A Rendezvous in Haiti (2 page)

The sergeant squinted at the colonel's shadowed features. Their mingled breath steamed in the feeble yellow glow. The sergeant said without heat, “Fuck your war,” and trudged past them.

The Americans turned to watch this phenomenon out of sight, and when he had melted into the darkness they resumed their march. “At least he didn't spit on my boots,” the colonel said. “Too much time in the line, I imagine.”

McAllister only said “Yes, sir.” He was startled by his colonel's forbearance; he would remember it; rank; noblesse oblige.

“I'm sending you to Paris,” Colonel Barbour said. “For a week or two only. You'll join General Harbord's brigade at the end of the month. Not staff: you'll take a platoon.”

“It's what I want, sir.” Paris. He would see Caroline. Perhaps the colonel would speak of her now.

“Of course. But let me tell you something. It's not only the British who've lost a million men; the French and the Germans and the Russians too. Colonels pay attention to such numbers. We do not enjoy sacrificing the flower of our manhood et cetera. Your job is not to win medals and lose platoons.”

“I appreciate the advice, sir. But with permission, I don't believe it was necessary. I am not one of your glory hogs.”

“You astonish me.” The wind was slacking. “Harbord's setting up at Château-Thierry. You know the town?”

“Down on the Marne.”

“Yes. Historical. It's … grey.” After a pause the colonel said, “The Germans are reinforcing all along the line. There will be a hell of a battle this spring, I promise you that.”

“Maybe the last, sir. They tell me we're here to see that it doesn't happen again.”

“It will happen again,” the colonel said. “I just don't want it to happen to
us
. We may have to run the world yet. Everybody else killing themselves off like lunatics.” The Hotchkiss creaked as they settled in. McAllister spurred the engine to life. “There's never a last battle,” the colonel said. “Bit of wisdom: remember it: there's never a last battle. Dim your headlights.”

“Aye aye, sir.”

Night had fallen; the abbey was invisible. Streaks of contraband light flashed from tents and barracks windows. A surge of here and now shook McAllister: he was in France, in this vehicle, in this dream, blood and bone and muscle and gold bar, a cold night, and little yellow lights like cold fires, and white stars pricking out the night now, and a war out there waiting for him.

The whole day had been freakish and foreign—an illusion, a piece of pageantry. The wind singing down from the north, and no sound of shot or shell, and a bizarre ceremony with its Sikhs and Australians and monocles. Generals. A consumptive hero. Crosses and stars and palms and ribbons. A lonely abbey. A one-armed band-master.

McAllister saw more of Caroline Barbour than he had dared hope. His brief leave in Paris took him from the Luxembourg gardens (cheap) to Rumpelmayer's (expensive) and from the Invalides (solemn and somehow false) to Sacré Coeur (solemn and somehow true), always in her company. They strolled the famous quais, and crossed the famous bridges. They were happier together than apart; then much happier; then giddy.

He admired what men usually admire: wide-set eyes, straight nose and full lips; he had early noticed her generous bust. Her hair was silky black and her skin silky fair; she mocked his compliments, and told him of her youth as a gawky wallflower blossoming a few times each year for the one male present who could talk horses and look her in the eye from a comfortable eminence. She loved horses. And the adolescent was long gone, matured by travel and war; Caroline was indeed beautiful now, and preserved from vanity by the memory of a lonely silent girl. Her body had at last rounded to match her height, and the miracle of her breasts astounded her every morning—those firm assertions of arrival, those annunciations.

McAllister was lucky: he was a tall amiable young man with curly blond hair matted on his forearms; and his father raised horses. But unlucky too: shortly he was off to Château-Thierry and Harbord's brigade, and by mid-May he and his platoon were one, sharp and ready, and on June 6, 1918, they attacked Belleau Wood and McAllister was riddled by shell fragments. Only four, really, but “riddled” was what he told Caroline. “It was the end of the German drive,” he told her. “They're calling it the Battle of Chemin-des-Dames. They reached the town on May twenty-seventh. We had a machine-gun battalion there and the Wood was just west of town. We went in on June sixth and stopped them cold. And these—funny, it was like being slugged, not stabbed. No pain. I don't even remember a boom.”

“So many of you say that. Nothing hurts till later.”

“We took about eight thousand casualties. I was lucky.”

“So was I.”

He had wangled his way to the IIIème Hôpital Provisoire, where she was a nurse's aide and wore a small red cross. They were not embarrassed by his body and its rude demands; they were not just Bobby and Caroline but soldier and nurse. They had both seen blood and guts and death, and had rid themselves forever of certain reticences.

But not others. Soon they could roam the Tuileries, she strolling and he limping, and once when he had been silent for some time and she said, “A penny,” he replied, “That's it. You know I have no money. We're barefoot landed gentry. My father breeds horses, drinks Bourbon and damns Republicans.”

“I hope you're not apologizing.”

“Never. It is no less estimable than doctoring or lawyering or robber barony, and McAllisters have raised horses for four generations—carriage horses and highbred riding horses, and none of your slugs or Percherons. They're obsolete now except on the racetrack. So the old man may go broke,” McAllister mourned, “but he will not raise hacks for young ladies' riding academies. Excuse me. That was an unintended slur.”

“I've ridden with a number of young ladies,” she said, “and you are forgiven. Tell me about your mother.”

“A good-looking round warm woman who likes to hug my father. They're so happy there's nothing else to say about them. They keep no house servants, for the obvious reason but also because they suffice, the two of them. I'm twenty-eight and they make me blush. And yours?”

“She was tall and elegant, a proper Bostonian with the dry wit they love in New England. My father lived in fear of that wit; God knows he was afraid of nothing else, but she could insult with a gentle smile, and he was always afraid she'd devastate some senator's wife. She never did, of course. She promised me I'd be beautiful, and she dragged me to museums and galleries and concerts, and I miss her terribly. It may seem odd, but she was my closest friend. She died five years ago, just like that, her heart. She taught me when to say ‘damn' and how to ride astride. I'm sorry, but she left me a lot of money.”

“Then we'll take a rest at the Carrousel,” he said, “and you can buy me a Dubonnet.” But he was embarrassed. He piled up three saucers while she talked of yachts, and her father's patriotism, and finishing school in Geneva. He talked of the Naval Academy, and guns and drums and wounds. They learned that both had sat a horse before they could walk.

They rambled the Bois de Boulogne too. His leg healed well and grew strong. He was reassigned in August. On the last night he kissed her farewell and again set one gentle hand on the generous bust, and she only said, “Ah,” and drew back after a moment to lay her own hand on his lips.

He failed her. “I make seventeen hundred dollars a year,” he said, “plus ten percent overseas bonus, and I have to buy my own uniforms.”

“But your quarters allowance is two hundred and eighty-eight dollars a year,” she said demurely.

“Don't be clever.”

“Our first quarrel,” she said, and kissed him again with fervor, pressing his hand firmly to her, and when he left her hours later he had only time to dash for his dunnage and join his detachment at the Gare de l'Est. But it was indeed a quarrel, the sweet essential quarrel that confirmed love—Christ! the horror of separation, of disagreement, of being less than one!—and it was not easily resolved. The war to end wars ended, and Caroline went quickly home; but he was detained in Europe, and his letters grew defensive, and hers impatient; and when he was repatriated and given at last a good long leave, she had sailed for the peace conference in Paris, where she would hobnob with marshals and ambassadors and prime ministers, and play hostess when her eminent father invited other eminences to grand luncheons and grander dinners, with Filipino messmen to cook and wait upon them.

He applied immediately for European duty, and was sent instead to another war. He wrote to her, cursing the Corps but a stubborn slave to his own choices. Her answer reached him in Port-au-Prince, Haiti: “If you won't come after me, I'll come after you.
Damn
your pride.”

2

He was First Lieutenant McAllister and he owned three ribbons and was fighting a smaller and balmier war. He was riding miles most days, eating well, sleeping soundly and evading enemy fire; he enjoyed regular leave in Port-au-Prince, a filthy and magical city; and his war eased the ache of Caroline's absence. But it was a queer war, the Marines guerrillas, gendarmes and politicos all at once, the black enemy both friend and foe, the war not a true war but a pacification without peace.

And lately the Marines had been mauled in a number of sharp skirmishes. For almost five years now rebel after rebel, liberator after liberator, had stuck a red feather in his hat and fired away at Marines. The new one was named Martel, and people prayed to him at hidden shrines deep in the forest, and either these clowns were finally learning or some supernatural intelligence was at work. Queer indeed. He was uneasy. Everything he wore was sweatstained or mildewed. October in Haiti was a rotten month, neither winter nor summer, the trade winds slack and sullen, much rain and muggy heat and always the throb of tambors, the Haitian drums that pounded and tapped at them all day and half the night.

One late afternoon he was lying soaked from his campaign hat to his canvas puttees, muddying the dust of a Haitian plain south of Hinche and scattering a ragtag band of poorly armed, half-clad Haitian bandits. He heard a last shot, and saw a distant fleeing black figure fall.

“You see him skid?” Private Clancy buffed the sweat from his sunglasses with a red bandanna and expelled a proud spurt of tobacco juice. “You see that nigger skid?”

Gunnery Sergeant Evans called, “The captain says we are not to call these coons ‘niggers'. And for Christ's sake pipe down.”

“I just been
shooting
,” Clancy said, and swabbed his upper lip. “I just
killed
one. They sure as hell know where we are now.” He jacked another cartridge into the chamber.

“Pipe down anyway,” the sergeant said. Evans stood about five eight and weighed about one-ninety, all of it sandy and hard.

McAllister rose, damp and stinking, slung his own rifle and trudged toward the debate.

Clancy said, “If they didn't hear my goddam gun, they ain't gonna hear a little civilized conversation.”

“You call that weapon a gun again,” Evans said, “and they'll hear me wrap it around your neck.”

“Mah rahffle,” Clancy mocked him.

Heat shimmered off the baking plain: mirages, sheets of blinding white water that dissolved into sparkles of silver light and then vanished.

“They won't move again,” McAllister said to the sergeant, “unless they come out for that corpse. I do believe our day's work is done.”

“I think so too. Now ordinarily we would have to wait until this brilliant idea seeped into a lieutenant's head.” The men were securing their weapons and easing closer. “Lieutenants' heads,” the sergeant explained to them, “
most
lieutenants' heads, are somewhere between bone and stone. You ever see any of that petrified wood from Arizona and out there, Lieutenant?”

“Never did.”

“Sometimes you find a chunk that didn't quite make it, mostly rock but still a little woody like.”

“Sounds about right.”

“Course, if a lieutenant has fought in France, that makes a difference,” Evans said. “But with the last one I always had to make it feel like his idea. The last one could not count to twenty-one without dropping his pants.”

A drumbeat, a deep hollow boom; then a pattern, pom-pom-boom, pom-pom-boom. Another answered, tap-tap-tap-tap.

“Tambors,” McAllister said. “Jazz music.”

The drums conversed. Rhythms crossed, urgent. McAllister's fingers danced on his canteen. “Quitting time.”

“That's what it is,” Evans agreed. “They do make music. You'd almost think they were human.”

Clancy said, “Gunny, you might ask the lieutenant if that drumming ain't the same as closed up shop yesterday.”

“Feel free to address me directly,” McAllister said.

“Recall,” Evans said. “Last one, I'd ask the lieutenant if that was recall. The last lieutenant was a salty dog. I mean with the last lieutenant it was all bulkheads and decks and starboard and port.”

“And where is this last lieutenant?”

Evans remembered his manners, and frowned. “Sorry. He was killed over by Mirebalais.”

“Then respect his memory,” McAllister said. “Let's go home.”

This afternoon they were completing one of a dozen patrols sent out by the 2d Marines in October of 1919. After a day's rest they would ride out again, this time on a more merciful mission: to keep a rendezvous with a small Caco village that was tired of war. The Marines would come bearing gifts: extra rations, plugs and small sacks of tobacco, bolts of blue cotton cloth. Today the stick, tomorrow the carrot.

“Caco” was what the rebels called themselves. It was low Spanish for “thief,” but it was also the name of a local red bird, and many of the Caco corpses bore a touch of scarlet: a ribbon around the neck, a red thread twined through a gold earring, a spot of crimson dye on the forehead like a caste mark. They were insurgents and guerrillas but thieves and bandits too, and McAllister was startled by the variety of them. He had expected regiments of identical blacks, but he was fighting everything from villagers in loincloths to light-skinned men in felt hats, dress shirts with no collar, cast-off morning trousers and leather shoes. Martel was a fiery, educated black and no one knew where he might be from day to day; he waged a darting harassing war at the head of a ragtag horde of men and women, and McAllister was tempted to admire him. The Cacos claimed to be patriots, and many carried black-powder rifles from the nineteenth century; and daggers, spears, machetes; some were mounted.