The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  They went back to the bed for more and slower lovemaking, interrupted by intervals of reading and short immersions into the television, falling asleep snuggled back to back. In the morning they lazed around, stealing time, going to a nearby truck stop for a breakfast of biscuits and sausage gravy, returning to the room for another bout, checking out at noon and spending the rest of the day on the freeways, at the mercy of the weekend traffic, 64 to Williamsburg, then the stop-and-go torture of 95, the traffic bumper to bumper north of Fredericksburg, then the Beltway, she guiding him to the exit to Vienna on 123 until the two of them sat in the parking lot in front of a row of colonial-style town houses, hedgerows of unpruned azaleas in bloom, the brick walkways lined with tidy boxwoods, behind the building the tops of maple trees like green clouds poking above the roof, Dottie’s mood swung low the moment he pulled into an empty space and turned off the engine. I don’t want to stay here, she said. Okay, said Eville. Nobody says you have to, but tell me how this works. You’re supposed to be dead.

  I think it’s a case of mistaken identity, she said, getting out. You must have mistaken me for somebody else, and when she says this senseless thing, for a moment he wants to throttle her.

  She knocked and they waited, listening to the clicking release of multiple locks, Eville bewildered by her infuriating caprice, Dottie nervously fluffing her unruly hair, sun-bleached to a color resembling cantaloupe, mumbling that she hated this place and then the door swung open and there stood a reproachful, stern-faced Steven Chambers dressed in a navy polo shirt and crisp chinos and tasseled loafers with no socks. Eville observed her quicksilver change into loving daughter, greeting her father with a prolonged hug and a peckish bouquet of kisses, Steven Chambers looking gimlet-eyed over her shoulder at Burnette with a tight courtroom smile of parental displeasure.

  I had expected you last night, said Chambers. Why on earth didn’t you call?

  Yes, sir, said Burnette.

  You ignored your pager. We call that dereliction, don’t we?

  It’s my fault, Daddy, she said, ending her embrace to come to Ev’s rescue without bothering to explain the nature of her blame. Don’t be cross.

  Her father’s mint-blue eyes rescinded their indictment as they fell back upon his daughter and he looked at her then directly, brightening with repossession, the graying bon vivant restored to his natural pose of conviviality and panache. You made it, thank God, he said. You almost missed your surprise.

  The surprise made its happy entrance—her brother Christopher, a shorter, dark-haired, and less dominating version of his father, and a lovely woman with shoulder-length locks and a strawberries-and-cream complexion, dressed in a white knit top and printed cotton skirt and rubber flip-flops, stepping out from the living room into the foyer. Dottie, who hadn’t seen Christopher in six years, walked into the invitation of his arms with an effusive spool of questions. Wasn’t he supposed to be in Texas, working on his doctorate? Done, said Christopher, comps, dissertation, defense, the whole academic shitload, signed, sealed, delivered, done. Never again a schoolboy, his real life now beckoned, replete with an unexpected nostalgia for the wider world. Hey, this is Jocelyn, he said, and his sister seemed stunned when he made his announcement—they were getting married in August in Harare. Harare! It’s where my parents live, explained Jocelyn in the sonorous lilt of an Anglo-African accent. It’s where I’m from. Rhodesia. Zimbabwe. But we were neighbors, weren’t we, in a manner of speaking. You once lived in Kenya yourself. Christopher has told me so many wonderful stories.

  Forgotten, Burnette stood awkwardly on the front stoop, a teenager all over again, bringing home his date, waiting with no little ambivalence to be invited inside to the rituals and bigotries of another’s family code; instead, the undersecretary joined him outside to speak confidentially. I have some good news, he said, lowering his voice. You’re off the hook.

  What hook is that, sir?

  Chambers said Jack Parmentier seemed to have hired a private detective, who was down in Haiti snooping around. With someone I believe you know, a lawyer—Tom Harrington?

  Yes, sir. We’ve met. Dottie knows him too.

  Well, it seems they tracked down the actual gunman.

  Sir? How can that be?

  I’ve been told that the Feds in Miami plan to release Parmentier tomorrow.

  Excuse me, sir. What the hell is going on?

  Chambers looked Eville up and down, faintly patronizing, mildly dismissive and entertained, unruffled by Burnette’s challenge to this ludicrous assertion that two plus two equals three. He shrugged and said, It all seems damn promiscuous, doesn’t it, Ev? and then looked absentminded, glancing at his wristwatch, apparently lost in a swath of empty thought before he turned away and clapped his hands inside the doorway, collecting his children. Everyone, let’s go, he announced. To Maria’s first, a cramped little Mexican joint a short drive up 123, and then Christopher and Jocelyn had an international flight to catch out of Dulles.

  The reunited family piled into Chambers’s silver Mercedes and Eville followed unhappily in his truck, kicking himself for being a damned fool, screwing the boss’s daughter perhaps the least of his transgressions in light of his apparent inclusion on the list of suspects in her murder, a decoy in their fucking games, the self-dramatizing schemes of overheated minds, unrestrained in power and influence and felonious inspiration. It all seemed a bit too diabolically fanciful and he felt once again shanghaied, made to join an absurdist theater troupe renowned for bloodshed, performing exclusively for kings and their unsuspecting subjects, the cast and audience equally at risk of cutthroating or mock executions or ironically, because it was less titillating, almost a disappointment in its imaginative deficit, wholesale slaughter.

  Dinner passed without a hint of discord, save for the Chambers’s collective inconsiderate bad manners, the group oblivious to their outsider and yet its mutual exchange of affections unexpected, given what Eville had been conditioned to assume about the family from Dottie’s innuendos. The implicit unwholesomeness of her relationship with her father, aberrant by any rational standard, was a mystery Eville had no desire to solve. The tacit regret he had heard in her occasional remarks about her brother, who Eville had been led to believe was too weak to bear the harsher realities of life as an adult. But none of these assumptions seemed to hold up and he endured their ostentatious enthusiasm with a sinking of his own.

  The meal’s celebratory theme was water. Newly armed with postgraduate degrees in hydrology, the engaged lovebirds were off to southern Africa to launch an NGO, DrinkUp, the organization already hatched, chartered with the United Nations and the war-weary government of Mozambique, where DrinkUp had received its first grant for its inaugural project, drilling bore wells and designing irrigation systems in the arid countryside. (Chris is the engineer. I’m the queen of groundwater, quipped Jocelyn. My path is the one of least resistance.) This is so exciting, trilled Dottie, who vowed nothing would stop her from attending the wedding. Then without pause the siblings shifted the conversation to their mother, apparently reincarnated as a saint, whom Christopher and Jocelyn had just visited in Missouri on their journey east from Lubbock, where the mother had immersed herself in devoted care for her elderly parents. The topic of his wife the Samaritan seemed to produce a surge in their father’s appetite, Chambers’s fork set in a quickened rotation from plate to mouth, packing in the chicken enchiladas and carne asada quesadilla, his disinterested eyes watering from the heat of the chilis. Will she come to the wedding? Dottie asked her brother. It depends, he said. You know. If she can get away. You’re coming, aren’t you, Daddy, she asked, and he looked up distracted from his plate, chewing boorishly, a grain of rice stuck to his chin, and nodded, his affirmation unconvincing, but with his mouth again empty he declared with a receding smile, Wouldn’t miss it for the world.

  Is Mary Beth still in Nairobi?

>   Last I heard, said her father.

  Mary Beth? said Christopher. God, how is she?

  We should go see her, Daddy. On the way to the wedding.

  There’s a good idea.

  Ev, said Dottie, shattering his invisibility, will you come?

  Oh, grand, said Jocelyn, beaming belated curiosity toward Dottie’s male companion, her inquiring eyes probing the unexplained nature of their relationship, preempted by the undersecretary’s cursory introduction back at the town house; Ev, a friend of the family. Jocelyn reached across the table with a surplus of sincerity to lay her hand atop Eville’s. Please come.

  Let me check the dates, said Eville, more uncomfortable with the sudden attention than their preoccupation and indifference, the unconscious rudeness families seemed to generate when they gathered into their nucleus, orbited by outsiders.

  Steven Chambers swiped his red-greased lips with a napkin and took out his wallet, setting money on the table, Dottie slipped away to the restroom, and Chambers stood up saying, Sit tight for a minute everyone, but motioning for Ev to join him. Let’s get Dottie’s things out of your truck.

  Sir, may I speak? Eville said, once they were out in the parking lot, and Chambers said impatiently, For God’s sake. About what? The transfer was messy, Burnette unzipping the duffel, yanking out Dottie’s clothes, grabbing her day pack from the cab, Chambers flustered because he couldn’t find his keys, left behind inside on the table. He came back out with the full crew, Dottie casting a chagrined doll’s face at Eville, an offering for his plight or hers, hard to say which, helping him stuff everything into the available space in the Mercedes’s trunk, already occupied by the couple’s luggage. Numbed by the sudden opacity of Dottie’s eyes and her father’s irritable behavior, he reported wooden-voiced to Steven Chambers, I think that’s it, sir. Chambers told him to head back down 123 toward Tysons Corner, take a right on Route 7, and go a mile to a Hilton, where a prepaid room awaited him. Burnette, flat-faced, nodded acknowledgment of these instructions and pivoted with the practiced precision of obedience, baffled and furious once his back was turned to the undersecretary, stomping to his truck and climbing in, shutting the door, Dottie running over to knock on the window. He took a breath, refusing to look at her, grimaced, and then sighed and rolled it down.

  I have to go to the airport with them.

  I know, said Eville.

  I’ve been horrible, haven’t I? she said, searching his face for consensus.

  It’s family, he said. It’s important.

  And then she was back-stepping away, her hand raised to the side of her head, fingers pantomiming a telephone, saying she would call him, and he started the engine and drove off, convinced he had just been inducted into the Suckers Hall of Fame, certain his episodic misadventures with the undersecretary’s daughter had been permanently discontinued, his service ending in the customary manner, a sudden forfeiture of meaning and utility, the voiding return to irrelevance and banality, the personnel who previously found you necessary and vital staring at their feet at the mention of your name. He would never see her again, he told himself, hauling his cargo out of the bed of the truck to the elevator and up to his room, a severance that would have been almost all right with him were he able to forget or even dismiss their days out on the island, their night in the motel.

  At midnight, though, she was knocking on his door at the Hilton, passionate with apology and outbursts of gratitude, rattling with fucked-up rationales and nevertheless a presence he welcomed as he never thought he might or could, his good sense unmoored by this alchemic mess of a woman and her countervailing force—you always know better until suddenly you don’t seem to know anything at all.

  Seeing my brother Christopher was odd, she said.

  You seemed glad to see him.

  We were really close as kids and then one day we just weren’t.

  What happened?

  I don’t know. Daddy. I guess that’s what happened.

  How’s that? he asked, but she was thinking in another direction.

  I always thought my brother was queer. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Do you have brothers and sisters?

  Two brothers.

  Are you close to them?

  Like you, he said. I was and then I wasn’t. I’m close to my mother.

  So, can I stay? she asked, less manic, glancing around at the gear cluttered around the room. Is that a problem?

  Am I aiding and abetting an act of home-front insubordination? he said, attempting lightness.

  I told you, she said. I wasn’t spending the night there.

  Explain the rules. Dead? Not dead?

  Explain an act of grace. I want my life returned to me. It’s mine. I’m taking it back.

  And Parmentier? What about him?

  He’s gone. We won’t be hearing from Jack again.

  You and your father—

  We’re not talking about it.

  Minutes before she appeared he had taken an Oxcycontin for the recurrent pain low in his back; now, after such a day of aggravation unscrolled from the ease of their splendid morning, he felt incongruently mellow, sloppy with tenderness, pleased that she came to him regardless of what she ran from. Hey. Honey, he said. Look. Shh. Sitting down on the edge of the bed. It’s okay, I don’t care, none of that matters, and, suddenly queasy but painless, he floated back flat and loose and she responded as he might have hoped but for the bad timing of the opiate’s arrival in his bloodstream, leveling him out, deboned, Dottie occupying another spectrum of energy, recharged and moving forward, his jeans unbuckled and tugged from his legs. He fell asleep caressing her silky head, her mouth warm and wet around his grateful penis, startled upright in the morning by the room phone ringing, the operator announcing his wake-up call, Dottie undressed and clinging to his bare self from behind, mumbling, We have to get up, we have to get Daddy and take him to mass at St. Luke’s, and all Burnette could think to say was, Fuck all that tradecraft stuff, huh.

  Dottie keyed open the door to the town house to a sonic blastwave of Rigoletto playing top volume on the stereo from one of the upper floors, her father’s unfaltering tenor joined in a duet with the soloist, Dottie ascending the stairs and descending ten minutes later on her father’s arm, dressed for Sunday services but wearing a blonde shoulder-length wig and designer sunglasses, everyone behaving with the utmost circumspection, like coddled, overprotected amnesiacs, imminently vulnerable to the wrong word or careless action that might trigger the memory of old grievances, and so they drove to church like any other family carved away by time, incomplete in number and destined for further shrinkage, filing together reverently into their pew on Sunday morning.

  Ev, Chambers stage-whispered, offhanded, wickedly, into Burnette’s ear, stepping close with jaunty arrogance as they walked back out into the sunshine an hour later. You fucking my daughter? He chuckled, one cocksman to another, and clapped Eville on the back and said, You lucky dog, and Eville gritted his teeth and impulsively placed his open hand on Chambers’s chest, over his gold necktie, his hand there and gone in an instant but the line irrevocably crossed, the slightest push of insolence, warning the undersecretary to never speak to him this way again.

  Or you will strike me down, Ev? asked Chambers, his head tilted with a taunt of gleaming interest, and Burnette said, Yes, sir.

  Dottie, ahead of them, turned around gaily and asked, What are you guys laughing about? and Eville, his face blanched and rigid, said, I’m not laughing, am I? But she laughed herself, scanning their confrontational expressions, ignoring them with a smirk, continuing to the car, not about to step between them.

  They went to the Joshua Tree for brunch, an Agency hangout in McLean, where the undersecretary spent much of his time table-hopping among his fellow suits and their fleshy accessories,
the painted wives sipping mimosas, big-haired ladies smelling of Paris, his clubhouse laugh of affability bubbling through the atmospheric clatter.

  He’s like the fucking mayor, isn’t he, said Eville.