Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [25]
“Maitress Erzulie likes you.”
And he proceeded to describe the tag team that was so vividly running amuck through Dirk’s dreams—the black beauty was Erzulie Dantor, the white, Erzulie Freda, twin incarnations of the goddess of love. A week later, doing recon in the hills, Dirk and the team stopped in a village where an old woman announced that she could see the Erzulies floating around Dirk. This woman—she was a few spoons short of a full set? A wired smurf of a granny with notched earlobes and crazy African stuff draped around her neck, amulets, stoppered bottles, burlap sachets, and her mouth spraying Creole in an aerosol stream, shouting how good this was for Dirk, two Erzulies! Meaning his head was well-balanced, his person much favored. The news burned through the market in a flash fire of laughs, blan sa-a se moun voodoo li ye! The white guy’s a voodoo man!
“So what are they like?” Melissa asked. “These dreams.”
“Sometimes they’re pretty hot. We’re talking wet dreams here.”
“Dirk, gross.”
“Hey, it is what it is, baby, balls-to-the-wall sex. The kind with all that burning truth in it, like you and me got.”
“Yeah, right. Nice try.”
“Weren’t we telling the truth last night?” Cocky as the day she met him, which wasn’t to say he hadn’t come back a changed man, a more thoughtful, thankful man with a newfound gift for patience, a slackening of the male impulse to domineer. From the first she’d always been the one who tried harder, who sacrificed her pride to his moods and whims and relieved herself with tearful rages in the bathroom, but eight months of living with the wretched of the Earth had returned to her a kinder, gentler Dirk who appreciated the good love he had at home. But those dreams worried her, the sense of forces, vectors of conscience and control that she couldn’t see and didn’t understand. So can they read your thoughts, she wondered. Can they get inside your head?
“Anyway,” Dirk added, “she’ll probably start showing up in your dreams too.”
Melissa bristled. “I don’t think so.”
“Maybe not, but that’s how it usually works. We’re all connected now.”
And James, was he connected too? He called her at work every few days, “just checking in,” he’d say, “just watching out for my girl.” “You’re a special little lady,” he told her. “I want us always to be friends.”
“Sure, James, we can be friends.”
“Now you tell me if he’s not treating you right. I know how tough it can be when a trooper comes home, and if there’s anything, well, I just want you to know I’m here for you.”
“I appreciate that. But my husband’s treating me just fine, thanks.”
“If you ever need to talk, we could meet for lunch sometime, or maybe a drink if you want…”
Wasn’t going off to war supposed to screw them up? And yet she was the one brooding and holding it in, not faking, exactly, but struggling to maintain, putting a happy face on the pressure cooker inside. In their spare bedroom Dirk devised an altar out of an old mahogany cabinet, “so you can shut it when company comes,” he explained, “I don’t want you to be embarrassed.” Inside he stuffed all manner of junk, a miniature yard sale tumbling over the shelves: trinkets, perfumes, a silver comb and brush set, candy, minibottles of champagne and liqueur, a plaster statue of the Virgin Mary. He taped cheap-looking prints of the Virgin inside the cupboard doors, two different Virgins, one black with scars on her cheek, the other white with a jewel-encrusted sword through her heart. At sundown on Tuesdays and Saturdays he lit candles on the altar, sparked up some incense, and played voodoo drum cassettes on the boom box in there,