A Rendezvous in Haiti

by Stephen Becker

  Life was too sweet. Love, he decided, did not improve an officer.

  Slowly and in silence the platoon worked uphill, scanning the slopes, noting unconcerned birds and lizards; pausing for long minutes to catch any break in the rhythm of birdcall and rustle.

  McAllister’s shirt was soaked, his boots were leaden. He was twenty-nine years old and breathing hard. The climb was heavy going for a horse Marine, and when Clancy flung up a hand McAllister was glad of the pause. In the hot silence a cuckoo whistled; when a breeze whispered through the forest, and leaves rustled, it was like the sudden passage of a summer storm.

  Evans pushed through the brush. “Looks good.”

  “It does. Quiet but not too quiet. Push on for the village but have your trailer keep a sharp watch behind. Safeties off now, but what I said about women and children still goes. Questions?”

  “None, sir.”

  And Evans melted into the brush, replaced by Clancy.

  “Tell Dugan,” McAllister said. “Have him pass the word to the rear: sharp watch fore and aft. Then come here to me. You’re my runner.”

  Clancy said, “You need a point man, sir.”

  “I’m your point man, Clancy. Now do it.”

  No one came at them from flank or rear, and quietly they closed in. Like many Haitian villages Deux Rochers was built about a dusty grassy sort of common; a dozen huts of wood and thatch, and as usual one, the houmfort, was outsize, and served as festival hall or voodoo temple. A stream flowed outside the dwellings, doubtless into the river below; in it two boulders loomed like tutelary gods. Livestock ruminated, and noted their arrival: goats, kids—in all seasons, here—a scrub bull and a mangy cow. Chickens scratched and pecked. This was a prosperous village.

  In the doorway to the houmfort stood a very old woman, wizened, all in blue cotton.

  McAllister saw the crucifix, nailed to the post beside the old woman: Christ on the Cross, wrapped about with a green serpent. He saw paintings on the lintel: an egg, a stick figure, a thundercloud and raindrops. He did what he could with Creole: he used his working French and slurred it. “B’jou. We have come as planned. Are you the mamaloi? Is there a papaloi or a houngan?”

  These were voodoo priests or priestesses; McAllister had never studied this superstition but had acquired a few of its words and ideas.

  The woman did not speak. Beside her appeared a, child, a naked boy of perhaps six, all curiosity. McAllister wondered where they buried their dead. Or perhaps a pyre. He had witnessed that: the heap of brush, the smell of burnt meat.

  In the forest, birds whistled and chirped; he heard a dog yap, and then he heard the tambors wake, far off, the steady sad beat.

  The woman was staring hard at him, as if she could see his past and future. She took the boy by the hand and retreated into the houmfort.

  Sergeant Evans said, “We’d best look, sir.”

  “I’ll go in with Clancy,” McAllister said. “You all cover. We’ll be going from light to dark and if anyone’s waiting for us we’re dead.”

  “I don’t know,” Evans said. “There’s better things in life than dying.”

  “Let’s do it,” McAllister said, and they walked out of the light and into the dark, leaping quickly once inside, Clancy to the left and McAllister to the right. The temple was less dark than McAllister had feared, and much cooler than he had hoped. He saw a dozen half-naked women and a dozen naked children, huddled against the rear wall, and the old woman in front protecting them all. McAllister said, “Mamaloi.” He made an effort but found nothing more to say. The old woman only looked, and soon the younger women looked, and then the children. A child giggled. These people had bargained for peace and quiet with Haitian gendarmes, and the Marines might be the first whites they had ever seen.

  In a corner, three rifles stacked muzzle to muzzle: ancient Lebels, the first French rifles to use smokeless powder.

  The temple brooded at them. McAllister made out a bowl of eggs on an altar, other wooden bowls, some pellets of clay or stone, what might have been a pair of chicken’s feet. “Out,” he said. “My Christ, out. I’d rather fight.”

  “It’s the women and children that scare me,” Clancy said.

  They dodged outside fast. McAllister called, “Gunny! These other huts.”

  Gunny called, “A dozen horses, a corral in the woods. Pretty fair horseflesh.”

  The other huts contained more women and children.

  “That’s a break,” Clancy said.

  “The hell it is,” McAllister said. “Where are the men? Livestock. Cassava. I think that’s a field of cane across the stream. Those rifles. Two dozen huts, three dozen, and a temple—this is a town, that’s what. Gunny! You set a perimeter?”

  “Doing it now, sir.”

  “Hurry up. Clancy, bring on those mules. Fast, now. Have the men stack the goods here in front of the temple.”

  Goods: rations and tobacco and bolts of cloth, and eventually four hundred pounds of seed maize. The men worked in silence, running sweat.

  And now the Haitian women and children emerged from the temple. Fear and greed and delight struggled openly for their souls. McAllister understood little of what they said but for a moment he felt fatherly and generous. “Seed!” “Tobacco!” A young woman quickly unfurled a bolt of red cloth, stripped off her tunic and draped herself in the cotton. A few Marines laughed. “Never mind the women,” Evans called. “Watch the woods.”

  A few moments more, and the women and children were almost dancing—jiggling and jumping and handling the goods until the mamaloi uttered stern warnings. The children shrieked and made huge white eyes; one approached a wary Evans, and touched the skin of his hand.

  “You’re a freak, Gunny. Like the two-headed baby at the county fair.”

  “Thanks. I still don’t like this, Lieutenant.”

  “Me neither. We withdraw with extreme caution. Roughly in a circle, right? About fifty yards across. Well spaced. Point, wings, tail. A BAR forward, one right, one left. I don’t mind advice, Gunny.”

  “That’s good enough, sir. One suggestion: when we start across that river, let the forward BAR drop back and cover our ass.”

  “By the book. Thanks,” McAllister said. “Fall back,” he called. “Clancy, point. Gunny: tell ’em what’s what while I say goodbye here.”

  To maman he said, “Where are your men?”

  She waved. “Another village. Vodun.” She gazed off through the forest, as if she could see the other village.

  “The houngans hate us. They agitate the people.”

  She did not respond.

  “Maman: all this is for peace. Do you understand? If the Cacos come, you will send word. Every month we will visit, with black soldiers to protect you. Next time I want to talk to the men. At the full moon.”

  “We had black soldiers once,” she said. “They ate everything and abused all the women.”

  McAllister’s heart sank: had the gendarmes been brutal, and then lied? No; she must be speaking of Cacos. “And your men came home and killed them, and we sent more to kill your men. That is what we want to stop. No more. All right, Maman?”

  “All right,” she said, almost jolly. “Such cloth! And scarlet! Now we can all be Cacos!”

  McAllister was not sure that he understood this situation.

  He breathed easier as they proceeded down the slope, and began to think that they had succeeded in a difficult and perfectly futile mission. They reached the ford. Half of Flanagan’s squad was a quarter mile off, with the horses; the other half were in position on the far bank. McAllister’s men started across and when about a dozen of them were climbing onto dry land again and another dozen were in the stream, thunder erupted on the right flank.

  McAllister bawled, “Hit the deck! Fire at will!” Davis was the BARman on the left flank, useless for the moment; McAllister saw him whirl and head for the center, and shouted, “Davis! Hold your ground!” and shortly over the wowwowwow of rifle fire and the stutter of the
other two BARs more thunder rolled, as the enemy opened fire on the left flank and Davis—who had halted in his tracks, whirled again and set up—returned fire.

  The men in the stream ducked under and floundered forward. The others were returning fire patiently; McAllister, at the center, held his fire until he was sure of a clear field, and then opened harassing fire. He glanced up: two mules reproached him. On the far bank Flanagan’s men fired steadily. Two scurrying figures detached themselves from the mass of horses: the fourth BAR.

  These men had suffered a score of ambushes and reacted without orders. The fourth BAR came into action, sweeping the enemy on McAllister’s right flank; the riflemen across the river shifted their fire to the left flank.

  The firing diminished. Sixty seconds, or two minutes, and always it seemed an hour. McAllister came to one knee and shouted, “Anyone hurt?”

  “Gunny;” came the answer, and McAllister cursed.

  “How bad?”

  “Bad.”

  “First aid. Where’s the wound?”

  “Belly.”

  “Conscious?”

  “No sir.”

  An isolated shot on the left flank; an answering burst.

  “And Dugan. Jesus Christ, Dugan’s dead.”

  Silence then, until Clancy called, “Pursuit, Lieutenant?”

  “No! Fall back to the water!” He cupped his hands to shout across the river: “Shostak! What do you see?” and Shostak called back that the Cacos had vanished, and with every precaution nevertheless McAllister saw his men across. “Right. Rifles, blankets, stretcher. Four strong men, and for Christ’s sake be careful. Where’s Dugan?”

  He knelt by Dugan, and confirmed the bad news. “Carry him across. Lash him to his mount.”

  He followed, last and still useless: the men had deployed perfectly, each wader finding his spot on the bank and covering those to come; Gunny lay supine on the improvised stretcher of rifles and blankets. Angrily McAllister inspected him. The sergeant was blotched, grey and tan and sandy; his mouth drooped open, his lips slack.

  Gunny!

  “I don’t know how you brought him back alive. He may live. He may be crippled. I would like to hang every Caco in this whole goddam country and cut off their balls.” Captain Healy spat a shred of cigar. “This whole goddam country is not worth his trigger finger. He is the best goddam Marine I ever served with.”

  McAllister sat in his own stale weary stink—sweat, the uniform not off him for thirty-six hours while the men bore Evans as if he were new-born, turn and turn about, two by two, cashing in now on the thirty-mile forced marches inflicted by mounted martinets, discovering now even more than in battle why they had been enslaved, berated, driven, punished for a dull button or a bad shave. “God be good to him,” McAllister said. “There was not a thing we could have done better. They were dug in and hidden and there was not a sound, not a wisp of smoke or a cough or a smell, to betray them. And they lay hidden for two hours while we crossed, and climbed, and parleyed, and hiked on down the hill and started across. And then they hit us from the right, and in a few seconds they hit us from the left too. If they’d waited another half-minute I might have swung my line and then there really would have been hell to pay. No, I wouldn’t have, but it was tempting.”

  “Poor Dugan,” Healy said. “A nineteen-year-old Irish boy from Savannah. He was a fine shot.”

  “He was. He and Clancy competed. Clancy is all cut up about it.”

  “And I’m all cut up about Gunny,” Healy said. “We go back a long way. Cuba, Nicaragua.”

  “He has a chance.”

  “He has a chance to be crippled from the waist down. Let him die, sooner.”

  “Is that very Catholic?”

  “The Lord works in mysterious ways,” Healy said with venom, “his wonders to perform.”

  “Like educating the Cacos. Captain, we’re only one brigade for the whole country and it’s their country and they’re learning how to fight a war. They’re learning from us. That Martel is a thinker and a fighter.”

  Healy hesitated. “Those Cacos at Deux Rochers held back,” he said. “They took present pain for future gain. Niggers don’t do that.”

  “I thought we weren’t calling them niggers,” McAllister said.

  “That order came from on high and I passed it along. When I am with my own officers I revert to the ancestral ways.”

  “I’m only a little surprised,” McAllister said. “These people being Catholics.”

  “When the McAllisters were grabbing all that free right-of-way and building the railroads, the Healys were their niggers. My turn now. Fair is fair.”

  “Don’t take it out on me, Captain. We raised horses, not iron horses.” McAllister rose, stiff and sore. “Like to bathe and shave, Captain.”

  Healy waved him away. “Come back for a drink.”

  So later they sat on the veranda again, watching their men keep house, but now they were in shade, and the beer—French, and not bad—washed away the rotten taste of a disastrous patrol. “Glad you’re back safe, McAllister,” Healy said awkwardly. “I mean, young love and all. The colonel’s daughter on her way. If you’d gone and got yourself killed and made that poor girl cry, I would have felt just awful. And her daddy would’ve nailed me in grade for the rest of my life.”

  At the edges of camp, vendors cried fruit. Not far from the two officers, Lafayette the yard-boy tossed a coconut high, and whacked off the nib as it came down: a moment’s wink of setting sun on the blade of the machete and thwack! They saw then that this little fellow was observing the observers, with the barest hint of a smile to come. They stared hard at him, and finally a grin split the Haitian’s face like another splash of sunlight.

  “He asked me if he could carry my bag tomorrow,” McAllister said.

  “Wants to see that plane close up. Listen, you did everything right. Gunny and Dugan were not your fault.”

  “Thanks.”

  Healy said, “I still think there’s a white Caco. He could be some sort of Spic: does his dirty work, heads for the border and crosses into San Domingo.”

  McAllister disagreed. “You underestimate these people. A hundred years ago they drove the French into the sea.”

  “And they haven’t done much since. Besides, they had Toussaint back then.”

  McAllister shrugged. “They have Martel now. Tough and smart and they say he makes a rousing speech.”

  “Talk and tactics ain’t the same,” Healy said. “Bet you ten we flush out a white man one of these days. One of these days he won’t head for the border.”

  “Done,” McAllister said. “A white man makes no sense at all.”

  “There’s your birdman,” Healy said next day. “There’s our Wyatt.” The Jenny loomed, banked, swooped like a falcon and touched down.

  Beside them Lafayette stood entranced, hugging the lieutenant’s duffel bag; Healy nudged McAllister, and they shared amusement. “I’ll take that bag,” Healy said sternly.

  Lafayette cried, “Oh, mon capitaine,” and clutched it to him.

  The officers laughed, and McAllister reassured the little man with a clap on the shoulder.

  The Jenny had turned, and was taxiing toward them.

  Lafayette said, “Ah. Ah mon dieu.”

  Lieutenant Wyatt was a ferocious bantamweight who spoiled for a wrangle every time he vaulted out of the cockpit, which was his real home. His Jenny was the old JN-4, a two-seater biplane with four struts on either side, and when he was aboard, it was as if they had built it around him: he was another element, like the rudder or the stick, a pilot carefully fabricated, with gasoline in his heart and engine oil in his joints.

  Then he would grump his way to the ground, where he stood about five foot six, a hundred and thirty pounds wringing wet, and he would glare and puff and bark. The terrestrial leathernecks kept out of his way, as if he possessed the true evil eye. “Goddam Marine Corps,” he said. “Goddam Haiti. Supposed to go to France, I was. Could have been an a
ce. Goddam Germans too full of blood sausage.” He searched about for someone to challenge. Any man in the encampment could have killed him with one punch, but no one would even argue with him. He was their amulet, their guardian angel. “Christ, that Wyatt,” they said, and shook their heads in supreme approval.

  “You know what they got in France?” he asked. “Air-fields. Even a paved runway sometimes.” His airstrip here was a stretch of plain that baked hard in steady heat and dissolved into sump and bog in overnight rain. “There is one over by Gonaïves,” he snarled, “that they got a million slaves to spread a million bushels of gravel onto, and somebody made a fortune, and the goddam gravel shoots up like bullets on takeoff. Tear off your tail!” He scratched furiously at his crotch. “Not a mechanic in the whole fucking country,” he said.

  “You taking off right away?” McAllister had pinned on his ribbons and was a mite embarrassed.

  “All right, all right. Goddam sex maniac. I suppose this island going to be full of cocoa-colored kids in a few months.”

  “There’s cocoa-colored grownups running the place right now,” McAllister said. “Bring me back in three days or so?”

  “Any day you like. I once made this run three times between breakfast and bourbon. A goddam taxi, is what. And no white nooky nowhere. Sorry I ever left Burnt Corn.”

  “Left where?”

  “Burnt Corn, Alabama, and no jokes, sonny.”

  “Burnt Corn, Alabama. Bet you got a store and everything.”

  Healy said, “We even have railroads.” Beside Wyatt, Healy seemed muscular, even burly.

  “Captain! You’re not from Burnt Corn?”

  “Two from Burnt Corn would be depopulation. No; I’m from Montgomery. Wyatt: how are you?”

  “Good enough, Captain. I am going to loop and dump this Yankee out.”

  “Yankee!”

  “Where you from, then?”

  “Virginia.”

  “Never heard of it. Captain: you lost a man, I heard.”

  “One killed, one wounded.”

  “This damn country,” Wyatt said. “Sorry, Healy.” Wyatt made a quick farewell, and hustled McAllister aboard. “Just don’t fool with the instruments.” The pilot sang and chattered all the way to Port-au-Prince, but any meaning was lost in the engine’s racket and the shrill windstream. McAllister was too busy for talk: to fly was immensely exciting, and below him rose and fell Haiti’s verdant hills and valleys, while within him rose and fell his own gorge. He skimmed blue rivers, he terrified whole villages. Faces twitched toward him and Haitians ran for cover in huts or beneath trees, one white-thatched long-legged farmer, stiff as a stork, plunging into a stream and ducking under. Beyond their port wingtip, to the southeast, sullen clouds drifted; to starboard the sky was an immaculate blue. A rude and barbarous land, but beautiful from the air: emerald hills jutting up from the plain, tendrils of black smoke above circular villages; verdigris rivers, or silver, winding to the sea; massing cloud and clear azure sky; and tiny black people, McAllister’s brothers and sisters in God’s great family, scurrying from a monstrous and incomprehensible wingèd enemy.