Voodoo Lounge

by Christian Bauman

  Chase left them there, at attention, shivering and filthy, slamming the barracks door behind her. When she emerged again—an hour later—she was clean, showered, in a fresh uniform.

  “Platoon, rightface !” she called. “Forward,march !” And off to chow.

  Marc Hall was clean-shaven when he emerged from the latrine, gray PT jacket pulled on, wiping his neck and face with a brown Army towel, running it over his smooth skull. Tory was still on the deck, pumping out push-ups.

  “At ease, Sergeant,” he whispered. She looked at him but wasn’t smiling.

  “I’m almost done,” she said, and made him wait while she did ten more.

  Junior Davis was so manic himself in soldiering he didn’t think much of Tory’s drive, or if he did never said anything. Not at first, not in their first year together. They weren’t in the same company, they never ran together on weekends (even though they both almost always ran at least once over a weekend). Junior encouraged her to stand for the promotion boards and do it early, but he didn’t coach her; that was all Dick Wags inspecting her uniform and quizzing her—What’s the muzzle velocity of the M-16 rifle? Recite the creed of the noncommissioned officer. How many techniques for sighting a compass are there and what are they called?

  Junior Davis took unabashed pride in having an ass-kick of a girlfriend but distanced himself from the process. It wasn’t until late, very late for them, that he seemed to watch her, watch what she was about beyond him.

  The first they ever ran together was after a very bad time. So bad as to be almost beyond repair. For months he’d been building to it, disappearing, gone a day then days at a time, gone from her and also gone actual AWOL once although he talked his way out of it. And then he talked his way back into her truck and back into her room and she shouldn’t have been surprised because she loved him—there it was, she did. The next morning, a Sunday, she made coffee early and suited up and then he was next to her and said, “I’m coming, too.” He smiled. “Gotta show you how it’s done.”

  It was the first time she knew how far gone he really was. The disappearances hadn’t actually done it for her. Somehow she’d gotten past that. But this was hard to get past. He couldn’t make the run. Less than a mile, and he was heaved over, hacking, desperately pulling air into his lungs.

  That night in bed was the first he asked about her, her future, in a way not directly connected to him.

  “What is it you want?” he said. His palm was flat against her belly, head on her chest. Her fingers moved across the stubble of his high-and-tight and the smooth skin of his neck.

  “I don’t know,” she said. Then, “This.”

  His palm lifted and he slapped it down—wrong answer.

  “I don’t know,” she said, and her fingers on his hair stopped moving. She was quiet a minute, then said, “Well—I’m doing it. What I want.”

  “Doing what?”

  “You know,” and then she growled, a good Army growl.“Grrrrrrr.”

  “Hoo-rah,” he said, quietly.

  “Yeah. Exactly. Hoo-rah.Grrrrrr. ” And then she raised her voice, head lifting from pillow, and did it for real, echoing loud in the little cinder-block barracks room, Junior Davis feeling the vibration from her chest—“GRRRRRRRRR.”

  Junior Davis said, “Pretty good.”

  “Yeah,” she said. “It is.”

  “And that’s what you want.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re already there.”

  “I’m getting there.”

  “You’re there. You kick ass.”

  “Yes,” she said, her fingers moving across his head again. “I do.”

  “So,” he said. “Why?” His head was still on her chest, his face still not visible to her. “Why are you here?”

  “What do you mean?” she said. “That’s stupid, Junior. Why are any of us here?”

  “Maybe,” he said, “but I think you’re gonna stay.”

  Silence.

  “Aren’t you?”

  She nodded, then said, “Yeah.”

  “Grrrrr,”he whispered.

  “Grrrrrr.”

  His open palm moved across her belly, then counted ribs until it annoyed her and she swatted his hand away. Still he kept his head down, face averted. Hand back on her belly, he let it sit a few moments, then slid it up to her breast, cupping it. This she let stay. After a while she reached with her free arm to the night table and pulled a Marlboro from the pack there. She lit it, and smoked that way, on her back, Junior Davis half-curled up and softly caressing her. She was leaving in a week, for school at Fort Knox, sergeant’s school. When she graduated a month from now she’d have the same three hard stripes as Junior Davis. It was, in the end, the reason she’d taken him back this weekend. It was selfish, her first purely selfish act in their relationship: she’d be at Fort Knox a month and didn’t want any distractions. Junior, drifting about at home, would be a distraction. But now, she thought, now she could concentrate.

  Junior had asked why she was here but it was hard to pin. And why she was here and why she stayed were two very different things. Both with Junior and with the Army.

  She knew people who’d enlisted for a specific, known reason. But not many. And of them, half she didn’t believe. In the small percentage left, there were a few good reasons—Dick Wags and Junior Davis, for instance. Starched and shining now, but both came in the same way: a judge’s order. Army or jail. Green uniform or orange. Tree suit or jumpsuit.

  On the boat, Cain the kitchen private was nineteen, had a wife and two kids in a town east of nowhere in east Texas. Pelton was the same, nineteen, from northern Oregon, subtract one kid and add diabetes to the wife. These two, Tory thought, were born with enlistment papers in hand.

  Only once could she remember the subject coming up, one night, a group of them out drinking late, telling horror stories from basic training that didn’t seem so bad now, then a few predator recruiter stories. Scaboo, who rarely drank and was the only sober head among them that night, announced he’d sought out the recruiter. He was in the U.S. Army for one reason and one reason only: to serve like his grandfather before him, to defend the country, defend freedom. This was a while back, when he’d been a PFC. Junior Davis, just pinned sergeant, had reached across the table and smacked his young, Italian roomdog on the side of the head. Hard.

  “Fuck you,” Davis mumbled. “You think your cock is bigger than ours? You’re here ’cause you were too lazy or stupid to get into college. Same as everyone.”

  Tory remembered the guys at the table laughing. Except Scaboo. And Junior, of course. He hadn’t laughed. He’d no tolerance for poster patriotism. Anyone who gave a reason like that for enlisting was either lying or, as he said, stupider than dirt.

  “Remember before the Gulf?” he said. “Did you watch TV? Wasn’t a black face to be found calling for war.” He pointed to Matata, still a buck private then. “Or Spanish. Am I right, Don Pablo?”

  “Right as rain, white man,” Matata said, nodding. “Nothing in Saudi got nothing to do with nothing.”

  “Exactly.” Junior Davis was slurring now, his face gone red. But he wasn’t done. “Until I see a gunship with an Iraqi flag off the coast of Maine, one thing we’renot doing here is defending freedom.” He took a drag on his cigarette, then poked his finger at Scaboo. “My little roomdog, you’re a hired gun. Nothing noble about it.” He spread his arms. “We’renoble, mind you. We’re the goods.” He slammed his palm down on the table. It was impossible to tell whether he was serious or mocking. Tory wondered whether Junior knew it himself. He hit the table again. “We’re Americansoldiers. ” He hissed the word, drawing it out. The group was silent now, drunk and holding its breath. “But don’t think what wedo is noble. You’re drawing a paycheck, is all. Taking a bullet.” He stubbed out his smoke on a cold piece of pizza. “You’re an offensive tool of the United States government. You ain’tdefending nothing.”

  Scaboo opened his mouth to say something, and Tory
tensed because she knew he was going to argue and Junior was drunk and if Scaboo argued more likely than not Junior would be across the table punching. Without looking up Scaboo said, “I think—” but Riddle slammed his fist down on the table and cut him off. “I’m defending something, Junior,” he said. All heads turned toward him, a sneer rising on Junior’s lips. Riddle leaned across the table, right in Davis’s face, and said, “I’m defending my God-given right to pork your Mom.”

  And that was the end of that.

  Another thing Tory hadn’t missed: they’d gotten to talking about Somalia later. Junior Davis openly questioned why the Army and Marines were there. This was tricky; there was a Waterborne unit, the 710th Provisional, en route. Some of their own. But Junior questioned the whole mission. And she knew he meant it. But because she was his girlfriend, she also knew he’d begged—literally begged—to be on the deployment, and when his name wasn’t on the list, he’d gone to see the battalion sergeant-major to plead his case. He didn’t think the Army should be there, but he was furious he hadn’t been sent. Heartbroken, really. And she knew he didn’t see this as a contradiction.

  Tory, if he’d asked, would have told him she didn’t see it as a contradiction either.

  She’d made her reenlistment decision over the last weekend he’d been gone. Her first enlistment was running out. It was a simple choice: let it expire, or re-up and be a sergeant. It was automatic, she’d already been accepted into school, top of the battalion list. She made the decision with Dick Wags and Alicia over beer and soup at their place, but it wasn’t really a decision and she knew it and they knew it, too.

  Junior Davis seemed surprised. “I thought you were getting out,” he said. “I didn’t know you wanted this.” And she thought he meantWhy would you want this?

  And she said simply, “You never asked,” and meantHow could you not know?

  And she wondered about Junior. Especially since his growing silence after being left off the Somalia deployment roster. Lately when she watched him—when he was there to watch—she thought of Lucy Harris, her grandmother. Lucy and old Dean, who might or might not have been Tory’s grandfather, had raised her, from four years old. When Tory was around twelve or thirteen, Lucy started going soft with Alzheimer’s. She’d had it years, but it seemed to stay more annoying than bad—forgetting who was on the other end of the phone, or why she’d gone upstairs. Her doctor wasn’t even sure it was really Alzheimer’s, maybe just old age. But no, she’d had it. It was Dean, his presence, keeping her together, and Tory read it was that way sometimes. The old woman burned extra strength to keep it together while her husband was around, all energy diverted to the brain to keep those synapses firing. When he died there was no longer a reason. She slipped quickly, from making Tory’s breakfast every day to not knowing who she was in six months. She went into a coma just shy of a year from old Dean’s death, and died a month later, on Tory’s sixteenth birthday.

  It made her think of starched, squared-away Junior Davis, so recently popping at the seams. And she wondered who or what he’d been white-knuckle holding it together for, and why, and she wanted to think it was her. But maybe it wasn’t enough. It was like his steam was running out. He’d been pushing all his energy to one thing—going to war—for so long, and like old Lucy he was starting to shut down.

  Tory stood, brushing the dust off her hands. She’d worked out to exhaustion, muscles limp in her arms, pushing so hard after such a long break. Marc Hall leaned against the bulkhead, still there, watching her, waiting. “I think I should shower,” she said. “I’ll meet you on deck?”

  Dick Wags walked out then, raising a hand, wordless down the passage on his way to engine-room watch. Tory grabbed her stuff from the cabin and when she stepped out again the passage was empty. She knocked on the latrine door, flipped the sign toFEMALE, locked it behind her. She went to the far shower stall and it felt funny, knobs on the wrong side; she never used this one.

  Marc Hall pulled his cabin door closed, stepped back in to the empty passage. He was clicking his teeth and not noticing. He knocked lightly on the cabin door next to the latrine, though he’d seen Staff Sergeant Wagman leave for watch and Tory go into the latrine. Still, he knocked anyway, soft, just to be sure. Then twisted the knob and stepped in. He climbed to the top bunk, found the hole in the bulkhead. It wasn’t hard to find, a small hole but right there. He put his eye to the hole.

  She was slick and smooth, four small line tattoos on the back of her shoulders, lean and muscles tight. Her dog tags, encased in plastic silencers, hung from their chain backward, between her shoulder blades. A long, raised purple scar ran the front of her left thigh. She circled and soaped, then stretched her neck, face direct in the spray of water, eyes closed tight.

  See me,she thought, though he would have no way of knowing.This is the me I want you to see.

  Tory never looked up, never opened her eyes, and when she reached for a towel, water off, Marc slipped from the cabin, down the passage to the forward hatch, outside to the deck.

  Chapter

  22

  Tory towel-dried slow, dressed quick, then went back next door to her cabin just to drop her shower gear and get a pack of cigarettes. Stepping back out of the cabin she was almost knocked to the deck by Riddle, running flat out down the passage. She was too surprised to say anything, and by the time she thought to he was already gone, out the forward hatch to the catwalk outside, gray metal slamming behind him. A few seconds later Temple came around the corner from the bottom of the stairs, running much slower but obviously following Riddle.

  “What’s he doing?” she said.

  “Staying awake,” Temple huffed, stopping to jog in place in front of her.

  Tory raised her eyebrows.

  “Poor guy’s been up all night, but caught himself dozing a few minutes ago—took off like a bat out of hell from the mess. Victor Charlie told me to follow, make sure he doesn’t trip and go in the drink.”

  Tory remained silent, not sure what to say besides the obvious. Finally, Temple said, “You didn’t hear what happened.”

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “He got hit in the face. With powder.”

  “Powder?”

  “Powder. When we were at the fence in Port-au-Prince, buying shit. This old woman comes up close, throws a handful of yellow powder right into Riddle’s face.”

  “Powder.”

  “Powder! Voodoo powder, Jersey—you know? Like in the movie?”

  “You have got to be kidding me.”

  “Kidding you?” Temple was turning red, either from running in place or frustration, it wasn’t obvious which. “What? What could it be? We’re in Haiti, some old lady is throwing powder at us—what else can it be?”

  She shrugged.

  “So we gotta keep him awake.”

  “Who? Riddle?”

  “Yeah. If he sleeps, he’s done for.” Temple smacked his hands together. “Pow! Zombie time.”

  “Zombie—”

  “That’s how it works. When you fall asleep you don’t wake up, then you look dead, and Pow! You’re a fucking zombie.”

  Tory nodded. Temple was almost purple now.

  “A fucking zombie!” he said again.

  She pointed forward, toward the hatch. “You better go get him,” she said.

  “Yeah,” and he was gone.

  The Haitian drivers weren’t in the well-deck. Marc had led them all to the fantail—in a line, up the steep staircases through the house—so they could see the horizon and feel the breeze. The shoreline of their country lay a mile off the port side, a thin green line hovering in the morning sea haze. There was no way of telling from looking which part of Haiti it was, just certain knowledge they were far from home.

  There was a picnic table lashed to the aft anchor winch, and Matata had laid out hotel pans filled with scrambled eggs and ham, the ever-present Army apples, and a jug of instant orange juice. The Haitian men sat cross-legged on the damp and sticky d
eck, faces turned to the morning sun, paper plates of breakfast in their laps. Marc was sitting on the picnic bench and when Tory came out on deck she sat beside him, immediately uncomfortable. Young white woman with black boys at her feet. She looked at Marc, thinking it might help that a black man sat with her. It didn’t. She stood, walked to the rail, lit a cigarette. When she looked back Marc, too, had his face raised to the sun. She sat next to him again.

  “This man,” Marc said, pointing to the driver closest to them, “is from Cange, in the Central Plain. His name is Jean. He’s never been to Jacmel. But he has a cousin there, whom he hasn’t seen in ten years. They were close once, he says. So he’s excited.”

  “Hello, Jean,” Tory said.

  The man smiled, unable to talk, his mouth stuffed with food. He was not an old man, but older. She imagined it would be difficult to pinpoint someone’s age in Haiti. He wore green shorts and plastic flip-flops, his thin shirt off and around his neck. His throat bulged when he swallowed, skin tight and stretched.

  “Are they all from so far away?”

  “No,” Marc said. He pointed to a boy across the deck, the youngest of them, maybe a teenager. “He is, though. He’s from Gonaives. He’s the farthest I think. He left Gonaives because a church group in Port-au-Prince sponsored him to go to their school. He says he gets good marks. Now he works with the Red Cross when they have room for him. But he’s young, so he doesn’t get much of the work. He’s here free, no pay. They filled the slots, but he wanted to come anyway.” He waved at the boy, who waved back. “To ride on the ship.”

  “We’ll pay him,” she said.