The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover (71 page)

He turned on the television, hoping to catch the weather on the late local news, but
the broadcast was wrapping up with sports and she said, Let’s not worry about the
weather, let’s just go. Drive all night, be there in the morning—doesn’t that sound
great? she said, watching him consider it, watching him waver. Come on, she said,
tell me one good reason why we should wait until tomorrow? Are you too tired to drive?
I’ll drive. Or, she said, we can pack the truck and do what’s left of the coke and
hit the road. He blinked at her, nodding uncertainly and then just nodding, giving
in and not unhappy about his surrender, saying, As influences go, you are definitely
not good for me.

They hauled the gear out and stowed it and stretched a tarp over the truck bed and
tied it down and came back inside and split the last of her coke and she went to the
fridge and opened beers for the road and he took his beer and said, I believe there
goes my life, I’ll be busted before we’re a mile out of town and she said, thank God
we’re not risk takers, right, or who knows what the fuck we’d be doing.

As soon as he felt the coke sear the membrane in his nose for the first time in more
than a year he craved a cigarette and when they stopped to gas up he went inside to
buy a pack of Camels. I want one too, she said as they drove off. Let’s be bad in
all the normal wholesome ways. Reprobates, he said, is what we are. She turned on
the radio and spun through the dial until he said, Stop, that’s my parents’ tunes,
they loved that fifties stuff, and she slid across the seat next to him and he said,
Yo, seatbelt, we’re already asking for trouble and she quoted from
Romeo and Juliet,
all the world will be in love with night, and told him she wasn’t driving to the
beach at midnight with an attractive, kissable hunk of a soldier boy—Did we ever kiss?
No
. That’s what I thought—listening to sock hop music and feeling so good only to strap
herself in on the other side of the cab, a thousand miles away from her mood.

They headed away from the city lights, east on Route 24 toward the coast. When they
weren’t singing along with the Shirelles or Leslie Gore or the doo wop groups, Ev,
amped up and unusually talkative, riffed about some new experimental type of D-boy
training he had begun out west before he was yanked for Haiti—aikido, a martial arts
regimen on the surface but something a bit New Age queer the more you sank into it,
he said, developing your so-called inner technology. You heard anything about that?
Biofeedback? Meditation?

Meditation? she snorted. Now there you have two things that don’t go together—meditation
and killing.

I don’t know, he said. The longer I had to sit still, the more I wanted to shoot the
instructor.

She could feel the bigness of his coyote grin before she turned to admire it and be
uplifted, the harmony of the alcohol and the stimulant, the cigarettes and music,
the flirty patter and the mellow springtime air and the lunar gleaming and the motion,
all the fine small things in the world simulating a sense of romantic buoyancy that
she hadn’t experienced, or granted herself, in ages, without pretending.

It took an hour for the station to fade and by then they were deep into the Tidewater,
past Roseboro and Clinton and out into the farmscape of old plantations where America
first practiced being America, the moon-lit antebellum mansions now timeworn anomalies
between the more regular intervals of less-old sharecroppers’ shacks and lesser old
trailer homes and featureless brick houses, the big estates parceled among the many,
this field of new corn and this field of cotton and this field of tobacco and this
pasture fallow, overgrown with abandonment or dispute, the land sandy and honeysuckled,
wrapped in kudzu and flat as a lake encompassing a vast archipelago of pines, stray
covens of fog along the bottoms where the sluggish rivers and creeks lay like serpents.
Without asking, she turned off the radio and the middle of the night pressed into
them and made them contemplative, smoking and nursing their beers, and after a long
silence she said, Is it all right if I ask you about killing?

At first she thought the answer was no because he didn’t answer her and the abrupt
torque of his nerves was so tangible she felt it ratcheting into her own neck and
shoulders. She said, Is that a weird question—knowing full well it was, even for
people like them, the cause of chronic moral indigestion. I don’t mean to sound depraved,
she said. I just want to know what you know. Maybe you can’t tell me. Maybe there’s
nothing to say, and she gasped as he swerved suddenly and pulled off the road, mad
at her, she could only surmise, but he waited for the headlights far behind them to
float past and got out to take a leak and climbed back into the driver’s seat with
another cold beer for each of them. I’m just trying to figure out how to begin, he
said, and she nodded gratefully, her attention there for him as if it were something
much more than just ears and listening. I guess the first thing I want to say, he
said, hesitating, and they were on the road again, the truck accelerating through
its gears through the countryside.

The first thing I want to say is SF black, if that’s who you were, meant the stories
were taken away from you, Eville said. Even without instructions and oaths he had
little desire to talk about his missions anyway. Speaking would diminish them, shit
begins to sound all B-movie, speaking would merely dilute the narratives into sensational
tales that everybody loved and nobody understood.

Outside of the Wall, he told her, you’re probably the one person on earth I can tell.

He had no desire to kill anybody, except sometimes he really did. In Haiti when they
told him to get out there and train the detainees to be cops and the other cops to
be better cops, some guys were ancien régime, some were guerillas, and they all hated
each other and he tried not to hate them, but it wasn’t difficult to come to terms
with the feeling that the day might arrive when he would have to shoot one of them,
somebody turning against him in an unacceptable and absolute way, the most likely
candidate for a bullet being Ti Phillipe. The recruits seemed consumed by a shifting
array of little moods, pinned to imagined slights, and it made him more combative,
more volatile, more prone to petty aggression, until he began to see how it was he
might become a person no one who thought they knew him well would ever recognize or
accept.

When he was younger, before the military, he told her, my imagination, my tough-guy
schemes, were about protecting every girl and woman from the man he himself might
be without an imagination. That sense of vigilance, of being poised to step into the
middle of something, never disappeared, it just expanded outward to the nation, but
in Haiti I could see how easy it would be to shrink the whole trip down to an enraged
redneck walking around purifying the earth of its infestations.

But here’s what I want to tell you, he said. How many years have I been in uniform
now? Since I was twenty-one. And I never killed anybody, at least as far as I know,
until my command—your father was in on this—sent me to the Balkans last year to work
on a hunter-killer team with a Croatian counterpart, a colonel named Vasich. I don’t
know why you asked about killing—okay, I suppose I do—but this is the only story I
have. That’s funny, right? Trained to kill for years and just one story. So we’re
in Sarajevo, okay. We have a list, some names, and we’re tracking people. Terrorists.

Before they could get to the Palestinian with American blood on his hands, the Mossad
got to him first. Then Vasich and Burnette sat shivering their asses off for two days
in an urban hide, staring through their scopes at the windows of an eighth-floor apartment
in a concrete building across and down a bullet-pocked block. Late on the second afternoon
the Iranian appeared in the apartment and they watched him sit down on a couch in
the small living room. Me the spotter (a legality issue), Vasich the shooter, and
I’m the American talking through the steps with this guy—range confirmed, wind speed
negligible, identity confirmed. Fire when ready—
Wait.
A woman dressed in cosmopolitan clothes entered the frame of Burnette’s scope and
sat down next to the target on the couch and then in the next instant her blouse and
face darkened with a heavy splatter of her companion’s brains and she appeared not
screaming but stunned, her hands swiping at the pieces of flesh in her eyes while
Vasich already had the rifle broken down and back in its case. You didn’t wait, said
Burnette as they walked to the stairwell at the rear of the hide. Wait for what, said
Vasich. For them to make
mujo
babies?

The assassination of the Iranian exhausted the only target list Burnette was aware
of but Colonel Vasich had no intention of ending their partnership, and Burnette soon
understood why. In Bosnia, Vasich was a target himself, his presence as a foreign
combatant unacceptable to the NATO command, which was still trying to separate the
ethnic groups from one another and sort out the wholesalers, the bona fide war criminals,
from the run-of-the-mill retail killers. I need your help, the colonel announced.
It will be a good thing for your country, I promise. Burnette’s encrypted e-mail bounced
back an answer from Fort Bragg in less than an hour.
Stick with Vasich until told otherwise.
We need transport, said the colonel, and they took a taxi to the NATO motor pool at
the airport and several hours later Burnette had persuaded the officer in charge to
call a number at the allied headquarters in Brussels for clearance and they drove
off in an armored SUV, back to the safe house to pick up their rucks and weapons and
then up into the mountains and its still-smoldering patchwork of battlefields, staying
that night with an American Special Forces A-team billeted in a ruined village, everything
destroyed except the eternal hatreds.

In the morning, they headed higher and deeper into a zone of fluctuating hostility,
a ravaged world haunted by its starving survivors, plunging along the slushy ruts.
Do you have a wife? the colonel asked Burnette. Do you have a son? Vasich had traded
with a Russian kill team—a clandestine cell of Chechens for the Bosnian Serb militia
leader who had raped his wife and murdered his twelve-year-old boy. You fall on your
knees thanking God, said Vasich, when God lets you bargain with the devil for revenge.
For two hours they drove on back roads through the mountains, almost impassable tracks
sometimes barricaded by snow drifts where they were forced to dig their way through,
high into the subalpine wilderness, Burnette feeling strangely back home in the evergreens
of Montana, until shortly before dawn the colonel said pull over by this stream and
they stopped near a brook tumbling in white cascades down the mountainside and washed
their faces with the freezing water. Vasich clawed through his ruck and emerged with
bread and cheese and, already in his mouth, a bottle of slivovitz, which he passed
to Burnette. Back and forth it went, the bottle emptied as the sun rose behind the
eastern slope of the peaks and the colonel passed out in the backseat and Burnette
was swirling in the front of the SUV, his eyes closed but his mind clamoring, much
too jazzed to connect with sleep, thinking about something Scarecrow had told him,
the Crow a Ranger during the Panama op and then deep behind the Iraqi lines with his
A-team chasing scuds during Desert Storm. War, Scarecrow had said, it’s just like
pussy. You don’t know why you want it but you gotta have it. And then afterward, you’re
looking at yourself asking yourself, Why the hell did I want that? And where can I
get some more? and Burnette stared out the window at the serenity of spruce trees
and their frosted needles and thought,
A little more would be all right
.

Vasich leapt awake looking ten years older saying, Let’s go. They drove west, somewhere
in the mountains three hours later crossing an unmarked border between Bosnia and
Croatia, then driving south until they reached a Croatian town and Colonel Vasich
announced, Now we are home. They drove to the scarred center, masonry spewed out into
the streets as if the city’s walls had vomited out their guts, and parked at a municipal
building while Vasich went inside to find a working telephone. Good, he said returning
a half hour later, we have now our appointment, and they drove on into a neighborhood
of houses traumatized by shelling and close-quarter combat, chimneys vanished, facades
herniated and bulging or slumped into rubble, stubborn flower gardens decorated with
a glitter of glass shards, stucco cratered and blackened by scorch, families gathered
under bright blue tarps, cooking their midday meals. Here, turn in here, gestured
Vasich eagerly, and Burnette pulled into the yard of a cottage with half its roof
of red tiles blown off and away.

His wife was named Dajana, a blonde-haired overweight woman with a pugilist’s broken
nose and dentures that caused her to lisp. She was wearing camouflage pants and a
black flannel shirt and she sat on a decrepit water-stained couch, petting a sickly
little white dog curled like a festering hairy fetus in her lap, cigarette butts crushed
under her military boots on the concrete floor, her bowed head jerking up to register
the presence of her husband and his companion. Vasich, physically effusive with his
affection, sauntered forward to bend himself into an embrace and kiss her on the forehead,
stroking her limp hair, and when he stepped back she remained as she was, vacant-eyed
and unmoved, even as he introduced her to his friend the American. He spoke to her
for a minute in their language and she pushed the dog away and raised herself with
a wet sigh and went into the kitchen and Vasich went to the side table filled with
family photographs in tin frames and picked one up to hand to Burnette—My son—first
his son, a tow-headed, hawk-faced lanky kid in a soccer uniform, then his wedding
portrait—Look how beautiful my Dajana was—although she clearly was never attractive,
even as a bride, and then the third picture he wanted Burnette to see was Dajana in
uniform, a guard at a detention camp operated by the Croatian army during the war,
two knives strapped to her service belt and one protruding from her left boot. She
did her duty, said the colonel, and now they want to charge her. Who? said Burnette.
The Hague, those bastards, said her husband. She had been gang-raped by the Muslims,
had lost a kidney to a bomb blast, and had shrapnel in her skull. Yes, of course,
she killed the
mujos
in the war, he said. What do you expect? Sometimes hand to hand, and I am proud.
Later, back in Sarajevo, Burnette would hear the stories of the colonel’s wife in
the detention camp, accused of multiple atrocities—carving crosses into prisoners’
foreheads, slitting a man’s throat and making his cellmates lap up his blood, forcing
men to drink gasoline and then putting a match to their lips, cutting off the penis
of a man she said she had witnessed rape and kill a teenage girl. She is a human being,
said the colonel, she watched our son bleed to death before her eyes, she is guilty
of being a mother and a woman, what do you expect?