The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (63 page)

Just accept it, man, he snapped in English.
Comprenez?

Oui,
noncomittal.

Comprenez Anglais?

No.

Okay then, pal. Let’s just keep it to ourselves.

They arrived at the central police station downtown with its bullet-riddled exterior,
shot up by the marines in the first week of the invasion. This was not the deliverance
the detainees had imagined and they became unruly with resentment and everybody, even
the police and Dupuys, looked at Burnette as if he were to blame. Eventually the men
were processed and registered and taken upstairs and divided between two large cells.
He told them it was his understanding they’d be out of there in a few days and asked
them to be patient and said give me your word you won’t try to escape and they narrowed
their eyes and stared at him as if he were Mephistopheles reincarnate. I know you’re
innocent, he said, although the truth was that he really didn’t know squat about any
of them. He went back downstairs to the front desk and saw Ti Phillipe in an animated
and unnervingly jocular conversation with some of the cops and he waited for Major
Dupuys to get off the phone and said, What about Phillipe? and the major smiled and
told him that Ti Phillipe had agreed to be his deputy. Burnette rocked back on his
heels and said, Whoa, that’s what I call a reversal of fortune. He borrowed one of
Dupuys’s men and returned to base and filled up the back of the CUCV with cartons
of MREs and bottled water and drove back to the station and kept a carton of each
for Margarete and unloaded the rest for the prisoners. The rules of the game, he told
Major Dupuys. Unless you want me breathing down your neck night and day, I have to
be able to trust you. You can trust me for three days, said Dupuys. Then I am letting
them go.

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 requiring 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 allowed 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.

Then, deep in the regimen’s warrior-zone and not welcoming the interlude, in August
he was summoned once again by the Friends of Golf for another walk-and-talk, this
time to Virginia.

International Town and Country Club, August, 1996

They were on the back nine, Eville Burnette patrolling the sloped shore of a small
green lake pressed down glassy smooth against the contours of the rising Piedmont,
the fairway behind him flanked by magnificent groves of old-growth hardwoods, oaks
and ashes and maples, hickory and walnut, the greenery wilted by the heat and muggy
air that carried the mouldering cut-grass smell of deep summer sweetened by honeysuckle.
With lazy futility he waved at the cloud of gnats in front of his face and scanned
the shallows of the jade-colored water, wishing for his fly rod. The lake looked clean
and came fresh and slightly cool into his nostrils and, suspended out over the drop-off,
Eville could discern the long tapered shadows of a pair of dinner-sized fish.

He had lived in Carolina long enough to foster an appreciation for the pleasure of
a large-mouth bass rising to the fight, a true satisfaction but nothing like the thrashing
good fight of the native cutthroats or ten-pound rainbows that launched up out of
the depths of his parents’ lost world, his mother and father out on the crystal flow
of those Montana rivers in his father’s homemade wooden dory, the three bare-chested
little kids, the brothers, high-siding in the bow. A wild brand of happiness only
available in the West, uncensored and unregulated. His mother had taught her boys
how to fly-cast but Dawson himself had been a meat fisherman, a man who preferred
a baited hook held fast to the pebbled bottom by a wad of lead, and as an angler and
as a soldier, he scorned the modern and so-called enlightened practice of catch and
release. Whatever you beat needs to stay beaten, he liked to tell his sons.

He was developing some kind of dreamy feeling for this course, its swaths of antebellum
forests, rolling vistas of the confederacy, Manassas just up the road, Winchester
not far to the west, the old battlefields echoing in his imagination with the thunder
of cannonades and the fearless charge of cavalry, sabers clanging like blacksmith
hammers. Everything absorbed by his senses, here under the hazy white sun of Fairfax
County, every mote of scent, every pitch of sound, reminded him of a beautiful pain
within his rib cage, the tender hurt that was always there inside, mostly quiet, when
you loved your country as much as Eville Burnette loved America. It wasn’t a matter
of being raised a certain way, although he was. It was a matter of gratitude, the
thing that you were called upon to feel if you ever hoped to be a decent man, or a
soldier.