He watched the road turn again down out of the fields and toward the plane of lightlessness where the sea must be. On his trip through Boystown’s night he had told himself that this was the reason he went there in the first place: to see a world scarred by trauma. Well, here, he had it. In Key West he had taken comfort in Samantha’s signs of troubles until they erupted into his life, and now here he was again, heading through a landscape of damage. When he had first gone south, to Texas and then Mexico, he was only craving a geography uncluttered by memories of guilt, he was reaching for the purity of fear, the availability of grace in the presence of real suffering. He was not planning on coming again to Copal.
He rolled down the window. When he married he’d imagined his life spreading out before him like an undiscovered country seen from a ship’s deck. His future rose, lush and mist-shrouded, full of poss-ibility and still too distant to know the measures of. He figured that if he moved toward it, gave himself up to it, it could not fail to harden into form: a beach of white sand he could step onto. So he had sought it with abandon and it had turned out to be a mirage. The beaches he found were those he drove along now: hot and coral-sharded, bordered by cliffs of dry forest and cities long gone to rot—the old despair of the new world.
The detective had finished his story and was waiting for Ethan to respond. His sneakers flashed as he worked the pedals. He pushed his glasses back on his nose, coughed, and looked once at Ethan and then quickly back at the road. He seemed suddenly shy.
“Are there really guerrillas in the hills?” Ethan said.
The detective touched his glasses and then his mouth, and when he withdrew his finger, he did it with the deliberation of a man pulling a hair from his food.
“Guerrillas. I don’t know what this word means anymore,” he said. “Certainly there are paramilitaries, but Copal has not gone the way of its neighbors.”
He gestured in the air like he was flicking something filthy from his fingers. He closed his eyes for longer than Ethan would have liked. The road rose into a sudden hill and the horizon of cane and jungle disappeared for a moment into a peak of sky.
“Copal has never undergone a Marxist revolution. When the rest of Central America burned, we endured coup after coup. Everyone was trained here. Everybody had a gringo uncle. You can blame whoever you want for that.”
He turned as he spoke and peered at Ethan over the wire rims of what, Ethan realized, were his reading glasses. He glared a little, he furrowed his brow. Glancing down like that over his little spectacles he appeared like an enormous storybook owl.
“The interior is not like the coast,” he said. “There have never been any incentives to make it so. Few mines remain because the railroad does not run and the roads are unsafe. Basically, we have farmers and then Indians and then, in the cloud forests, who knows?”
The detective stopped speaking, he left his hand outstretched and the gears unshifted, but the silence seemed temporary, a practiced pause. There was something performed about his speech. As if he’d been rehearsing this response for years. But of course Ethan had asked the same question when he first met him and received a different answer. The speech must be prepared for him.
“So are these men guerrillas? Certainly they are men whose interests are not El Lobo’s. This country has no internal economy. We have CAFTA, we have our exports, our bananas and our coffee and our pitiful minerals. And now we have blight in the crops and a shrinking U.S. economy. This puts some pressure on El Lobo. So what do these men do? These guerrillas? They close the roads from the fields to the coasts, which makes things even harder for the exporters. When that is not possible, they burn the fields. Less and less cash comes in. At a certain point, El Lobo will be stripped bare.”
“That doesn’t help anybody,” Ethan said, and immediately felt foolish.
Again the detective was barking.
“I really do love Americans,” he said. “I love you all so much. I have been married twice before, but now I think I am going to wait until the tourists return.”
Ethan considered the moldy ruin of Mara de Leon and watched as the truck’s lights swept on, and then over, a cluster of tin-roofed shanties set in the shadeless expanse of the cleared field. The tourists, he felt sure, were not coming back.
“Then I will marry some big American woman,” the detective said. “A Miami Jewess, I think. They are not so different from Cubanas—and let me tell you, my friend, there is nothing better than a Cubana.”
“I think you’d have to convert,” Ethan said.
“So what? That should not stop a man from finding love. Besides, my grandmother’s name was Perera, so I am probably a Sephard.”
He let go of the wheel and held his hands up to the sides, splayed out through the driver’s side window and in front of Ethan’s face, as if he were indicating the size of a very large fish.
“This is what we are here—Spain’s rejects!”
“And the Indians?”
The detective puckered his lips. For such a meaty face, his mouth was particularly thin, two brown lines, brush-drawn and delicate.
“Maya’s rejects,” he said. “Same story, different empire.”
He still had not taken the wheel again and Ethan had to ask, “Are you wearing your reading glasses?”
“Yes,” the detective said. “For the signs.”
FOR A TIME ANOTHER truck trailed them. Ethan watched its headlights rise and fall on the undulations of the road behind them. The detective was an unsteady driver, he slowed and accelerated as the mood took him, and the truck seemed to match their speed. It did not gain or fall back; its lights held their place as if constrained by rules of orbit.
“Have you heard of a man named Soto?” Ethan asked.
The detective checked the rearview mirror for the first time.
“No,” he said.
He checked the mirror again, held his eyes there as if he were inspecting his own reflection.
“Never even heard the name?” Ethan said. “It’s not that uncommon.”
The detective accelerated. The lights stayed with them and then, after a time, disappeared so quickly that Ethan wondered if they had ever been there at all. The detective did not slow down.
“When I was a young man I wanted to be a poet,” he said. “I lived in the capital back before the capital became what it is now. Many of my friends were literary types. They were saving money for the airfare to Buenos Aires because they intended to move there and become disciples of Borges. We were all very idealistic about things that did not exist. We were all little bitty Marxists. When things began to change, when the yanquis shut down their hotels and opened up training camps for Nicaraguans and Salvadorans, all my friends thought that it was their obligation to speak out. To write editorials so that people would know the truth. Do you understand?”
They continued on, after that, in silence. The road ran higher now. They’d gradually crested a plateau, and to his right, beyond the diminishing rows of cane, Ethan saw the flicker of fires in the valley. When he looked back to the road there was a man in it, walking far ahead in the middle of the lane. The detective slowed but did not stop.
“Hold on and get ready to duck,” he said to Ethan. “You do not want to meet people in the road.”
At first the man was in shadow, ambling ahead, stoop-backed and unturning, clothed it seemed in a dark cloak and carrying a staff or walking stick—a medieval friar or solitary penitent making his pilgrimage across barren lands. And then, as they approached and the glow of their headlights climbed over him and threw his shadow fifty feet down the road and into a wall of cane, he did not turn or step to the side or acknowledge the truck in any way. Ethan knew they should not stop, there was no good reason to stop, it was dangerous to help lone travelers on the roads at night. It was the oldest trap: pull over for a man in peril, get ambushed by a gang hiding in the cane. The detective, of course, was downshifting, then breaking. He was pulling over.
“Roll down your window
,” he said to Ethan, but Ethan’s window was already down.
They puttered along next to the man. He was small and stood shorter still for his stoop; he wore a hood and worked his stick through the dust. He shuffled ponderously beside their truck and paid them no notice. He was saying something. Ethan saw his mouth move mutely, his lips widened and collapsed around his words. He was toothless.
“Father,” the detective said, “do you need a ride?”
The man walked on and continued to speak to himself. He never turned his eyes from the empty way before him.
“Father, you should not walk in the middle of the road. There are cars and worse.”
They waited there a moment. The night outside the truck was perfectly silent. No calls of birds or sounds of waves. Even the old man’s stick, thrusting through the rubble of the road, was soundless. Ethan felt like one at the edge of dream, receding sense by sense into waking. He did not know what would meet him when he got there.
When Ethan came upon Doyle he was sitting in the ruined pavilion and talking to a stray dog. Flowering trees can-opied the plaza, and he sat on a stone bench as wind off the water fluttered pink fallen petals about his feet and carried the briny smell of algae and dead fish through the town. He sat with his back to the sea and faced the narrow twist of winding cobbled streets that rose up into the hills. Directly across from him, stores on the shore sold fresh fish and empanadas. Behind him, fishing boats and charter vessels clunked up against the palmwood dock. Beyond the plaza, down along the malecón, lay rows of small concrete houses ornamented with iron-latticed windows and winding pastel-painted fretwork. Then the roads rose up again into hills and a larger, cobbled plaza surrounded by the town center, a mayor’s office and police station and the cathedral clocktower: tall and brown and broken-looking. A gothic tower casting the day’s first long shadows.
This was the route Ethan walked. The detective let him off at the outskirts of town at dawn, on a rocky, jungle-bordered road beyond which all he could see was the top of the cathedral cresting the trees. He walked and men on mules riding out of the mountains tipped their hats and passed him. Twice pickup trucks offered him a ride into town, but he nodded and smiled and waved them on.
The road turned and flattened and the jungle cleared. He came to the shantytown where stray dogs, or dogs so ill-fed they looked stray, slunk what thin tin-cast shadows they could find. Two children without shirts or shoes waited in the shade of a rusted-out oven by the side of the road. They ran to him shouting and holding up their pointer fingers like little prophets threatening vengeance from on high.
“Hey, gringo, gringo, one dollar. One dollar, gringo!”
“No, niños. No dollar,” he said, and continued past the cathedral that he knew from the postcard. Fruit of memory, the country of the dead, a cathedral crumbling itself into the sky. Beyond the cathedral, the town opened into view. He had to trust the symmetry of moments like these. If Doyle sent the postcard it was because he was here, and if he were here, Ethan knew exactly where he’d be.
THE TWO GUARDS outside the discothèque slept slumped over their rifles like fallen soldiers. Ethan stood and watched them breathe. Each held a rifle clasped idly between his knees, and one had two revolvers, old and rusted, some banana man’s six-shooters, slung crossbarreled, in his pants. They were children with guns and Ethan did not want to wake them. Their first reaction would be fear or shame and either one could lead to anger. He skirted them slowly and stood before the door of the club under the rising sun. From inside he could hear the electric thump of the reggaeton, and when he put his hand against the stuccoed concrete he felt it tremble to the beat of the music. A mangy goat regarded him from across the lot with an expression of discernible sorrow. It fixed its sad black eyes on him, and after a time returned to rooting through the weedy trash. The disco was set against the water and Ethan could hear the dawn tide beginning to recede over the coral shoals. Whatever the club held, he’d have to go in after it. Ethan took off his sunglasses and opened the door.
Inside, the disco was divided into a bar area and a dance floor leading up to a low stage. The bar was empty, but on the dance floor there flourished a weird world of nocturnal revelry, where two dozen people jerked in some creepy approximation of a bump and grind. Mostly they were women. They shuffled and stepped, they sweat and closed their eyes, they bounced their hips in undulant humpings. In a lifetime disconnected, it seemed, to this moment, Mallory had read to Ethan a medieval description of Fairyland—and under the unceasing strobing of the neon lights the dancers here reminded him of the denizens of that realm: tranced and dazed and caught in a world of low light and sludging time. And over them all, Ethan saw now, reigned Doyle.
Doyle danced with a glee unshared by the crowd swaying about him. He wiggled and strut his way across the dance floor, he pulled women to him and pushed them away; his shirt was unbuttoned, and under the shuddering fluctuation of light his mad sneer appeared mirthless and rigid, a gargoyle’s grin exposed by lightning.
Ethan stood and watched Doyle dance and felt the sudden freedom one feels when a menacing dream turns to nightmare. At least now he knew what he was dealing with, and whatever it was, it was another world altogether, a new wrinkle forever removed from any choice made in any morning at any table in New York. The whole thing reeked of ruin, and Ethan felt the urge to reach for a camera that was not there. He raised his hand to Doyle but Doyle did not see him. Doyle had made his way to the stage, where he frolicked with the club dancers, the women paid to stay and dance as long as there were customers. He moved between them, he bumped and bounced, he laughed over the hundred decibels of reggaeton—he produced, in the blackened half-second between strobes, a dead chicken.
Even as Doyle plucked and threw its feathers from the stage, the somnolent dancers did not notice the bird. Ethan alone was audience to the spectacle of Doyle dancing with the chicken. He merengued and waltzed to beats unheard and discordant. He twisted it by the wing, held it before his groin, grinded with it almost down to the floor, and when he rose he passed behind the dancing women and took turns propping the half-plucked bird upon their bare shoulders where its broken neck lolled and bopped in a grotesque parody of their dancing.
Ethan pushed into the dancing crowd. In their heavy, sluggish thrustings they were hard to circumvent. Women with eyes half-lidded clung to his arms and tried to pull him into their circles. On the stage, Doyle Rockette-walked the chicken across a dancer’s upheld arm. He’s really lost it, Ethan thought. Like Samantha, he’s wandered into a country from which there is no returning.
He had almost reached the stage when Doyle disappeared. For a moment he was gone—he had vanished in the space of a strobe—and then Ethan saw him again, striding quickly away toward the fire exit, like a man fleeing the scene of a crime. He neared the door. The music throbbed, the lights pulsed, and Doyle was gone.
APPROACHING THE DESICCATED PLAZA, Ethan saw Doyle from afar. He sat there—strange and statuesque, totally still in some attitude of meditation or penance as the trees dropped flowers about him and the moving green and swampy sea glinted through the branches like a slithering reptile. A miserable little dog stood at his feet with its head cocked, its ears perked, and as he drew near, Ethan heard Doyle’s voice addressing it: “Have you killed a chicken? I think it’s fair to say that we both like chicken very much. But I couldn’t kill one. Do you have blood on your mouth? Yes, you do. That’s terrible.”
Ethan passed the empanada store that puffed the smell of fry oil into the morning. He stepped into the pavilion with its cracked and mossy tiles, its heavy vines swollen with fleshy flowers hanging from trees and said, “Dr. Livingston, I presume.” And Doyle, then, looking up, buttoning his shirt, standing beneath the canopy of blown blossoms, wiping his eyes, checking his watch. “Ethan,” he said, as if he just saw him yesterday, as if whatever transpired in the club was simply mirage. “You must have taken a night bus. Not too smart. Not too smart at all.”
Soto’s
third dawn on the hillside. The last stars of morning hang and wheel on the bluing horizon. A thin slit of moon, pale and fragile as a child’s femur, traces, in its quickening descent, the people’s progress away from their homes and into the sugarcane fields. Soto has not eaten for two days and the children with him whimper in their makeshift cots of cut banana leaves. When they wake, they stare about with eyes wide and white against their dirty skin; when they stand, they stumble like fawns on legs still rickety and incomprehensible. They wake and stare and stand and do not speak. He paces to the top of the cleared mountain, watches the village and the folk there trudge into the fields. When he returns, the children are lined up single-file. He nods and they commence down the mountain and over the red, rocky scree of drawn and half-tilled earth. From afar, from the village looking back, as they crest and circumvent the ridge, he wavers black and sun-stamped into the horizon and the children do not seem children at all but misshapen, palsied forms following in medieval procession. Then they turn and descend, drop back into the shadow of the yet-unlit reaches of the mountain, and come to the logging road that winds like a dry river into Rio de Caña.
Horse Latitudes Page 16