“Maybe they won’t let us in,” Jersey said, watching Hall closely through the windshield.
“We can only hope.”
The gate guards were a squad of 10th Mountain light infantry, armed to the teeth and fully geared-out. They had headsets and microphones clipped to their helmets, blank expressions on their faces.
What the fuck? Over,she thought, then said, “Friendly fire.”
“What?”
“Friendly fire. I’m going to shoot any gate guard who has better gear than me.”
Riddle nodded, reaching for his canteen. “It’s all about accessories, Tory.”
The trip through the gate took them straight onto the flight line, C-130s and massive Galaxy C-5s roaring low overhead and thudding down on the runway with two-minute precision. Closer to the main group of airport buildings, choppers came in fromEisenhower with the same frequency, three or four at a time, dropping platoons of soldiers. And the soldiers were everywhere, thousands of them, doing nothing. Crouched on the ground, sitting and kneeling in loose formations. All of them fully dressed: helmets, flak jackets, uniform sleeves down and buttoned at the cuff.
“Why don’t they take that shit off?” Riddle said, steering wide to follow the looping route of the convoy across the airport. “No sign of Charlie anywhere.”
“If the Army wanted you cool, they’d’ve issued you a fan.”
“True.”
It took them an hour to find Captain Hall’s lost company, squatting and sweating and cursing on a corner of the tarmac, baking under the sun. Hall’s first sergeant still wasn’t sure why they’d ended up in the airport instead of the seaport, but the lead chopper pilot had been from Connecticut and the Louisiana first sergeant was fairly well sure that had something to do with it.
Tory checked her watch. They’d been in-country three hours.
Jérémie
Chapter
5
The vessel master of the Jesus boat was a Nova Scotian named McBride. It wasn’t his boat, or his Jesus. He was just skipper, paid by Pastor to do the job. An aging scarecrow of a man, tall and stalk-thin, he had short sandy hair chopped with his own scissors, massive hands and feet. Those feet, in rubber boots, splashed through puddles and chewy mud as he set out from the ship into the humidity of Jérémie to retrieve his engineer, an American, a sick addict named Davis. The Jesus boat—a 485-foot steel relic from 1914 that had been a cruise ship, a hospital for Italian casualties in World War II, mothballed, then a low-end island hopper in the Mediterranean before being drafted into the Lord’s service in the mid-1980s—had been in Jérémie a month, and McBride hadn’t seen Davis for the last week. He knew where he was, though.
It was only a five-minute walk from the small pier to the hovel of low buildings and huts behind the cemetery where most of the drinking was done in this town, but McBride carried his pistol, and today carried it not holstered but in his right hand where anyone could see it. Law and order were always fluid concepts in Haiti, a wise man maintained his own, and in McBride’s mind the arrival of the U.S. Army this morning didn’t change things at all. If anything, it complicated. He thought he might not be alone in this thinking—the road was deserted. A first. McBride kept head up, gait sure, and made for a wooden house with a second-floor balcony overlooking the larger, richer crypts in the boneyard. He paused at the door, listening to the town. Nothing. He turned his head toward the hills beyond; nothing. Nothing at all. There was never nothing at all in Haiti. Not before today, anyway. He’d never heard nothing. He looked over his shoulder again at the nothing, then went inside.
The old woman behind the bar didn’t look twice at his pistol. She pulled a glass from the shelf as he walked in, relieved for the business. There was no one else in the cramped, hot room. There’d be a lack of patrons until it was clear where things would fall with the Americans. It made a difference. Port-au-Prince might well be on fire today for all anyone here knew—probably was—and the whole of Jérémie had been quiet since sunset yesterday, holding its breath. McBride shook his head at the old woman before she could start pouring. “No, Maman,” he said, then asked a question instead. He didn’t speak Creole, but they understood enough of his maritime French here to get by. She pointed behind her, to another door, and the man went through it. It led to a closet of a hallway, and McBride went to the farthest of two doors. With pistol in hand he felt sinister. He shifted the pistol to his left hand, raised his right fist, and knocked twice.
“Davis!” he yelled to the wood.
There was a noise, undecipherable. Damn the man, anyway.
McBride yelled again, then turned the knob, opening the door. A wave of smoke rolled out over him, cigarettes and marijuana and something heavier, sweeter.
The hall was dark, but the room darker. Almost complete, this blackness. Limbs he could see, pale and long. And a glimmer of skin. Who or how many or of what ilk impossible to say. Then Davis’s ghost-white face, blinking, floating, caught framed in a meager ray of light from the hall. His eyes were dull and heavy-lidded, unfocused and distant in his skull, the eyes of a deep cave dweller.
“Good Christ,” McBride said, turning his head away. “Get it together and meet me outside. We’re sailing.”
Unable to stop himself, he looked again. There was the faintest glow from a weak candle in the far corner. A whisper, unidentifiable from the pitch, but not Davis.
Then, “Sailing,” a voice said, and that was Davis, his face now gone.
“All right,” McBride said, and pulled the door closed behind him.
The engineer Davis—his friends called him Junior, the name from when he’d been a soldier, back to basic training when he’d been the younger of two recruits named Davis—floated in the pitch-black room’s cloud of smoke, lost somewhere in a fold of flesh and slick, warm wetness, the candle puffed out as the door closed. There was a large hand putting pressure on the small of his back, then a fingertip tracing the inside of his left thigh. He clamped his legs together, tight. There were rules, now; very specific rules to be followed. He’d hardwired them in his brain, so no matter how gone he got the new rules were followed. Finding no entry between clamped thighs, the ghost hand slipped away. Junior Davis reached with his own hand to where he knew there was a bottle resting on a wood table at the head of the bed. He drew the bottle to his lips and filled his mouth with sticky rum. Swallowing, Davis reached out and placed his free hand flat against skin, pressing in and then sliding up, up, until he found a nipple, small, hard and ridged. He rolled it under his fingertips. He took another swallow from the bottle, then moved his mouth to the nipple, wetting it with his lips then placing it between his teeth. This was all right, this was in the rules. He sucked, and if there’d even briefly been a memory of McBride opening the door and ordering him out it was gone now, gone and far away. Just like the rules.
McBride let Maman fill a glass with beer for him. He took the drink to a small table near the door and sat down, prepared to wait no more than ten minutes. After that, he’d give the old woman a few gourdes or maybe a U.S. dollar and send her in to evict Davis. He kicked at the sawdust on the floor with the toe of his boot and sipped.
The beer was foamy, warm, thick with yeast. He’d developed a taste for it. The missionary boat had been here almost a month now, in this most-remote of Haitian ports, way the hell out at the end of southern Haiti’s lobster claw. They’d been in Cap-Haitien before this, up north, then Jacmel, down below. Neither of which ended well. Cap-Haitien had been a quick exit, Pastor never clear why. Just a very forceful late-night waking of McBride and a clipped order to have the ship off the pier by sunrise. The departure from Jacmel, on the other hand, McBride had been involved in—a week-long negotiation to extract Davis from a cell in the basement of thecaserne on the mountain. They should have dropped him there, but Davis had persuaded Pastor to keep him until Puerto Rico, their next call. He’d at least be on American soil, he’d pleaded. More, there was none among the hundred-odd Bible thumpers onboard qualified to take hi
s watch in the engine room and coax the cranky old Fiat diesel to life—the real and only true reason Pastor had even put up money to get him out of the FADH’s grasp, let alone keep him onboard. Of course they hadn’t cleared Haitian waters before the second of the four massive cylinders that pushed the boat seized tight. They didn’t make Puerto Rico. They didn’t even make Port-au-Prince. They took refuge in Jérémie, the last Haitian port they hadn’t been ejected out of, run from, or Jesused to death.
So far, Jérémie had been fine. But they were leaving now. The Americans had arrived, and Pastor wanted to be back in Jacmel.
The front door of the bar swung open. Two men walked in, arms entwined, both laughing. The taller of the two wore sunglasses, and McBride thought what he always did when he saw one of these guys, which was how the hell he saw anything with those glasses. But apparently they saw just fine. Or saw enough. McBride’s back stiffened as they came in, but the men barely glanced at him, paid the woman for two brown bottles, and left. On the way out the door, Mr. Sunglasses threw a glance at McBride, but he never paused or broke his stride. Out the door.
Attachés.The one, anyway. Mr. Sunglasses. Almost certainly. Paid bullies.Bullies at best, McBride thought. Killers. Shiftless and lazy but sometimes smart and always dangerous and always on the right side of whatever argument they were in.Macoute. In fact if no longer by name. Ton Ton Macoute. It was why McBride carried the pistol; although the worse for him if ever he were to point it at one of them. Certainly the worse for him. He’d seen firsthand what had been done to Davis’s body. He only survived his stay in the prison, McBride thought, because he was pickled.
As if the thought drew him, the door behind the bar flew open—poor Maman there yelping in surprise—and Davis himself sailed through it, propelled by stumbling and gravity. He was dressed now, in black jeans and a half-tucked black T-shirt, and he crossed the room in three quick steps. He passed McBride without a look, and was gone outside.
Junior Davis was almost as tall as McBride. He had a sharp, pale face topped with short, curly hair. The engineer was pushing his hands through his hair now, trying to control it, weaving across the road. He looked profoundly ill. McBride followed from the bar and Davis spun on one heel to say something to him. He opened his mouth and instead said, “Oh no.” He stumbled two steps from the road and vomited. McBride looked at his watch and waited.Never again, he thought, and wasn’t sure whether he meant Davis or himself or something else entirely and then decided it didn’t matter: None of it, ever again. If he could help it.
After a few moments Junior Davis pulled a wad of tissue from one of his pockets and, turning back to McBride, wiped his mouth. He looked up, his blue eyes dull and stupid. “Sorry,” he said. “Okay.”
“Okay?”
“Okay.”
“Can you walk?”
“Of course.”
“Of course nothing.” McBride tapped his pistol against his thigh. “I should have left you in Jacmel.”
“Yes,” Junior Davis said, in perfect agreement. “You should have.”
They walked slowly back toward the ship. McBride glanced behind them every time Davis coughed, nervous, jumpy at the noise. But the town was absolutely silent, empty.
“There’s nothing bad in Jérémie,” Junior Davis said to McBride, slurring.
“What?”
“There’s nothing bad. Here.”
“So you say. There wereattachés in there. Today. In that place where you were. So what do you know.”
“They’re everywhere. Doesn’t mean anything.”
“Maybe.” McBride stopped to light a cigar, then held the flame out to light the cigarette Davis had pulled from his back pocket. “Of course, there’s no American soldiers out here yet. I’ll bet we’ll see less of that lot when your Army arrives.”
Junior Davis looked at McBride through the smoke. “What makes you think the Americans have any interest in controllingattachés ?” he finally said. He was remembering how to talk.
McBride opened his mouth, then paused. He thought a moment. “They’re here to give Colonel Cedras the boot,” he said.
“That doesn’t really change my question, does it?”
McBride puffed his cigar, then said, “No, I suppose it doesn’t.”
He started walking again, Junior Davis a step behind.
Tied at the end of the narrow pier, the Jesus ship was long, thin, unbreathing. As with everything else onboard, fuel was fiercely rationed; Pastor ordered the generator off most days. The vessel looked dead. McBride and Davis slowly maneuvered the narrow, wooden gangway, McBride calling out to the watch as they went up. Unanswered; the watch, a young blond man in shorts and light-blue T-shirt, had succumbed to the sun and was sound asleep in a folding chair at the top of the gangway, thick softback Bible open on his lap. Wide awake on the deck next to him, glaring at McBride with territorial arrogance, was a large rat.
“Hi!”McBride yelled, quickening his step, right foot shooting out in a kick as he crested the gangway, boot tip connecting perfect with the rat’s head. The watch jumped from his chair, blinking in surprise. The rat down and stunned, McBride slipped the toe of his boot under it, lifted his leg slowly, then kicked again, the rodent sailing over the rail to the water below with a fat splash.
“Keep that goddamn plank raised,” McBride snapped at the watch, who still wasn’t sure what had happened.
“Sir,” he said, “I—”
But McBride was already gone aft, making swiftly for the outside stairs to the bridge.
“The Lord hates rats,” Davis whispered to the kid as he passed him on the quarterdeck, following McBride. On his feet, the watch hoisted the rope pulley, raising the gangway off the pier a foot.
Junior Davis stumbled as he rounded aft to the fantail, slipping on something greasy, his chin nailing the steel railing as he went down. He lifted himself, vomiting again as he got his head over the rail. He let his head hang over the side a moment, then took a deep breath and wiped his mouth on his T-shirt. The noon air was still, thick as brackish water. He turned round twice, remembered, and crossed the small fantail to the stairs, up the back of the ship’s house, then forward.
With no air-conditioning to cool, McBride kept the old shutters on all the bridge windows secured tight during the day. He’d fry, otherwise. No power to run even the lights meant a need to improvise. The bridge glowed red, seven or eight thick candles burning on the chart table, the radio cabinet, the throttle station. The room flickered in warmth and strange light, stopping Davis in his tracks for a second as he stepped in, confused, the scene so like aVodoun hut he had to blink and look over his shoulder then look back. Even Pastor, coming round the chart table, unmistakable in cropped hair and padded safari khakis, seemed different; a second, hollow shadow face floating over skin for a second as the candlelight flickered then snapped the real Pastor into place.
“I’m late,” Davis said, looking for McBride, not seeing him. He didn’t like being alone with Pastor.
“You are.”
“I need my engine now, Mister Davis,” McBride’s voice said, then there was McBride, a black hole in the glow on the port side of the bridge.
“Mister Davis,” Pastor echoed.
Junior Davis nodded, and turned to leave. He stopped, and turned back.
“We can’t go back to Jacmel.”
“The engine, Mister Davis,” Pastor said quietly. “Just the engine.”
“The Army’ll sink us pierside, you just barrel in there,” Davis said. “If the Navy doesn’t do it as we come around Point L’Abacou.”
“They won’t. Either.” Words precise, clipped, like Pastor’s hair, like all the preacher’s words.
Davis looked at Pastor, and at McBride standing calm to it all. He understood, or began to.
“You have an arrangement.”
Pastor didn’t answer right away, then said, “There are a few blessed, uniformed American souls who carry arms in the left hand and the Bible in the right.”
“I’ll be damned.”
“It seems likely, Mister Davis.”
McBride came around the chart table, a glowing shadow moving behind the candlestick burning in the center. “I need the generator now, Mister Davis,” he said. “And the engine.”
Davis nodded. “It’ll be all we can do to crawl back to Jacmel with that.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Pastor said. “We’ve been promised assistance there.”
Pastor walked the front of the bridge, opening each shutter as she went. Window by window the bridge grew brighter. She was quiet as she did this, then said, “How long?” McBride for the life of him wasn’t sure what she meant. How long until Davis dropped dead? How long could they keep the vessel running, let alone afloat? If it did run, how long a sail back to Jacmel with a crippled diesel? How long until Judgment Day?
“What?” he said, at the same time she clarified: “Jacmel.”
Squinting against the sudden intrusion of sunlight he glanced down at the chart although he didn’t need to. “Two days,” he said. “Maybe three.”
“It only took us one day to get here.”
“We’re bound to be much slower now,” he said. “Limping. No better word for it. And there’ll be weather. Little doubt of that.”
She came around the console to the chart table. She wet her forefinger and thumb and snuffed the candles, one by one. There was a sizzle as each went out, and a small puff of black smoke.
“There is some danger in this,” McBride said. “Even if the Fiat doesn’t die altogether, if we’re too slow when serious weather hits she could capsize.”
Pastor chewed her lip and thought about this. McBride was somewhat comforted she at least seemed to be thinking it through. He knew what her answer would be, though.
“We’ll go,” she said.
McBride nodded. He kept it to himself, thought it good to project caution, but he was happy to go, happy to sail. Relieved. Even crippled, it was better than sitting here, rotting on the pier like they’d been. All the brats and women running around the vessel made him crazy. The men went out to preach and the brats and women made a nuisance of themselves onboard. They all disappeared back into cabins when he got under way, though. None of them could stomach the sea. It was the only break he ever got. He’d found a stinking, crappy cloth diaper on the deck outside his own cabin the previous day; none of the women onboard were worth a damn, Pastor aside. No, he was happy to pull anchor and go.
Voodoo Lounge Page 6