Horse Latitudes

by Morris Collins

  Ethan looked down at the plate on his lap. Beans, rice, Wonderbread, and a ragged slice of fried pork, crusty with grit from the cooking tin. His stomach moved and churned and he reached for the bottle of rum that had appeared with the new light on the floor.

  “Delicious,” Doyle said. “Thank you.”

  Ethan nodded as well and tried to smile. He drank from the rum. He chewed and chewed. He did not want to vomit on the pine-needled floor. Samantha, he had said, holding the bottle of cough syrup to the broken mirror light. Throw it up or I’m calling an ambulance.

  “So you are looking for a girl?” Tireisias said. His voice was high and scratchy, but his English was almost unaccented. Standing across the room, in the far corner watching them eat, he seemed as thin as the cane stalks in the wall behind him, a part of the house, an indoor scarecrow. “Well, I don’t know any women in Rio de Caña.”

  Ethan waited and chewed and tried to swallow. Then why were they here? His pulse throbbed in his fingertips and his skin was improbably wet, lathered in sweat. It occurred to him that the world itself was sweating.

  “But I do know the man she claims is hunting her sister,” Tireisias said. “His name is Soto. Lieutenant Soto, I think they used to call him, but for no good reason. He’s nobody’s lieutenant.”

  Doyle put down his fork and reached for the rum.

  “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said. “That Soto?”

  “There have been murmurs in the hills again,” Tireisias said. “They say he’s come out of the mountains, they say he’s back in the villages and in the towns. He’s buying children. He’s passed this way.”

  The lantern fluttered and dimmed and went out. Tireisias stepped to the table and lit it again. Then he backed away, back into the shadowed corner. “Wait him out,” Doyle had said on the walk up to the house. “He’s mad, but he usually comes around to the truth.”

  “Soto was born in the ruins,” Tireisias said. “In the places of bones and ill light. They say his mother was Colombian and his father American. She had to flee Colombia and moved with his father to Copal, where he abandoned her. She lived with Mayans. She gave birth in the ruins and there was bone dust in his hair when he was born. He calls to children. He has the Duende’s voice.”

  Something scrambled across the roof and Tireisias paused. Ethan found his throat working like a python’s. He swallowed and swallowed but could not seem to get the pork down. He knew Doyle was watching him. He reached for the rum.

  “Soto lures children from the street,” Tireisias said. “When I saw him last we were in Managua. It was almost thirty years ago and he was playing the conquistador. We sat under a lime tree. Managua then was not as it is now. Things were happening there. It was changing. You knew you were at the threshold of a new world but you didn’t know what kind of world it would be. He sat there with me and drank his aguardiente and smiled his scorpion’s smile and I knew then how Managua would go. He glowed. He shone. He shackled himself to the conquistador’s golden gifts. Anything you gave him there, in that city, he would bite. He is a child of the ruins and now he moves children.”

  Tireisias seemed to have paused. Against reason and possibility Ethan’s plate was empty. The night was no longer cold and the bird calls that came now were not those of the night birds. New birds, new day. Some impossible dawn.

  “Sex trade?” Doyle said through a full mouth.

  “Sex trade or slavery or who knows what? He doesn’t use the usual routes. He’s not your normal coyote. He collects the poorest of children. He leads them into the mountains. They disappear.”

  “Guerrillas, then?” Doyle asked.

  “Maybe. He could be delivering them to the guerrillas. Enlisting them. Who can say? Why would he do that? He was never a reactionary or a communist. The opposite, really. He lived in the States. He went, I’ve heard, to Yale. Some say he sells them to the Indians. To fill the spaces of the children recruited by the guerrillas. There is no way to know. His motives are beyond reason. They are the motives of stones and old light. When I saw him last he wore a white suit and a Panama hat. He drank rum and smoked Havana cigars. His hair was almost blond and I saw him lead the gringos into Managua.”

  It all sounded too torrid to Ethan. A doubt that had seemed inconsequential in Mexico’s chemical morning had been blossoming for days now. What did all this have to do with Yolanda or her sister? He considered the possibilities of coincidence, random convergence, but the center did not hold. Soto seemed a figure entirely out of proportion with the situation. Admit it, he said to himself. Doyle’s right. That’s why you like the idea. The impossible vastness of it. The terminal consequences.

  “Why Yolanda’s sister, then?” he asked. “She’s not a little child. Why target her? Do you really think he’s running extortion on Mexican whores?”

  Tireisias shrugged, and when he did his plastic fireman’s hat slid forward over his face. He pushed it back.

  “Maybe he’s not,” he said. “I suppose it depends what the brothels are funding, but I’ve never known him to be involved with prostitution. Why believe this whore? Soto might just be a legend to her, someone else’s bad dream. Maybe she was just trying to help her sister out, find her a compassionate gringo?”

  “That doesn’t sound right, does it?” Doyle said. “I mean, it’s overly complex. It’s unnecessary. Usually, things are what they are, or they’re worse.”

  Outside, in the jungle, a monkey howled.

  “Do you have a bathroom?” Ethan said.

  “I do not like to give advice,” Tireisias said and Ethan thought he saw Doyle smile. “But Soto is the bastard child of colonial rot. He thinks Copal owes him something. You are an American, a gringo. Here there is probably nothing that you cannot take. But if Soto covets this girl, you should not try to steal her from him.”

  He nodded at the door leading to the outdoor kitchen.

  “The bathroom’s back there. Past the cook stone. Check for snakes before you use it.”

  Ethan ran out into the night. The wheeling stars and jungle pulse and throb in his bowels. Another day coming on in the south.

  “Rosa,” Mr. Bernal called from the back patio, “will you bring me some mangoes?”

  Mirabelle waited a moment in the kitchen to see if he’d correct himself, say the name again. But he did not. He had only been on the patio for half an hour, but he must already be drunk. Or very tired. Drunk would be better for him. He would not realize his mistake, the shock of it, like waking from a dream where the dead speak to you. In Mirabelle’s dreams the dead often spoke.

  “One moment,” she called.

  She took a mango out of the refrigerator and washed it in purified water. Mr. Bernal would have chastised her if he’d seen. He always claimed that it was unnecessary, that tap water would be fine. “Did you know,” he said the last time he saw her washing food with jug water, “that the average person eats two rats a year without realizing it?”

  But after Rosa and the cholera, it seemed a sensible precaution to Mirabelle. She wondered if he too hoped to get cholera, to join his daughter that way. But then, how could you? It was devastating and disgusting—he had been unable or unwilling to approach Rosa’s sick room. He didn’t even burn her clothes himself. He had sat on the patio, as he did now, and prayed as Rosa shat into a bucket through a hole they cut in her mattress. When she was dead she weighed no more than sixty pounds and it was Mirabelle who washed and dressed the body. Since then, more cases had been reported in the far villages, by the river. As always, people were beginning to suspect the Mormons.

  Mirabelle cut up the mango and placed it on a plate. She trimmed the skin and poured a glass of water. Mr. Bernal would probably need it. Outside, through the kitchen window, the light over the bare mountains settled into a shifting, aqueous blue—a strange, undersea fish tank light. She turned away from the window but did not go yet out onto the patio where she knew Mr. Bernal would be sitting with a glass of rum, a cigar, maybe—though she did not smell i
t yet—and his feet on the card table. Dogs barked in the street, and the kitchen dimmed into a blue dusk. She stood and waited, even hoped this time, for the Mother to appear, but she was alone in the room and she did not know what to tell Bernal about Soto’s visit.

  Tonight Soto was escorting the children to the river, where a boatman would ferry them seaward. There, he’d said, they’d change boats, head into Belize, and fly to Miami. It seemed an impossible distance to her, too far for the six kids, but Soto had assured her. He had said, “I am a professional and my associates are very careful. Tomorrow afternoon,” he’d said, “I will return from the river. I will, by then, expect your answer.” He had bowed to her slightly, an action genteel and archaic and as strange as if he’d kissed her hand. He had bowed and turned and walked away, and without speaking the children had followed.

  “But why me?” she had asked just before then. “Why not hire an American girl? Why have you chosen me for the orphans?”

  “You were revealed to me, Mirabelle. Of you, I had already heard. Your kindness, your patient ministerings to Bernal’s daughter, those deeds were not overlooked.”

  Overlooked by whom, she wondered? He spoke with the authority of an attending angel. Someone who could bestow grace or judgment. Again, she remembered the Mother’s words. When he calls you, you must answer. But who was it that called to her? And why did she wish to go with him? The Lord called to Abraham and Abraham said, here I am, and to say that, to say that to anyone—herself or Mr. Bernal, Rosa or Jose—the dead who took no notice and passed, she hoped, no judgment—to say that, here I am, to make such a rigorous accounting, seemed a task beyond possibility. Where was she that the Lord would call to her, or that the Mother would approach in anything but Her veils of sorrow and dust? Rio de Caña? This arid, heat-blighted town with its fields of dead cane, its tepid, cholerous river, and the sad old man on the patio who loved her, loved her dearly—but as what, she did not know. Daughter or wife? His love, she felt sure, was both sad and sinful, and it terrified her that she could not tell the difference.

  But how could she answer his call? In this town, where most families had worked the cane for two centuries, she was a stranger. A girl without mother, woman without prospects, child on the brink, she knew always, of sanity. And what use were her visions now? She was not special or beautiful or ordained for any duty. She was caretaker to a ruined man, seeress of Ixtab the suicide queen and her Motherly double, Our Lady of Sorrow. Or she was worse than that. She was a mad girl living in what she knew must be sin.

  “Mangoes, eh? Where are the mangoes?” she heard Mr. Bernal cry from the patio.

  She carried the plate across the house. If she went with Soto to America, whose call was she answering, whose desire did she fulfill? She thought of his festival voice and his scorpion eyes. He was terrifying—a spirit come courting from the hills—but also he was beautiful. She felt his need for her like a firm hand pressed over her mouth.

  She opened the screen door and stepped out onto the walled patio where Mr. Bernal sat under the canopy of a mango tree. The yard was dark, and for a moment its objects—Mr. Bernal, the table and trees and bottle of rum—were invisible to her beyond their blurring silhouettes. They seemed an underwater shoal seen at night by a lampless diver—outcroppings of darkness gathering in the bluedark, jagged trembling shapes diffuse and wavering. She waited a moment on the threshold and looked past the lime tree, over the wall at the far horizon: a paler blue, smooth and welcoming, the star-flecked sky over the river and the sea. When she looked back down, the patio had settled again into form. She crossed the tiles and placed the plate of mangoes on the table before Mr. Bernal.

  “Thank you, Mirabelle,” he said in a voice wet with drink or grief. A liquid chortle, the consumptive’s slow drown. “It took you a while. I could have plucked and peeled one with my fingernails.”

  “Tsk tsk,” she mouthed, more an action, a shaking of her head than a sound, and she wondered if he heard her at all. “Not after you’ve been drinking rum you couldn’t.”

  She reached for it, the rum, the smooth brown of its glass reflecting for a moment, as she lifted it, one lone star directly overhead.

  “Do you want me to take the bottle?” she asked.

  “No, I do not want you to take the bottle.”

  He tapped his glass and raised his unlit cigar.

  “Then I would have no rum to go with my cigar.”

  She put the bottle back on the table.

  “Sit down,” he said.

  She did. She couldn’t see much but she could see that his eyes were wet and staring up into the spindle of mango branches. How was it, she wondered, that she saw him at all? By what light was the night unveiled? Did it radiate from far-off towns, or from insects flashing in the forest, white orchids opening in the dark, red gecko throats rupturing into call, or did it rise from all the wet and broken eyes staring up into the night? Mirabelle reached across the table, lifted the bottle of rum and drank from it. She knew these thoughts, knew that their strange, vagrant luster preceded the appearance of the Mother. Please, not now, she thought. Or not yet.

  She put the bottle back on the table. Mr. Bernal still stared into the trees. Mirabelle felt the heat of Her, the gathering presence. She closed her eyes and breathed as slowly as she could. There came the chirp of insects, the slight whisk of wind through the mango and citrus trees. The night ripened with smell: eucalyptus and lime, hard, dry dust, heat and frogspawn off the river and the fruity caramel of the open rum, the last departing vestiges of the good earth.

  Mr. Bernal spoke out of the quiet. “When I bought this house, that lime tree was barely a sapling. I grafted it myself. I shaped it myself. It is my fruit. Do you know what I mean?”

  Mirabelle nodded. It was as much a truth as a lie. Everything, she felt sure, meant something, and none of it had ever been revealed to her.

  “Rum and cigars,” he said. “They are like women and children. They are meant for each other. Can you have a cigar without rum? Ridiculous! Of course you cannot. I cannot even imagine it. Of course, the world is full of things I cannot imagine.”

  He drank from his rum and held up his cigar, put it in his mouth and then took it back out. It remained unlit.

  “Or maybe they are men and women, eh? They are meant to go together or they are meant for nothing.”

  He looked down, finally, from the tree canopy and stared at her through the night’s new sick fragrance. Venus in slow ascent.

  “Come closer,” he said.

  When she did, he put his cigar down slowly on the table and reached up and opened his wide and trembling hand and patted her head. He patted it and then stopped, held his hand there and traced it slowly again, down the length of her ponytail. Beneath the heat of the night she could feel the heat of his hand through her hair.

  He drank again. “Do you remember your first haircut?” he said.

  She did not remember anything from her youth. She had never been to her mother’s island.

  “No,” she said.

  “It’s too bad. A girl’s first haircut is a beautiful thing.”

  When he pulled her head to his she closed her eyes. She felt the open wet of his mouth on her throat and the teary wet of his mustache on her face. When she stood he was already staring again into the trees.

  “I’m leaving,” she said.

  “Be a good girl.”

  “No,” she said. “I’m leaving.”

  “In my day,” Mr. Bernal said, “we would have killed all these Mormons.”

  Soto stands on the riverbank and flashes the lantern three times out over the dark, moving water. The children huddle, not far from him, behind a brake of wild bamboo. He waits and smells the air; the water level is low and the bank reeks of the night flowers that have blossomed from the drying river clay. Fish bones and crusty webbings of frog bodies clutter the bank’s lower reaches. He flashes the light again and this time the signal returns, three quick blinks from within the mangroves, and
then the soft swish of paddles against the water, parting downcurrent, for the approaching canoe.

  Soto whistles a low tune, a nursery whistle, a dreamsong that, like the sudden palpable change of light or location, announces nightmare.

  “Come now, children,” he says, and whistles again as they shuffle around the bamboo and stand before him, small, shivering, smeared with the blue mud of the riverbank and the dirt of the road. Now the boat, first a sound, then a shadow, sharpens into form. A long Indian canoe with two rowers fore and aft slicking it toward them, downstream. It cuts and turns against the current as it reaches them, the rower in the back puts down a paddle and pushes it onto the bank. The lead rower waits for Soto to help, to reach down and pull the nose onto shore, but he does not. The Indian jumps out, grabs the canoe and nestles it onto the riverbank. He nods at the children.

  “These are all of them?”

  Soto spreads his hands, shrugs, and opens his eyes in a wide clown’s pantomime.

  “We were expecting more,” the Indian says. “Last time there were more.”

  “And when did anyone ever promise you that the future would resemble the past?” Soto says.

  “Hey, friend,” says the Indian in the back, starting to stand and then thinking better of it. “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that here are six children. I have suffered them into my care. I’ve scarred my mark onto these hills. If youth were so abundant you would not need these, would you?”

  The Indian on the shore puts a cigarette into his mouth, lights it, lets it glow a moment in the dark and then realizes his mistake, thinks better of it. He drops the cigarette into the river.

  “This should be symmetry enough,” Soto says. “Where I come from, your people are the keepers of bones and pitiful crops. I was born, you know, into your ruins. Is that what you’d like?”

  “What are you, anyway?” the first Indian says. “You an Anglo?”

  Soto smiles and nods to the children. He whistles and birds in the trees wake to his whistle and call back to him. Something rustles and barks on the far bank. One by one, with the Indian gently helping, the children step into the canoe. Once they push off, the lead rower says, “Next time, there will be more, understand?”