by Ben Fountain
“The dogs?” Mason asked, wondering if his Creole had failed him again.
Sure, the driver explained. They were zobop, men who could change into animal form. Those dogs over there were de facto spies.
Mason nodded, squinting at the distant dogs. M’ tandé, he said. I hear you.
Each week Mason photographed the bodies, drafted his report, and turned it over to his boss, the increasingly demoralized Argentine lawyer. They were all lawyers, all schooled in the authority of words, though as their words turned to dust a pall of impotence and futility settled over the mission. The weakest on the team gave themselves up to pleasure, taking advantage of their six thousand tax-free dollars a month to buy all the best art, eat at the best restaurants, and screw strings of beautiful, impoverished Haitian girls. The best lapsed into a simmering, low-grade depression: you had to watch, that was your job, to observe this disaster, a laughable, tragically self-defeating mission.
“What does it mean?” Mason asked the mulatto one night. They were sitting in Mason’s kitchen during a blackout, studying Hyppolite’s Rêve Haitien by candlelight. The picture was taped to the back of a kitchen chair, facing them like a mute third party to the conversation.
“It is a dream,” said the mulatto, who was slumped in his chair with his legs thrown out. The first beer always went in a couple of gulps, and then he’d sag into himself like a heap of wet towels.
“Well, sure,” said Mason, “Haitian Dream, you told me that.” And the colors did have the blear look of a dream, the dull plasma blush of the alternating pinks, the toneless mattes of the blues and grays, a few muddy clots of sluggish brown. In the background a nude woman was sleeping on a wrought-iron bed. Closer in stood an impassive bourgeois couple, the man holding a book for the woman to read. The room was a homely, somewhat stilted jumble of curtains, tables and chairs, framed pictures and potted plants, while in the foreground two rats darted past a crouched cat. As in a dream the dissonance seemed pregnant, significant; the sum effect was vaguely menacing.
“I can’t make heads or tails of it,” said Mason. “And that thing there, by the bed,” he continued, pointing out what looked like a small window casement between the bed and the rest of the room. “What’s that?”
“That’s part of the dream,” said the mulatto, almost smiling.
“It looks like a window.”
“Yes, I think you are right. Hyppolite puts this very strange object in the middle of his picture, I think he’s trying to tell you something. He’s telling you a way of looking at things.”
On these nights the gunfire seemed diminished, a faint popping in their ears like a pressure change, though if the rounds were nearby the mulatto’s eye would start twitching like a cornered mouse. Here is a man, Mason thought, who’s living on air and inspiration, holding himself together by force of will. He was passionate about the art, equally passionate in his loathing for the people who’d ruined Haiti. You don’t belong here, Mason wanted to tell him. You deserve a better place. But that was true of almost every Haitian he’d met.
“You know, my father thought Duvalier was retarded,” the mu latto said one night. They were looking at a deadpan Obin portrait of the iconic first family, circa 1964; Papa Doc’s eyes behind his glasses had the severe, hieratic stare of a Byzantine mosaic. “It’s true,” he continued, “they worked together treating yaws during the 1950s, every week they would ride out to Cayes to see patients. Duvalier would sit in the car wearing his suit and his hat and he would never say a word for six hours. He never drank, never ate, never relieved himself, he never said a word to anyone. Finally one day my father asked him, ‘Doctor, is something the matter? You are always so quiet—have we displeased you? Are you angry?’ And Duvalier turned to him very slowly and said, ‘I am thinking about the country.’ And of course, you know, he really was. Politically the man was a genius.”
Mason shook his head. “He was just ruthless, that’s all.”
“But that’s a form of genius too, ruthlessness. Very few of us are capable of anything so pure, but this was his forte, his true métier, all of the forms and applications of cruelty. The force of good always refers to something beyond ourselves—we negate ourselves to serve this higher thing. But evil is pure, evil serves only the self of ego, you are limited only by your own imagination. And this thing Duvalier conceived, this apparatus of evil, it’s beautiful in the way of an elegant machine. An elegant machine that may never stop.”
“I can see you’ve thought about it.”
“Of course. In Haiti we are forced to think about it.”
Which was true, Mason reflected as he made his rounds, Haiti shoved it in your face sure enough. During the day he’d drive through the livid streets and look for ways to make the crisis cohere. At night he’d lock his doors, pull down all the shades, spread twenty or thirty canvases around his house, and wander through the rooms, silently looking. After a while he’d go to the kitchen and fix a bowl of rice or noodles, and then he’d wander around some more, looking as he ate. It was like sliding a movie into the VCR, but this was better, he decided. This was real. With time the colors began to bleed into his head, and he’d find himself thinking about them during the day, projecting the artists’ iridescent greens and blues onto the streets outside his car, a way of seeing that seemed to charge the place with meaning. The style that seemed so primitive and childish at first came to take on a subversive quality, like a sly commentary on how the world had gone the last five hundred years. In the flattened, skewed perspectives, the faces’ confrontational starkness, he began to get the sense of a way of being that had survived behind the prevailing myths. The direct vision, the thing itself without the softening filter of technical tricks—the vision gradually became so real to him that he felt himself clenching as he looked at the paintings, uneasy in his skin, defensive. An obscure sophistication began to creep into the art; they were painting things he only dimly sensed, but with time he was starting to see a richness, a luxuriance of meaning there that merged with the photos, never far from his mind, in the mission’s files of the Haitian dead.
Life here had the cracked logic of a dream, its own internal rules. You looked at a picture and it wasn’t like looking at a picture of a dream, it was passage into the current of the dream. And for him the dream had its own peculiar twist, the dream of doing something real, something worthy. A blan’s dream, perhaps all the more fragile for that.
He packed sixty-three canvases in a soft duffel bag and nobody laid a hand on him. He had to face the ordeal all by himself, with not a soul to turn to for comfort or advice. There hadn’t even been the consolation of seeing the mulatto before he left, the last sack of paintings delivered by a kid with a scrawled one-word message: Go. But Mason was white, and he had a good face; the whole thing was so absurdly easy that he could have wept, though what he did do on getting to his hotel room was switch on the cable to MTV and bounce on the bed for a couple of minutes.
He’d gone from Haiti to the heart of chic South Beach. His hotel rose off the sea in slabs of smooth concrete like a pastel-colored birthday cake, but for a day Mason had to content himself with watching the water from his balcony. When the call finally came, he gathered up the duffel bag and walked three blocks to The Magritte, an even sleeker hotel where the men were older, the women younger, the air of corruption palpable. Well, he thought, here’s a nice place to be arrested, but in the room there was only the Frenchman and a silent, vaguely Asian type whose eyes never left Mason’s face. There were no personal items about; they might have taken the room for an hour. Mason had to sit and watch while the Frenchman laid the paintings across the bed like so many bolts of industrial cloth. He was brisk, cordial, condescending, a younger man than Mason expected, with a broad, coarse face only slightly refined by a prissy mustache and goatee.
They wore dark, elegant suits. Their hair was smooth. They looked fit in the way of people who obsess over workouts and what they eat. New wave gangsters—Mason sensed a sucking
emptiness in them, the void that comes of total self-absorption. It made him sick to hand the paintings over to these people.
“And the Bigaud?” the Frenchman asked in English. “The Bathers?”
“He couldn’t get it.”
A quick grimace, then a fond, forgiving smile; he was gracious in the way of a pro stuck with amateurs. He acted like a gentleman, but he wasn’t—it was only since he’d lived in Haiti that Mason found himself thinking this way. Only since he’d met the first true gentleman of his life.
They gave him the money in a blue nylon bag, and he made them wait while he counted it. Later, perversely, he would think of this as the bravest thing he’d ever done, how he endured their stares and bemused sarcasm while he counted out the money. When it was finished and he’d zipped up the nylon bag, the Frenchman asked:
“What will you do now?”
Mason was puzzled, then adamant. “I’m going back, of course. I have to give him the money.”
The Frenchman’s cool failed him for the briefest moment. He seemed surprised, and in the silence Mason wondered, Is my honor so strange? And then the smile reengaged, with real warmth, it seemed, but Mason saw that he was being mocked.
“Yes, absolutely. They’re all waiting on you.”
At the house in Pacot he stuffed the cash up a ten-dollar voodoo drum he’d bought months earlier at the Iron Market. Then he settled in and went about his business, staying up late at night to listen for the door, going down to the park in the afternoons to take his daily drubbing at chess. He realized he was good at this kind of life, the lie of carrying on his normal routine while he kept himself primed for the tap on the back, the look from the stranger that said: Come. Meet me. Late at night he could hear machine guns chewing up the slums, a faint ghost-sound, the fear a kind of haunting. During the day he would look at the mountains above like huge green waves towering over the city, and he’d think, Let it come. Let it all crash down.
He missed the paintings with the same kind of visceral ache as he’d missed certain women who’d meant something to him. He missed the mulatto in a way that went beyond words, the man whose aura of purpose burned hot enough to fire even a cautious blan. My friend, Mason thought a hundred times a day, the phrase so con stant that it might have been a prayer. My very good friend whose name I don’t even know. The air felt heavy, thick with delay and anticipation, though the slow sway and bob of palm fronds seemed to counsel patience. Finally, one evening, he’d waited long enough. He carried his chess set past the park into the Salomon quarter, an awful risk that the mulatto would surely scold him for, but he couldn’t help himself. He had trouble finding the street and had almost given up when it appeared in the ashy half-light of dusk. He turned and walked along it with a casual air. Just a glance at the house was all he needed: the green walls streaked with soot, the charred stumps of the trees, the blackened, empty windows like hollow eye sockets. Just a glance, and he never broke the swing of his stride, never lost the easy rhythm of his breathing.
The next day he went back with his truck and driver, poking around under the guise of official business. He knocked on doors and explained himself; the neighbors shuffled their feet, picked at their hands, glanced up and down the block as they talked. Lots of shooting one night, they said, people shooting in the street. Bombs, and then the fire, though no one actually saw it—they’d rolled under their beds at the first shot. The next morning they’d edged outside to find the house this way, and no one had gone near it since.
When did it happen? Mason asked, but now the elastic Haitian sense of time came into play. Three days ago, one man said. Another said a month. Back at the office Mason went through the daily logs and found an incident dated ten days earlier, the day he’d left for Miami. The text of the report filled a quarter of a page. They had the street name wrong but otherwise it fit, the shooting and explosions and ensuing fire, then the de factos’ response to the O.A.S. inquiry. Seven charred bodies had been recovered from the house, none identified, all interred by the government. The incident was characterized as gang activity, “probably drug-related.” Mason winced at the words. The line had grown to be a bad joke around the mission, the explanation they almost always got whenever a group of inconnus turned up dead.
Still, Mason hoped. He made his rounds each day through the stinking streets, past old barricades and army patrols and starving street kids with their furied stares, and every afternoon he wrote his report and watched storms roll down the mountains like the hand of God. Finally he felt it one day as he was driving home, he just knew: his glorious friend was dead. It caught him after weeks of silence, a moment when the cumulative weight of days reached in and pushed all the air from his chest, and when he breathed in again, there was just no hope. False, small, shabby, that’s how it seemed now, the truth washing through him like sickness—he’d been a fool to think they’d had any kind of chance. Inside the house he got as far as the den, where he took the voodoo drum from its place on the shelf and sat on the floor. Wearily, slowly, he rocked the drum over and reached inside. The money was there, all that latent power stuffed inside the shaft—something waiting to be born, something sleeping. He cradled the unformed dream in his hands and wondered who to give it to.
The Good Ones Are Already Taken
It was after midight when the plane came smoking down the runway at last, the vast cyclone roar of the C-130 a fair approximation of Melissa’s inner state. A cheer went up from the families strung along the fence, the kids in their pajamas and scruffy cartoon slippers, the frazzled moms trying to keep it all together in the heat, hair, makeup, manic kids; they’d parboiled for hours in the parking lot while word kept coming from the off-limits terminal, Delay, Delay, Delay, until Melissa thought she’d chew through the chain-link fence. It had been eight months since she’d seen her husband, and every hard-fought minute for this young wife had been the home- front equivalent of trench warfare. They’d even cheated and tacked on an extra ten weeks, a high honor the captain said when the rest of the team exfilled in March, you should be so proud. Proud, sure, she would have been proud to nail Clinton’s draft-dodging ass to the wall, but what could you do? SF WIFE read the T-shirts at the Green Beret Museum, THE TOUGHEST JOB IN THE ARMY, and she supposed she was proud, or would be, once she had him back. Even among the elite Dirk had proved himself special, his surprisingly quick fluency in French and Creole earning him extra duty in the Haitian Vacation, that tar baby of a mission known to the rest of the world as Operation Uphold Democracy.
Chogee boy, she’d written in her last letter, I’m going to screw you into a coma when you get back. Melissa was twenty-four, a near-newlywed of fifteen months, and his leaving had been like an amputation—for weeks afterward she’d had missing-limb sensations, her skin fizzing and prickling where her husband should have been. As every man who’d undressed her mentally or otherwise would agree, celibacy was wasted on a body like hers: she had high, pillowy breasts, the compact butt of a boy, and abs you could bounce golf balls off of, a smallish package topped with a pretty heart face and reams of wavy sorrel brown hair. That she was also smart, sensible, and socially well-adjusted didn’t save her from serial panic attacks, the fear that sex was an engine that dragged the rest of you along. A month ago she’d been having drinks with friends and found her mettle being probed by an older, handsome man with a shoebox jaw and rapturous muscles straining at his shirt. This was James, ex-paratrooper, ex–special operations, now on private contract with the DOD; his mere proximity, their casual bumping of arms and legs, tripped an all-over sensual buzz in her, a Pavlovian hormone flush that felt like drowning. After that there was lunch, and friendly phone calls at work, then a Happy Hour that ended with her bottom pressed against his cherry red Corvette while his tongue did a soft, sweet crush inside her mouth.
The whoop of his car alarm had wrenched her out of it. She’d driven home in tears, cursing Dirk for being gone and wondering how they’d done it, all those loyal, suffering women down thro
ugh the ages who’d waited out crusades and world wars, not to mention whaling voyages, jungle and polar expeditions, pointless treks to wherever just because it was there. James kept calling; Melissa resorted to cold showers and masturbation until the captain called from Bragg to say Dirk was headed home, today, now, ETA 2200 hours. She wasn’t sure she believed it until he walked off the plane, his sleeves in a jungle roll, beret blocked and raked to the side, head carried with the bearing of a twelve-point buck. Like someone had died, that’s how strong the moment was, all that tragic magnitude suddenly floored in reverse—she had to lean into the fence while the earth stabilized, a sob dredging the soft lower tissues of her throat. Then she lifted her head and started cheering.
They lived in a trailer off base, a modest single-wide down a sandy dirt road amid the pine and sweet-gum forest outside Fayetteville, or Fayette-Nam as it was known when Melissa was growing up, forty miles down the Interstate. Thanks to the mighty spending power of its military bases, Fayetteville boasted more clip joints and titty bars than any city its size in the U.S., and Melissa’s first business as a married woman had been to move beyond the city’s trashy outer tentacles. Aren’t you scared out there, all by yourself? people asked her, other women usually—her mother and sisters down in Lumberton, post-menopausal aunts, friends from high school who’d settled for hometown boys. Plenty of worse things to be scared of, she’d answer, leaving unsaid her sense of marriage as a nearer threat than any snakes or feral dogs the woods might throw out. The threat of waking one day to find a very familiar stranger next to you in bed—she felt it sometimes in his lockjawed moods, his slides toward the brute, monosyllabic style that might drive her away in twenty years. Stranger still, and maybe funny, were the shooting sounds he made in his sleep, pow-pow, pah-pow-pow-pow, like a kid popping off an imaginary gun. Who was he shooting in that subterranean field of dreams? But he laughed when she razzed him about it in the morning, and that was the Dirk she trusted, the sweet-natured goof who could sing “The Star-Spangled Banner” in note-perfect burps and had a thing for tonguing the backs of her ears. You had to be a little crazy for the Green Berets, hardcore warriors who could kill with their hands thirty-seven different ways.