Don’t be so sure, he said. I was trying to compliment you. Voice my admiration.
It was the first time either of them had mentioned her father since the evening on the veranda at the Oloffson when Harrington had stepped away. So anyway, he said, just as their food came to the table. How’d your day go? What did you do?
Walked around, she said, picking up her chicken leg and nibbling at it, halting her reply to chew and swallow a tiny bite of flesh. Checked out the port. Humint. You know.
Right, he said. He asked her if she was headed back to the States now that the Lecoeur operation was a wrap and she sent a surge of rotten electricity through his neck and shoulders by revealing that the Lecoeur thing was nothing more than a last-minute add-on to her primary mission, which would likely keep her on the island for several months.
Why are you looking at me like that? she asked.
Tell me right now that you’re bullshitting me, please.
Nobody was sure that your buddy Harrington would let you tag along on his vision quest. You know what they say, right?
I haven’t the slightest idea what they say. Who’s they?
They is you, singular, plural. They say, What money won’t buy, pussy will.
Eville, recoiling, asked her why she had to talk like that. Like what? she said and he told her like a hooker, an insult that made her eyes roll, clearly about as cutting as a butter knife.
I’m having another beer. Do you want one?
Last one, he said, dropping his voice to not be overheard by diners at the nearby tables. Look, it would help me to know some things about you. I’m pretty much in the dark here. Does Colonel Khan know who you are?
She shook her head no and reverted to being flip. Why would he? You don’t even know who I am.
Man, he said. Man.
She reconsidered her attitude. All right, she said more evenly. We’re on a separate track, behind separate fire walls. Ask anybody—I’m nobody. I can’t speak for you.
Khan knew Burnette was army assigned to him as an advisor. Why the ruse, I can’t figure, said Eville, but at this point it’s plain ridiculous, right, he said. He flicked the laminated UN-issued press pass that hung from a lanyard around his neck, identifying him as a correspondent for some outfit called American Media Initiatives. Who else is in the loop, nobody bothered to tell me.
I don’t think there’s any loop, she said. There’s a Gordian knot.
Eville gave a squinch-faced nod, not wanting to let her further into his ignorance. He’d get a green light and a wave-through whenever somebody needed to check a list, which meant he was not as abandoned as he felt. But you, he said, wagging his stripped chicken bone at Jackie, you’re NOC—nonofficial cover.
Her eyes narrowed in contradiction. Bad form, she said. Don’t say that.
Even in the spook playbook, that’s extreme. No one there to catch you if you fall.
I guess someone had the bright idea that you should audition for that job.
Someone who happened to be your father, he thought, satisfied that their encoded conversation, in most ways resembling a random stroll through a minefield, had now arrived at a destination worth exploring, if only for a business-minded view of its practicalities.
What exactly are you doing in Haiti?
Surveillance and research.
Okay, he said reluctantly. Thanks.
She picked up her fork and stabbed at her rice and beans, toying with him yet again. What are these called? she asked and, acknowledging his quizzical frown, added, in Spanish. What are they called in Spanish? The dish originated in Spain, I think. Or maybe Cuba.
I have no idea what you’re talking about, he said, completely and understandably missing her gist, which, in retrospect, would bang like a temple gong in his memory. There would be, in the years ahead, countless opportunities, more than a sane man would ever wish for, to revisit in grief this puzzling moment, Jackie pointing to her plate with a self-satisfied grin, Eville not comprehending her implication, that a world of hate, a world fully awakened by hate, was a lot further along in becoming what it would become than he could possibly have imagined.
Moros y Cristianos, she said. Isn’t that a riot. That’s what’s on our plate.
You’ve lost me here, he said.
Best not to know. It’s all you need right now. That could change.
Okay, he sighed, wearied by the riddle and all its sealed-lip smug cousins. What I think I’m hearing loud and clear, and what I know I’m seeing, is you don’t need me, right? Your father was only being—what, a father—when he asked me to keep an eye on you.
Yes. Don’t need you. Probably not. But that could change too.
He glanced down at his own empty plate and fixated on her partially-gnawed chicken leg and untouched mound of beans and rice and felt his appetite redoubled. Are you going to eat that? he asked, and she shoved the remains of her dinner across the table.
By the way, she said.
By the way? He could hear the exhaustion press down on his voice and he needed to take a breather from the high-velocity roller-coaster ride of Jackie’s apparently sociopathic personality and retreat to his room, still booked for another couple of nights, where he could feel like shit in peace.
Have you been down to the harbor?
Which harbor? I’m not following what you’re saying.
The harbor here in Cap. That ship from Gonaïves. It’s anchored out there, she said, pointing beyond the secure glow of the Christophe’s self-generated light into the darkness of the streets. After you liberated the ship from the bad guys, or the good guys, or the in-the-middle guys or whoever, they sailed up here.
Okay, he said tentatively. And that means what? I’m still not following you.
Friendlier waters, she said with an odd burst of gaiety, as if she had just revealed the emotional resolution to an excellent story, as if this resolution also described the universal condition of where they together now found themselves. She asked him if he was ready to retire to the hotel’s bar for a nightcap and instead of wishing him good night when he told her he really had to lie down she flashed a downturned expression of childlike disappointment and sniffed, Suit yourself, and walked away alone into the bar, the swing of her hips just another piquant ingredient in the way she mixed her message. Lust rose up through his weariness like a hiccup, up and out and gone and done, and he scaled the stairway to the second floor and keyed himself into his room, tossing his rucksack onto the tiled floor and emptying his bladder of beer before he toppled facedown in an inhuman sweat atop the yellowed sheets of the mattress on his bed to sleep unmolested until dawn. And as he slept in such sound oblivion, a demon-free celibacy much unlike his normal routine of dream-harried tossing, the ship from Gonaïves was being off-loaded, a fact that would elude him during his next two months in Haiti, its discovery delayed until he was back in the States, on a golf course in North Carolina.
CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
In early April, after almost two months in the north of Haiti, where he had been braided into an operation he quickly realized was seriously fucked, someone at the bar at the Christophe bought him a drink, identified himself as State, counterterrorism, et cetera, and said all the right things to relieve him of his misery. The next morning he boarded a Blackhawk on the airfield for Port-au-Prince, where he was to reacquaint himself with the men he had once trained on the presidential guard, assess their competency and loyalty, make nice with the natives, and await further instructions. He hooked up with a pair of Delta boys already assigned to the palace and a sense of honor began to trickle back into Eville Burnette’s blood, and what he had most woefully missed in Le Cap, camaraderie. Even with a stack of books at hand in his hotel room in Cap, being a lone wolf and set apart had bugged him more than he expected, and the solitude
came with an insight that should have been obvious before now, that he naturally gravitated toward a world of buddies—once upon a time his own brothers, his teammates on the gridiron in high school and college, his fellow grunts in basic training, his platoon in Iraq, his A-team in Haiti. Going solo had put a crack in his alignment that the undersecretary’s daughter only seemed there to intensify. They were not buddies, that’s for sure.
Back in the capital, he had checked in to the Oloffson despite its liability—Jackie was living there—because it was downtown and close to the palace and the proper venue for a phony correspondent with murky credentials. Four days later at breakfast on the veranda the waiter passed him a note from the girl at reception, which summoned him to the military attaché’s office in the embassy, where he was handed a voucher containing a plane ticket. Don’t know who you are, don’t know what you’re doing, but it’s time to go, he was told. Burnette flipped through the voucher, learning that he was on the afternoon flight to Miami with a connection to Raleigh-Durham. Wait a minute, he said. I should be booked to Fayetteville. The connection’s the connection, said the attaché. On whose orders? Eville asked. Not ours, said the attaché. We’re not in the business of ordering journalists to do anything but fuck off, and Burnette gripped the man’s hand and couldn’t stop saying, Thank you, like some imbecile. He took a cab back to the Oloffson to collect his gear and was standing at the front desk, signing his bill, when Jackie Scott—Dottie—came in off the street, drooping and empty-eyed and skanky beneath her cameras, looking like she had plowed through an all-nighter, which in Haiti could mean all manner of reckless or suicidal pursuits.
You’re avoiding me, she said. Why?
He asked her if she still had a rental and she said yes and he asked her if she was still using Gerard and she said he was out on the veranda ordering lunch. Lend him to me, he said.
Where are you going?
Stateside.
Reporting to Daddy.
What’s to report?
Whatever, she said, I need a shower, walking away toward the stairs and the second floor and her room.
He had waited for Gerard to finish his ham sandwich and lemonade and on the crawl through traffic to the airport he couldn’t get the driver to talk much at all, Gerard’s hard feelings burning bright from the day the two of them had met back in February, the guy still carrying Tom Harrington’s torch, and fair enough, he thought, but by now the Haitian knew more about the screwball doings of the undersecretary’s slattern daughter than Eville himself, and he had to ask.
She still wigging out with the voodoo priests?
Oui.
Taking pictures and stuff?
Yes.
Foo foo shit, my friend.
I don’t like it. It’s not good. Bad people. Why is she doing this?
Have you seen Tom?
No. Tom is gone.
If you see him—
He’s gone.
At the terminal, Eville’s guilt slipped five of his remaining twenties into Gerard’s shirt pocket and they turned away from one another without anything more to say. In the Miami airport he rode an elevator to the rooftop bar above the hotel to smoke and have a beer and slam down a cheeseburger while he watched a trio of pubescent girls splashing in the swimming pool, faux tarty, showing off for the boys in their dreams, more serious about vamping than about their game of Marco Polo, and his mind drifted back to Dottie-Jackie-Dottie, in a temporarily flirtatious mood during their last dinner together in Le Cap, telling him, You know, I used to have a crush on you, and just as he scoffed and said, When was that? an image of her with her pants down, her fuzzy peach pudenda presented for display, flicked on in his memory. What was she back then, twelve or thirteen? Which meant he was probably eighteen, that summer in Rome before he started college, on the way to visit his father in Ramstein, Dawson on a three-month assignment teaching an advanced jump-masters class to NATO troops.
After tapping on the closed door and getting no response, he had walked into the bathroom in the Chambers’s flat in Trastevere and she was standing there, posing, not getting up off the john or stepping out of the shower but just there with her shorts and panties around her ankles, the puff of her mons proudly thrust forward, glowing eagerly like a junior hostess at a birthday party—Here’s the cake!—or some other happy occasion for exhibitionists entering puberty. He had a four-count of enthrallment, gaping, unable to tear his eyes away from what he had never actually seen, not live anyway, a female’s mysterious real estate, though he could boast of no longer being a virgin, as of the last semester of his senior year. But the deed, twice done, had both times unfolded under musty quilts in the pitch black interior of a friend’s family cabin on the Kootenai River, and he had only the vaguest visual sense of his penis’s destination. He hadn’t grown up with sisters, and even the times he saw his mother buck naked—not that rare, actually, when the family was on a river camping—all he could really absorb was the dark thatched triangle of her crotch, which impressed him as resembling nothing so much as a slice of blackberry pie. Her breasts, more exposed, more all there, were more interesting, in a science fiction sort of way.
In the bathroom in Rome with Dottie, the four seconds of bewitchment imploded into an awful, self-righteous, stupid disgust, as if somehow he were suddenly channeling Nathaniel Hawthorne, a sanctimonious schoolboy self with all the traits of a puritanical little prig. Pull up your pants, he said, What’s wrong with you? and the expression on her face jumped from bright nymphet invitation to confusion to bitter compliance, as she bent over to do what he told her but kept her head raised in a bold challenge, hissing back at him a fierce accusation, What’s wrong with you? He didn’t regret his reaction then, but he regretted it soon enough, sitting down the next morning for breakfast with Dottie and her parents (her brother remained in his room, a hostage of Nintendo), his embarrassment no match for her unshamed buoyancy as she sang the praises of a girl’s exciting life in the Eternal City, her self-confidence clearly not jarred by his scorning rejection of her precocious sexuality, even flaunting a mean smile when her parents got up from the table, to call him, in a voice that only he could hear, Faggot. Off he fled to the airport and by the time he landed in Germany, the image of her precocious middle-school crotch, untouchable and unthinkable, had buried itself so deep in the sedimentary muck of his own psyche that he could never, not once, in the years ahead summon it forth into his libido as an erotic picture-memory to fuel a jack-off fantasy. It was simply unavailable, not lost but repressed for a reason hard to fathom, and when he saw her again when she was fifteen her personality had surprised him with its chaste self-consciousness and sensitivities.
And then, to his dismay, another memory of Dottie, his earliest, oozed out of the confounding carnal world of his own childhood, not erotic but certainly sexual and not even partially understood at the time, yet perhaps exaggerated now in its lewd implication. The memory had popped up disguised in an innocence he had thought was genuine until it segued unexpectedly into another dimension.
I think the first time I ever saw you, he told her at the candlelit dinner on the terrace of the Christophe, you were still a baby.
That must have been when we lived in India, she said. Why were you there? You must have been like what, five or six?
Six, I think, he said, my dad was on R and R and my mom decided to meet him in New Delhi, your parents must have invited them, and then the tableau appeared out of the blue in his memory—walking with his father and little brother through a house fragrant with cardamom, following a man’s voice somewhere ahead in the maze of hallways—Back here, Dawson. Come on back—and entering a bedroom where Mr. Chambers was bent over a baby laid out on the wide interior sill of a window, changing her diapers, tiny pink legs capped in lace-cuffed anklet socks, the feet pedaling the air above her father’s head.
What? sai
d Jackie, studying him, the inward veer in his mood.
Nothing. Just remembering.
There’s not much I remember from back then.
Our moms were out shopping I think and our dads were sitting around drinking whiskey and telling war stories. That’s all I remember, except for elephants in the streets, but in his mind now was a scene he was certain his six-year-old self had witnessed, ignorant of the code of its sordid meaning, Dottie’s father slowly lifting his nose away from the infant and grinning at his own father and winking, What do you know, Dawson, pussy smells the same on a baby. The picture stopped right there and the words became odd clenched feelings and all that remained was a residual but still withering sense of his father’s unexpressed disapproval. As a child, the moment had flapped away on wings of insensibility, meaningless until this new moment twenty-five years along into the future, when he tried to steer the subject into the relative safety of a parallel groove.
I guess you’re pretty close to your father, he said, but his angling made her dour. What was he hinting at anyway? Now everything shifted and it became the sort of dinner endured by people who once knew each other intermittently as kids but were now required to have a professional relationship as grown-ups. She wasn’t going to talk anymore about her father, maybe the taboo was nepotism or maybe something else, although the topic prompted her to mention his own. Do you miss him? she asked, and he nodded a long time before answering, Every single day, and then listened numbly as she revealed the strangest bond between them, the death of her own grandfather during World War Two, as grisly yet more comprehensible than Dawson’s own demise, a one in a billion accident, his father’s head clipped off on an everyday jump in Georgia when he exited a DC-3 not falling down but flying back, face-first into the plane’s horizontal stabilizer. Of the rare and arcane things their families had in common, the most surreal was decapitation.
A mother rose up from her poolside chaise longue, extending the offering of towels, calling her nubile ducklings from the water. An arid sorrow washed over Burnette. He was back in America, always a nip of culture shock after a deployment. He never entertained the thought that his life could be different—the structure of it, the fundamentals, not the interchangeable parts like a woman or a place, or the harness of a narrow ideology or a religion—because he never once wished it to be different, swapped out for some ersatz lifestyle. If not today then soon he was going home to Fayetteville, back to an empty—and emptied—off-base townhouse, his domestic life once again a casualty of his service. He already saw himself ordering a pizza to be delivered, sitting on whatever piece of furniture his now ex-wife had left him, watching TV until he dozed off. I want my own kids, he thought, but their presence in his life was something he had only imagined. Their mother remained unattainable, a stranger somewhere off in the world carrying his heart around like an overripe and soon to be rotting apple.
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