Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [24]
“He called me his son,” Dirk told her, “he said that God had brought us together. At first I thought he was just juicing me, right? The guy’s a survivor, he figured to get on the winning side. But all this weird stuff kept happening between me and him, and after a while I’m like, okay, maybe I need to think about this.”
What kind of weird stuff?
Dreams, coincidences, uncanny divinations. Then Moïse proved his ultimate good faith by alerting Dirk to a plot by the local Macoutes to poison the entire Special Forces team, and after that Dirk was staying for all-night sessions, going deeper and deeper into the voodoo. Which led to initiation, revelation, the mystic marriage; the stories were blurring into a hopeless purée when Melissa looked at the clock and saw that it was five a.m.
“Are we talking about a real woman here?”
“This is Erzulie, Lissa, a god, a lwa. The voodoo goddess of love.”
“But you said there was a woman in a wedding dress.”
“Well, yeah, she came down and possessed a woman from the temple, that’s how it works in voodoo. She used this woman’s body for the ceremony.”
Melissa shivered, forged ahead. “So after. After you got, married. Was there, like, sex?”
“Well, no. Yes and no. It’s really hard to explain.” He paused. “It’s more of a spiritual thing.”
Melissa sputtered, rolled her eyes—was he giving her the world’s lamest line? “Dirk, dammit, for eight months I’ve been climbing the walls like a good Army wife, and now you’re telling me, you, you’re telling me, uh…” She found herself backing up. “Did you have sex with another woman down there? I mean a live human being, an actual person. Or anything else. Or whatever.”
“Why no, baby, it’s not like that.” He cupped her face in his hands, turned her toward him; she searched his eyes and found them clear amber-colored wells, her own pocket-sized reflection peering back from the bottom.
“No way,” he said softly, “you’re the only one. You’re the only woman on Earth for me.”
Dawn broke, filling the windows with pale, milky light. Outside the birds began singing like hundreds of small bells, their notes scattered as indiscriminately as seed. Once the sun rose Dirk was released from his promise, and in the early morning they did make love, though it wasn’t the dirty movie that Melissa had been scripting in her head for months. It was, instead, as gentle as a stream washing over them, with Melissa quietly crying as Dirk poured himself out behind a sweet, knowing, mysterious smile.
It had started in dreams. Luscious, full-bodied dreams in which two beautiful women, one white and one black, were making love to him—Dirk put it down to the sexual deprivation of the field, combined with the Penthouse-fueled fantasies of any all-American boy. Then the team was tasked to nation-build in Bainet, and Dirk started making the rounds of the surviving power elite, the neurotic mayor, the budding Hitler of a député, the effeminate Catholic priest, and finally M’sieur Dieuseul, the locally renowned voodoo man. Moïse received the young sergeant like this was Schwarzkopf himself, inviting him into the shade of his thatched-roof temple where they discussed la situation over coffee, the stew of international politics and underground intrigue that seemed more intractable with each passing day. This was grunt-level diplomacy, basic hearts and minds; Dirk was already starting to cut his French with earthy Creole slang, and while they talked he