze to the sergeant’s kennel.

Eville sat on the edge of his cot, hunched over, elbows on his knees, the son and grandson and great-grandson of a Montana ranching family, staring at his massive steer-roping hands as if they had been painted with disgrace. Tom lowered himself down on a footlocker facing him and sat quietly for a while, waiting for Eville to speak but he could not stitch together words and Tom was bewildered and saddened by the sight because the master sergeant was a strong man in every way, open and true even in his unmilitary emotions, and now Tom was seeing him made weak.

Say, Ev, you all right, man?

His team had been shipped out in the middle of the night. No warning, said Eville, nothing, just, Listen up, girls, there’s a C-130 waiting for you at the airport and I want you on it in one hour because you are outta here . Eville raised his head, his eyes red with the sting of betrayal. They left me and Stew and Brooks to sweep up, we have a couple more pallets to pack and then that’s the ball game, back to Bragg by the end of the week, Hey baby, I’m home, let’s pick up the pieces of our sorry-ass lives . He paused and shook his head like a boxer after a roundhouse punch, his flat, plain face contorted by anguish, and said softly — Eville was always soft-voiced, you could look at him and guess that about him — Man, we should have been there today. We were screwed by our chain, man.