A Rendezvous in Haiti Read online

  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.

  McAllister issued brief orders. His men secured their gear and crooned to their horses. McAllister and Evans walked side by side, and McAllister said, “When I was a second lieutenant and had not seen combat, gunnery sergeants were next to God.”

  Evans grunted: this was good sound doctrine.

  “And now I am a first lieutenant, with scars, and I remember what they told me at the Academy: that when I was all grown up sergeants would call me ‘sir’.”

  Evans said, “Aye aye, sir. Sorry, sir. In this goddam country it is like all white men are brothers and we can be careless with our speech. No offense, sir.”

  “None taken,” McAllister said. “It only made me feel small in front of the platoon. That’s bad for me and bad for discipline.”

  “Sorry, sir. It won’t happen again.”

  “No,” McAllister said, “I don’t think it will.”

  Even in the shade of mahoganies, Haiti baked. The horses had cooled down and watered; men also; no use; they broke a sweat standing still. There was no need for pickets; the trees were sparse here and they could see for miles across the shimmering plain.

  In the camp at Hinche there stood one house, headquarters, occupied by Captain Healy and his staff. It was an old house, of stone and mahogany, with a spacious veranda before and, in a small gable, an old-fashioned bull’s-eye window. Captain Healy was an Alabamian and said that the smell of slavery lingered—over a century since what these people called emancipation, but still the house reeked of it, the spacious house, the high ceilings and the cool rooms and the phantoms of servants. He knew a plantation house when he saw one; more so when he lived in one. He had never before lived in one. “White trash,” he liked to reassure his lieutenants.

  From the veranda next morning McAllister and Healy surveyed the encampment: shelter-halves precisely aligned, posts vertical and guys taut. The rows stretched the length of a football field, and there was room between them for the clattering Ford truck that brought meat a
nd produce from the town; the truck stood sagging now, steaming and hissing, and in its shade a swarm of children squabbled. The Marines were domestic this morning, policing the camp and sewing buttons on shirts, and sorting laundry for the Haitian men who would call for it and deliver it.

  Mules came too, and scabbed local horses, and Haitian vendors offering vegetables, which were refused (“You know what they use for manure”), chickens, which were sometimes purchased, and eggs, which were deemed safe if uncracked and cost one gourde for half a dozen. That was less than a penny each, and eggs were fresh, and beat beans. The cooks kept one of those half dozen as a fee for frying up the other five.

  McAllister had discovered an extreme partiality to banana fritters with lime juice, and with Captain Healy was now destroying some three dozen of these. They were served by Lafayette the yard-boy. Lafayette was not his real name. His real name was Emilien-zézé or some such. “This war will never end,” said Healy. The captain’s hair started about where his ears finished, and his little blue eyes were usually merry above his potato nose, and most of the day he chewed on Havana cigars that he had free from the U.S.-administered customs. He was wearing britches and a sleeveless white undershirt. He was talkative, and liked to say that a few dozen of him were in charge of finance, customs and police for a country of two million people most of whom were Roman Catholics and also believed that God was a snake. “You young fellows. War doesn’t blunt your appetite. Or maybe it is young love. The colonel’s daughter draws nigh.” Healy had not been lucky enough to serve in France, and it was understood that he could therefore take a spoofing tone with McAllister.

  “Fritters,” McAllister apologized. “They are so damn good.”

  “It is the French influence. You find a Haitian who knows how to cook, and he’s a real chef. The food has improved considerably since the Spanish-American War.” Healy had served in that one; he was restoring the balance.

  “Can’t imagine what sort of hound’s mess you ate back then,” McAllister said. “I heard we lost more to food poisoning than we did to the Spanish.”

  Healy squinted into the past. “Human meat,” he said lugubriously. “Sick cows. Decayed hogs. Those Chicago packers made millions. They put the stuff in cans and it was like a hothouse. Every disease known to man and I believe a few that have not yet been classified. We only lost about six boys in combat in that whole war, and they were all Texans and thought we were at war with Mexico. The rest died of overeating, by which I mean eating that garbage at all. I lived on local beans and eggs and yams, and sucked cane for dessert. I was a corporal then and smart.”

  “And I was about eight years old,” McAllister drawled. “Didn’t even know I was white.”

  “I hope you know it now.”

  “You talk as if Virginia wasn’t the South.”

  “It ain’t,” Healy said. “And anything within fifty miles of Washington ain’t even Virginia. You know they sent mostly southern boys down here because we know how to handle these people. Good Marines got to hate niggers, Jews and all foreigners.”

  “I don’t hate anyone,” McAllister said.

  “Oh Christ, one of those.”

  “A matter of family style,” McAllister said. “The decaying gentry cling to good manners.”

  “Just don’t be too polite with these Cacos. Kindly bear in mind that they have mutilated dead Marines.”

  “I bear that in mind every time I lead a platoon. I also recall Captain Vogel.”

  Healy was not pleased. Captain Vogel, serving across the border in San Domingo, had been charged by the Corps with killing and mutilating prisoners. Every couple of wars the Marines turned up some avid collector of body parts. Confined to quarters and awaiting court-martial, he had committed suicide with a small civilian pistol. “Some things we do not discuss at the table,” Healy said. “Anyway, you can stay. I need young heroes to do my dirty work. Lafayette! More coffee.”

  The lithe, very black yard-boy had almost anticipated him; two steps, and hot Haitian coffee steamed into their cups. Lafayette was perhaps thirty, perhaps fifty. His face was sleek, his eyes were bland. He wore white cotton trousers and a long-sleeved white cotton shirt, and he went barefoot. He was rumored to have several dozen children in the mountain villages.

  The officers sipped in silence. The house faced east to catch what trade winds crossed the plain. Afternoons the veranda was shadowed and they could enjoy beer, rum or absinthe like gentlemen, but now the risen sun scorched.

  Captain Healy said, “You’ll move out again tomorrow. Tell your men they have twenty-four hours and they may be out for a week.”

  “They know that, sir. I believe we could move out this minute if we had to.”

  “Might as well rest the horses, and I suppose the goddam fools will go into town tonight. I do not have the heart to forbid it or set guards on them.”

  “They’ll be back in time,” McAllister said. “And while morals is morals, they do fight better after bending a few rules.”

  “We can’t all be engaged to a colonel’s daughter.”

  McAllister said, “I can’t afford a ring,” and they set down their cups and withdrew in good order, to consult maps and lists in the cool gloom of the salon.

  Next morning the platoon took its leisurely departure after a large breakfast. Captain Healy’s career had taught him the military value of reliable and abundant food. “By God, keep your eyes and ears peeled,” he said. “Every ford is an ambush, I told you that many a time.”

  “No scouts needed on the open plain,” McAllister said. “We ride bunched for the first day, maybe two days. Questions?”

  A silence. Then Evans: “No problems, sir. Let’s go make the world safe for democracy.”

  Captain Healy gurgled and wheezed. “They just had seven presidents in seven years,” he said. “If that ain’t democracy, what is?”

  Laughter broke the tension, and McAllister was glad; he wanted his platoon full of pep and not forebodings. They rode out with a jaunty creak and jingle.

  He led his platoon along the edge of the plain, with cover sparse, and the standing untended crops dwarf yams and stunted maize, and not cane, and little livestock grazing. Tambors reported their progress: the interminable Haitian drums. The beat thumped at them from all directions, and was eerie: the Marines were unassailable but surrounded, while the enemy was assailable but invisible.

  For a day and a half they saw not a Caco, but the drums seemed to follow them. They crossed the plain and rode into upland foothills and then into the “mountains”, what the Haitians called mornes, three or four thousand feet and easy enough going, and plenty of open slope. “Last thing we want is cover,” Gunny Evans explained to Clancy. “This way we can see a mile.”

  “And they can see us.”

  “Scares ’em off,” Evans said.

  Late in the second day they approached their objective. The village was called Deux Rochers. It stood on a steep hillside and the only serious approach was across a swirling river and through a mile of rain forest. They reconnoitered for half a mile upstream and downstream of the ford, and then camped and set pickets. In the morning they made plenty of noise, like campers or picnickers, and cooked up another big breakfast, and reconnoitered again. They would cross on foot and hike up, leaving the horses well out of range with Flanagan’s squad. Sergeant Flanagan was a former groom who had joined the Marines when his livery stable became a garage. McAllister liked the man and felt a kinship, and left one of the four Browning Automatic Rifles with him. Reassuring weapons: thank God for the BAR.

  The platoon would climb eastward but they would be in rain forest and the sun was not a factor. Six men crossed while the rest of the platoon covered them; when the far bank was secure the platoon followed. McAllister deployed them in two columns with a rifleman at point and another trailing, and flankers out wide, and the two laden mules at the center.

  They proceeded with caution—but with safeties on, by God. The village had promised peace and loya
lty, and requested gifts; and while this rendezvous—negotiated by dubious Haitian gendarmes with inscrutable dark warriors and village elders—exposed the Marines to disastrous betrayal, Deux Rochers and its people came first. McAllister had seen more than one scampering child or bewildered crone shot to death, the Marine sighting swiftly through brush, or a mist of sweat, or a haze of ground heat, and the victim tumbling.

  With luck they would be away in an hour and camped on the plain by sunset. Luck. Around the neck Haitians wore little bags full of luck, ouanga bags they called them, and when McAllister stripped a corpse and opened one of these bags, he found shiny colored pebbles, petrified lizards’ tails, dried hummingbird feathers, a lead bullet, unidentifiable tiny bones, a small wooden crucifix. Luck.

  He inhaled the mingled odors of sweat, mule, scrub. His scouts were out wide, his men were veterans. His eyes ached: every bush was—well, an ambush. Fine time for jokes. He would tell Caroline when she arrived. Fine time to think of Caroline. Still, if he was to die he would like to be thinking of Caroline. She had honored him with plain talk, a steady eye and an honest blush. A hell of a thing, love.

  Not now! His eyes roamed a screen of trash trees. A thrush screeched and fled, a lizard scurried. Easy enough to imagine a skirmish line of Cacos only yards away; to imagine a volley, half a platoon of Marines wiped out in seconds. It never happened. Only at fords. But the Cacos were learning.

  A fat black bee buzzed toward the lieutenant like a lazy bullet, and veered away.

  Women and children. McAllister had returned from Belleau Wood with vivid memories of anonymous entrails and detached limbs—who was who? friend or foe? Waste, waste. In war was much waste. He had become a stingy killer.