HOUSE OF JAGUAR

by Mike Bond

  62

  THEY TOOK HIM to a cell with plywood walls. A child sat on a wooden chair, two men in black hoods behind him. Dark hair, skinny arms, one bright with burns. Ankles and arms clamped to the chair. Jesús.

  “You wouldn’t do this. Not even you.”

  “It’s their turf,” the black man said. “Kid’s not American, nothing we can do. Only you can stop it.”

  “Even you wouldn’t do this.”

  “We need answers,” said a man with a thin mustache and sideburns. “You’re making us do this. You’re the evil one.”

  TWO MEN came down the sewer on ropes and tied another rope under Dona’s arms. “Bring her up too!” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Her! This woman whose tongue you’ve cut out, she’s still alive.”

  “There’s no one here but you, madwoman.”

  They hosed her down in a bright tiled room. One pinned her to the floor while the other felt up inside her, back and front, pulled down his pants, his flesh like stone inside her.

  They chained her to the wall and left. Sperm dribbled down her thigh. They came back with a stooped, portly man in his sixties in a white lab coat. He shut the door softly behind him, checked a clipboard, shined a small flashlight in her eyes. “So! The young doctor!” He had a conscientious manner, smile wrinkles at the corners of his eyes, wire-rim glasses, a little gray mustache and a kindly mouth. A bureaucrat, she wondered, prison inspector, anything, there’s hope... He nodded at her, her torturers, glanced at his watch. “Pick up tempo,” he said, and left.

  “ARENA’S in a warehouse above Carchá. An adobe warehouse with a tin roof, banana trees.”

  “There’s no banana trees above Carchá, Mr. Murphy. The elevation’s too high. We will now spoon out one of the boy’s eyes. You choose, Mr. Murphy: right or left?”

  The man with the thin mustache and sideburns held up the spoon like a magician ready to perform a well-known trick. A soldier unclipped the electrodes from Jesús’s fingers and tipped back his chair, the boy’s head rolling; the man took it one-handed and with a flick of his wrist dipped the spoon into and under the boy’s eye; the boy sat up screaming. “Tell us?” the man said.

  He told them how he’d flown down, stumbled on the village, the boy’d done nothing, knew nothing, just a kid, but they wouldn’t listen, refused his lies, refused his truths because they weren’t enough, didn’t go all the way. The man with the thin mustache spooned out the other eye too; it hung down Jesús’s cheek on its connective tissue like a baby squid, Murphy’s wrists bloody from trying to break the cuffs, his arms nearly torn from the sockets, but it did no good, nothing did any good. Die, Jesús, he prayed, urging him along, it’s not that hard, child, die quickly now, die from shock, die from pain, die. Over the boy’s upraised pleading face the man with the thin mustache slid his plastic bag, the boy’s mouth sucked it taut, his ribs heaving.

  In the corner of the floor was a scrap of red Indiana, a Kekchi girl’s bracelet. On the plywood wall were splashes of blood and the words Boise Cascade.

  “It’s on your soul,” said the man with the thin mustache. “This death.”

  WITH RIFLE BUTTS they beat him along a corridor into a cell. It was too small to stand or lie except diagonally across a sewer hole. Wind down the corridor swayed a bulb hung by its wires, the shadows of the bars sliding back and forth.

  From the other cells came moans, weeping, a far-off solitary cough that made it seem for an instant this might be a hospital. In the next cage a man lay with legs bent, an emaciated, white-bearded face. He shoved himself up, wiped dribble from his mouth and squirmed his hand through the bars. “My God! It’s you!”

  Murphy took the frail, wet hand. “Hola, compañero.”

  “Don’t you remember? It’s me, Father Miguel!”

  “YOU GOT nine hours.”

  “The Guats’ll stretch it.”

  “Can you find Arena in nine hours, Howie? That’s the question.”

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “You know what I think of people’s best? It’s never good enough.”

  “That’s a problem with you, Curt. You’re too tight on people.”

  “You call this tight, Howie? We ask you to carry on Kit’s work, and you don’t succeed in raising contributions. We ask you to explain to Arena the tactical value of pulling in the Colombians, and you’ve seemed to fail at that too. Then Arena gets kidnapped on your watch.”

  “I wasn’t assigned to watch him!”

  “He’s your baby. How many times I have to explain this with you?”

  “Explain it to me, Curt?”

  “Call it how you like. But you don’t find Arena before noon, Howie, things are going to be bad on you.”

  “You threatening me?”

  “You know what I’m doing.”

  “You don’t want to, Curt. Not like you did with Kit. I’m ready for that. You’ll all get hurt. Badly hurt.”

  “You’re back in your private agenda again, Howie. Your private traumas. You got nine hours to find Arena. Safe and sound. Any hope you ever had of getting out of the field depends on this. You don’t get Arena back, Howie, you’re stuck with us forever.”

  Lyman put down the receiver and lit a cigarette. Nine minutes past three a.m. First one of the day. Still keep it at ten. Twelve yesterday, eleven before, but most of last week ten. Normal, for your hands to shake like this. Too cold. Cold in here.

  Three eleven. Feel the smoke like brandy in your soul. Rising fire in your brain. Lovely scented leaf with the power of the sun.

  He locked the MACRO room door and went through the three sets of doors and outside. The night hung heavy and cold, the stars like Christmas lights.

  “YOU’RE LUCKY,” Father Miguel said. “It’s better to be shot right away.”

  Down the aisle a man was coughing, shallow and repetitive. Picking blood from his stubble Murphy watched a cockroach select its delicate way across the sewage on the floor. “It’s pathetic, the way you try not to hate.”

  “We’ve had our time for hating and wanting and running around. Now it’s time to thank God and live in peace with what’s left. You know that.”

  “Who the hell is that coughing? Why doesn’t he stop?”

  The cough was like a pendulum: cough-cough... cough-cough.

  “It’s an old man, Santana. They’re shooting him too.”

  Through the canopy and rotor blur the Mekong sky is porcelain blue. Five thousand feet below are the verdant evil hills. Okie scanning right, chewing gum. Always chewing gum. Okie’s black helmet with the Grateful Dead on one side and the Chicago Bears on the other.

  Back on the deck three grunts, an ARVN intelligence man and a US Special Forces captain with a woman prisoner and a little girl. Slick riding the thermals, appreciative flutter from the blades, Okie popping gum. The US Special Forces captain shoves up between Murphy and Okie. “These people don’t have no feelin’s,” he says.

  The US Special Forces captain has tears in his eyes, from the wind. “I been asking her some questions, me and Dao here, and Dao was holding her kid out the door, you know, to make her talk? The stupid fucker drops the kid and the woman just sits there, not a change in her face. Fuckin animals!”

  “Take it,” Murphy screams at Okie. He unbuckles and climbs through to the deck. “You did what?”

  “He dropped her by accident, Dao did. Don’t get unbent.”

  Dao holding the woman by the hair, a .45 against the side of her face. She is looking out the door.

  Murphy takes out his pistol; the Special Forces captain shakes his head. “You’re getting out of line, trooper.”

  Dao speaks in Vietnamese, turns the .45 on Murphy. The grunts stir, reaching for rifles. The captain steps back.

  That was it. The moment it all went bad, the moment that led to this. When you should have shot him and didn’t. Then came the court martial but they won, so they sent you into the very wor
st, every time you and Okie, Okie chewing gum, every time a jet was down and Charlie was waiting, every hot LZ, till Okie got it, and they gave you Searles, and then Finkelstein, and when he got it and you got wounded for the second time they gave up and sent you home.

  63

  “IT ISN’T WRONG,” the priest said, “to try to make a better world.”

  “I wasn’t trying to make a better world,” Murphy answered. “I was trying to please myself.”

  “We all do that. Even God did that, inventing us. Though why I’ll never know. Or perhaps I shall.” He coughed; it sounded like a laugh. “You took on too much: the Army, your own government. That’s like trying to battle God. I use that word too easily, God. I’m not sure I believe in God.”

  “Then why are you a priest?”

  “Because here it was the best way to do something, to make a better world. And because I loved Christ, believed in what he said, about how to live and how to treat each other.”

  “All I’ve learned is that the world is evil...”

  “You were like a bird caught in a hurricane, there was nothing you could do. There was your government supporting a fascist dictatorship as it nearly always does. And you were smuggling drugs, a role they didn’t want to share with anyone but the Guatemalan Army and, as you say, the Colombians. So your intelligence agency, with the help of your Mafia, hunted you down, killing a lot of Guatemalans in the process.”

  “That’s what I’ve learned: every attempt to do good only brings more evil. But I wasn’t even trying to do good. I cared more about my so-called love than the person I loved.”

  Again the priest coughed. “That’s love. Even God does that.”

  Footsteps echoed down the stairs to their cells. The black man positioned himself before Murphy’s. “I can stop them,” he said. Murphy dropped his head, uninterested. “I can get your woman.”

  Murphy looked up. “You could have stopped them long ago. You always could have.”

  “I was home in bed with my wife when this village of yours got hit. If it ever did.”

  “That’s not true.” It was an old, worn voice, Guat accent, the next cell. A small skinny man, hair tangled and white. “You were there, when his village got attacked.”

  “Who the hell are you?”

  “I saw you. Don’t you remember, the helicopter? When you kept the one named Angelo from kicking out my teeth?”

  The black man peered down at Father Miguel, chuckled. “That’s what comes of good deeds. I should’ve dropped you out the door.”

  “But you didn’t. You stopped him from kicking me. Why?”

  “Might have needed you later. You turned out not to be worth much.”

  The priest smiled. “Most of us aren’t. How about you?”

  Lyman laughed. “Not much, either. Call it fate.”

  “It isn’t fate. You don’t have to live this way. None of us does.”

  You won’t much longer.” Lyman leaned back against the far cell, arms crossed. “And after you’re dead there isn’t even going to be a trace of you.”

  “Think back over all the years and all the pain it’s caused you, think of all the love you’ve had to throw away.”

  “I’m down here to ask him one last time...”

  “There’s no good in asking. You know that.”

  “For his sake. Can’t you see you’ve made your rules too strong?”

  “The rules of goodness are inside you. That’s why you fight them so hard. The rule never to hurt people is engraved right on your soul. And every breath you take, you can feel it.”

  Lyman stretched, arms behind his head. “I’m going upstairs, get some sleep. They’ll wake me when you’re dead.”

  SANTANA’S incessant hack through the bars. A man snoring, another gasping in a dream. From somewhere upstairs came faint moans and begging voices. On the cell’s concrete back wall so many names carved in the khaki-colored slime: José María Montejos, 4-4-51—11-11-90. Gloria Casales, 19-10-57—4-91, Jaime Aidaño, how many others, names with new names carved atop them, names old in the stone?

  He could leave his own body and stand beside them, in them, think their thoughts and feel what they felt as they carved the day of their deaths into the damp cold stone. Brothers, sisters, we are all the same body and the same blood. For there’s only two human families, prisoners and guards. He saw them with sweaty numb fingers digging their names with a piece of metal into the stone, as they imagined how the bullets would feel.

  Tick tick ticktick tick water dripped from the ceiling into the muck of the floor. Did you stare into the muzzles? See the flash?

  Curious but timid, a rat ducked its head through the bars, darted over his foot and down the sewer hole. She said to live a good life you have to do as much good as you can. He folded his fingers, felt the pulse between them. Blanched frightened skin.

  A rooster crowed but it couldn’t be dawn. Wakened by a weasel, something. Santana’s cough was like a man trying to remind you of something. There’s no time, Santana, to be reminded. It doesn’t matter, your cough.

  Stuck on a car fender, little kid. Father gets you down. He could see it, feel the bees stinging, rough grass. Walking by the road, skipping rocks across it. Fingers stuck with cold to the rifle barrel, whitetail diving over the ridge, crack of the Winchester splitting the sky. Girls in the back seat pulling down their underpants, windows of frozen breath. Gulls over the sand spit, scream of the sea. Rites of love all come to nothing. Man just another seed eating out its heart to populate the stars.

  A truck, starting. Couldn’t be. You can live it all in the next two hours. The whole thing. Live it fast. Don’t be afraid. Accept it’s coming and be ready to meet it.

  Bell. Two. Three. Four. Five. Let it not be six, Lord.

  Six. Somewhere a generator shuddered, took life. Boots tramping, wail of a gate. Pure water of Montana’s Sun River off the Chinese Wall through lodgepole and meadow, down in swirls of light, red-gilled trout, grass tan like elk hide. Sonora cactus cañons, the air a hot knife. Dawn rising over the world at fifty thousand feet. Scents of love and flowers and blood, fresh blood of a kill and old blood between a woman’s legs and dried blood of people lying on the ground, one’s own miraculous blood spreading over the dirt.

  Pain travels at the speed of light.

  AN OFFICER and soldiers came softly down the aisle. They opened Santana’s cell and led him out, confused and disarrayed. Then Father Miguel. “So you’re really going to do it,” he said. They tied Murphy’s wrists with rope and led the three of them back up the oily green stairwell that Murphy could not remember descending. He saw everything clearly, every grain of concrete and flake of rust, the scintillating windows and the stars dying behind them, years passing in a moment, a marred boot heel rising on the stair before him, Santana’s threadbare sandal slap slap, when he had looked into her eyes and in them had seen the sun in his own. The wall, a cold rail, brushed him, click of opening door, snap of rifles, long lean wall of pockmarked concrete cavitied with stains, three wooden posts before it.

  One soldier came close. “You want the blindfold, hombre?”

  He shook his head. “Where do you shoot?”

  “Straight for the heart.”

  “Amigo −”

  “Sí?”

  “Don’t shoot me in the head.”

  “You’ll feel nothing.”

  “It’s a joke,” Santana said, beside him, “to end this way.”

  Beyond the soldiers checking their magazines was another concrete wall with a tiled roof and above it the early blue of day, the cries of birds and the distant morning clatter of the town, roosters and dogs, a donkey calling. “It’s a shame,” Father Miguel said, “a Goddamned shame.” A fly buzzed round, warming his wings in the new sun. He rose like a diamond up over the parade ground and flashed away; rifles clicked as the soldiers brought them to their shoulders, but there was still time for the world in all its glory, her flesh s
oft scented and sinuous, the apple, the wine, the core of the tree red like a beating heart, as we go down the tunnel of our love back to the first days, the first day of all, before time.

  Black muzzles pointing with little black eyes. Black hard steel. “Bless us O Lord for these Thy gifts,” he heard himself saying, “which we are about to receive.” He realized he was saying grace, the oldest prayer, felt a warm scarred hand grip his shoulder.

  Flame spit from the guns, the thunder in one hideous long roar. There was nothing; he floated in an ether of pure perception. It’s true, he thought, you just don’t feel it.

  He would find Clint now, tell him about Sherrie, how she was going to be fine, that Saul would steer her straight, good Saul with his beard and calm reflective manner, he would find Dona now as soon as she passed over and darling come quickly, it’s better here.

  A loud bang made him jump. An officer with a pistol moved from Santana and fired again, this time into Father Miguel’s temple. Blood hissed over the dirt; chunks of Father Miguel’s brain stuck to Murphy’s face. The officer jabbed the hot barrel into Murphy’s temple. “We haven’t shot you yet. Want to live?”

  The soldiers were lining up again, reloading. A flock of multicolored parrots burst from a tree.

  “We give you one last chance,” the officer said. “Give us names!”

  His mouth was too dry to speak. He tried to look into the officer’s face but the world was dancing. There was the smell of blood and excrement and dirt and sweat and anguish and burnt powder and seared oil, the calls of men and birds, the soaring music of the sun, the brilliant sky in which all the worlds were coalesced, blood crashing through the streams and canyons of his body. The pistol whacked his jaw. “Want to live?”