HOUSE OF JAGUAR

by Mike Bond

  “Don’t worry, mother. Just checking you’re not carrying something else in your sacks. Enough, men. Toss ten of them up here!”

  “Please, Jefe! Everyone needs corn, everyone needs tortillas.”

  “We do too, mother. It’s your penalty, for traveling by night. You’re lucky we let you through.”

  Boots thumped back and forth on the planks as the soldiers lifted the ten corn sacks up to the patrol boat. Murphy tried to pull up his feet so that they would not show beyond the planks. Each time his knees bumped the wounded man’s he moaned.

  The other engine revved; the canoe’s prow lifted as the boots rose from it. “It’s no wonder,” the woman wailed, “you soldiers have trouble with the campesino.”

  “Have the sense to be quiet, woman, when you’ve come out ahead,” the voice called down as the patrol boat pulled away. “No critiquemos Guatemala!”

  “Water!” the wounded man murmured.

  Again Murphy tried to free his own hands. “You can’t reach it?”

  “Water!” the other said. Murphy twisted his face down into the water and blood, took a mouthful, and filled the wounded man’s mouth. The man swallowed, then with a burst of blood coughed it up again, face contorted with pain. “Water!” he gasped, “please water...”

  NANCY JUST WON’T play by the rules, Lyman reflected. It’s because of her I go to other women. Just like it’ll be because of the Agency if I go outside. If the Agency’s bringing the Colombians into Guatemala, who says I can’t work for them? You can only take so much, when you’re doing all the giving. Like with Nancy. She’s too sharp, too independent. Trouble with her being so self-sufficient is that someday nobody’s gonna need her.

  He shoved the pillow aside and rested his head on his folded arm. With one blanket he was too hot, with just the sheet he was too cold. Shouldn’t even think about Nancy, times like this. Surrounded by cowards and dunces, ignorant Arena and insidious Angel. Nancy’s the past, while I create the future. A field man, scouting enemy territory ahead of the tribe. Standing on peaks they’ll never even see.

  Today wouldn’t look so bad by the time the Agency reviewed it. Fucking Guats afraid of the jungle. How they gonna catch guerrillas with their chopper at three thousand feet? Fucking Guats afraid of doing a little patrol. They hit hostile fire and they run. One thing to burn down a village of kids and old people, another thing to fight somebody who shoots back. When it was only that pilot, and maybe too the chica.

  The way he fights, something familiar, how he uses cover. How he came through us and fired down from behind, got the two guys on the hill. Or was that the chica? Now I’ll never know. Unless I find them alive, talk to them about it.

  I can ditch Nancy and still stay close to the kids. No, that’s just liberal bullshit. For the kids it’s better if Nancy and I are unhappy together rather than being happy apart.

  Can’t ditch Nancy till I get back into the field. The Agency won’t let me back into the field if I blow this pilot. And I won’t find this pilot with these fucking Guats running away whenever things get hot.

  If the priest would talk. A real confession. But Angel will kill him, out of misplaced zeal. No moderation, that’s the problem with these people.

  THE RIVER SLACKENED under the keel; the prow bumped mud. Feet splashed alongside the hull; someone dragged aside several corn sacks and planks. “Hurry!” one of the women hissed. “Here’s the path to Sayaxché and the Flores road.”

  The night air was cool and sharp. Murphy tried to pull himself up but his legs were asleep. “The doctora asked me to stay with him!”

  “It was her way to get you to leave. Now go!”

  He clambered over the side. The Río was shockingly cold against his crotch. The gurgle of the canoe vanished in the raucous croak of tree frogs and the muted rush of the current along the bank.

  He took off his poncho, shirt, and trousers, washed the wounded man’s blood from his face, hair, and chest, wrung out his clothes, and put them back on. They sloshed and rubbed against his skin as he followed the bankside path north, downriver, till the half-lit hovels of what must be Sayaxché appeared on the far bank. Ahead the jungle thinned into a clearing where campfires flickered on the dun camouflage of armored personnel carriers. A few soldiers were clustered, talking, around the fires, their rifles stacked in pyramids. He backed away and circled them through the jungle till he picked up the two muddy ruts of the Flores road. He waited several minutes beside it but no one came, so he followed it north till it rose up from the riverside jungle and crossed a huge burnt forest under the vast bowl of the stars.

  A charcoal dawn grew in the east. The road began to climb again and he left it to sleep in the scrub, awaking to bright hot sun and the nearing grind of an engine. It was not soldiers but a red Hino truck jammed with cattle, crawling up the last grade. As it downshifted to low gear he ran from the scrub and jumped on the rear bumper, climbed the rack, and dropped in among the longhorns’ swaying haunches.

  The truck jarred steadily toward Flores, the cattle staggering at each turn, staring round at him, rolling their white eyes and lathering their grass-stained liverish lips, huffing him with hot fetid breath. Beneath their bellies he caught flashes of rushing brush and cragged limestone. The brakes squealed, the axle shimmied and wailed, slowly the truck grated to a halt. Boots thumped round it. “What you got?” a man commanded.

  “Can’t you see?” a voice answered from the cab. “Twelve eunuchs spawned by El Negro, greatest bull of all Petén. On their way to Paradise, the San Benito abattoir.”

  “Seen anyone on the road?”

  “Several girls coming out of Sayaxché. One of them had tits I could’ve licked all night.”

  “Beat it, farmer. You’ve never licked anything but yourself.”

  The truck lurched along the dusty rutted road, its crankcase clattering, stock rack rivets rattling, longhorns staggering and sliding on the manure-slick floor and slapping up at green flies on their bellies with dung-caked hooves. Three more times the truck stopped for checkpoints, the cattle lowing uncomfortably, the sun boring down like a blowtorch, crickets crackling like small-arms fire in the scrub.

  The air smelled of charcoal and garbage; the truck wallowed from one pothole to the next; above the slats Murphy could see a radio tower, then lamp posts. He climbed over the back, hopped from the bumper, and walked into wide, gritty, unpaved San Benito.

  Barefoot boys were playing tin can soccer in the street. A shady sidewalk fronted a string of shops. In one window were hammers with black rubber grips, yellow-handled chisels, saws with gleaming teeth, wooden boxes of shiny nails, zinc pipes, bags of seed, an orange diesel pump from Japan, machetes with flawless gleaming edges, and behind them the weird reflection of a man in a rag serape and threadbare trousers, skinny dirty toes out of home-made caites, his tangled hair and short beard thick with dust, who he saw was himself.

  22

  FIVE SOLDIERS turned the corner, sun glinting off their black rifles. Murphy drew his serape up around his face and stared down like a peasant at the broken stones and litter of the sidewalk, watching their dusty black boots as he stepped aside to let them pass.

  Beyond town the road narrowed; the sun beat down. Dizzy hunger gnawed his guts. He walked and walked, but the distant hills drew no closer.

  To the left the machine gun nests of Flores Airbase were like huge concrete toadstools with black eye slits watching him. A pickup truck took him to the junction of the Dolores road then turned south toward Machaquilá. He stood at the crossroads, the road to Machaquilá broad and dusty before him, and he felt it was the entrance to the path with heart, back into the time when he had flown at night over this same road, over Dolores and past Machaquilá and between the ziggurat hills and down between the lanterns to the bad landing on the pockmarked road, and he’d been furious because Paco hadn’t fixed the potholes, and Paco had been right to fear the Army.

  The dusty, still air blistered his
lungs. If you concentrate, you can figure how long ago that was, he told himself. If you go down the road, it means you should go back to Dona. You’re going down the road to your end. It was September 13 when you left San Francisco. You stayed over in Merida and left the next night, the 14th. After midnight, the morning of the 15th. So you got shot up and hid in the jungle on September 15. It was two or three nights in the jungle, then a week maybe, in the village before Dona came. Then two weeks more till the priest came to take you downriver. Then the soldiers attacked and it was that night in the jungle with Jesús and Epifanía, then the next night was Dona in the hut with the woman having a baby and we ate the monkey the boy had killed.

  The night with Dona seemed like all his life, not just one night.

  His brain seemed impossibly clear and he could see his life as if it were a skeleton, bared of flesh. What if it were true that he’d spent his whole life with her, because the only time he’d lived was that one night? To think of her was to feel the pain strike to the bone, a rod of steel down to his core, the huge weight of sorrow.

  It was truly the path with heart, as Castaneda called it, to go back toward Dolores and Machaquilá, back into the past. It called him so insistently it could not be wrong. But what would he do in Machaquilá? Go through the jungle again to the village? It was now burnt and empty. Yet intensely the road drew him: who was to say you couldn’t figure out your future?

  A heavy truck came grumbling up behind him and he turned, sticking out his hand. It was an Army troop transport, more trucks following, and he pulled in his hand but the first truck stopped. “Where you headed?” a soldier in the cab called down.

  “Belize,” he answered, not looking up.

  “Come here!”

  The man who had called down had a round face and a swollen jaw, as if he were chewing tobacco. “You’re not Guatemalan!”

  “I’m from Belize. Going home.”

  “Belize is Guatemala too. The Ingleses just stole it for a while. Hop in the back.”

  “Thank you but no. I’ve got friends to see on the way.”

  “Come on! You stuck out your thumb. We won’t hurt you. We’re going all the way to the border. Hurry or we’ll lose first position and be eating dust all the way!”

  A soldier leaned over the tailgate to help him up. The truck crunched into first gear and jerked forward. He sat down quickly against the tailgate, the soldiers shouldering aside to make him room. More sat circling him on the floor, others along two benches; they watched him half curiously. They do this, he reminded himself, pick people up then execute them in the hills. “Thank you, compadres,” he said.

  “De nada,” one answered, turning to spit over the tailgate. He passed a sticky bottle. “Have a drink. It’s good for the dust.”

  It tasted like jet fuel with a caramel odor. “Jesus, it’s strong!”

  “It’s just boj, comrade.” The soldier had hairy nostrils. Flecks of tobacco stuck to his teeth. “It’s what the gods gave us when they took away our freedom.”

  The bottle clung to Murphy’s palm when he passed it on. “Does anyone know what day it is?”

  “Day? It’s the Lord’s day. You don’t know that?”

  “Yes, but what day of the month?”

  “Luis, Franco, you hear?”

  “It is 21 October,” a soldier said. “Sunday.”

  “How far is the border?”

  The man who had given him the rum glanced at the sky. “Till dark.”

  “Maybe,” said a man with a bandaged eye.

  “Since he got wounded,” the first said, “Cíclopes here always worries about la guerrilla.”

  “You never know when you’ll get ambushed,” said the man with the bandaged eye. “Especially in the first truck. These pigs,” he pointed at the other soldiers, “they laugh at me because I’m not afraid to fight, don’t keep my head down like them!”

  A soldier with a thick Mayan nose elbowed Murphy. “But soon comes the bad part!”

  Murphy glanced round the circle of faces. The bad part is when these guys take you out and shoot you. “Guerrilleros?”

  “It’s when we pass the turnoff to Tikal. After that the road’s no good. It’s just paved between Flores and Tikal to impress the tourists.”

  “It takes a wise man to stick his head up in battle,” said the hairy one.

  “You should know, Valderrama. The only place you’ll ever get injured is your ass.”

  The truck dropped with a bang from macadam to a boggy track that narrowed and twisted painfully up and down the rambling green slopes, the truck bed whanging and wailing on the bumps and ruts, one torn fender flapping like a broken wing. At times there were strips of un-logged jungle where thin waterfalls necklaced black mossy cliffs, trailing skeins of rainbow mist. Then came miles of slash-burned hills bleeding their cuprite soils into frothy brown torrents, the truck’s dust coating the convoy behind it.

  Checkpoint after checkpoint passed unheeded; Murphy sank down among his fellows, a chill breeze carving at his ankles. If they were going to shoot you they would’ve done it long ago. Unless they’re playing with you. The road climbed through tangy pines flushed with sunset; he thought of chill Novembers in the Texas Llano country, walking rocky ridges with his father through frozen juniper, a cold rifle in his hands, a scent of deer on the snowy wind.

  LYMAN KEPT the telephone close to his face, his back to the Guatemalan soldiers in the Cobán signals room.

  “You’re not making things happen, Howie,” Curt Merck was saying.

  “You want a new deal with Arena, you work it out.”

  “What about this pilot, you’re not getting him.”

  “It’s the Guats, Curt. They won’t let me. They won’t fly low, they get freaked on hostile fire, and they’re . . .”

  “You’re getting Arena pissed. We have too many irons in the fire for you to do that. I’m sending down some people, give you a hand.”

  “Listen, we brought in a witness, a priest. Theology liberation type. Vodega was gonna do him, but I saved him. Let me talk with him a while.”

  “How come you ain’t already done this? You don’t have your heart in it, being down there.”

  “I don’t want any fucking D-team, Curt.”

  “Stop goading me, Howie. I’m sending down Vaughan, a dozen guys.”

  “You telling me I’m not cleared? That you guys got some other agenda?”

  “You know what you know. When you get back here we discuss it.”

  THE TRUCK CRESTED a long ridge of pines and halted. The cab door slammed; a fist banged the tailgate. “Get him out!”

  It was the swollen-jawed man. “Far as you go,” he said. The second truck came grinding up behind. If they shoot me, Murphy thought, this is it. Below was a narrow black valley speckled with lights.

  “Wait!” a soldier called from the back. “Come on, you guys, let’s find him some food.”

  They bundled bread and a chunk of pork into a paper bag and handed it to Murphy over the tailgate. “Sorry we can’t take you closer,” said the swollen-jawed man. “But we’re not supposed to take riders. Those lights down there are Melchor. Got your Belize identity card?”

  “Yeah, somewhere.” Murphy fumbled at his clothes.

  “Just have it when you cross the bridge. Or you get a ride in another Army truck all the way back to Flores.”

  He stood by the roadside gulping the bread and meat as the convoy descended toward Melchor, mufflers banging and shooting sparks, headlights darting up and down the road cuts. Soon all was silent. Guatemala was empty and dark behind him; the western breeze carried across Belize’s plains and piney mountains the dampness of the sea.

  23

  HE WENT DOWNHILL into the sleeping town. A rusty statue slumped under a greenish street lamp; huts and hovels straggled along the river bench. The bridge and guard post gleamed with concertina wire under yellow tungsten arc lights. He turned south into a pasture past a
clapboard hut roofed with straw, a pen smelling of pig manure and rotten mangoes, a hutch where chickens clucked fearfully.

  At the pasture edge the jungle was a black impenetrable wall. He angled toward the river till he found a path mushy with rotten leaves and occasionally the dung of donkeys. Fireflies were like shooting stars in the brush; mosquitoes whined in his ears; he kept wiping them from his face. Something pinged underfoot and he dived expecting a mine but nothing blew; he rolled away and ran, tripped and sprawled; with a deep thump a flare burst overhead trailing down radiant embers, cutting the jungle into black and white staggering shadows. From the guard post came the growl of a siren.

  He ran along the trail, stumbling on sapling stumps; another flare cracked, a third. The jungle was like day; he pushed through it to the river; the bridge was hidden by a bend. He slid into the water and began to swim across, coming up for breath. It’s easy, he thought, I’ll make it. Then beyond the shallows the current snatched him, tumbling end over end, fighting up for breath and slipping under. The bridge swung into view, impossibly high and bright. With a crushing pain something huge and heavy hit him, dragged him down, he was caught in the boughs of a half-sunken tree; the bridge was overhead now, black under the flares; like a sea creature the tree churned over and spat him to the top and he clung inside its branches, hidden from the bridge.

  The river swung to the left, the tree bearing hard against the Belize shore. He swam to land, pulled himself up a slippery steep bank and climbed a clearcut slope out of rifle range to a ridge overlooking the black river and the bridge gilded by the arc lights of the Guatemalan guard post on the far side, where up and down the banks soldiers were beating the brush, their flashlights winking.

  Below him the corrugated huts of the Belize border post were lit by one lantern in whose wan glow a single unarmed sentry loitered. Murphy ran down a slash-burned cindery hillside to the road climbing up from the bridge, and ran east along it, away from the river.