“Out of hand?”
The colonel lowered his voice. “There’s no mandate to interfere in local actions unless the lives of your troops are in peril.”
Hall opened his mouth, then snapped it shut. He looked quick at the sky, then back down, dead-eyeing the colonel straight on. He set his face, then made his lips move; short, clipped words.
“There were shots fired. At my convoy. We reacted accordingly.”
The old colonel stared him straight back, wheels turning. You could see it, he was thinking so hard. Running down options, possibilities, probable outcomes, varied bad endings—trying to float Hall’s lie. Jersey was impressed the colonel was even considering it.
Seconds that ran for an hour, then finally, “That’s fourteen stories to get straight. In the time it takes to drive to the airport.”
Hall opened his mouth but the colonel immediately cut him off.
“I mean straight. Razor straight. No deviation. You can’t do it, Captain Hall. Don’t martyr yourself. The man in the tree is already dead. The other three are saved.”
He turned then and pointed. Jersey thought he was pointing at her, but the colonel was indicating the young sergeant next to her.
“At least one round came from that M-16. That’s a missing bullet. Even without a body there’ll be questions. You know that.”
Hall said something Jersey didn’t hear. Her eyes were flicking back and forth, from the two American officers to the now-circled cadre of FADH, all of them except their pissed-off commander with their hands at least half-raised.
Captain Hall spat on the ground. He looked at the colonel, then turned and looked at each of the American soldiers. His eyes met Jersey’s and stayed there a moment. She made no expression, continuing to shift her gaze from him to the FADH and back. When she looked again Captain Hall was nodding at his sergeant. Hall unholstered his pistol, pulling it free again, then stepped toward the FADH, gesturing.
“Back! Get back!” he yelled, then, to Jersey’s surprise, continued yelling but in what sounded like French and she guessed was Creole. The Haitians looked just as surprised as she was to hear their language coming from his mouth. A long string of something, Hall waving his arm at the FADH, waving them off the two injured men still on the ground. The young Latin sergeant joined him, M-16 leveled from his waist. “Step the fuck off! Get back!”
The FADH as a group backed away, putting themselves a few feet closer to the body hanging from the tree and a few farther from the two injured men. They were now terrified—not of the Americans, but of the crowd. Their weapons remained on the ground.
Is it friendly fire if your countrymen tear you limb from limb?Jersey thought.
Two and two and front-line view / bubbling FADH in the voodoo stew.
Captain Hall pointed to the crowd, at a group of men standing toward the front. He gestured, said a few clipped words in Creole, waving them in. They nodded and ran over, grabbing the bodies of the injured Lavalas demonstrators, pulling them back into the oblivion of the crowd, a cheer rising. Small victories. Jersey was watching Hall.He’s Haitian, she thought. Or something. His English was Brooklyn-perfect.
Jersey looked to check the anger level of the FADH, but all of them were past that now. Scared, with no weapons. Sweating, eyes flicking around, looking at this black American officer who spoke their language. Looking for escape.
The injured gone, the Latin sergeant two-finger pointed at two privates, then at the FADH’s weapons on the ground. “Rizzolo, Joe Brown. Sling your rifles. Grab this shit here and put it in the Humvees.”
“No,” Captain Hall said, barely audible. Then, louder, “Belay that, Sergeant.”
“Sir?”
“Hold.” Hall put his fist up. “Return to the vehicles, Sergeant Lamas. Squad withdrawal, by the numbers.”
“Sir? We can’t leave their weapons—”
“What part of ‘return to the vehicles’ didn’t you get, Sergeant?”
The young sergeant looked at his captain, eyebrows raised. Jersey watched, incredulous. Then saw the colonel, standing behind Captain Hall’s shoulder, rules-of-engagement paperwork in hand. She heard Pelton, under his breath, “What the fuck.”
A sunburned corporal hooked his thumb over his shoulder, indicating the crowd, a slow drawl from his thin lips. “These people gon’ git fucked, we leave weapons for the troops.”
But the sergeant had locked eyes with Captain Hall and like Jersey he knew the score now and already was holding his M-16 with just his right hand, pointing sharp with his fingers at his troops, coordinating the pull-back. He looked over at Jersey.
“Y’all get outta here, Sergeant Harris.”
She nodded, and turned with Pelton back toward the Humvees. Suddenly it seemed there were flies everywhere, and she waved her arm, shooing them from her face.
Two by two the infantry soldiers peeled off, falling back to the vehicles. The crowd watched with curiosity at first, not sure what was happening, then in mounting collective disbelief. Shouts and murmurs, then louder, and then, as it became clear the saviors were leaving the dragon alive and armed, people began running—running for cover, down the avenue, up alleys, bellowing a warning. The FADH were in just as much disbelief to see the Americans retreat, the commander—the only one who didn’t look surprised—eyeing the stack of rifles and pistols and batons like a starving man to a steak. Captain Hall, Sergeant Lamas, and the old, pale colonel stood alone in a circle in the park, then the colonel turned and jogged back toward the hummers. Hall and his sergeant stayed, and Jersey saw they were making sure the crowd was as gone as possible before they withdrew. Finally, Hall raised his pistol and pointed it at the FADH commander. Looking over her shoulder, Jersey winced. But he didn’t shoot. He yelled something, something in Creole. The FADH commander’s face didn’t move, didn’t flinch. Captain Hall lowered his pistol and walked to the hummers. Sergeant Lamas waited a few beats, then started walking half-backward, covering his captain’s retreat.
Captain Hall slammed an open palm down on the hood of the Humvee with the .50 cal gunner as he passed it. “Put a round in the dirt if they move toward those weapons before we’re out of sight,” he said.
The sergeant, right behind him, added quietly, “Only in the dirt, man. Only in the dirt.”
Scaboo and Riddle, who’d stayed with the .50 cal gunner, joined Jersey and Pelton.
“We’re not arresting those guys?” Scaboo asked, pointing the barrel of his M-16 toward the FADH.
“We’re not arresting them,” Jersey said.
“We’re not taking their weapons?”
“We’re not taking their weapons.”
Scaboo blinked, twice.
Riddle barked out a laugh. “Oh that makes sense!” He crawled into the Humvee. “Why exactly are we here?” Out of sight, his rant went on: “I liked yesterday’s plan better, when we were going to kill anything that moved. Can we go back to yesterday’s plan?”
Jersey raised her head to the Haitian hanging from the tree. “We should cut him down,” she said, but no one heard her. Everyone was scattering. She looked at her watch; they’d been on Haitian soil just over an hour. Her eyes went back to the lynching; she couldn’t stop looking at him. A crow was sitting on the branch the man hung from. Jersey wondered if the crow had seen the whole thing.
Strange witness,she thought.
Strange fruit.
There were no Haitian civilians left in the park, just a few across the street, watching from a distance; none of them smiling.
Run,she thought.Run now.
The 10th Mountain soldiers were almost all back in their vehicles, yelling signals to one another, covering points and confirming. They were muted now, though. Sweeping their fields of fire, especially the FADH standing in the park, but watching them Jersey could see they always came back to the man in the tree.
A group of children, ten, eleven years old, were at the Humvees now, not singing, not begging, just quietly standing with the Americans. No
where to go. The lead Humvee was pulling slowly away, the head of the blind American snake headed for the airport. Jersey, half in the vehicle, pulled her leg back out and jogged four quick steps to them. “Tory!” Riddle yelled at her, but she ignored him. The oldest was a girl, dirt-streaked and bare feet. “Run,” Jersey said to her, and then saw they were all girls. Three in shorts or pants, two in dresses, but all girls, quiet and scared. She put her hand out and grabbed the girl’s shoulder. “Run now. Fast.” She pointed across the street, toward an alley, away from the park. “Run, girls. Go.”
The oldest looked Jersey in the face, and nodded. She clucked at her group, the little ones pulling in closer to her. She said something in Creole, looking into Jersey’s eyes. “Just run. Run now,” Jersey said, then turned and swung herself into the Humvee as Riddle put it down in gear and pulled out with the convoy.
The kids were moving across the street, not as fast as Jersey would have liked, looking backward as they ran, at the park, and at the Americans. There were few people on the streets now. Jersey thought they would be yelling at the Americans, but those left were silent—too late for protest. They were moving out, moving away. Behind, the soldier/cops of the FADH stood stock-still in the same place, watching—amazed—as the convoy moved down the street. Two of them stepped toward their weapons but their commander growled and they stopped.Too bad, Jersey thought. She dearly would’ve liked to have seen the kid manning the .50 cal get trigger happy.
“This is fucked, yo,” Riddle said, steering.
She opened her mouth then closed it again, saying nothing.
“What’re you gonna tell the skipper?”
“I don’t know, Specialist Riddle,” she snapped. “What do you suggest?” She pulled her goggles back down over eyes, just another faceless grunt.
She realized she was soaking wet. Under the dead weight of the flak jacket, her BDU top and T-shirt and sports bra were plastered to her chest. She opened her mouth to say something else to Riddle, and instead her left hand clenched into a fist and she slammed it down on the dashboard. She turned suddenly and leaned out the window of the Humvee, looking back. The little girls were gone. The dead Lavalas supporter hung unmoving from the tree, the crow still above him. As the convoy swept around a corner, the last view Jersey had was the FADH, at the center of the empty park, bending down to retrieve their weapons.
Chapter
4
Hillside neighborhoods swept by, the convoy moving at a clip now, warm air rushing in the open window. Jersey and Riddle had no tactical radio for guidance or communication, and the marine-band handheld still clipped to Jersey’s flak jacket had lost signal just a few hundred yards from the boat. Pelton raised an open palm to them from his driver’s seat in the Humvee behind; other than that they were alone. Riddle talked and Jersey nodded absently, rifle in her lap, and she tried hard and failed to stop thinking about how it might feel to be hauled up into a tree by a rope around your throat.
The Humvees were winding down through the city, back toward sea level, descending from poor neighborhoods into desperately poor neighborhoods. Cité Soleil, the cruelest slum in the hemisphere, the convoy forced to slow again as avenues became streets and streets became cramped blind alleys and no one could tell Jersey they weren’t lost. They’d been driving too long and the route made no sense. The Captain’s convoy was lost. Alert again, rifle up, she leaned out the window, gasped from the stench, raw sewage under the wheels of the hummer.
No crowd and all crowd here, individuals, faces, eyes watching from behind flimsy curtains, or filling the space between two shacks. And then, for a dark stretch, even the shacks weren’t shacks, but dwellings without name, constructed in an evolutionary manner that changed with each passing storm and subsequent tidal flood. The eyes here were not just poor but hungry. Movements slower, gatherings smaller. But no less maimed and wounded than higher in the city; visible stumps and scars and once, close enough to touch as they passed, a face hollow and black and caved-in where eyes would have been, lids half enclosed in a scab of mucus.
“Dear Lord,” Riddle said.
“Grangou, grangou”—voices from the open fronts of shacks and cramped roadside.“Sils vouz plait, grangou,” empty palms out, tiny children’s hands and necks, skin stretched tight over round, empty bellies.
Tory Harris watched.
She wondered how many they passed carried a toxic, deeper wound than broken limbs from birth defects or work or torture. This was Haiti; that meant something. There’d even been a class, if you could call it a class, for the lower enlisted, a few days before they sailed. Hastily arranged—as all things related to this war (is it war or is it not?) were hastily arranged—a few direct statistics, a lot of laughs about bend-over buddies and bend-back Bettys and what passed in the blood and fluids of the unprotected. The Fort Eustis post medical officer writing on the board in the crew’s mess, his clipped, blond hair so neatly parted, his tone dry as the government chalk in his hand. He reminded them about a Private Stupid who came back from Somalia with a gift from a prostitute, an evil gift in the bloodstream and a one-way ticket to an Army discharge. He’d been a stand-up guy, ol’ Private Stupid, with a Bronze Star for action in Mogadishu. But you can’t deploy with HIV, and if you can’t deploy why bother wearing green. Bye bye, Private Stupid. Tory had sat near the door during this lecture and when she thought her fists would break from the clenching she slipped out to the passageway and then out the hatch to the deck beyond. She’d found Dick Wags on the fantail, a small can of black paint beside him on the deck, scraping rust off the ship’s propane barbecue. Sitting now in the Humvee, she remembered he’d looked up at her and stopped work to smoke a cigarette with her and that’s when he’d asked her—for the first time—if she knew what she was going to do. She’d told him, and he hadn’t said anything. He hadn’t looked surprised, though, at her decision.
Riddle droned on in her ear.Jersey this and Jersey that and what do you think about it, Jersey? Lost, lost. Lordy, lord. Tory kept her eyes out the window of the hummer, looking for the women among the Haitians now, wondering about them, how it was for them. It occurred to her most of them who carried it probably didn’t even know their own early death flowed in their bloodstream—didn’t know they had it. Just didn’t know.
Tory put her wrist up and looked at her watch.
“We should just brake, fall the hell back with Scaboo and Pelton, and let these guys lose themselves down here.” She put a cigarette to her lips and lit it—fuck convoy rules. They weren’t allowed to shoot the soldiers they came to overthrow, and she wasn’t going to shoot anyone else. Might as well smoke. “The four of us could sniff our way back to the boat faster than it’s taking them to find the airport.”
Riddle nodded twice without expression. “Sergeant, yes. You give the word, New Jersey. I’m on it.”
She exhaled, then shook her head no.
If anyone but that captain was involved in this, she just might have. But something was going on with that guy, that Captain Hall. She didn’t know what it was, but wanted to know. He was—
“Looks like the road’s opening up.”
She blinked. Riddle had leaned forward, squinting.
“Yeah.” He swerved to avoid a scrawny chicken, almost taking out a goat instead. The front right tire of the hummer slammed hard into a pothole and if Jersey’s rifle hadn’t been safed it would gone off.
“Hey, that’s water,” Riddle said, and he was right. Centered in their vision, down the dark medieval tunnel of road, was a thin patch of the same crystal blue Jersey had seen from high on the hill, at the park. And then, as they turned a corner, the blue was replaced by chain-link fence visible about half a mile away and a warehouse and over the warehouse was the gear and spinning radar from the top of a ship’s house and it was the LSV. Different angle, but back where they started.
“You’d think someone would’ve mapped this out, no?”
A Black Hawk sliced over them, screaming and low, its s
ucking wake ripping plastic and boards off the roofs of the shacks they passed, the Haitians on the street throwing themselves to the ground, arms over their heads. The chopper was there, then it was gone, echoes in their ears and debris on the ground.
“That captain up there can’t be happy.”
No, I don’t think he is.
They turned another corner, and the LSV was gone. Two more turns and the road opened up and they were on Route Nationale One headed out of Port-au-Prince, green Air Force cargo planes circling far in the distance, descending, preparing to land.
In the hour they’d been gone into the city, the U.S. Army had arrived. Not an inch farther than the coast, it seemed—but they owned the coast. This small stretch of Route Nationale One was all racing five-ton and deuce-and-a-half trucks, hummers overstuffed with troops and gear, and a few Bradley fighting vehicles. The Bradleys, Jersey thought, were useless—she’d been to the city. The streets were too narrow. They’d never fit. Riddle laughed his barking laugh when she mentioned this.
“Chalk another for intelligence and planning.”
“Airborne, baby,” she said.
They were almost in an accident at the gate of the airport. The convoy was racing fast, barely time to stop, each hummer in succession almost plowing into the one before it. Rubber burned—then another wait. Static and squawking voices pouring through the humid air from tactical radios in the other idling Humvees. Riddle reached out to the dashboard and picked up an imaginary microphone. “What the fuck? Over,” he said into his hand.
At the front of the column Captain Hall was negotiating entrance.
What the fuck? Over.
Hall had pulled off his helmet again, smooth skull shining in the sun, free hand back and pointing toward the city.
Voodoo Lounge Page 5