Voodoo Lounge

by Christian Bauman

  “Fucking-A,” Mickey said, and sauntered his big frame back to his post.

  “How long you going to be here in the Voodoo Lounge?” Davis asked.

  “Duration, I guess,” Rice said, accepting one of Junior’s cigarettes. “Long as it takes.”

  “Long as it takes to do what?”

  “Good question.”

  “It’s a nice place, Jacmel. You could’ve done worse.”

  “Guess so. You’ve been here before?”

  Davis nodded. He wasn’t sure why he’d said it was a nice place. It was a nice place, mostly, but he hadn’t had such a nice time here. Rice asked and Davis told him; an abbreviated version, anyway.

  “How long were you in there?”

  “Couple weeks.”

  “No shit. How was it?”

  Davis said “Pretty bad” and left it at that. He couldn’t think of a better way of putting it.

  Rice got up and went to a door in the corner and knocked on it. The door opened and a face appeared. A thin, well-groomed African-American captain in a neat, creased uniform.

  “Hey, Sir, this guy here’s been in the hoosegow up on the mountain. Recently. For a couple of weeks.” He hooked his thumb at Davis.

  “Really?” Captain Nellis said. He stepped out into the room, looking at Davis. “Would you mind telling me about it?”

  Davis shook his head. He didn’t mind. Would they mind giving up an MRE? He’d been eating powdered eggs and peanut butter for weeks now.

  “Come on in here with me,” Nellis said. “Sergeant Rice, bring a notebook, will you?”

  Chapter

  31

  Tory walked alone through the hospital grounds, small pebbles in the yard crunching under the soles of her boots and bats zipping past her ears. Inside the wall all was quiet. Outside the wall she could hear voices, singing, diesel engines; the sounds of night and the weak glow of lights in the darkness.

  She saw Marc through the iron bars of the gate. She almost called to him, then didn’t, watching instead. He was under a set of generator lights set up around the Red Cross trucks. His rifle he’d slung barrel down over his back, but all his other gear he’d taken off, helmet and flak vest and LBE. He’d been helping them unload and working with the director of the hospital, taking notes on what else was needed, and on where best this stuff should go. His smooth, bald head shone under the white light, and he laughed as he worked, his whole face filling with it in the same manner as all the Haitian men around him; full-body laughing, not a surplus of movement, but a sense that one’s whole body was invested in the emotion. She smiled to see him this way, and when finally she did call to him and he turned to see her his face grew even brighter and his eyes gleamed like a cat and she knew it was a trick of the generator lights against the night but she liked it anyway. She recognized old Jean, one of the truck drivers from the boat, standing next to him, and Jean clamped his hand down on Marc’s shoulder and whispered in the captain’s ear and both men laughed as Marc raised a hand and waved her over.

  “Sergeant Harris!” he called, his arm around Jean. “Our friend Jean was just telling me a joke.”

  “And what was the joke, Captain Hall?”

  Marc’s smile grew even wider, and he said, “Once again, I’ve absolutely no idea.”

  “Your Creole may be more lacking than you thought.”

  “Either mine or his.”

  Marc picked up his gear from the ground. “Have you eaten?” he said.

  “No.”

  “Let’s go lock this stuff up then find something to eat.”

  The hospital director—a pale, thin, very tall Frenchman everyone called Pip—had an office with no windows, a solid door, and a solid lock. The two soldiers kept their weapons on their backs but locked everything else in his office.

  “If the Dominicans invade tonight,” Marc said, “we’re done for.” He had a special kind of handheld radio he’d brought from Port-au-Prince, and he clipped it to his rifle strap.

  Dinner was in a long, low thatch-roof building with no walls, directly outside the hospital gate. Marc and Tory sat on stools at a high table, the only ones eating, but a small party gathered to watch them. Four women worked the open-air kitchen and they shooed people away but only to the boundaries of the building’s wooden support beams. The effect, then, was of being alone at a huge table with floating eyes in the shadows twinkling and hovering.

  “Eating as spectator sport,” she whispered.

  “Quite romantic.” The lighting came only from candles and lanterns, warm red light flickering off the wood and thatch. Absent the crowd staring at them, it was, Tory admitted, intimate.

  Dinner was served on tin camp plates. Thick black beans and fried plantains first, all sweet and smooth in the mouth, the plantains brown with their sugar. One of the kitchen ladies came saying something neither of them understood. She left two cups of water. Marc put his hand on Tory’s arm. “Don’t drink that.” He motioned to a boy in the crowd watching them, a teenager, said“Apprens bier pour moin,” and passed him a few dollars. The boy was back as they were finishing their beans, two brown bottles of Red Stripe in his hands.

  “Warm,” Marc said. “But safer than the water.”

  Tory looked at him over her empty plate as he popped the caps off and wiped the tops clean with his uniform sleeve. “Likely story,” she said to him. “I think you’re just trying to get me liquored up.”

  “A positive side-effect of keeping you safe from bacteria.”

  They raised their bottles and clinked them in a toast.

  “Absent friends.”

  “Yes.”

  The oldest of the kitchen women motioned them over, and they took their plates into the cooking area. There were five or so unlit burners attached to a string of small propane tanks, and a large open-air fire a few steps away from the hut with a pot hanging over. The woman, though, went to another pit, this one just coals in a ring of stones. She prodded at the edge of the coals with a stick, uncovering something. She reached down and gingerly grabbed two blackened husks from the hole there, turning and dropping them quick on the soldiers’ plates, whistling and blowing on her fingers where she’d almost burned them. It took Tory a moment to realize what she was looking at.

  “Lobster?”

  “Yes!”

  Marc thanked the woman profusely, a string of Creole gratitudes.

  “There’s no claws.”

  “No,” he said, guiding her back to their seats. “This is rock lobster. No claws. You throw them in the coals, burn ’em, pull ’em out.”

  He picked up a big knife from the table and slammed the wooden handle down on the smoking carcass on her plate, cracking the burnt shell. He peeled it open with his fingers, revealing the clean, pink, cooked flesh of the tail. He wiggled it out and held it for her. She took a bite from his fingers, the meat soft and just a bit chewy.

  “Hot!” she whispered, fanning her mouth. “Fantastic.” She took a long pull from her bottle of Red Stripe, the beer warm and perfect.

  Marc cracked open the tail of his lobster and began to eat.

  “You know what the fishermen call these in Maine?” she said, speaking around a new mouthful of food. She held up the shell, wiggling the head at him. “Bugs,” she said. “Sea bugs.”

  When they finished Tory washed the lobster from her hands and cheeks at a basin set in the far corner, careful to keep the water from her mouth. Marc took their plates and paid the women with a few dollars, washing his hands, too, then guiding her out of the hut and through the crowd of watchers.

  “Bonswa. Bon nuit, messieurs,”he said as the passed through.“Bon nuit, s’ami. Dormi bien.” Good night, friends. Sleep well.

  Tory assumed they’d be followed, but they weren’t. Not overtly, anyway. The show was over, it was late, life went on. American soldiers were interesting, but only to a point, she guessed. Marc guided her—one step behind, a hand soft on her back here and there to show her when to turn—around a series of
small dwellings, deeper into the camp. They passed into an area completely unlit, only the silvered, clouded moon to define walls of huts, curves of a face. Marc’s hand closed on Tory’s, holding it, and he stepped up beside her. His hand was big, smooth around hers, and she squeezed it. She stopped, keeping hold of his hand, and turned into him, pressing her face into his chest. She felt his other hand in her hair, and she breathed deep, pressing harder. She looked up then, his face ghostly in the moonlight. Their lips passed, barely touching, her face going to his neck. She squeezed tighter on his hand, wrapping her other arm around him, pulling him close, feeling herself pulled in by him, holding each other tight and close, his skin warm against her cheeks and lips.

  “This is fraternization of the worst kind,” he whispered.

  “Good.”

  He put his lips against hers then, and she savored it a moment, a brief moment, not thinking just feeling, all the nerves there alive and receiving his lips, soft and full and his face in hers. She dropped her head then, back into his chest, feeling him pressing harder against her, his hand flat between her shoulder blades and holding her there. The rain came, just a few drops on a breeze, then stopped again, the air moist and thick.

  “Walk with me,” he said, letting her body go, keeping hold of her hand. And in that way they walked, hand in hand, Marc leading deeper into the warren past sleeping families and heated conversations alike, from shadows through fire-lit clearings and sometimes lanterns hanging from hooks on poles. Small fires burned here and there and they stopped at a few, men around the fires offering a bottle. They always said no but felt warmed by the offer, and would stand or sit a few minutes, Tory listening to the singsong talk and Marc’s attempts to duplicate it, join it. They held hands openly or he put his arm around her if they were sitting because it didn’t matter here, nothing to hide here, no one to keep a secret from. She smoked cigarettes as they sat by the fires and when they walked she stopped him when she felt like it and put her face in his neck and once her hands flat on his chest as he stood there.

  At one fire, later, Marc asked a question and an older man answered, his tongue dancing between toothless gums, pointing out toward the edge of the field and pointing at Tory then again into the distance. Marc thanked him and walked to where he’d been pointing, through an area where the tents and huts thinned and toward a line of woods and thin jungle.

  “There are so many fires.”

  “It’s special, tonight, they say. Many of the people are celebrating.”

  Tory had a hard time imagining anything for them to celebrate.

  “A man died this morning, a worker in the hospital. Everyone loved him, everyone knew him.”

  “They’re celebrating? Like a wake?”

  “Yes, and that he wentmort bon Dieu —by God. He was old and died natural.”

  “Rather than in the storm.”

  “Yes, or by soldiers or Ton Ton Macoute.” He said the last words very quietly.

  She could see the light of another fire now, through the branches. And drums, she was sure of it—the low sounds of the camp at night had solidified into something distinct, a rhythm of drums. They stepped into the woods, dark growing darker except for the bright lick of flame. They could see people then, forms and shadows and then someone moving around the fire. Tory and Marc moved into the group, no one seeming to notice or care about their presence. She saw three drummers now, under a roof of braided leaves, and a woman dancing around the fire. She was what all the people watched, this woman, leaping and spinning and bending over, hands on knees, then leaping again. She was nineteen or twenty maybe, this dancer, with a long red skirt and her breasts bared, full and heavy on her chest as she danced and twirled. Marc’s hand tightened around Tory’s. He nodded to where a man sat, wrapped in white, near the drummer.

  “Thehoungan, ” Marc whispered. “Like a priest. This is hishoun-four. ”

  Tory heard him but could not take her eyes from the woman. The dance was entrancing, the woman magnificent. She must have been dancing for some time—the muscles of her arms and back and legs shaped and trembling, cut and moving with the effort, a sheen of wet across her body, a slick second skin of sweat. She didn’t pant, exactly, but breathed short, quick breaths through open lips. Her eyes closed sometimes, head back as she moved. Other times she would seem to pick someone to stare at, her bare feet planted wide in one place as she moved from the waist, her eyes locking into one of the onlookers. She screamed suddenly, high-pitched and almost desperate, throwing herself backward and to her hands. She leapt, landing on her feet in front of where the two soldiers stood, and her eyes locked with Tory’s.

  Tory stumbled back, startled.

  The woman was swaying now, back and forth, slow, her arms rising over her head, drawing herself out and up, her breasts rising, her chin lifting, but still her eyes fixed on Tory’s.

  She said something, a stream of syllables, and Tory didn’t know if it was Creole and if she was saying it to Tory or part of the dance and Tory saidI hear you but didn’t know if she said it out loud or only in her head and then the woman showed her teeth, a tiger’s smile, and was gone around the fire.

  Tory showed her teeth then, too, showed them to the fire and whatever Haitian god was watching all this, pulling on Marc’s hand, pulling him away, back through the wet leaves and to the field where it was raining now, slow but for real, everyone asleep as they moved through the camp. Tory led, tiger teeth bared, rainwater streaming down their faces, through the gate of the hospital, to the director’s office to retrieve the gear. They didn’t look at each other in there, just got what was theirs and left, to their clean hut with the two cots.

  The rain on the thatch roof was soft static on a radio, and the noise, she thought, was good, like the noise in her head, soft and muted but more than a little insistent.

  She climbed on him where he stood, like a tomboy girl climbing a tree, his back straight and strong as she moved over his limbs and wrapped her two hands around the skin of his skull and moved her mouth over the top of his head, his ears and neck.

  His hands found her breasts then, rough through her wet uniform top, and he made a noise, Tory whispering, “I saw you watching her, watching her chest as she moved,” and Marc answered, “I wasn’t the only one watching.” She clung to him fiercely, letting his hands move. His mouth came to hers, and again she let it rest for just a moment then drew her head away. “This has to go how I say,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “Promise me.”

  “I promise.”

  “I’ll dance for you then, Marcel.”

  He lay her flat on his cot, undressing himself then undressing her, one article at a time, slow with his hands. He folded her up into himself, their bodies entwining skin to skin, warmth to warmth. She let him move over her, allowing his fingers here and then there, but holding his head away as he ducked low, pushing him away as she teased it out, or he thought that’s what she was doing. Then his back was on the cot and she wrapped her legs around him and held herself there, held herself close, so close, but not quite and it was agony, delicious agony, but then just agony and she moved up and off and grabbed his hand.

  And then it was all hands and fingers, open and closed palms, the two of them touching and holding and sliding across the other’s body. “This,” she said, her thighs holding his hand in place. She reached down for him and held him tight and felt the blood under his hard skin and when it was his time he raised off the cot, voice loud and fingers gripping her so it hurt. And when he was done he pushed the fingers of one hand through her soft hair and the other hand moved slow and even and she called his name as she came, “Marc,” she said, “oh, man.” She curled in his arms and the blood pumped in her temples, blood pushing through her veins so she could feel it, almost hear it, her hands on his heart and her own blood still thumping through her body.

  Tory was so aware of her blood, so attuned. It infuriated her, this over-awareness, but she was powerless before it. She
could feel blood well from a small cut on her finger, the weight of collected drops and liquid smell of copper. And under her skin, running in veins and capillaries and the fluids of her body, always the knowledge of it close to the surface, so thin the skin trapping and holding it, an easily pierced envelope embracing the poison warmth.

  She felt it. She felt it pound in her head, behind her eyes; she felt it between her legs.

  This awareness was immediate, from the moment Tory left Junior Davis sitting in a Norfolk diner. She hadn’t known for sure yet, but the physical inventory was immediate, every particle of skin and fluid needing to be accounted for and not a molecule to be carelessly lost or passed on. She’d gone to a clinic, in jeans and a T-shirt, a private clinic where she paid cash and used a different name. The thin needle slipped into her skin, sliced the protective envelope, and she’d winced at the stick and weird pull and more from anxiety, the possibility of a drop falling, an unaccounted-for drip sliding where it did not belong.

  The awareness was immediate, the careful-stepping and full inventory immediate—it was the soldierly thing to do, full and precise control, dress-right-dress, all corners tucked and tight all weapons locked and loaded all units stand-to until information is complete, until situation is understood. But though awareness was immediate, belief was not. Odds were not good, and she knew it. The logic was quite clear about how this would almost certainly go. But still, belief wasn’t there. Or, rather, belief was there, but it was disbelief. You just didn’t work this hard, struggle so long, to have it end this way. It just wasn’t supposed to happen this way. It was baffling, ridiculous.

  She’d gone back to the clinic three days later, and collected an envelope and left without opening it, leaving a counselor sitting in a small room. However this was going to go, she’d not talk to a stranger about it. She held the envelope all afternoon, then most of the night. She watched TV and drank vodka and orange juice and smoked cigarettes and not until the eleven-o’clock news was half over—just before the weather report, the chubby baby-faced weatherman—did she finally reach for the envelope and begin to open it—Ladies and Gentlemen I’d like to thank the Academy and my maker the Lord Jesus Christ and I can’t believe this I can’t just can’t believe this and who knew how far this New Jersey girl could go and—