The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  Her waist twisted again and she readjusted her hips atop his left thigh but still exerted the faint invisible clutch of press and release that was like a vibrational echo from the drums into his aching groin, her head rotating her profile into his line of vision, on her face the look of cool dispassionate attention she directed at the priest, the entirely credible deception of that gaze, the alert observer, revealing not the slightest clue of sensuality or the unbearable desire of the man throbbing beneath her. He looked away down the row at the other faces, compressed and disfigured by the effort of propitiation, until at the end of the line he looked again at the woman in the daffodil dress, her lips pulled and turned so tight by disease or hunger that despite her terror she was already grinning like a dessicated corpse.

  Curiosity had gotten the better of Gerard, or perhaps he understood that the ceremony was about to end, for he came to stand in the chapel’s doorway, half-draped by the curtain and scowling. And then the drumming stopped and soon the chanting as well, their urgency replaced by torpid silence, and Jackie relaxed. In only seconds, though, a new tension swept in and flared along the connection between the ill woman and the houngan, who stared at her naked swaying torso with doleful resignation until the other women in the chapel began to softly weep and the farmer and the man standing in the corner choked back sobs. The houngan lifted the drum from between the vise of his legs and set it aside with a thud of finality, done, finished, his abandonment of the woman in the daffodil dress as sharply deliberate as cracking a stick over his knee, and he turned with studied cordiality to the next order of business, looking past Jackie to Tom.

  You have come to see me? he asked in Kreyol.

  Oui.

  You are welcome here. Please tell me what you want.

  Jesus Christ! Tom yelped.

  Without a sound the sick woman had come hurling out of her chair and pitched facedown in the dirt at their feet, vomiting a cloudy ocher liquid that splashed across the toes of his boots and the cuffs of his pants but missed Jackie, who jerked her legs up just in time. His instinct to somehow help was immediate but just as quickly blunted by the confusing response of everyone else, the houngan calm and unconcerned, not looking down at the woman but still at Tom, chin up and expectant, waiting to hear his response. One by one the other Haitians snapped out of their gloom to collect themselves and glide, noiseless and wraithlike, through the curtain, their communal obligation to the prostrate woman apparently terminated. Just as puzzling was Jackie, who scooted off Tom’s lap onto an empty chair, crossed her legs impatiently, and leaned forward, oblivious to the woman on the ground, her crisis a slight annoyance at best, looking back and forth between Tom and the houngan, anxious for them to get on with it.

  Tom’s eyes were fastened on the woman’s back, her shoulder blades like embryonic wings ready to burst through her black skin. He was going to reach down and check her pulse when the houngan repeated his question and Tom asked, without thinking, What is a soul? and the priest answered this and every question without hesitation.

  That in you which belongs to God.

  Can you lose your soul?

  No, monsieur. It can be stolen by the devil.

  It can only be stolen?

  Oui, monsieur.

  You can’t misplace it?

  Oui, monsieur, you can misplace it.

  How?

  What followed was an elaborate but often cryptic explanation about big and little angels—gros bon ang and ti bon ang—celestial checks and balances, the cosmic vulnerability of humans when they fall asleep, and an unintelligible caveat about bad deeds—literally, the mistakes of man—in a jumble of Kreyol. He was relieved to find Gerard still there, posted like a sentry in the doorway, but his translation was even less coherent than Tom’s own grasp of what was spilling out of the houngan.

  What are you guys talking about? said Jackie. She seemed peevish and edgy.

  Hold on, Tom said to her, turning back to the priest to make clear the nature of the problem. This woman says she lost her soul. She wants to know if you can help her get it back.

  The houngan looked away from the white man and considered Jackie for the first time with more than courtesy, examining her from head to toe while she stared back at him impassively. He kept his searching eyes on her even as he asked Tom how she had misplaced her soul, and Tom, eager for the answer himself, relayed the question to Jackie but she shook her head with an almost imperceptible flash of defiance and said it wasn’t important. Looking at her, trying his best to comprehend her, Tom realized that should he ever mention it, she would never acknowledge what had just happened between them, the secret conversation of their flesh; she would cluck her tongue and say he had quite a horny little imagination, didn’t he?

  Can he help me or not? she insisted, her eyes locked with the houngan’s, who did not wait for the English to be translated but answered, Oui, and Tom found himself brokering an unreal negotiation. For ten dollars, the houngan said, he would pray to the gods for her protection.

  What will that do? Jackie asked, and the houngan admitted, Not much. To do more, he said, would require an offering to the lwas to merit their full attention. Tom asked for further specifics before he translated and the houngan allowed that he could perform a small offering for fifty dollars and a bigger offering for much more. How much more? Tom asked him. A goat for a hundred dollars, a bull for five hundred dollars. If he sacrificed a bull for the woman, the priest said, the lwas would be very happy and certainly he could persuade one of them to go locate the woman’s soul and return it to her. When Tom turned half-around and began to explain this to Jackie, he was taken aback by the smirk on her face and her unlikely self-assurance.

  Look, he’s not being unreasonable, Tom said, exasperated. The animals cost money. This is how he makes his living. This is the only way he knows how to help you. And, after a sullen pause, This is what you wanted.

  Jackie guffawed. Fifty dollars to kill a chicken! That’s bullshit.

  He had, at Jackie’s bidding and despite his common sense, taken her seriously up to this point and for a moment he thought the issue making her balk might not be the bargaining price as much as her own poverty and he foolishly offered to lend her the money.

  I’m not giving this man fifty dollars. Don’t be ridiculous.

  Suit yourself, he said indifferently although he struggled to contain his anger and ignore her arch tone, the juvenile play of contempt across her lips. Suddenly she seemed to him traitorous and venal and crass and he felt duped by this woman, her frivolous seduction of his inclination to be sincere and useful. But there was a ceiling to his ability to care, wasn’t there? A ceiling to anyone’s ability to care, unless you were deranged. It’s your soul, he told her. I would think that it’s worth at least fifty dollars.

  I have news for you, she said. It’s not.

  All right, then it’s time to end this game.

  It’s not a game.

  Tell me what you want to call it then, he said to her back as she jumped to her feet and ducked past Gerard through the curtain. And honestly, what was he supposed to think about her grinding her lovely ass into his cock like that? How excruciatingly intolerable to think she might one day tell this story at a dinner party back in the States and set the table howling with laughter. Don’t laugh, she had pleaded with Tom in the car, and he had no doubt now that to laugh would be impossible. He felt at a loss to even imagine what her motive might have been for soliciting his help to come here. Her bratty fickleness, skating from one impulse to another, preempted any thought of motives—motives seemed simply beyond her. But what’s a soul worth after all? Not a goddamn cent, not one gourde, and if you’re in hell kicking around with a hapless lot of humanitarians and do-gooders, even less.

  The sheer farce of it all.

  He felt a rash of guilt heat his face as
he glanced at the woman on the ground, shocked by his inability to see her as anything but an inanimate object, and then he refocused on the houngan to be done with the protocol of their visit, offering an awkward explanation of his friend’s wish to think things over before she made a decision. Perhaps he would return with her another day, he lied, and the houngan said Bon, but send word so the animal could be purchased and made ready. Tom extended his hand and the houngan shook it with limp goodwill.

  What is your name, monsieur?

  Bòkò St. Jean.

  Harrington came to his feet in a slow rise, absently patting his pocket to give the priest a few dollars for his time but as he stood he felt himself pushing up through a heavy cloud of dread and he understood what he knew he should have realized earlier, that, distracted by Jackie posting in his lap, something was terribly wrong, that the exorcism had not been a success, that the woman half-stripped of her dress hadn’t simply lost consciousness from the strain of the ritual. Wearily, he bent his knees and lowered himself next to her body, wrapping his fingers under the wrist of her flattened hand, a hand unadorned by the priceless rings of friendship or love, unable to find a pulse. Her face was smashed straight down in the dirt, her mouth opened as if she were eating it, and beyond her head the bowl he did not want to look into but did, the calabash shell filled with liquid as black and viscous as crankcase oil, floating with blackened sprigs of herbs and ghostly tissues of flesh and grayish globs of unidentifiable organs, unspeakably detestable and lurid as death itself.

  He stood up and was going to say something useless about an ambulance or a doctor but the houngan waved a hand to tell him not to worry.

  She is ours, said Bòkò St. Jean. We will attend to her, and Tom gave him money so that the woman might have the otherwise unattainable dignity of a pinewood coffin.

  He walked blinking back into the sunlight, past Gerard and Jackie who followed him around to the front of the compound, across the shadeless scorch of the courtyard, down the steep bank to the road and the roasting car. He opened all the doors to let the heat out and handed the keys to Gerard and after a minute they climbed in and Gerard made a U-turn and they drove south.

  I could use something cold to drink, said Jackie.

  Tom sighed heavily in the backseat and announced that the woman in the daffodil dress had died. Jackie looked over her shoulder at him, inscrutable, without any visible emotion or conciliatory gesture, not the faintest suggestion of either regret or compassion, as if she had lived a life already overpopulated by dying women under her feet.

  What did she have? AIDS?

  I don’t know.

  He became fixated, though, on the intense color of her irises, robin’s egg blue, and she returned his gaze, holding it until it seemed to Tom they both knew and understood each other much too well and had formed a shameless bond that he couldn’t conceive as being anything other than dark and fiery and heartless. She turned away to look ahead out the windshield and he bowed his head in thoughtless reverie, noticing for the first time the dried oval patch on his olive-drab pants, the left leg, mid-thigh, where she had melted into him, the stain mocking the pretense of his altruism. He ran his fingernail along it, exploring the slightly starched texture of the patch, and rode to Saint-Marc in a glassy state of distress, confounded by the outrage and exhilaration of her audacity. She’s dangerous, he thought, which was not a particularly differentiating trait in Haiti, nor an isolating condition, and he knew it was not unthinkable or wholly impossible that he might find himself, in more appropriate surroundings, enjoying this woman’s brand of trouble.

  Gerard slowed down as they entered the ruined streets of Saint-Marc and Jackie, sweet-voiced, reminded him that she was dying of thirst.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  He speaks English, Tom Harrington said. You won’t need me.

  Harrington would not go into the morgue with Dolan but waited outside near the rental car, ignoring a promise to his wife by smoking a cigarette. Of all the vile horrors to which he had willingly exposed himself, the morgue in downtown Port-au-Prince was in some respects the most ghastly, the one that produced in him the most unbalanced existential sense of spiraling vertigo, and he had no wish to have his shoes defiled by the fulsome ooze channeling its concrete floor, or stare in cold despair at the boxcar-sized room where the bloated corpses of infants and children were stacked like cordwood, waiting for the loan of a dump truck from Public Works to be hauled to the swamps of Tintayen.

  He knew the coroner, Monsieur Laurent, well, knew he was at heart a good man, educated and courtly and gentle, but Laurent had been over-supplied by his country’s harvest of death, with no resources to manage his vocation with competence or delicacy, the excess rotting out of sight until its eventual disposal. Cause of death? Why ask, why bother? To understand what? To satisfy whom? Does God ask such questions of the dead? What most disturbed Tom was the violation of the principle, his conviction that death presented an obligation to the living to restore value to lives without overt value, to declare at last to the society that which the society never seemed able to acknowledge—here is a human being, let us show respect. Dignity first and then, perhaps, justice, but here at the morgue both were rebuffed by crude practicalities.

  He watched a swarm of skinny, bare-chested boys weaving through traffic kicking a scuffed soccer ball, a gift from the American soldiers who had tossed out hundreds from their passing convoys in the final months of the occupation. By the time his interest had turned to a pair of toiling stevedores up from the wharves, enslaved to a wooden pushcart stacked overhead with bags of cement, Conrad Dolan was emerging from the stinking depths of the morgue, his face red and splotchy and his eyes hardened, wiping his mouth with a bandanna pulled from the hip pocket of his jeans. He walked past Tom to the SUV and got in and waited for Tom to start it up and crawl back into traffic, headed for the American Embassy, farther downtown toward the port.

  A few blocks on, Dolan, straightening the slump of his back and shoulders, released a long groaning sigh and blew his nose into the bandanna with enough force to clear his senses. Son of a bitch, Dolan rasped. If anything happens to me down here, burn my body in the friggin’ streets before you let anybody put me in there.

  Tom asked if Monsieur Laurent had been able to tell him anything new about Jackie’s death and Dolan said, Yeah, yeah, as if whatever he had learned inside the morgue amounted to a vast annoyance. This guy, this coroner, never properly examined the body, said Dolan. Laurent’s name was on the death certificate under the inexact description of the cause—gunshot to right side of head—with no reference to forensic particulars, powder burns or caliber or exit wound or time of death. When asked to explain himself, Dr. Laurent had told Dolan that he had done no more and no less than what had been required of him by the laws of Haiti and by the Americans. When the coroner had arrived at the morgue that morning several weeks ago, a dark blue embassy van was parked by the door; apparently it had retrieved the body of the woman during the night and brought her down from the police station in Saint-Marc’s.

  As the doctor had approached the van, its front doors opened and two white men dressed in coats and ties stepped out to meet Laurent, waving embassy identification badges and handing him four copies of the Republic of Haiti’s Certificate of Death, each form completed except for his signature. The men had apologized for being in a hurry—a military flight was waiting at the airport to receive the body and deliver the remains of Renee Gardner back to the States. If you don’t mind just signing each copy, one of the men said, and Laurent had replied, Mais, oui, Of course, but if the gentlemen didn’t mind, he preferred not to sign without first viewing the deceased, it was his duty, and the men seemed to expect this request and slid open the side door to the van and there inside was a squared aluminum casket. One of the men unbuckled the clasps to its lid; the other man held the woman’s passport in Laurent’s face, o
pen to her picture. The first man raised the lid of the coffin to a forty-five-degree angle and the coroner stepped forward. Bon, he said after a minute, and signed the papers.

  Dolan had asked the coroner if he had noticed anything unusual about the body, something he might remember of its condition. Laurent had said no. Anything make an impression on you, Dolan asked. No . . . , said Laurent elliptically, and then, after thinking about it, said, Yes. Poor child, no one had troubled to wash the blood from her, she was a terrible mess. And I remember I was filled with shame, Laurent continued, because she was a blan and her feet were bare, someone must have stolen her shoes. Unfortunately, this is not so unusual. We take from the fallen, like soldiers on a battlefield.

  The traffic unclogged and slowly began to move again and he put the car in gear and drove toward the embassy, Tom’s thoughts looping back toward a single bit of information he was unsure how to interpret. Jackie’s body had been returned to the States on a military flight and he wondered why, and if such an arrangement was common. Apparently Dolan was thinking the same thing.

  That kid got special treatment, said Dolan.

  The military flight. The dispatch of a van. As a special agent working out of the Bureau’s office in San Juan, Connie Dolan had become familiar with standard procedure for dealing with American citizens murdered throughout the Caribbean. A consulate would notify the victim’s family, help them make the necessary arrangements with a local funeral home, shepherd the paperwork through the bureaucracies, provide flight schedules for whatever U.S. carriers serviced the island, and, if no family member showed up to accompany the body home, be there at the airport to oversee the transfer of the coffin from hearse to cargo hold and sign off on the documentation. The process took days or weeks, depending on whether the crime was a political asset, a liability, or a wash for an existing regime and its opposition—and every government saw opportunity in even the accidental death of an American on its soil, ransoming the body back to the bereaved family for many thousands of dollars.