“Put your hands up and look down,” Doyle said. “Don’t make eye contact unless they force you to.”
They were police, Ethan saw that out of his peripheral vision as they came closer. The khaki uniforms. The blue, white, and red of the national flag. The men on the ridge, though, were wearing ski masks. Probably they were local officers and, if they did seize any drugs, didn’t want any gang retribution against their families. Still, the masks were ominous—Ethan had no idea what manner of men were pointing machine guns at him.
For a roadblock or a checkpoint, the police seemed undermanned. The three men on the ridge covered the two on the ground, but the ridge was overgrown and draped in greenery. They had the wrong weapons for their position and probably did not have any open shots. Clearly the officers in the road were nervous. One ordered the Indian out of the cab, the other, glancing over his shoulder every few seconds, held his gun on Ethan and Doyle.
The Indians walked to the side of the road and put their hands on their heads. They seemed nonplussed. The one who was driving, whom Doyle had met at the bus station, took off his straw hat slowly and showed the officer that it was empty. He placed it on the ground by his boots. “No drugs,” he said.
“Where are you going?” the officer asked.
“Zacapa,” the other one answered.
“Zacapa?”
“Guatemala,” the first Indian said.
“Ah, yes. Zacapa. Why?”
“My sister lives there.”
“Why does your sister live in Guatemala?”
“Her husband is from Zacapa,” the second Indian said.
“They are all imperialists in Guatemala,” the policeman said. “They’d claim us if they could.”
The first Indian shrugged.
“Don’t move,” said the policeman.
He checked the cabin. Looked through the dashboard and the glove box, peered under the wheels.
“Don’t try to smuggle drugs out of Guatemala,” he said.
The Indian picked up his hat, brushed it off, and put it back on his head.
“Okay,” the second policeman said to Ethan and Doyle. “Get out of the truck.”
Ethan hopped out of the bed and collapsed onto his face. His right leg was asleep.
The policeman jerked back as if he thought this were some kind of trick. “Stand up,” he yelled. “Stand up!”
Ethan did, and slowly. The last time someone said that to him he had held a bottle in his hand.
“Sorry,” he said. The Indians were laughing at him. How could they be so relaxed? The police had dropped hundreds of supposed Indian collaborators out of planes during the upheavals in the eighties. Now that they were standing next to each other, Ethan saw that the policeman who was speaking was older and higher-ranked—a captain. One of his front teeth was huge and jagged and his gums were bleeding. The younger officer had long black hair, longer surely than regulations allowed. He wore green American aviator sunglasses and kept smiling, licking his lips and smiling again. It was a look Ethan saw plenty of in Boystown. Either a psychopath or a half-wit.
“What are you doing here?” the captain asked.
Doyle kept his eyes down in deference. “I am from the HIV aid mission to Quiectepe,” he said. “This is my friend from the United States. We were trying to find new locations for foreign aid allocation.”
It was amazing how his arrogance, his bristling anger, disappeared. He seemed shy and uncertain. Just what they’d expect. An American idealist lost in a country he could not understand. Ethan thought that he too should try to affect such meekness, but realized that he’d already fallen out of the truck. His lip was bleeding, his hands were trembling and he was sure that if asked he would not be able to speak a word of Spanish. There was nothing to affect.
“Where do you live?”
Doyle gave an address in the capital. Two hundred miles away to the northeast, the police probably wouldn’t know it. Doyle must be counting on their provincialism, their inherent respect for the capital, their fear of accidentally fucking up a chance to get additional aid. Still, if they brought him to the station and checked his passport, they’d find out who he was. Then, Ethan thought, had been thinking since they turned toward the jungle and the threat of a roadblock, there was a very good chance they’d be shot in the street.
“I do not understand,” the captain said. He gestured slowly with his rifle at the surrounding jungle, the banana plantation behind them in the gathering mist. “There are no towns here.”
The other one smiled and licked his lips, shifted his weight from foot to foot like he needed to piss. Ethan saw the reflection of a blackbird flutter in his mirrored sunglasses. It flashed, warped and distended, across the glass. Not a blackbird at all, something bald and sickly. A vulture.
Doyle was smiling.
“No,” he said. “Tonight we’re going to Plaza del Porros. For the bullfight.”
“There’s a bullfight tonight in Plaza del Porros?”
“Yes,” Doyle said. “A good one.”
The captain nodded. He seemed interested.
“I am sorry,” he said. “But the road is closed.”
“But we have no drugs.”
“The road is closed and dangerous.”
The sun came slantwise now. They were still on the eastern side of the mountain and the light would disappear faster here. It gilded the edges of leaves and flowers so that the whole forest suddenly shimmered with strange parallel light. The world was sharp and lambent and the red petals of the blossoming bougainvillea, previously fleshy and sensual, now appeared hard and fragile, ceramic. A tree frog croaked nearby, and in the lingering light its call knelled another rare certainty. They didn’t want to be on this road after dark.
“I see,” Doyle said. “I understand, captain. Is it possible that we could pay a toll? For the effort of opening the road? Is that possible?”
He had delivered the line well. He didn’t sound cynical, he had protected the captain’s pride. Another tree frog called, farther off now, to the west.
“Yes,” the captain said. “That might be possible.”
DRIVING AGAIN and the cool of the night coming on. The Indians taking the curves fast, even beeping now, racing the sun to Plaza del Porros. Ethan hugged his knees to his chest—he was still trembling in the barricade’s aftermath, and separate from that, the night was getting cold. The road slipped into shadow. The gorge, to their left now, pulsed with green, wind-trembled leaves and webs of moving Spanish moss. Ethan could not see its bottom through the shade. It was his first cold night in the country.
“We’re almost there,” Doyle said. “You hungry?”
Ethan thought about it. He hadn’t eaten since the morning. He must be hungry. The road ran straight and level. Up ahead, he saw the swaying glow of paper lanterns, the silhouettes of adobe huts hardening from diffuse shadows into form against the moving lantern light. Somewhere beneath the tree frogs’ ubiquitous chorus and the freakish call of the night birds, music played and men laughed. The Indians rolled down their windows and honked the horn as they approached the cleared settlement. For the first time in hours, Ethan could see the sky: black in the upper reaches, settling into cobalt and a thin line of amethyst on the horizon. Against the wide view, the humps of mountains rolled on without end. The sea was invisible in the dark but Polaris had long risen and Venus, yellow as lantern flame, was in ascension.
ACCORDING TO LEGEND, the Spanish established the bull ring at Plaza del Porros when they first landed on Copal’s shores. Supposedly, the Maya or Lencas were so impressed by the Spaniards’ bravery in fighting bulls that they granted them this area for what they thought were sacrifices. There was little to support the claim. The ring at Plaza del Porros was nothing more than a flat, cleared plateau surrounded by a low wooden fence and some palm and rattan-wood bleachers. On its left, the ring bordered the ravine—bulls had been known to horn-toss matadors into its depths. A row of concrete and soft-wood cantinas and cafés lin
ed the northeast side of the ring, so you could watch the fight as you drank. Dirt roads entered the village of adobe and thatch huts and continued on, narrowing, into the jungle.
“It’s ridiculous,” Ethan said. “How did the Spaniards get the bulls up the mountain?”
“I don’t know,” Doyle said.
“And why would they have them in the first place? Who’d lug a bull across the ocean just to fight it?”
They were sitting in an open cantina sectioned between two stands of bleacher seats. Their table was pulled up against the ring fence and crested by a dry palm canopy. They were drinking Honduran beer. Copal did not make its own beer and the Honduran imports, often smuggled, were the cheapest and most popular.
“It’s just a story, Ethan. It’s a mestizo fairy tale. Of course it’s not true.”
Ethan reached into his bag and pulled out his spaceship sweatshirt. He zipped it against the night’s cold and read his beer bottle’s label in the flickering lamp glow: Salva Vida! He drank from it, shook his head. Doubtful.
“There’s no worse beer than this, is there?” he said.
Doyle grimaced, nodded, and signaled the waiter for two more.
“No, this is the worst beer in the Americas.”
Their food came with the drinks. Doyle had ordered them a large plato tipico to split. Seared steak, fresh cheese, tortillas, and fried plantains. Ethan ate with little relish. He hadn’t been hungry for days. The meat was well prepared, frighteningly fresh, bloody, but he had trouble swallowing. He chewed and chewed; his tongue felt slick with grease and his throat tight. From somewhere behind his eyes he felt another vestige of fever coming on. He slapped at a mosquito flickering at the edge of the lamplight. Dengue, in the jungle, would be a torment. He drank from his rancid beer and his bowels began to cramp.
They released the first bull into the ring. It trotted a fitful circle. It snorted and threw back its head and its breath plumed a red cloud in the night cool. Flying insects whirled and flashed in its rising vapor. No, thought Ethan, it’s not cold enough for that. Across the ring, in the far corner near the drop-off, the matadors huddled just beyond the fence. They drank guaro and slapped each other on the back and they were not really matadors, but local cowboys who’d gotten drunk enough to give it a try. The first, as they cheered and helped him climb into the ring, could barely stand. His hat hung low and half askew over his eyes, he flailed wildly with a cutlass machete. He roared at the bull and the crowd roared with him.
Ethan did not want to watch. His beer was empty. The bull stamped and kicked at the mud, it turned another circle and bellowed and faced the cowboy. Ethan knew what would happen. The bull moved into and through the darkness. It blew its impossible red breath. There was no art to it now, no dance or bow. The bull trembled as the jungle trembled and the cowboy was not matador but rodeo clown. He lurched and swung and stabbed with the cutlass as the bull charged. Ethan looked away.
“God,” he said over the groan of the crowd. “Do they all end like this?”
“Pretty much,” Doyle said. “But, Ethan, can you do me a favor here, buddy? You think that guy is loco, huh? You think maybe he should have seen that coming?”
“Look at him,” Ethan said and nodded out to the ring, where the audience distracted the bull by tossing beer bottles and fireworks at it while the other drunken cowboys dragged the mangled man out of the clearing and over the fence.
Doyle popped the last piece of meat into his mouth and wiped his lips with the back of his hand. A mosquito landed in the streak of steak blood on his chin. He did not wipe it away.
“What do you think is going to happen to you when you find this girl? If you do. What do you imagine?”
“I don’t imagine anything, Brendan. I think somewhere there’s a fire on the hill. I’m going toward it.”
The night quavered with distant luminescence. Ethan saw it breaking and flashing at the treeline, in the dark frond-grottos of the forest. The night birds called and called and their calls glowed in the trees. Ethan raised his hand and nodded for two more beers. Mosquitoes lit on his ankles, behind his ears, in his hair. He was aware that his hood was bobbing about his neck—he was shivering through his clothes.
“Ethan, what happened with Samantha?” Doyle asked.
Samantha. The name was jarring to hear on another’s lips. A phantom bell ringing itself back into the world. He was certain that he would find recrimination in Doyle’s tone.
“We’ve separated, Doyle. She was raped and she didn’t recover. In my way, I abandoned her.”
“And you feel responsible for this?”
Doyle had not paused before asking his question, he registered no shock, and Ethan realized that for him, a man who had killed a police officer and who lived his life devoid of intimacy, it might not seem such a big thing. Commonplace. Ten years in a world of constant catastrophe had ruined his perspective. Doyle still stared at him, waiting. Well, fuck him. What did he know? With his bloody mouth and his Peter Pan life. His freaky room of mirrors, and lizards, and dancing chickens.
“Hey, man,” Ethan said. “I know it’s not much to you. I mean, we all deserve what we get, right? With our money and privilege. There’s got to be an accounting, right? Every action deserves its consequence?”
The bull ring now blurry with light and the plantains on the plate squirming in their own grease. Samantha had said, what are you thinking? and when she left, when the door closed behind her, he had no idea what he’d sent her into. At some point he’d set this calamity in motion and it still unfolded beyond his understanding. The action was done—his first mistake, his second—but the consequences were still coming. About this, Doyle was right. There was new damage brewing on the tropical horizon and he would go off into it.
A different cowboy stood in the ring now, swinging his machete. The bull reared and snorted and turned toward him and the cowboy fled, ran for the nearest wall, and dove into the bleachers. The bull followed him there, ran right into and then through the rotten fence and began thrashing about the stands as if it were trying to swim. People dove out of their seats, pistols fired, the bull bellowed and kicked and disappeared into the jungle.
“Another travesty,” Doyle said.
Their beers arrived. Fallen lanterns ignited the trash in the ruined stands. The ground flamed suddenly like a conjurer’s circle.
“Just tell me that you’ve considered the situation. Tell me you’re not trying to kill yourself.”
“I’m repaying a debt,” Ethan said, and felt, for sure, that he was lying.
AFTERWARD, THEY SAT in the old man’s living room and watched the bleachers burning in the distance. The fire caught and spread through the dry wood. Only what was already rotten would be spared. Outside, the old man cooked under a tin and cratewood lean-to while they waited inside, in the main room, on palm-tied sugar cane chairs. Through the small, barred window, Plaza del Porros burned. Something skittered above them in the cane roof. Ethan felt his fever still coming on. He sweat and trembled and sensed a heat and roil in his bowels. He might need a bathroom very soon.
“Doyle,” he said, “there’s no way in hell I can eat anything.”
“You’re going to have to, because Tireisias is making us dinner.”
“It’s impossible. I’m sick. I’ll vomit. I’ll shit myself. It will be disgusting.”
“Ethan,” Doyle said, “do you know how many times I’ve shat myself since I’ve been in Copal?”
“No,” Ethan said. “I don’t know that.”
“Seventeen times. Seventeen times in ten years. It happens, and really, it’s nothing to be ashamed of. You pissed in a whore’s sink and now you’ll shit yourself. Some would call that a trend.”
He looked over his shoulder toward the sound of crackling oil.
“Tireisias is very poor and he’s offering you his food. It’s a magnanimous gesture and it will be a real insult if you don’t eat it.”
“And if I shit on his floor? Will that be a sign
of my gratitude?”
“Some food will be good for you,” Doyle said.
Out through the dark of the doorway, the meat sizzled on the tin sheet while Tireisias hummed to himself. According to Doyle, at least thirty years earlier, a French missionary dubbed him Tireisias, and the name had stuck. “I won’t lie to you,” Doyle had said on their walk over the jungle road up to his house. “He’s not even close to sane. But somehow he knows just about everything one could wish to know about Copal. Rumor is that he worked with the CIA in the eighties, but I’m not sure I believe that—and anyway, that’s the rumor about everyone around here.”
Tireisias was waiting for them, sitting in a plastic rocking chair, when they turned off the road and wandered up a machete-cut path through the jungle. He stood to embrace Doyle.
“I heard you coming,” he said in English, and stepped into the mosquito lamp’s green halo of watery light. He was wiry and tall for a Copalan, shirtless and impossibly thin, jackal thin—what little flesh he had sagged from his bony arms, his spine dented at his stomach. He embraced Doyle and then quickly released him. He was wearing, Ethan saw, a child’s red plastic fireman’s helmet and vest.
Doyle introduced Ethan and Tireisias smiled so broadly that the corners of his lips seemed to push almost beyond the borders of his face. A toothless smile jerking into realms of its own accord.
“Come in, come in,” he said over the sudden call of a nightjar. “It’s cold cold cold out here and you must be hungry.”
THE POWER WENT OUT as Tireisias placed their food before them. There was a sudden groan and hum and the whole house fell into immediate darkness. In the distance a few remaining fires still glowed, but Ethan could not see his plate. The food smelled strongly of fried grease and something else, something sharp and astringent, nearly rancid, and for a moment there was nothing in the new dark but the food smell, the clammy sweat of it, and then Tireisias’s rustling footsteps, the hiss of a match and the room opening to the paraffin lamp’s frail light.
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